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This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (technical). 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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"Speedy Deletion" Overkill

We spent a good deal of time last night working up an Indexing (List) format for individual issues of The Saturday Evening Post magazine. Before we got interrupted by mundane life, around 8PM CST, we'd gotten as far as setting up two headers and listing one article as contents for the September 16, 1950, issue. This morning, that's all gone and we have to start over again.

This is absurd. It's the second time it's happened, too. We tried to default several motion pictures from a chronological list, where we'd added the titles, to the main alphabetical list of titles: since our notes are in alphabetical order, it will be obviously much easier and quicker for us to get the data details into each film's "article" by access from the alphabetical list. But first thing next morning, the added titles had all been wiped off that list (while remaining on the secondary, chronological list).

If you're serious about having our input, you're going to have to do something about the arbitrary overnight erasures which accomplish nothing except to set us back in our efforts to help. Why not allow at least a 24 hour period, or 48: since we're not on salary, and have outside lives, we cannot be expected to drop everything and service wikipedia on a 24/7. Program your site otherwise, or run the risk of killing off geese who can lay golden eggs - for you.

23May05

I don't know who deleted them, but deleted pages can be easily undeleted and restored by an Admin, so nothing is lost. Could you please give the article names that you want restored, and I'll bring them back for you. A list of recent deleted articles can be found in the deletion log. Shanes 13:45, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

My gripe is, no one deleted them: there's an automated addition of a "delete" command by the master computer (put there by the owner/programmer) to text spaces that don't have a certain amount of verbiage in them when the writer leaves the page to do something else. The command removes the "offending" piece then within what cannot be more than a 12-hour period. No one reads them, much less tries to understand why they might've been left, or e-mail the contributor to inquire. I found it on a couple of workpages I'd set up, and removed it, and they stand where positioned in the alphabetical film index: those I didn't, evaporated.

Also, NB, I tried to use the list of deleted articles and there are 50 of them deleted between 9AM and 1PM today, and it's just 9:05 CST now: where is this machine's clock? Furthermore, when I hit the "next 50", "next 100" URLs, I kept getting the same first-50 page: either my browser or wikipedia's programming for that page doesn't get me anywhere. (Maybe I should come back at 2:00PM?). In any case, I'm not going to waste time scanning down hundreds of deleted entries looking for one, when I don't even know what time the deletion occurred (my time or wiki-time); it's not worth it to me. I appreciate your offer to help, but the real problem is in the programming, and that would need to be up to an administrator to fix. --24May05, 9:05AM

This is not how it works, so I'm curious to know where you've read or heard about any "automated addition of a delete". Nothing like that is automated as far as I'm aware of. I might be wrong, though. I've been wrong before once. But here's how it works. If you make a very, very short article that clearly is not up to standard and only contains 3 or 4 words, people monitoring the list of newly created articles might see them as just being a test and/or not meriting being an article. They will then manually edit the article and add the delete tag. This again makes the article being noticed by administrators (like me) who again will review the content and decide if it really should be deleted. In my case I sometimes delete them, and sometimes I don't and I remove the delete tag. The point is: Nothing is automated, and it's all done by unpayed hardworking volunteers who just want wikipedia to be as good as possible.

That said, I'm very sory that you feel your hard work is not being appreciated. I wish that wasn't so, and I hope that by clearing up any misunderstandings and inform about how stuff like this works, we can avoid it hapening again. Thanks for contributing. Oh, and btw, the clock in the logs are on GMT time. Shanes 14:52, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the kind response. Will address your comments in my response to Golbez, below, who now has also shown up to defend the ramparts, since they are duplicated there.

According to the deletion log, this was the content ===Masthead Staff:======Contents:==='''Fiction:''''The Lady In The Jungle'..............Author, Hugh B. Cave. Such a page is definitly not up encyclopedia standards. Why not work on the page offline so that when you do enter it here it is complete? And another thing, wikipedia wont host a separate article for each issue, that is just absurd. Make an article for all the issues and put in the information there. And by the way, none of us (well, very very few of us) get paid to do this. Please don't be so arrogant when posting, it really don't serve your purpose well.

Gkhan 13:53, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

Look, friend, don't tell me how to post complaints. I endulged in no obscenities or personal attacks. I'm not arrogant, I'm justifiably angry that my work got the overnight blowoff because wikipedia programming attaches a delete command to contributions that don't have X number of lines of text in place before the contributor goes off to bed. I could put gobbledygook in to hold the space, and that would really not be "up encyclopedia standards" - whatever that means - but it would hold the place 'til I could get back to it. It's obvious from reading several articles on this site that that's just what some others do, intentionally or not. Not "up encyclopedia standards" either. Or I can go in and erase the delete command, something I've done twice, but that requires extra time and energy.

And wikipedia will too host a separate article for each issue, that is not absurd or I could not have started setting up the connections in the first place: there's no way to "make an article for all issues" as this is a weekly magazine of 80 or more years' duration. Such an article would scroll on forever and never be downloadable to users. Let each of us create in his/her own way: no one else is working on this topic, so stop imposing your vision of "encyclopedia standards" on the one person who is. I'm a 59-year-old English major, with nearly 30 years' experience in technical writing, cataloguing and categorization, so stop the unnecessary and uninvited attempt at one-upsmanship. Or, to put it another way, if you can't help correct the problem, then MYOB. --24May05, 9:22AM

There is no automatic deletion system. Nothing is automatically done here. If someone added a delete notice to the page then a human did that.

My assumption, based on the rapidity with which the delete command was added, and the fact that it could be manually disabled (deleted) by me: see Two Lost Worlds for a entry where I deleted the delete command, 4-5 days ago, and it hasn't been touched by human hands since.

It's not a command; it's simply a template that puts the article into the speedy delete category. Then admins look through the category and see if things should be deleted. --Golbez 19:30, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia is physically located in Eastern, but I believe its official time is UTC, so 9am CDT would be 1pm UTC I think. Lemme check the log... the article "The Saturday Evening Post - September 16, 1950" was created at 21:31 on May 23 and the deletion notice (specifying it as "nonsense") was added at 21:32. I must say, the New Pages patrol was working quickly that day.

Lastime it was done to me, it happened just as quickly. Which also led me to reasonably assume it was automatic.

And it was deleted at 01:00 May 24. The article consisted of, as stated above, ===Masthead Staff:======Contents:==='''Fiction:''''The Lady In The Jungle'..............Author, Hugh B. Cave'.

Actually, it consisted of

Masthead Staff:

Fiction:

• "The Lady In The Jungle................Author, Hugh B. Cave

which might seem nonsense to someone who's just done a careless glance and made a snap judgment. But anyone familiar with a magazine (and this was an article about a magazine) should recognize the beginnings of a table of contents page, which anyone who stopped and thought about it a moment, might realize could easily be going somewhere, especially since it hadn't been lying around the site for weeks but had just been saved One Lousy Minute Earlier.

You're assuming people on Wikipedia care about familiarity with a magazine. No matter what you say, a mostly empty table of contents is not encyclopedic, even if it does include linefeeds. --Golbez 19:30, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

Now, could this have grown into a real article? Entirely possible. But as it was, it was not an article at all. Please understand that we are working against the tide here, and any article that doesn't immediately have context and information runs the risk of being speedily deleted. The best way to avoid this is to finish the article first. This isn't a race.

"Please understand that we are working against the tide here... This isn't a race." Please, make up your mind. You give me one minute to do something to a saved page or else have a delete command attached to it, and about three more hours to do something (at night) to avoid having that command acted upon - whether by a human or automatically, it doesn't matter - and you talk to *me* about a race? C'mon, loosen up, give a plan a chance to come together. If that thing had been sitting there a week, it would make sense to delete; but three lousy hours? I'm not the one who was in the BFHurry.

Sure you were, you submitted an incomplete article. You aren't the one in the race, we are. You have all the time in the world to work on your article - but for us, new edits only stay on the recent changes list for *seconds*. If they scroll off, then it's unlikely anyone will see them. We have to work quickly. Such is the life of a Wikipedia janitor. --Golbez 19:30, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

I doubt anyone else in the world is working on "The Saturday Evening Post - September 16, 1950". So what's wrong with not submitting it until its done?

As I said in my original post, I started on it, with every intention of getting it done, or at least getting a larger chunk done before bedtime fell, but got interrupted by another facet of real life. Since it's not "a race", and there were three lines of data (one part of one line being URL'd, even, to something else in the pedia, even) with some semblance of form and relevance to anyone who bothered to look, the real question is, what's wrong with leaving it alone, watch and see what develops? Do you have a "delete quota" to meet each day?

If you got interrupted, then there was no reason to save it to the main namespace. Save it to notepad, or start a sandbox in your user space. No, we have no quota, and your lack of good faith in this circumstance is starting to annoy me. Do you have to try this hard to start a fight, or does it just come naturally? --Golbez 19:30, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

As it was, it could be said to fall under the candidates for speedy deletion, in particular, Article #1 (very short, no context).

What I'm saying is, we have to actively prune wikipedia, or everyone and their mother will have a profanity-laden "article" in this "encyclopedia" about how much they hate their little sister's cat.

Which this in no wise resembled. If I'd submitted that sort of crap, I'd expect my entire account to be deleted.

For better or for worse, we don't work that way. We assume good faith, that bad editors will reform. --Golbez 19:30, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

If you can finish the article before you submit it - or, perhaps, start with a different issue, which might have more content readily available - then please, resubmit it. It is your responsibility to make sure the first version is useful. There's really no excuse for starting a new, incomplete article.

A new, incomplete article is called, in your terminology, a "stub". This site is crawling with "stubs", which no one has assumed the responsibility for completing OR deleting. And expanding/editing on even fairly long text is part of the stated wikipedia project. And I *was* going to complete the one I had started; you just couldn't wait even 12 hours to see what happened. Besides which, the whole project could take weeks to complete my part of, and my way of working is to handle several projects at one time, an hour or two on each one, with time off for outside life. There are many (most) issues of SatEvePost to which I do not have access, and can provide nothing more than a date and cover artist: once I'm done with my part, there will still be a need for others' involvement. It isn't a race???? Then back off the delete keys, because this is a big project that will take time and help from others - many of whom may not feel welcome here if they know they could be deleted after hours, weeks and months of contributing, on someone's whim

Yes, the site is crawling with stubs - and the ones that aren't deleted have context, which, again, your article lacked, and you have steadfastly refused to admit that simple fact. --Golbez 19:30, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

That said, such articles aren't exactly what we handle here,

What articles *do* you handle? For specific motion pictures, you have a separate article for each picture, not just a big mess for each country or studio or director. For specific novels, you have separate articles for each book, not just a simplistic composite for each publisher or writer. So you don't handle specific magazine editions or their specific stories and articles, you just want everything dumbed down and glumped together under the lowest common denominator. Isn't this what the PC is supposed to do for information - create an environment not limited by the boundaries of paper size, type size or volume size-to-cost ratios in which to install information??

and even if you do make it and complete it, it may be put up for a deletion vote - note that I said vote. If it has context and actual information, then it's no longer a candidate for speedy deletion, and someone could put it up on Votes for deletion, which is a five day process to determine if said article belongs in the encyclopedia. I don't think we typically have articles like this here, so it would be a useful precedent if it did come to that.

Well, I have been roaming around and found quite a bit of disorganization, incomplete text (sometimes marked stub, sometimes not), illiteracy and just plain nonsense on randomly picked "articles" "categories" and "lists"; so, how does one go about putting *them* up for deletion? No one seems to be bothering with those. If it's your intention to "monitor" me, and then after I've done something very time consuming and satisfying at the time, and just kill it off by the vote of some ubercommittee, then you can count me outta here. Please advise; I'm already fed up enough for today.

All things considered, I won't miss someone as unlikely to be reasonable as yourself. --Golbez 19:30, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

But all this is irrelevant until you resubmit the article. Long story short: The speedy delete was not overkill. It is not our responsibility to wait for the article to be completed, it is yours to complete it, to a reasonable extent, before you hit submit. Otherwise, the article will scroll off Recent Changes/New Pages, and our chance to easily get rid of what seems to be a horribly incomplete, context-lacking article will be gone. You said yourself, "no one else is working on this topic," so there's no problem in taking your time and creating a proper article.

Like I say, that's what I was doing when I got deleted, taking my time and creating a proper article. I hope you aren't suggesting I write it out in pencil first, or on a typewriter. If that's what you want, give me your mailing address and I'll send it to you written and you can waste *your* time reformatting it and retyping it.

You weren't taking your time - you hit save the moment you got one name in there. As it was, it wasn't an encyclopedic article. We assume good faith in many cases, but when an article meets the criteria for speedy deletion, that isn't one of them. We can't assume that every sub-stub created that has a single valid wikilink and no context will be returned to in good time by its author. --Golbez 19:30, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

And I agree, one article per issue may be a bit much, so perhaps a middle ground - one article per year? Either way, I suggest you make only a few, and then see if they stick. Again, if they contain actual context (like explain what this is - never, ever, rely on the article title to do that for you) and information, then it will not be speedily deleted.

Well, you would have to wait and see. Obviously, Hugh B. Cave was already a completed section of the fiction piece: all you did was cut off the URL by deleting the text. The fiction piece itself would have to be read and synopsized - a ways down the road when we were just at the start of getting the content titles and authors and other names installed.

Do you have any more questions? --Golbez 15:02, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

Golbez puts it in a very good way, and as he said, there is no automated deleting. Two people looked at your article and decided that it should be deleted (the person who tagged it speedy delete and the admin who made the deletion). As for the arrogance part, I was reffering both to your style and the "geese that lays the golden eggs part". If this offended you, I apologise. But to be frank, you come off with an unwarranted amount of hostility, especially now that you were incorrect in your assumption.

The only thing I was incorrect in, was assuming an unreasonably short amount of time had been allotted to an automated program function. Knowing that two actual people showed up and neither one had the decency to wait and see what happened, or ask me what was going on, but just made big-assumptions on their parts - incorrectly - and played god with the delete key, makes the hostility all the more warranted. Treat people like people: I spent 2 hours experimenting with formats and layouts to get as far as I did and, since this is not a race, and this thread is attracting people like flies all of a sudden, with plenty of time to talk, I don't think I'm the least bit out of line with that hositlity.

Why should we have the "decency" to wait and see, if you didn't have the "decency" to wait until the article was remotely finished before posting it? I apprecitate that you spent time and effort learning layout and style, and your next step is to apply it towards a complete article. You started the hostility here, don't push it on us. --Golbez 19:30, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

You'd get much more help and the conversation would be nicer if you simply had asked for helped and described your problem. Now, as for the articles, one article per year would certainly be acceptable (52*80=4160, surley that is a bit much, don't you think). Also, consider signing up if you want to make a significant amount of contributions,

I am signed up. For some reason - computer, or human? - when I use Show Preview and then Save Page, I find I've been logged out and the contribution credit goes to some number. I have not discovered how to correct this glitch when it occurs.

It happens on random occasion. We don't know why either. :( --Golbez 19:30, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

it is so much nicer to communicate with someone with a name than an IP-adress. Gkhan 15:18, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

Gkhan is a name?? My name, when the -pedia shows it, is Rich Wannen, which is my real name.

(added after an edit conflict, so I'm repeating some of the things Gkhan said)

If I may add to that; here are a couple of ideas you (the original poster) could try out.

1. It would help if you could write one complete article, to show what the final result would be.

For the umpteenth time, that is what I was *doing*. I had to stop for the night and when I came back this morning to press onward, the start I'd made had been peremptorilly and rudely deleted.

So the main Wikipedia space is just a blank notepad for you to do your scribblings on? That's what sandboxes and notepads are for. Not the encyclopedia. Imagine if Brittanica published an article that the person had put into the main queue but had left for the night before finishing it. Don't you think they'd be annoyed that he had made it a real article? --Golbez 19:30, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

It would seem that at least 2 other wikipedians thought your article had no potential to grow (one who added the {{delete}} template; one who deleted the article). Prove them (and me) wrong.

I will try. However, I have the hunch that if the logic isn't immediately obvious - and as I said above, this is one of several longterm projects - some one or another will apparently feel free to hit the delete key without so much as a courtesy e-mail. It's bad enough that the environment itself allows strangers, even unregistered ones, to stumble across your work, decide they don't like it for any whim or dense moment, and edit it all to hell. It's quite another to find that there is actually a hidden committee of overseers of the same temperament with access to an instant delete key.

If you don't want strangers editing your work, perhaps Wikipedia isn't for you. --Golbez 19:30, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

1. Create an account for yourself. If you do so, you'll get a user page to explain your plans, a talk page at which other people can contact you, and an infinite amount of user space, where you can start writing your articles without the threat of having them deleted. Move them to the main article space when it's ready. If you do this for the first few pages, and if they are accepted, you'll have an easier time convincing us of the usefulness of all of your articles. (Anonymous users also get user space, etc. But it's better if you get an account. It's also easier to build up credibility that way.)
2. If you want your articles back, go to Wikipedia:Votes for undeletion, and make your case there. It's probably easier if you say that you want them moved to your user space.

No, I'll just start it over again. Maybe. Or maybe I'll just not waste my time trying to satisfy people who claim outwardly to be open and receptive - be bold - but have a clandestine set of narrow, rigid expectations applied swiftly, at least to newcomers, at the expense of creativity and interest. We'll see how I feel tomorrow. From 2-4 I work for IMDb; they have weird constraints and quirky policies, but at least they state most of them up front. --Rich Wannen 24May05 2:04PM

PS - Oh, looky. My name is in red again. Yesterday, it was in blue, after I stuck in a couple of trial sentences, intending to come back to that later too. Guess the delete-o-philes even mess around with user's personal pages!!

It's red because you linked Rich Wannen, not User:Rich Wannen. It's simpler if you simply sign remarks with ~~~~.User pages are ot deleted in the same fashion as other articles. --Golbez 19:30, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

1. You don't need to type in the date and time manually each time; use ~~~~~ for that (5 tildes). If you have a user account, type in four tildes ~~~~ for user name, date, time.

Eugene van der Pijll 15:28, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

Wow

This is getting difficult to read. Here's my summary:  :::which is wrong on several key points.

1. Rich made a short article with no context. It is not our responsibility to know if he was coming back to it; it is his to make it of undeletable quality from the start.

Rich started an article in the context of Saturday Evening Post - Index of Saturday Evening Post Issues - 1950: September 16. He had gotten two headers and one text entry in place on the latter connection when he was called away by other business; so he saved the work done to pick up the next day.

1. Rich has not assumed good faith in his dealings here; he could well counter that we did not assume good faith with his article.
2. Rich continues to assume bad faith in thinking we deleted his user page.

I assumed only, in all innocence, that the delete was automatic. Staff members told me it was done wilfully and manually. I assume in good faith they are telling the truth. The only "bad faith" was the two deleters' assumption that I had just stuck in some stuff to annoy them or ruin the -pedia and thus it merited deleting without warning.

1. I personally welcome any future contributions, but stress that, for temporary or still-working-on-it pages, Rich may want to use a sandbox, like User:Rich Wannen/Sandbox.

I could, but why. If the editors/readers would assume *in good faith* that I would finish what I start, and not be so quick on the trigger, it works better for me to just go on the article page directly and work there. It also makes sense because the -pedia is *filled* with articles by others that are only partly done.

1. And the fact remains, had he not spent the time ranting on this article, he might have finished the article by now and we could see what he intended.

And the fact also remains, if three or four of the supposedly harried editors hadn't felt it necessary to pile on me in detail for critiquing a user-unfriendly practice, apologized, and restored the work, I wouldn't have felt the need to defend myself against personal attacks (NB: the original post complained about a presumed automation problem. Personal attacks were started by others) and explain in as much detail why I think they need to get flexible here.

1. I see Rich has made several other edits, including starting a new article, which he should notice was not deleted, and has in fact been improved by another editor. (well, me)

Which one?

1. However, he also made Index of Saturday Evening Post Issues and Contents. This lacks context, but it has more than the other article did, since the article title says it's an index, as opposed to simply a name. Personally, if I were on deletion patrol, I would give this one the benefit of the doubt - but probably not the older one that was deleted. It might be put on VfD, though, and that doesn't mean it's deleted - part of the VfD debate allows people to improve an article, and many great articles have come out stronger in part due to VfD.

The Index is in the context of the main article on the Saturday Evening Post. Why do you say it lacks context? I simply used a word I was more comfortable with - Index - instead of List (which is hidden). It is intended to be an index of the issues - cover date by cover date over the 80-some years of the magazine's history - in two steps. The first step is to identify (List) each issue by cover date. The next step is, where information is available, to create a page for each issue defining the contents and related demographics of each issue. Those contents - staff, writers, and article titles - will also be accessible and contain an article on each person/literary piece.

Logic: Magazine Main Page, click to see chronological Index of Issue Dates, select and click to specific Issue Description article, select and click title of piece(s) or name of person(s) of interest to read individualized articles. Voila, you have a logically linked chain taking the reader as far into the contents of each issue as he/she wishes to go, without shortcutting any part of the overall subject matter in order to avoid a relatively useless, generalized, single-volume print-encyclopedia short subject on a major piece of Americana.

The strategy and logic of the approach I propose is applicable to any topic, many of which have bits and pieces unconnected and floating about the -pedia currently. (Some, of course, follow similar constructs). We had hoped to do some other tidying up as well so that users could, e.g., look up Cinema on the search field or go to Cinema in the Index for the Culture page, and come up with the same main article, something you can't do now, or couldn't as of 2 days ago. We have several areas of interest, tho film is our major one: but we've been 9 years with IMDb and are/were looking forward to making publicly available collected data in other areas of interest as well. Wikipedia appeared, by a recommendation from a contributor and by its main page, and with some early experiments, to seem a place open to creative structuring as well as in need of certain types of coverage, especially in areas (such as the SatEvePost) where there isn't a great deal of evident contributor involvement.

Hopefully, this little escapade with the overzealous anonymous deleters and the gangup on the visible newbie for trying to help with a personal, creative spin on data organization, is not a harbinger of worse things to come. IMDb has a number of problems arising from institutionalized rigidity, and it is only trying to deal with film, TV and videogame: Wikipedia is still new and trying to cover the entire universe, no small undertaking, which requires openness to newcomers and their experiments, not reactionary deletionism. RW

In short: Rich, please calm down and try again. --Golbez 19:39, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

I might want to warn Rich, though, that even if he completes an entire article which contains nothing but the table of contents for one issue, or even the table of contents of an entire year's worth of issues, some (myself included) would conclude that such an article is not an encyclopedia article, and would list it for Votes for deletion, where it would sit for 5 days while the community would discuss whether or not it should be retained. RickK 21:19, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

Rich, you have repeatadly assumed bad faith in this discussion, you have been angry and bascially insulting wikipedia when twice when you were wrong (the automated deleting thing and assuming your user-page had been deleted). You are over-all very uncivil. Calm down and realise that your article simlpy wasn't good enough. This is not something to be ashamed of, when I was a newbie I created a few articles which were all speedied (including a vanity article, of which I am a little ashamed :P). Get off your high horse and accept our advise. We arn't "ganging up" on you. Because you are new you do not know how things are done here, and that is ok, none of us did in the beginning. There is nothing wrong with that! Now, please calm down, read Wikipedia:Civility, and try not to be so hostile to everyone. Gkhan 21:58, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

Thank you both. You continue the process of blaming the unfairly injured, good-faith contributor and avoid absolutely looking at the actions of staff and interloping (troll) users in inciting and fuelling the hostilities on this board. It is clear this is not an open site focussed on the product and quality improvement through infusion of new ideas, but just a closed clique trying to appear as one; and complaints and disagreements that confront the clique's pre-established notions will only result in more and more personalized insults, "warnings" and other acts of Wikipedia "civility", and always dodging the major issues raised.

At this juncture, I can only offer that a Wikipedia staffer submit the description of my plans for improving the Saturday Evening Post coverage at the site to the Five-Day Community Discussion Board, or whatever it is; and if you decide it would be something really worth examining in more detail without any reactive "I...would list it for Votes for Deletion" attached, you can e-mail me and I'll consider whether I feel like giving you a look at what you would've had if your two editors hadn't decreed my bare start "nonsense" (covertly, amongst the staff) and consigned my 2 hours of thinking and format-experimenting to the Wikitrash. Having had my enthusiasm for this site completely numbed by the wet-blanket-and-cold-shower verbiage of most of the respondents here (especially Golbez), I imagine I'll decline, but you do have the option to try. You might include a thanks for the stuff I contributed that you did decide to use and probably will decide to keep, at at least a rate of agreeability as the disagreeability the majority of your responders have presented in defending the indefensible here today.

I also suggest you look at severely revising your home page to indicate that this is not the open, curious, progressive and friendly site you play it up to be. That way, at least you will attract more of your own kind and not have to waste *your* time trying to drive off people who don't exactly fit your narrow views and ways. Whoever said it was right about one thing, I have been wasting my time today. Indeed, I've been wasting it for the last few days.

Meantime, to the couple of you who've shown some effort at trying to understand and mediate - thank you. It's just too bad you're in the minority.

Adios, wikeroos.

---Rich Wannen, 24May05, 6:55PM

I am very sorry that you feel this way. I always hate seeing editors go, especially those who can contribute anything worth including. I would email you but you provided no adress. Suppose that you email me instead (don't forget to include a return adress). Gkhan 00:12, May 25, 2005 (UTC)

I think Rich's description of how Wikipedia works is quite perceptive and accurate. Mirror Vax 03:22, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

So

I know I tend to stick my nose into things, but honestly, someone else say something, did I say anything that was remotely wrong or hostile? If I was hostile, I was certainly less hostile than he. Cmon, repair my wounded ego please. I could expound on how irritated his parting shot makes me, but hey, we don't get anywhere by biting the newbies, right? Especially if they start out by stabbing us. And mirror vax, if it's so accurate, I suppose you're welcome to come to the same conclusions and take the same actions - whining and leaving in a huff. The article was a bit crappy, yes. --Golbez 03:37, May 25, 2005 (UTC)

Reading through this exchange I'm not sure who was at fault, but the fact is a newbie distinctly felt bit. I think we should all feel bad about it, and I think we should all try to make newbies feel more welcome. IMO, some of your comments weren't exactly welcoming. Was the article crap? Who cares. The newbie felt bit. -- Rick Block 04:04, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

(Note: refactored my argument above to remove my attack, retained word "crap" so as to not change the meaning of Rick's response) Perhaps we did bite him, but what do you suggest? That we don't slap {{delete}} when needed? It was a bit quick, but 99% of the articles caught within the first minute by new page patrol are worthy of deletion. If the newbie didn't want to feel bit, maybe he shouldn't have come at us with teeth gnashing. Because we bit the newbie, do you propose we change the way CSD works, Rick? --Golbez 11:41, May 25, 2005 (UTC)

In my opinion we shouldn't be critisising a new wikipedian on a page like this. Even if a new contributor comes across as abit angry and teeth gnashing, we should just not comment on that and just explain politely what he had missed about the technical stuff. Thats what this page is about after all. Shanes 13:49, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

We weren't the first "criticism" he received; he got one in the form of the delete template, and in another in the deletion itself. He had already felt criticized and came across that way. We tried to be civil and understanding; he refused to be. --Golbez 14:16, May 25, 2005 (UTC)

I fully agree with Golbez here. The newbie came here with all guns blazing, and the old hands tried to be reasonable in explaining what happened, why it happened, and what to do to achive his goal without the same happening again. He was also asked to calm down and remain civil, but he refused and kept raging at the "staff and interlopers" of Wikipedia. Thryduulf 14:27, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

I would like to point out that Golbez first edit to this discussion [1] which is now hoplessly massacred, was a long helpful and generally nice comment. He had not been nice, made assumptions that weren't true and generally said that we sucked. I could have perhaps been a little more diplomatic in my first comment, but my second was a genuine attempt to be nice and help, and he responded in a very hostile way. We did nothing wrong here. Gkhan 14:37, May 25, 2005 (UTC)

I'm not suggesting changing CSD policy. It's not obvious it was followed in this instance, particularly Try to avoid deleting a page too soon after its initial creation, as the author may be working on it. I am suggesting if you can't see a very clear difference between this response and this one, you might want to refrain from commenting on pages regularly accessed by new users. IMO the above protestations of innocence are stunningly insensitive. And, in case anyone doesn't know, telling someone to calm down almost always has exactly the opposite effect. -- Rick Block 18:40, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

Oh hey, you're right, it does say that. --Golbez 19:07, May 25, 2005 (UTC)

So his grievance was founded after all. Well, who's willing to contact him and offer an olive branch? Or don't we care?

Hi Rich! I am glad you decided to come back. I assume that this is you since your ip-adresses are nearly identical? I would have contacted you but you did not provide a return adress. Pleas do, and I will certainly email you. Or you can email me instead if you wish. gkhan 20:04, May 26, 2005 (UTC)

Huh? - 00:11, June 6, 2005 (UTC)

Rabid deletionism, hostile atmosphere

Well, it's no surprise to me to read this thread. This is exactly what I've been opposing all along. Notable to see that the original assumption was that some sort of bot was killing this poster's work out of hand. That is exactly how we appear to the newcomer -- unthinking, machinelike, and ultimately hostile.

This community has become a nest of snakes and anyone foolish enough to take the invitation at face value to Be Bold is in for a rough time. His incomplete or tentative work will be trashed; he'll find a nasty, snippy comment or three on his talk; and when he gropes around for answers, he'll come across a bevy of assertive pages that contradict one another, each one such the scene of a pitched battle. For every genuinely helpful user, he'll run into 4 more with axes to grind, who somehow manage to turn every conversation around to their pet peeves.

Only two kinds of people are likely to join this community now:

1) Otaku whose interests are so narrow that they just plow ahead and (by luck more than anything else) churn out dozens of lightweight, insipid edits or even whole pages of cruft. This content is so un-notable or detached from reality that the community has no warring factions ready to hound the new guy for his honest effort.

2) Those with an inability to respect or a disregard for the opinions of others; these range from vandals to trolls, but in any case contribute even less to the project than the otaku. These may be very thick-skinned indeed and difficult to eradicate.

Why would anyone join this community to do thoughtful work? Good work is still being done by members who have been here for a long time; they have developed ways of coping with the hostile atmosphere and they have already invested much of themselves; they won't be chased out by rabid deletionists or arrogant "RTFM"-type remarks. But who willl join now?

A month ago, I still thought it possible to help to turn this community away from becoming a behavioral sink. Now, I just don't know. — Xiong熊talk* 23:30, 2005 Jun 1 (UTC)

And also:

3) People who are able to admit it might be their mistake after all, and learn how to work with the older members who are already here.

I find your lack of faith disturbing. --cesarb 23:51, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

4) People who are willing to perform "grunt work." I've joined this community very recently, and have not been bitten, insulted, slapped, or otherwise abused. Most of my contribution has been in the areas of stylistic editing and categorization, with very little actual content addition -- because I feel I should take the time to become familiar with the standards and norms here before I attempt to produce content from scratch. It is my opinion that the OP should have done the same.

Adalger 04:44, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

As one of the resident snakes, I can only say: thanks for your elucidating summary. The fact that you pointed it the situation to us in such analytical terms is a great boon. You stride towards well-founded conclusions through impeccable logic, and in doing so support our own efforts at understanding and solving the problems.

But enough irony. Required reading material for everyone, and I mean really read it again, don't just throw around the page name as a cliché: Wikipedia:Assume good faith, Wikipedia:Please do not bite the newcomers and Wikipedia:Remain polite in the face of overwhelming rudeness if all you have to lose is your ego. Well, I'll admit that last one isn't written yet, but you can fill it in for yourself, right? Note that "this is how we do it and you do not conform" is generally not a productive approach. Newbies can't be demanded to conform; cooperation on a wiki doesn't work by lecturing newcomers on the existing mores. Even vandals are given the honor of a "please" (and I don't mean a "please don't be so arrogant" either...) Instead explain why we do what we do, and be very much willing to consider the possibility that we are wrong from the newbie's point of view, and tailor your response to that. The object is not to explain why we are right, but to convince others that we are, which is not-so-subtly different (and, I'll readily admit, a hundred times more tiring than just slapping people with Da Rules, as you'll be doing it over and over again and worse, suffer some fools in the process).

At least some of the unfortunate dialogue above could have been avoided by a simple change in tone, even if the helpful information was all there. It's all water under the bridge now, however. And let's not blow it out of proportion, either. This was an unfortunate clash of attitudes, but you're not going to convince me this is some symptom of the Wikipedia community (or even a significant part of it) being rotten to the core. Hiss! JRM · Talk 00:47, 2005 Jun 6 (UTC)

Update

Rich Wannen is back and is editing up a storm on the Film page and related things. I managed to revert his un-wikipedia-like changes overnight and got him upset once again. He has a link on his page to this discussion and I just read through it.

I just wikified my name link for you. You'd left it at just User:Rich Wannen!

Here's what I've noticed.:

1) It is probably nearly impossible to NOT upset a newby who doesn't, for whatever reason, want to learn and use customary Wikipedia style.

2) The way things are set up now, it is unrealistic to expect someone cleaning up an article to do an investigation into whether someone is new to Wikipedia.

Please clarify. *I'm* the one who's cleaning up the article. And it is a tremendous job, in the interests of which some stylistic and tradition considerations need to be, for me to do the job as completely and quickly as possible, to put on hold. Rich Wannen) 02.04, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

It would help if when you went to someone's user page or user contribution page if you could find some statistics like the date the account was created or the users edit count. Better yet, have the user-count posted with each edit in each article's history. That way you could just look at the history and see if someone is new.

3) Perhaps, instead of a speedy delete, there should be a speedy move to the user's edit space. In Rich's case, his deleted article could have been automatically moved to his page with a comment directing him to the manual of style, and encouraging him to finish the article before posting it.

4) I gave explanations of what I was doing when I reverted Rich's changes in the Edit summary. I realized pretty quickly that either he never saw my comments or didn't understand them.

I don't understand this, as I sent Mr. Wantman a response and he acknowledged it yesterday. Subsequently, he has sent two additional messages, which didn't have time to answer because I was working on the page cleanup project or other personal matters.

Unfortunately, I cannot accomplish much on improving the site if I'm tied up writing letters. I had to waste time last night confronting a vandalistic troll, Splash, who simply waddled into my work space 2 nights ago, deleted an entry wantonly, then did the same thing last night after I'd reprinted and expanded the entry. Since his vandalism erased the History along with the text, I identified him only by chance moments before his delete command was followed by a bot-admin, whom I should've thought had learned something from the foregoing discussion. Another proposal, therefore, is that editor/writers should somehow be notified that, and by whom, their stuff was deleted, with a revert mechanism, at their user page if total deletions are going to take out the History... Rich Wannen 00:46, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I tried an explanation on his talk page with my second revert, and when that didn't work, I tried a longer explanation but I didn't revert his changes. Someone else has reverted part of his changes, so hopefully, he won't think I'm picking a fight. It would be better if he learns how things work and makes the changes himself. I will try to encourage him this way.

5) "Be bold" needs to be explained more. It should probably say "be bold only if you have the stomach for a very long frustrating debate and you probably won't succeed", or "be bold, but only about some things and never about some others".

6) Some people are not suited for collaborations.

I'm quite agreeable to collaboration. Nitpicking or deleting works in progress are not acts of collaboration, but of saboutage. I welcome anyone who wants to work with me to sort all this out ("this" being that Wikipedia carries two parallel sections dealing with motion pictures: one, reached through the Main Page Culture portal is entitled Cinema, while the other, reached through the Search field, is Film - Cinema, on the search field, takes you to Film, in other words. Both subsequently contain some overlap, and possibly a lot of overlap, but are so disorganized and differently arranged that it will easily take a couple weeks to get them unified and organized in a meaningful way). Anybody who wants to help do this, just contact me, and we'll collaborate like all getout. Rich Wannen) 01:56, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I'm not convinced that Rich is suited for Wikipedia.

I'm suited for any place that is open to my participation and willing to assist me if I volunteer to take on a task. Of course, if "Wikipedia" means carelessness, sloppiness, trolling, nitpicking, appearance over content, cliquishness and sneaking around posting things about me behind their backs, then I would certainly have to say Wikipedia is not suitable for *me* (something about casting pearls before swine, I think.) Rich Wannen) 01:56, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

We'll find out.

Very soon, too I don't do well with people who talk about me behind my back, or stalk me or invade my workspace just to powertrip.

My return here was by way of giving the place a "fair chance", especially after the discussion my first confrontation raised. While some seemed unable to accept responsibility for anything at all in the affair, there were some people who seemed genuinely interested in making Wikipedia a productive community and a successful project. But it would be nice to have some of their direct involvement, as my return seems to be leading to just the SOS as the firstime I tried. Rich Wannen) 01:56, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps we should encourage users to make their own private wikis in their user space and have a place to link it to the main space. Thus Rich could organize film however he wants, and there'd be a link below "See also" that said "Other wikis" or "User pages". This might encourage some very creative work. :: -- Samuel Wantman 10:34, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Anything that will encourage creative work will benefit Wikipedia. Anything - or anyone - which strikes it down the moment it appears in public view, will not. Rich Wannen 01:56, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I put all of User:Rich Wannen's comments in italics to make things clearer. He changed my heading "Update" to "Upchuck" and I put it back. I'm certainly not trying to talk behind anyone's back. I assume that Mr. Wannen is watching this page.

Only on occasion. I am mostly tending to other matters elsewhere when not looking at the task to which I've put myself, or reviewing time-consuming messages. 12.73.201.145 15:29, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I'm at a loss at how to proceed.

How about just taking an MYOB approach, and working on one of the many Open Tasks at the Village pump mainpage. Come back to Film/Category:Cinema in a couple of weeks instead of frantically running over there 3-4 times a day. And learn how to not fret so much; you will get ulcers. 12.73.201.145 15:29, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC) Rich Wannen

Perhaps we should send people to "Wiki Driving School" if they refuse to learn how things work. Mr. Wannen redirected Category:Cinema to the article Film! He marked Category:Albanian films for speedy delete because it was "Redundant with contents of Article Cinema of Albania and List of Albanian films", etc. He thinks that there shouldn't be any duplication between lists and categories!

We've been a busy little Mommy, haven't we. Like I say, you need a diversion, badly. Get a hobby. Get a life. Get away until I'm done, then come back, review the final product, and offer up some salient comments when there is really something there to comment upon. Or else, collaborate. 12.73.201.145 15:29, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC) Rich Wannen

I'd be thrilled if he learned a bit and became a valuable contributor. I spent quite a bit of time trying to explain things to him without success. Perhaps someone can explain things better than my attempts. --Samuel Wantman 08:14, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Some cheese with your whine? *I'd* be thrilled if you'd learn something about the human condition. Forget what I said above: turn off your computer, get out of your room and go meet some real people. Don't dictate how they should live their lives; instead, listen, learn about their dreams and aspirations, their experiences and accumulated information. Be sure to include plenty of OP in your sample: they are as valuable as resources as any YP (pronounced "wipey").

By the way, do you notice, no one else has commented on your essays yet. Perhaps you are alone - Alone - ALONE. 12.73.201.145 15:29, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC) Rich Wannen

I've put Mr. Wannen's comments in italics again to make it clear who said what. Mr Wannen seems to think that since he has taken on a project no one else should touch what he is doing. He believes that, even if some of what he is doing makes no sense. He doesn't want to spend the time to understand some basic things about how wikipedia works. He takes attempts of assistance as threats. He is offended if others clean up anything he is working on even if they leave all his content alone. I'm not going to attempt to explain anything else to Mr. Wannen if he doesn't want my help. Good luck to the next person who tries to help. --Samuel Wantman 20:16, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

What’s the Use?

The crowning blow comes this morning. Saturday, I received an offer to help with the project I've undertaken for Wikipedia. And then yesterday I spent a good deal of time describing what I was working on and what kind of help I could use, and I get a message back from him today in which he says, well, he didn't really want to help on the *project*, but rather wants to help 'wikify' it, so to speak. On that score, I was referred for possible guidance on how to proceed to Wikiproject:Wikipedia Movies as a model for an 'approved' starting point - which Project I find has been DEAD since before Christmas 2004, and at least two of the five designated "Participants" also "dead" (to Wikipedia) since that time. Wonder why?

The really sad thing is, this message was sent to me in all friendliness and sincerity, but it clearly misses the point as has every other message/post to/about me, friendly and not. Again, style is trumping substance in the wikipedic mind, and even a friendly hand can't be trusted not to have a hidden life-control, imagination-tamping agenda tattooed on its downturned top. That is also why I no longer go to church.

I'm not mad, now, I'm just exhausted, and put off. Wikipedia is self-destructive in its current state, and I have no interest in wasting my time, energy and expectations on improving something which is not interested in improvement and which may be gone in a year or two if it doesn't make some major changes in its priorities and quality control mechanisms. I have addressed these concerns in more detail to another writer, an admin, but received no response. So it goes.

I've restored Film and List of movie-related topics to their form prior to my beginning to fix them, and you collectively have them back as they were, since that is what you collectively were most happy with.

At any rate, that is what Mother Wantman was most happy with: he has been found everywhere I go, posting to other wikipedians, as he does above, obsessively about me working out of conformity to his way of doing things. I could call it stalking, but it is really very funny, and symptomatic, of a wikified brain at its hardest work. I wonder if he's doing *any*thing else on the site but tagging after me making comments about "my" appearance and style, or lurking somewhere fretting about a missing bracket or two.

I'll keep my account open, in the event that the "Article Validation" project gets off the ground - though it seems to have bogged down in programming problems - as critical input from outside sources is desperately needed, and is about all I'm in the mood to contribute here anymore. But I relinquish all remaining contributions I've made to the trolls, dorks and morlocks of the night, to eat away as they please; and will not reply to any additional messages. Rich Wannen 12:57 CST, 21 Jun 2005

Closing his parting shot with a poorly formatted signature - I think that sums him up perfectly. --Golbez 20:42, Jun 21, 2005 (UTC)

And this Gofart kid is an admin! I think that sums up Wikipedia perfectly 12.73.194.81 22:44, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Rich - I'm very sorry if I missed the point. I thought the point was that you wanted to contribute and various folks kept getting in your way. I still think you have much to contribute and am still willing to do whatever I can to help you find a way to contribute. If you don't want this kind of help or are unwilling to learn enough about how things work around here to avoid having your efforts reverted at every turn that's certainly your prerogative. My offer still stands. You know where my talk page is. -- Rick Block (talk) 02:34, Jun 22, 2005 (UTC)

Stupid auto-logout revisited

Because the discussion above did not actually answer the question: I have been having the same problem for over a month now. I can stay logged in for 2-3 links, then I am auto-logged out. I am consistently logged out when attempting to edit a page. The ideas mentioned earlier about cookies, browsers, etc, all occurred to me too, so I have varied all of the following:

1. Firewall. Same both on and off.
2. Check box. Regardless of what you call it, it doesn't remember me.
3. Browser. Same with IE, Opera, and even Lynx. Opera allows direct editing of cookies, which here have all necesary permissions and (apparently) don't expire till 2009 or some such.
4. Computer. Same on other peoples' machines.
5. Time of login. Followed the advice above. Morning, midday, evening, dead of night: same thing.
6. Connection. Same deal on both dialup and broadband; thought it might be IP-related. This is redundantly subsumed here, but for completeness-- also the same whether networked or direct connection.
7. Operating platform, for Pete's sake. This also happens on a Mac I have access to.

So what gives? Have I been exiled by the Wiki gods? Guru comments appreciated. (Signed, Mashford)

I have this experience: I open wiki in a second, third, ... browser (IE, via Citrix). First page: I am logged in, OK (as in the first browser). But almost every other page (tab, Contributions): I am logged out (anonymus user, on IP-number). This happens also when I start Editing. And t happens when I change from say nl-wiki to en-wiki. My solution: every openend browser and every language-wiki need a separate login. That works OK for me. -DePiep 19:56, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

But, with all respect, this hardly seems like a solution. Surely one browser should be sufficient, if it's referring to the same set of cookies. Argh. (Mashford) 66.82.9.34

For me, I can work around the problem. I really skipped the Argh's since. Does it work for you too? Then we have a solution, albeit by working-around. When the technical improvement arrives, that would only be better. btw: I use several browsers to do lookups in wiki while editing - practical reasons. -DePiep 11:19, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Spurious article in a category and search

The category listing for Category:Stub contains an entry for [[Katz%27s Deli]]. This article is also listed in searches.[2] In both cases, though, the links point to Katz's Deli which is not a member of the Category:Stub category. Any thoughts? Susvolans (pigs can fly) 12:32, 12 May 2005 (UTC)

I tried adding the article to Category:stub and removing it, which didn't seem to help. It might take a developer to fix this. -- Rick Block 22:15, 12 May 2005 (UTC)

Could the article be copied, deleted, and then recreated? Or would the problem be re-animated along with the article? Joyous 23:32, May 12, 2005 (UTC)

This is due to an old page title bug which allowed certain inaccessible titles to be created (but then you couldn't get to them again). I've renamed it to Katz's Deli (broken title); move, delete it or otherwise as appropriate. --Brion 10:19, May 14, 2005 (UTC)

Thank you for fixing it. I deleted the page. It's also at Katz's Deli. - User:Docu

Brion, I'm not sure how you did this :-), but the following articles all appear to have the same type of problem, so if you could fix them too, it would be greatly appreciated!:

• • The Three Musketeers (1993)
  • Water Music (Handel)
  • FWAK

RussBlau 18:17, May 19, 2005 (UTC)

There is also an article called Ris%F8 that duplicates Risø. It can be seen in a search]. I can't get at it. Is there a generic solution for this problem? Bobblewik  (talk) 10:22, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

More

A few more: the link doesn't lead to the article whose cur_id and nowiki-title is shown afterwards.

The_Heartbreakers_(band)

953379 Title: The_Heartbreakers_%28band%29

Water_Music_(Handel)

954308 Title: Water_Music_%28Handel%29

Diffusion-limited_aggregation_(DLA)

954998 Title: Diffusion-limited_aggregation_%28DLA%29

Unblack_metal_(music)

955055 Title: Unblack_metal_%28music%29

The_Spark_(band)

955755 Title: The_Spark_%28band%29

The_Three_Musketeers_(1993)

956633 Title: The_Three_Musketeers_%281993%29

Juan_"Chi-Chi"_Rodriguez

958683 Title: Juan_%22Chi-Chi%22_Rodriguez

Gelnaw's_Law

961077 Title: Gelnaw%27s_Law

Ghostclub,_The

962607 Title: Ghostclub%2C_The

Oil,_gas_in_field_effected_geographical_changes

965188 Title: Oil%2C_gas_in_field_effected_geographical_changes

[[Cayetano_Redondo_Ace%F1a]]

967385 Title: Cayetano_Redondo_Ace%F1a

JSA_(movie)

971887 Title: JSA_%28movie%29

Utility Maximization Problem

1018337 Title: Utility%20Maximization%20Problem

Niklaus Wirth

1022419 Title: Niklaus%20Wirth

A query to find them:

SELECT * FROM cur WHERE cur_title LIKE '%\%%' AND cur_is_new=1 

-- User:Docu

BTW, there is

953380 Student_%28newspaper%29

957788 Cats_and_dogs_%28movie%29

958255 Ris%F8

without the "cur_is_new" flag. --User:Docu

Rollback on Template:Infobox OS not working

Just tried it then, doesn't appear in history. - Ta bu shi da yu 30 June 2005 03:07 (UTC)

Rollback no longer working

Every time I try to use the rollback function, I get the message

There seems to be a problem with your login session; this action has been canceled as a precaution against session hijacking. Please hit "back" and reload the page you came from, then try again.

This doesn't seem to be related to the MediaWiki upgrade, as it worked fine yesterday. Any idea what's going on? I have not changed browser or anything like that. - Fredrik | talk 29 June 2005 16:18 (UTC)

It only seems to be a problem when rolling back from the contributions page; rollback from history diffs is OK. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 29 June 2005 17:31 (UTC)

Actually, it seems that I can revert from the user contributions page, but not from the history diff. Crazy! - Fredrik | talk 29 June 2005 19:07 (UTC)

That might have been a fluke, as now it isn't working at all again. I also have the problem of getting the edit previewed instead of saved when I hit "Save page", and have to retry for minutes before it actually gets saved. This is incredibly annoying! :-( - Fredrik | talk 29 June 2005 20:26 (UTC)

I coudn't agree more. Also, is this just me, or has anyone else found that new windows are suddenly created in sequence, about twenty or more at a time? Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 29 June 2005 22:35 (UTC)

AAAAAAAAAARGH! This is really annoying. Still here btw. — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 30 June 2005 19:12 (UTC)

new font difficult to read

Is anyone else having trouble with the new font? I'm getting headaches from squinting to read it. The old font was much more user-friendly in my opinion. Is there anyway to go back to it?

Thank you. kidzwrtr@aol.com

On my browser (Firefox 1.0.4 run on Windows XP) there's been no change of font. --Angr/_{tɔk tə mi} 29 June 2005 16:02 (UTC)

What's differen't about it? What browser are you using? — oo64eva (Alex) ^{(U | T | C)} @ June 30, 2005 00:50 (UTC)

Colours

I was wondering what are the codes for each colour?, can anyone help me out? Are they layed out anywhere in How to edit a page? CooldogCongo 28 June 2005 23:28 (UTC)

Do you mean HTML web colors? If so, try here. Joyous June 29, 2005 00:34 (UTC)

Kate's tool

Ahh! Kate's tool is down! What happened? —MICLER (Мыклр) June 28, 2005 19:32 (UTC)

The tool used the old DB schema, which changed in 1.5. – ABCD 28 June 2005 20:37 (UTC)

it's fixed now. —kate

use of unicode in article titles

Now this is techincally possible we need to form a policy on it. imo we should restrict ourselves to ASCII LATIN1 and LATIN EXTENDED A and B and there should always be a redirect from the title stipped to plain ascii what do others think? Plugwash 28 June 2005 15:49 (UTC)

I suggest this discussion be continued at Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(technical_restrictions). Wikipedia:Naming conventions (technical restrictions) has already been changed to suggest Latin-1 can be used. -- Rick Block (talk) June 28, 2005 18:34 (UTC)

ok i've copied this conversation there. Plugwash 28 June 2005 18:40 (UTC)

Use of unicode within articles

On a related topic, what about using Unicode characters directly in pages instead of entities like &#593; etc.? At International Phonetic Alphabet for English, Nohat replaced the entities with phonetic characters; an anonymous user reverted, complaining the character display was funny; I reverted to the characters, pointing out that the display of the two is identical and if someone's having a problem with display it isn't a matter of whether characters or entities are used; and the anon reverted again, calling entities "safer". Is the anon right, are entities somehow "safer" or "better"? Or can I go ahead and type ɑ directly into pages instead of &#593;? --Angr/_{tɔk tə mi} 29 June 2005 13:44 (UTC)

Go ahead. I think someone doesn’t appreciate what the change to Unicode means yet and needs to be set straight. Susvolans (pigs can fly) 29 June 2005 14:05 (UTC)

Phil Boswell has informed me:

Some browsers are unable to understand the characters to such an extent that, instead of simply preserving them during an edit operation, they replace them with gibberish; this is why HTML entities, which are entirely written in ASCII, are preferable in may if not cases [sic; I assume he means "many if not all cases"]

So I'll quit converting entities inside articles to characters, unless and until someone tells me Phil is mistaken! --Angr/_{tɔk tə mi} 30 June 2005 15:20 (UTC)

any chance you could find out which browsers? it may be that we wan't to do something about this issue (such as converting the text to some safe form before letting the browser edit it). Plugwash 30 June 2005 16:57 (UTC)

If there would be any serious browser problems, the Wikipedias already using UTF-8, would have seen serious trouble. At least for de.wikipedia this is not the case and our policy there is to always have straight Unicode in the source, no entities.

Very, very few edits are seen, trashing the Unicode source. Those users are asked to check their system.

Known problem components:

• Netscape 4 (can't seriously be used to view the Wikipedia, so that's a non-issue)
• IE5 on MacOS 9
• iCab on MacOS 9
• Privoxy (can be circumvented by configuration)

Pjacobi June 30, 2005 18:08 (UTC)

I just encountered this problem today, where an edit turned some Cyrillic Unicode characters to question marks. I believe that IE5 on Mac OS X also can't properly edit Unicode, but I'm not positive. —Michael Z. 2005-06-30 18:16 Z

Watchlist count inaccurate since 6/27 downtime

• I noticed that the watchlist count is inaccurate since the 6/27 downtime.

You have 34.5 pages on your watchlist (including talk pages); you can display and edit the complete list. Gbeeker 28 June 2005 15:27 (UTC)

• This item is already in the Wikipedia:MediaWiki 1.5 bugs page. Gbeeker 28 June 2005 15:36 (UTC)

MW 1.5 bugs (EN)

Moved here to split up into sections: Wikipedia:MW_1.5_bugs. For problems related to the upgrade, see that page.

Saving problems

I don't know whether this is my browser or the software upgrade causing trouble, but lately I get a preview when I hit save page. I have to hit save page several times before it works. Any idea what's up? (just got it again saving this comment) Deco 20:04, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• Sometimes there is database lag that will cause this. Also.. see the top of the page currently.. All Wikimedia servers are having their software upgraded; thus, this wiki will become read-only for a while at some point. May have something to do with it. <>Who?¿? 20:13, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Translations

How can I translate an article in a different language. I can write in English, German, Spanish and Italian. And I do that free for Wikipedia, because I want to be a good cytizen of the world. A hug,

Fabio (fabiodrigani at alice.it)

Thats really great! If you want to help out with translations you should check out Wikipedia:Translation into English and maybe list yourself on Wikipedia:Translators available. Thanks! Shanes 12:52, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

You could also offer to convert English articles into those languages. Often I click "in other languages" to see what they've got but find the other pages to be sadly lacking. If you could help pad them out, that would be great! Master Thief Garrett^Talk 00:43, 27 Jun 2005 (UTC)

TOC command used for vandalism

Extremely recently somebody used the TOC command to vandalize the Admins noticeboard. I managed to figure this out myself after a while. The adminstrators didn't notice it, and this is the (disturbing) reason why. I contacted two admins about this, but they continued to leave notes on my talkpage saying that they couldn't see any vandalism... even when the link that one of them gave me took me to the noticeboard where the vandalism was quite apparent. Removal of the TOC command got rid of the vandalism, and adding it back in didn't bring it back. However, the fact that the admins couldn't see it makes this an extremely nasty bug. By using this bug, the identity of the vandal was hidden as the edit history showed no entry for the vandal. In addition, the TOC command has a legitimate use and is utilized in many articles. Despite the fact that the vandal would have to be quite skilled to take advantage of this bug, it is still a major problem. It has already been confirmed that this bug is NOT linked to a specific browser, as one of the admins I contacted was using the same browser on the same OS as I was, and couldn't see the vandalism. In addition, the other adminI contacted only saw the vandalism after logging out. This bug could end up being becoming a big problem if not taken care of. --Chanting Fox 20:24, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

What TOC command? I'm not sure what you're talking about. --Golbez 21:01, Jun 24, 2005 (UTC)

__TOC__ is the only thing I can think of... Cburnett 21:08, Jun 24, 2005 (UTC)

Looking at his recent changes ("extremly recently" gives the hint), you can see he indeed removed and readded the __TOC__. --cesarb 21:12, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

It is certainly not to do with the browser, as MediaWiki has to convert markup into HTML/CSS before giving it to the user, regardless of what they're browsing on. I'd say you should report this to BugZilla or MediaZilla or whatever it's called these days. Who knows, this might have already been reported there from another Wiki? Master Thief Garrett^Talk 21:29, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

So what happened, someone hid vandalism inside a TOC? I'm confused here. --Golbez 21:35, Jun 24, 2005 (UTC)

Judging by talk page contribs, Chanting Fox seems to be referring to the rant added to Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Header which is transcluded at the top of WP:AN. It was reverted pretty swiftly. Maybe removing and readding __TOC__ cleared a cache somewhere for Chanting Fox. --rbrwr^± 21:40, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• Ahhh....mystery solved. That would explain why we couldn't find a history of the edit: we weren't looking at the header. Thank you! Joyous 21:48, Jun 24, 2005 (UTC)

Wiki <=> HTML translator, yes, but Where ?

Hello, I already seen Wiki <=> HTML translator, but I don't remember Where. Someone can help me ? Yug Yug

Something I've been mean to try: Wikipedia:How_to_use_tables#Converting_from_HTML_tables_to_wiki_table_syntax Quinobi 13:25, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Oh, beat me to it! These converters work great, except for tables. Oh sure when viewing the page they look near identical to the HTML ones, but the actual code behind them is often a confusing mess of colspans and such. But other than that I've found no problems with any of the flavours of converters on offer there. Master Thief Garrett^Talk 13:36, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)

UserID:

I saw my `User ID` somewhere just flowing past. Never seen it since.

Where is it used, and is there a listing? How can I check whats my own? Or others? Can it be used for anything? Im thinkin in the lines of boasting that Im #308 or whatever it was....

-Snorre/Antwelm 11:35, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Comment: Just saw the `How tell how long a member?` post above me (just hit post, didn`t read others). My post might have relevance? -Snorre/Antwelm 11:38, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

You can see your User ID when you set your Preferences (link at top of page). The only thing I know it's useful for is entering users into banning/sysopping forms and similar if they have strange or unknown characters in their username. 11:42, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

So they`r not added slavely chronological? Meaning if someone get deleted, someone else might get their ID? If not do, its a pretty nifty tool to establish joindate etc... -Snorre/Antwelm 11:54, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Just checked the pref page, thats where I glimpsed it earlier, reads in the format of: `Your internal ID number is 308`. So, is it possible of seeing/checking other users ID? -Snorre/Antwelm 11:58, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

AFAIK only developers can see other users' IDs. They are database identifiers, so they will never be reused. Their assignment is sequential. --cesarb 13:31, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I run my own wiki using MediaWiki, and I am 99% sure CesarB is correct. smoddy 13:36, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

MediaWiki design is generally anti-status, that's why there's no (easily) visible edit count or registration date. If user IDs were visible, you could use them as a rough estimate of seniority. Note that the first few hundred user IDs were taken by people who were active with the project before the phase 2 software switchover. Ordering within this group is not related to seniority. -- Tim Starling 19:01, Jun 24, 2005 (UTC)

It's just like how many forums don't have instantly visible post counts or registration dates beside every post, they don't want it to be held over the heads of new users. Same thing virtually applies with our admin policy, where it's clearly emphasised that the admins don't have any real specialness or superiority above regular users in the chain of command. Master Thief Garrett^Talk 20:45, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

image syntax

Is there a way to make [3] ( [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/it/thumb/b/b1/210px-Beppe_Grillo.jpg] ) display an image instead of just the link to an image? It's in the article Beppe Grillo. RJFJR 03:28, Jun 24, 2005 (UTC)

By the looks of the URL that's on the Italian Wikipedia. I'm faily certain you can't cross-link embedded images. So either upload it to the Commons (if it fits under a free licence) or upload a copy here (if it doesn't).Master Thief Garrett^Talk 03:45, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Bingo, you can't link across languages. Cburnett 03:47, Jun 24, 2005 (UTC)

Thanks. That would explain it. (I was just trying to wikify it so I had nothing to do with the uploading). RJFJR 04:14, Jun 24, 2005 (UTC)

I think the bingo is that you cant use external images, and that the it-wiki would be considered external from en. ? ..Just to be pedantic.. -Snorre/Antwelm 12:12, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The only externla-to-en-wikipedia you can link to is the commons, but that's done implicitly if there is no image by that name at en: Cburnett 16:02, Jun 25, 2005 (UTC)

How tell how long a member?

Is there a way to tell how long an account name has existed if the person has no user or talk page? I'd leave them the subst:welcome template but it'd be kind of embarassing if they have been a long time participant and just never had anything posted at user or talk. ---- RJFJR (sig added by Cburnett)

Go to their user page and click on "user contributions" and find the first contribution they made. It's a fair assumption that their first edit was close to when the created the account. Cburnett 02:30, Jun 24, 2005 (UTC)

See topic below `UserID:` -Snorre/Antwelm 11:56, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

New dumps?

Database dumps [4] are a valuable tool for several purposes: off-site mirrors, backups, and off-line analysis. In particular, my wikipedia cleanup project needs to analyze timely dumps in order to have the best impact. Unfortunately, the dumps available have not been updated in well over a month. Is there an expected timeframe for another version, or a schedule? It seems they are getting less and less frequent, which hurts projects like mine substantially. Brighterorange 21:27, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• Well, I'd hate to think that complaining made it happen, but there are new dumps now. ;) Brighterorange 02:49, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)

What media can be uploaded?

What media can be uploaded? Where is the list of file types available and where can they be found? There must be something encoded into the database somewhere.

From a quick little experiment:

Can upload:	*.jpg, *.gif, *.png *.pdf and other media (*.ogg)
Can't upload:	*.txt, *.zip

Can source files for created diagrams be uploaded, e.g. Image:Darwin-Wedgwood-Galton family tree.png. Can this be done? I think that's in dia but is this one of the allowed ones, and why isn't there a Wikipedia:Upload FAQ?

I would try to upload a *.dia file but I can't work out how to download and install it on windows, so any help for that would be appreciated. Dunc|☺ 16:08, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

m:Image#Supported_file_types; miscellaneous mentions the same, except pdf. If that can be uploaded that page can be updated. Source files in text form could just be put in a page, with pre-tags. --Patrick 13:52, Jun 24, 2005 (UTC)

tr.wikipedia.org

http://tr.wikipedia.org is dead! Can anybody look into this? --Pjacobi 10:07, 2005 Jun 23 (UTC)

Huh?

My monobook.js Can someone with some extra time look at that and tell me why I am not, in fact, getting an extra tab on top which will place my welcome message into the User Talk: edit box? And perhaps help me add tabs for inserting my "You're an admin", "You're a bureaucrat", and Anon test 1-4/ban/copyvio templates in there? Thanks. — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 03:29, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

You can add links for those templates to your monobook!? ooh ooh how? :D --Golbez 04:35, Jun 23, 2005 (UTC)

It's actually javascript that inserts text into the edit box. — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 17:36, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Yes yes yes, but how? :) --Golbez 18:15, Jun 23, 2005 (UTC)

Well I don't know cuz it doesn't work ;) — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 19:03, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Have you tried clearing your cache? smoddy 10:06, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, I have pressed Ctrl+F5 (Firefox). I'll try doing it through preferences. — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 17:36, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Firefox is Ctrl+Shift+R. smoddy 19:07, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Oh...well I did a cache claering thru the pref. window, still no cookie. — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 23:35, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Biting the newbie

Many of you, no doubt saw the long back and forth (now archived) with a newbie who felt attacked when his contributions were deleted and reverted. Even though I was a party in the debate, and may have unwittingly caused part of the problem, I think there is an issue that should be looked at by those of us who have been around here for a while. I posted some suggestions in the midst of the discussion about steps we could undertake to make the newbies first experiences here less traumatic. I'm posting them again now, because I'm hoping we can now discuss ways to help ANY newbie, rather than that particular newby...

1. The way things are set up now, it is unrealistic to expect someone cleaning up an article to do an investigation into whether someone is new to Wikipedia. It would help if when you went to someone's user page or user contribution page if you could find some statistics like the date the account was created or the users edit count. Better yet, have the user-count posted with each edit in each article's history. That way you could just look at the history and see if someone is new. If I knew that someone was very new here, I'd be more likely to have a longer more personal Edit summary for that person. I probably wouldn't type "rv" or "wikify", and instead type a comment with a link to a page with instruction. I also might visit their talk page.
2. Perhaps, instead of a speedy delete, the process could be replaced with a speedy move to the user's edit space. If a user posts an incomplete article that makes no sense, it would get tagged and then automatically moved to the user's page with a comment directing the newbie to the manual of style, and encouraging the person to finish the article before posting it.
3. "Be bold" needs to be explained more. It should probably say something like "be bold only if you have the stomach for a very long frustrating debate and you probably won't succeed", or "be bold, but only about some things and never about some others".
4. Perhaps we should encourage users to make their own private wikis in their user space and have a place to link it to the main space. Thus a users who wants to set up something unusual could do it however they want, and there'd be a link below "See also" that said "Other wikis" or "User pages". This might encourage some very creative work. There could be standards for what links remain and what links get deleted.

-- Samuel Wantman 19:44, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

1. New users rarely have a user page. New users also rarely have much substance on their talk page. So looking at the RC or watchlist, you'll see two red links. That's an easy indicator. There's always [5].
2. Or the admin-doing-the-deleting should validate that it's nonsense or a newbie making an attempt. The one putting a page on speedy delete should also have the responsibility for checking.
3. Sounds like instruction creep
4. Again, sounds more like instruction creep. The edit page has a link to the sandbox. Now maybe it should be more prominent.

Cburnett 20:37, Jun 22, 2005 (UTC)

I'm not commenting on points 2-4 yet, but I too think it would be benefitial to see on a user's page when he joined Wikipedia (I find this interesting and have for that reason added this to my own user page). To also add how many edits a user has may also be interesting, if it isn't too difficult to implement and takes a lot of server load. --Fred-Chess 21:47, Jun 22, 2005 (UTC)

If you want to see when a user joined you can check his contributions (go to his (possibly non-existant) user-page and click "User contributions" under the search-box) and check when the first edit was made. To see how many edits a user has, use kate's tools. gkhan 22:06, Jun 22, 2005 (UTC)

There's people with over 10,000 edits. You try clicking "next 500 edits"-link 20 times in a row. Having it easily accessible encourages people to check such things. - Mgm|^(talk) 12:25, Jun 24, 2005 (UTC)

If you really are aching to know, check how many contributions a user has with kates tool, then adjust the offset in the url-bar of the user-contribs page. It isn't that hard, but you have to know how it's done. gkhan 21:28, Jun 24, 2005 (UTC)

Stop feeling sorry about this newbie being bitten. Looking at his edits, particularly this one [6] it was clear he had no intent in learning our style guidelines. If he wanted to change them, there's an outlet for that, but if a "newbie" is going to dive right in without paying attention to style guidelines, change how we do things, then whine when he's "bitten" by someone trying to educate him about procedures here, then I have no sympathy for that "newbie" (more like a troll) at all, and neither should you. Yes, he contributed some good edits - And so did Wik. And Wannen was far more abrasive in his early career than Wik was in his late career, IMO. I'm sorry to see Rich go, because he did know a lot of good stuff - but I'm not sorry that it's his fault. --Golbez 22:37, Jun 22, 2005 (UTC)

You need to read Wikipedia:Please do not bite the newcomers. Especially the last two points:

• Remember Hanlon's Razor. Behavior that appears malicious to experienced Wikipedians is more likely due to ignorance of our expectations and rules. Even if you're 100% sure that someone is a worthless, no-good, low-down scum-sucking Internet troll, vandal, or worse, conduct yourself as if they're not. By being calm, interested, and respectful, your dignity is uplifted, and you further our project.
• Remember that you were once a newcomer also. Treat others as (if possible, better than) you would be treated if you had just arrived at Wikipedia.

Maybe even put Hanlon's Razor on your user page. Your attitude in the above post certainly does not show respect to any degree. Cburnett 23:00, Jun 22, 2005 (UTC)

Maybe he should have paid attention when lots of people tried to help him understand the style guidelines. His own statements show he had no intent in "playing by the rules", and then complained when they were pointed out to him. And maybe you should actually read the evidence I put forth and statements I made: he was ignorant, but ignorant by active choice. He refused to figure it out, and yelled at us because we just didn't "get" him, when he had no intention of "getting" us. I know I was a newcomer - which is why I treaded softly. At first, I was terrified I was doing something wrong. I spent a long, long time reading the style manual for every edit I made. Why should I expect less of someone so vocal? I treated him just fine, and he had no intention of being civil. Eventually, around the time he leaves his parting shot, it reaches the point where we must ask, why should we? --Golbez 04:34, Jun 23, 2005 (UTC)

I repeat: Even if you're 100% sure that someone is a worthless, no-good, low-down scum-sucking Internet troll, vandal, or worse, conduct yourself as if they're not. So it's wrong for Rich to ignore things, but you're allowed to pick-and-choose?

The style guide

Writers are not required to follow all or any of these rules

is no more fixed than the guideline of WP:bite

It illustrates standards or behaviors which some or many editors agree with in principle. However, it is not policy.

I have no intention of picking a fight or fanning a flame war here, but from my reasonably external position on the whole thing...you are not an innocent in the matter but you're quick to condemn the guilty. Cburnett 05:46, Jun 23, 2005 (UTC)

You're wasting too much time weeping over this guy. I did conduct as if he wasn't - as long as he remained. The moment he left, it was time to remove the mask and speak candidly. The styleguide is not fixed, no - but his reaction when people tried to inform him of present consensus was hostile at best. He never assumed good faith -- I'm tired of giving him that unearned respect. Samuel Wantman, I don't think there's any problem with the process, that's why I'm being so vocal here. Stop rolling over because one stubborn man was particularly skilled in whining. We have dealt with thousands and thousands of newbies here, no problem - this one requires neither special attention nor response. --Golbez 09:56, Jun 23, 2005 (UTC)

My intent in resurrecting this discussion was not to point fingers and find blame. I'm hoping we can keep this discussion about ways to make it easier for the newbie. The easier it is for the newbie, the easier it is for everyone. -- Samuel Wantman 06:00, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I belive the Wikipedia:Please do not bite the newcomers is the all important guideline towords new wikipedians, basicly saying that we must give newbies a lot of slack and never bite back even if the newbie bites first. There are many rules on wikipedia and you are right in that we can't expect new wikipedians to know, understand or follow them all. But that's why we want to give them so much slack and let them fail repetedly and even behave rude and flaming to begin with without us being rude and biting in return. Regarding your points about the various rules and guidelines (be bold, welcome newusers, speedy-delete prosess, etc) I believe changes and improvements there should be discussed on the coresponding rule/guidelines talk-pages and not here on Wikipedia:Village pump (technical). Shanes 06:23, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I agree with WP:bite (ergo my bit with Golbez above). Biting begets more biting and people leave.

Regardless of how much you want to talk about it; no matter how much you want to write guides and/or tutorials; no matter how much you want to help newbies; no matter how much you want to make everyone's life better...there will always be a learning curve for newbies and none of that will remove it. At some point, the learning curves levels off no matter how much you do (see instruction creep) and I'm not sure how much more we can do except to not bite the newbies. A bitten, pissed-off newbie isn't going to be as receptive as a non-bitten, pissed-off newbie nor as receptive as a non-bitten, happy newbie. So this is the key: biting a newbie does not improve the situation. Can anyone disagree with that? Can being rude and disrespectful be better than being kind and respectful? I can't fathom a case where that's the rule, not the exception. Cburnett 06:40, Jun 23, 2005 (UTC)

Well put. But what I'm trying to get at is that I had no intention of biting a newbie, but did so partly because I had no idea that he was a newbie. He had an account, and was making changes to formatting -- things that I don't expect from a newbie. If I had been aware that it was his 20th or so edit, I might have put an explanation at his talk page with my first revert. If his page of nonsense had been quickly moved to his user page instead of deleted, he could have possibly been encouraged more. Yes, in this case it might not have made any difference, but in other cases it may. I know the first time I made an addition to a manual of style it was immediately reverted with little explanation. I was shaken a little from the experience, but I found my text in the history and figured out where to post it. If this had happened with my first article it would have been pretty upsetting. In a sense, this is institutionalized biting of newbies. Finding people's edit counts are already possible, but it is pretty time consuming. Finding the date they started is also possible but time consuming. I don't know if these proposals are technically problematic, but if they can be easily done I can't see that it would hurt anything, and it might help. -- Samuel Wantman 07:00, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Why bite at all, newbie or not? Anyway, I don't find it time consuming to look at a users talk-page and see how old the first entry there is. It takes maybe 2 seconds, 2 seconds well spend to know how you should formulate your answer even if you aren't planing on being bity ;-). I don't see the need for having edit-counts more available. It would make the number even more prestigious than it is now. And it's already way overrated on RFA and other places as it is. Shanes 07:32, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I'm not sure it's about biting or not, per se. If I did something stupid and was reverted, chances are I could understand why without an explanation since I understand how things roll around here.

If I didn't know the MoS, didn't know the various guidelines & policies, and am generally new to the whole thing...then I might take it as being biten ("why was my contribution undone?" seemed to be a common question with Rich). To me, it would be about gauging the correct response with the action so that it's not misunderstood or ambiguous. Cburnett 07:43, Jun 23, 2005 (UTC)

And we didn't bite him. We pointed out quite simply what went wrong - and he assumed maliciousness. I did nothing of the sort until it was clear that that was all he was going to do. You're giving him a free pass, and assuming maliciousness in me where none existed. --Golbez 09:56, Jun 23, 2005 (UTC)

"Stop feeling sorry about this newbie being bitten." Will you make up your mind? Cburnett 19:00, Jun 23, 2005 (UTC)

I'd invite you, Golbez, to "stop feeling sorry" for yourself. Rich's original complaint was that something he was working on was prematurely deleted: he thought it was an automated deletion. If he attacked anything, it was the bot he suspected. You were the first one to hurl a personal attack, at him. That makes me wonder if you weren't the one who deleted whatever it was, and you've taken it personally and won't look beyond that. Also, Rich is certainly not the only person to leave here angry or frustrated, for whatever reason; he has just done a better job of explaining why he left. I really think you need to put something on your wounded ego and look beyond "Rich" to the validity of his complaints. I think Sam and others are doing that; why can't you? 12.73.198.186 22:17, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

His "original complaint" was dealt with WITHOUT BITING. Any biting was a PERCEIVED slight by Rich. We did no biting. He assumed bad faith and never let go of that. I have no wounded ego here. And nice try, but no, I didn't delete it, and looking at the delete log (not to mention the archive, where I believe I pasted the whole line) would prove that. That you're stooping to such moronic tacts to continue this train of thought is disturbingly laughable. I have no wounded ego here. Rich came and bitched; I responded in a straightforward, not coddling but not mean, matter. He didn't care, and continued his abrasive tone. I tried. Others tried. He clearly had no other tone BUT abrasive, and finally he's gone. There's no reason to treat this as a "newbie biting" incident. His complaints may have been valid, and we discussed that for a short time - deleting a page too soon after creation, etc. His later complaints (and in retrospect, his original complaints, though I wouldn't have responded any differently) were ranting that had no business being answered. --Golbez 22:50, Jun 23, 2005 (UTC)

On your note about reverting newbie-edits without comments. Yes, that's a real problem. I admit doing it way too often, and I feel bad about it when I do. A friend of mine had his first WP edit reverted (incorrectly even) by an admin with the standard uninformative rollback comment. He hasn't edited since. To help on this, I think there should be a feature allowing for an edit-comment on rollbacks. Myself I have become way too lazy after getting the one-click rollback-feature so I often neglect reverting the old way when a edit comment really would be in order. And I know this is also the case for many other admins. But it's really a case of how much time to put in when doing RC-patrolling, and where to put in that time. The perfect way of reverting would be with a good edit-summary as well as a comment on the users talk-page about why you reverted. But, well, I am sadly not perfect. At least not when it comes to this ;-)Shanes 07:56, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

That came out wrong. I don't want to defend being sloppy with me not being perfect. That's not a good reason for not trying better. In short: I agree that newbie-reverts can be seen as being bit, and I think it should be better emphesised in some (yet another?) guideline. Or maybe it is, and I haven't read it well enough yet ;-). Shanes 08:04, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

To return this to civil discourse and state my position - I simply see no reason to change or even re-examine the policies after the late incident. It was an isolated incident. Don't worry too much about it. --Golbez 18:17, Jun 23, 2005 (UTC)

Hah, you think this has been incivil? I take it you've never been around a real flame war to know the difference. :)

I've been in some nasty flame wars. This is the most incivil I believe I've ever gotten on Wikipedia, which probably says a lot on how I typically conduct myself here. --Golbez 22:50, Jun 23, 2005 (UTC)

I've examined your user page, Golbez, and it's not an isolated thing. You've gotten several people angry at you over your expressed attitude towards others. 12.73.198.186 22:17, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I recall two negative remarks on my page; one from an anon whose complaint was totally baseless, and one from another guy who later agreed with. But hey, thanks for trying. --Golbez 22:50, Jun 23, 2005 (UTC) EDIT: I checked and there were a couple other people chiding my for my curt tone to anon IPs who left reverted edits. That's fine - I've gotten better about that, and I thank them for their concern. --Golbez 22:55, Jun 23, 2005 (UTC)

Frankly, I don't care if it's isolated incident or not: it was an incident. Maybe this speaks volumes of differences between us, but I strive to improve wherever I can (and I wasn't even involved!). The probability that Rich would have stuck around to be a contributor is non-zero, therefore I see that there's room for improvement to increase that probability. If you have no desire to re-examine or to try and learn from hindsight then by all means go elsewhere; no one is forcing you to participate in something you don't think needs to happen. I'm not going to speak for Sam nor Fred nor Shanes, but there's at least one person who thinks you're wrong and that there is room for improvement of some kind. If it's adding account creation dates or edit counts, then so be it. If it's re-examing policies, then so be it. If something can be done to reduce the probability of this happening again, then I'm up for discussing it. Just please stop raining on the parade.

Now that was an entirely civil response. Having conflicting views does not make a discussion incivil. Cburnett 19:00, Jun 23, 2005 (UTC)

I didn't say you were being incivil. I said I was. :P And certainly the anon whose attempts to impugn my character are getting more and more laughable. --Golbez 22:50, Jun 23, 2005 (UTC)

Template for blank space

Hi. For some technical reasons that I will not go into, I need to create a "space" or "gap" template that will simply do the following: Create a blank space (length: roughly the space of 12 characters) in the middle of the line.

Ideally, if the template occurs towards the end of a line of text (rather than in the middle) it will leave a bit of the end of the line blank and force a small indent at the beginning of the next line of text.

Needless to say, just tying 12 spaces into a template doesn't work. The Mediawiki software disregards this as simply a blank text, and doesn't even save the template. Also, in general, typing a bunch of spaces in the middle of a paragraph doesn't show up at all when the page is viewed.

Any suggestions for how it might be possible accomplish this? Dovi 08:15, Jun 22, 2005 (UTC)

Only thing I can think of is this "            " (look at wiki-syntax to see how).

Forcing             a             line             break             to             see             what             happens                         ok?

That will produce white-space at the start of the next line. It won't be perfect, but the best I can think of. Cburnett 08:30, Jun 22, 2005 (UTC)

Hmm, well. It works in preview mode but not in viewing mode (so it won't work until you edit the page and hit preview). Oh well. Cburnett 08:32, Jun 22, 2005 (UTC)

BAH! I have no idea what this will do for you. After my first reply, it didn't work. Then after my second reply (saying it didn't work) it works. *shrug* Cburnett 08:33, Jun 22, 2005 (UTC)

See also m:Template talk:Hs.--Patrick 10:01, Jun 22, 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps <nowiki>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</nowiki>? Which looks like

Forcing             a             line             break             to             see             what             happens                        ok? -- Rick Block (talk) 18:12, Jun 22, 2005 (UTC) (no different from Cburnett's suggestion -- Rick Block (talk) 18:13, Jun 22, 2005 (UTC))

Wikipedia links to local files [installed in Intranet]

Hi,

We've installed Wikimedia on a server in our company and we'd like to add links to files on another server (the Windows authentication should decide whether or not the user can open the file). A construction like this:

[file://data2/Document.pdf Document]

doesn't work. Do you guys have any suggestions how to solve this problem / a workaround?

Thanks in advance, Chris

You might be better asking this question on a MediaWiki forum. I'm not entirely sure of the correct place; you might look at the mailing lists - Wikitech-l might be the most appropriate one. I'm sure you'll get a suggestion of a more appropriate place to ask if that's not right.-gadfium 09:19, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Mediawiki-l is the correct place to ask questions about Mediawiki installation and usage. -- Cyrius|✎ 02:25, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

its documented somewhere on meta how to allow file: urls but even if you do many browsers won't accept them in thier default configurations. Plugwash 30 June 2005 16:53 (UTC)

Centering a {{Prettytable}}

What do you have to add to the wiki markup to center a table in this format? Phoenix2 17:57, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

You can {{subst:prettytable}} and edit it? - Omegatron 20:19, Jun 21, 2005 (UTC)

On List of rivers by length I'm trying to center the little legeend table between the two pictures. Phoenix2 20:24, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Something like that? (Referesh page) Cburnett 23:18, Jun 21, 2005 (UTC)

Looks good. Phoenix2 17:25, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

theres no alignment specified in that template so you should just be able to add align=center after the prettytable template. Plugwash 12:42, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Interwiki links and lists

I'm curious to know if anyone has solved this problem (one that WP:FICT amplifies).

Given a page on the english WP like kilobyte and the redirect on the german WP de:Kilobyte (redirects to de:Speicherkapazität), how does one link kilobyte and the other 6 language pages on the german page that's not specifically about kilobytes but storage sizes?

The only two solutions I can come up with are:

1. Make a list of interwiki links on de:Speicherkapazität under bit, byte, kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte, petabyte, exabyte, zettabyte, and yottabyte
2. Remove the redirects on the german article, use interwiki links as per usual, and write a bit about kilobyte and link Speicherkapazität (in other works: make it an article)

Other than those, I can't come up with a decent solution. You could link all the interwiki pages (for bit, byte, etc.) on de:Speicherkapazität but then you could potentially have an insanely long list of interwiki links on the left to sift through. But this is such a bad solution, I don't consider it one since it just causes another problem.

The first solution then requires you to make lists within the article which could be extremely distracting if you're actually trying to read the german article (and not looking for it in other languages).

The second solution is in direct contradiction with WP:FICT since it requires un-condensing article which is the antithesis of what WP:FICT strives to achieve (condensation). The example that involves fictional characters is vulcan (Star Trek) and de:Vulkanier (redirects to de:Völker im Star-Trek-Universum and then you have to find the entry on that list of races). Since I know no german, I have no idea what all the star trek races are in one article: perhaps they have a WP:FICT equivalent or no one has bothered to create individual articles. Regardless of the motivation, the problem still persists: how do I link to en:Vulcan (Star Trek) on de:Völker im Star-Trek-Universum or how do I link to en:Kilobyte on de:Speicherkapazität?

Does this concern of interwiki linking out weigh the motivations of the supporters of WP:FICT? I've never understood the rationale for the support of WP:FICT: it's blatantly deletionist based — less articles, merging only relevant/removing non-canon — though it doesn't delete, but it's certainly not inclusionist. Cburnett 18:36, Jun 20, 2005 (UTC)

Bringing the inclusionist/deletionist segregatism into this is entirely irrelevant. Are you aware that before the existence of WP:FICT, fiction articles were semi-regularly deleted as fancruft? Basically, you found a minor problem that should be solved with a feature request for MediaWiki software (to allow interwiki links to article sections), and instead you blame it on one of our many local guidelines. Would you like a list of the many things that are inconsistent between the separate language versions of the wiki? Wikipedia is inconsistent. Radiant_>|< 08:08, Jun 21, 2005 (UTC)

You sound rather defensive there and rude with your edit summary of "whatever". Perhaps I care more about it than you, but that doesn't mean you have to be incivil about it.

• Condensation and compaction is a result of deletionism, and its said action that's causing the problem...so I hardly see it as irrelevant; tangential, maybe
• Your suggestion to fix media wiki is much easier said than done
• "blame"? I suppose you could say that. WP:FICT is (as I said) amplifying the problem (or probably more correct: WP:FICT is not fixing the problem)
• "Wikipedia is inconsistent"...so you're essentially writing off my concern/question because it...what?...isn't an attempt to make WP consistent?

The point is this: you're suggestion of "fixing code" is addressed above — having a big list of interwiki links amidst the article (in the case of de:Speicherkapazität that's going to be incredibly distracting with each -byte prefix having only three lines; and each prefix doesn't have a section). That's 27 languages for bit, 25 for byte, 7 languages for kilobyte, 9 for megabyte, 12 for gigabyte, 5 for terabyte, 3 for petabyte, 3 for exabyte, 1 for zettabyte, and 3 for yottabyte. I really am curious how you'll cram 95 links in the space of 27 lines and not make it distracting. Really, I am. Cburnett 08:44, Jun 21, 2005 (UTC)

• • "Whatever" was not intended as a swearword, sorry if it sounded like one. A solution in this particular case would be merging *byte into storage capacity. I'm disagreeing with your concern because what you're suggesting is impractical. If inconsistency between language editions of Wikipedia is a reason for changing one of them (and I'm not saying it isn't; it sounds like a good idea but one unlikely to get consensual support), the solution would not be to change the one that is more than twice as big as any other. Radiant_>|< 09:13, Jun 21, 2005 (UTC)

This question has come up at least twice on Wikipedia talk:Interlanguage links (with what look like not very satisfactory answers). I'd suggest this discussion continue there. -- Rick Block (talk) 13:48, Jun 21, 2005 (UTC)

Possible bug in near-simultaneous saves

The following is a conversation between myself and User:SamuelWantman which probably explains the possible bug as well as I could otherwise:

From the looks of the history, it looks like you deleted a comment of mine at Wikipedia:Stub types for deletion. I find it hard to believe this was intentional. What happened? SamuelWantman

It was accidental, and I apologise. Not sure what happened, but I can guess... I did two edits, at 6:56 and 6:57 (the second was simply adding the four tildes I forgot the first time. Your edit was also at 6:56. When I did my second edit, I used the "back" button to get to my previous edit and resave. It's possible that it you saved in the ten seconds or so between my two saves, I would have accidentally blanked it. I'll have to be more careful with that. Sorry! Grutness

I realise it was laziness on my part using the back-button and that that may have been the primary cause, but it may be something that people should be made more aware of if it causes this sort of "overwriting" of edits. Is it a documented glitch? Grutness...wha? 11:22, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

RSS feed of Featured Articles?

I would like to promote the Wikipedia more from my personal site, beyond the banner link I already use. It would be cool if I could pull in an RSS feed of featured articles and show them on my site as well. Is there such a thing? If so, I'd set up a cron job to pull it periodically rather than my site pages pulling it every time they're loaded--I don't want my site to any sort of drag on Wikimedia servers. — Stevie is the man! ^{Talk | Work} 07:37, Jun 20, 2005 (UTC)

Whoops... just ran into Wikipedia:Syndication... not exactly what I was looking for, but a step in the right direction. — Stevie is the man! ^{Talk | Work} 07:41, Jun 20, 2005 (UTC)

tidy not working?

Is the tidy module not working? Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Log/2005 June 9 seems to have a number of leaky tags. --cesarb 02:16, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

search not showing substring result; cycle time on updates?

A few days ago, I recently authored two articles. Say that the article is titled "A B". Oddly, when I search for "A" or "B" separately, it doesn't show my page for "A B". Only when I go to "A B" will it find the page.

Shouldn't this be immediately updated or am I doing something wrong in my page?

Or is there a delay time before some index gets updated?

It does work on GO, but it's been nearly four days since I entered the article. Using search doesn't find it or anything in it.

Say the article I created is entitled "Firstname Lastname". If I put in 'Firstname Lastname' (no quotes) and hit enter or click GO, it finds the page.

But if I enter simply 'Lastname', or 'Firstname Lastname' (no quotes) and hit SEARCH it doesn't find either of my new pages or anything within them at all, using other searches.

Is this a wait-for-some-massive-Wikipedia-update or am I doing something wrong?

I has been nearly four days since I created the articles.

Please Help!

This is really critical. I will be writing some other articles, but I can't do it if this is not understood.

Wikiklrsc 23:43, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

There is a delay. In fact, I believe the index generation is started manually. --cesarb 15:29, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

VFD

I might be being daft, but I can't seem to edit the VFD page for today to place a vote. Does anyone else have this problem. Leithp 20:09, Jun 19, 2005 (UTC)

If it's the [edit] links not showing, it has already been fixed. Clear your cache. --cesarb 23:17, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Yes, I noticed that it had been fixed later on. Thanks anyway. Leithp 14:57, Jun 20, 2005 (UTC)

getting rid of past edits

On the paul bearer page, i was testing out how to edit and upload pictures, however instead of clicking prview i clicked save by accident my laptop touchpad is f'ed up) so i wondered if i could be removed from the history page, as it could b offensive.

Rvd 15:20, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Removing edits from history cannot happen without extraordinary measures being taken. This isn't one of the few cases that justify that effort. -- Cyrius|✎ 22:49, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Template:Islam

It "cuts" the heading lines and looks pretty ugly. How do we fix this? For an example, see Jihad. - Ta bu shi da yu 05:25, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

If you put style="margin:0.2em;" | into the top line of the table that is in the template, this should render correctly. smoddy 11:23, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

New categories

Hi there! I would like to have an automatically generated list of all newly created categories, updated daily or weekly (don't really mind which). Is such a thing possible? Does it already exist? Thanks. Radiant_>|< 13:32, Jun 16, 2005 (UTC)

Doesn't yet exist publicly, as far as I know. I could produce such a list by diffing database dump analyses, but these dumps seem to occur once every 2-4 weeks. A developer might be able to get you a more frequent, more current version. What sort of application(s) did you have in mind? -- Beland 04:47, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Anyone know why categories don't show up in Special:Newpages? -- Rick Block (talk) 05:00, Jun 17, 2005 (UTC)

I don't know why, but it's a good thing they don't because that would make it much harder to tell the day a given article-count milestone was reached because you would have to ignore categories in the Newpages list. - dcljr (talk) 05:05, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps someone could make Special:Newpages work like Special:Allpages in that the namespace could be specified. Maybe this has been discussed before... - dcljr (talk) 05:08, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Bug on en

fr:Wikipédia:Yong-test

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:%E6%B0%B8-order.gif

Yug 00:46, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The English Wikipedia does not support Unicode. No, I don't know when it will. -- Cyrius|✎ 01:30, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I'd venture that it will be supported when Mediawiki supports multiple character encodings in a wiki. Ambush Commander 02:09, Jun 16, 2005 (UTC)

it will be supported some time after mediawiki 1.5 is live, since it supports on-the-fly conversion of encodings without requiring the wiki to be taken offline while the database is converted.

When we switch, it will be available immediately. Mediawiki 1.5 doesn't support non-Unicode wikis. Susvolans (pigs can fly) 16:46, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Unicode is now supported. Three cheers for the developers! Gdr June 28, 2005 10:46 (UTC)

Google results of Wikipedia articles

It's not clear to me where Google takes its short summaries beneath Wikipedia articles in its results, and why there sometimes isn't a summary at all. Four different examples.

First, take a Google search on george w. bush. Google's summary of the Wikipedia entry (seventh result) is as follows:

Open-source encyclopedia article provides personal, business and political information about the President, his policies, and public perceptions and ...

I can't find that text anywhere in the article. Where does it come from? Now take nafaanra for another example. The Wikipedia article (1st result) is listed without a summary. For a third one, try lord's resistance army. Our article is the second hit, and gets a summary composed of some text halfway the article. Last but not least: gbe languages gets the first few lines from its lead.

Can someone explain what's going on? — mark ✎ 19:23, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I'm not an expert, but from my understanding, Google cache's results from it's spiders. The text summary it shows may not appear in the article now, but did when it cached the information. The text below the summary is not "live," it's from some point in the (hopefully not too distant) past.

The last result you showed, for gbe languages, is an article that probably isn't heavily edited, so its text is the same as it was when it cached the information from the page. The article on "W", however, is heavily edited, so the text summary that Google shows doesn't appear in the article now, but did in some point in the past. If you look back in the history of the article, at some point I'm certain, you'll find the phrase that Google is using. If you do a Google search again in 3 months, the Google summary may be different, but still not the text that appears at the beginning of the article.

But, like I said, I am not an expert. This is just an educated guess. — Frecklefoot | Talk 19:38, Jun 15, 2005 (UTC)

I can't explain why, but this is the text that appears on the Google Directory [7]. It's clearly a précis of the WP article, written by someone else. It's understandable that Google would choose this to put on their summary. What is less explicable is the other two. I have no clue why either would be listed as they are. smoddy 19:44, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

<facetious>I'm telling you, it's a side effect of the experiments Google is conducting on Wikipedia. Beware!</facetious> Related reading: Wikipedia:Send in the clones Ambush Commander 02:12, Jun 16, 2005 (UTC)

Ah, that last one is really helpful, thanks! — mark ✎ 15:13, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

It looks like Google is using some complicated algorithm to try to automatically extract summaries from web pages. It appears to be malfunctioning on many Wikipedia articles, such as some of those listed above. It should always take the lead of the article, which is intended to be a quick summary of the article or of the concept(s) explained. (I'm sure Wikipedia's actually rather simple structure differs greatly from many other web pages.) -- Beland 04:38, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Snippets, as they are called, can come in the form of 2-3 sentences from various places inside the web page, and also from another web page that Google feels is discussing the web page in question (and it may or may bot be linking to it), or not at all --Alterego 07:45, Jun 20, 2005 (UTC)

The short summary comes from the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) listing at [8] -- it's at the bottom of the page. DMOZ is a basis directory for Google. — Stevie is the man! ^{Talk | Work} 07:59, Jun 20, 2005 (UTC)

And whether there's a DMOZ summary for a given article depends on whether that article was chosen by a given category editor as a useful link in his/her category. (You can submit sites for inclusion in categories, but a human editor will decide whether it belongs and what the final summary will be.) — Catherine\^talk 04:05, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Different image placement in different skins

Have a look at Rubber duck. If you're using the "MonoBook (default)" Wikipedia skin when you visit that page, the three images show up in a vertical column on the right of the page. If you're using the "Classic" skin like I am, the three images show up in a horizontal line, smooshing the article's first paragraph into a narrow column to their left. This difference in the way the skins behave has caused problems for me when I try to format the images in an article and end up screwing it up for someone who's using a different skin. Is this a bug in the Classic skin; can it be fixed? Or is it an intentional stylistic decision to flow images differently in different skins? - Brian Kendig 17:38, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I don't know if it's intentional, but you can fix it by putting div.tright, div.floatright, table.floatright { clear:right; } into your standard.css. --Cryptic (talk) 19:34, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Thank you, but that's not a solution - I don't the image formatting to appear correct for just me, I want it to appear correct for everyone. I don't want to see the article laid out differently than other people see it. - Brian Kendig 02:16, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

In that case, you can bring it up at MediaWiki talk:Standard.css; placing it there will put it in place for everyone using the Classic skin. --Cryptic (talk) 03:10, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I suspect you know this already, but this can be fixed case by case with a div, see Wikipedia:Picture_tutorial#Co-aligning like images. -- Rick Block (talk) 02:56, Jun 15, 2005 (UTC)

Actually, wrapping the images in a div tag causes different problems - namely, when I put the images in Rubber duck into a div, it puts them in a vertical column at the right of the window, but in Mozilla and Firefox (both on Windows at least) it forces the article text to start under the images, leaving a huge empty area to the left of them. - Brian Kendig 05:11, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Adding a width to the div (as shown in the example on the picture tutorial page) fixes the Mozilla/Firefox (and IE) issue with the text starting below the div. -- Rick Block (talk) 14:06, Jun 15, 2005 (UTC)

This has long been a problem for users of the classic skin (like me), and I often bring it up as an objection on WP:PR or WP:FAC (it easily worked-around with a div or a table). Can someone with the requisite skills please fix the default style sheet (I don't have the technical skills otherwise I would do it myself). -- ALoan (Talk) 13:39, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

It's also a problem with the Cologne Blue skin. -- User:Docu

So where do I raise this as a bug to be fixed with the Classic and Cologne Blue skins? Or has someone logged it as a bug previously? - Brian Kendig 04:24, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

MediaWiki talk:Standard.css, MediaWiki talk:Cologneblue.css, and (as it's present in Nostalgia also) MediaWiki talk:Nostalgia.css. --Cryptic (talk) 06:00, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I'd always assumed this was a browser issue, not a skin one. It's probably the wrong day to try and catch a developer's attention, but could someone please fix this? Either for those skins globally, or by giving clear step-by-step instructions on how to modify our CSS sheets. Please? –Hajor 28 June 2005 15:02 (UTC)

Usernames in different language versions

I attempted to login onto this account on the German Wikipedia, but it doesn't allow me to do so. As one can see from my User page, I study German at school, so having the German version is invaluable.

My question is this; are usernames therefore restricted to the language version in which they were registered?

Yours sincerely,

Sasuke Sarutobi 09:51, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

You have to register separately there, but you can use the same name.--Patrick 10:15, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

So long as no one else has already registered that name. RickK 22:59, Jun 14, 2005 (UTC)

Or someone finally implements the Single login andy 20:00, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Even if and when they do, that will not resolve the problem of different people using the same User ID on different language Wikipedias. RickK 22:57, Jun 15, 2005 (UTC)

Village Pump box template

I noticed that recently the Villagepumppages template was changed dramatically from the old version. The old version was apparently designed so it could also be displayed on user pages. Therefore, I've recreated the old template here. I apologize if this has already been done. — Stevie is the man! ^{Talk | Work} 06:12, Jun 14, 2005 (UTC)

Aha! So that's what the point was. Sorry, I wasn't exactly sure what the point of the Village Pump Template was because they seemed to be linking to it like this[[.]] Ambush Commander 02:14, Jun 16, 2005 (UTC)

Category:NowCommons

Why is nobody deleting the Image listed there??? They r just used agian, if they stay too long. What's the use of this? In the German Wikipedia the images listed there are deleated soon after they weare listed. In fact en.wikipedia.org is wasting a lot of diskspace and makes work not really easier ... --141.70.124.98 13:40, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Because on the English Wikipedia, the fact that an image is now on Commons is not a reason for speedy deletion. -- Cyrius|✎ 06:24, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Why not? Have the images all to be listed on the delete-request page? --141.70.124.98 12:00, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• For the moment, yes. I believe there is a debate at WP:IFD on whether or not this should be a speedy. Radiant_>|< 15:13, Jun 14, 2005 (UTC)

Page cut in half

I've seen two instances this week of a page being truncated after editing, possibly because of a server error half-way past storing it. Anyone know what's up? Radiant_>|< 09:36, Jun 13, 2005 (UTC)

Can you give a link to those instances? I thought I'd put in some protection against incomplete page submissions, but it's possible that it either isn't complete or it doesn't quite apply in some cases. It may or may not help to see the examples. --Brion 00:52, Jun 14, 2005 (UTC)

• Certainly. One instance is here, [9] and [10]. The other, I cannot reproduce since it popped up during 'preview' and at that point I thought it wise to cancel that edit and restart from scratch. It was RickK's talk page, if that's any help. Radiant_>|< 09:06, Jun 14, 2005 (UTC)

jpeg preview

Some of the images I downloaded will not open and I cannot cut, copy nor delete them. What should I do?

Which images? Zeimusu | (Talk page) 14:38, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

IMDB tag

I recently found an odd IMDB tag on a page, Hey Arnold!: The Movie. At the very top it has IMDB:0314166. Is this a new template, or a new built in feature? Rather than using {{imdb title|id= |name=}}. To me it seems a little bit out of place, mainly for the fact that it takes the user off of Wiki without have the little arrow. I think it may be a bit confusing for some readers. It aslo makes the other imdb templates redundant. I scoured through as many Wiki pages I could find (policies, howto, layout, features, etc.) and couldnt find a mention of it anywhere. Any thoughts on this? <>Who?¿? 07:47, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

That's an interwiki link. --Brion 13:06, Jun 12, 2005 (UTC)

Uhm, yea I got that <g>, but an "interwiki" link implies it goes to another Wiki site run by Wikipedia, like Mgm states below. <>Who?¿? 16:04, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• Why are there interwiki links for non-wiki pages? Mgm|^(talk) 15:12, Jun 12, 2005 (UTC)

• And why does it go to the US one rather than www. ? violet/riga (t) 15:20, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• • There are a lot of non-wiki links on the Interwiki map at Meta, most of which I never knew about. I don't see why it should be us. rather than www., but it looks like discussion on that talk page is encouraged before making any changes to the list. — Catherine\^talk 20:09, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Wow, thanks for the info, could not find anything on Wikipedia. Will move my question there. <>Who?¿? 20:17, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Many were on the default list on UseModWiki prior to our moving to custom software. Others have been added since, for convenience or whatever. --Brion 00:53, Jun 14, 2005 (UTC)

watchlist

Since the June 7 downtime, my watchlist has become so slow as to be unusable, sicne it invariably times out. What's going on? jimfbleak 06:46, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I agree. At this moment, loading normal Wikipedia pages takes less than 5 seconds for me, but viewing my watchlist takes more than 30. – Smyth\^talk 09:56, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I am not an admin on Wikipedia (yet :)), but I suspect you both might be experiencing the ongoing problem with database latency. It is briefly described in the FAQ at the top of the page. I've noticed a slowdown on many pages since before the June 7 downtime, and especially the problem with the watchlist since after the downtime. It might help (but no guaruntee) to remove some of your watchlist topics one at a time by selecting them, and clicking on unwatch. It worked for me. Then see if your response time improves. Gbeeker 02:31, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

there was an issue with the watchlist in particular which was since fixed by Domas, i believe. should be working normally now. it wasn't related to the move. — kate

Yes, it's seemed fine for days now. Thanks. – Smyth\^talk 12:04, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

?'s for non-existant pages

Am I the only person that thinks the new style of using question marks to show pages that do not exist is a really bad idea. It makes it hard to read with question marks all over the place and a very large majority of wikipedia traffick is people reading, not editing or looking for new pages to create. The red underlined text was not the best solution but I think it is far better than adding new symbols all over the place. --Clawed 30 June 2005 12:10 (UTC)

and seconds? later wikipedia? has been? reverted? back--Clawed 30 June 2005 12:16 (UTC)

Wilfred Benitez photos

Hi there! I was gonna nominate the Wilfred Benitez article for featured article, but, to my surprise, the two photos there had dissapeared. Can someone help me? Thank you and God bless! Sincerely yours, Antonio Counterpunch Martin

See Wikipedia:MW 1.5 bugs#Images_bogus_size. Susvolans (pigs can fly) 28 June 2005 09:18 (UTC)

Update

Rich Wannen is back and is editing up a storm on the Film page and related things. I managed to revert his un-wikipedia-like changes overnight and got him upset once again. He has a link on his page to this discussion and I just read through it.

I just wikified my name link for you. You'd left it at just User:Rich Wannen!

Here's what I've noticed.:

1) It is probably nearly impossible to NOT upset a newby who doesn't, for whatever reason, want to learn and use customary Wikipedia style.

2) The way things are set up now, it is unrealistic to expect someone cleaning up an article to do an investigation into whether someone is new to Wikipedia.

Please clarify. *I'm* the one who's cleaning up the article. And it is a tremendous job, in the interests of which some stylistic and tradition considerations need to be, for me to do the job as completely and quickly as possible, to put on hold. Rich Wannen) 02.04, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

It would help if when you went to someone's user page or user contribution page if you could find some statistics like the date the account was created or the users edit count. Better yet, have the user-count posted with each edit in each article's history. That way you could just look at the history and see if someone is new.

3) Perhaps, instead of a speedy delete, there should be a speedy move to the user's edit space. In Rich's case, his deleted article could have been automatically moved to his page with a comment directing him to the manual of style, and encouraging him to finish the article before posting it.

4) I gave explanations of what I was doing when I reverted Rich's changes in the Edit summary. I realized pretty quickly that either he never saw my comments or didn't understand them.

I don't understand this, as I sent Mr. Wantman a response and he acknowledged it yesterday. Subsequently, he has sent two additional messages, which didn't have time to answer because I was working on the page cleanup project or other personal matters.

Unfortunately, I cannot accomplish much on improving the site if I'm tied up writing letters. I had to waste time last night confronting a vandalistic troll, Splash, who simply waddled into my work space 2 nights ago, deleted an entry wantonly, then did the same thing last night after I'd reprinted and expanded the entry. Since his vandalism erased the History along with the text, I identified him only by chance moments before his delete command was followed by a bot-admin, whom I should've thought had learned something from the foregoing discussion. Another proposal, therefore, is that editor/writers should somehow be notified that, and by whom, their stuff was deleted, with a revert mechanism, at their user page if total deletions are going to take out the History... Rich Wannen 00:46, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I tried an explanation on his talk page with my second revert, and when that didn't work, I tried a longer explanation but I didn't revert his changes. Someone else has reverted part of his changes, so hopefully, he won't think I'm picking a fight. It would be better if he learns how things work and makes the changes himself. I will try to encourage him this way.

5) "Be bold" needs to be explained more. It should probably say "be bold only if you have the stomach for a very long frustrating debate and you probably won't succeed", or "be bold, but only about some things and never about some others".

6) Some people are not suited for collaborations.

I'm quite agreeable to collaboration. Nitpicking or deleting works in progress are not acts of collaboration, but of saboutage. I welcome anyone who wants to work with me to sort all this out ("this" being that Wikipedia carries two parallel sections dealing with motion pictures: one, reached through the Main Page Culture portal is entitled Cinema, while the other, reached through the Search field, is Film - Cinema, on the search field, takes you to Film, in other words. Both subsequently contain some overlap, and possibly a lot of overlap, but are so disorganized and differently arranged that it will easily take a couple weeks to get them unified and organized in a meaningful way). Anybody who wants to help do this, just contact me, and we'll collaborate like all getout. Rich Wannen) 01:56, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I'm not convinced that Rich is suited for Wikipedia.

I'm suited for any place that is open to my participation and willing to assist me if I volunteer to take on a task. Of course, if "Wikipedia" means carelessness, sloppiness, trolling, nitpicking, appearance over content, cliquishness and sneaking around posting things about me behind their backs, then I would certainly have to say Wikipedia is not suitable for *me* (something about casting pearls before swine, I think.) Rich Wannen) 01:56, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

We'll find out.

Very soon, too I don't do well with people who talk about me behind my back, or stalk me or invade my workspace just to powertrip.

My return here was by way of giving the place a "fair chance", especially after the discussion my first confrontation raised. While some seemed unable to accept responsibility for anything at all in the affair, there were some people who seemed genuinely interested in making Wikipedia a productive community and a successful project. But it would be nice to have some of their direct involvement, as my return seems to be leading to just the SOS as the firstime I tried. Rich Wannen) 01:56, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps we should encourage users to make their own private wikis in their user space and have a place to link it to the main space. Thus Rich could organize film however he wants, and there'd be a link below "See also" that said "Other wikis" or "User pages". This might encourage some very creative work. :: -- Samuel Wantman 10:34, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Anything that will encourage creative work will benefit Wikipedia. Anything - or anyone - which strikes it down the moment it appears in public view, will not. Rich Wannen 01:56, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I put all of User:Rich Wannen's comments in italics to make things clearer. He changed my heading "Update" to "Upchuck" and I put it back. I'm certainly not trying to talk behind anyone's back. I assume that Mr. Wannen is watching this page.

Only on occasion. I am mostly tending to other matters elsewhere when not looking at the task to which I've put myself, or reviewing time-consuming messages. 12.73.201.145 15:29, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I'm at a loss at how to proceed.

How about just taking an MYOB approach, and working on one of the many Open Tasks at the Village pump mainpage. Come back to Film/Category:Cinema in a couple of weeks instead of frantically running over there 3-4 times a day. And learn how to not fret so much; you will get ulcers. 12.73.201.145 15:29, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC) Rich Wannen

Perhaps we should send people to "Wiki Driving School" if they refuse to learn how things work. Mr. Wannen redirected Category:Cinema to the article Film! He marked Category:Albanian films for speedy delete because it was "Redundant with contents of Article Cinema of Albania and List of Albanian films", etc. He thinks that there shouldn't be any duplication between lists and categories!

We've been a busy little Mommy, haven't we. Like I say, you need a diversion, badly. Get a hobby. Get a life. Get away until I'm done, then come back, review the final product, and offer up some salient comments when there is really something there to comment upon. Or else, collaborate. 12.73.201.145 15:29, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC) Rich Wannen

I'd be thrilled if he learned a bit and became a valuable contributor. I spent quite a bit of time trying to explain things to him without success. Perhaps someone can explain things better than my attempts. --Samuel Wantman 08:14, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Some cheese with your whine? *I'd* be thrilled if you'd learn something about the human condition. Forget what I said above: turn off your computer, get out of your room and go meet some real people. Don't dictate how they should live their lives; instead, listen, learn about their dreams and aspirations, their experiences and accumulated information. Be sure to include plenty of OP in your sample: they are as valuable as resources as any YP (pronounced "wipey").

By the way, do you notice, no one else has commented on your essays yet. Perhaps you are alone - Alone - ALONE. 12.73.201.145 15:29, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC) Rich Wannen

I've put Mr. Wannen's comments in italics again to make it clear who said what. Mr Wannen seems to think that since he has taken on a project no one else should touch what he is doing. He believes that, even if some of what he is doing makes no sense. He doesn't want to spend the time to understand some basic things about how wikipedia works. He takes attempts of assistance as threats. He is offended if others clean up anything he is working on even if they leave all his content alone. I'm not going to attempt to explain anything else to Mr. Wannen if he doesn't want my help. Good luck to the next person who tries to help. --Samuel Wantman 20:16, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

What’s the Use?

The crowning blow comes this morning. Saturday, I received an offer to help with the project I've undertaken for Wikipedia. And then yesterday I spent a good deal of time describing what I was working on and what kind of help I could use, and I get a message back from him today in which he says, well, he didn't really want to help on the *project*, but rather wants to help 'wikify' it, so to speak. On that score, I was referred for possible guidance on how to proceed to Wikiproject:Wikipedia Movies as a model for an 'approved' starting point - which Project I find has been DEAD since before Christmas 2004, and at least two of the five designated "Participants" also "dead" (to Wikipedia) since that time. Wonder why?

The really sad thing is, this message was sent to me in all friendliness and sincerity, but it clearly misses the point as has every other message/post to/about me, friendly and not. Again, style is trumping substance in the wikipedic mind, and even a friendly hand can't be trusted not to have a hidden life-control, imagination-tamping agenda tattooed on its downturned top. That is also why I no longer go to church.

I'm not mad, now, I'm just exhausted, and put off. Wikipedia is self-destructive in its current state, and I have no interest in wasting my time, energy and expectations on improving something which is not interested in improvement and which may be gone in a year or two if it doesn't make some major changes in its priorities and quality control mechanisms. I have addressed these concerns in more detail to another writer, an admin, but received no response. So it goes.

I've restored Film and List of movie-related topics to their form prior to my beginning to fix them, and you collectively have them back as they were, since that is what you collectively were most happy with.

At any rate, that is what Mother Wantman was most happy with: he has been found everywhere I go, posting to other wikipedians, as he does above, obsessively about me working out of conformity to his way of doing things. I could call it stalking, but it is really very funny, and symptomatic, of a wikified brain at its hardest work. I wonder if he's doing *any*thing else on the site but tagging after me making comments about "my" appearance and style, or lurking somewhere fretting about a missing bracket or two.

I'll keep my account open, in the event that the "Article Validation" project gets off the ground - though it seems to have bogged down in programming problems - as critical input from outside sources is desperately needed, and is about all I'm in the mood to contribute here anymore. But I relinquish all remaining contributions I've made to the trolls, dorks and morlocks of the night, to eat away as they please; and will not reply to any additional messages. Rich Wannen 12:57 CST, 21 Jun 2005

Closing his parting shot with a poorly formatted signature - I think that sums him up perfectly. --Golbez 20:42, Jun 21, 2005 (UTC)

And this Gofart kid is an admin! I think that sums up Wikipedia perfectly 12.73.194.81 22:44, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Rich - I'm very sorry if I missed the point. I thought the point was that you wanted to contribute and various folks kept getting in your way. I still think you have much to contribute and am still willing to do whatever I can to help you find a way to contribute. If you don't want this kind of help or are unwilling to learn enough about how things work around here to avoid having your efforts reverted at every turn that's certainly your prerogative. My offer still stands. You know where my talk page is. -- Rick Block (talk) 02:34, Jun 22, 2005 (UTC)

So, I take it this user has been deleted.?. If so, I would like the admin or whoever who did so, to state a short reason here. Link to previous decision, Links to where `the battle` has happened, or something like that. I just read through the lengthy first post (where noone else commented) and spent time on such. If a real conclusion (trust me, short could be good in this case) were at the bottom, a lot of my time could be spared.. -Snorre/Antwelm 13:00, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I'm not an admin (so certainly I didn't do it), but Rich asked for his user page to be deleted (as far as I know user pages are NEVER deleted except by request of the user). I believe his account is still intact. A brief summary: IMO Rich's experiences with wikipedia amount to a series of unforturnate events. His initial attempts at editing consisted of adding some articles which were speedily (actually, more like immediately) deleted. These edits don't show up in his edit history since the articles are gone. His complaints about this (archived here) were, with some exceptions, met with defensive and disrepectful responses, which (IMO, understandably) increased his anger and frustration. He left for a bit. And after coming back (!) he started contributing (history here) on a different topic apparently in his field of professional expertise and, bascially, the same thing happened again although for largely different reasons. This description perhaps makes it sound entirely one-sided, but IMO we (wikipedia) failed miserably to provide a welcoming or even particularly civil atmosphere. -- Rick Block (talk) 14:51, Jun 24, 2005 (UTC)

When I noticed the red link, I checked - yeah, he nominated his own page for deletion, Speedy I think. We assumed good faith when he never did. He assumed bad faith from the start. It's difficult to work with someone like that. I tried. Was it defensive? Perhaps. But I am a mirror. --Golbez 18:49, Jun 24, 2005 (UTC)

"Speedy Deletion" Overkill

note: the previous parts of this discussion fell into disuse and have been moved to Archive, this is only the current part of the discussion

Reliability and resources

I've been experiencing intermittent edit failures ("The wikimedia web server didn't return any response to your request.") all day. A few people on #wikimedia-tech looked at a few things, but didn't reach any conclusions. In the meantime, the master MySQL server crashed and restarted, but didn't solve the problem. It would be nice to know what's causing this problem, and it'd be even nicer to have it fixed.

I worry about the number of useful contributions and productive contributors we are losing when there are chronic editing problems. It seems a little embarassing for a site our size to have such availability problems.

Are people interested enough in increasing reliability, or maybe getting at the backlog of MediaWiki bugs, to make a concerted effort to recruit more volunteer developers, or even do a fundraising drive with proceeds earmarked for those purposes? -- Beland 06:23, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

Massive page rendering errors

I don't know about you, but when I look at the Bible (our article about it, I mean) I see about 100 errors saying:

Warning: strpos(): Empty delimiter. in /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.5/includes/Parser.php on line 1065

followed by the text of the article with basically every single word hyperlinked! And it's not vandalism because the last several changes to the article have been very minor, as seen in the page history. I assumed this was just a MediaWiki error that was affecting other articles as well, but I haven't come across any others yet. What's going on? - dcljr (talk) 23:15, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

Oops, no, it's now happening on List of Tibetan monasteries as well... - dcljr (talk) 23:17, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

i think it's affecting many talk pages that have enough headings to generate a table of contents. SaltyPig 23:38, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

Ditto when I tried to save an edit on Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (names and titles). When I entered the page it was black. I reverted my edit. Yet when I looked back a moment ago the page was perfect. So why did it show up on my screen as blanked? Curious.

FearÉIREANN\^(caint) 23:45, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

File:Pi-messup.jpg

I just upgraded to Firefox 1.0.6, and am witnessing severe screwups on at least Bird song and Pi. Nearly every single word on each page is wikilinked to their respective articles, among other problems. The Bird song article originally appeared as a massive list of errors such as that mentioned above, but then on reload appeared screwed up as I describe now. The Pi article loaded for the first time screwed up as is shown in the picture. I don't see these problems in IE. -- BRIAN0918  23:50, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

Everyone: make sure you add ?action=purge to your URLs before "me, too"ing. Errors of this magnitude normally don't last for more than a few minutes, but caching ensures the results linger on for a long time. JRM · Talk 23:54, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

thanks for the ?action=purge tip. i was ctrl-refreshing, but it was the ?action=purge that fixed it. SaltyPig 01:16, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

See also BBC Radio 1. Lee M 00:37, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

Link problems

I created the Template:User trumpet-1 and the novice/Category:User trumpet-1 link and the Category:User trumpet-1 link at the bottom of the page wont become blue. They stay red even though there are pages for the links. Is there anyway to make these links blue?

Jobe6 01:33, July 22, 2005 (UTC)

Extended Pipe Trick with Categories for table, including heights, records etc etc

I was looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-thousander, and it occured to me that a Category with "extended "pipetrick" could be used to generate a table. eg: by putting (maybe in a template) the following into Mount Everest: {{Category:Peak|Name=Mount Everest|8850|Height=8850||region=NP|First Ascent|[[May 29]], [[1953]]|First ascensionist=[[Edmund Hillary]] and [[Tenzing Norgay]]}} It could/would generate a table, instead of just an alphabetical list. And by using a second field, then table could be sorted into ascending height. This would encourage the growth of consistent indexes.

NevilleDNZ 07:01, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

Year sorted Categories

I am experimenting with Category:Timeline_of_New_Zealand and the Template:Born, Template:Event, and maybe Template:Founded / Template:Constructed. The problem is that the Category is indexed by the first letter of the "pipe trick", when I actually want it index by the first 4 digits (or word). eg the year 1969. Any chance there is a __INDEX_FIRST_WORD__ option for a category?

NevilleDNZ 00:42, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

That would be nice. A workaround is to use codes such as section K for 1920-1929.--Patrick 13:21, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

Or in a subcategory for the period 1900-1999, section 1920-1929 could in the category 2. At the top of the category page there should be an explanation, of course.--Patrick 13:36, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

request for anonymized apache log data for a recommendation system

Hi, I'd like to make a request to obtain access to anonymized apache logs for wikipedia user data.

I am creating a new interface for wikipedia that requires clustered user data (in that sense it is akin to the amazon recommendation system or, more originally, movielens).

For this I need access to user page requests over time- preferably stored in a database. I can provide a script that will translate users' ip addresses to a unique signature so that the users themselves remain anonymous.

Who might I talk to to arrange this?

Wikitech-l. -- Cyrius|✎ 23:34, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

Godmode-light.js

I don't know how many people use this script, but something in the last week broke [this script]. Is there any way I can check what has been changed (like bugfixes, etc) since then? -- BMIComp (talk) 00:53, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

I'll bet it was due to the change in the software that gives the current version of an article a permanent number immediately, rather than waiting for another edit. Just a thought... smoddy 08:18, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

If you're including the js file, then any updates will be made automatically. Otherwise, all you can do is wait. Be nice. Or fix it yourself. :) — Ambush Commander^(Talk) 02:05, July 23, 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Vandalism in progress

I can't access the WP:VIP page anymore, the server won't respond. Earlier today sections of the page seemed to have "doubled up." Chunks of the page got copied and pasted at the bottom of the article, resulting in duplicate sections. It was up to an unweildy number, around 50, if I remember correctly. The talk page indicates that it's happened before on a number of occassions. -D. Wu 21:12, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

I second that. It is unusable now. With previous design I was able to move oldest content to archive, with new style it looks too complicated. Pavel Vozenilek 17:56, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

If got better today. To deal with such situation next time perhaps short list of people who are willing to move old items into archive could be added on top of the page. Pavel Vozenilek 20:51, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

category+template

I removed Category:Computer science from {{compu-lang-stub}}. How long will it take for the articles with this template to be removed from the category? --R.Koot 20:38, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

Why did you do that? The stub templates and associated categories are generally managed at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting, with changes usually being discussed at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Criteria. Most stub tempaltes but the stub into a suitable general category or categories, in addition to the stub-specific category DES 20:47, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

Because I'm oranizing Category:Computer Science, and Category:Programming Languages seemed much more appropriate for those articles. --R.Koot 20:57, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

That is reasonable, but you might want to drop a note at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Criteria. DES 21:05, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

Such changes take effect when each of the articles involved is next edited, as i understand things. DES 20:47, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

Is there parhaps a faster way too achive this? --R.Koot 20:57, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

As I understand the matter, no, but I'll do a test in my userspace and confirm. DES 21:05, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

I believe Netoholic may have a bot to do a null edit to each. smoddy 21:14, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

I just confirmed by test, the revised category is appled only when the stubbed article is edited and saved. (I presume because that is when the template is applied or re-applied.) A bot to do a null edit on each article would solve the problem. DES 21:19, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

How do I upload a video to my website?

I am selling my house and want to add a video of the surrounding area (golf courses, fishing etc) to my website, but I don't know how to add it. I am truly a novice so the instructions would have to be specific. I have saved the little video blurb on my computer but I don't know how to get it on my website. I hope this makes sense. Thanks so much for any help you can provide. Blessings, Marcea

1. Go to the Reference Desk
2. Ask the question there (which I already have done :P)
3. Wait for instructions...
4. Then, well, do it :D

Cheers! gkhan 20:46, July 20, 2005 (UTC)

Special:Mytalk

On MediaWiki:Blockedtext, it has a link to the above page. Why is this not on the list of special pages?

I guess it's because it isn't really a special page, rather just a redirect to the appropriate talk page. Just my guess... smoddy 16:47, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

Cinque terra

Please delete the Cinque Terra article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinque_Terra).

Already exist Cinque Terre (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinque_Terre).

Done. See Wikipedia:Redirect. Cheers, smoddy 13:44, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

Interaction Between IP blocks and User Blocks

There is a feature I would like to see. If a user is logged in, and is not blocked as a user, an IP-specific block should not apply to that user. The primary reason for this is that with shared IPs, a vandalism block often affects innocent users, who are logged in and have a good edit history to demonstrate that they are not deserving of a block. Specifically I frequently ediut via dial-up AOL, and have several times run into IP-blocks imposed becase of other AOL users, although I am logged in. Since there is a need to block sockpuppets, and people who evade user blocks by anon editing, there really need to be three levels of blocks:

1) Ordianry IP blocks, due to vandalism or other problem edits from anon users. These would not affect logged-in users who happen to edit from the same IP.

2) User blocks. Thes woulld apply to the user involved, no matter what IP that user is editing from.

3) Hard IP blocks (I want a better name for these). These would apply to any user editing from the IP involved, and would only be applied when a user seems to be trying to evade other sorts of blocks by creating sockpuppets or making anon edits. Admins should be particularly wary of imposing these on shared IPs.

I hope the above is useful. I don't see why it would be technically hard. DES 22:10, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

Yes that would solve things, but create other problems. For example under this new system I could log out right now, do vandalism until I get blocked, log in again and continue editing as if I was innocent. Not to say our editors will (hopefully) be doing this, but it is a possible exploit under such a "kind" system. Garrett^Talk 23:49, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

True. But if you did it very often the situation ought to become evident, just as sockpuppets do now, and a level 2 or level 3 block imposed. I think the gain in not blocking valid users for the acts of others makes up for the possible ability of determined vandals to evade blocks. A really detemind vandal can get throguht pretty easily now anyway, by changing IPs and using socks. The average vandal doesn't bother, and that is by far the most common sort. This would still leave all the tools needed to deal with the average vandal while not hampering good dial-up editors. DES 00:17, 20 July 2005 (UTC)

How to add your own Alphabetical Index ???

Does anyone know how to implement an alphabetical index for one's own mediawiki like the one here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Quick_index

I'm guessing you're the same person who just filed a bug asking this same question, in which case hopefully you have my answer already; if not, please see. - IMSoP 18:28, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

Can {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} show a period instead of a comma?

Hi... I am a contributor to the Esperanto Wikipedia. In Esperanto (and I believe some other European langs), the comma and the period are swapped in numbers. For example, in English, we use the comma for number grouping, and the period denotes decimal characters. In Esperanto, these two characters are reversed. Ideally, I'd like to have {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} show a period character separating the thousands instead of a comma. A slightly less elegant but workable solution would be to get rid of the character altogether. (I notice they have done this on the German Wikipedia.) Is this possible, and if so, how? Thanks in advance... --Yekrats 17:32, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

Same issue for bg.wikipedia, could you use this function for number formatting

  function formatNum( $number ) {
    return strtr($number, '.,', ', ' );
  }

or even maybe use &nbsp; instead if a space?

Thanks, Smartech 02:53, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

VfD mechanism has gotten arcane

I don't know about you but I don't get it. I used to be able to put things on VfD easily but now it's gotten kind of arcane. Why isn't it simpler? Like this page here, for posting a new section in VP. Seems like we ought to be able to put one tag at the top of the article to be considered for deletion, and one form kinda like this for a new entry in VfD, and the form should take care of all the details. A third step should not be necessary. ;Bear 17:07, July 18, 2005 (UTC)

And if somebody would like to take a look at my VfD entry for Jordan Acker, maybe you can tell me what I'm missing on the third step. ;Bear 17:09, July 18, 2005 (UTC)

I use a javascript tool to make life a lot easier. It's at User:Korath/autovfd.js, with documentation on User talk:Korath/autovfd.js. This opens up all the relevant pages, so you get the process simplified. smoddy 17:13, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

after edit conflict

You needed to follow the link which says "Edit This Link" in step three in the instructions at the bottom of Wikipedia:Votes for deletion and add {{Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Jordan Acker}}. I've done it, you can see the entry on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Log/2005 July 18

It's not really any different from before, except the page is now divided into sub-pages for different days, so that it's not so cluttered. — Asbestos | Talk 17:15, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

If you remember the old procedure and are confused by the new instructions, then just use the old proecedure:

1. add {{subst:vfd}} on the page you want to nominate.
2. save that page with an apropraite edit summary (e.g. vfd. hoax article).
3. follow the "this article's entry" link to create the vfd page.
4. at the top of the page put ===[[article name]]===
5. below that put your reason for nominating it, sign it and then save the page.
6. go to WP:VFD/Today
7. edit the page and add the following to the bottom of the page: {{Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/article name}}
8. save the page with an edit summary including a link to the article you have nominated (e.g. nominated article name for deletion.

Altghough that has more steps than you might remember, I've broken it down more than it previously was. Thryduulf 22:45, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

Timeout

Several times since the installation of the new software, I have apparently been timed out shortly after login, as briefly as ten minutes. On a couple of occasions, this has happened after I had made some fairly lengthy article edits; those edits were lost> I'm wondering why my connection would be terminated so quickly after login. Denni☯ 20:18, 2005 July 16 (UTC)

What connection? HTTP doesn't work that way. Anyway, this is a weird on-going problem. Make sure your browser isn't throwing out Wikipedia's cookies. I can't offer any other advice. -- Cyrius|✎ 20:55, 16 July 2005 (UTC)

You may want to go to "Internet Options" in the Control Panel folder and choose the "Privacy" tab. Make your browser accept all cookies. Also, check "remember me" when you log in. If you have more problems, please feel free to tell me! — Stevey7788 (talk) 20:43, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

Preventing spam mechanism contanimation

John Dvorak of PC Magazine claims that the Wiki design will be doomed when spam mechanisms are adapted to attack it and corrupt too often to be practically countered.

Are there any proposals to prevent such an eventuality?--kchishol1970 03:38, 16 July 2005 (UTC)

What does he mean "when"? They already do that. -- Cyrius|✎ 03:59, 16 July 2005 (UTC)

In what way? Dvorak's article implies they don't.--kchishol1970 04:06, 16 July 2005 (UTC)

They already can edit pages to do things like this. -- Cyrius|✎ 04:26, 16 July 2005 (UTC)

RC patrol, watchlists, bans, blocks, page protection, vandalism in progress, vandalbots... Wikipedia has been confronting spam, vandals, et al. basically since it was created, and for the most part winning. We will never prevent spam from occurring, but I think we can keep it from getting the upperhand and ruining the experience. Dragons flight 04:39, July 16, 2005 (UTC)

Yes. The extent that vandalism has been happened and reverted is so diverse that many people underestimate what Wikipedia has been through. Personally, I think that the biggest problem will be clashing people on controversial articles. — Ambush Commander^(Talk) 13:20, July 16, 2005 (UTC)

Immediately after Dvorak posted his article, I posted a comment that contained the entire text of Wikipedia:Replies to common objections. He actually thanked me for it, oddly. Anyway, that man has some serious misconceptions. --Alterego 22:06, July 17, 2005 (UTC)

What happened to the Sandbox?

After an edit at 16:43 UTC, I was unable to load the current Sandbox anymore (according to my network analyser there just wasn't any response coming from the server for at least a minute). Apparently this affected everyone, as there were no edits on this usually busy page for two hours. Now that I've reverted the Sandbox to a previous version, it appears to be back to normal. Does anyone have an idea what might have caused this? --IByte 19:21, 15 July 2005 (UTC)

Maybe you accessed it at the exact moment it wipes it so it needs a few seconds to process without interruption? I don't know about the technical side of things, but that's about all I can see barring another 1.5 bug. Garrett^Talk 22:48, 15 July 2005 (UTC)

Unlikely, see ACID --IByte 15:00, 16 July 2005 (UTC)

Contribs

When I click on my contributions at the top, there is no place for me to choose what namespace I am looking at. The text Showing 50 edits starting with edit 0, or something like that, is also gone. Is this a mediawiki 1.5 bug? Howabout1 ^{Talk to me!} 14:52, July 15, 2005 (UTC)

I don't know. I noticed that as soon as 1.5 was operational, and I assumed they merely took it out. If it is a bug, it's a weird one. Garrett^Talk 22:52, 15 July 2005 (UTC)

It's been removed as it's unfriendly to the database. --Brion 21:25, July 17, 2005 (UTC)

{{ref}} rendering link+bookmark URL in full when using commonPrint.css

With any page using this template--let's be really boring and give George W. Bush as an example--when you print it it displays the links written out in full. This is not browser-specific, as going to print other websites will not render the URLs.

If the reference numbers are in the^{[1] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28technical%29#Technical_archive )} middle of a line...

...it looks ugly, as you can see. And the URL is not needed as it's only a bookmark; on paper you look down to the number yourself.

Is there a way to fix this, and what CSS code would be used? I ask because I want to implement whatever fix is available on another wiki.

If this is the wrong place to ask, then please direct me to the right place.

Many, many thanks in advance! Garrett^Talk 04:58, 15 July 2005 (UTC)

• There is discussion in the Template talk page. CSS problem. Template_talk:Ref#Plainlinksnoexpand_is_not_working_again.21 (SEWilco 02:56, 16 July 2005 (UTC))
  • Thank you very much! I knew there'd be a solution! :) Garrett^Talk 04:41, 16 July 2005 (UTC)

! Handler could not be removed

I get this message while navigating through the site but it goes away by clicking "OK."

What's a handler and why would I want to remove it?

(I'm a visitor/guest who looked up a bio.)

See #IE problem two sections above. Bovlb 23:51:28, 2005-07-14 (UTC)

Thanks! It's only a minor nuisance and is apparently harmless. I had never gotten that particular warning message prior to using Wikipedia. It's kind of cute.

<pre> broken

Check out WP:FPC. See how the block of code has been broken into two blocks, with "Nominate and support" stuck between? That should be inside the box, and the two boxes should be one. This looked fine only a couple days ago. --brian0918&#153; 17:26, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

• It appears to be this edit by you on 25 June that was the last change to that bit of the page when the <pre> formating was introduced. From experimenting it appears that the * at the start of the line is what is brekaing the box. I've fixed it by surrounding the whole contents of the box with <nowiki> tags. I'll experiment further and file a bug if I can repeat it elsewhere. Thryduulf 23:12, 14 July 2005 (UTC)
  • someone beat me to reporting at bugzilla - bug:2857. Thryduulf 23:37, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

IE problem

Yes, before you say it I know - IE is a problem. But it's still a very commonly used browser. And today, there's been a problem with IE and Wikipedia that I've never encountered before. Every page I try to reach on Wikipedia, a warning appears before it will load - "Internet Explorer Script Alert - Handler could not be removed". I've never seen this alert before (it's certainly not appeared while trying to use Wikipedia before) and I've no idea what it means. There no problems at all when I use Mozilla. Any assistance would be useful. Grutness...wha? 05:38, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

I've googled for the error. It looks like it might just be IE on the Mac ([11]), which probably isn't the most common browser for that platform. It's possible to turn off IE alerts but I don't know how not being a Mac (or IE) user.

Does this happen on every WP page, or just some? Does it happen on other sites as well? Have you tried rebooting?-gadfium 05:52, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

Well, firstly, yes, I am using a Mac, and I've tried rebooting... Second, it happens on every Wikipedia page - and only on Wikiedia. And it wasn't happening this time yesterday. Grutness...wha? 06:41, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

Don't worry - I've managed to work out how to disable the alerts. Weird that it suddenly started happening today, though. Grutness...wha? 06:47, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

IE for Mac is horribly obsolete... -- Cyrius|✎ 23:49, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

Tell my boss. Grutness...wha? 02:51, 16 July 2005 (UTC)

"Hey, Grutness's boss, IE for Mac is horribly obsolete." The product is dead, and hasn't received so much as a bug fix in two years. -- Cyrius|✎ 16:21, 16 July 2005 (UTC)

This was caused by broken experimental code being checked in. I removed it yesterday. --Brion 21:25, July 17, 2005 (UTC)

Linking an image in Wikicommons

I followed the advice on the wipipedia upload page to upload my image to the Commons. Nowhere have I been able to find the syntax to insert into a wikipedia page an Image tag to allow me to see that image in a wikipedia image. Anyone know the answer to this blindingly obvious question? Matt Stan 00:32, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Picture tutorial. You can reach it by clicking "Help", scrolling down to "Modifying a Wikipedia page", and then "How to use images" is a few lines down.-gadfium 01:27, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

Are you wondering how to use images from Commons on Wikipedia? Just use the same syntax as you would normally for a English Wikipedia images — [[Image:blah.jpg|...]]. The only thing you have to be aware of is that if there is already an image uploaded to en.wikipedia with the same filename as your Commons image, the en.wikipedia image takes precendence. Evil Monkey∴Hello 01:30, July 14, 2005 (UTC)

Microsoft Data Access Components

Coudl someone help me fix the table in the history section? There is an extra column that has suddenly appeared... It's sort of halting my work on this article :-( Would like to get this article about an extremely important Microsoft software component fixed. Oh, and if they want to make it pretty, I would not be unhappy :-) - Ta bu shi da yu 12:49, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

the line causing the problem is "2.6 SP2" also "2.5 SPS3" is one cell short. i need to know what it should look like before i can fix it however. Plugwash 12:59, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

Thanks Plugwash - it should look somewhat like this table, though in the security issues MS02-06 should span 2.6, 2.6 SP1 and 2.6 SP2. - Ta bu shi da yu 00:24, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

I've fiddled with it, feel free to revert if you don't like it.-gadfium 00:36, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

cross-wiki template insertion?

I remember someone came up with a way to insert images inline from another wiki by placing a template on the originating wiki, but I can't find where I saved that info to! Anyone know what the code for such a function would be?

Nevermind, worked THAT bit out, but how do I link to a foreign template? I should be able to type something like {{de:Vorlage:Bild-GFDL}} and and have that template inserted "from afar".

Anyone know how to do this? :) Garrett^Talk 13:40, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

You can't, and probably shouldn't have any need to. -- Cyrius|✎ 03:18, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

Ah, OK then. :) In the end I just gave up and copied the images... Garrett^Talk 03:44, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

this is actually implemented, but it's disabled... —kate

Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object

Whenever I try to save a change to one of my talk page archives, User talk:Quadell/archive10, I get the following error:

Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.5/includes/Article.php on line 2029

What's this about? – Quadell ^{(talk) (sleuth)} 01:31, July 13, 2005 (UTC)

Bug in a bug fix. Was fixed a few hours ago. --Brion 04:17, July 13, 2005 (UTC)

Go box disabled

Is anyone elses Go box suddenly not working? All I get is the search option and that's screwed up too. There pages are here, you just have to go through google or the URL. Dunc|☺ 21:56, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Now on http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2829 though I'll get shouted at if it's not affecting anyone else. Dunc|☺ 21:58, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Template:Main

The History of Science article switched over to a Template:Main which now behaves differently. I am going to have to revert to the hard-coded links which were there previously. What happened? Ancheta Wis 19:50, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Just change the text "{{seemain1 |title}}" to "{{main |title}}". It looks like redirected templates stopped being inserted. —Michael Z. 2005-07-12 20:15 Z

Actually, {{seemain1}} was a phantom which I didn't know about and is not part of the seemain, seemain2 group. It was a redirect to seemain, and when that was changed to a redirect apparently the double redirect was too much. I'll edit seemain1 references to seemain. (SEWilco 22:18, 12 July 2005 (UTC))

Please note that a lot of the seemain type templates have just gone through votes at WP:TFD. ISTR that the wording of the {{main}} was changed at that time. Grutness...wha? 01:17, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

False request for a new password

I have just had an email saying I have requested a new password and issuing a new one. The problem is that the login name in the email is not the one I use, and I have been able to login on my usual password. Another bug? Apwoolrich 17:34, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

• Sounds like phishing to me. Radiant_>|< 11:21, July 13, 2005 (UTC)

New dashboard tool, harmful?

I've made a new apple dashboard wikipedia utility tool using javascript and Ruby programming language. I've uploaded screen shot here: http://www.ce-lab.net/images/WikiRecent.png

you can see the tool on the bottom-right of this image.

This tool checks new pages every 2 minutes and shows the new entry in a small window, put right-bottom of the screen shot. This tool accesses the special page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Newpages

I am now wondering that this tool can be a harmful one because if a lot of people uses this dashboard tool it can make a kind of attacks to wikipedia server. so I haven't released it on the Net.

What do you all think about releasing this tool to the net?

I know that CryptoDerk in his vandal-fighting tool uses messages delivered to an irc server for recent changes. That way it wouldn't have to query the database at all. Maybe you should do that but only display the new pages. gkhan 17:12, July 12, 2005 (UTC)

Thanks, I tried cryptderk's VF, but IRC needs Ident server running in my environment. It is too inconvenient and stressful to forcing every user of the dashboard tool run ident server. Installation have to be easiest. So, one idea is using my web server to forward Recent Changes information. Any good solutions rather than this? User:Kengo.nakajima

Alemannic User interface

There currently is no way to select Alemannic as the User language. On the Alemannic Wikipedia ([12]), this is a bit annoying because once someone accidentally switches the language or some other setting, it's impossible to switch back to Alemannic. Anyone know how to make Alemannic available and where? --Chlämens 11:43, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

thats an issue for the developers i think take it to bugzilla.wikimedia.org or #mediawiki on freenode. Plugwash 12:40, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Need a solution to an Auto-logout issue.

Here's my dilemma:

I log in and browse the Wikipedia without any problems. I can add pages to my watch list, etc and everything's grand. However, when I try to edit a page, I am automatically (and transparently) logged out. It's back to the Upper-right "Create account/log in".

The same thing happens in both IE and Firefox, so I tried running through a free, anonymous external HTTP proxy. Success! While everything ran much slower, I was able to successfully edit a page, and remain logged-in.

However, I very rarely am running on a separate proxy (due to the untrusted nature of such things) so I would love to have a good solution to all of this.

Here's the technical data:

My ISP: Direcway 2-way Sattelite

Because of the large latency of 2 way Sattelite communication, there is a Web accelerator that grabs the entire page (images et. al.) at the Hughes NOC before it sends it to me - I am assuming this is my problem.

My web acceleration address: 66.82.9.53

My Router Address: 66.82.10.41

Now, if I can access Wikipedia.org as if it were a secure site (HTTPS), then it will connect directly, and not use the Web Acceleration.

Anyone have any ideas?

(Done by User MinstrelOfC - note that I am not logged in due to technical issues)

66.82.9.53 22:58, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

If you don't mind losing access protection, get Firefox to memorise your login details. That way every time you get logged out you'll be logged back in. Also ensure you've got "remember me" checked.

If you are using a shared computer, then you should maybe write your ISP an angry letter or something :( Garrett^Talk 12:50, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

I am having the same problem, in both IE and Firefox, and I also use Direcway, so my guess is that it is an ISP problem. (Why am I not surprised?) That's fortunate for me, since I get to (finally) switch to a new ISP in a few short weeks. User AdelaMae, also not signed in due to technical issues... 66.82.9.76 15:58, 25 July 2005 (UTC)

Kate's Tool

Is anyone else having problems with Kate's Tool? It seems to have stopped counting my edits at 9980 (and I've been looking forward to 10,000 for a while now :( , I think I missed it). -R. fiend 15:57, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

You are suffering from editcountitis. Please seek professional help. -- Cyrius|✎ 18:29, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

Likely that is true. I was thinking reaching 10000 would cure it, but this Kate's Toll problem has only nade it worse. -R. fiend 19:35, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

I'm having this problem too. It has my edit count stuck at 208 and I've made several edits since then. Columbia 21:12, July 12, 2005 (UTC)

I believe that Kate's Tools does not count edits which are the last edit of an article (i.e., one that says (top) on your contribution list). Or has that been fixed now? — Asbestos | Talk 21:58, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

No that's not it. Its just temporarily busted. I'm stuck at 1029 when I'm really at about 1300. Redwolf24 02:07, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

should be fixed now. —kate

Date format of sigs

This is not a big deal, but I am curious. Why and how did the preference for dates in sigs go from "July 11, 2005 14:37 (UTC)" to "14:37, July 11, 2005 (UTC)" and from "11 July 2005 14:37 (UTC)" to "14:37, 11 July 2005 (UTC)" sometime during the last two days?

The placement of the hour:minute in my sig just randomly changed and now I see there isn't even a preference for the old orientation. I don't really care how it is arranged, but I am wondering why someone would feel compelled to change this and how such a change could even be accomplished.

Dragons flight 14:46, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

External link change

Something changed in the last few days. On the pages List of bridges by length and List of largest suspension bridges there is a table with a list of bridges. The list is numbered with external links to the home pages of the bridges. Since they are in order, the link numbers also number the ranking of the bridges. Since many of the bridges are not yet linked, the links were just entered as [http://] and this previously appeared as a numbered link, but now it is not appearing as a link (as you can see). What happened? -- Samuel Wantman 09:34, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

Why do you want those to be URLs anyway? I mean, isn't it kinda false advertising to have a link that goes nowhere? As for why it does that, http:// is not a valid link. However if you put [http://this.url.is.a.placeholder] it will appear as a # link: [13]. Basically it needs anything (even a single character) after the // to make it function. Garrett^Talk 22:16, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

I've modified List of largest suspension bridges using the dummy URL [http://no.link.yet] . This works, but not quite as well as before. This has the disadvantage that the browser tries to find the page and returns an error. The previous version [http://] didn't do anything but it used to appear as a numbered link. We want the table autonumbered, and have links to external sites, so we were able to do both togehter. Is there another way to have the table autonumber? I haven't yet figured out how to do that. -- Samuel Wantman 23:01, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

Using an external link to an anchor on the same page, much like {{ref}} does? --cesarb 23:08, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

This is not a good idea. You're using a side effect of external links which can be changed for many reasons, as you are discovering. Dead links are likely to get cleaned up in various ways. And don't link to random nonexistent sites, as something might appear; example.com or example.org are defined as being for use in examples. (SEWilco 20:20, 12 July 2005 (UTC))

So how should we auto-number entries in a table? Better yet, how can we create a red external link that auto numbers? --Samuel Wantman 01:10, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

Use a normal numberd list with # at the start of each entry. Then put a page title in each link so the links don't show up as numbers and confuse things. DES 22:05, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

But then it would be a list and not a table, and pictures would mess up the auto-numbering. -- Samuel Wantman 23:30, 19 July 2005 (UTC)