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Wikipedia:Village pump archive 2004-09-26

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Deb (talk | contribs) at 12:21, 27 December 2002 (technical question). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
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Moved discussion

On the decline of the quality of writing in Wikipedia

Is it just my imagination or is the general standard of this project turning into a Drexleresque grey goo scenario? Notwithstanding the contributions of non-native English speakers who have a more than valid excuse for a certain amount of lexical and grammatical inexactitude, the standard of writing seems to have dropped as dramatically as a barometer in the eye of a hurricane. Previously I and a few others who care not only about content but about mode of expression were able to keep on top of the orcish hordes with their horrible tautologies, oxymorons, grocer's apostrophes, split infinitives, inability to distinguish between there and their, etcetera, etcetera.

I can only stomach editing so much of this admittedly well-researched but ineffably poorly written nonsense a day. user:sjc (23/12/02 04:36)

I believe it should be grocers' apostrophes instead of grocer's apostrophes. :-)
One grocer's apostrophe is a grocer's apostrophe too far in my book... user:sjc
I sympathize with your plight Unfortunately, I don't think this battle is winable. Eclecticology 06:56 Dec 23, 2002 (UTC)
I've not noticed an increase in "it's" & the like. I'm more concerned with POV stuff, crank theories, articles for minor porn stars, fetishes and every single word in LOTR. -- Tarquin 11:28 Dec 23, 2002 (UTC)
What's wrong about every single word in LOTR? :) Talking about fetishes and LOTR is a redundancy :):)--AN
What's LOTR? Wikipedians quickly learn what the initials "POV" stand for, but apart from that, a common criticism of the presentation in articles is the introduction of undefined or unexplained abbreviations and acronyms. Eclecticology
LOTR is the Sad Person's Book also known as The Lord of the Rings. An all too common acronym for a deeply regrettable pile of piffle. user:sjc

See Talk:London (disambiguation) for question about data in disambiguation pages. -- SGBailey 10:59 Dec 24, 2002 (UTC)

Who's setting up the Hebrew Wiki and do they need help?

How does one go about finding them and what can one do to help once he does :-) aarrrggghhh

Try talking to User:Brion VIBBER. He's the point man when it comes to setting up the non-English wikis. -- Stephen Gilbert 17:48 Dec 24, 2002 (UTC)

Merry Christmas one an all. Mintguy

God bless us, every one! User:Tiny Tim

Self links are listed on the maintenance page as if they were a Bad Thing which generally I guess they are. The relevant maintenance page simply says: The following pages contain a link to themselves, which they should not. However a number of pages contain deliberate self-links, for example List of group theory topics and List of musical topics. In these cases an author has left a note (on the page itself in the case of the former, and on the latter's Talk page) asking that the self-link not be removed, as it is needed to help with page or topic maintenance.

I feel that the current situation is a bit messy in that someone wanting to help by tidying up can accidentally thwart the plans of people who are trying to maintain a page or topic area. This happened just now at List of musical topics. Could we please have a clear policy on this? I would have thought it either needs to be that self-links are just not allowed, in which case maybe a clearer note on the maintenance page could clarify this (plus maybe something in the style manual etc somewhere??) or, if they are allowed (where they are a deliberate action of page maintainers and not just a mistake), this should be made clear on the maintenance page, in the same way that the spelling page tried to make it clear that not every apparent misspelling needs to be corrected - that there are in effect false positives too. Maybe there could even be a standard statement that people woudl be encouraged to use in that case - the List of group theory topics has a nice clear statement: Since the page is a maintenance page, the interested parties also want to know when changes are made to this list as well; so please do not remove the self-link.

Apologies if all this has already been covered 93 times in here or in an FAQ or something. Thanks, Nevilley 11:50 Dec 26, 2002 (UTC)

Normally a self-link is unconvenient for the user: a link promises related info, but all you get is the same again. However, I understand that it can be useful in connection with the use of Related changes (no need to check the history of the page itself additionally) and then the statement above is a good solution, especially because the self-link occurs in this statement itself only. It is clearer than in List of musical topics. - Patrick 12:23 Dec 26, 2002 (UTC)

A clear short version of the statement, best put at the end of the article, is also:

This [[...|self-link]] is for technical reasons (use of Related changes), please do not remove.

Patrick 12:58 Dec 26, 2002 (UTC)

Wouldn't it be better to change "Related Changes" so that it includes changes of the current page (and maybe also pages that link to the current page)? -Martin
Yes, I think that would be better. Patrick 13:26 Dec 26, 2002 (UTC)

I'm the guy who removed the self link on list of musical topics. I see why they wanted it now, and I very much agree that Related Changes should include changes made to the current page. Maybe if for some crazy reason people didn't like this, it could be an option in their preferences so that related changes doesn't include the current page. Then, surely we could just automatically strip out self links, as they would then be rendered completely useless, and there would be no possibility of a false positive. Just an idea for the automatically stripping out self-links, there may be some reason against it, but I definitely think related changes should include the current page Smelialichu 17:28 Dec 26, 2002 (UTC)

How to add an other language link? Marc Girod

See Wikipedia:Interlanguage links. --Brion

Why are the Background of some pages Light Yellow and others White? 

User:Phoe6
Encyclopedia article pages have white backgrounds, while dynamically generated 'special' pages, talk pages, user pages, and about-wikipedia pages have yellow backgrounds. This is intended as a visual cue that you're not in the encyclopedia per se. --Brion

In order to make searching work reasonably, we have to be aware of American / British spelling differences. For example, if you search for "electronic colour code", you fail to find the article electronic color code, which was presumably originally written by a USAite. As the text is written, there is no conventient way to slip the word "colour" into the body of the text so that it gets found in a search.

I've tried adding text in html comments <!-- electronic colour code --> which seem to work as comments if on a line by themselves. but not if embedded mid paragraph. Search doesn't find them. Is there a way of adding "keywords" for searching to an article? Is there a way (like misspelling) of automatically making a search for either color or for colour actually search for "(color or colour)"? -- SGBailey 22:26 Dec 26, 2002 (UTC)

Just make a redirect (as I just did) and mention the alternate spelling on the first line. Then searches will work. --mav
What you actually appear to have done is to create a new article electronic colour code which is a redirect to the US spelling and then have linked to the redirect from Talk:electronic color code to prevent it being an orphan. -- Fine. Which FAQ should this tit-bit of information go in? (I'm happy to put it there. -- SGBailey 22:57 Dec 26, 2002 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Contributing FAQ (do a find on "American"). This FAQ does need help. Your other questions will have to be answered by a developer. --mav

What do we do for "significant" search keywords which are not in the article name? As an *example* if there was an articel 'Famous actors', we might have text "theater" in the article but want "theatre" to also work in searches. -- SGBailey 22:57 Dec 26, 2002 (UTC)

Another one on searches: Try searching for the four colour theorem: The following are rejected by SQL:

  • "four color ( theory or theorem )"
  • "( theory or theorem ) four color"
  • "( theory or theorem ) and four and color"

yet the follwoing work:

  • "( theory or theorem ) four and color"

Why? -- SGBailey 22:37 Dec 26, 2002 (UTC)

SQL requires each boolean word (and, or, (), not) separated by words being searched (non-boolean words). The format is boolean your words boolean your words boolean ....
ALL your first 3 failed searches didn't meet the criteria:
  • "four a boolean here color ( theory or theorem )"
  • "( theory or theorem ) four a boolean here color"
  • "( theory or theorem ) another word here and four and color"

Can the search engine developers confirm this? And for SGBailey, Try Wikipedia:Searching -- kt2

Short answer: the boolean magic in our search engine is very fragile; one of these days we're going to throw it out and replace it (possibly by upgrading to MySQL 4.0, which has built-in boolean magic in its fulltext search). Until then, boolean searching is more of an art than a science.
In this particular case, the "four" is causing trouble, as it's in MySQL's "stopword" list: it's one of a number of common words that it assumes won't bring useful search results, so they aren't indexed. The way our fragile search works does separate matches on each word and then ands/ors them together; searching a stopword thus gives _no_ results for that word's match, and for the 'and' common case gives a non-intuitive total result (ie, nothing!). So, we silently strip stopwords from your query before parsing it: thus "four color ( theory or theorem )" becomes "color (theory or theorem)". Note that 'and's are implicitly added most of the time, but parentheses muck up the works: search explicitly for "color and (theory or theorem)" and you'll get your man. --Brion 08:21 Dec 27, 2002 (UTC)

Hello, all. Can anyone tell me why I haven't got the option to move pages (as opposed to doing a cut and paste)? It's not because I'm not logged in, because I am. They tell me this option should be on the "sidebar", but I don't have one of those. Deb

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