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Wikipedia:Village pump archive 2004-09-26

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Moved discussion

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Is there a way to make a title which ends in an apostrophe both italicized and bolded? See Burnin'. Tuf-Kat

Nobody knows or cares whether a space is bold or italic! --Brion
I would never in a million years have thought of that. A sheepish Tuf-Kat
Could be worse; see Wiki:SixSingleQuotes. ;) Also, if you need to abut a printing character (like punctuation), you can separate it with an empty HTML tag (Know what's great? Wikiin'!) --Brion


When I want to refer to a city, is it better to use "CityName" or "CityName,_Country", e.g., "Paris" or "Paris,_France"? Paris or the redirected one Paris? -- mkrohn 21:56 Mar 22, 2003 (UTC)

How about Paris, France? --mav
Erm, no offense or anything, but that sounds very American! "Paris" will do if it's obvious from the context that the one in France is meant; otherwise you could say, "the French city of Paris", or something... -- Oliver P. 23:06 Mar 22, 2003 (UTC)
P.S. - Tarquin says...
My (current) number one Wikipedia grouse is this: "Venice, Italy", "London, England" and so forth. That is how cities are indentified in the US; not in the rest of the world. A rout through UK train timetables for the few duplicate towns shows they use "Gillinham (Kent)", for example. The same form or "Gillinham in Kent" is usual in newspaper or reference articles if readers may not know which country a place is in. However, in the interests of consistency in page names, we're stuck with the stateside terminology. It's probably all irrational reactions to cultural imperialism. That or seeing that dratted comma always reminds me of Marilyn Monroe saying "Paris, France is in Europe?" in Gentlemen prefer blondes...
Yes, I was refering to the cases, where it is clear from the context which "Paris" I refer to. Since I am new, I was interested if there is some kind of policy for that. I did not find anything and before messing things up I decided to ask here. Since it seems common usage to give certain cities priorities, e.g., the main page of Paris is "Paris" and not "Paris,_France" it makes sense to me in these cases to set the link directly to "Paris". -- mkrohn 00:23 Mar 23, 2003 (UTC)
I think he meant "Gillingham", though. :) -- Oliver P. 23:12 Mar 22, 2003 (UTC)

Why was the hit counter dropped from each page? Was it the server strain thing? jaknouse 01:55 Mar 23, 2003 (UTC)

I do hope it returns some day... Arno

The 'Pedia Icon: Where to Download?

I just discovered the pretty 'pedia icon when I put the shortcut of a 'pedia page on my desktop. It's really quite nice, with the Earth and the big W. I'd like to use it on my personal computer. Where can I download it? --Menchi 02:10 Mar 23, 2003 (UTC)

Right here -- Notheruser 02:14 Mar 23, 2003 (UTC)
Thank you. How did you find the link? --Menchi 02:18 Mar 23, 2003 (UTC)
I'm pretty sure that favicon.ico is the standard location for icons. For example, NY Times Slashdot etc. -- Notheruser 02:28 Mar 23, 2003 (UTC)

"Oscar Wilde's Tomb" Link

On the page "Père Lachaise", there's a peculiar link: Oscar Wilde's Tomb ([[Oscar Wilde|Oscar Wilde's Tomb]]). The link says "Oscar Wilde's Tomb", but it directs the user to the page "Oscar Wilde". This is misleading. Shouldn't the link be like: Oscar Wilde's Tomb ([[Oscar Wilde]]'s Tomb)? Is there some reason behind such a confusing format of linking? --Menchi 02:36 Mar 23, 2003 (UTC)

Yes. --mav
I think mav means, yes it should be [[Oscar Wilde]]'s Tomb and no, there is no reason to have [[Oscar Wilde|Oscar Wilde's Tomb]] (unless I misunderstood which you were saying "yes" to mav). Hephaestos has already removed the link anyway, it's not needed because there is already a link to Oscar Wilde in the main text. -- sannse 07:15 Mar 24, 2003 (UTC)

About concurrent edits (sorry if this has been discussed before, I seem to recall reading something but can't find it now):

When two users edit an article simultaneously and don't know about each other, it may take some work to integrate the concurrent changes. Wouldn't it be useful to have an alert "user:soandso is currently editing this page" and some means of communication so you can coordinate your work? Don't know if it's technically feasible; do others consider it desirable? Kosebamse 10:33 Mar 23, 2003 (UTC)

It is not possible to know whether another user is editing a page, because we don't have spies sitting on their desktops watching what they do. ;) The most we could know without installing spyware is whether another user has loaded the edit page or run a preview recently (ie, with an arbitrary timeout). This would be somewhat problematic for two reasons:
  • False negatives: people taking longer to make their changes than the timeout allows; end result is same as present, another user can unknowingly make an edit, and when the first guy comes back and hits save, he is informed of an edit conflict and must merge.
  • False positives: people hitting the edit link accidentally or just to copy/check out the source of a page, or starting to edit but deciding not to. (Or worse yet, misdirected web spiders hitting every edit page on the site...) Meanwhile, users will be scared off from trying to edit, and may never make that excellent, clean edit that would have taken three seconds to merge. End result: less productive activity on the wiki.
I at least don't find it a particularly good trade-off. What might be a good idea though is making a note of edit conflicts at the preview stage. --Brion 11:31 Mar 23, 2003 (UTC)

If I create a new page, and then make another edit or two, it would be nice if a flag would pop up for 5-10 minutes indicating that Im probably working on the article. Likewise, if I make a series of edits within a short time to an older page, its probably a good guess that Im making yet another edit. It would also be useful if a user who had made 10 edits to a page (without any other user making interim edits) could delete the 9 previous edits, thus making it appear as if they had only made one major edit. Susan Mason

Quite so, Susan. That last idea would be really neat, but not very practical from a software design point of view, I imagine. Since I started putting in progress in the comment field when I make the first edit of a series, and then still going (or etc.) as I go, and then done for now for the last one, I don't get nearly as many edit conflicts. Not a 100% cure of course, but worth doing. Mind you, lately I've been working on obscure articles that no-one else much edits anyway, so I guess that helps too. :) Tannin

Why is 1918 in literature a protected page? User:Black Widow

Unprotected. Probably an Admin mistake ('Watch this page' is next to 'Protect this page'). --mav

Article title starting with lower-case

Currently, it is impossible to start an article title with a lower-case letter. So we get things like IMac instead of iMac. Was there any discussions about this feature? Any possibility that it will be changed in the future? Thanks, Tomos 05:02 Mar 24, 2003 (UTC)

Leaving your ACTUAL question for the more technically minded to answer, in the meantime, you can take advantage of the fact that the first letter of an article is case-insensitive: iMac and IMac take you to the same place. So even if the article title is "funny", your reference to it doesn't need to be... -- Someone else
Initial capitalization is a tricky thing. If we were to make title completely case-sensitive, you'd get links to two separate pages from these two sentences:
Asteroids are relatively abundant in the region between...
Many have dreamed of colonizing the asteroids and mining...
That would greatly magnify the occasional problems caused by variations in capitalization in subsequent words. Alternatively, we might preserve the case, thus allowing iMac and pH to look right, while allowing both variations to match and link to the single article. This would lead to great inconsistency in titles, as we find ourselves with here a lowercase asteroid and there a capital Comet. This would at least be aesthetically displeasing (less a lot of effort at renaming to maintain a nicer system); and I'm not sure how much trouble it would be to make partial case insensitivity work -- and if we were to change to complete case insensitivity, at least hundreds of title pairs would need to be cleaned up. Redirects removed and alternates merged or disambiguated; that's going to require some manual labor.
The simplest solution would be to create a manual tag of some sort creating a 'display title', which would be displayed in the header in place of the page's 'real' name and could be differently capitalized or contain special characters. (I think this was discussed a long time ago on the mailing list, I don't know what the commentary was.) --Brion 06:30 Mar 24, 2003 (UTC)


The "Display Title" - yes, great idea!
Semi on-topic, earlier today, someone created an entry Tasmanian Devil about the cartoon character modelled on a Tasmanian Devil (Sarcophilus harrisii)), the entry for which (under Wikipedia's weirdo animal naming rules) has long been at Tasmanian devil. What should be done? Tannin 09:08 Mar 24, 2003 (UTC)
The first thing that should be done is to review the discussion that preceded the creation of the article.  :)
(At the time of this writing, said discussion is on the Village pump page, about halfway up from this discussion.)
--Paul A 09:12 Mar 24, 2003 (UTC)
Ahh. I see. Thankyou Paul. Two comments: (a) It should have been mentioned on Talk:Tasmanian devil, so that interested people could stand a rough chance of finding it in the first place. (b) It's a really dumb way to name an article in this instance. The name of the animal is Tasmanian Devil (capital "D", see any field guide) and now we have an entry under the correct name of the animal about an ephermeral and subsiduary thing! Tannin 09:27 Mar 24, 2003 (UTC)
Actually, field guides tend to have it wrong. Talk to any biologist, and you'll be told that English names of organisms should always be in lower case unless one of the words is a proper noun, in which case only the proper noun should be capitalized, such as Tasmanian devil, or Virginia pine. There is, obviously, a gap here between accepted scientific usage and popular usage, but the point is that Tasmanian devil is correct as far as the scientific community goes. jaknouse 15:13 Mar 24, 2003 (UTC)
On the contrary: see Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (flora and fauna) for an extended list of examples. Tannin
This is silly. "Tasmanian Devil" is a proper noun since it is the name of a particular singular thing. "Tasmanian devil" is the name of a group of animals - it is not a proper noun. As is explained on the above talk page field guides are not good sources on capitalization. Published manuals of style are'. I've never seen Tasmanian devil or bald eagle etc capitalized as you suggest in any biology textbook, any dictionary or any other encyclopedia. The only sources that are doing things in a "really dumb way" are the field guides --mav


Seven hardcover volumes at $400 each and you are calling it a "field guide"? Hoolie Doolie! Tannin

The Warren Commission published 26 Volumes of Hearings and Exhibits. Researchers cite these as 1H1, which would be translated as:

Warren Commission Hearings, Vol. I, p. 1

So, If i'm writing an article and want to cite the Warren Commission hearings, which is better? --hoshie

For the purposes of Wikipedia articles, I'd use the expanded form: most readers are not going to be Warren Commission researchers, and won't know how to interpret "1H1". --Paul A 09:05 Mar 24, 2003 (UTC)

Talk (etc) pages vs Mailing list: Sorry if this is an unbearably naive question and/or discussed to death elsewhere, but: What's the mailing list for, and how does it compare in function to various facilities on the wiki like this village pump, annoying users, votes for deletion, various standards discussions etc? Sometimes on the list I see someone say that this would be better off on a Talk page; sometimes in the wiki I see someone say this should be taken to the list ... I just can't nail down what the effective difference is, and when you'd choose which for what ... help!. As always if this IS discussed elsewhere please feel free to point me in that direction rather than rehash a whole load of stuff here for the Nth time. :) Nevilley 08:53 Mar 24, 2003 (UTC)

Good question. WikiEN-L is for general discussion of en.wiki policy and direction. Wikipedia-L is for general discussion of Wikipedia-wide (all languages) policy and direction. The specifics for en.wiki are supposed to be worked out wiki style on en.wiki. The specifics for the whole project are supposed to be worked out on meta. That is how it is supposed to work. In practice it doesn't work out so nicely. --mav

I was looking at 1944 and I noticed how frequently Nazi is used to describe German military forces. I find this offensive and inappropriate, this is comparable to referring to US forces in Iraq as "Republican Forces" or to US forces in Bosnia as "Democrat Forces". Likewise, referring to Iraqi forces as "Baath Forces" would be inappropriate. German troops of World War II should be referred to as Germans, not as Nazis. Many of them were not Nazis and many of them were killed for disagreeing with the Nazis. Dietary Fiber

Many Germans would rather not be associated with the genocidal Nazi Germany but if you don't like it then change it. This is a wiki if you haven't noticed. --mav

I thought you might want to form a consensus on the issue before I changed it. Dietary Fiber

This isn't that important - both terms are unambiguous. Besides if anybody didn't like your edit it is very easy to revert. --mav
Axis powers (linked as [[Axis powers|Axis]] would be a good solution, when talking about the Axis side as a whole. "German" is the best solution when talking about the specific German forces. "Italian" is the best solution when talking about the specific Italian forces. "Japanese" is the best solution when talking about the specific Japanese forces.
Similarly, when talking about the allied side, Allied powers (linked as [[Allied powers|Allied]] would be a good solution, but when referring to specifically British forces, use "British", etc. Martin

I want to add an external link to Afghan Hound, but how do I link to this page without loosing the site frames? The URL I see in the address bar ( http://www.the-kennel-club.org.uk/ ) links to the home page. Is there a way round this? Thanks -- sannse 19:10 Mar 24, 2003 (UTC)

...and that's why frames are evil. E-mail their webmaster and ask if they have a way to link to their frameset such that it will show a particular file in the content frame. --Brion 20:40 Mar 24, 2003 (UTC)

Is Image:Tibetmap.png copyright violation? The user has altered the image by adding a thumbnail (is this image also violation?).

If you do think that the user has violated copyright, does it mean no matter how much or how little one has modified an image, so long as it is originally a copyrighted image, it is copyright violation? --142.103.108.105 23:50 Mar 26, 2003 (UTC)

That's what we call "blatantly removing the copyright notice and making a couple of scribbles -- oh look it's all new!" That's roughly as acceptable from a copyright standpoint as ripping the "property of Joe Blow, please return if found" tag out of a pickpocketed wallet and calling it your own. I've deleted the image (a sad rip-off of [1]). At least trace over them yourselves, people... geez. --Brion 00:24 Mar 27, 2003 (UTC)
Actually, I found the image without any copyright information. Thus, the image will remain on wikipedia. If you wish to argue with me, email me, and we'll arrange a court date.user_talk:hfastedge 01:35 Mar 27, 2003 (UTC).
Ach, fuck. This pre-emptive, disrespectful behaviour of deleting the image, now see us without a Tibet map at all, as it is deleted from my own system.
Since you found the image without copyright information, you could have argued to a court that you didn't realise the image was copyright. Since you've now been told (by us) that it is copyright, that defence is no longer available to you. --- Tim Starling 01:43 Mar 27, 2003 (UTC)

As a semi-professional chess player, I would like to expand the chess section. In particular, I would like to add instructive chess tactical problems. Each of my .jpgs has a size of about 130kb and I have quite a few. Although this is not necessarily encyclopedic, I don't see how it could hurt to have the wikipedia also contain the internet's best source of chess problems. Below is an example:

Clicking on the picture takes you to a screen which shows the answer.


Dietary Fiber

I don't know whether putting chess problems in the Wikipedia is a good idea or not (if you can make an encyclopaedia article out of them, I suppose it's fair enough), but why are you adding them to the Village Pump? The VP is for questions about the Wikipedia. --Camembert

I wouldn't object to more chess stuff in the wiki (please link them somewhere appropriate from Chess), but 130k per image is a bit excessive. These boards could be reduced to just a few kilobytes each by using solid squares for the board and PNG instead of JPEG compression (which is inappropriate for what is essentially line-art, and thus has to use an absurdly poor compression ratio to achieve decent visual quality, hence the large size). --Brion 20:59 Mar 28, 2003 (UTC)

Camemberet, I suppose I must have been asking a question at the Village Pump? Brion, PNG is no problem, but Im not sure I have a means of making solid squares. PNG doubles the size of these .jpgs. Dietary Fiber

What are you using to create the images? Can you adjust its settings? --Brion

I am not sure what your question is, but I don't see why one should clutter up the pump with this stuff. I am moving the chess problems to -- surprise -- Chess problems Slrubenstein

If you weren't so rude you might take the time to reflect on what my question might possibly be. Dietary Fiber

If you weren't so rude you might have created the page and done the link yourself. But no need to thank me -- wikipedia now has one more article. Slrubenstein
Slr, DF was giving an example of some material and asking if it was appropriate to put in Wikipedia. That's entirely appropriate for discussion in the village pump. --Brion 22:16 Mar 28, 2003 (UTC)
Thank you for explaining -- and my apologies. Should I delete the article? Or should we leave it until someone can compress the ficures? Slrubenstein

Hi! A question for everyone ..... does it look best, if an article has two pictures, to put them:
One on the right and one on the left - see Airbus A380
Both left - see Amber
Both right - see Avro Vulcan
I just can't decide.
Thanks -- Adrian Pingstone 09:41 Mar 29, 2003 (UTC)

IMO, one on the right and one on the left. The variation gives more interest to the layout -- sannse 09:45 Mar 29, 2003 (UTC)
I agree. But just make sure they are not too close to each other -- otherwise they will sqeeze the text between them at lower resolution screens. --mav

Would someone please delete Image:4-A00- 27...Re7.gif Dietary Fiber

I'm a little uncomfortable with what's happening at Robert Mugabe at the moment, I notice the page is protected, yet folks with sysop status are still making edits. this suggests a two tier level of editorship, from which non-sysops are excluded. i can understand that the page needed to be protected due to the edit war that was unfolding, but surely that should mean that EVERYBODY leave the page alone until things have cooled off or until a third party can intervene and adjudiacte fairly, not that the person with syssop status be in a position to continue to makes edits whilst the other person is excluded from having a write to reply as it were. This isn't meant as personal, if anything I actually agree with danny's edits, but if 172 isn't allowed to edit, dannny should also refrain. Just thoughts. quercus robur 16:35 Mar 29, 2003 (UTC)

As far as I can tell the page doesn't seem to be protected right now. -- JeLuF 16:37 Mar 29, 2003 (UTC)
That's true now, but it was happening for a while- i was flagging this up more as a general point (which is why I put my comments here rather than on the relevant talk page), that really protected pages (at least those that are protected due to an edit war) shouldn't be touched by either party until the problem is resolved. (That's my view anyway) quercus robur 16:50 Mar 29, 2003 (UTC)
For a sysop, the only difference between a protected and an unprotected page is that the toolbar button to the left doesn't read "protect this page" but "unprotect this page". So normaly a sysop won't recognize a protected page on first sight. -- JeLuF 17:15 Mar 29, 2003 (UTC)
Good point, I'll make the flag more prominent. (I'd also love comments on m:Protected pages considered harmful.) --Brion 20:17 Mar 29, 2003 (UTC)

A date has been chosen for the Wikivention. It will be July 29-31, 2005, so mark your calendars!

Mega LOL!. :) --mav

I'm using Mozilla 1.3B on a Mac with OS 10.2 and, for the last two weeks or so, Wikipedia has been sporadically forgetting my login. I've never had a problem before, and have always been automatically logged in as soon as I came to wikipedia, but maybe a dozen times in the last few weeks, I've had to re-log in. I can't detect any pattern to when (and clicking on the box to be automatically logged-in doesn't prevent) being logged-out. Am I alone? Tuf-Kat

Just so no one gives it as an answer, I've checked my cookies and Wikipedia is allowed to give them to me. I have four from Wikipedia; they are called "User Password", "User Name", "User ID" and "PHPSESSID". Tuf-Kat
I had a similar problem with Chimera, but it seems fine now I've upgraded to 0.7 (now Camino) :-) -- Tarquin 09:14 Mar 30, 2003 (UTC)

____

Almost a third of the most-wanted article list has now been created. Could someone please reset it long enough to renew the list? jaknouse 03:00 Mar 31, 2003 (UTC)

Done. --Brion 03:16 Mar 31, 2003 (UTC)

Where did several entries for March 29th of the Current Events page go? --66.47.86.47 12:02 Mar 31, 2003 (UTC)

Well, the first page from March 30 shows this:

March 29, 2003

  • 2003 invasion of Iraq
    • The Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf has accused the US forces of killing 140 civilians during the last 24 hours and denied allegations that Iraqi soldiers are disguising themselves as civilians.
    • An explosion damaged a shopping center in Kuwait City before dawn, apparently caused by a malfunctioning U.S. cruise missile. No injuries are reported. [2]
    • A Iraqi military suicide bomber, driving a taxi, killed four US soldiers in an attack. "We will use any means to kill our enemy in our land and we will follow the enemy into its land," Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan said, "This is just the beginning. You'll hear more pleasant news later."
  • SARS: Dr. Carlo Urbani, a WHO expert on communicable diseases and the physician who first identified the outbreak, dies of the disease in Thailand. He had been infected in Vietnam. [3]

An aweful lot of edits to go through here. I suggest you just reinsert this material if it meaningful to you. Fred Bauder 13:40 Mar 31, 2003 (UTC)

Please add Carlo Urbani to Recent Deaths. Dietary Fiber

It's not protected - do it yourself. If you're referring to the Main Page, try Wikipedia talk:Selected Articles on the Main Page. Martin

Where is the real Spanish wiki? I think it hurts the project that we do not have a clear link to that site. The main page should link to it. Where is it? Dietary Fiber

As far as I know, the Spanish monarchy has not endorsed any wiki. ;) Are you trying to get at the Spanish Wikipedia (http://es.wikipedia.org/ ) or the more active Enciclopedia Libre (http://enciclopedia.us.es/ ), which is not a part of the Wikipedia project? --Brion 22:03 Mar 31, 2003 (UTC)

Yes, plz create a front page link to it. Its a wiki and its Spanish and its 600% larger than the es.wikipedia Dietary Fiber

Why? It is not a part of Wikipedia. --mav

Out of educational respect and Wikilove, it is rude to not link to them as they are trying to do the same thing we are. Dietary Fiber

It was rude of them to fork es.wiki to begin with. They are already linked on Wikipedia:About which in turn is linked from every single page here. That is IMO way more than enough. --mav
Someone having been rude to you is a poor excuse for being rude to them, even if it is a frequent one. EL may not be a part of Wikipedia, but it's goal, process, and license are identical, making es.wikipedia.org largely redundant. It makes more sense to me to link it more tightly from es.wikipedia.org than from the English-language front page, though, if we're to continue to maintain it. We don't link any other non-Wikipedia projects from there, just the other Wikipedia subprojects (meta-wikipedia, wiktionary) and the other languages Wikipedia is available in. --Brion 01:03 Apr 1, 2003 (UTC)

A general observation, folks. I think Wiki could do with a lot more images. It makes pages on wiki look much more attractive. In this image conscious age, endless pages of text is not overly user-friendly. Right now, it is up to each of us to track down images, and it isn't always easy to find if there is already an image elsewhere that might suit a particular page.

Is it possible for a group of people to take on the task of putting together a wiki image-bank, ie spend some time tracking down images that are not copyrighted or are available through GNU. This bank of images could be displayed not as an alkward list of jpegs but by name of the contents on a special browser button. For example I've just finished a page on the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It would have been wonderful if I could check on a list that tells me if we have any images of the UK parliament, listed simply as say

  • UK Parliament (wideview)
  • UK parliament (House of Commons).

and I could then easily pick an image for the page. You could have a long list subdivided, telling us if we have an image of Abraham Lincoln, Eamon de Valera (oh, we have that. I downloaded it), Sydney Opera House, Red Square, Jacques Chirac (stop the hissing, Americans! *grin*) etc etc. We could also include on the page a standard command that we could cut and paste to install the image in. It would make it easy then for people to know what we have and how to use it, rather than our rather haphazard way now, where if someone discovers we have a good image, we then have to think - ok which pages would that suit also? It would take a bit of work to get off the ground, but if we could even pull together a list of what we currently have, in simple name format saying what it isalphabetically rather than our current 'search through lists of Jpegs with variable and often useless names in the hope of just maybe finding something sometime. Any observations? STÓD/ÉÍRE 01:28 Apr 1, 2003 (UTC)

Start with:

Minor enhancement suggestion - when you add a page to your watchlist, the text on the confirmation screen which then appears: The page "Foo-Bar" has been added to your watchlist contains a link from your watchlist to - erm - your watchlist. When you stop watching a page, there is a similar confirmation text, but your watchlist isn't linked. It would be more consistent, as well as nice and helpful, if it were. Can some nice developer-type-person please consider adding this to their list of Things To Do?? Thanks Nevilley 07:16 Apr 2, 2003 (UTC)

I'm currently engaged in a project describing detailed the history of all the coin denominations of British coinage. At the moment I'm doing probably the largest article, English/British coin Penny, which has some 1200 years of history to recount and at the moment I've got as far as 1422. I'm aware that there's some maximum size to a Wiki article, but I've no idea of how big that is compared to what I've already written -- could someone suggest an article that's near the maximum size so that I can see how much more I can write before I run into problems? By the way, I know some people have complained about the naming style of the different articles for the individual coins, but that was adopted before I ever found Wikipedia - maybe we can rename them in a more elegant fashion once they've been written! Thanks -- Arwel 23:55 Apr 2, 2003 (UTC)

There's no theoretical maximum, but our server only has 2 gigs of memory, so don't push it please. ;) In all seriousness though, I very strongly recommend against letting articles grow beyond 32 kilobytes. (This page right now is about 34 kilobytes.) Not only is this uncomfortably long to navigate if you're only looking for a small bit of information, and very annoying to edit if you want to touch on something in the middle somewhere, but it's technically problematic because some browsers (including most browsers on MacOS) cut off the text around this point when editing. If a page can't be reliably edited, it really should be refactored into several smaller, more self-contained sections.
When a page reached about 28kb, you'll see a warning message appear on the edit screen letting you know that you're entering the danger zone. See Wikipedia:Browser notes et al for more details on browser compatibility. --Brion 00:57 Apr 3, 2003 (UTC)
see wikipedia:page size
Thanks for the advice. In fact the article hit 30K at 1558, so I'll start writing about Elizabeth I's pennies in part 2! :) -- Arwel 23:50 Apr 3, 2003 (UTC)

Wikipedia can't upload audio files including songs, national anthems etc. Is there any current project that would do the trick? I am pretty sure that quite a few people have brought this up in discussions but could someone direct me to any current result or conclusion drawn up? Thanx. kt2

We can and do have audio files. OGG Vorbis format is preferred (as it is not patent-encumbered, like MP3). Use [[media:somefile.ext]] to link directly to any uploaded file (including images, audio, video, etc). As usual, respect copyright! --Brion 07:54 Apr 3, 2003 (UTC)

I'm looking for volunteers to develop a GNU Free Documentation License Project Management Standard (just like the PMBOK, but possibly better). Mkoval

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