User talk:Erik Zachte

Hello there Erik, welcome to the 'pedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you ever need editing help visit Wikipedia:How does one edit a page and experiment at Wikipedia:Sandbox. If you need pointers on how we title pages visit Wikipedia:Naming conventions or how to format them visit our manual of style. If you have any other questions about the project then check out Wikipedia:Help or add a question to the Village pump. Cheers! --maveric149

Stats

Erik, a first french version of WikiReports is available on fr: at WikiReports_FR.pl. -- Looxix 23:57, 14 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Thanks for the stats. The translation of the languages part is done. -- Looxix 21:38, 15 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Heya,

I just wanted to say thanks again for your excellent statistics pages. They're a real pleasure to look at, and tremendously useful both for analysis and marketing. Great work! —Eloquence 01:29, Dec 9, 2003 (UTC)

Hi Erik! Thanks on the info about the out-of-date stats due to the server switch - I thought my memory was betraying me, because I could swear I have seen more up-to-date stats than I can see now. Now everything is explained. Thank you! --denny vrandečić 15:08, Feb 5, 2004 (UTC)

Greetings. I love the Wikistats collection... A question about updating the language list: Could the language selection be changed? Scottish and Manx don't seem to be active. Swahili and Urdu are more active, and, as major world languages, merit a place on the list (if only to encourage awareness/contributors). +sj + 10:36, 2004 Mar 15 (UTC)

Rembrandt page

Hi, I just now noticed your question on my user talk page about converting the Rembrandt paintings to thumbnails. Don't know how I missed it! I wasn't ignoring you, really--I'd offer you treats to make up for the long delay, but I haven't figured out how to send it over the internet. To answer your question--I thought that the larger original picture sizes were big for someone using a smaller screen and that thumbnails would work well there because then they could possibly see an even larger version, which I thought for artwork would be a nice thing. But I guess that's most useful if there *are* larger versions and if the page felt crowded with them full-sized. I don't feel strongly about it one way or the other in this case, so if you do, I wouldn't claw my eyes out with despair if you changed them back. :-) (Oh, BTW, I did try changing my user image to a thumbnail when I first put it up, but it's so skinny that it came out just about exactly the same size! Hooray for Weight Watchers.) Elf 07:10, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

ET

Jeluf's ET implementation is looking good already. He suggested checking in the code into CVS. Would it be possible for you to also maintain the code over our CVS server? That would make collaboration a lot easier. There are several graphical CVS clients for Windows such as WinCVS. Of course you don't have write access to the CVS server yet, for that I would need your SourceForge username.--Eloquence * 20:25, Apr 25, 2004 (UTC)

Pacific War

Hi Erik, the only real contribution of Nazi Germany in the Pacific Theatre was naval; U-Boats and raiders/auxiliary cruisers, e.g. the Kormoran, which sank & was sunk by HMAS Sydney off Western Australia in November 1941 were operating in the Indian Ocean from an early stage of WW2 and some Nazi naval forces later used ports in Malaya, Singapore and the Dutch East Indies (e.g. U-862[1]). I intend to include a little on this in the Pacific War article at some time soon. Regards,Grant65 (Talk) 04:32, Apr 26, 2004 (UTC)

EasyTimeline documentation

I was rather expecting some nice documentation to be prepared which would be resident within Wikipedia, probably on Meta-Wiki within the Manual of Style. I just don't feel comfortable with the documentation for a Wikipedia feature residing on an external site: it doesn't feel consistent. Call me obsessive or anal-retentive if you like (nothing new, I can assure you :-) but in this kind of situation I like to have all my eggs in the same basket. I have no idea of the status of your website, but if it should move or even (fates forfend) disappear we would be left bereft. Your idea about a LotR timeline is a good one, and I have some other possible ideas (some alas involving non-standard calenders such as I mentioned the other day, so they'll have to wait): I'll have to see if I can squeeze enough contiguous time out of RL Work to put something together. Ciao. --Phil | Talk 08:32, May 17, 2004 (UTC)

I was thinking of having a go at using something like html2wikipedia, or maybe being bloody-minded and just hacking it together myself. Basically I wanted your OK to use your original text, since you went to all that trouble putting it together. --Phil | Talk 11:44, May 17, 2004 (UTC)

Namespace User: in portuguese

Hi Erik,

Just to let you know that the namespace User: is "Usuário:" in the portuguese wikipedia. I'm telling you this because we've had a few cases of people starting user pages under User: which I think came from your stats (which are great, BTW). Jorge @ pt

EasyTimeline version identifier

It might be a good idea to support a syntax like

<timeline version="1.2">code</timeline>

By default, the latest version would be assumed. This would make it possible to support multiple versions of the program simultaneously, so that old timelines would not have to be rewritten. What do you think?--Eloquence * 05:06, Jun 2, 2004 (UTC)

I am not quite sure a version id would work well: no-one will add the id until needed; once they notice someone has fallen over with the new version, they would have to establish which version worked well, which may be three versions back. Using the id rightaway makes sure no bugs will be fixed automatically with any edit/save. I think I have to do my utmost to keep the syntax downward compatible. When behaviour is modified I will have to add a functional tag that request this new behaviour. Erik Zachte 20:12, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)

EasyTimeline

Yeah, I was just playing about. I found it quite easy, I suppose, but then I'm probably not a typical Wikipedian in terms of technical ability, and certianly not lowest-common-denominator level. Other than the initial looking at things and fiddling, it seemed fine, though using variables makes for more easily tunable pictures, it also makes for less readable syntax, IMO. Also, sometimes previewing the timeline would result in no picture, and I'd have to preview it again, sometimes needing to change something (a bug in the rendering code resulting in a non-standard image file?). But no, it was quite do-able.
Thanks for the hard work you've put in to give me the opportunity to play with timelines!
James F. (talk) 13:47, 15 Jun 2004 (UTC)

There seems to now be a bug in the EasyTimeline code - if I edit my timeline test (say, change the wording), the preview shows a rather broken layout (but the text does indeed change); see, for example this test...

James F. (talk) 01:10, 3 Jul 2004 (UTC)

EasyTimeline colon bug

Check out Template:Timeline CGI in movies. The bug is self-explanatory - colons in links confuse the timeline script that thinks they are defining some parametres. Paranoid 23:09, 23 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Fixed. Erik Zachte 23:07, 26 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Can't get bars in the right order

Hello, I'm es:User:Comae, from the Spanish Wikipedia. I've been translating meta's EasyTimeline guide, and attempting to do some timelines for our Wikipedia. But I can't get it right with es:Template:Línea de tiempos de reinos de España. Bar titles are in the right order, but bars are inverted. Could you please take a peek at my code? Thank you very much. --es:User:Comae 23:41, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Fixed. Erik Zachte 23:07, 26 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Thank you, Erik!! --es:User:Comae 00:10, 27 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Soviet bug

I had to revert to a pre-easy timeline version of List of leaders of the Soviet Union since the version with easy timeline obliterated the table that was supposed to appear on the right side of the page. If you are able to fix it could you also modify the timeline to include Malenkov? Thanks. AndyL 11:36, 27 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I'm using IE Explorer 5.1 for the Macintosh. What happens is that the table that's supposed to appear to the right of the graph appears no where on the page at all while the footnotes appear after a lot of white space. The graph appears on the left side of the page. AndyL 17:23, 27 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Just in case you're looking at my reverted version of the page try this link AndyL 17:25, 27 Jun 2004 (UTC)

A suggestion

I'm Comae again. At the Spanish Wikipedia we have been talking about genealogical trees. It would be very useful for Mithology, kings, Tolkien, and others. The trouble is that we can´t find an usable way to do it, getting links in the tree. I've used HTML lists, but they don't make the cut. Tables are difficult to edit and correct. I was trying to do it with timelines, which may come in handy, but it's not as intuitive for non-tech people to edit later. Now, I see you are already busy with all the trouble with timelines, but I thought you may use a suggestion for future versions, or find an alternative. Thank you for the patience. (I hope you can understand this strange babbling I call "my English") --es:User:Comae 01:03, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Don't worry, I feared it. We are Wikipedists, not Superman. Thank you anyway. Also, I'm glad you have your priorities right ;D --es:User:Comae

Creep

Hello, Erik! When I wrote that, I was meaning to be lighthearted. In calling Alberto a "creep" I was having a friendly "dig" at a colleague who has worked with me on my Fiji project, by more or less translating some articles I have written. I didn't mean to put him down in any way - quite the opposite. Seeing that my remark was not understood as intended, I will remove it when I update my page (in the next day or two). David Cannon 04:06, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Tour de France vs Soviet leaders

Tour de France works for me. AndyL 07:08, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Parenthesis "(, )" don't work in links

Can´t get working links in timelines with parenthesis. For example, I can't link es:Plutón (planeta) in a timeline. Could you fix it? Thank you very much. --es:User:Comae 18:32, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Comae, yes it is a bug and I will fix it, but it will take some weeks before a new version is online. In the meantime you can code it as follows (click edit page for code)

Timeline on fr:

Bonjour, I hope it's the right place to submit such observation : copied Template:Timeline_Tour_de_France_Winners into wikipédia in french but the result is a blank page. Someone told me it's utf-8 related problem. Thank you for all the features you did ! Greudin

Greuding, there are two issues here. Yes EasyTimeline does not handle UTF-8 code yet. I can't tell you when it will, as this is a significant adaptation, it involves custom font support for one thing. I will surely do this, I'm only very busy on another project right now. However you should still see something, an image with some garbled text, or when you input contains errors, an error box. Both do not happen on several Wikipedias, only old images are still shown, so someone made a change which disabled EasyTimeline, I tried wikitech yesterday but got no response, I'll try again. Cheers, Erik

Template:Timeline Tour de France Winners

No one seems to be able to update this so that it works. Any idea what we are doing wrong? Rmhermen 20:01, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)

Somehow somebody messed up, so EasyTimeline is not invoked on any Wikipedia since a few days. I tried to reach a developer with server access through wikitech two times, but too much is going on there apparantly, will try now on IRC. Erik Zachte 22:37, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Update: EasyTimeline disappeared form the server some days ago. I has been reinstalled but is not yet active. Further research needed. Erik Zachte 03:32, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Any news on when EasyTimeline will be back? I wanted to update the geologic timeline with corrected information (as seen on ~~Geologic Timeline~~Geologic timescale), but I see that EasyTimeline is still not working (at least not for me :) Gwimpey 03:56, Aug 3, 2004 (UTC)

I haven't forgotten it. Several people looked at it. Script was missing from the server. Also access rights were wrong, script could not run. Then Apaches were out of sync on this module. So three steps forward but there is still a missing piece. Now that I have server access I can do some more digging, but I'll have to be slow and careful as I don't know Wikimedia internals well enough yet. Erik Zachte 04:05, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)

EasyTimeline fixed

Congratulations! It looks great now. It's a pity our beloved 'eñe' it's still unsupported :( Maybe the spanish characters test table in es:Wikipedia:Líneas_de_tiempo#Fuentes de letra could be helpful... Anyway, we can go back to work again! Cheers!--es:User:Comae

ATaleOfTwoCases

Thanks for the EasyTimeline-generated timelines! I became aware of them via Tour de France. But I have a gripe as well, possibly not directed at you but having to do with Category:Graphical Timelines: too bad this and the other similar timeline categories aren't titled like Graphical timeline etc (lowercase t in "timeline")... Since categories can't be Moved like articles (at least not by mortal wikipedians -- don't know about sysops or wikipedia developers) I guess there'd be quite a lot of work fixing this. The cat titles where "timeline" is the first word is OK, of course, likewise the templates. --Wernher 21:20, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I plead guilty. I did come up with that category name. By the way I just realize this page starts with "Editing User talk:... Are there clear rules about this? I know the rules for normal sentences, with subject, verb, etc, but I'm not sure in other situations. For instance it is quite customary to capitalize all major words in a book title. Erik Zachte 02:50, 11 Aug 2004 (UTC)

UTF-8 support in Easytimeline

Thanks for your fine work on the Easytimeline module. There's a minor glitch however - UTF-8. I urge you to add UTF-8 support to Easytimeline now that more and more Wikipedias have been converted to it. Hope to see an UTF-8 enabled EasyTimeline soon. Regards, Kpjas 18:22, 15 Aug 2004 (UTC)

EasyTimeline has been made UTF-8 aware recently. 2 caveats: only extended ascii range accented characters are recognized so far, and a few of those, e.g. è ñ are missing from the internal font used by Ploticus (which does the rendering). Complete unicode support will come once external fonts support has been added. This will take some time (months), as I am pretty busy with other Wikipedia work right now. Cheers, Erik Zachte 22:41, 15 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Bothering you some more, first easytimeline is great thanks alot for making it and in turn giving us all a great tool. I know you're currently working on full unicode support, but in the meantime would it be possible to do some kind of replacement to support the following characters: A Á B (C) D Ð E É F G H I Í J K L M N O Ó P (Q) R S T U Ú V (W) X Y Ý (Z) Þ Æ Ö (The Icelandic alphabet) so that timelines like these: is:Snið:Tímalína íslenskra forsætisráðherra will work? (the ð character doesnt and the links are incorrect.) thanks. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 14:43, 2004 Aug 16 (UTC)

I'm sorry, till external font support has been added there is not much I can do. Here is a list of extended ascii characters (special symbols omitted, and out of ascii order). As you can see some characters have no counterpart in the Ploticus font and are replaced by unaccented characters (or shown with wrong accent).

ÀÁÂÃÄÅÆàáâãäåæ
Çç
ÈÉÊËèéêë
ÌÍÎÏìíîï
ÐÑñ
ÒÓÔÕÖØòóôõöø
ÙÚÛÜùúûü
Ýýÿ
Þßðþ

Adding external font support for the whole unicode range is second on my todo list, but I'm currently very busy with another Wikipedia project, it will take quite some time (months) before this issue has been resolved. Also it is not a trivial affair, I will have to patch Ploticus (open source c program) in the process, to make it suitable for EasyTimeline requirements (unicode fonts have variable character widths, this has some implications on how Ploticus shows inline links) So please be patient and either delay working on timelines or add some comment in the script that explains why characters are not yet rendered properly (or else other people will try to correct it with no succes). Thanks, Erik Zachte 17:21, 16 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Wiktionary

Hmm, IIRC you were the chap who also did wiktionary, right? Haven't quite been able to track down your user contributions there :-) (Or am I mixing up faces already? That'd typically be me :-P ). Have a nice day! Kim Bruning 10:05, 29 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Yup, I remember now, thanks! Kim Bruning 13:54, 29 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Musical pitch range

Thanks Erik for compliments. I want put this to an English version on en:. I speak little english. Is the title musical pitch range OK ? Lzur 11:50, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Vocal and instrumental pitch ranges. Lzur 13:35, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)

In Template:Vocal and instrumental pitch ranges link to "basso" is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/alto_28%voice). It's should be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alto_(voice) or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alto_%28voice%29 Lzur 13:43, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)

EasyTimeline

Is it possible to make playoff trees in EasyTimeline? // Sander of Sweden 08:35, 2004 Sep 18 (UTC)

With perseverance you might be able to bend the syntax into a playoff tree. But the resulting script would not be very intuitive as a model for reuse by others. A html table seems more appropriate, until someone makes a new <playoff> extension. Erik Zachte 13:07, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Take a look at wikitex which is currently being tested on Wikisophia: there is a tree-drawing tool which might help. --Phil | Talk 07:59, Sep 20, 2004 (UTC)

ROA-RUP is Aromanian

Hi Erik! Just to let you know that, for the Wikipedia Stats, the code ROA_RUP (which should actually be roa-rup with a hyphen) represents the Aromanian language. It is the only language code without a name in the stats (that's OK since I know that there are so many new Wikipedias being founded all the time!). Would it also be OK if you could update the Romanian language file for the Stats so that the name of roa-rup is Aromână (the name of the language in Romanian). Aromanian is a language similar to Romanian (a bit like Kashubian to Polish). And, one more question. Are Categories counted as an interwiki link (so, if an article belongs to two categories, and links to them via [[Category:x]] is that link counted as an interwiki?) and also, are the articles in a Category page all counted as interwikis, even though they are machine-generated (cannot be edited). Cheers (and thanks again for the great stats), Ronline from ro.wiki (talk).

EasyTimeLineScale

Hello! I'm working with a timeline over swedish goverment secretaries for various departments (it's here!) and I've run into some problems. I would to have years as major scale and election years as a minor scale but the problem is that the period between parlimentary elections changes from 3 to 4 in 1994 (i.e. the next election was in 1998 not 1997). This appear to be impossible to accomplish?! (i've tried "LineData" but the lines are too thick to fit into the chart). Cheers!/ Narym 18:13, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I added width:0.5 for LineData. I'm afraid I'm a bit behind with the documentation, some options are not yet covered. Erik Zachte 20:28, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Thanks, great work! Narym 21:21, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)

mediawiki conference

Hello Erik, I'm currently preparing a developer meeting at the 21C3 in december in Berlin and like to invite you to come there. If you have any questions, please contact me on my german talk page. --Elian 18:37, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

How to install EasyTimeline in an own MediaWiki project?

Hello!
At first I hope you understand my school English...
I am running my own MediaWiki project (inspired by the Wikipedia) and I like the graphs, generated by your tool very much. I would like to have it included into my wiki, too (like in Wikipedia), but I can't find any documentations about it. At your site I only can download the script for using it "offline" at my local computer - or am I blind and couldn't see a page called "How to include EasyTimeline into MediaWiki"?
Perhaps you can give me some hints on my German talk page, how to do this...
Yours, --Erlando 17:36, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Template:Timeline_Classical_Composers_Medieval

Apparently the Template:Timeline_Classical_Composers_Medieval was incorrectly the same as Template:Timeline_Classical_Composers_Classical. I hope I changed it correctly?

Donar Reiskoffer 11:02, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Wikinews demo up and running

Hi!

I'm writing to let you know that the Wikimedia Board of Trustees has approved the first stage of the Wikinews project. There's now a fully operational English demo site at demo.wikinews.org. This will be used for experimenting with various review models and basic policies before the site is launched officially in about a week. demo.wikinews.org will become the English version later.

You voted for the Wikinews project, so I'm asking for your participation now. Everything is open, nothing is final. What Wikinews will and can be depends in large part on you. There already is a global Wikinews mailing list for discussing the project. If you are interested at all, please subscribe -- coordination is of key importance. There's also an IRC channel #wikinews on irc.freenode.net. Realtime discussion can help to polish up articles.

If you're looking for something to do, check out the articles in development and articles in review. Or start a new story in the Wikinews workspace, or ignore the proposed review system - it's up to you. I hope you'll join us soon in this exciting experiment.--Eloquence * 01:58, Nov 17, 2004 (UTC)

Unification of the different Wiki fixup projects?

Greetings TB, Neilc, Sietse Snel, and Erik Zachte! I'm posing this message on each of your four talk pages, asking you if you're interested in unifying the different Wiki fixup projects (User:Topbanana/Reports + User:Neilc/External links + User:Sietse_Snel/Fix_common_mistakes + Wiki Syntax Project + Erik's list of HTML problems that he emailed me a subset of).

Currently, we all have different pages at different locations listing different types of problems. What I'm wondering is whether we and the Wikipedia would all be slightly better off if we had one location that contained all of the outstanding problems from all of these different projects. It would be the ultimate clearing-house for problem-finders like us to list problems, and for contributors to go find list of things that need fixing, and fix those problems.

Consider the benefits:

One page address for all problems is easier to remember, and we'd set up a super-short shortcut (e.g. "WP:WF") that was very easy to remember.
It's easier to avoid duplication by seeing what other people are already doing - for example, I've started searching for redirect problems, only to find the Topbanana was already doing something similar. I didn't mean to do this, but I simply didn't know it had already been done.
It evens out the workload - currently one person's problems all get finished, and another person somewhere else has a new batch that's suddenly done and ready for fixing - and it's hard for the contributors to know where to go to find outstanding problems.
If we have one page with everything on it, we could list it as a place for newbies to start out doing productive stuff when they're new to the Wikipedia - and by seeing and fixing the types of problems that came up, they'd be that much less likely to make those mistakes themselves.
There's a momentum that builds up from having a continuous supply of problems, rather than having a stop-start supply. If problems stop coming, contributors stop checking - they like to see new problems, and feel a part of community project that's getting somewhere and doing something useful.
With one central repository, if you go on holidays or disappear for a few weeks or contribute new problems very infrequently, it doesn't matter - someone else will still be doing something useful while you're off doing other stuff.
New developers could easily add problems they found to the page, and indeed would be actively encouraged to do so. Rather than a series of independent and competing efforts, it would be one combined effort, with people actively encouraged to expand the scope with new systematic searches for problems (such as Erik, who out-of-blue sent me a list of HTML problems a conversion script of his had found - this is the exactly the type of thing we need to actively encourage, because the whole Wikipedia is that much better off for it).
It would make it easy for the contributors to know what's out there - There may be other fixup projects already running that I don't know about, and it would be really good to include them - I haven't omitted anybody deliberately, so if there are omissions, it just proves my point that currently it's hard to know what's out there.
As the number of articles in the Wikipedia grows, the need for some systematic central repository of problems grows - and the pace of growth shows no signs at all of slowing.

What do you think? Are you interested? I'm completely open to your suggestions - and to get us started, can I just throw some ideas out there:

It would be good to have a WikiProject location (and it does NOT have to be "Wiki Syntax" - it could be "The SuperList of things that need fixing", or "Wiki Fixup", or any other name you like).
All problem-finders would be listed in a special credits section (and for the record I'm more happy to be the last name on the list :-) ) - so that everyone still gets recognition and credit.
It would be good to have the current list of locations redirect to the new central location, wherever it is, so that any pre-existing links still work.
Some basic criteria for the scope of the new project would be good (something like: Covers the whole English Wikipedia; Has lists of problems; The list of problems should be generated by some type of automated process - e.g. software or database query - which ensures that it's systematic and repeatable; The problems listed should be simple to fix, so that the barrier to entry for contributors is low; And it would be good if when contributors fixed problems if we could ask them to put a link in their edit description that pointed back to the central location).

Maybe I'm crazy. Maybe it's a bad idea. I'd really like to think it could work. Maybe it's a good idea. You tell me.

P.s. To save lots of different messages on different pages, can we please have one location where everybody can speak their mind? How about Topbanana's talk page ?

All the best, -- Nickj 07:12, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Might I suggest, being the nosey sod that I am, the project talk page for maximal coverage? --Phil | Talk 09:30, Dec 1, 2004 (UTC)

Image copyrights

Hi! Thanks for uploading Image:OudeRijnLeiden.jpg. I notice it currently doesn't have an image copyright tag. Could you add one to let us know its copyright status? (You can use {{gfdl}} if you release it under the GFDL, or {{fairuse}} if you claim fair use, etc.) If you don't know what any of this means, just let me know where you got the images and I'll tag them for you. Thanks so much, Edwinstearns 21:05, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Article Licensing

Hi, I've started a drive to get users to multi-license all of their contributions that they've made to either (1) all U.S. state, county, and city articles or (2) all articles, using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-by-sa) v1.0 and v2.0 Licenses or into the public domain if they prefer. The CC-by-sa license is a true free documentation license that is similar to Wikipedia's license, the GFDL, but it allows other projects, such as WikiTravel, to use our articles. Since you are among the top 2000 Wikipedians by edits, I was wondering if you would be willing to multi-license all of your contributions or at minimum those on the geographic articles. Over 90% of people asked have agreed. For More Information:

Multi-Licensing FAQ - Lots of questions answered
Multi-Licensing Guide
Free the Rambot Articles Project

To allow us to track those users who muli-license their contributions, many users copy and paste the "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" template into their user page, but there are other options at Template messages/User namespace. The following examples could also copied and pasted into your user page:

Option 1

I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:

Option 2

I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions to any [[U.S. state]], county, or city article as described below:

Or if you wanted to place your work into the public domain, you could replace "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" with "{{MultiLicensePD}}". If you only prefer using the GFDL, I would like to know that too. Please let me know what you think at my talk page. It's important to know either way so no one keeps asking. -- Ram-Man (comment| talk)

Unverified images

Hi! Thanks for uploading the following images:

I notice it currently doesn't have an image copyright tag. Could you add one to let us know its copyright status? (You can use {{gfdl}} if you release it under the GNU Free Documentation License, {{fairuse}} if you claim fair use, etc.) If you don't know what any of this means, just let me know at my talk page where you got the images and I'll tag them for you. Thanks so much. [[User:Poccil|Peter O. (Talk, automation script)]] 05:06, Dec 11, 2004 (UTC)

P.S. You can help tag other images at User:Yann/Untagged_Images. Thanks again.

Those images are ineligible for copyright.However I would like to know the source of Image:DeclarationOfTheTie.jpg might it be from [2]? If you could leave a note at Wikipedia:Image sleuthing — Zeimusu | Talk 03:08, 2005 Feb 13 (UTC)

Wikipedia stats

Hi Erik,

First of all, great job on Wikistats... I certainly didn't expect all of it to be the work of a single fellow Wikipedian! :thumbsup: ;)

I've got a question stemming from a dispute with User:Dbachmann... how did you arrive at the word count statistics for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Thai? Chinese and Japanese don't use spaces at all to separate their words, so do the counts refer to single characters? Thai uses spaces to separate sentences and clauses instead of words, so do the word counts refer to single syllables instead (or something else)? Korean does use spaces similarly to European languages, so does the word count also refer to "words" as strings of characters separated by spaces?

Thanks in advance! -- ran (talk) 20:53, Jan 2, 2005 (UTC)

Hi Ran, thanks for compliments. I had some discussion with User:Tomos about word count long ago. I decided to make a rough estimate of ratio English words vs Japanese characters by comparing the English and Japanese full sentence texts in the wikistats language files, which are supposed to be very literal translations. Same for Chinese. I ended up with one Japanese character is 0.3 English word and one Chinese char is 0.4 English words (the numbers are fictional, I'm not at home, so can't check the actual ratios right now). So I count unicode chars in both languages and multiply by a language specific factor, so far only for Japanese and Chinese. It is very rough, but at least better than usual word count algorithm that see spaces, dots etc as word boundaries. Cheers, Erik Zachte 00:57, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Ah... I see. I'm impressed with the trouble you went to to account for the special orthographies used in those languages. Great job! ;)

Your word counts, btw, are now being used on the Main Page. -- ran (talk) 01:46, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)

EasyTimeline vertical bars

Any chance we might eventually have the ability to create multiple vertical bars that don't overlap. I was playing around with it and apparently the only option is a single overlapping vertical column. Just as an example, it would be nice to be able to take a chart like you see at Template:Timeline Geological Timescale and turn it on its side so that the three vertical columns are side-by-side. —Mike 09:06, Jan 16, 2005 (UTC)

Mike, as a test I took this unual 'timeline' from [3] and rotated it 90 degrees (I removed the texts which would have been been misplaced on the map, as they are in hard-coded coordinates). I would say these bars are vertical and non-overlapping. Is this what you want? Erik Zachte 14:29, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Yes, that works. It looks like it is because I wasn't using the 'bar:'. And I couldn't find any example that used multiple vertical bars to copy from. Thanks —Mike 19:45, Jan 16, 2005 (UTC)

StatisticsUsers.csv

Hi Erik; you implied on Wikipedia talk:List of Wikipedians by number of edits that you have some responsibility for http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/csv/StatisticsUsers.csv. I use it for purposes other than generating the WP:1000 lists, but the csv has not been updated in some time. Is it a manual process to update it, or is there a cron job broken somewhere? Where would be the best place for me to ask that it be run again? —Ben Brockert (42) 02:45, Jan 27, 2005 (UTC)

Brockert, the csv files are generated by my wikistats script. This is normally run after new database dumps have been created, which has not happened for three weeks. The databases are reorganized with a different compression algorithm, heavy job, which has been running for weeks now. After this has finished, I still need to adapt the scripts to the new scheme, which I can only start to work on when a dump is available for testing. Cheers, Erik Zachte 11:07, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Ok, thanks. I shall add to the chorus of requests on Wikitech-l if it doesn't get run in the next week or so. —Ben Brockert (42) 03:39, Jan 28, 2005 (UTC)

Problem with Timeline reported on Meta

Are you aware of the problem reported m:Help talk:EasyTimeline syntax#Timelines and Templates here on Meta? If you put a timeline into a template, it is apparently not possible to use parameters because the transclusion system doesn't substitute the parameters inside the <timeline> tags. --Phil | Talk 18:01, Feb 2, 2005 (UTC)

You might not be the person to talk to about this, but the English website link at statistics for all Wikipedias no longer routes directly to the English page. Moogle 03:56, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia Statistics

These tables and graphs have always been extremely useful, quite invaluable infact. Congratulations on this work. I notice that it has not been updated since the 30 January 2004, approaching 2 months, is there a particular reason for this? If not, would it be possible to update it? Thanks. --Oldak Quill 00:38, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

See post at wikitech for full answer. Erik Zachte 04:01, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)