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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Fantasy (talk | contribs) at 07:35, 8 July 2003 (How can i contribute money?). 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

See the archive for older moved discussion links.

Paragraph breaks in meta pages

My question is, should long posts to meta pages be split up into several paragraphs with blank space in between (as Nafnaf's, above; there doesn't seem to be a better example on hand) or separated by line breaks (as this one)? I find that paragraph breaks within posts are rather annoying, but some people don't seem to think so.
In the same vein, what's with the apparent custom of placing a horizontal line before every new post in talk: pages? -Smack 07:35 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Yes, if you want people to be able to read what you post, paragraph breaks are a very wise thing. As is breaking up unrelated discussions with a horizontal rule or heading. --Brion 07:38 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)
A good example has presented itself: Anthere's post below.
I was talking about breaking up related discussions with horizontal rules. -Smack 17:34 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Big white blob

Something I caught moments of on the news last night but didn't see in full -- some sort of weird white blob thing on a beach in south america. what is it and do we need an article on it?

Google is your friend...
Sounds fun. But is there enough info for an article? --Menchi 09:08 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Let's keep an eye on the story. When they announce which species it is, we can add (or create) to the article for that species and mention "in ... 2003, a ... was found washed up ... etc" -- Tarquin 16:16 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)


I tend to disagree with what user:Mydogategodshat is currently doing. He has set a 6 links design, and is currently adding them to many articles. First the design is quite different from what is current practice. But more importantly, for some of the articles, it introduces links to articles that have nothing to do with the current topic. If such a practice becomes common, we are gonna find hundreds of links at the bottom of articles. I don't think it is very wise.

For example, he put this new design on the [1]

similarly, I could set a list of six links about ecology, and put them there...till the point where we would have dozen of packages of six links. Here for example, I don't think that List of Marketing Topics is in any way relevant.

As I also told him, I also think it is not a good idea to introduce html code so liberally, as it makes the article edition more scary to non html-introduced people. I think that whenever possible, we should keep editing easy. The improvement does not appear to me so obvious that it absolutely require to introduce this.

I would be glad to have some feedback on this.

User:anthere

It's a table. It's grim. Change to a plain list if these lists are really necessary. -- Tarquin 16:16 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Agreed. These should be lists, if they should be there at all. See Wikipedia:How to use tables (most of which I wrote, I admit, but it's all true, I swear). They're sort of like see-alsos, but aren't really always related to the article... hmm. -- Wapcaplet 03:16 6 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Current Events doesn't render properly in Safari - the text goes over the sidebar. I don't know enough HTML to consider editing... Also, I found that typing Loma-Prieta in the search bar brings up the Mira Loma entry, even though there is a Loma-Prieta page (it was empty, so I changed it to a redirect to Loma Prieta - oh, I just realized it should have been Loma Prieta Earthquake!). Anyway, the search behaved the same both before and after I added the redirect to the page. -Aion 18:58 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Safari renders all pages here at Wikipedia just fine. The only thing that does not work is when you make the page too small from left to right. Then the text in the upper right region overlap the left column. Drag the Safari window bigger (the horizontal size) and see if that fixes things. Also, are you using the latest Safari 1.0 (v85)? As I said, Safari works fine for me at Wikipedia. Good luck. --Mahongue 02:02 6 Jul 2003 (UTC)
There was an HTML error on the Current events page, which I've now fixed. Does it render properly now? --Zundark 19:23 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)


No, it's still the same. It looks like maybe the "Hong Kongese constitutional changes" item is setting the width of the sidebar to be too wide? It renders properly in IE, and Netscape, though. So it might be a Safari problem. -Aion 21:15 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Putting 'loma prieta' in the search box and hitting 'go' brings up Loma Prieta earthquake for me. Current events looks fine in Safari 1.0 for me, though if you shrink the window down real small of ourse you get problems. More detail please? --Brion 22:06 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Hm. I'd love to log in as KF but I can't. Looking at Recent Changes, no one else seems to have that problem. Could someone tell me what is wrong?

Hm, I'd love to help you, but you've given absolutely no information that could be used to do so. What, exactly, is the procedure you're following and what, exactly, is the wiki doing in response? Are there error messages? Are cookies enabled in your browser? Are you in fact KF? ;) --Brion 22:11 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)
If all else fails, try Mozilla temporarily. It does miracles. --Menchi 22:26 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Okay, sorry for the lack of information. I'm using Internet Explorer (and have been doing so all the time, and haven't changed any of the settings disabling cookies or whatever). When I click on Wikipedia (any page) I'm told that I'm not logged in. The spaces for my username and my password are empty. I type in both and get the message "Log in successful". Whatever page I choose next I'm again "not logged in". And there is no way I can prove who I am.
From that description, it's almost certainly a (no-)cookie problem. Sad to say, we don't actually do a double-check that the cookies were received and saved by your computer: so if the login goes okay, it says "success!" and tells your browser to save id cookies, but the next page you go to, there's no cookie returned to identify you, so you're not logged in. If all is well, you should have a PHPSESSID cookie, a wcUserID cookie, and a wcUserName cookie from www.wikipedia.org. If you don't have these, make sure you haven't accidentally set it to not accept cookies or something. (Check also if you're behind some kind of proxy that's meant to strip out advertisements; sometimes these may go for cookies too.) --Brion 22:52 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Thanks an awful lot. I'm impressed. Someone else seems to have changed my cookie settings. Something still seems to be wrong here, but at least I can log in again. Thanks again, and enjoy your Saturday night! KF 23:09 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

wikipedia as dict-ionary

I wonder if someone thought about making dict files of the Wikipedia. It would be cool to have the Wikipedia wherever I am, independent of an internet connection. (Okay, I still need my laptop for this...) dict seems a good way to achieve this. I'm willing to spend some time hacking a Python script that can create the dict files from the SQL stuff. But I'd like to know if other people are interested in this as well, or maybe there's someone who already did this job... :) --Guaka 22:38 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Doesn't Tombraider achieve this? CGS 22:40 5 Jul 2003 (UTC).
You mean Tomeraider? No... First of all, tomeraider is shareware. And AFAICS it is totally not meant to convert the wikipedia into the dict format. Guaka 02:37 6 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Ha ha :) I know it's not meant to convert files to dict format, but it does what you want - view files on the go without a net connection. CGS 20:28 6 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Another thing is... Tomeraider is non-free software. This is already enough reason not to use it. But even if I wanted to, I couldn't because I run GNU/Linux. Guaka 16:06 7 Jul 2003 (UTC)
If it's the right tool for the job, swallow your pride and run it through Wine. CGS 22:15 7 Jul 2003 (UTC).

I was able to edit a user's page. Is that right?

I'm really impressed with Wikipedia and am considering setting up a user page. As a simple experiment I tried editing an existing user's page (User:IZAK) and, to my surprise, it worked. Is that the way it's intended? I'm confused because I would think that a user's page would belong to them. For example, what keeps someone from adding fictitious bibliographic information to a user's page?

(Needless to say I un-did the edit I made to IZAK's page.)

Yes, it's possible to edit other users' pages. The idea is that no page, even user pages, belongs to any one person (and it's useful to be able to fix a broken link, for example, on somebody else's user page). There's nothing to stop people adding incorrect info to a user page (apart from a lack of desire to do it), but suspicious looking changes are usually undone pretty swiftly, just as bad edits to encyclopaedia articles are undone. Welcome to the 'pedia, by the way! --Camembert
It should be said that good-faith edits of other people's user pages are probably outnumbered by vandalism and misplaced discussion (which is meant to go on "User talk"), but that's wiki for you. -- Tim Starling 03:46 6 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Should an article in my User talk:Dieter Simon really appear in Yahoo Search under the heading User talk:Dieter Simon - Wikipedia in which an item is being discussed between two users in their what after all is a private talk page? Could this not become embarassing at times, especially if policy such as NPOV or copy right issues might be discussed? --Dieter Simon 00:41 6 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Don't write anything on a public web site that you don't want to read on the front page of the New York Times the next morning. There is no such thing as a "private talk page" here. If you want privacy, send e-mail. And hope they don't send all your correspondence to the Times later. ;) --Brion 00:51 6 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Yeah, Brion, point taken :-). Comes as a bit of a shock though. --Dieter

At least the conversation will drop out of the search engines eventually if you remove it from the current revision. If you make a post to Usenet, it's archived forever. -- Tim Starling 03:46 6 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Is there any kind of rule about whether "Saint" is abbreviated in article titles? —Paul A 05:44 6 Jul 2003 (UTC)

"Saint" is not abbreviated is article titles about individual saints (Saint George, Saint Nicholas), however it may be abbreviated in names of building, etc. when this is common practice (St. David's Cathedral, but Cathedral of Saint Stephan). Furthermore, the title "Saint" is avoided in article titles when possible (John the Baptist, Martin of Tours) - Efghij

The Treaty of Waitangi article crashes my browser! (Mozilla 1.4, Linux). This must be a browser bug of course, but is there anything illegal in the article? Maybe it's the image? 81.86.233.209 07:17 6 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Yes, it's the image: http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=image:treatyofwaitangi.jpg
In another tool I get a warning: Corrupt JPEG data: premature end of data segment 81.86.233.209 07:35 6 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I fixed Mozilla by recompiling with different options. The precompiled versions should be OK 81.86.233.209 18:29 6 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Factual error

I was parlaying the timeline that is Jefferson Davis into something reasonably article-like when I came upon a statement that Davis was elected to the House of Representatives in 1845. From context, I inferred that this was the United States House of Representatives, not a similarly-named legislative body of the state of Mississippi. The problem is, in case you haven't figured it out yet, that 1845 is not an election year. I think I have three options at this point: keep the erroneous date, spend hours finding a free resource where I can find the correct date, or scrap the whole timeline as factually untrustworthy. -Smack 07:24 6 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Don't throw the baby out with the bath water for goodness sake! Just because there is one error do not delete the whole thing. I check each Events entry in the day articles I work on and sometimes delete several entries that I cannot confirm. And there is such a thing as a run-off elections and maybe a minor error where the author wrote "elected" when "took office" should have been inputted instead. --mav 07:31 6 Jul 2003 (UTC)
The Funk & Wagnall's encyclopedia that's collecting dust in the other room here says "...He was a planter in Mississippi from 1835 to 1845, when he was elected to the U.S. Congress. In 1846 he resigned his seat..." No details, but it could well be a mid-term election due to the previous guy resigning or dying, or some sort of run-off. Or, of course, it could also be badly worded. --Brion 08:16 6 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Village Pump is too long for me to edit without truncating, but 1845 seems correct for Jefferson Davis. See [Biographical Directory of the United States Congress]. -- Someone else 08:39 6 Jul 2003 (UTC)

That does confirm he started his term in 1845. The article claims he entered office in December 1845, which if true would be consistent with a late election (in 1845). --Brion 08:44 6 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Very well then. The timeline says that he took office on December 8, 1845. Unless someone here objects, I'll say explicitly that this was a special election. (Which is rather odd, since Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution says that vacancies in the House shall be filled by "writ of election" of the governor of the state affected. I'll just say that he was elected to fill a vacancy.) -Smack 23:51 6 Jul 2003 (UTC)
On the other hand, his biography on the Congress website says he served in the House from March 4, 1845 -- right at the start of the 29th Congress -- until his June 1846 resignation. However, I see December or December 8th, 1845, sometimes with a November or November 4, 1845 election date, plastered all over mysterious amateur web sites. Anyone want to look up the Congressional Record and make sure? :P --Brion 00:19 7 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Another question - what should I do with all the information regarding speeches that Davis made in Congress? Policy is not to remove any useful information, but if I tried to retain all the speeches, they would just overrun the article. -Smack 18:47 7 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I notice that in some pages people are referred to, after the first stating of his or her name, by just his or her surname.

I know that this is widely done in newspapers and so on, yet I do feel that it seems incredibly rude.

As a hypothetical example, suppose that there is an article about Jane Smith.

It might start as follows.

Jane Smith was born in Anyville, USA in 1943 ...

Fine.

Yet later it might say something such as the following.

Smith wrote a textbook on chemistry in the 1980s.

I feel that it should say either "Jane Smith wrote a ...." or "Ms Smith wrote a ....".

Is there a specific rule about this or is it just how some people write?

Songwriter 10:58 6 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I don't think it's rude at all, and prefixing everyone with their titles (Ms, Mr) would sound very odd. Also, prefixes change over time, and how would we know if someone liked to be Miss or Ms? Obviously if someone has a more important title, (Dr, Sir), that should stay. I was taught to always use the full name first, "John Keats", and then to use the surname "Keats" from then on. This may just be the British style. CGS 11:23 6 Jul 2003 (UTC).
I think only the NYT and WSJ(?) uniformly add the social title anymore, and it sometimes sounds really odd - "...when Mr. Culkin entered the third grade...". Look closely at the books in your library that are less than 20 years old, you'll see very few of them using Mr. etc anymore.
Of the UK broadsheet newspapers, The Guardian and The Times both have their style guides online, and have roughly the same rule: on news pages they generally use "Mr" (etc.) except for dead people, convicted criminals, sportspeople and artists. On sports and arts pages they generally use surname alone. See: Guardian (under "Mr, Mrs, Miss, Ms"); Times (under "appellations"). I personally feel more comfortable using surname alone for encyclopedia articles, even when referring to (for example) living politicians. --rbrwr
The use of the last name without the social title (called an honorific, IIRC), seems to be rude in speech, but in writing it's quite acceptable. -Smack

since sub and sup change the spacing between lines, how about an option to give that spacing to all lines, regardless of whether they have exponents? Pizza Puzzle

Good idea - but it's an HTML issue (more precisely, it's an render issue), and nothing to do with the Wikipedia markup. You should suggest this to either W3 or the browser developers. CGS 23:44 6 Jul 2003 (UTC).

I think I already answered that question. Here:

blah blah blah blah blah blahsupscript blahsubscript blah blah blah blah blah blahsupscript blah blahsubscript blah blah blah blah blah blahsupscript blahsubscript blah blah blahsupscript blah blahsubscript

Accomplished easily using font-size and line-height style attributes. May require tweaking, if your fonts are (probably) different than mine.

-- Wapcaplet 01:07 7 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I would recommend highly against using absolute font sizes, as these won't scale in many browsers if the user tries to bump the page's font size up or down. Just use "line-height: 160%". --Brion 01:14 7 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Good point. I wouldn't personally do this at all, actually. Sub/superscripts don't bother me that much :) -- Wapcaplet 01:40 7 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Even if you can overcome the scaling problem, you may due with something like abc. This is not really a HTML problem, it is a stylish problem for all types of publications!!! Wshun

Help! Is there any browser out there that doesn't screw up something on wiki? IE does bizarre things to some pictures, won't go into pages over 32K (or rather chops the end off) and turns <small></small> captioned text into spidery unreadable stuff, Netscape won't recognise <small></small> at all, putting all text into the same size (which sort of f**ks up captions carefully laid out using the commands), safari is brilliant but times out after 60 seconds (which means that 4 times out of 5 lately on wiki it fails to enter a page, change a page, etc). I thought camino was fail-safe but no, now I find that it too won't accept the <small></small> command. It is as if the designers of these things all get a perverted pleasure in putting some little glitch just to annoy users. :-) Is there anything out there for a mac that doesn't chop pages, muck up captions, move around pictures or time out after a minute? FearÉIREANN 02:22 7 Jul 2003 (UTC)

A minimal test page for <small> looks ok for me in Mozilla 1.4 and Camino 0.7... Can you point to a specific page that's problematic? --Brion 02:41 7 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Short answer: No. There is no perfect browser. But Mozilla and Opera seem to be the least prone to weirdness, in my experience. -- Wapcaplet 02:52 7 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I always use Mozilla 1.3 on Mac OS X. I suspect that it randomly inserts newlines sometimes in edit boxes, but pics and html and exotic fonts all seem to work fine. Stan 03:22 7 Jul 2003 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Browser notes, if you haven't already. You can look for browsers with no problems reported and report the problems you have encountered not already listed there. --Ellmist 03:59 7 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Okay, what's the deal with self-promotion and Daniel C. Boyer? He has written his own article about himself and created articles and linked from many articles whenever some piece of his art has the same name as something else. There also appears to be some amount of promotion a female with the same name, Allison Boyer (his wife or sister, perhaps?).

Allison Boyer is my sister. With the possible exception of her being listed under surrealist poets, in my opinion to say "there also appears to be some amount of promotion" of her is inaccurate as:
  • if it is legitimate to have an article on Idealist Press International, Ltd. at all, clearly it would be appropriate to mention that she was one of the original partners in it (I am making no argument about the Idealist Press International, Ltd. article in general here)
  • she did do the illustration for "Blair House" and so would have to be mentioned if this poster-poem is mentioned in Wikipedia (your argument seems to be against the inclusion of "Blair House" in this sense rather than the mention of Allison Boyer)
  • the same argument as above applies to Daniel C. Boyer.
    • --Daniel C. Boyer

    Pages written by Daniel about himself and his personal projects: The Erotic Life of the Eskimo, Daniel C. Boyer, The Tailgating Spinster, List of visual artists, Idealist Press International, Ltd., Surrealist poets, Dead Man, Echo computer graphic, The Dead Man, International Union of Mail Artists, Donnelly, The Octopus Frets, and Surrealist Subversions.

    While it may be appropriate to call some of these my "personal projects," clearly for others it is a flat-out lie (Idealist Press International, Ltd., in which I started out as one of the limited partners and have at times served as President, CEO and CFO, but at any rate it is not merely one of my personal projects; International Union of Mail Artists, founded by someone else long before my involvement in it; and most ridiculous of all to call one of my personal projects, Surrealist Subversions, (which I note you did not look up on Amazon.com) in which I am just one of the contributors and it was edited and introduced by others. In my opinion a major surrealist anthology such as Surrealist Subversions hardly depends for its inclusion on my contribution). --Daniel C. Boyer

    Pages where he has added references to his stuff which seem to vastly overinflate his relative importance in the world. I don't really have a grudge against the man, but these are really silly:

    I may have missed some stuff (he has also done some edits when not logged into his account). So, is it okay for people to use Wiki as advertising for themselves and their own works? -- Dan at 216.103.211.240

    Generally people aren't allowed to advertise their own works, but clearly there has to be a point where a person is famous enough to be in Wikipedia, and their being a Wikipedian shouldn't detract from that. We decided some time ago that Daniel Boyer is important enough. There are a handful of others in his position, but it is very rare. See User talk:Daniel C. Boyer. -- Tim Starling 05:58 7 Jul 2003 (UTC)
    It's clearly advertizing, especially for the latter list of places where he's added his stuff to pre-existing articles. I guarantee that nobody looking up Blair House is looking for his products. At the very least, I think some sort of reality check is needed. He has links for individual works of his whereas even extremely well known artists rarely get that treatment. If this stuff was listed on a personal page, I think it would be fine, it should even be sufficient for his ego, but putting it all over the place is clearly trying to generate traffic (again, especially for the latter list of real articles, the ficticious articles are not necessarily as bad).
    I don't understand your meaning opposing "real articles" to "fictitious articles". --Daniel C. Boyer

    -- Dan at 216.103.211.240

    You can remove references to him in Blair House, 1994 in film, etc. at your discretion. Of course he should not appear more important than he really is due to his own self-promotion. But we decided that he's allowed in the main namespace, so you probably won't find much support for the deletion of articles such as Daniel C. Boyer or The Erotic Life of the Eskimo. You're welcome to try, of course -- you can list them on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion if you feel strongly about it, but be aware that we have discussed this issue before. -- Tim Starling 14:13 7 Jul 2003 (UTC)

    Hi, today Wikipedia is EXTREMELY slow (sometimes 5 Minutes to show a page). I tried it from Germany, I also tried it from Holland, Always the same (over the whole day...) Is there a Server-Problem? Thanks, Fantasy 18:54 7 Jul 2003 (UTC)

    slow page loads is an ongoing problem of Wikipedia. I noticed a slight problem for a few minutes, but it has since passed. It's something I have gotten used to. It would be nice for someone to isolate the problem :). MB 19:21 7 Jul 2003 (UTC)
    I've had the same problem lately. I'm placed in Norway. In France one week ago, through a pay-to-surf, I wasn't even able to load the mainpage. Sigg3.net 19:32 7 Jul 2003 (UTC)
    I personally don't have so big problems with it. But it is specially embarrasing, when you show a "possible" new Wikipedian the page, and after some minutes you have to look for excuses... I think we loose a lot of future Wikipedians by this problem... Fantasy 07:11 8 Jul 2003 (UTC)
    The answer is that we need both more servers, and more optimisation of the Wikipedia code. The first takes money, the second takes time. -- The Anome 07:28 8 Jul 2003 (UTC)
    If the money is a problem, I am ready to contribute. How can that be done? Fantasy 07:35 8 Jul 2003 (UTC)
    PS: is there a way to donate money to the developers (eg. functions implemented...)? I have the feeling, improving Wikipedia has also some "value"...

    I have tried using & mdash for dashes, but get "&mdash" (no quotes) in the article, not a dash. So far I ma using "--" Thanks for any info. User:Dino

    It displays correctly on my browser, even though it's not valid HTML -- try it with a semicolon: &mdash; becomes "—". -- Tim Starling 02:28 8 Jul 2003 (UTC)
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