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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Brooke Vibber (talk | contribs) at 10:36, 25 August 2002 (Accents in titles). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Welcome, newcomers and baffled oldtimers!

Your questions answered here

What's the convention for movie titles? Should they go in italics in the body of an article, and bold italics when first mentioned in their own article? --Ed Poor

Movie titles are italicized (English convention), but the first mention of the subject usually goes in bold (a wikipedia convention), so someone (Zoe, maybe?) started bolding and italicizing the first occurence of a movie title on the movie's page. I've started doing it too, but maybe I shouldn't. --KQ 10:10 Aug 23, 2002 (PDT)
Thanks for quenching my thirst -- only took 4 minutes for an answer: better than the waiter at . . . --Ed
Funny.  :-)
Now that I think about it, Zoe's probably been writing the most about films, so if you want to change the policy before this becomes convention, too, you should talk to her. I've just been going along because it seems logical enough, but I don't have any strong feelings on it. --KQ 10:10 Aug 23, 2002 (PDT)
These are the questions that a manual of style is supposed to answer. I started italicizing film titles because someone told me that was the style and I mentioned it to Zoe and KQ. I think first mention in bold subsequent in italics seems right, and I've been doing it for books, magazines, ships, and TV shows too. The University of Chicago Manual of Style says it should also be done for famous statues, but not little-known ones, which doesn't strike me as the greatest rule. How about everybody whose interested collaborating on a one- or two-page style guide? Ortolan88 10:40 Aug 23, 2002 (PDT)
It's starting to look like a manual of style, take a look. Ortolan88

Multiple subjects - same name: A newcomers question - what?s the convention for a page that refers to several subjects. I was looking for Blackberry and found the page has details of a radio wireless link called Blackberry. I have data for the fruit/plant Blackberry to link from Bramble fruit and Rubus and would like to know the convention (if there is one) on Wikipedia. TerrapinDundee

You're in luck, we've got a whole page on the subject! See Wikipedia:Disambiguation. --Brion
Read that page, then the changed Blackberry page, now I get it, ta. --TerrapinDundee

Wrap text around pictures: How do I get text to wrap around a picture? (Copied from Talk:Dwight Eisenhower to promote the idea of this village pump page.)

Easy way: <div style="float: left">[[image:Eisenhower.jpg]]</div>
Hard way: use a table (shudder). --Brion VIBBER

Of course, the table works in older non-CSS browsers, too.

So does ASCII art.

Gutenberg link looks awful: How do I link to the uncopyrighted ASCII text maintained by the Project Gutenberg? I copied a link and it just looks awful?

Text copied from Talk:Robert Louis Stevenson to make it more accessible and to promote this village pump page).
You can't just look up something in Project Gutenberg and cut and paste the link. If you do, you end up with a dog's dinner like something this (broken into two lines for "readability"):
http://promo.net/cgi-promo/pg/t9.cgi?entry=120&full=yes
 &ftpsite=ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/
The wiki software can use it to link, but apparently wiki can't get rid of all the excess characters no matter how much you try to mark it up. However, if you edit the link down to this
http://promo.net/cgi-promo/pg/t9.cgi?entry=120
wiki takes you to the same place but is clean.
There are several forms available, use "edit this page" to look at the coding:
The last form is less desirable, but since you see that kind of URL in the wikipedia all the time, I thought I should show it too.

The advantage of the last url is that if somebody prints out the wikipedia entry, they get a usable URL that they can type into their browser later, rather than just seeing the name of the link. KJ 21:08 Aug 5, 2002 (PDT)


Please note this on bug report 583234. A workaround until it gets fixed someday is to manually change the colon that appears in the compound link to %3A, like this:

[http://promo.net/cgi-promo/pg/t9.cgi?entry=120&full=yes&ftpsite=ftp%3A//ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/ Gutenberg text]
becomes Gutenberg text

Uhhh, okay that doesn't work either. Time for more bug reports. :) --Brion VIBBER

Editing individual year entries I stumbled across Tarquin's style guide for the layout of contents of these pages, but I wondered whether there was any particular commonly agreed restriction on content for these. For example, can one just check on pages which link to a year article and slap the events in (with discretion over omitting particularly boring events!) Mazzy

In the absence of some robot spider doing the same thing with limited intelligence, I have been adding to the various "day" and "year" pages as I go along. Very few of them are thickly populated, and if the only thing that happened in 864 was "Khan Boris of the Bulgarians is baptized an Orthodox Christian", then that tells you something, either about 864 or about the state of the Wikipedia.
So, it seems to me you should go ahead and add to the "day" and "year" pages. Wiki on. Ortolan88
I've added an item to 864. It's easy if you look!
Now Boris doesn't need to feel lonely. :-) Eclecticology 11:58 Aug 23, 2002 (PDT)

I added an HTML comment to a page I was working on (for a semi-good reason) and it munged up the editing process in Konqueror - the existence of the comment caused it give up before finishing the textarea. I assume it doesn't affect (at least some) other browsers, since someone else went in and removed the comment and it was fine after that. Is this a known bug? -- Bth

This sounds like it's probably a bug in Konqueror. All "<" and ">" characters are turned into &< and &amp;> before they're put into the textarea, so they can't possibly be interpreted as actual tags or comments. (By the way, you'll find a link to our bug-tracking system at Wikipedia:Bug reports; if you find what seems to be a bug, please report it there and we'll be able to keep track of it better.) --Brion VIBBER

Logging in trouble:

When I log in, and return to whatever page I was on, I'm not shown as having logged in. This happens no matter how many times I do it. Sort of defeats the point of joining, really. -Egoinos

It sounds like you have cookies disabled, what browser and version are you using? --mav
Special:Userlogin could stand to have a sentence pointing out that cookies are required. I often surf with them turned off; and even though I know to check these when I have trouble loggin in or such, still it can be annoying when sites have expectations of my surfing habits that I don't meet. — Toby 23:10 Aug 12, 2002 (PDT)
On a sidenote, what's the expiry on the cookies set to? --Bth

Cookies shouldn't be required; if you have them turned off, your session will just go away quicker, requiring you to relogin. Cookie expiration is 30 days. --LDC

I think I've figured out why I can't get it to say I've logged in all of the time (sometimes, it works). I think it must be my slightly weird connection to the net. Stupid university connections! --Egoinos

Should we kill Oops I Did It Again? I mean, one of these is not bad, but we don't want to set a precedent!! --Juuitchan

As much as I think the world would be a better place if the subject of that article didn't exist, it does. And since the subject exists (and has a certain popularity), it's not entirely unreasonable for there to be an article about it. It would not be entirely unreasonable for said article to include more than just a track listing and publisher, though. A review which places it in historical perspective, perhaps? (Shudder) --Brion
FWIW, the parent page Britney Spears is quite good. Ortolan88

You greatly misunderstand my point. I mean, if we start giving a discography of every pop artist with 15 minutes of fame, where are we going to stop?? THAT in itself could get its own wiki!! --Juuitchan

Any particular reason we should stop at any particular point? Remember, Wikipedia is not paper. --Brion 15:35 Aug 20, 2002 (PDT)
I can imagine quite an interesting series of articles on Britney albums as she marks her progress, both real and in image, through her career. Her version of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction)" ... I can't go on, but someone else could make this article into a very useful piece of pop history. As it stands, the article is weak, however, but, indeed, why stop? Britney is lagging far behind Led Zeppelin, and when I do my fabulous series on the albums and singles of Wreckless Eric, well, wow! Ortolan88 18:22 Aug 20, 2002 (PDT)
Juuitchan is considering writing one of those about a China Dolls album.

converting images

Juuitchan wants to convert some BMP images to PNG for an article. Anyone willing to help out here?

For easily manipulating images in pre-determined ways (changing attributes, converting to other formats, resizing, etc.) my favourite toolset is ImageMagick. It's free software and runs on most common operating systems. -- Bignose

Most modern raster graphics tools understand PNG (those that don't aren't worth using), but some understand the format better than others. Also, people sometimes forget that PNG has got 8bpp and 16bpp modes, which are complete overkill for most maps and flags and such. PNG Tips for Cartoonists is an introduction to PNG for comics artists, but most of the article contains pretty useful information for Wikipedians too. The tool mentioned in the article, pngcrush, really does squeeze the last bits out of your PNG files and comes recommended.--user:Branko

If he can put them somewhere I can access them (like FTPing them to ftp.piclab.com:/incoming), I'll do the job. If he wants to do it himself, I recommend Paint Shop Pro from http://www.jasc.com . --LDC

Deleting articles

Can someone tell me how to delete an article? I wrote Sound Card and realized that Sound card exists (and is the correct spelling?). I moved the contents of Sound Card to Sound card and made Sound Card empty, but can't delete it. -- User:Volker

Hi, Volker. I'm here to help (hold on to yer wallet!):

  1. You could put #REDIRECT [[sound card]] (note second word "card" is lower-case) in the Sound Card article. That way, if anyone vists the Sound Card page, they will be whisked automagically to the real sound card article.
  2. Only Administrators can delete pages, and we do so only rarely. Usually a REDIRECT does the trick.

--Ed Poor

  • Also, for future reference; if the name you realize your article should have had doesn't already exist as a page, you can click the "Move page" link in the sidebar to move/rename the article to the new name. This will automatically keep the old name as a redirect for consistency's sake. Moving this way is the "cleanest" way to rename an article, because the edit history stays with the article, instead of being broken across the old page and the new page. (Note that the "move page" only appears if you're logged in.) --Brion

are Umlauts allowed in article titles?

It should not be :Ludwig Maximilians Universitat, Munchen, but Ludwig Maximilians Universität, München, may I change the link, or will occur any errors with "äöü" in titles? --chd

They work just fine (as long as you only need stuff in ISO 8859-1). However, for those whiners who can't or won't type them (and in cases when a form with accents stripped is commonly used in English), make a redirect from the unaccented title to the article or vice versa. Ability to link cleanly is key. --Brion
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