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[[da:Wikipedia:Landsbybr%F8nden]]


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Quick reference on server status

  • Web server for the other wikis ("pliny") is online
    • Motherboard and CPUs have been replaced (2003-10-14), which hopefully will eliminate the frequent crashes we've had
  • Webserver for the English-language Wikipedia ("larousse") is online.
    • Back online 2003-10-14, running on older, slower processor temporarily
    • Faster processors and memory are being tested now (2003-10-17) and should be put back in soon if all is well
  • New database server online
    • As of 08:45 UTC, 3 December 2003

Related pages: Mailing lists - IRC - IM a Wikipedian - Talk pages - Wikipedia talk:Software updates

File:Village pump yellow.png

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Moved discussion

Questions and answers, after a period of time of inactivity, will be moved to other relevant sections of the wikipedia (such as the FAQ pages), placed in the Wikipedia:Village pump archive (if it is of general interest), or deleted (if it has no long-term value).

See the archive for older moved discussion links. For the most recent moved discussion, see Wikipedia:Village pump archive#November 2003 moved discussion.

Requests for help and comments

  1. See User:Daniel Quinlan/redirects if you want to help out with fixing thousands of broken links prepared by Brion and Daniel.
  2. See Wikipedia talk:Interlanguage links for Hashar's information on using RobBot to add interlanguage links.
  3. See Talk:Historical anniversaries/Example for mav's idea to add table to day page articles
  4. Should more than three reverts be allowed? Comment on Martin's proposal.
  5. snoyes requests that people who are not logged in and adding inter-language links please put "de:", "fr:" etc. in their edit summaries.
  6. Aoineko has set up an international Egyptology project for all Wikipedias. If you would like to join it, see m:Egyptopedia.
  7. Comment on Kokiri's Wikipedia Quality Assessment at User:Kokiri/WQA
  8. Kingturtle would like to remind biography writers that the first paragraph of a biographical entry should always mention birth and death years, nationality, and brief descriptions of three or for of that person's most important accomplishments. If the person is still alive, the first sentence should say what that person is. See Wikipedia:Manual of Style (biographies).


Made a mistake moving a page

I happened upon Oswiecim while random-paging around, and tried to move it to the accented [[Oświęcim]]. In the process something blew up, though; the article got moved to [[OÅ›wiÄ™cim]] instead and now when I try going there to move it back Wikipedia thinks the link leads to O instead. I pasted the text of the article to Talk:Oswiecim just in case I've done something horrible and unrecoverable. Has anyone got suggestions on how I can fix this? Bryan 08:00, 28 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Update: The text I copied and pasted has been restored to Oswiecim, but the edit history is still gone so I still want to move the original article back if possible. Bryan 08:03, 28 Nov 2003 (UTC)

I've restored the page history revisions to Oswiecim. Clear your cache if you don't see the additional entries in the history right away. --Brion
Hi, the problem you experienced is related to the Unicode UTF-8 encoding, or lack thereof - it's needed to handle some characters that are not found in the traditional Latin alphabet, and the English wikipedia is not using it (it's on iso-8859-1 instead). So I guess that the wiki will have problems handling those characters. Moreover, some browsers handle UTF8 correctly, others translate them into HTML entities, others leave them alone, others don't know what to do with them. I'm not sure if the problem is the browser or the fact that certain characters in the title are not allowed at all. Alfio 10:14, 28 Nov 2003 (UTC)
The problem is that this wiki (and several of the other european languages) are not set up for UTF-8 internally, but interpret non-latin1 character entities as UTF-8 for generating outgoing links to the rest of the languages. When you try to put these characters on an internal link, the wiki gets very confused. Just use Latin-1 for now here; it'll get moved to full working UTF-8 at some point once we get some more 'armor' code against problem browsers that don't support it well. --Brion 10:42, 28 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Is Wikipedia a suitable place for *constructing* knowledge?

Though Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopaedia, would it be appropriate for researchers in a set of overlapping fields to use it for collating fragmentary information - that is, for *constructing* knowledge rather than for *referencing* knowledge?

My example: I recently discussed setting up a collaborative Wiki for early modern historians to collate information about minor personages in Quattrocento Northern Italy. This kind of information is normally extremely fragmentary, strewn carelessly (by the winds of time) across multiple sources of varying reliability and accessibility - diaries, letters, footnotes, etc. Collaboration would help the community of early modern historians bring together these shards of knowledge into a more complete whole.

However, while this would satisfy some of Wikipedia's objectives and match its collaborative methodology, it would also implicitly contain a content mismatch (typically book references rather than URLs), while also relying on internal completeness to be useful (rather than on summaries plus links).

True, I could easily host it on one of my own (personal) mini-Wikis... but building it directly into Wikipedia would seem to be an inherently better approach. I'm really in two minds about this - what do you think?

Nick Pelling --Nickpelling 11:55, 28 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Constructing existing knowledge, sure, Wikipedia is collaborative. Just as long as an article looks relatively presentable if someone was to come across it, it should be okay. But constructing new knowledge, probably not, you may want to check Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not. Thanks Dysprosia 12:00, 28 Nov 2003 (UTC)

My instant reaction is that you should use your personal mini-wiki to build the content, then pipe it through into Wikipedia in a controlled fashion. You could include links back to the originating mini-wiki for anyone who wanted to see the process, or contribute further. This would localise the traffic and relieve the main Wikipedia site of some pressure. YMMV. Phil 12:03, Nov 28, 2003 (UTC)
An interesting question that lines right on the border between two of our current practices. We routinely sift through sources, often biased and/or inaccurate media sources to try to build an accurate and balanced article. In this sense we do gather primary sources together into a secondary source article. However Wikipedia is emphatically not a repositry for original research. I think the main driver for this is that many of the people who've tried to add original research have been of the crankish/crackpotty type that frequent many of the sci.* hierachy newsgroups. Your plan - to gather together very primary and fragmented sources into a coherent article is on a border line. My feeling is that other encyclopedias don't do this "close-to-the-knuckle" sourcing - they probably coallate secondary sources. However if you achieved your goals I am sure it would be very valuable addition to Wikipedia so would hope that the rules could be interpreted to accommodate you as you piece together Quattrocento Northern Italy. Interested in other opinions.... Pete 12:36, 28 Nov 2003 (UTC)


If a Wikipedia article can present a primary source then that is excellent providing that primary source has been subject to academic peer review and ideally other similiar studies have been done. The issue with a primary source is whether it can be considered reliable. I'm struggling with the Dolphin brain article because it is cutting edge stuff, which has a lot of controversy around it, and the lack of reliable primary sources to fill in all the sections. Looking on the internet there does not seeem to be an article that has carefully considered the existing evidence in the way we are now trying to do. Wikipedia can provide a real service by tackling such controversial issues in a sensible non-partizan way. : ChrisG 16:40, 28 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Walk away; WALK A-WAY! :-) Seriously, Wikipedia can't be its own authority on anything; otherwise the crackpots will take over. If you're struggling with contradictory primary sources, that's a sign that your subject is not yet ready for a WP article; wait for the book or review article to come out, and work from that. You might have to wait a while, but WP isn't going anywhere, and it isn't a science news magazine anyway. There are thousands of topics for which the research is settled, and that WP needs in order to be a good encyclopedia; by the time those are done, current controversies will likely have have been resolved by the experts. Stan 17:17, 28 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Thank you all for your feedback - I held back from adding any pages for precisely the kinds of reason given. However, does anyone know of any existing larger-scale Wikis out there which try to act as a genuinely open and collaborative forum for (what one might call) the "social construction of new knowledge"? I take Phil Boswell's point that it might be a good thing to build in a cross-reference to related Wikipedia articles... though where one should begin and the other should end might be hard to judge in practice.

I suppose what I'm talking about is a kind of "Wikipository"... any suggestions? Nick Pelling --Nickpelling 19:16, 28 Nov 2003 (UTC)~~

I'm not sure its a 100% fit, but http://sources.wikipedia.org/ should be a good place to start such a project. --snoyes 19:22, 28 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Project Sourceberg, eh? I suppose what I'm describing does amount to collaboratively constructing a primary source... unfortunately, while the French/German/Nihongo versions are all running OK, the English appears to be crashing ATM (perhaps because of a recent server move?) I'll keep trying though... thanks! --Nickpelling 23:12, 28 Nov 2003 (UTC)~~

Edit conflicts confined to a single section

Is the software clever enough to detect whether an edit conflict is confined to a single section of an article? I ask because Dysprosia and I just clashed heads on this page whilst editing what was at that point the final section. I was explicitly editing that section, but I have no idea what Dysprosia had selected. Whatever the odds, I was presented with the entire page to sort out, just for the sake of about 10 lines at the bottom. Phil 12:06, Nov 28, 2003 (UTC)

Oh yeah, gotta love that kind of edit conflict. And currently the software is that dumb :)
Best bet is to copy an addition ready to paste back if a conflict occurs - if your changes are less monolithic then there's no other really easy way... Dysprosia 12:09, 28 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Agree. I learned during the many past times when one would save only to be told that page no longer exists. I always block and copy my additions in anticipation of something going South before the save goes through - Marshman 20:53, 28 Nov 2003 (UTC)
See MeatBall:EditConflict and MeatBall:MergingAutomatically for alternatives. See wikipedia:bug reports to suggest them to the developers. See Wikitech-l to volunteer to help develop the software. Martin 00:51, 29 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Automated / Scripted Wiki Migration

Is there any software around or under development to migrate pages from the old Usemod wiki to the new MediaWiki ? 5pectre Fri Nov 28 13:16:01 GMT 2003

See the script importUseModWiki.php in the maintenance subdirectory. It's incomplete currently, requiring manual cleanup of case sensitivity changes, subpage links, etc. User accounts need to be recreated, and the article count is not set. There's an older, non-functional copy in maintenance/archives which has half-implemented a few of these other things. --Brion 23:55, 28 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Is there a conflict with this image: Image:Urchintest2.jpg. The description says: "Copyright ©2003 by Daniel P. B. Smith. Licensed under the terms of the Wikipedia copyright." It doesn't sound right to me. Dori 22:41, Nov 28, 2003 (UTC)

Sounds ok to me, though it should probably say "GNU Free Documentation License" by name rather than the vague "Wikipedia copyright". Remember that contributors retain copyright in their submissions here, and are licensing them under a common redistributable license. --Brion 23:43, 28 Nov 2003 (UTC)
I asked Brion above the same Q months ago. Here's his A: [1] --Menchi 23:47, 28 Nov 2003 (UTC)
OK, just wanted to be sure (thought that Copyright and Copyleft were not compatible). Dori 23:51, Nov 28, 2003 (UTC)
Copyleft requires copyright (and if those articles don't explain that, they should do). Martin 00:49, 29 Nov 2003 (UTC)


Natacha Rambova

Why is Wikipedia's entry on Natacha Rambova filled with so many errors? -- Michael Morris

If you feel that there are errors, you should feel free to correct them. The information that is there was entered by other editors like you. Dori | Talk 05:06, Nov 30, 2003 (UTC)


That is to say, just click here, Mr. Morris, and correct away. ScareQuotes

GFDL from other authors

If we copy text from an article from another source released under the GDFL, into a wikipedia article, are we required to link to the other site and mention that the original text came from that site? Alexandros

Yes. See Bacterium and anachronism and time travel and Hydatius for recently updated examples that are (IMO) 100% compliant. Do you have a particular article in mind? Martin 19:22, 30 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Someone has written new policy, wikipedia:blank page idiomatic link, about adding interwiki links to pages that don't exist. I think this is a bad idea. Having a link to a page in another language at the top, only to click on it and find that there is actually no such page is annoying and a waste of time, I really wish they would stop adding such links. Maximus Rex 18:41, 30 Nov 2003 (UTC)

I agree - it should be policy that at least a stub should be created when adding a interwiki link to a not yet existing article. As interwiki links cannot be red it is not possible to see that the article exists or not. But even worse than a interwiki link that points into nothing is a page which only contains the interwiki link back - that one will make the red links in that language disappear with brown small article links. What I do when I have a interwiki link which will exist soon (e.g. the german districts which are created on both de: and en:) is that I add the interwiki link with HTML comments around it like <!--[[de:Kreis Neuss]]-->, so they are easy to activate once the target is created. This can also be useful for animals or plants - if one knows the name of an animal in the other language then a commented link can help to avoid that link being missed later. However too many commented interwiki links cluttering the beginning of the article is a drawback. andy 21:48, 30 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Hmmmm... are policies on instant deletion of sub-stubs and similar issues the same in all the various languages? It seems to me that such policies should to some extent reflect the culture associated with the particular language. Is this how it works?
I've watched with interest the development of this new policy. There are more issues here than might at first meet the eye IMO. Andrewa 22:59, 30 Nov 2003 (UTC)
I wouldn't call it a new policy. More like one person's ideas on how these links should be treated. The policies on sub stubs are certainly not the same across different Wikipedias. For example, on the Arabic Wikipedia, pages with no text at all, but some interlanguage links are not deleted, whereas here they usually are. There seem to be objections to the creation of these empty pages at the Hungarian, French and Dutch Wikipedias that were expressed on the mailing list when a Polish was sent round to create these, but it's unclear whether the issue was more with the fact it was a bot than the pages per se. Angela 23:37, 30 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Google search not finding main entries

Back in October, I wrote new entries for Carl Spaatz and Lyman Lemnitzer. Today I decided to do a search and see if there were any mentions of their names that were not linked back to the main entries. I did, in fact, find two such mentions. But I also found that a google search under "Spaatz" or "Lemnitzer" failed to provide a hit on either of the main entries for these men. Obviously both names were mentioned several times in the relevant entry. Other entries with links to these entries were listed (such as List of people associated with World War II). Google even had the links from my user page which post-dated the creation of these entries. So why doesn't google pick up on them? MK 15:34 (EST) 30 November 2003

One month isn't that long for Google to find something, particularly if the pages that link to it have a low page rank. Angela 23:37, 30 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Consensus decision-making--original article

How could I find out who wrote the original text on consensus decision-making or where it was taken from? I'm curious about the sources for certain assertions. Page history only seems to go back to January 2003. I was hoping to go back to the root article. Sunray

Voting on Brilliant Prose

The Wikipedia:Brilliant prose has articles which were added before the Nomination system. Some of the articles rise some doubts and there was a discussion on Talk: BP candidates about what to do. A voting was decided. So now, everybody, please vote on:

Cheers, Muriel Victoria 14:28, 1 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Adding certain html codes

Well, after viewing a long article, and wanting to make a link into a certain section, which couldn't be defined in the table of contents with the double = sign without making the article all screwed up (Namely, I'm trying to link to the part in Modem about echo cancellation in the history section

So, rather than split it, I thought I would try changing 'Echo Cancellation' to '<a name=echo>Echo Cancellation</a> so I could link from Cancellation to Modem#echo

Any way to go about this other than to split the article --Fizscy46 14:46, 1 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Wikipedia does not allow manual insertion of anchors. However, for general stylistic reasons, the words Echo cancellation should be made a heading, using ===heading=== syntax. It is my understanding that such a heading is automatically made an anchor. -Smack 01:39, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Why or why not? Has anyone worked on an automated tool to do an import?

Yes they are, but with some limitation. The most important one is that the information can be outdated, a minor one is old spelling. You can find most already discussed in Wikipedia:1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, as that encyclopedia is the prime one used for import already. So a automatic import isn't recommended, most articles need at least a bit work. And don't forget the scanning/OCR errors of the internet version of the 1911 EB. andy 20:13, 1 Dec 2003 (UTC)
An example of suckiness, Britannica 1911 includes, as a norm, lengthy references on books written around late 19th century -- which are basically unreadable and impossible to find even in large library easily. But EB 1911 does have some applicable info that doesn't expire too. So, automatic import is not good, but taking stuff from them with good taste and selection is good. --Menchi 04:42, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Redirect question

The Whatlinkshere page for Baltimore Oriole shows Geography of Equatorial Guinea which links to Maryland, USA but certainly not to Baltimore Oriole. Is this a bug or a feature? Big Iron 20:13, 1 Dec 2003 (UTC)

The Whatlinkshere page lists redirects, of which Baltimore oriole is one. Maryland, USA redirects to Baltimore oriole (this is called a double redirect, and is nonfunctional) and Geography of Equatorial Guinea links to Maryland, USA. The redirects should be sorted out by someone (of which you might be an excellent candidate) by redirecting Maryland, USA to Maryland and eliminating entirely the comparison in size currently at Geography of Equatorial Guinea, because the comparison means something only to a relatively small number of people worldwide, and could not be reasonably made more accessible without losing functionality. Feel free to leave a question of my talk page if needed, or consult Wikipedia:Redirect Tuf-Kat 05:08, Dec 2, 2003 (UTC)
No, the double redirect is how it is displayed. But in fact Maryland, USA redirects to Maryland (everything else would be nonsense), and that one contains the link to Baltimore Oriole. Maryland USA should be listed in that list at all, as pages which link to pages which contain the link are not listed normally. So it is an actual bug in the WhatLinksHere, but IMHO not a serious one. andy 08:50, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Actually, because of the reference above, the Village Pumps is now showing as a double redirect, but it doesn't appear in Wikipedia:Defective redirects so it isn't a true double redirect. Big Iron 21:28, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I believe this is a known bug that has already been recorded at SourceForge. By the way, Wikipedia:Defective redirects hasn't been updated in a long time. Believe me, there are plenty of double-redirects floating around right now. --Minesweeper 09:22, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)

How to set up a disambiguation page

List of Australians lists a link to Daisy Bates, which the page describes as "self proclaimed psychologist" yet the link points to an article about an American civil rights activist. I want to set up a disambiguation page points to Daisy Bates (psychologist) for the Australian and Daisy Lee Gatson Bates for the American. I've never done such a thing before. Any tips on doing it well? Dmbaguley 22:16, 1 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I'd like to hear from some Aussies on whether a "self-proclaimed psychologist" is ever going to have a page of her own. If not, then remove Daisy Bates from the List of Australians and there ios then no need for a disambiguation page (I would not assume there is such a need). If later, any "other" Daisy Bates does deserve a page then the disammbiguation page can be created at Daisy Bates and the Daisies separated by middle names or some such - Marshman 03:16, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)
The Australian Daisy Bates was a pioneer ethnographer (and a very controversial one} and is an important figure in the history of Aboriginal Australians. She certainly should have an article. Adam 03:20, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

How-to to Wikibooks?

I think that that page should be deleted, and all of the articles that it links to should be integrated into Wikibooks. I got a vote of consent on talk:How-to, but I want a little more discussion before I undertake such a significant change.-Smack

Are you proposing one or more "How-to" books for Wikibooks using as starters these articles at Wikipedia? If so, sounds like a good idea. How-to articles consolidated into one or more texts would probably be more suitable as a Wikibooks project IMHO - 24.94.82.245 02:59, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)- Marshman 03:18, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)
I have no doubt that that is a good idea. What I meant (sorry I wasn't clear the first time) is that the Wikipedia articles (or sections of articles, as the case may be) should be deleted. -Smack 07:15, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Would it be possible to leave the how-to pages but replace the contents of each one with a link (maybe even a redirect ?) to the relevant part of Wikibooks ? Articles that link to the how-to pages would then not be left with broken links. -- Gandalf61 10:10, Dec 2, 2003 (UTC)
That's a sensible idea. Is it possible to create redirects like this ? Smack might I suggest you start with the cookery pages, as It is clear where you could put them in wikibooks. Drop me a line on my talk page when you are ready to start and I'll give you a hand. theresa knott 11:07, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Yes, it is possible to make interwiki redirects. Unfortunately, such a redirect seems to omit the familar Redirected from line. User:Smack/interwiki redirect test -Smack 02:18, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)
It is possible, but a lot of people see it as a bad thing, because of the difficulty in editing the redirect and the confusion that being at another site may cause. See m:Redirected user pages considered harmful. Angela 02:23, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Point taken. So would it be wise to delete the how-to content altogether? -Smack 04:00, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Slow page

I can't guarantee it wasn't just a browser anomaly (especially since it's MS-IE), but at one point most pages seemed normal, but Computational_geometry wouldn't load, but it would load quickly, with [2]. (But still wouldn't load the normal way.) At the same time, there was a several minute hole in recent changes. Doubt whether any of this has any significance, but mentioning it in case. Κσυπ Cyp   03:02, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I have never seen the system more unstable than it is right now. I assume the sysops are busy converting over to the new computer, but I cannot get anything in without one or two "server does not exist" errors and when I do finally get something accepted, the system has logged me out. Wikibooks is almost completely dead in the water. - Marshman 03:18, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)
For someone who claims to have been here since July, I find that difficult to believe. ;)
We had a network accident waiting to happen in the configuration, which caused some problems (IP conflict) after the new machine was brought into the network. Pliny was offline for a little while, but this should now be resolved. --Brion 03:28, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)
I do try not to complain because invariably (due to you and other sysops' fine work) I'm going to eventually be embarassed by fantastic performance - as was the case this time (came back fast). Yes, there have been some bad days since July, and maybe this afternoon was not the worst (I'm known to exaggerate ;o), but the bad day at hand is always the worst, and I had as many as 3 or 4 inserts saved on my computer working file, for inability to get them in. And Wikibooks was just gone (could not raise). So - you are right, probably not the worst and seems very good now. - Marshman 04:52, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Watchlist defaults

I've mentioned this before, but once the new server is online, I wonder if the watchlist default could be upped to 12 hours or maybe 1 day? I presume that the watchlist default was changed to one hour (some months ago now) for performance reasons, though I suspect that those who use the watchlist feature will generally immediately ask for a redisplay with a longer interval (I know I do) which negates completely the performance advantage - the server is having to generate two lots of watchlist instead of just one. The result is that the not very useful default actuallly increases server load, the opposite of what was intended. I know I can craete my oen link with whatever default I wish, but then it's only accessible from my user page, not in the sidebar as I would like. GRAHAMUK 04:24, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Make a button in the Links button bar if you're using MSIE or Firebird, or make a bookmark in your browser. Fuzheado 04:27, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)
My watchlist defaults to a lot more than 1 day (all the way to 2002) and I wish it would stop at 1 day :) Dori | Talk 04:34, Dec 2, 2003 (UTC)
Mine too (to way back before I joined up) but that has to do with the total number of pages you are listing as "watching". You are in the lower number group (usually means a new person) that will get lots of time span. - Marshman 04:57, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)
My watchlist is now showing everything, whereas yesterday it was defaulting to one hour; is this due to the installation of the new machine? I think it should be put back the way it was if so, to help system performance. - Hephaestos 16:26, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Cancelling user account

is it possible to cancel my account? i.e. i no longer wishes my handle (p0lyglut) to show up in wikipedia in articles i edited or anywhere. Thanks. 

Xah P0lyglut 04:27, 2003 Dec 2 (UTC)
I hope you're not leaving us! If you just want to change your username, see Wikipedia:Changing username Dysprosia 04:29, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

A question fixing disambiguation on a redirect

I am trying to disambiguate Hindu. There is an article referring to The Hindu (newspaper), and an article referring to Hinduism (religion). Hindu is the redirect clause presently for the latter page.

Converting the redirection page for Hindu to a disambiguation page seemed like a solution. But, the newspaper page has only three pages linking to it, whereas the religion page has hundreds. And every reference to Hindu redirect page presently, is to the religion and not to the newspaper. And hence, that seemed like an extreme step.

Nevertheless, considering the newspaper's popularity in India, sooner or later there will be more articles referring to it, and an early disambiguation seems necessary. So how do I proceed? chance 07:02, Dec 2, 2003 (UTC)

I think the best way would be a disclaimer at the top of the Hinduism article:

This article is about the Hindu religion; for other meanings, see Hindu (disambiguation).

Then list the other meanings at that disambiguation page. - Hephaestos 07:06, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)
I agree with Hephaestos's solution. The [... (disambiguation)] format is suitable for situations like this. The newspaper will most likely never be more famous than the religion. It is, after all, named after the religion. Not the other way around. --Menchi 08:56, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Orphaned Pages

When will the list of the first 125 orphaned pages Special:Lonelypages be updated again? I believe that virtuall all the pages on the current list are either disambiguation pages or no longer orphans. -Anthropos 07:38, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Whats the criteria for a page to be included in that list? -Antonio Fatal Attraction for Men and Women Martin

An orphan is an article that has no other articles linking to it. I believe this list is just the first 125 such orphans alphabeticaly. - Anthropos 21:03, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I created a page from text on a web site I am a contributing member of

spent a lot of time setting up the links to other enteries and potential enteries

and someone decided that as on paragraph of the text was the same as the web site that I was breaching copyright and the whole text was deleted.

My points are

  1. Only one paragraph was taken from the web site so why was the whole page trashed? - I had to do the work over to recreate the links
  2. As a contributing member I was not breaking copyright - so would not it have been better for someone to email me first to ask IF I had copyright.
  3. I could not find out how to reinstate the original page.

Another point

I showed my 12 year old daughter the system and encouraged her to enter something - eventually we noticed her school was mentioned but had no entry so she typed in a short entry saying where it was a what type of school it was - just a couple of lines but factual.

Someone then put in a line saying 'THIS IS A STUB' etc. etc. and it just seemed to me to be insensitive and discouraging - given that the information did tell you the status of the school and where it was - may have been short but it was not valueless.

I'm sure many people have made this point - but the absence of an uptodate search engine seems to be a major major flaw in the credibility of the project.

Kevin Flude

As to your copyright issue - the page was not trashed and its content is all still visible. You merely need to make mention you own the copyright on the talk page and everything should be okay.
As to the stubnote thing - this is standard procedure to add a short note as an indication and an invitation for others to expand on an article. I trust the user who added the stubnote meant not to be insensitive or discouraging, but is merely a courtesy to other users. A stubnote is not a judgement of lack of value, but in my eyes an invitation for expansion.
The search engine issue is unfortunate, but I'm not sure how it impacts credibility - considered the Wikipedia runs on donations and support from Bomis, I believe. Dysprosia 09:01, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)
To re-iterate and expand on Dysprosia's comments:
Sadly the number of people who simply take content off other people's websites and submit it as their own vastly exceeds the number of people who write their content, put it on the web, and then submit to Wikipedia as you did. To avoid legal problems we _HAVE_ to take down material as soon as its legality is questioned - happily in cases like yours when the fact that it is a false alarm is realized the material can be easily recovered. If this has not been done in your case yet, tell me the name of the article and I will do it. I hope this answers your questions 1&2. In response to 3, it is easiest if I point you to Wikipedia:How to revert a page to an earlier version.
Re the stub, I endorse Dysprosia's comments. The "THIS IS A STUB" notice is not a "THIS ARTICLE IS HOPELESS" euphemism. Actually it serves a technical purpose. If you go to the Wikipedia:Find or fix a stub page and click "What links here" you get a list of all the pages with a stub notice... i.e. a list of pages that, in an ideal encyclopedia, would be longer and more complete than they are. Without that notice, the technical trickery would not work.
Re the search engine, thanks to donations, we get a third server dedicated to Wikipedia turned on tonight. (This server alone cost around $6000.) Hopefully search facilities will be expanded as a result of this. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 14:38, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Perhaps that's not something to rush into.
What's the problem with using Google? I've found it works fine! It's not completely up-to-date, that's true, but that could even be an advantage. When someone is using a search engine in an encyclopedia, IMO they normally want stable content.
The other thing about using Google like this is it may promote our articles in Google when others use Google "native". I don't think Google actually reveals this either way, or even announces when their ranking algorithms change let alone how, rather they keep them a secret to hinder attempts to rig their rankings. But if our visitors from many different IPs use this feature, and then branch to a Wikipedia article, I'd expect Google to notice that. It's not rigging the ratings as such, just providing Google with some valid and accurate evidence which they will happily use IMO. Food for thought? Andrewa 19:57, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)
The new server has not been purchased for the search engine. It will help to solve the slowness problem that Wikipedia is experiencing since months (even if lately is quite better, but the increase in traffic will get us anyway). If, after this, there is enough spare capacity for the internal search engine, all the better. Alfio 20:37, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Why do you say all the better? That's what was originally suggested in this string, and I expect many agree, as it has generally been assumed that this is the case. But in reading this, it suddenly occurred to me that there are some good reasons for not having one. So, what are the reasons for wanting an in-house search? How does it assist readers? Is it just the vanity thing that other sites have them and we don't want people to think we're not able to?
Are there any problems with using Google apart from this 'credibility' issue? If not, is our credibility really increased by the in-house search engine? Or might it even be increased by being green hat enough to stay with Google?
As for stable content, not being up-to-date doesn't mean it will have the stable version. It would be possible for someone to search just as the page is changed, but it's also possible for Google to cache the page just as the page is changed too. Κσυπ Cyp   20:39, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)
True. It certainly doesn't guarantee that the version will be stable. I'm not even sure whether it actually improves the probability of getting the content that the reader wants (I once studied such things, but that was more than 20 years ago), but my guess is that it doesn't make this probability any worse, that's all I was saying, probably not very clearly. If this is so, then it's not a valid reason for an in-house search engine.
This discussion has now been taken up on Wikitech-l. Andrewa 00:49, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)
As for Special:Wantedpages, that's a different issue. If the capacity is there it could be turned back on. Perhaps, have a feature automatically disabling it and any similar processor-hungry frills on the fly whenever performance reaches an unacceptable level? Andrewa 18:21, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Conflicts between users

Question by Angelique was moved to Wikipedia:Conflicts between users.

why do I see square boxes in math formula?

Often a square box appears in math formulas where I would expect a character. I guess this means my browser can't render the charachter. How can I fix this or get around the problem to find out what charachter should be in the place of the square box?

Thanks

If you log in, then you will be able to set the formula rendering style in your user preferences. It sounds like the "always render PNG" option would be best for you. -- Tim Starling 23:25, Dec 2, 2003 (UTC)
FWIW, this is one reason to prefer always using TeX markup, even for relatively short formulas, rather than ∫ and other such HTML entities. Another reason is ease of future conversion to other (non-HTML) formats. --Delirium 04:32, Dec 4, 2003 (UTC)

Machaco Alert!

Please pay attention to the posts of this user, related to a Colombia's dialect that he name Machaco, Bambuco songs and others topics. Even when those contributions will be [3]poorly translated, this guy is very obstinate and bad-mannered and brought [4]us many problems (vandalism, non NPOV, flamewars...). His intentions to promote a wikipedia for this creole dialect has gone [5]quite far, using another [6]nick, or IPs in 200.21.108.xxx. Actually, we were forced to run a bot to delete his 'contributions' because of his intolerance, misunderstanding (read non observance) of the publishing policy and crude attitude with the community. -- Best regards -- 200.45.101.236 18:29, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC) ([7])

Editing a Redirect

Is this the right place to post a "how do I?" question? I am slowly working my way through Buckinghamshire creating articles for all the places therein. However one of the places is the village of Penn, ancestral home of William Penn after whom Pennsylvania is named. However as you will see Penn automatically redirects to University of Pennsylvania. First of all how do I turn the Penn page from a redirect into something else? Secondly what is the protocol for sorting this out? Should there be a disambig page for Penn or a note at the top of the University of Pennsylvania article? I personally feel that automatically linking Penn to the univerity page is not the right thing to do... Graham  :) 01:05, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Go to Penn. You will be redirected to the university article but there will be a link saying "Redirected from Penn" just below the article title. Click on that link. Then you will get a Penn article which says just "#REDIRECT University of Pennsylvania. Edit that page to create a disambiguation page rather than a redirect page. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 09:24, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Ok I couldn't resist doing it for you, but you'll know for next time. p.s. Penn is now a stub that you may care to expand upon! Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 09:29, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Thanks for that. Penn has now been destubbed. Graham  :) 21:03, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Internet Connection

Just curious, what type of Internet connection does Wikipedia use? What is the bandwidth?
66.32.17.177 09:09, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)

There's a statistics page for the Wikipedia (here), which say that for the last month, the peak throughput was 13650806 KiB/day ~= 1264 Kbps, or less than enough to saturate a T1.
The computers that host the Wikipedia (there are now three of them; huzzah) are all located in Bomis' data-centre, and Jimbo claims (semi-frequently, on the mailing lists) that the Wikipedia's traffic gets lost in the noise, though there is suspicion that he's just trying to be polite and modest about his expenditure on the project.
For this to be so (Wikipedia traffic < 10% of total), Bomis probably has a DS3 or better. Sorry I couldn't be more definite.
James F. (talk) 17:06, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Is there a way to make a wikilink that will go to a redirect page, without redirection? Or must I use a regular HTML link?
Thanks, Tualha 15:39, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)

AFAIK, you have to use a regular HTML link. Why do you want to do this, by the way? Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 15:43, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)
For a reference in Wikipedia:Redirects for deletion. It would save people having to go back. If there is a wiki way to do it, I'll note it in the page guidelines. If you have to use HTML, it's less trouble to go back. Tualha 15:47, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Unicode

Please see the history of David Hume. An anonymous user is attempting to insert Unicode special characters into the article, and has had a modicum of support in this purpose. There's no problem when viewing the article, but when you attempt to edit it, you have to delete several characters in order to remove the codes if it becomes necessary. I'd hate to see this become a de facto standard on Wikipedia. RickK 16:42, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I hate them too. It makes it harder to edit, especially when there is a long string in a row. Don't most modern browsers support just pasting in the characters. What is the actual problem with doing that? If there is anything wrong with that, maybe the characters could be parsed so that when editing they look like normal characters, but when the page appears for display they are in Unicode. Dori | Talk 16:52, Dec 3, 2003 (UTC)
I agree except for &mdash; (—) which I think is better than using two dashes (--). Here's the transform (perl code) I've been using to fix special characters. This (well, the guideline, not the code) should go into the manual of style if it's not there already.
   # smart quotes
   s/[\x93\x94]+/\"/gs;
   s/[\x92\xb2\xb9]+/\'/gs;
   s/[\xb3]+/\`/gs;
   s/[\x96]+/-/gs;
   # HTML escapes
   s/\&#8211;/-/gs;    # &ndash;
   s/\&#8212;/&mdash;/gs;
   s/\&#8216;/\`/gs;   # &lsquo;
   s/\&#8217;/\'/gs;   # &rsquo;
   s/\&#8220;/\"/gs;   # &ldquo;
   s/\&#8221;/\"/gs;   # &rdquo;
   # unwanted HTML escapes
   s/\&ndash;/-/gs;
   s/\&lsquo;/\`/gs;
   s/\&rsquo;/\'/gs;
   s/\&ldquo;/\"/gs;
   s/\&rdquo;/\"/gs;
Daniel Quinlan 17:40, Dec 3, 2003 (UTC)
&mdash; and &ndash; do not display on some older browsers. So I use Unicode for them. This may be why you are seeing others as well. Fernkes 21:30, Dec 3, 2003 (UTC)
&mdash; should be used in articles. If it's an issue for display in HTML, then the Wikipedia software could do a transform to the Unicode character when generating HTML from the Wiki source, but I doubt that Unicode characters actually work on a higher percentage of browsers and systems. For &ndash;, it is far easier (and well-accepted) to use a simple "-" character. Daniel Quinlan 22:29, Dec 3, 2003 (UTC)
Dashes are annoying, everyone seems to have their own idea. People use -, --, &mdash; and &#8212;. The latter apparently works in more browsers than &mdash;, but nonetheless people go through articles chaotically changing each of the four styles to any other of the four styles, the target style being determined by the phase of the moon and various other astrological indicators. Let's just implement render-time automatic conversion from -- to some decreed standard and save everyone the hassle. -- Tim Starling 04:06, Dec 4, 2003 (UTC)
I thought about requesting that some time ago, but I had a bad feeling that "--" is sometimes used in other ways where it doesn't want to be &mdash;. Using &mdash; in article source may be safer. Anything to avoid numeric codes in article source, though! (If &#8212; is really more reliable, we should at least convert &amp;mdash; to that when producing HTML.) Daniel Quinlan 04:17, Dec 4, 2003 (UTC)
What else is -- used for? I don't think it's used for anything where the meaning would be obscured by converting it to —. But if there is such a case, it can be escaped: &#45;-. -- Tim Starling 04:26, Dec 4, 2003 (UTC)
If I understand your regexps, you're adding the backtick, by the Wikipedia:Manual of Style is still not a Good Thing... Dysprosia 04:08, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)
I only replace a Unicode/HTML backtick with a plain-old backtick. I add nothing. Much more manual editing is required to fix backticks since you need to figure out what the original editor intended or what is most appropriate in that context, so this script does additionally warn that a backtick was found. Daniel Quinlan 04:17, Dec 4, 2003 (UTC)
I'm no good at explaining things :) I'll let the MoS do it for me - not curved (smart) ones or the "backtick": Dysprosia 04:22, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)
You're replacing left quotes with backticks, aren't you? Not backticks with backticks. -- Tim Starling 04:26, Dec 4, 2003 (UTC)
Ah, gotcha. Thanks for the correction. Daniel Quinlan 04:42, Dec 4, 2003 (UTC)~
For reference I mean this character ` <-- backtick. Dysprosia 04:33, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Yeah, for some reason I thought &lsquo; was the same, but it's not. I'll default to converting &lsquo to ' now. Daniel Quinlan 04:42, Dec 4, 2003 (UTC)

Watchlist takes too long to load

Now that the old settings have been restored, my watchlist takes a very long time to load. Is it possible to change my preferecnes from the default number of displayed days? --Jiang 21:43, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)

  • It takes a longtime because the default is now ALL rather than 1 hour. How can we change that? Kingturtle 21:57, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)
    • D'oh!! This is going from one extreme to the other. I mentioned a few days ago that '1 hour' was a poor default - 'ALL' is an equally poor default. For me, 1 day is about right. I feel these should be user preferences, but as someone pointed out to me, a workaround is to make a bookmark in your browser with the desired parameters. I now have this as a button in my toolbar, very convenient. GRAHAMUK 22:02, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)
    • Agreed, 1 or 2 days would be better (barring the ability to set this as a user preference). 2 might be an acceptable default (if not 1) because it's easy to edit 25 hours later than your last set of edit. How about 36 hours? ;-) Daniel Quinlan 22:31, Dec 3, 2003 (UTC)
      • So can someone fix this? Kingturtle 00:31, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Search engine

Just wondering, now the new box is online, will the internal search engine be switched back on any time soon?. It's been out of action for ages now G-Man 23:08, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Maybe. See the thread on Wikitch-L called Fast. Angela 23:14, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Reverting

I've seen people refer to the act of "reverting" text as if this were easy. I don't find it so - I have to show up the diff of an article and select the text, which (maybe it's my browser) usually selects across the page and hence both copies at once. I then have to manually edit out the parts of the old article that I don't want. This strikes me as awkward and error-prone. Is there an easier way I haven't discovered? Couldn't there be a simple "revert" link next to each version in the history? Not sure what this implies from a technical standpoint but it would make the occasional necessary revert much easier. GRAHAMUK 23:32, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:How to revert a page to an earlier version. --snoyes 23:48, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)
It's not that hard (see link posted above by Snoyes), but I'm not sure how much easier I want it to be. Making reverting to any version a one-click operation could make people less interested in moving an article forward. I'm not really sure that's a great idea. Daniel Quinlan 00:00, Dec 4, 2003 (UTC)
D'oh! Helps to RTFM.... thanks for pointing it out. I tend to agree that a one-click revert might be too tempting for some. GRAHAMUK

Database error when trying to block a user

When I tried to block a user's address, I got the following error message: Database error From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

A database query syntax error has occurred. This could be because of an illegal search query (see Searching Wikipedia), or it may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was:

INSERT INTO ipblocks (ipb_address, ipb_user, ipb_by, ipb_reason, ipb_timestamp, ipb_auto ) VALUES ('64.208.58.117', 0, 13800, 'you were warned','20031204044847', 0) from within function "Block::insert". MySQL returned error "1062: Duplicate entry '2147483647' for key 1". RickK 04:52, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)

A bizarre auto-increment problem. Should be resolved. --Brion 05:15, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Duplicate articles

Apologies, not sure if this is the right place to point this out but I could not find any pages related to it--I have come across two pages, Magellanic Clouds and Magellanic clouds which relate to the same thing. What is the usual practice for fixing something like this?

--Chopchopwhitey 06:06, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)

This is a proper name, so you want to edit the lower-case case version into a Wikipedia:Redirect to the upper-case one. Double-check that there aren't any useful info bits in the article you're overwriting, but Magellanic clouds looks pretty minimal. Stan 06:14, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Done. Thanks. --Chopchopwhitey 06:25, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)

For future reference, see also Wikipedia:Duplicate articles. —Paul A 07:40, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Edit date bizarreness

The article Charles Xavier was just now renamed to Professor X. The edit history of Talk:Charles Xavier correctly shows this as occurring at 7:39, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC) - but the edit history for the article itself claims it occurred at 3:46, 22 Nov 2002! (Regressing back to the last time someone renamed the page, or something?) —Paul A 07:51, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)

"Bolded" text

The watchlist page says that text will be "bolded". From dictionary.com:

\Bold\, v. t. To make bold or daring. [Obs.] --Shak.

Could we have "emboldened" or "displayed in bold", please, instead of this revived archaism? -- Paul G 15:00, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)

dictionary.com has for "embolden":

To foster boldness or courage in; encourage.

and, for "to bold":

To be or become bold.

"to bold" is the appropriate term among those of us involved in the text editing field. RickK 16:14, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Constitution of Wikipedia

Is this a joke, or is it in any way vaguely official?

Don't mean to offend anyone, but I can't help wondering. Thanks. -- Pakaran 23:04, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)

  • This is not a joke. It will be official. Alexandros
    • Ok thanks. -- Pakaran 01:35, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Well, Alexandros saying it is official doesn't actually make it so but no-one has opposed it so far. Angela. 01:45, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I think it's quite hideous and terribly, offensively US-Centric. Just my $0.02, but there's some opposition FWIW. Not saying that a constitution per se is a bad thing though - just this particular one. --Rlandmann 01:53, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Which happens to be the local currency where I'm writing.... Or did you think that only the US uses dollars as currency units? :) --Rlandmann 02:16, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Working in a language in which you are likely to make mistakes

Is it acceptable to work in a Wikipedia whose language you have only studied academically, and may make grammatical errors in? I was thinking about working in the Spanish Wikipedia, but I have only taken Spanish through a second-year college level (probably 7 years of classes in and before college) and I'd be likely to make grammar errors. Given my experience trying to fix up the travel article, I don't want to put anyone else in the same boat, but I feel I could make significant contributions there. -- Pakaran 01:35, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Personally, I think that would great. The small Wikipedias (Arabic for example) need all the help they can get and would probably welcome people with a less than perfect knowledge of the language. I don't know whether people at the Spanish Wikipedia would feel the as I do though. Maybe you could ask at es:Wikipedia:Café. Angela. 01:45, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Ok thanks, I just made an account and posted there. -- Pakaran 01:59, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)
I occasionally write stuff in the French wikipedia...despite about 15 years of French classes, I can still only write something that is almost French-like, but the French-speakers there don't seem to mind fixing my mistakes. Likewise, I don't mind fixing non-English peoples' mistakes when they post here. I think the idea is that it is better to have an article with grammar mistakes than no article at all. Adam Bishop 01:59, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)
That makes sense - and those of us who are multilingual are in a position to translate articles over, and they can then be fixed much faster than an article could be written from scratch, or so I'd like to think. -- Pakaran 02:07, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

One way around this is to set up an editing partnership, as we have been doing at the History of Poland series. I write a draft section in (I hope) good English. Various Polish users who do not have good English then make comments and add more material. I then edit their material into good English. This seems to work quite well. Adam 03:32, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

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