Wikipedia:Other frequent questions

Other Frequent Questions

Q. Why are some of the links scrunched together and capitalized LikeThis, while others aren't?

A. The original wiki standard was to treat anything scrunched together and capitalized LikeThis (sometimes called CamelCase) as a link, to take advantage of automatic linking. Because this looks odd to many people, the current software uses a technique called Free Links, which should be used for new articles. The old-style links are gradually being converted to free links.

Q. Why not just use HTML?

A1. Good question. The short answer is: for simplicity and security.

A2. The longer answer is in Talk until someone summarizes it here, or points to another page that discusses it in more detail.

A3. See MeatBall:RawHtmlWiki.

Q. What about non-ASCII characters, and special symbols?

A. Just because the codes are defined in HTML4 doesn't mean they actually work in any common browser. See the Wiki special characters page for a detailed discussion of what is generally safe and what isn't. Of course, this will change over time as more browsers come to support more features.

Q. What about math topics, which require many special symbols, fonts, and graphics?

A. See the discussion in Talk. (This is just an interim location.)

Q. Which languages are -- from a technical or a social point of view -- desirable?

A. On Wikipedia, English. But we can set up wikis in any language. Please ask (or look to see if one has been created in your language) on international Wikipedia.

Q. American English though, I presume, not British English?

A. Why presume that? People are writing in all sorts of English. This isn't necessarily a bad situation, either. Anyway, of course, the Americans aren't going to adjust their usage for the Brits, and God knows the Brits won't adjust theirs for the Americans. :-)

Q. Since anyone can edit any page, why would I give any credence to anything I read here?

A1. You should not give credence to anything you read here.

A2. Less flippantly, you should realize that this is, quite self-consciously, an experiment in public collaboration quite unlike any print or online encyclopedia, and therefore it will be difficult to project the results, in terms of their credibility, until the project is farther along. But even then, you'll have to judge the results based on the articles themselves, rather than the credentials of their writers (which is itself often an unreliable way to determine credibility, as you know).

A3. Some people think Wikipedia will give Britannica a run for its money. Wikipedia commentary/Making fun of Britannica.

Q. Is it possible for a vandal to delete all Wikipedia pages?

A1. Not really. You need to be a wiki administrator (with a special password) to permanently and totally delete pages. Any other users could remove the text of a page, but any other user could restore the text from the "kept pages" archive (which is kept for at least 2 weeks in the default wiki setup). If someone did an extensive attack, they could be blocked from further editing by the admins. (In the future a new feature may also allow an admin to undo all recent edits from a particular user or IP address.) Moreover, we are keeping backups of the server itself. For more discussion see this discussion of "wiki wipeouts."

A2. MeatBall:KeptPages will protect against short-term vandalism. However, to prevent irreparable harm, it's important to be civil and human towards others. After all, this is an open collaboration. Further concepts in security employed by UseModWiki are listed in MeatBall:SoftSecurity.

Q. What happens if two or more people are editing the same page?

A. The second person (and later persons) to save the page will receive an "edit conflict" message, and the opportunity to merge their changes into the most-currently-saved version. The wiki will also check for a conflict if you are editing and do a preview of the edit. Multiple consecutive conflicts are noticed, and will generate a slightly different message.

Note that the wiki ignores edit conflicts between two edits with the same user-ID number (if you set your preferences), or the same IP address (if neither editor has a preferences cookie). (These same-user "conflicts" are usually the result of using the back-page browser function to re-edit a page.) To test the conflicts by yourself you will need either two different browsers (with different cookies), or two different systems.

Q. Are Wikipedia articles open content? What is the license agreement on the contents of Wikipedia?

A. The contents of the Wikipedia are covered by the GNU Free Documentation License.

Q. Is it, or will it be, possible to download the contents of Wikipedia to transform (parts of) it to other formats?

A. Yes it will, but isn't yet.

Q. I have, or can get, special permission to copy an image or article to Wikipedia. Is it OK to do that?

A. The contents of Wikipedia are covered by the GNU Free Documentation License. Unless an item is covered by the same or a similar license, or is in the public domain, it cannot be used on Wikipedia.

Q. Is it OK to link to other sites, as long as the material is not copied onto Wikipedia?

A. External links are just fine. Arguably, they increase the usability of Wikipedia. Some Wikipedians feel rather strongly, however, that articles should not consist exclusively of links and that Wikipedia is not intended to be just another Internet directory.

Q. What's the point of getting a user ID?

A. It's not required, but it allows you to tell wiki to save your settings and thereby have Wikipedia be displayed in the same way each time you return. It also credits you, on the Recent Changes page, with changes you make, instead of a meaningless IP number. Visit the Preferences page to create your user ID.

Q. Huh? What's that about setting preferences? How do you set a user name, and what is that about a password?

A. To set preferences, including your user name and password, click on "Preferences" on any page, fill in the options you desire, and click "save" at the bottom of the screen.

Q. How do I keep from getting new user numbers every time I use a different machine? I have an 'account', such as it is, but I keep getting new IDs every time I use a different machine or browser to work on this. The same problem would happen if I deleted cookies, wouldn't it?

A1. Don't worry about different user numbers. It's often easier to set up your different IDs than to use the current (April 2001) login procedure.

A2. If you really want to log in, here is the procedure (note that you must set a password before trying to log in from another system):

Go to the Preferences page and write down your "User ID number" (near the top).
While you are on the Preferences page, enter a password into the "Set Password" field. Save your preferences.
On your other computer/browser, visit http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?action=login
Type in your "User ID number" and the password you set in step 2, then click the "Login" button.
The other computer/browser will then receive a copy of the first computer/browser's cookie.

Q. How do I change my username?

A. Simply Log out and then input a different username and password. Avoid using email addresses as logins, since they will be displayed on Recent Changes and result in a mass of spam.

Q. Is this safe? I mean, I could start defaming people. Then the legal implications of this could become a problem to the provider of this service.

A. Good question. Why not write on TheLegalImplicationsOfWikis? (It's probably already been done on Ward Cunningham's original wiki.)

Q. How do you pronounce "FAQ"?

A. Some say "fack", some say "eff-ay-que".

Q. What is the meaning of life?

A1. See philosophy, but don't expect a coherent answer.

A2. Life is the reification of the process of living - Ernst Mayr

A3. 42

Q. What is the best way to link into Wikipedia from another site?

A. Most of us would probably prefer that you link to the homepage ( http://www.wikipedia.com ) so that people get a clear idea of what the site is, and (we hope) become interested enough in it to contribute. If what you really want is to link to a specific topic, there is nothing to stop you from doing so, but why not also give a link to the front page with a description of what the site is about? We've just started the site in January and are still very much interested in new contributors.

If what you're after is a banner to use to link, one of our contributors has made some and offers them here. You can of course make your own, and if you wish them to be freely distributable, why not send us a copy so we can post them here, as well?

Between wikis, the standard MeatBall:InterWiki prefix is WikiPedia. This site has been added to MeatBall:MetaWiki as well.

Q. Can I mirror entire sections of the Wikipeda to my site? (Perhaps edited a bit) How much can I quote?

A. You may mirror or quote as much as you wish, as long as you maintain the text under the GNU Free Documentation License. Don't do this if you're writing a paper for school, though!

Q. If I link a word from my site to the Wikipedia, am I required to use the GNU FDL for my site? What if I use a small quote (3-4 sentences)? What if I quote entire articles?

A. Check with your lawyer.

Q. Will there / should there be a CPAN module to standardize querying of Wikipedia?

A. An interesting question. A full-blown module might be overkill, though. If you're just after retrieving a topic page, the following Perl sample code works. In this case, it retrieves and lists this page, but modifications to the $url variable for other pages should be obvious enough. Once you've got the page source, Perl regular expressions are your friend in finding wiki links.-- Malcolm Farmer

#!/usr/bin/perl
use LWP;
$browser LWP::UserAgent->new();
($url) "http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?Wikipedia_FAQ";
$webdoc$browser->request(HTTP::Request->new(GET> $url));
if ($webdoc->is_success) #...then it's loaded the page OK
{
print $webdoc->title, "

"; # page title

print $webdoc->content, "

"; # page text

Q. Is there a way to search for all the changes made by myself in Wikipedia? For example, if I contributed to numerous pages over a long period of time, then 2 years later, I would need a way to find out whether someone else added to the subject I once touched.

A. No, there isn't, but we can point you to two pages that might help you: feature requests and Recent Changes. In particular, http:wiki.cgi?action=rc&showedit=1&all=1&newtop=0&days=9999999. However, since the recent changes log has been culled, this will prove insufficient.

Q. The SandBox page shows how to link to a picture via a URL. That means Wikipedia needs to rely on an external address to pick up the graphic. Is there a way to upload the graphic file into Wikipedia site and use a relative link instead of an external one? If not, please make it a feature request so that Wikipedia can be self-contained regarding graphics.

A. You're right to think we should not use external addresses to pick up graphics--that means we put a drain on other peoples' servers, which is a no-no. As to your feature request, it's a good one, and it has already been made. Besides, this is a participatory website, so we make (and, hopefully, fulfill!) feature requests ourselves. See feature requests.

Q. Any idea when the software will be updated? My understanding is that among other things the upgrade will make the wikilinks case-insensitive, and that would be helpful. --loh

A. We are not sure. The reason we don't just upload the new version of UseModWiki is that the new version of UseModWiki treats links like this and Like This as well as like This and Like this as all linking to the same page, namely, /wiki/Like_This. This, as you can imagine, is going to cause a huge headache for us. Basically, we need a one-time solution to make sure that all the correct links and page names are preserved when we install the new software. It seems that this will require some deep thinking on the part of He To Whom We Are Grateful, Clifford Adams, the designer of UseModWiki.

Q. What legalities must be considered in creating conventional printed snapshots of Wikipedia? Are there any plans for any?

I realize the thing is still growing like a weed, but it is already a pretty respectable source of information. I'd like to see it made cheaply available for schools, but I suppose the on-line version already accomplishes that.

A. The full answer to the first question will be found at GNU Free Documentation License.

Re the second question: No specific plans on the part of Bomis yet, anyway (there has been vague talk and long-term dreams)--that doesn't mean someone else couldn't do it, even right now. This is open content, after all.

Q. How does the View other revisions page work? What determines how many previous revisions are listed, and once old revisions get dropped from that page, are they utterly irretrievable?

A1. This is one of the mysteries of UseModWiki which perhaps, someday, if we are still using UseModWiki, CliffordAdams will help to answer. Until then, you could perhaps find out from the man himself, at his website.

A2. Much of UseModWiki's feel has been driven by ideas from MeatballWiki. The feature you are refering to is MeatBall:KeptPages.

Q. Where's the article-a-day list--the list of articles that are sent out as part of Wikipedia's article-a-day feature? Can I add to it?

A. Yes, you can. Please go to Wikipedia/Article a day queue and add to it.

Q. I'm worried about scalability. What happens if Wikipedia is invaded by hordes of new people who don't understand what's going on here, and mess it up?

A. Well, that's why we set up The Wikipedia Guard.

Q. How do I cite a Wikipedia article in a paper?

A. Cite it as you would any other web page, including the full URL to the article, in accordance with the normal citation practice whatever you are submitting the paper to follows. It would be a good idea to also include the revision number of the article you are quoting (go to "View other revisions" and write down the most recent number), and the date you viewed it on (the latter should be standard practice for citing websites anyway.)

I am confused regarding the edit boldly policy and the meta.wikipedia.com site. When performing research or chattering productively with other Wikipedeans collegially regarding the facts or merit of the presentation of material ..... is this discussion supposed to originate at or migrate to meta .... leaving the talk for users of the "controlled" or "certified" (by Wikipedian community's collective efforts) materials?

No. This productive type of chat about material in the encyclopedia is exactly what Talk: pages are for. If you want to talk about the project in general, lets say "to make Wikipedia a better project", then you should go to meta.wikipedia.com. --AxelBoldt

Can casual users disable editing and access to talk and metaspaces in their preferences to avoid accidental damage?

No. But how can you accidentally hit "Save"? If it was really an accident, everything can be and will be restored quickly. --AxelBoldt

If not, is this contemplated? Right ... I will see if I can find the requested features page and add the request.

Is there a draft specification somewhere that explains the existing features so that if someone chose to tackle formalizing or automate regression testing there would be a starting point?

No specification of features exists. Everything is still very much in flow. --AxelBoldt

Are questions like the above supposed to be added to the meta FAQ and then migrated here when have been asked frequently and a consensus answer achieved?

Is there a formal ratification precedure to submit proposed answers or other meta issues to the community appropriately for discussion, design review, votes on clear issues of style or preference (I do not anticipate we should be voting on the value of pi or CPU speed at Bomis ...)?

There is nothing formal like that. Occasionly there are semi-official votes taking place on meta.wikipedia.com, say about our logo. --AxelBoldt

Is there any thought of making this a two stage process? Perhaps first consensus by the meta interested Wikipedians with a trial period at meta and more general request for comments in the wider community and then perhaps a veto/referendum process. .... If the real users dislike it then rapid back pedaling would seem indicated if we desire growing market/mind share.

Anyone feeling any of this is better at meta feel free to move it as appropriate. If you could drop the new location and some discussion of why you moved it or a link to the file where further explanation is located at my talk page it would be extremely useful. Thanks. user:mirwin