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For general problems with Wikipedia not pertaining to any single article, see Wikipedia:General complaints [[da:Wikipedia:Landsbybr%F8nden]]

Summarised sections

This is a list of discussions that have been summarised and moved to an appropriate place. This list gets deleted occasionally to make room for newer entries.


Linking to family trees

As an example, the article Julio-Claudian family tree has a single image with the entire family tree. I'm wondering if it's possible to create a family tree that appears similar but has a feature linking the individual names in the tree to the articles about those people. Does the software exist to do this? MK 06:22, 16 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

I suggest some sort of mark-up to generate the trees in HTML format may be best - I know the GEDCOM file format exists for genealogy data, but I don't know of standards for genealogical markup in an easily readable format (for example, in XML) or conversion utilities. Image maps are possible but may not be compatible with all browsers (but then, images are not compatible with all browsers either.. --Chuq 03:38, 24 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]


Quantum optics

Quantum optics is a very lively field of current physics research. But so far we only have articles on its more application-related neighbouring field, laser science. I've done a start by writing the article quantum optics, but there's much to do: MOTs, optical tweezers, PDC, and the like should be covered as well. Any fellow physicists out there willing to help? Or other people knowing about it? (Sanders muc)


Wikipedia trophy room

Where should Wikipedia awards be recorded? Discuss at Wikipedia talk:Trophy box

Watchlist trauma

Watchlists were temporarily cached to save server load. See Wikipedia talk:Watchlist help.

Can You Give us the E-mail address of National Congress.

Dear Sir, Can you give use the E-mail address or the Contact address of National Congress, actualy we want to give congratulation to Congress President Mrs. Sonia Gandhi, Please sir, help us in this matter, please give reply us on [email protected], [email protected], [email protected].

With warm regards,

M/s. Access Point, Puri, Orissa India

The party's website appears to be http://www.indiannationalcongress.org/ -- it has a "contact" option on the front page which opens a form to email [email protected] though of course we don't know if these would get forwarded to Mrs Gandhi.
Alternatively you can write to the INC at 24, Akbar Road, New Delhi 110011, or telephone 91-11-23019080 or fax to 91-11-23017047. -- Arwel 19:20, 17 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]


Vandalism in Chinese Wikipedia

Chinese WP is suffering mass attack from several IPs, continuously creating nonsense pages like "Shizhao再麻煩你砍一下吧44daf22d99161b01a4148a8c3cffedc4". Can the developers ban the feature of creating new pages in Chinese WP for a while? --Samuel 18:11, 17 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Hello,

the chinese Wiki is experincing massiv vandalism with a bot and a proxy again. Please help.--Philopp 18:13, 17 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Please ban the IP addresses rang from 210.139.252.1 to 210.139.252.255. --Samuel 18:17, 17 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
Any sysop on zh can ban a range. See m:range blocks. Is the problem that you need more sysops temporarily? Angela. 19:48, May 17, 2004 (UTC)

Speedy Deleting things on VfD

Should candidates for speedy deletion that have been mistakenly listed on VfD not be speedily deleted?

-->Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy

Press release: Wikipedia wins 8th Annual Webby Award for Best Community

Discussion moved to Wikipedia talk:Press releases/May 2004. More help still needed to write the press release before it is ready to be sent.

Cannes Festival!

Know someone who was, or still is, at Cannes? Are you surfing WP from an internet cafe in Cannes at this very moment? Help us get a good GFDL or public domain photo from the festival to use on Wikipedia! It would be nice to feature an image of this year's festival in the Cannes article, in the news on the main page, and on the Press Corps page. +sj+ 22:01, 2004 May 17 (UTC)

Kennt jemand jemanden, der in Cannes war oder immernoch ist? Surfst du die Wikipedia in diesem Moment aus einem Internet Café in Cannes an? Hilf uns bitte, indem du ein gutes GFDL oder Public Domain Foto vom Festival machst, damit wir es für die Wikipedia benutzen können! Es wäre schön, dieses Jahr ein Foto im Artikel Cannes, in den News / Nachrichten der Hauptseite und auf der Press Corps Seite zu haben. Fire 22:12, 17 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Banjo-Kazooie rhymes

I recently started adding to the Banjo-Kazooie article. I dont' have a copy of the game but thought it would be wise to ask here if anyone who does could fire it up and write down some of the funnier rhymes Grunthilda utters during gameplay. Also of course if anyone remembers something from the game which i forgot that would be great, thought it would be nice to ask this in village pump instead of pages needing attention since this is really a request very few are able to fill.. and the more eyes... --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 02:22, 2004 May 18 (UTC)

Suggestions from Kapil-Y

(Moved by Starx from MediaWiki:VfD-Kapil_Yedidi)

Also, 1 more thing. I would just reccomend a link from an article to a contributions page, where you see the contributions for that article. I understand it is not all about 1 person doing the encyclopedia, and more about everyone creating it, but a contributions page would be awesome!

1 last thing. Are there any ranks in the Wikipedia? Like if you help out a lot, would you be recognized and be a VIP in the members room or something?

Whe you serach for your member name in the encyclopedia, you need to types in usr first. Why not ignore the fact whether the USR is there or not?

I promise this is my LAST suggestion. Why not a lounge chat area for members where you can talk about the articles, improve grammar, and other things?

See Wikipedia:Chat and Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by number of edits. Dori | Talk 04:47, May 18, 2004 (UTC)

Just a few suggestions by Kapil-Y!

Wikipedia:Requested pictures...

...needs your help. We need photos of braided hair, felt, flyswatter, Palette knife, polyester, rayon, sickle, magnifying glass, Alquerque, Gomoku, Auditorium Building, Chicago, Benjamin Franklin Bridge, Chainsaw, roundabout, Baseball bat and glove, Blue Grotto, brassiere, panties, undergarment, all kinds of Cats, Hats, Instruments, and computers (VAIO), and much more. If you have any of the above pictures, or if you have the item, please take a photo and go to Wikipedia:Requested pictures! (all clothing requests are person-optional) -- Chris 73 | Talk 04:42, 18 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

"all clothing requests are person-optional"
Is the converse also true? For people pics, is clothing optional? →Raul654 04:45, May 18, 2004 (UTC)
If so, I'd like to submit a list of requests. MK 07:25, 18 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Name

I have trued to find out what the name Amanda or Mandy is in korean, i hope you can help me as this is to with the Martial art WTF Taetwondo that i study.

Thanks, Mandy.

Why not 아만다? — Monedula 17:18, 18 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Google results: Mirrors vs Wikipedia

Our mirrors sometimes have higher Google rankings than Wikipedia. See Wikipedia:External search engines#Google results: Mirrors vs Wikipedia.

Interwiki

Should we have a "central repository" of all interwiki links? Please discuss at Wikipedia talk:Interlanguage links#Interwiki: central repository feature suggestion.


Intuition

Item: Intuition Discuss on: Talk:Intuition & User_talk:Heidimo#Intuition

Remark: I have a factual error dispute but the other person is unwilling to explain what she thinks is wrong with my way of reasoning. I guess what needs to be done is to sort out the philosophical meaning of the word from the informal meaning. I am studying this seemingly simple subject in another encyclopedia but it has not helped much until now. Thanks in advance Andries 18:31, 18 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Peer review or Wikipedia:Requests for comment might be a better place for this. Angela. 06:39, May 19, 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia for crosswords

Hey, I just found a new use for Wikipedia. I was wrestling with today's crossword puzzle. Usually the weekday ones are fine, but today--lots of facts that I just didn't know. I used it to find the following in just a couple of minutes:

But--I couldn't find "dashboard of an English car"!?
Elf | Talk 18:56, 18 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

How many letters? Marnanel 19:02, May 18, 2004 (UTC)
Five, am I right? Did you get the one about the flute? (spooky coincidence) As a thoroughbred Englishman, I can tell you that the dashboard of an English car is called... a "dashboard". So I'm not surprised you didn't find the answer here! [What crossword is this, anyway?] - IMSoP 19:18, 18 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
Tribune Media Services puzzle; I'm seeing it in the San Jose Mercury News. Elf | Talk 20:12, 18 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
A five letter synonym for Dashboard in an English car would be "Dials"... But from what I read elsewhere, that doesn't fit. Peet42 19:47, 18 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
How about fascia? That the best english-german dictionary http://dict.leo.org showed as one of the translations of the german Armaturenbrett. andy 20:08, 18 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
Huh. I am 95% certain about all of the crossing words. This leaves me with a 5-letter word for "dashboard of an English car" as _ACIA, and "high-pitched flutes" of _IBES (first letter is same for both words). I played flute for many years & don't know what they're talking about. I thought of Fascia, but that's 6 letters, so unless they spelled it wrong-- and that also left me with "fibes", which I couldn't find a reference to anywhere. Elf | Talk 20:11, 18 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
According to Dictionary.com, "Facia" is an archaic form of "Fascia". I'd assume a problem with the "b", making the other answer "Fifes"... :) Peet42 20:35, 18 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe they think it's an Anglicism. (It isn't, to the best of my knowledge.) -- the English Marnanel 20:39, May 18, 2004 (UTC)
OK, fifes works. (For some reason the first time I looked at the B vs F for the first letter it didn't make any sense. Another case of brain needing cache cleared & reloaded.) 66.122.214.230 21:28, 18 May 2004 (UTC) (oops, that was me. Elf | Talk 16:13, 20 May 2004 (UTC))[reply]
Collins English Dictionary definitely gives fascia or facia as Brit.. a less common name for "dashboard". Dieter Simon 01:18, 19 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
The Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors (2000) says that facia (pl. facias) is 'the instrument panel of a motor vehicle' (among other things), and that fascia (pl. fasciae) is 'a long flat surface between mouldings on the architrave' etc. IME this dictionary is more conservative than those on the Web, and is of course Britannocentric. -- Heron 18:43, 20 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
I love seeing Wikipedia being used for a wide variety of purposes like this. I found Wikipedia when I was running "online pub quizes" and in desperate need of trivia. Our list of lists was perfect for my purposes, and in a few weeks I'd got interested in the project and began contributing. Elf, perhaps soon the compilers of your crosswords will use Wikipedia as a source, just as you use it to crack the hard clues. ;) fabiform | talk 07:25, 19 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
I've used the Wikipedia for this myself. It helped about 75% of the time. Crazyeddie 00:30, 2004 May 24 (UTC)

No signatures/bylines policy?

I just left a note on a newbie's talk page explaining that Wikipedia articles don't have signatures or bylines, in order to emphasize the fact that nobody has ownership of an article. I'm really pretty sure I'm right about this, but... I wanted to cite a policy page, and I couldn't locate one. (And I tried googling on what I thought were all the obvious word combinations). Am I right, and, if so, what policy page should be referenced? Dpbsmith 22:26, 18 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Ownership of articles is relevant, though doesn't mention signatures specifically. Angela. 01:07, May 19, 2004 (UTC)
Just for information, I've seen newbies who did not sign articles at first but started signing them after getting a welcome message. Some people misunderstand the part of welcome message that tells how to sign. Andris 14:28, May 19, 2004 (UTC)
I've added something to my standard welcome message to advise that signing is usually used on talk pages rather than on main articles. I might suggest that the rest of the welcoming committee consider doing the same. --ALargeElk 14:44, 19 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
I've added a quick & dirty discussion of the issue to Wikipedia:Ownership of articles--I'm sure it can be improved, but at least it's a start. Niteowlneils 18:34, 20 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Vandalbot page updated

Although many people might not have noticed, the Chinese (zh) Wikipedia suffered an astronomical scale vandalbot attack, spread over two days. Thousands of pages were created. The users there didn't quite know what to do about it. So as a result, I've updated m:Vandalbot. Everyone needs to read this so that they know what to do in the event of an attack. -- Tim Starling 04:02, May 19, 2004 (UTC)

can navratna disinvestment be reverted?

Understand it is a clause in disinvestment agrrement that decision of disinvestment made can be reverted within 2 yrs of takeover by the Government without assignning any reason. If it is so Congress Government may take initiative for the idisinvestment made for IPCL(Navratan Company) for reverting within 2 yrs.IPCL was disinvested on 4th June02 and hence now 16 days are left to government to revert the decision. This is mainly due to deal which was made at thraw away price by NDA Gov as against Worth of the company. 

SUBJECT MATTER IS URGENTLY TO BE LOOKED INTO BEFORE EXPIRY OF PERIOD.

Subject to be forwarded to Congess Working Commotty at earliest. Regards.

Suggestion: tooltip first few words of article when mouse is over link

I would like to suggest a new feature for Wikipedia: display the start of the linked article as a tooltip when the mouse lingers over a link. Currently, only the title is displayed, using the TITLE property of the LINK tag.

Quite often I read an article about an unfamiliar subject that contains many unfamiliar terms. My main purpose is to understand the main article, but I need an idea of what those terms mean. For example, when reading the article Mycenae, it is helpful to know that Argos is a "city in Greece in Peloponnese", and that the Persian Wars "started about 500 BC and lasted until 448 BC".

It is inconvenient to have to follow each link to an article about each unfamiliar term, because the extra operations of clicking on the link and going back to the original page are required, and because of the delay of loading the pages. It interrupts the reading of the main article. It would be alleviated if the first 100 or so characters were shown as a tooltip.

For an implementation of this idea, see for example http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Mycenae. The page itself is a bit cluttered, but I'm just talking about the tooltips on the links. TheFreeDictionary has implemented them using Javascript, but a similar thing can be done using the LINK tag's TITLE property.

Pgan002 08:05, 19 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Workaround: get a browser that deals with tabbed browsing, such as Mozilla Firebird, or if you're on a Mac, Safari. Dysprosia 08:12, 19 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
I second this suggestion, at least as a "wishlist" feature. Even with a tabbed browser (which I do use heavily for this purpose), this would be a great aid to reading; switching between tabs is still more awkward than a transient mouseover popup, and on a slow internet connection (or a slow wiki-day) auxillary pages can take a while to download. There'd presumably be a painful performance hit, though, for the server? — Matt 08:34, 19 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
Workaround, even in a non-tabbed browser: right click & open in new window. Spares you the reload time for "back" button. -- Jmabel 18:31, 19 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Just to give a technical slant on this issue: Firstly, the tag in question isn't <link>, it's <a>; a slightly pedantic point, but <link> is for something else - it's how you link in stylesheets and favicons, for instance. Secondly, there is a major limitation with implementing this feature using title attributes: not all browsers have multiline tooltips; for instance Mozilla, and I guess any other XUL-based systems, will only show a limited amount of the caption, as much as it can fit in a medium-sized one-line box. So to make the feature useful, we would probably have to do something crazy with JavaScript, like TheFreeDictionary do.

Now, the reason I say "something crazy", is that I'm not quite sure how this would have to interact with the database. Our mirrors have an advantage over us here, in that they don't have to deal with the information constantly changing - they can be really aggressive with their caching, whereas we have to make sure changes get reflected ASAP. Looking at the source, it seems that TheFreeDictionary actually merges in the text for the tooltips as part of the page that gets sent - so before being sent, each article has to be generated from not only itself, but all those it links to (and you will generally end up downloading a load of text that you never see). An alternative would be to have the JavaScript fetch the data somehow when you point at the word - saving on server costs and initial download, but meaning you get almost as much delay as opening the link anyway (esp. if you use a new window/tab/whatever, as people have suggested).

I'm not saying this is a bad idea per se, just that implementation-wise, there are a few things that would have to be worked out. It would certainly be useful, but it wouldn't be easy. - IMSoP 14:54, 20 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Is the word "Scandal" in an article's title POV?

Recently, the article Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal was renamed Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse reports because some users found the word "scandal" in the title to be pov. But wikipedia has dozens of articles with the word "scandal" in the title, including Watergate Scandal, Lewinsky scandal, Whitewater Scandal, Harken Energy Scandal, Quiz show scandals, Olympic Games scandals, Mutual fund scandal (2003), Accounting scandals of 2002, Teapot Dome Scandal, Black Sox Scandal, and many others. So should the word "scandal" be removed from article titles? Or is the word "scandal" inherantly pov? (For more details, see the article's talk page.) Quadell 13:55, May 19, 2004 (UTC)

The word is not necessarily POV. If an event is very widely described by others as a scandal then that may very well be the best article name. Sadly many people understand NPOV to mean "never call a spade a spade". Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 15:05, 19 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
I raised the issue and, after nearly a week of discussion, moved the page. My intention was not to whitewash or minimize the seriousness of what happened. Quite the opposite: my issue with the word "scandal" is that I believe it trivializes the seriousness of the matter, which is far beyond "scandalous." As noted on the talk page, the dictionary definition of "scandal" is
1. A publicized incident that brings about disgrace or offends the moral sensibilities of society: a drug scandal that forced the mayor's resignation. 2. A person, thing, or circumstance that causes or ought to cause disgrace or outrage: a politician whose dishonesty is a scandal; considered the housing shortage a scandal. 3. Damage to reputation or character caused by public disclosure of immoral or grossly improper behavior; disgrace. 4. Talk that is damaging to one's character; malicious gossip.
"Scandal" is typically used for crimes that are victimless, or for whom the victim is something vague like "the public treasury," and focusses, not on who was hurt by the scandalous acts themselves, but who was embarrassed by the public disclosure of those acts. We do not normally use the word "scandal" in reference to criminal behavior involving personal injury to victims.
The word "scandal" is typically used for incidents of sexual misconduct (Senator Wilbur Mills caught with a stripper in the Tidal Basin), bribery (Albert Fall giving Harding's cronies preferential treatment on Teapot Dome leases), etc. Quadell lists some examples above of how the word "scandal" is typically used. More can be found via links from the article Scandal. As I noted, we do not speak of the My Lai "scandal" or the Black Hole of Calcutta "scandal" or the Japanese-American internment camp "scandal," and Cecropia noted that Wikipedia speaks of the Iran-Contra Affair, the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Oil for Food Allegations, the Dreyfus Affair, etc.
Further discussion welcome. I ask those who don't like the present title to propose specific suggestions. Dpbsmith 15:34, 19 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
Whilst I appreciate your point, it doesn't really answer mine, which was that we as editors of Wikipedia shouldn't abitrate on what an event is called - it is better to follow in the footsteps of others if we can. '"Abu Ghraib" scandal' currently gets 220,000 Google hits (not bad for an event so young!), suggesting that the dictionary definition doesn't quite capture how the word is being used in practice. I would prefer the original wording. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 16:46, 19 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
My opinion is that, if anything, scandal is POV by virtue of being far to polite a term. I think Human Rights Violations or Geneva Violations - something of that sort would be more accurate. --bodnotbod 22:08, May 21, 2004 (UTC)
In general, maybe it's best not to used the word "scandal" in a current events article? Give history time to decide whether or not it's appropriate. Just my 2 cents. Crazyeddie 00:36, 2004 May 24 (UTC)

List of Colorado Senators

The title of this artitcle (I've seen List of New York Senators as well) seems confusing, to me. I would think that it would be a list of people who have represented Colorado in the US Senate. To make it less confusing, should it be moved to List of Colorado state Senators? RickK 14:50, 19 May 2004 (UTC) [reply]

I agree with the proposed renaming. If not, there should at least be a "see also" to an article with the US Senators from these states. MK 17:57, 19 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that the title should say "state senators", though even "List of Colorado state Senators" could be understood as meaning a list of all past and present U.S. Senators from the state of Colorado. Perhaps it would be more specific to say List of members of the current Colorado State Senate or perhaps just Members of the Colorado State Senate (the word "list" implies an open-ended quality, and the current members of the senate are a finite group--presumably a member's name will not stay on this list after they leave office. older≠wiser 18:45, 19 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
I like older/wiser's proposal. RickK 19:01, 19 May 2004 (UTC) [reply]

How to make a two-part signature?

I've seen more and more of these around recently...the user sigs that link in one part to the User page and one part to the User Talk page. I know how to edit how my name is displayed in my sig via preferences, but whatever I put in that field is piped into a link of the form [[User:Ed Cormany|mysigtext]]. Therefore, when I try to put a link in the sigtext, it starts breaking things. What am I doing wrong? &#151;Ed Cormany 14:52, 19 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

It takes two links, like [[User:Ed Cormany|sigtext]] [[User talk:Ed Cormany|talkpagetext]]. I had to fool around with mine for some time in my sandbox before it came out the way I liked. - Hephaestos|§ 14:59, 19 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
User:Pcb21/Sig hacking
In the preferences i set my nickname to Chris 73]] | [[User talk:Chris 73|Talk, and got the following results: -- Chris 73 | Talk 15:37, 19 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Brilliant workaround, although this means of course that I can't put the link to my talk page first, as I had hoped. Oh well, thanks anyhow! &#151; Ed Cormany 02:45, 20 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Never mind, i actually came up with it on my own! This takes it even one step further: start your sig with any whitespace followed by ]]. Now you have effectively closed off the link to your user page, but it is invisible because it is only whitespace! Now you can put whatever you please after that in your signature...you can even include plaintext, if you reverse the trick and tack it on the end ([[whitespace). OK, now go nuts! &#151; Ed Cormany 02:45, 20 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
The only problem with doing it that way is that it makes the wikitext a lot longer, so diffs and edit boxes are not as readable. It appears as [[User:Ed Cormany| ]][[User talk:Ed Cormany|&#151;]] [[User:Ed Cormany|Ed Cormany]]. Angela
I'm aware of this. I'll keep tinkering. --Ed Cormany <--manual signature! ;-D
I had this signature for a while: Chris 73 | (New) Talk, but the code was just too long: [[User:Chris 73|Chris 73]] | ('''[http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk:Chris_73&action=edit&section=new New]''') [[User talk:Chris 73|Talk]], so i switched it back to this -- Chris 73 | Talk 02:55, 21 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]


How hard would it be to teach MediaWiki to support this? I'd much rather have the software do this than hack it manually. Okay, taking a look... damn, there's no Debian package ;-) --Jae 06:32, May 21, 2004 (UTC)

plagarism?

who copied who?

http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Utilitarianism.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism

Links on both point to identical articles and even identical graphics!

They copy us (as they're entitled to) - their article says ...It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Utilitarianism" -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 15:49, 19 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Naming conventions

I've noticed some time ago, admittedly to my surprise, that even within Europe, nameing conventions vary considerably. For example, in German and English speaking countries, a wife adopts her husbands surname, while in France, this is not done. In Spain and Portugal, people even have two surnames, one from each parent.

Some people wrote articles about personal names in different countries, and a list of links to these articles can be found in the list of personal naming conventions. But this list is quite short.

I would like to ask the international Wikipedians to enlarge this list by explaining about the names in their home country. That might be interesting. TIA.

Sanders muc 17:51, 19 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Along these lines, a few of us have recently done significant work on Spanish and Portuguese names, though I'm sure it could still use a lot more. It currently covers Spanish-, Portuguese-, and Catalan-language names. It should probably also cover at least Galego and Basque. -- Jmabel 17:58, 20 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Who killed Trip Hawkins?

Undeleted. Discussion moved to Wikipedia:Votes for undeletion. Angela. 20:45, May 19, 2004 (UTC)

Reference Desk Technical Difficulties

I'd like to post to or answer some of the discussions on the Reference Desk, but I don't see how to do that if the discussion in question is not the last one. Clicking Edit just makes part, but not all, of the massive Reference Desk bulk appear in the edit box.

Well, I'm guessing this is a page size limitation with your browser - the entire article should appear when you click "Edit this page", and it does for me. However, you can get around the problem by using section editing - basically, if you set your preferences correctly, you get a little link saying [edit] next to each header, which lets you work on just the section under that header (note that you have to be logged in for this, but it's ever so easy to create an account, if you haven't already). HTH - IMSoP 15:05, 20 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

The problem is that the user is not logged in. Anon editors don't have the option of section editing. RickK 23:50, 20 May 2004 (UTC) [reply]

That was my guess, too (although I didn't go to the page history and check - a logged in user could easily just not have signed); hence my link to Wikipedia:Why create an account?. Wikipedia:How to create an account? would have been more to the point, but I don't know of such a page, since it's so trivial... - IMSoP 00:22, 21 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

XML usage

My apologies if there's a better place to ask this, but I was curious if Wikipedia supports XML. I mainly ask for the possiblity of implementing a few databases. Oberiko 16:50, 20 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

My understanding is that a forthcoming version of mediawiki supports exporting articles in an XML format. Is that what you had in mind? -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 16:57, 20 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know what you mean by support, but try out Special:Export. In the upcoming version 1.3 there will be more features that involve XML (look for them in http://test.wikipedia.org ). Dori | Talk 17:00, May 20, 2004 (UTC)
Clarification
An example of what I mean by supporting XML would be to keep data, stored on Wikipedia, in an XML format for the purpose of table generation etc. I think it would make it easier to read, edit, use and upload/download by users. It would also allow data to be kept centrally for seperate articles that might rely on it (thus preventing redudancy). Oberiko 17:05, 20 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
Optimally, of course, would be if Wikipedia had an actual database and allowed JSP. It would certainly help in terms of large articles, especially long lists so that we could dynamically generate sub-lists. Oberiko 17:43, 20 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
To date, a trade-off has been made. We've favoured ease of editing, with wikimarkup accesible to almost anyone who can run a web browser, trading this against the increased amount of manual work this entails. You're quite right to identify this need - the next time there's a major election in a country for which we have good constituency coverage (particularly the US and UK) there will be a lot of work to get the wiki back to being correct, and a nontrivial period during which it will be wrong. Worse, when the next US census data comes along, thousands of articles will be outdated. We've used bots in the past, but they have limited use in making updates (as opposed to mere substitutions or additions). The addition of transclusion to mediawiki makes some tasks simpler (such as centralising some kinds of tables). The real problem is that very very few of wikipedia's contributors are web developers - so the software project is short of developers. Also, we need to keep our barrier-to-entry for new contributors very low (that's how we've grown so big) and making a database-inclusion mechanism that's accessible not just to sad technogeeks like you and I, but to our moms and dads, is durn hard. But your idea is good (although exposing the ordinary contributor to XML is about as welcome as exposing them to ebola)) and the need exists (it's not a major problem yet, but it will slowly increase as the wikipedia expands and the bot-authored data ages). The mediawiki article has links to the sourceforge page - perhaps you'd consider helping adding these features to mediawiki. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 17:58, 20 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
Your comment re: US and UK elections and the next census, while quite correct, are nevertheless also quite depressing. →Raul654 18:08, May 20, 2004 (UTC)

I saw some debate about using the As of 2004 etc feature to mitigate this - is there any concensus? Mark Richards 19:45, 20 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I was about to mention that, too - the explanation lies at Wikipedia:As of, to which is attached much discussion. It doesn't remove the need for manual updating, of course, but it allows one to find where it is needed most. I rather like the idea, personally.
My main concerns with having some kind of database/XML "backend" built into the wiki are a)who would design the schema, and how (given that if you ever changed it, it would break everything using it); and b)how would the information be incorporated grammatically into free text (which I'd guess the majority of places this would be used would require). I guess you could have something like {{current president of the USA}}, but it would be hard work making sure it made sense properly.
I think SQL is simple enough that it could be incorporated (it's not like EVERY user would have to use it... just those who know), so long as it's limited to SELECT statements. Something like Template:SQL: Field, Field, FROM Table WHERE....
An example of census data it would just be Template:SQL: US Population FROM Census WHERE Current = 'True'. Still quite readable IMHO Oberiko 23:37, 20 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
I think elections are fine - not all that much changes each time; most MPs stay in the same seat for years [how lazy! ;-)] - but the census data is going to be a pain. Will we run Rambot (and other similar bots for other countries) every time a new census comes out? But if we did it a more database-y way, how encouraging would it be for users to edit the page (one of the main arguments put forward for inclusion of Rambot-style data) if it was covered in some weird syntax they didn't understand? Hmm... - IMSoP 21:20, 20 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
The election data is indeed an manageable change (it'd be worse of lots more countries' electoral constituencies were added). The census data is problematic - lots of Rambot's additions have now been manually changed to make the article as a whole read better (e.g. East Palo Alto). With hindsight (and more software) inclusion of such external info might better have been (or in future be) handled by transclusion (e.g. {{uscensus:East_Palo_Alto}}), which would make a discrete box on the page. Such a large, and rich, source of raw data would justify writing specific code to support. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 21:36, 20 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
this isn’t the forum – but, m2cw, couldn’t conventional div or span tags address some of these problems more simply? ie giving the robots hints about what to target?
eg "Brisbane has a population of <div class=’population’ id=’Brisbane, Australia'>1.5 million</div>"
just a thought… Erich 00:28, 21 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
Eek! That's kind of a half-way house - much of the XML ugliness, but less of its power. Really, what we're collectively asking for is something with the expressive power of a query language and presentation layer, but the simplicity of free text - something I don't think can be done. Not to worry - wikipedia is a testament to the power of thousands of people botching stuff together. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 01:04, 21 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Merging articles

The Community Portal devotes a couple of lines to listing articles that need to be merged. Wouldn't it be better to have whole page for this? --Smack 17:45, 20 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

If I understand the question, most cases would go on Wikipedia:Duplicate articles. Niteowlneils 18:36, 20 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Tech question

Every few minutes, I get a white screen saying "Sorry! The wiki is experiencing some technical difficulties" etc. Then, if I wait a few minutes, wikipedia works again. Wikipedia:Hardware status has nothing. What's up? Is this just me? Meelar 18:06, 20 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

No, it's not just you. Been happenning to me a lot recently. older≠wiser 18:10, 20 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, me too - although note that generally, I don't bother waiting a few minutes, just a few seconds. My guess is that the servers are running at pretty much their exact capacity a lot of the time, and occasionally get one too many requests per second or whatever. - IMSoP 21:23, 20 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
Does that mean it's time for another fundraiser? Meelar 22:42, 20 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
There's more hardware already on order. Arwel 23:27, 20 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed, it should arrive tomorrow [1] don't know how long that improvement will last though. Dori | Talk 23:59, May 20, 2004 (UTC)

Bug or feature?

Check this extra semicolon http://sample.link/<hello> in the end. Should I make a case of it on the bugtracker? // Rogper 19:04, 20 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

It can't hurt, I say go for it as I don't see a need for inserting that ; Dori | Talk 19:34, May 20, 2004 (UTC)

Creative Commons petition (dual liscensing)

On my user page, I have a draft of a petition. This petition proposes that the Wikipedia community migrate toward releasing its collective work under both the GFDL and Creative Commons liscenses.

While this has been suggested previously (see here: http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFDL_FAQ ), I believe that this proposal gets around the problems that have been mentioned. If it doesn't, I'm confident that the Wikipedia community, working in collaboration, can find a way around any problems.

Please go to my user page and edit this draft, especially if you disagree with this proposal. I'm planning to move the final petition to Wikipedia talk:Copyrights after July 1, 2004 (although I may hold off). Before I move it, I will make sure I personally approve the final draft. If you disagree with the final draft, you can link to a statment of your objections. At this time, I will also remove any signature from the draft, since I can't be sure that people who signed the draft will agree with the final form.

Thank you!

Crazyeddie 21:24, 20 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

One problem is the massive amount of text already available. There is no way that can be converted. Another is convincing people to release material under two licenses. I doubt this will happen. Dori | Talk 23:44, May 20, 2004 (UTC)
I agree with Dori. We've got tons of material released under the GFDL, if we had to go to everyone who has submitted material and re-ask if they want to also release their contributions under a new license, it would be a nightmare. RickK 23:46, 20 May 2004 (UTC) [reply]
I don't propose that we ask each contributor to give permission. I do propose that we ask every registered user permission for content that was released underneath their username. Even I'm not crazy enough to think we should (or even could) track down every anyonomusly submitted piece of content. This would be a one time click on a dialouge box, so from the user's point of view, it would be relatively painless. I'm hoping that maybe 60% of the Wikipedia be made available for use by projects using Creative Commons. Ideally, the portions that we can't track down will be replaced over time by new dual-liscenced material, but this will take years. Crazyeddie 19:14, 2004 May 21 (UTC)
Indeed. I guess Crazyeddie's proposal is inspired by the relicencing effort of the Netscape browser. But in that case most (I guess > 90%) of the code was written by employees of a fairly small group of companies, so merely getting those companies to agree takes care of 90% of the relicencing effort. Secondly, they didn't allow anons to contribute, so tracking down almost everyone else was fairly straightforward. This left only a tiny percentage that couldn't (or wouldn't) relicence. I'd guess that maybe 50% of wikipedia's articles have been edited by an anon at some point, and absolutely 100% of the significant ones. So, without exaggeration, it would be less work just to delete the database and start again. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 00:24, 21 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
No, this is the first I've heard of that effort. The Mozilla project I'm guessing? Actually, I'd guess the number of articles that have been edited by an anon would be closer to 90%. However, I'm not concerened with what article may have been edited in the past by a GFDL only contributor. I'm only concerned with what portions of the current version of the article were contributed by dual-licensors and what portions were contributed by GFDL-onlies. As for starting from scratch, that's pretty much what the smaller wikis are stuck with doing right now. I think this migration is going to be a big, hairy mess to accomplish (which is why I'm doing this as a petition to encourage debate and consensus) but it would still be better than starting over. Crazyeddie 19:14, 2004 May 21 (UTC)
A biiiig problem with your suggested solution is this part: "(With a link to a page containing just the CC portions.)". The MediaWiki software currently has no such thing as a "blame" feature (who contributed which parts of a page), and such a feature would be impractical with the way articles are edited (in any combination of expansion, reduction and refactoring you feel like; unlike a program maintained by CVS, which is most of the time edited line by line or even block by block). So it would be impossible to have a licensing status for anything more fine-grained than each article, and as Finlay says, that would rule out dual-licensing on most articles. It's a pain, but our only hope is for the FSF and CC to create versions of GFDL and by-sa that are compatible (and don't let's even start on the "should we abandon copyleft"; it's just plain too late!). - IMSoP 00:51, 21 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
I really don't know too much about the inner workings of the Wikipedia. For the record, I based that CC only page idea on the page histories. I thought that maybe we could somehow do a diff between the different versions and figure out who contriubted what. I think if we can work out the legal angles, the technical side will be hairy but doable. Fortunately, I'm not the one who has to work out the Small Matter of Programming, since I can't code to save my life.
I do agree that for this plan to work, we will need a way of determining who wrote what. This shouldn't be impossible. Any programmers out there? Here's the problem:
  1. We have a copy of each version of an article.
  1. We know who submitted each version.
  1. We have (or will have) a database of users who have agreed to the CC scheme.
  1. Given this, write a program that determines which portions of the current version were created by CCers.
Incidently, I've been wondering: if the GFDL was modified enough for material to be released under the CC, would the old version of the GFDL still be compatible with the new version? Can CC material be released under the GFDL? If a wikipedia article includes material from another wikipedia article, does it have to give the changelog of the other article? (As well as not being a programmmer, I'm also not a lawyer. Just because I started the petition doesn't mean I know anything about what I'm talking about.)
Has somebody seriously suggested abandoning copyleft? Good lord, without copyleft, this place simply wouldn't work!Crazyeddie 19:14, 2004 May 21 (UTC)
I quite like that Wikipedia is under the GFDL, what do people have against it --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 13:43, 2004 May 21 (UTC)
My main objection to the GFDL is that it's keeping me from reusing Wikipedia in another project. I wouldn't get so worked up about this except I'm reasonably sure that the contributors would approve of this reuse if they could. As for why other wikis don't use GFDL, the short answer is that people reusing content from them would have to include about 12 pages of legalese along with a 1-2 page article. Crazyeddie 19:14, 2004 May 21 (UTC)

Who created this page?

I'm not sure what you mean. Also, could you login and sign your message? Crazyeddie 00:43, 2004 May 24 (UTC)

I've come up with a new plan to get around the problems you've all brought up. I'm submitting it as a new thread to avoid quadruple indentation. Crazyeddie 00:43, 2004 May 24 (UTC)

rambot-generated US town articles

Should the several myriad rambot-generated US town articles be moved to Wikibooks? --Juuitchan

No. Maximus Rex 05:00, 21 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
No, encyclopedia material, not a book. -- Chris 73 | Talk 05:01, 21 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
Several?! No, I don't think so. Mark Richards 05:05, 21 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
"Several myriad" is, I believe, correct. The number is four myriad something isn't it? --J

No. Absolutely not. RickK 15:02, 21 May 2004 (UTC) [reply]

Hey, I wrote those 30,000 articles myself with the help of my master! Us bots are people too. -- rambot

Maybe actions from anonymous ones should be limited?

I recognize that the following ideas may be un-Wikipedian in their nature, but here goes.

There is at least the appearance that many articles are being vandalized by anonymous contributors, and also that many new junk articles are being created by the anonymous ones as well. Note the frequent vandal deletions of the United States article. I would like to submit that since the Wikipedia is very close to maturity (IMHO), it would be a good time to start restricting what anonymous contributors can do. I think it would be good if anonymous contributors should not be able to:

  • Create a new article (to reduce the many new junk articles being created)
  • Change more than a small percentage of an article text at one time (to all but prevent major vandalism, like full article text deletions)
  • Make more than a certain number of edits in a particular time period; perhaps take the Slashdot/discussion board idea of maintaining a flood interval. For this purpose, track edits by IP.

Ultimately, the work of the registered contributors will become immensely difficult if we have to continue to battle the increasing wave of vandalism and junk articles coming from anonymous contributors. So, if we don't consider the ideas I present here, what honestly can be done? (Or, has this already been discussed before?)

Stevietheman 07:43, 21 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

See m:Anonymous users should not be allowed to edit articles and m:Posting by anonymous users should be limited, but not banned. Angela. 08:08, May 21, 2004 (UTC)
Thanks for the links. From what I read, I think my proposal can be considered modest in its approach. It continues the ability for anonymous contributors to make edits (just not new articles). So, the typo and grammar fixing that anonymous contributors are famous for can continue, and vandalism and new junk articles should decrease. Besides, I would think that we would want the anonymous ones to have a major reason to upgrade to a registered account: so they can create their own articles.
However newly created nonsense article can be spotted rather quickly with the Special:Newpages - the don't get lost as fast as edits on Special:Recent Changes, and the byte length of an article also gives an idea what might be nonsense (something less 100 bytes is either nonsense or a very bad stub which needs attention as well). So if we don't allow anonymous users to create new articles, then the damage will be even greater than before. Speedy deletion of nonsense is easy and quickly done by the admins, while looking for a bad edit in an article takes more time. andy 08:52, 21 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
Stevie I don't like your idea at all. It's very unwiki. I don't think vandalism by anon IP's is a particluar problem. It's delt with quickly and easily by admins. As wikipedia grows we will get more of it, but then again we will get more admins too. I often sit and watch RC for vandalism edits, I know that loads of other admins do too. When I see an anon make an edit I check it, usually it's good, but every now and then it's vandalism. I hit roll back then I check that users other contribtutions, roll back all the vandal edits, warn the vandal, protect the page if necessary, temp block the ip if necessary. This can all be done very easily, with no stress on my part. Most vandals either become legit users or get bored and go away very quickly. I just don't see this type of vandalism at all difficult to deal with, and it's certainly not worth putting restrictions on the thousands of legit anon users in order to combat it. theresa knott 09:03, 21 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
It is known that "RC watching" isn't going to scale in its current form forever though. It used to possible to examine all edits! Now that is hopeless. It looks like a software solution along the lines of being able to tick a box to say "I, Theresa Knott, have checked this edit, and it doesn't appear to be vandalism). Then those who trust Theresa Knott will see that edit greyed out in RC, and know it doesn't need to be checked. I think something along these lines will eventually be required, to avoid a massive amount of redundacy with RC watching. I agree that blocking anons would cause more problems (lack of new blood, more "hidden" vandals because they are have a blue username) than it would solve. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 09:58, 21 May 2004 (UTC)~[reply]
That seems a sensible suggestion. theresa knott 11:13, 21 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
I think that's a great idea. Currently a lot of effort is wasted because each good anon edit to an article like Hitler is checked a hundred times while other articles go ignored. Such a system could also serve a second purpose of increasing the amount of positive feedback in Wikipedia, especially for new users. Instead of greying out the link just have a comment (e.g. Good Work - Username) appended to the edit in RC, watchlists, and page histories that clearly indicates the edit is thought to be a good one. The button to mark a good edit could be right next to rollback, sort of as its friendly opposite. - SimonP 22:15, May 21, 2004 (UTC)
Based on your comments, since the review of new articles seems to be still somewhat manageable, I could lop off the first suggestion and leave the remaining two, which I have still seen no argument against. I'm not convinced that these are "unwiki". They are rather an automated control measure that limits vandal damage while permitting the vast majority of what's already done by good anonymous contributors. I want to reduce the work for admins, and reduce the problems, rather than just depending upon the scalability of lots of new admins as the community grows. -- Stevietheman 15:54, 21 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
I like the idea of having some limits; I also like being able to pop in and fix a typo without logging in (like if I'm at somebody else's house, showing them Wikipedia). As far as the idea of having things checked by a trusted checkerperson, that's much better than the mere anthill method we have now. It works OK for McDonald's but I have to wonder how well it would scale in the long run. ;Bear 23:20, 2004 May 21 (UTC)
I'd like to just have apparent vanity pages by anon users added to the list of what is eligible for speedy delete! The WP:VFD process eats a lot of time that could be better spent. -- Jmabel 05:31, 22 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
On the contrary many people on VfD seem to positively delight in being rude about vanity pages. It would be a shame to deprive them of their daily cathartic moan. More seriously, I would oppose as this one type of article where you quite often find the usual crowd of deletionists saying "DELETE!!!" and then someone comes along and says "well actually, Xyz is a famous cba and I just wrote a decent stub." That needs the five days. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 09:29, 22 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think we should worry about restricting the rights of anons. When it gets to be too much of a hastle, don't allow annons to edit anymore. But that's just me. Crazyeddie 01:08, 2004 May 24 (UTC)

Magie delle Ande: Portale Perù

Buenos dias. Deseo segnalar las mejores paginas web sobre el Perú en idioma italiano. Apartenecen a nuestra asociacion sociocultural Latinoamericana Magie delle Ande. Gracias por su disponibilidad. Gabriele Poli

http://www.peru.sudamerica.it http://www.magiedelleande.it

  • Babelfish translation (FWIW): "Good day. Desire to segnalar the best paginas Web on Peru in Italian language. Apartenecen to our sociocultural association Latin American Magie delle Ande. Thanks for its availability."
  • Mostly close enough; "segnalar" ==> "Señalar ==> "point to"; I believe "Apartenecen" is an un-word; the last sentence is basically "Thanks for helping (more literally "putting yourself at my disposal"). Anyway, he wants Italian-language pages about Peru, presumably either from Wikipedia or elsewhere. -- Jmabel 05:44, 22 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
It seems to me like you've got the intent backwards. The poster has pages on Peru in Italian, and wants us to point at them. But then, I don't speak Italian. -- Cyrius|&#9998 17:21, May 22, 2004 (UTC)
You could be write. It's a little hard to decipher an Italian-speaker's slightly broken Spanish. (Wonder why he thought it was better to address English-speakers in Spanish than in Italian...) -- Jmabel 18:00, 22 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
Which also shows how rusty my Spanish is. -- Cyrius|&#9998 19:18, May 22, 2004 (UTC)
A little OT, but... Does anybody know of a open-source translator project? There has got to be something better than babelfish. Crazyeddie 01:10, 2004 May 24 (UTC)

MediaWiki 1.3

We're going to be phasing in a pre-release version of MediaWiki 1.3 over the next 24 hours or so. Expect minor service disruptions, and the sudden appearance of lots of new features. -- Tim Starling 14:08, May 21, 2004 (UTC)

I've created a new page to serve as a collection of comments and bugs about the new release: m:MediaWiki 1.3 comments and bug reports. Please use only that page to focus the efforts. Dori | Talk 14:42, May 21, 2004 (UTC)
Sweet. I think everyone needs to give props to our very hard-working developers. →Raul654 15:20, May 21, 2004 (UTC)
this feature will only trigger an edit conflict if users attempt to edit the same few lines. Oh. My. God. Who do I buy a beer for??!! Fantastic! Mark Richards 16:03, 21 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
Dibs on the second round, for that and for Links in summaries allowed! - jredmond 16:11, 21 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
*frown* Still no Wikisophia features like chessboards, music and chemistry diagrams, and they put in this timeline thingy, which seems to have just flown out of nowhere? Pfeh. It's a lot easier to write a text timeline than it is to write a text chemical diagram, or to make one with xfig or PPCHTeX Though I definitely appreciate the ability to include wikitext in image captions, and the ability to caption images without thumnailing them. This is the way image markup should be, definitely. Grendelkhan 20:28, 2004 May 22 (UTC)
If I understood previous responses correctly, that whole version of Wikitex was more-or-less a one-man project, and that one man has since disappeared, so I wouldn't hold your breath for it - it's all got to be rewritten from scratch if at all. (I may have the wrong end of the stick there, though). - IMSoP 20:46, 22 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
I'm putzing around with the developers now. Pain in the butt. Might be easier to track down the guy who wrote wikitex. grendelkhan|(blather) 07:35, 2004 May 23 (UTC)

Calendar bot

The calendar on the Japanese Wikipedia is changed each day apparently by hand. I think maybe we could use a calendar bot to automate such tasks.

Red Cross Logo on Main Page wrong

Can someone take a look at the logo for the ARC on the main page? The logo there is of the IFRC, of which the ARC is a member, but the ARC never uses this logo, and it is not the same thing. Can we swap it out for a plain red cross without the border, which is the logo of the ARC? Thanks, Mark Richards 16:40, 21 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

I uploaded a simple red cross here but have no ideas how to change the main page. Thanks! Mark Richards 17:51, 21 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
Main Page doesn't have ARC or anything like that.... What? --Menchi 05:39, 22 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
ARC was founded on May 21 1881; its founding was one of the Featured Anniversaries for May 21. We're now on May 22's Featured Anniversaries, so it's a moot point until next year. - jredmond 05:43, 22 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
That red cross should be a PNG: . I've taken the liberty of uploading a PNG version of it. (One-tenth the size, and no yecchy JPEG artifacts!) grendelkhan|(blather) 05:37, 2004 May 23 (UTC)

RE the article on Margaret Trudeau

I was about to insert a book cover with her image but saw where one had been removed by User:Angela: (cur) (last) . . 23:06, 17 Nov 2003 . . Angela (remove photo - see Wikipedia:Possible copyright infringements) - However, while doing the biography for Errol Flynn’s wife, Lili Damita, I see that the Image: ErrollFlynn.jpg "Cover of My Wicked, Wicked Ways, by Erroll Flynn" was inserted by a Wikipedia Administrator, User:Zoe -- Can someone clarify this? Should I delete Flynn or insert Trudeau? JillandJack 16:56, 21 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

The removal of the Trudeau image isn't material to your case - it was removed on its own merits. Similarly, the Flynn one remains in its. Hopefully what you upload will be acceptable under the "fair use" doctrine - take a look at Wikipedia:Fair use for pointers as to what is and isn't fair use. Fair use is, however, problematic, so it would be better if you can find a public domain image of her, or can persuade the owner of some image to grant us licence to use it here - see Wikipedia:Boilerplate request for permission for sample letters/emails to send. Oh, and my compliments on checking this matter out so thoroughly. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 23:28, 21 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

New features

With the upcoming features I think we should keep in mind that "just because we can doesn't necessarily mean we should." What I mean by that is that the new parametrized templates and categories can make pages pretty hard to figure out. We should probably come up with a policy/guideline about how these two features should be used. As an example, keep a newbie mindset and try and figure out this page: [2] We should preserve the wiki principles of simple and easy editing as much as possible while making use of new features IMO. Dori | Talk 21:26, May 21, 2004 (UTC)

While I agree we could need a policy on new features (we still need one on the navigation bar inflation on the country pages, many now having four of them already), I think the templated version of the infobox is easier to grasp for a newbie, as content and display is separated. I consider the HTML table currently in Belgium much more scary than the template useage one on [test:Belgium]. And for shorter infoboxes, for example a taxobox, the difference will be much more striking. andy 21:37, 21 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
To be honest I'll be glad if that example is as bad as it gets. Apart from writing the template parameters in thisstyle instead of this_style it looks quite readable. I think a newbie would be able to "get it", even if creating new templates would be an advanced user thing. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 21:54, 21 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
I am sure it can get a lot worse than that. Perhaps we will need an obfuscation contest to see just how bad it can get. Dori | Talk 03:47, May 22, 2004 (UTC)


Removing Vandalism from Edit Summary

Is there a way to remove Vandalism from the edit history. My impression is that the general response to Vandalism is to just revert the edit, but I recently noticed a problem where the vandal also included the offensive text in the Edit Summary so that it continues to show up in the edit history. You can see an example on the page history for Ridley Scott or [3] --- Solipsist 06:52, 22 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

there should be some way to effectively delete a change -- rolling back to the previous version, and replacing the preceding edit-version with a note "<timestamp> edit by <user1> deleted by <user2>"; the deleted edits could be stored in a deleted-edits table for 90 days (or forever), but not shown to the average reader. +sj+ 08:52, 2004 May 22 (UTC)
This will be possible to remove with the new software to be uploaded this weekend (that is, Real[ly] Soon Now) - sysops can import an entire article history using Special:Import (or something) which takes the same output as Special:Export (the XML output that Yahoo wanted from us, IIRC). Obviously this system will be ripe for abuse (but we trust our sysops, don't we? ;-))...
HTH.
James F. (talk) 10:50, 22 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
A minor correction: Special:Export has been around longer than the Yahoo-related thing - unless they're going to change the format, that is, and annoy the Wikinfo folks, who've had an importer for some time (come to think, maybe that's not such a bad idea ;-)) - IMSoP 20:39, 22 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

http://www.tinyurl.com Very handy. Andries 09:49, 22 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Also great for hiding pornolinks, shocksite links, and affiliate program links. Very handy indeed. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 11:07, 22 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
But what happens if tinyurl go out of business or stop offering a free service, all the links stop working and there is no indication where the link is supposed to go to. -- Popsracer 11:59, 22 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed. Full links should be provided here. -- Stevietheman 15:22, 22 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
They claim on the webpage that the service will not stop. Andries 15:37, 22 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
And we're soooo sure they won't go out of business - do they even have a revenue source? Not to be a pessimist here, but I don't see what's the point, since it's only a minor inconvenience to use the appropriate wiki markup. Johnleemk 16:42, 22 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, the Wikimarkup allows you to display the link in whatever guise you like anyway so I don't see any advantage there. TinyUrl comes into its own in emails and forums where clients routinely leave you cutting and pasting - but that's not a problem here. --bodnotbod 18:41, May 22, 2004 (UTC)
Once there was a similar service, IIRC it was http://shlk.com. They went out of business. Why add a vulnerability when it is totally unnecessary? pstudier 23:45, 2004 May 22 (UTC)

How Far Should the Extent of Writing Articles About Places Go?

Not sure where else to write this, so I'm asking here: How far should the extent of writing articles about places go? Let's use Malaysia as an example. There's district level (Petaling). Or you can go for subdivisions, or mukim in Malay, which would be, for example, Damansara. And some subdivisions have several townships in them, so you might have an article like Bandar Utama. How far should this go? I see some villages in the United States which have populations in three or four digits, and yet have articles, and as townships presumably have a comparable if not even larger population, I presume such articles are ok. Is this alright? Johnleemk 10:14, 22 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

In short, yes, it is. Anything that's NPOV and verifiable is all right, particularly if it has some historical significance - and it's safe to assume that each and every settlement on this planet of ours has historical significance, if only in the date it was conquered by whoever conquered it last. Feel free to include every town you can think of. As for the US articles, in case you wondered, most of these were generated by a bot - an automated software - that imported US Census information (copyright-free, like most US publications) into Wikipedia. -- Itai 15:00, 22 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
There have been some unremarkable parks and localities given their own articles. When these have been listed on VfD I believe the consensus has been that these should not be deleted. What seems to happen is that a newbie, or just an ethusiast thinks it would be fun to include details of their local park or area. Someone argues, not unfairly, that is unencyclopaedic. But the consensus (I think) has been that;
  • They do little harm
  • A new visitor who finds their local shopping centre listed will think "wow! Wikipedia is amazing!"
  • There are far worse edits being made to take up Admin time
That's just the way I've observed it - I'm sure there's an opposing view. --bodnotbod 18:49, May 22, 2004 (UTC)

new version of the software does not work

The new version of the software used on meta does not work on IE5 (Mac). It is completely impossible to view the content of the page, or to edit. 83.109.133.44 12:35, 22 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

We tested with 5.2 which seemed to work fine. More specific data about browser version and the exact problem would be helpful. If it's a layout glitch, a screenshot would be nice as well. -- Gabriel Wicke 02:56, 23 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
I am currently using Internet Explorer 5.0 on MacOS 8.5.1. Here is a screenshot. Wolfram 06:06, 23 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
Ok, we didn't test 5.0. I'll try to disable styles for 5.0 (it's very buggy), the look is a bit like nostalgia then. I'd recommend an upgrade to Safari, , Opera, Camino or IE5.2 in any case. It might be possible to find a half-working style for 5.0, it would be necessary to coordinate the tweak/test session on irc if possible (irc://irc.freenode.net/mediawiki/). -- Gabriel Wicke 17:31, 23 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
I have upgraded to IE 5.1.7, which is actually working! (This is the highest version of IE for Macs not running OS X). Wolfram 18:31, 23 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

10% of profit to Wikimedia

I'm a big fan of Linux and of its Tux mascot. Wanting a Tux sticker and not finding any on the internet, I manufactured some, selling them by myself (see Tux Sticker). I'm also a contributor of the french Wikipedia and wanting to share with the community, I decided to give 10% of all profits to the Wikimedia foundation. Dirac

Thank you, Wikimedia eats hardware for breakfast it seems :) Dori | Talk 20:49, May 22, 2004 (UTC)

Cyd Ho Sau-lan Cyd Ho

It seems like the article and re-dir should be reversed. I don't want to ruin the page histories by doing it via cut&paste, but I can't move it because I can't delete the redir. Can some admin do it? Niteowlneils 17:52, 22 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

The redirect had no unique edit history to save, so I went ahead and deleted it and moved the page. For future reference: Wikipedia:Redirects for deletion. -- Cyrius|&#9998 18:17, May 22, 2004 (UTC)

Verdana bug revealed

This may be of interest to those who use Verdana as the default font in their browsers.  This bug has already caused some misunderstandings.  See Verdana#Combining characters bug — Monedula 20:48, 22 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

And recently the default style of Wikisource has been changed — exactly to use Verdana!  This should be reversed ASAP, because there are some accentuated Russian texts there, and Verdana shows accents in the wrong places! — Monedula 21:20, 22 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Is this only the case in one specific version of Verdana or in all of them? This would be a major bug in Windows- Verdana is one of the most common fonts on the net today because of it's good readability especially on screens and in small sizes. Arial might be an alternative (if it doesn't suffer the same bug). In any case, you can change the font in your user stylesheet like this:
#bodyContent { font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; }
-- Gabriel Wicke 19:17, 23 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
The font copyright says "Typeface and data © 1996 Microsoft Corporation", so perhaps the font didn't change since 1996 and most probably there are no other versions of Verdana around.  The normal (non-bold non-italic) font version is 2.43, and bold, italic and bold italic Verdanas have version 2.40. — Monedula 20:02, 23 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
Bitstream Vera Sans is actually the first font. [ alerante | “” 00:03, 24 May 2004 (UTC) ][reply]

"Washington Post", "The Washington Post", or "The Washington Post March?"

Believing that the correct title of the famous Sousa march was The Washington Post, I confidently tinkered, moving The Washington Post March to The Washington Post (march), and editing articles accordingly. (E. g. in The Washington Post I wrote, "The Washington Post is also the title of a march..."

Then I decided to see whether I could notate the melody of the opening strain. And found to my chagrin that one of my three recordings simply calls it Washington Post (no "The", although some of the other marches, like "The Thunderer," had their titles given with a "The"). Another calls it The Washington Post... and a third calls it The Washington Post March.

a) Anyone know which really is the correct title of the march?

b) Anyone know a convenient way to resolve this sort of question? Googling isn't it, both because of the difficulty of constructing proper searches to pick up only one of the three variants, but also because it is obvious that writers are not punctilious about the title of this work and "most frequent" would not necessarily be "correct." For example, I'm pretty darn sure the title of the famous Strauss waltz is "On the Beautiful Blue Danube", not "The Blue Danube waltz," but both give almost identical numbers of Google hits.

Zen answers, such as that it doesn't matter because nobody cares, or that the correctness of the title of marches is not altered by adding the word "march" to a title that lacks one or removing the word "march" from a title that has one, are not needed. (And no, don't bother to tell me that the actual title of the Strauss waltz is "An Der Schonen Blauen Danau...") Dpbsmith 00:21, 23 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

I'm a big fan of Sousa, so I checked my CD from the US Marine Corps band. On that CD, it's labeled as The Washington Post March. I realize it's not definitive, but it's a pretty solid indication IMO. I figure the Marines know what they're doing. ;-) -- Dan Carlson 15:08, May 23, 2004 (UTC)
Indeed. Is that the same one I have, "Sousa Original?" from the Musical Heritage Society? On that one, about 2/3 of the titles are listed as ending with the word "march;" "Manhattan Beach March", "Saber and Spurs March","The Gridiron Club March", King Cotton March... But OTOH Frederick Fennell, who made his career recording Sousa marches with the Eastman Wind Ensemble for Mercury Records, also knows what he's doing (and is an academician), and "Hands Across the Sea" CD lists it as "Washington Post" (no "The", no "March"). Oh, and http://www.crystalrecords.com/Sousa.html is selling what they claim to be remastered versions of recordings made by the Sousa Band from 1897-1930, who should also know what they're doing, and if the Web listing is an accurate transcription of the record labels, it's "The Washington Post". The Britannica's article on Sousa refers to "The Washington Post." The Columbia Encyclopedia prefers "The Washington Post March" . Dpbsmith 16:31, 23 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

tokipona interwiki

Language links to tokipona: aren't working any more. (See, for example, Drug, which ends with the text "tokipona:ilo nasa" because the link isn't interpreted correctly. Can someone fix that, maybe? Marnanel 05:39, May 23, 2004 (UTC)

User:Chameleon's changing '-' to "—"

I don't see why they should all be changed to "—". At large font sizes an "—" is *huge* and looks very ugly. A '-' works just as well and doesn't stand out as much.

Darrien 17:19, 2004 May 23 (UTC)

This perceived problem is a perceived font problem. Argue to have the Wikipedia font changed if you feel its m-dashes are too long. In the meanwhile, if a dash (—) is meant, a dash should be used; if a hyphen (-) is meant, a hyphen should be used. Read any book from a major publisher — you won't find them using hyphens for dashes, either single, as you like them (-), or double (--), as most wikipedians seem to. Bad punctuation is ugly to educated people Chameleon 17:35, 23 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

It is not a font problem at all. I'm surprised an "educated" person would expect a hyphen to have the same boldness as a dash. Perhaps you should concentrate on changing the all the 'U's and 'J's to 'V's and 'I's.
Darrien 17:43, 2004 May 23 (UTC)
I think it'd be better, more wikilike, to have '--' render as '—'. (I agree that a distinction between hyphens and em-dashes should be made.) If there's no burning need to use HTML entities for something, they shouldn't be used. I vote for '--'. (Then again, we could go the TeX route and use '-' for the hyphen, '--' for the en-dash (used for ranges, like 10--25), and '---' for the em-dash (used for saparation---like this---of text). Higher-quality typesetting, fits well into the syntax ('----' is a horizontal rule, which is kinda sorta like the god-king of all dashes), and no more ugly HTML entities in the wikitext. Sounds like a win to me. grendelkhan|(blather) 18:45, 2004 May 23 (UTC)
Yes, I agree that there should be automatic conversion. That way, people could just type "--" or "---" and correct dashes would appear. That would be great. However, until this is implemented, we will have to use HTML, in the same way that we would have to use <i> </i> if we didn't have '' '' — Chameleon 19:12, 23 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
Automated conversion is a good idea. But & m d a s h ; (rendered as —) isn't supported in all browsers, as far as I know. And "--" seems to me a usenet style for m-dashes, not for n-dashes. (A related probleme is, btw, the difference between "some text ? some extra text ? some text" and "some text?some extra text?some more text" in different languages.) -- till we ☼☽ | Talk 18:54, 23 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
& mdash; displays correctly in all modern browsers these days. Let's work for forward, nor backward compatibility. Also bear in mind that "-", "--" or "---" for dashes do not display correctly (—) in any browser. — Chameleon 19:12, 23 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
We did have automatic conversion up and running for a couple of months ago: really cool, except that it broke the wikitable formatting commands and was deactivated in a matter of minutes. It'd be nice to have it back, but I'm afraid I'm not a programmer.
Re the em-dashes and how they can look too long (a lot longer than a capital M here in Tahoma): the alternative is to use en-dashes (spaced), which is sanctioned by a fair number of schools of typography and punctuationalists. –Hajor 01:14, 24 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia running really slow

Wikipedia is running so slow today that most of my attempts at posting are timing out. What's going on? RickK 21:51, 23 May 2004 (UTC) [reply]

Just overload. — Monedula 22:11, 23 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
Hopefully not the MediaWiki 1.3 transition. -- till we ☼☽ | Talk 22:32, 23 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

New Creative Commons migration plan

Orginal post

Okay, new Creative Commons migration plan. No horrendous programming involved. For a list of reasons why I think migrating toward dual liscensing under both the Creative Commons and the GFDL is a Good Thing, please visit my user page.

  1. Proceed with the getting permission phase. For those just tuning in, this consists of:
    1. Changing the submission copyright notice so new, post-changeover material will be released under both Creative Commons and GFDL.
    2. Presenting registered users with a dialog box at their next login asking for permission to release pre-changeover submitted material under the Creative Commons (in addition to the GFDL).
    3. The Wikimedia Foundation agrees to release material contributed by it under the Creative Commons.
  2. Mark in the page histories which versions were submitted by dual-licensers, and which were submitted GFDL-only. The CC and GFDL (or GNU) logos would be a good marker.
    1. Also mark all versions before the first GFDL-only version with a “This version is licensed in its entirety under both the Creative Commons and GFDL.” notice.
    2. Mark all versions after the first GFDL-only version and before the first “liberated” version with a “This version may contain material that is only available under the GFDL.” notice.
  3. If an article has never had a GFDL-only submission, have a copyright notice in the article saying “This article is available under both the Creative Commons and the GFDL” or something to that effect.
  4. Wait a month or so to give time for registered users to give their permission.

Then:

  1. If an article has had a GFDL-only submission in its history, have a link in the article saying “Portions of this article maybe available under the Creative Commons. Click here for a Creative Commons compatible version.”
  2. The Creative Commons compatible page will be “seeded” with the last version of the article that hasn't been tainted by a GFDL-only submission.
    1. If the first version of the article was GFDL-only, the page will start off blank.
    2. This will effectively fork the article.
    3. In addition to the usual submission copyright notice, add a line like this: “This submission contains no material that is licensed solely under the GFDL.”
    4. Users can then manually add CC-licensed material from later versions of the article.
  3. When the Creative Commons compatible version is just as good as the original version, replace the original article with the CC version.
    1. Since the exact moment when the CC version is just as good as the original is a matter of opinion, I suggest that registered users should report candidates to the sysops, who will then do the actual replacing.
    2. Mark this version and all later versions in the page history with the “This version is licensed in its entirety...” note.
    3. Have a "This version is available under both the Creative..." notice in the now liberated article.

Does anybody see any problems with this plan?

Crazyeddie 00:58, 2004 May 24 (UTC)

Cyrius

I may be reading this wrong, but doesn't it mean we have to start over from scratch? -- Cyrius|&#9998 01:16, May 24, 2004 (UTC)
Okay, I'm now regretting not putting in a bit more of an introduction. I left off a lot of intro material in the interets of brevity. Anyway... Starting over from scratch is exactly what I'm trying to avoid. This plan would fork articles that might contain GFDL-only material into a regular (GFDL only) and Creative Commons + GFDL versions until they could be combined. Crazyeddie 01:49, 2004 May 24 (UTC)
You realize that "articles that might contain GFDL-only material" is nearly synonymous with "every article on the entire site", right? -- Cyrius|&#9998 02:23, May 24, 2004 (UTC)
Oh, brother, am I ever. The CC fork would be reverted back to the first version that would be CC compatiable. By what I mean by CC compatiable, read down. Crazyeddie 02:34, 2004 May 24 (UTC)

Dori

It's not going to happen, many users have just plainly left. What about anons? What about permissions already obtained from other sites? Dori | Talk 01:19, May 24, 2004 (UTC)
Anons and registered users who haven't yet give permission, or users that have refused permission would be considered "GFDL-onlies" whose submissions would have to be worked around. I'm not sure what you mean by permissions already obtained from other sites. If it helps, a user who has submitted GFDL material that's copyrighted by someone else would have to refuse permission. In theory, they could give permission for each individual permission, but I think it would be better to just count them out entirely. Crazyeddie 01:58, 2004 May 24 (UTC)

RikK

Several objections:

  • Presenting registered users with a dialog box at their next login asking for permission to release pre-changeover submitted material under the Creative Commons (in addition to the GFDL).
Some people, such as myself, don't ever log out, so would never see this unless their cookie was somehow damaged.
  • The Wikimedia Foundation agrees to release material contributed by it under the Creative Commons.
Why would they do that?
  • Mark in the page histories which versions were submitted by dual-licensers, and which were submitted GFDL-only. The CC and GFDL (or GNU) logos would be a good marker
How do you plan on doing that? Manually? And what if the "version" consists of a one-character minor change?
  • Also mark all versions before the first GFDL-only version with a “This version is licensed in its entirety under both the Creative Commons and GFDL.” notice.
What is the first GFDL-only version? The current Wikipedia, as we speak, is GFDL. There is no first version.
  • Mark all versions after the first GFDL-only version and before the first “liberated” version with a “This version may contain material that is only available under the GFDL.” notice.
What does "liberated" mean? And what if the article is GFDL only? Do you somehow make it unviewable? And why would you do that?
  • If an article has had a GFDL-only submission in its history, have a link in the article saying “Portions of this article maybe available under the Creative Commons. Click here for a Creative Commons compatible version.”
I still don't see how you plan on splitting the different edits out.
  • The Creative Commons compatible page will be “seeded” with the last version of the article that hasn't been tainted by a GFDL-only submission.
I find the use of the term "tainted" highly offensive, and suggest you re-think not only your terminology, but your entire idea as to why you think this entire, man-hours intensive project is a good idea.
  • If the first version of the article was GFDL-only, the page will start off blank.
STRONGLY oppose. Wikipedia is Wikipedia, not the "Creative Commons Wikipedia."
  • Since the exact moment when the CC version is just as good as the original is a matter of opinion, I suggest that registered users should report candidates to the sysops, who will then do the actual replacing.
Nice of you to volunteer the immense amount of work involved for us sysops to do.

As you may see from my above comments, I see no good coming of this project and must ask once again, just WHY do you think this is needed? RickK 01:24, 24 May 2004 (UTC) [reply]

Crazyeddie's Reply to RikK

Okay.... You bring up a number of good points, but I guess I better start out with a general declaration of principles. First off, I believe that the entire reason that the Wikipedia didn't start out under the Creative Commons from Day 1 is that it simply wasn't invented yet. The GFDL was simply the best available at the time. I have nothing against GFDL myself, but I'm told that if a outside agency wishes to use a Wikipedia article under the GFDL, they would have to attach 12 pages of legalese along with a 1-2 page article.
The new wikis that have been inspired by the Wikipedia have looked at the copyright choices, and by and large, have chosen Creative Commons, even though this means they have to work completely from scratch! For example, the LQwiki, which I contribute to, is having to write an article on Richard Stallman from scratch, even though there is a mature, multi-page Wikipedia article, whose creators, in all likely-hood, would love for us to use. (This initative is not sponsered by the LQwiki BTW, it's all my stupid idea.)
Essentially, I feel that the Creative Commons better reflects the spirit and intent of the average Wikipedian than the GFDL, and that the sole reason for the use of the GFDL is historical. Further, if the Wikipedia doesn't migrate toward Creative Commons, than the Wikipedia's work will have to be reduplicated from scratch. There is even the possibility that the Wikipedia may fork. Almost any thing will be less work than having to make the Wikipedia all over again. Crazyeddie 02:08, 2004 May 24 (UTC)
Now on to your individual points:
  • Presenting registered users with a dialog box at their next login asking for permission to release pre-changeover submitted material under the Creative Commons (in addition to the GFDL).
Some people, such as myself, don't ever log out, so would never see this unless their cookie was somehow damaged.
This is a minor technical difficulty. Is there anyway to force users to logoff? (Sorry if this seems dismissive. It's just that I think that it's too early to worry much about questions like this while big ones like "Why are we doing this again?" Still need to be answered.)


  • The Wikimedia Foundation agrees to release material contributed by it under the Creative Commons.
Why would they do that?
Maybe I should expand this a mite: "The Wikimedia Foundation agrees to release Wikipedia content that it created itself into the Creative Commons." By this I mean such things as the US city articles created by Rambot. (I'm assuming that Rambot was created by the Wikimedia people.) The main reason why the Wikipedia has not already migrated to Creative Commons is that the individual contributors, not the Wikimedia Foundation, holds copyright. All this means is that they agree to release whatever content that they hold copyright into the Creative Commons. If they don't wish to agree to a simple thing like that, then this whole plan is moot. As for why they would want to do this, see the "general declaration of principles".
  • Also mark all versions before the first GFDL-only version with a “This version is licensed in its entirety under both the Creative Commons and GFDL.” notice.
What is the first GFDL-only version? The current Wikipedia, as we speak, is GFDL. There is no first version.
By first GFDL-only version, I mean "the first (by first, I mean by earliest date of submission) version of an article that was submitted by someone not in the CC-permission database and was submitted before the CC changeover date. Every version after that, until the remerging with the CC fork could contain material that is liscensed only under the GFDL.

Cyrius

Which means we have to start over to achieve dual licensing. -- Cyrius|&#9998 02:50, May 24, 2004 (UTC)
No, I think this fork method will work. I'm just trying to iron out the bugs.Crazyeddie 02:57, 2004 May 24 (UTC)
If you have to "fork" all the way back to the first non-GFDL-only version, you're going back to a blank page for nearly all of the pages in Wikipedia. -- Cyrius|&#9998 03:01, May 24, 2004 (UTC)
This forking would start sometime after the inital phase of the changeover. (I said a month.) By this time, most registered users who are going to do so would have given permission for their previously submitted work to be released under the Creative Commons. So the only versions that are GFDL-only would have been submitted by anons, or users who have not given permission or have refused permission. I believe that a majority of versions by that point will be CC+GFDL. So most articles in the fork would have something in them, but it would be a very earlier version of the article.Crazyeddie 03:12, 2004 May 24 (UTC)
My experience looking at page histories says that we'd have to throw away an enormous amount of work to go all the way back to before anon edits. It just won't work. -- Cyrius|&#9998 03:16, May 24, 2004 (UTC)
From where I sit, either we fork the articles or we fork the project. Manually copy and pasting already existing, CC+GFDL material is less work then creating the same material from scratch. And this work would be done mainly by those who need the material under the CC. Unless the lawyers work out away for GFDL material to be released under CC, I'll keep trying to think of a way to make this as easy as possible. Crazyeddie 03:29, 2004 May 24 (UTC)

Crazyeddie's reply continued

  • Mark all versions after the first GFDL-only version and before the first “liberated” version with a “This version may contain material that is only available under the GFDL.” notice.
What does "liberated" mean? And what if the article is GFDL only? Do you somehow make it unviewable? And why would you do that?
By liberated, I mean the first version where the CC+GFDL fork remerges with the orginal GFDL-only fork. The GFDL-only versions will still be visible, even after the remerging (through the page histories). All this messages means is that you can't use material from this particular version of the article under the Creative Commons. You can still use it under the GFDL.
  • If an article has had a GFDL-only submission in its history, have a link in the article saying “Portions of this article maybe available under the Creative Commons. Click here for a Creative Commons compatible version.”
I still don't see how you plan on splitting the different edits out.
Hmmm, that should be "if a version of an article has had a previous GFDL-only submission,...." The link would go to a seperate wiki page- the CC+GFDL fork. I guess a good place to put it would be en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CC_GFDL_fork/<page_name> This fork page, at first, would be the first version of the article before the GFDL-only material was submitted. Users then could add CC+GFDL material from later versions manually. I hope that explains it.
  • If the first version of the article was GFDL-only, the page will start off blank.
STRONGLY oppose. Wikipedia is Wikipedia, not the "Creative Commons Wikipedia."
The only reason I can see for you to get this angry is if you think I mean that the main, regular, GFDL-only article would be blanked. I'm only talking about the forked CC+GFDL article which most people will never see.

Cyrius

You mean the start-from-(almost-)scratch CC+GFDL article. This is looking like a worse and worse idea. Even if you got the majority of active logged-in users to retroactively agree, and even if you wrote software to handle chopping out the singly-licensed bits, you would still have to go through 90+% of articles manually to rewrite them back into a coherent state. It simply will not work. -- Cyrius|&#9998 03:45, May 24, 2004 (UTC)
The only thing I can say in defense, is that it's the only way I've come up with to get wikipedia content released into the Creative Commons besides waiting for the FSF and CC lawyers to solve it, which I'm not sure can be done. Crazyeddie 03:54, 2004 May 24 (UTC)
The only way that this idea would work would be if a version of the GFDL were to come out which explicitly cited the CC license as an equivalent license. (And what license would it be, anyway?) That would allow the cross-licensing to occur legally. Otherwise, it's a violation of the GFDL, and just too much trouble to manage the fork, with too much immediate chaos, for too little gain. And I'm unconvinced that the CC license is better suited to Wikipedia - the GFDL is really the revolutionary license. Others just followed along. Snowspinner 03:49, 24 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
I've long wondered, if a version of the GFDL came out that was compatable with the CC, would older versions still be compatabile with the new GFDL? That's one reason I'm not willing to wait for the lawyers. Crazyeddie 03:54, 2004 May 24 (UTC)~

Crazyeddie's Reply continued

  • Since the exact moment when the CC version is just as good as the original is a matter of opinion, I suggest that registered users should report candidates to the sysops, who will then do the actual replacing.
Nice of you to volunteer the immense amount of work involved for us sysops to do.
I do apologize for that. It does seem to be the nature of sysops for work to be dumped on them, doesn't it. This was only one alternative that occured to me. The problem is that remerging the two forks will not be a simple decision to be taken lightly. If it's done too soon, somebody will revert to a previous, GFDL-only version, or inject GFDL-only material. However, like the "some people don't logoff" problem though, the exact solution to this problem can wait until the bigger issues of this project are settled. Crazyeddie 03:54, 2004 May 24 (UTC)

Well that's the best I can do for now. Crazyeddie 03:54, 2004 May 24 (UTC)

Blank page?

Whenever I log into wikipedia ,I get a blank page.I am using aol version 8 plus and internet explorer version 6. 

       S. A. G.

Australian post code pages

Since people don't read the Talk:List of Australian post codes page ;) I'll copy what I wrote here:

Would the table I did a few months back at Australian States and Territories (with postcodes, area codes, etc) be better suited here? Or linked from here? Or merged with this page, or something like that? Perhaps all this would be better suited at Communications in Australia? (to follow the naming format of the CIA World Factbook, that many country pages on Wikipedia are developed from) --Chuq 04:33, 17 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
I also notice that additional postcode list articles Postcodes: Victoria, Postcodes: Tasmania, etc. Have been made - not even capitalised, wikified, etc. Some sort of standardisation of this articles would be good. --Chuq 03:22, 24 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_archive_2004-09-26&oldid=3711220"