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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Ram-Man (talk | contribs) at 02:54, 24 December 2002 (removed source text discussion (kept links). Moved wallace discussion to archive). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
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Moved discussion

Feature Requests, Enhancements and Suggestions

  • Time-Independent version of Recent Changes: Possibly viewed in terms of number of page views since. Alternatively, Unexamined Changes, those pages which have changed but no one has checked.
  • Consider moving from sourceforge to something such as Bugzilla or a stripped down version of the sourceforge code. Also considered moving Wikipedia to BerliOS, but it would mean moving the implied private user database to a third party.
  • Confirmation box for editing an earlier version: Disliked because it makes reverting more troublesome. There is already a bold alert which should be sufficient.
  • Add a floating quickbar on the right.
  • Add the ability to talk to non-logged in users (IPs).
  • What we need is a basic trust metric, a way to distinguish in Recent Changes etc. between an anonymous, unknown user and a well established Wikipedian with a good reputation. Also, being able to talk to anons would make it possible to explain to them why vandalism on Wikipedia is futile (w/ a "Why vandalism doesn't work" page)

Orphan articles doesn't seem to have a "discuss this page" option - so you get the discuss here :-)

Some of the orphan articles are disambiguation pages eg Alton (which I haven't linked to since that would unorphan it). Some are almost certainly 'alternative' spellings - probably where some original link to the wrong spelling has been corrected but the redirect from the wrong spelling remains.

I assume that Orphans are generally considered poor. Would it be sensible to do links from the talk:good-spelling-article page to bad-spelling-redirects, or even from talk:orphan-article to orphan-article to cause them to be removed from the orphan list? -- SGBailey 09:41 Dec 15, 2002 (UTC)

There is a page with one purpose in life: to de-orphan disambiguation pages. See Wikipedia:Links to disambiguating pages. -- Stephen Gilbert 13:56 Dec 15, 2002 (UTC)
Disambiguation pages should be placed on Wikipedia:Links to disambiguating pages - one of its functions is exactly to remove these pages from the 'orphans' page. Bad spellings should normally not appear on the orphans page because redirect pages do not (at least last time I checked). Any incorrect spelling that does occur is probably an unwanted duplicate article. Andre Engels 13:59 Dec 15, 2002 (UTC)

If another editor adds a unreferenced statement to an article I dont think is true, should it be there or should it be removed? I.e: Him: Most people think Coke tastes better than Pepsi Me: No Him: Yes Me: No

Get my point? --BL

What is the evidence? If there is some sort of market research study that says this, we should quote it. If it's just a straw poll of friends, or a general hunch, it doesn't belong here. -- Tarquin
I think that was meant to be an example rather than 'the real thing'(pun unintentional). Mintguy
LOL. Yes it was an example. A statement which I cant prove the opposite and the other editor cant prove. Who has the burden of proof? And is there any exceptions like "but everybody knows that!" for example. --BL
ah. I see. Oops. we could move this discussion to Wikipedia:Avoid blanket statements. -- Tarquin

Why did Stephen Gilbert block my address when I tried to make a minor correction to the Arthur Machen bio? The fact that The Hill of Dreams is semi-autobiographical is well known, there's no "perhaps" about it. This is hardly "vandalizing."

You apparently had the unfortunate distinction of being behind the same AOL proxy server as a blocked vandal ([1], [2]). --Brion 20:24 Dec 15, 2002 (UTC)

A bit of background then a question...

There was a page 'Surrey' which was moved to 'Surrey, England'. 'Surrey' itself became a disambiguation page. It turned out that there were many links to Surrey that wanted Surrey, England, none (or VERY few wanting other Surreys).


Thus I decided to move 'Surrey' to 'Surrey, (disambiguation)' and 'Surrey, England' to 'Surrey'. All except the latter worked. The latter should have worked as at that point 'Surrey' was a redirect with no history. Why was the move rejected?

The workround was to leave 'Surrey, England' and change the 'Surrey' redirect to point to 'Surrey, England'. It works but is clunky and unclean. -- SGBailey 23:16 Dec 16, 2002 (UTC)

Because Surrey was not a redirect to the page you were trying to move over it (Surrey, England). --Brion 23:42 Dec 16, 2002 (UTC)
Maybe I'm hallucinating, but today I see that 'Surrey' is the article and 'Surrey, England' the redirect. I assume that someone did the chaneg somehow, but there is no sign in the older versions log of "Surrey". Can you explain How/Why/When etc please. -- SGBailey 16:59 Dec 17, 2002 (UTC)
I deleted Surrey and moved Surrey, England to Surrey. --mav

While working in Wiktionary I tried to combine the IPA character (593) ɑ with the combining tilde (771) ̃ but this gives me ɑ̃ where the tilde does not go over top of the other character. What am I doing wrong? Eclecticology

Behavior of combining diacritics seems to be highly dependent on the output system. I can't get them to combine on Linux (tried Mozilla 1.0.1, 1.3 alpha and Opera 6.1), but on Win98 it works like a charm in Mozilla; the IPA character doesn't show up in IE6, but there is a tilde on top of the little box. ;) I would recommend against trying to use these unless you really have to, it's just not widely supported. --Brion 02:32 Dec 17, 2002 (UTC)
OK and thanks. I guess I'll just have to live with it, and the ugly overhanging tilde when I try to represent the French nasalized vowels. BTW the problem does not seem to be there when I don't need to use a UTF code for the underlying letter thus x̃ and ÿ̃ seem to work fine. Eclecticology 07:27 Dec 17, 2002 (UTC)

Eventually, we should come up with some nice format for articles about chemical compounds. Right now, I like caffeine: a picture of the 3-d structure, a picture of the chemical structure, the chemical formula and the correct name. Maybe the CAS number should be added for completeness. I know that 3-d structure images can be produced with the program rasmol. Does anyone know a nice program for producing the 2-d structure formulas? Right now, I use JChemPaint and I don't like it. AxelBoldt 03:36 Dec 17, 2002 (UTC)

One site that I like for chemical models is http://people.ouc.bc.ca/woodcock/molecule/molecule.html . It has links to Chemscape Chime at http://www.mdli.com/ and "Rasmol", but that link does not currently work. Rasmol has something to do with the University of Massachusetts, so it's likely that the link is only broken. Eclecticology

I've contributed a couple of images (Baritonesax.jpg and Xiangqiboard.png). The page on the image use policy says to describe them on their description pages. How do I get to their description pages? Could someone point me to the description page of an image that's been done correctly?

Simply click on the image to get to the description page. Also, when you upload the file everything you put in the upload summary is placed into the image's description page. See Image:Great Horned Owl.USFWS-thumb.jpg for an example of what goes onto one of these pages. --mav

Here's another new user question: How does one indicate pronunciation in an entry. Is it acceptable/desirable to do so? I haven't find any information about this. The example I have in mind is the Arkansas River and the city of Arkansas City, Kansas. The common pronunciation of Arkansas is like AR-kan-saw, but we Kansans do things a bit differently. The river starts in Colorado with the above mentioned pronunciation, but as it crosses into Kansas, the pronunciation becomes like ar-KAN-zus. The city name is also pronounced the latter way. The river reverts to the "normal" pronunciation when it enters Oklahoma. Thanks for any advice. Zeaner 00:03 Dec 18, 2002 (UTC)

Even if that's a somewhat vague answer: I think the criterion should be the relevance of the pronunciation. A Frenchman with only a basic knowledge of English asking a Londoner how to get to Beauchamp Place (near Harrods) will never be able to make himself understood, so it may be important to point that out. Also, in a bookshop it can be quite embarrassing if you have no idea how to pronounce names like Carl Hiaasen or Chuck Palahniuk. I don't know if similar misunderstandings could crop up if a tourist said AR-kan-saw instead of ar-KAN-zus. --KF 00:19 Dec 18, 2002 (UTC)

How to represent pronunciation is one of those issues that keeps getting discussed but never resolved. Take a look at Talk:Language and Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (under the "Pronunciation" section) for some previous discussions. In your particular case, I think your information is very interesting, so I would include it just as you have here, with a homemade pronunciation guide. If the issue of how to represent pronunciation ever gets sorted out, someone can go back and change it. If not, it communicates what you want to say perfectly well. -- Stephen Gilbert 00:38 Dec 18, 2002 (UTC)

The absolute best way to represent pronunciation, of course, is to record a sound file (preferably encode as Ogg Vorbis) and upload it. --Brion

Is pronunciation of a printed proper name or words on Wiki a real issue? If you're from Oklahoma, you might pronounce "oil": all, or from New Zealand Oy-el. Dictionaries do help. Dialects vary all over the world. BF

Anyway to control line spacing of a paragraph? -- kt2


Sure: <p style="line-height: 200%">Bla bla bla</p> Use sparingly. :) --Brion

In a spanish web forum a user asked about the copyright situation of notes taken in a class. Any comments? --AN

Well, if the person doesn't feel qualified to organize the information herself and express it herself, maybe it isn't a good idea to do that particular article. The legalistic answer is that copyright protects the expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves. It would certainly be illegal to write down the professor's words verbatim and then put them on wikipedia. There's also the issue of plagiarism, which can be addressed by properly crediting the source, but again, it just raises the question of whether the idea was appropriate in the first place. --User:Bcrowell

I'm a newbie in need of advice. After happily working on some articles about physics and other noncontroversial subjects, I did some editing on these articles: astrology, horoscope, and Walter Mercado (an astrologer). Now I seem to be getting into "edit wars." Any suggestions on how to handle this? I felt that the original articles were completely credulous about astrology, and lacked any pretense of a neutral point of view. The Walter Mercado article is particularly goofy; if you look at its history, it started out with an anonymous user sticking in a fluffy, adulatory fan piece. Then someone edited it to try to restore a neutal point of view. Then a user came along and changed it back, and then I edited it again. How long does this go on? -- User:Bcrowell

Well, it depends on the dispute in question. I looked at astrology and Walter Mercado. For the latter, it seems you are the only person who has edited it since November, so there's no conflict there. Generally, when two Wikipedians disagree on edits or article content, they take it to the discussion page of the article in question, which I see you've done. I usually find it helpful to stop editing until some sort of agreement is reached in discussion; this tends to keep the other party from getting defensive and avoids edit wars. The vast majority of Wikipedians are reasonable people, and agreements are often reached quickly, as longas both parties recognize that they are working on the article in good faith. Oh, and welcome to Wikipedia! We're glad to have you here. -- Stephen Gilbert 00:48 Dec 20, 2002 (UTC)
Well, it's pretty discouraging if you look at the history of how the zodiac and Walter Mercado articles have been edited. People who don't believe in astrology have repeatedly tried to introduce a neutral point of view, but over and over again the true believers have deleted their text and reverted to a completely credulous, one-sided view. -- User:Bcrowell
I think we're making some progress now, because some new people have gotten involved in working on the articles, and it's no longer just a back-and-forth between me and User:Eclecticology. Right now, I think it would be helpful if someone without an agenda could go over some of the most controversial articles such as horoscope and just edit them for style, so they don't read so much like "one person says this, and another person says this." -- User:Bcrowell
In my own defense, I know nothing about Mercado so I have said nothing there at all. User:Bcrowell can apply whatever POV material he wants, and I won't interfere with it. In the other articles he has insistead on his POV that astrology is pseudoscience should dominate all ithers, and insists on a one-sided idiosyncratic interpretation of scientific method. He fails to understand that his true believer syndrome can afflict the orthodox scientific view just as much as its opponents. There are dogmatic Points of View on both sides of that divide, and I feel quite content to revert that kind of bullshit from either side. Eclecticology 02:38 Dec 22, 2002 (UTC)

I just wanted to thank some of the nice people who welcomed me to wikipedia and took the trouble to give me positive feedback on work I'd done on some physics articles. Thanks, maveric149 and Tarquin! I've decided to stop working on wikipedia. When I first heard about wikipedia, I was skeptical, because it seemed like there would be no way to make sure that the articles were of high quality. When I checked out the project recently, I was pleasantly surprised at the high quality of many of the physics articles I looked at, and it inspired me to start contributing. However, I then got interested in trying to restore NPOV to some of the articles like horoscope and zodiac, and what I learned from that experience has brought me back to my original impression; it's clear to me that wikipedia's social structure cannot stand up to abusive behavior by someone, like User:Eclecticology, who is determined to squelch any point of view that doesn't agree with his/her own, and wants to set up certain articles as his/her own petty fiefdom. I just don't have the energy to keep up an edit war when my text keeps on getting deleted over and over and over. It also gets old fast when I have to keep on responding to stuff by users who don't even bother to log in or sign their comments. I feel strongly that wikipedia is deeply flawed, and I no longer wish to lend my name to the project. Is there a way to delete my account? --User:Bcrowell

Hi! Sorry to hear that you think Wikipedia is doomed. It's easy to get that impression after your first edit war ;-). Eclecticology indeed tends to violate NPOV when writing about his pet subjects, parapsychology, astrology etc. However, I've found it possible to work with him on improving these articles. I followed the early discussions on the Horoscope article and I think there's another side to this story, too: When we correct NPOV violations, we often make the mistake to use phrases like "foo point out that ..", "xy explains ..". These phrases themselves can be seen as non-NPOV, as they imply a certain agreement by Wikipedia. The original author then often sees this as non-NPOV and deletes the changes, and eventually, an edit war results.
It's better to use the following procedure:
  1. Inquire politely on the article's Talk pages about aspects of the article you consider non-NPOV (unless they are really egregious), and suggest replacements.
  2. If no reply comes, make the substitutions. (use your watchlist to keep track of what you want to do)
  3. If a reply comes, try to agree about the different phrases you want to use.
That way, when an agreement is reached, an edit war is very unlikely. The disadvantage is that the article stays in an unsatisfying state for a longer period of time, but an article that changes every 5 seconds hardly leaves a better impression with other Wikipedians.
Now there are cases where this strategy doesn't work. There are users who simply cannot and do not want to write NPOV articles, users who want to delete relevant information, users who are notoriously anti-social etc. I think this is the type of users we don't really want on Wikipedia, and we have banned three (Lir, 24, Helga) of them. But in my experience, while many Wikipedians tend to write slightly POV articles about subjects that are near and dear to their hearts, most of them can be worked with.
I don't know if you would consider the result of such a process satisfying -- after all, we would then present in great detail the views of, say, astrologers (including their pseudoscientific studies on how star signs correlate with certain behavioral traits -- yes, these studies actually exist) together with the replies of skeptics, instead of just saying "this is bogus". I'm not sure if traditional encyclopedias are really any better -- they are often very biased one way or another, and ignore relevant facts.
I think you should give it another try. If you want me to, I'll try to help in cases of conflicts -- I'm a secular humanist, so my stance on these subjects should be easy to deduce, but I do try to write articles that respect NPOV and that are not biased towards by own views. Leave me a note on my Talk page in case you're interested.
Other than that, we can delete your account (email Jimbo, he will then probably forward the request to Brion ;-), but it would be harder to remove your contributions -- if you want that, you should revert the articles you worked on yourself (be careful not to break later edits). But I'd hate to see that happen. -Eloquence
Yes, please stay. If you don't like to get in edit wars then simply stick to less controversial subjects - like physics. Wikipedia articles on controversial subjects do tend go through periods where they are POV dross but our general science, math and most of our biography sections are great. Even though POV zealots camp on on some articles in the short term, Wikipedia is self-healing in the long term (as Eloquence states we have had to ban these type of people before and will do so again in the future) - please stick with it. :) --mav
Alas, the cranks win once again :( Sorry to see you go, BCrowell -- if you decide to come back in a while, remember that Wiki operates in an eternal now (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiNow). There's plenty of time to fix articles. I've only vaguely followed this recent astrology edit was -- I'll take a look at those articles when I next have time. crackpots beware. -- Tarquin 11:44 Dec 22, 2002 (UTC)

If anyone has a view about UK counties and place names, I've added discussion of a problem to Talk:County (England) that I would love to get resolved. -- SGBailey 18:47 Dec 22, 2002 (UTC)

On the decline of the quality of writing in Wikipedia

Is it just my imagination or is the general standard of this project turning into a Drexleresque grey goo scenario? Notwithstanding the contributions of non-native English speakers who have a more than valid excuse for a certain amount of lexical and grammatical inexactitude, the standard of writing seems to have dropped as dramatically as a barometer in the eye of a hurricane. Previously I and a few others who care not only about content but about mode of expression were able to keep on top of the orcish hordes with their horrible tautologies, oxymorons, grocer's apostrophes, split infinitives, inability to distinguish between there and their, etcetera, etcetera.

I can only stomach editing so much of this admittedly well-researched but ineffably poorly written nonsense a day. user:sjc (23/12/02 04:36)

I believe it should be grocers' apostrophes instead of grocer's apostrophes. :-)
One grocer's apostrophe is a grocer's apostrophe too far in my book... user:sjc
I sympathize with your plight Unfortunately, I don't think this battle is winable. Eclecticology 06:56 Dec 23, 2002 (UTC)
I've not noticed an increase in "it's" & the like. I'm more concerned with POV stuff, crank theories, articles for minor porn stars, fetishes and every single word in LOTR. -- Tarquin 11:28 Dec 23, 2002 (UTC)
What's wrong about every single word in LOTR? :) Talking about fetishes and LOTR is a redundancy :):)--AN
What's LOTR? Wikipedians quickly learn what the initials "POV" stand for, but apart from that, a common criticism of the presentation in articles is the introduction of undefined or unexplained abbreviations and acronyms. Eclecticology

Ideal length of an article

Has there been some discussion about the ideal length of an article? or a "maximum" length over which is better to split it in smaller pieces? --AN 11:42 Dec 23, 2002 (UTC)

I did raise this point a while back in response to the proliferation of separate stub articles for each of the separate characters in Milne's Winnie the Pooh books. It strikes me as very inconvenient for the reader to be chasing stubs that don't say very much. The mass of stub articles concerning The Fountainhead are probably the worst offenders.
Articles seem to have clearly diminished technical performance when they exceed 32K in length. My rule of thumb: >30K must be divided; 20K-30K probably should be divided; 10K-20K consider dividing if the subject conveniently warrants; <10K don't bother. Size is only one factor; a 30K article with no likelihood for increased size is probably fine the way it is. In "Tree of life" articles size is secondary to the structures imposed by taxonomic hierarchies. Eclecticology
Don't forget tables! For example the empty elements template weighs in at 6K+ and after I'm done with an element the article is usually in excess of 10K. So about 5K of text is HTML and shouldn't really be counted. I therefore trim and spin-off text to keep the articles at less than 15K. IMO anything above 10K of actual readable text is probably getting into the realm of diminishing returns for most subjects. --mav
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