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Wikipedia:Village pump archive 2004-09-26

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Moved discussion

See the archive for older moved discussion links.

How long does copyright last? At what point can I quote large chunks from a book first published in 1934? -- SGBailey 19:30 Jan 26, 2003 (UTC)

It depends on the law of the country to which the author had the closest connection.
  1. The general international rule is Life + 50 years and it would apply of the author was Canadian or Australian.
  2. If the author was an EU citizen the rule is life + 70
  3. If the author was American it would go into the public domain on Jan. 1, 2030. If, however, the author failed to renew his copyright in 1952, it is already in the public domain.

There are some variations. Eclecticology 21:19 Jan 26, 2003 (UTC)

What the heck is this?????:

You've followed a link to a page that doesn't exist yet. If you'd like to create a new page under this title, delete this message and get typing! Click the 'Help' link up top if you haven't used a Wiki before and aren't sure how to go about it.
If you didn't mean to create a new page, just click the 'back' button in your browser, or use the search box at the top of the screen to find existing articles.
Isn't that a tad excessive? -- Zoe

It's an experiment; a longer, more informative message has been frequently suggested, and I say it's about time we tried it. Over the next couple of days, count the number of pages that are created that are empty or contain only "test" or "what's this" or the new-page message. Compare with the count of pages deleted as "newbie experiments" from the previous few days. See if it's gone down. --Brion 05:42 Jan 27, 2003 (UTC)

I've changed the code so that the text is autoselected via JavaScript. It's in CVS, bug Brion if you want it on the live server. --Eloquence 10:02 Jan 27, 2003 (UTC)
At the same time let's start counting the number of 400 byte pages that are created with only that text or a slightly modified version. The text also has a comma so it counts as an article! It would be nice to have javascript delete this text as soon so a cursor touches it. Of course, not everybody has Javascript enabled but I'm pretty sure that over 90% of people visiting us do. The other 10% should be presented with what we have now except for the fact that the software does not create pages with only the intro text (as it was with the old "Describe the new page here". --mav
That was a bug caused by the linebreaks in the longer text. It's fixed in CVS. Also, see my comment above re: JavaScript. --Eloquence 11:42 Jan 27, 2003 (UTC)

Hi, it is a very nice project. Hope you add Hebrew support for it soon. I tested in the sandbox: mose things do come out well in Hebrew, but there are some problems, such as alignment to left, not recognizing the "Enter" when it is between 2 Hebrew lines and combination of Hebrew and English. There is a relative of this project, another clone of Wiki, that supports Hebrew (and has many other very nice features - you can copy) in http://sourceforge.net/projects/chiqchaq it is the technology behind of a very big content site in Israel, http://www.beofen-tv.co.il/cgi-bin/chiq.pl ("beofen tivi" is "Naturally" in Hebrew") when you enable Hebrew - plese let me know, and I will both contribute myself and spread the word in Israel. Thanks, Oded, [email protected]

SEARCH BOX QUESTION
Hi!
I'm puzzled by the search box at the bottom of each page. There are two words (to the right of the box) SEARCH and GO. But they seem to do the same thing. I've never seen two words to choose from on any other web site.Please explain! Arpingstone 10:32 Jan 28, 2003 (UTC)

If you type the exact title of an article in the search box and hit the go button, you will be taken directly to the article. Whereas if you hit the search button you will be shown a list of pages containg the text. Mintguy

Copyright question

I have an obscure copyright question: If I embroider a commercial kit, and then take a photo of my finished product, does publishing the photo infringe copyright? Thanks for any help - Sannse 10:56 Jan 28, 2003 (UTC)

I'm no expert, but I think that if you published the picture it would. Judging from cross-stitch magazines etc. most kit manufacturers actually like having photos of their kits displayed. If you give details of the kit you are giving them a free advert, so I doubt that they would object. If in doubt write to them and ask for permission, they will probably be delighted. -- Chris Q 12:06 Jan 28, 2003 (UTC)

I believe that your photo does not infringe on the copyright. The company would have rights to the pattern, but I don't think you can apply copyright to a finished embroidery product. I'll ask isis for her informal opinion... -- Stephen Gilbert 14:26 Jan 28, 2003 (UTC)

Thanks both. As you suggested Chris, I've mailed DMC (an embroidery company) to get their view, but the more info I can get the better so isis's opinion would be a help too - Sannse 18:10 Jan 28, 2003 (UTC)

A Question of Stumps

Like a Virgin

Despite being well-known and, IMHO, a pretty good song, it would seem to me that this article will never really go anywhere, and might just be better off having its guts moved over to Madonna (singer). Like a Virgin, to the best of my knowledge as a Madonna fan, doesn't really have enough of a back-story to warrant it's own article. Sure, I could crank out some articles like ROYGBIV (Boards of Canada song) or My Fair Lady ('Boogiepop Phantom' TV Episode #4), but at what point does this stop being appropriate ? - Tzaquiel 17:06 Jan 28, 2003 (UTC)

I agree. If nobody can see how an entry will ever grow into a serious article, as opposed to a stump, its content should be merged into an appropriate parent article. That said, there seems no harm in leaving such stubs for a week or so to see if they do get expanded. Like a Virgin was only created today, so why not give it a chance? If anyone thinks it can become more than a stub, let hir prove it by doing so... Martin
Well you could point out the Reservoir Dogs reference, and there are probably a few other things that this track has had a cultural influence on. I doubt whether before this song came out any child under 10 was ever heard to sing the word 'virgin'; with the possible exception of some refence to Queen Elizabeth I. Mintguy
I am no fan of Madonna, but I see some value to it, as it is now. This kind of basic info. is not bad to have. Of course, it would be better if one can add how the song was/has been received, any influence on the piece, influence of the piece on others, etc. I am no plan to familiarize myself to Madonna, but if I were, I would possibly come back to the article and find it worth reading. Tomos 04:44 Jan 31, 2003 (UTC)

A Boards of Canada and Madonna fan all rolled up in one? holy crap.

MarcusAurelius

Perhaps I've missed it, but there's nothing about donating to Wikipedia on the front page, or anywhere in the FAQ. The site does often seem slow, and so the question arises naturally. Of course, donations may be impossible because of the corporate origins of Wikipedia, etc, or they might be possible in the future. Could the answer be added to the FAQ?

Pde 08:42 Jan 29, 2003 (UTC)

Great question! I am not a developer but I do read and contribute to the developer's mailing list. First, outside of the occasional Slashdotting or other media exposure, the slowness is not the result of our server not able to handle the load or our bandwidth pipe not being large enough. The slowness is from table locking in My-SQL and other programming inefficiencies (which are being worked-on and improved all the time - albeit slowly). So even if we were to buy a new server that is four times faster there would probably be little if any noticeable improvement in performance. What we really need is somebody with a great deal of experience optimizing databases for heavy loads. Our developers are doing a great job but they are largely learning how to do this type of optimizing as they go.
Right now Jimbo Wales is our sole benefactor. He pays for our bandwidth and for the Wikipedia domain names (which are all cheap for him since he owns an ISP) and last year he bought us a new $US 3,000 server. There are serious plans, however, about forming a non-profit organization to manage Wikipedia's and Wiktionary's finances. Such an organization would be able to accept donations but Jimbo has stated that he doesn't need any help right now supporting Wikipedia. He has also stated that he would continue to at least provide bandwidth for Wikipedia and Wiktionary even after the non-profit is set-up. So financially we are doing just fine - we just need a developer who is an expert in database optimization. --mav


Sequential searches are ineffecient at searching vast text databases. They should not be used as a primary. File Includes are a much better way to go.
I've got meetings next week with people who I might persuade to fund qualified experts ( proof is in the pudding! ) for this open source programming initiative. Rate determining steps to are unknown at this point: I don't know how long it may take to secure funding. But I have started so there will be funds made available either through an existing NGO, Canadain Government Bodies, or Venture Communists. I don't care to get an e-mail or a phone so any message should be placed on my talk page. Two16

Recently I have seen some pages being created with special characters in their title (eg. Istiklâl Marsi, François Paul Jules Grévy, Émile Saisset, etc.). I'd like to know if this is accepted policy. If so, should the special character be typed in straight from the keyboard (eg. "é"), by its HTML entity name (eg. "é") or by some other means? After all, and strictly speaking, the guy's name is not Francois but François. D.D. 11:26 Jan 29, 2003 (UTC)

Some people only want to allow 7 bit ASCII for page titles while a growing majority want to allow full 8 bit extended ASCII which allows for accented and other Latin-1-based characters. Some older browsers (esp. on Mac OS 9x) destroy keyboard-generated é characters. But this is becoming less and less of a problem for at least Latin-1 characters (the situation for UTF is a HUGE mess with MANY browsers breaking characters). However many English-speaking users don't know how to create these extended Latin-1 characters at all so the only way they can link directly to François Paul Jules Grévy is to copy the characters. This is bad and very unwiki. It would therefore be very nice if the software treated Francois Paul Jules Grevy as a synonym of the accented name. That way users who don't know how to create the special characters can easily still link to article titles which have them. Of course, if and when there is widely accepted Anglicization you really should use that instead. --mav
We could freely add redirects with unaccented titles to article with accented titles, like I just did for François P.J. Grévy, and suggest people to do so. (BTW, is putting all a person's first names in the title really useful and recommended ? I'd answer "no" to the first question, it's a bit of a nuisance for me. I'm afraid the current informal policy answers "yes" to the second question.) --FvdP 20:32 Jan 29, 2003 (UTC)
But this only solves part of the problem (people may want to link to articles for which the redirect is not done yet). I would agree with automatic redirects, when no article exists under the unaccented title. --FvdP 20:38 Jan 29, 2003 (UTC)
Thanks for the answers. I think those redirects are a sensible solution to the problem. I'll stick with that for the time being. D.D. 09:07 Jan 30, 2003 (UTC)
Can we have the same auto-redirects for mis-capitalisation? If there's no article under the uncapitalised title, of course.
How will these "auto" redirects work? It is easy enough to strip the cedilla off of François, but in Norwegian, sometimes the Å (a separate letter in the Norsk alphabet) is rendered as Å and sometimes as Aa. The Aa is probably what Norwegians would expect to see in English, but maybe not. See Talk:Åfjord for a brief, slightly informed discussion. By the time you went through all these cases in all languages you'd have a pretty big table and likely some conflicts. Aren't handmade redirects like Aafjord safer? Ortolan88
Why not make it as simple as possible, and if there are more difficult cases, just ignore them. Surely that way we get a system better than our current one which is simple, easy ot maintain and unlikely to run into problems. Maybe when you click on an edit link for something like united states of america, in the explanation on how to edit the page it could give suggestions as what this page may be trying to link to? i.e. United States of America Smelialichu 16:19 Jan 31, 2003 (UTC)

BUG!!!

problem saving chuink of TeX. See Talk:Ellipse for details.

Look at what I did to Quitman, Missouri. Should I be able to do this? And would it be a good idea if there was a script that did more of exactly this? (I can't do scripts myself. Sorry.)

I am guessing that if you can do scripts, you can input numbers as words.

I'm not sure where to mention this, but I just posted a draft at Wikipedia:Talk page layout. Ortolan88

I may have missed out on essential information, but whatever happened to the "his page has been accessed ... times" feature? Okay, first it was disabled. Has it gone for good now? I've always considered it relevant (if only quantitative rather than qualitative) feedback. --KF 18:58 Jan 30, 2003 (UTC)

It's gone for good for performance reasons. There will be a replacement though, based on log analysis. --Eloquence 19:14 Jan 30, 2003 (UTC)
At the least, it's gone for now, as the counting part of the counter is disabled for performance reasons (and in any case not very accurate, as it shows repeat views by the same persons; hits by web search index spiders; doesn't indicate how long the page has been around to accumulate those hits; etc.) --Brion 19:18 Jan 30, 2003 (UTC)

I saw that http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?xyz can be abbreviated to [[Wiki:xyz]]. For which other wiki's are such InterWiki links possible, and what code (like wiki here) to use? - Patrick 22:23 Jan 31, 2003 (UTC)

I have expanded the InterWiki article, it should now answer your question. --Eloquence 23:31 Jan 31, 2003 (UTC)


Please see question about Conventicle Act on its Talk:Conventicle Act page. -- SGBailey 23:33 Jan 31, 2003 (UTC)


Been out of the loop. Please fill me in. Seems that somebody was banned for advocating illegal drug use. I don't know what drugs it may have been; however, I've read the apology and wish to know more about the cicumstances. My thoughts read like this:

  • illegal in what jurisdiction?
  • even if we were to accept present day american legislative sensibilities, who is to say the legislative branches won't come to their senses and repeal vast amounts off their drug legisation? Or that their system of checks and balances might effect change? Who knows what could happen in the wink of an eye. The jurisdiction I live in presently (Ontario, Canada) has no law about the possession of less than 30 grams of marijuanna. It is not an illegal drug in that amount here. All those front page newspapers photos of people puffing cones in front of city hall are giving the lie to Reefer Madness and make it less likely that a new repressive marijuanna law will withstand a constitional challange. Canadain laws can be overturned level if it can be shown that the law is not "reasonable in a free and democratic society."
  • more (or better) reason (persuassion) needs to be used before resorting to banning in situations like this.

Two16 : Lockdown Sv Rule.

I've not even read the apology... :-/ Link? As someone who thinks the UK laws against cannabis and possibly ecstacy could do with a review, I'd be interested in the details. Martin

Nobody has been banned for advocating illegal drug use - User:Vera Cruz (who I guess this is referring to) was banned because 1) User:Vera Cruz was getting on a lot of people's nerves and was generally felt to be doing more harm than good; and 2) because there were very strong suspicions that User:Vera Cruz was the same person as User:Lir who was already banned. For the record, I doubt that anybody would be banned for advocating illegal drug use on their talk page or on article talk pages (within limits of course - I shouldn't think overt drug dealing would be tolerated), though doing so in a POV manner in articles would be a different matter, of course. --Camembert

Thanx for the info. Wasn't Lir returned to good standing about 2 weeks ago?

Not as far as I know. If so, it happened while I wasn't looking (which is possible, but probably unlikely). --Camembert

People create articles for dates like 1500 BC or links to non-existant articles like 7326 BC. This seems undesirable to me, since dates so far in the past are uncertain and subject to revision. Most of the articles will be useless because they will contain at most a few events. I think some kind of massive redirection of these dates (and their BCE equivalents) may be helpful, but what to redirect to? Articles like 16th century BC are perhaps not helpful when dates are often approximated to a round number like 1500. -(

IMO specific years before 6000 BC are completely useless since that is before recorded history. Decades are probably better suited for anything from 6000 BC to about 4000 BC due to very inaccurate data. So yes the edit links you talk about should be de-linked and any pages created on those dates should be redirected to probably corresponding century page. --mav

Okay, stupid question time. If one wants some text to appear next to a picture, and then some more text to appear below the same picture, is there any easy way of doing this without just inserting lots of <br>s? By the way, sorry if I've messed up the STS-107 article by trying to sort that out... -- Unsigned (due to shame)

Put in a single <br clear="all">, that will force following text down until the margins are free of floating images. --Brion
Thank you. :) -- Oliver P. 04:16 Feb 2, 2003 (UTC)

It seems there is in fact an entry for the Latin phrase ad hoc. You can get to it by typing it in the window and pressing Go. Any attempt to link to it with the brackets fails, it disappears, like this: ad hoc <-- it's in there. It may work with a link like this: Ad hoc What gives? --Ihcoyc

I can see "ad hoc" in all of the articles you've had a problem with. -- Zoe
I am using Mozilla 1.2.1. Let me try Internet Explorer. . . --Ihcoyc
Nope, it disappears with Internet Explorer just as surely as it disappears with Mozilla. Let me see if it's a WebWasher thing. --Ihcoyc
Just for reference, I'm using IE 6.0 -- Zoe
I've never seen such a problem with Mozilla 1.2.1 or 1.3a. If I may hazard a guess; your overzealous spam-blocker may be triggering on the "ad" part... Does this direct URL vanish the same as the wiki link? --Brion
That's apparently it. For some reason, the WebWasher standard filter (v 3.2) is removing the text link with ad hoc in it. I have no notion why. --Ihcoyc
How about ad hominem or ad libitum? AdLib? Ada? Adam Ant? --Brion
A-ha. It deletes anything with the accursed string ad in it standing as a single word. It forbids ad hominem (<--ad_hominem) and ad libitum(<--ad_libitum), but allows AdLib and so forth. I think I am grasping why now. I tried to add the words ad hoc as a link and they kept vanishing on me and I never thought to blame WebWasher. --Ihcoyc

At emir, shaikh is listed as not having an article. There is an article at sheikh and selecting takes one to the edit page, isntead of the actual page. Vera Cruz


Add option G (grammatical change) to the recent changes and edit modification choices. Vera Cruz

Yep, and let's also have S for spelling changes and P for punctuation changes and... Ahem, no, sorry, only joking. :) I'm not sure it's really necessary to distinguish between all the different types of minor change. It would just get annoying having to choose between the different tick boxes each time, I think. -- Oliver P. 22:17 Feb 2, 2003 (UTC)

When editing an article and creating new links, how do you link a word which may not be exactly the same as the title of a relevant page to that relevant page (e.g. if you write the word 'Epicureans' and want to link it to a page called 'Epicureanism', how do you do it?) Sorry, that's very badly explained; I hope someone knows what I mean!Olivia Curtis

adslhadlhasjhdsakhdakjshdasjkjash click edit and see how this was done


You could write [[Epicureanism|Epicureans]], that will display what is after the | and link to wwhat is before the |. BTW, use 3 tildes (~) to sign, that will create a link to your user page -- Tarquin 22:00 Feb 2, 2003 (UTC)

Sorry? I'm afraid I'm more than a bit technologically backward. How do you get that vertical line symbol? I've found it on my keyboard, but there are two other symbols on that key and I only get one or the other of them when I try pressing shift and alt and things. And what's all that <nowiki business for? Thank you Olivia Curtis

you on mac or PC? on a PC it's to the left of Z. on my mac it's to the left of ENTER. The nowiki thing was a mistake, fixed, see above -- Tarquin 22:12 Feb 2, 2003 (UTC)

Aha! Or should I say Eureka (quite literally - you already know I'm a bit of a pretentious classicist). It was to the left of Z - I was looking at the wrong one. Thanks a lot (and sorry if you've just come rushing back to answer a query, only to find it's just a thank you note)|||||Olivia CurtisOlivia Curtis

that's cool. being a pretentious classicist is a Good Thing as far sa I'm concerned :-) -- Tarquin 22:23 Feb 2, 2003 (UTC)

at worse you can cut and paste the | ; is an html flag which allows one to write wikisoftcode which wont be processed such as <nowiki>==No headline== Vera Cruz

You could also do it another way, which is a bit more effort, but which would allow you to link directly to Epicurean in future, if you wanted to. You could create a redirect at Epicurean - i.e. a page which just contains the line "#REDIRECT [[Epicureanism]]". Then going to Epicurean will automatically redirect you to Epicureanism. Then you can just write "[[Epicurean]]s" in articles in future. (The "s" automatically gets put into the link.) Hope this helps! -- Oliver P. 22:17 Feb 2, 2003 (UTC)

I'm running MSIE 5.5 on Win98SE. Becasue of the slowness of the wikiserver (or the SQL data base table or whatever) I'm often running several edits on related subjects at the same time. I find that when a page is updated it pops on top of whatever I'm doing at the time. Is there a way to stop this "pop on top" behaviour? -- SGBailey 22:57 Feb 2, 2003 (UTC)

We have a little JavaScript that puts the cursor in the edit box when creating new pages (the same thing Google does for the search field). We also have the floating quickbar, which also does some JavaScripty stuff I haven't looked into. Are you referring to newly created pages? If so, the JavaScript may cause the "popping" on some operating systems. Or are you perhaps using the floating sidebar? Does anyone else have this problem? --Eloquence 23:12 Feb 2, 2003 (UTC)
In Mozilla 1.3a on Linux (Red Hat 8, Gnome desktop), I get:
  • open an edit link in a new tab (appears under the current tab, not focused) -- when the edit page finishes loading, the keyboard focus moves to the still-lowered tab, and keystrokes go into the edit box
  • open an edit link in a new window (comes up focused, but I then click-focus back to the first window while it loads) -- when the edit page finishes loading, the edit window is brought to top unbidden, and focus goes to the edit box
This is new behavior; I don't recall it happening until recently. --Brion 23:20 Feb 2, 2003 (UTC)
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