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How do I display an image in multiple language versions of Wikipedia without having to upload it more than once? Mkweise 18:42 Mar 21, 2003 (UTC)

You don't, so far. Or, if you want to cheat, you can upload it to the English wiki and then use the direct URL for the picture on the others, where I think we haven't got around to disabling external image links. But these won't link to image description pages, and there's no way to track usage from within the wiki (ie, if an image is no longer used by a page on the english wiki, the page won't show that it's still being used on the German or Japanese wikis). --Brion 19:03 Mar 21, 2003 (UTC)
Somebody mentioned that this could be one possible use of wikimedia.org. --mav
As 9 out of 10 images are language-independant, it would certainly make sense to have just one image repository used by all language wikis. Why burden the server with storing, serving, caching and backing up a dozen or more copies of the same image? Mkweise 17:23 Mar 25, 2003 (UTC)

Does anyone think it is good idea that we have an aritcle for each Chinese character? While each western alphabet has own article like C, I think it is not bad to have an article for a Chinese character. Each Chinese character has ethnology, the relationship with other characters. Wikitionary is not suitable for this because it is about a word not a character. We can also put a character code of each encoding. See [1] In fact, there are many dictionaries in Japanese and Chinese that have each entry is one Chinese character. If no one seems to show objection, I will start to add some. -- Taku 03:56 Mar 22, 2003 (UTC)

Besides, we can use a bot to have a good coverage of each Character at first with presumably Unicode code and each native code with rendered character. -- Taku 03:57 Mar 22, 2003 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not a dictionary and you mention that Japanese and Chinese dictionaries have entries for each character. I fail to see how Wiktionary isn't the most appropriate place for these entries. For one thing, you will be able to have the native Chinese as the title of the page - in en.wiki you are limited to extended ASCII (and for good reason). The reason we do have encyclopedia articles for each English letter is because this is the English language wiki encyclopedia and for some reason this is a tradtion for English language encyclopedias (I have no idea why since this is the stuff for dictionaries). At the very least I would like to see how substantial an example article on a single character would be. I'm very skeptical though (aren't there over well 10,000 Chinese characters BTW? I see some major article bloat if we were to include every character in every language). ---mav
First of all, While most of Japanese dictionaries contain one character entries, there are independent dictionaries dedicated only to Chinese characters, called "Kanwa-jiten" (loosely translated as Chinese-Japanese character dictionary. I have same concern with you. I am not sure we really can have decent articles. Adding an each character individually might be an option but in that case the drawback is much -- definitely we want to put graphic-rendered character and encoding to each character, which is a really tedious jobs and the number of articles might be numerous.
Wikitionary is in turn a bad place to do this kind of project. Chinese characters are called ideography because each character represents certain idea. Wikitionary is a dictionary about basically words. I don't see the reason why we want to mix up characters and words, both are different concepts.
So maybe an independent project does make more sense? I don't know how much people are interested in such although I bet there are so many people having trouble handling Chinese characters love such a project. -- Taku 22:54 Mar 24, 2003 (UTC)
Both Wikipedia and Wiktionary are not a good place to do it. Wikipedia is not good as Wikipedia is not a dictionary; Wiktionary is not good because we do not want to talk only its meaning, but its history as well. I recommend a new project outside Wiktionary, maybe called WikiKanji? ---Wshun

WikiKanji? No, maybe we should name it wikiunicode since we want to cover all characters out there in the world, possibly including Hierography in Egypt. -- Taku 23:07 Mar 24, 2003 (UTC)

I think Wikipedia could be a great place for it. Chinese characters have complex meanings and ancient histories; they're not used simply for spelling words like Roman characters, and yet we can easily write encyclopedic articles about A (which needs some work, I see...). However, I'd like to see a sample article before I give my support. -- Stephen Gilbert
I (or anyone) will write an sample article. One article for discussion should not hurt anything. -- Taku 23:07 Mar 24, 2003 (UTC)

Among the smallest set of chenese characters in Japan is approx. 2000 (Joyo Kanji), for daily use. Mass media use mostly these ones, except for proper nouns. But many criticize it to be too limited. Japanese Industrial Standards offer a basic set of approx. 7,000 and expansion/supplementary set of 6,000 characters. Unicode is not complete but quite good, offering, well, 34,000 or so? I guess it takes a lot of time to develop good 34,000 articles...

Do we really cover every single character in wikipedia? Many of Chinese characters are actually simply combining simple parts. We don't need thousands articles at all. That is not my intent. I guess at least one hundered is needed to explain decent history of the characters. If we go to a new project, the story is different of course. -- Taku 23:07 Mar 24, 2003 (UTC)

Besides, I have seen Taku proposing a use of bot twice in the past (once for Japanese writers, the other for cities) it seems he never gets permission or definitive answer and the discussion just fades away. Why is that?

Regarding making encyclopedia articles on characters, I am not sure. We can talk about the meaning, and the origin and history of the shape (why this character's shape is as it is, how it has been changing over time and across different places), how it is used, what are the characters with similar or opposite manings, etc. I guess it's good for Wiktionary. Tomos 21:58 Mar 22, 2003 (UTC)

Those proposal are not dead yet actually. I will organize my plans atWikipedia:Bots page. -- Taku 23:07 Mar 24, 2003 (UTC)
Taku's previous bot proposals haven't gone anywhere mainly because the created articles have been so very very minimalist. It's okay to input an individual microstub -- it will get expanded -- but a lot of people will balk at dumping hundreds or thousands of microstubs with a bot. The name and birthdate of an author by themselves aren't much of an article; something more like name, birthdate, nationality/languages written in, genre/medium, and a list of major works would be the minimal acceptable stub for a mass dump. For the cities: name, prefecture, and URL to web site is too little; I could have gotten that link from google, I want actual information! The present state of Funabashi as an example is much improved, though still somewhat light. --Brion 22:35 Mar 22, 2003 (UTC)

It looks like thousands of bot-generated short entries would be welcome in Wiktionary but not here. --mav

I still believe it is better to start a new project, maybe an even more ambitious one, a project about all characters in the Unicode. -- Wshun

I want to do an article on the Tasmanian Devil cartoon character. There is already a page called Tasmanian devil that has a dummy link to a page called Tasmanian Devil cartoon character. I think that's a bit unintuitive. If someone wants to link to the cartoon character, they will most likely type in his name as it is officially written, Tasmanian Devil. The capitalized "Devil" keeps the link from going to the page about the real-world mammal.

So, what should I call my article? I'd prefer Tasmanian Devil, but if y'all think this will make for to much ambiguation, I'll call it Tasmanian Devil cartoon character. -- Brian Smithson 6:24 (UTC) 3-22-03

IMO Tasmanian Devil is fine. For better or worse we aleady have quantum leap/Quantum Leap and red dwarf/Red Dwarf. --mav 07:06 Mar 22, 2003 (UTC)
IMHO, this is fine, BUT each page should have a disambig link to the other. jaknouse 01:55 Mar 23, 2003 (UTC)

Is there a way to make a title which ends in an apostrophe both italicized and bolded? See Burnin'. Tuf-Kat

Nobody knows or cares whether a space is bold or italic! --Brion
I would never in a million years have thought of that. A sheepish Tuf-Kat
Could be worse; see Wiki:SixSingleQuotes. ;) Also, if you need to abut a printing character (like punctuation), you can separate it with an empty HTML tag (Know what's great? Wikiin'!) --Brion


When I want to refer to a city, is it better to use "CityName" or "CityName,_Country", e.g., "Paris" or "Paris,_France"? Paris or the redirected one Paris? -- mkrohn 21:56 Mar 22, 2003 (UTC)

How about Paris, France? --mav
Erm, no offense or anything, but that sounds very American! "Paris" will do if it's obvious from the context that the one in France is meant; otherwise you could say, "the French city of Paris", or something... -- Oliver P. 23:06 Mar 22, 2003 (UTC)
P.S. - Tarquin says...
My (current) number one Wikipedia grouse is this: "Venice, Italy", "London, England" and so forth. That is how cities are indentified in the US; not in the rest of the world. A rout through UK train timetables for the few duplicate towns shows they use "Gillinham (Kent)", for example. The same form or "Gillinham in Kent" is usual in newspaper or reference articles if readers may not know which country a place is in. However, in the interests of consistency in page names, we're stuck with the stateside terminology. It's probably all irrational reactions to cultural imperialism. That or seeing that dratted comma always reminds me of Marilyn Monroe saying "Paris, France is in Europe?" in Gentlemen prefer blondes...
Yes, I was refering to the cases, where it is clear from the context which "Paris" I refer to. Since I am new, I was interested if there is some kind of policy for that. I did not find anything and before messing things up I decided to ask here. Since it seems common usage to give certain cities priorities, e.g., the main page of Paris is "Paris" and not "Paris,_France" it makes sense to me in these cases to set the link directly to "Paris". -- mkrohn 00:23 Mar 23, 2003 (UTC)
I think he meant "Gillingham", though. :) -- Oliver P. 23:12 Mar 22, 2003 (UTC)

Why was the hit counter dropped from each page? Was it the server strain thing? jaknouse 01:55 Mar 23, 2003 (UTC)

I do hope it returns some day... Arno

The 'Pedia Icon: Where to Download?

I just discovered the pretty 'pedia icon when I put the shortcut of a 'pedia page on my desktop. It's really quite nice, with the Earth and the big W. I'd like to use it on my personal computer. Where can I download it? --Menchi 02:10 Mar 23, 2003 (UTC)

Right here -- Notheruser 02:14 Mar 23, 2003 (UTC)
Thank you. How did you find the link? --Menchi 02:18 Mar 23, 2003 (UTC)
I'm pretty sure that favicon.ico is the standard location for icons. For example, NY Times Slashdot etc. -- Notheruser 02:28 Mar 23, 2003 (UTC)

"Oscar Wilde's Tomb" Link

On the page "Père Lachaise", there's a peculiar link: Oscar Wilde's Tomb ([[Oscar Wilde|Oscar Wilde's Tomb]]). The link says "Oscar Wilde's Tomb", but it directs the user to the page "Oscar Wilde". This is misleading. Shouldn't the link be like: Oscar Wilde's Tomb ([[Oscar Wilde]]'s Tomb)? Is there some reason behind such a confusing format of linking? --Menchi 02:36 Mar 23, 2003 (UTC)

Yes. --mav
I think mav means, yes it should be [[Oscar Wilde]]'s Tomb and no, there is no reason to have [[Oscar Wilde|Oscar Wilde's Tomb]] (unless I misunderstood which you were saying "yes" to mav). Hephaestos has already removed the link anyway, it's not needed because there is already a link to Oscar Wilde in the main text. -- sannse 07:15 Mar 24, 2003 (UTC)

About concurrent edits (sorry if this has been discussed before, I seem to recall reading something but can't find it now):

When two users edit an article simultaneously and don't know about each other, it may take some work to integrate the concurrent changes. Wouldn't it be useful to have an alert "user:soandso is currently editing this page" and some means of communication so you can coordinate your work? Don't know if it's technically feasible; do others consider it desirable? Kosebamse 10:33 Mar 23, 2003 (UTC)

It is not possible to know whether another user is editing a page, because we don't have spies sitting on their desktops watching what they do. ;) The most we could know without installing spyware is whether another user has loaded the edit page or run a preview recently (ie, with an arbitrary timeout). This would be somewhat problematic for two reasons:
  • False negatives: people taking longer to make their changes than the timeout allows; end result is same as present, another user can unknowingly make an edit, and when the first guy comes back and hits save, he is informed of an edit conflict and must merge.
  • False positives: people hitting the edit link accidentally or just to copy/check out the source of a page, or starting to edit but deciding not to. (Or worse yet, misdirected web spiders hitting every edit page on the site...) Meanwhile, users will be scared off from trying to edit, and may never make that excellent, clean edit that would have taken three seconds to merge. End result: less productive activity on the wiki.
I at least don't find it a particularly good trade-off. What might be a good idea though is making a note of edit conflicts at the preview stage. --Brion 11:31 Mar 23, 2003 (UTC)

If I create a new page, and then make another edit or two, it would be nice if a flag would pop up for 5-10 minutes indicating that Im probably working on the article. Likewise, if I make a series of edits within a short time to an older page, its probably a good guess that Im making yet another edit. It would also be useful if a user who had made 10 edits to a page (without any other user making interim edits) could delete the 9 previous edits, thus making it appear as if they had only made one major edit. Susan Mason

Quite so, Susan. That last idea would be really neat, but not very practical from a software design point of view, I imagine. Since I started putting in progress in the comment field when I make the first edit of a series, and then still going (or etc.) as I go, and then done for now for the last one, I don't get nearly as many edit conflicts. Not a 100% cure of course, but worth doing. Mind you, lately I've been working on obscure articles that no-one else much edits anyway, so I guess that helps too. :) Tannin

Why is 1918 in literature a protected page? User:Black Widow

Unprotected. Probably an Admin mistake ('Watch this page' is next to 'Protect this page'). --mav

Article title starting with lower-case

Currently, it is impossible to start an article title with a lower-case letter. So we get things like IMac instead of iMac. Was there any discussions about this feature? Any possibility that it will be changed in the future? Thanks, Tomos 05:02 Mar 24, 2003 (UTC)

Leaving your ACTUAL question for the more technically minded to answer, in the meantime, you can take advantage of the fact that the first letter of an article is case-insensitive: iMac and IMac take you to the same place. So even if the article title is "funny", your reference to it doesn't need to be... -- Someone else
Initial capitalization is a tricky thing. If we were to make title completely case-sensitive, you'd get links to two separate pages from these two sentences:
Asteroids are relatively abundant in the region between...
Many have dreamed of colonizing the asteroids and mining...
That would greatly magnify the occasional problems caused by variations in capitalization in subsequent words. Alternatively, we might preserve the case, thus allowing iMac and pH to look right, while allowing both variations to match and link to the single article. This would lead to great inconsistency in titles, as we find ourselves with here a lowercase asteroid and there a capital Comet. This would at least be aesthetically displeasing (less a lot of effort at renaming to maintain a nicer system); and I'm not sure how much trouble it would be to make partial case insensitivity work -- and if we were to change to complete case insensitivity, at least hundreds of title pairs would need to be cleaned up. Redirects removed and alternates merged or disambiguated; that's going to require some manual labor.
The simplest solution would be to create a manual tag of some sort creating a 'display title', which would be displayed in the header in place of the page's 'real' name and could be differently capitalized or contain special characters. (I think this was discussed a long time ago on the mailing list, I don't know what the commentary was.) --Brion 06:30 Mar 24, 2003 (UTC)
The "Display Title" - yes, great idea!
Semi on-topic, earlier today, someone created an entry Tasmanian Devil about the cartoon character modelled on a Tasmanian Devil (Sarcophilus harrisii)), the entry for which (under Wikipedia's weirdo animal naming rules) has long been at Tasmanian devil. What should be done? Tannin 09:08 Mar 24, 2003 (UTC)
The first thing that should be done is to review the discussion that preceded the creation of the article.  :)
(At the time of this writing, said discussion is on the Village pump page, about halfway up from this discussion.)
--Paul A 09:12 Mar 24, 2003 (UTC)
Ahh. I see. Thankyou Paul. Two comments: (a) It should have been mentioned on Talk:Tasmanian devil, so that interested people could stand a rough chance of finding it in the first place. (b) It's a really dumb way to name an article in this instance. The name of the animal is Tasmanian Devil (capital "D", see any field guide) and now we have an entry under the correct name of the animal about an ephermeral and subsiduary thing! Tannin 09:27 Mar 24, 2003 (UTC)
Actually, field guides tend to have it wrong. Talk to any biologist, and you'll be told that English names of organisms should always be in lower case unless one of the words is a proper noun, in which case only the proper noun should be capitalized, such as Tasmanian devil, or Virginia pine. There is, obviously, a gap here between accepted scientific usage and popular usage, but the point is that Tasmanian devil is correct as far as the scientific community goes. jaknouse 15:13 Mar 24, 2003 (UTC)
On the contrary: see Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (flora and fauna) for an extended list of examples. Tannin
This is silly. "Tasmanian Devil" is a proper noun since it is the name of a particular singular thing. "Tasmanian devil" is the name of a group of animals - it is not a proper noun. As is explained on the above talk page field guides are not good sources on capitalization. Published manuals of style are'. I've never seen Tasmanian devil or bald eagle etc capitalized as you suggest in any biology textbook, any dictionary or any other encyclopedia. The only sources that are doing things in a "really dumb way" are the field guides --mav
Seven hardcover volumes at $400 each and you are calling it a "field guide"? Hoolie Doolie! Tannin

The Warren Commission published 26 Volumes of Hearings and Exhibits. Researchers cite these as 1H1, which would be translated as:

Warren Commission Hearings, Vol. I, p. 1

So, If i'm writing an article and want to cite the Warren Commission hearings, which is better? --hoshie

For the purposes of Wikipedia articles, I'd use the expanded form: most readers are not going to be Warren Commission researchers, and won't know how to interpret "1H1". --Paul A 09:05 Mar 24, 2003 (UTC)

Talk (etc) pages vs Mailing list: Sorry if this is an unbearably naive question and/or discussed to death elsewhere, but: What's the mailing list for, and how does it compare in function to various facilities on the wiki like this village pump, annoying users, votes for deletion, various standards discussions etc? Sometimes on the list I see someone say that this would be better off on a Talk page; sometimes in the wiki I see someone say this should be taken to the list ... I just can't nail down what the effective difference is, and when you'd choose which for what ... help!. As always if this IS discussed elsewhere please feel free to point me in that direction rather than rehash a whole load of stuff here for the Nth time. :) Nevilley 08:53 Mar 24, 2003 (UTC)

Good question. WikiEN-L is for general discussion of en.wiki policy and direction. Wikipedia-L is for general discussion of Wikipedia-wide (all languages) policy and direction. The specifics for en.wiki are supposed to be worked out wiki style on en.wiki. The specifics for the whole project are supposed to be worked out on meta. That is how it is supposed to work. In practice it doesn't work out so nicely. --mav

I was looking at 1944 and I noticed how frequently Nazi is used to describe German military forces. I find this offensive and inappropriate, this is comparable to referring to US forces in Iraq as "Republican Forces" or to US forces in Bosnia as "Democrat Forces". Likewise, referring to Iraqi forces as "Baath Forces" would be inappropriate. German troops of World War II should be referred to as Germans, not as Nazis. Many of them were not Nazis and many of them were killed for disagreeing with the Nazis. Dietary Fiber

Many Germans would rather not be associated with the genocidal Nazi Germany but if you don't like it then change it. This is a wiki if you haven't noticed. --mav

I thought you might want to form a consensus on the issue before I changed it. Dietary Fiber

This isn't that important - both terms are unambiguous. Besides if anybody didn't like your edit it is very easy to revert. --mav
Axis powers (linked as [[Axis powers|Axis]] would be a good solution, when talking about the Axis side as a whole. "German" is the best solution when talking about the specific German forces. "Italian" is the best solution when talking about the specific Italian forces. "Japanese" is the best solution when talking about the specific Japanese forces.
Similarly, when talking about the allied side, Allied powers (linked as [[Allied powers|Allied]] would be a good solution, but when referring to specifically British forces, use "British", etc. Martin

I want to add an external link to Afghan Hound, but how do I link to this page without loosing the site frames? The URL I see in the address bar ( http://www.the-kennel-club.org.uk/ ) links to the home page. Is there a way round this? Thanks -- sannse 19:10 Mar 24, 2003 (UTC)

...and that's why frames are evil. E-mail their webmaster and ask if they have a way to link to their frameset such that it will show a particular file in the content frame. --Brion 20:40 Mar 24, 2003 (UTC)

Link question

Why does the Mathematical Association of America link within Underwood Dudley appear dead when it isn't dead, and why does it link to the "edit" MAA page, rather than the MAA page itself? I am baffled

looks fine to me -- Tarquin 16:26 Mar 25, 2003 (UTC)
Well I'll be darned. It was screwy a few minutes ago ... honest.
It's a caching issue (see m:Cache strategy).

Is Image:Tibetmap.png copyright violation? The user has altered the image by adding a thumbnail (is this image also violation?).

If you do think that the user has violated copyright, does it mean no matter how much or how little one has modified an image, so long as it is originally a copyrighted image, it is copyright violation? --142.103.108.105 23:50 Mar 26, 2003 (UTC)

That's what we call "blatantly removing the copyright notice and making a couple of scribbles -- oh look it's all new!" That's roughly as acceptable from a copyright standpoint as ripping the "property of Joe Blow, please return if found" tag out of a pickpocketed wallet and calling it your own. I've deleted the image (a sad rip-off of [2]). At least trace over them yourselves, people... geez. --Brion 00:24 Mar 27, 2003 (UTC)
Actually, I found the image without any copyright information. Thus, the image will remain on wikipedia. If you wish to argue with me, email me, and we'll arrange a court date.user_talk:hfastedge Hfastedge 01:35 Mar 27, 2003 (UTC)
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