Wikipedia:Village pump archive 2004-09-26

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File:Village pump.JPG

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Moved discussion

See the archive for older moved discussion links.

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL ON TALK PAGES

Is it a violation of copyright law to copy two paragraphs from an external web page and put it on a Wikipedia article talk page. The purpose is to explain a word.

Thanks,..Norm2 05:50 20 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Smells like fair use to me. CGS 10:58 20 Jul 2003 (UTC).

Transitory information in entries

I was looking at the entry for Urban tribe which includes the following statement:

Urban Tribes are the rapidly growing groups of never-married's between the ages of 25 and 39 who gather in common-interest groups and enjoy the urban lifestyle.

My inclination is to remove the "rapidly growing" assertion. Even if Urban Tribes are or recently have been rapidly growing (probably subject to debate anyway), such a trend would have to be quite ephemeral. As such, I wonder if it is appropriate for an encyclopedia article. I'm curious how others feel about this. Bill 10:40 20 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Maybe it means that the groups grow rapidly, not the trend. :-) Seriously, I agree that it's not a good idea to have that kind of assertion in there. -- ESP 00:15 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Rather than deleting the "rapidly growing" claim, it would be interesting to know who claimed that the trend is growing, and when. AxelBoldt 17:57 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Searching questions

Maybe I'm missing something (highly likely), but it seems to me that searches in Wikipedia are still primitive in some ways. One thing I noticed recently is that searching seems to change if a new node is created.

For example, suppose I do a search for "yyxxxzzz" in Wikipedia. If there is no node for "yxxxzzz", then I will probably see a list of entries which contain this string. However, if I now create a node for "yyxxxzzz", and do the search again, the search will find the new node, and short-circuit all the other entries. While this is often useful, it is not always ideal, and makes it harder to find entries which should cross-refer to each other. Perhaps there are features of the search facility which I don't know about, but this behaviour does seem unhelpful. -- David Martland 10:39 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)


There is a difference between the behavior of the search button and the go button. See Wikipedia:Go button for details. --Eloquence 12:29 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)
That's helpful, thank you. However, it doesn't solve all problems. I've been experimenting, and discovered this, for example. Try typing in "Theobald Boehm"

and then hit either Search or Go. Neither should find any page. Firstly, Theobald Boehm does not yet exist as a node in WP. However, it does exist as a proto-link on the page flutist. Surely this should be picked up? Perhaps the problem here is that the search term makes use of two words linked together? (There's some odd formatting here, not sure why!) -- David Martland 12:52 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)

The reason for that is that the fulltext search is currently disabled on the English Wikipedia for performance reasons. It's still dog slow, though ..--Eloquence 13:00 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)

What was the purpose of the conversion script that ran in Feb 2002? For example, this edit on Nancy Sinatra. You can't that tell me that someone wrote a bot to replace all instances of "lounge crooner" with "singer". CGS 22:29 21 Jul 2003 (UTC).

importing all articles from the UseModWiki script. We're past 32k. I thought this question was FAQed. If not, could you make it so? :-) -- Tarquin 22:32 21 Jul 2003 (UTC)
The closest thing we seem to have at the moment is User:Ryguasu/conversion script AI, a copy of an earlier Pump conversation on this subject. (It also goes into why the conversion script has been credited with non-conversion edits like changing "lounge crooner" to "singer", by the way.)
—Paul A 01:38 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)

It would be really helpful if we could protect the village pump during archiving and just one person archives it. Otherwise the edit conflicts make it nigh on impossible. Good idea? CGS 22:41 21 Jul 2003 (UTC). [[Wikipedia:Village pump

It might be good to put a note with a timestamp at the bottom saying it's being archived and please don't edit for a few minutes, then remove it when you're done. I'm kind of against protecting it, since invariably someone will forget to un-protect it. Edit conflicts are annoying, but they aren't really that hard to work around if you're just deleting stuff that no one's editing. -- Merphant 04:29 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Speaking of which... -- Merphant 04:41 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Well now that I've calmed down a bit about what made me quit - I want to not let a couple of people ruin my participation in this interesting project. I want to make a suggestion to fidgety busy-bodies. It won't hurt the project to wait more than 2 minutes before you start stepping all over something someone else is in the current process of working on. In my case as a newer user, it may take me an hour, but it is satisfying when I can accomplish it and then "set it free to the wolves". During the process helpful hints are welcome, but constantly having a tug-of-war of working on something, edit conflict, reverts, repeat... is tiresome. Have a bit of patience. Let me quote the helpful hints I got before I threw up my hands and said, "this isn't worth it.": Dmsar 01:05 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

You've created an article at Wikipedia:Bulletin Board. This is in the Wikipedia namespace, which meas it's for utility pages. There was an article for bulleten board already at Bulletin Board, which you have redirected. Why is this? Mintguy
Material moved from incorrectly named page:
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1. album by The Partridge Family
2. Hacker jargon
3. Standar usage of bulletin board
This is a disambiguation page. If you followed a link here, you might want to go back and fix that link.
What is this for? Mintguy 23:13 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
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Are you trying to start an article? You've put it in the wrong place. Meta pages are not for articles, but for information relating the the operation of this site. Put you article at Bulletin board. and sign your name with 4 "~". --Jiang 23:27 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
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Nonono!!!! This doesn't belong here. Why put it on a utility page? Plus, you redirect should be #REDIRECT[[Wikipedia:Bulletin Board]] for it to work. Please move the contents of this page (minus the discussion) there and this one will be deleted. --Jiang 23:47 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
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End of moved material Enchanter 23:54 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
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Ordered lists

archive to Wikipedia:Feature requests in a few days


Does anyone else think it would be a good idea to modify the default stylesheet to add space between ordered list items (see User:Merphant/sandbox)? It would make paragraphs in ordered lists much easier to read. For simple bulleted lists we don't have that problem, since we can just insert a space between bullets. -- Merphant 04:38 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

It does look much better and more readable, certainly.
James F. 07:04 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I agree. I definitely think it should apply to bulleted lists also. Inserting a space (in the wiki-code) between bullet points actually causes the software to generate multiple lists of one item, which is silly. -- Wapcaplet 10:27 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I like the 0.4 em spacing option over 0 (hard to read) and 1 (ugly and a space hog). --mav
I've mentioned it on Wikitech-l. -- Merphant 22:34 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Blame

Has anyone ever tried to implment an equivalent of CVS blame for the revision history page? If you don't know what I mean, it's like a diff, but shows the current revision and who added what to it when (sections of text are highlighted with a user and date). Do people think this would be a goode idea? I could have a stab at it myself, perhaps. CGS 15:40 22 Jul 2003 (UTC).

Anon user 64.119.193.140 is adding links to http://www.maintour.com pages for every Southern California town. They seem borderline to me, because the pages contain a tiny bit of encyclopedia info and massive advertising. Are these worth keeping, or are we just being used to generate traffic? Stan 19:24 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

It looks like the IP address belongs to Grand Pacifc Resorts. So it would seem they are trying to use the 'pedia to beef up business? I'd revert the edits--they don't add any useful information. —Frecklefoot 19:44 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Alright, I have put a temporary block on the IP address. Feel free to unblock it at anytime. MB 19:55 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I'm at lost with Jennifer Lopez, a presumably young enthusiast is adding POV material under anonymous IPs 67.39.46.8 and 68.78.49.170, and my interest in J.Lo. is too low for be to bother correcting this for too long. --FvdP 19:37 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Could a mathematician take a look at 1 E21. Doesn't the number actually belong at 1 E22? Or maybe Order of magnitude (numbers)? Evercat 21:06 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I'm almost certain that 7*1022 is bigger than 1022, I'll change the range to from 1021 to 1024... כסיף Cyp 21:47 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)~

I've seen "Academy Award" and "Oscar" used interchangeably (for example, in the new article on Frances McDormand). Should they be? Most people use the words interchangeably, but I didn't know if we ought to choose one for simplicity's sake, and to limit confusion for the many people worldwide who pay little attention to the AMPAS's awards, let alone their nickname? Jwrosenzweig 21:19 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Yes, at least in the same article with all parts written by the same person. Being properly chastened, I've changed Frances McDormand accordingly. Bill 21:31 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Would it be possible to have a convention on references where we site them within the text like so: [1] Pizza Puzzle

The convention (unwritten as far as I know) is to have naked wikirefs within the text that are then numbered. All other external links go in the External link section. --mav

But how do we number them? If somebody adds one, its easy for all the numbers to get changed up. Also, it might be useful to have a link to an article on the source.

Don't they automatically number themselves? Lemme try... [2] [3] [4]... yep, they sure do. -- Wapcaplet 22:50 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)

But mav says not to do it that way... Pizza Puzzle or are those naked wikirefs? Pizza Puzzle

Which reminds me: Is there any way of inserting an anchor <a name="foo">bar</a> in Wiki text? I've looked in obvious places like Manual of Style and Cite Your Sources, but it doesn't seem to be there.


What I'm thinking of is the difficulty of citing specific material from a long printed source, meaning a book. If you have several references, you don't want to repeat the whole gory bibliographic listing in each place. If you put that in a Bibliography, there's the problem of putting a page reference in each place while linking it to the proper item in the bibliography. I see that the Cite entry suggests a Wiki entry for the book itself; but is that really what you want for every work cited? What I'd rather see is something like
...not putting him to torture (NEL, pp. 400, 406). On the other hand,...
Bibliography
<a name="NEL">NEL</a>: Orio Giacchia, Nel Terzo centenario..., Università Cattolica etc etc


where a click on the NEL link would take you to the biblio item to find the publication data. One could use this reference style without the hyperlink, as is done in many books, but that seems so twentieth-century. Any comments?
Dandrake 23:02 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I personally like the [1] [2] citation style (the standard in many journals), with a bibliographic listing at the end. Auto-hyperlinks and auto-numbering would be helpful, but would require code changes. See Depleted uranium for an example of doing this manually, which has the problem of re-numbering your references when you add another one anywhere other than the end of the list. --Delirium 23:13 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Manual renumbering would be a major problem, absolutely. That sort of thing was behind my proposal to use abbreviations of the document name in place of numbers. But I'm not proposing that somebody make code changes to support the anchor capability; just checking that it wasn't already there, obscurely.
Naturally, when the footnote is one of several to pages in a book, I can write a full footnote with biblio data and page numbers in the first one, then use good old loc. cit. and op. cit. in the rest. A pity, though, about having the numbering of footnotes set in stone as the order in which you created them and appended them to the numbered list. Makes the auto-numbering of the list a dubious advantage: arguably, if you're manually numbering the [nnn] references, you should do the same to the footnote bodies, to reduce the chance of crossing them up. Just rambling here, but it seems there might be reason to discuss a more automatic design for footnotes. Should I be on some list or watching some page in order to keep up with any discussion that might arise?
Dandrake 01:17 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Actually the naming sounds okay too, and that also is fairly common in journals. Something like [Smith], or [Smith 1998] if disambiguating is necessary (the latter is sometimes used even when disambiguating isn't necessary if it's in a context where the date of the reference might be of particular importance). That avoids the renumbering problem, without having to put full unwieldy citations in parentheticals. Of course, I personally still prefer a standard footnote method (with superscript footnotes instead of [1]), but that would require the auto-numbering changes just like the [1] method would. --Delirium 02:22 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)


User:127 protected Talk:New Imperialism, apparently to prevent me from discussing the page with other users. He also moved a huge section of text written yesterday (and today) to an "archive", the entire page he moved was nothing but discussion regarding potentional changes to "his" page; something he apparently doesnt want happening. Pizza Puzzle

Now he just protected New Imperialism because I moved a "see also" out of the middle of nowhere and put it somewhere visible. Is this guy the owner of the site or something, I don't think he likes me. Pizza Puzzle

Wikipedia_talk:Protected_page might be a better place to discuss this. The page history makes it look like there's an edit war going on. If this is the case, and 172 is involved in this, then he should not be protecting the page anyway. <quote>If you are an admin and you want a page in an edit war in which you are involved to be protected, it is recommended that you contact another admin and ask them to protect the page for you. (from :Wikipedia:Protected_page)</quote> Angela 23:08 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)
For the record, I just unprotected both pages. I am, frankly, at a loss as to why they were protected in the first place (especially the talk page). --Camembert

I suggest we create a formal mechanism to declare an edit war and rules to control it. We ban those who disregard the rules. When there is an edit war, each side should create its version like New Imperialism/temp1 and New Imperialism/temp2 and let others to choose which one is better-through a voting system maybe. No matter what the voting result is, the ones involving in the edit war should not start the war again unless they get new ideas. During the edit war, the article may be protected--not because we want to ban somebody from modify it, but because we don't want the edit war affecting the general public. Of course, we have to choose a mediator acceptable to both sides to oversee the edit war. Wshun

Its a good idea except that one user will leave his article at New Imperialism and the other will be forced to the temp page where they will feel marginalized and left out. Pizza Puzzle

We have Wikipedia:Current disputes over articles to report "edit wars". I'm not sure if a set of formalised rules on how to handle them would be possible, but feel free to have a go (you could start with a note on Wikipedia talk:Current disputes over articles, perhaps) - everyone would be grateful to you, I'm sure, if you could come up with a workable system. --Camembert
Each side should create its own version? That's an awful system. To suggest that we create two POV articles and vote on which one is the best seems quite bizarre to me. Each side should work together to produce an acceptable compromise. Lengthy discussion, not voting, is the best way to acheive a well-informed and intelligent result. (posted via edit conflict, twice)-- Tim Starling 00:11 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Yes, but what do u do when people refuse to discuss? Or when they insist that discussion must continue indefinitely? Pizza Puzzle

You need a good mediator to help out. User:Stephen Gilbert is doing a great job at sorting out a long running edit war on the Open Directory Project page. A temp page has been created when all concerned parties put forward their suggestions for and against various things being included. Angela

Each side with its own version is an awful system, but it is better than an ongoing edit war which may change into nonsense hatre. To win an edit war, one may need continuously modifying its own version to be plausible to most wikipedians. I believe naively that the winning version would be as NPOV as possible. Do not underestimate the power of voting. Wshun

Both sides doing alternative versions is the worst possible solution. The problem here is that we have an article that is far too big (50K!!!!) and with a bad history of edit wars, some of whom involved both protagonists and which got one banned the last time. Each side sees not merely what is happening now but is influenced by the past, seeing edits now as part of an ungoing war. 172 was wrong to protect the page, but Pizza Puzzle is hardly contributing to a good working environment by plonking large chunks of text onto 172's talk page and by provocatively implying a simple archiving of a talk page was censorship. It is in PP own interest to avoid a rerun of past battles that caused so much bad blood last time. FearÉIREANN 01:35 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)

... Pizza Puzzle

A page was created some months ago called theories of imperialism. As there was a discussion at Talk:New Imperialism I looked through the history and discovered the earlier page which was apparently part of an attempt to shorten New Imperialism; upon mentioning it I was attacked by User:172 who then attempted to hide the entire conversation (claiming he was "archiving" the conversation) and then, without using the votes for deletion page he deleted theories of imperialism. Its a bit ridiculous. Pizza Puzzle

Just a short note. I have been timid and posted Wikipedia:Waitingroom (draft version) because I didn't have the boldness to post it as a off the shelf functional page. You may want to polish it or discuss it on its talkpage. (Just don't delete it as patent nonsense :) -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo-stick 08:26 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I don't get it. What does this page do over "requested artciles" and "pages needing attention"? CGS 09:44 23 Jul 2003 (UTC).
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