Wikipedia:Village pump archive 2004-09-26

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by OlofE~enwiki (talk | contribs) at 00:27, 21 September 2002. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Jump to navigation Jump to search
File:Village pump.JPG

Welcome, newcomers and baffled oldtimers! If you have a question about Wikipedia and how it works, please place it at the bottom of the list, and someone will attempt to answer it for you. (If you have a question about life, the universe and everything, go to Wikipedia:Help desk instead.)

Before asking a question, check if it's answered by the Wikipedia:FAQ.

NOTE - questions and answers will not remain on this page indefinitely (otherwise it would very soon become too long to be editable.) After a period of time with no further activity, information will be moved to other relevant sections of the wikipedia, placed in the Wikipedia:Village pump archive if it is of general interest, or deleted.

Your questions answered here

Question: I love the Wikipedia! - Where can I find more projects like this? I'm familiar with one other - the group proofreading project To me, this is what the net is all about. JBrave

New problem. I've just been typing for two hours on an edit and the computer locked up. I had previewed many, many times. Are those previews available? Or is one forced to save an incomplete text in order to ensure its safety? -- Dr. Retard

I'm afraid the previews are not saved. If I'm doing any major work, I use a text editor or word processor and save copies on my local hard disk, then copy it into Wikipedia's edit box. --Stephen Gilbert 14:37 Sep 15, 2002 (UTC)

All I want to do is make a small user page! I go to User:DrRetard and edit the page like I've edited every page since I starting editing here, and it looks fine. And then I click on a link like this one, User:DrRetard, or the one at Talk:Free_will_and_the_problem_of_evil, and I get a page with no text. Waaagh! I want to die!

Thanks for your help! -- Dr. Retard

Have you tried refreshing the "blank page"? Sometimes my browser gives me the old version of a page. -- isis 14 Sep 2002
It must be something like that - I checked and your user page does exist, with text and all. Andre Engels 19:35 Sep 14, 2002 (UTC)
Yes, I kept refreshing and refreshing. Even logging out and back in. Now it appears to work! I don't know why! Waagh! I still want to die! Thanks again for your help! -- Dr. Retard
In Internet Explorer, if you sit behind a proxy cache, sometimes you have to hold down Shift while clicking on the refresh icon, to really convince the program to refresh. http://freespace.virgin.net/john.cletheroe/pc_int/ieoe/shift.htm
I have no idea what that means, but I found out the hard way it's true -- I've had trouble several times on Wikipedia when an image in an article had been updated, and I kept getting the old one even when I refreshed the article page. I'm using IE 5.5. -- isis 14 Sep 2002
A proxy server sits between you and the rest of the internet and (invisibly to you) stores ("caches") web pages so that they load faster the second time around. Internet Service Providers often run caching proxys. If these proxy servers are not configured correctly, the above problem occurs. AxelBoldt

Hello, can someone help a newbie, please? 1) How can I get an uploaded picture onto a page? 2) What makes a page into an orphaned page? Thanks Renata

Hello, to get an uploaded picture onto a page you would put a link in like this: [[image:imagename.jpg]] (if it's a PNG, you'll obviously have .png there instead). If you want to show something and display ALT TEXT, you would put [[image:imagename.jpg|ALT TEXT]]. What makes a page an orphaned page is that no other pages link to it, which means that no one will find it except through "random page" or a search. To resolve that, just find a page that's relevant and work in a link to the orphan. --KQ

Wrap text around pictures: How do I get text to wrap around a picture? (Copied from Talk:Dwight Eisenhower to promote the idea of this village pump page.)

Easy way: <div style="float: left">[[image:Eisenhower.jpg]]</div>
Hard way: use a table (shudder). --Brion VIBBER

Of course, the table works in older non-CSS browsers, too.

So does ASCII art.

Editing individual year entries I stumbled across Tarquin's style guide for the layout of contents of these pages, but I wondered whether there was any particular commonly agreed restriction on content for these. For example, can one just check on pages which link to a year article and slap the events in (with discretion over omitting particularly boring events!) Mazzy

In the absence of some robot spider doing the same thing with limited intelligence, I have been adding to the various "day" and "year" pages as I go along. Very few of them are thickly populated, and if the only thing that happened in 864 was "Khan Boris of the Bulgarians is baptized an Orthodox Christian", then that tells you something, either about 864 or about the state of the Wikipedia.
So, it seems to me you should go ahead and add to the "day" and "year" pages. Wiki on. Ortolan88
I've added an item to 864. It's easy if you look!
Now Boris doesn't need to feel lonely. :-) Eclecticology 11:58 Aug 23, 2002 (PDT)

Deleting articles

Can someone tell me how to delete an article? I wrote Sound Card and realized that Sound card exists (and is the correct spelling?). I moved the contents of Sound Card to Sound card and made Sound Card empty, but can't delete it. -- User:Volker

Hi, Volker. I'm here to help (hold on to yer wallet!):

  1. You could put #REDIRECT [[sound card]] (note second word "card" is lower-case) in the Sound Card article. That way, if anyone vists the Sound Card page, they will be whisked automagically to the real sound card article.
  2. Only Administrators can delete pages, and we do so only rarely. Usually a REDIRECT does the trick.

--Ed Poor

  • Also, for future reference; if the name you realize your article should have had doesn't already exist as a page, you can click the "Move page" link in the sidebar to move/rename the article to the new name. This will automatically keep the old name as a redirect for consistency's sake. Moving this way is the "cleanest" way to rename an article, because the edit history stays with the article, instead of being broken across the old page and the new page. (Note that the "move page" only appears if you're logged in.) --Brion

are Umlauts allowed in article titles?

It should not be :Ludwig Maximilians Universitat, Munchen, but Ludwig Maximilians Universität, München, may I change the link, or will occur any errors with "äöü" in titles? --chd


They work just fine (as long as you only need stuff in ISO 8859-1). However, for those whiners who can't or won't type them (and in cases when a form with accents stripped is commonly used in English), make a redirect from the unaccented title to the article or vice versa. Ability to link cleanly is key. --Brion
Shouldn't it be either "München" or "Muenchen"? That is, the customary way to express the umlaut if not available is by putting an "e" after the altered vowel. I suppose you'd still want a redirect from "Munchen" and "Munich" for that matter. Ortolan88
Yes, the German language is special in this way, in that it has a standard 7bit version of its alphabet, and we shouldn't forget this in our redirects. To judge from Wikitech-L, in fact, the "ue" version is quite common on de:. — Toby 23:05 Aug 25, 2002 (PDT)

On a recent visit to Austria, I was quite surprized (probably shouldn't have been) that this is applied even to URLs. ÖBB, the Austrian Railway (presumably Österreichische Bundesbahn?) has the web site www.oebb.at (and www.obb.at most definitely doesn't work) -roy

Is there any reason not to bypass redirects?

Every time I click on a link in an article and discover that I have been redirected, I am tempted to return to the original article and fix the link. Is there any reason not to do this? Do people refrain from doing this because it is purely mechanical and a waste of time? Come to think of it, if bypassing redirects is purely mechanical, couldn't we write a script to bypass all redirects everywhere, and leave the redirects in place only for the sake of future misspellings? ---Karl Juhnke 23:39 Aug 25, 2002 (PDT)

Yeah, mainly it's a purely mechanical waste of time. Additionally, for forms that are equally correct (ex, British vs American spellings, short/long form of a country name, etc) adding a big old bla bla bla bla| to the link code clutters up the edit box. Clean, easily readable and editable code is paramount to what's supposed to be a community-edited project, and piped links are harder, not easier, to work with. An automatic redirect "fixer" might be nice (if it can be trusted), but it shouldn't be blindly thrown at everything. (All the above is IMHO.) --Brion 23:47 Aug 25, 2002 (PDT)
The usefullness of the redirect depends. If it is really a spelling error, then you should fix the link in the article, since it's a spelling error there as well. Many other redirects are for renamed pages because of naming conventions or the like (for example /subpages that have been moved), and there's no harm in fixing these (though no harm in leaving them either). However, sometimes the author of an article intends to use a slightly different term than the name of the article, but wants to link it anyway. For example, he may want to talk about the Kingdom of the Netherlands to specifically indicate he's talking about the Antilles and Aruba as well. Although the Kingdom of the Netherlands redirects to Netherlands, the use of a different name makes sense. Of course, the author could have written [[Netherlands|Kingdom of the Netherlands]], but this is much easier. That would be one reason not to mechanically change all links to redirects.


What is a good format for writing large numbers? Should we use the American format? --Juuitchan


See orders of magnitude. The exact format is still being debated on the talk page. There are long chains of pages you can link to from large numbers. -- Tarquin
No. I mean, should a pinball score, for example, be written as 3 486 147 040, or as 3,486,147,040, or what? -- Juuitchan
Ah, I see. 3,486,147,040 is preferred, I should think. I'll mention it in Wikipedia:Manual of Style.


I would like to make suggestions for eliminating some hassles in using one's Watch List. On what page should I do this? Also, why has my TOC comment on Wikipedia:Chat not been answered? David 09:02 Aug 27, 2002 (PDT)

Wikipedia:bug reports has a link to the feature request tracker on sourceforge. (It's kind of a pain to use, but it's easier to keep track of things there.) If you think it bears discussion, you might also post a note about your idea to the Wikipedia-L mailing list. Wikipedia:Chat doesn't seem to be used much these days; probably nobody answered it because nobody saw it, or because the few who did weren't particularly interested. (A child of the computer age, I never use the main page / table of contents -- I find things by search or via a link on another page I've already found; or of course on special:Recentchanges!) --Brion 11:36 Aug 27, 2002 (PDT)

Hi- how do I remove an entry after discovering that a very similar one aleardy exists? breatharian is very similar to breatharianism, which I just created, how do I get rid of the latter??

Thanks quercus robur

The easiest thing is usually to redirect it to the existing page, so when someone goes to the new page they get shunted automatically over to the old page; see Wikipedia:How to use redirect pages. I went ahead and redirected that one. --Brion 11:20 Sep 2, 2002 (PDT)
The convention so far seems to be to have the main page as the "ism", for example "surrealist" -> "surrealism", etc. It doesn't really matter though. :-) -- Tarquin 12:05 Sep 2, 2002 (PDT)

I find myself somewhat annoyed at the amateurish contributions of one particular Wikipedian who is ignoring valid criticism of his work. After an extended discussion and rewrite of one particular article, he simply restored portions of his own work, placing them at the front of the new article. Most of the information in the restored portions has been incorporated into the new article, but some of the information is just plain wrong. My solution to this quandary has been to state my objections (which have been casually dismissed by the Wikipedian in question) and abandon ship, working on other portions of Wikipedia while I wait for someone else to come along who has more patience than I do, but I am not happy about it. Does anyone have any advice or suggestions on how one might handle such petty confrontations without coming across as a control freak?--NetEsq 8:40am Sep 6, 2002 (PDT)

I've commented on the substantive issues at Talk:Law. I ended up there in response to a similar appeal by the other party on the mailing list. Edit Wars are seldom solved by two determined Wikipedians clashing head-on when both believe that they are right. Even though my views on the issue appear to be closer to yours, I have so far avoided putting them anywhere other than the talk page for fear of fanning the flames of war. Two things that can help are the involvement of more Wikepedians, and even more importantly the lapse of time to allow for reflection.
Definitions are especially tough, because everything that follows in the article will depend on the definition. I was recently involved in an edit war over the definition of Biblical canon, and can sympathize with your frustration. It all does make me feel that we may need a definition of definition. I'll have to think about that one, and maybe even do something. Eclecticology 17:29 Sep 6, 2002 (UCT)
I truly appreciate your attention to this matter, and I share your concerns about Edit Wars. What concerned me most was not the content of the article, but the fact that forward movement of the editing process was thwarted by one contributor reinstating portions of a previous article which were written by him without any attempt to address the concerns raised by me and by other contributors. There is no doubt in my mind that criticizing the contributions of other Wikipedians will create contentious situations, but I also believe that criticism is a necessary part of the editing process, as is responding to criticism, whereas simply restoring a previous version of an article without responding to criticism is counterproductive. In any event, I will heed your considered response and await the involvement of more Wikipedians and the lapse of time to allow for reflection.--NetEsq 11:12am Sep 6, 2002 (PDT)

Somewhere I saw a page listing all pages in the [[wikipedia:]] namespace. Does anyone know where to find that? --KQ 20:49 Sep 6, 2002 (UCT)

I don't recall, but that's a pretty simple and efficient SQL query: SELECT cur_title FROM cur WHERE cur_namespace=4 ORDER BY cur_title
user:AstroNomer knew it: it's Wikipedia:List of articles in Wikipedia: namespace. And you're right, that is a very quick query. --KQ 21:20 Sep 6, 2002 (UCT)

Special characters

From: Talk:Connective
Anybody knows how to get the correct symbols for conjunction/disjunction? (</> only rotated 90 degrees) -- Anon


The chars that are okay in all (well behaved) browsers are on Wikipedia:How does one edit a page. Link to outlandish ones there too. It's ∧ and ∨ BTW -- Tarquin

A discussion about copyright was moved to Wikipedia_talk:Copyrights

It looks like it was accidentally deleted. Where did you put it? -- NetEsq 02:57 Sep 16, 2002 (UTC)
Update -- Nevermind. My bad. I was confusing this with the move noted below. wikipedia:copyright issues -- NetEsq 03:02 Sep 16, 2002 (UTC)

Changes etiquette

When is it a good idea to mention or discuss an edit on the corresponding Talk page? Does size of edit matter? Potential controversy? Apparent other activity? -- Khendon

If you're removing or contradicting existing material, it's probably a good idea to explain in the talk page (or if it's brief, at least in the summary box in the edit form). In general try to be pre-emptive; if you think someone else is likely to question what you're doing, you can save a step by clarifying your intentions first. (The talk page is also a good place to cite sources for possibly controversial material.) --Brion

I had a possibly related question... If I believe that information on a page is suspect, but aren't (yet) in a position to confidently refute it, what is the appropriate way to flag the issue? Most articles I have looked at don't have anything at all on the talk page, so the chances of anyone seeing a comment I might put there seem remote... -roy

You should raise your concerns on the talk page - there are always lots of people looking at Recent changes who may see your comment, and other people who read and edit the article are also likely to look at the talk page. So the chances of someone seeing it are actually pretty good! Enchanter

I added links to the two pieces of legislation mentioned in European Company Statute, which I assume is appropriate. I'm not sure if I've done it in the most appropriate way, though. I'm simply put the links at the end of the article, but I wasn't sure if there was a better way of doing this. Is there any standard approach to linking to external documents that are cited in an article? Perhaps in this case the formal citations to the documents (which appear in the main text) should be external links themselves? Then again, is it really appropriate for the citation to be in the body of the text to start with? 

          -roy


Looks like the common practice. In general, external links are left at the end of the page. There are some among us that even prefer external links without the [ ], so that the URL is visible in case someone prints the article. But I think that has not been decided. --AstroNomer 19:32 Sep 9, 2002 (UTC)


Thanks. I just though it would seem more natural if there was some way of linking to the source inline -- but it doesn't seem to be the Wikipedia way...

It can be done. See Wikipedia:Manual of Style. It is looked down upon, but useful in some circumstances, and not apparently outlawed. Ortolan88

I notice many ppl, like AstroNomer in the last message, use a sort o automatic current date/time insertion. How do I do this? Yves

  • To add it to your signature, use four tildes in a row (~~~~) which produces a signature like this: -- April 00:38 Sep 10, 2002 (UTC)
    • And three tildes in a row (~~~) produces a signature without the time stamp, like this:Ortolan88

Abuse? How do you report abuse? The page September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/Zionist conspiracy theories has had an abusive sentence added. I have deleted it but should we report the user who added it (64.229.129.155)?

Chris, deleting the abusive or offensive material is indeed always the first step you should take. If you put "revert vandalism" or something in the edit summary box, this will also attract the attention of other Wikipedians.
Next, you can do a number of things. One of them is to check whether there are any other pages the offender has vandalised, using this page. If there are more offensive acts, you can clean them up and put or at least put a notice at Wikipedia:VANDALISM IN PROGRESS and explain what the user is doing or has been doing. One of the 40 Wikipedia administrators will check updates to that page and block the person if necessary.

However, most vandals leave after only one act, or are discouraged when their vandalism is removed by others, so that is usually sufficient action. Hope this is clear enough, Jeronimo

Okay. I tried to fix some of the formatting on the Japanese language page but I can't! How do I do this??

I have also seen other pages with a similar problem. --Juuitchan

It would help if you explained what the problem was. :) Since your fix appears to have been changing <pre> tags into <tt> tags, I'm guessing the preformatted text is too wide for your browser window, either overlapping the sidebar or pushing the page wider than the screen. The sample dialogues are particularly egrerious, with two columns of text side-by-side. If you want to make those prettier, you'll probably want to reformat them entirely, to not be so darn wide. For instance, the translations and notes could go under instead of to the side. (By the way, help with the nascent Japanese wikipedia would be greatly appreciated. I have only a minor smattering of the language myself and can't do much more than set the software up and be enthusiastic.) --Brion 20:03 Sep 11, 2002 (UTC)
I can't do it. I am not much more than a beginner at Japanese myself. --Juuitchan

Is it appropriate to put planned or anticipated events into future "year" articles? Khendon 10:40 Sep 12, 2002 (UTC)

Yes, sure. Can't imagine anything else in these articles (they are now mostly filled with vague predictions I think). Jeronimo

I'm thinking of adding some fairly lengthy articles about specific pieces of classical music (long enough that they'd unbalance an article about the composer in question). Does anybody have any ideas how I might name them? .... ....

In the interest of keeping the village pump page at a usable length, I've moved this to Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (pieces of music). -- Tarquin


Is it possible to change ones username? I registered as roybadami (my name), but Roy Badami (or at least RoyBadami) would have been better—I notice other people with spaces in their names. If not, perhaps I should just reregister; it's not like I've made many edits (and most of the ones I have made I wasn't logged in for anyway...)


You could set your nickname in preferences -- then that will show up whenever you sign with 3 "~" characters, and point to the roybadami user page. I don't know about changing the user nme itself. -- Tarquin
Thanks, that's all I was after. Roy Badami

---

I've asked this question a couple of times, but no one seems to be answering. Every time I look at an article containing an image - and that includes "Village pump" itself - the image, if it is right justified, overwrites the text of the article. If it is left justified, there is no problem. I still don't believe that I'm the only person experiencing this problem. -- Deb

Which browser do you use? It's fine in Mozilla, and even with clunky old dinosaur Netscape 4.7 -- Tarquin

I'm just using Internet Explorer, and I haven't had a problem with any other website. -- Deb

user:Lee Daniel Crocker is technologically savvy and in a position to see what's going on and figure out how to solve it. --KQ

Looks OK to me using IE 5.5 SP2 under Windows 2000 SP2 Roy Badami

I've had this same problem on some computers at school - but nowhere else. I do beleive that the offending browsers were IE 5.5 SP1 or w/o service packs. So it is probably a broken browser and the only way to fix it is to upgrade. --mav

In any case, if you're running 5.5 (original) or 5.5 SP1, then you need to upgrade to 5.5 SP2 immediately to protect yourself from the Nimda virus. Roy Badami

(hoarse stage whisper) mo ... zi ... lla ... o ... pen ... source ... ;-)



I just noticed that it only happens when I'm logged in - so does that mean that it's something to do with my user profile? Any suggestions?

--Deb


In your preferences, try changing the quickbar settings. I think "floating left" has problems. Is that what you have? AxelBoldt
Tried that and it didn't work. However, I have now overcome the problem by changing the skin - to "Nostalgia". Deb

The lost password e-mails are being sent with an invalid envelope sender, namely <apache@localhost.localdomain> (or at least they were last week). This means that any well configured mail system will not accept them. There doesn't appear to be any working webmaster or postmaster address that I can find (in fact wikipedia.org doesn't seem to accept e-mail). Can someone pass this on to the appropriate people, please, or point me at the appropriate mechanisms for contacting the administrators? Thanks Roy Badami

user:Lee Daniel Crocker is the person to talk to about this. --KQ

Thanks, I've e-mailed him. Roy Badami

I noticed a misconfig in the network settings which caused the hostname to get reset to "localhost.localdomain"; I've changed it to "www.wikipedia.org". Should be better now. Not so sure about incoming e-mail though, that may be going to a nice pretty black hole. --Brion 06:02 Sep 16, 2002 (UTC)

Yep, that's fixed it, I tested reseting my password and I received the e-mail without problems.

You would appear to be right about incoming e-mail, you have no MX records (which isn't an error in itself), and you don't appear to be running an SMTP listener. (Though technically it's not a black hole, because the mail will eventually time out and generate a bounce message.) Roy Badami 22:26 Sep 16, 2002 (UTC)

Sendmail is accepting connections on loopback, but either it's configured to refuse connections via the real network or the port is firewalled off. I still have nightmares from the last time I tried to configure sendmail, so I haven't looked at it too closely. :) I'll bug the tech list about it. --Brion 04:59 Sep 17, 2002 (UTC)

Just a comment:

Of the 43,000 or so Wikipedia pages, about 27,500 are less than one KB in size.

user:renata

Lengthy discussion on Image copyright and use of copyrighted materials moved to wikipedia:copyright issues KJ 01:05 Sep 16, 2002 (UTC)

Another copyright discussion was moved to Wikipedia talk:Copyrights. These two should probably be integrated at some point. -Stephen Gilbert 03:06 Sep 16, 2002 (UTC)


Various entries of German cities in City Listing show &uuml; etc. Should these be corrected to use the appropriate character - example

  1. D&uuml;sseldorf

I would do it myself, but not knowing German I would probably make mistakes 

-- Chris Q 11:25 Sep 17, 2002 (UTC)


Hello, I just fixed the problem. The characters are now correct.

Cordyph

copy and paste from User talk:Maveric149

All of the old user pages that just redirect to new user pages should be deleted. Sure things link to them, but they are taking up space in the main namespace, rather than where they should be, which is in the User namespace. I tried to prepair some of them for deletion, however you (Maveric149) didn't seem to agree with my motives. What if one of those old user pages is the same name as something that could make a useful entry? Why should they take up space in the 'pedia so that they can just redirect to their user page? I find it quite annoying when I am looking for something relovant in the 'pedia, by using the Random page link, and I get some outdated user page redirect! -- Mbecker

The_Cunctator
Kpjas
Matt Stoker
Eob
Taw
PaulDrye
MMGB
SJK
Simon J Kissane

I agree it would probably be better to just delete them rather than having redirects; but the best way to "prepare" for that is to fix the pages that link to them. Then they can be deleted with little objection. But until then, they should remain redirects. --LDC
Should not it be the responsibility of the users who lay claim to these misplaced pages to change all of the links to said pages? If they really want all of those pointless links to talk pages to point to their user pages then they should find all of the links and fix them. The pages should just be deleted, and redirect of improper links should be the users responsibility. -- Mbecker
Since you're the one all fired up about it, why don't you fix the links? That's the traditional wiki way. --Brion
You have got me there. I started doing that exact thing, then I ran into someone's old user page that had at least 100 links, and realized it was not really worth my time. I am just trying to take out the trash, but it is not something I am willing to spend all of my time on. If the user's who originally created these old user pages, cherish them so much, then they should do the job of taking out the trash. Or, maybe the progarmmers could create a page, that allows people to submit old user pages, and then some script will change all of the links to those pages, before deleting it? -- Mbecker

Mbecker what you are trying to fix is a bug. If you don't like the fact that the random page function brings you to redirects then file a bug report. If and when something else comes up that has the same name as an old user name then we can worry about fixing ancient talk links. I don't think we would ever have an encyclopedia article named The Cunctator or kpjas or maveric149 and I don't know of anybody of encyclopedia interest that shares the real names you list (except maybe Lee Daniel Crocker and Larry Sanger but those two are Wikipedians). As LDC says, at the very least each old user page link must be fixed before the pages are deleted. --mav

It is not that I don't like the fact that the random page function brings me to a redirects, it is the fact that these pages exist at all. I don't see anyway of flaging these pages so that they are not used by the random page function, so I think they should just be removed, since they are not needed anyhow. -- Mbecker
But they are needed to make sure old talk sigs still work. If and when those links are edited to point directly to the target then and only then there would they not be needed. --mav
Even then, they may still be needed. There may be links from outside Wikipedia. People might have them in their bookmark files. We shouldn't break links without good reason. --Matthew Woodcraft

I think that the best solution to this problem would be to make a function that could be used by users to flag the culprit pages. Then another function could automatically fix all of the outdated links, and remove the flagged page. There are many ways to go about doing this. It could be made a request page that would require actions by the administrators to actually go through, or it could be a Special User function. I don't know what would be the best way to go about adding this functionality. -- Mbecker

That sounds like a feature request. If you want it to have any chance of being implemented then you should file it at sourceforge. --mav
Just want to say I never thought of it as a problem, but I certainly see Mbecker's point. Upon checking, I just discovered that I'm probably one of the chief culprits. For what it's worth, I'll try to take time to take out my own trash, at least. Then Wesley can point somewhere more useful, like to John or Charles Wesley. Perhaps a polite request to some of the more egregious offenders like myself would lead to some more of them being cleaned up. Wesley 21:19 Sep 17, 2002 (UTC) (btw, I like the tilde sig. feature)

FWIW, the random page function does not select redirects; however, it does for efficiency pre-select 1000 random pages at a time, and then refreshes that set every 1000 requests or so. So if it pre-selects a page with content that is then changed into a redirect, that redirect may be selected by the function until the next refresh. Also, MBecker, you might not be aware that the existence of these old user pages is not because of any mistake on the part of their creators--they exist because the first version of the software we used here made no distinction between user pages and content pages. So it isn't a matter of them "cleaning up their own mess" (Although I'm probably one of the bad cases too, and I can clean that up). Many of these users are no longer active, and so aren't around to clean up the mess even if they wanted to. If I or some other developer comes up with a way to clean up those with too many links to clean manually, that will be great; until then, clean up the ones that are reasonably easy to do, and leave the redirects to the others. --LDC

I honestly think that it would be easier to automate this process. I have submitted a few clean-up suggestions to sourceforge. I hope they will be considered for implementation. (btw, how can one participate in development of the wiki code?) -- Mbecker

The wiki code is the project "wikipedia" on SourceForge. See http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net . You'll have to go through the usual Sourceforge process of getting an account, downloading the code via CVS, etc. You'll have to be familiar with PHP and MySQL.
(an aside) perhaps such details as the pre-namespace state of wikipedai could go on a meta-article about the history of wikipedia ... not that I want to encourage navel-gazing at this early stage in the project! (or is there such an article already? -- Tarquin
There's a section about the history of Wikipedia at Wikipedia. The namespace issue is not covered yet. AxelBoldt

Is there a gallery of style somewhere? I (a newbie) happened to check the entry for my home city Uppsala and ... well, it's there at least. Then I happened to see Cologne. Then I thought, maybe I should do something for my hometown, eh. So, is there - or could there be - a collection of well made articles of various types, serving as a convenient way to see how to do things? (and how not to?) There should be a lot of categories that could benefit? -- OlofE

EEEK! Cologne is an HTML disaster please do not copy that style. See Wikipedia:Manual of Style for some pointers. --mav

We're working on it at Wikipedia:Manual of Style, but nothing yet as specific as how to lay out articles for cities. The layout for Cologne is a bit heavy on tabular data IMO -- Tarquin
I always thought that the page for Frederick looked nice. It works in tourist information well. Michael Becker 14:54 Sep 18, 2002 (UTC)

Is there a way to rename images? Just spotted Image:Parliament3.jpg in the uploads. I'm sure we'll have images of parliaments of than Canada, it would be nice to give it a less generic name. -- Tarquin

Well trying to move the image description page didn't work. I would call this an exexpected behavior of the software. There should be an easy way to rename images. --mav

  • Presumably the kludge (if necessary) would be to re-save the image under the new name and alter the page to refer to the new name. Yes? No? (Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. :-) )
Yes, that's the way to do it. As with pages, the downside is that you lose the history (previously uploaded versions of the same file; date/time, username of the uploader) unless you manually copy it in as a note. An extension to the page move/rename function (as there is for deletion) to cover uploaded files better would be a good thing. Please head over to Wikipedia:Bug reports and file a feature request to bug the programmers about it. --Brion

Hi. I am a new user and I was editing my User info and decided to turn my user info into an article. About 5 minutes later, a request for the deletion of my article was added and the info was returned to user status. Now, my personal opinion is that *everyone*, famous or not, is deserving of article status. However, I am willing to go with the majority here, but I would like some feedback. Please give reasons why "regular" people should or should not be given article status. Now my reasoning says that an encyclopedia should have as much information as possible. The Wikipedia says "An encyclopedia(alternatively "encyclopaedia") is a written compendium of human knowledge." Is my autobiography not "human knowledge"? Who would know more about Stephen Mills than me? What's wrong with the Wikipedia serving as a collection of articles, stories and biographies of "regular" people as well as "famous" ones? If I am willing to share my personal details and accomplishments with the rest of the world, what better place than an encyclopedia by the masses? --Stephen Mills

An answer is already on your user talk page. --mav

Just the fact that we have more space than a paper encyclopedia doesn't mean articles shouldn't be encyclopedic in nature. If we can add a list of your hobbies, we might just as well add your views on World Peace, euthanasia, George W. Bush or buddhism. But that kind of information is totally uninteresting to virtually everyone in the world. If they want to know you, they'll visit your personal website. An encyclopedia is for people that hear or read a name and think: "who was he?", or "what was he famous for again?" or "what else did he do?" or "when was he born?" or "why is his work in this area so important?" etc. Unless you've done something that has people ask such questions, your article is not encyclopedia material IMO. Jeronimo

Another newbie topic! I was messing with the cichlid article and it's got a link to oscar - except, it's not the academy award but a rather massive fish... so, can someone guide me through (or point me to the tutorial) for setting up an article with that same name (the fish really is called oscar and it's very well known) and ... so on? I can create the new article, no problem there. TIA, -- OlofE

I just created the page Oscar (fish), and made Oscar point to it, you you can put some text there now (please do!).
Done - but now I'll never learn that thing you did with splitting the two articles ;-) Many thanks! -- OlofE
When disambiguating pages, please please PLEASE don't forgot to click on "what links here" and fix all the links! There are a few dozen pages linking to Oscar on the assumption that it's a redirect to Academy Award, which it isn't anymore. --Brion 00:24 Sep 21, 2002 (UTC)
Dang I knew there was something more to do:-) I'll get to it -- OlofE
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_archive_2004-09-26&oldid=301747"