Wikipedia:Village pump archive 2004-09-26

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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 (such as the FAQ pages) or placed in the Wikipedia:Village pump archive if it is of general interest, or deleted.

Archiving talk

This is a two-parter for anyone who's willing to field either or both:

1) How do I archive most of what's on my user talk page, please? I'd like for the old material to be where it can still be read, but the page is getting too long for comfortable editing in current discussions.

2) How/Where was I supposed to find the answer to this question in the existing "how to" materials, please? As is true of many of the articles themselves, I have found the instructional pages consistently useless for explaining anything I didn't already know, and frequently confusing about the stuff I did know, and so fragmented that it's hard to track thru enough pages to find what I'm looking for if it does turn out to be there at all. (And I mean that in the nicest possible way.) -- isis 05:35 Oct 6, 2002 (UTC)

Here goes:

  1. Cut the text from your talk page and paste it into a new page, which you link from the main talk page.
    • Alternately, just cut it out entirely, then include a URL-link to an older revision from the page history.
  1. Probably nobody thought of documenting such a thing. If you wish to do so, please go where you would have looked and add it!

--Brion

Thanks for your reply, but I don't understand enough of it to implement it, so let me try again, please: I'm ignoring the sentence that starts with "Alternately" (because it's so far beyond my understanding that it scared me) and focusing on the one before it that I could follow much of: I'm good with the cut and paste part and "main talk page," but "new page" and "link" raised more questions for me -- would you (or someone) please elaborate on that? (I'm not stupid, but I haven't taken a computer science course in 30+ years, and they didn't teach me any of this stuff, so I'm incredibly ignorant.) -- isis 06:11 Oct 6, 2002 (UTC)

Look at the top of user talk:maveric149 and user talk:Brion VIBBER, for instance. You will notice links to pages which contain archived old talk. These pages at one point did not exist, so they were new pages when they were first created by making and following a link to them, putting text into them, and saving them. If need be, Wikipedia:How to start a page may help. --Brion 06:18 Oct 6, 2002 (UTC)

Requesting copyleft permission

I sometimes find myself requesting that people re-license their documents under the GFDL and giving a description of the Wikipedia and the consequences of releasing under the GFDL. Is there any boilerplate text for this request? DanKeshet

I am sure I've seen this. But the best I can come up with is Wikipedia:Building Wikipedia membership. Maybe it's on Meta. Maybe I'm picking the wrong words to search for. -- Tarquin 19:55 Oct 11, 2002 (UTC)
Very good question. I'm pretty sure there isn't one yet but I could probably whip one up over the weekend (I've explained this and seen it explained more times in more ways than I would like to count). --mav

I looked around a bit but didn't find any examples of linking book titles to the gutenberg project...I believe it could be a fine way to encourage readers to pursue and peruse the works of the people so oft cited i.e. descartes, plato, aristotle, which are readily available in full text on line.--dgd

It has been done - see for instance Wilfred Owen. I agree, a link to Gutenburg under "external links" is a good thing. --Camembert

table of contents

Hi, any way of creating TOCs for wikipedia? is there a tag set that allows for relative anchors in a page? That way we could have longer articles and less fragmentation and fluidity of the prose...--dgd

Nope. We are debating this exact issue over at m:Consolidating v/s breaking up which is on our discussion site Metapedia. I don't like the idea though since it would make it practical to have very long articles which in itself isn't so bad but in a wiki large articles are intimidating to edit and read. IMO it is far better to summarize and then link to detailed articles (See United States and Wikipedia:Naming conventions for good examples). --mav

Does the Metapedia site have talk pages as well? I'm thinking maybe at that purported discussion site one might actually have something vaguely resembling free speech at, say, the Metapedia genocide:talk:talk:talk level?--Anon

Go look for yourself. Metapedia uses the same software as is used here except for some minor differences (such as charsets and interlanuage link behavior and background fill). Metapedia is not an encyclopedia and does not have an NPOV policy or really any policy other than maybe net-etiquette. --mav

Wikipedia Page Loading Errors

Moved to Wikipedia:Troubleshooting

Bots

Moved discussion to Wikipedia talk:Bots.

Boilerplates

Moved discussion to Wikipedia talk:Boilerplate text

Wikipedia Evangelism

Hi, I've mentioned this before and thought I'd mention it again. As I'm browsing the pedia I find articles that might interest friends/coworkers. I pop them a link in a quick hello message and ask them if they confirm the accuracy of the content...the response so far has been first one of wonder, then awe, then enthusiasm! And it's been a nice way to relate to some folks I'm not often in contact with. Anyway, I searched for evangelism and came up with nada around the 'pedia. Is there a place for sharing an evangelical/ 'help us' message of wikipedia? --dgd

There's some stuff at Wikipedia:Building Wikipedia membership. (Hint which wouldn't help here but may in general: after searching, go to the "Power search" box at the bottom of the screen and check the box for the 'Wikipedia' namespace. You'll get various about, help, documentation, etc pages that aren't supposed to show up when you're searching for encyclopedia articles.) Also check the Meta-wikipedia where we keep general project discussion and misc stuff. --Brion 20:42 Oct 22, 2002 (UTC)
How about doing what a lot of news web pages do? They have a box at the bottom, "Send this article to a friend" with some kind of java mailer to ship it off and a box for you to add a signed message. Ortolan88
I like that idea too. Especially, and I know this would require more overhead, but a way to keep my list of folks in memory so I don't have to open my email client (which may not be available esp, as I'm a student and working on diff. machines).

I do not know if this is a case of vandalism, or an edit that went wrong -- but a considerable amount of the Karl Marx article has been deleted without explanation. Can someone revert to the previous version (I do not know how to do this easily). Thanks, Slrubenstein

I think what you want is Wikipedia:How to revert a page to an earlier version. DanKeshet

Thanks!

Perhaps Marx, like alternative views of genocide, is not sufficiently neutral.

Is there anyplace designated to list duplicative articles? If not, shouldn't there be?

I'm talking about ones like Abgar and Abgarus of Edessa that I have no doubt need to be combined (with the other title becoming a redirect), but I don't have enough knowledge of the subject to do it (and am not willing to learn enough about it).

I'm also talking about ones like Acid and Strong acid, where I do have expertise, and my expertise tells me they should be combined, but I'm not sure the majority of the community would agree.

What I'm suggesting (if it doesn't exist) is a page of "Votes for combination" like "Votes for deletion" is. -- isis 18:38 Oct 26, 2002 (UTC)

A list of duplicate articles already exists: Wikipedia:Duplicate articles -olivier 18:40 Oct 26, 2002 (UTC)

Cool. Now, could we please put that one and 'votes for deletion' on one of the special pages linked at the top of the screen, to make them easier (for me) to find and to encourage people to work on the ones on the list of duplicates? -- isis 18:52 Oct 26, 2002 (UTC)


It's not a "special page" because it's a human-written list, rather than some magically-generated thing. The place to go for all these sorts of pages is Wikipedia:Utilities. I'll go check this is mentioned in the FAQ. At some point I plan to put a few links at the top if the "editing help" page that's linked to at the foot of every edit box. -- Tarquin
(goes away... comes back) yup, it's here: Wikipedia:Contributing FAQ: What do I do if I find two articles on the same subject in the Wikipedia? Please could someone check the FAQ entry is good enough & then clean the pump? -- Tarquin 19:53 Oct 26, 2002 (UTC)

The recent flurry of editing on articles such as The Simpsons/Episode List, list of fictional cats, and felching has made me wonder: is there a "Most ridiculous articles" or similar page? Someplace that lists articles that have encyclopedic value, but at the same time make you wonder, "Why did someone make a page on this?" I looked briefly but didn't find one. I am very happy that we have articles like these; there should be a page celebrating their existence. -- Merphant 08:41 Oct 27, 2002 (UTC)

Just commenting the opnly reason I put The Simpsons/Episode List on a seprate page is that its a very long list. If it was shorter I would haev pt it on The Simpsons.

I understand completely; I recently did the same thing with List of musical instruments and the musical instrument article. It's still funny, though. -- Merphant

Markup Language

I'd like to suggest a large change to the markup used for the 'pedia. Currently, markup codes are used to format the text in an article and add wiki-text. My suggestion is that the markup language should instead be used to format the layout of the article itself. For example, to create a section, instead of using the equal-sign codes to create a header, perhaps use a Begin Section code followed by an identifier for the section, the section's text and finally an End Section code. I won't suggest a syntax formally but as an example:

{Markup Language|
Put section text here...}

And the wikipedia can interpret this to mean any number of things. The most obvious interpretation would be to insert the header Markup Language into the article. A not-so-obvious interpretation would be to insert an A html tag into the document with a NAME attribute set to Markup_Language. This way, the section itself can be the target of a wiki-link. If sections are nested within one-another, the wikipedia can create the headings for subsections one size smaller then for the headings of its parents. IE: 2 equal-signs for main sections and 3 equal-signs for sub-sections. I'd suggest that the codes for bold and italics also be removed and replaced with codes which suggest the meaning of the text itself (which can then be interpretted for formatting by current appearance standards).

Preferences can then be given to the user regarding how to deal with things like images, sections and code. For example, a user can opt to have the 'pedia add Header Link to the top of an article which point to that articles main sections. The user might also be given the option to expand/collapse sections by clicking a +/- symbol next to each heading. The user could perhaps be able to turn on or off horizonal rules between sections. If given the preference, a user might opt to have code snippets longer then 5 lines be truncated and a link be inserted to view the rest of the code in a seperate window.

It would give articles a more unified appearance, especially if applied to tables and other rich content which currently have to be written in HTML. And it opens up new preferences for readers of the 'pedia. New scripts can be made available for users of bots as well. For example, instead of just being able to "edit" an article, an "add section" page could be created which takes an Identifier, Parent Section and section text as arguments. This would make it easier to (for example) add the demographics data to cities via bot by simply creating a new section.

Also, non-content data like links to non-english version of articles and article type should be set via a seperate form (also for auto-manipulation by bots). If the pedia knew that a given article were an entry for a City, for example, it would know that properties such as "population", "Area", "State/Country" and so on should be included. Now, the author only need supply a value for this property in a seperate form to update the article. Within the article text, the variable %Population% could be inserted to tell the 'pedia to insert the articles Population variable. Now future contributors or bots can update the population property without directly editing the file (practically impossible for bots and hard for humans). I'd suggest that articles for years, dates, people, places, languages, chemical elements and musical instruments (to name a few) be formal "Article Types" with associated format "Property Lists". In fact, I'm suggesting that contributors be able to create thier own article types by creating an article under (for example) a 'Classes' namespace and setting the content of that article equal to an XML document (or something).

Just some ideas. But I'm ranting now. Rlee0001 05:54 Oct 28, 2002 (UTC)

Another copyright question: is it definitely OK to use short (about 15 seconds) sound samples from copyrighted recordings in articles? I want to add illustrative noises to articles like string quartet, flute and Piano Phase. Looking at The Beatles (album) and A Hard Day's Night, it seems to be OK, and I know it was discussed on the White album talk page, but I want to be certain before I start uploading. If it is OK, should I fully credit the recordings on the image page (performers, conductor, etc) or not? --Camembert

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