Wikipedia:Village pump archive 2004-09-26

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Mav (talk | contribs) at 10:58, 18 February 2003 (:See Talk:Losers in literature for the reply.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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Moved discussion

See the archive for older moved discussion links.

The article School sanitation seems a little odd and its related link about IRC reads like a business plan without saying much. Should either exist? If so in what form?

I think a rating system similar to amazon would work well on a site like this. That way if i want to use this for my kids school i can guage if it is a good article. This generally needed for subjects that the reason i am coming to the site is that i know little or nothing about the subject i am searching for.

Rating systems of various kinds have been discussed many times. The general opinion around here seems to be that the base Wikipedia should remain as it is, with any rating or moderation systems built as separate projects. Larry Sanger was working on one such system, but there hasn't been much said about it in the past few months. -- Stephen Gilbert 15:12 Feb 14, 2003 (UTC)

At Talk:List of songwriters/temp a link has automatically appeared to Talk:List of songwriters. Is this a relic of the subpage system? Tokerboy

Partial support for subpages has been restored for user pages and talk pages in recognition of the facts that A) sub-pages have continued to be in de-facto use in these domains and there's no clear suggestion for replacing them, and B) the complaints against sub-pages were primarily in regards to their distortion of article title conventions, which doesn't really apply to the above usages. --Brion 03:51 Feb 12, 2003 (UTC)

Can someone look into the issue I raised at Talk:History of Singapore, regarding copyright problems with the History of Singapore article? I don't have the time to handle it right now. -- CYD

Is is just me, or are the pages starting with a 'V' not showing the 'v' try Secret_Intelligence_Service and click on the vauxhall stuff at the bottom... -Stevert

p.s. : never mind - wierd browser glitch.-SV

I've uploaded an image and forgot to rename it. How can Wikipedia get rid of this (too simple) filename? BTW, it was Image:Leo.png --Torsten Bronger 02:47 Feb 13, 2003 (UTC)

Asterisks in Revision History

In revision history, some people put * in front of their summary. What does the asterisk signify?

Most likely, nothing at all. An older version of the wiki software put an asterisk in the summary field in the edit form by default, and some people forgot to delete it when typing in their own text. --Brion

The list of words not used in searches seems reasonable for words IN articles. Is there anyway that the search of article TITLES could use ALL words? -- 217.24.129.50

When we upgrade MySQL to version 4 (which has much better fulltext search capabilities, including exact phrase searching), we'll try to reduce or remove the stopword list. This'll have to wait a bit, as the last couple of revisions have had bugs which specifically affect types of queries that we use. --Brion 17:34 Feb 13, 2003 (UTC)

Wouldn't it be nice to have piped wiki links displayed in a different color (e.g. a darker shade of blue)? Mkweise 05:21 Feb 14, 2003 (UTC)

Well, it would be confusing. With luck, that'll scare a few of the less savory types away. ;) --Brion 05:23 Feb 14, 2003 (UTC)

I have a question about headers and subheaders in articles. Obviously, the first word should be capitalized, but should the subsequent words be capitalized? Obviously if the words are part of an official title, it should be capitalized, but what about in general? I've seen it both ways, and I didn't see this issue addressed anywhere. I know article titles are not supposed to be capitalized, but what about headers in those articles? Which should it be:

or

-- 136.152.197.237 06:28 Feb 14, 2003 (UTC)

My impression is that the general convention is not to capitalize subsequent words in section headers (unless they're proper names, of course). I suppose it doesn't really matter, but "External links" etc fit in better with the house style. --Brion 06:32 Feb 14, 2003 (UTC)

Wikidates

Is there as a rule as when to wikify dates and years? For example, on the pages "Parti Québécois" and "Bloc Québécois", only some dates were wikified, while others aren't. To me, the choice seems to be arbitrary. Are only the relatively more important dates wikified? --Menchi 05:23 Feb 15, 2003 (UTC)

It's a matter of taste as much as anything else: some people will wikify all dates, some will only wikify important dates, some will wikify very few. Birth and death dates in biographical articles should be wikified (as per the Wikipedia:Manual of Style), but beyond that there's no policy on date wikification, nor any consensus on it, as far as I know. --Camembert
I tend to favor wikifying all dates (and all possible words, for that matter) because a heavily cross-linked encyclopedia is more useful than a bunch of text blobs, it doesn't hurt readability, and it will facilitate various kinds of automated consistency analysis in the future. For instance, imagine being able to check Foo Bar's participation in some meeting against the dates in his biographical info. (Recently I was working over data on early Spanish kings, and found an interesting monograph where one of them was tracked by the grants and charters to monasteries and such - when the dates and locations were plotted, it became clear that he had to have spent most of his life on the road. The names of the witnesses to each charter also showed who traveled with him. Basic date info can be very useful material!) Stan Shebs 14:57 Feb 15, 2003 (UTC)

I've noticed two or three instances where some contributor has inserted comments about the safety of certain types of aircraft. Some of these are certainly justified. For example, the DC-10 had a major problem with the cargo door seal and some hundreds of people were killed. This is relevant, factual information and should be included in the Wikipedia entry on the type. However, the great majority of passenger aircraft types are widely known to have a good record.

Someone with a particular weirdo POV inserted comments in some of the Airbus entries, suggesting that they were unsafe (an assertion that is clearly without evidence or merit). That's fine: I removed the POV comments some time ago and there is no controversy about that.

But now I get to the curly one. Look at the links from Airbus A300. The last two links contrive to suggest that it is an unsafe aircraft (which it is not) without the contributor actually having to say anything. Now the first link (to a CNN page) is easy: it's an ill-informed tabloid article and the link should be deleted. (I'll leave it for a day or two longer so interested people can have a look first. If you don't understand why it's BS, sing out and I'll provide appropriate details.) But the second link is (a) perfectly valid information from a respectable source, and (b) highly misleading, insofar as the link is made from Airbus A300, but similar links are not made from (for example) Boeing 747, or Lockheed L-1011 (two other aircraft types which also have perfectly respectable safety records). I don't like to delete good information, but the placing of this particular link in this particular context without similar links in all the other entries is highly POV and possibly slanderous.

Thoughts? Tannin 15:03 Feb 15, 2003 (UTC)

Tannin, I do not see why the first link should be deleted. Any airplane article should have links to relevant press coverage of past accidents. As for the second link, the answer is simple: Add similar links to other airplane articles. --Eloquence 15:07 Feb 15, 2003 (UTC)
That's what I'm afraid someone would say! Three reasons: (a) lots of work to do that, (b) we end up with a whole stack of redundant links to different pages of the same site, (c) we make the aircraft pages look like a roadmap to a graveyard (when in fact the modern passenger aircraft is one of the safest transport technologies ever invented). The first link though is - forgive my technical term here - crap. It's disinformation, not "relevant press coverage". Tannin
Sure, it's not the best solution, that would be to have a detailed article about aircraft safety, with a discussion of different types of aircraft and their safety record, and so on, linked from every aircraft page. But as a temporary solution, it's completely acceptable. Regarding the CNN link, if it's crap, point to a publication that shows why, or explain that in the article. Just removing the link without explanation is not OK. In generally, make statements (and links are a form of statement) NPOV by providing balancing statements, not by removing them. --Eloquence 15:32 Feb 15, 2003 (UTC)

Is the Wikipedia guideline of only linking to the first reference of something in an article, written down in the style guide or elsewhere? I can't find a reference to it. Mintguy

The Wikipedia:Manual of Style says "Do not link every occurrance of a word; simply linking the first time the word appears will usually be enough" (in the section headed Free Link Style). --Camembert
Thanks for that. I skimmed through that bit, and moved my eyes on swiftly after reading George W. Bush. Mintguy

Wide Screen problem. I have seen some oblique references to this, but only really noticed it this past couple of days. It seems to happen when I edit an article containing an image. What causes it and can I prevent it happening? Deb 21:41 Feb 15, 2003 (UTC)


Is there any way to get to an anonymous user's talkpage except on recent changes? Like in the list of contributions page... If not, can there be? Tokerboy

Be a man: type in the URL manually! --Brion 10:57 Feb 17, 2003 (UTC)

It did it again. This is now the third time in a few days that I properly entered revisions to an article, but the next day it is gone! This is pretty discouraging, especially since I do not usually take local backups of what I do (it is too cumbersome)! I think it may be connected to the (far too short IMHO) login timeout. Perhaps when you're submitting the article and the article times out, the article seems to be all right when you look at it, but it is not really properly entered into the database after all? (I know there is a bug report thing somewhere - it just seems much more suitable to discuss bugs at the pump first) -- Egil 10:06 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)

Can you tell us what the articles were? Any chance your changes are in the Older versions? -- Zoe
Just to double check: hit ctrl+F5 to reload and override local cache. (You must hold down control.) Does the new version show up now? And yes, for the love of all that is wiki, when you report a problem PLEASE say EXACTLY what pages the problem is occuring on, as well as exactly which web browser, which version of it, and under what operating system you are using it. We simply cannot effectively figure out what the problem is without that information. --Brion 10:20 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)
OK, the latest incident seems to be perhaps me jumping to conclusions based on two previous incidents - the artciel in question had disappeared from my watch list. The previous incident was the Nile, were I lost something on February 12, or thereabouts. The one incident before that I did not record - I will try to keep my eyes open. Browser is Galeon 1.2.7, on Linux RedHat 8.0. And no, It never seems to cache thinhs it shouldn't. And yes, it would greatly help me restore my sanity if the auto logoff period could be extended. -- Egil 15:03 Feb 17, 2003 (UTC)

How can I make a REDIRECT to an other wikipedia? #REDIRECT [[ps:Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel]] doesn't work. -- JeLuF


It works just fine, but please don't dump English-language source texts into the Pashtun-langauge Wikipedia, even if nobody's using it yet. --Brion 11:21 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)
Are you saying we shouldn't use Project Sourceberg, or just not make redirects to there using [[ps:...? If the latter, is there any way to do an interwiki redirect to there, or not? The main page of Sourceberg, and other pages, are unclear. --Camembert
No, I'm saying that [[ps:... is an interlanguage link to the Pashto-language section of Wikipedia. There is no wiki for the proposed, never implemented, Project Sourceberg. --Brion 19:02 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)
Project Sourceberg is at http://ps.wikipedia.com - I mean, it does exist. And if you put #REDIRECT [[ps:Pi To 1,000 Places]] in an article, then it redirects you to Sourceberg - see my user page at present --Camembert
All such pages are offtopic and will be removed. If you want Project Sourceberg, it needs its own location. --Brion 19:12 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)
I wouldn't be happy with the idea of redirecting people out of the Wikipedia when they haven't asked to be. That's what "external links" are for, isn't it? If you want to refer someone to a Project Sourceberg page, you can put an external link to it at the bottom of the page. -- Oliver P. 18:19 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)
I agree in general, but sometimes someone makes a page at the 'pedia, then it gets shifted off to Sourceberg, and then one has to decide what to do with the original page - delete or redirect? When there's a lot of links pointing there, or when the page has been in place for a long time (meaning somebody may have linked from an external website), interwiki redirects are very attractive. --Camembert

I don't personally care whether Sourceberg lives or not, but both me and, I seem to recall, mav, have told people they can and should move stuff there. It's even linked from the Main Page, which was what led me to believe it had some sort of official status. --Camembert 19:25 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)

Best untell them, then. The Pashtuns will be livid! :) -- Oliver P. 21:51 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)
If so, mav is in error. I have removed the incorrect link from the main page. --Brion 10:57 Feb 17, 2003 (UTC)

OK - thanks for clearing that up. --Camembert

I've just put a request for guidance on the structure of the America's Cup article at Talk:America's Cup. Dramatic 21:12 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)

Wikipedia Logo

Why are the logos of some non-English language 'pedias, such as the Afrikaanse, have two enormous vertical strikes over it, like this? What do they symbolize? --Menchi 22:39 Feb 16, 2003 (UTC)

I believe that's the old Nupedia logo; it's a giant "N" squished into the circle. --Brion

Random page function

Is there any way the random page function can be changed so that it doesn't throw up these Nowheresville, Ohio census statistic pages? (Or, alternatively, offer some options in the user preferences page). Whilst I'll admit that a purely random page choice should throw them up occasionally, there's so many of them that they occur very frequently and are of, I would imagine, little interest to people who aren't looking for them directly but just looking for something interesting to read. cferrero

This should really be in the Wikipedia:FAQ. The answer is no, just push the button again if you want to see something different. :) On the other hand, if you'd like to spend a few moments researching the town to add local history, that'd be even better! Many communities have at least some web presence, and you could send an e-mail letting them know Wikipedia exists and has an article on their town which they can expand. Might get some bites! --Brion 10:51 Feb 17, 2003 (UTC)
Perhaps the random page feature could be weighted by size, so that you're more likely to go to a page with more content, rather than a stub. Martin
Since one of the things people use it for is to find stubs that need to be expanded, that may not be the best idea. The problem is that different people want 'random page' to do different things -- some want interesting fully-formed content to read; others want stubs to expand, still others want anything that may need fixing up, wikification, proofreading. Weights appropriate for one are wildly inappropriate for the others. --Brion 11:20 Feb 17, 2003 (UTC)


The effort might outweigh the benefit, but you could have a user-preference option to weight random pages towards "short articles", "long articles" or "no weighting". -- Chris Q 12:05 Feb 17, 2003 (UTC)
Surely short pages are best found using the special page for short pages? Or most wanted stubs or find or fix a stub... Martin

Those city articles are rather longer than most articles in the 'pedia. -- Zoe

Searching

I'm trying to do a search and exclude redirects, but it's not working. Ideas? Martin

after adding the image, I'm getting the following error when I display the page for the Bab.

Warning: error_log: Unable to write to /usr/local/apache/htdocs/upload/logfile in /usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/OutputPage.php on line 436

I rotated the logs to compress the old one and save disk space. You must have loaded the page during the split second between the old file being renamed and the new one being created. Congratulations! :) Reload the page (you may need to hold down "control" to force a reload) and it should be fine. --Brion 08:18 Feb 18, 2003 (UTC)

An interesting question has been raised by mav concerning NPOV. I'm posting this here before someone actually deletes the page ("Losers in literature"):

How in the world can this entry ever be NPOV? This page needs to be deleted. --mav 10:28 Feb 18, 2003 (UTC)

Delete it then -- it's in your power, not mine. However, I urge you to reconsider what you have just said. Including even fictional (!!!) people in that NPOV craze is really carrying things to extremes. Has it ever crossed your mind that creating winners as well as losers is exactly what fiction writers are doing all the time? And before you delete this talk page as well, I'll have to copy it and paste it over to the Village pump. --KF 10:54 Feb 18, 2003 (UTC)

See Talk:Losers in literature for the reply. --mav
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