Wikipedia:Village pump archive 2004-09-26

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Moved discussion

See the archive for older moved discussion links.

Here I am again with one of my great newbie ideas. This one concerns the short pages list, which I perceive is still down. I think there should be an option in the left-hand nav bar to add a page to the short pages list, interfacing to a little tiny program that edits said list. The list would be of a fixed length (the current 125 looks good), so that any time a new stub is listed, an old listing falls off the end of the list. -- Smack

Why don't the ''emphasis quotes'' work in the LOOM article? CGS 20:14 29 May 2003 (UTC).

Because they are "double quotes" not two single quotes. Theresa knott 21:12 29 May 2003 (UTC)
No, that's not it. This is very odd: it's currently fine, but the emphasis quotes were not working in this revision, and if you do a diff against the current, working revision, you will see that the quotes used are exactly the same (and they are two single quotes). CGS 22:42 29 May 2003 (UTC).
Oh, that was because the quotes were on different lines back then, that doesn't work. -- John Owens 22:45 29 May 2003 (UTC)
Why can't the parsing software report errors like that, instead of just ignoring them? We don't want the Wiki markup to become soup like HTML. CGS 22:52 29 May 2003 (UTC).

I advice in the article when use the Chinese characters for specifying, use simplified Chinese characters instead of traditional Chinese, since the simplified Chinese has become the international standard. Samuel 04:31 30 May 2003 (UTC)

You probably want to discuss this also at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (chinese). -- Taku
We should better include Penkyamp transliteration for Cantonese as Hong Kong grows increasingly conscious about its differing identity from Beijing.

Maybe one day Taiwanese will also be included to give a genuine multicultural feel to the Han language and culture.

Hi, could someone have a look at Solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it's basically a list of possible solutions and something of an analysis (from one user's opinions) of which are the best. They're currently adding links to it from lots of Israel/Palastine articles. In my opinion, this article will never cause anything but trouble, it's guaranteed to be hijacked at different times by people who are convinced that their particular 'solution' is best. I don't think we should be in the business of saying 'these ideas wouldn't work but these others would', it doesn't strike me as particularly encyclopaedic. I have to return to my much hated revision now but I couldn't bear to let this article slip by un-noticed. Happy editing -- Ams80 09:11 30 May 2003 (UTC)


The above-mentioned page looks as though it would make a great "Meta" article, but I agree that it is probably not for Wikipedia. Maybe one of the admins should consider moving it. -- Chris Q 10:20 30 May 2003 (UTC)
I think it is good for Wikipedia, because it clears up the several attempts to solve the problem and creates a good basis for discussions (outside the Wikipedia of course). To be a good basis for any debates is IMHO one major goal of Wikipedia. Therefore this article should remain. 212.137.33.208 11:28 30 May 2003 (UTC)
At the least, the title of this article needs to be changed! The title is misleading, sounds as though it is THE solution. We should add, proposed, or attempted to the title. In addition, it is not NPOV for anyone to mark which solutions are better. MB 12:48 30 May 2003 (UTC)
If the title is misleading - no problem, change it. But IMO it is still NPOV to point out which solutions are impossible or unwanted. -- 212.137.33.208 13:37 30 May 2003 (UTC)
"IMO it is still NPOV to point out which solutions are impossible or unwanted." Well, this is your opinion, and you are allowed to have one, but any attempt to determine which solutions are wanted or unwanted requires the use of opinion. Therefore, and such additions to articles would not be NPOV. It's alright though, b/c it has been moved to meta. MB 18:12 30 May 2003 (UTC)

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaarg. I've just had an absolute nightmare connecting all the Zygote articles together across en, nl, pl, da and es. Please could one of the devs implement this quick hack. It surely can't be more than a line of code or so, and it would be a GODSEND to people trying to further multilingual integration of articles. -- Tarquin 12:41 30 May 2003 (UTC)


Temp Page Problem

What exactly are Temp pages? It just has a newer and more standardized outlook. It is confusing to have two pages on the same topic. And the notice on top of the page is often overlooked, as a result, many pages with temp pages have extensive history on both the Temp and the main pages. Unpleasant mergings are therefore necessary at some point in time. Why aren't the content of Temp simply on the main page? That'd eliminate all these problems. --Menchi 14:44 30 May 2003 (UTC)

Sometimes, for really long articles that need lots of work, it's easier to start over and do the article right, using a temporary page so as not to mess up the original article in the meantime. For example, right now I'm working on Bjork/Temp to replace the long and nearly incomprehensible Björk article. If someone overlooks the notice at the top of the original article, and edits it anyway, those changes can always be included in the new (temp) article. Most people will probably see the notice at the top and not edit the original, though, so mergings shouldn't be all that unpleasant :) -- Wapcaplet 15:39 30 May 2003 (UTC)

I have set up voting for naming convention of Emperors of Japan. If you care, come to Talk:Emperor_of_Japan for voting. Cheers! -- Taku 18:41 30 May 2003 (UTC)

It seems that interlanguage redirects do work, but there is no "redirected from..." message at the top of the page when you access it through the redirect. That makes it a bit difficult to return to the redir page in order to edit it (the interlanguage redirect was really just a test, as I was curious to see whether it'd work.) Case in point: Bild. Perhaps it would be best to simply disable language prefixes in redirect statements, as that was probably never intended to work in the first place. Mkweise 21:12 30 May 2003 (UTC)

I've removed the interlanguage redirect by manually typing "redirect=no" in the URL. Now if you want to see an interlanguage redirect in action, see http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Bild&oldid=980225. Mkweise 21:22 30 May 2003 (UTC)
This was added some while back to support the (then frequently requested) ability to provide redirects for pages being moved to http://meta.wikipedia.org or http://sep11.wikipedia.org. It's just a quick hack and a little rough around the edges, but easily enough worked around & fixed if used inappropriately or mistakenly. --Brion 04:02 31 May 2003 (UTC)

to whoever is responsible: Nice background color on Wiki pages. BF 02:53 31 May 2003 (UTC)

There are 17576 possible abbreviations for TLA. Is it really in wikipedia's interest to list all 17,576 possibilities with links? Many of these links amount to nothing but dictionary entries. Kingturtle 03:38 31 May 2003 (UTC)

Wiktionary is where most, if not all, of them belong.
The lists of TLA are of bad style. It uses Wiki<pre> and doesn't even fit on my 1024 screen. Not to mention the smaller computers. --Menchi 03:45 31 May 2003 (UTC)
I agree with that wiktionary should cover words stuff. I doubt the usefulness of the list in the first place because we already have a List of abbreviations in which we cover famous ones such as FBI. So I guess we can just get rid of list of any possible abbreviations for TLA. -- Taku 15:42 31 May 2003 (UTC)
That page definitely doesn't belong on wikipedia LittleDan 16:21 31 May 2003 (UTC)
I vote for keeping it, as it could prove useful to someone looking for a TLA that's not in use yet or trying to determine whether a TLA he intends to use has existing meanings. Mkweise 17:38 31 May 2003 (UTC)

Google seems a better solution for this. -- Taku

The real value of TLA pages is as disambiguators; most TLAs these days have multiple meanings, more than most encyclopedists are aware of. If Wiktionary can disambiguate Wikipedia links, then great, but I don't think it can do that. Google is often useless for this sort of thing; if a TLA has 50,000 hits, then the less-common usage with "only" 5,000 pages will likely be invisible. Wikipedia disambiguator puts the common and less-common usages on an equal footing. The list of all possible TLAs is a useful index; Wikipedia is accumulating too many poorly-indexed articles because people aren't adding them to appropriate lists, luckily for this we can have a pregenerated list, and thereby save some work. Stan 18:28 31 May 2003 (UTC)

I admit that the tables are not pretty, but I think it's useful to have them in neat columns. My excuse for creating them was so that I could see at a glance which ones existed as articles, and to make it easier to create new ones just by clicking on the red links. I noticed a flurry of new TLA disambiguation pages after I uploaded these tables, so I feel that they catalysed quite a few new articles. That's why I think they are useful, despite their shortcomings. The style issue raised by Menchi wasn't my doing: I just put a space at the beginning of each line to invoke fixed formatting, which is standard Wikipedia practice. -- Heron

Neutrosophy looks coppied. Do you think it is? LittleDan 16:21 31 May 2003 (UTC)

Yup, I put the opening sentence into google and found almost everything: Try this link for more http://arxiv.org/ftp/math/papers/0010/0010099.pdf Danny
BTW Florentin Smarandache is from the same IP-address and has some connection with the subject of Neutrosophy as well. I have no qualification to comment on the subject, but at the very least it could do with a bit of wikifying. It appears to have stood there without edits for quite a long time... -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo stick 09:52 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

For some strange reason I got an error message trying to move Ess-tsett to ß, even though the target page didn't exist, but ß clearly is a valid page name as I was able to paste content there manually. Could a sysop please do the move? Having the page at Ess-tsett is inconsistent the way we handle other Latin-1 characters (e.g. Ä, Å.) Mkweise 17:34 31 May 2003 (UTC)

There was a weird little bug in the rename code that wouldn't let you rename a page to a one-character title. (!) Fixed now, page renamed. --Brion 20:22 31 May 2003 (UTC)


Thanks, I figured it had to be something weird since I was able to create an article by that name, just not move. Mkweise 20:31 31 May 2003 (UTC)

I can't seem to move power supply to power supply unit, even though the destination never had anything but a redirect in it. Weird, huh? What I think should be done is for power supply unit and electronic power supply - which essentially cover the same subject - to be merged, and I think the most logical place for this article to reside is at power supply unit. Comments, anyone? Mkweise 20:31 31 May 2003 (UTC)

It's because the redirect had a page history (albeit a history of different redirects). Anyway, I deleted it, then made it a redirect again, but now it has no history, so you can move a page there if you like. Evercat 21:12 31 May 2003 (UTC)

What's the consensus on User talk:Viking/ban? Should it be undeleted? --Dante Alighieri 20:40 31 May 2003 (UTC)

User:Viking has morphed to User:Vikings so the debate on banning viking is moot. User:Kils , who is associated with the group has stated that they will not be vandalising any more pages, but will try a different tactic. Never the less User:Vikings needs to be monitored and I think the ban page should be undeleted so that there is a history that can be checked Theresa knott 22:44 31 May 2003 (UTC)
Done. --Brion 00:35 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Can anyone translate Roman Odzierzynski into english? Kingturtle 23:19 31 May 2003 (UTC)

Should Vulcanology just be a redirect to volcano? If so, change it. LittleDan

I don't think it should. I'm sure there are interesting things to say about vulcanology; if we leave the page, someone will probably flesh it out one day. Followup to Talk:Vulcanology. -- Merphant 02:31 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

An anonymous user is adding a lot of links from computing articles to his favourite computing website. Actually, I don't find this annoying yet, as they seem quite reasonable links. But I thought it worth mentioning, in case it gets out of hand. Here are the contributions. Evercat 02:44 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I've been writing quite a bit (too much, in fact) on Middle-earth recently, and frankly, I'm getting tired of writing "Elendil is a character from J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional world Middle-earth" at the start of each and every page. Furthermore, many, many of the Middle-earth pages are quite old, and do not have this blurb. I think that the best way to resolve this is to - yes, I am a newbie and I am suggesting that we bring back the subpages.
To use an analogy from Middle-earth, the resurrected subpages would be like Lúthien redivivus - they would sit quietly in their assigned corner, rather than running loose in the wiki and doing all sorts of crazy things. I think that subpages are appropriate for fictional people and places. I have looked at many of the arguments against subpages, and found that they simply do not apply. It would, of course, be good to replace the slash character (and the concomitant subdirectory backend structure) with something else, such as the proposed "--" character.
So feel free to grab this idea by the tail and bash me over the head with it if you feel that it is appropriate, because I am afraid that I am being a stereotypical newbie and failing to see the gaping maw of some mistake or other. Smack 07:04 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I think you'd be better off using standard disambiguation format, e.g. Luthien (Middle Earth). And don't call them subpages, use a euphemism like "pages from the Middle Earth category", because some editors are very hostile when they hear the S-word. :) -- Tim Starling 07:11 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Sorry, subpages, no matter which separator is used, are dead and gone, end of discussion. Everything has already been said on Wikipedia:Do not use subpages and people are tired of going through this again. The proper way to organize these pages is to create longer articles:

--Eloquence 07:16 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

See what I mean, Smack? You can make subpages, just don't call them subpages :) I don't know if Eloquence looked at the pages in question, but they seem to me to be too long for merging. -- Tim Starling 07:42 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
With few exceptions, most of the articles in the Middle Earth section could be merged and redirected to longer articles. Exceptions would be stuff like Elvish language. Many of the Middle Earth articles are horrible stubs, e.g. Elrohir, Éomer. And adding a qualifier like "(Middle Earth)" will not help: Smack wants to do away with the introductions to save time. Sorry, but this is not how Wikipedia works.--Eloquence 07:53 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Sorry Eloquence, you're quite right, doing away with the intros is completely unacceptable. The articles I saw, which I thought were too long for merging, were Lúthien, Thingol and Beren. -- Tim Starling 08:31 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I don't really think they're too long, especially since the characters' fates are interwoven, so some present redundancy could be eliminated. A good overview article can well be 20,000 to 30,000 characters in length. See also the Wikipedia-l thread Limits to the non-paperiness of Wikipedia. --Eloquence 08:54 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I appreciate the nuisance factor of the leadins required to set context, which is why I prefer "In the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien, ", which is succinct and sufficient. Giant omnibus articles do not serve the reader well, because if I'm reading along and am confused whether it's Glorfindel or Galadriel that's the bigshot queen, I don't want to wade through a massive Lives of the Elves to find them. What I do see in Tolkien articles is that enthusiasts have wanted to retell the entire story in each article, and those should be pruned down, so that, Rashomon-like, each character's article only describes what is directly relevant to that character. If there's not much to say about Elrohir and the article is short, fine, that means I as a reader am done with it more quickly and can get back to my original activity. Stan 13:08 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Please see the long thread on wikipedia-l referenced above for why this is a very, very bad idea. --Eloquence 13:15 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Indeed, I even contributed to that thread. Having experimented with both the "long form" and the "short form" articles, I've decided that shorter cross-linked articles serve the reader better. Consider HMS Ocean - nice long article, lots of content, but if the reader links to it from Royal Marines, it takes some work and reading of irrelevant material to find which of several ships was being referred to. That is unfriendly to the intended audience, and some day the Ocean article will be divided up according to the standard for ship articles. Stan 18:13 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
HMS Ocean is really a bad example. This is a bunch of articles thrown together simply because they are about ships with the same name. In a way, it's the expanded form of a disambiguation page. I agree that this should be divided. However, if there's not much to say about a ship, it may be more useful to have "XXX class ship" and then list and describe the ships of that class in the article. --Eloquence 18:19 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

A Photograph Source

I have attempted to recruit contributors or photographers several times before, but have all failed until now. I just met a Mississippian photographer on a digital graphics DelphiForum, and convinced him to let Wikipedia to use, and modify if necessary, his photos on plants. For an example, see his Naked Lily (Lycoris radiata, L. squamigera).

Where do I announce this exciting (well, for me, anyway) information, so other contributors interested in gardening and botany can use them freely too? --Menchi 07:37 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Excellent news! Wikipedia:Announcements would be a good place, and you may want to create a page like Wikipedia:Merman flower collection to describe the copyright status of the pictures, so that it can be easily linked to from the image pages. I checked out the first page of the thread, and while he endorses sharing, I don't really see a comment referring specifically to the use on Wikipedia, or distribution under a specific license. So please do your best to describe when and where he made that declaration. --Eloquence 09:10 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
I'll make a page with his exact statements relevant to uses on Wikipedia. But another members on that forum has just gave us permission to use her photos as well, and I have not gotten the details on her conditions yet. After receiving them, I'll make a page. --Menchi 10:12 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Done. Wikipedia:Plant photo collection I. I'll add it to Wikipedia:Announcements now. --Menchi 15:37 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

A question (yet again!) on copyright. I've come across a site which would be a good source for pictures of all kinds but I can't decide if the pics are public domain. Any opinions, please?
Go to http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/~aminet/pix/vehic/ then click on HELP, then on SECTION 8 (Copyright Status and Disclaimer). Thanks Adrian Pingstone 09:03 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

The collection copyright that Mueller claims does not concern us, since we do not intend to setup an AmiNet mirror. What does concern us, however, is the copyright status of the photos, which are described as "freely distributable". But that claim is without legal value if it is not made by the copyright holder, so you may want to contact umueller at aminet dot net and ask for the names and email addresses of the persons who created the photos you want to use. Just putting the stuff online and describing it as "freely distributable" would be fine with me, but Brion would probably disagree again .. --Eloquence 09:14 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Image Boilerplate

A few weeks ago, somebody discovered a set of HTML code that makes aligning works in most versions of most browser. But I can't find it. --Menchi 12:52 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

You mean a floating frame? that's <div style="float:right;">{image}</div>. To make it work in all browsers, you can make an aligned table by doing <table align=right><tr><td>{image}</table> LittleDan 18:07 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

(No idea if I'm doing this right... oh well.....) I created a page for 'America's Best Comics', but due to an irritating Shift key, it's come up as America's best Comics... is it possible to change this at all..? --ntnon 15:00 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Yep - from the article page in question, you should see a link to "Move this page" (it'll be one of the links down the side of the page and/or at the bottom). Click on that, follow the instructions, and there you go. More details are at Wikipedia:How to rename (move) a page --Camembert


Next Query: Pictures. I've just uploaded two, 0201peoplelikeus2.JPG and 0201peoplelikeus.jpg, and the former is not showing up on the page People Like Us, while I can't find the latters Image Page... um... --ntnon 16:04 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Misspelling.
image:0201peoplelikeus2.JPG is the image description page. You didn't upload image:0201peoplelikeus.jpg. --Menchi 15:11 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Disinfopedia has taken wikipedia articles and expanded them usually with a back reference. Is it worthwhile to forward reference from Wikipedia to Disinfopedia? Zardoz 17:57 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

no, why would you do that? LittleDan
Disinfopedia is highly POV. CGS 19:51 1 Jun 2003 (UTC).

Size of Wikipedia-L NNTP

I had been reading the online Wikipedia-L archives for info and for fun, but there seems to be something even easier to browse: the Wikipedia-L NNTP. But I tried it, and there are over 10,000 messages! How many bytes is it? I can't overload my Internet connection again. The last time I did, they phoned and threatened to disconnect me. :-} --Menchi 18:54 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

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