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The miscellaneous section of the village pump is used to post messages that do not fit into any other category. Please try to post within news, policy, technical, proposals or assistance rather than here. For general knowledge questions, please use the reference desk.

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This talk page is automatically archived by Werdnabot. Any sections older than 7 days are automatically archived to Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)/Archive. Sections without timestamps are not archived.

These discussions will be kept archived for 7 more days. During this period the discussion can be moved to a relevant talk page if appropriate. After 7 days the discussion will be permanently removed.

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Moved to MediaWiki talk:Nocreatetext.

Size of the T article

This article has been getting so big faster and faster within the past few days; it is now 92KB. I would like to think of a good way to split certain sections, but I'm sure that Macaw 54 will revert me. Anyone have a good idea?? Georgia guy 13:54, 18 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Have you discussed it with him? Have you discussed in on the article's Talk page and attempted to gain consensus for your proposals? User:Zoe|(talk) 01:52, 19 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've discussed it a few times and he just doesn't accept it. He thinks it's okay (not just theoretically possible, but okay) to make articles as big as you like. Posting info on the talk page also doesn't do any help. Georgia guy 15:12, 19 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've wondered a few times just how accurate is that size value really? It seems as if it is including the size of the images as well. I've never had a problem editing an article of any size. But as for this particular issue, have you tried the Wikipedia:Mediation Cabal? I'm not sure how effective it is, but it beats an annoying edit war. — RJH (talk) 21:59, 19 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Amazing how much information you can squeeze out of a simple T. --さくら木 17:23, 22 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've done more than just boggle at the current article size. I've read a good bit of it and left a comment on talk. Some of the content is okay and some is just cruft. Macaw 54 (talk · contribs) is undaunted and continues to bloat the article. WP:NOT an indiscriminate collection of information and this has gone more than far enough.

Will someone step in with a big stick before this article becomes totally useless? John Reid 17:48, 24 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

T is a very-common sound inside and outside of English. In our language, it is also a common letter because it is used to form two sounds: th and t. T also has a long history. The fact that it's big is irrelevant, as it deserves a big entry. I've partitioned it into large, distinct sections with subsections, so it seems easy to navigate to me.--Macaw 54 23:31, 24 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Ugh. Way too long: it took a while to load for me, and that's even with a cable modem! Maybe T (abbreviation) could be sliced off for a start? (sorry about the boldface... I couldn't resist!) --SB_Johnny|^talk|_books 00:09, 25 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

One way we could cut the size would be to simplify the coding for the table under "Frequency." I made it in MS Excel and pasted it into MS FrontPage. But, the latter's coding is very wordy. If someone could rephrase the HTML (not necessarily in wikiformat), then we would save about 20 kb.--Macaw 54 18:48, 25 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Just for fun, I replaced the table code with a simple wikitable. The page shrunk from 123K to 101K. It's still too long though -- slicing it into related articles seems like a good idea to me. -- ArglebargleIV 19:29, 25 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Another thing that I can do is replace the <span style="font-variant:small-caps;text-transform:lowercase">b.c</span>s with B.C.s. That will save more space. I used small capitals because they look better, but the tag is kind of wordy.--Macaw 54 19:34, 25 September 2006 (UTC) P.S. Although I appreciate the work on the table, isn't there a way to make it look more like the old version?[reply]

There certainly is a way to get it to look more like the old version -- but I don't think that would be a good idea, actually. It was occupying a lot of visual space on the page for a fairly simple set of data. BTW, this discussion really should continue at the the talk page. -- ArglebargleIV 19:40, 25 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Then, just move it to the talk page when archiving old sections of the village pump; lots of sections get saved this way I think. Georgia guy 19:42, 25 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I really can't help but admire the sheer amount of detail involved on that page. It's mesmerising, to a fashion. Lankiveil 06:41, 3 October 2006 (UTC).[reply]

Clem Cola Company?

I collect old bottles and recently came into possesion of 3 Clems Cola Company bottles. Malvern, Arkansas is printed on the bottle (embossed). I live in Hot Springs myself, so I am curious about the history of the company, and it's years of operation. Any info will be welcome and appreciated! Thanks!

Andrea Hot Springs, Arkansas

An interesting web site which can assist in dating bottles can be found at http://www.blm.gov/historic_bottles/dating.htm which has helped me date some which I own. --Gvandermeulen 23:52, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Matthew knowles???

Matthew Knowles a Bahamian?

Empty page

I don't know if it's just me, but I'm not seeing anything (anything at all) on the page List of environment topics on one page. Is this true for anyone else? - dcljr (talk) 17:42, 28 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

How odd. I see what you mean by anything at all. I was expecting page blanking, but this doesn't even have the sidebar or, well, anything at all. Not even a "This page cannot be displayed" message. How strange. ~ ONUnicorn (Talk / Contribs) 18:17, 28 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Normal for me. Problems probably have to do with the page being ridiculously long. Piet | Talk 19:02, 28 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

How long is it? I have no problem seeing the two (at the moment) longest articles, List of Brazil-related topics and Names of European cities in different languages (both over 250K, but well below some huge page lengths I've seen in the past). - dcljr (talk) 11:14, 30 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I also see nothing at all, perhaps this is related to the section #Disappearing page above. Someone should probably report it on bugzilla, pehaps as part of bugzilla:7401 although I can't tell from the descriptions if these are related. Cool3 20:07, 28 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

For the record, I was originally using IE 5.0 on Windows 2000 Pro (at work), now I'm using Firefox 1.5 on Gentoo Linux (at home) with same results. Using wget on the command line returned a zero-length file, as well. There's definitely something wrong on the server end. FWIW, here's some output from wget:

Resolving en.wikipedia.org... 66.230.200.100
Connecting to en.wikipedia.org|66.230.200.100|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
  HTTP/1.0 200 OK
  Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 11:00:36 GMT
  Server: Apache
  X-Powered-By: PHP/5.1.2
  Content-Type: text/html
  X-Cache: MISS from sq19.wikimedia.org
  X-Cache-Lookup: MISS from sq19.wikimedia.org:80
  Via: 1.0 sq19.wikimedia.org:80 (squid/2.6.STABLE4)
  Connection: close
Length: unspecified [text/html]

I'd prefer it if someone more familiar with Bugzilla took care of any necessary bug report... - dcljr (talk) 11:14, 30 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've added this issue to the thread associated with bugzilla:7401. -- Rick Block (talk) 15:42, 30 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

User:Ligulem/work/templates using hiddenStructure

Liguem just made a check in the database, and found over 250 templates still using hiddenstructure, please feel free to help fixing it. _→AzaToth 12:57, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Linkspammer trying to negotiate in good faith - how to proceed?

I and others have been reverting the gettingtogradschool.com linkspam from these articles: Master of Business Administration, Business schools, Graduate Management Admission Test, Juris doctor, Law degree, and Law School Admission Test. All were spammed by the same user or sockpuppets. I reverted them all, added warnings to User talk:75.28.143.183, who acknowledged the warnings and stopped spamming... for a while.

Confirmed sockpuppets User:Jbanderson949 and User:MikeWill949, and suspected sockpuppet User:Bspear, all added the same link to various articles, and all those accounts seemed to be created for that purpose. They haven't made edits since my last mass of reversions.

Now he's engaging in conversation from a different IP address (User:71.107.251.124), trying to negotiate a way to include his site in the article. I outed him as the operator of the web site, and he admitted it on the GMAT talk page. At least this time he's now making actual contributions to the article, unlike before.

He wants to modify his site so that it would be acceptable to include a link to it. I'm not sure what to say. It seems like a gray area: on one hand, his site is a potentially useful reference and he's willing to make it more so; on the other hand, many other sites are also useful references and allowing one may invite a flood. I have to admit, his site may have relevance to the LSAT and GMAT articles among all the ones he spammed.

I don't really want to be the only other party in this conversation, and I don't want to start a reversion war. How to proceed? Should I bother starting a RFC on a talk page that few people seem to look at? Can somebody weigh in on the GMAT talk page? I'm still a relatively new user here, and I suspect this reforming linkspammer is even newer. Thanks for any advice. =Axlq 19:51, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

His site doesn't seem to be anything more than a shell designed to sell his product (study materials for the tests). Other than the links to his product, he has a (short) list of tutoring companies ripped from Google, a list of essays pulled from Answers.com, etc. He's essentially a marketer who just put a (very good looking) website to sell his product and is now trying to promote his site as something that it's not. In my opinion. Banaticus 20:06, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Gary Paulsen Biog

I believe the statement "He is the author of more than 200 books but none are worth reading" on the Gary Paulsen biography page ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Paulsen ) should probably be investigated. I'm not a Wikipedia contributor, and I have just been somewhat confused by the procedure for reporting this kind of thing. Hope I'm not committing some kind of faux pas by posting this here. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Isokoira (talk • contribs)

First off, Welcome to Wikipedia! The best thing to do when you come across that sort of nonsense is to remove it. Anyone can do this, you don't even have to register an account. Looking at the article now, it seems that that has already been removed.

Because anyone can edit Wikipedia without even registering an account, Wikipedia does get the occasional bit of vandalism. Most of it is caught and removed right away, and that particular article appears to be experiencing quite a bit of vandalism lately. You probably just caught it at a bad time. Articles about authors that children are required to read in school (Like Mr. Paulsen) seem to get more vandalism than other articles.

I've left a little welcome message on your talk page, it has some helpful links telling you how you can begin editing. I hope you stick around and help us! ~ ONUnicorn (Talk / Contribs) 20:33, 2 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Relevance of articles - Ducati Sporting Club DesmoDue Championship and related

Can I seek some guidance? I notice an editor called Domcann has since 15 July 2006, added a number of articles related to the UK based Ducati Sporting Club DesmoDue Championship club motorcycle racing championship. Great, a valuable new addition - except, these articles appear to be in both isolation to most other articles (hence, most have orphan status tags); all were created in the main by Domcann - and the winner of the championship for 2006 was: one Dominic Cann! If as i suspect user Domcann and Dominic Cann are one and the same, then he's broken the rule about writing your own biography at Wiki. But that aside, I can't see the relevance of most of the sub-rider articles. These guys are club racers, and we probably won't hear from them again. Suggestions? The Ducati Sporting Club DesmoDue Championship article is poor but would be nice to be retained, while the sub-rider articles are all pretty much exact copies of each other. Thank You! Regards, --Trident13 12:21, 3 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

definition of integrity

i need someone to help describe in a deepthy way the meaning of "Integrity"

please e-mail all ideas to (e-mail address redacted).

i figure since this is a bulliten board on an Encyclopedia someone has a decent view of the meaning.

See Integrity, or failing that, post at the Reference desk. —Scott5114 ↗ 14:25, 3 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:1 featured article per quarter

I just moved the above to Wiki space. The idea is an informal list of people to bring articles to featured standard and a timeline to do so. I thought of talking it proposals but then decided to just add it and see how it flies. It's a fairly straightforward idea, and signees are much hoped for. Marskell 15:02, 3 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Desperate help needed at the Black people article! Please get involved!!

Moved from Wikipedia talk:Village pump This article is an absolute mess. It provides no coherent well sourced definition of a Black person and just rambles on and on about various people who were labled Black in different times, places, and languages, and tries to merge them all together as a coherent ethnic group. It would be like trying to merge Native Americans and people from India into a coherent article called Indian people. It makes no sense. We had requested mediation and the mediator said we should use the census as our source. Here's what the U.S. census says:

A Black is “ a person having origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa. It includes people who indicate their race as "Black, African Am., or Negro,"or provide written entries such as African American, Afro American, Kenyan, Nigerian, or Haitian.”

Black Africa is a synonym of sub-Saharan Africa and all of the non-African groups mentioned (i.e. African-Americans, Haitains) are descendents of the recent African diasporas. And yet we still have editors insisting that South Asians be given equal weight in the article and be considered Black. These people provide no cited definitions or census classifications to defend their assertions, instead they cherry pick from different sources in different countries for examples of South Asians being labeled Black, often in different languages. But by the same logic, I could argue that the Black Irish are Black. The point is the people editing that article need to be forced to adheare to a coherent sourced authoritative definition of a Black person, or the entire article should just be deleted as POV and unencyclopedic.

Dictionary.com[[1]], the free dictionary online[[2]]., the U.S. census[[3]], and the British census[[4]] all emphasize the idea that Blacks are of African origin-in fact it is against the law for a dark-skinned person of South Asian or Australian origin to claim to be black in the census. An article by the BBC makes a clear distinction between Blacks and the dark skinned people of South Asian ancestry[[5]]. This article about race in biomedicines says “The entities we call ‘racial groups’ essentially represent individuals united by a common descent — a huge extended family, as evolutionary biologists like to say. Blacks, for example, are a racial group defined by their possessing some degree of recent African ancestry (recent because, after all, everyone of us is out of Africa, the origin of Homo sapiens)."[[6]]. I really need help getting the editors of that article to stick to a coherent definition, instead of just pushing their own POV. Editingoprah 06:16, 1 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

You're probably not going to get a "coherent well sourced definition of a Black person" that editors agree upon. That's a political issue. --John Nagle 19:01, 3 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia content being used without permission

I 'assume' that as the following page isnt showing a wikipedia credit the content from the article on Antigua has been lifted without permission. I just thought I should bring this up but it wasnt easy trying to find out where to do so.

http://www.funtripguides.com/antigua/

Adam777 00:11, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

What to do about such sites is listed at Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks. -- Rick Block (talk) 00:31, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Editors Who Are Vandals, and Thugs and Ferals

Have a look at what some 'editors' do on the Gundagai page. They post content with no cites, plagarise stuff, remove others posts then remove evidence of those posts from 'history' to cover up their own ineptitude and bully tactics. (Very brave to hide the evidence of their garbage isnt it. No medals for them.)

All in all, this feral gang that is doing this stuff are giving wik a very very bad name. Its not just that though. They are totally hopeless re some of the stuff they do post so the pages end up reading like something from a lower junior school project board. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.54.9.95 (talk • contribs)

The anon who posted the above is the subject of an RfC. See Wikipedia:Requests for comment/203.54.*.*. -- Longhair\^talk 11:06, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

An Rfc. Sounds important. Whatever it is I do not want to know though I guess longhair gets its jollies off sprouting about them. Longhairs post is a prime example of what this topic is about. Its what gives wik a terrible name and its this style of garbage discredits anything to do with it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.54.186.120 (talk • contribs)

That's an attempt to resolve the dispute. See Wikipedia:Requests for comment. It's more likely you'd work things out by participating there than by raising the matter here. Durova 04:29, 6 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Durova, raising the matter here wont hurt u.

The above anon has shown no interest whatsoever in resolving "the dispute". They're only here to be a pain in the arse at every article they edit, and being handed frequent blocks for doing so. -- Longhair\^talk 04:40, 6 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Longhair continues, giving more examples of the aggro that it uses wik to spread. The dispute is the loutish, thuggish, bullying and vandalising behaviour of some wik eds who go on like they do as part of their gang dynamics, attacking other posters. Those sort of antics cannot be "resolved" as to do so would require whoever these gangs are currently having a go at on wik, to join their gang.

Believe it or not, some decent peopel choose not to join in with online liasons such as that.

Meanwhile, the abberant behaviour of some eds, continues on wik, giving it a terrible bad name.

Artkos/Golden Wattle and RobertMyers/Bidgee really DO NOT want me to post a comment on Rfc about this stuff they are doing. Would make anyone wonder what they are trying to hide. Why does wik have Rfc if the eds use it to try and exclude some posters, then prevent those contributers from posting on the Rfc site. Highly bizarre of the eds and wik if that is how wik runs.

User name

Good evening folks,

I was googling a French profanity ("Mon vier", litt. "my dick") used as an interjection in Marseille, for I wanted to check its spelling—it is seldom written. I was quite surprised by the first hit: User:Mon Vier. Coincidence? Marseillan independentist making propaganda? Or a side-effect of the "Friday night contribution syndrome" (see alcoholism and drug addiction for more details)?

Cheers.

Lachaume 19:04, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

how to write essay

regarding the logistical operation in offshore platform by supply vessel and hwo to safe mony and time — Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.163.84.1 (talk • contribs)