Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)

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Twisted Metal 4 music

As a player of Twisted Metal 4, I happen to know that the song: Closing Time [Live] is the song played in the Neon City level.

Time's Running Out is the one played in the next level.

Cypress Hill does Closing Time [Live] in Neon City.

(Minion1112)Minion1112(Minion1112) — Preceding undated comment added 16:47, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

LENS

I believe LENS (the new technology) should also be listed on the Lens page...

see www.ochslabs.com

thanks

chris collins, st. louis — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.107.123.78 (talk • contribs) 14:10, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

What Percentage of Anonymous Edits are Helpful?

Whenever someone proposes that Wikipedia should block anonymous IP's once and for all, someone makes the rebuttal that 30% of anonymous edits are helpful. I'm pretty sure I've read this a few times, but I've never found the source of the statistic.

I can see that 31% of total edits are by anonymous users, but I can't find the statistic that 30% of anonymous edits are helpful. It seems that any argument for allowing anon IP's to edit Wikipedia would hinge on this statistic. Does it exist?

If it does exist, what was the methodology? If it doesn't exist, can we create an objective survey on anonymous edits?

If a rigorous and objective survey found that, for instance, only 10% of anonymous edits were helpful, that would present a very strong case for finally disallowing anonymous IP's once and for all. Jonathan Stokes 02:03, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

What problem do you solve with that? We'll drive off some vandals, yes, but we'll drive off many people who contribute well too. And many vandals will just register; they only don't because they don't have to. -Amarkov moo! 02:10, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Would it not also defy the basis of Wikipedia to be "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit" if we limit it so that only registed people can edit? Captain panda In vino veritas 02:40, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

No; anyone who can edit can register an account too. It is Foundation policy, so it can't be decided here, but I don't think it would be completely non-negotiable. -Amarkov moo! 02:42, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Banning Anonymous IP's is a perenniel proposal, here and on on meta. I'm not suggesting we rehash this debate. I'm only asking if there is any hard statistical evidence to support the idea that Anonymous Edits are 30% helpful.

If this evidence does not exist, then I will start a proposal to create an objective survey. If we were to objectively find that, say, 90% of anon edits are harmful, that would be extremely relevant information for setting Wikipedia policy. Jonathan Stokes 18:37, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

It would be very interesting ... but how would you go about compiling the info? And how do you define "helpful" and "harmful"... I can think of a number of cases where an anon editor added something I disagreed with, but where I would not necessarily call such an edit "harmful" (the editor certainly did not think so). Blueboar 19:37, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm sure those helpful anons wouldn't mind creating an account if they needed to. 129.120.94.151 21:31, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

I would claim the info of "helpful edits" would be of little interest, the claim is many make a user after having done a few edits as anons. I heard you, this is not the place to discuss, but why discuss if you entirely miss the point. Greswik 18:17, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Blueboar, that's the million dollar question. Each survey judge will have their own bias in interpreting the positive or negative intention of the edit. Perhaps the solution would be to encourage a number of different Wikipedians to conduct their own anonymous edit surveys, publish their tallies, and then average the total results.

A possible methodology might be for each judge to select 25 random articles from March 5, 2007, and tally the anonymous edits into three groups: Helpful, Harmful, Unknown. Jonathan Stokes 22:49, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:WikiProject Vandalism studies which is currently doing some tests on the vandalism of 100 random articles. --Salix alba (talk) 14:08, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the link Salix alba! The preliminary results suggest between 80-87% of vandalism is done by anonymous users. However, we don't seem to have statistics on what percentage of anonymous edits are harmful/helpful. It seems this is the statistic necessary to determining if anonymous users should be blocked from Wikipedia once and for all. Jonathan Stokes 03:58, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

You might want to take a look at Wikipedia talk:Don't protect Main Page featured articles/December Main Page FA analysis, an analysis of anonymous edits of Main Page Articles for seven days. Among other things, it shows the difficulty in analyzing such edits - a revert of someone else's vandalism clearly is constructive, for example, but if the vandalism was done by another anonymous editor (almost always the case), should that be counted? What about small changes that are rejected (for example, revising a sentence in a way that makes it less clear, not more) - not vandalism, but not constructive. In short, at some point analysis only leads to speculation: what percentage of anonymous editors who do constructive edits would, if forced to, register first; what percentage of vandals, if forced to, would register so they could continue to vandalize? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 14:09, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

I have lots of thoughts on the issues of vandalism and anonymous editing (these are, in fact, two completely separate issues, although there is, no doubt, more or less overlap between them). I don't think it would be wise to sweepingly ban an entire subset of our editorbase. Actually, we have already banned an entire subset of users, but that set grows by one vandal/troll at a time. Rather than putting the onus on anonymous editors, put it on the vandals: how much vandalism comes from anonymous IPs, and how much vandalism is from registered editors? (should've read about the above project, first) I'll bet the cheap, easily reverted vandalism primarily comes from anonymous sources, while the more infuriating, creeping kind of trollish vandalism comes from editors.

I mean really, what's the real issue here? Is vandalism so rampant? I think Wikipedia's greatest problem has nothing to do with anonymous editors, but rather the wolves in sheepskin: those who pretend to abide by the Pillars, but instead have personal agendas. (I'm not making accusations, but I'd like to differentiate between the greatest problem of intentional subversion of the Wikipedia project, and the lesser problem of dilution of quality due to lack of proper sourcing, which I believe overshadow the minor irritation of removing profane words and reverting blanked pages.)

</soapbox> Xaxafrad 18:17, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

I've thought quite a bit about a related issue to this. The problem I was thinking about was how do you actually determine authorship of an article, at least in terms of compliance with the GFDL Section 2(B), which requires you to name at least five authors if you wish to reproduce GFDL'd content. The current approach is to simply list every unique contributor to a given page. This obviously would also include very blatant vandals and even people who are on RC patrol and reverting the vandals (and otherwise don't make any meaningful contribution other than standing as guardians). Or those who do other administrative action like marking NPOV violations or adding only category modifications and interlanguage links.

In theory, you can determine the authorship of each and every word in any given Wikipedia article. Or even each letter of each word (if you want to get that picky!) From a pragmatic aspect, such an analysis would only be done for research purposes, but I think this is one of those that would be very interesting. Certainly the analysis of anon edits could include some sort of similar analysis that would try to see how "permanent" any words were that were edited, as that would be the real test of meaningful contributions. Any contribution that lasted more than a month might be considered "meaningful", and is in theory something that could be determined algorithmically on this basis. Such analysis would not be a trivial program to write, but it would be interesting to see what sorts of results would come from it. --Robert Horning 21:07, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

Bottled water investigation underway on Wikipedia

Environmental Working Group [1] is launching a new investigation into bottled water--where it comes from, what's done to "purify" it, and if it's even worth the expense. We need help building our label database and have begun creating a publicly editable list at bottled water. If you've got any water bottles handy we'd appreciate it if you took a few minutes to add your information to the list.

Using Wikipedia presents a few problems. Since we'll be dumping the contents of the list into a database at some point, we need the fields to be consistent and as typo-free as possible. We're open to comments and suggestions on improving our methods. --Environmentalwg 21:11, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

I suggest doing it elsewhere. There is no guarantee that the information in the bottled water article will be retained, and there is certainly no guarantee that it will stay in the format you want it in. Please read WP:NOT. Wikipedia is not a webserver. Corvus cornix 21:26, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

The mutability of the format was understood and was a risk worth taking. As for WP:NOT, duly noted. --Environmentalwg 21:58, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

If you're interested in using a wiki to do this sort of thing, you might want to install your own version of MediaWiki on a server you own. Tra (Talk) 22:41, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice, Tra. We were trying to engage the Wikipedia audience rather than squat on server space, so no worries. (Our form can fill the data collection role.) --Environmentalwg 15:29, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

My only concern is WP:NOR. If, for instance, you plan to put the information back to Wikipedia once the data is collected, this is the very definition of original research. If, instead, you're just using Wikipedia as a data collection point, then I think WP:NOT becomes applicable - regardless of your attempt to include the WP community, what you're really doing is server squatting. I have some concerns... Philippe Beaudette

What I'd originally posted is not on the bottled water page any longer, Philippe. (Corvus cornix removed it post haste.) We'll be sure to update the page with the results of our research, though! --Environmentalwg 22:32, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Goodness, I hope not, unless it's published elsewhere - that would fall under our "No Original Research" policy. Get it published, THEN add it and source it. Philippe Beaudette 22:43, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

It should be of note regarding original research issues that Wikiversity is considering a limited role in conducting and allowing the development of original research. There are some very strict guidelines that are being written right now that would govern this activity, but if you are interested in that sort of thing, I would strongly suggest that you drop a note on v:Wikiversity:Colloquium. There is also the Academia Wikia to look at for original research. --Robert Horning 15:51, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

I've removed the list developing on the talk page where people were asked to add info on brands of water bottles. Mass original research is not exactly in line with site policies. This is remove-on-sight stuff, as far as I'm concerned, to keep the article from becoming a marketing/research tool for an advocacy group. - BanyanTree 21:03, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Lumpers and splitters

I've noticed that almost every time we have a choice of "lumping" things together or "splitting" them apart, we opt for the latter. Sometimes I agree wholeheartedly—I'm entirely supportive of the recent trend toward separate "in popular culture" articles—but I still believe we "split" too often. Is the reader really well served by having separate articles (rather than separate sections in an article) on a book and on the film made from the book? Or on a play and three separate films made from it? On the high school in a one-high-school town, separately from the town? - Jmabel | Talk 20:27, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

I think it all depends on how much information there is in any given article/section. Some sections deserve their own articles, and some articles should only be a section within another article. Did you have any specific examples? I could understand a case where the only high school in town is more notable (on a regional/state level, that is) than the town itself. However, notability is only the criteria for inclusion, not the criteria for a dedicated article. I think that if a given topic can be talked about in so many aspects (one aspect per section), it should be an article, but if it's just an off-hand, singular kind of notable aspect, it should be a subsection within it's parent concept. Somebody should be able to think of the policy page that covers merging and splitting. Xaxafrad 03:00, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm really hot for this topic. In fact, I think this topic is so important as to merit its own page which I shall create forthwith, moving this discussion there. No, on second thought, perhaps its better placed here. Oh my, oh my, what to do? (Just kidding!) Dave 15:03, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

Footballers - Mere Curiosity

Not sure if this has been brought up before, and didn't really know an effective way to search, but I noticed that there is a large number of articles about "footballers" (aka "soccer players") being posted lately. Being an American who doesn't follow international football, I personally have no way of knowing notability of these players, and I can only assume the same can be said for the vast majority of North American editors. I wasn't sure if footballers were considered "encyclopedia material" or not, especially as there seems to be a very large number of teams all across the world. Maybe I am just an un-cultured American, but it seems to me that these articles are no different than if I were to list every player for every minor-league and farm baseball team in the United States. Please don't get me wrong, I really have nothing against soccer/football. This is just something I have been pondering for a while.  F  Aviation  S  U - T - C 19:46, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

The numbers are high because pretty much every country on the planet has a national team who's memebers are noteable. Any country of any reasonable size his a top devision all of who's players are likely noteable (certianly there will be no shortage of information writen about them). Below that level the judgement cal becomes harder but every player in say the UK championship is probably noteable. Where exactly the line is drawn will depend on the country ( in the case of the UK I would probably go for the confrence) You've got to remeber that world wide association football is a much bigger than any US sport. Another difference is that all the leagues tend to be connected. It is technicaly posible for a team playing at local sunday league level to over rather a lot of years get promoted to the top league in the country. Won't happen but it is posible.Geni 20:03, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

If you have concerns over any specific articles, drop a note at WikiProject Football. The usual guideline is Wikipedia:Notability (people). Oldelpaso 14:41, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

Multilingual counterparts for disambiguation pages

I just found the funniest thing. On the disambiguation page for the term core I noticed links on the left for counterpart articles in German, Japanese, Slovene, Ukrainian, and Chinese. Since the whole point of a disambiguation page is to deal with terms with multiple meanings, this seemed misguided and impractical. For example, the German link goes to an article on , which translates "core" in the sense of "nucleus", but in the sense of an acronym for a particular digital animation studio. There could be multiple meanings each of which would have its own translation in the other language, and the selection of one of them as the counterpart is entirely arbitrary. —Largo Plazo 21:25, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

That does seem improper. I think that disambiguation pages should only interwiki link to other disambiguation pages. —W. Flake (talk) 22:12, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

Well—they shouldn't link to any interwiki pages at all. If the word "gork" has five unrelated meanings in English, all having distinct translations into German, and all five German equivalents themselves needing disambiguation in German, which of the five unrelated German disambiguation pages should be linked to? There isn't one correct destination. So it's absurd to have interwiki links on disambiguation pages. —Largo Plazo 13:30, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

Help with auto edit summary

How do you activate the "Undo" edit summary? --AAA! ^(AAAA) 04:48, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

It depends on what you mean by "activate". Gracenotes^T § 22:41, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

Well, to activate the page blanking one, you have to delete everything in the editing field. Or to activate the page creation one, you just need to create a new page. So basically, what do you have to do to make the Undo summary appear in your Edit Summary? --AAA! ^(AAAA) 23:55, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

When viewing a diff, at the top right side of the page, next to "Current revision", there is an "undo" link. Click it and the change will be reverted with the edit summary filled in automatically. Jwillbur 22:45, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

Information about the history of Wikibooks

This is a special request for those who are into archane knowledge and might know where I might be able to dig up some of the discussions. I don't need references to obvious things such as the Wikimedia mailing lists or things like the b:Staff Lounge, as those are fairly easy to try and dig up.

What I am looking for is some parts of the original discussions that got b:User:Karl Wick pushed off of Wikipedia and allowed to create his own Wiki for what is currently known as English Wikibooks. Specifically, I'm looking for older AfD/VfD discussions from back in 2003 and other discussions, including things in the Village pump, that would be from about that same time period. While there is an effort to archive some of this stuff, I know other parts may have simply been deleted altogether... even though they may be accessible via administrator rights.

The motivation for this is to gather source material for a book about the history of Wikibooks (another book about b:Wikipedia is also being written, BTW). I'm sure there must be a couple of old hands still left here on Wikipedia from 2003 that might remember where some of this historical information is located at. I am especially interested in user discussions as they would be (in this context) original source materials for reference purposes. Recollections and private e-mails (if you have permission and are willing to GFDL the contents) would also be useful.

As Wikibook started here on Wikipedia, the justifications and rationale for starting a completely independent wiki project would seem to be found here somewhere. I just need to be pointed in the right direction. If you want to contact me on my user talk page, you can do that here on Wikipedia or on on my Wikibooks account. I will also be watching this space. --Robert Horning 23:52, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

Fan reaction

I'm having trouble with a page where there is a small section on fan reactions to the relationship between two characters in a long running series (4 seasons + 2 movies/feature length editions).

I've kept things short and concise (a single paragraph), it meets WP:V, WP:RS and contains no WP:OR or WP:POV but a couple of people keep deleting it because they appear to have a personal reaction with the topic (a fans view of romance subplot). Are there any precedents from past cases of arbitration or discussion etc that I can direct users to in order to show that fan reactions are valid if kept in proportion to the rest of the page?

(In this series, fan reactions were crucial in the reversal of an earlier decision to end the franchise with season 3).

perfectblue 09:35, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

Try an article content request for comment to bring in some fresh opinions. It's difficult to offer specific commentary without a link to the relevant article, so it's impossible to gauge from this summary whether the actions are due to some editors' topical POV or something more worthy of discussion such as a generally deletionist approach to editing. It's also impossible to gauge the significance of fan reactions to that particular show. Sometimes fan input changes the way producers handle a series. Durova^Charge! 02:04, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

What about non-existing links?

I frequently am finding articles which contain internal links to non-existent articles. Of course, these appear in red on the article page. Should these links be removed? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by J. Bryant Evans (talk • contribs) 18:40, 14 March 2007 (UTC).

Usually, no - they're a prod for editors to create new articles. Click on the link and create away! - DavidWBrooks 18:42, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Red link. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 00:02, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

some help?

I am reletively new (about five months, and I have been wondering, where do you get the userboxes? Avatar of Nothing 00:38, 16 March 2007 (UTC)Avatar of Nothing

See Wikipedia:Userboxes. Garion96 (talk) 10:20, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

THANK YOU! Avatar of Nothing 12:27, 16 March 2007 (UTC)Avatar of Nothing

Wikipedia:2006 Wikipedia CD Selection

There is one week left for final comments on the 2007 Wikipedia CD Selection to be submitted. The 2006 CD has an estimated circulation of over 50,000 so its worth getting as good as possible. The most recent viewable copy is at : [2]. Changes planned are listed at Wikipedia:2006 Wikipedia CD Selection in terms of (1) articles currently included to exclude (2)articles to add (3) articles to update because the version listed is vandalised (4) sections to exclude (mainly on appropriateness to children) (5) string deletes and spelling corrections (to UK English) (6) redirects of common article names to the main article. Most proposals are coming to me by email (which is a bit easier to manage, so please do) but suggestions on the article page or discussion pages are also useful. Navigation and search pages are being sorted separately. --BozMo talk 10:21, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Answers needed for celebrities

Apologies if this is off-topic, but I thought it might be of interest to the wikipedia community.

I've put together an experimental engine which will correlate a user to a variety of famous historical figures. By answering a series of questions, you find if you are roughly more similar to Bertrand Russell, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Napolean, etc. If you want to try the site, it's here.

The correlations between you and these celebrities are based on the answers that you give, and the answers that each celebrity "would have" given. Anyone is allowed to modify the "answers" of a celebrity at any time -- we trust the community to be as accurate as possible in supplying information about these people. Some of the questions have straightforward factual answers ("Are you married?"), while others may require some intuition to answer: ("How much do you like chocolate?").

I'm posting here because I thought this community might enjoy filling in the answers for some of the celebrities used. To do that, go to the list of celebrities, and click on the name of whomever you know something about; then, answer questions as if you were they.

Thanks for any help,

-ed —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 70.231.234.250 (talk) 01:02, 17 March 2007 (UTC).

592 × 599 pixel

On image pages, we currently see annotations like:

Size of this preview: 592 × 599 pixel

Image in higher resolution (1195 × 1210 pixel, file size: 541 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg)

Emphasis added. In English, the plural of "pixel" is "pixels". 207.176.159.90 01:14, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Interesting poll on the German Wikipedia

Well, I figure here is as good a place as any to mention this. On the German Wikipedia, an interesting proposal was made: article creation is to be disabled for one week per month, and the time is spent improving the quality of existing articles. Unfortunately, the conservatism and wariness towards bold new ideas that we're stricken with on enwiki carries over there - and the proposal is being soundly trounced at 173-93 against. More than that, I can't say, because I know approximately ten words of German; the poll is at de:Wikipedia:Meinungsbilder/Nichts Neues for anyone whose interested. Picaroon 01:55, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

Different language Wikipedias have different rules. What ever the poll may be on the German Wikipedia has no effect on what happens on the English language Wikipedia. And I can't see that ever flying here. Corvus cornix 04:53, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

Also, not every contributor to Wikipedia is good at improving articles. We should not prevent good-faith edits from occuring when we can help it. Sorry if you weren't interested in opinions, but I thought I might offer mine. Captain panda In vino veritas 01:28, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Image on Template:Maintained

Template:Maintained, currently contains an image of the admin mop. I am proposing that this image is changed to Image:Crystal xedit.png. I feel that the admin mop is unfitting for this template because one does not have to be an admin to be active in maintaining and improving an article. However, Quadzilla99 has stated that "A precedent was set in template:done, indicating that the fact that someone might confuse the two, with no proof that it has ever happened is not a good reason to change a symbol." I am seeking some opinions on the change of the image. --24fan24 (talk) 03:02, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

As of yet there is zero evidence that that the two are being confused. See here and here for similar discussions. Basically I find it extremely unlikely that the two are being confused, which no one has shown through evidence to be the case in either situation. The fact that they should be changed because they might be confused is dubious in both cases in my opinion. No one is confusing the two at all as far as I can see. Quadzilla99 03:15, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

• I think it would be better if the template did not have the administrator symbol on it unless it refers directly to administrators in some way. It certainly could cause confusion, if used on a user page. Perhaps there is a better symbol that can be used? Kukini ^{hablame aqui} 03:45, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

A question from sweden

Hello, in the swedish version of wikipedia the administrators have begun using their administrative powers to ensure that the content of the articles are in their own personal liking. This expresses itself in the form that they may for example remove scientific sources which results they dislike and those who dare to protest get blocked if they dare to try to stop it. My question is simple, did something like this ever happened here and how did you solve it? And if not, is there any advice you could give for how to solve problems as these? Thanks. Drogheda 20:35, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Not a long-term Wikipedian so I wouldn't know, but if you have a problem with another Wikipedia, go to them first. If that doesn't work, I suppose you can go to m:We need your help, m:Meta:Babel or contact User:Jimbo Wales personally. x42bn6 Talk 23:26, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll try one of your links aswell. More comments are welcome. Drogheda 00:17, 20 March 2007 (UTC)