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I'm not sure that I'm asking the question, below, in the correct forum. If there is a better place for the question to be asked then please point me there.
This is a question that bears on the way disputes should be conducted on talk pages, on DRN, and at Wikipedia in general.
Should these disputes be conducted via logical argumentation? I claim the the answer to this question is "YES, of course! User:Deicas, why would you need to ask such a stupid question?"
If the answer to the question, above, is "YES" then would someone please point me to the applicable guild-line(s)/policy(s) that require this use of logical argumentation?
If the answer to the question, above, is anything other than an emphatic "YES" then I'll go back and re-write this query. Deicas (talk) 22:18, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
You're absolutely right. Unfortunately, people's capability for logical argumentation seems to take a backseat to their passion for keeping or removing bits of information from the encyclopedia. If we could all think and act logically there would be no wars, no injustices, no discrimination, no Israeli-Palestine dispute, no hunger... well, you get the idea. §FreeRangeFrogcroak23:14, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
I think a definition of "logical argumentation" is in order here. If you mean "use common sense and reason", than we already try to do that - it doesn't need to be written into a policy (though it probably is, somewhere); if you mean "wikilawyer", we discourage that for the reasons outlined at WP:Wikilawyer. Either way, you haven't explained why/how a change is in order. – PhilosopherLet us reason together.00:34, 17 January 2013 (UTC)
Yes, I mean "use common sense and reason". I know most of us try, but that's not true of all Wikipedians in all situations. As to what change would be in order, the only thing I would recommend is that everybody chill, which is probably not practical - thus our guidelines and policies. We have one that precludes the insertion of "eats poo in his spare time" to John Smith's biography, although common sense dictates that we shouldn't need one. §FreeRangeFrogcroak01:03, 17 January 2013 (UTC)
In answer to User:Philosopher question regarding "a definition of 'logical argumentation'" Perhaps I can illustrate the issue I am addressing by showing a *lack* of logical reasoning? Note that what I'm calling a "lack of logical reasoning" could also be described as a failure to respond dispositively to a good faith questions.
Search for the string: "please quote the applicable argument. Deicas (talk) 03:03, 15 January 2013 (UTC)" ... and scan from there. Does that make the issue I'm trying to address clearer?Deicas (talk) 02:01, 17 January 2013 (UTC)
I am looking for either:
1) A metaphoric hammer marked "Use logical argumentation and respond dispositively to good faith questions" with which to hit certain people.
OR:
2) A authoritative answer (From who? The Arbcom?) that "User:Deicas's expectations, that Wikipedia editors, in the course of disputes, *must* use logical argumentation and dispositively respond to a good faith questions, are contrary to Wikipedia policy.
If you want some policy pages to read, I'll point you to WP:Wikilawyer (wikilawyering discouraged), WP:Consensus (consensus-finding encouraged). Basically, our rules/procedures are dynamically generated by discussion and agreement and the rules are to be interpreted in light of their a) spirit and b) commonly-understood meaning, not in terms of their letter alone.
I don't think this is a productive way to approach disputes, because what's sensible and reasonable to you might seem strange and silly to me.
Here's an example that might illustrate the problem: A single act of unprotected vaginal intercourse with an HIV man has less than a 1% chance of infecting the woman. (It's more complicated than that, e.g., depending on whether the woman has bacterial vaginosis, but that's the average.) This is a well-accepted, scientifically attested fact.
One person might say, "It's sensible and reasonable to include information about risks, because it's basic information. You'd include information about the chance of winning a card game or having a genetic disorder, so why not this? Besides, if someone was accidentally exposed to HIV, such as through a broken condom or by a partner who didn't realize that he was infected, then knowing that the risk is so low might make her worry less while she waits for her test results."
The next person might say, "We can't include that information. If people learn that the risk is so low, then they'll quit using condoms. Some people will think 'Oh, that means I can have sex at least 99 times without getting HIV'. People will actually die if we tell them this fact. Common sense means that we think about how people will react to this information. It is never reasonable to present information that will result in more people dying. We should no more present this fact than we should have a page providing a step-by-step guide to committing suicide."
Both of these are reasonable, sensible, defensible, moral positions. In the real world, different organizations have taken exactly opposite approaches to this one fact. Requiring "common sense" and "reason" cannot solve a dispute over this. You have to appeal to a fixed standard or a value, not to a reasoning process.
Here at the English Wikipedia, we bypass the question of "common sense" and "reason" by saying that we're not censored and we don't really care what the results of that are, even if people die as a result of our commitment to anti-censorship. So we include that type of fact. But it still would have been "sensible" and "reasonable" of us to have made the opposite choice (perhaps supporting the value of "promoting health" instead of the value of "anti-censorship"). WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:12, 17 January 2013 (UTC)
The article Communism is currently semi-protected, which means IP addresses and new accounts (like yours) can't edit the article. When your account is four days old and you've made at least ten edits, you should be able to edit the article. szyslak (t) 08:47, 17 January 2013 (UTC)
Short answer: because you have made only a few changes ("edits") to Wikipedia web-pages ("articles")
Long answer: you are not yet "Auto-confirmed", and the article is "semi-protected", so only users with accounts that are auto-confirmed or confirmed can make changes to it.
I suggest that if you want changes made to the article, you should first discuss them on the article's "talk-page".
Do Wikipedia have enough contributors to Undid not true contributions? when Wikipedia do protect pages so readers can not for example Undid false revisions. I think that protection idea should be just for a little among of time. Thanks for the help. سلامت (talk) 13:34, 17 January 2013 (UTC)
If you have found errors in the article, please propose your changes on the talk page: Talk:Communism. If other users agree with you, a more experienced editor will do the edit for you. --RJFF (talk) 14:36, 17 January 2013 (UTC)
The problem is that such pages attract an incredibly huge number of 'bad' edits, so for the sheer sake of keeping people from babysitting the page all day, such pages basically need to have permanent semi-protection. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 14:38, 17 January 2013 (UTC)
New project proposal
I've made a proposal of a new wiki project for open source codes, here. I invite wikipedians to edit that page, in order to debate the proposal. E. Feldtalk20:56, 17 January 2013 (UTC)
Another New Project Proposal
I've made a proposal of a new wiki project for articles that may not fit into an encyclopedia, here. I invite wikipedians to edit that page in order to debate the proposal. All input is welcome! ·Add§hore·Talk To Me!00:26, 19 January 2013 (UTC)
Unnoticed bad edits
Another section deletion, either mistake or vandalism, done last October and never noticed:
Supposedly 73 page watchers, so how is it that such obvious bad edits are not spotted? If there was some log of doubtful edits for people to check then I would be happy to do a few from time to time. I expect other people would too, and then perhaps these things would be noticed. To be honest, section blanking with no edit summary probably should be automatically reverted. 86.160.213.0 (talk) 04:20, 20 January 2013 (UTC)
Hello. Thanks for fixing that. Also, thanks for your concern, but you have to keep in mind that we are volunteers here, and we might be watching hundreds or even thousands (236 in my case) of pages - we can't sift through every edit by every user. That said, there are anti-vandalism tools in place to prevent such things, and most of them are caught in minutes or seconds; if they are not, however, it becomes very likely very quickly that the bad edit slips through for a long time (which is why I like to patrol with an offset of a few hours to a few days).
Every edit made in the near past is logged at Special:RecentChanges; you are welcome to take a look, but the vast majority you will find are constructive. WP:LUPIN and WP:HG are tools available to registered users for detecting changes just like this one. If you create an account (something that carries with it many other benefits) you can use them.
That said however, I note that the edit was tagged by the edit filter as being section blanking, which normally attracts human review. In this case for some reason it didn't. You can find a log of edits that trip this filter and others at Special:AbuseLog. Intelligentsium04:33, 20 January 2013 (UTC)
Excuse me if my question doesn't related to this topic but I should ask that if a user can't write properly, what should we do? Can he/she contribute in all articles? Can we block him/her? Regards --Arjanizary (talk) 13:45, 20 January 2013 (UTC)
IMHO blocking for good faith edits is too harsh. We should revert or copyedit and in a friendly way suggest that the person edits in the Wikipedia of his/her own language. Lova Falktalk14:43, 20 January 2013 (UTC)
Giving a prize for the winners of next month's disambiguation contest.
Greetings! I will be awarding a cash prize to the winners of the February 2013 monthly disambiguation contest. The first place prize will equal one cent for every fix over 2,500, up to a maximum of $100 for 12,500 links fixed. Therefore, if the winner fixes 3,675 links, they would get $11.75; and if the winner fixes 12,500 links, they would get the full $100. The second place finisher will receive a prize calculated the same way, but cut in half, so a second place finisher who fixed 10,000 links would receive $37.50. The third place finisher will receive a prize calculated the same way, but cut in half again, so a third place finisher who fixed 8,500 links would receive $15. Finally, the fourth place finisher will receive a prize calculated the same way, but cut in half again, so a fourth place finisher who fixed 7,300 links would receive $6, which is better than nothing. As usual, careless or incorrect edits will not be counted, and a pattern of such edits will result in the disqualification of the contestant. Cheers! bd2412T04:29, 17 January 2013 (UTC)
Sorry to do this, but does anyone else here slightly question the motives behind doing this? I don't mean to cast aspersions on BD2412, but it seems slightly odd to me that this pops up out of nowhere - and I assume it will mean them taking information in some way for the "winners" to receive their prize. I'm not saying don't compete, hell, go for your lives - but something to me doesn't seem right. FishBarking?00:09, 20 January 2013 (UTC)
@ BarkingFish - are you suggesting that this sounds... fishy! ;-) Actually, this is not so out-of-the-blue as you think. I sought community input over a month ago regarding the proposition of offering such a prize, and proposed the same thing on the project board around the same time. As for my motivation, every morning I wake up and turn on my computer and check Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links/The Daily Disambig. I hope to see that all of the numbers across the board have gone down. Sometimes they oblige me, and sometimes they don't. This is just an experiment to see if a little extra incentive will fan the flames of disambiguation repair. To be frank, I doubt anyone will hit the 12,500 edit mark required to win the maximum amount, which would exceed the current monthly record by nearly 3,500 edits. However, I'm keen to see editors try. Also, with respect to personal information, I have actually met a few of my fellow leading disambiguators at Wikimania and other D.C. chapter events. Those editors already know me, and for those who do not, I will be glad to accommodate means of paying out the prize in ways that maintain the anonymity of the winner, whether by making a donation to the Wikimedia Foundation in their name, sending it via an online retailer giftcard, or whatever else the winner prefers. Cheers! bd2412T00:12, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
I have created a new page called WP:Rolling Ball. It shall be a friendly place where experienced as well as new editors can freely discuss topics on Wiki. Everyone is invited and welcome to join the Group. You presence shall also be much appreciated.
You may join by adding your name to the list here. We are currently trying to hold all discussions on the Hang Out Zone. We would love to have some feedback from you at the talk page. Should you join, please also watchlist/keep an eye on the Hang Out Zone, so you can be aware of all the discussions that are going on.
When adding a {{stub}} template to an article with a navigational box, should one put the stub template above or below the box? For example, see Caetano Calil (and countless others). Since I've seen both cases, I was curious if either was "more correct"—i.e., if a guideline/MOS was every formed about it. —Theopolisme (talk)22:35, 21 January 2013 (UTC)
Wikimedia Commons is happy to announce that the 2012 Picture of the Year competition is now open. We're interested in your opinion as to which images qualify to be the Picture of the Year for 2012. Voting is open to established Wikimedia users who meet the following criteria:
Users must have an account, at any Wikimedia project, which was registered before Tue, 01 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 [UTC].
This user account must have more than 75 edits on any single Wikimedia project before Tue, 01 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 [UTC]. Please check your account eligibility at the POTY 2012 Contest Eligibility tool.
Users must vote with an account meeting the above requirements either on Commons or another SUL-related Wikimedia project (for other Wikimedia projects, the account must be attached to the user's Commons account through SUL).
Hundreds of images that have been rated Featured Pictures by the international Wikimedia Commons community in the past year are all entered in this competition. From professional animal and plant shots to breathtaking panoramas and skylines, restorations of historically relevant images, images portraying the world's best architecture, maps, emblems, diagrams created with the most modern technology, and impressive human portraits, Commons features pictures of all flavors.
For your convenience, we have sorted the images into topic categories. Two rounds of voting will be held: In the first round, you can vote for as many images as you like. The first round category winners and the top ten overall will then make it to the final. In the final round, when a limited number of images are left, you must decide on the one image that you want to become the Picture of the Year.
Wikimedia Commons celebrates our featured images of 2012 with this contest. Your votes decide the Picture of the Year, so remember to vote in the first round by January 30, 2013.
Thanks,
the Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year committee
Good morning to all! Italian Wikipedia reaches one million articles today, come party with us, and leave here a message to support our community! Have a nice day! --Patafisik (talk) 07:28, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
As long as attribution is given, yes. Someone else here might give you a more detailed description of exactly how the text needs to be attributed, but Wikipedia does allow its text to be used for commercial purposes. RyanVesey18:30, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
About half the outfits that market books that are word for word copies of our articles do acknowledge that the text is from the wikipedia, while the rest do not. Geo Swan (talk) 20:16, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
WP:NOTINHERITED is wikilink to a section of the highly regarded essay WP:Arguments to avoid. I am not forum shopping, so I won′t name the discussion where this came up, but I was recently concerned by participants in a discussion who I thought were calling upon WP:NOTINHERITED in a completely backward manner.
Most individuals who have standalone articles written about them have notability based on a number of factors. WP:BLP1E allows for exceptional individuals, who are notable for just a single event, to nevertheless have a standalone article written about them, if the single event is compelling notable -- like being awarded their nation′s highest medal. But for most individuals their notability is based on evaluating various factors that build towards notability.
For individuals who have had a book, or a chapter of a book, or a couple of paragraphs of a book, written about them, this is a strong factor for their notability. Similarly, having an interview published in an WP:RS, being quoted, or appearing in a documentary would be a strong factor adding to their notability.
In this discussion I have argued that when an individual has their courage recognized by having a ship named after them, this too is a factor adding to their notability.
Other participants claim this does not add to their notability, because notability is not inherited.
But Martin Luther King′s already very considerable notability is further enhanced by having streets named after him. I suggested namesakes derive further notability by having something significant named after them, as I see it as a further recognition from their peers of how remarkable they were.
It likely depends on the relative level of geographic importance here, as I know that at local levels there are often buildings, streets and parks named for local individuals of merit but without broader importance outside the community - eg just becuase John Q Smith Drive exists in Smalltown USA doesn't mean that John Q Smith is notable. On the other hand, when what is being named has regional or national importance - such as a battleship for the military, federal government buildings, and the like, there's probably a very good reason that the name was used for such an important item and likely there will be sources for that. The problem is distinguishing from local source for a person with only local notability, and broader sources for a person that should be notable in broad terms. I would argue that it is still the case that NOTINHERITED applies, but like how the subject-specific notability guidelines work, having a major building or feature named after a person is a likely sign that sources about that person exists, and thus we presume notability for a stand-alone article. --MASEM (t) 21:07, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
Thanks.
I think we mainly agree. I wouldn′t agree that a park named after a local, by local officials, conferred zero notability to that individual. Rather I would suggest a sliding scale, where a National Park would confer more notability than a Provincial or State Park, which would confer more notability than a municipal park. I think the size and underlying value of the park, as well as the size of the municipality-province-country would also be a factor. But I think even the smallest park, mandated by the smallest municipality would still confer a small measure of notability -- particularly if the local park was named after a local who had acheived a measure of national or international prominence.
For WP:ACADEMICS publications add to their notability, but other reflections of that they are admired by their peers also add to their notability. When evaluating publications, we consider whether there is meaningful professional editorial review, for fact-checking, reasonable, an absence of plagiarism, and other credibility issues. Publications that have meaningful professional editorial review count more than publications with poor or non-existent editorial control.
The way I see it, many of the decisions to name infrastructure after an individual are done after thorough planning. Lists of candidates are drawn up. Recommendations are made, based on the strengths and weaknesses of the candidates. When the naming choice is done professionally like this I see it as similar to the behind the scenes work of professional editors. I see this as conferring notability, without surmizing the decision makers relied on what we would consider WP:RS. I see the behind the scenes research of the decision makers and their professional staff as a substitute for the research of professional journalists and their editors.
From a status update from The Geek Group's president, Wikipedia (or, more probably, WMF) have donated a load of servers to The Geek Group. On behalf of The Geek Group, I'd like to say thank you. Osarius - Want a chat?18:37, 21 January 2013 (UTC)
I want to update cite error messages for the top used languages. Can anyone translate "see the help page" for these languages? I need "help page" to be linked, so I have shown it underlined. --— Gadget850 (Ed)talk02:45, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
I can't really help with the translations, but if no one else comes along I note that the default message for MediaWiki:newarticletext contains "see the help page"; if it's translated more-or-less the same (which I believe is typically the case) you might be able to crib from the other-language versions of that message. Then there's MediaWiki:viewhelppage which is "View help page" and MediaWiki:tooltip-ca-nstab-help which is "View the help page". Anomie⚔03:45, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
Circular citations in connection with Jean-Pierre Hombach
I would like to draw attention to the work of Jean-Pierre Hombach. Seemingly prolific he just copies content from Wikipedia and make it "his" books, — if my investigations are correct! I have made a blog post about the case. There are two problems with this issue:
For at least some of the works he does not seem to give correct CC BY-SA attribution. If you browse Lulu, Amazom.com or Google Books the CC BY-SA nature of the material is not apparent. I should note that at least one of his books might be attributed correctly (the Whitney Houston one). I have not acquired his books. My only entry for the content of the books is Google Books so I cannot examine the full content, and the license and attribution might be hidden somewhere.
Citing Hombach's production gives rise to circular citation in Wikipedia: Wikipedia used as a source for Wikipedia. I have just done a Google search and found five citations to the Hombach books.
IANAL, but possibly Wikipedia contributors could take legal action, that might put a bit attention to this issue. Perhaps a word of warning should be issued for Google Books when using it for quick "citation needed" fix: It is not easy to get an overview of the entire book. It was not immediately clear to me whether Hombach had copied Wikipedia. The copyright pages on Google Books for Holmbach books say in many cases "2010", while the books seem to be published in 2012 (see links in blog post. — fnielsen (talk) 10:47, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
"Am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen", hatten wir alles schon mal. "By the German character the world shall be healed", we had that before. But perhaps one of your suggestions should be followed; it is for you to guess which one. Lectonar (talk) 23:27, 21 January 2013 (UTC)
"holocaust denial gets version-deleted, the vandal gets only one waring ang gets blocked" - Despicable enough, I agree, but in article space noting someone's views about this (with some high quality references, naturally) is (unfortunately) unavoidable at times. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 00:09, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
In that case it wouldn't be holocaust denial, but writing about holocaust denial, which is a completely different thing. There are pretty obvious historical and legal reasons why the German Wikipedia might choose to have a specific written policy about this, rather than rely on general vandalism policies to deal with it as we do here. Phil Bridger (talk) 15:33, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
Oh, I'm quite aware of the historical and legal implications, but the OPs description of the issue left a lot to be desired. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 11:25, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
Need fewer trivial templates but more clever: I agree, as a general principle, that there are "too many templates" especially for trivial issues. However, the current vast diversity of templates, on enwiki versus dewiki, has inspired creating some new valuable templates, based on the wealth of prior template ideas. For example, new Template:Autotable5, which autonumbers the rows in a table (up to 5 columns), was based on examining some earlier, but very complex, row-number templates which ran too slowly, and could have been deleted as unworkable. The wrapper template for measurements Template:Convert/spell uses {Convert}'s wealth of unit names ({{convert|spell=in|7.65E12|mi|ly}} → seven trillion six hundred fifty billion miles (1.301 ly)). Also, new Template:Location_map_all can show locator dots correctly in all browsers, based on old Template:Location_map which now fails in Internet Explorer compatibility-mode browsers. Plus, Template:Brick chart now handles decimal numbers. Yet, I have also advised deleting many trivial templates, but anti-template deletions went too far years ago, and some of the most valuable efficient templates were deleted, such as for quick spacing inside wp:wikitables. Instead, we need to foster more clever templates, and the new, lightning-fast Lua script modules (searching text 180,000x faster than markup) will enable development of astounding, text-analyzing, helper templates using heuristics in #invoke'd modules. Meanwhile, we can still learn clever ideas from numerous old templates. -Wikid77 (talk) 14:25, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
Is this list the result a discussion about this specific subject on de:WP, or is it your opinion of the general feeling there? If it's the former then could you please provide a link to the discussion? My initial reaction to this is that it seems to confirm national stereotypes, with de taking a more prescriptive approach and en being more laisser-faire, apart from the last point where these roles seem to be reversed. Phil Bridger (talk) 15:33, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
The Germans have long been innovators, ahead of the pack in new technologies and ideas for how to run a wiki, but I seriously doubt the list posted above has any kind of official standing or support from the bulk of de.wp users. If it did I suspect someone with, you know, an account, would be telling us about it. Suggest ignoring this thread as useless shit-stirring. The Germans run their WP, we run purs, each according to local community consensus. Beeblebrox (talk) 19:04, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
That is most probably 93.82.1.22's personal interpretation of the situation - at least I am not aware of any kind of "official standing", recent discussion on that topic, poll etc. There are of course many different opinions. Just one example: On the one hand, there are people who think that the category structure at en: is way too complex (or "deep" in the sense of Category:1980ies movies with male persons flying helicopters) and needs serious weed control. On the other hand, there are people who think that the category system at de: is being regulated way too strictly, prohibiting even the basic Category:Aviation films (because that is not a "recognized genre"). My very personal impression is, that de: is drifting into the direction of an Encyclopedia Galactica while en: floats into the opposite direction (i.e. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), with both appoaches having their own advantages and disadvanages. de: seems to be a bit short of hoopy froods and maybe en: could benefit from some of our german Vogons ;-) --El Grafo (talk) 13:23, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
For those poor Germans who are so unhappy about the state of their big sister English Wikipedia. I thought cookies and love might cheer them up and adopt a more positive view. Lova Falktalk10:33, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
Not to get too caustic here: just try posting the wikilove on de-WP...but what do I know, I am German myself. But I never felt at home in de-WP....Lectonar (talk) 10:36, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
Lova received cheerful thanks, followed by a request for something to drink. A glass of milk was provided, and then a cup of tea in case anyone was lactose intolerant. It was a very happy conversation. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:58, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
Maybe I am to German for my own good, with prejudices against Germany. I will sit in my corner now, and cry a little bit ;). And listen to Gustav Mahler, and yes, I know he is Austrian. Lectonar (talk) 13:30, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
Hi all! I am looking for opinions - preferably with a good argument - on external links, because I don't know if I was right or wrong removing them. Could you please shine your light here? Thank you!
Appropriate noticeboard for input on "offensive material"
Per WP:GRATUITOUS: "Offensive material should be used only if its omission would cause the article to be less informative, relevant, or accurate, and no equally suitable alternative is available." I found a crime scene image in Barry Seal that does not appear to be particularly "informative"or "relevant" to the article. Is there a particular forum or noticeboard to which I should bring this for a second opinion? Thanks! Location (talk) 01:14, 28 January 2013 (UTC)
It should be discussed at the talk page of the article. Discussions regarding article content are best handled on talk pages of articles. Give such a discussion a few days to develop, if things reach an impasse, you can attempt dispute resolution. --Jayron3205:28, 28 January 2013 (UTC)
About trying to get the element names in the Periodic table. At WP:VPT I have started a question about layout problems. Since it is not only Tech, but also about good UI design, I'd invite you at VPM to take a look. -DePiep (talk) 18:58, 28 January 2013 (UTC)
Template:MOS-TW
An un-registered Wikipedian went to Template talk:MOS-TW and they want the template changed. Please go to the talk page and see what to say in response. (This morning, I wrote this on Joe Decker's talk page, but he hasn't made any response.) Georgia guy (talk) 20:49, 28 January 2013 (UTC)
I do believe that tool refreshes on demand, however the toolserver automatically caches all database queries for performance reasons, so you should probably wait an hour-ish for it to update. Legoktm (talk) 03:09, 26 January 2013 (UTC)
Hurm. It says the list was generated on 21 January 2013, 8:32:43 UTC, and the changes I've made over the past couple of days (addressing the issues listed in maintenance templates and removing them) haven't shown up. I check back pretty often, I'm sort of vain that way. --Kierkkadontalk/contribs03:15, 26 January 2013 (UTC)
And it might have something to do with the migration to the Virginia servers that will hopefully be resolved. See WP:VPT. Template:Date shows the 22nd for me, for example. I say definitely post again if it doesn't go away. Biosthmors (talk) 03:19, 26 January 2013 (UTC)
I missed the timestamp in the original report, I'm guessing its generated on a regular basis, so its probably best to ask Svick when it will get updated next. Legoktm (talk) 03:43, 26 January 2013 (UTC)
Svick's cleanup lists are updated more or less weekly, unless tool server issues delay things or he runs a manual update. The-Pope (talk) 14:56, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
Could someone explain to me what does this edition by a bot mean in my user sandbox page?
The edition is this. Which page did I supposedly change its English style to? And the bot ends its message inviting me to ask questions in my own talk page! I am absolutely puzzled. Thank you in advance. --Canyq (talk) 01:41, 28 January 2013 (UTC)
You may also want to ask at User talk:AnomieBOT. This is the type of message meant for your talk page, not your sandbox. Looking at your contributions, I don't see what may have triggered it. Chris857 (talk) 01:51, 28 January 2013 (UTC)
Thank you both for your info. Since I try to write a neutral English I was wondering how could I have done something like changing between British and American English but, in case I did something wrong I, preferred to post the issue here. Again, thank you very much. --Canyq (talk) 22:09, 28 January 2013 (UTC)
Good afternoon Scymso. I must impress on you this is not really the place to be asking for article sources, you can easily google it yourself. Indeed, any public message/discussion board is not for asking for people to find sources; you would have to ask an editor individually on their talk page. Rather, here is for discussing things relating to wikipedia itself, not the articles. Rcsprinter(babble) @ 17:44, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
I apologize if this message is not in your language. Please help translate it.
Do you have an idea for a project to improve this community or website?
Do you think you could complete your idea if only you had some funding?
Do you want to help other people turn their ideas into project plans or grant proposals?
Please join us in the IdeaLab, an incubator for project ideas and Individual Engagement Grant proposals.
The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking new ideas and proposals for Individual Engagement Grants. These grants fund individuals or small groups to complete projects that help improve this community. If interested, please submit a completed proposal by February 15, 2013. Please visit https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG for more information.
Where does Google get height, when the information appears to come from Wikipedia?
I realize we don't have any control over how Google populates their version of infoboxes, but I thought someone here might have some insights.
This Google search lists Nicola Peltz as being 5 feet even, which is incorrect. (The photo is also outdated, but I trust that will get updated shortly). I don't see any evidence that her height was ever in the article.
I considered adding it, in the hope that if the field is filled out, it would override whatever other source they are using, however, the infobox discourages the entry of height unless they are notable for it.
Again, I fully understand it isn't under our control, but if I knew where it came from, it would help me respond to an OTRS request about this issue.--SPhilbrick(Talk)16:19, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
It's more in your control than you think. Click "Feedback / More Info" to the bottom right of the Google infobox (it's small pale text so it's not immediately apparent) and click "Wrong?" by the height. Enough people do that and it'll alert them to check their sources. Also, in that same screen, instead of clicking "Wrong?", if you click the height itself, it performs a Google search to try to show where it came from, and it didn't come from here or the IMDB. Maybe it's reading its source wrong, since the IMDB clearly states 5'6". Either way, it didn't come from Wikipedia and it's not exactly Wikipedia's responsibility to correct Google, so I'm not sure what you can tell them through OTRS beyond that. --Golbez (talk) 16:28, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
I have gone ahead and tagged our photo for her for deletion as it doesn't have sufficient evidence to clear OTRS. Werieth (talk) 16:36, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for the feedback. I'll follow up on that. Regarding the height, 5' 6" is correct. Sounds like Google is pulling it from IMBD but doing it wrong. I've taken your suggestion and marked it as wrong.--SPhilbrick(Talk)16:50, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
People wanted Wikipedia to fix wrong spouses at Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2013 January 22#Chris Anstey Google search and Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2013 January 24#Brian Fallon -- Sidebar google serach via wikipedia. I marked them wrong but both Google pages still show the spouses. Should we set up a page to coordinate reporting of such Google errors by multiple people with different IP addresses, or whatever Google wants if anyone knows? I'm not in OTRS and only heard of these three errors but there are probably many others and it's natural for people to think it's our fault. I think this Google feature started around 8 January 2013. Here are the current reported errors or obsolete statements:
You can do whatever you want, but it's not the responsibility of Wikipedia as an institution to make sure that every other website in the world is correct. We're busy enough making sure that our website is correct; the last thing we need to do is to police the rest of the internet in any systematic way. If you, as just some person, wants to do this feel free. But I think out efforts as an institution are better spent making our own information more accurate. --Jayron3218:52, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
I have no intention of fixing whenever someone is wrong on the Internet. But we get blamed for this particular problem due to Google's confusing layout with "Wikipedia" followed by wrong information with an unspecified source. If we continue to get misguided complaints then it might be nice to be able to say "It's not our fault but we will try to fix it anyway". Just a little reputation building. And if we actually fix it then fewer people will see the errors and think it's us. Most people wouldn't bother to contact us about it but just assume we screwed up. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:43, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
New Q&A website proposal for wikis
I understand that this might be off-topic here, but I would like to garner some attention to a proposal for a new Q&A website just for wikis hosted by the StackExchange Network. This new proposal allows new editors of Wikipedia to post their question on how to edit or other relevant questions. Experienced editors with the coding bit in them can also use the site to know about contributing to MediaWiki, which is the software behind Wikipedia. Not only this, the site is also relevant for other wiki systems like DokuWiki.
I am currently on the call for people to follow the proposal and support the creation of such a Q&A website. If you don't mind, please create an account on the Area51 site, confirm your email address and follow it! If you are interested, you can also create some example questions for the site and upvote existing questions too. Thank you! --Hydriz (talk) 10:25, 28 January 2013 (UTC)
Yes, thank you for pointing that out. I am retrying with a new proposal with a broader scope so that it can attract more questions and editors and not necessarily be isolated to Wikipedia alone. --Hydriz (talk) 11:10, 28 January 2013 (UTC)
I understand that people might need to create a separate account on StackExchange apart from their current Wikipedia account. Please do take the trouble to do so and confirm your email address to follow and support the proposal! Thank you! --Hydriz (talk) 12:45, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
"No messages"
I have stated on my page that I did not want to get anymore messages and yet this request has continued to be ignored.
I would appreciate people abide by my wishes and not sent me anymore messages. I don't care what it is about as I will not be reading them.
That is all.
The Shadow Treasurer (not TST)
Really? Then I suggest you stop editing Wikipedia. This is a collaborative project, and your talk page (and mine, and everyone's) exists to facilitate that. See WP:UP, if you have not already, and stop complaining or, again, stop editing. If you don't edit, there's no reason for anyone to communicate with you. Simple as that. §FreeRangeFrogcroak23:55, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
The last message was in November - anything more recent must be on an IP talk page (and possibly intended for another person) or via email (which can be switched off in preferences). Peter James (talk) 00:30, 2 February 2013 (UTC)
A third-party opinion is needed about a typesetting disagreement at talk: Eigenvalues and eigenvectors #Destruction of .26nbsp; (knowledge of the subject is not required, only basic ability to understand the grammar of a mathematical text). Possibly, my point will eventually be rejected, but were these s really so inappropriate that one may remove them in the absence of any discussion? Incnis Mrsi (talk) 17:32, 4 February 2013 (UTC)
wrong info on candyman 1991 movie page
someone put wrong information on the candy man page, things such as actors who were not in the film, and the film being a comedy have been added to the page. its not a big deal but its a good movie, and people should be able to get correct info. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.111.222.140 (talk) 00:10, 5 February 2013 (UTC)
I have noticed WP information quoted elsewhere, but during a recent Google search I found an entire web site (Alternapedia) which mirrors all of WP except for those articles that it has written from their POV, which is alternative medical treatment. In order to edit Alternapedia, one has to join and provide credentials as an expert. (?)
I suppose this is the Catch-22 of public domain, anyone can use anything edited by volunteers here for their own purpose: a complete, alternate encyclopedia? (The unaltered WP articles are clearly marked.)
So Alternapedia is a derivative work, which is ok as long as they have the same licensing; but it also means they get to have the appearance of a complete encyclopedia with an overlay of their content that is not NPOV, but represents their minority opinions with regard to alternative medicine. There is nothing preventing religious fundamentalists or others who do not believe in NPOV from doing the same?
We who create Wikipedia give people permission to do a lot of stuff with our work, and we really don't impose all that many conditions. From WP:CC-BY-SA, the human-readable summary includes: "You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work.)", and the License itself includes, "to create and Reproduce Adaptations provided that any such Adaptation, including any translation in any medium, takes reasonable steps to clearly label, demarcate or otherwise identify that changes were made to the original Work." I'm not actually going to check Alternapedia; does it run afoul of any of these conditions? Ntsimp (talk) 23:34, 5 February 2013 (UTC)
When I try to fix an article's intro (per WP:DATE) from Born in Year; Died in Year to Year–Year (for example), the editing process goes beserk, when a hebrew or arabic translation is invovled. Why is this? GoodDay (talk) 18:21, 6 February 2013 (UTC)
I've got my own troubles with Hebrew but I don't know where I can ask these questions as they involve the Hebrew wiki also. Is this the place for pan-Wiki help? Based on the code of my user and talk pages I tried to produce Hebrew versions here and here. To begin with, when I pasted into the right to left Hebrew editor on the Hebrew Wikipedia text copied in my English files it messed up the whole file. The code looks now like goat vomit. Anyway, the source is not pretty but it sort of works at the result end. But then when I try to modify those files inside the Hebrew editor, changing tags and so on, everything goes crazy, tags jump all around instead of being inserted where I want them. It's gotta be seen to be believed. Is there anything special about Hebrew HTML? It doesn't look like it's only a matter of inverting the syntax from left to right to right to left (e.g. changing <span...> ... </span> into </span> ... <span...> and stuff like that). There seems to be some more involved. What's going on? Signed: Basemetal (write to me here) 21:41, 6 February 2013 (UTC)
WhatamIdoing? Helping me. For which I am grateful as well as to Biosthmors. I'll try all these routes and also Biosthmors's suggestion once I get to the point where I can forumulate a coherent enough technical question to even post to WP:VPT. In any case you may be certain that there "ain't no mountain high enough, ain't no valley low enough, ain't no river deep wide enough, to keep me from" becoming an absolutely ambidextrous HTML programmer. Cheers Signed: Basemetal (write to me here) 12:13, 9 February 2013 (UTC)
I've never seen the series, and I don't plan to ever watch it. And please keep your snarkiness to yourself. My question above was sincere as I was only pointing out what seemed to be an oversight on your part In how you worded your invitation. Sorry if I stepped on your toes by pointing that out. ···日本穣? · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 08:44, 9 February 2013 (UTC)
Query: Spacing in contractions, esp Italian
My question has to do with the fairly stylized language of operas from the early 20th C and earlier, rather than either formal or colloquial speech or writing:
It seems clear that you never space following the apostrophe where the contracted word is an article, such as with L'elisir d'amore, or in other situations where a word might be frequently contracted, such as, just for example, "Dov'è Angelotti?" or "Mario, consenti ch'io parli?". But then you sometimes get things that it's impossible to tell from the typography, but they look strange when they're not spaced, such as "Ho una casa nell' Honan" or "Nient' altro che denaro", "Quando me 'n vo soletta", "Sa dirmi, scusi, qual' è l'osteria?" etc. Are there rules for this?
"Qual'è" is always a mistake, with or without space. It's truncation, not elision, so no apostrophe is required.
As for your other examples, I've never seen them written with a space, just Google these: "nell'antica Roma", "nient'altro" and "me'n vo".
It's an interesting question though, I don't know if there is a general rule about spacing. Articles and prepositions ("l'uomo", "d'acqua", "un'attrice") don't need a space, but "un po' di vino" and "a mo' di" do need it. Uhm... 220.246.155.114 (talk) 11:31, 10 February 2013 (UTC)
"Uhm", indeed. Thanks very much for your thoughtful examples. I'm not sure I followed the reasoning for "qualè", though - that looks awfully strange. Milkunderwood (talk) 20:37, 10 February 2013 (UTC)
I'm not aware of any such list myself, I just tag them as I come across them. It seems like it wouldn't be too hurt to write a bot to find them though, if no one's done that already. Robofish (talk) 17:56, 10 February 2013 (UTC)
If you want a list of all the tagged articles, leave a note here and someone should get back to you. We used to try and keep track of untagged articles through WP:WVWP, but that was more relevant 5-6 years ago when we had some major subject areas that weren't covered at all. One useful category (not very full!) is Category:Orphans_needing_WikiProjects. If you find any important topics that aren't covered, please let us know at WT:1. Thanks! For the 1.0 project, Walkerma (talk) 06:08, 13 February 2013 (UTC)
Where to publish quantitative research on Wikipedia articles?
I've been analyzing the presence and consistency of certain types of metadata on Wikipedia pages. I think Wikipedians would find it useful (especially the list of internally inconsistent pages). Any suggestions where I could publish/post this work? I can't make it to Wikimania. Espertus (talk) 21:39, 11 February 2013 (UTC)
I have just accepted a contractual position with the Wikimedia Foundation, and posted a full disclosure with details and an invitation for community comments here. — Coren(talk)21:19, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
WebCite
Wikipedia has a lot of links to WebCite (webcitation.org). I often add such links myself. (There's even a page about using the website.) I'd rate the site as "invaluable". (I also appreciate its lack of advertising, its lack of fancy Javascript that won't work with half the browsers I use, and its general no-nonsense approach.)
Yes, good, thank you. I might add that I hope more people will also cough up some moolah for WebCite, and quickly. This is not incompatible with persuading WMF to offer to take over; indeed, it would help. -- Hoary (talk) 05:03, 10 February 2013 (UTC)
Needs to be on Watchlist
This needs to go up as a Watchlist Notice. Our citations are part of our critical infrastructure. They are the basis for valid content and critically important to our readers. Without them, our content is no more valid than any random website on the net. This conversation needs to put on a Watchlist Notice in order to get input from the wider community. Can some knowledgeable Admin please set up a Watchlist Notice? Thanks in advance. 64.40.54.47 (talk) 10:48, 11 February 2013 (UTC)
I'll make a request at the talk page, but if somebdy wants to just do it...
<ul id="watchlist-message">
{{Display/watchlist
|until=2013-2-21
|cookie=142
|text=Editors are invited to '''[[meta:WebCite|comment]]''' on a proposal to start a new sister project to take over the [[WebCite]] archiving service used to archive citations on Wikipedia.
}}
<!--{{Display/watchlist
|until=
|cookie=143
|text=
}}-->
</ul>
You have '''$1''' {{PLURAL:$1|page|pages}} on your [[Help:Watching pages|watchlist]] (excluding [[Help:Using talk pages|talk pages]]).
His dad Bo Xilai is a chinese communist criminal, and his mother is a murderer. there is no known report that he has gone back to china. he is most likely still living in the usa. therefore, either he is an illegal immigrant or he has a US passport or something else.
you wikipedia simply can NOT verify his real nationality. and why did you put the un-verified nationality on Bo Guagua?
I changed it from nationality to ethnicity, but your stupid admins called it "vandalism", therefore, it was reverted, and put under protection due to "vandalism".
therefore, I demand you to explain it to me, how you got "confirmed" that he has a chinese passport, but not other foreign countries' passport? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.198.182.185 (talk) 03:56, 11 February 2013 (UTC)
A passport tells you the person's citizenship, not his nationality. They are technically separate things, although most people don't know that (especially most Americans, because holding American citizenship automatically confers American nationality, although it does not automatically revoke either citizenship or nationality from other countries, so most Americans have no need to know anything about the technicalities). It is entirely possible for a person born to Chinese parents to still be a Chinese national even if he has passports from and citizenship in a dozen other countries. See Nationality for more information. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:08, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
Articles for hire
This was reported to us via OTRS. I'm sure it's not uncommon, but anyone doing page curation or patrol might want to be on the lookout for these titles - assuming the content turns out to be unwanted, of course. §FreeRangeFrogcroak21:37, 13 February 2013 (UTC)
Notification of discussion on Gibraltar-related Did You Know articles
Grant for consolidate wikiArS to involve Art Schools
Hi, This message is to inform you that I have submitted an Individual Engagement Grant (personal grants for projects that benefit the Wikimedia movement) to the Wikimedia Foundation that would allow me push the initiative wikiArS in the coming months, between spring and autumn.
Since last academic year (see Llotja and Serra i Abella) we are collaborating with Schools of Art and Design to generate missing images for Wikipedia (and publish it to Commmons) or outreach materials (and publish it to Outreach wiki). This year there are already seven schools contacted, 4 of which have already begun to work. With this Grant I could increase my time commitment to coordination and support to volunteers, consolidating the project. The idea is also to produce a travelling exhibition and supporting materials.
Any comments or suggestions are welcome in this Village Pump or on the discussion page of the proposal. In addition, to the IEG succeed it needs the support of the community, so I ask you, if you find it interesting, to give your support in the Endorsements section.
This has to be among the top ten most important articles that needs to get updated
Harlem Shake (meme) should be a huge priority for updates. Baauer should probably be updated as a result too. Both articles have maintenance tags, and both inadequately describe the subject. Harlem shake when adding the old and new titles has gotten well over one million views in the past week.165.123.233.168 (talk) 00:19, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
Thank you for your suggestion. When you believe an article needs improvement, please feel free to make those changes. Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone can edit almost any article by simply following the edit this page link at the top. The Wikipedia community encourages you to be bold in updating pages. Don't worry too much about making honest mistakes—they're likely to be found and corrected quickly. If you're not sure how editing works, check out how to edit a page, or use the sandbox to try out your editing skills. New contributors are always welcome. You don't even need to log in (although there are many reasons why you might want to). Rmhermen (talk) 02:03, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
I certainly plan on working on it, but I don't have time available for a while. I was hoping that drawing some attention to it might get some people who were able to update it while interest is still high and before we hit another couple hundred thousand views. It's always disappointing when so many people see such a bad article. On another note, the article should probably get pending changes protection. It's a spam magnet.165.123.233.168 (talk) 02:42, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
As already announced in the Signpost we currently plan to deploy the first phase of Wikidata here on Monday. (We're still waiting for a performance review so worst case we'll have to push the date back some more.) We've already deployed the first phase on the Hungarian, Hebrew and Italian Wikipedias and things there went rather smoothly. We hope this is the case here too.
What is going to happen exactly?
Language links in the sidebar will come from Wikidata if they exist there.
Existing language links in the wiki text will continue to work and overwrite links from Wikidata.
For individual articles language links from Wikidata can be supressed completely with the noexternallanglinks magic word.
Changes on Wikidata that relate to articles on this Wikipedia will show up in Recent Changes if the option is enabled by the user
At the bottom of the language links list you will see a link to edit the language links that leads you to the corresponding page on Wikidata.
You can see an example of how it works at it:Marie Curie.
The second phase of Wikidata (which is about Infoboxes was started on Wikidata but can't yet be used on any Wikipedia. This will follow later.
The first phase should not have much of an impact on those. If you want you can start removing language links from the wiki text but that is mostly it. The result is that you will have less markup in the article since the links come automatically from Wikidata and don't need any special syntax.
Later for phase 2 that is different. When that is done you can decide if you want to continue to maintain your infobox data locally in the article or if you want to move some or all of the data to Wikidata. You can decide this for each article and infobox. You can imagine the whole thing like the decision to host an image locally or on Commons - just for data like the GDP of a country and so on. Phase 2 has only just started at the beginning of this week on Wikidata and will still take a bit to show up on the first Wikipedias. It is probably a good idea though to start thinking about if and how you want to make use of it. You can see some examples of the current state here, here and here. The decision in which articles you'll use this is with the editors and can happen gradually. It's not an automatic process. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 21:16, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
Lydia, will bots be running starting from Monday to remove interwiki links from the articles? Or is it just our business to organize? (I saw how it was done on hu.wp, but I have no idea about the bots).--Ymblanter (talk) 21:42, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
There's a bit of a derailed and confusing discussion at Wikipedia:Wikidata interwiki RFC, but the general consensus (in as much is there is any) seems to be that we should not start massive bot runs, at least not in the near future; there's no harm done by leaving interwikis in place for the time being. Likewise, removing them won't do much harm. but there's no urgency. There is a suggestion at the bottom to run a bot for the most-interwikied articles, but it doesn't look like anyone's prepared it (and that would only cover 25k pages). Andrew Gray (talk) 23:05, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
I participated in Wikipedia:Wikidata interwiki RFC, but my reading of it was that it was not sufficiently well prepared, and there was no consensus anyway. On the other hand, as soon as it works, interwiki conflict articles are avoided, and we provide some protection against vandalism on Wikidata, it does not really matter.--Ymblanter (talk) 11:14, 9 February 2013 (UTC)
I have a nagging concern that interwiki links are not equivalence relations, because the scopes and boundaries of the articles in the different language wikis can be really quite different. So suppose we (language A) have an article W, and the nearest equivalent in language B is their article X. Now the nearest equivalent to language B's article X in language C might be their article Y; but the nearest equivalent in language C to our article W might be a different article, article Z.
From what I've heard about Wikidata, it seems to be assuming that there is a definite set of equivalence classes that all the articles in all the languages can be partitioned into, and WD will have one page per class. But what happens when this assumption fails, as above? How does WD propose to deal with such cases? Jheald (talk) 18:06, 10 February 2013 (UTC)
What you describe is known as an interwiki conflict. Currently, Wikidata can not deal with them. We just need to keep the interwiki links for these articles locally, overwriting every Wikidata solution. Fortunately, these articles are only a small minority.--Ymblanter (talk) 21:57, 10 February 2013 (UTC)
So can you clarify how that works? If there are any interwiki links on an :en page, does that over-rule everything coming from Wikidata? Or at the :en page's links added to those coming from WD ? Or is there something like a template {{get iw links from WD}} that can be switched on and off on the page ?
* If there is no link in the local wikitext then links will automatically come from Wikidata (assuming someone entered them there of course). No special syntax is needed.
* If there are links in the local wikitext but not on Wikidata then the local ones will be shown.
* If there are links in the wikitext and on Wikidata then they will be merged. For example if the local wikitext has a link to the German language Wikipedia and Wikidata has one to the French language Wikipedia then both will be shown. If there are two links for the same language then the local wikitext will be taken for this particular one.
* Links coming from Wikidata can be turned off completely for a specific article by adding the noexternallanglinks magic word to the wikitext.
For this to work the Wikipedia article here needs to be connected to Wikidata. This happens by adding a link to enwp to the corresponding article (called item there) on Wikidata. This has been done for a lot of articles here already. For those articles a "edit links" link will show up at the bottom of the language link list in the sidebar. If that doesn't show up then the article isn't yet known to Wikidata and needs to be entered in Wikidata. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 13:04, 11 February 2013 (UTC)
That's very interesting. Thanks!
One more question: what if an article here gets split? Does one simply manually split the interwikis (if appropriate), so the new :en articles both end up with hand-made interwiki lists? Is a change like that something that will automatically be picked up? Or should the proposed ontology split be somehow flagged to WD ?
Also, if two articles get merged, and it appears that their associated interwiki lists ought also to be merged, what's the correct procedure now with WD?
Sorry to have so many questions, but thanks for answering them!
Yes Wikidata will need to be made aware of the split. Later this might happen automagically in some cases but at the moment it does not.
For merging it is a bit trickier. Assuming these two articles previously talked about two separate "things" you might have to resort to local links in the wikitext becaue Wikidata works with the assumption that it has individual pages about particular "things" that correspond to one Wikipedia article. There will obviously be cases where this assumption doesn't hold true. This should fortunately be the minority. It's one of those things that'll have to be worked out when it is actually used.
I don't think there is a guidance page yet. Can you give me an example? Can someone who knows more about them help write something? I'm happy to give a hand but don't know the particular things needed. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 14:01, 11 February 2013 (UTC)
Well at the moment we have pages like WP:MERGE, WP:SPLIT, WP:MOVE, Help:Interwiki -- mostly discussing the policy guidance of when things should and should not be done, but also covering the practical implementations. All of those I think probably need to be updated as WikiData comes into play. But probably the place to start is a new page, eg perhaps Help:Wikidata, to act as a FAQ page all in one place, covering all the sort of questions above as to how WikiData links work, and when and how and what ordinary WP editors will from now on need to take WikiData into account.
Having created such a core page, you then have a resource you can link to using templates like {{See}} when you edit the specific existing help pages, that people can go to for further information and an overview as to how WD as a whole interacts with WP, from a WP perspective.
The talkpage of the Wikipedia:Help Project may be a good place to seek further pointers, from the people who actively aiming to improve and better co-ordinate WP's rather baroque jungle of information pages. Jheald (talk) 21:32, 11 February 2013 (UTC)
Just a suggestion, but not everyone has been paying attention to this deployment. To help minimize confusion when removing iw links from articles, it would help if there were some documentation that could be linked to in the edit summary. Otherwise it might be mistaken for vandalism. older ≠ wiser22:48, 13 February 2013 (UTC)
Don't know where to ask about this but the current set-up (on EN, at least) is confusing. The current sidebar makes it seem like if you click on this you will get a translation of this article, which is entirely untrue. Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:26, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
small problem in several articles
I've noticed this problem in several articles which is why I'm posting here instead of on each articles talk page. Where the article lists the area of a region in square kilometers, the number is often listed with the comma changed to a decimal so that a number like 109,467 becomes 109.467. This further becomes a problem because when the square kilometers is converted into square miles, the smaller, inaccurate number is used in the calculation.
The worst case I've seen of this is in the article for the Victoria Daly region in the Northern Territory of Australia. The region is 64,972 square miles in area but the article lists it as 65 square miles because of the decimal error.
I could fix this myself in some of the articles but I've seen this in so many articles that it would be good to have a bot that double checks these numbers and makes sure the decimal is supposed to be a decimal instead of a comma. --Bejjinks (talk) 23:47, 2 February 2013 (UTC)
As a "low-hanging fruit" approach, I'd like to suggest taking the opposite tack. I.e. flagging pages where: (1) there is a comma followed by a number of digits other than three (ex.: 35,21), (2) there are numbers with multiple periods (ex.: 3.456.789), or (3) there are numbers that have a period followed by a solitary comma (ex.: 3.542,21). That approach wouldn't catch everything, but you'd have a much lower false positive rate. Praemonitus (talk) 19:53, 10 February 2013 (UTC)
Do we have a list of the articles that do not exist that get the most hits? I just happened to create #4999 on the WP:5000 (Kevin Gates). It had been one of the most viewed articles, despite not existing. Biosthmors (talk) 22:07, 10 February 2013 (UTC)
In cleaning up an article that has an excessive amount of quoted text in its references, I have begun to remove a few of those quotes, with the eventual goal of getting rid of as many as I can. What I would like to know is if what I am doing is appropriate, and how and when it is a good idea to use quotes of the source in references. I have seen reference quotes challenged in FACs before, so I assumed there was some unwritten rule that they are not necessary, and that citing the source alone is enough to verify the information. Does anyone have any input on this? Evanh2008(talk|contribs)04:57, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
It depends. Sometimes a clarifying footnote, which quotes the original source, is useful, for example providing some data or other information which would interrupt the flow of the narrative, but which may be useful. However, if the quote is merely there to "prove" what the citation is saying, it would be excessive. So, sometimes quotes in references are OK, but I can think of many instances where it would be redundant. --Jayron3205:50, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
(ec) I believe the general idea behind quotes in references is to make it easier for the reader to verify that content is correct and also to help help editors determine that the reference is valid rather than made up. Adding a quote to a reference makes it infinately more easy to find and verify. Overquoting is a bad thing as we want to limit our fair use issues, but I think quotes in references are an exception to that rule. 64.40.54.22 (talk) 05:58, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
I would avoid removing them wholesale, since a significant number of them will have been provided on request by editors without free access to the source. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:30, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
On the topic, Spanish Wikipedia has a typo checker. It highlights things that might be a typo on pages and if you hover over them it suggests the proper spelling. I think it's a javascript tool. RyanVesey01:19, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
A lot of these do not appear to be "misspellings" so much as hyphenated alternate spellings, or spellings with underscores and the like, and many that are indeed misspellings appear to be the invisible portion of a pipe link. I would consider those a low priority, but would love to have some way to isolate the links that are genuine spelling errors (missing, added, or interposed letters), and are in the visible text of the article. bd2412T14:35, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
I don't know, but I hope not. It's considered a list class article and I feel like it serves an encyclopedic function. The only difference between it and Flags of the U.S. states is that the article you linked has less prose at the beginning. RyanVesey21:36, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
Speaking of that article, the Coat of arms of Ascension Island is a non-free image, and therefore shouldn't be used in a gallery irregardless of the type of article that the gallery is in. Should it just be removed? Sven ManguardWha?22:48, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
Is that explicitly our policy? It seems to me that an ideal use of a gallery is a compare-and-contrast exercise involving a small number of carefully selected images (rather than the more common spam-my-favorites approach). A detailed comparison of a couple of images is probably a pretty easy way to meet fair use under US law. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:37, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
I just noted that in the featured picture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yamato1945.png the view from above has different crane than the side view. I am not sure but I think above view is correct because it has the crane as it was when Yamato was built. At least I haven't seen any text which would mention that there was a modification of the crane. It is a truth that some photos taken during operation Ten-Go hasn't the high crane as in earlier photos, but the crane may be destroyed in aerial attacks. And what comes to the article Japanese battleship Yamato, there is also a discrepancy between this picture and the article: in picture there is 152 25 mm AA-guns, but in text 162. --84.249.89.206 (talk) 14:47, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
It's the same crane as from the side. I you look closely, you can see there are three spars on the crane: one in the middle and one on each side. Due to the angle of the two on the sides, when looked at from the side they will be one behind the other. ···日本穣? · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe · Join WP Japan! 16:54, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
I am not talking about spars. if you look the above view even closer you will see thin lines crossing over the cranes center. They are the lattice thing of the high type crane wich Yamato had in originally. Compare the picture for example to this drawing of Yamato as it was built. --153.1.133.98 (talk) 08:58, 19 February 2013 (UTC)
Hi, could anyone please point me to the bit of policy that explains the rationale why edit summaries are not mandatory?
I have some 5,000 pages in my watchlist, and it's very difficult to follow everything up when so many people are not leaving edit summaries.
I am sure this is the kind of thing that must have been discussed 498134598 times before, so if you could please point me to the discussion, that'd be great.
I believe that edit summaries should be mandatory.
It would be far more informative, because I'd immediately check to see if the edit was vandalism. I agree with Azylber here, there is no reason not to make edit summaries mandatory in order to save an edit. RyanVesey19:12, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
How? Can't you do the same for a blank edit summary if you think it's something a vandal might do? Either way, you'd only catch the vandals who want to be caught. The vandals who want their work to stick around already know to lie in their edit summaries so their diffs are less likely to be scrutinized. Kilopi (talk) 20:14, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
Oppose - For users who actually write long articles instead of just watching them, it is very annoying to have to give an edit summary every time you make a small edit. Would suck the joy out of it. Mandatory edit summaries would hardly prevent vandalism. The vandals would just make false edit summaries, which they do already.[2] Thus, every edit would have to be checked anyway, and nothing would be gained. A much better way to prevent vandalism would be mandatory registration, or make registered users have to approve IP edits before shown, since practically all vandals are IPs, while registered vandals are simply banned. FunkMonk (talk) 20:33, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
The OP never said he'd like making edit summaries mandatory in order to prevent vandalism. In fact the OP never said anything about vandalism. To him requiring edit summaries is just in order to help people who are watching a large number of pages for whatever raison. One can be watching a page for all kinds of reason. How was the discussion distracted into discussing what would or wouldn't deter vandals? Signed: Basemetal (write to me here) 06:06, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
Edit summaries should be required to be good faith edit summaries. A few words of edit summary could satisfy this requirement. Occasional forgetfulness could be overlooked. Bus stop (talk) 20:58, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
See above. Vandals are not stupid. Sometimes they just write "corrected typo" or some such, while actually adding malicious content. So again, absolutely nothing would be gained from making edit summaries mandatory. Nothing other than adding a nuisance for those of us who actually write articles. FunkMonk (talk) 21:00, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
Edit summaries serve a variety of purposes. Their use cuts across this project from article space to talk page spaces to many other parts of the project. A general policy should be in place requiring good use of edit summaries. I think constructive edit summaries should be a requirement for participation in this project whether one's account is "registered" or not. Bus stop (talk) 21:06, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
You're still ignoring the point. Vandals can make edit summaries that appear "good". They already do, as shown above. So I repeat, absolutely nothing would be gained, and false edit summaries would just become the norm for vandals, instead of blank ones. FunkMonk (talk) 21:09, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
Not for the majority of contributors here it seems. And it would be the only strong argument for mandatory summaries, which, again, has been shown to be weak after further inspection. IP edits approved by registered users is the way to go, and has already been implemented in some articles. It should be applied to all. FunkMonk (talk) 21:28, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
Oppose - Wouldn't really change anything; vandals would add fake summaries. Might also make it a bit harder for new users to contribute; if they don't see/forget the edit summary and click save; they'll end up with the edit form again. I'm guessing that most people won't have any problems with this and will see the message above the edit summary input field, but it might be an issue for some (this has actually been a problem for a few users coming to #wikipedia-en-help). If you are having problems checking up on every edit to the articles in your watchlist, a better solution might be to reduce the number of articles you follow instead. Bjelleklang - talk21:35, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
There are many reasons for requiring edit summaries. Accountability is primary, in my opinion. It is not sufficient to simply make an edit; one should also be required to justify and explain the reason for that edit as well as identify it in the scheme of edits. Bus stop (talk) 21:43, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
If I have to explain every time I correct a minor typo, move an image, move text, move word order, or whatever, which I might do dozens of times within an hour when writing an article, I'd rather not waste my time, and not write the damn article. Usually, one can trust that a registered user is not doing vandalism. Therefore, the problem is mainly the IPs. FunkMonk (talk) 22:02, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
"one should also be required to justify and explain the reason for that edit" Um, I dunno about you, but I've got better things to do with my time. I usually just say "tweaking" or "formatting" and leave it at that. Yes, it'd be NICE if the edit summary is descriptive (mine for this comment isn't, just because), but it's a waste of time to try to regulate their use with policy. EVula// talk // ☯ //22:11, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
"Tweaking" is fine. "Formatting" is fine. These are good faith edit summaries. Everybody has their own style of explaining what they are doing. I think leaving the field blank should not be permitted. It is not hard to type some sort of short explanation that sheds light, for other editors, on the purpose of the change you have made. Vandals can be very resourceful. No one has suggested that making edit summaries mandatory eliminates vandalism. I think there are many purposes edit summaries can serve in many settings. A focus should be placed on the role edit summaries play in the daily operation of the project. We are each ultimately accountable for ourselves. Our edit summary should be a counterpart to a good faith contribution to the project. Bus stop (talk) 00:52, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
Then I, and probably others, would cease to write long articles here. Long articles require tremendous amounts of "tweaking", so in a given article expansion I will write it once for every ten edits perhaps, and then the next ten edits will be blank, because they are also "tweaking". FunkMonk (talk) 01:57, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
FunkMonk why don't you "Preview" your tweaks (instead of saving every time) and when you're happy with your tweaking, then save and provide that edit summary. Signed: Basemetal (write to me here) 06:06, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
There could be created software which would insert the same edit summary repeatedly. But a pause should be inserted into the automated process at which you would be asked if you wished to use the stored edit summary. You would have to choose to use the stored edit summary or write a different edit summary. Bus stop (talk) 03:13, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
I actually sympathize with the need to "tweak". I too write in a "to and fro"[3] manner that I don't fully understand. Therefore the automated edit summary mentioned above appeals to me. Bus stop (talk) 03:33, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
"Preview" won't stop the "tweaking." I do preview my articles and it never ceases to amaze me how often I don't see the error in the preview but do see it as soon as I've published it. Perhaps it's something about the preview itself that fools my eyes.--Bejjinks (talk) 23:38, 2 February 2013 (UTC)
I think strongly recommending summaries for article edits is as far as we should go with this. Although I would like it to be mandatory to link to the applicable policies/guidelines when we revert article edits. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 23:57, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
No it wouldn't. What it would do is tell hapless newbies (a) that we have policies and guidelines, (b) which one they've broken and (c) what they can do (if anything) to improve their edit. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 00:28, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
Sometimes it's obvious why an edit should be reverted but less obvious whether there is a policy that applies - and even where there is we shouldn't expect editors to have read all of the policies. Peter James (talk) 00:48, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
Oppose If I have to make 20 identical minor edits, say adding a category all of the selected picture pages in a portal, I don't want to have to give edit summaries. Yeah, it's not a big deal when it's 20, but when it becomes 140, then it becomes painful. Sven ManguardWha?00:55, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
First of all: I don't think it is a good idea to have even hundreds of pages on one's watchlist, let alone thousands.
As to making edit summaries mandatory or not, there are halfway solutions. For instance: Make edit summaries mandatories except in the case of minor changes (in that case that would be more effective if the software could detect what could, in no case, be called a minor edit). Some Wikis (I seem to remember the Japanese one, the Italian one, etc.) force you, if you want to save an edit without an edit summary, to enter the characters from one of those "spam filters" (what are they called?) which show moving modifying characters in ways that can't be handled by spam software (you know what I mean, but what are they called?). Also it is possible to always prompt you if you've entered a blank edit summary (with a more visible message, incidentally) but let you do it eventually it you insist. For the moment that is an option in your preferences Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing. Sven Manguard's point is of course well taken. But such special cases as he describes could be handled differently. More generally the requirement could be tailored to the type of file and type of action. Finally I'd like to know what the OP thinks is the reason for people entering blank edit summaries? Laziness? Signed: Basemetal (write to me here) 05:06, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
Ah. I remember. They're called CAPTCHAs. Damn it. I never remember those names and nobody wants to help me. So I was saying: some Wikis force on you a CAPTCHA if you try to save without an edit summary. Whew. Signed: Basemetal (write to me here) 10:39, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
Afaik, CAPTCHAs are used globally for anon edits, not for logged in users. Just tried editing on jp.wikipedia.org, and there was no CAPTCHA despite having no edit summary. The goal of Wikipedia is to have a source for knowledge it's as easy to contribute to. The community can of course define what "easy" means, but requiring edit summaries (which doesn't help against vandalism) or CAPTCHAS for edits without edit summaries is a step in the wrong direction in my opinion. Bjelleklang - talk12:47, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
When I was a lad, I enabled the force edit summary option which I got around by leaving space bar or punctuation as edit summaries. I'm sure watchlisters were just thrilled. Marcus Qwertyus (talk) 05:23, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
The fact that you can get around something is not a good reason not to make it mandatory. Some people take those things seriously. No one is suggesting that overnight every one will consciously start providing informative edit summaries. But making it mandatory will certainly increase (by how much?) the number of people attempting to do so. Actually the fact that it is so easy to get around the requirement means that people who claim it would make their editing life into a living hell just don't have a leg to stand on. In fact if they dislike so much they could do what you did "when that [you were] and a little tiny [lad], with hey, ho, the wind and the rain"... Signed: Basemetal (write to me here) 06:06, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
Actually I've just thought of another halfway measure: requiring an edit summary every say 5, or 10, or 20 "Saves" by the same editor in the same file. That would at least get rid of those long series of unsummarized edits. At least once every 5, or 10, or 20 edits you would get something descriptive. Signed: Basemetal (write to me here) 06:06, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
To all those who think providing edit summaries is just an unbearable chore: I used to be very bad. But little by little (after I enabled prompting in my preferences, which made not providing an edit summary more of a pain in the backside than providing one and be done), it became second nature; now I do it mostly without thinking (come on you, you know what I mean!); when I really can't think of anything descriptive I try to write something funny. At least those watchlisters will be having a laugh while watching those old files. :-) Signed: Basemetal (write to me here) 06:06, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
There's a script or option somewhere that you can enable to force edit summaries. It's great for prospective RfA candidates, and it really kicks the habit of lazily omitting edit summaries. However, it can also result in esoteric, unintelligible and nonsense edit summaries. If you just need to quickly fix a small error, it unnecessarily stalls the process and discourages quick, minor edits. And, contrary to what is suggested above, vandals virtually never leave misleading edit summaries. Forcing them to put a summary would invite edit summary vandalism and/or misleading edit summaries, both of which would negatively affect the project. In a nutshell, it's just not a very efficient system. SwarmX06:16, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
It depends on what kind of articles they vandalise. Those who vandalise science related articles are usually smarter than those who vandalise pop culture articles. Therefore, I've often seen many false edit summaries on the former. FunkMonk (talk) 16:56, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
I'm horrible about this. What about not requiring them if you tick the edit as 'minor'? And not in talk space. — kwami (talk) 08:47, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
Last I checked, unregistered editors can't tick the edit as 'minor' in the first place. But they can put in garbage, either by mashing the keyboard or by putting in the opposite of what they actually did (I wonder how long it would take before "Rm spam" would become a popular edit summary with serious spammers?) WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:21, 3 February 2013 (UTC)
There are only so many ways to state that an edit is fixing a typo or grammar wart without risking being nasty to the editor who introduced it (eg, "I rite good" as an edit summary is unacceptable unless fixing your own mistake), and even playful summaries like "fixd tyop" get old fast. If I have to spend more than 30 seconds putting in an edit summary (by typing, selecting, approving an automated suggestion, or whatever), that's one typo I likely won't fix, because I have the attention span of a golfdish. The Crab Who Played With The Sea (talk) 13:55, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
Are edit summaries a good idea? Of course they are, in almost every single case. However, some people don't want to do them. What is being asked here is that those who don't wish to do them be forced to do so for the convenience of others. That's not ok. Clicking a link to view a diff is even less trouble than writing an edit summary. Beeblebrox (talk) 21:49, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
I have not read the whole of this discussion, but in my opinion "vandals would just make false edit summaries" is not a good objection. Many vandals, especially children and teenagers, are not capable of writing proper edit summaries in good English, and betray themselves with their writing. "i made it beter" is a dead giveaway, for example. 86.130.67.84 (talk) 22:05, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
I often write in crappy English in edit summaries, because I don't really care, so I guess my edits would be seen as vandalism then? FunkMonk (talk) 10:57, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
Oppose. When doing a lot of rapid work on a single article, having to lead edit summaries for each is just a nuisance. I know what I am talking about because I am using the user option that (almost) enforces edit summaries. However, I guess this argument rarely applies to users without an account. Maybe the following would work:
The option that nags when you don't leave an edit summary becomes the default and also applies to all IPs. But it can still be disabled by every logged-in user.
Edits without edit summary are still possible for all users -- by confirming that that's what you want or by using a space character as edit summary.
Where applicable, an empty edit summary (i.e. no printable characters) is replaced by "(edit by non-autoconfirmed user)". Hans Adler23:34, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
Oppose, although I always write an edit summary (sometimes I forget). It's good way to use it, but we can't make it required thing. --Stryn (talk) 11:48, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
Redirect categories for abbreviations and accronyms
total time spent on wikipedia, by everyone combined
In this wired interview from May 2010 Clay Shirky says "All the articles, edits, and arguments about articles and edits represent around 100 million hours of human labor. That’s a lot of time. But remember: Americans watch about 200 billion hours of TV every year.". Anyone know how he did that calculation? How many articles were there in early 2010? With 4M today the 100M figure sounds really low to me, 25 hours per article? I guess there are a ton of stubs, but is that enough to make up for the vast number of hours put into GA and FA articles? Plus is he really considering how long it takes to chase down some references, that could be looong time for what ends up being a tiny edit? Any thoughts?
I think even if he is off by a factor of 10, so it's 1B hours, that's still tiny compared to TV, which I think was his point. But I'm just wondering if he exaggerated his point by low-balling the number of hours people have put into Wikipedia. Silas Ropac (talk) 00:23, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
Shirky's calculation actually dates to 2008, and he doesn't seem to have explained the methodology beyond saying "I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought" [4]. We might have a more up-to-date and slightly more well-founded (but still rough) estimate shortly based on the soon to be published results from the 2012 editor survey. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 00:58, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
Thanks, yes would be interesting to see an update. Looks like in 2008 Wikipedia had about 2M articles. I still think 100M hours is low, more than an order of magnitude off. I think people sometimes spend many hours researching or reading to make a small edit, for example. Silas Ropac (talk) 14:37, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
It just so happens that Staeiou and I tried to answer this question using a more granular method. I summarize our analysis technique in meta:Research:Metrics/edit sessions. You can read the full paper pre-print on my website [5]. TL;DR: We identified 41,018,804 total labor-hours expended in the English-language version of Wikipedia by April 2012. Note that this metric is meant to measure "time spent editing pages" which is a subset of "time spent working on Wikipedia". Given that a substantial amount of work goes into mailing lists, IRC chats, etc. that doesn't appear as an edit on the wiki, our method is bound to underestimate. --EpochFail(talk • work)17:30, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
Heh! I saw this header on my watchlist and was going to post a very rough estimate of "about sixty million person-hours" I came up with a while back - it's good to know that the real calculations care in the same ballpark :-) Andrew Gray (talk) 21:06, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
Talk about hitting the motherload, nice research and paper! Great charts. Gosh but 40M hours means just 10h per article on average. That just sounds low. Perhaps if there was a histogram it would tell the story. Number of articles in Y and number of hours spent in X. Must be a power law where most articles were stubs with <= 1h of work, while the tip of the long tail would countain just the very few highly-edited articles. So the average is pulled down by the sheer number of stubs? Really, nice research and thanks for spotting my post and sharing. Silas Ropac (talk) 22:03, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
There has been limited discussion and edit reverts on the list of "modern gifts" on Wedding anniversary. The modern list appears to have a verifiable source listed as Complied by librarians at the Chicago Public Library in 2000 with a link. Despite it being a reputable source I am of the suspicion that the list is spurious with no rhyme or reason to the gifts chosen or additional notes on the existence of such traditions in the real world. From where did this list originate prior to the compliation by the librarians concerned? There might well be a credible explanation or we could all be looking at the results of a coffee break hoax by an employee of the aforementioned institution. I would be please to find evidence in support or against it. It is not so much of a problem mentioning it in the article from the verifiable source, but perhaps a little more evidence than what we have at the moment to be in the main table (links that are clearly clones of the source or wikipedia articles should obviously not count as evidence here) Dainamo (talk) 19:40, 19 February 2013 (UTC)
While WP:RSN is duly noted with thanks, the purpose of posting this to VP is to arouse wider debate on such issues than would be confined to the limited few who viewed the relevant area of the article dicussion. Dainamo (talk) 10:56, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
Out of curiosity I performed a transclusion count of the first few sections under
Wikipedia:Template messages/Cleanup. Counts higher than three digits are in bold:
Multiple issues – 57,827
Cleanup – 29,084
Cleanup AfD – 56
Cleanup-remainder – 55
Cleanup-rewrite – 3,691
Copy edit – 3,251
Copy edit-section – 63
CIA – 93
Cleanup Congress Bio – 52
Cleanup-book – 309
Cleanup-school – 501
Cleanup-university – 330
Game guide – 179
Local – 74
Metricate – 6
USRD-wrongdir – 81
All plot – 1,313
Fiction – 168
In-universe – 3,358
Plot – 3,960
Need-IPA – 163
Abbreviations – 135
Advert – 14,466
Peacock – 3,243
Buzzword – 222
Cleanup-tense – 231
Crystal – 136
Debate – 20
Editorial – 115
Essay-like – 3,362
Howto – 538
Inappropriate person – 184
Like resume – 1,346
News release – 788
News release section – 24
Obituary – 82
Pro and con list – 149
Repetition – 67
Review – 295
Story – 290
Technical – 2,451
Tone – 7,436
Travel guide – 221
Over-quotation – 378
Cleanup-reorganize – 1,404
Condense – 129
Duplication – 118
Importance-section – 231
Section-diffuse – 19
Sections – 763
Spacing – 22
Too many see alsos – 70
Trivia – 264
Very long – 645
Inadequate lead – 196
Lead missing – 2,597
Lead rewrite – 1,390
Lead too long – 572
Lead too short – 5,983
POV-lead – 45
Note that there is a high proportion that only show light or moderate usage. Perhaps this indicates an opportunity for consolidation and simplification? Praemonitus (talk) 02:09, 21 February 2013 (UTC)
Okay, I see. Maybe there is also a familiarity factor as well as just an overall likelihood to occur as a problem? Shrug.
It seems like some long-term trend data could be informative and perhaps suggest improvements and helpful ideas. For example, finding out whether the rate of Advert templates is increasing, and if the problem it represents is being addressed. Praemonitus (talk) 02:27, 22 February 2013 (UTC)
Wikidata phase 1 (language links) coming to this Wikipedia
Sorry for writing in English. I hope someone can translate this locally.
Wikidata has been in development for a few months now. It is now time for the roll-out of the first part of it on your Wikipedia. Phase 1 is the support for the management of language links. It is already being used on the Hungarian, Hebrew, Italian and English Wikipedias. The next step is to enable the extension on all other Wikipedias. We have currently planned this for March 6.
What is Wikidata?
Wikidata is a central place to store data that you can usually find in infoboxes. Think of it as something like Wikimedia Commons but for data (like the number of inhabitants of a country or the length of a river) instead of multimedia. The first part of this project (centralizing language links) is being rolled out now. The more fancy things will follow later.
What is going to happen?
Language links in the sidebar are going to come from Wikidata in addition to the ones in the wiki text. To edit them, scroll to the bottom of the language links, and click edit. You no longer need to maintain these links by hand in the wiki text of the article.
Where can I find more information and ask questions?
To stay up-to-date on everything happening around Wikidata please subscribe to the newsletter that is delivered weekly to subscribed user’s talk pages. You can see previous editions here.
Lydia obviously forgot to switch off the delivery for English Wikipedia, but if someone is interested, there is more here and on the talk page.--Ymblanter (talk) 16:14, 21 February 2013 (UTC)
I recently passed 1,000 edits and I wanted to jokingly tell my friends their are only X people nerdier that I in the world where X would be the number who have 1,000 edits. Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by number of edits only lists you once you have 11,000+ edits which I won't have any time soon. I don't need my exact place but some kind of idea for how many have 500, 1000, 200 and 5000 edits. Thanks. >> Jesus Loves You!M.P.Schneider,LC (parlemus • feci) 14:56, 21 February 2013 (UTC)
Hi there - I posted a Request for Comment on Talk:Water_fluoridation related to how we report findings of scientific studies - so far only people already involved in the discussion have commented, and it would be great to have some more eyes on the issue - appreciate your time, Tilapidated (talk) 03:36, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
I've just seen this today as a new thing when searching for an article. I was just wondering what it was. Simply south......catching SNOWballs for just 6 years15:58, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
Remove this to somewhere if this isn't a right place for this, but I need to write here because there is
discrepancies in articles Japanese battleship Yamato and Yamato-class battleships which are both featured articles, and because it looks like nobody notes my comments from talk pages of these articles.
2. both articles stand for information that Yamato had 162 25 mm AA-guns in spring 1944 onwards as her final maximum amount. But there is also mentions that amount of the guns was increased twice after spring, which was not possible if Yamato had her final AA-complement already in spring 1944. Featured picture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yamato1945.png, http://www.combinedfleet.com/yamato.htm and German Wikipedia all stands for 152 AA-guns as maximum. German Wikipedia also informs that amount of the guns was 98 in spring 1944 and 113 in summer 1944. Over all there is only one reference for 162 guns mentioned in articles. Besides there is a foto, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yamato_hit_by_bomb.jpg, wich shows to them who are familiarize themselves with Yamato that there wasn't 162 guns at least in 1944.
3. Both articles inform that Yamato's 15.5 cm wing turrets were removed in 1943, but again http://www.combinedfleet.com/yamato.htm and German Wikipedia inform that they were not removed before 1944, at the same time when 127 mm guns were added.
How do we handle those on the verge of leaving wikipedia? Ive been heee for a certain ammount of years and attempted my very best to improve wikipedia, but wikipedia isnt good to me in the sense that there is always one or two editors blocking my progress and never a group to give a good answer or any attention at all.
Similar to gaming the system, i find constant ammount of editors game the system/discussion by treating wikipedia as a vote count and as much wikipedia attempts to deny this, it still leans with vote over reason. So editors game the system by posting once and once asked for elaboration, they ignore it knowing fullwell its their advantage in a discussion.
And attempting to draw more editors gets me. And thats the sad thing, these editors care more about winning the discussion rather than helping the other editor with reasoning. Im exhausted and i know wikibreaks wont help me here. I think we should find a way so that multiple editors cant game the system and for wikipedia to also make sure reason triumphs over vote. SORRY if this is at the wrong place, but im tired and dont know where else to propose and get taken seriously.Lucia Black (talk) 22:09, 11 February 2013 (UTC)
If you've reached that point Lucia, I'd just walk away. Ego battles just aren't worth the bother and it's just better for you to work on something that you're happy doing. If you still want to work on Wikipedia, you should give yourself some "rules of engagement" and be willing to abandon work that people are sabotaging, for whatever reason. Praemonitus (talk) 00:58, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
I have to agree with you, Lucia. Wikipedia s u c k s because most of the people here today treat it as a game to be won. Back in its heyday, this place was great—but that was many years ago. The only solution I've found is to work in areas that few people traffic. If you get articles from WP:DUSTY, most people will let you work in peace. 64.40.54.40 (talk) 16:28, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
See meatball:GoodBye. There is a life cycle to editing. If it's time for you to leave, then you best course of action is to just quietly leave.
I have at a couple of points considered leaving because serious problems (usually at minor articles) were not being addressed. My response has been to recognize how bad that was for me, and to make a special effort to help other people in similar situations. It means that I spend less time dealing with "my"goals, but I like to think that someone else's day was improved as a result. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:14, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
"but I like to think that someone else's day was improved as a result." I can say, without fear of contradiction, that you have succeeded wonderfully in that, WAID. As our resident expert on policy, you have helped thousand of people understand how Wikipedia works and your efforts have been a great help to the project. I have seen many times that others have made life difficult for you, and I thank you kindly for hanging in there. Your help with the project has been of immense value and I am glad you are part of our community, WAID. Best regards. 64.40.54.22 (talk) 05:42, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
Sounds like you have wikistress. You may wish to simply take a break. If you are frequently coming across irksome editors, maybe you are just trying to edit articles on topics that attract that kind of editor. There are some topics that I tend to avoid because of the types of editors those topics attract. Jason Quinn (talk) 22:30, 24 February 2013 (UTC)
my technique is to have many topics, to go back and forth between them, to sometimes work at random, to not follow up insistently on any one issue too long--and never look back to see if I've won an argument. Of course we all care about winning when we're in an argument, even the most friendly of arguments. But if you get into disputes, you are not going to win all the time, and losing affects people poorly--we're built that way. The way to deal with it is to keep a few different things going--you won't lose all of them. Obviously some people who care primarily about a subject can't do all of that, but they can still work on different aspects of it. there are some parts of WP where the decision are frequently those I do not agree with, and I just stay away from them. The great thing about a project this size is that everyone can find a place where they're comfortable--actually, many different places DGG ( talk ) 02:33, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
My Reference Desk question was falsely construed as trolling
Hi, I hope I have found the proper board for this issue.
On January 18, I decided to ask a question that had been eating me for a while. Over on the NYRA board, there was a thread where we were discussing nerds and one poster there said, "They sing in a grindcore band where the lyrics to all of their songs consist of them screaming the word 'penis'". I didn't see why screaming the word "penis" was particularly nerdy, so I puzzled over it. Then I came across a few more comments linking nerds to an obsession with penises over the next few months. Then I remembered the movie Superbad with its nerd main character, who is fixated on the human phallus. It hit me: society has a stereotype that nerds are obsessed with penises. I didn't see why this should be particularly nerdy, unlike, say, astrophysics. I also noticed that people link nerdiness to Mountain Dew around the same time, and had no idea about the reasons behind that stereotype either. So I asked a question on Wikipedia's Reference Desk here: "How did the stereotype that nerds are obsessed with penises come about?"
The first responder asked me if I was trolling, so I explained. The responder, Jayron32, then wrote: "No, I think you're cherrypicking a few examples to make some point, which I don't know what it is, but there isn't any such sterotype at all. If you want to read about the stereotype, there's a Wikipedia article titled Nerd. While the characterization of 'nerds' does have many well known sterotypes (grooming habits, social awkwardness, obsessive interest in obscure pursuits, intellectualism), being overly intrested in penises simply isn't one of them. It just isn't. To claim that there is reads like pure trolling, and yes, I know, you've sucked me in to the debate, so you've won. Congrats." I wasn't cherrypicking examples -- I came across the examples first and then drew my conclusion. Jayron said, "to make some point, which I don't know what it is". I wasn't trying to make a clever point. I just observed a pervasive stereotype, at least in the online community, and I posted here because I wanted to know why. Instead of feeding my need for an explanation, I was falsely accused of trolling -- Jayron even said "To claim that there is reads like pure trolling, and yes, I know, you've sucked me in to the debate, so you've won" -- and even had my question locked before I could receive a satisfactory answer. Wikipedia has assumed bad faith about an honest question. How can I get this answered? Jeremy Jigglypuff Jones (talk) 08:00, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
Forget about it. There is nothing that can be done to "fix" the situation. You expressed your opinion, someone else expressed their opinion. A third person made a rather silly and inappropriate joke. Welcome to the Internet! Wikipedia is definitely not a forum, so there is a reasonably high degree of resistance to village pump discussion that might be unhelpful (and asking a question based on an alleged stereotype with no explanation or justification is unhelpful, and a wikilink to penis is totally superfluous, and just that link makes the whole thing appear rather dubious). Johnuniq (talk) 08:20, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
This diff should make it clear. Medeis closed it because he thought it was trolling, and the tag said that no one should post in the thread anymore "without consensus". A good Samaritan reopened the thread with edit summary of "assumptions of bad faith + unwarranted accusations of trolling", but 4 minutes later, Medeis closed it again, with the edit summary "consensus this is trolling". Apparently Medeis is counting a joke about the word "cocksucker" as one of three "votes" towards the conclusion that I posted the question just to troll. Yeah, now that I think of it, linking the word "penises" probably gave people the wrong idea. As for why I didn't explain my question right up, I assumed that everyone else was already aware of the nerd/penis stereotype and I was just slow to the stereotype. Since no one is allowed to unlock my thread without "consensis", may I have official permission from Wikipedia to ask the question again and have the thread remain open for 7 days? Jeremy Jigglypuff Jones (talk) 05:13, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
I suspect the answer is pretty simple: it's likely a random association that a small group of people turned into a pattern (apophenia). Most young men, including nerds, are obsessed by sex—so it's a common subject for song writing. Why do managers wear neckties to work? It's a phallic symbol.[6] Does that make them obsessed with the penis? Or is it just a consequence of the culture? Praemonitus (talk) 01:56, 24 February 2013 (UTC)
This makes a lot of sense. Maybe it's just the current societal fixation with what it is to be a nerd.
When Wikidia first opened, pages were printed with the links automatically in Blue. I would like to again print my pages with the links in Blue. Is there anyway it could be done within Wikipedia without having to go through Word or its equivalent? — Preceding unsigned comment added by ALEX GARTLAN (talk • contribs) 07:48, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
When Wikipedia first opened links were in camel case, then they were underlined and links to unwritten articles were followed by a ? Rmhermen (talk) 02:20, 24 February 2013 (UTC)
I think that is a browser/printer issue. I have seen some combinations that print links in blue and others that do not. Apteva (talk) 05:08, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
The short, unuseful answer is "Yes". The slightly-longer answer is "Use CSS". The correct answer is more work than I feel capable of at 12:15 AM. :-) --SarekOfVulcan (talk)05:15, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
Sirs: I wish to dearly avoid an edit war. There is an article that has one source, and I am looking for other sources, as I have read the other source, and seen the other source, neither of which I can document now, but easily more noteworthy than the current source. ( the primary source is dead, but it has been documented twice outside the web, ( unfortunately before I was born )).
I made the changes, but was reverted without discussion or notice.
Article: Light-Foot.
Source: Time Life Books on computers.
Source: Computer History Museum.
Would you suggest, I got to the museum, take a picture of the wire ( that predates me. ), and post it? Would that be original research?
The email I got back from the museum:
"Oh those idiots[ Wikipedia ]? The wouldn't know the truth if it was drilling into their thick skulls.", personal email.
I have made my decision. I hold this so-called committee responsible for the events that transpired that led to my permanent ban. I have waited long enough to let cooler heads prevail. You are ultimately responsible for the actions of the CheckUser, although DeltaQuad certainly shares the blame. I definitely intend on making this precedent, giving everyone else, and I assume there are many, who has been arbitrary banned for no good reason but were unable to make it so obvious as to give you no room for maneuver. I will be doing this for them as much as for myself. I will be their voice.
You should strip DeltaQuad of his CheckUser permissions immediately for, at a minimum, incompetence. I did and still do consider his actions malicious, but even assuming good faith, it is plain incompetence. There are plenty of individuals who can take his place. Out of all the administrative positions, there simply should not be any question about the motives or competence of a CheckUser.
Thereafter, you should step down from your positions on this board, for even letting this outrageous incident happen, and re-run or -apply or whatever it is you did to get this job. I will not necessarily oppose your renewed application, but at least it will give pause for a review of your performance.
YOU, this board, are the biggest threat to Wikimedia Foundation projects I have yet come across. Your incompetence cannot be reverted, unlike the common vandal or troll. Your incompetence cannot be countered or contained, and with the CheckUser it knows no bounds. This whole affair is a stain on this project, and I, we, all of those who are your past or next victims, are here to see the stain removed.
I will not stop. Years from now you will tire of this, but I will still be there, here, wherever, clamoring for your fall. I will not stop. Ban me if you will, but I will see this through. You will step down or I will spend every ounce of skill I have to see you are forced to do so. You will step down or ... I am not even sure yet. If it means having your administrative right revoked, so be it. If it means a letter writing campaign to the Wikimedia Foundation board, so be it. If it means wearing a bright red t-shirt at the WikiMania con or otherwise causing a ruckus, then so be it. I will see this through.
Ok so let me get this straight (as a non admin non involved editor that has never seen you before)- your not banned anymore because it was determined to be a mistake and you recived an apology - correct? Your now saying that all even those not involved in a simple human mistake by a human volunteer that has been corrected should step down - correct? Ultimately ending with threats of long term plans to disrupt the project - correct? Just one question - is this the only thing that has happened to bring you to this point? Sounds a little crazy that this one mistake that you received an apology for is the only reason to be flipping-out - are we missing something?.Moxy (talk) 05:29, 27 February 2013 (UTC)
Just one answer for your one question then: Yes, you are missing something; I have only just begun, but I am confident someone will tell me what happened sooner or later, or I will find out somehow, they can't stonewall me forever (at least I don't think they can.) Int21h (talk) 20:54, 27 February 2013 (UTC)
"Years from now you will tire of this, but I will still be there, here, wherever, clamoring for your fall" Now here's some hardcore bikeshedding. For your sanity and blood pressure, maybe another you should take up a calming hobby. Like biking? Or painting sheds? --Golbez (talk) 06:27, 27 February 2013 (UTC)
I prefer pulling nails, and long backwards walks through corn fields. Every now and then I even enjoy editing Wikipedia (I know right! No life!) But thank you for the suggestions. (I prefer walking, and I do not like sheds--horrible architecture if you ask me.) Int21h (talk) 20:54, 27 February 2013 (UTC)
Just out of curiosity. Any idea what the minimum number of links a person should follow from a specific article to reach any other article? Actuall that's an odd way of putting it. What I'm trying to ask is: Anyone knows what the six degrees of separation is for articles on the English Wikipedia? Is there any current tool that can find that out? Rehman14:09, 27 February 2013 (UTC)
WP:BJAODN was big for years, but today almost nobody knows what it is. I don't know if that means it was a flop, but it's certainly only a shadow of its former self. 64.40.54.45 (talk) 05:33, 1 March 2013 (UTC)
Facebook harvests Wikipedia articles (which they're allowed to do under the license) to build "topic" pages, presumably as a focus for people to go and like. I don't know how frequently they update; IIRC they started doing it a few years back. Andrew Gray (talk) 21:24, 1 March 2013 (UTC)
Want Wikimedia Commons to delete a flag design I created and put on it
Since the file is on the Wikimedia Commons, you need to make a request there. You can either post a message at the Village Pump, or nominate the file for deletion by clicking on the "Nominate for deletion" link which appears on the left side of the file description page. However, note that since you applied a "copyrighted free use" tag to the file when you uploaded it, and the licence is irrevocable, if other editors feel that the file should be kept for one reason or another you may not succeed in having the file deleted. — SMUconlaw (talk) 21:11, 1 March 2013 (UTC)
I have messaged a person who has used the file that I am intending to delete it, I thanked him for suppporting the flag, and will support him having a copy of it. I offered to send him a cloth version when I can get one made if he wishes to do so.--R-41 (talk) 21:40, 1 March 2013 (UTC)
Anyone have a few spare hours and is familiar with the timeline extension? I would like to create a timeline but am clueless about it. Werieth (talk) 20:13, 4 March 2013 (UTC)
Help with translation from Greek to English
Can anyone help by reading an article i have translated from greek to english? I want someone who speaks greek. Xaris333 (talk) 13:50, 3 March 2013 (UTC)
This is interesting. Looking at the page history, this diff seems to show that Wikipedia:Disputed statement, a guideline, was merged into Wikipedia:Accuracy dispute, an essay. The problem is, I'm not sure if the consensus to merge also concluded that accuracy dispute should be "promoted" in its entirety. I don't see a problem with it being a guideline per se, but I don't know if there was ever any discussion on the subject.--Fyre2387(talk • contribs)21:57, 8 March 2013 (UTC)
I found a CFD discussion that seems relevant: "either categorizing or listifying films by the sort of scenes they contain is overcategorization"
"I don't think it makes sense to start a convention of categorizing films based on specific scenes. There's thousands of possible things that happen in films, and I don't want to see Films which include a kidnapping, Films which contain nude scenes, Films which contain gun violence, etc."
"Categories are for defining characteristics, which "contains scenes depicting X" is generally not."
"If we created categories for every possible ... topic, most articles would have more categories than content."
Much of the benefit of categorization by loose correlation escapes me. Your first example seems to fit item #1 in the WP:NOTDIR criteria, and would almost appear to scandalously associate video games with a heinous crime. Praemonitus (talk) 05:14, 9 March 2013 (UTC)
Please read my message to the ArbCom. This concerns my permanent ban a few months ago. I would love to tell you all about it, but I really have no idea what happened. Still. I was banned, then unbanned, and all I got was a stupid apology and a wall of silence. They would like to pretend this is all over and done with, but with this, let it be known it is far from over. Other than that, you will have to look to the logs for details... Here it is:
Can I use/download the wiki application to create my own non-profit organizational wiki?
Hello,
Is it possible to download the application that wiki runs on to use in an non-profit organization? If so, I would be interested to know:
a) how to go about doing this b) what system requirements are required c) any costing information (one time and ongoing) or other information you would deem of value to provide
For those who may be interested, I have boldly created a WikiProject to collaboratively recognize Wikipedia's finest editors, which can be found at the link above. Please feel free to add your name to the list of members. AutomaticStrikeout (T • C) 17:21, 13 March 2013 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
People had been putting pages in the aforementioned category even though it is stated to be a container category, including user pages. I had removed pages, but not user pages. I think This person did it. Please deal with this IssueNadav Bronicki 03:05, 14 March 2013 (UTC)
I am planning to create an essay, such as "wp:Editor activity levels" to describe patterns of Wikipedia editing activity. In particular, after 2007, the activity levels dropped and later stabilized (in recent years) for several languages (but not Russian, Latvian, or Persian Wikipedia). Compare charts for stability of other-language wikipedias:
I was wondering which "population-control factors" (or "crowd control") would cause a worldwide population of editors to edit at the same even-keel levels for years, with only slight +/-7% variation in monthly edit-count levels. What does that stability indicate about the general population of editors, or the methods of counting? Is there a specific area of "Internet psychology" or "cyberspace psychology" which describes patterns of online user activities? Thanks. -Wikid77 (talk) 15:38, 17 March 2013 (UTC)
It would probably depend on the site, eg, there is a 'natural level of activity', given its particular factors of engagement (and no known exogenous forces pushing in a particular direction). Assuming all those sites have roughly the same engagement environment to do the same thing, then that would go towards explaining it. Perhaps you could also look at other Wikimedia sites that do different things, to see if that suggests anything. Alanscottwalker (talk) 16:24, 17 March 2013 (UTC)
Factors might include:
The availability of any technology to participate in editing.
The introduction of competing technologies where desktop computers prevailed. How many edits are made with smartphones?
The freedom to participate.
The amount of time available for leisure activities.
In many ways, Wikipedia is like a giant version of the Stanford prison experiment where people are let loose to act as they would in the wild—with a minimum of restrictions. On Wikipedia, there is the rule enforcement group (predators) and content writing group (prey) and the interaction between these groups determine the population level of the system as a whole. The system tends to form a balance because the types of interactions between each group influences the population levels of the other group. This interaction can be viewed as a negative feedback loop that keeps the system stable. For example; when the prey group gets large, the predator group can grow. As they prey group diminishes, there's less food for the predators and they die off allowing the prey group to grow. So the system strikes a balance between the two. 64.40.54.69 (talk) 18:28, 17 March 2013 (UTC)
Do carping critics and policy nerds really "die off" as the number of contributors diminishes, or do they "pile on" to further discourage the remaining contributors? -Ac44ck (talk) 19:26, 17 March 2013 (UTC)
Graphs do not indicate attitudes, but the low-activity editors typically do "die off" faster than high-activity editors (5+ versus 25+ versus 100+ edits), where even 2500-edits/month editors are replaced by others when on break, as stable counts across the year, dropping only 2% per year for high-end editors. When total editors are just a few hundred, in some languages, then activity swings up/down ±20%-30% every month, as with Esperanto (http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/PlotEditorsEO.png) which follows general trend lines, but along zigzag swings. -Wikid77 (talk) 07:31, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
I am conducting a research on contribution behaviour regarding social media platforms such as Wikipedia. I developed a questionairre with the intention to reveal different motives in contributing to different social media websites. I would much appreciate it if you could help me out by filling out the following survey: www.thesistools.com/web/?id=329391. It will only take two minutes of your time!
Hi Lester, when the questionaire was finished, language changed to Dutch: "Hartelijk dank voor uw deelname aan dit onderzoek, ook namens ThesisTools!" A few pages further, I got this page: "Uitnodiging onderzoek: Online Winkelen. Doelgroep: U woont in Nederland" No, I do not. Met vriendelijke groeten! Lova Falktalk19:14, 16 March 2013 (UTC)
An encyclopedia is a media, and Wikipedia is build by common users, so it's social. So I think it's a social media indeed. It may have some characteristics that differ from other media, for sure. --NaBUru38 (talk) 18:35, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
By the way, oelig, that's an essay, so it "may represent widespread norms or minority viewpoints". And I disagree with it, first of all because Wikipedia should also focus on sharing the knowledge, not just write pages. --NaBUru38 (talk) 18:37, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
I answered your survey, but I vehemently disagree with the idea that Wikipedia is a social medium or should come to resemble one more closely. I find the comparison to YouTube odious. --Orange Mike | Talk17:48, 20 March 2013 (UTC)
Looking for two concepts
I'm looking for two concepts in English Wikipedia in order to relate them to the equivalent pages in Persian Wikipedia. First, it seems that in English Wikipedia, there is no article about having a baby or having a child as an event or process in one's life (like marriage). Such an article would have information about reasons for reproduction, preparation, psychological situation or problems of parenting, the ethical issues concerning this etc. Second, I found no article about the act of making up, apart from cosmetics. Does English Wikipedia have an article for the act of applying cosmetics to body? --Ali Pirhayati (talk) 00:07, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
Neither is the one I'm looking for. Childbirth deals with a short-term process, maybe from one or two years before the very act of giving birth to one or two years after it. I'm looking for a long-term process, the process of decision and implementation and duration of having a special kind of relation to another person that may continue until death. As far as the second is concerned, I can give you an example. We have computer keyboard and we have typing and we need both. The first deals with the tool and the second deals with the act. Both are important and can have a distinct page. Also, typing doesn't deal with "the study of typing". It's itself! Thanks anyway. --Ali Pirhayati (talk) 04:51, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
See articles: For having a child, see: "Parenting" (aka "Childrearing") and for using makeup, try "Lipstick" or "Eyeshadow" or some specific, major type of cosmetics because English Wikipedia tries to remove articles which describe "how-to" perform activities and each act is described for using a specific product. -Wikid77 (talk) 07:43, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
"I found no article about the act of making up, apart from cosmetics. Does English Wikipedia have an article for the act of applying cosmetics to body?" Wow, you are right the English Wikipedia is seriously lacking an article (or section in Cosmetics) that deals about the cultural aspects of makeup. Thanks for pointing it out! --NaBUru38 (talk) 18:56, 19 March 2013 (UTC)
In addition, the article was forked as a result of the conflict of edits, and there were more edits in the fork, which were deleted after it was renamed. (I do not complain, it is just the the actual edit count was probably higher by several dozens).--Ymblanter (talk) 21:41, 15 March 2013 (UTC)
Not a record then. Does this mean Sarah Palin is more interesting than the Pope? Or just more vandalised? Well found anyway - thanks. An optimist on the run! 22:03, 16 March 2013 (UTC)
I succeeded to add my edit from the third attempt, and it is now not in the article, I am too lazy to check the history but I suspect it might have been removed as a result of a yet another edit conflict.--Ymblanter (talk) 12:27, 17 March 2013 (UTC)
There is no reason to assume that the topic is more interesting or more vandalized simply because it was editing more in a certain window. --Onorem♠Dil01:22, 22 March 2013 (UTC)
[10] - This user is importing only the last revision of lots of articles from Wikipedia, violating the license. Is this legitimate? I've heard about users using wikia for testing, so I'm not sure. --88.13.91.252 (talk) 20:59, 17 March 2013 (UTC)
It is legitimate as the page attributes to Wikipedia, though it would be better if it linked to the exact version of the page, rather than the current version. RichFarmbrough, 01:23, 22 March 2013 (UTC).
ACC needs help!
Hello everyone, I'm DeltaQuad (also known as DQ), an account creation interface administrator and developer. Recently, our project has had an increased backlog in getting accounts for new users. Our numbers are currently above 250 people waiting for accounts on the English Wikipedia. If you could even spare a moment to do a few requests a day to help us clear this backlog. If this interests you and your willing to help, and you match the following description, then please do apply! Ideal users are:
We have a very friendly team to help you get started and we also have an IRC channel. If you have any questions for us or about the process, feel free to ask at the talkpage. If you can help out, we would greatly appreciate it. For the ACC Administration and Development Team, -- DQ(ʞlɐʇ)23:20, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
As wikipedia is increasingly being used even in the scientific community, we are starting to see articles that actually cite or link to wikipedia. See here for a nice example which is filled with links to wikipedia. It is quite feasible that the here-mentioned article would actually end up as a cited reference on the Bayesian statistics page; that would then constitute a form of recursive citing. Is this behavior desirable? In such a way, wikipedia would theoretically be referring to itself, while seemingly citing others. Would this not somehow violate the principle described here?
Tenth Plague (talk) 11:33, 20 March 2013 (UTC)
There's no recursive citation at work here! This article is in fact the same as our Approximate Bayesian computation article; PLoS Computational Biology are experimenting with a program whereby it publishes overview articles ("topic articles") that are then migrated into Wikipedia; there's more details here.
Authors in the biomedical sciences get academic reward for publishing papers in reputable journals that are indexed in PubMed and have associated digital object identifiers (DOIs). In contrast, contributions to Wikipedia can be anonymous and do not count for much in the current system of academic advancement. We hope to help to resolve this disparity in PLoS Computational Biology. (...)
Topic Pages are the version of record of a page to be posted to (the English version of) Wikipedia. In other words, PLoS Computational Biology publishes a version that is static, includes author attributions, and is indexed in PubMed. In addition, we intend to make the reviews and reviewer identities of Topic Pages available to our readership. Our hope is that the Wikipedia pages subsequently become living documents that will be updated and enhanced by the Wikipedia community, assuming they are in keeping with Wikipedia's guidelines and policies...
The PLoS version of the article links out to Wikipedia pages for context, but close reading shows that it doesn't at any point cite Wikipedia; I don't think there's anything immediately problematic about us using this particular entry as a source, assuming we are sensible about doing so. The reviewed version in PLoS isn't made less reliable by having a copy put into into Wikipedia, and it isn't made less reliable by the fact that it chooses to include links to Wikipedia to help gloss specialist terms. Andrew Gray (talk) 00:10, 21 March 2013 (UTC)
I confess I didn't know about it until now :-). Daniel Mietchen seems to be the main person involved from our side.
In general, I think it's worth making a clear distinction between people citing Wikipedia (definitely bad for all concerned, in 99% of cases) and people who are using Wikipedia - pointing the reader towards it for further details or background information, for example. The latter isn't actually drawing any information from us, so there's no circularity. Andrew Gray (talk) 11:34, 21 March 2013 (UTC)
External links should not normally be used in the body of an article (WP:ELPOINTS). There are very few exceptions, so I doubt the problem of disguising the elink icon (in an article) has ever arisen - in 99.9% of cases, the response would be, "remove the link from the article".
"Plainlinks" can be useful for talk pages - for example if giving a history or diff like this - especially if you're listing a lot of diffs.
I can't think of any valid use for plainlinks in an article. An external link should be clearly designated as such. In my opinion, that example from MTG should be removed from the article(s), and probably the template should be deleted. 88.104.27.2 (talk) 16:51, 24 March 2013 (UTC)
not sure if this is the right location to post my comment. {{Location map}} only has {{Location map Afro-Eurasia}}, but I just need Eurasia. I am not an expert and fear that I might make mistakes. If anyone has interest in doing that task: it would eliminate many issues and improve readability. Regards.--Tomcat(7)12:00, 24 March 2013 (UTC)
Something must have changed with the Wikipedia interface. The Search input box (upper right) no longer shows a guess list and the edit panel no longer displays the graphical bar along the top. Praemonitus (talk) 00:17, 26 March 2013 (UTC)
Hello! Do we have some listing of article set that should each country have? Like Transport in XXX, Economy of XXX, Energy in XXX, Agriculture in XXX, Culture of XXX, etc? Do we have some complete list of those? And with default names? I wanted to create that, but do we have it already? --WhiteWriterspeaks14:13, 24 March 2013 (UTC)
There seems to be a column aligning problem with the 'Studio albums' table in the 'Discography' section on the article. As I'm rather inexperienced when it comes to wikicoding, I would be very grateful for help with this issue. -- Halfpastformerly SUFCboy14:08, 29 March 2013 (UTC)
Audit Subcommittee vacancies: Call for applications (2013)
The Arbitration Committee is seeking to appoint three non-arbitrator members to the Audit Subcommittee ("AUSC"). The Committee is comprised of six members and is tasked with investigations concerning the use of CheckUser and Oversight privileges on the English Wikipedia. The AUSC also monitors CheckUser and Oversight activity and use of the applicable tools. The current non-arbitrator members are Avraham, MBisanz, and Ponyo, whose terms were to expire on February 28 but were extended with their agreement until April 30 by the Committee.
Matters brought before the subcommittee may be time-sensitive and subcommittee members should be prepared and available to discuss cases promptly so they may be resolved in a timely manner. Sitting subcommittee members are expected to actively participate in AUSC proceedings and may be replaced should they become inactive. All subcommittee members are given both CheckUser and Oversight access but are expected to not make regular use of them unless needed. They are subject to the relevant local and global policies and guidelines concerning CheckUser and Oversight.
If you think you may be suitably qualified, please email arbcom-en-clists.wikimedia.org to start the application procedure for an appointment ending 30 June 2014. The application period will close at 23:59, 1 April 2013 (UTC). Further information is also available here.
Audit Subcommittee vacancies: last call for applications
This is a reminder that the application period for the three non-arbitrator seats on the Audit Subcommittee will close at 23:59, 1 April 2013 (UTC), less than 36 hours from now.
The Audit Subcommittee ("AUSC") is comprised of six members and is tasked with investigations concerning the use of CheckUser and Oversight privileges on the English Wikipedia. The AUSC also monitors CheckUser and Oversight activity and use of the applicable tools. The current non-arbitrator members are Avraham, MBisanz, and Ponyo, whose terms were to expire on February 28 but were extended with their agreement until April 30 by the Committee.
Matters brought before the subcommittee may be time-sensitive and subcommittee members should be prepared and available to discuss cases promptly so they may be resolved in a timely manner. Sitting subcommittee members are expected to actively participate in AUSC proceedings and may be replaced should they become inactive. All subcommittee members are given both CheckUser and Oversight access but are expected to not make regular use of them unless needed. They are subject to the relevant local and global policies and guidelines concerning CheckUser and Oversight.
Please note that due to Wikimedia Foundation rules governing access to deleted material, only applications from administrators will be accepted.
If you think you may be suitably qualified, please email arbcom-en-clists.wikimedia.org to start the application procedure for an appointment ending 30 June 2014. Once again, the application period will close at 23:59, 1 April 2013 (UTC). Further information is also available here.
... it also contains an incentive to (at least temporarily) vandalize different pages - is that being discussed centrally anywhere?
--Jonasbinding (talk) 13:01, 1 April 2013 (UTC)
Where do you see anything even remotely related to vandalism in this? All I see is an unfunny (IMO) comic, the last panel of which links to a Wikimedia donation page--Atlantima (talk) 01:44, 3 April 2013 (UTC)
It changed recently. The hover over the company name currently says "Happy April 1st, everyone!", but it use to have a rotating incentive to change the name in the comic by adding a NASDAQ-100 to a certain article (which kept changing). Chris857 (talk) 01:58, 3 April 2013 (UTC)
Several Wikipedia articles mention something called the "Jeremy Nicholson Negro Achievement Award." I suspect this may be a hoax. Can someone please look into it? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.29.132.240 (talk) 02:57, 4 April 2013 (UTC)
This seems to be the usual problem with articles about transsexuals: someone wants to make it all male because that was the birth sex, and someone else wants to make it female, including direct quotations that ought never be changed, because that was the self-identified gender, and all of them believe that Georgia Guy is wrong for sticking with our actual guideline on the subject. I'm sure that Georgia Guy would be happy to have a few more eyes over there. If you're not familiar with the guideline, it's summarized in a box at the top of the talk page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:00, 3 April 2013 (UTC)
The MOS says that we usually use female pronouns, but that male pronouns in direct quotations must stay. How understandable is this?? Georgia guy (talk) 18:02, 3 April 2013 (UTC)
I have just edited an article with a new external link, for which I had to enter a captcha. The only problem is the words the captcha came up with were "dyinghmong". I find this very objectionable since the Hmong are a persecuted minority in eastern Asia. Is it possible to find a way to avoid potentially objectionable terms coming together like this, before we get a captcha that says "shootkids" or something equally offensive. Before anybody points it out, yes I know it is just mean't to filter out human users and yes I know Wikipedia is mean't to be neutral, but I just do not like the idea of typing in "dying" "hmong". 90.218.98.130 (talk) 11:55, 5 April 2013 (UTC)
Hello. The Wikimedia Foundation has received a request from Drugs.com for the removal of some of the content in the article List_of_largest_selling_pharmaceutical_products. The WMF does not believe there is a legal reason under U.S. law to remove the complained-of content and thus believes it is a decision that rests with the community, as all content issues do. The WMF has informed them of this and indicated that they would put the decision to you. We will simply communicate the community decision to the company after the community has come to a consensus for or against removal.
Sorry I can't translate to English the whole thread in French, I just hope you will understand the most important part. Any comment is welcome. — S t a r u s – ¡Dímelo!– 05:11, 6 April 2013 (UTC)
Reading through the thread at the French Wikipedia is informative. When an editor's real life identity can be determined—law enforcement, governments, corporations, etc. can put pressure on editors to do what they want OR ELSE. It raises some serious questions about how wikipedia can be manipulated. 64.40.54.78 (talk) 11:14, 6 April 2013 (UTC)
Apparently this is also currently the second most popular article on the Fr-Wiki, so the Streisand effect is clearly happening. Nick-D (talk) 23:53, 6 April 2013 (UTC)
Here's the quote from Wikimedia France.
the DCRI summoned a Wikipedia volunteer in their offices on April 4th. This volunteer, which was one of those having access to the tools that allow the deletion of pages, was forced to delete the article while in the DCRI offices, on the understanding that he would have been held in custody and prosecuted if he did not comply. Under pressure, he had no other choice than to delete the article, despite explaining to the DCRI this is not how Wikipedia works. He warned the other sysops that trying to undelete the article would engage their responsability before the law.
This volunteer had no link with that article, having never edited it and not even knowing of its existence before entering the DCRI offices. He was chosen and summoned because he was easily identifiable, given his regular promotional actions of Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects in France. — Christophe Henner, Wikimedia France
Someone may want to use WebCitation and make sure URLs going back to sourced information on the articles stay live in case other sites suddenly "disappear" and we can't source content. Regards, — MoeEpsilon23:25, 6 April 2013 (UTC)
It's interesting to note that Google Maps has what appears to be uncensored imagery of this location - Google censors most other sites associated with the French nuclear weapons program, so it suggests that either the French Government hasn't tried to take on Google over this, or they also told them to go jump. The situation concerning the FR-Wiki admin is appalling, and I commend the WMF for standing up for admins by publicizing this madness. Nick-D (talk) 23:43, 6 April 2013 (UTC)
Is there some way we can show our support of this French SysOp? I'm not sure how to go about doing that - on his French talk page, or something? I just think maybe it'd be nice if he knew that lots of us support his voluntary efforts in trying to maintain Wikipedia, and that we're concerned about his treatment. 88.104.27.58 (talk) 23:52, 6 April 2013 (UTC)
From the WMF posting to the French equivalent of our WP:AN, linked above: “We ask that you respect his privacy as we work through this matter.”—Odysseus1479 (talk) 02:42, 7 April 2013 (UTC)
♠"Is there some way we can show our support of this French SysOp?" +1 me, whatever it is. This is outrageous.
♠There's also a bigger question in my mind. If France is doing this, how long before some other gov't pulls it, too? How long before the U.S. threatens some SysOp with Gitmo unless he/she deletes a page on the very existence of NSA or NRO?8o
I wouldn't worry about gitmo or the US National Security Agency but I would more worry about the precedent this would set in other countries. I propose a protest like how it.wikipedia had on Italy over a controversial censorship law or how similar had unfolded here in regards to SOPA. The message IMHO should be "If you target one of us, you target all of us". I do not want to see Wikipedia involved with politics but I also do not want to see politicians, government officials, lobbyists or anybody else dictate our content regardless of the language. We are the FREE encyclopedia! Politicians particularly in countries like France, UK, US, Germany, etc. should see censoring wikipedia as a potential to loose votes at best hence be strongly discouraged to dictate content. -- A Certain White Catchi? 03:21, 7 April 2013 (UTC)
frwiki editors are compiling a centralized list of media stories and blogs (in all languages) on what they call l'Affaire Pierre-sur-Haute. Feel free to add links to stories and blogs related to the controversy. Thank you for your support. Bouchecl (talk) 21:05, 7 April 2013 (UTC)
Droit d'auteur : les textes sont disponibles sous licence Creative Commons paternité partage à l’identique ; d’autres conditions peuvent s’appliquer. Voyez les conditions d’utilisation pour plus de détails, ainsi que les crédits graphiques.
Following the "Conditions d’utilisation" link, I find the following statement:
“
Vous consentez également à ce que les lois de Californie et, le cas échéant, les lois des États-Unis d’Amérique régissent les présentes Conditions d’utilisation, de même que tout litige d’ordre légal se produisant éventuellement entre vous et nous (nonobstant les principes sur les conflits de lois).
”
The English translation is as follows:
You also agree that the laws of the State of California and, to the extent applicable, the laws of the United States of America will govern these Terms of Use, as well as any legal claim that might arise between you and us (without reference to conflict of laws principles).
I read that quite clearly. This administrator knew the rules when he signed up: French law does not reach Wikipedia. This administrator, fr:Utilisateur:Remi Mathis, should be reprimanded for willingly violating Wikipedia policy. It is quite straightforward: the Foundation already ruled the request to delete the article invalid. If the French police want a page deleted, and the Foundation refuses, their rights are clear: the San Francisco Superior Court and the United States District Court for the Northern District of California are always open to them. Other than that, Remi's duty was clear:
He should have resigned his position rather than violate his agreement with the Wikimedia Foundation.
Since he did not, and since he decided to either not read the Conditions d’utilisation or ignored them, he should be reprimanded by the Foundation for abusing his administrative rights.
Wikipedia, nor any of the projects, can survive if they are subject to the tyranny of French law and its "Interior" Ministry run rampant. Keep the French Police off Wikipedia. If the French want to live in fear of their own government, that's their problem, but keep it off Wikipedia. Resign. That being said, I look forward to the day when French law is actually available on Wikisource for the world to see so I can actually blame the editor. (Blame or no blame, Remi clearly violated policy and should still be reprimanded.) Int21h (talk) 22:00, 8 April 2013 (UTC)
OK, so let's game that out. You're at the police station. You're an admin. You're sitting across from the French version of CIA or NSA. They tell you to delete it. You would do.....what? You have no access to resign your rights. They're making threats. You don't know when you can go home, and you don't have a lawyer with you. What would you do? Personally, I'd do the same thing that this sysop did - I'd delete the page, and immediately post a note saying what I did, so that someone else could undelete.
Is this a joke? You want this admin sanctioned? This volunteer editor who was physically called before a government agency and ordered to do something on Wikipedia under threat of criminal sanction to risk incarceration by refusing? Have some sense of proportion man.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 22:30, 8 April 2013 (UTC)
Lova Falk talk 14:43, 20 January 2013 (UTC)
you're fired 11:52, 20 January 2013 (UTC)
Resolved
Lova Falk talk 10:33, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
Done Cookies and love Lova Falk talk 11:09, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
Resolved
Thank you for your suggestion. When you believe an article needs improvement, please feel free to make those changes. Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone can edit almost any article by simply following the edit this page link at the top.
Note: Please see also the recent discussion at the policy pump, Behavioral guideline for minor edits (now archived). — Hex (❝?!❞) 18:16, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
Fixed with a Google Books search -- John of Reading (talk) 08:25, 12 March 2013 (UTC)
Lova Falk talk 08:23, 17 March 2013 (UTC)
/Archive_41#c-84.249.89.206-2013-02-18T14:47:00.000Z-Featured_picture:_File:Yamato1945.png){kind=link}
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lists.wikimedia.org to start the application procedure for an appointment ending 30 June 2014. The application period will close at 23:59, 1 April 2013 (UTC). Further information is also available here.