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Wikipedia:Village pump archive 2004-09-26

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Moved discussion

Questions and answers, after a period of time of inactivity, will be moved to other relevant sections of the wikipedia (such as the FAQ pages), placed in the Wikipedia:Village pump archive (if it is of general interest), or deleted (if it has no long-term value).

See the archive for older moved discussion links. For the most recent moved discussion, see Wikipedia:Village pump archive#August 2003 moved discussion.

Watchlists Disabled

First aproach: limiting the article count

Is there any way to view the items on our watchlists to bring the total down to less than 200 articles? -- NetEsq 19:38, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

(I just bumped the limit from 200 to 500, BTW.) Not yet, but I'm messing with it still. --Brion 19:42, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)
For the too-big watchlist, it now dumps an alphabetical list of watched pages with the option to remove selected items. Primitive, but it seems to work for now. --Brion 21:12, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Thanks, Brion. That's just what the doctor ordered! -- NetEsq 21:17, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Hey, that is the function, I was looking for!!! I wanted for months already to create a function that shows me, what I am watching. Now it is working ;-)
Please keep this function (add some button on the watch list page) so that we can manage better our "children"... (you know, how Wikipedians think about their pages... ;-) Fantasy 22:18, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Yeah, should have had that years ago. :) --Brion

How about automatically removing all redirect pages from all watchlists? I certainly don't want any redir pages on my watchlist, and removing the 100 or so that are on it would at least bring me a bit closer to 500. BTW, I noticed that special:recentchanges still shows watched pages in bold. I assume it isn't really helping the server load that I'm now using recentchanges since my watchlist is disabled? Mkweise 22:30, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I don't like this: you will not know if someone changed the redirect page... Fantasy 22:37, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Recent changes' use of watchlist entries is pretty much "free". To explain... the recentchanges table lists all edits (in the last few days) indexed by timestamp. The database just starts at the most recent and grabs entries in reverse time order until it reaches its limit. For each edit it looks at, it checks the watchlist table for that page, with the direct index keys of your user id and the namespace and title of the page. This should be quite fast, and it only has to check the watchlist for the same number of pages that it actually shows in the results. So if your limit is 200 pages, it looks at up to 200 pages.
The Special:Watchlist view works differently. It takes the entire set of your watchlist, and for each watched title looks up the page(s) that correspond to it. The database sorts them all by reverse timestamp order and then shows only the most recent X number. So if your limit is 200 pages, but you're watching 2000 pages, it had to look at and deal with the full 2000 pages. --Brion 05:26, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)
That's interesting, because all I've ever really wanted to see when loading my watchlist has been a list of watched pages that have changed since I last loaded my watchlist (usually < 24 h). It sounds like that could easily be done the same way recentchanges works, and just filtering out non-watched pages instead of bolding the watched ones. Certainly much less work to code than what you're planning... Mkweise 07:12, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Alas, the scale is about the same: we trawl through a couple thousand watchlist entries to see which are recent, or through a couple thousand recent edits to see which are watched. --Brion 07:28, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Same scale, perhaps. But my way, you're checking the same records for each user, meaning much more cache hits. Also, consider that the users who load their watchlist frequently tend to be the same users who have thousands of watched articles. Thus, a "Show new changes starting from ..." link at the top of the watchlist should really help reduce load. Mkweise 08:17, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I hope the disabling of longer watchlists is intended to be very short term only? I absolutely have well over 500 articles I wish to keep an eye on. I've created more than that number of articles. I would hate if my watchlist remains disabled. -- Infrogmation 00:03, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Yes, I'm working on rewriting the watchlist and hope to have something that's both workable and faster up soon. Probably by adding a duplicate timestamp field to the watchlist table, which should allow for a pre-indexed sort and hopefully won't slow down page saves significantly. --Brion 05:26, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Second aproach: 1 hour watchlist

Okay, the current state of affairs is thus:

  • no major restructuring of database yet :)
  • default time cutoff for Special:Watchlist is now 1 hour, you can select up to 7 days if you dare
  • it attempts to judge whether it will be more efficient to check every page in the watchlist or every page edited since the cutoff time, based on how many pages are in your watchlist and how many edited pages it might have to look at
  • there's a clickable link to the raw list page where you can remove multiple items

So hopefully this should be fairly usable for the meantime. --Brion 11:16, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Although I share some of the concerns expressed above (Infrogmation's not the least) I think you've done this in a laudable way! -- Ruhrjung 14:18, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Nice—the way it is now works for me. What would be even better is to have a link to show pages that have changed since the page was last loaded, just like on the recentchanges page. (Or, if you want to get fancy, store a watchlistlastloaded timestamp in the user table and just have the watchlist show pages that have changed since it was last looked at.) Mkweise 16:03, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Experiences with this unexpected changes

I cannot in all honestness fault the way the watchlist works now. Nor most of all the way the change affects the wikipedia speed and functionality.

Nevertheless, I would like to "vent" the experience I was first faced with (without warning, or phase in). I had an excessive amount of items on my watchlist. Guilty. There was though not a warning to me that this might cause a problem. Rather it seemed to be that a healty watchlist was a guarantee of not many articles going astray for too long. In hindsight, I realize that this must have caused huge bits of duplication of effort both of the hardware, and of the wikipedians themselves.

This does not change the fact that when I was faced (quite unexpectedly) with the ultimatum to reduce my watchlist to below 750 "or else", I tried to think very carefully which pages could I really be the most competent watcher of. Well, guess what? My login timed out during the process. I guess I can just blame myself, but still the experience was not a positive one. And in a pique, next time around I scrapped without discrimination all the articles that weren't in the "User:" or the "Wikipedia:" spaces. In retrospect that may not be that bad, starting from a "clean slate" or something proximate to that, but... (maybe something should be learned about this, or maybe not) -- Cimon Avaro on a pogostick

Cimon, I was also really surprised, when I saw that I have to reduce my watchlist. My first thought was: NEVER! But I knew, Wikipedia is growing (probably faster that it can handle, sometimes), so there are some growing-problems, but we have really good people looking after this so I gave the problems 2 days. I was wrong, not even one day, and the problem was solved. ;-)
The other solution, to get around this problems, in the real world in real software-projects is the following:
  • A team works on the project, creates documents, discusses, tests, quality cecks, changes again, test, ... and after some months or years the real users get the (probably) working version of the software.
Wikipedia is able to support changes "on the fly".
  • There is a problem, lets try to solve it. One way is wrong, ok, lets take the other way.
Which one of this two aproaches do you prefer? I go for the Wiki-aproach ;-) Fantasy 08:01, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Move Comoros/Temp to Comoros

I am content with the current state of this page (Comoros/Temp). I think it is 'finished' (for as far as a wikipage can be finished...). Can anyone who knows how to move it the proper way to Comoros do this (or tell me how to)? (See: Wikipedia:WikiProject Countries
By the way, the subpages still need some work. Pascal 21:25, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Done Enchanter 22:39, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Question from newbie - privacy

I am considering signing up as a registered user. But I am curious if there is a privacy policy regarding e-mail addresses. I cannot find any. Is it a risk unless I set up an e-mail address via (e.g.) yahoo, hotmail, etc., from spam?66.80.243.130 23:48, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

You are not required to list an e-mail address when making an account. However it is helpful so other users can use the E-mail this user feature which is available on user pages. Your e-mail address will not be listed even if you do provide one, unless you list it somewhere on you own (some users put it on thier user page). MB 23:57, Aug 6, 2003 (UTC)
Please see the draft privacy policy. --Brion 00:00, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)
thanks so much. here I go. 66.80.243.130 00:02, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Chinese characters

I have made a suggestion on the use of traditonal/simplifed chinese characters on Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(Chinese). Please give your comment. wshun 00:03, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Vandalism, Annoying User, or What?

Same person editing from least three IP addresses: 67.31.32.119, 67.31.35.141, and 67.31.18.253. Editor is adding obscure/POV/opinion/useless links to a lot of articles including: Stokely Carmichael, John Maynard Keynes, Attack on Pearl Harbor, J. Edgar Hoover, Sigmund Freud, and Francisco Franco. I can't really figure out what point this guy is trying to push (seems a bit all over the map), but he's adding pretty low quality links (user pages, random editorials, conspiracy theories) that are also rather unveriable/unaccountable sources of information and he's adding them somewhat rapidly. He's probably using more than just these three addresses, looks like a dynamic user. He has made a few good edits, though, so I was hesitant to label him as a vandal, but he has already re-added his pet links once or twice with no comments/summary ever in any articles or talk pages, so I'm not sure how to proceed. If anyone has the ability to look for other recent edits from 67.31.x.x, I'd also appreciate some help, etc. Daniel Quinlan 04:27, Aug 7, 2003 (UTC)

Posting him to Wikipedia:Vandalism in progress. -Smack 18:00, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Here, have some unidentified Swedish plant photos

I snapped some photos of vegetation while in the wilds of Sweden. If anyone can identify them and would find them useful for illustrating Wikipedia articles, consider them FDL'd. --Brion 05:11, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I may have made a faux pas

When I first discoverded wikipedia, I went gung-ho and added an article, without reading anything much. The thing is I borrowed most of it. I totally forgot that I borrowed it and someone has called me on it. Should I take out the article?

Jon 10:05, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Don't worry, no-one's going to shoot you for it. Something has to be done, and now that it's out in the open, it's going to happen whether you do it yourself or not. But there's no reason you can't do it. List the page on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion with a brief explanation, and replace the article content with the copyright infringement notice from Wikipedia:Boilerplate text. Welcome to Wikipedia! -- Tim Starling 13:31, Aug 7, 2003 (UTC)

I just wanted to point out that the edit section links appear even in the printable versions of articles, which is probably a bug. -- Arvindn 14:57, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Yeah, doesn't look too good. Somebody else mentioned this a few days ago: [[#[edit]_and_printable_version]]. --Menchi

Spanish football

Should Spanish football be made a redirect for Spanish football league teams? Much of the information given in the former seems to properly belong in sub-pages of the latter, although I'm not enthusiatic about wading into all that. Bill 15:04, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Edit Section behavior

The Edit Section function behaves unexpectedly if an edit conflict occurs. Firstly, it is somewhat astonishing that there is an edit conflict when the only other edit was in a different section—but I suppose that's because it was done using Edit Page. But what's even more astonishing—not to mention ugly—is that I get shown a diff of the section I edited against the entire article as edited by my "edit opponent". Mkweise 16:12, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)


I've been wondering how edit conflicts were handled with that .... -- Tarquin 17:02, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)
I expected this to be reported as a bug somewhere already, why I didn't bother ...until the next software update... :->>
-- Ruhrjung 18:54, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Edit corruption

Does anyone know what happened at Wikipedia:Redirect? I only made one minor edit to it and now it looks like I vandalized it. -- 213.73.161.245 16:25, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Oh no, not again... Something like that happened earlier today, too, and Wikipedia went down for a while. Ксип Cyp 16:29, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

The section edit feature is great, but the top link makes some existing pages look a bit funny. The problem is that if the first paragraph doesn't have a title, the first edit link sort of flows into the text. It also introduces a strange hanging indent.

This may be browser dependent, I'm using IE 5. Is there any recommended workaround? Mine for the moment is to add a first line consting of a blank, which seems to restore the appearance to what I'd expect. See cymbal alloys for an example. It doesn't seem to work to just view the previous version to see how it used to look, you need to actually save an edit to test the behaviour properly, so maybe compare it to Wikipedia:Please do not bite the newcomers which is unfixed (it is as I write this anyway).

I'd also remove the section edit links from the printable version if that's easy. Andrewa 17:23, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Have you tried using right click editing instead of the [edit] links? The option is "Enable section editing by right clicking on section titles (JavaScript)" in Special:Preferences.—Eloquence 18:14, Aug 7, 2003 (UTC)
That's not really the point. I'm not all that concerned about how it looks for me. What I want is for the article to look good to those who read Wikipedia. Andrewa 01:14, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Re: Printable.
It's been mentioned by 2 others already: [[#[edit]_and_printable_version]] & #Edit link in printable version.
--Menchi 18:22, Aug 7, 2003 (UTC)
So it has! Don't know how I missed that. Looks like that's under control. This is my first use of Village Pump, it seems to work rather well. Andrewa 01:14, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Feature request: Easier redirects to talk page

A feature request. Can we have a variable name like Template:TALKPAGE ("TALKPAGE") which expands to a link to the talk page for a page. It will make certain boilerplate text much easier to edit.

New design of main page

A new design for the main page has been proposed at Main Page/Temp5. Please vote on whether the new design ought to replace the current design at Talk:Main Page/Layout design. Thank you. Angela 22:28, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Apologies to all

I'm sorry for flooding the most wanted with about 50 Governor General's Awards pages (just as we were finally getting rid of the Grammies to). I will continue to work away at them, however, and they will hopefully be gone soonish. - SimonP 23:02, Aug 7, 2003 (UTC)

Pump moved

I have moved the pump to the talk namespace so the "Post a comment" feature can be used. This makes attaching comments easier, as it does not require loading the entire page and it cannot trigger edit conflicts.—Eloquence 01:26, Aug 8, 2003 (UTC)

Unfortunately, the move breaks the interlanguage links because these are always rendered in-text on pages in the talk namespace. Have to think of a solution for that problem ..—Eloquence 01:28, Aug 8, 2003 (UTC)
I've put it back for now. (By the way -- it takes a long time to rename a page with a hojillion history entries like this. If at first it looks like the history is gone, please wait a few minutes; it should turn up soon.) --Brion 02:01, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
That's not good. All the redirects are now broken. That was unnecessary, just for the interlanguage links, which were still accessible anyway.—Eloquence
Or rather, all the redirects are now fixed. --Brion 02:52, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
I still think moving it back was unnecessary, especially given the mega history which we now will have to move one more time. The last time something seemed to go wrong as the move returned an error after 2 minutes of churning, but the page was still moved. I presume it may have something to do with the page being edited during that period. Each move of this page is a risky procedure. I also think the interlanguage link behavior on talk pages and article pages should be identical anyawy.—Eloquence 02:58, Aug 8, 2003 (UTC)
Where do we go if we want to talk about the Village Pump, now? —Paul A 01:31, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Just do it here.—Eloquence

Patrick Jennings

For those of you who may be wondering about this entry in Wikipedia:Deletion log:

  • 01:13, Aug 8, 2003 Eloquence deleted "Patrick Jennings" (deleting on direct request from Patrick Jennings because of slanderous statements against him)

I received a personal email from Patrick asking me to delete the page because it contained slanderous information about him. The content was indeed of a highly inflammatory nature (I will not reproduce it here), and no evidence for the claims therein was provided. I suggest that the page be deleted on sight if it is recreated, unless the author provides direct citations for his claims.—Eloquence 01:53, Aug 8, 2003 (UTC)

Password not being accepted

Everytime I have tried to sign in I have been told my password is incorrect. What is going on? FearÉIREANN 02:54, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC) (And when I try to save this I am told I am in an edit conflict . . . with myself!!!'

I had the same problem; try turning off the 'remember my password' option. - Hephaestos 03:05, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Should be fixed. Old problem in the source cropped up again. --128.125.23.68 02:56, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

wikipedia.org is not redirecting to Main page

Personal Watch List

Is someone or something fooling with the way the personal watchlist is displayed? Seems like it used to come up pretty much however I had set it last session, but this week it is different each day, each session, and is now defaulting to "previous 1 hour." If there is an attempt to default this to some value to cut down on cpu time, put it at 1 day. Marshman 04:23, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I see you only have 40 items in your watchlist, so you probably aren't aware of how big a problem the watchlist code has been. A number of power users have a couple of thousand items in their watchlists, which leads to very very slow load times which tie up the database. I've been working on tweaking it to be easier on the server, and am not finished yet... a 1 day cutoff would not help with the problem population, where the number of edits per day and the number of watched items are of a similar magnitude. My next step is to get it to try to balance off the cutoff, so people with smaller watchlists will have a much longer default cutoff time (or even no time limit). --Brion 04:52, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Okay, users with fewer than 250 items watched should now get no time cutoff by default. Users with over 250 items will get the 1 hour cutoff by default. --Brion 05:11, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)


The search is up, Watson?

Full-text search is back up, with no apparent slowing of the server - what happened? Did a bug just get fixed? -Smack 05:52, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

See announcement on the mailing list. Search is temporarily running off a copy of the search index table on the other server. It's a static copy so it will slowly become more and more out of date. --Brion 06:25, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Will it ever be updated? -Smack 06:32, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
To reiterate: "temporarily". --Brion 06:38, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Ah, yes. I missed that. But then what? -Smack 06:47, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Quote from above-linked message: "I'd prefer to be running these sorts of things on a third machine, capable of being a full live backup database server, but we don't yet have one." --Brion 07:05, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Spam from Within

What is the recommended approach/remedy when somebody sends you "talk"/e-mail about their great T-shirts they have fore sale? Spam within this system is even more annoying (if possible) than spam to my regular e-mail address. I assume there must be a process for protesting against the activity of somebody who sends such junk. Patrick0Moran 06:46, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Has this ever actually happened? Your user talk: page doesn't show anything of the sort. Spam depends on high volume. A single message targeted at a single person is vanishingly unlikely to get any response. It's just so much easier to send real email in bulk. -Smack 06:50, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Font size

Why am I seeing the font size on the 'pedia as tiny? I haven't changed my screen resolution and no other sites or applications are affected - just here. Did I change a preferences setting or something? This change happened sometime over the last couple of days -- sannse 08:44, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC) <-- feeling I'm probably asking something stupid

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