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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Kingturtle (talk | contribs) at 23:27, 26 December 2003 (thanks!!!). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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File:Village pump yellow.png

Welcome, newcomers and baffled oldtimers! This is where Wikipedians raise and try to answer Wikipedia-related questions and concerns regarding technical issues, policies, and operation in our community. However:

To facilitate ease of browsing and replying, please:

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See also: Wikipedia:FAQ, Wikipedia:Help, Wikipedia:Please do not bite the newcomers

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#December 2003 moved discussion.

Requests for help and comments

  1. Daniel's redirect project still needs your help with fixing thousands of broken links
  2. Muriel Victoria and Bmills urge you to vote at Wikipedia:Refreshing brilliant prose
  3. mav invites you to discuss expanding the focus of the Sep11Wiki at meta:Wikimorial
  4. Jiang requests comments at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Countries
  1. Adam suggests every American Wikipedian visits List of Members of the U.S. House of Representatives and contributes a short biography of their local Congress-person (see also public domain congressional biographical directory)
  2. Dysprosia requests comments on the new login text
  3. Viajero asks for your help in expanding the Guidelines for controversial articles



List of Wikipedians by number of edits

Update Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by number of edits? --Jiang

Try the stats. I can't believe it. The last time I checked you were just one above me, now you're like 10 or 15. :-) --Menchi (Talk)â 23:46, 21 Dec 2003 (UTC)

12314 total pages edited

I may be a bit slow understanding how Wikipedia works, but what does "12314 total pages edited since cutoff" mean? (I'm talking about my basically empty "watchlist".) Edited by whom? Certainly not by me - I've only just discovered Wikipedia. Who or what was cut off (ouch)? Wikikiwi P.S. Hope this is the right place to ask this question.

That's 12314 edits by anyone, within the last week or so, or whatever the cutoff time was when viewing your watchlist. (Cutoff time ---> Show last 1 | 2 | 6 | 12 hours 1 | 3 | 7 days all) Κσυπ Cyp   23:36, 21 Dec 2003 (UTC)


Hi and welcome to wikipedia. hope you like out place. feel free to ask questions here whenever you are unsure about how something works. Optim 00:46, 22 Dec 2003 (UTC)

When should there be a picture?

I see lots of entries which I could add a picture. Should I go ahead and add the picture, or are the guidelines as to which articles should and shouldn't have pictures? Eurleif 04:23, 22 Dec 2003 (UTC)

As long as there are no copyright infringements, I think most articles could do with a picture. - Hephaestos 04:33, 22 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Please do! Also, if you find articles that especially need a picture, and you can't provide one yourself, please list them on Wikipedia:Requested pictures. -- Wapcaplet 04:45, 22 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Great new thought - I want feedback!

I just had an interesting idea and I wanted to get some feedback. On the main page, we have catagories for "In the News", "Recent Deaths", "New Articles" and "Anniversaries". The only way for a non-timely article to get put there is just after it is created.

My thought was - why not create a 5th catagory - "Featured Articles"

People could nominate articles on the discussion page (or would could have a special page just for that). That way, nontimely articles get their time on the main page too. Personally, a lot of the editing I do is on technical articles, which never makes it to the front page. I think this is a way of rewarding people who have similiar tastes. ---Raul654 10:48, 22 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Maybe the most recent additions to Wikipedia:Brilliant prose would fit the bill? Bmills 10:50, 22 Dec 2003 (UTC)

or random or rotating selections from that list. Gentgeen 11:15, 22 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I agree. Let's add it under the anniversries bar (take out the second line); there's also space in the enclyclopedia box. --Jiang 17:08, 22 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I've created a page for further discussion of this topic --Raul654 17:27, 22 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Romanian Wikipedia down

not down anymore

Automobile diagrams?

I'm idly considering working on a generalized 3D model of important parts of an automobile, completely assembled, for the benefit of current or future articles that may need illustration. Significant bits I'd like to include:

  • Engine compartment, including engine block, radiator, air filter, battery, and however much additional detail I can squeeze in
  • Suspension/steering system and drive train, including shocks, struts, wheels

This is obviously a large undertaking; I am thinking of loosely basing the model on the illustrations in the repair manual for my Corolla, and plan to essentially build the car from scratch, body and all, in Blender. I'm confident that it can be done, but I'd be interested in hearing opinions on whether it would be worthwhile. Eventually, it'd be great to get a fine enough level of detail to make it applicable for illustrating almost any aspect of how a car works. There's probably enough encyclopedia-like information on automobile construction to make a fairly decent WikiProject out of it. Thoughts? -- Wapcaplet 21:14, 22 Dec 2003 (UTC)

How about doing this as part of the illustration WikiProject? I would definitely love to recruit a 3D artist for rendering some ancient temples and machines... ;-) In any case, we certainly need a decent 3D model of an automobile. How would you upload this? Maybe Flash would be an appropriate format here (it's open), to allow rotation of the model.—Eloquence

Still images (jpg or png) would be easy to export, but since the resulting images will be raster, rather than vector, I don't think Flash would be a possibility without additional conversion. Animations are easy enough to do with Blender, but they'd be .avi or another video format, and probably prohibitively large. What kind of ancient temples and machines do you have in mind? Request them and I'll see what I can do :-) -- Wapcaplet 16:43, 23 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Refreshing Brilliant Prose

The voting for this is on going, but there have not been many voters (a notable exception in an almost entirely negative Tuf-Kat). Could a note of this winnowing be put somewhere prominent, eg Recent Changes, to encourage participation? TwoOneTwo 23:46, 22 Dec 2003 (UTC)

When did articles get categories?

I was reading Drum and bass and saw this notice at the top of a table: This article is part of the Electronic music series. When did Wikipedia articles get categories? Where can I find guidelines to incorporating articles into categories?

I don't think there are any guidelines. Do as you see fit and be willing to discuss alternatives if others don't like it. Tables like that have no technical effect -- they're just a method of organizing articles.Tuf-Kat 03:32, Dec 23, 2003 (UTC)
There's a real technical category system in the works (I kinda get tired of saying this -- when will it go live?), but these series boxes are fairly arbitrary. Someone came up with a standard layout for them once and several users adopted it to group related articles together. I think these boxes are quite neat, personally.—Eloquence

Usernames

What is the relationship between Wiki and Clublet? Why won't my Wiki username let me post/reply there. There is not page, that I can find, that lets me register with Clublet seperately. Is it me, or is Saturn too close?--anon

Are you referring to http://clublet.com/c/c/why?HomePage ? If so, that is a completely different website. "Wiki" is simply a name that describes the concept of openly editable websites, Wikipedia is one website (an encyclopedia) which uses this concept. There are many others, and they all require separate registrations (unlike Clublet, most allow anonymous editing). Please read the article Wiki for more details. As for registering on Clublet, when you click "Edit" on a page, there should be a "Sign in" popup window. If you enter a non-existent username and a password you will be prompted for further information to complete your registration. Hope that helps,—Eloquence

Search Log

Back before the Wiki Search was taken down, there used to be a Search log, where we could see what things people were searching for. Is that still available? RickK 06:32, 23 Dec 2003 (UTC)

That was taken out in mid-2002. It wasn't really directly usable for clicking to create articles as most of the entries were misspellings and/or not exact titles (lowercase, missing articles, with extra terms for 'search engine' style). Further, I don't think most people expect that typing something into a search engine will record their query publicly for posterity. There are privacy issues. --Brion 08:50, 24 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Aria Giovanni is #1?

According to the current list of popular articles, the individual whose article is most frequently viewed is Aria Giovanni. This amazes me. For those of you who are unfamiliar with her, Ms Giovanni is a relatively obscure nude model and soft core porno actress. But by at least one standard she's more famous than George Bush, Saddam Hussein, Jesus Christ, or Britney Spears.

I don't have a point to make about this except that I find this very strange. MK 0124 EST 23 December 2003

Please note that this is based on the page counters, which have been disabled for ages. It might have been because of a high Google ranking at the time (it's not high now), while we have no chance to achieve a high ranking on Jesus or Britney (at least until Google integrates us into their UI like they did with dictionary.reference.com).—Eloquence

Tech: external site to wikipedia wikilinking

Hello villagers. As most good ideas in the world, wiki is becoming so obvious now that one is sure one did really have this idea before (which is obviously false, because ideas don't exist before they are realized). But, anyway, I have done a little web-site on Chinese culture (Classics, poetry...) where I wanted to add many cross-links on any name or important noun, but I never made that because it's too hard to code and maintain. It would be awfully convenient for me to be able to do that massive in-text linking using wiki's markup language. I guess I would only need to include the parse-link function in my php, to translate [[link]] into <a href="wikipedia.org/blabla"> bla </a>. Is it possible to grab politely this chunk of code somewhere? I do believe that it's a great improvement for any dedicated web-site to link many names, titles, or words on a ever-evoluting free encyclopedia (mostly because links should never be broken). I know that my question should be written somewhere else, but where? gbog 16:27, 23 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Look up wiki. there is a link to a list of dozens of Wiki engines. -- Tarquin 16:40, 23 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Stubs vs. short articles

Stubs are supposed to be very short articles, supposedly even without a comma. But I've noticed that many short articles, which just need expansion, have the notice "This article is a stub". Should we be doing this?

Real stubs (with or without a comma) are not properly formed encyclopaedic articles, and should be immediately sent to cleanup, while short articles should be listed on something like:Wikipedia:Articles needing expansion. Maybe thay could have a notice, like "This article needs more work. See the talk page for details."

A whole another thing is that some articles may even need to be short. Zocky 16:58, 23 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Help with random Graphs

Help!!

I can't find any basic detailed information on random graphs anywhere and neither can my project tutor. If you help me please email strokable@hotmail.com.

If you're for real (with a handle like that, who can tell?) try the Wikipedia:Reference desk. HTH HAND Phil 18:12, Dec 23, 2003 (UTC)
I just tried Googling for "random graphs" (in quotes). Turned up a ton of what looks like relevant stuff. Suggest you do likewise. Dpbsmith 20:06, 23 Dec 2003 (UTC)

It's great that articles like Architecture of the United States are linked to "sideways" topics like Architecture of the United States. But could we find a way of doing this without a table? They are undesirable for a large number of reasons, and only articles where tabular data is essential should have one. -- Tarquin 17:38, 23 Dec 2003 (UTC)

This case could be done, I believe, with a floating DIV (in much the way we do most images in floating DIVs).

Finlay McWalter 17:51, 23 Dec 2003 (UTC)

even with a floating DIV, it's still a lot of code at the start of the article, which makes it awkward to edit and confusing to the less technically-minded. I think a section at the foot of the article would be better -- Tarquin 18:02, 23 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Given than we have lots of floating (left and right) stuff, perhaps we should have some specific wiki markup for them. You're totally correct that the CSS markup is too technical - I see lots of images on wikipedia that have botched floating markup (plainly copied from some other article). -- Finlay McWalter 18:15, 23 Dec 2003 (UTC)
I copy and paste images and tables from other articles. If there were a simple wiki markup, I would learn but I've never been able to figure out how to do nice tables with backgrounds or things, or how or why to set margins and the like. Tuf-Kat 20:17, Dec 23, 2003 (UTC)
the point is that it would be preferable to have a section using plain markup, like:
  • Other articles in this series: foo - blah - thingy

No complex markup needed. -- Tarquin 20:43, 23 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Well, there is the new table syntax, which is still slightly complicated. I converted the table on Architecture of the United States to the new syntax. It's still a bit of code at the beginning, but it's a lot prettier than the HTML. -- Merphant 08:07, 24 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Error: duplication of "Hua-Yen" / "Huayan" / "Hua-yen" article(s)

A general notice of an error to be rectified:

There were two different articles on the Hua-Yen / Huayan school of Buddhism. I made their texts consistent (and corrected one misleading statement), but there are still two separate pages.

Also, I'm not the greatest master of HTML, so the formatting could probably be improved.

Here's the text for both articles as they now stand.

One of the sysops should elminate one of the two pages, and make sure that all the links are sorted out.

[Probably, there are other problems with Chinese words being Romanized with more than one method]

E.M.

I fixed this using a redirect. -- Tim Starling 07:02, Dec 24, 2003 (UTC)

"revert" a bad move

How can I "swap" Ann Danielewski and Poe (singer) ?

It was not a move, it was the contents copied from one article to the other - and thus the article with the text did not have the history of the text anymore. Thus all that was necessary was to revert the changes of the anonymous user. If it were a real move then it can be undone be moving the article back - as long as the redirect page has no history of itself it is possible. Only if the redirect page has a history (like now Ann Danielewski) it needs an administrator to delete the redirect before the article can be moved back. andy 21:59, 23 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Thank you. Andy Mabbett 00:36, 24 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Hi

Hello I would only like to know how do I say I LOVE YOU MY WIFE in Romanian I speek english and am for the US please if you could help me I would appriciate it Thanks Ted here is my email tcecilus2000@yahoo.com

Try Wiktionary:I love you -- Merphant 22:47, 23 Dec 2003 (UTC)
"Te iubesc, soţie mea." -- Jmabel 07:39, 24 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Automatic adding of information

Recently added a page for Twin towns and wondered if there was a way of automatically making the towns added to the list generate the twin info on the article for that town.

e.g. On the Twin towns page you might add: Oxford - Bonn; Is there a quick way of getting the pages for Oxford and Bonn to have something like:

Twin town: Bonn and Twin town: Oxford

added to their respective articles

[user:btljs]

No there is no such way right now. You have to enter the information manually. By the way, you can sign your messages with ~~~, or ~~~~. Dori | Talk 00:33, Dec 24, 2003 (UTC)


Organization of articles

Right now there is a slightly-more-than-stub article about the Committee of Public Safety (during the French Revolution) as such, but much more about the Committee in the excellent article on Maximilien Robespierre (largely from the 1911 Britannica). I kind of like leaving the article on Robespierre intact. Should I just add something to the "Committee of Public Safety" saying, "See also Maximilien Robespierre for a good discussion of the committee and its members", or should I duplicate the content, or what? -- Jmabel 07:55, 24 Dec 2003 (UTC)

One of the 1911EB's idiosyncrasies is to focus excessively on individuals, describing many organizations inline rather than giving them their own articles. I would move all the CoPS material into the other article, and prune Robespierre down to just the stuff about him personally. 1911EB articles are good starting points, but if you read a modern bio of the person, you'll likely want to do massive editing anyway, just to reflect what historians have discovered in the past century. Stan 14:25, 24 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Highlighting

What do I add to the end of the URL to highlight certain words on a page? --Jiang 09:38, 24 Dec 2003 (UTC)

That is a feature of some PHP scripts running some webpages. I suspect the syntax to do this varies from site to site, and far from all sites are served as PHP content. —Sverdrup(talk) 11:18, 24 Dec 2003 (UTC)

IMDB pseudo-namespace

I was browsing SourceForge to see what was happening and I spotted a report about "IMDB InterWiki namespace incorrectly expanded (out of date)" (it's ID 856707: I would link to it but I'm uncertain what all the doo-dads in the SF URL do). I didn't even know there was such a thing, and I have searched in vain for an explanation. I tested the described behaviour (IMDB:American Pie) and it happens just as stated. Where is the official blurb on this feature? Phil 09:41, Dec 24, 2003 (UTC)

That's "interwiki" linking. We've had that for ever. -- Tarquin 09:48, 24 Dec 2003 (UTC)
So it uses the table on Meatball UseMod Wiki at [1]? Is that updated real-time, so if I adjusted the Meatball Wiki table would the links automagically re-adjust? I think the problem reported in the bug report is because the URL created has a "_" (underline) instead of each space. Phil 09:59, Dec 24, 2003 (UTC)

RC → IRC

Just a feature plug: I'm running a simple IRC bot on irc.freenode.net which dumps recent changes to the #enrc.wikipedia channel. Some people might find it useful. French and German bots are also running, at #derc.wikipedia and #frrc.wikipedia. I've recently improved it so that the bot doesn't have to be manually restarted all the time. There are no immediate plans to extend the service to the other wikis, I don't want to annoy our friends at Freenode too much. -- Tim Starling 12:09, Dec 24, 2003 (UTC)

This bot is extremely useful! Optim 06:53, 25 Dec 2003 (UTC)

==may I suggest a few points?===

In producing a wikipedia in another language (in Hungarian, for instance) it may/would be useful for the Hungarian native speakers to have the option of some sort of alignment between phrases and/or sections of texts in an article or the headwords themselves. In the Hungarian texts one could keep in brackets or otherwise the hypertext links that are to be contrasted with the Hungarian terms/concepts and their domain. That can help further translation or learning English, which may of course be out of your scope. But should be? For instance it is very tempting/challenging to translate and/or write the article knowledge in Hungarian which would result in two words tudás and ismeret respectively. They are then used to form a number of other phrases connected with knowledge and to be detailed within. All that may be necessary to explain, just as similar differences in mapping other words are very likely and call for commenting. Further examples include the names of various courses and degrees, a constant headache for translators of diplomas and certificates for accreditation. ~~apogr~~

Message tags

I've seen tags for the number of articles (6,897,725) and stubs (

This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

). Is there a page somewhere with a complete listing of them? --Raul654 21:22, 24 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Try Wikipedia:MediaWiki custom messages. ~ Jake 22:09, 24 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but I'd like an answer to my question

Has Wikipedia or at least the Village Pump been taken over by an authoritarian regime or what? For days now I've been trying to find out why the "list of links" may be incomplete and what could be done about it, but all I get is no reaction (Wikipedia talk:Bug reports) or my question being archived, i e deleted (here, this morning). I don't give up easily, so here it is again. To all of you who believe in Jesus, a merry Christmas! --KF 23:33, 24 Dec 2003 (UTC)

What list of links? If you mean the list for "What links here", there are two reasons, as has been answered many times in the past:
  1. The links tables aren't always accurate.
  2. The list is cut off after the first 500 results as an initial measure against pages that gained ~30,000 links due to user:rambot-created city entries, and an ability to page through the list hasn't gotten added yet.
If you mean something else, please specify. --Brion 00:13, 25 Dec 2003 (UTC)
When I'm reading, say, the 1960s page and I click on "What links here", I get
==1960s==
(List of links)
The following pages link to here:
101st Airborne Division
etc.
So this is why, not surprisingly I think, I referred to it as "list of links".
However, the alphabetical list stops at Co- (Coleco). This never happened, at least to my knowledge, when the list was still chronological.
It was never chronological, though it was previously in no particular order. I explained all this before, who was asking then?
I don't understand what this is to do with the city entries. I don't think it shows 500 results; it seems less. And anyway, if that feature does not work, how on earth are you supposed to build an encyclopaedia? --KF 00:44, 25 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Yes, that shows 500. Count them if you like. --Brion 00:53, 25 Dec 2003 (UTC)


PS When I want to edit a section of this page a different one opens.

All this sounds unfriendly and impatient to me. Am I supposed to be sorry for asking? Am I supposed to be happy that every other question is answered?
"As has been answered many times in the past": When? Where? By whom?
I'm too tired to continue now, but I don't understand any of this. KF 01:02, 25 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Here, in the pump. When? I don't know exactly, a few weeks ago? It's probably been archived somewhere where it will never be found again. Anyway, I'm right now banging at the code to try to make it possible to page through the results; apologies if I sound impatient, but it's a bit of a hectic time of year. --Brion 01:06, 25 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Merry Christmas!

Merry christmas and best wishes for Peace Profound! Optim 06:51, 25 Dec 2003 (UTC)

thanks!!!

thank you to whomever fixed the system after the xmas crash. Kingturtle 23:27, 26 Dec 2003 (UTC)

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