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Moved discussion

Todo lists

How do you all feel about me rearranging all the "to do" lists we have? I was thinking somehting like the following -- Tarquin 14:06 Jan 4, 2003 (UTC)

  • Articles in need of attention (parent page)
    • Votes for Deletion
    • Copyright infringement (split from VfD -- because we give these longer grace than nonsense entries, and VfD is getting too long to handle)
    • articles in need of NPOVing
    • factual questions (where someone with knowledge of the subject is needed)
    • copyediting / rewrites for clarity (ie work that someone can do with no knowledge of the subject other than what they read in the article itself)
    • duplicate articles
    • renaming (where people request opinions on a suggested rename)
    • Find or fix a stub (of course...)
    • Requested Articles
    • & maybe others
Sounds like a good idea to me. Good luck. --Camembert 15:36 Jan 4, 2003 (UTC)
Yep, that looks pretty good. -- Sam 17:52 Jan 4, 2003 (UTC)
Any further opinions before I go ahead? -- t
How does "factual questions" relate to Wikipedia:Help Desk? Do we really need so many different lists? It's hard to keep an eye on all of them. Perhaps copyediting/clarity/duplicate/rename could be merged -- these are all "assistant" type tasks in that they do not usually require in depth knowledge. factual questions/fix a stub/requested articles on the other hand require deeper knowledge.
the rename thing could just be at wikipedia talk:naming conventions Martin
I also think the "Votes on Deletion" page could stay one page (i.e. no split up) if we change the rules to move deleted articles to a separate page immediately. The only reason we don't do this is that we don't want people to be "confused", but if we put a clear explanation on top -- "if you are missing an article from this list, see .." -- this should not be necessary. --Eloquence 21:19 Jan 10, 2003 (UTC)
IMO VfD is too long to work with. It also runs at two speeds -- copyright violations are given a weeks' grace or more; but nonsense articles get deleted sooner. -- Tarquin 17:53 Jan 11, 2003 (UTC)

Can anybody help me with center on a image. Can get it right and left, but not in the middle. Tryed the FAQ, but couldn't find any explanation there. I have tried putting the picture into a tabel, but no luck there. Tried also to find a allready centered picture, but no luck there.

Thanks in advance BrianHansen. (Danish wikipedia).

I think "

Centered image.

" should work, but it wouldn't surprise me if someone made a supposedly better way in the latest version of HTML. --Ellmist Sunday, January 19th, 02003

I am working on the Lindy Hop articles, which are about 20 different ones at this point. The question is how should I link them together for someone who wants to find all of the articles on a given subject. I have been putting links to most of them at the bottom of all pages, but that is irritating. Is there some some way (or preferred way) (or future preferred way) to link them together, like chapters in a book, or slides in a presentation? -- xxx


is there a "parent" article? -- Tarquin 17:53 Jan 11, 2003 (UTC)
The main parent currently is (dance move). This is not a real problem for dance, but linking together articles for food would be very difficult.

Why is google not referencing wikipedia now? -- xxx

Our robots.txt file had a missing slash, causing googlebot to ignore all articles instead of just dynamically generated pages (diffs and 'see next 20' and crap like that). It's been fixed, and the site should be re-indexed soon. --Brion 21:49 Jan 8, 2003 (UTC)
From what I've heard, a) Google reloads its database once a month or so b) however it's possible to remove pages from the database almost immediately by modifying the robots file. So it may take a month or so for the missing references to reappear.

The result of <math> tags is ugly. The pictures are too big, and the ALT text shows the awful-looking raw markup when people move their mouse over it in most browsers. Any hope of some more user preferences in this area, hopefully with sensible defaults? -- Tim Starling

I tend to agree on the size; font sizes can be manually bumped up on equations that really need it. (But the PNGs are limited to fixed pixel sizes, which does not have a guaranteed relation to a readable font size for any given user.) What other improvements would you suggest? I'm afraid "not ugly" and "more sensible" aren't things we can code. ;) Eventually output as inline MathML is hoped for, but few browsers currently support it and we would need to beef up our wiki->HTML translator to produce proper XHTML. --Brion 06:42 Jan 9, 2003 (UTC)

Not so much a question as a comment that I couldn't figure out where else to make - has anyone else noticed that the top bar on the page is totally fouled up and overlapping the wikipedia logo? It seems to be okay on metapages, but not in the main namespace. KJ 10:04 Jan 9, 2003 (UTC)

What browser, what operating system, what version? --Brion 19:01 Jan 9, 2003 (UTC)
sorry! I'm using Netscape 4.77. This wasn't happening before the other day - someone's apparantly changed the display. The dropdown bar appears beneath the other links, and the wikipedia logo is sitting right over the top of the 'main page' link if that makes sense. KJ 00:43 Jan 10, 2003 (UTC)

Could someone explain how the edit conflict system works, ie what the wpEdittime variable is all about? I ask as I'm playing with a script I'm writing, which conceivably could create a nice gui interface for wikipedia editing (but at the moment I'm just playing). Thanks Smelialichu 18:41 Jan 9, 2003 (UTC)

When the edit form is generated, the wpEdittime field contains the timestamp of the last edit of the article (if it exists). When saving, it's compared with the current timestamp of the page, and if it's different, the edit conflict screen is given. --Brion 19:01 Jan 9, 2003 (UTC)
Thanks, so to stop coming up with the edit conflict I just need to submit the current value of wpEdittime with the rest? Smelialichu 19:09 Jan 9, 2003 (UTC)
Yup; you can grab it out of the edit form. Also, have you taken a look at m:Wikipedia Client & related pages? A more machine-friendly wiki interface would help things like this. --Brion 19:14 Jan 9, 2003 (UTC)
I have had a look through there. The machine friendly interface seems like a good idea (it isn't too hard to grab the needed info from the edit pages, but search, edit histories etc seems a bit more complex, and susceptible to breakage in the case of users using different themes, or a minor html change), but I'm certainly not up to writing anything to answer all the needs listedat m:Wikipedia Client. I'm just mucking about really, trying to hone my Python skills. But I guess due to python's reusable, and object oriented nature anything I did write could be useful, for the basic login, logout, post article functions anyway. Thankyou for your quick and helpful replies! Smelialichu 19:29 Jan 9, 2003 (UTC)

OpenCourseWare

I have a question. I found MIT OpenCourseWare, the site providing a course materials from MIT's faculty. (I found that site from the list at [1]). I read the term of use [2] and it looks like the materials in there can be adapted to here, wikipedia. What do you think? -- Taku 22:54 Jan 10, 2003 (UTC)

My answer is a bit late, but I think that we are not free to use OpenCourseWare materials. I have read their license and it seems to restrict uses to non-commercial purposes. This is an "additional restriction" that is conflict with the GFDL. DanKeshet 19:26 Jan 19, 2003 (UTC)

foo web browser

Who's been moving pages on web browsers to pages like Opera web browser and Chimera web browser? That is not standard page naming convention. Use the simple name, and disambiguation parentheses if required. The current form requires users to type "...[[Opera web browser|Opera]]. Most of these should be at "foo (browser)". -- Tarquin 00:12 Jan 11, 2003 (UTC)

And these can be simply linked to like this: [[Opera (browser)|]] (no space between the bar and the last brackets) in order to look like this: Opera (cute trick).
Indeed. That's the "pipe trick", fully documented on the FAQ & elsewhere. I'll be moving these back in a few days. -- Tarquin 10:39 Jan 11, 2003 (UTC)

I am just wondering is there any way to diplay external links differently than internal links. The list of links at Open content look so confusing. I guess there is none thought -- Taku 00:40 Jan 11, 2003 (UTC)


They do actually display in slightly different colours, I think. We could, of course, have an icon for them -- many wikis have a little "planet" icon that goes in front of external links. That's a question for the mailing list. -- Tarquin 00:43 Jan 11, 2003 (UTC)
Well, I don't think there should be mixed lists of internal and external links like that at all - the list in question should have "ghost" links to unwritten 'pedia articles (on Openlaw and so on), and the external links should be in the "External links" section. Then there's no problem. --Camembert 00:46 Jan 11, 2003 (UTC)
With Internet Explorer I get external links in blue, links to articles that do not yet exist in brown and internal links (visited and not visited) in the two colors I have specified in the IE options, so I made sure they are different. I understand that the first two are specified in http://www.wikipedia.org/style/wikistandard.css and not the other two, they are left to the user to choose and are the same as for surfing elsewhere. - Patrick 14:25 Jan 11, 2003 (UTC)
I should mention that this is with Standard skin, with Cologne Blue I get external links in green, links to articles that do not yet exist in brown and internal links (visited and not visited) both in blue, all different from the two colors I have specified in the IE options; apparently you can not choose any colors with this skin. - Patrick 17:26 Jan 11, 2003 (UTC)


I agree with Camembert. And what do you mean by a question for mailing list Tarquin?

If you meant a fancy icon -- implementing that would be a question for wikipedia-L -- Tarquin

Taku

The colour I get for external links is soothing green. The purple I see when I web my tracks makes me feel vast. The blue I see to another article fills me with trepidation. But the red I see when there is no article, fills me with fire. Hope you're seeing in technicolur soon. Two16 16:31 Jan 11, 2003 (UTC)

Oh, I see. Because I am using a laptop, I can't recognize the slight difference in color at all. -- Taku 18:03 Jan 11, 2003 (UTC)

"web my tracks" = make web log? - Patrick 18:28 Jan 11, 2003 (UTC)


When I am reading and editing the encyclopedia I surf down differnt paths leaving my tracks as I read and write, which show up as a beautiful purple when people are bold in other articles that I visit. Not knowing wiki words for the phenomenon I made my own: "web my tracks". I was trying to convey the experiance of colour wikipedia to a plasma screen wikipedian. I explained all the different high lights. The red really does fire me up. Soon I will know enough to strip red from the wikipedia like bits of red from my atlas. Two16

Ah, then blue are internal links not yet visited, and it fills you with fear of not yet knowing the precious knowledge behind them. I don't get what stripping bits of red from your atlas means. - Patrick 23:03 Jan 11, 2003 (UTC)

hey mav maybe the nile blue you see is the nile green i see ;-} I'm using a Mac with os9 and microsoft and netscape 4.7

The bits of red represent the map colour of the worldaround British Empire. As each new country gained independance, the red was slowly diminished and was offset by the new colours of worldaround British Commonwealth of Nations.

Two16

Um, huh? --Brion

Is it my imagination, or are page deletions and file uploads not showing up on recent changes any more? Is this deliberate, or some bug/oversight? --Camembert

It is all part of my evil plot to delete all pages dealing with Christianity and upload p0rn. No, I've noticed this too and would like to know why. --mav
Looks like Magnus introduced a bug to the logging code when he added the caching for MostWanted. Fixed now. (I blame PHP's crazy syntax for accessing member variables. $this->varname? WTF??!) --Brion 06:34 Jan 12, 2003 (UTC)

Watch list for 'last 1 day' does not seem to work (works as 'all'). - Patrick 13:50 Jan 12, 2003 (UTC)

Seems that the banned 142.177.97.215 had a partner in crime. Maybe 24.42.43.3 rings a bell. He wrote through my userpage. I'm going to go through every contribution in their histories to rectify every single thing they mukked with. Two16 will then get back to writing encyclopedias.

Please only remove vandalism and nonsense. --mav

How random is the random page feature? I mean over the past few days I seems to be getting some pages more than once, and it isn't just one page. Is it just me, or is it not really that random? Just wonderimg... Smelialichu 19:43 Jan 13, 2003 (UTC)


There are so many different methods that could be used. True randomness is hard; but, pseudo randomness is indistinguishable to a casual observerer. It could be that you are only seeing a pattern in the flux. When I was a child I saw my brother roll 7's with two die an amazing 17 times in a row. Then chance moved back to equilibrium. Someboy told me that the casino record for a consecutive run of one colour is in the high twenties. If you never got a duplicate or a quick revisit to an article, that would that be weirder. Two16

After having tried the random page feature myself, and having some practical experience with computer pseudorandom number generators, I believe that either it's a very poor PRNG or there is some other problem causing less randomness than what one might expect. --Robert Merkel
It seems that way to me too. I guess I'd need to actually do a proper scientific test to be sure, but I seems to get repeat articles very often. Cuold any devs comment on this?

The random page function (see the source) keeps a queue of 1000 randomly selected pages (no duplicates), which queue is regenerated at semirandom intervals (avg time between refills should be about every 450 loads). On each load, one of those 1000 pages is selected randomly. This can produce duplicates on subsequent or relatively close loads, and with a field of only 1000 is fairly likely to if you push the button frequently. Possibly better would be to remove each one from the queue as it is loaded, then refill the queue when it's found to be empty. (Which would have the additional benefit of semiautomatically replenishing the random queue of a very small wiki.) --Brion 02:02 Jan 18, 2003 (UTC)

I had a feeling it may work something like that. I guess that's the reason for the duplicates. Thankyou for clearing that up, it's much appreciated. Smelialichu 09:16 Jan 18, 2003 (UTC)

Perhaps we could flag and pipe minimalist American geography articles. They are hardly interesting to anyone and they certainly discourage the random pages use as an editing tool. It's not just a substitute for opening a Volume at random by the reader: for the editor it churns articles to the top of the to do list. if tagging were made available, random change junkies would have the rambot stubs filtered out in no time. Anytime it was filled out to the point of interst of a random user, the flag could be lowered. If someone forgot, or didn't know about it, there is no problem 'cause the next time a Wikipedian accessed that page they could lower the flag. Two16 _____________________________

Can we use the text of http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10092a.htm in Wikipedia? The copyright notice says: The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume X. Copyright © 1911 by Robert Appleton Company. Online Edition Copyright © 2002 by Kevin Knight. olivier 03:25 Jan 14, 2003 (UTC)

Yeah, I think the copyright protection term already expired. But the problem is "Online Edition Copyright 2002". Can we really use it? -- Taku 03:44 Jan 14, 2003 (UTC)

This has come up before. If I remember right we chose to accept the 2002 copyright at face value since the quality of their text isn't worth a fight. But there is no harm at all in asking. See Wikipedia:Boilerplate request for permission. --mav 08:23 Jan 15, 2003 (UTC)

The Catholic Encyclopedia is highly biased. Please do not dump their material in Wikipedia. --Eloquence 08:36 Jan 15, 2003 (UTC)

If you click "email this user" or whatever, the next page says inter alia:

"If this user has entered a valid e-mail address in is user preferences".

Whilst I applaud the cheery cockney informality, surely it should be made non-sexist and properly punctuated thus:

"If this user has entered a valid e-mail address in 'is or 'er user preferences"

Unless of course something else was meant? :) Nevilley 13:09 Jan 15, 2003 (UTC)

_________

Thanks for all the sage advice. Its procesing now. Long silence on a busy talk site. Couldn't decode the silence.No need to get an email now. Something very peculiar is happening; but, the talk is processing again. I wish that we could pov like SUV. Two16

As of right now 1730 GMT, Jan 17 2003, Wikipedia changes are showing up as Jan 18 -- Hotlorp

Not here - check the UTC offset in your user preferences. What's it set to? --Eloquence 17:37 Jan 17, 2003 (UTC)
Thanks!

What is the proper response to duplicate articles? Three different articles, all with lots of decent text, cover the topic of Deerwood, Minnesota (Crow Wing County). What to do? Is this covered in help pages anywhere? Which of the three titles is in the best format? - "Newbie"

What are the three articles in question? All I can find is Deerwood, Minnesota, Deerwood Township, Kittson County, Minnesota and Deerwood Township, Crow Wing County, Minnesota, which would appear to be about three different, but nearby and similarly named, places (at least it seems the US census bureau counts them separately, as the data on those three pages is completely different). On the more general question of how to handle duplicate articles - you can either merge all the duplicates into one article yourself (the best name for the article can often be determined by the Wikipedia:Naming conventions) or you can add them to Wikipedia:Duplicate articles. Welcome to the wikipedia, by the way :) --Camembert

I think the paragraph tags in the cologne blue theme are way to tight, surely, a simple touch of the css should fix this.. anyone agree? --spiff

I just discovered enhanced recent changes in my preferences, real nice addition. Vera Cruz

Actually....why is there no longer a diff button??Vera Cruz

The lines showing individual entries show a 'cur' and/or 'last' diff button just like in the history (but, inexplicably, on the right side of the title). The multi-change header entries (the ones with the arrows) have a 'diff' link that covers all the changes they list. Send ideas for improvement to Magnus, the mastermind behind its implementation. --Brion 19:31 Jan 18, 2003 (UTC)

I am new to this, and heard about it on NPR. I was interested in looking up the Mars Pathfinder project, as I did some of the calibrations of load cells for testing the lander at Plumbrook Station in Ohio. I have some video tape of the testing, and a short discussion of the problems they were working on for the mission but your site is not as easy to navigate as I expected so I'm asking for contact information on writing/posting some of the stuff I know about but don't see here. Thanks harry_gentry@ameritech.net

I'll reply by e-mail. --Eloquence 01:24 Jan 19, 2003 (UTC)

A wikiparable

Once upon a time a grad student in sociology or psychology or philosophy (let's call him "Larry") wanted to do his dissertation on how people on the Internet would respond to certain situations. There was also a computer wiz with his own hardware (let's call him "Jim") who was willing to sell researchers the time for their experiments on Internet behavior. The subjects in these experiments didn't seem to notice the "project" they were working on was impossible, by definition. Should the picture above be lab rats instead of sheep? -- isis 04:07 Jan 19, 2003 (UTC)

Oh the sheep are bad enough. If there were lab rats... I'd never stop thinking
about The Milgrim Experiment. This project is about freedom. If the goal is
static residue: by definition you are right. The project was never meant to ::end. It is meant to process information and to process the process. That proces ::is NPOV.
I say we wouldn't have all these problems if people had voted for Strom Thurmond .. uh, I mean, if we would use voting for policy matters. --Eloquence
Ever read Asimov's Foundation, Isis? A bunch of people who thought they were writing an encyclopedia find out that they're doing something quite different ... ;-) -- Tarquin 23:08 Jan 19, 2003 (UTC)


Should we expect on Wikipedia's 100th anniversary that Larry Seldom's (or was it Jimbo's?) holographic image will

appear from a hidden wiki page and tell us what are we really doing?--AN 20:47 Jan 20, 2003 (UTC)


Instead of having to contact any administrator and hoping that he/she reads the request, how about creating a page Wikipedia:Sysop requests which all admins are required to watch? This could be used to request the editing of protected pages, banning of IPs, what have you. Is there such a page already? Alternatively, sysop usernames could be flagged in some fashion, but this would smack of elitism. ---Eloquence 21:25 Jan 19, 2003 (UTC)

but w3 *IS* teh l33t! (kidding) -- t
... and detrimental to npov. Sysops already have a disproprtionately high
credibility with the credulous. See Milgram experiment. It is bad
enough that the Hubris of some Sysops, prevents them from recognizing the  ::failure of logic, that is known as an appeal to Authority. Who else but ::Two16

We need a policy on how to name those members of royal families who are not monarchs. We have such a policy for monarchs' names, but see Talk:Anne Windsor -- Zoe 21:15 Jan 20, 2003 (UTC)

Hi, this is my first post on the Village Pump. Three questions: firstly, I can't see how to get that vertical bar character on my PC keyboard (the one used to put images onto a page). It's on the key OK but lower case gives a comma thingy and upper case a horizontal bar.

Not sure about this. UK keyboard?

Secondly, I have uploaded a 600 pixel wide pic to my Tillandsia entry (it's a houseplant that needs no soil, very weird!). I don't know if such a large pic is acceptable. If not, I have a 250 pixel wide thumbnail ready but how do I link the thumbnail to the 600 pixel pic so that the reader can have a larger pic if he/she wishes.

You can make a direct (text) link to an image by using 'Media' instead of 'Image'. So if you put something like [[Media:Big version of image.jpg|Click for larger version]] next to the smaller image, that should do it.

Thirdly, why does everyone else have their username at the bottom of their entry (here in the Village Pump) underlined in blue, and the date and time, but I don't? Do I have to type it in myself? Thanks, Adrian Pingstone (username arpingstone)Arpingstone 22:59 Jan 20, 2003 (UTC)

Type four tildes (~~~~) at the end of your comment, it'll be automatically turned into a link to your user page and the time. If you don't want the date and time, just type three tildes. --Brion 22:57 Jan 20, 2003 (UTC)


okay ... the pipe character | not sure. What computer & OS do you have? Try fiddling around with the key to the left of Z and those to the right of L. (using SHIFT too)
600 wide is indeed big ... not sure about thumbnails. I'm sure someone else will come and give the solution. In the meantime, try a search for the words "larger image" and ruthlessly copy however it's been done elsewhere ;-)
3rd... sign your name with 3 tildes ~ in a row. 4 ~s gives you the date as well. You can see if you have new notes on your personal talk page by the asterisk that appears in the top right of any page next to your login name -- Tarquin 23:01 Jan 20, 2003 (UTC)

There is, indeed, a policy on what sized images to use -- it's at http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Image_use_policy . (Frankly, I've never seen any reason for a thumbnail and a bigger picture, but I've been here only six months and still have much to learn.) On all my keyboards, the "pipe" that lets you use a different name for a link is the capital of the backslash, to the right of the right bracket key at the right end of the second row, under the backspace key. -- isis 08:38 Jan 21, 2003 (UTC)

I've noticed that each year now has a link to 'XXXX in sports'. As a British English speaker it grates, and just looks wrong. Most of the rest of the world would refer to 'sport' rather than 'sports' in this context. Would 'XXXX in sport' be any less acceptable to American English speakers? Mintguy

It works for me. But then again, Wikipedia has so brainwashed me that I now spell meter metre and spelled spelt. ;-) --mav


They mean different things. "Sport" is the singular (baseball is a team sport); "sports" is the plural (cricket and baseball are my favourite sports); "sport" is the generic singular: (on Saturdays, many people play sport). "Sports" is used to indicate a particular number, even when the exact number is not known or not stated (the French people play many different sports); "sport" is used to indicate the generic activity (the French people play a lot of sport) - notice that this example says that they spend a lot of time playing sport, where the French people play a lot of sports indicates that they play many different ones, perhaps baseball, rugby, golf, & so on. Unless the intention is to indicate a variety of different sports, rather than sporting activity in general, "year XXXX in sports" is (to the best of my knowledge) not variant usage, it's simply illiterate.
It's not illiterate it's simply American usage. Would you say History of Film or History of Films? Mintguy
A subtle distinction is possible, but I would tend to accept either as correct in the general case. In this topic we would also tend to use movies only in the plural, and cinema only in the singular. Eclecticology 20:06 Jan 21, 2003 (UTC)
I agree with Mintguy. "It's simply illiterate" is sometimes fighting talk wrt differences of language usage, and perhaps better avoided. :) Nevilley 11:11 Jan 21, 2003 (UTC)
Would you write "Year XXXX in works" about employment? Or "Year XXXX in loves" about romance? Tannin 10:51 Jan 21, 2003 (UTC)
This is a silly argument. Year in Sports is correct usage for Americans, and Year in Sport would sound silly. Vice Versa for the British side. This is one situation in which there's no "right answer" and appeals to grammatic correctness won't help. Dachshund
Very simple solution. Take the 's' off the end of "sports", carry it across and stick it on the end of "math". :-) And mav.... do you have cravings for upward of a dozen cups of tea a day? Are you complaining about the weather? Are you convinced cricket is dead? ;-) are you turning English on us, mav? ;-) -- Tarquin 19:27 Jan 21, 2003 (UTC)
I think you may be on to someting there. ;) --mav
How about this: Since a long time ago a Brit was the first to create an article on sports he called it sport. Therefore it can be said that we have standardized on sport for page titles about sports. But Americans link to that article via [[sport]]s. So why don't we have the articles at [[XXXX in sport]] (to satisfy everyone outside the US) but within each of the year articles we link to the year in sport articles via [[XXX in sport]]s (to satisfy the Americans). What say you? --mav 20:45 Jan 21, 2003 (UTC)

A few questions:

(1) Is there any chance that Mary I of Scotland could be retitled Mary, Queen of Scots? It is a title that this monarch is far better known by.

(2) What is the wikipedia policy on quotes? Should they precede an article or not?

I am thinking in particular of the Madeline Amy Sweeney article which started its existance as an anonymous note by someone who had obviously been a friend of Ms Sweeney. The page gradually became an article. It seemed respectful to leave the note there at the top of the page as an annymous quote. Someone else decided otherwise.

Arno

Regarding (2), no, quotes on top are generally not acceptable, because such prominent placement of a single opinion violates NPOV, and because it is not encyclopedia-style. In the case in question, the quote is also anonymous, which makes it unverifiable and therefore worthless, however touching it may be. Sorry. --Eloquence 09:00 Jan 21, 2003 (UTC)
Regarding (1), I don't think so. The current title is I think dictated by some sort of Wiki policy which aims to make names of monarchs consistent. I also don't think it's necessary - we could either (a) just put in a redirect at the Mary, Queen of Scots place, and shift all the stuff about films and books into the main Mary I of Scotland article (where it is already in part duplicated already), or (b) just leave things how they are, on the grounds that it is very quick and easy to find her on a search anyway - if you find the MQoS page you are only one click away from the M1oS article. But I will leave it to you or others to worry about this. And I suppose you could equally well argue that the same process in the other direction would work just as well - merge the historical stuff into the MQoS page and make the M1oS a redirect. I dunno! :)
... and While you are at it, you might want to take a look at Scotland: Mary Queen of Scots which worries me much more - a completely unedited and near-orphaned (one link in) page which has been sitting there since 6th November. This page should certainly not exist, as it is just another version of Mary I of Scotland, but what I'm not clear about is how much of its content should be rescued and merged into the latter. Nevilley 10:14 Jan 21, 2003 (UTC)

Thanks for the replies to my three questions. I've found the Pipe symbol (to the left of the Z, in upper case) on my UK keyboard. I'd like to leave the 600 pixel pic on my Tillandsia entry unless I get any objections. Arpingstone 09:10 Jan 21, 2003 (UTC)

I have a question ..... what is the meaning of copyright? Obviously very few of us actually "know" the person or object we are writing about. For example, when writing about Mary Queen of Scots I assume no one has actually met her to get a report on her life (!) so everything about her on this site must have been taken from an existing text.
So most of this encyclopaedia is copyright!!
My last statement is obviously nonsense so where does copyright end? Is it OK to rephrase an existing text in such a way that it cannot be recognised in the encyclopaedia? How different must it be?
I'm really puzzled. Help!!
Arpingstone 20:51 Jan 21, 2003 (UTC)

facts are not copyright, but the expression of them is. So rephrasing text, basically, is fine (it's got to be rephrased enough to be original -- same as essays at school) -- Tarquin 20:54 Jan 21, 2003 (UTC)
Tarquin is right. I'd like to add that if you want to write really good Wikipedia articles, you scour multiple sources -- books, papers, websites, mailing lists, newspaper articles ... -- and try to develop a coherent picture from that. By doing so, you are creating a new work that presents all points of view. However, if someone has already done so, you should just summarize that source.
But copyright is an idiotic concept that should be abolished. One way to get there is to create lots of open content -- so go for it! --Eloquence 21:12 Jan 21, 2003 (UTC)
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