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Wikipedia:Village pump archive 2004-09-26

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Brooke Vibber (talk | contribs) at 22:39, 13 May 2003 (List of rock and roll albums -- break it up by decade). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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Moved discussion

See the archive for older moved discussion links.

I suggest create a wiki tag for translation without the need of create a new article in the destination language. For example, if I am in new-article and see no translation to my natural language, I could use this translation tag (i.e. [[t:languageaISObbreviation:translationA]]<nowiki>) to indicate that there is no correspondant article in the another language, but the translation of the article to the another langue is ''translationA''.

Function Request: "Move Page" in Nostalgia

Could we have the "Move this page" option available in Nostalgia skin? Maybe somewhere on the lower bar, among "Discuss this page", "Watch this page", etc. --Menchi 12:32 May 4, 2003 (UTC)

Why do nobody like Nostalgia skin? It's so big and wide! Surely it's lacking in this one function, but that can be fixed, can't it? --Menchi 06:36 May 9, 2003 (UTC)

Technical: IPA

Why is it that on IE 5, while this web site can display every single IPA letters and diacritics correctly, none of the Wikipedias can display any, except the standard 26 English letters? Something looks wrong. We should better WP. --Menchi 07:13 May 7, 2003 (UTC)

It's the difference between <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> and <meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">, I suspect.
--Paul A 08:10 May 7, 2003 (UTC)
That reminds me, are there plans afoot for following LiveJournal and using UTF-8? (LJ did so, and arranged for server-side on-the-fly translation of "legacy" entries to UTF-8 - and LJ is a good example because that's mostly user-contributed content too. Most users were unware of the change to UTF-8, but those that maintained journals in non-english charsets were overjoyed.) Tenbaset 23:21 May 7, 2003 (UTC)
We already run in UTF-8 on all phase 3 wikis except for English, Danish, German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Swedish. The reason the western European languages haven't been moved over yet is that when you edit a page on a wiki, your browser has a chance to screw up not just your contributions but the entire contents of the page. It happens fairly regularly on meta and wiktionary that someone (usually our dear Anthere :) destroys every non-ASCII character in a page by making an edit with a browser that has broken UTF-8 support, and someone else has to go in and fix them. Until we either banish all such browsers ;) or make tweaks to make safe round-trip edits in those browsers without inconveniencing the rest of us with too much armor, the western european languages will stay in Latin-1.
Note that you can use all the Unicode characters you want, including IPA, with &#12345; etc. See Wikipedia:Special characters. --Brion 00:15 May 8, 2003 (UTC)

Suggestion: keep using SAMPA in markup, but provide an option to have this "translated" into IPA characters if the user chooses. -- Tarquin 08:23 May 7, 2003 (UTC)

So, I've had this problem occasionally sprout up when creating redirect pages. Basically, the redirect doesn't work, and when I try to edit to correct it, it gives me the edit page for the page that I'm trying to redirect to. How can this be created? john 03:28 May 9, 2003 (UTC)

If you mean the edit conflict bug, I submitted it to the SourceForge bug tracker some time during the last ice age. Read this and tell us if it sounds familiar. -- Tim Starling 03:38 May 9, 2003 (UTC)
I don't think that's what it is, but I'm not sure. With the current problem edits Lord Beaconsfield and Earl of Beaconsfield, which are supposed to redirect to Benjamin Disraeli, they apparently work fine on IE, and just don't work for my stupid Netscape. john 03:41 May 9, 2003 (UTC)
Have you tried clearing your cache or doing a shift+reload? -- Minesweeper 22:33 May 9, 2003 (UTC)

a minor problem with redirect

I noticed that when I'm redirected to another page, the usual statement "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." doesn't show up. Instead, it says "redirected from _____." Not that it's a big problem, but should I bring it to sourceforge? Tomos 21:07 May 9, 2003 (UTC)

As a user, I'd prefer that this "redirected from..." statement appear in those cases. I like to know when I'm being sent somewhere other than where I thought I was going. As a contributor, I may find the redirect either unnecessary or inappropriate, and then decide to start an article for the page I was trying to pull up in the first place. RL Barrett 03:43 May 10, 2003 (UTC)

Hi, this could cause a little bit of debate... do we have a policy on images of the clitoris? The Wikipedia has just gained itself a picture of one and if you're easily offended I'd reccomend not clicking this. Have fun -- Ams80 21:29 May 9, 2003 (UTC)

If someone would like to make a cold, clinical, well-labeled drawing of the human female genitalia, that might be less controversial and just as educational. --Brion 21:36 May 9, 2003 (UTC)
I think that the image should be removed. I wouldn't mind a drawing or something, but this is clearly a porn image that has just been labeled to make it look like a medical image. I think we are being trolled here. I'm removing the link from clitoris. Cgs
OK - I'll draw a diagram. However I don't have a scanner and I'm not sure how good a digital photo of the drawing will look.... --mav 03:39 May 10, 2003 (UTC)
I remember seeing that "clitoris" was the a popular artcle immediately ranked after your user page. So, it seems like "the logical thing to do." --Menchi 03:52 May 10, 2003 (UTC)
I forgot about that - I guess subconsciously I'm trying to even things up. ;-) Alas, my blasted memory stick card reader doesn't want to mount for some reason so I can't upload my drawing yet. It didn't take long - I'm sure somebody else can whip up an even better one before I get my card reader to work. --mav 05:08 May 10, 2003 (UTC)
talk at image talk:Clitoris.jpg, talk:clitoris

Is there anything in the works to make the "@" symbol work in article titles? I ask because Genome@Home and Folding@Home don't show up correct as links on distributed computing. -- Minesweeper 22:33 May 9, 2003 (UTC)

I still don't see a way to put it in the actual title (other than workarounds like SETI(at)Home), but did you already work out that you can at least do things like [[SETI|SETI@Home]] (SETI@Home), or [[SETI(at)home|SETI@Home]] (SETI@Home)? It's a step, at least. -- John Owens 22:44 May 9, 2003 (UTC)
I suppose I'm a little more curious as to why it doesn't work in the first place. I don't have any plans to work on those pages for now, but in the long run, it seems this is something that should be resolved. Is there any reason we shouldn't allow "@" in wiki? Is it to prevent email links from being posted? -- Minesweeper 09:38 May 10, 2003 (UTC)

Why is it when I do a search for Novel I get a "Badly formed search query" result? Kingturtle 04:09 May 10, 2003 (UTC)

"Novel" is a "stop word" on Wikipedia search - it cannot be searched for. See Wikipedia:Common words, searching for which is not possible and Wikipedia:Searching. --rbrwr


Nearly all of the stop words are not essential article titles, but novel most certainly is. How do I go about creating a movement to remove the word novel from the stop word list? Kingturtle 03:02 May 11, 2003 (UTC)
It'd be useful for the reader to receive a link to Wikipedia:Common words, searching for which is not possible on the searched page, instead of the not very informative: "Badly formed search query. We could not process your query...." --Menchi 03:11 May 11, 2003 (UTC)

Nonresponsive Anon

142.59.27.250 has made some unreasonable changes. S/he separated a Chinese word arbitarily into two parts in the middle against the official convention that all characters of a word is to be written without a space in between (that represents a pause), on Kung Fu and Wushu. S/he also deleted mention of Cantonese terms, on Wushu. I have asked him/her why on the Kung Fu Talk page, but s/he did not respond. Ten minutes later, I posted a message on his Talk page. It's been over half an hour now, he still is ignoring. Although s/he has add the phrase "two word" before 功夫, seems as a response to my question. But it's wrong. 功夫 are two characters, they are collectively one word. What do we do? --Menchi 07:29 May 10, 2003 (UTC)

Quick note: could a developer look through the history of communist state - this edit by Tannin seems to be in a weird state... Martin

Ryder cup -- Clue me in, please. Why is the "c" in cup not capitalized? The Ryder Cup is the legally incorporated name of the tournament, it is not a descriptive word like say, coffee. The reason I ask, is that this type of label appears in several places at Wikipedia and it is affecting links. Thanks. Jacques Delson

So, move it to Ryder Cup... I just did. -- Infrogmation 07:11 May 11, 2003 (UTC)

I think there may be a conflict when uploading a picture. I mean when someone creates a new article, and upload a picture, nothing tells him that the picture already exists and the web site doesn't ask him to confirm. I guess a confirmation should be required. Thomas 21:23 May 10, 2003 (UTC)


There is deliberately the ability to upload new versions of images. If you make a mistake, the old version can be reverted back with one click. A warning/confirmation might be nice, but doesn't seem like a big deal. --Brion 02:58 May 11, 2003 (UTC)

Are there any statistics on how often Special:Randompage gets accessed? I'm trying to figure out how often each page in the 'pedia gets viewed (on average). -- Crenner 03:06 May 11, 2003 (UTC)

According to Special:Statistics, we have 53.89 views per edit. --Menchi 03:18 May 11, 2003 (UTC)
That doesn't answer my question. I'm trying to figure out how often we can count on each page being viewed, and at the same time, being peer re-viewed. So, the only way to reliably get people to the very rarely-viewed pages is via Special:Randompage, hence my interest in the number of access per day/hour/whatever. -- Crenner 03:32 May 11, 2003 (UTC)
Average of about 1300 hits per day over the last week. --Brion 06:49 May 11, 2003 (UTC)

Repeated wikification

What's the current concensus regarding links from (and over-linking of) years and dates in articles? Where should I look? A Style guide?

To what degree is it adviceable to link from all occurances of a certain year, or to limit it to when deemed relevant, or the first occurence in an article, or the first occurence under a headline or a line... :-) -- Ruhrjung 05:29 May 11, 2003 (UTC)

Usually one link per article is sufficient, generally first occurence, unless there's some reason that it would look or function better at a later occurance. -- Infrogmation 05:39 May 11, 2003 (UTC)

In tables, we may want a link repeated several times, because readers do not always start at the top and read through the table, as they more likely would with prose. --Ellmist Sunday, May 11th, 02003]

Hi all, I'm sure that a while ago I came across a page somewhere (possibly on meta) which listed landmarks for all the wikipedias, so for example when the Danish wiki reached 5000 articles it would be announced on that page. I can't find it anymore (which in some ways makes me question whether it existed in the first place...), if anyone knows where it is could they let me know? I started looking for it today because I noticed that the German wiki had passed 15,000 articles. Anyway, if it does exist I'd appreciate having my mind put at rest! Thanks in advance -- Ams80 22:59 May 11, 2003 (UTC)

Is this -- m:Wikipedia News -- what you're looking for? --Menchi 23:09 May 11, 2003 (UTC)
Yes, thankyou. It's a very sensible name for it, I searched for lots of things like 'events', 'landmarks' and 'timeline' but missed the obvious 'news'! Thanks again, Ams80
Perhaps this is where redirects come in. --Menchi 23:30 May 11, 2003 (UTC)

How do I find articles with the word nickname in them? When I do a search I am taken to the nickname article. I don't want that. I want to see a list of all the articles with the word nickname in them. I used to be able to do a search for word-appearances. Is the merging of the Search and Go buttons the reason why I can't do this anymore?

Being able to find word-appearances is important for editing. For example, when I made the No-Fly Zone page, I then went to each article that had the words no-fly zone, and I bracketed them to link to my new article. Kingturtle 05:49 May 12, 2003 (UTC)

I disabled title search again to get the machine running smoothly again this morning. If 'go' doesn't do what you want, for the meantime use an external search engine like google. --Brion 05:54 May 12, 2003 (UTC)
I used google to reduce use of the Americanism "sophomore" to mean "second", and it seemed sufficiently effective - more so than the wikipedia search, in fact. Try it! :) Martin 16:23 May 12, 2003 (UTC)
How do I get to the Wikipedia-google search page? Kingturtle 17:21 May 12, 2003 (UTC)
Like this. --Menchi 17:37 May 12, 2003 (UTC)
Visit it directly here (or just add "site:www.wikipedia.org" into your google queries). Or, put some junk into the search box and just hit 'search', then scroll down to the form. --Brion 17:34 May 12, 2003 (UTC)

Logo/Image Protection

Having our logo Image:Wiki.png vandalized is a great insult to Wikipedia and all of us. Why isn't that image protected? The vandal must be banned. --Menchi 20:36 May 11, 2003 (UTC)

Brion's changes this so uploading a new wiki.png doesn't change the logo
The vandal has been blocked, but note that such blocks only have limited effectiveness in enforcing bans. Martin 16:21 May 12, 2003 (UTC)

We don't seem to be able to Protect Image pages. Can this be done? -- Zoe

You can protect image pages, but this only protects the page from edits, it does not protect the associated image from re-uploads, reversions, or deletions of old file versions. That's probably a bug; I'll add it to my list of little fixes to do. (Additionally many older images don't actually have description pages, which can lead to weirdness in behavior.) --Brion 06:12 May 12, 2003 (UTC)

There is a table somewhere of the people with most edits on Wiki, so presumably there is some software counting this for each user.

Whilst I would not aspire to such heights as that table, I would be interested to know my own figures, either for total edits, new articles or both. Is there any way of finding this data, or is it information restricted to administrators? (I don't want to count all the way back through My Contributions, even if it keeps all edits. jimfbleak 12:06 May 13, 2003 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Most active Wikipedians. It's about due for an update, by the way. Tannin
Thanks for the pointer, I knew I could depend on you for help. Unfortunately, since I don't make the top 200 list, I'm still no wiser about my own figures. jimfbleak
If, after your recent efforts, you don't make the top 200 next time one of the software gurus runs the counting script, I'll eat my cat. Tannin (PS: ~1000 to 1500 edits would be my guess. Does the Wikidollar concept extent to making small wagers? I'll put W$10 on it.)

FA Premier league, season review

Would it be worthwhile to have an article about a particular season in the English football Premier league. I'm planning to add the end of season league table, as well as a few miscellaneous highlights. For example, Arsenal F.C. losing their xx point lead, Sunderland A.F.C. having the worst season ever. etc.

Which naming format should this article use? I want to name it as a subpage of the main FA Premier league page: FA Premier league/2002-03.

Erzengel 13:09 May 13, 2003 (UTC)

you may wish to read Wikipedia:Naming conventions (years in titles) and participate in the related discussion. No convention has been set yet, though FA Premier league, 2002-3 and 2002-3 FA Premier league would probably both have some support. Try one of those? Martin 13:23 May 13, 2003 (UTC)

The page was helpful, but there are no mentions of events spanning years yet. Usually, soccer seasons are called 2002/03 or 2002-03 (two digits). I feel inclined to follow the convention set by the Football World Cup pages, so I'm tempted to go for FA Premier league 2002-03. Erzengel 13:50 May 13, 2003 (UTC)

  • At NBA.COM, on player pages, they write 00-01 to represent seasons (See: [1])
  • At NHL,COM, on player pages, they write 2000-2001 to represent seasons (see: [2])
  • At Yahoo.com, for both the NBA and NHL, 2001 is written to represent the 2000-2001 season (see [3] and [4])
  • for what its worth, Kingturtle 22:16 May 13, 2003 (UTC)

Is there any reason why you can't put a comment on a move page as you can on an edit page to explain briefly why you are doing it, or apologising for a move to a mispelt page title? jimfbleak 15:29 May 13, 2003 (UTC)

Good idea. You can always put something on the talk page, but I quite often want to add a comment when moving pages. Depend on how hard it is to implememt, I guess. Tannin
I think the big problem with that would be, you can only have one summary per edit, and it's crucial that it include the actual name of the page it was moved to, so it can be tracked down if it needs to be moved back. There might be an adequate solution involving some character which oughtn't appear in any article titles to separate an automated move summary and a user comment, and glomming them together, but no good punctuation to fit the need comes to mind offhand; the only things coming to mind that can't be in titles are the double quote '"', and at symbol '@'. -- John Owens 16:33 May 13, 2003 (UTC)

Talking of comments, it would also be nice to be able to embed a comment within an article page so that it showed up while editing but not while viewing. This would be useful for marking pieces of text or facts which are in fact correct even though they appear to be wrong to a casual reader. -- Derek Ross

I thought you could do that with HTML comments? Tannin

Excellent! Can you give an example ? -- Derek Ross

Let me test a bit with previews... <!-- comment here --> OK, that works, that's how it's done (but without the <nowiki>, if you're looking at the page source here). -- John Owens 16:33 May 13, 2003 (UTC)
Is this documented somewhere obvious? If not, it should be. MB 17:41 May 13, 2003 (UTC)
Now it is, just added to Wikipedia:How to edit a page. -- John Owens 17:47 May 13, 2003 (UTC)

Thanks, guys. That's a neat feature. -- Derek Ross

You've heard of pages so big they can't be edited? I've found one so big it can't even be displayed, as far as I can tell. List of rock and roll albums, 156K. I don't know what's to be done with this... but paradoxically, I can edit it - I assume the HTML markup that the page generates is really big though, causing my problems viewing it. Evercat 21:49 May 13, 2003 (UTC)

I can view it. It is awful big, though; the obvious thing to do would be to try breaking it into sections by decade, since it's chronological to begin with. --Brion 22:39 May 13, 2003 (UTC)

Announcing a naming conventions vote

Since it's topical... There's a vote on in Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (years in titles) to decide how to put years in titles. We don't have a particular standard at the moment - different articles use different options. Voting closes in one month's time: June 13 (aka 13 June). If you don't vote, you forfeit the right to bitch if you don't like the outcome! *grin* Martin

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