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August 18 Information
question about Julia Earl deletion
The article Julia Earl was deleted, for what appears to be ill-considered reasons. And the deleter, Phil Sandifer, seems to offer a snarky page suggesting that he doesn't listen to the guidelines. I've attempted (probably incorrectly) to appeal that deletion. What to do?
Notfromhereeither03:49, 18 August 2007 (UTC)reply
The article in question was about a non-notable person and contained nothing more than a long description of why she was fired from a non-notable job. As stated, it is a hit job and Wikipedia has no place for it. --
Kainaw(what?)04:35, 18 August 2007 (UTC)reply
The deletion explanation didn't say she was non-notable. (That could be debated honestly either way.) Instead, it says that it was messy -- which it clearly was not. It was verifiable, well-documented, neutral in point of view, about a person who has been much covered in the press. In any case, thanks for explaining the process to follow. (I didn't know that an article could be deleted with no process, but restoring it requires a process.)
Notfromhereeither04:42, 18 August 2007 (UTC)reply
You can appeal. I was just trying to warn you that it will not be reinstated. She is not notable. It doesn't matter how many articles she has in the local press. She was nothing more than a superintendent of public schools. --
Kainaw(what?)05:04, 18 August 2007 (UTC)reply
Has the proper procedure been followed here? A discussion was under way on the talk page of the Julia Earl article, when someone named Phil Sandifer just outright deleted it -- again. Can he do that?
Notfromhereeither04:53, 19 August 2007 (UTC)reply
We went through deletion review already -- maybe you didn't know that. And the article was restored, and deletion review was under way -- and that's when this Sandifer user just outright deleted it. Is that really the way it works?
Notfromhereeither05:11, 19 August 2007 (UTC)reply
What is the protocol for editing posts on your own company?
I work in public relations for a mid-sized technology corporation. When I was searching for information today on something totally unrelated to work, I came across several articles pertaining to our company, products and our executives.
There were several glaring inaccuracies, as well as some information that was likely not posted by impartial, third-party sources. More like someone with a grudge (if it's a customer who had a bad, experience then fair enough, but I'm talking about content much more likely contributed by a competitor, former employee or a journalist with an ax to grind).
Or what if it's one side of a story? For example, a reporter writes an editorial (opinion) and someone cites it on Wikipedia. But maybe the reporter's opinion is old, or mis-represents real facts...what do we do?
What is Wikipedia's protocol in these types of scenarios? Contact Wikipedia with our requested edits, or just make them ourselves? If we make them ourselves, should we note that in the post? We don't want to be accused of manipulating this site, as our developers and employees respect the spirit of it's purpose. But nor do we believe it's in anyone's best interest to have bad info posted.
Our "Conflict of Interest" policy applies the most here, and generally if you feel that opinions represented are
not that common or just plain wrong, it's best not to edit it yourself. You can contact Wikimedia using the "Contact Wikipedia" link on the left hand side, although there's nothing specifically wrong with editing it yourself. I highly recommend you see
Wikipedia Scanner for some of the things that have happened to corporations that edit Wikipedia in ways that could seem nefarious. If you want, you can make a comment on
my talk page with the changes you want to make, and I'll do them for you, if they are appropriate for wikipedia --Lucid04:35, 18 August 2007 (UTC)reply
Usually companies and individuals should avoid editing articles on themselves, since it is hard to view yourself/your company
neutrally. However improvements are always welcome, so fixing spelling, removing inaccuracies, and that sort of thing is ok. Removing criticism that is properly cited is not. When in doubt you can leave a note on the article's talk page asking someone else to review your proposed edit and make it if they agree.
Prodegotalk04:36, 18 August 2007 (UTC)reply
mail
How can I change settings so that the picture of the day that I receive daily is shown as a picture in the mail, and not as a link?
Thank you
Can you tell us where you see these settings? I don't see anything in
Wikipedia:Picture of the day about receiving a picture in the mail, and if nobody else chimes in with the answer, that would mean the other Help desk volunteers aren't familiar with this feature (most questions on the Help desk tend to get an answer quickly if they are going to get any answer at all). If you can give us a
link to the page where you asked to receive the picture of the day, perhaps someone can investigate and help you. --
Teratornis13:38, 18 August 2007 (UTC)reply
Is it okay to start an list article if you don't have much to put in it?
I have an article I would like to start, a list, but I don't have much infomation to put in it. Is it okay to start it and let people fill it? Or should I have more info to start?
Dragosian07:54, 18 August 2007 (UTC)reply
Your
article may be deleted.
Be bold if you like, but boldness alone is no guarantee that your article will "stick." If you need time to work on your article, before throwing it to the tender mercies of the
Deletionists, you could start it first as a
user subpage, for example:
User:Dragosian/My list or whatever. If you do start a user subpage, do yourself a favor and make a link to it from your user page, so you don't lose track of your subpage. --
Teratornis13:43, 18 August 2007 (UTC)reply
How to provide a page outline (via template?) so that article contributors can fill in details between preset paragraph headings in the article ?
Hi there -
reviewed the template FAQs and fiddled quite a bit with templates (on my private mediawiki installation) but I seem to be missing a point - thus thought I dare ask the Wiki pros over here for some guidance.
What I try to do is to provide information about some historical persons (one person per wiki page) - following a standardized outline with detail paragraph texts in between povided by additional, other contributors. (The question is less if such information would make sense in the general Wikipedia - I can do it on my private wiki first - it's about how to accomplish this with the Wiki [template?] technology.)
Now of course I'd like the people who contribute to adhere to the rather strict outline of the article - thus I had hoped I could set up the outline as a template.
Upon generation of a new page (per person in the directory) the contributor would simply fill in the details BETWEEN the paragraph headings as set in the 'template'. That way I could still change/consolidate the paragraph headings at a later point without having to go through all individual pages. (Or add additional headings for additional paragraphs to be filled in for each entry, for that matter.)
Not sure if made my requirement clear enough.
In fiddling with the templates I came across the problem that while I can of course have a template included in an acticle it's kind of tricky (impossible?) to set it up as such that the individual contributor could write the detail text in between the (template preset) paragraph headings.
To that end it seems I would have to enter a template for EACH paragraph heading - but I'm sure there must be a better way?
Any hints appreciated (I'm quite a newbie to the Wiki technology from Germany).
If your
personal wiki (and "
wiki" should not be capitalized as it is not a proper noun here, to distinguish from a particular wiki called
WikiWikiWeb) runs on the
MediaWiki software, you can use
template substitution to insert boilerplate text from your template into an article, such that henceforth other users may edit between the headings you inserted. However, once you substitute your template into an
article, there is nothing to stop users from editing or rearranging your headings, and if you update your template to change your heading layout, your changes will not propagate to articles that substituted text from an earlier revision of your template. For more on templates, see:
Also note that the Help desk is for questions about using
Wikipedia. For your future questions about
MediaWiki, please use
mw:Project:Support desk. Personally, I don't care, if I know the answer to an unanswered question on the Help desk, I try to answer it when I see it, but those are the rules. --
Teratornis13:24, 18 August 2007 (UTC)reply
Well yes, I understand (and you'll see that my question is posted there, too - with no reply as of yet). However, as my question seemed like a GENERAL question on how to use templates in Wikipedia, after all, I assumed (after some consideration, indeed) that it might be appropriate to post it over here. (I assumed much more visibility here due to probably much higher traffic on this general Wikipedia help page). I still hope that my reasoning was appropriate - and yes, I do appreciate the quick response.
Your reasoning was plausible, but we have a precedent here of directing MediaWiki-specific questions to
mw:Project:Support desk (what, you did not read the entire Help desk archive before posting? - yes, I am joking, no one could expect you to read all that stuff). Since
Wikipedia runs on the
MediaWiki software, many if not most questions about MediaWiki could somehow relate to Wikipedia, and then the Wikipedia Help desk could end up absorbing questions about the thousands of other MediaWiki wikis in the world. However, the big red instructions at the top of this Help desk page say the Help desk is for questions about using Wikipedia. A question that is really about using another
wiki is not a question about using Wikipedia, which is to say the big red instruction is narrowly defined (there isn't enough room there to put up detailed hairsplitting instructions about every sort of question and which ones belong here, etc., and few people would reach such detailed instructions anyway). Even so, we try to answer all questions on the Help desk, and there is no doubt that Wikipedia's Help desk provides faster responses than many other sources of help. Everyone here is a volunteer, however, and if too many off-topic questions come to the Help desk, that might start driving away the volunteers who answer questions. The system works if we have clear rules and
everyone agrees to follow the rules to the best of their knowledge. So it's no big deal that you asked a MediaWiki question on the Wikipedia Help desk, but for further questions about MediaWiki you should use
mw:Project:Support desk. You may also wish to
create an account so you can make a section of
useful links on your
user page. The
links I put on my section let me look up answers to many of the same kinds of questions you will have as you learn to be a MediaWiki administrator. In particular, see my links for searching the Help desk archive, and the various MediaWiki sites. MediaWiki demands a long process of
RTFM. Have you read the
MediaWiki Handbook? --
Teratornis19:04, 18 August 2007 (UTC)reply
Well, I did review the
Help:Template entry in the EDIT section (and repeat this now) - but did not really find the answer I was looking for. I will - as you suggested - continue the discussion at
mw:Project:Support desk. However, it seems to me that my above stated request is in fact not easily - if at all - being resolved in Wikipedia editing (or any other Mediawiki installation for that matter).
I reviewed the
template substitution and
template transclusion sections you suggested and found that this about corresponds (without me knowing the terms) to what I had assumed as my initial approach that I referenced above: namely creating the articles from an initial template (for the outline) via substitution (as the first step). That would substitute the paragraph headings (as outline) into that article, allowing those then (in a second step, as they are 'transclused') to be amended later for all articles by editing the respective paragraph heading template.
However (and this was my initial concern prompting my support request) this does not allow for later (i.e. 'after the article creation fact') adding additional paragraph headings into all existing articles (while it would work for articles created after the additional paragraph headings are added to the outline template which is substituted into the articles upon creation).
It seems to me - but I had hoped that I am mistaken - that this is due to a general design issue (or rather, symptomatic challenge); I guess it is because my requirement basically requests the final article to be made of (intervowen) parts which for one come from a template (the outline = paragraph headings) but for the other are added manually per individual articles in between the stuff from the template/s - something which is not easily achieved via a scriping/parsing appproach.
Thanks for the help so far - sure hope I will also get a follow up over there at
mw:Project:Support desk
Hi. This help desk is for asking questions about using Wikipedia, as stated in huge red letters at the top. Questions like this are asked at the
Reference desk. In any case, many telephone companies and internet providers also provide DSL; try yours. Or you can Google "DSL" couples with your state/province/territory etc. It's not hard to find something many companies are advertizing, eager to sell.--
Fuhghettaboutit12:46, 18 August 2007 (UTC)reply
unreliable
I like your encyclopedia ;however I have found articles which make claims that in fact are not accurate.Meaning your content cannot be trusted 100%—The preceding
unsigned comment was added by
68.242.12.102 (
talk •
contribs).
If you find a claim to be inaccurate, please fix it. Please remember, we're a work in progress - of course our content can't be blindly trusted.
Nihiltres(t.
l)12:44, 18 August 2007 (UTC)reply
In general,
critical thinking demands that we do not blindly trust anything on its own. That's why
scientists try to replicate their results, why
police try to interview every witness to a crime, and so on. The fewer sources of information we have to support a particular claim, the more we should question it. However, the vast majority of people make important arbitrary exceptions, for example most people place blind trust in some variety of
faith-based thinking. Most often, this would be in the locally-popular
religion they had been indoctrinated in since childhood; many people also place blind trust in various
political philosophies. Critical thinking, the opposite of faith-based thinking, has an excellent track record of building things that work (such as the computer in front of you now), but it is laborious, and the results may not be psychologically comforting when the truth turns out to be unpleasant or disappointing. --
Teratornis13:10, 18 August 2007 (UTC)reply
Yours is a valid criticism of the Wikipedia. That may not necessarily mean, however, that the Wikipedia is not the best freely-available source of information on the Internet on some topics.
69.143.80.20000:44, 19 August 2007 (UTC)reply
Yes, often the Wikipedia article on a given topic is one of the best available introductions to the subject on the
World Wide Web. At least on Wikipedia we have some sort of mechanism for finding and correcting errors; on many other
Web sites there is no telling what you are getting. That is why
search engine sites such as
Google Search are now elevating Wikipedia articles to the top of many search results. But obviously, given what the
disclaimers say, nobody should take a Wikipedia article as the final word on any issue of importance (for example, if a person is going to stake a large amount of money on the information). If someone needs to make an important decision, they should research the issue carefully from multiple sources, and consider hiring a professional advisor if the issue is seriously important. Another tip: try reading some previous revisions of a Wikipedia article to see if it has undergone drastic changes, and to look for signs that the current revision may have been vandalized. --
Teratornis03:02, 19 August 2007 (UTC)reply
Image usage
One of my pet articles,
Silvertown explosion, could use some images. This in itself isn't unsurmountable: there are images of the factory before and after, and of the destruction. All well and good so far. Now, about the copyright status: these were taken in 1917, in the UK, and I presume some of them were published soon afterwards. I have no idea when these were published in the US, or even if they were available before they were put up on the internet. To confuse matters further, these images have copyright claimed on them. The pages I was hoping to use images from are:
[2],
[3] + linked pages, and
[4].
In short: I have no idea whether these would be fair use or public domain under US law (let alone UK law), and I'd appreciate it if someone could tell me so I can upload them correctly.
Abednigo13:31, 18 August 2007 (UTC)reply
According to the article on
Public Domain, which I assume to be reliable due to the sources provided:
In the United States, any work that was published before 1923 (in the US) is now in the Public Domain. If it was not published before 1923, then the image is held under copyright for the life of the author plus 70 years, unless of course such rights are waived.
In the UK, things are even more confusing, but it looks as though the soonest these images will become public domain is 2039, or the life of the author plus 70 years, whichever comes first.
If copyright is claimed on the images, go with that. It wouldn't hurt to contact the owner of those websites anyway just to figure out what's going on. If you're lucky, you might be able to get
permission, which will make things worlds easier anyway. Hersfold(
t/
a/
c)17:57, 18 August 2007 (UTC)reply
Need to upload image but it is "overwritten by an existing image"
I need to upload an old photograph of Brigham Young, circa 1857 (a photograph of Young beardless) at
Mountain Meadows massacre. But when I try to do so (namely, as [see image at right margin]
), an existing image from English Wikipedia--a painting of an older Young with a white beard--gets in the way.
If the image you want is already uploaded to Commons, you don't need to upload it here as well. The MediaWiki software will pull the image you request from Commons and display it as though it were uploaded here. Just type the image code as you have above ([[Image:Brigham Young.jpg|thumb]]) and it'll go in. If you still have to upload a different picture, just choose a different filename. Hersfold(
t/
a/
c)17:48, 18 August 2007 (UTC)reply
I just wanted to help developing this site in my main language, so I decided to translate the page which is about Amidamaru, but I have no idea how to publish the article, should I use 'change' option or should I make a new page to put it?
Thank you.
What is the point of having this system if the images are still being deleted??? :( --WIKISCRIPPS 07 SAT AUG 18 2007 2:12 PM EDT
According to the deletion logs of some of the images you have uploaded that were deleted, the fair use rationale was deemed inadequate for the intended use. Improve the rationales, make sure that there actually is a valid reason to have the image, make sure the image is actually being used and the use is noted in the rationale, and make sure that they're low-resolution (generally around 0.1 megapixels and at most some 300-400px on the widest direction). --
Pekaje20:52, 18 August 2007 (UTC)reply
How to link from Wikipedia to a Library of Congress record via ISBN
This was a tricky one - as the URL call notation of the
Library of Congress is quite convoluted and usually (strangely - go check!) entails a date/timp stamp for timeout issues.
Thus I thought I share what I figured out:
In order to link from a Wikipedia article to a Library of Congress record via ISBN you need to use a link in the format of
Perhaps I should add that I am aware indeed of the Wikipedia internal ISBN handling, like in ISBN 0375507256.
And now, as I finally take a closer look at that page I note that the (even if slightly different) link to the
Library of Congress URL via ISBN is indeed there - so I could have spared all that fiddling!
However, the question if the URL can be optimized further remains.
I just archived my talk page by moving it to a subpage. I then removed the redirect on my talk page so it could be again. However, even though there is no redirect, any time I like to my page it goes to the moved page. I hope I didnt totally screw things up. isaid19:31, 18 August 2007 (UTC)reply
Hello. My name is Jon Kleinow and I'm a page designer at The Kansas City Star. We're running an article about Wikipedia in the paper tomorrow and would like to use a screenshot of www.wikipedia.org with the article. Would it be possible to get permission to use the screenshot and, if so, how should we credit the image? Any replies that could be sent this afternoon (Saturday, August 18) to (email removed) would be very helpful. Thank you for your time.
We've had to remove your email for your own security, and for other security reasons we can't send replies to email addresses. However, Wikipedia and all of its content (at least, anything that will be displayed on the main page) is licensed under the
GFDL, which allows for free distribution of the content. The MediaWiki software which we use is similarly licensed. The Wikipedia logo, appearing in the top left corner of this page, is copyrighted by the
Wikimedia Foundation, but as you are using it in an article about Wikipedia to identify the main page, I would consider that to be appropriate
fair use. For more information, please see
WP:COPY. Hersfold(
t/
a/
c)22:18, 18 August 2007 (UTC)reply
Needs Help with User Boxes
I'm new here, and I really couldn't figure out how to make a userbox. I read the Userbox page but I couldn't understand it. Could you please help me learn how to make one?
Psycho-Marth-Fangirl20:38, 18 August 2007 (UTC)reply
Article About me removed but my name still appears
I am writing here just to make sure nobody has a problem with this issue. Somebody created an article about me, without my knowledge and it was deleted after debate, and then the deletion was reviewed (with debate). At a couple points, due to my ignorance on Wikipedia, I became amused with the idea that there was an article about me, but it really wasn't something I wished for. In any case, the debates have been causing me some problems because of the instances of my name appearing, and so I have asked for my name to be replaced by a placeholder. It would not alter the structure of the archive, nor would it prevent any reader from understanding what was said. I just prefer that the use of my name be removed. (Of course, to people who might be interested, the original including my name would remain in edit history. Despite my non-importance, this has been the subject of some discussion on User talk:Anber, User talk:JGGardiner and User talk:Atlan. The debate has gone in the direction to acquiesce to my request, however Atlan, who has shown some disapproval has agreed to join the consensus provided I post on the Help Desk which is what I am doing.
Anber22:24, 18 August 2007 (UTC)reply
It's not entirely clear to me, based on your talk page and what you wrote here, exactly what it is you want done. However, if it involves changing the text of an archived AFD, then I don't think that's going to happen unless you have a reason good enough for requesting
oversight. That does not immediately appear to be the case. --
Pekaje23:08, 18 August 2007 (UTC)reply
My registered name is "Samuel Curtis," but the actual used name since May 2007 has been "Samuel di Curtisi di Salvadori" and has been reflected in the signature. Hence, I registered
User:Samuel di Curtisi di Salvadori as a placeholder to prevent others from impersonating myself. I have no intent to use the latter account to do anything.
I've seen this done several times before. A simple note on the user page of the placeholder account should suffice. Of course, it can't be accused of sockpuppetry if it never actually makes any edits.
Raven4x4x00:21, 19 August 2007 (UTC)reply
This is considered a
doppelganger account. There are instructions at the linked page to explain what should be done with these accounts. It technically is a sock, but it isn't called one generally. isaid03:15, 19 August 2007 (UTC)reply