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This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (policy). Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.

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French-o-pedia

I'm wondering why policies in the different language encyclopedia aren't coinciding. Here is an example of the use of fair-use logos in the article used as decorative purposes. Why does the french Wikipedia use different fair-use policies compared to the English Wikipedia? Are all policies like this? Why the different standards when they're both essentially the same?++aviper2k7++ 07:08, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

Copyright laws vary by country. The English Wikipedia follows U.S. copyright law. John Broughton | Talk 16:08, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
Internal policies also vary from Wikipedia to Wikipedia it seems. Just H 21:57, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
Each Wiki was set up by different people, and the rules on each one have evolved as decided by the editors on that project, so they have diverged. Fan-1967 21:59, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

Wait, shouldn't all Wikipedias hosted in the U.S. follow U.S. copyright law? The fact that it's in a different language doesn't in any way change the fact that the server's located in Florida. -W.marsh 03:05, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

Yes, each Wikipedia is expected to follow US law. Many also strive to be compatible with the laws of the country or countries where their language is most common. If the French Wikipedia is intentionally breaking US law (as opposed to ignorance or accident) that would probably be an issue for the Wikimedia Foundation to address. Dragons flight 03:14, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
I believe there is a large cluster of servers located in Europe (Netherlands? Belgium?) - I saw discussions a few months back about buying a bunch more blades for that. I'd guess that many if not most of the other-language wikipedias are hosted there, not in Florida. John Broughton | Talk 13:45, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
It's in the Netherlands, with m:Kennisnet. Actually, it's not really a large cluster (I don't find the numbers, but it must be about 30; compared to Florida that's nothing), consisting only of proxy servers and the m:Toolserver; so no wiki content is permanently stored there. Having said that, there was an announcement on dewiki-l (German) before Christmas that a server will be installed to make regular database backups of all Wikimedia projects. --Dapeteばか 15:24, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

Vandalism forum and policy

Regarding Vandalism, I've been told that the Vandalism forum isn't the correct place to discuss the misuse of vandalism reporting facilities (eg, sockpuppets being used to place fake vandalism warnings to get another use sanctioned during an edit wars, users plastering vandalism warnings as user-page vandalism etc), and have been given the impression that this is sore topic there that is to be avoided. Is there a another forum for discussing this kind of issue, or an official policy on misuses of vandalism reporting? perfectblue 12:08, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

The best place is probably Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents. A more general page is Wikipedia:Requests for administrator attention. John Broughton | Talk 13:41, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
Seems to me that leaving wordy almost poetic vandalism warnings or "thanks for editing, your experiment worked and has been reverted" notes on vandals pages is unnecessary. If someone blanks a page, it could be accidental. If someone adds nonsense to a page it's NOT an accident. Even if they only do it once. It may not be a hardcore vandal of course, could be some 10 year old doing a prank, but still, we should be aiming to do a few things: 1) encourage them to be constructive, 2) Let them know that vandal accounts will be deleted/blocked swiftly and 3) tell them that we're aware of their vandalism. Anything which tiptoes around the fact that they ARE a vandal and KNOW they're vandalizing is just going to make them think "how gay!" and continue doing it. Take a look at http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Arthur_Ernest_Percival and see all the vandal edits just in the last 2 days! I am quite prepared to help with getting rid of vandals but I'm simply not prepared to devote the time to make sure each vandal has the right number of warnings, in the right order, and then the right amount of time has passed with each one, and then list them for admin attention and then follow it up to make sure the admin has done the right thing. I'm just not going to do that. And it's a waste of time anyway. Common sense, please. If someone is knowingly vandalizing, telling them in friendly language that their edit worked is not the right response.SpookyMulder 23:16, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
Actually telling them in friendly terms is exactly the right response. "Adding nonsense" can be explained by a few things: cat walked on the keyboard, keyboard broken, drink spilled, child borrowed computer, user wanted to see if they could actually edit the 'pedia, etc. I understand your frustration but the controlling policy (really, a principle here) is Assume Good Faith. Unless you have incontrovertible evidence that someone is a vandal, calling them one may push them away, push them into vandalism ("That was just a test edit! But I'll show them vandalism!!!!!!!11"), or any number of other unpleasant reactions. Whereas if we treat everyone as if they mean well from the beginning, we run the risk of converting them to our cause, boring them into behaving, or other fully intended consequences. :) -- nae'blis 00:12, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

What is PROD?

I recently find someone add PROD to article for deletion, without prior AfD. So what is PROD? Any official policy establish a new way to delete article besides speedy and AfD? I'll show you an example, Mr. TexasAndroid recently added PROD to article Yi Zhi, his reason was "An official from 3500 years ago? No claim to notability made beyond that.", I'll ask this sir, doesn't anybody live 3500 years ago and still known as of today count as "non-notable"? I strong doubt how many people still remember Mr. President Bush after 3500 years, so Mr. Bush is not notable and we should delete it? HELLO, WORLD! 21:56, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

Prod is deletion without the restrictions of speedy and the hassle of voting. It's used when something is not likely to survive AfD in the first place. That said, he could have speedied that article with ease. One sentence does not an article make. Subjects must assert their notablility, not expect others to find it. Your argument is merely a non-sequitor for inclusion. – Someguy0830 (T | C) 22:00, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
(edit conflict) "Prod" is Wikipedia:Proposed deletion. It's an avenue for deletion in-between speedy and AfD. As for "notability", all that word means in the context of Wikipedia is "non-trivial coverage in multiple independent sources". (See Wikipedia:Notability.) If Yi Zhi has been the subject of such coverage, then he's notable, by our definition, no matter whether anybody feels that he's "notable", as they generally understand that word. On the other hand, if his being written about in published works isn't demonstrated, or even asserted, then the page may well be deleted, although it's always best to do a little research first, and checking on a subject's notability. I hope that answers your questions. -GTBacchus(talk) 22:03, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
So how can I avoid the article to be deleted? It was not me start this article, and I do not want to add any more info to it. But I find the birth/death date and something else might be useful, I don't want to see this one sentense to be deleted, what can I do if I think the PROD not appropriate? HELLO, WORLD! 22:07, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
For a start, you could add a citation to a source that demonstrates that the person actually existed and is notable. --Milo H Minderbinder 22:09, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
That's a good suggestion. You're also welcome to remove the Prod tag if you disagree with deletion. Contested Prods are taken to AfD, if someone still thinks they should be deleted, except in cases of clear speedy deletion candidates - this article is a potential A7 speedy, though. By far the best thing to do is to find sources for the article. -GTBacchus(talk) 22:23, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
For what it's worth, the two articles that currently link to this one refer to him as "legendary great prime minister of Shang Dynasty" and "a legendary regent of Shang Dynasty", so, assuming the descriptions are correct, he does seem notable. In fact, I rather tend to agree with the claim that anyone who's still remembered 3500 years later, even if only by name, not only must be notable, but also must have been mentioned in several books that an expert on the subject could locate and cite. We still do need to have those citations actually added to the article, though. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 00:31, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
I've added a source from a Google search. That should hopefully clear this up. Fagstein 04:52, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Status of Wikipedia:Notability (books) - historical, proposal, or guideline?

The WP:BK talk page discussion has trailed off -- I would be interested in people's opinions of whether the page is now historical, an active proposal, or a guideline. Feel free to respond below or on the talk page. Thanks, TheronJ 19:40, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

I was a little surprised to see WP:BK labeled historical because I've seen it used recently in a number of AfDs. I don't think its a perfect guideline by any means but it does seem to be useful. GabrielF 19:43, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

WP:OR in relation to user generated images

(If this is the wrong place to post this, please suggest a more appropriate venue)

In relation to images used as a graphical or object representation of the subject of an article, under what circumstances would a user generated image be considered WP:OR?

For example, can a user draw their own sketch of Bigfoot, based on the description given on the Bigfoot page, and use that image as the page's main graphic? Or could a user (using WP:V sources) draw the route taken by a murder suspect and include it on the page about the trial?

Also, would it be considered WP:OR to include a user generated picture of an X identical to the X written about in an entry, or does it have to be the exact X. For example, could a user take a picture of their own Glock 9mm pistol, and use it in a section of a page claiming that the police planted a Glock 9mm in a suspects house (making sure, of course, to make clear that it was stock picture)?

perfectblue 11:17, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

WP:NOR#Original images would be the current applicable policy.
As for the examples you name: there is a thin line sometimes between "illustrative" and "decorative". Merely "decorative" images are often rejected. Seen the difficulty to give a universally applicable definition of "decorative" vs. "illustrative" in this context, assessment of which of the two applies is often a case-by-case exercise. In other words, I don't know which of the two applies for the examples you mention: would be an exercise in wikipedia:consensus I suppose. Anyhow, I tried to narrow the "illustrative"/"decorative" distinction down somewhat in the Wikipedia:Use of primary sources in Wikipedia guideline proposal, see Wikipedia:Use of primary sources in Wikipedia#Broader concept of illustration (and sub-section of that section) in particular. --Francis Schonken 12:20, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Request for clarification on Wikipedia policies (Original research, verifiability, not primary source)

Hello. I have a question applicable to the Slam Dunk (Manga) article.[1] Slam Dunk is a Japanese manga depicting a fictional high school basketball team, its members, and their exploits. The article currently contains one or two real-life player comparisons for each character it lists; as far as I can tell, these real life analogies have been around for nearly as long as the page has existed.

A glimpse at the edit history of the page will show that there is much disagreement about which real life player corresponds to each character. A brief discussion on the talk page also shows a wide range of opinions.

I am a Wikipedia newbie and I have no desire to wikilawyer, but my impression is that these real-life player comparisons should not be in the article, for several reasons: they qualify as original research as each editor contributes his/her own opinion on the comparisons, they are not verifiable, and they make Wikipedia a primary source as these comparisons have not been published in any other reputable source.

The majority of the editors of the page appear to prefer these comparisons staying in the article. I proposed a compromise on the talk page, and after a few weeks silence I edited the article to remove the player comparisons, but they were swiftly restored. It appears the consensus among editors there is that the real-life player comparisons should stay, but I thought I'd seek an opinion here, from the wider Wikipedia community, regarding its appropriacy. Should such player comparisons be kept?

Thank you. Bhamv 15:44, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

I agree. If such comparisons are to be in the article they need to be sourced. I've tagged them and left a message to that effect on the talk page. ~ ONUnicorn(Talk|Contribs)problem solving 17:24, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
Most of these policies and guidelines were developed to stop people making things up wholesale or using sources that had been made up, and are primarily intended to ensure factuality, but they seem to be being misused at lot when dealing with the factuality of fiction.
As I understand it, there is traditionally a bit more of leeway in terms of WP:OR when discussing fictional characters just so long as you aren't trying to insert unlabeled fannon as cannon, and aren't attributing mechanisms to things that have not been described in universe (for example, hypothesizing on exactly how Superman generates his heat vision). Basically, stick with cannon, try not to surmise too much, and don't apply out of continuum things to continuum.
If in doubt, find a WP:RS source that says it.
perfectblue 17:57, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
If there's a reliable source (author of the manga, published critic/reviewer, etc) that maintains that X is based on real-life person Y, include it. Otherwise it's opinion and original research. -- nae'blis 18:50, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
(Not relating specifically to this case, but) it's often not quite that simple when dealing with a fictional characters. Especially ones that predate the internet or whose popularity has peaked and troughed already. For example, I could say that character X is similar to player Y and base it on the fact that they both shoot from the 3 point line. It could be a fact that character X makes 3 plays out of 4 from the line, and that shooting from there is player Y's signature. However there might be no third party WP:V and WP:RS source that actually names both of them and compares their playing style. It's not WP:OR, and it's a valid thing to say but it's not verifiable to policy.
Policy is there for a reason, but it's got to be a little flexible for non critical entries (and rigid for biographies etc).
perfectblue 19:12, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
I have to disagree most strenuously, as that is an almost textbook definition of original research. Why do you think that the fact that the character makes 3 out of 4 plays from the line makes them analogous to that real-life player? Because you've conducted your own analysis. It's not rigorous to rely on editor opinion; pre-Internet sources may be somewhat harder to find but that is no reason to allow original research (and it will help get us away from being quite so Google-centric). If the analysis is sound and encyclopedic, it will be sourceable somewhere. If not, it should go. -- nae'blis 19:18, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
Nae'blis is correct, this is original research. The "Real-life Resemblances" ought to be sourced or removed. Looking at them, it seems pretty clear that in at least some cases these real-life players are not in anyway the basis for the fictional characters. I find it hard to believe that Kevin Martin (basketball), drafted into the NBA in 2004, was the basis for a character in a manga series form 1990 – 1996. -- Dragonfiend 19:25, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
OK, that was a bad example, let me rephrase (look at the spirit of what I'm saying, not the exact example). I could say that Superman is stronger than Spiderman based on the fact that one was able to lift a 747 and the other wasn't. I can cite a superman comic showing him lifting a 747 and one showing Spiderman being unable to lift a 747. What I can't do is cite a third party source comparing them lifting 747s, or a source with both of them trying to lift a 747 in the same comic. This isn't WP:OR, but it isn't strictly WP:V either as I'm comparing two separate sources rather than using a single source containing the comparison.
I suppose that the classic example is a list of differences between a book and a film. The individual differences can't be WP:V in most cases (as unless it's something like Harry Potter or a Marvel comic nobody WP:RS would bother), but they aren't WP:OR either.
perfectblue 19:51, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
I think you're underestimating how much is sourceable and written up out there, if you can just find it (which I admit is frequently a problem). The bottom line is that Wikipedia shouldn't be making claims on its own, but collecting data from other sources and publishing them, as an encyclopedia. Many of those "differences between the film and book" sections ought to go as well, but on the other hand some of them *have* been covered in film critic reviews, books on the topic, etc. -- nae'blis 20:08, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
Also, if there is no source for something there is no indication of its relevance to the article. Why should the article on Superman say that Spiderman is stronger, even if you personally are unequivocally certain of its truth? Why not conceive of comparisons between any number of superheroes, or brainstorm what would happen if they battled each other? A Wikipedia article is not the place for that. —Centrx→talk • 20:28, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
I've run into the policy problem more than once. Often it's not so much that there are no sources, it's that those sources are not considered WP:RS enough. For example, according to some of the people over at the comic book project even an interview with a creator is not WP:RS unless it is perfectly mirrored and explicitly stated in a cannon text, and I've had users blanket revert half an article simply because it covers an event that was triggered by an urban myth, on the grounds that I couldn't prove the myth itself to be true (the myth existed, but was an inaccurate account of events).
"Why should the article on Superman say that Spiderman is stronger"
Again, please look at the spirit of what I'm saying, not the exact example. I shall rephrase again. The page is about a random page that is arbitrarily notable for some reason. Season 1 of Lost is X episodes longer than season 1 of Found. I have a source Lost's length, and Found's length, but no source with the length of both being compared. Would you argue I can't say that one is longer than the other unless I have third party saying so, or that I can use two different sources with, two bits of information, together without violating WP:OR?
perfectblue 21:26, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
Even in the spirit, you are talking apples and oranges. If you have a source (or sources) that gives the lenth of each season of Lost, it is not original research to say one season has more episodes than another season... that would be a simple numerical calculation drawn from readily available, and sourced, data. However, saying that a Magna character X is based on real life person Y, is not a simple numerical calculation or comparison... unless you have a citation to back that statement up it would be Original Research. Blueboar 14:25, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

That's all made things much clearer. This Wikipedia newbie thanks you all. :) Bhamv 15:46, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

NPOV

I am having some trouble with understanding NPOV. If I am discussing a debate that has several domains that it impacts, and one side has 95-99% of the support in domain A, and maybe 50% of the support in domain B, is it wrong to describe this with references? Is there something I am missing? Should I pretend that the side that has 1-5% support in domain A really has more support in domain A, even when it can be conclusively demonstrated with copious sources that this is true?--Filll 03:49, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

I'm not fully following your percentages... an example might be in order. Essentially NPOV means that we represent all points of view on any given subject, and the article should not be written in language that implies that one view is more "correct" than another. If one view is more prevelent among the experts than the others, we can say this (with proper citations to back the statement up), but WE do not pass judgement on which is correct. Fringe views can be given short treatment (or even ignored if they are very fringe). Hope this helps. Blueboar 16:18, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
(edit conflict w/Blueboar)
So I'm guessing this is a situation where 95% of scientists think Intelligent Design is stupid, but 50% of Christians think it's great. Since there are more Christians than scientists, the overall figure is 40% of people think Intelligent Design is great, but reporting it that way would give Intelligent Design more credibility than it deserves.
I don't think you should be pretending anything. Using my example, if there are sources to back up the statement that only a very small minority of scientists believe in Intelligent Design, there's nothing POV about saying so. There's nothing POV about saying 50% of Christians believe in it either, but you can't make the decision for the reader that the scientist figure is important than the Christian figure. Basically, I say throw it all in there with the kitchen sink and let the reader figure it out.
OK, whoa. I just checked your contribs and the first one is Talk:Intelligent Design. Did I guess right? –  Anþony  talk  16:29, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Pretty much.--Filll 16:33, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

You also might want to check out Wikipedia:Fringe theories Which talks about it in some detail. Blueboar 18:23, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Esperanza Category?

I was working on the CFD backlog when I came across the "Esperanza Members" category (Wikipedians in Esperanza). However, it linked to the MFD, not a CFD, as a reason for deleting it. Should this category be kept for historical purposes and renamed "Wikipedians who were in Esperanza", or should I simply delete it as the backlog says I should? I just figured I should check here to avoid deleting without consensus. — Dark Shikari talk/contribs 23:05, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

  • If you check the MFD, you'll notice the outcome was to remove and salt the pages related to membership (but keep certain other pages unrelated to membership for historical purpose), since the "members are superior" attitude was one of the prime problems with Esp. Yes, it's technically the wrong process, but Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy and the consensus on the issue is clear. So you can go ahead and delete it. >Radiant< 09:14, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

blacklisted domains

I'm unable to figure out the rationale of blacklisting a domain like suite101.com. I can't find where such rules are noted, I cant find out any reason to do so. Certainly such a site is not spam. Can someone help me get to the bones of this and work out a way to un-exclude the work of several hundred very skilled Web researchers and writers, and many, many very high quality, factual articles in cites or outside links? Thanks —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Mkpelland (talk • contribs).

  • Sites are generally blacklisted because someone continually attempted to spam them into articles and a decision was made that the site would, in the vast majority of cases, not be an acceptable external link. — Dark Shikari talk/contribs 02:19, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
  • The list of blocked domains is at m:Spam blacklist. If you have questions on why a site is listed or think a domain you are trying to add is legit, the talk page for m:Spam blacklist is your best bet. -- JLaTondre 02:23, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Suite101.com was nominated because it was continually spammed to Wikipedia articles, the site encourages SEO tactics from it's authors and the articles are not subject to the sort of formal fact checking that might make them suitable as reliable sources. You can see the discussion about it in the Wiki project spam archive (please do not add to the discussion in the archive, if you have something that is new to add to the discussion please do so at an appropriate venue). -- Siobhan Hansa 03:13, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Notability (architecture)

I thought it might be a good idea to establish some notability criteria for architecture and I seek discussion and comments. It's my first time at proposing anything like this so please be gentle with (but robust in your comments!). Cheers. --Mcginnly | Natter 01:58, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

I don't think I agree with that, especially as many notable buildings, especially those that are private residences, are not regarded as "of local interest" by the inhabitants at all. Architects & those with an interest in architecture tend to look at townscapes in a very different way from other people, and I see no harm in a page relecting this. Johnbod 20:22, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Fair use image in user namespace

Image:TintinCast.gif is today's featured article (Wikipedia:Today's featured article/January 5, 2007) and the image page shows that it is being used in over 100 pages in user namespace. Criterion 9 of the Wikipedia:Fair use criteria states that "Fair use images may be used only in the article namespace. Used outside article space, they are not covered under the fair use doctrine." Several of the users in question seem to be using the template {{Wikipedia:Today's featured article/{{CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{CURRENTDAY}}, {{CURRENTYEAR}}}}. --Oden 16:23, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

I suppose we could wrap fair use images in TFA in a #if which makes them only show if it is transcluded into main space (ie the main page).--Nilfanion (talk) 16:26, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
I don't see a problem with it; it's accompanying the same text as on the main page, so there isn't any less of a fair use claim. The policy against FU images in userspace is to obviate the need to argue with innumerable people over whether the image is being used properly in their own personal space and to be overprotective against the legal risk of use outside of articles. As part of the FA template, however, the user's discretion over whether and how it is used is removed, and it only appears in the context of the article summary. Let's not elevate formalistic interpretations of rules over substantive impact, where there's no actual benefit to doing so or concern over not doing so. Postdlf 17:03, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
My main concern is the enforcement of the Wikipedia rule. Removing fair use images from userboxes or personal essays in user namespace while leaving this matter unresolved seems contradictory. In all probability the argument could successfully be made that content in user namespace is also covered by the doctrine of fair use, but it seems like an unnecessary risk to test the doctrine of fair use by exposing a fair use image across so many pages. Also, user pages are provided in order to facilitate communication among participants in the project, not to display article content (images and text) outside of article namespace. --Oden 17:26, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
I think my comment above explains why userboxes and personal essays are completely different from the FA template, due to the lack of individual discretion and choice in the FA content and the guarantee that the image will always accompany the FA article summary. And because the use of the FA template on user pages highlights Wikipedia content that they consider useful or valuable, the FA template in this respect functions the same way on user pages as it does on the main page—it draws attention to a highly regarded article. I simply don't see any problem here because the usage is not individually driven and performs the same function as on the main page. Postdlf 20:32, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
Fair enough. Sounds reasonable. --Oden 09:22, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

Bridgeman v. Corel and foreign works

Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. does not allow for copyrighted reproductions of public domain images. I was wondering if this also applies to works where the image in question is located outside of the United States? --Oden 17:41, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

It's not about where the image is, it's about where you're trying to enforce the copyright. Under U.S. law, an accurate reproduction of a public domain image cannot be protected by copyright because it is insufficiently original. Originality is a constitutional requirement for copyright, and so it binds all U.S. courts. Postdlf 20:24, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
OK, good to know. I would assume though that this does not apply to the Commons, where differences in the copyright laws have to be taken into consideration? --Oden 10:51, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

Using web resources on the portals

There are portals who have web resources on the portal page. I strongly disagree to have web resources on the portals, because, the web resources links motivate the users/readers to leave the Wikipedia project. External links should always be used to cite the texts on the page. All the texts on the portals come from the various articles and projects. So I suppose there is no need of Web resources. They seem like advertising. I would like to get added one more point in the criteria for featured portal, i.e. 7. It should not contain extensive external links which are not useful as refernces on the portal. We have one featured portal, Portal:Houston, which contains extensive eternal links in the "Web Resources" section at the bottom. The issue has been come into picture regarding disputed promotion of Portal:Vancouver which contains extensive external links. Regards, Shyam (T/C) 18:00, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

This issue has been shifted to page on featured portal criteria. You may commen on that page. Shyam (T/C) 20:01, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Legitimacy of e-Sports on Wikipedia

Over the past while, I had submitted a number of AfDs in relation to players in the Major League Gaming e-Sport organisation. The result was that a number of pages were kept, but would have to be cleaned up; the remaining pages were deleted.

The following pages were not kept:

The following pages were kept:

These kept pages resulted in being kept largely due to no consensus. As well, these players and their teams (Team Str8 Rippin, Team Carbon, and Team Final Boss) are not the lone e-Sport-related articles that exist on WP.

When I submitted these players and teams for AfD, I cited that they violated WP:BIO, and it could be argued that they are not notable like sports players. It is cited that those in the MLG are featured on USA Network, as the players compete in their games there.

While I do not agree with the consistent adding of the stats of these teams and players into WP, I am certain that others have a different viewpoint. I would like to see some sort of consensus and maybe have this lead to policy undertakings. :: Colin Keigher (Talk) 04:29, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

whilst i will willingly confess to little or no knowledge of this area, instinctually my feeling is that the sport in question deserves an article, whilst the participants do not; they deserve a subsection at best. nevertheless it's an interesting topic; i can see the consensus changing at some point; both xbox and wii operate worldwide rankings in various degrees of implememntation now. at some point in the future wiki will have to deal with people who are really really good at this stuff. nevertheless i think it's safe to postpone this decision for a while to see what happens. --Kaini 06:16, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
So are you suggesting for now that we let these pages be created or we don't do so and wait and see what happens with this industry or fad? :: Colin Keigher (Talk) 06:36, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Many of the players/teams seem to be notable based on the fundamental notability requirement of "multiple non-trivial reports." However, the detailed game-by-game breakdowns are not encyclopedic, any more than we want to carry detailed stats for the Yankees-Orioles game played on August 15 of last year (Yanks won 6-3). Provide a basic summary of accomplishments and add a link to those sites which carry the details. Fan-1967 14:15, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • I think that if the team members have enough sources from which to create a seperate article, such as T Squared or Tom Ryan (an article which I am currently in the process of improving), then they deserve an article just like any other notable competitor and should not have to reach higher standards just because they're gamers. Most of the players that were kept were at the very top of the foremost national gaming league, which like it or not (and some people in the AfD's clearly didn't like it) is MLG. The players I argued for had more than enough media attention and cult status to meet WP:BIO, as well as competing in the top of their sport. There are different levels of MLG play, and all the kept articles are at the pro level (as compared to semi-pro or amateur). My overall opinion is that if a top level player has enough sources from which to create a good article that adds to the quality of Wikipedia, then they shouldn't have to jump through extra hoops just because they're about gamers rather than other competitors. If they don't have enough sources, but should be noted somewhere, then note them in their team's article. If we're worried about their "staying power", these pros have been around and will continue to be around way longer than the average internet phenomenon and have way more sources. J0lt C0la 13:01, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • I'm not sure why there needs to be a discussion on the legitimacy of the sport as a whole. It's not Wikipedia's job to reach a consensus amongst editors on every type of competition to determine if we feel it's worthy or not. What decides this is whether it meets notability criteria. The MLG clearly does meet the notability criteria. Beyond that, each player needs to be evaluated on a case by case basis, in terms of how well they've performed in the league and if they've received substantial 3rd party media attention, which a number of them have. There are many things that I don't consider to be "legitimate" sports by my own definition, but if they meet the criteria set forth by Wikipedia, I have nothing to say against them. Leebo86 13:31, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure why we would have coverage of any professional sport, and having articles about virtual sports is even more far fetched. If we did that, I'm sure someone would claim that there is no reason to cover sexuality, or any hobby or pastime though. I guess we all have the right to waste our life anyway we choose. Atom 15:29, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Um, Atomaton, I think your edit lacks something. Do you mean "if we decided not to cover them for these petty reasons, somebody would..."? If so, you have my support. :)--SidiLemine 16:20, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia doesn't make value judgements. It generally just comes down to notability. As long as the virtual sports and participants meet the notability guidelines, they are appropriate for inclusion. I don't see any reason for policy to make distinctions between virtual sports and "real" ones. --Milo H Minderbinder 17:06, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

I think e-Sports (competitive video gaming or whatever term is preferred) is definitely fit for inclusion in Wikipedia, just like any other professional sports. There is a matter of caution though. Being a relatively young sport, third party sources, even acknowledged media or press agencies, often drop the ball in their research. For instance, when any players are referred to as "the best gamers in the world", it stops being a reliable source to me, since there is no such thing, being the equivalent of "the best sportsman in the world". At the moment, e-Sports is in a phase where large investments are starting to take place, and the same scenario (yet in smaller scale) may be forming as the Internet-bubble. Including manufactured fame/name and such. I find media too eager to pick up on this, and what better example than the recent MLG player signings. Questionable situations occur when the subject is not at all mentioned in specialized (e-Sports) media, but is in mainstream media. This could be a clear sign of the mainstream media not doing their homework, so those situations need a specialist eye. So where should the line be drawn? As far as I am concerned, the biographies of competitions, players, teams and organizations participating in the three major international professional games mentioned in 2006 e-Sports World Champions (Counter-Strike, Quake and Warcraft) are fit for inclusion without question. These are all notable on a global scale due to their performance and professionalism in their sport. Also fit for inclusion are people who made major contributions to the sport, such as Andreas Thorstensson and Angel Munoz. Then, there is the question of local competitions, such as Major League Gaming (Halo, USA) and Starleague (Starcraft, Korea). Top professional contenders and teams of these should be included as well, as long as the competition itself is notable. However, not all players of these top teams should be included if they are not notable individually. Regarding the MLG, it is generally regarded as being at least questionable outside of the USA. Especially the practice of signing players to the company that owns the competition greatly conflicts with the common practice of players being signed to independent clubs (formerly clans). Also, the games being used by the MLG, being Halo and SSMB lack a competitive nature and are not played competitively (disregarding professionalism) anywhere else in the world. Also the level of play has been a regular subject of debate. Nonetheless, I think it is fit for inclusion, as long as the MLG does not receive the great emphasis it has now. It is regarded as a minor league world-wide and Wikipedia should reflect this. Other things considerable for inclusion are for instance the 2005 and 2006 CPL world tour/season and the 2006 WSVG, as well as yearly WCG and ESWC results. These are all considered world championship competitions. -- DJiTH 18:16, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Halo does have its biggest presence in the United States, but SSBM is popular on a global scale. At the very least I imagine the millions who purchased it in Japan are probably playing their copies. Leebo86 13:32, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Just a couple of comments:

First off, I have a real problem using the term sport and sportsmen here. I think we need to remember that these are people playing e-games. They are, therefore, competitors. I think the language needs to be very clear about that. This is nothing against people playing e-games; but to call someone playing a video game an “athlete” is really stretching the use of the term (and yes, I am aware of the usage regarding ‘mental’ competitions).

Therefore, the same criteria for anyone playing an e-game should apply here. Given that, the basic WP:BIO multiple non-trivial reports criteria should be applied (as User:Fan-1967 points out). This would apply to both the individuals and the teams (although I fear that we might be facing a “garage band” problem with every team that gets blog-coverage and has a my-space account will think that they are therefore notable ;) ).

My other concern is about notoriety. Much of the notoriety being cited on many of the gamers’ pages (not just these specific ones) appears to be very good marketing from the game manufacturers. Getting these people in the limelight is their business, but doesn’t necessarily make for notoriety. If I could draw the parallel to the multitude of developers of various video games that are being interviewed in magazines like Computer Gaming World, Electronic Gaming monthly, and the like. Those types of citations aren’t normally applicable for notoriety; at what point do we take aggressive marketing campaigns use of gamers to promote their games as legitimate coverage for notoriety? For these specific pages, there is a lot of reliance on cites to the websites of MLG and the USA Network, which broadcast MLG competition. Possibly the ‘criteria’ mentioned by User:Djith would be a starting point, the breakout into the mainstream media (opposed to the specialized), would be a starting point. I don’t know the answer to this, but I think it does need to be included in the discussion.

I agree with User:J0lt C0la that the basic inclusion criteria should be WP:BIO. I think that the delete/keep for the groups mentioned above is an indication that this just wasn’t the case here. Some of them did meet BIO and were deleted, like Dave Walsh, and others who don’t, like Zyos, were kept. SkierRMH 20:54, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

For the record, Dave Walsh did get kept. J0lt C0la 23:32, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
This whole notion of people being interested in how other people play computer games seems utterly ridiculous to me, so I'll limit myself to a single comment. We read above: I have a real problem using the term sport and sportsmen here. I think we need to remember that these are people playing e-games. They are, therefore, competitors. But sitting on moving chairs, burning great quantities of gasoline, and advertising stuff (traditionally booze and cigs) is conventionally called motor sports. True, motor sports sounds like an oxymoron to me, but millions of right-thinking folk disagree. Anyway, doublespeak is endemic within languages: "people's republics" (tyrants' monarchies), "defense" (offense, invasion and occupation), "Liberal Democratic Party" (conservative crony cliques), etc etc. -- Hoary 14:45, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
Just wanted to say that I agree with basically everything in SkierRMH's post above. -Hit bull, win steak(Moo!) 05:08, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
  • I'm not saying that everyone who has ever competed in MLG (or CPL or insert-a-league-here) should have an article, but if they are at the top of their league consistently (such as Team Final Boss members, who had 2 or 3 national championships in a row) and have enough sources to write an article from (I am having no problem writing the Ryan twins' articles, except my own lack of time) should be kept. But what I am also saying is that someone who is at the top of their league and does have adequate sources from which to write an article should not be deleted just because they have not participated in any international competitions. If we do this to gamers, we should have to do that to every competitor, and then no one who hadn't been in the Olympics or something of that nature could be kept. I also disagree with the concept that Halo 2, for example, "lack[s] a competitive nature", and the idea that it doesn't matter enough to include. I know that it doesn't get played professionally much outside of the US, but neither does American football, and that doesn't keep it from being included. Top of one's national competition is all that is required under WP:BIO. Gamers should not have to reach higher standards than other competitors, they should be held to the same standards as anyone else. If you feel that MLG is over-emphasized, start writing articles about players from other leagues to even things out rather than decide MLG notables should be deleted because you are under the opinion that the league is minor. This may be true from a perspective of the entire world, but again, only being the top national league and the top national winners is required, and if we change this for gamers, then we should change it for everyone. J0lt C0la 23:32, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

"Threats of Blocks"

There's an odd issue with the current policy for handling WP:NPA. At the moment, we require for WP:PAIN posting the {{npa2}} templates.

However, the language of these templates mentions the possibility of blocking. Threat of blocks has been interpreted as a personal attack, so this leaves the odd position of the recommended response to a personal attack being something that could be read as a personal attack. It seems like this needs to be investigated. --Barberio 18:18, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Informing someone that personal attacks can result in a block is not a personal attack. It is a warning only. Blueboar 18:25, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
I don't see how warning someone of the potential consequences of their actions can be construed as a personal attack. The threat of a block is legitimate, and routine in higher-level (3 and 4) warning notices. Quite frankly, some people don't pay attention until they see that threat. Fan-1967 18:28, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
This is my personal understanding too, but others have read it differently. --Barberio 18:30, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
I find that leaving canned template turds on the talk page of people you are in a dispute with is really satisifing and often works well. if your goal is to piss people off and escalate disputes. Policies that require us to do such are great ideas if we want editors to leave the project in disgust. Sarcasm intended. Legalistic requirements that people be warned via template as opposed to personalized message are stupid. Hipocrite - «Talk» 19:46, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
I couldn't disagree more. Personalized messages are far more likely to end up getting inflammatory and escalate the situation. Fan-1967 20:24, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Only if they are laced with vitriol. A calm and polite warning would always be more effective than a template. The problem is that editors too often forget they are dealing with real people. It is one of the draw backs of online interactions. Just look at usenet. We don;t have to be usenet if we think before we write. David D. (Talk) 20:35, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
If the person placing the warning is the one being attacked, all the more reason to use an impersonal, canned template. The alternatives are likely to seem either angry or whiny ("Please stop being mean to me.") -- Fan-1967 21:19, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Sure, but better it is left to a third party, if it really has to be done. I can't think of one good reason for an aggrieved party to use a canned template. If their dispute is beyond discussion they should walk away and get mediation. In general allowing others to defend you is ten times more effective than doing it yourself. David D. (Talk) 21:24, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

WP:PAIN has been modified to allow alternative methods or responding to the editor. Relevant essay on this topic Wikipedia:Don't template the regulars --Barberio 19:40, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

... And it was reverted by an administrator soon after. Discussion on changes to the WP:PAIN process should be discussed on its talk page prior to such edits. The process and templates have stood for a long time and have developed in this way for various reasons. In addition, there is clearly no concensus even here at this time. Steamrollering such a fundamental change over a page is certainly not a good way to edit even an article. It certainly isn't appropriate for a wikipedia process, policy, guideline. Especially a longstanding one. Be bold, but do it with respect, due attention, care and discussion (in the appropriate place and with concensus). Crimsone 20:21, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
I'd certainly prefer being able to use alternatives to the templates, to avoid counter accusations of 'threats'. --Barberio 20:26, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
WP:PAIN is no "longstanding" process, having come into existance less than a year ago (5 February 2006 was it's first real use). The requirement to use stupid inflamatory boilerplate on experienced users talk pages is even newer, added on 21 June 2006, in a fit of WP:ISTOTALLYALEGALSYSTEM by Paul Cyr. Hipocrite - «Talk» 20:35, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

I'm extremely frustrated by this. From my perspective, the templates should be worded such that using them should be the accepted course of action. In practice, it appears that using them is often seen as a hostile action, especially when the involved party uses them. Maybe there needs to be a separate set of templates specifically for use by the involved party? --Ronz 20:53, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

See my reply to fan above. The short version, let others defend you. David D. (Talk) 21:26, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Yes I saw it and don't agree. What you're saying is basically to document the templates with "Don't use this template for warnings if you're an involved party. Instead wait for help." If you'll forgive the sarcasm, it's a bit too close to "You're a victim, get used to it." --Ronz 21:36, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
(edit conflict with hipocrite) My experience of seeing these things play out is that, victim or not, confronting the problem head-on always ends up in a protracted fight with one party leaving "forever". Mediation from third parties usually calms things enough for normal relations to continue. This has shaped my view of the effective strategy. I know its hard to resist not defending oneself, but it is by far the most effective approach. David D. (Talk) 21:49, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
If nothing else, the templates need to be better documented. --Ronz 23:03, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
More accurate - "If you're an involved party
If both you and the other side both know the warning templates are useless
You already know to email a bunch of adminstrators and experienced users who are likley to stand up for you.
If only the other party knows the warning templates are not useful
9/10 times you are wrong.
If only you know the warning templates are not useful
9/10 times you are using them to browbeat rather than inform.
If neither of you know the warning templates are not useful
They're actually useful.
Hope that helps! Hipocrite - «Talk» 21:45, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
Sorry, you lost me there. If they know what? --Ronz 23:03, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
The warning templates, like the one you thew on my user page like a turd on a platter, serve to make experienced users know they are dealing with people that don't get it. See WP:TEMPLAR. Hipocrite - «Talk» 03:02, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
You demonstrate an interesting point. Editors use template use as an excuse to continue the behavior that the template warns against. Thanks. --Ronz 03:14, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

What's the point ?

I think we have lost the plot: some of the articles here go way beyond an encyclopedia in terms of their length and the scope they are trying to cover. Rather than simply laying out a concise definition of a particular term, some articles read more like (bad) university theses ! We must resist this and edit accordingly ! —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Fbooth (talk • contribs) 16:45, 5 January 2007 (UTC).

Then address the pages in question or mention them here, so we can know which ones you're talking about. However, and I've heard this twice in the last few days, there seems to be a misconception that an encyclopaedia article shouldn't go into "too much" detail on the topic; it should remain a short précis of the information. But Wikipedia is not paper - there is no need to exclude information purely to be concise, it just needs to be ordered better. Your point may well have merit, but an example would be useful to understanding what you mean. Trebor 16:57, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

I would agree that much of Wikipedia goes beyond what is encyclopedic. While Wikipedia is not paper, and can therefore include information that would not be included in encylcopedias like World Book and Britannica, there still needs to be limits. It bothers me most on the popular culture topics. Wikipedia should not be a replication of all the information available on sites like allmusic.com, imdb.com, and tv.com. Also, Wikipedia should not be a place for the replication of all information available on company websites. Wikipedia: What Wikipedia is not does try to address this problem, but it's a weak attempt.Librarylefty 08:16, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

I agree that there should be limits imposed, but the idea that "laying out a concise definition of a particular term" should be the answer would, I feel, make us Wikidictionary rather than Wikipedia. To say 'include information that any researcher could possibly be interested in, omit minor details that they wouldn't be in' would be a good plan but impossible to enforce because researchers could be interested in anything. For example, an article on a minor cricketer, one person may just be interested in thier run totals, but someone interested in his bio might want to know where he went to school, even if it isn't notable information from the point of view of his cricketing career. Personally, I don't think superfluous information can be too great a problem in a medium where there is little limit on space. Needs differ from article to article and from POV to POV. SGGH 11:25, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
It's certainly true that some articles are too long. It'a also almost certainly true that (a) trying to reduce their length is going to produce an argument, and it is also true that (b) that are a huge number of articles that are too short (stubs) or need a lot of other work. Thus a suggestion: work on (b), for which you will simply receive gratitude, rather than on (a), where you could end up not only using up your valuable time without any significant result, and also take up the time of other editors who don't agree with you, and won't be doing something else more constructive because they're debating with you. John Broughton | Talk 01:33, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

PC

Does Wikipedia have a policy about not being politically correct. I believe we should have such a policy. --Haham hanuka 17:30, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not censored probably covers that, saying "some articles may include objectionable text, images, or links if they are relevant to the content". Trebor 17:39, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
Or, another interpretation, may people interpret politcal correctness to be a non-neutral point-of-view, so WP:NPOV would cover that aspect. Fan-1967 17:42, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
I agree with Fan-1967. Political Correctness can be interpreted as POV, because its a 'spin' on consensus so as not to appear to be against any possible group or belief etc. and surely that is a POV in its own right? SGGH 11:19, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
I don't think that a policy would be advisable as it could be abused by people purposefully trying to add bad language or offensive material (for example, a user trying to turn entries about racism into galleries of racist abuse, for racist purposes and blocking revisions on the ground that they are against the non-PC policy). A guideline stating that objectionable content is permitable in context and moderation might be more appropriate.
Personally, I see PC as being worse than POV, it's a form of censorship aimed at softening the impact or meaning of something. It distorts and it devalues.
perfectblue 11:42, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

Proposed guideline v. Guideline

Hi. I started an AfD debate and I am becoming confused regarding the importance of a proposed guideline. My concern is over the proposed guideline WP:ROYAL being applied to preserve an article while the subject of the article may not satisfy the accepted guideline WP:BIO. Please see the debate, Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Farahnaz_Pahlavi. While I definitely admit to making mistakes in some of my arguments, I still feel that my distinction between guideline and proposed guideline is correct. But I am not sure, so I have come here. Most of the people seem to believe that WP:ROYAL has value over WP:BIO for this article. Is there something I am missing? The Behnam 22:48, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

We generally upgrade proposals to guidelines or policies when there is evidence that people are using them. If most people believe WP:ROYAL is superior to WP:BIO for the topic, that may well be evidence that WP:ROYAL will be a guideline shortly. At the heart, all notability is about whether there are multiple, independent, reliable sources for the topic; whether they have been found yet or not. GRBerry 15:01, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
And when the topic is a former princess whose father was an internationally-recognized Emperor, it is likely that such sources exist, even if they're in Farsi. Lethiere 09:19, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
Hello Houston! we have a slight problem here. Is Ségolène Royal ? -- DLL .. T 18:40, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Note that WP:ROYAL is pretty much a one-man show despite heavy discussion on the talk page. I've seen people complaining both that it sets the bar too high and too low, and it's not particularly heavily used, so I seriously doubt it reflects actual consensus or will do so in the near future. >Radiant< 13:43, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

user page in general category?

Category:Insurance includes a link to User:Porto Seguro S.A. Is this allowed? If not, may I suggest when someone has time they automatically disable Category designations on user pages. (Well, unless there are a whole set of private categories where user pages would be normative.) 2*6 06:20, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

It's not there anymore. Remove any such miscategorizations like that you find. Just state in the summary that userpages can't be in article categories. There are user categories, however, so doing what you suggest wouldn't work. – Someguy0830 (T | C) 06:25, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
Thanks. I wasn't asking for a ban on the user -- just wanted to know policy on the matter. I was pretty sure the category designation didn't belong, but I'm new and didn't feel comfortable editing someone else's user page. I'll be bolder in future, though. :) 2*6 07:16, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

Song Lyrics

Simple yes/no will probably do here. Am I correct to assume that complete song lyrics are not appropriate for articles about a copyrighted song? –  Anþony  talk  14:42, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

Yes. Lyrics are generally copyrighted, so including them is a copyright violoation. -- Rick Block (talk) 19:29, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
There are rare exceptions in which the song may be copyrighted but not the lyrics used in it, such as where the lyrics were lifted from a public domain poem, the Lord's Prayer, or some such other ancient source. In this case, however, it makes more sense to link the article describing the original work, or if there is none, to simply mention that work by name. Deco 16:19, 1 January 2007 (UTC)
Lyrics are also allowed when there are critical discussions of the lyrics, such as We Didn't Start the Fire or American Pie. User:Zoe|(talk) 00:23, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
This shouldn't be abused (I think these articles are OK in this situation), and commentary and scholarly discussion about them should still follow acceptable standards for textual fair use. This is essentially the "100 word" rule for a quote, although there really are no hard and fast principles. Verbatium copying of the whole text (or the entire song in this case) is generally not permitted, although quoting a small portion can be considered acceptable fair use. --Robert Horning 08:36, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
Neither of those articles has complete song lyrics. Snippets of song lyrics for analysis are fine for fair use, as long as they aren't too much of the song. And the Billy Joel one has a link to the full lyrics on the official BJ website, a perfect example of what external links are for. --Milo H Minderbinder 16:04, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
I heartily concur. Just wanted to add that external links to sites which contain lyrics are also not acceptable since we cannot link to other sites which violate copyright, but in the Billy Joel case, the site is to his official website, and since he is the copyright holder, that link is perfectly fine. User:Zoe|(talk) 16:46, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
See point #6 here and also this for details. − Twas Now 11:09, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
A while back, I posted some searches here that I did (now removed from the archive), highlighting the sheer number of song articles linking to lyrics sites: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. I have started removing these, but don't have the time or patience to remove them all; if others could assist it would be much appreciated! Scott 21:10, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

Upgrade WP:KETTLE to guideline

Following from two things - one being my response to a recent WP:PAIN report, and the other being the MfD currently tabled on WP:PAIN itself, I've just noticed the kind of tit for tat that seems to be regularly going on.

I've just (hopefully) come from the end of an issue between two users where a clear case of WP:KETTLE was evident, the last comment from the reporting user being "Thanks, I'll have to be more careful about rising to the bait in future" (but not quite so civil.) Sure, perhaps not the best way of saying it, but still an important lesson that it seems too many people don't quite "get".

A recent comment on the MFD noted the increasing responsibility passed to administrators on the issue of dispute resolution (HERE), and suggested promoting better awareness and involvement of editors in the dispute resolution process.

Perhaps the result in the talk page linked above is a one off case, but it seems that the use of WP:KETTLE seemed to get the point across that misbehaviour on one side doesn't excuse it on the other. This is implicit in the WP:NPA policy, which states that there are NO excuses for personal attacks. I feel that if WP:KETTLE were more prominant, more editors would be aware, and so hopefully encouraging more editors to seek alternative resolution to their disputes rather than the tit-for-tat seen so often. This may involve WP:DR, or may involve simply walking away. I just feel that it should be seen and explained clearly in official terms that a personal attack/incivility is no justification for reciprocal behaviour, and that in such cases, both sides of the dispute/disruption may be treated equally where WP:KETTLE is evident. This, I hope, might help to reduce the number of disputes that spiral WAY out of control, and into the depths of the vicious circle of incivility and personal attacjs that seem to embolden and further divide both sides in a dispute. A second benefit is that it becomes more strongly citable in dealling with such situations.

Feel free shoot me down if it's a bad idea, but please speak up also if you agree :) Crimsone 22:14, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

I agree with the principle of WP:KETTLE but am not sure it needs to be a guideline. A guideline, after all, is something that recommends or recommends against an action. WP:KETTLE is only really an extension of WP:NPA, saying "Don't make a personal attack as a response to one". Couldn't that point be added briefly to the remedies section of NPA? That's just my opinion though. Trebor 22:52, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
  • I think the better approach would be to clarify on WP:CIV and WP:NPA that you shouldn't be complaining about people if you're guilty of the same. Another place where this might help is WP:AN3, considering that many reports are made by a person on the other side of the same dispute, and thus give a biased view. I have no objection per se to calling KETTLE a guideline, but doing so won't actually accomplish anything much. >Radiant< 13:39, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
    Thanks guys. You are of course quite right. Following this and a variety of other recent comments, I've made some additions to WP:NPAs remedies section regarding this, and also regarding ignoring personal attacks as a "first-stop" remedy. I believe the changes reflect the current and most reasonable view. Some better wording may be needed though. I'll refrain from adding similar statements to WP:CIVIL though on either point for the time being to see how well received they are on WP:NPA. Of course, somebody else is most welcome to do so theirselves if they feel they should. Crimsone 17:45, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

Proposed refactoring of NPA

WP:NPA, as it stands, presents a few problems, especially given its importance. First, frankly, it is just not well-written. It is disorganized, at times redundant, and even outright states that it is subject to abuse or manipulation through Wikilawyering. Second, the page can be read as encouraging a certain level of escalation and confrontationalism regarding personal attacks. In the interests of shifting the focus somewhat away from tit-for-tat and in ensuring that established policy pages at least have a modicum of compelling prose, I've authored a suggested refactoring. I don't think being bold is appropriate on a policy page; instead, I'd like to see if these changes -- or perhaps some compromise or third option -- can meet with consensus. Serpent's Choice 07:59, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

I've taken the liberty of doing some copyediting on the proposal. Please change back anything that you think is not consistent with your intent for revising the policy. I do think I've clarified and sharpened the language, but I realize that I may also have inadvertently changed the meaning; I won't argue with whatever you want to do with my revision.
I also made one change of substance, which (thinking about it) probably should have gone to the talk page instead, so I'll note that here and post it there as well - A strong recommendation in the policy against replying to personal attacks on the talk page of an article. John Broughton | Talk 15:15, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
To be honest, when I first started getting into Wiki editing, WP:NPA was probably the the only thing I truly understood (I encountered a severe situation very early on), and seemed quite clear enough. I am absolutely certain that the entire thing does note require a re-write.
As to your second point though, following the response to my WP:KETTLE question on this page, the comments in the PAIN MfD, and indeed your own, I have made two additions to the remedies section of the policy which, subject to their not being removed, should reduce options for wikilawyering, and reduce the incidence of people using the policy to escalate conflict rather than de-escalate it. Crimsone 17:29, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
I'd still like to see NPA better written simply because it is a policy page. In the "live" version, it has a large number of very small sections, some of which (Don't do it and Community spirit, in particular), probably ought not stand on their own as sections because they are only a single sentence. My suggested refactoring changes very little of the general content of NPA, although it does try to suggest a generally less retaliatory stance. It does, however, re-arrange a great deal of text to make the policy seem more of a coherent whole. Regardless, the proposal is "mine" only in that I made it ... your input, like everyone's, is welcome and appreciated. Serpent's Choice 00:24, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
I'm afraid I can't agree with you. The content of those small sections is very important, and the fact that they are in their own sections adds much needed emphasis on them. As I read it, it IS a coherent whole. Admittedly it's not all bunched up into paragraphs, but then, for what really should be a simple concept, it neads to be a simple page, which is what we have now. The policy as it is gets the point across, and gets it across clearly. To anybody who reads it, it's spirit is quite clear. With the additions I made earlier to the remedies section, it's not very retaliatory either (in fact, it discourages it). Policies are not articles - they are official stances on a concept (ie, in this case, an official stance on personal attacks). They don't need "brilliant prose" - they need appropriate and official prose that gets the point accross quickly, easily, and with appropriate emphasis. I feel that the current page does just that. Crimsone 00:38, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
Although "don't make personal attacks" is certainly a simple concept, the very fact that we currently have a disclaimer (WP:NPA#Be aware of Wikilawyering) on a policy page tends to indicate that we cannot have just a simple page. My concerns with the current structure are largely that related material is split up or repeated. How the attacked person should or can respond is split into the Being reasonable, Alternatives, and Remedies sections and part of the Consequences section (about removing attacks). Speaking of consequences, those can be found in both Consquences and Remedies. The misguided notion section (whose title I also think is problematic) seems to overlap with the brief Community spirit line. It is true that policy pages don't need to meet the writing standards of Featured Articles, but they are how we present ourselves, our traditions, and our expectations to newcomers and to ourselves. I think it benefits everyone to have them written in a clear, thourough, organized manner to set the tone that this is a serious project with expectations about the quality of the written word. In any case, VP probably isn't the ideal place for this sort of threaded discussion ... would you care to adjourn to either the main NPA talk page or the proposal talk page to discuss your objections to the refactor in an effort to move towards compromise and consensus? Serpent's Choice 01:54, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Elimination of Fair Use Rationale in Promotional Photos

17:38, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

PD in US? What about other countries?

Hi, Can anyone explain how does the PD-US, PD-Gremany, PD-France, etc. comply with the "PD" idea worldwide? For example, I have a 1945 text book originated in the US. Here in Israel, text books expire 50 years after creation - this book is PD in Israel. However, from what I understand, US policy is that text books expire 70 years after the author's death.

1) I live in Israel. Does this mean I can upload this text to commons/wikipedia as PD-IL?
2) If I had lived in the US, does this mean I could not upload this text as PD-US? Could I upload it as PD-IL even if I were in the US?
3) If a picture has a PD-IL tag, does this mean that americans cannot use the picture freely? And if the picture resides in the commons site - can they link to it?
4) Am I allowed to add/upload a non-PD-IL picture to the Hebrew Wikipedia?

I did check out your policy and FAQ pages, the problem is that you have too many of them, and my reading-English is so great. Thanks, Yonidebest 10:42, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

If the book isn't in the Public Domain in the US, you shouldn't upload it, not under any PD type license, not on any US-based server (afaik content of Hebrew Wikipedia is currently on US-based servers too). If the book "originated in the US", I assume it was (also?) published in the US, so you wouldn't get a "PD" in the US with a US publication date of around 1945. Extracts may be Fair Use, depending on circumstances, but never the book as a whole. And also, existing books rather go to Wikisource: than Wikipedia. And then I wouldn't know if the book is interesting enough to be uploaded there (I don't know, you didn't name a title).
Of course, if the book can be considered a reliable source (can it? - I don't know, you didn't mention what book you were talking about) there's usually no problem to use it for Verifiability. If it isn't in English, note however to comply to WP:V#Sources in languages other than English.
Re "tailored" answers: Wikipedia:Help desk is rather something where you'd get an answer specific to your situation. Or they might redirect you to existing policies and guidelines. Then, read them, like we do. I'm no native English speaker either. And Wikipedia doesn't have "too many" pages in that sense. For instance, http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Copyright_How-To is quite instructive for copyright issues regarding publication on US-based servers of material from several parts in the world. Wikipedia help/guidance pages on the subject don't give half the amount of detail given there: for example your 1945 book *may* fall under the exception mentioned in http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Copyright_How-To#Rule_6 (that is: for the Gutenberg website!) - Wikipedia doesn't go in such detail for possible exceptions. --Francis Schonken 14:29, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
Basically......All wikipedia servers are in the US, so it has to meet US copyright law regardless of what local law or wikipedia version you are using?
That's a bit of a pain, especially if you come form a country like China or Russia where copyright is a recent invention and most old resources would otherwise be fair game.
perfectblue 15:11, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
perfectblue 15:11, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
My comments above quite hinge on the I assume it was (...) published in the US for the 1945 book. Never published in the US before is quite a different matter, and depends much more on the copyrights as applicable in the countries where it has been copyrighted (or: published without copyright), and possibly on international agreements those countries and/or the US have subscribed to, and *also* on whether Wikipedia aims at honoring copyrights that have no force of law in the US (see last paragraph of Wikipedia:Copyrights#Afghanistan, Bhutan, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Nepal, San Marino, Yemen).
China agreed to the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works on 1992-10-15, and some other copyright-related treaties after that (see List of parties to international copyright treaties). I've no idea what transitory measures (if any?) apply to pre-1992 Chinese works w.r.t. publication in the US in the early 21st century.
For Russia, there are some notes here: Wikipedia:Copyrights#Russia: copyright exemptions.
These matters tend to be very complex. No easy solutions. Mostly all works published or copyrighted before 1923 are now in the public domain in the US (compare http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Copyright_How-To#Rule_1 ), if you want a one-fit-for-all-rule. But then you're not happy because for some other countries some more lenient rules might apply (note that for some countries also more stringent rules apply). Then, study the complex copyright rules & treaties if you want to know about these possibilities (or don't, if you don't want to stumble into the more stringent rules). --Francis Schonken 17:14, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
If US law is the law that counts on any Wikipedia-US-based-site - why do we have PD-IL, PD-DE etc. license tags? Yonidebest 21:15, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
Because, as I said above "Never published in the US before is quite a different matter, [...]" - that is: both copyright-wise in general and PD-wise in particular. It should have been clear from the above that US law distinguishes between countries where a work was originally published (or was authored without being published), and if published, whether or not it was published with a copyright notice (depending on country: for some countries depending on date of first publication the inclusion of a copyright notice does or does not make a difference), and in general: depending on date of first publication by country (copyright status in the US depends on very different dates, that is: different depending on country of first publication). Plus the exception rules by country (France, for instance, has some works *first published in the 19th century* which are still not in the Public Domain) --Francis Schonken 12:19, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

Policy, Guideline and Essay. Please learn the difference.

Way, way, way too often recently I've see both regular editors and admins calling things that are not policy a "policy"...

  • Guidelines - Guidelines are not policy. They can, and should, be broken when they need to be, and can change more often.
  • Proposals - These are not policy yet. It's very unwise to start implementing a policy that's still under discussion.
  • Howtos - These are technical instructions, they just tell you what can be done, not if you should do it.
  • Essays - Essays are not policy, especially not the perennial favourites WP:DICK and WP:DUCK. Try to find actual policy or guidelines to refer to instead of these.

In particular, people referring to guidelines and essays as policy causes a lot of confusion for new users. Try to avoid it. --Barberio 19:42, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

    • Guidelines are summaries of generally accepted consensus. Verifiability is a policy, but we depend on guidelines to determine what counts as a source. Essays perform a similar feature, summarizing a position better than you could yourself. WP:DICK is not policy, but very closely related to WP:CIVIL, which is. WP:ILIKEIT is not policy, but very closely related to WP:DELETE, which is. They're expansions and commentary on the policies which provide useful guidance, like the talmud to our policy torah. Don't knock essays, and don't actively encourage disregarding of guidelines. If you have to break the guideline, one of you is wrong and should be fixed. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 20:36, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Image:Heat Pump COP VS Temp Curve.JPG ... is the licensing valid?

This image was uploaded by an intermittent visitor to Wikipedia. His image summary says that the image came from a Canadian government website ... but he licensed it as a Work of the U.S. Government. I used the link he provided for the Canadian government website and read completely through the the publication that contained the image ... and nowhere did I find that it had come from a U.S. Government agency, although it may well have done so. Is the licensing of this image as Public Domain from the Work of a U.S. Government source valid? Could someone more experienced in the subject of image licensing please look into this? - mbeychok 07:24, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

Incorrect license, plain and simple. I've tagged it as such. – Someguy0830 (T | C) 07:34, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
I also removed it, since it's both a disputed image and was woefully out of place. – Someguy0830 (T | C) 07:38, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
I've deleted it. Crown Copyright is not a free license, and the image doesn't meet our criteria for fair use. --Carnildo 09:19, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

Proposed deprecation of deletion for policy/organisation pages

Please see here for a proposal to archive old policy pages and pages of inactive organisations, instead of deleting them outright. Carcharoth 11:43, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

ReDoing Diagrams

What's the policy on redrawing complex images from copyrighted sources? There are two diagrams (Figs 1 and 2) in

  • Funk, Colin D. (30 November 2001). "Prostaglandins and Leukotrienes: Advances in Eicosanoid Biology". Science. 294 (5548): 1871–1875. doi:10.1126/science.294.5548.1871. Retrieved 2007-01-08.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: year (link) (.pdf format)

that I'd really like to have for the Eicosanoid page. They need to be updated a little – some more research has come in since they were published. With text, I understand that long, verbatim quotes can violate copyright. But with an image, if somebody redraws the image (with different layout, but the same arrows connecting the same ideas, and giving credit for the idea) is it legal and honest? – David.Throop 19:29, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Unless you are careful you might find yourself in a WP:OR based conflict with other users. I suggest treading lightly.
perfectblue 20:07, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

OK, with or without anything new - can somebody re-do a diagram so that it's not an exact copy (or even a nearly-exact copy) but clearly is a derivative work? – David.Throop 21:31, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

  • One point I'd like to bring up is that since that diagram is a result of their research, it might be tough to reproduce without OR or plagarism issues with copying their data. If a way can be found around that you ought to be clear... Wintermut3 05:50, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

my own possible NOR violation?

Please see Talk:HSV color space#Subcategories in .22Visualization of HSV.22. I added the Image:Hueborhood.png along with a description of how it shows a neighborhood of hues around a given color. Since I am the source of the image, and the word "hueborhood", does this violate WP:NOR? I won't object if editors decide to remove it, but I would wonder how much "original research" I did compared to others who have contributed to the page. 2*6 22:36, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

I've posted a comment on the talk page, and I encourage any further discussion to occur there. John Broughton | Talk 02:35, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Correcting Minor Errors

What is the appropriate procedure? If I simply edit the page, how should I justify the correction? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Gerardfoley (talk • contribs) 03:20, 11 January 2007 (UTC).

Be bold and correct it. Fill in a brief edit summary in the box below the edit window (if it's a spelling correction, for example, "sp" will do) and click the 'this is a minor edit' below the edit summary window. This tells those watching the page that your edit was minor. --Sam Blanning(talk) 03:26, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
If you think people may misunderstand your correction, you can simply leave a note on the talk page. start a new section on the article's "discussion" tab explaining yourself. And then say "see talk page" on your edit summary. --`/aksha 03:28, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Reconciling the formal and common definitions of "sock puppet"

As a few here may know, I advocated changing the terminology of "sock puppet" some time ago. The rationale was that, while the majority of Wikipedia users understood "sock puppet" as meaning an impermissible account that should be banned, the WP:SOCK policy in fact defines "sock puppet" as "an additional username used by a Wikipedian". In other words, while "sock puppet" brings to mind Willy on Wheels, it in fact includes a wide range of legitimate accounts, including Dannyisme, Mathbot (and all other bots), and myself (thus my keen interest in this).

Unfortunately, while the situation at the time only involved the discrepancy between policy and common understanding, I fear that my ill-timed proposal made the situation worse. The change in terminology to "alternate account" and "sock puppet" was included into a large rewrite of WP:SOCK by a dozen or so users, which was later found to have been compromised by a banned user. My somewhat half-hearted attempts to reinstate my parts of the changes did not generate any discussion, most likely because I only posted on the SOCK talk page, and dropped the issue soon after. Unfortunately, another section of the rewriting, the Wikipedia:Suspected sock puppets infrastructure, was kept, and continues to use my terminology to this day. This means that while there are many legitimate sock puppets according to policy, there are no legitimate sock puppets according to WP:SUSPSOCK and the associated pages and templates. Whereas before, this was merely a matter of perception, there are now pages which actually contradict each other. Therefore, we need to do something, and I am posting here in hopes that it will start a discussion as to what course of action should be taken. The method which would change policy the least would be to modify all pages relating to sock puppetry and suspected sock puppets to refer to forbidden uses rather than sock puppets. This would also likely require some difficult page moves. My preferred solution would be to change WP:SOCK to define an "alternate account" as an alternate account, and a "sock puppet" as an alternate account used for forbidden purposes (which are already described in WP:SOCK). What do others think would be the best thing to do?--Philosophus T 04:51, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Official policy on "Cultural references" sections in articles

One thing that has personally kind of irked me is sections in articles usually called "Cultural References", "In popular culture" or "Trivia" that do nothing but list references to that topic in TV shows, movies, video games, etc.

I call it the "Family Guy Effect". Now, I'm not against the show Family Guy, but with the huge amounts of cultural references the show makes it is the best demonstration of what I am talking about. Check out Special:Whatlinkshere/Family_Guy and you will see examples of what I mean: the link will almost always be in a section called "Cultural References" or "Trivia", and be along the lines of "In episode 12345 of the cartoon Family Guy...". Family Guy is by no means the only offender here though, other TV shows like South Park and the Simpsons often pop up in the same manner, as well as movies. Another common sight in these sections is songs that mention the topic, invariably in the format of "(artist) mentions (subject) in their song (song), on their album (album)". These can range from very notable, huge hits by popular bands, to songs by artists so obscure and non-notable that they don't even have their own articles.

Now, I am not completely against these "cultural references" lists. Rather, I think they are being put in the wrong place. Almost always, the article for the movie/album/TV show making the reference will already have its own list of cultural references in said movie/album/TV show. Going back to the example of Family Guy, each Family Guy episode already has its own article with a comprehensive list of everything satirized in that episode. Why duplicate the exact same information in this article in the article for the subject being referred to?

These sections can grow to become an enormous mess. Check out KFC#Cultural_references. The section is huge, with references to TV shows and movies, some of which don't even have links to articles on said shows/movies. It heavily detracts from the professionalism of the article. If someone really, really wanted to know what movies and TV shows made cultural references to KFC, they could just click "What links here" and get an even more comprehensive list.

I have found discussions that seem to indicate that other Wikipedia editors are against these sections as well, but have not been able to find an official policy either for or against them. However I think it can be argued that the sections violate parts of WP:NOT, particularly "Wikipedia is not a directory" and "Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information". Does Wikipedia have an official policy on these kinds of sections in articles? If not, I think it would be helpful if one were developed. Krimpet 23:06, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

You can find relevant things at Wikipedia:Avoid trivia sections in articles and Wikipedia:Trivia (which there was consensus to merge appropriate parts of, but no one ever bothered to do it). Wikipedia:Notability and Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Wikipedia:No original research are relevant as well. If there are no reliable sources that discuss the cultural reference in regard to the topic, there is not sufficient evidence that it is important to that topic or why it is notable. A lot of times most or all of these references should simply be deleted, as they are often unsourced, unverifiable, and totally irrelevant. Sometimes, they can warrant keeping for future inclusion in the article, but that does not mean a trivia section is warranted, rather the it is folded into the main text appropriate. For example, the Julia Child article includes culture references, such as a parody on Saturday Night Live and being featured on the cover of Time magazine, but these are integrated directly into the prose of the article and are specifically to indicate the person's importance and involvement in the culture and are cultural references that were included in obituaries and biographies of her as being important. Unverified trivia is a double problem: Aside from having unverified or unverifiable "facts", trivia sections themselves are not encyclopedic. For unsourced trivia specifically, see also the part of the Wikipedia:Verifiability that says unsourced material may be removed. —Centrx→talk • 23:24, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
I'd agree that Wikipedia:Avoid trivia sections in articles is the controlling guideline here; despite the section header being different, they're still essentially "Trivia". A good rule of thumb is that well-written articles should not have bullet pointed text. -- nae'blis 00:15, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
Is the consensus in favor of this approach strong enough to warrant "delete on sight"? So many articles have these, the effort of so many editors, that I rarely bother even pruning them. But they can become a problem, especially for minor but popular figures (Betsy Ross-types). I'm seeing more and more quotations from lyrics where the allusion is so minor that it isn't even "fleeting". -Will Beback · † · 00:30, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
Since it's an editorial deletion and not an administrative one, it's easily undone, discovered, and/or discussed, so I'd say yes. The guideline is fairly new but will not become widely known unless it's implemented (I've been lax about doing it too, pressed for time usually on integrating). -- nae'blis 00:46, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
The guideline has been tagged for four months, and also the concept is fundamental to an encyclopedia. You can find evidence of it in Wikipedia:Five pillars ("Wikipedia is not a trivia collection") and Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not ("Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information") and undoubtedly elsewhere. —Centrx→talk • 09:44, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
It depends on the situation of course, but if trivia is unsourced, you do have a double problem. Even if it were not a hoax and even if there were sources, the items would almost invariably not belong in an encyclopedia article, but what's more there are usually no sources. Also, these pop culture references typically do not represent any "effort" at all. Most of them are from a fan or some other passer-by adding it to the article off the top of his head (is it even true?) with no effort beyond typing, because it is 'neato'. I have just spent more thought and effort writing this single comment about why trivia sections are bad than the effort collectively put into most trivia sections. —Centrx→talk • 09:44, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
Thank you both for pointing out Wikipedia:Avoid trivia sections in articles and Wikipedia:Trivia, I had not noticed them before. However I noticed at Wikipedia:Trivia#Practical_steps_suggestion that spinning off "trivia" sections into separate "in pop culture" sections seems to actually be encouraged! However this particular page notes that it is not a policy or guideline, and the official WP:TRIV page is silent on the issue; perhaps it should be updated to clarify that "cultural references" sections are indeed the same as trivia and should be dealt with? Krimpet 01:30, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

In most cases "Cultural References" are pretty much "Trivia" actually in almost all cases they are but the term trivia is not usually used as needed notice this article Flash it should be merged with the complete article but it has two lines having a whole section, not to mention it's out of place. Cultural References are not always this messed up but some can grow up HUGE like an deleted "References in Warcraft" page, I am in favor of regulating this kind of sections however I don't think we should delete on sight, the important facts should be integrated to the main article before deletion-Dark Dragon Flame 08:08, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

I've done some Trivia pruning by moving the content from the article to the talk page with a note that the text needs to be sourced and converted to prose. I figure that move is at least respectful of the time and effort of the contributing editors but also encourages a more professional and encyclopedic article to be in place. If something is unsourced and seems highly unlikely then I'll delete it with a separate edit noted my suspicion. Agne 20:20, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

With no prejudice to the other mentioned solutions, I've often tried to improve trivia sections by merging related items. For example, twelve separate bullet points for "X is referenced in Y's song Z, where Y sings 'I just love X'" can be condensed to a single one to the effect of "X has been referenced in many popular songs, including Y's song Z, A's song B, ..." etc.

I also agree with the above comments that "what links here" often serves the function that these trivia sections attempt to, and without intruding into the article. I also frequently see categories that similarly try to capture everything that ever might intersect with an article. A lot of these problems might be solved if "what links here" could be made more prominent in the Wikipedia layout, maybe accompanied by a caption that emphasizes its function so that more people realize what it does. Postdlf 20:36, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

I will admit that I very roughly skimmed through much of the above, but to add my own two cents, I generally see three types of "trivia": specific, Family Guy, and arbitrary.
~ I tend to dislike arbitrary things such as "this insert noun here does not contain any letters from insert random word here." The list for these types of things could go on forever, so providing one is little more than a slippery slope into providing hundreds of them.
~ The "Family Guy trivia" can get lengthy, but there is ultimately an end to that information; and I actually think that the What Links Here tool can provide an interesting insight into how things are linked together. I enjoy using the What Links Here tool to see the many things that Family Guy, for example, has referenced. Ideally, it'd be nice if we could separate What Links Here into direct relationships (such as aerodynamics with airplanes) from indirect relationships (such as Family Guy relationships), but I'd guess that doing so would require some relatively-major modifications to the very foundations of Wikipedia's code. All-in-all, I like this trivia if it can be properly handled. One of Wikipedia's greatest assets is that it is virtually infinite. It is unbound by costs of paper and we could, theoretically, create endlessly long pages or as many subpages as we want. Therefore, I'd personally prefer to keep this type of trivia, but designate specific methods for how to organise it.
~ Specific trivia, which is notable for the article, should of course remain. It's really more of a stub that just needs expanding (just like the Wikipedia policies reference).
So there's my two cents... hey, Family Guy had a reference to two cents. :) --Thisisbossi 21:31, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
See Cultural depictions of Joan of Arc ,a heroic effort, I think started by User:Durova who has done a lot of work on similar sub-articles for major historical figures or things. That is the ideal way to do it. The advantage of this is it gives you somewhere to tell people to take their Family Guy ref to. Also, don't underestimate the interest in these references for some people (not me). In most cases these sub-articles will just be Lists, but thats ok. Johnbod 17:23, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
I agree with separate "Cultural references" pages for irrelevant trivia, and trivia-that-isn't-trivia - interesting and relevant trivia - should be merged in with the rest of the article. But basically trivia sections are an abomination in the sight of the Lord, to be avoided at all costs. You get a fair amount of operatic trivia, oddly enough, and we just stuff it into separate articles. Moreschi Deletion! 18:17, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

No matter what current guidelines say, I think it would be beneficial to document verifiable cultural references, but I definitely prefer placing this content into separate articles. How culture responds to various subjects is informative in nature. How can anyone not see that? Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 21:06, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

Personally I do not see what the big deal is here. While the "In popular culture" sections do sometimes go too far, I find some of the information interesting, and I assume that others with different cultural interests find other portions interesting. (For example, most of the video game references mean nothing to me, but that may be because my idea of a video game is something along the lines of Galaga or Ms. Pac-Man, which tend to contain few cultural references. And yes, I know the latter article has its own Trivia section.) So, yes, references that are questionable should be removed, and if an article is being overwhelmed with cultural references, there should be a spinoff article (see The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy cultural references) but I do not think that wholesale deletions of material are appropriate in this case. On the list of all the problems facing Wikipedia, I don't think this one even makes the list. 6SJ7 22:02, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

Update on Ms. Pac-Man, I just broke up the "Trivia" section, placing the items about the game itself into their own section, "Versions and bugs" which is what they were, and renaming the rest of it "In popular culture". The resulting "popular culture" section is short enough that it doesn't bother the rest of the article. Some of the items are so badly written that they probably should be removed, or clarified by someone who knows what they are supposed to say, but someone else can do that. The point is, these things can be made better, wiping them out is not the answer. 6SJ7 22:29, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

The great majority of this stuff is obviously unencyclopedic. I tend to delete it, sometimes plonking it in the article's talk page, and anyway trying to note the deletion there. If there's already an ".... in popular culture" article (and these cultural references are almost exclusively to popular/commercial culture, or anyway to culture whose perps would like it to be popular or commercial), then it all goes in there. I've no fondness for ".... in popular culture" articles and never create them, but when they do exist they act as useful (near-) garbage receptacles. -- Hoary 22:50, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

If the gist of what you're saying is that sociology is unencyclopedic, then I have to disagree. Cultural references, as an expression of how human culture reacts to subjects we cover, can indeed be informative. They can make the subject fuller and easier for the reader to relate to. Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 04:15, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
I'll agree with "can be"; but in practice, it's "not very often." I mean, until two minutes ago the article on Lettuce mentioned two lettuce-referencing sketches on Saturday Night Live! This does not add to people's understanding of the subject. Andrew Levine 03:54, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

Is there a policy for dealing with bad faith AfD nominations?

In the last week or so, we've seen a pair of AfD floods of arguably bad faith nominations, first one users assault on sexual slang, and now today a single user that has an apparent issue with books critical of Islam. In both cases, over half a dozen articles were nominated. In the first instance nearly all of the articles were kept per WP:snowball, and one of the two that wasn't is likely going to pass an overturn at deletion review. In the second case, the vast majority of discussion is leaning towards a unanimous keep.

In both cases the nomination flood was characterized by nearly cut-and-paste nomination rational (if not actual cut-and-paste), and overwhelming keep majorities apparent early on in the debate.

In short, is there a policy to avoid having to tediously defend each of the nominated articles on their face when we're confronted with a massive list of clearly questionable deletion requests? In my opinion I think it's unfair one user's choice to push a WP:POINT to the limit forces other editors to scramble to defend articles that are good and valid. Wintermut3 20:41, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

  • I guess I should clarify, is there a way to apply WP:CSK without having to engage in a deletion debate to the point consensus is apparent? In light of the potential WP:Point violation of a large number of simultainious deletion debates do you guys think notifying an administrator would perhaps be appropriate?Wintermut3

Date-Time Format

Dear Editors:

The ISO date-time format is yyyy-mm-dd tttt+-hh where: 

  yyyy is year,
  mm is month and
  dd is day of month
  tttt+- is time plus or minus hours from UTC (GMT) and
  hh is the number of hours from UTC (GMT).

This ISO format is clear and unambiguous and is being used more and more on the Internet, in archiving and many other places. This ISO (International Standards Organization) format eliminates the ambiguity between the European format (dd-mm-yyyy) and the United States format mm-dd-yyyy.

I propose that the ISO date-time format be advocated and used exclusively.

Regards, G. Stanley Doore 72.83.110.247 05:48, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

Hear, hear! There are 6 possible permutations to scramble days, months, and years, and only two of them make sense. This ISO 8601 standard is one; the European continental DD-MM-YYYY standard is the oother. The English/American convention is not. In fact numerical month numbers are better avoided altogether just because of this confusion. Tom Peters 16:09, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
You do realize that an encyclopedia is written for its readers, right? Your run-of-the-mill user would have no idea what ISO format means. Why would we possibly want to do as you suggest? If you create an account, you can set your Preferences to what date format you prefer. User:Zoe|(talk) 17:26, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
Agree with Zoe. WP:MOSDATE explains the issue. Crimsone 17:41, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
The only truly unambiguous dates are ones like January 10, 2007 (or 10 January, 2007). I don't see why an encyclopedia should bother with abbreviations at all, the shortened dates read horribly in prose. --Milo H Minderbinder 17:49, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
I'm not sure what you're talking about when you say the "English/American convention". The British use DD-MM-YYYY, as do the Continental Europeans. Why would you think we use the American system? -- Necrothesp 17:56, 10 January 2007 (UTC) -- Necrothesp 17:56, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
O sorry. The american convention only makes sense if it is derived from spoken words like "January tenth, two thousand and seven". I thought the yankees inherited that from the Brits. Tom Peters 23:34, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
Not all crazy things the americans do are our fault ;-) Shimgray | talk | 00:43, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

redundancy among articles

This is not about an official policy (that I know of), but is there a consensus about the following?

Multiple articles, in particular technical ones, may partly treat the same material. This may happen on genuine different lemmata, not suitable for merging, and be necessary to explain technical issues and jargon whenever they appear. Now my question is: Do we want, and our readers need, this redundancy, i.e. do Wikipedia articles need to be self-sufficient? Or do we design some hierarchy where a page elaborates on a possibly unfamiliar concept treated elsewhere?

Case in point, see Saros cycle: after a Lunakhod's rewrite, this page now contains much explanation not only how eclipses recur in saros cycles, but also why an eclipse occurs at all. Much of this is also treated in eclipse, solar eclipse, lunar eclipse, and eclipse cycle. In this case I could imagine some merging, but there is a lot of material so the article would become huge, hence the split; but do we need to repeat the common section of the various related lemmata in all of them?

Tom Peters 16:04, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

  • If the articles share almost an identical set of information, they should be merged.
  • If the articles share a hefty amount of identical information but have substantial seperate information, the shared information should be split off into it's own article.
Some articles may require a brief restatement or summarisation of detailed information, but they shouldn't include huge rafts of redundancy.
--Barberio 18:36, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
In such cases provide summary information as background, and use the {{main}} template quite liberally. It lets readers know that if they still need more info it is available for them, while those that don't need it can carry on reading the article. Zunaid©® 13:18, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

Don't use Essays

For your consideration - Wikipedia:Don't use Essays --Barberio 21:44, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

The first that thing gets cited that in a discussion, the world will explode with the irony. I'd go further, why not just tell people to argue from first principles of our fundamental policies? Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 23:40, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
Essays exist in order to save people the trouble of re-explaining their point constantly. Why not cite them? --tjstrf talk 02:44, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
Because instead of saying things like "Try to be a little calmer, escalating an issue this way might not help", people say "Stop being a WP:DICK!". Which do you think works better? --Barberio 03:19, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Um, we already have one of these: Wikipedia:Don't cite essays or proposals as if they were policy. Of course, since it's an essay, there's no real reason why there should only be one on the same subject - in fact that's approaching ridiculous ("sorry, Mr Marx, but Mr Smith already covered this"). But when they both have the stamp of the Wikipedia space, it's obviously confusing. I think the proliferation of essays and WP: shortcuts may have reached breaking point if we're starting to get this sort of duplication. --Sam Blanning(talk) 03:23, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Could always merge them. --Barberio 03:36, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

And of course, because this is a wiki, we now have a rival essay in dynamic tension with it. Wikipedia:Per --Barberio 16:06, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

And which has had a nice useless edit war around removing the {{essay}} tag on the grounds that it's a "help page" not an essay. Which I think really demonstrates how out of hand the Essay problem has gotten.--Barberio 17:05, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
WP:BIKE. Steve block Talk 17:19, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
This is a good example of why citing essays can be bad. I really have no idea what your comment is saying, or even who it's directed at. Are you agreeing with me? Are you agreeing with Radiant? Are you saying something about the process? I don't know, because you've only posted a cite to an essay, and that essay could be applied to pretty much anyone about anything... --Barberio 23:47, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
WP:AHIWP:RSN. Steve block Talk 00:09, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
WP:ARGH! --Barberio 00:18, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
WP:RELAX :) Steve block Talk 00:23, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

Peronal Knowledge and references

I have attempted to place personal knowledge of significant matters on Wikipedia, and have had the material removed for lack of references.

Should one establish a web entry somewhere else, recounting the facts, and then "refer" to that as the source? Gerardfoley 16:53, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Unfortunately, that won't work either. See WP:RS. -- Visviva 17:13, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
In standard Wikipedia parlance what you are attempting to do is called original research and the problem is there is no sure-fire method to tell you apart from the cranks and pranksters that periodically attempt to add nonsense. As a result, unless the web page you create is controlled by some type of fact-checking editor (news service, peer-reviewed journal, or similar location) a personal web site is not considered an adequate source. --Allen3 talk 17:24, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

WP:Deletion Process

A discussion relating to non-admin closing AFD debates is underway at Wikipedia talk:Deletion process#Disputed tag. Interested parties encouraged to comment. Navou banter 04:02, 12 January 2007 (UTC) ,

Changing one's mind

If a photo is uploaded by the author as public domain, can he go back and change it to "copyrighted" after the fact? Releasing an image into the public domain is a permanent thing; it can't be rescinded, as far as I know. See Image:Sunflower farm.jpg (diff) for an example; this user is changing the tags on a lot of his free images because I've been removing watermarks of his website from them. As I understand it, once an image has been released it can be modified without consent and can't be re-copyrighted. Am I wrong? Kafziel Talk 13:59, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

I think that you are correct that an image that is put in the public domain by its creator can't be removed from the public domain.
One issue is that Wikipedia wants to avoid copyright conflicts. If an artist claims copyright on something, we don't try and research it to prove them wrong, we usually just remove the image and avoid potential conflict. This is a pragmatic legal issue, but also one of being responsible and ethical and respecting intellectual property. In this case, since we can clearly connect the image to the artist recently, we should honor the request and remove the image from Wikipedia. That may not be legally necessary, but we aren't about to go to court to force an artist to honor moving their work into the public domain, so that we can use it on Wikipedia. Since we aren't going to enforce it, the sensible approach would be to not acknowledge or dipsute the public domain status of the image, and remove it.
The action that caused this was apparently the removal of the watermark linking to the web site. I think that action, IMO, was appropriate, and removing it not a violation of intellectual property rights. Clearly a public domain image may be freely modified. I am assuming that you did not remove attribution from the image though. Even if put in the public domain, attribution to the artist should be maintained. It is possible, with appropriate careful and respectful neogtiation, the creator of the image will let it remain. Any artist tends to be sensitive about someone changing their work, even if they have released it into the public domain. I suggest tactfully apologizing, but explaining the necessity or removing the watermark, and suggesting how much we like the work, and that giving it to the public domain offers so many people access to their beautiful work. Atom 18:06, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
Well, I think the situation will largely be okay; I've made the necessary changes to the important images over the last few days, which he doesn't seem to have a problem with. I also made a list of others that aren't being used in articles or are too heavily watermarked to edit, and made some suggestions to him about how to proceed as far as deleting them. I don't think he's especially upset, but I was just curious because I spent a lot of time working on those and it would be a huge waste if he could just speedy delete them all (or cause them to be deleted by, say, changing it to a "no commercial use" copyright tag). For now things seem okay, and the only images we'll be losing are orphaned or in small galleries. Thanks for your help! Kafziel Talk 18:42, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

POV comments

I just removed the following comment that had been added to Alum Bay:

A place of outstanding natural beauty, marred by the pleasure park nearby. Don't go there, you'll be ripped off at every door you walk through. Bypass it and go to the old battery on the headland.

I was somewhat torn because I understand the sentiment but it is more appropriate for the tourist Wiki. I often encounter this. Do you think it is appropriate to maybe promote wikitravel more somehow from Wikipedia, or put a special link to Wikitravel articles on regular Wikipedia tourism-related articles? Wikitravel is not part of Wikipedia, but it contains POV articles which many people are probably looking for in travel-related subjects. --Filll 14:06, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

I was just looking at the article on Bermuda, and appreciated the wikitravel link I found there. So my opinion is that such external links are useful, don't risk the "if you link to that site, why don't you link to our site" sort of argument that occurs when linking to a commerical website with useful but opinionated information, and - because it's a wiki that is linked to - makes it less likely (I think) that the reader will take the information there as absolute truth. John Broughton | Talk 14:46, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

What is it with WP:EL?

I've been following WP:EL, and wonder why it is so contentious, even for a policy page (actually it's only a guideline). The slightest changes trigger a revert war and edit protection. It's impossible to reach consensus on the talk page. Sometimes it even looks like people start arguments just to filibuster all changes, rather than work their ideas into new proposals. But there are serious problems with WP:EL, and it is self-contradictory in places. For instance, we can't even agree whether WP:EL applies to all offsite links, or whether it only applies to the "External Links" section at the end of an article. Parts of it are only applicable to one interpretation or the other, but it is impossible to organize the article. Squidfryerchef 04:49, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

As mentioned in talk discussion there, it applies to all links from a page. *But* any time Wikipedia:External links conflicts with Wikipedia:Citing sources, Wikipedia:Citing sources wins. This could be made clearer in the text. (If it didn't keep getting protected over a silly dispute) --Barberio 00:26, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
It really needs to be refactored into a preface that applies to any offsite link and a part that applies only to the "EL" section at the end of an article. Because some paragraphs are clearly written with the EL section in mind. I feel that is a major contributor to not being able to agree on policy. And I think more eyeballs would help straighten it out, which is why I brought it up here, and an RFC sounds pretty good. Squidfryerchef 01:03, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
I've attempted to raise the issue on the talk page, but it looks like there is too much heat over the Youtube issue. Come back in a month when people might have started acting with civility and calm editing again. --Barberio 13:22, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
You know, I'm beginning to think that policy pages should be permanently protected, and every change ought to be decided by a poll similar to an AfD (NOT the talk page), and should be entered by an administrator. We have lots of stuff on policy pages that shouldn't be there, but happened to get frozen there during a revert war. Squidfryerchef 17:26, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Verifiability for images of artworks attributed to an artist

Does Verifiability apply to uploaded images of works of art that are attributed to a specified artist?

  • I am not addressing cases such as "How do we verify that Leonardo da Vinci really painted the Mona Lisa?" or cases of fraud by an artist.
  • I am not addressing Copyright or Fair Use questions about the image.
  • I am not addressing images of "things" which are not attributed to an artist such as images of Interstate signs or an image illustrating the Pythagorean theorem or a picture of a roller coaster.

I am specifically addressing the question:

How do we (or a user of Wikipedia) determine that the uploader of an image did not create the artwork themselves and attributed it to the artist in the absence of any WP:V or WP:RS source for the image.

  • If an editor adds a quotation: Thomas Paine said "Give me liberty of give me death", they are required to Cite a source. [[[WP:REF]]
  • If an editor adds a statement about a fact: "Darwin suffered badly from seasickness", they are required to cite a source.
  • Does the same standard apply if an editor uploads a work of art and states: "John Doe drew this picture"?

[[WP:V|Wikipedia:Verifiablity] states: "Verifiable" in this context means that any reader should be able to check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source.", "The burden of evidence lies with the editor who adds or restores material.".

Why should these guidelines apply less to claims of attribution of artwork than they do to quotations or to facts?

If the WP:V and WP:RS standards do not apply to the attribution of uploaded images to specified artists, what is to prevent any editor for uploading any image (including images they drew themselves) and attributing it to an artist?

For example, an editor could pour, drip, and fling paint on a canvas, then scrawl "Pollock" on the image, upload it to Wikipedia and claim that it was from their private collection, obtained directly from Pollock, and point out the signature as proof of the images authenticity.

Does WP:AGF apply in such cases? Should everyone assume the uploader was trying to help the project and not hurt, and therefore the image should therefore be accepted?

If any editor is allowed to upload art images and claim they are bona fide creations by a named artist, who is allowed to question that claim?

If no image is available that meets WP:RS is it OK in that case to use an image that does not meet WP:RS or is it better to have no image? Note that I although I do have a specific example in mind, I am looking for a general policy which applies in this case. Note also that I do not believe the editor in the example uploaded a fraudulent image. Uncle uncle uncle 21:29, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

That bold is really distracting, and you're getting past the way things are here. We require the source of images to be provided to verify both copyright information and that they are what they claim to be. Unsourced images may be deleted. Dubious sourcing claims are often challenged (like gfdl-self images that were obviously taken from copyrighted unfree sources) Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 21:45, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Style: dashes in page names

At Wikipedia:Naming conventions#Special characters it says "For use of hyphens, dashes and hair spaces in page names, see Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dashes)." And at that page it says:

For page names:
  • Hyphens and dashes are generally rather avoided in page names (e.g., year of birth and death are generally not used in a page name to disambiguate two people with the same name).
  • If hyphens and dashes are needed to write a page name correctly (e.g., Piano-Rag-Music, Jack-in-the-box, Nineteen Eighty-Four), prefer simple hyphens, and avoid hair spaces, even in the odd case of a range forming part of the title, e.g., History of the Soviet Union (1985-1991).
  • If for greater precision another type of dash is used, always provide a redirect from the variant with simple hyphens and without hair spaces. Note however that using less common types of dashes in non-redirect page names can easily break Wikipedia:Naming conventions (common names), for the reasons given in the Rationale section of that guideline.

First, the suggestion to "prefer simple hyphens" is odd, since about the only case when a hyphen and dash could be considered interchangeable is within a range.

Second, the guideline talks about when not to use hyphens or dashes, but it doens't really talk about when to use them. I've noticed that articles about Canadian electoral districts do use em dashes: for example Etobicoke—Lakeshore. On the other hand, and this is what called the issue to my attention, Quebec City-Windsor Corridor has a hyphen. To my eyes that one is a mistake, since a hyphen can't reach across the space to bind with Quebec: I think it needs to be Quebec City – Windsor Corridor with an en dash. Alternatively, the page could be retitled Quebec-Windsor Corridor, which already exists as a redirect (and is in fact the way I'd normally say it; both usages seem to be about equally frequent in ordinary use as estimated by Google counts).

I raise this here both to suggest that it would be appropriate for the Manual of Style to provide examples of how to handle such page names, and also to invite someone to retitle this particular article if they agree that a dash would be better (anonymous users can't do that).

207.176.159.90 06:00, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

There is a general guideline for wiki article titles that says that the most used name should be the edit title, for instance John Smith would be the title for an article on John Richard Peter Smith if everyone knew his has John Smith. Therefore, I think I'm right in saying that if a hyphen is used it the subject name in the majority of the time outside wikipedia, it should be used in the title. However that point doesn't address much of your question. Taking the Quebec-Windsor Corridor, that then may add confusion as to whether its the province or the capital for someone who is searching for it. To be honest, a possible policey would be to omit/include hyphens based on what is the most likly form for which someone trying to reach the article would search for? that ties in with what it's known as outside wikipedia aswell, personally I would go for that approach but I suspect there are plenty of reasons to disagree with me. SGGH 11:16, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
"THE QUÉBEC CITY – WINDSOR CORRIDOR" appears to be a sort of commercial brand name of VIA Rail Canada ([2]).
Other publications referring to the "railway" aspect also use e.g. "Quebec - Windsor Corridor" and "Quebec-Windsor Corridor" (sometimes both variants on the same page [3])
Publications of a more "official nature", referring to the area, use e.g. "Windsor–Quebec City corridor" and "Quebec City-Windsor Corridor (QWC)" (these two variants both on the same governement-operated website, Environment Canada)
No, apparently, there isn't a way of writing this name "more correctly" than any other variant.
I'd oppose "Quebec City – Windsor Corridor", because of its proximity to the VIA Rail Canada brand name (currently, the Wikipedia article is about the area, not exclusively about the railway aspect). But that redlink can of course be made a redirect to the current article.
Apart from that consideration, if several versions are "correct" there's not much use to advocate the "enhanced precision" rule of the third bullet quoted above from the "dashes" guideline. "Prefer simple hyphen" (second bullet, as quoted above) seems perfectly appropriate here. --Francis Schonken 13:11, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
First, VIA Rail is not using "Quebec City – Windsor Corridor" as a brand name. They do distinguish their services in the Corridor from those in other parts of the country, but this is no different from the way another organization might distinguish services in the Atlantic Provinces from those in another part of the country; they're using it as the name of a region where they do things differently. The form "Quebec-Windsor corridor" can also be found on VIA's web site, for example here and here (page 8 of the PDF).
Second, I argue that in choosing a primary title, "Quebec City-Windsor Corridor" is not one of the correct forms that can be chosen between; it's true that there are people who use it, but these are people who are unclear on the proper use of hyphens, or not used to having en dashes available, or that sort of thing. (As to which city is named first, that makes no difference to me, but "Quebec-Windsor Corridor" is the way I'm accustomed to seeing it, so I imagine it's the more common order.)
207.176.159.90 04:40, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, this isn't a problem of style only. The problem is f. ex., if you're saving a file on local HD, browsers by default take the title of the HTML page as a file name. For WP articles that is the article name. I don't know how US-en based Windows systems behave, but in CE (Central Europe) systems there's a problem if you want to reload that locally saved file back to your browser. In W95 and W98, what I checked, loading a file including an em dash in its file name, fail to load in total. In XP, what I use, reloading the file into IE works, but any pictures, styles and so on are missing since the browser doesn't recognise the subdirectory in which that data is stored in. I am pretty sure that effects any Latin 2 based Windows systems, maybe even Latin 1 (but I have no available). The test to verify would be. Save an article with an em dash, e.g. War in Somalia (2006–present) but don't change the name. Then finish your internet connection, empty the browsers cache. Then double click on the file in the Windows explorer. If now the article appears in your browser window without any images then you see the problem I am talking about. (I believe the reason for this issue is that em dash resp. ALT+0150 isn't a valide character of an URL, the file name of a local saved HTML page therefore has to follow browser conventions. As I understood the problem doesn't appear with other unicode characters (e.g. cyrillic characters) but I found out that left and right single quotes are causing the same issue.) --213.155.224.232 14:47, 14 January 2007 (UTC)


I'm all for usability (see e.g. Wikipedia:Usability). What you describe is very much an Old versions of MS Windows problem ('95 and '98 are currently "officially" not even supported any longer by their manufacturer...). OK, I think Wikipedia technical people should do as much as they can to keep MediaWiki software (and its implementation on any Wikipedia site) as compatible as they can with whatever system that is still more than marginally used (across unicode compatibility or not). Then, the actual problem you describe is a problem that only occurs in an off-site situation (a problem that furthermore can be avoided by the way you save the files on such older systems). I'm not sure what the community thinks about this (that is: keeping absolute compatibility to all systems, whatever their age, and as well both in off-line as on-line situations, even for easily avoidable issues). In this case (for the easily-avoidable off-line problem with MS Windows 95 and 98 etc systems), I'd be inclined to drop that far-reaching backward-compatibility issue (why don't you ask Microsoft to solve it? They're the ones that for instance fail to give a correct implementation to the unicode standard!) - certainly if this far-reaching backward compatibility issue couldn't be saved without making the MediaWiki software lose too much of the unicode-related advantages. (could someone technically-experienced check the viability of the technical issues I asserted above)
See also Wikipedia:Naming conventions (standard letters with diacritics)#Printability for characters/glyphs/... that should be avoided in Wikipedia page names for compatibility of the on-line Wikipedia with older systems, AFAIK the "ndash" is however not an unprintable character in that sense. Or is it? --Francis Schonken 15:38, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
After all the problem with the dashes appeared to be more than only Win'95/'98, so I updated guidance in several places:
Please don't use n-dashes (–), m-dashes (—) or any other type of dash, apart from standard hyphens (-) in page names of content pages, because such symbols, apart from regular hyphens, prevent that some systems (including Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP) could save the page as a file to their computer.
The non-hyphen dashes can however be used in redirect pages if an enhanced precision for the page name is desired for use in wikilinks elsewhere.
Rationale: see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dashes)#Dashes in article names.
--Francis Schonken 14:34, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

on the garbage of the English wikipedia - "in fiction and popular culture" - something NEEDs to be done

Many articles in the English wikipedia, and only in that language version, are currently plagued by irelevant information on the mention of different topics in popular fiction, such as soap operas, pop-concerts, comics, anime and TV-series - most of them look like a dump for fanboys and fangirls with virtually no encyclopediatric value - sometimes this garbage is twice as long as the article itself. I strongly suggest creating a policy taming this trend in this or that way by creating a standard. The article on Vampires seem to have a sane approach on medial reference, up to a certain point after which is starts reminding a dump. Surprisingly Jesus, love,death cancer,The Battleship Potemkin, and Mohammed articles remain completely untouched by it - there must be something holy about them ;). I have a couple of suggestions for policies, but yours are more than welcome - something needs to be done:

Examples: <commented out, see below> —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Internazi (talk • contribs) 16:22, 8 January 2007 (UTC).

I don't know why you felt it necessary to clog up this page with all of those lengthy examples, except to make a point. The solution is to spin those off into their own articles, such as The Art of War in popular culture, and move all of that there, then link to it from the main article. That's the way things are trending, anyway. User:Zoe|(talk) 17:17, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
Commenting along the same lines as Zoe (apart from: don't spin off trivia in separate articles, such recommendation is not officially supported):
  1. {{sofixit}} ("Thanks for your suggestion. When you believe an article needs improvement, please feel free to change it. We encourage you to be bold in updating pages, because wikis like ours develop faster when everybody edits. Don't worry too much about making honest mistakes—they're likely to be found and corrected quickly. You can always preview your edits before you publish them or test them out in the sandbox. If you need additional help, check out our getting started page or ask the friendly folks at the Teahouse. ") — the applicable guidance is at Wikipedia:Trivia#Practical steps suggestion
  2. The guidance at Wikipedia:Trivia#Practical steps suggestion offers many possibilities. Copy-paste to WP:VPP is not one of these, so I commented this copied stuff out above. --Francis Schonken 17:37, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
  1. Agree. The complaining party's username doesn't impress me much, either. Newyorkbrad 17:47, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
And please avoid spaces before your lines : the text becomes scripty and the page can't be printed. Thanks! -- DLL .. T 18:19, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
This is being discussed at the "Official policy on "Cultural references" sections in articles" above, or does it get a new section every week? Johnbod 18:58, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
The suggestion to "just fix it" is useless. If I had a nickel for every time I've deleted a trivia section and it was reverted, I'd be rich. We need a policy on this. Otherwise people will hold on to their precious trivia sections until their last dying breathe. Kaldari 06:36, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
Let's try not to mix up everything here. Trivia section and ".... In popular culture" are two different things, even if the second is sometimes incorporated in the first. I will first start by saying that while I'm opposed to Trivia sections per se, it doesn't mean all the info that's in it must be deleted. Most of the time, there is some notable info there that could find its way to either "legacy", "production", "reception", etc. Sometimes, it's non-notable, trivial, non sourced information, that can be deleted for these three reasons.
About the subject at hand (popular culture), I think it is often a part of what makes a subject notable. The reason for the "popular" is only because they are recent subjects. I don't imagine anyone complaining that the article on Jeanne d'Arc lists a few books and paintings from the 17th c. under a section "in culture". Zoe's suggestion seems very reasonable to me: split to own article, as you would with any section of indue length per summar style.--SidiLemine 16:02, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
The problem is that there is a lot of relevant or just plain interesting stuff that simply isn't notable enough to have an entry of its own. For example, I can see a page citing examples of the lampooning of a fictional character in other media being AFD'd on the grounds that it was a list of non-notables. However one or two (but not much more) relevant examples, such as a tribute episode of another shows, would be valid trivia items.
perfectblue 18:07, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

I am going to have to agree with the original poster that some sort of policy needs to be developed which will address if and when a section on 'cultural references' is appropriate for a given article. I've run into this problem on a number of ocassions in articles where it was clearly inappropriate but also where edit conflicts may be sparked if attempts are made to remove the section. A good recent example is the article on the country of Kazakhstan where a cultural references section existed that talked extensively about Borat and also listed several US movies which showed the country; this information clearly should not have been in an article about a country. There are several reasons why these types of sections are not usually appropriate:

1. The very concept of popular culture is ambiguous and tends to essentially boil down to "This Topic in American Movies, American Music and American Television."
2. These sections tend to become simple trivia sections and are typically far longer than they should be in proportion to the rest of an article.
3. The notability of such mentions is often questionable and tends to detract and trivialize the articles topic. Encyclopedic articles should be focused solely on the serious and notable information regarding the topic at hand, they don't need to catalog every time that topic has been mentioned in movies and on TV. --The Way 07:38, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

NPOV and minority opinions

I would like to discuss what seems to be an ambiguous clarification provided by Jimbo Wales in 2003. He states that for an opinion to be that of a significant minority "it should be easy to name prominent adherents". The issue with this is it does not make clear how many adherents there should be, nor how their prominence should be measured.

For example, two professors may be prominent in their field and their opinions in academia may constitute those of a significant minority, but if they are commenting on an issue that is a mainstream one, should their prominence not be measured in relation to mainstream opinion rather than their prominence in their field; even if the subject they are touching on does relate to their area of expertise?

An extreme example I have used in a discussion is that if you could find another two professors with Ward Churchill's opinion on the victims of 9/11, would it be wrong to say that his view is then the view of a significant minority, even in the knowledge that the overwhelming majority of people do not share the opinions of him and whoever agrees with him?

A slightly different example is if sociologists were in some agreement among themselves that violence by soccer fans is not really mindless hooliganism, but motivated by a reaction from working class males to their surroundings. Where one individual professor and maybe one journalist had commented on a case of one soccer fan killing another soccer fan and asserted the opinion (or speculation) that this was not mindless violence (and these opinions were lone voices, where mass media coverage and the state accepted this killing was mindless violence), would this qualify as a significant minority?

--Guardian sickness 20:30, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

This is a judgment call and must vary depending on the subject of the article. The key is the word "prominent". Even one prominent adherent can be enough in some situations ... if he or she is prominent enough. In others it may take several adherents of lesser prominentce. Be sure you read WP:RS and you may want to look at WP:FRINGE. Blueboar 15:11, 9 January 2007 (UTC)


Thanks Blueboar. I was hoping someone could make a rough judgement from the above examples. Anyway, it is interesting that you are not following Jimbo Wales clarification to the letter. It would seem to make sense to me. If one very prominent person held a view then it is likely other prominent people would agree with that person. Maybe that is what he was thinking when he stated "adherents". Guardian sickness 18:53, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

GS's reading is that NPOV=MPOV i.e. neutral point of view is mainstream point of view (using a definition different from that in WP:FRINGE in that it excludes specialist publications entirely). See his comments on Talk: Kriss Donald as to what constitutes a prominent adherent.

""I believe “prominent adherents” on mainstream issues should at least be easily recognised in the mainstream and have mainstream acceptance of their opinions when the issue they comment on has been the subject of mainstream opinion. Prominent, in my view, would be someone who determines what is news and what is not rather than a journalist who writes articles. I would also say that someone in an important position of responsibility in an institution, be that a Director, an editor, a government minister. Also, someone who has achieved mainstream recognition or fame through their work." “Otherwise opinions like those of “Ward Churchill” could be described as prominent, which is ridiculous. An opinion of one or two professors who are seen as “prominent adherents” on a subject covered by the national media, politicians etc. could give a misrepresentation of an opinion being that of a “significant minority” when it is not. For example, if you could find another professor with Ward Churchill’s opinions, his would still be the opinion of a very tiny minority” “The idea that any BBC journalist who reports on a subject automatically has a “claim to authority” at all is fanciful.”"

GS has argued for the removal of the following sources from the Kriss Donald article on the grounds of being insufficiently "prominent":

1) a politics lecturer specialising in race/racism, writing in a fairly widely-read but non-mainstream magazine, 2) the main BBC investigative journalist assigned to the case, 3) anti-racist groups of all kinds, 4) the trial defence, cited in the mainstream media

(He also claims the disproportionate coverage of the case by far-right organisations and websites should not be mentioned because the sources are insufficiently prominent, but the main dispute is over the inclusion of anti-racist viewpoints and of framings of a killing other than those of the prosecution and the verdict.)

GS has also tried to draw a distinction between "mainstream" and "non-mainstream" topics - i.e. to argue that material which is sufficiently prominent or "mainstream" for inclusion in Wikipedia in general (in articles on academic topics, dealing with adherents of theories, etc) should be excluded from articles dealing with "mainstream" issues.

My own view is that all the sources listed above are sufficiently prominent for the use made of them; further, that opposing narratives of "anti-white racism" more broadly is majority opinion in the relevant specialism and the mainstream definition of racism is not accepted in the specialism (see racism), so the question is of whether mainstream opinion can be used to exclude informed specialist opinion entirely. There are only a few sources because the issue has not yet been addressed extensively in the specialist literature due to the usual academic research/publication delay.

I offered a strong counter-argument that GS's position would require the exclusion of round-earth theories, in a context where flat-earth theories were dominant in the mainstream, regardless of the status of scientific knowledge. I think it is absolutely against NPOV to try to exclude scientific and specialist views simply because they are ignored or peripheralised in the mainstream media. I also think the status of a general theory (e.g. definitions of racism, existence or not of anti-whtie racism) in the specialist literature is relevant to each specific instance, and that comments by people aligned broadly with a majority or significant minority specialist position on the relevant general issue, commenting on the specific case, are

I edited the article initially because I felt it was utterly non-encyclopedic, simply reproducing a dominant POV with no recognition of different viewpoints. I come to Wikipedia as a reader, looking for information and coverage from different angles, to follow up different controversies and make my own mind up - not to be restricted by what editors seek to include. The verifiability, prominence and tiny minority criteria have a legitimate purpose in dealing with baseless claims and "crank" theories, but GS's reading effectively turns them into tools of political censorship, wrongly implying that a perspective popular in the mainstream media is true and preventing readers from exploring alternative explanations.

Incidentally: there's no reason in principle why Ward Churchill shouldn't be included in a 911 article (in practice the 911 article is already burdensomely long and the Churchill issues addressed very extensively elsewhere, so it's a bad example). The 911 article (in its protected version) does include reference to 911 conspiracy theories and a link to a separate article on these; these by definition have no mainstream adherents.

-82.19.5.150 09:30, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Interwiki map

Request help in cleaning up this page, in particular removing sites that are (1) defunct or (2) inappropriate external links. >Radiant< 12:23, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Centralised discussion at MoS on flag icons

Please contribute to the centralised discussion on flag icons at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Flag icons - manual of style entry?. Please add comments over there, not here. Thanks. Carcharoth 14:03, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

An end to vandalbots?

Here is an idea that may eliminate vandalbots/automated spam. I know that when creating an account, it is nessecary to answer a math question to protect agianst vandalbots. What if a math question had to be answered before an edit can be saved, at least for IP's? Yes, this would decrease productivity and be annoying, but it would protect agianst vandalbots very well. Or is this too big a change in Wikipedia's policy, and would not even be used because of policy problems? Seldon1 19:42, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

It would be a complete pain, but it might be less of a pain than vandalism. perfectblue 20:09, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
It would possibly limit accessibility for some people. There are some methods of allowing those with disabilities to access it, but some people still struggle with them. :: Colin Keigher (Talk) 20:14, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
Realistically, vandalbots are the least of our problems. Most of our vandalism comes from living, breathing human beings. Fan-1967 20:49, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
Agreed. Only a tiny, tiny percentage of the vandalism I've seen comes from bots. Most is from anonymous, but still human (unfortunately), editors. -- Necrothesp 19:03, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
A few bots will be stopped, but think of the millions of annoyed people. HighInBC (Need help? Ask me) 17:14, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

No personal attacks

If I say of an editor that "his major problem is that he is a bean-counter, not a researcher", is that a personal attack, or could that reflect an accurate position of their edits, and be exempt? --Iantresman 06:53, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Talk about the edits, not the person. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 07:52, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
The quoted statement would be a criticism of his research skills, and hence would be an attack, yes.--Anthony.bradbury 12:09, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

Does this mean that somebody could say "Edit X has a hidden agenda" but not that "Editor X has a hidden agenda", or would this be classed as trying to weasel in personal attack? -- perfectblue 13:51, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

This is still a personal attack. "Edits" don't have agendas, people do. Compare that to "Rv - added word is racist" - which doesn't call the editor a racist, but simply says that you think he/she made a mistake. You can then (if necessary) have a (hopefully polite) discussion on the article's talk page as to whether the word really is racist, if that editor, upon reflection, disagrees and thinks the matter is important enough to discuss. John Broughton | Talk 14:40, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
What would be an acceptable way of saying that an edit was done in order to push a hidden agenda? For example, how would you word it if you suspected that another editor was adding the religion/nationality/etc that famous murderers/pedophiles were born into specifically to defame that religion/nationality/etc, but you were not able to challenge the edits themselves as they were WP:V/WP:RS and totally factual?
perfectblue 14:56, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
Don't confront the editor personally... If you suspect that a given editor is pushing an agenda, his edits might be considered a form of vandalism. Complile examples of his agenda pushing edits and his edit history. Then bring it to the attention of admins and let them deal with it. Blueboar 15:43, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
If you only suspect the user was trying to defame something, then assume good faith and just ask why s/he feels the information should be included, and why you do not. If the editor couldn't give any valid reasons for inclusion, you could remove it, and if this persisted, bring it to the attention of an admin. Just be careful not to jump to conclusions. Trebor 18:32, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
"reverting, edit implies XXX" Something like that? You're not making assumptions about why they wrote it, that way. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 19:02, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
I would have said know but I probably wouldn't have gotten away with such direct language because of AFG. Unless you have a signed affidavit from them you can not say that you know.
The problem here is that sometimes people conduct legitimate edits for illegitimate reasons and there isn't much that you can do about it. If somebody tags 1,000 murderers and rapists up as being from a particular religious/ethnic background, and it's true and they are from that faith/ethnic background, what can you do? It would be different if you went around deleting things that are true to discredit a race/religion by denying its member recognition, or adding things that weren't true. It's a tricky problem with no simple answer.
perfectblue 19:29, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
It depends on the presentation of the information, but the fact that something is true doesn't mean it has to be in the article. If you don't feel it is relevant or important reverting may be a good choice as long as you are willing to discuss it. Though you might want to discuss before reverting all 1,000. Christopher Parham (talk) 21:22, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
For example, how would you word it if you suspected that another editor was adding the religion/nationality/etc that famous murderers/pedophiles were born into specifically to defame that religion/nationality/etc? Well, you might start by posting a question on his/her user talk page: "It looks to me like you're being selective - doing Germans but not French (or whatever). Is this the case, or have I missed something?" You may learn something. If the editor refuses to answer, or is hostile, then you've got something to point to.
In general, even though much public discourse and debate is about motives ("George W. Bush is a stubborn person, so his unwillingness to change the course in Iraq is understandable"), and this is fully acceptable in public life, Wikipedia policy is based on not attacking edits by attacking editors. And the success of the project shows, I think, that this policy is a good one here. John Broughton | Talk 02:04, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
Hm, interesting - different people have different views on what is actually "racist" (for example, some Americans think "oriental" is racist and most English do not), and there's quite a few people that take personal offense to being implied racist. I wonder if that means that it would be considered a personal attack. ColourBurst 17:19, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Naming conventions

I want to challenge Wikipedia:Naming conventions (common names). It's a bad idea; we should name things what they're called, not what they're known as or what will show up best in search engines. If it's sufficiently popular usage, then that will show up in the nebulous "what they're called" and no special allowance needs to be made for it. I realize that this is a nuiance but it seems almost like the difference between WP:SPOV and WP:NPOV. Since science is the right answer then it will show up in a neutral answer and no special provision needs to be made for it. As for what people will type into the search box: that's what redirects are for, to place users at the correct article name from the common name. Maybe not the whole guideline is totally flawed, but it definately comes off way too strong and I think that it should go in an entirely different direction. --frothT 13:21, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

Whatsoever...
Note that Wikipedia:Naming conventions (common names) is a guideline. It doesn't supersede the Wikipedia:Naming conventions policy, which is summarized as

Generally, article naming should give priority to what the majority of English speakers would most easily recognize, with a reasonable minimum of ambiguity, while at the same time making linking to those articles easy and second nature.

It doesn't name "commonness" of a name, nor "popularity", nor "what they are called" (where's the difference with "commonness"?), etc, as the general naming conventions principle, but maximum recognisability by the majority of English speakers. For article names in English Wikipedia, there's few relevance in using 日本/日本国 as a page name because that would be "what it is called", because it is simply not recognised by, well, the overwhelming part of English speakers (and that includes most non-native English speakers). --Francis Schonken 13:52, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
Are you really proposing that our article at Rome be at Roma? Should Florence be at Firenze? Should USSR be at Soyuz Sovietski Sozialistiki Respubliki? In Cyrrilic or in Latin? User:Zoe|(talk) 21:17, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
The problem is that things are called by a lot of different names. WP:MILHIST is having a big conflict over naming standards for guns. The official name of the M16 rifle is "United States Rifle, Caliber 5.56 mm, M16," but it would be silly to put it under that name. People usually just call it the M16, but M16 is ambiguous, so we specify M16 rifle. Recognizable, unambiguous. Now the big conflict there is over whether rifle should be capitalized. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 07:17, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
The short answer is that we use a lot of redirects to make sure all or most possible names for a thing do end up at the thing itself. >Radiant< 13:24, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
This has been suggested quite a few times. The problem is the proper names tend to be unrecognizable, creating massive amounts of confusion when people type in a name and get redirected to a unfamiliar place. ColourBurst 17:10, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Use of International System of Units (SI)

What is the policy/guideline/concensus on the use of units in measurements?

I ask because I came accross an article an editor decided to "Americanize", giving preference to traditional units like pounds and inches instead of kilograms and centimeters. Since nearly all countries in the world, including the US, has adopted the International System of Units (SI), and the English Wikipedia can be regarded as an international comunity, one would expect to use the SI as standard practice. When I suggested this to the editor, (s)he replied "We do not use the International System of Units" and stating that since the English language Wikipedeia is written from an American POV, it should use American standards.

I disagree, and since I cannot find any policy or guideline, i'd like some input from the community. --Edokter (Talk) 13:27, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

  • the English Wikipedia is most certainly not written from an Americentric point of view. Sure it's an english-speaking wiki, but we don't want to exclude Brits, Austrailians and all the other english-speaking people of the world. As to the units themselves, I'm of a mixed mind. Since I am an American, SI units fequently seem a bit awkward to me (and some of them are more clumsy, frankly, especially when you start talking about having to use miliatmospheres instead of mmHg or inHg or other more esoteric units, and I still think a Roentgen is far more useful as a practical unit than the Sievert which needs a mili/micro prefix to measure anything useful). I'd be loath to support a push to make either the standard, frankly, given the number of editors it might put off. SI is the international standard, especially in the sciences, where even the Americans seem to have given up trying to keep the imperial system. I say for verifibility, use data the way it's native source does barring other considerations: if the source uses SI, copy it faithfully, if it uses imperial units, ditto. Wintermut3 13:58, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

Here's the relevant guideline: Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_(dates_and_numbers)#Units_of_measurement Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 14:17, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

Lists

I have raised this before, and been jumped on, but being fairly resilient I am going to raise it again.

As we all know, there are a vast number of "List of......" articles in the encyclopedia, with varying degrees of usefulness. And we also know that new "list" articles are generated daily, most of which get deleted either via {{AfD}} or occasionally via {{speedy}}. And a few survive as useful contributions.

Given that there are about 30,000 articles of this type already contained in our pages, a review of all of them would be a challenging project. But as about 99% of new "list" articles do not survive, but take up a significant amount of editorial time in AfD, would it not be possible for any newly submitted edit with the title "List of........" to be submitted to immediate peer review? And would it not save time? We could build in an appeal process for the author if s/he was not willing to accept the review decision.--Anthony.bradbury 15:22, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

One problem that I see with this idea is that it take a bit of time to determine if the list in question is cruft or useful. If we put it to peer review as soon as it is created, it will be in it's infant state (probably with only a few entries on the list). That is too soon to see if it is useful or not. I agree that most "list of" articles are useless and should be deleted, but we don't want to eliminate the few that might be useful before they have time to be built. Blueboar 15:30, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
Do list articles really have a worse survival rate than any other kind of article? It seems like the normal new pages mechanism can handle this fine. Christopher Parham (talk) 21:24, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
If I understand you correctly, you're proposing an entirely new "peer review" and appeals process for a relatively small percentage of new articles. So editors would need to thrash out how that would work - which would require, what, new policy? And there would then be two parallel processes, one for all new articles but lists, and one for lists, meaning yet another increase in the things that Wikipedia editors might need to know?
In short (if it's not already clear where I'm going), if you feel really strongly that a closer review of new articles that are lists is merited, you might consider just starting a wikiproject. John Broughton | Talk 01:54, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
Do you have a source for that 99% figure? -- Visviva 17:03, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia Essays

So after reviewing many of these "essays" written on wikipedia, I agree with above posters that conclude that these essays are useless, confusing, and sometimes downright stupid. I propose that they be candidates for speedy deletion. The risk of confusion to new users who might think they are official policy (like me) is too great. Plus there is the fact that these essays are more often than not self-referential wiki-cruft, as one might say. Any thoughts? Bookishreader45 06:09, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

  • You should probably find some of the worst essays and put them on WP:MFD. Sending them to userspace is a plausible alternative. But please do explain how you could think an essay is official policy, when it says right at the top of the page that it's not. >Radiant< 12:15, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

WP:Game guide

I would like to get more input into WP:Game guide as it is currently a proposed guideline and I hope that it passes that stage. Greeves (talk • contribs) 17:01, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

request for further input

I'd like further input into this matter:Wikipedia_talk:Reliable_sources#Request_for_comment_.28Blog_as_source_for_Barrington_Hall_graffiti.29 - Thanks, ---J.S (T/C/WRE) 17:48, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

Articles about fiction

I am certain this has been discussed before, probably here and elsewhere, but I would like to be enlightened. There are a bunch of guidelines that state subjects must be the subject of multiple, non-trivial coverage in sources independant of the subjects themselves. How is it that the literally thousands of articles about obscure villages in Middle Earth, magical powers possessed by characters on Buffy, pieces of armor you can buy for your D&D avatar, and weapons used on Star Trek do not violate this simple directive? Very, very few of these articles have sources beyond the subject itself (Note, for example, this AfD.) Is there policy that can be quoted to support keeping these articles that doesn't violate the prime directive of non-trivial third party sources? --Dmz5*Edits**Talk* 18:09, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

This would probably better be discussed at Wikipedia talk:Notability (fiction). User:Zoe|(talk) 18:37, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
Good call thanks, I don't yet quite know my way around the labrynthine backstage area of wikipedia.--Dmz5*Edits**Talk* 18:51, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
"Labyrinthine" is a good description.  :) User:Zoe|(talk) 18:52, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
This is why. Because people read them, and care about them, and write them. Hundreds of thousands of pageviews for the category of articles on a bunch of made up ninja. A brief scan reveals something like 50 Naruto articles in the top 1000 most visited articles. (And I might add that those people aren't coming here because they want to read out of universe info either, but I digress...) Until/unless we get an official wikifiction project, we might as well just deal with it. --tjstrf talk 18:50, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
This is almost exactly what my thoughts were - it's something we put up with, a sort of parallel set of wikipedias on these topics that apparently don't meet guidelines but are ubiquitous.--Dmz5*Edits**Talk* 18:53, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
Well, it doesn't exist yet. If a fictional article is informative, understandable to those who aren't avid fans of the series, and written in comprehensible English, it's not a high priority to get rid of even if the page is totally in-universe. My opinion is that if we are intending to serve our readers, our guidelines for inclusion of fictional universe articles is that the universe in question is notable and sufficiently detailed to allow the authorship of a non-speculative article. --tjstrf talk 19:15, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
I agree. The guidelines are ambiguous (I feel) on this issue and don't always agree. You should be able to write an out-of-universe article on the whole universe (per WP:FICT); this will include providing a précis of plots/characters/places. If a précis becomes overly long, it should be split into its own article (per WP:SS). However, then the article on the plot/character/place may become entirely in-universe which conflicts with guidelines again. So decisions on whether a particular article like this belongs are quite subjective. Personally, I would tend towards including for many of these pages, but others disagree. Trebor 18:41, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
WP:ILIKEIT is not a valid reason for having an article. User:Zoe|(talk) 23:57, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
WP:ITSINCREDIBLYPOPULARWITHTHEREADERSANDWORLDASAWHOLE is. --tjstrf talk 05:34, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
Actually, it's not a valid reason for keeping the article, which is different. I've lost the count of articles we have because people don't care enough about them either way to have them deleted.Circeus 22:51, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Medical questions being asked at the Reference Desk

There's been a recent, extensive discussion about how to handle questions at the Reference Desk which seek specific medical advice in response to medical problems.

This is a relatively small problem in terms of volume — perhaps three or four questions per week – but potentially associated with a large downside (harm to readers, risk of bad press for Wikipedia, etc.).

I have proposed a framework/guide to identifying questions and responses to avoid, and how to handle these discussions. The proposed guideline is at Wikipedia talk:Reference desk#Dealing with medical questions.

Comment and criticism are welcome. Thanks, TenOfAllTrades(talk) 02:08, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

Disclaimer: Take medical advice from Wikipedians at your own risk. No matter how knowledgeable in the field they might be, they're still not being paid and thus their advice may not be clinically sound.
Something to that effect? Simply denying answers to such questions would also be good. – Someguy0830 (T | C) 02:13, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
Pay has nothing to do with it. The problem is that you neither know their knowledge level nor do they know you as well as your own doctor. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 03:30, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
There already is Wikipedia:Medical disclaimer, which (my reading) rather seems to discourage giving medical advice. John Broughton | ♫ 03:36, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
I don't really see that much probability of wikipedia taking the brunt of any "scandal", as the reference desk is basically nothing more than a message board. If a bunch of people were giving medical advice on some American Idol fan site message board it seems unlikely the Fan site would get in trouble if someone got sick.-Dmz5*Edits**Talk* 04:55, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
Good point; I created the template Template:Meddisclaimer, feel free to add/clarify to it. Cheers! Yuser31415 05:28, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
Yeah, the best responce is to simply not offer medical advice. Most people don't realise the kind of liability they incure when they offer that kind of advice. ---J.S (T/C/WRE) 00:59, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

The only really responsible advice that we, as an encyclopedia, can offer in case of specific medical questions can only be "consult your own physician". Advice offered in the absence of specific and detailed personal information about the patient can only be speculative, and may well be incorrect and actively harmful. Note that I am medically qualified.--Anthony.bradbury 01:08, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

What is Proper attribution for a remix of Wikipedia work?

Hi I am wishing to become an accomplished professional web designer however and now just an amateur. Consequently I require some source material to work on to make web sites. I was thinking of possibly doing a web site of say a visual browser of some of the most fascinating vintage technology. I would gather pictures from Creative Commons available pictures and then have links of these pictures to stories on Wikipedia. And perhaps other Wiki's. Would the proper way to give Wikipedia it's attribution be to say in a link on the top of the article in distinctive typeface contrasting with the type of the article this "originally from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" and then on the bottom of the page repeat Wikipedia " GNU Free Documentation License" link. I am just not sure what is proper. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 67.41.219.179 (talk) 23:40, 16 January 2007 (UTC).

You might want to take a look at Wikipedia:Copyrights to start with. John Broughton | ♫ 23:51, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
I think Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks#License has some of the awnsers your looking for. Goodluck! ---J.S (T/C/WRE) 01:03, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

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