Help desk
< September 30	<< Sep \| October \| Nov >>	October 2 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Help Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current Help Desk pages.

October 1

How to use spreadsheet in wikipedia

UY4Xe8VM5VYxaQQ (talk) 00:06, 1 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Tools#Excel . Lourdes 01:54, 1 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Colin kaepernicks page racist towards african american men

On. Colin kaepernick's "early life" section of his bio, it says: Kaepernick was born in 1987 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Heidi Russo, a 19-year-old who was single at the time.[4] His birth father, an African American man, left Russo before Colin was born.[5][6] Russo placed Colin for adoption with Rick ... The fact that the poster includes that Colins father was african american.has no bearing on the article except to further the stereotype that black men run out on their families. Please remove this— Preceding unsigned comment added by 2602:306:3106:ee40:3920:717c:1815:ee34 (talk) 05:31, 1 October 2017‎ (UTC)[reply]

@2602:306:3106:ee40:3920:717c:1815:ee34: Normally, anyone can edit pages to correct/change things in the article, as long as references are provided. If you head over to the article, you'll notice a little lock symbol at the upper-right corner of the page. This lock indicates that the page has been semi-protected; clicking it will take you to WP:SEMI, which explains what's going on. To put it simply, the article has been protected to prevent editing by unregistered and brand new users due to high levels of vandalism to the page. Your account will need to be autoconfirmed in order to edit it, which will happen automatically once your account is four days old and you've made ten edits to Wikipedia.

Now, you don't necessarily have to wait for the ability to edit the article. You can head over to the article's talk page and submit a request for another editor to edit the page for you. You may create a new section at the bottom of the talk page, specify what exactly you wish to change in the article, and then add {{edit semi-protected}} to your message to alert other editors that you've made a request. Seagull123 Φ 09:59, 1 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) Sources and readers care about the race of people (just see Wikipedia:Reference desk/Humanities#Are there countries where Colin Kaepernick is white?), and we don't generally hide such information. Other readers may find it positive for African-Americans that Colin Kaepernick#Early life mentions a notable quarterback has an African-American father. You can post a suggestion to Talk:Colin Kaepernick, e.g. that the fathers race and his leaving is not mentioned in the same sentence. I don't think anything was implied by the current wording. It's the only content about his father in the article and if his father is non-notable and had no role in his life then I don't see reason to say more. It belongs in the article that he is adopted and then it would be odd to not mention that his parents were not together. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:08, 1 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@2602:306:3106:ee40:3920:717c:1815:ee34: Race is an important part of a person's life. Where known, someone's heritage is almost always included in their biography. For example, I recently created Elsie Singmaster, stating that her parents were German Americans. This isn't racist, and neither is Kaepernick's article; it's an vital fact about his life.

Also, his race is obviously especially important to him, with his recent protests at the anthem. This is all the more reason to include the information. Jjamesryan (talk | contribs) 01:22, 2 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The guideline about when it is appropriate (or not) for an article to discuss/mention matters like race, religion, sexual orientation, etc. is at WP:EGRS. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 16:10, 2 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Unnecessary line break protection

On page Sea Dart the sclass template creates unnecessary line break protection, of "Invincible-class aircraft carriers". Is there a way to prevent that? --Mortense (talk) 08:43, 1 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The article says {{sclass|Invincible|aircraft carrier|1}}s which produces: Invincible-class aircraft carriers. It makes a non-breaking space between "class" and "aircraft". It cannot be overridden when one long link to Invincible class aircraft carrier is made. I assume the idea is to avoid a line break which would make it look like Invincible class and aircraft carrier are separate links. See Template:Sclass#Usage for other options where the template doesn't make one long link. PrimeHunter (talk) 09:47, 1 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Shahnaz Pahlavi

I have one question. I have heard that Wikipedia doesn't allow the articles that are only notable by relationships and that it may need independent sources. But the articles like Shahnaz Pahlavi have confused me, because it only tells it's notability in being the daughter of Reza Shah Pahlavi. Am I wrong? 182.182.58.35 (talk) 14:40, 1 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions#Notability is inherited is about cases where independent sources are about something else and only mention the discussed subjects in passing, if at all. But many of the independent sources in Shahnaz Pahlavi are focused on her and not her father, and the article uses those sources to tell things about her. She easily passes Wikipedia:Notability (people) which doesn't require people to do notable things but to have "received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject". It's the same with lots of members of royal families. They became famous because of the family they were born into but their fame quickly goes beyond just mentioning whose children they are. People may think what they want about royalty but it cannot be denied that a lot of media and readers are interested in them. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:15, 1 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks 182.182.46.34 (talk) 10:21, 2 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Redirects

I am doing some research on one-and-two-letter redirects.

Is there an easy way to tell how many links there are to a popular redirect like WP:V?

At WP:GU it says "A page with this title has previously been moved or deleted." Is there a way to tell what it once redirected to?

If a redirect gets moved without being replaced by a redirect (let's say we want to free a seldom-used redirect for a new use), is there an easy automated way to update all the pages that linked to the old redirect so that they now link to the new one?

--Guy Macon (talk) 17:19, 1 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Help:What links here#Number of links mentions a tool. I don't use it.
As an administrator I can see contents and page histories of deleted pages. It said: #REDIRECT [[Wikipedia:Good userpage]]. Others do not have a general way (apart from asking an administrator) but can often guess some things with a little work, e.g. by looking at WhatLinksHere or the logs and visible edits of the deleting administrator. Here [1] it shows they deleted Wikipedia:Good userpage 16 minutes earlier.
Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser can speed up some tasks with semi-automated edits. Bot work can be requested at Wikipedia:Bot requests, but that's usually for more than "a seldom-used redirect". PrimeHunter (talk) 17:46, 1 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! I tried the tool. It says that WP:V has 1322 links to it and WP:OD has 73. Alas, http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Wikipedia:OD shows only 7 for WP:OD, and http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?search="WP%3AOD"&fulltext=1 only shows 3, so somebody isn't counting properly. --Guy Macon (talk) 18:13, 1 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Or somebody isn't using the tools properly ;-) "WP" is a namespace alias for "Wikipedia". https://dispenser.info.tm/~dispenser/cgi-bin/backlinkscount.py says: "This tool does not support namespace localization, use English namespaces or the ns parameter instead." For Wikipedia:OD it says 8, and Special:WhatLinksHere/Wikipedia:OD now lists 8 pages including this help desk. 73 is the number of links to OD, including links via redirects. Wikipedia's searchbox only searches the rendered page by default. Use insource:"WP:OD" to search the wikisource instead. But linksto:"Wikipedia:OD" is a better search for this purpose, and gives 8 results when everything is searched. I forgot linksto: in my first reply. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:55, 1 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Alas, that still leaves me manually counting links. http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Wikipedia:V and a search for insource:"WP:V" still don't give me a total for how many links there are to WP:V. And https://dispenser.info.tm/~dispenser/cgi-bin/backlinkscount.py?title=Wikipedia:V say that WP:V has only 95 links. --01:09, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

Wikipedia searches display the number of results at the top right. insource just looks for a specific string in the page source. linksto is better to find links. linksto:"Wikipedia:V" in all namespaces says "Results 1 - 20 of 303,589" on the first page. This includes links made by templates. Your link https://dispenser.info.tm/~dispenser/cgi-bin/backlinkscount.py?title=Wikipedia:V says 304047 for me. That's very close to 303589 and the difference may just be cached data. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:21, 2 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Odd display issue

I'm asking here because Wikipedia's the only site displaying oddly. Even Commons, with all the same settings, is working just like normal.

Since some time yesterday, my top-right links (e.g. userpage, sandbox, contributions) have been mis-aligned; see screenshot. Normally, the link to my userpage would be above or right of the "watch" tab, rather than being above "change protection". Basically, everything's shifted left by a certain amount — the clock gadget is normally on the right edge of the page, so the distance between it and the right side of the page is the distance by which everything is shifted. Please note that my Notifications icons are also missing, although if I mouse over the spot, I get the notifications dropdown just like normal. Yesterday, all these links were shrunken to about 50% resolution, although the rest of my browser was at 100%, and as you can see, they're back to normal resolution.

Any ideas what is going on? This is IE 11, and as you can see, it's Monobook. I don't have Chrome, but I've looked at this page in Firefox, and everything looks normal. I've restarted the browser several times without change, and I've also restarted the computer (by accident; I unintentionally removed the battery when it wasn't plugged in), but this persists. Nyttend (talk) 21:29, 1 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

hi

I created [2] but don't know how to separate it from my sandbox(I did something similar on English Wikipedia a few months ago and had the same problem), any help is appreciated, thanks--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 22:11, 1 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Ozzie10aaaa. This took some hunting to track down, because you linked to the target, but not to the redirect, which is in your sandbox in the frwiki: I didn't know that French for sandbox is "brouillon".

The general answer to this problem is that whenever you go to a page via a redirect, it will have a link to the actual redirect page at the top. So if I enter "fr:Utilisateur:Ozzie10aaaa/Brouillon" into the search box (equivalent to this wikilink [[:fr:Utilisateur:Ozzie10aaaa/Brouillon]] - note the colon at the start - which displays as fr:Utilisateur:Ozzie10aaa/Brouillon) it goes to the target fr:Utilisateur:Wikiprojet:Medicine/app (which appears to be an error, and is itself a redirect). But at the top it says "(Redirigé depuis Utilisateur:Ozzie10aaaa/Brouillon)", and if you pick that link, it will take you to your actual sandbox, which you can edit to remove the redirection. --ColinFine (talk) 23:02, 1 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

thanks Ill try that--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 23:05, 1 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Submitting a draft article

I have created a draft but am stuck how to submit it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tamupadhi (talk • contribs) 23:33, 1 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I've submitted the Draft to AfC for this user. Legacypac (talk) 23:45, 1 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]