WikiPedia:General complaints

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

This is a page for discussing all the little wikiwoes you may encounter in your travels here. This page is not for complaining about other users. See Wikipedia:Resolving disputes for that. Please list new problems on the bottom. Please place resolved articles on Wikipedia: General complaints (resolved)

Contents

1 Wallpaper? 2 Main page broken in Mozilla 1.7.3 on Windows XP 3 Search buttons: Why no ALT-text? 4 Front Page: Featured Article 5 Unseen images 6 Gundam Universe 7 Undesirable links 8 Templates and Template-editing 9 WikiSlow 10 WikiSlow: The Monster Returns 11 WikiSlow 3: With Apologies to NightMonkey 12 The printing option 13 Mojave/Mohave 14 White Skins 15 Getting pnm: RealAudio links to work in Wikipedia 16 Wikipedia:Cleanup 17 Spelling Spelling 18 The &$*# Search Engine is Broken Again 19 VRML Files for Polyhedra pages 20 Bug 21 Searching 22 Ireland Article Edit-Flaw 23 Hide edit section 24 Separation of Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese in Wikipedia 25 Grey heading line extends too far 26 "pre" tags are badly rendered in Mozilla Firefox 1.0 27 Some students prevented from creating accounts due to a "10 account" limit 28 Main page status vs. level of "did you know" trivia 29 Special pages too long 30 Wikipedia symbol/link invisible 31 About Wikipedia Page Corrupted 32 Language specific accounts 33 Overzealous Keyboard Shortcuts 34 Undefined Math symbols 35 Michael Jackson 2005 Trial 36 Catherby 37 Portuguese Log in 38 Camerlengo - Wikipedia License Violation? 39 Ragged text 40 Benedict XVI 41 Towers 42 Benedict XVI 43 China's Second Artillery Corps 44 British Columbia Moderate Democratic Movement 45 Forced Reloading Problem 46 The Teach the controversy page: Merely one train wreck that manifests the general and pervasive problem in Wikipedia 47 Speedy deletion policy 48 verison = version 49 Interlanguage links 50 Listing in Categories and things like that 51 Star Destroyers 52 Invalid deletion of Hellenic Genocide page 53 Dutch Low Saxon problem! 54 Background of Pages, Skins 55 European accented characters search

Wallpaper?

WALLPAPER of hearts = UNREADABLE TEXT!! gee, isnt it obvious? ten thousand little hearts blot out the text. It is painful to try to read witkipedia. Also, no obvious way to post this complaint, so i now put it here, hoping someone big will take note and fix this incredible error.

Does anyone know what this person is talking about? -- Cyrius|✎ 07:37, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)

There are no hearts on Wikipedia. Optichan 21:42, Jun 12, 2005 (UTC)

Main page broken in Mozilla 1.7.3 on Windows XP

The main page doesn't work in Mozilla. It worked yesterday, but today when I went to it, words didn't wrap (so the page was extremely wide), and the whole main content area functioned as a link to the Chinese edition. Internet Exploder had no problems with it, though. --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 16:20, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)

• • I've run it in IE and Firefox; it works fine in both of those. isn't Mozilla the same thing as FF? -Litefantastic 00:33, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)
    • It works now. I'm not sure what was going on. --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 21:23, 4 Nov 2004 (UTC)
• Images are not showing up in Mozilla Firefox, but are working using IE. I've tried this on three different computers now on the Columbia University campus, including my own. Any ideas? 160.39.232.221 19:38, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)
• I'm using using Firefox 1.0.2 on Windows XP. The images overlap the text at the bottom of the page depending upon the size of the text. 9:10am PST, Apr 4, 2005

Search buttons: Why no ALT-text?

The search field has two buttons, "Go" and "Search", but unlike most other navigation elements they lack an ALT-text explaining their function. Also, the buttons are identical, and thus do not show which one is the default button (that is, the one that is activated when you use the Enter key rather than clicking on the buttons). I suggest adding an ALT-text to each button, and making the default button stand out somehow. (10/13/04)

You can add requests for software changes to MediaZilla:. Angela. 18:20, Oct 19, 2004 (UTC)

Front Page: Featured Article

The featured article on the front page is extremely offensive, but I can't figure out how to change it... Is it even possible? (9/19/04)

• You mean the one about Cricket? -Litefantastic 12:48, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)
• No, it was early in the morning. On September 19th, a bunch of swears, and someone talking bad about the Chinese government was in huge red letters.

You can comment on the featured article the day before it goes live at Wikipedia talk:Tomorrow's featured article. Angela.

Unseen images

All of a sudden i cant see images from wikipedia. None of them. can someone tell me how to fix it.

I see no images using Firefox 1.0, yet they do appear using IE. Is this a feature?

I can't see images. I'm with firefox 1.0.4 (running on slackware linux) and I have checked adblock and webdev whether it is them blocking images, but still can't see all images in wikipedia, but some I see. For example buttons above input, and small person icon near top user menu (the one with log in / log out.) As well as background image, but no others.

---

IMPORTANT EDIT: I've just tried firefox but with another profile, and there were images! So it is something in the settings, but I can't understand what. If anyone has any ideas please write answer here: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=275354

Gundam Universe

I went looking for the ships in the gundam universe, and for some reason they don't show up on general searches of on the disambiguation(?) page for gundam. Additionally, it seems that their may be more than one article about these ships floating over the sight. I m relativly new to Wikipedia, and feel uncomfortable doing anything major to other peoples pages, but I do feel obligated to point this out because it may be wating unessicary space. Any ideas on how to fix this?

Undesirable links

• I was adding new city in the list of Bulgarian cities (namely Elena). Once I saved the page, the new city was linked to some kind of a game by the same name, which has nothing to do with the Bulgarian city. What can I do to break that link and add the article I had in mind?

I did notice, the same problem exist with some of the rest of the city names.

Try making 'Elena' a disambiguation page. Move the city page to Elena (city) and the game to Elena (game). Is that the sort of thing you're shooting for? -Litefantastic 23:56, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Templates and Template-editing

Templates are a nuisance to edit throughout Wikipedia. You must first click "edit" in order to delve through the article and find the name of the specific Template you want to edit. You must then manually edit the URL line to include Template:(NAME OF TEMPLATE) and only then you can begin the normal process of editing the template. The other option is manually adding yourself an edit button within the content of the template -- but that's problematic for other reasons. For starters it goes against the natural division between the content and the mechanism for changing that content. Also it's often ugly to intrude an edit button within a template.

Can we please make it so that each page in Wikipedia *automatically* lists all templates used in that page, in a nice little box on the left side of the screen? The same way that Wikipedia currently says "other languages" and lists links to all the other-language wikipedia articles, it would be very convenient if it also said "This page utilises:" and then we got a listing of the templates of that page. e.g. This page utilises: Template: NATO - Template:EU_countries - Template:OECD

I think that would solve all problems.

- Aris Katsaris 20:37, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)

WikiSlow

Today it feels like Wikipedia has just eaten a tub of lard. Pages take ages to load, database errors abound. What's making Wikipedia sick today? Is it the Slashdotting (!)? --NightMonkey 04:28, Jul 29, 2004 (UTC)

This sort of thing happens now and again, and is generally attrbuted to heavy load or problems with the servers. However, since the "To help support Wikipedia, please visit our fundraising page" message is back up, I'm guessing that we're being featured somewhere, which is why a) the servers are slow and b) that wretched message is back up, begging all new visitors to donate. -Litefantastic 16:41, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)

We intend to order some new hardware as soon as Jimbo is back from his holiday next week. The fundraising notice is up at the moment because we are featured on Slashdot, which tends to bring in a lot of potential donors. Angela. 18:22, Jul 31, 2004 (UTC)

WikiSlow: The Monster Returns

Yes, I know this is annoying, but there's been no long-term improvement in speed. This is apparent on several networks, done at several times of day (though it is better in the North American nighttime). Note that I'm NOT saying that it makes Wikipedia totally unusable, but it really makes editing a pain and is somewhat embarrasing to introduce Wikipedia to lots of folks with every one of them saying something like, "Wow, that sounds really cool! <45+ seconds pass to load the page text> Pretty slow, but I'll check it out more later." I love Wikipedia. I'll give it cash. But, I hate to view it through lard-colored glasses ;).

Isn't everyone experiencing this sluggish response? --NightMonkey 20:54, Sep 29, 2004 (UTC)

OK, I never knew I liked crow as an entre before, let alone a whole buffet of it. After looking here (http://openfacts.berlios.de/index-en.phtml?title=Wikipedia_Status), I see that today and yesterday a hardware move is in progress, along with a network bandwidth megaboost. Apologies for the complaint. Keep up the great work! --NightMonkey 21:17, Sep 29, 2004 (UTC)

WikiSlow 3: With Apologies to NightMonkey

It's not as bad as before, but every twenty minutes or so the site just sort of seems to stall. I don't think we're on SlashDot again (how many times can we be featured, anyway?) but it just seems like the site is narcoleptic. -Litefantastic 14:47, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I'm new to Wiki and am enthusiastic about its potential however the server lag that I'm experiencing all too regularly here has me now doubting my ability to sustain participation (we're talking minutes here folks, and sometimes no load at all). As this, apparently, has not been commented on since 27 Oct, I thought I'd solicit some current observations on page loading problems. JakeInJoisey 20:01, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)

It gets better sometimes. Really. -Litefantastic 23:03, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The printing option

In the olden days there used to be a "Print this page" button on all articles. What ever happened to that? Though most times today I'm at a computer when searching for or using knowledge, but not all the time. I would like to take certain Wiki pages with me to read, but as the Wiki stands now, you have to reformat most of the site. AFAIK it would be a simple task to implement this again, and I hope to see this in the future. --Gruesome 09:29, Aug 9, 2004 (CET)

The other skins (you can change this in your preferences) still have a link to the printable version. The default "monobook" skin does not have one, but if you press print in your browser, the print stylesheet will be applied automatically. Angela. 21:30, Aug 11, 2004 (UTC)

Why not change the "monobook" skin so that it has a link to the printable version, otherwise people might believe that it's not there (as I did).--STM 16:57, Dec 25, 2004 (UTC)

What about an export to PDF function? That would certainly be very useful for archival purposes. --STM 08:27, Aug 16, 2004 (UTC)

See the wiki-to-pdf converter (http://wiki.auf-trag.de/). Angela. 23:27, Aug 17, 2004 (UTC)

PDFCreator[1] (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/) easily creates PDFs from any Windows program. It is a pseudo-printer driver; you use it just like a printer, but the output goes to a PDF file instead of paper. Kbh3rd 16:45, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)

On my browser, Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040917 Firefox/0.9.3, the printing stylesheet screws up badly around any font style change, causing massive text elements' overlap. Am I the only one, and is it a Firefox bug, or a CSS problem with the Monobook printing style? BACbKA 10:38, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

• It's not just you; every now and again this happens in IE, too. However, if it happens to you constantly, you may wish to consider either switching browsers or an official complaint to the people who write the WP software. -Litefantastic 14:54, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

• • Actually, neither Firefox nor Konqueror are good for me for any page, even without any embedded floaters. Konqueror seems better than Firefox, but also is a bit screwed up (sometimes inter-character spacing, but also with the pagination issue – it has massive overlaps between adjacent pages! or is that intentional?). It's either a browser bug, or a CSS bug, or both. The fact that you say it happens sometimes to you with the IE points to the CSS. Konqueror and Firefox use different rendering engines, so this is another clue against the CSS. Amaya doesn't support cookies :-) all the other mainstream options available that I know of on Linux are using one of the same layout engines as the ones already mentioned before, so I don't know what other browser to switch to :-( Can somebody else with a know-how of WP printing from Linux please step up and share the experience of successful (or insuccessful) printing, before I submit bug reports? BACbKA 19:39, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Mojave/Mohave

Kinda a "dumb question": a fellow (new) user/editor has placed a redirect on Mojave to go to the unincorporated community of Mojave, California. There is also a Mohave page, without a redirect, which goes to the Native American tribe. Both spellings are pronounced the same, BTW.

Some months ago, Menchi redirected Mojave to Mohave. But Anon changed it to go to the unincorporated California community, which (to add confusion) is in the Mojave Desert, (California), and not the Mohave Desert (Arizona).

Because the spellings are different (but pronounced the same) and considering the word means different things to different people - especially when adding the word "tribe" or "desert" to it. . . Would there be some way to do a disambiguation page to straighten out this mess? (friendly grin) Granted, the spellings aren't the same, but the pronounciation sameness causes some difficulty - perhaps along the lines of "Joaquin" (as in San Joaquin Valley and "walking." You get the drift? Your thoughts, please. --avnative 18:10, Aug 20, 2004 (UTC)

• I ran into this in another place and the disambig page is in place. Now to find the links to the wrong spelling of the tribe, Vegaswikian 08:50, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)

White Skins

Does no one else think wikipedia is too white? I spend a lot of time reading it, and it would be easier on the eyes if a dark alternative were available. For example, Microsoft word has the option of "White text on a dark blue background", which works very well.

You can create your own skin. See m:user styles for information. Angela. 20:59, Aug 21, 2004 (UTC)

Removed the insulting comment from Sam Spade from this comment. We need useful things here, not moronic jokes, alright? For reference purposes, his link was White Power

Ariamaki

Getting pnm: RealAudio links to work in Wikipedia

Normally, if you put a URL: resource address in [brackets] the wiki server side process will properly format a buried link for the browser. However, there are many more URL: resource addresses than just those that begin with "http:". For example, the wiki server side process does not properly format the following [pnm://rm.content.loudeye.com/~a-600111/0676330_0104_07_0002.ra URL: resource], as you can see. If you paste the URL: resource address

pnm://rm.content.loudeye.com/~a-600111/0676330_0104_07_0002.ra

into your browser address window, you will see from the browser reaction how the wiki server side process should format that pnm: URL: resource address as a link (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link) in the above examples. Could you please add pnm: to the table of allowed external URL: resource prefixes, such as http:, https:, ftp:, etc.? Thank you. ---Rednblu 20:17, 29 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Cleanup

I always love it when project pages fight each other. Remember that time Wikipedia:Votes for Deletion tried to kill us? Yeah. Well, I really have to point out that Cleanup is, infact, itself in serious need of help.

1. . It's a mess. There really out to be some sort of organizing. over in Wikipedia:Requests they organize things by topic, not by date.
2. . Too big. My second complaint is the same reason I can't fix this. In my opinion, it ought to be archived by months (and by topic); the page is huge, I have dial-up, and I just can't find my way around.

Best of luck. -Litefantastic 01:36, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Spelling Spelling

I believe the correct phrase is spelling check rather than the word-processor-shortened spell check. The use of check in this manner is usually (always?) [noun] check such as reality check, sanity check, price check, or correctness check. Given this, a spell check would be something Harry Potter does, so I suggest the use of the more correct phrase spelling check. The How-To index is one of many places where the wizarding version is used.

Peter (Cactus Pete) 18:04, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)

• Okay... what would you like us to do about it? -Litefantastic 12:23, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Yeah, and they also have street signs that say "drive slow." We'd need Harry Potter to change popular breAches of the rules of grammar.

The &$*# Search Engine is Broken Again

• -.-; -Litefantastic 12:47, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)

VRML Files for Polyhedra pages

I was browsing the pages on polyhedra, and noticed that the pages have links to animations of polyhedra, but not to manipulatable files such as VRML files, that those with the proper plugins can use. I find that such files help understand the polyhedra better, and plugins for your browser can be downloaded free of charge. If it is simply that no one has added the files, I've got a couple of files I could adapt (wireframe-ish only).

Bug

Intended to post this on Bugzilla under Wikipedia, but I'm receiving no registration email. On http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zegunder there is an error where [[Gil Cohen]] produces no wikilink.

Usually due to misbracketing earlier on in the article. Let's see... Well, a CRT and spaces in a link will break it, uh? JFW | T@lk 20:30, 7 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Searching

Is it possible to stop the search function or links being case sensitive? CheeseDreams 17:26, 7 Nov 2004 (UTC)

• Apparantly not. That complaint was the problem that started General Complaints. -Litefantastic 01:48, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)

It may not be a perfect fix, and I appreciate it would be better to keep it in-house, but I often use Google, restricted to search only the wikipedia site.

 http://www.google.com/search?q=site:en.wikipedia.org+&q=zigbee

I've used this trick a few times to find articles I failed to locate via the main wikipedia search

Ireland Article Edit-Flaw

The Article "Ireland" contains an unremovable "Charlie k is awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!" at the end of it's first paragraph! How can it be, that this awful thing is not showing up in the edit function?

Hide edit section

As explained in the How-to page it is possible to hide all edit links with the code __NOEDITSECTION__ in a document. According to the same How-to page, it is also possible to hide a section from the Table of contents by using HTML-tags like <h2>sectionhead</h2> instead of ==sectionhead==.

Bug:
The edit link is hidden using HTML tags, but the next edit link links to the edit page of the first section marked by the HTML-tags, which was not editable. The second edit link to the second section marked by HTML, and so forth.

Ilse@ 12:51, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Separation of Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese in Wikipedia

Since both traditional and simplified Chinese are located on the same subdomain, http://zh.wikipedia.org/, their menus and the corresponding links are exactly the same. For example, a user browsing the traditional Chinese version may want to return to the Main Page, click on the link on the menu, and arrive at the Main Page for the simplified Chinese version. In addition, since there is only one set of menu pages for the two languages, some of the menu pages end up containing both traditional and simplified Chinese. For readers unaccustomed to using both forms, reading these pages can be quite exhausting. In fact, I think this is one of the reasons there are so few Chinese-language articles. Many users who use either forms of Chinese are much more content with sources other than Wikipedia due to the extensive mixed use of these two forms. Many users are hesistant to contribute to Wikipedia because they do not know which language to start writing in. Is there any way traditional and simplified Chinese could be separated into two separate subdomains of wikipedia.org, so that users instructed in reading only simplified Chinese could read through pages written in only the simplified form, and the same for those trained only in traditional Chinese?

Grey heading line extends too far

On pages like List of colonial governors in 1880, the grey line extends through the middle of the "See also:" box at the right. The same thing happens if you hide the table of contents on pages like List of state leaders in 2004. I don't know how to fix it.

The same thing seems to be true with any box on any page, though some boxes are not transparent. But even for opaque boxes like on Angola (and a million other pages), the grey line extends all the way to the edge of the box instead of stopping at the margin.

If the margin between the box and the right edge of the page is greater than zero, you can see the grey line sticking out the other end. For example, if you edit University of Notre Dame du Lac, changing "margin: 0 0" to "margin: 1em 1em", and view the preview (obviously, don't save the page).

For some reason, pages like Alabama seem to look ok. 68.225.20.115 20:26, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)

"pre" tags are badly rendered in Mozilla Firefox 1.0

Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul#Philosophical_views

The dotted border fits the screen, but the content of the tag goes far beyond the screen border.

Some students prevented from creating accounts due to a "10 account" limit

While trying to get students set up with Wikipedia accounts yesterday, some of the students were unable to create accounts because of some sort of limit on the number of accounts that could be created. The error message (sorry, this isn't an exact quote) said that a given student was unable to create an account because s/he had already created 10 accounts. This was not at all the case; there's no way that any one student even had time to create that many accounts.

Is this some sort of security feature that monitors the domain from which accounts are created? I realize that the computer lab in which we worked might be using some sort of sub-domain that makes it look like one IP address, but that's not the case.

How can this be avoided in the future? It's usually best for me to supervise the students when they create their accounts, but I might be able to turn this into a homework assignment that's done from home or from different labs on campus.

Any help or suggestions on this matter would be greatly appreciated.

Main page status vs. level of "did you know" trivia

The Wikipedia Main Page is read by gazillions of people every week. This in itself should create a need for a "lower cutoff" on the "did you know" trivia section. As in, if less than 0.1 person per thousand might bother reading the particular piece of trivia, then something else should be there. Right?

While reading the Main Page, I stumbled on the following, under the heading "Did You Know":

...that in the Ulster Cycle of Irish mythology, Ness' son Conchobar mac Nessa was brought up as the son of the druid Cathbad, although the true father may have been her lover, Fachtna Fáthach, the High King of Ireland?

No offense against the Irish, the druids, the Wikipedia, but I just can't help feeling that this bit of trivia might be, er, just a bit too trivial. (Pun intended.)

We all know that J.R.R. Tolkien derived part of his vocabulary and ideas for the mythology from the Finnish National Heritage Epic Kalevala. Now, as a Finn, I'd be severely flattered to find a bit of trivia on Joukahainen's travails on Wikipedia Main Page. But, believe it or not, I'd still complain about the level of triviality.

(Nobody's fault! Of course the existing Trivia Engine has been appropriate for ages. But as things grow, parts have to be adjusted. And I just happened to be the one noticing this one.)

Special pages too long

Special pages such as Categories and Uncategorized pages are far, far too long. I had to page through 7,000 numeric Category entries simply to reach the first alphabetic one. They are desperately in need of some indexing mechanism, even if it's just a first-letter index. -- TonyP 17:51, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia symbol/link invisible

The wikipedia symbol in the upper left of all pages that links to the main page is invisible on several versions of ie in different OS versons (2k, xp, me...)

About Wikipedia Page Corrupted

The About Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About has been corrupted with some garbage text, but when going to edit the text is not there to edit.

Language specific accounts

Why is an account for only one language? Okay it might prevent some name clashes, but is this really such a great benefit? For multilingual people to have to have several accounts is pretty annoying. MarSch 17:17, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Overzealous Keyboard Shortcuts

The keyboard shortcut overrides for editing features are neat, but it's a handicap to lose Ctrl-W for <close window>, etc. At the least, Alt-F for accessing the File menu should be open, which gives access to the menu systems. At the best, all wiki shortcuts except for Alt-E for editing the current page should be disabled until the user begins actually editing the page. It's quite intrusive to the web-browsing experience and makes mouse-less web browsing impracticle.

Undefined Math symbols

On http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_edit_a_page#Variables and on any page which uses those mathematical characters, most mathematical characters show up as single character boxes containing a 2x2 array of digits, e.g. &or on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuitionistic_logic Can I fix this? If so, then how? I am running: Mozilla Firefox 1.0 for Linux with Character Encoding Western(ISO-8859-1) and loading of images enabled.

do you mean these? They work on my FF.

Mathematical characters:

∫ ∑ ∏ √ − ± ∞ ≈ ∝ ≡ ≠ ≤ ≥ × · ÷ ∂ ′ ″ ∇ ‰ ° ∴ ℵ ø ∈ ∉ ∩ ∪ ⊂ ⊃ ⊆ ⊇ ¬ ∧ ∨ ∃ ∀ ⇒ ⇔ → ↔MarSch 16:00, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)

If you see a square with a 2x2 array of digits on Mozilla Firefox, it means you do not have a font with that character. After you install the proper font, it will work. The numbers are the character's code; you can look at the Unicode standard to see which character it is supposed to be. --cesarb 20:02, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Michael Jackson 2005 Trial

The discussion page is broken, and needs fixing.

Catherby

I've just found a strange page called Catherby. Upon consulting the Internet, it would seem to be an imaginary place, located in a game-realm called RuneScape. The article is a very short stub, but I don't see that it could grow into anything. It could be transferred to the aforesaid existing article, I suppose, but I know nothing about RuneScape and wouldn't know how to fit it in. Kelisi 03:37, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Ok, I've redirect that to RuneScape locations and inserted the information into the Catherby section. One of the problems seems to be that there's quite a number of anonymous users creating these articles even though there should be contained in the RuneScape articles. --Ricky81682 (talk) 04:47, Apr 6, 2005 (UTC)

Portuguese Log in

I have no idea if I'm posting this problem in the right place since i'm quite new to Wikipedia. The thing is, though I have no problem logging into my account in the English area (where i originally created the acount), the Portuguese version of Wikipedia completly ignores my existance.

Is that just me or does everyone need to register on every language that they wish to contribute with? Is there any chance this could be merged into a single database of users? I have enough usernames and passwords as it is, and having another one for the same place seems pretty bizarre to me.

Fmafra 16:30, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Yes, all the wikis are separate. See meta:Single sign-on. --cesarb 13:39, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Camerlengo - Wikipedia License Violation?

I was doing some research for an article re: Papal Conclave and noticed that the page http://camerlengo.biography.ms/ is identical to the page on Wikipedia found by typing "Camerlengo" into the search box. On closer investigation, it appears that the entire site http://www.biography.ms/ is ripping off Wikipedia articles but displaying no copyright or licensing information. Isn't this against your rules? Sorry if this is the wrong place to mention it, but I'm a little pressed for time and couldn't immediately find anywhere better.

It seems you are correct MarSch 11:23, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Ragged text

The standard text uses ragged right edges (i.e. uneven line length). This affects the aesthetic layout of many pages such as this one (Taj Mahal). Instead the line length may be made constant to produce a more visually appealing effect.

Benedict XVI

There seems to be a picture of the leader of the Evil Empire from Star Wars on the new Pope's article, or at least there was at the time of writing.--217.42.208.169 18:18, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Oh wait, it's fixed now--217.42.208.169 18:25, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Towers

Does every tower need a page? Are these really encyclopedic? Most entries are one line with two external links? Vegaswikian 19:09, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Benedict XVI

As of 20:38, Wednesday, April 20, a photo of Osama bin Laden was in the place where a photo of the new Pope, Benedict XVI, should be. Please, folks, stop hijacking this page and show some maturity!

China's Second Artillery Corps

It appears that there is no article about China's strategic missle force. This seems extremely odd to me considering the effort that went into making the page on the People's Liberation Army. I can't remember if I have read this article before but I'm guessing that this was completely deleted by someone. --Hypo 19:32, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

British Columbia Moderate Democratic Movement

It lists their platform, and Wikipedia isn't a soapbox. Another user refuses to remove it, and reverts my edits. --Spinboy 19:53, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I would add that Spinboy's complaint has implications for all political party articles. His concern seems to be that including a description of a political party's platform in the article about the party is "using Wikipedia as a soapbox".

I have made attempts to address Spinboy's concerns by editing the text on this article. He has refused to work with me on this issue. He has not responded to arguments that I have made on the Talk page. In particular, I believe that Spinboy has does not understand what Wikipedia isn't a soapbox means. It says:

Propaganda or advocacy of any kind. Of course, an article can report objectively about such things, as long as an attempt is made to approach a neutral point of view.

I have edited the text to make it a more objective, factual recounting of the party's policy proposals, which are of historical interest, and not advocacy for its program. For the record, I was never a member or supporter of that party, which was registered in a province that is 3500 km from where I live. I would be happy to work with Spinboy and/or a third party or mediator on this.

If I am out of line, then I will stand down, but it would be a shame if political party articles cannot tell readers anything about what the parties stand for. Ground Zero Ground Zero 13:39, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Forced Reloading Problem

This site has one annoying feature for me so far, the forced reloading of pages. I use Opera browser, and usually going back and foward between pages (ie to check a previous page and then go forward to some other page that you accessed more recently) - usually pages do NOT reload when you move back and forth. First of all, not having to reload makes accessing pages much faster. But my major problem is that if you are editing a page, and you go back to check something, it will DELETE YOUR WORK when you return to the page on which you're working. I was just creating a page for the band called Treat (which doesn't exist in wikipedia yet), and I must have accidentally clicked a link, cause it went somewhere. When i went back, all my work was displayed for a milisecond - then the page reloaded and all my work was lost. Its late, and I'm tired, so i really don't feel like redoing it in a separate editor so my work doesn't get DESTROYED. This problem needs to be fixed. Thanks.

(edit:) Also, people have been complaining that wikipedia is getting slow - and i've noticed the site isn't a sprinter. I'm pretty sure that if the site forces reloading when not neccessary it will RUN SLOWER. Its a two-fold problem.

--User:Fresheneesz 2:32, 23 Apr 2005 (California)

For me in galeon-1.3.20, I don't lose work when I change pages by clicking a link and hitting the back button in the browser. I also don't get a "forced reload" when I do that. So it sounds like this might actually be a bug (or a feature, if you don't want potentially personal information lying around) in your browser. -- Beland 02:18, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The Teach the controversy page: Merely one train wreck that manifests the general and pervasive problem in Wikipedia

The Teach the controversy page is one of several spread throughout Wikipedia covering many subjects and reflecting many aspects of humanity all featuring ORIGINAL RESEARCH by a handful of polemical writers who insist that only their view remains. I suggest that there is a bug in the Wikipedia system, and I suggest that the bug in the Wikipedia system repeatedly sets off the train wreck that the Teach the controversy page is. I wouldn't even want to convince anybody of what the bug is at this stage--because I don't have a clear understanding of what the bug is myself. So let me give you the data that I see in the patterns of bug and train wrecks. Feel free to state what you see.

1. Both sides assert that they understand the situation better than the published scholars, so both sides rip out the quotations, paraphrases, and citations to the analyses of published scholars to leave behind their own ORIGINAL RESEARCH.
2. There are plenty of Wikilinks to people. But the Wikilinks to people are little more than ad hominem fallacies that attempt to discredit ideas by cataloguing the faults of the originators of the ideas. Why not paraphrase, quote, and cite to the published scholars that have analyzed the actual faults in the ideas? Forget the originators of the ideas. It is the ideas that are faulty here. Let's stop all of these ad hominem fallacies; they are all over Wikipedia.
3. Beneath the tangle of the train wreck is the repeated attempt to blame the ills of society on the imaginary God and on the zealots' imagined relationship with the imaginary God! That is preposterous, my friends! There ain't no God, I say. Forget all of that religion and black magic stuff. Whatever is wrong has nothing to do with religion and God; the fault lies in the heart of man and arises from the very evil side of the very godless atoms that make up all of us. And both sides manifest the very same bigotry and closed-mindedness at which religion and God excel.
4. What can you do about it? Please feel free to make your own statement of what you see as the "bug." None of us know what the bug is, I say. But we all have clues; so we have to work together and pool our information to get a good-enough picture--so that we can get a grip on the real problem that is underneath and sets off the train wreck. ---Rednblu | Talk 10:52, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

• • The bug is a peculiar assumption ingrained in the western secular mind -- the divorce of science and religion. In western secularism, as long as religion bears no link to science, then it's safely within the realm of conjecture -- it's harmless. "Believe whatever you want, it doesn't matter, because it's all just harmless imagining." But when a religion begins to make hard claims to historical fact that demand response, religion is no longer safely neutered, and secular civilization finds itself aghast at the arrogance of those religious individuals who make claims to hard reality. Such efforts to marry science and religion are subversive to western secularism. They are the cats that walks by twice in The Matrix. They draw out the irrational paranoia in otherwise intelligent, balanced people. The solution to this bug is not a change of religion. the solution to this bug is the recognition of one's assumptions, and the recognition that they are assumptions, rather than absolute truth. Once fundamentalists of the Christian, Muslim, or Atheistic variety understand and own their assumptions and the assumptions of others, ideological conflict vanishes, and mutual understanding begins. Ungtss 23:39, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

• • I think the bug is actually larger than just "God", but there is a serious lack on Wikipedia of a quick means to end disputes about content in relation to pseudoscience articles. Moderation, arbitration, and the other myriad of dispute resolution processes just doesn't seem to work in the face of the attempts by multiple editors to write different articles on identical subjects when the authors are simply entrenched in either science or in their own pseudoscientific viewpoint. It gets to the point where months are spent arguing on very minor details because of perceived biases by both sides that slip through. I think that the pseudoscience articles that exist on wikipedia from non-standard cosmologies to creation science are all very poor articles from a strict quality standpoint because they tend to have a haphazard writing style as the result of this consensus articulation. This is due to the fact that there really isn't consensus on how to view the topics themselves and there is no general policy of wikipedia on how to view pseudoscience other than to declare that it should be NPOV. But npov is way too vague to deal with this. The way to be NPOV with respect to pseudoscience isn't clear because science works in a very clear manner as opposed to, say, an article on John Kerry which looks to the neutrality of a moderator of a political debate on how to view a subject in NPOV. What could be very useful are authors (not just moderators) who are not related to the conflict brought in to rewrite the articles in less offensive ways. Too often, the "sides" are too used to reading the detail arguments of the other "side" and so any one editor on one side is likely to push the other sides' buttons. We don't have enough neutral editors for articles about pseudoscience, and frankly I don't know where we will find them. Joshuaschroeder 23:26, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)
    • The npov guidelines are very clear and explicit on pseudoscience. treat it sympathetically, descibe the beliefs on their own terms, and then explain in attributed terms why these ideas are rejected by the mainstream scientific community. it is neither complex nor vague. it just requiresus to write for the enemy -- something that is very difficult to do when your entire worldview is on the line. Ungtss 00:30, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

See, it's backhanded comments like the one included above that have become par-for-the-course in editting these articles. The problem is, what is considered "sympathetic treatment" to Ungtss looks like propaganda to me and vice versa. Joshuaschroeder 00:53, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

"sympathetic treatment" has a very clear definition under npov. it means the text itself should neither state nor imply that any point of view is right or wrong, but maintain textual neutrality, accurately describing and attributing the "lies" to those who tell them, while describing and attributing the "truth" to those who speak it. Ungtss 02:10, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

However, in the realm of science there are facts that cannot be denied. It is a fact, not an opinion, that the Earth is billions of years old. To try to attribute this fact would be ridiculous, even though creationists object to it. Sympathetic treatment means we must describe the reasons given why creationists make claims they do, but it does not mean that we have to treat their claims with the same weight as those of science. Joshuaschroeder 15:13, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

the age of the earth is an absolutely unfalsifiable proposition. there is absolutely no way to demonstrate that the earth is not 10,000 years old, or that it is not 1,000,000,000 years old. we don't have the tools. we can make estimates based on assumptions, and come to conclusions that we think are reasonable. but your assertion that "it is a fact that the earth is billions of years old" is absolutely laughable. we weren't there. we don't know. Ungtss 22:07, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

Speedy deletion policy

I didn't realize this page existed. There's currently an issue in which some admins are speedying "recreations of deleted content" that the majority doesn't see as such. Most of the examples and associated crap are in Wikipedia:Requests for comment/RickK; there's also a bit at the end of Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion. --SPUI (talk) 12:54, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

verison = version

I went to look up 'Verison' in the search menu, and got a whole bunch of hits -- for 'verison' as a mis-spelling of 'version'. I fixed a few, but there are over five pages of this to be fixed! Is there some way we can quickly correct a lot of these sorts of typos? - Kit Foxtrot 22:37, 8 May 2005 (EST)

I've copied your question to User:Humanbot, it should be completed soon. Thanks for pointing it out! — Catherine\^talk 05:51, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Interlanguage links

Has there been any discussion here or on Meta to create a common repository of interlanguage links (like en:, de:, fr: and so on)? It seems that the English Wikipedia functions now as such. --Eleassar777 16:48, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

Listing in Categories and things like that

I think that articles that start, for example, with an accent, such as Á or È or Õ (for example, Álvaro Cunhal, do you get it?) should be listed in categories, or other listings that take the first letter in account, under that same letter without the accent. For languages that use accents everywhere, such as mine, Portuguese, considering Á as another letter is a very strange thing to see.Afonso Silva 13:44, 21 May 2005 (UTC)

hi, sorry for bothering, i'm not really sure how to use this, but could u guys please fix the "Edison speech, 1920s.ogg" if possible, it doesn't play for some reason, might be broken. I'd appreciate that very much, thanx.

~Raksha

Star Destroyers

I have recently made changes to the Star Destroyers article, which was promptly changed back. I know that this is allowed and that debate it good, but the information and facts being used to support the information which I changed is completely false. I have already written a section in the dissuasion area, May 25th 2005A.D., and would now like some kind of moderation to solve this dilemma.

Invalid deletion of Hellenic Genocide page

The page on the Hellenic Genocide was deleted in violation of Wikipedia rules despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of users voted to KEEP it. After people companied that the deletion was invalid and resistated the page, the page was then locked in its deleted state so that it cannot be replaced.

The deletion of this page was out of order and carried out for political reasons alone in order to suppress the knowledge of a historical event equivalent to the NAZI holocaust. Wikipedia should be ashamed of itself that this was allowed to happen. The deletion of the Hellenic Genocide page is TOTALLY INVALID and is nothing short of HOLOCAUST DENIAL ! Overwhelming evidence and references was presented on the page to show that a premeditated genocide of 4 million Greeks from Asia-Minor was perpetrated by the Turks, including US congressional resolutions which recognised the mass murder of Greeks, Armenians and Assyrians.

I demand that the page be reinstated immediately and that action be take against the apologists who deleted it and who have systematicaly been abusing Wikipedia rules in order to have the pages related to this page deleted as well including biographies of authors such as Thea Halo, George Horton, and Leonidas Koumakis who have written about the Hellenic Genocide.--Argyrosargyrou 17:38, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The vote was 16:5 in favour of deletion, after removing invalid votes, and completely withing Wikipedia procedures. DJ Clayworth 21:07, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)

NO IT WAS NOT

This is what the RFD page actually say about how votes should be counted.

"Your opinion will be given the most weight if you are logged in with an account that already existed when the nomination was made. Anonymous and new users are welcome to contribute to the discussion, but their votes may be discounted, especially if they seem to be made in bad faith. "

There is nothing forbidding anonymous and new users from voting and since their votes were ALL in GOOD FAITH and they gave genuine reasons for why they wanted the page kept, (that the Hellenic Genocide was a proven historical event and it should not be denied for political expediency etc.), there is NO REASON WHATSOEVER for them to have been discounted, and since the votes to KEEP were in the OVERWHELMING MAJORITY of 2:1 the page should have been kept.

This page was deleted in violation of Wikipedia rules and should be reinstated immediately.--Argyrosargyrou 21:31, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Dutch Low Saxon problem!

Hi, most Dutch people using the Low Saxon Wikipedia, can't understand/or almost not understand the current Low Saxon version because it is in German Low Saxon this is very annoying we can't even read what the main page is about, isn't it a good idea to make a "nds-nl.wikipedia.org" page? (Dutch Low Saxon) and keep the current nds.wikipedia.org for the German Low Saxon? I'm willing to start that translation, understandable for all people living in the Netherlands. - Servien [Dutch user (http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gebruiker:Servien)]

Background of Pages, Skins

I do not think that I am alone in this feeling, but the stark contrast of a white background on most pages, along with blue links and black text, is VERY painful to me. All of the skins for Wikipedia simply change layout, not actual color, as most skins for sites and forums do. Is there any chance a "EasyEyes" skin, or somesuch, could be made with a dark background and lighter text choices? Even a dark shade of grey would be better then plain white. - Ariamaki Risenki Ariamaki

• Quite sorry, I just noticed that above there is a link to fix this very problem. Sorry for the space-waste, but I will leave this here to ask anotehr question... Can anyone aid me by making a CSS style sheet that makes the pages look better from a harsh-on-the-eyes POV?

- Still Ariamaki Risenki Ariamaki

European accented characters search

I think it would be good if articles titled using accented European characters could be searched for and retreived by entering unaccented characters. For example the article 'Spanische Küche' would be suggested by entering 'Spanische Kuche'.