> Two pages are listed as Orphans that have illegal names:
> [[What_is_Mathematics,_Really?|What is Mathematics, Really?]]
> and [[Wikipedia:|Wikipedia:]]. Can someone with powers that
> surpass those of us mere sysops either blow those pages away or
> rename to some that can be accessed for editing?
>
> Secondly, the years 803 through 809 continue to be listed as
> orphans despite having numerous incoming links. Why is that?
It just so happens I looked at that code recently, so I fixed it.
I deleted the illegal articles manually, and I found the bug in
the code that was causing it to misreport the year pages as orphans.
It's rather instructive, actually: The code was relying on two lists
of article titles being sorted, and comparing them 3-tape-merge style
(and yes, I'm probably one of the few programmers here who calls it a
3-tape merge because I've actually done it with tapes:-). Well,
MySQL faithfully returns the titles in text order, but then then code
uses a simple PHP "<" to compare them; PHP is typeless, and therefore
will use numeric comparisons when strings look like numbers, so it
thinks "80286" > "803", even though MySQL got it right. The fix is
in CVS.
0
Re the recent (and excellent) efforts being made to apply consistency for naming conventions, I would like to throw a mild spanner in.
How come cities in the USA are identified simply by [[City, State]] and not [[City, State, USA]]? There would seem to be a presupposition that *everyone* will recognise US state names.
Admittedly you'd be hard pressed to find someone who hasn't heard of California. However a lot of people might not have heard of Iowa, Missouri, New Hampshire, Montana, or Louisiana, or would not know that New York, Mississippi and Washington are also states, or that New Mexico is actually in the USA.
I did a quick survey of people in my office (all of whom can be regarded as quite highly educated), and in each case I managed to find a US State they had never heard of or were confused about. By means of comparison, those US editors might try and name the 6 states of Australia, or the 9 provinces of South Africa, or the I-don't-know-how-many Provinces of Canada (with due apologies to my Canadian colleagues). And that is only considering the English-speaking world...
Manning
Daniel Mayer <maveric149(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
>On Wednesday 19 June 2002 12:01 pm, tarquin wrote:
>
>
>>alternatively, should "naming conventions" be absorbed into
>>WikiProjects? the original proposal is about naming schemes as well as
>>consistent content presentation.
>>
>>
>
>No I don't think this would be desirable. [[Wikipedia:naming conventions]] is
>(more or less at least) a policy article and the WikiProject idea has never
>been much more than a way for wikipedians to collaborate on a certain set of
>related articles (which hasn't been used much BTW). Only part of what is
>determined in a WikiProject is what to name articles -- but those names also
>should conform to standard(ish) naming conventions.
>
>In other words the WikiProject is really more informal and only enforceable
>through bold editing and peer pressure while naming conventions are more or
>less part of policy and are enforced in this light. Of course in a wiki the
>line between the two types of enforcement is blurred -- but a distinction
>should still be made.
>
I agree that presentation templates shouldn't be enforced on new and
casual writers; partly they're too much to take on, they make newcomers
feel constricted; also because (unlike page naming), it's very easy to
tidy up articles later.
However, they're of interest to more than the group that chooses to work
on a specific project: the many players of WikiRoulette aka Random
Weeding, for instance.
As I said on Talk:WikiProject, it seems to me that we currently have 4
rough meta- areas which overlap somewhat:
* naming conventions
* WikiProjects: presentation guidelines for types
* basic topic pages, eg "[[Music basic topics]]"
* WikiProjects: gathering wikipedians to work on a subject area
ManningBartlett's OO-style hierarchy of pages is clean and neat, and I
think it could be used for naming and style conventions. Whether that's
by seperating presentation guidelines from WikiProjects or somehow
integrating it all together, I don't know. We don't want to make
newcomers feel they're being herded, but when they want to look things
up to ensure they're being as constructive as possible, the information
should be clear and easy to find.
tarquin
If you examine a postage stamp from the United Kingdom you will note that
the name of the country is missing. This is a commonplace of philately.
Likewise I believe it is a supportable convention to abbreviate topic
titles such as Paris, Texas or Saguache County, Colorado or even simply
Dorset or Yorkshire. There is a slight objective problem for those who have
some English but are not throughly familiar with English language popular
culture. Somehow adding USA or England on to the examples seems quite
awkward.
The convention for the reader is that if no country is mentioned the United
States or Britain can be assumed.
Fred Bauder
Currently, we require an "invariant section", which means that anybody
has to put a specifically formatted HTML table on every page that
uses Wikipedia materials, asking people to contribute to Wikipedia.
(See below (*) for the rather messy details.)
Here, I want to argue that we should abandon this invariant section.
The FOLDOC computing dictionary has been licenced to us under GFDL
without invariant sections. We have incorporated many articles from
them. Two weeks ago, somebody asked me whether the material from our
TeX article (http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/TeX), which was originally
based on FOLDOC's but has since grown considerably, could be
reintegrated into FOLDOC. The answer is: only if they put our
Wikipedia table into the FOLDOC entry, which they are unlikely to do
because it doesn't really fit with their article formatting.
There is a new, exciting and fast growing math encyclopedia at
http://planetmath.org; everything is licensed under GFDL without
invariant sections, and can therefore be used by us without problems
(while acknowledging the source, as we do for FOLDOC articles). I
haven't copied anything over yet, but I'm sure I will in the future.
People have asked me whether they could take Wikipedia materials and
post them on PlanetMath. For articles that I have written exclusively
myself, and there aren't many, this is no problem. For others, the
Wikipedia invariant table is required, which pretty much excludes them
because of the site's particular layout.
These are two examples of the fledgling open content movement that's
growing right now. We are currently the clear leader of this movement,
but we are not playing very nicely. If everybody required their own
invariant sections, cooperation and exchange would become almost
impossible. I believe that this movement is ultimately even more
important than Wikipedia. We should do everything to foster it, if
only out of self-interest.
Even without an invariant section, the GFDL requires proper
attribution of all materials. Rather than fretting over the possible
evil schemes of big bad corporations, why not apply wiki principles:
trust that people are basically good, and that the more freedoms you
give them, the better the outcomes will be.
Axel
----
(*) The invariant section requirement is alluded to in
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/GNU+Free+Documentation+License, but no
link is given. http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/wikipedia:copyright
contains a "draft" which explicitly disputes an invariant section. The
invariant section requirement used to be contained in the uneditable
file http://www.wikipedia.com/license/fdl.html but that has ceased to
exist after the software change. It can still be viewed at
http://web.archive.org/web/20011112090138/http://www.wikipedia.com/license/….
The invariant sections, or "linkbacks" have been defended by Jimbo and
Larry in several Wikipedia-l messages in October 2001:
http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2001-October/date.html
Since I am hearing several voices saying "invariant sections bad,
linkbacks good" and no forceful opposition, I will go ahead and edit
[[Wikipedia:copyrights]] and [[GFDL]] accordingly.
If anything I write is disagreeable, let me know either on this list
or in Talk:.
Axel
On Friday 14 June 2002 12:01 pm, Karen wrote:
> I promise to use my powers only for good :)
>
> Seriously, Maveric said I should ask because it would make doing
> maintenance easier. I've been trying to make a start on unshuffling the
> 'country' entries from /s to proper titles but it takes forever and a
> day!
I forgot to tell Karen to also list her user name and/or user id - mea culpa.
I went ahead and editted her status to make her a sysop so she could get to
work. I'm sure Jimbo would have already done so himself if he knew her user
name (which is [[user:Karen Johnson]], BTW).
Hope this doesn't get me in trouble :)
maveric149
> I downloaded the stick drawing of all amino acids and am cutting
> them apart. It is a PNG with one color set to transparent, which
> shows as dark gray checkers, which makes the writing, which is
> mostly black, hard to read. The acid group is well-nigh impossible
> to read. Is there a way to change the checkers to something lighter?
> I found a button at the lower left, which changes them to red
> checkers, but that's no better.
I often just add a layer filled with whatever color is useful
right underneath the transparent layer, then delete that layer
before saving.
0
I'll probably be finished before anyone answers, but for future reference:
I downloaded the stick drawing of all amino acids and am cutting them apart.
It is a PNG with one color set to transparent, which shows as dark gray
checkers, which makes the writing, which is mostly black, hard to read. The
acid group is well-nigh impossible to read. Is there a way to change the
checkers to something lighter? I found a button at the lower left, which
changes them to red checkers, but that's no better.
phma