Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 16:19, 15 March 2009

• Table of contents
• First discussion
• End of page
• New post

• WP:VPM

Public Domain picture

Would the picture on Matthew Martin at http://www.richmondfed.org/press_room/press_releases/about_us/2009/mmartin_20090205.cfm be considered fair use?Smallman12q (talk) 00:25, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Mattew Martin is still alive, so using a Fair Use image of him is a bad idea. (also, I don't see an image there) EVula // talk // ☯ // 00:37, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

How about a public domain picture? The picture is at the bottom of the page where it says Photo of Matthew Martin (Print Quality). The direct link is http://www.richmondfed.org/about_us/who_we_are/management_team/images/matt_martin.jpg Smallman12q (talk) 20:49, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

There doesn't seem to be anything on that page to suggest that picture is in the public domain. At best there's an implied license for press use. Algebraist 21:23, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

So would that be considered fair use? Also what about the pictures here at http://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/bios/banks/pres01.htm . Is that also not usable?Smallman12q (talk) 23:04, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

As EVula stated, no picture can be considered fair use for Misplaced Pages's purposes if a free alternative could be made. This includes almost all pictures of living persons. Only public domain or freely licensed images are allowable. The pages you've linked to contain nothing to suggest that the images are PD or freely licensed. Algebraist 23:09, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Aren't they works of government agencies(Are the federal reserve banks not considered government agencies...if not, then that's a whole other discussion)? Or does that not apply to pictures?Smallman12q (talk) 03:03, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

The copyright notice on the website claims that the bank is capable of holding copyrights. Algebraist 10:09, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

Thankyou for pointing that out...now they also have a link to this site http://license.icopyright.net/creator/tag.act?tag=federalreservebankofrichmond ...so how does that fit in? Does this mean the photo for the baltimore office at http://www.richmondfed.org/about_us/visit_us/locations/baltimore/ can't be used?Smallman12q (talk) 13:31, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

Yes. Algebraist 11:15, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

Yes to which one? Can I please get an explanation?Smallman12q (talk) 21:23, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

Yes to the yes/no question that you asked. Algebraist 21:59, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

All I'm asking for is a thorough answer. I would appreciate if it if you could provide me with an explanation(I don't follow your last response). Thank you in advance.Smallman12q (talk) 22:42, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

(undent) Basically, fair use isn't good enough for living people. Specifically, a fair use picture of a living person fails criterion 1 of Misplaced Pages:Non-free content criteria. So if you're looking at a picture of a living person, one you found on the web, it's up to you to demonstrate that the picture is in the public domain or has been released with a free content license. And the lack of an explicit copyright claim is not such a demonstration. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 00:10, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

Well perhaps this picture is in the public domain...that's what I'm trying to get at. Is this picture in the public domain? The site is by the federal reserve(which I believe is a government agency) and their copyright license is here http://license.icopyright.net/creator/tag.act?tag=federalreservebankofrichmond (which seems to be a creative commons license). So my question really is...is the picture in public domain?(And if so, why not).Smallman12q (talk) 20:09, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

It's been a few days...and still no answer. I also would like to ask if the Detroit branch is also under CC rather than as a work of a government agency.Smallman12q (talk) 01:31, 28 February 2009 (UTC) ...Anyone want to give an answer?Smallman12q (talk) 01:02, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

The Federal Reserve is not a government agency, it's precise legal status is interesting, but it is not an agency of the federal government, but rather "quasi-public", meaning that it can hold copyrights and its images, works, etc. are not in the public domain. The license you cite reads "A license to reproduce and/or distribute the work unchanged, for non-commercial purposes." (emphasis added). Under the current policy, we're sadly not allowed to use such images. Cool3 (talk) 01:08, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

I thought that wikipedia was a non-profit organization? Why wouldn't they allow non-commercial purpose images? (Can I please get a policy link)...And if it that is the case...then this I can mark this is as resolved.(I will be a bit disappointed nonetheless). —Preceding unsigned comment added by Smallman12q (talk • contribs) 12:37, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

The policy you want is WP:NFC. Algebraist 12:46, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

Well...thats very disappointing. I'm going to assume that these images wouldn't qualify under fair use?--Smallman12q (talk) 20:57, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

Anyone? Would it qualify under fair use?Smallman12q (talk) 19:33, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

It would not. Unless the images illustrate some peculiar, important, encyclopedic feature that it would be completely impossible to get a free image of (Not because there is no such image, but because it's physically impossible to take one. Perhaps because the building burned down.), Or unless the article is about the image itself, then I don't think you're going to be able to fit these into Misplaced Pages's policies on non-free images. APL (talk) 14:52, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Ethnio

http://meta.wikimedia.org/search/?title=Special:CentralNotice&method=listNoticeDetail&notice=ethnio_recruitment

Could someone explain what this is all about ? Thank you.-- ExpImp 19:00, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Seems like some sort of randomly triggered (20% of the time) notice, something about "Live near SF and have an hour to help Misplaced Pages?". I wonder if this is still in test mode? And I wonder what, if anything, it has to do with this website? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 00:45, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

No, it is not in testmode. It popped up on my wikipedia pages, which is why i searched for ethnio on wikipedia. which lead me to the linked page. but i don't quite know what (if any) this has to do with wikipedia, and why it pops up on these pages. and who authorised it, as there seems to be NO discussion nowhere. at least i was unable to find any.-- ExpImp 03:53, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

Well, since it's at meta, perhaps you might post your question at m:Meta:Babel. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:49, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

I learned it is part of the meta:Misplaced Pages Usability Initiative More here. Just in case i'm not the only one interested.-- ExpImp 11:27, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for that link. The operative words include The target audience of testers are Misplaced Pages readers who have little or no experience in editing the Misplaced Pages articles. The banner is displayed within the range of 1:400 to 1:100 page views ... So I'm guessing that most readers of this page would not have seen it. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:34, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

Main Page

The "In the News" section on the Main Page hasn't been updated in more than a day (WP Time) and there is current;y a message on the Main page talk page. Since there's been at least one fairly high profile event yesterday (The Tsvangari Crash incident) is it possible that someone could update? BigHairRef | Talk 04:30, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

A better place for discussion is Misplaced Pages:In the news section on the Main Page and its offspring. There is a semi-formal process for adding items to the list - this isn't something that casual editors should do. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:37, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

I was aware of the process for the change of ITN candidates, I was merely hoping to prompt an appropriate admin to update once per 24 hours as per the guidelines on the main page talk page. UNfortunately the same has occurred again with almost a 40 hour delay since the last update. BigHairRef | Talk 08:27, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

the same in french

Does it exist a French Misplaced Pages Village pump? --Cywil (talk) 21:23, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

If you're asking if the French Misplaced Pages has a similar page to this one, the answer is "sort of". If you look at the top-level village pump page, you'll see a box of "languages" links on the left side; it includes a link to the French equivalent to that page.

Such a link isn't here on this page (WP:VPM), I'm guessing, because the French Misplaced Pages doesn't split up their village pump as much as we do. But I've not looked. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:31, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

Velascanding

There is an article at Velascanding which has been prodded as being made up. When I did a Google search for the word, there are very few sources, but the word turns up in X Games, http://wapedia.mobi/en/X_Games (which is a mirror of Misplaced Pages), http://top40-charts.com/pedia.php?title=X_Games_12 (which is also a mirror), and http://it.wikipedia.org/X_Games, which is the Italian Misplaced Pages. Are we being hoaxed? Who then was a gentleman? (talk) 22:29, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

And the reason you are posting here rather than, say, at Talk:Velascanding and Talk:X Games is ... ? (And you can also post {{hoax}}; not sure if anyone is monitoring the category, though.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 00:29, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

I posted on the Village Pump because the Village Pump is the place to have discussions in such matters. It wouldn't have done any good to post on the article's Talk page because nobody would have seen it, and I don't believe in putting a hoax tag on an article that I'm trying to get more information about. I definitely didn't expect to get attacked for trying to get information. Who then was a gentleman? (talk) 20:26, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

No one has attacked you. Someone has asked you a question. As you're discovering, the village pump is not in general a good place for discussing problems with specific articles. Algebraist 13:18, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

::::I wasn't asking for a discussion about problems. I was asking if anybody had ever heard of the term before. How cooperative. What's the point of the village pump if valid topics are looked down upon? Who then was a gentleman? (talk) 19:42, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

You know what, never mind. Nobody wants to be cooperative, why should I care? Who then was a gentleman? (talk) 19:47, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Pseudonymous editing and ethics

I've posted this on 'Misplaced Pages Review - it's related to some 'big picture' stuff about wikipedia, pseudonymous editing etc. etc. - thoughts most welcome anywhere :-) - it was prompted by a post by ex wiki stalwart Doc Glasgow, who said - "Hiding behind a pseudonym, whilst commenting on real identifiable people, is cowardly and deplorable." - a view echoed on akahele.org - "When people hide behind anonymous identifiers or phony pseudonyms, trust breaks down." (those interested in these issue should definitely read akahele - it's very good.

I just wanted to mention (as an pseudonymous person!) that I kinda hope that pseudonymous writing and good ethics / value / humour / quality aren't fundamentally in tension, rather that they will just tend to lead to the whole slew of problems well documented already.

In particular, I thought I'd mention the example of 'Private Eye' - a british institution and fantastic magazine which doesn't generally do 'bylines' (with notable exceptions) - contributors make up silly names and write their stuff... sound familiar?

The fundamental difference of course is that Private Eye is 'published' - and as such is regularly in and out of the courts, with varying degrees of success. The important point is that they manage very successfully to continue to publish, and even though they fairly regularly make mistakes / cross lines and have to pay damages, they're more often 'right' in some sense or other.....

So if one allows that pseudonymous contribution can be valuable - where does 'responsibility' come in? - On the part of the publisher, I guess - and it's the absence of such which I reckon is of higher importance than the identity of author thing.

The more you think about it, the odder it seems that publication wouldn't be a stated goal of a foundation seeking to share the sum of human knowledge. If the tool requires 'self-publication' (which is how I'd describe wikipedia?) - then that's where identification is required - fundamentally because the buck stopping somewhere is a good thing, and should be supported - I don't think many would disagree? Privatemusings (talk) 23:47, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

Yes, there are good points there. Accountability is and will always be an issue, and identification is certainly an easy solution to the problem.

That being said, where exactly do we draw the line? I've long considered the option of revealing my identity and being open about who I am, but after seeing incidents like that leading to the retirement of H, I'm largely convinced that openness of real-world identity on Misplaced Pages isn't worth the potential harassment by with time on their hands. Yes, this is ironic given your quote of Doc Glasgow, but I would think that it would be obvious that while commenting negatively on "real identifiable people" anonymously may be deplorable, harassing other "real identifiable people" while not anonymous or pseudonymous is similarly deplorable.

What I see as being the main issue in this is not so much whether (optional) pseudonymity is good or bad, but rather what, in practice would happen if we disallowed it. How well would that work? What side-effects would be applicable? What would happen if we suddenly required all editors to identify themselves? If so, how would we verify these identities? What if identification was optional but offered advantages? What if people with particular permissions or under particular circumstances were required to release an identity? These are the sorts of questions which we'd need to ask if we wanted to think about changing from our current system of pseudonymity (which is an obvious application of what you discuss). While the system is not by any means perfect, the status quo might be preferable to any change. {{Nihiltres|talk|log}} 05:38, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Not to mention the fact we have editors under 13 -- useful ones (supposedly at least one admin who was 12), and which gets into some issues with U.S. law and such. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 11:34, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

recent change frequency

How many rc take place every minute ? ava. value .User:Yousaf465 (talk)

I just looked at the most recent 500 edits, which occurred in a four-minute period. That's a rate of about 125 edits per minute.

And, in fact, as you can see here, there are about 10 million edits every 50 days, or about a million edits every five days, or about 200,000 edits per day. Which, divided by 1,440 (the number of minutes per day), is 138 edits per minute. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 13:38, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

There is, of course, variation in the edit rate according to the time of day, day of the week, and whether there are breaks going on in universities (as a large proportion of our editors are university students). It would be fun to see an extensive study of these statistics. Dcoetzee 13:42, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

No,tool to montier those ?.User:Yousaf465 (talk)

And whether Misplaced Pages is working or not. For 40 minutes there were zilch rc/min. - Jarry1250 20:32, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

See: Misplaced Pages:Village pump (technical)#Error message. – ukexpat (talk) 21:13, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

also gives information on current editing rates and trends. Cool3 (talk) 21:58, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

<geek>Is it safe to assume that edits arrive in a Poisson process? :)</geek> --Ixfd64 (talk) 00:37, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

Books and editing

OK, this is relatively new, but I guess we need to start thinking about it. Edits for the sole reason of improving the book of a user, instead of improving the article. Do we want to allow such things ? --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:25, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

I don't see a problem - it's benefiting anyone in the future who wants to make a book from that article, not just that one user. Tra (Talk) 21:55, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Although I think it's probably debatable whether hiding the see also section does actually help individuals planning to print the article. Christopher Parham (talk) 23:14, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

You wouldn't be able to follow the links in the printed article, so if the see also section was present, it would only be useful if the person reading the book was also sitting next to a computer and was able to search for the related terms. Tra (Talk) 23:26, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

WIKIPEDIA- Home of the Free and Bias

Misplaced Pages promotes itself as "the 💕." This is not completely true. Yes, it may not costs anything of monetary value to read the articles. However, it costs a great deal to the people whom are reading it assuming they are recieving the truth. The costs of midinformed people is something we need to consider. If Misplaced Pages chooses to continue with their with holding of truth and political spinning, then they should change their slogan. Instead of "The 💕" they should refer to themselves as "The not Completely Free but Completely BIAS Encyclopedia." —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.139.220.55 (talk) 07:38, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

WP:General disclaimer. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 11:22, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

That and wikipedia is Free as in speech not as in beer. --Kim Bruning (talk) 11:36, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

Grind your axe much, IP? Or are you angry over an article about a certain U.S. president? MuZemike 22:31, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Anyone up for creating a template message we can use every time this nonsense repeats itself, or maybe we just ignore it? Oh, and by the way, IP poster, "bias" (note lower case, not Berkley Integrated Audio Software) is a noun, the word you were looking for is "biased". – ukexpat (talk) 15:39, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

If he only knew that of greater concern is our systemic bias away from subjects of great concern to people who lack Internet access. Tempshill (talk) 17:19, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Why is it that these axe grinders can never understand the difference between "bias" and "biased"? Who then was a gentleman? (talk) 19:59, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

help please

hi, whenever i look for something with google i always get lot of sites to get info. And always one of those would be something-Misplaced Pages,the 💕 but recently when i click on it the message drops down with save or find and i get no-where. Would you help me please to fix it so it will be as it was before —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.41.71.211 (talk) 17:44, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

Unless other editors can report the same problem (I just tried a google search, Firefox 3, Mac OS X; worked as expected), you're probably not going to get much help at this page (which is for assistance with editing). For problems with reading Misplaced Pages (or with Google or your computer), you can try the reference desk. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:33, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

'toon lists

Quick question. I've been watching a steady increase in the size of a number of lists in one article, Spacetoon, of what appears to be the name of every single program that has played (or potentially will play) on this television channel, almost all added by a single editor. My question : is this considered acceptable practise in Wiki; that long lists of TV shows are displayed as they are here? Even when many of them already have their own article? The lists now appear to form the bulk of the material in the article. It doesn't seem useful to me. What's your opinion? Deconstructhis (talk) 04:52, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Unavailable on the mainland

The secure server has been unavailable in mainland China for several weeks now, as are all the English pages on the non-secure server that relate to this problem. Someone who can access them should check whether those pages have been updated. English non-secure pages on other topics are unaffected. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 123.122.115.161 (talk) 05:53, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Need advice on article content

At the PlayStation 3 article there has been discussion and back-and-forth about what to list as the "Best Selling Game" in the info box. I was sure Misplaced Pages had some policy or guideline at least that frowned on the inclusion of information that changes too fast to be of use. I need to know the best way to approach this. Padillah (talk) 12:31, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

there is a problem with putting a "best selling game" (it best to see here as it explains the problems putting one in)  rdunnPLIB  13:04, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Is that link relevant? That Zelda link is about Metacritic and heaping praise on an article, not "best selling" which should be very objective by comparison. Anyway, I don't see any reason to avoid use of fast-moving data in an infobox. Just match it to a date there in the infobox (already done) and you're clear. The article is heavily monitored and no doubt will be updated quickly when new data comes out. In-The-News articles have brand-new data slugged into them all the time as fast as it spews out of the media. Tempshill (talk) 17:15, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

"As of 2008"

What happened to as of 2007, as of 2008, etc? Tempshill (talk) 17:04, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

See Misplaced Pages:Redirects for discussion/Log/2009 February 21. – ukexpat (talk) 17:15, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Also, WP:As of#Previous method ("as of" links)♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 17:16, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

(edit conflict) The deletion logs in your links point to Misplaced Pages:Redirects for discussion/Log/2009 February 21 which links to Template:As of and Misplaced Pages:As of. {{As of}} replaces the system "As of year" links was a part of. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:17, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Got it, thanks. Tempshill (talk) 17:21, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

admins - automatic deletion summaries?

Deleting short pages used to automatically place the text "content was '<content of page>' " in the deletion summary field, but this no longer seems to be the case. Leaving the field blank or selecting nothing from the drop-down menu results in an empty summary. Is there a way to make this automatic summary appear, or has this feature been disabled? --Ixfd64 (talk) 00:35, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

What does it say when you click this link ? If it has a default summary, the issue stems from javascript found at MediaWiki:Sysop.js which looks for a template containing a delete-reason and adds this reason to the url in the "delete" tab at the top, e.g. . This will override any default "content was..." summary that was there before. If this is the source of the problem you can opt out of it with adblock plus, or add some kind of settings which to users to use their own js to disable it. — CharlotteWebb 01:02, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

The default summary was removed. It rarely provided a useful summary and caused problems when deleting attack pages and the like. Mr.Z-man 02:17, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

I clicked the first link and there is no default summary. --Ixfd64 (talk) 02:17, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

Still more useful than the damn code letters. Anyone want a retro-mode javascript? — CharlotteWebb 10:31, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

When should an image be copied to wikimedia commons?

When should an image be copied to wikimedia commons?Smallman12q (talk) 01:31, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

Never mind...found the policy at Misplaced Pages:Moving_images_to_the_Commons#RationaleSmallman12q (talk) 01:32, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

commons:licensing has much greater detail. — CharlotteWebb 01:41, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

Announcing Free text time templates

The principle of wikitext was to make editing articles as easy as possible. Unfortunately, some templates are needlessly arcane and serve to reintroduce complexity that wikitext sought to remove. There is new family of date/time templates that use free text dates. The following table is a list of this family of free text date templates and may be compared with those that do not have the dash in the name:

Advantages of new version

• Less error prone, easier to spot typos and contradictions
• WYSIWYG- the date appears in the format the user wanted it, accepting a variety of formats: EG:
  • 1963-11-22
  • 22 November 1963 1pm CST
  • Sunday, December 7, 1941
  • Compare to Old templates: Only day first and month first format supported. Time formatting is more restrictive. One way given to express timezone information in "22 November 1963 1pm CST" was:
    • Old Template: "19:00, 22 November 1963 (-07:00) (1963-11-22T19:00-07:00)" is produced by: {{Start date|1963|11|22|19|00||-07:00|df=y}}
• Besides freedom from such highly constrained formatting for times using the old template (24 hour clock only, no am/pm, only located in the first position) with timezones the new template does not require users to calculate the timezone difference from Greenwich mean time, or Daylight savings time.
  • In above example, the user is required by the old template to declare what the local time offset from UTC is for the location, correctly allowing for the dates when daylight savings time is in effect. (-07:00 needed to be given in the above old template example).
• No restrictions on formatting, even allowing use of templates and links. For instance,
  • Templates Birth date of James Cook: {{Birth-date| 7 November 1728 |{{OldStyleDate|7 November|1728|27 October}} }} produces: 7 November  1728 (1728-11-07)
    • Old templates: use with templates not supported
  • Links Birth date of Peter Drucker, formerly edited to display November 19, 1909 is currently displayed the same way, using the familiar right left format of wikilinks:

    {{birth-date | November 19, 1909 | ], ] }}

    • Old templates: Links not supported, only November 19, 1909 would be displayed.
• New template permits use with Julian dates
  • Old templates: Julian not supported
• Correctly calculates microformat death dates (they must be emitted as day +1 if day is specified, or Year +1 if only year is specified.)
  • Old templates not only do not perform this calculation, they emit nothing for death dates.

The older templates despite their arcane syntax don't support any of these additional functions. Of course, folks may choose to use the older templates if they wish. The new templates offer a second option for easier and less restrictive authoring of dates.

Use of {{birth-date and age}} and {{death-date and age}} is currently recommended as best practice in the Manual of Style (dates and numbers), as the former templates are generally regarded as needlessly complex by the MOSNUM community. The new templates are currently in use in over 1000 articles.

-J JMesserly (talk) 02:19, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

So, what uses these microformats? Is anyone producing a tool to replace the functionality of "whatlinkshere" as more dates are de-linked (getting a list of articles associated with a certain day/month/year, in order to find content for such pages)… — CharlotteWebb 10:37, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

From the context of your question Charlotte, I presume you meant who within the wiki community is using microformats to do stuff like what people used to use date linking for. I am unaware of anyone. The Geotagging stuff uses microformats but they don't rely on it operationally. Para and the geotagging folks are simply scraping the wikitext with perl scripts to create their kml files. Their geohack php code translates the parameters passed from WP to the various web sites. Currently, they bypass the microformats mechanism that internet browsers are promising to incorporate into their browsers as native features. This native feature behavior may be previewed by installing the Operator toolbar if you use firefox. There is an extension for IE but last I checked it didn't work very well. Anyway, what these extensions do is parse the html scanning for inoperative class tags that it recognizes as microformats tags. For example, a start date like a birthday is encoded with a class of dtstart. So when it finds one of those it looks for an ISO8601 encoded string within the cell or span. This family of templates does that span creation and encoding properly. This microformats functionality and wikipedia emission behavior may be verified by following the operator installation instructions and notes I created at here. Anyway, from what I assume people were doing with the whatlinkshere mechanism, this sort of scheme only had a granularity of articles. Microformats allow specification of events at a finer granularity, for example the dates of a marriage in a biography article, or a particular engagement within the context of a military conflict article. For the general internet population, the killer app for microformats appears to be mapping and calendar/contacts applications like google mapquest yahoo maps/calendar/contacts applications. Mapping is of interest to WP users, but I don't see a lot of folks using calendars to store historical events they find on wikipedia. Are folks going to go to USS Queen of the West (1854) and store all the engagements in their calendar? Maybe a civil war buff would, if the calendars accepted those dates, most of which don't. However, coordinates and events tags and the existing and speculative apps that would use them are small potatoes. Due to the connectivity that microformats enable, it is not hard to believe that when folks use disambiguated UIDs for a historical figure or a place that this uid will be a wikipedia article. (See Queen of West events button in data formats mode, and you will see the uid is an en wiki url, following common microformats practice. This is how they bind events belonging to the same thing. This central thing is designated with their uid tag.) Users will employ them without even being aware of their existence because the microformat code will just copy and propagate these uids as part of the normal activities of users on the web. Strategically, that is gold for the foundation, because whoever has the biggest repository of facts wins if and when this microformats trend snowballs. People start using common uids for information, and whoever has largest repository at the start dominates, and this domination self perpetuates. If our url is the UID, then anytime anyone refers to a microformatted fact, the identifier they are using has a foundation wikis as the destination. People will gravitate to the identifiers that deliver the most functionality, so the biggest snowball wins. The various foundation wikis are in the right strategic location at the right time should the microformats thing become ubiquitous. As an aside, it really doesn't matter if the microformat movement fails, because another mechanism will simply fill the same place. Hope this was responsive to the intent of your question. -J JMesserly (talk) 15:46, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

• Misplaced Pages noticeboards