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:Village pump archive 2004-09-26 - Misplaced Pages

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Welcome, newcomers and baffled oldtimers! If you have a question about Misplaced Pages and how it works, please place it at the bottom of the list, and someone will attempt to answer it for you. (If you have a question about life, the universe and everything, go to Misplaced Pages:Help desk instead.)

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NOTE - questions and answers will not remain on this page indefinitely (otherwise it would very soon become too long to be editable.) After a period of time with no further activity, information will be moved to other relevant sections of the wikipedia, placed in the Misplaced Pages:Village pump archive if it is of general interest, or deleted.

Mozilla 1.2b bug note

Just a note for Mozilla early adopters: the 1.2 beta contains a bug that causes image description pages for uploaded .png images to display as error messages. This is fixed in the latest nightly builds.

Or, as a workaround use the long-form URL such as:

The long-form URL is also a workaround for the "article title with ampersand is cut off" bug, which is a problem in our server configuration. A fix that doesn't cause random pages to be displayed from time to time is being tested and should be installed soon.

Mathematical wiki syntax

See m:Math Markup

Disambiguation pages not linked to

What is the thing to do when all links to a previous disambiguation page has been resolved? Is the disambiguation page just left there for future links to the page, or removed?

The former. --Brion 00:43 Sep 27, 2002 (UTC)

Great, thanks Brion. Carl

Capitalizing the first letter of article titles

I just made an article titled I'noGo tied but the link is from a lower-case "i" at the beginning, and I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be, at least according to my source (even at the beginning of a sentence, so I assume it's a pronunciation thing in Inuit). The system automatically switched it. Is there anyway around that? Not really a huge deal, I guess; it's still in lowercase in the article itself.--User: Tokerboy

You can link to it with leading lowercase, but you should talk to LDC about whether there's anyway to make it display the title with leading lowercase. --KQ

There isn't one, but you could talk with him about making one. --Brion

Birth and death format

(entry now in FAQ. This section to be deleted shortly)

A recent bit of expanding of Olivia Newton-John had me adding her date of birth at the start of her name in this style: (September 26, 1948- )

A certain astronomer then proceeded to change this to read (b September 26, 1948)

Which format is correct - and is there a correct format? I has a look in FAQ but found no help there.

Yes, there are standards. They are outlined on the Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style, and yes, you guessed it, some are still being thrashed out, in typical wikipedia style ;) The correct style for dates, however, is decided on. YOu'll be pleased to know that your preffered style is the standard: ( Rodney II (June 15, 1936- October 31, 2001). For the not-dead-yet, we use (born June 15, 1936). -- Tarquin

Reloading cached pages

I am unable to access the following areas:

I get various errors, all php related. Some are missing files, others are too many files open, and the like. The Clermont County one has been like this for days. What is happening here? -- Ram-Man

This is probably due to general heavy traffic loads from readers and very heavy edit load from me and especially you. ;) --mav

Shouldn't this clear out? Why has it been hours or days (in the case of Ohio) like this? -- Ram-Man

Clear your browser cache, hit reload, try again. Especially if you're using Internet Explorer, which seems to jealously preserve failed page loads. --Brion 03:18 Sep 29, 2002 (UTC)

I concur. Although I am using a Netscape version rather than Explorer, I too find that the error messages comes back if I go to the same page again, but then disappears when I hit 'Reload'. Andre Engels

Clearing the cache fixed my problem. Thanks! -- Ram-Man

Incidentally, one way to force Infernal Exploder to refresh is to hold down the Ctrl key while clicking the refresh icon. Which reminds me of a joke: "Only women refresh; men reload." -- NetEsq 20:10 Sep 29, 2002 (UTC)

If 'reload' also doesn't work, try to manually change the URL from www.wikipedia.org to www.wikipedia.com; rest unchanged. That should get around any caches that just keep acting on reload.Andre Engels 23:25 Oct 2, 2002 (UTC)

Perhaps the problem here is that, although we normally send pages set to expire immediately, so that there will be no caching, perhaps no such expiration is set when we send errors. Well, we generate the errors here on our server, so surely we can send such expiration commands then too? Programmers: Am I right? — Toby 05:26 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

If you're getting one of the errors described above, our script probably isn't even getting a chance to run; if it does, the error messages usually come up before we have a chance to output the custom headers, and you can't output headers after content has started. So, um, prolly not. --Brion 05:31 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

Quotes in titles

Following my earlier query about how to name articles about pieces of classical music (the responses to which I'm very grateful for, and still chewing over), I've got another problem in that area: I want to write an article about the John Cage piece 4'33", but it looks like article titles cannot have quotes in them, so 4'33" doesn't work. Is there any way round this? There are alternative names for the piece (it could be spelled out in words, for example), but this form is by far the most common, and I'd like to use it if at all possible. --Camembert 18:22 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

How does 4'43" (coded as ]) strike you? Ortolan88 18:44 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

Yes, I know I can use a pipe, and if it comes to that, I will (though I'll probably point it to Four Minutes, Thirty-Three Seconds rather than 4 33). But what I was really trying to ask, in a round about way, was: is there any way to use a " in an article title? --Camembert 23:20 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

How about ] as a quick cheat, with two ' for a " -- Tarquin 23:29 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

It might just work that, it might just work. Rather amusingly, however, if you try to surround the link with two 's to italicize it (as those tyrants at the Manual of Style will say you should, hem hem), it breaks the link, and italicizes one set of brackets instead. And I would be a bit worried about people trying to link to the article but not being able to work out that it's two 's rather than one ". But I can use html tags to italicize, and I don't see anybody else round here writing about John Cage, so... --Camembert 00:23 Oct 1, 2002 (UTC)

Randompage error

Special:Randompage seems to be no longer working, I get:

Warning: new Object failed: Too many open files in system (23) in /usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/wiki.phtml on line 7 

Warning: Failed opening 'Setup.php' for inclusion        
(include_path='.:/usr/local/lib/php') in  
/usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/wiki.phtml on line 12

Fatal error: Undefined class name 'outputpage' in 
/usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/wiki.phtml on line 14

Warning: new Object                                              failed: 
Too many open files in system (23) in Unknown on line 0

Warning: Failed to write session data (files). Please verify that the  
current setting of session.save_path is correct (/tmp) in Unknown on line   
0

Jeronimo 18:50 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

This has been happening on any page lately. Maybe a FAQ entry from one of the technically-minded wikipedians would help?

I've bumped the open files limit on the server from 8192 to 65536, so it oughtn't to be hitting this limit so often now. --Brion 22:55 Oct 2, 2002 (UTC)

50,000th article

We passed the 50000 article barrier yesterday. Does anyone know which article was the 50000th? (Not that it really matters, just idle curiosity on my part.) --Bth

I wouldn't put too much stock in that headline figuew. There are more than 15,000 "articles" with less than 500 characters. --mav 01:21 Oct 1, 2002 (UTC)

I think I saw Ram-man putting a comment in the little update box that he was 50000th for some county or another. I have no idea how he'd know that, and I may have been hallucinating, but I think I saw it. Tokerboy 22:09 Oct 2, 2002 (UTC)

Yeah it was some county, but I don't remember which one. I knew it was coming up because I saw something like "49,950" and I was adding more than 50 new county entries to some state. So I just watched to see which one would be 50,000 and added a little message. No biggy. 50,000 is only a partial landmark. Just wait till we have 50,000 *full* articles. That will be something impressive. Of course I don't know of any way to tell how many full articles there are, at least not easily. -- Ram-Man

Character encoding in Mozilla 1.1

I'm having trouble with the character encoding on my brower - it's mozilla 1.1 and the default encoding is iso8859-1. It makes any accents or unusual characters turn into rubb!sh and make a mess of the edit. Anyone know about this? User:andrewthorne

I never had problems with Mozilla 1.1a, and have no problems now with Mozilla 1.2a (on Windows 2000). Could you give examples of particular pages and particular actions which produce problems, and describe precisely what happens, and tell us which operating system you're running on? --Brion 04:15 Oct 1, 2002 (UTC)

Subpages

I've been struggling a bit with how to set off entries that can be very broad in application like but have many sub categories like or but I don't want the sub categories to get too wrapped up in the generalities... phpwiki 1.3 offers an interesting solution allowing users to create sub categories by adding a slash/ at the end like this Enlish / History . Has such a system been discussed before? ck out the demo version of |phpwiki_demo], make sure create a subject. save it. then add a slash to it at the end. it's pretty easy.- dgd

We have done this in the past, but it has been deprecated. It was felt that the disadvantages were probably greater than the advantages. See Misplaced Pages:Wikipedia_subpages_pros_and_cons. For cases such as you mention, you can either use sub-headings (Type ==History== on a line of itself), or create a page with a title like ]. Andre Engels 15:22 Oct 1, 2002 (UTC)

Downloading Misplaced Pages's data

I've been attempting to setup a copy of wikipedia on one of my servers for experimenting and testing. I want to use the real data to experiment with the wikipedia code and be able to more closely examine the data structure. I have in mind potentially altering the code to use in another project that is something of a "People Data Store" Example: "Quotes" are made by people, people have biography that relates them to other people, places, and events in time. This could also apply to many other works of people such as "Lyrics", "Books", "Articles", "Film", "Programming code". Lots of possibilities. In many ways it it much like an encyclopedia, just more (for lack of a better way of expressing it) factual and concrete. 8-)

My problem, For a couple of days now I've been attempting to download the datadump of the encyclopedia and history from the download page. Unfortunately all I get instead of a gzip, tar, or zip file is the text data dump to my browser. Is there some way that I can get the current data and history files some other way? I don't care about the size, but a file is much more useful than a text data list of many mb. Also is there some method of data replication that is used to keep other copies current? Any help with this would be much appreciated, Thanks (albrown AT chook DOT com or al AT thetinfoilhat DOT com)

Your browser appears to be helpfully un-gzipping the data for you. If this is a problem (ie, you don't want to take up that much hard disk space just for the dump), try a less intelligent program. ;) "wget" is a nice command-line web/ftp file fetcher; I think there's a version compiled for windows. (Google it.) Keep in mind that the SQL dump will be equally effective zipped or unzipped; you have to read it back into the database or write your own program to suck the data out of the SQL commands. --Brion 19:01 Oct 2, 2002 (UTC)

There are times when I actively hate the latest IE. Is ftp an option then? I tried to connect to ftp.wikipedia.com and didn't get very far as "anon".

Get Mozilla!

Try this instead: make a link to the file you want to download by putting it in brackets, e.g. The Internet Movie Database (), then right click on the link and "save target as."

IE for me has been particularly contrary and addlebrained; I can only assume that that's what you're using too. Best, --KQ 22:20 Oct 2, 2002 (UTC)

I was able to get the files by using wget. Thanks for all the help. I wil remember the trick about making a link in brackets. This is odd though as this is the first and only time that I have ever had IE (and netscape 4.7 even tried to download with that brain dead clunky ......) both were unzipping the file into the page, normally I can click on any download link and then get a message asking me if I want to save or not. Oh well, got the files and thanks much again for the help. Al Brown 23:21 CST Oct 2, 2002.

Encyclopedia Mythica hieroglyphs copyright

Copyright query: On Encyclopedia Mythica (http://www.pantheon.org), hieroglyphs for certain gods are given as image files. Are these okay to use? Obviously, they're not copyrighted by the people who etched them on the walls of the Pyramids or whatever, but the images appear to be computer-generated, not photos or anything. I know letters can't be copyrighted, and I'm assuming that, since they couldn't copyright Chinese characters for example, they can't do the same for hieroglyphics. Is that right?

For an example, go to http://www.pantheon.org/articles/s/saa.html

My first attempt at saving this question failed with an error box saying simply that the load failed. I'm using an iMac with IE 5.1 Tokerboy 22:09 Oct 2, 2002 (UTC)

Logging in errors

Help! I'm having trouble logging onto many pages as quercus robur , including the main page, recent changes and my own watch list, pluys other random pages including some I've created- when I click the link I just get a load of gobbledegook- I thought maybe it was to do with IE on my PC, so tried logging on using my laptop, and another computer in the house, same problem, so guess I've either been blocked (surely somebody would have told me???) or theres a bug inthe wiki.... If anybody can advise please reply on my user talk page, which hopefully I'll be able to access... Cheers quercus robur 22:32 Oct 2, 2002 (UTC)

No, if you were blocked, it would tell you that you've been blocked, by whom, and why when you tried to edit (but wouldn't bug you on loading pages up). As far as "gobbledegook", that's the stuff that tells us what's wrong -- please cite it exactly in future. We've been having occasional "too many files open" kinds of errors lately; if you get one, just reload and you should be fine. (Some browsers may be a pain in the ass to reload properly, such as IE.) --Brion 22:38 Oct 2, 2002 (UTC)

Hi Brion- the messages (there are 2 I think) I get are;

"Warning: new Object failed: Too many open files in system (23) in /usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/wiki.phtml on line 7

Warning: Failed opening 'Setup.php' for inclusion (include_path='.:/usr/local/lib/php') in /usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/wiki.phtml on line 12

Fatal error: Undefined class name 'outputpage' in /usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/wiki.phtml on line 14

Warning: new Object failed: Too many open files in system (23) in Unknown on line 0

Warning: Failed to write session data (files). Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct (/tmp) in Unknown on line 0"

The other message is;

"Warning: Host 'localhost.localdomain' is blocked because of many connection errors. Unblock with 'mysqladmin flush-hosts' in /usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/DatabaseFunctions.php on line 17 Could not connect to DB on 127.0.0.1"

I've had to create a new user name to be able to get to this page as well!! Please can you reply on my (Quercus robur) user page as that seems to bew one of the few pages I can still access!! Ta!

re above- as explained on my user talk page, I've solved the problem now, involved deleting all temporary files from my IE settings folder... bloody windoze.... quercus robur

Recent Changes showing too few edits

Today, if I choose 'show last 50' on Recent changes, it shows me 43 edits. Looking on the normal Recent Changes page, these are selected from the last 110 or so edits. I have 'show minor changes' turned off. Matthew Woodcraft

I tested that and came up with the same result. Sounds something for a Bug report. --KQ 21:21 Oct 3, 2002 (UTC)

I filed a bug report about it. --KQ 00:53 Oct 4, 2002 (UTC)

Technical help

Where is the appropriate place to address "technical support" questions? I'm having a few problems (can't log in under my user name, chas_zzz_brown; as well as some other details) that are probably system dependent, but I don't see a "tech" FAQ for this kind of issue. TIA - Chas

user:Lee_Daniel_Crocker is a good person to talk to about that. --KQ

see also Misplaced Pages:Technical FAQ. Do we have a technical help page? -- Tarquin 22:04 Oct 3, 2002 (UTC)

I don't know. There are far too many pages in the wikipedia: namespace for me to keep track of.  :-/ Please let me know if you find one.  :-) --KQ

The Misplaced Pages:Technical FAQ seems like more of a FAQ about technical aspects of Misplaced Pages, rather than a place to solve techincal questions. I haven't run across a "troubleshooting page" yet; an it seems like one wuld be a good idea; since I'm a newbie, I haven't a clue how one would make one in the Misplaced Pages: namespace, so for now I'll put it under Troubleshooting Misplaced Pages. Perhaps someone could move it to a better location? Cheers - User:chas_zzz_brown 4 Oct 02 20:12 PST

Archiving talk

This is a two-parter for anyone who's willing to field either or both: 1) How do I archive most of what's on my user talk page, please? I'd like for the old material to be where it can still be read, but the page is getting too long for comfortable editing in current discussions.

2) How/Where was I supposed to find the answer to this question in the existing "how to" materials, please? As is true of many of the articles themselves, I have found the instructional pages consistently useless for explaining anything I didn't already know, and frequently confusing about the stuff I did know, and so fragmented that it's hard to track thru enough pages to find what I'm looking for if it does turn out to be there at all. (And I mean that in the nicest possible way.) -- isis 05:35 Oct 6, 2002 (UTC)

Here goes:

  1. Cut the text from your talk page and paste it into a new page, which you link from the main talk page.
    • Alternately, just cut it out entirely, then include a URL-link to an older revision from the page history.
  2. Probably nobody thought of documenting such a thing. If you wish to do so, please go where you would have looked and add it!

--Brion

Thanks for your reply, but I don't understand enough of it to implement it, so let me try again, please: I'm ignoring the sentence that starts with "Alternately" (because it's so far beyond my understanding that it scared me) and focusing on the one before it that I could follow much of: I'm good with the cut and paste part and "main talk page," but "new page" and "link" raised more questions for me -- would you (or someone) please elaborate on that? (I'm not stupid, but I haven't taken a computer science course in 30+ years, and they didn't teach me any of this stuff, so I'm incredibly ignorant.) -- isis 06:11 Oct 6, 2002 (UTC)

Look at the top of user talk:maveric149 and user talk:Brion VIBBER, for instance. You will notice links to pages which contain archived old talk. These pages at one point did not exist, so they were new pages when they were first created by making and following a link to them, putting text into them, and saving them. If need be, Misplaced Pages:How to start a page may help. --Brion 06:18 Oct 6, 2002 (UTC)

In the CIA country articles "/People" is being broken out into "Demographics of...". Is this correct? Would not "Demography of..." be more correct as in "Geography of..." not "Geographics of...". 62.253.64.7

Check Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject Countries for how this was decided. It was originally "Demography", but was changed to "Demographics" as "Demography" was felt to refer more to the science of Demography rather than a description of a nation's inhabitants and customs. Scipius 15:23 Oct 10, 2002 (UTC)

Requesting copyleft permission

I sometimes find myself requesting that people re-license their documents under the GFDL and giving a description of the Misplaced Pages and the consequences of releasing under the GFDL. Is there any boilerplate text for this request? DanKeshet

I am sure I've seen this. But the best I can come up with is Misplaced Pages:Building Misplaced Pages membership. Maybe it's on Meta. Maybe I'm picking the wrong words to search for. -- Tarquin 19:55 Oct 11, 2002 (UTC)
Very good question. I'm pretty sure there isn't one yet but I could probably whip one up over the weekend (I've explained this and seen it explained more times in more ways than I would like to count). --mav

Would it be possible to add a rating system to Misplaced Pages. It has been mentioned before that Misplaced Pages is used in schools etc. There are a number of pages that may not be suitable for school use. Maybe a checkbox on the edit form could be used to generate a SurfSafe header (http://www.safesurf.com/ssplan.htm) or other PICS header. I would suggest keeping it simple and having just "suitable for all" or "suitable for adults". Some schools can only see suitably rated pages. I know that some people would say that children should be able to see all facts, but in practice a school is likely to have complaints from a number of parents if it turns out that the kids are looking up Handballing, Autoeroticism etc. -- Chris Q 06:13 Oct 16, 2002 (UTC)

<sarcasm>Oh oh, can we have special markup to save the children from dangerous political ideas and information about crime and violence, too?</sarcasm> --Brion 06:37 Oct 16, 2002 (UTC)
Hm. That sounds like both a feature request and a policy change. A much better venue for that is the Misplaced Pages mailing list. Any mention of SufeSafe or its ilk gives me the creeps and I'm not sure we should feed those demons (and if we get black listed by them then shame on them, not us). This is a Free as in Speech webstie. But go ahead and give it a whirl on the list. ---mav
This issue was a very divisive one at the Open Directory Project, where adult content was eventually cordoned off into a separate hierarchy that was labeled with PICS tags. This compromise did not please anyone, as coverage of legitimate topics was obscured from view and unabashedly blue content was still readily available to children.
No doubt there will be Misplaced Pages licensees who will filter and censor Misplaced Pages content to suit their needs and wants. However, our focus should be on generating Misplaced Pages content and making it freely available. -- NetEsq 07:49 Oct 16, 2002 (UTC)


OK, I can see that the concensus is against this. I guess NetEsq is right, anyone that wants to copy a subset of Misplaced Pages for open use will probably do so. -- Chris Q 08:07 Oct 16, 2002 (UTC)

The "neutrality" of articles in Misplaced Pages is intellectually dishonest. For the proscription of overtly partisan content is itself a violation of neutrality. If Misplaced Pages were truly neutral such partisanship would be welcomed, rather than rabidly deleted. One user diffused an edit war by moving my article to "meta" and that cooled my ire. What is not acceptable is outright arbitrary deletion. Whether this encyclopedia is truly open not just to minority opinion, but minority races (in the United States) is open to question, inasmuch as the dominant culture, which is white, carries its inescapable baggage. An honest acknowledgement of that baggage through openness to interpretations and criticisms of its contents ought to be a vigorous challenge, not anathema.

This is an encyclopedia, not a forum for political debate. I was the person who repeatedly removed your NPOV remarks. You can find another forum for your comments, and I find your rather bold statement that minority races are unwelcome here to be offensive. -- Zoe


We accomplish this by stating opinions as opinions, like this:
Foo is a kind of bar.
Some people, the pro-fooists, think that foo is good. Here's why.
Other people, the anti-fooists, think that foo is bad. Here's why.
Still other people, the nullibarists, deny the existence of bars altogether. Here's why.
The following is not a Misplaced Pages article:
Foo is a very good kind of bar. or Foo is a very bad kind of bar. or Foo is a spurious concept since bars don't exist.
What we don't do is publish unattributed screed. This is an encyclopedia, not a soapbox. A thorough and thoughtful discussion may be found at NPOV. I wasn't involved in your case, so I won't make any more specific comments - perhaps someone closer to the issue would like to. - Montréalais

"What we don't do is publish unattributed screed." Screed runneth over nonetheless, some attributed, much unconscious. As for the pump, it would operate much better without the haughtiness (we shall strive for the Holy Grail of Knowledge in Misplaced Pages, but the pump shall remain the same tired repository of flaming crap all opinion boards are). As I asked elsewhere in this page, do you have room for humor as you pick the fly feces from the pepper, or is this apparent state of misery a Village constant? mailto:f.g.wilson@sbcglobal.net

Who are the "we?" The Misplaced Pages has ingeniously solved the problem of attribution, and may ultimately contribute to the evolutionary demise of that questionably useful species of human need. However, the problems of distinguishing absolute truth, which is abstract, from knowable fact, and of ever trending toward truth as better evidence brings more solid facts, should be recognized. The problem of objectively determining what is neutral and what is not should also be recognized, for it is a deep one. If I have to edit the final product only second-hand, by influence, I like to know that the Uber Arbiters are subtle enough to make these recognitions. {8:52 P.M. -- preliminary addendum based on partial reading of NPOV: I admonish Montrealais that we the unelect would hold your feet to the fire by stating that Wikipedian rigor would say "One man's screed is another's truth, so be very careful what you characterize as screed."}

No, one man's screed is another man's opinion. You are correct to distinguish truth from fact. The job of Misplaced Pages is not to lay out the truth, but to mention what facts are available for a situation. "X is good" is not a fact; it is an opinion. "Group Y believes that X is good" is a fact. - Montréalais

"No, one man's screed is another man's opinion." -- Strictly your opinion, of course. mailto:f.g.wilson@sbcglobal.net

If you don't sign your name, then we won't be able to judge the worth of your assertions, not to mention the worth, if any, of your articles. As it is, this is the only article linked to your name. For my money, what you have written here is content-free. ("I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down!") I've written a lot of articles in the past few months, but I haven't found the uberarbiters yet. On the other hand, any number of people have added to, extended, and, yes, changed, what I have written, usually for the better, and I've done the same to any number of other people. You should read Misplaced Pages is the dopiest thing I've ever heard of. Ortolan88 04:12 Oct 18, 2002 (UTC)

btw, what's the Monopoly(TM)/Wikipedia:Village pump currency exchange rate these days? -- mailto:f.g.wilson@sbcglobal.net -- Frederick George Wilson -- attribution as worth...let me run that through the Computer of Truth, I'll let you know what it crunches out...btw2, is humor outlawed here?

One last rant --er-- opinion, before I pack it in for the night: the move of my "genocide denial" article from metapedia to redirect was a net entropic increase, i.e., stupid. mailto:f.g.wilson@sbcglobal.net -- Michel Foucault --

When I look at Microsoft ( http://www.wikipedia.org/Microsoft ), I get these error messages:

Warning: Failed opening 'Setup.php' for inclusion (include_path='.:/usr/local/lib/php') in /usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/wiki.phtml on line 12

Fatal error: Undefined class name 'outputpage' in /usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/wiki.phtml on line 14

I don't get these errors for other pages. David 00:42 Oct 17, 2002 (UTC)

The error message is stuck in your cache (maybe your browser's cache; maybe your ISP runs an intermediate web cache); try reload, ctrl+reload, shift+reload, alt+reload, clear the cache, reintstall Windows, whatever. --Brion 00:59 Oct 17, 2002 (UTC)

I am making this visible again because I found out how to fix it, and others may benefit from this knowledge. If you encounter such a problem, view the folder containing your temporary Internet files (in IE this can be found by selecting Tools->Internet Options...->General->Settings->View Files...). Near the end of this list of files will be one named for the page that has the problem. In my case it was called "Microsoft". Then, just delete that file. Poof! The problem disappears. David 21:17 Oct 18, 2002 (UTC)

I have a feeling this has been asked and answered before, but I can't find it, so... If I want to scan and upload an out-of-copyright image (say a photo taken in 1913) reproduced in an in-copyright book (say one published in 1985), is that legal or illegal? Or, put it another way: should I do it, or not? I think I'll be OK with it, but I want to make sure. --Camembert

IANAL but if they haven't altered the image then they can't claim a copyright on it. --mav
Well, I am a lawyer, and I'll second that opinion: If it was in the public domain before they used it, it's still in the public domain afterward. -- isis 01:44 Oct 19, 2002 (UTC)

Thanks - I'll dust off my scanner and get uploading (well, my friend's scanner - I don't have one...) --Camembert

I'm off to merge this into Misplaced Pages:Contributing FAQ. (what's the etiquette for pump cleaning at this point? do I delete because I move, or does Cam delete once he sees this?) -- Tarquin

Book links

I looked around a bit but didn't find any examples of linking book titles to the gutenberg project...I believe it could be a fine way to encourage readers to pursue and peruse the works of the people so oft cited i.e. descartes, plato, aristotle, which are readily available in full text on line.--dgd

It has been done - see for instance Wilfred Owen. I agree, a link to Gutenburg under "external links" is a good thing. --Camembert

table of contents

Hi, any way of creating TOCs for wikipedia? is there a tag set that allows for relative anchors in a page? That way we could have longer articles and less fragmentation and fluidity of the prose...--dgd

Nope. We are debating this exact issue over at m:Consolidating v/s breaking up which is on our discussion site Metapedia. I don't like the idea though since it would make it practical to have very long articles which in itself isn't so bad but in a wiki large articles are intimidating to edit and read. IMO it is far better to summarize and then link to detailed articles (See United States and Misplaced Pages:Naming conventions for good examples). --mav

Does the Metapedia site have talk pages as well? I'm thinking maybe at that purported discussion site one might actually have something vaguely resembling free speech at, say, the Metapedia genocide:talk:talk:talk level?--Anon

Go look for yourself. Metapedia uses the same software as is used here except for some minor differences (such as charsets and interlanuage link behavior and background fill). Metapedia is not an encyclopedia and does not have an NPOV policy or really any policy other than maybe net-etiquette. --mav

What is the Misplaced Pages policy on automated page creation? I notice that Ram-Man is currently entering statistics for every town in the US using some sort of script (unless he's a very fast typer.) I'm not sure that this is a particularly great idea. In the more general sense, I think that script-generation could get us into a lot of trouble (how do you revert vandalism when it's spread across five thousand pages?) Is there a page that would be more suitable for this discussion? Dachshund

I think it is fine. There have been a couple bumps in the road, but his bot's entries now appear to be correctly named, wikified, NPOVed and also have good and factual information. The only real policy on auto page creation is that you need to be very careful when you are doing it. For example somebody started importing hundred year old Eastman Bible Dictionary entries via bot and that caused an uproar: The entries were highly POV, incorrectly named, written in a pedantic Victorian prose and were incorrectly wikified (self links, multiple links, incorrectly named edit links...). The bot's IP was temporarily blocked and we worked everything out with the bot's creator on the Misplaced Pages mailing list. The city entries don't have these problems and also have the bare essentials that are needed for any city article; population and geography. And on top of this there is also demographic information. When complete this will be a unique resource on the net. What is better is that whenever somebody in the US looks up their town they will find an entry in Misplaced Pages (and hopefully they will add some historical info to the article after finding it). If an actual vandal uses a bot then we will block that bot's IP. --mav
Three thoughts on batch page creation:
1) Special:Recentchanges is presently useless due to the town & county bot. This is the source of the irritation which led me to notice that:
2) The main page's count of Misplaced Pages articles is increasingly inflated -- we've gone from 60k to 70k awfully quickly, but:
3) These thousands of town and county pages are not encyclopedia articles, nor are the bulk of them ever likely to become same. They are atlas or gazetteer entries that have been converted to useless paragraphs rather than useful tables. The data are potentially valuable as such -- perhaps there should be a WikiAtlas? -- but they are no more encyclopedic than would be batch-added dictionary entries. --FOo
They are a bit telephone-directory-ish. I hope in future people will add colour and detail to them. It would be good though if bots like this went a little slower -- that was discussed before with the Eason's bot: only 100 every hour or less, please! Otherwise, as said above, RC is unusable, even with number of edits set to 1,000. We may have added 10k articles, but we haven't really added any value. Hundreds of core topics are still uncovered or amateurishly-written, and here we have a page for every one-horse town across the US. It won't project a terribly good image of wikipedia; that concerns me. -- Tarquin 20:20 Oct 21, 2002 (UTC)


I disagree that these entries are harmful. I just came across Auburn, California which is a small city near where I live. I've been meaning to write an article about Auburn ever sine I started the project in January but never did so because finding boring yet vital to have up-to-date population and geographic information isn't fun at all -- this is a perfect thing for a bot to do. So since all the boring to find info was already there I simply added a few external links, a history section and a short line in the intro on why this city is interesting. Granted many small towns won't ever be updated with more than what is there now, but most towns don't have much of any historical significance outside their own counties. So what if they exist in our database? They have correct info, are correctly wikified and named. Having every town, city and village in our database ensures that anybody in the US who is looking up information on their hometown via an external search engine will find that info here - which makes these entries an important reader/contributor recruitment tool. Many of the same people will then update the articles with historical and other information. Yes, the US Census has this info but it isn't very readable or accessible and it can't be added to or its presentation improved. Can you think of another resource like this on the net (with 2000 data)? With that said, I also agree that Recent Changes is useless while Ram-Man's bot is at work. I wish there were a back-end way to import the 20,000 remaining cities/towns/villages/places. --mav


they are not bad pages -- but it's the Mithril argument again: newcomers clicking Random Page, finding pages and pages of middle-earth may think "encyclopedia! tolkienopedia, more like!"; finding hundreds of jargon file pages may think it's just a ton of hacker slang; finding these thousands of pages may think it's largely an encyclopedia of US towns. I am probably overreacting a bit, but we seem to be leaning every which way but toward serious core encyclopedic subjects: Arts, literature, science. There are plenty of minor novelists of the past centuries we don't say anything about, who are more important that these towns. I'm not against these town pages, but we must balance them! -- Tarquin
Obviously I agree with having the articles since I am the one making them. One thing I could do would be to make all the changes minor and then those changes could be filtered out by those who set up the option in their preferences. They are not minor, but maybe no one cares.
Since starting to add the information I have gotten comments from a number of people. One common idea is that without the articles in some form, people don't bother to add one line descriptions about a town because they want to avoid stub articles. I have had a number of people say that now they can add some information because the articles exist. In fact the RC's shows that people have been modifying their own town articles and adding some misc information. Unlike Maverick, I think that with an influx of users if many of them update their own home cities, then we can add quite a bit of new information. Also there is the possibility of adding other information automatically such as latitude and longitude, county seat information, etc.
I would vote to modify the "random" option to give city, state articles a lower priority. -- Ram-Man

Weirdness is afoot. I can't save changes in Konqueror at all and Mozilla tries, seems to fail, displays an error message saying there is no data in the page but then I see the saved edit in RC. --mav

same here. Chimera mac os. -- Tarquin
Same with me with IE. It gives me an error saying it can't find the page, but the editing is done anyway, according to Recent Changes. -- Zoe