Wikipedia:Village pump/February 2003 archive 2

Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump

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The article School sanitation seems a little odd and its related link about IRC reads like a business plan without saying much. Should either exist? If so in what form?

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I think a rating system similar to amazon would work well on a site like this. That way if i want to use this for my kids school i can guage if it is a good article. This generally needed for subjects that the reason i am coming to the site is that i know little or nothing about the subject i am searching for.

Rating systems of various kinds have been discussed many times. The general opinion around here seems to be that the base Wikipedia should remain as it is, with any rating or moderation systems built as separate projects. Larry Sanger was working on one such system, but there hasn't been much said about it in the past few months. -- Stephen Gilbert 15:12 Feb 14, 2003 (UTC)

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At Talk:List of songwriters/temp a link has automatically appeared to Talk:List of songwriters. Is this a relic of the subpage system? Tokerboy

Partial support for subpages has been restored for user pages and talk pages in recognition of the facts that A) sub-pages have continued to be in de-facto use in these domains and there's no clear suggestion for replacing them, and B) the complaints against sub-pages were primarily in regards to their distortion of article title conventions, which doesn't really apply to the above usages. --Brion 03:51 Feb 12, 2003 (UTC)

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Can someone look into the issue I raised at Talk:History of Singapore, regarding copyright problems with the History of Singapore article? I don't have the time to handle it right now. -- CYD

Is is just me, or are the pages starting with a 'V' not showing the 'v' try Secret_Intelligence_Service and click on the vauxhall stuff at the bottom... -Stevert

p.s. : never mind - wierd browser glitch.-SV

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I've uploaded an image and forgot to rename it. How can Wikipedia get rid of this (too simple) filename? BTW, it was :Image:Leo.png --Torsten Bronger 02:47 Feb 13, 2003 (UTC)

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Asterisks in Revision History

In revision history, some people put * in front of their summary. What does the asterisk signify? --Menchi 22:03 Feb 12, 2003

Most likely, nothing at all. An older version of the wiki software put an asterisk in the summary field in the edit form by default, and some people forgot to delete it when typing in their own text. --Brion

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The list of words not used in searches seems reasonable for words IN articles. Is there anyway that the search of article TITLES could use ALL words? -- 217.24.129.50[?]

When we upgrade MySQL to version 4 (which has much better fulltext search capabilities, including exact phrase searching), we'll try to reduce or remove the stopword list. This'll have to wait a bit, as the last couple of revisions have had bugs which specifically affect types of queries that we use. --Brion 17:34 Feb 13, 2003 (UTC)

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Wouldn't it be nice to have piped wiki links displayed in a different color (e.g. a darker shade of blue)? Mkweise 05:21 Feb 14, 2003 (UTC)

Well, it would be confusing. With luck, that'll scare a few of the less savory types away. ;) --Brion 05:23 Feb 14, 2003 (UTC)

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I have a question about headers and subheaders in articles. Obviously, the first word should be capitalized, but should the subsequent words be capitalized? Obviously if the words are part of an official title, it should be capitalized, but what about in general? I've seen it both ways, and I didn't see this issue addressed anywhere. I know article titles are not supposed to be capitalized, but what about headers in those articles? Which should it be: External links

or External Links -- 136.152.197.237[?] 06:28 Feb 14, 2003 (UTC)

My impression is that the general convention is not to capitalize subsequent words in section headers (unless they're proper names, of course). I suppose it doesn't really matter, but "External links" etc fit in better with the house style. --Brion 06:32 Feb 14, 2003 (UTC)

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Wikidates

Is there as a rule as when to wikify dates and years? For example, on the pages "Parti Québécois" and "Bloc Québécois", only some dates were wikified, while others aren't. To me, the choice seems to be arbitrary. Are only the relatively more important dates wikified? --Menchi 05:23 Feb 15, 2003 (UTC)

It's a matter of taste as much as anything else: some people will wikify all dates, some will only wikify important dates, some will wikify very few. Birth and death dates in biographical articles should be wikified (as per the Wikipedia:Manual of Style), but beyond that there's no policy on date wikification, nor any consensus on it, as far as I know. --Camembert

I tend to favor wikifying all dates (and all possible words, for that matter) because a heavily cross-linked encyclopedia is more useful than a bunch of text blobs, it doesn't hurt readability, and it will facilitate various kinds of automated consistency analysis in the future. For instance, imagine being able to check Foo Bar's participation in some meeting against the dates in his biographical info. (Recently I was working over data on early Spanish kings, and found an interesting monograph where one of them was tracked by the grants and charters to monasteries and such - when the dates and locations were plotted, it became clear that he had to have spent most of his life on the road. The names of the witnesses to each charter also showed who traveled with him. Basic date info can be very useful material!) Stan Shebs 14:57 Feb 15, 2003 (UTC)

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I've noticed two or three instances where some contributor has inserted comments about the safety of certain types of aircraft. Some of these are certainly justified. For example, the DC-10 had a major problem with the cargo door seal and some hundreds of people were killed. This is relevant, factual information and should be included in the Wikipedia entry on the type. However, the great majority of passenger aircraft types are widely known to have a good record.

Someone with a particular weirdo POV inserted comments in some of the Airbus entries, suggesting that they were unsafe (an assertion that is clearly without evidence or merit). That's fine: I removed the POV comments some time ago and there is no controversy about that.

But now I get to the curly one. Look at the links from Airbus A300. The last two links contrive to suggest that it is an unsafe aircraft (which it is not) without the contributor actually having to say anything. Now the first link (to a CNN page) is easy: it's an ill-informed tabloid article and the link should be deleted. (I'll leave it for a day or two longer so interested people can have a look first. If you don't understand why it's BS, sing out and I'll provide appropriate details.) But the second link is (a) perfectly valid information from a