Wikipedia:Village pump/June 2003 archive 5

To avoid being controversial again. Is there "Wikipedia:Votes for merging" page somewhere ? Sometimes 200 bytes is more than enough to write about someone or someplace but there is so much unnecessary segmentation going on.
Kpjas 14:10 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Might Wikipedia:Duplicate articles be what you're looking for? Andre Engels 09:10 23 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Whenever I am on RC (far too often), I get the impression that the input to the encyclopedia is rather unbalanced: lots on computer stuff (surprise!), science, pop music, sci-fi/fantasy, bits of geog/hist. The impression is that the typical user is a young male with computer qualifications and stereotypically geeky interests. (How many Tolkien or D&D articles do we need?). I'm not sure what can be done to redress the balance, but at least we should be aware of it. jimfbleak 12:17 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I brought this up over 12 months ago, and I don't think I was the first. Seems like we still have a long way to go! -- Tarquin 12:26 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Wikipedia is heavily biased towards computer generated articles on US towns and cities. Surely they must outweight the Tolkein and D&D areas combined! I don't think balance matters because we've got good organisation and no space limit. I prefer to think of the missing articles as the problem, not the ones we have in quantity. -- Tim Starling 12:28 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)

The inclusiveness is part of the project's culture, though I believe it detracts from the overall value of the effort. I myself believe that the project would have better balance if we made an effort to keep article length proportional among topics of similar importance. For example, Tolkein's literature does not deserve a more lengthy writeup than Dickens' or Steinbeck's books. D&D should not enjoy a more lengthy writeup than contract bridge, dominos, or mah jong--all of which have subtleties and histories rivaling that of D&D. And the Dead Kennedys should not enjoy a more detailed treatise than does Franz Liszt, who left a greater and far more enduring mark upon musical history.

The numerous articles on various fictional universes, particularly, do not appear to me to be encyclopedic in nature. What reader will turn to an encyclopedia for an entry like Bree (Middle-earth) or Aragorn? I'm not trying to pick on Tolkien, as I enjoy his writing immensely; the Star Trek articles have the same characteristics as do many others. These articles pollute the namespace and have far less potential to become encyclopedic than the geographical stubs from the census data.

IMO, for a fictional work, character, or setting to be encyclopedic, there must be references to it elsewhere in art or literature. Consider the Greek and Roman mythological pantheons. Portions of them appear throughout literature, sculpture, painting, and so on; an article on Aphrodite is unquestionably encyclopedic. Where are the sculptures of Aragorn or the literary references to Sarek outside the series of works where they originally appear? Now, perhaps we can do with an article on Mr._Spock owing to the inseperability of that character from pop culture of the 1970s. But Sarek? Kat 16:19 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Are you seriously proposing to delete all the articles about Star Trek, Middle-earth and other large-scale fictional universes? Perhaps most encyclopedias (like EB) don't contain an article about Sarek, but why is that reason for us not to have one? Perhaps encyclopedias are not normally considered a place to look up facts about fictional universes, but there's no reason for Wikipedia not to change that. I don't see why the articles aren't "encyclopedic in nature". I also object to your argument that they "pollute the namespace" (we can move pages and disambiguate; it's never been a problem), as do I object to your claim they have little potential to become non-stubs (see Vulcan (Star Trek) for an example I de-stubbed).

Also, how do you define "references to it elsewhere" -- Sarek is referenced in several of the Star Trek series and movies ;-). I also remember reading (though I forgot where) that there exists a full-size model of a Vulcan space ship in one of the various places called "Vulcan" in North America. Is that a "reference elsewhere"?

All this aside, I really don't see the problem with those articles simply existing. I mean ... you don't have to read them, do you? It's a bit like saying a program that has atrocious stability and limited usefulness should be deleted from the Internet. -- Timwi 17:22 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I can see you have strong feelings on this matter. I do not. Please note that I did not propose wholsale deletion of content. In any case, we would have to agree on the principle (that is, whether balance is a goal of the project) before trying to figure out how to achieve it. (Which could perhaps begin by merging some existing stubs).

The sum of the information available on the Internet is a mere aggregation of those things individuals and groups wish to publish. On the other hand, Wikipedia is edited, and there is already a consensus that certain things do not belong here (dictionary entries, biographies of obscure persons, POV material). The criteria for inclusion of fictional material are a legitimate topic for discussion.

<<you don't have to read them>> We're not, I hope, writing this for ourselves. A major reason I participate in this project is that I believe that it has the potential to become, in time, a legitimate, respected reference work. The opinions of people like librarians, teachers, and others who are not involved in the project will determine whether this happens. Now, including an article on a topic implies a judgement made by us that the topic is part of the canon of human knowledge. To a degree, the relative quantity and quality of information about two topics imply a judgement we have made about their relative importance.

What would you do if you're trying to decide whether an encyclopedia or other reference work is worthwhile? Well, first, you'll probably look up a few things that you're an expert on and evaluate the articles. You might look up some politicized topics to see what political bias might exist. You might look up some obscure facts that you know to check for breadth. You might look up some controversial or inflammatory topics and see whether they are treated in an appropriate manner. And you might pick a few pages at random just to see what's there.

At the end of all that, if you're more impressed with the thorough treatment of the Ents in Middle Earth than, say, the coverage of Brown vs. Board--then hoom, humm, let us not be hasty, we'll just stick with World Book until Wikipedia grows up a little bit. 209.150.193.201 18:12 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Because Wiki is not paper, we have the latitude to include as many articles on fictional worlds as we want to. The truly considerable number of articles on Middle-earth has not reached the same genuine nuisance proportions that the user:rambot entries have, and yet we consider the latter to be a valuable contribution. We can let the Tolkien fans (like me) have their fun, and then wait for the articles of broader interest to grow up around them.

As regards outside references, there may indeed be statues of the Beatles, but most bands in the Wikipedia will be gone and forgotten in a few years. Fewer people will know about N'Sync than about the Baggins family. Nevertheless, we will keep those articles around. -Smack

Agree with Smack. I just don't see a problem here. I don't see that Wikipedia has to exist in a state of balance; it is, after all, in its nature that it is constantly changing. The current user profile means we have more articles on certain areas than others, that's obviously agreed. That doesn't mean those articles are somehow made invalid by the non-existence of the supposed "balancing" articles. To take the Dead Kennedys / Liszt example, the correct solution is not to remove valuable information on the Dead Kennedys, but to leave it there and wait for someone to add information on Liszt, which they inevitably will. Removing the Dead Kennedys information (or not adding further information in the same area) till such time as the Liszt information is available is not the way forward, IMHO. --AW

There are places where Tolkien intersects with the real world - there was a CPU design called the "Hobbit" with an interesting history that I may write up some day, and googling "Aragon" I see a "Aragorn Enterprises" that runs boats on the Thames. One thing to keep in mind that it is difficult for us to know what will come to be significant in the future - students of ancient history tear their hair out because cryptic references to certain bits of the culture are not explained by a single surviving objective source. For instance, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea has words for trade goods from Africa that appear nowhere else in ancient sources, and trading centers whose names appear nowhere else, and we can only guess what they might mean. To the writer of the Periplus, they were so obvious that they didn't need explanation, and so now we'll never know. Stan 14:29 20 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Balance of subject matter is user-driven. Internet users and geeks tend to have specific kinds of interests. What we need to do is encourage more users to post information on their particular segments of expertise.Content should not be turned away.

We have bird enthusiasts working on birds. Movie fans working on movie awards. I, myself, am focusing on Afghanistan.

A beauty of wikipedia involves worlds colliding. The more information put forth in the database, the more connections can be made. Kingturtle 05:43 23 Jun 2003 (UTC)

For the heck of it, I just browsed all the NEW articles created in the last 24 hours. Although nothing close to an exact science, it was nice to see the wide range of topics broached. Your results will obviously vary from mine, but in my eyes, I saw topics on: geography (15 new articles), leaders (15), math (10), recipes (9), government (7), games (7), music (7), warfare (7), biology (6), religion (6), tv (6), novels and authors (6), poets (6), communications (6), transportation (5), schools (5), birds (4), Harry Potter (4), adventure (3), art (3), culture (3), software (3), corporations (2), mammals (2), archeology (2), sports (2), management (2), astronomy (2), technology (2), chemistry (2), restaurants (2), the internet (2), energy (2), advertising & marketing (2), products (1), language (1), scholars (1), reptiles (1), justice (1), historic events (1), race (1), cartoons (1), medicine (1), comedians (1), film (1), economics (1), food (1), gardening (1), physics (1), sailing (1), electronics (1). Just for fun!!!! Kingturtle 07:57 24 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I have received the following message three times over the last 10 minutes when I tried to enter some pages, including Jimbo's talk page.

Could not connect to DB on 130.94.122.197

Host 'larousse.wikipedia.org' is blocked because of many connection errors. Unblock with 'mysqladmin flush-hosts' If this error persists after reloading and clearing your browser cache, please notify the Wikipedia developers. FearÉIREANN 21:48 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Got the same error message just now. Often, Wikipedia pages have been rather slow recently (sometimes instant, sometimes very slow, to the point where I open pages in parallel instead of looking at one at a time), don't know if it's related. كسيپ Cyp 21:55 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Me too!!! Wshun

Me three... Evercat 22:53 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I did an honest search (much more than just a search-feature search) on Meta-Wikipedia for a good discussion of the "5000-people" rule, and I couldn't find one. I find it inconceivable that a meta-article like that doesn't exist. Could someone help me out here? -Smack 00:35 20 Jun 2003 (UTC)

It's just mailing list chatter. People have proposed all sorts of rules to determine which subjects deserve an article and which don't. None are official. Martin 13:47 20 Jun 2003 (UTC)

And if I don't want to subscribe to the mailing list, I should just create a meta-article? -Smack

Is there a good reason to keep bushfire and forest fire separate? -Smack 17:17 20 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Why do I keep receiving this message? Is there something you sysops can do about this?

Could not connect to DB on 130.94.122.197

Host 'larousse.wikipedia.org' is blocked because of many connection errors. Unblock with 'mysqladmin flush-hosts'

If this error persists after reloading and clearing your browser cache, please notify the Wikipedia developers.

-- Timwi 22:13 20 Jun 2003 (UTC)

P.S. In this message, "Wikipedia developers" is a link to an e-mail address that bounces. -- Timwi 22:36 20 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I am recieving the exact same error over 2 days, more so in the past 30 min. MB 22:18 20 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Ditto. Maybe the server's just really busy? -- Wapcaplet 23:20 20 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I just stumpled across Wikipedia:Wikipedians by number of edits. Although I don't think I qualify for this page quite yet, I'm wondering if there's a way to view my number of contributions? The Special:Contributions page doesn't seem to show it for me. -- Timwi 22:29 20 Jun 2003 (UTC)

But you do, Tim. You ranked the 181st, with 1066 edits. And considering this's all done basically within a week. You're one of the fastest rising star in WP history.

(I found this # out by reading your contribution page and copy the list to MS Word and convert bullets into #.)

--Menchi 01:00 21 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Thanks! :) But

How did you find out my rank if I'm not listed there?
How do you copy the entire contributions list to Word? I can only seem to get lists in chunks of 500.
Do you have a Sourceforge account? If so, please could you submit a Feature Request that this little number be added to "My Contributions"? It can't be that difficult. -- Timwi 22:17 21 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Welcome & congrats for making it.

Your contribution # is betwen those of the 180th & the ex-181 persons. Assuming nobody has made the list above 180 (and I'm pretty sure that's the case), you push the 181st person down and replaced him.
Manually replace the 50 in the URL ...Special:Contributions&target=Timwi&limit='50'&offset=0 with 999999
I don't, but from what I gather, even making the Active List has been quite a hassle for non-developer administrators.

--Menchi 00:00 22 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Or, download the page and grep -c "<li>" file if you're on a unix. CGS 12:00 21 Jun 2003 (UTC).

I wrote a Python script that does the equivalent of a grep which works on Windows. Anyone who wants to use it (responsibly :) ) can email me via my user page. Right now it requires Python installed but could be made into a standalone file. Pcb21 19:39 21 Jun 2003 (UTC)

You don't have to have a Sourceforge account to submit a feature request. You can just do it anonymously. In my experience, the fastest way to get a feature request (or a minor bug fix) implemented is to learn PHP and do it yourself. That's what I did, when after 6 months a bug reported by me hadn't been touched. -- Tim Starling 06:03 23 Jun 2003 (UTC)

More Speed Please!!! I have been using Wikipedia for about a week now and most of the time, the server seems to run reasonably quick. But I have also noticed some l-o-n-g delays. When Wikipedia stops dead, I check the rest of the Net to see if the problem is widespread, but all seems fine, running at normal speed. This suggests that the problem lies at Wikipedia. Anyone else having problems? Could Jimbo or other powers-that-be upgrade the capacity? -- User:MarcusVox

Seconded. It's just about unusable now, and this has been true for several days.

Adrian Pingstone

It's not just browsing. I'm constantly put off editing because it takes yeeeaaaars to submit changs. We really need that foundation up to accept donations. I'd be willing to stick 10 quid or so in every now and again. CGS 11:33 21 Jun 2003 (UTC).

Let me give an example of how pathetically show it is. This morning I tried to open Mav's page. After five minutes of waiting, I left my apartment, walked five minutes to a shop, queued while something was prepared for me, queued at the till (where a problem caused further delay), walked five minutes back, made some tea, ate the roll I had bought in the shop, finished it and washed up afterwards. And it still had not opened up Mav's page, after 26 minutes'. I can no longer use safari because it times out and wiki is so incredibly slow it times out 9 out of 10 times when on wiki. So I am reduced to using I Explorer, a browser I hate and which prevents me from editing any pages that are over 32K. (Right now, miraculously, I am on safari but I have no way of knowing if I can even save this page or will it take so long it will time out. I am on a dial up modem so everytime wiki hits one of these slow phases it costs me money. That 26 minute delay with Mav's page cost me money! (I ended up aborting my attempt to contact Mav in frustration.) Unless this problem is sorted out with wiki very soon, I am simply going to have to drop out. I cannot afford in terms of money and wasted time to sit and wait up to half an hour to get into a page. This has hit absurd levels. FearÉIREANN 11:23 21 Jun 2003 (UTC)

A problem so severe that it chases loyal Wikipedians away -- may be lethal.
For me, when the problem turns bad, I go offline and write new articles in word processor my computer. --Menchi 11:40 21 Jun 2003 (UTC)

The wikitech mailing list are aware of the problem and are discussing ways to deal with it. From what I can gather, it's not a question of throwing more hardware at the problem -- it's database code in need of optimization. -- Tarquin 12:22 21 Jun 2003 (UTC)

The dev team is chronically short on manpower. Both Lee and Brion have backed from their Wikipedia commitments in the past few weeks. Lee's last wikitech-l post was on June 4, and Brion announced last Tuesday that he's having a week off, to work on other things. Is 10 quid here and there enough to hire someone, at least part-time? In the short term, we need some more volunteers pretty urgently. -- Tim Starling 16:57 21 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I know the odd think about SQL databases and their optimisation. What needs doing? Where do I sign up? Darkov 17:21 21 Jun 2003 (UTC)

What sort of skills do you need? -- Tarquin 17:19 21 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Thats odd, the site is now running full speed (at 7 pm GMT). What's changed?.

Adrian Pingstone 18:02 21 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Perhaps this post on the tech list has something to do with it? :-) Evercat 18:05 21 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Quite resourceful he is. Which Wikipedian is Nick? --Menchi 00:05 22 Jun 2003 (UTC)

In reply to Darkov and Tarquin, it's a bit hard for me to say anything definitively, since I'm just a part-time observer in this, and I don't really contribute at all. Brion and Lee were basically the main two people responsible for maintaining the PHP code. On wikitech-l, people report bugs, make suggestions, and post patches. But Brion and Lee would install the patches to the server. Plus they did system maintenance, like what Nick did in the message cited. It seems to me that the shortage is not in people offering advice or code patches, it's in people who have free time and full server access.

Now I'm talking about them in the past tense as if they're not coming back, although it's almost certain Brion will, and very likely Lee will. But if they continue to put in only a few hours here and there, I don't think they will keep up with what's expected of them.

If you want to contribute, I suggest you read a few months of wikitech-l archives and find out what's really going on. Contact someone who sounds like they know what they're talking about. If you want the sort of server access I'm talking about, you'll probably have to talk to Jimbo. -- Tim Starling 12:59 22 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Wanted: skilled programmers with lots of free time. Preferably unemployed with no social life and willing to work for free. :) --Brion 21:30 22 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Yes, that would be nice. But barring that, I think we should pay someone, if Wikimedia can get the cash. -- Tim Starling 05:16 23 Jun 2003 (UTC)