Wikipedia talk:FAQ/Archive 1

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This page contains some questions and answers (sometimes) which are not ready for the FAQ.

How do I get my own wiki?

Q. How do I get my own wiki? For example for my own web site or business or family discussions or maybe a church group or some other organisation?

A. See the [UseMod:UseModWiki UseModWiki home page] to download the software used to build this site. (Note that the Wikipedia version is slightly different than the official release, but it is mostly the same.) --CliffordAdams

A2. Also, I am probably willing to hook you up with a wiki of your own at http://www.wikicities.com Someday this may be a full service, for now it is ad hoc. --Jimbo Wales

How should I make passing references?

Q. What's the Wikipedia convention on referencing (not quoting from) outside Web and traditional-media sources? What's the line between referencing, "I think _Foobar For Lusers_ is a great source", and shamelessly plugging something?

A. I'd say it's a matter of stating the facts from the neutral point of view.

Can I base articles on copyrighted work?

Q. Perhaps this question is stupid or perhaps this is not the right place to ask it, but I want to be absolutely sure before committing any blunder that could hurt Wikipedia: I would like to write an article about Julian the Apostate (Roman emperor), which I would like to base on an essay I prepared for a high school course some two years ago. This essay relies heavily on a number of books. It is not cut-and-paste work and it contains just a few verbatim quotations, but nevertheless I "used copyrighted work" to write it, because I read the books and got most of the factual information from them. I guess it is not a problem to publish this essay on Wikipedia (including a bibliography, of course), or is it?

A. First, see fair use. Excerpts for comment and criticism generally fall under those guidelines. The fact that your paper was done for school adds additional protection in that context that doesn't apply to the Wikipedia context, so it is possible that excerpts that would be considered fair use for a school paper might be more problematical when placed in Wikipedia, even though we might be able to claim that this is an "educational" project. But if they are small excerpts clearly identified as such, collected and used for comment and criticism, I don't think there will be a problem. The worst thing that could happen is that one of the authors requests us to remove it; we either capitulate and suffer no consequences, or else we argue fair use if we think using the material is important enough. --LDC

How do I know what links to an article (page?)?

Q. How can I find a list of all pages linked from a given page?

A. At the top of each page there is a button, Links to This Page which provides two lists. The first is a list of links to the page but to which the page does not have a link. The second is pages with which the current page has a mutual link arrangement. The links embedded in the page are not provided ..... probably because viewed as redundant.

Why are some links preceded by a slash?

Q. Why are some links preceded by a slash?

A. The slash indicates that the linked page is or will be a subpage of another. If there is no target specified, the page will be a subpage of the page you are currently on, unless you are on a subpage already. (There can only be one level of subpages. For instance, a link to /Newpage from Algeria/Economy would make the page Algeria/Newpage, not Algeria/Economy/Newpage.) Users can also specify which page the link should be a subpage of, for instance: Poker/High-low split.

There is an ongoing debate on Wikipedia about the usefulness and limits of subpages, with the debate centering around the contextualization and implied hierarchy of them.. See Larry Sanger/Why I am suspicious of subpages and Larry Sanger/The case against subpages for most (all?) of the debate. But it seems everyone agrees that subpages are useful for commentary, debate, and strictly personal pages such as To-Do lists.

----
Yeah, the very case insensitivity whose lack is causing your contributors huge headaches (and causing untold numbers of duplication of effort and redirections) will cause problems when it is implemented. Lots of articles will need renaming to the new standards.
On the other hand, its the type of problem that gets worse the longer it is ignored. Since you must (probably) go down for a piece while the upgrade is done, anyway, some additional time will be required to automatically convert all article names to the canonical form and detect and somehow handle those article names whose canonical names are the same. The longer you wait, the greater will be this time and the more manual intervention will be required.
If we had some data on the basics of how Wikipedia was set up (platform, how the articles are stored, etc) someone (perhaps I) might be able to offer some help in this matter. And no, I am not about to download and study the source code to find out. The payoff (for me) is not high enough.
--Buz Cory

Should Wikipedia promote or prevent linking to Amazon (unresolved)?

Q: There is a problem with linking to books. Some pages link to Amazon. You probably all know why you shouldn't do it. What should be done with such links? Should we choose some "official" books eshop ISBNs link to?

A: Some are concerned that editors should not be restricted. There is nothing to prevent editors linking to Amazon, but others believe that the wikipedia shouldn't promote this.

Should Wikipedia use the Library of Congress instead?

A2: Why link to a bookstore anyway? There's a wonderful system called interlibrary loan in place. In a matter of days, you can get pretty much any book ever printed delivered to your local library. Why not simply link to the entry in the Library of Congress catalog: it has all the information you need about the book, should you want to buy or borrow it. --AxelBoldt

What about non-US countries?

subQ: Does it also work in Europe ? A: Possibly. For the UK, at least, see the British Library (founded on a collection started in 1753 by the British Museum; possibly the basis for the library of congress) for a list of all books published in that country. See also here for useful search terms for finding out about some of the protocols used in UK inter-library loans.

When should one use a redirect and when should separate articles be written?

Q: What is the ruling on cross-referencing entries? I wrote an entry for Tasmania, but then created a separate entry for Van Diemen's Land. This seemed natural, the old term still occurs in historical documents and folk songs prior to the 1850s, and Brittanica has a similar entry. But then I wondered if it was strictly necessary, due to the search engine. Have a look and give me some stylistic pointers.

A: It also occurs as late as the mid 80s on a U2 album.  :-)

  1. MHO is that if the two entries are substantially different then write an entry on both, but if they are just two ways of expressing the same thing then the less common one deserves a redirect to the more common one. This is only my opinion, and may not be shared by others. You can make a #REDIRECT page by typing #REDIRECT at the far left (no leading space, all caps) and then following it with [[the name of the page you'd like to link to]]. --Koyaanis Qatsi

Searching

Why aren't I taken to articles I've typed the name of? (Unanswered)

Q. Why doesn't Wikipedia's search look at titles of pages? Sometimes, I want to go directly to a specific page title.

How frequently is Wikipedia indexed? (Unanswered)

Q. How long does it take for new pages to show up in Wikipedia's index?

How obscure can articles be?

Q. Should Wikipedia include topics which are very, very specialized? (I'm thinking about an article on my home town, population 200; or an article about my late grandmother, who could not have been called "famous"; or an article about the history of an old one-room schoolhouse near my house.)

A. I can think of no reason why not. However, if your grandmother's name was Margaret Thatcher or Whitney Houston, don't be shocked if someone moves your homage to make room for what most readers would be looking for.

One of the great things about Wikipedia is that it doesn't really matter how obscure a topic is. Maybe no one will ever read your article. Or, perhaps they will. It doesn't matter. Britannica can't afford the time, money, or page space to have an article about your hometown. Wikipedia can, if you want to write it.

The only provisos are that the article is complete enough and the subject broad enought that it can't just be a section of another article. It must also be Neutral point of View. The exception to this is bot-generated articles, such as US locations, as bots are too dumb to know if articles should be merged into others.

A2. One reason why not is that minutiae would clutter up the search engine. This was the old objection to doing this; now that the search engine looks at article titles rather than complete texts this may not be as significant.

This objection still holds for Google at present, and that is the search engine for Wikipedia for much of the time. Perhaps some nifty work with robots.txt? How finely grained can control over spider-bots be?

Can I really download the entire database?

Q. A stupid question, probably. I saw a link *Download Data* in the *Help* page and clicked it to download all the data to my computer. But there was no permission to access the download folder. Is it available only to priviledged users?

A. There is some discussion in the mailing list archives (links above and on main page footer I think) of maintaining a very flat "Democratic" hiearchy consisting of sysops, knowledgable community users, and new users. Basically the new users would have a couple of minor restrictions to protect the site from initial errors by novices learning the Wiki(pedia) Way or local ropes. I notice that my download button has also gone away so perhaps this mechanism has been added or the download was loading the system to badly or nonfunctional. It would seem reasonable to avoid accidental massive downloads by beginners and casual users so perhaps it has been relocated.

How do I know the wikipedia will always exist?

Q. A related question, is a business plan or organizational charter for Wikipedia.com intended to be published at some point such that its contributors can be confident it will always be available free to the public at large?

A. This is under discussion at http://meta.wikipedia.com/ which is an associated space setup for people interested in working on the site and community infrastructure. This preserves Wikipedia.com scholarly atmosphere and focus on improving and adding content to Wikipedia.com articles.

Is the wikipedia source code Open Source/Free Software?

Q. Is the wikipedia code going to be released under a free or open license? The reason I ask is that it seems to me that the information in the wiki entries is greatly diminished if one cannot access the related wiki links and track to more detailed or general information on the subject of interest.

A. From browsing email list archives it appears there has long been an informal understanding among the wikipedia community of developers that while wikipedia.com is a commercial venture the source to operate the site would be open or free. Browsing the wikitech-L archives reveals that this has been now formally documented and finalized by inclusion of the GPL text into the CVS tree on the 14 Feb 2002.

How is wikipedia backed up? Are there off-site mirrors?

Q. I am concerned about the backing up of data, however and would like to know more about that. How about wiki-mirrors? I wonder how many giga-bytes just the current versions of all the articles take up. --User:maveric149

A. One developer on the wikitech-L list stated that for testing purposes he had a "old" download snapshot of 21000 plus articles that was 30 MB and provided a link for developers interested in stress testing. I am unclear whether this included previous versions and attribution data as seen on the history page. user:mirwin

Some Unclear Questions

Q. Is the complete database (all data required to efficiently setup a mirror or free fork of the site)download functionality currently available or will it be extended at some point in the future for free (as in beer) or for fee?"


A.  ?

Q. Specifically is the attribution data necessary to comply with the specified FSF license contributors submit under by clicking submit on change or article submission part of the primary schema of the content database or a separate shema processed by the GPL source code that runs the site.

A. ?

Is it clear to newcomers...

What the wikimedia foundation is planning to do?

What intentions the communty agrees on?

Q. Are the casual dropins from the recent publicity drives and recruiting efforts given a misleading impression by the front page? In other words, is (there?) any work in progress to adequately (by who's standards?) define organizational and business models such that "Wikipedia: The Free Enclycopedia" can explain what its precise intended committments to Wikipedia.com users and contributers are and how it plans to fullfill them?

A. This is a complex issue, and it is not at all well-agreed or well-understood exactly what the problem is in the first place. It requires some discussion to find solutions acceptable to Wikipedia contributers and users. Some people are under the mistaken impression (or are conveying such an impression, anyway) that the leadership of the project--Jimbo Wales and Larry Sanger--regard Wikipedia as a "commercial venture," which is just false. They have been discussing ways of making the project entirely nonprofit for many months now. Please join us on Wikipedia-L or on http://meta.wikipedia.com/ if you wish to assist the Wikipedia community with clarifying these questions and articulating well-informed answers.

:-( I liked having the FAQ all on one page. --LMS

  • Perhaps both means could be utilized? Keep the present sub-sections and index to them, but also have the full text in the main document? -- April


Good idea! What if we create or hopefully restore the previous version with the "mini menu" at the top as you suggest and make it clear at the top via a Please ask New Quesions here linked to the talk. Then the users can browse as they please and hopefully we can still manage the multiple pages efficiently. If some people chime agreement in I can tackle this within a couple of days, got a recruiting drive in progress that I am setting up for.

Starting to violate the edit boldly essence here. Perhaps we can do as you suggest and reevaluate if any new problems emerge? user:mirwin

Incidentally, this was asked for anonymously. The page was getting long to load. Beginners spend a lot of time there initially, or hit it frequently anyway.

Augh! My eyes!  :-) Please change it back to the way it was, or make the headings much smaller. --LMS

(ensuing discussion moved to Ben Finney/Wikipedia markup. I think this issue is important to resolve for Wikipedia; if you do too, please continue discussing there. -- Bignose)

Wow, what a huge improvement to the FAQ! Thanks a lot, Hornlo! --LMS

Older discussion

I want to expand and re-organize the FAQ into subsections.One reason is to make it easier to incorporate questions and answers from Wikipedia:Village pump. Here are the categories to begin with:

  • General: general questions about wikis and Wikipedia
  • Using Wikipedia: directed at our readers
  • Contributing to Wikipedia: questions of interest to current or potential Wikipedians
  • Administration: who decides policy, what are sysops, etc.
  • Technical: software, server, etc.
  • Problems, criticisms and suspicions: forks, how do I know you won't do some evil things with my work, etc.
  • Misc: everything else

Many of the questions will already have entire pages devoted to the answer; in these cases, it's simply a matter of writing a short answer and a link to the appropriate page.

Comments, suggestions and (especially) help are requested. --Stephen Gilbert 02:35 Sep 26, 2002 (UTC)

I like your suggestion. This is something that needs to be done - the FAQ is unusably long. --mav


Excellent idea! I suggest you be bold, put those categories in and we'll start rearranging the questions to fit! Perhaps "Newcomers" or "Basics" or "Overview" instead of "General"? -- Tarquin


There's a 2nd FAQ page at Wikipedia:Other frequent questions. We should perhaps reorganize these two pages to be (1) General FAQ for newcomers, and (2) FAQ for people who have decided to join the project. -- Tarquin

Toby, I notice that over on Wikipedia:FAQ you changed the "Using Wikipedia" link to "Reading", noting that you get something out of contributing, too. I called it "Using" to cover questions a little broader than simply looking up topics; I was thinking about how people could use material from Wikipedia in their own projects, etc. Are you terribly opposed to the word "Using"? :) --Stephen Gilbert

I see your point as to why "Reading" is not the best term either. So now I don't like either of them ^_^. I guess that "Using" is probably the better one, but I'll still try to think of something better still before you get around to creating that page. — Toby 05:14 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

Wait, how about this?:

Since it's only natural that the readers of an encyclopædia do more than just reading — they use its material in their projects, etc. The downside is that it implies a division between readers and contributors, but we just have to remember that all of us wear different hats at different times. — Toby 05:19 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

Good idea, Toby. And I'm not sure what else we can call "people who browse but don't edit" other than "readers". "browsers" seems a bit rude; implies they're either casual or related to Internet Explorer. Besides, the "readers' FAQ" can emphasise that readers can become contributors... at the drop of a hat, as it were ;-) -- Tarquin
I take offense at the notion that "browser" and Internet Explorer are somehow synonymous. There are many browsers other than IE. BTW, "reader" gets my vote too. --mav (on Konqueror 2.2.2)
Internet Explorer is a browser. A person who browses is a browser. Thus, they are in the "browser" family and are related. In other words, it was a joke. Lighten up, mav. :) --Stephen Gilbert (on Galeon 1.25)
It was a joke, and I use Mozilla & encourage people to switch from IE to anything at every turn. :-) -- Tarquin
It sounds good to me. I don't think it draws too hard a line between reading and contributing; it's just a division of convenience. If we want to get pedantic, the Technical FAQ could go under contributing, since doing software work is contributing to the project too. :) --Stephen Gilbert 01:18 Oct 1, 2002 (UTC)


Great job so far! I've moved all the "Other Frequent Questions" into "Miscellaneous", so everything falls under a common scheme of pages. The "Miscellaneous" page will need sorting; plenty of those can fit under one of the categories. -- Tarquin 23:17 Oct 3, 2002 (UTC)
I've been sorting through them and moving them to the appropriate categories. This is going to take some time; I've been checking all the pages that the FAQ(s) link to, and most of them need some heavy refactoring. It's turning into a complete Wikipedia documentation upgrade :) --Stephen Gilbert 01:28 Oct 7, 2002 (UTC)


It's been needed for some time! I'm treating Wikipedia:Utilities as a hub of sorts; I gave that a clean a few weeks ago. -- Tarquin

Here are other pages that need to be incorporated (for my own reference, mostly):

--Stephen Gilbert 12:00 Oct 7, 2002 (UTC)

Personally, I think having one large index of FAQs that points to various pages would be more useful than the current set of different FAQs, where it's often difficult to guess in which FAQ a particular information is placed, and where you have to search different ones to see if a question is already covered before adding it. It only gets too long if we put the answers on the same page, which we shouldn't do anyway (just a max. two-sentence answer with a link). --Eloquence 03:40 Feb 17, 2003 (UTC)

"These documents refer primarily to the English Wikipedia; the Wikipedias in other languages may have their own specific FAQs."

Well why should it be any different between the English Wikipedia and other Wikipedias? The FAQ would need to be translated but shouldn't the content be the same?

Brianjd 09:43, Jul 19, 2004 (UTC)

Sorry, this is quite pointless, but I just have to ask... do you really say "two hundred and ten thousand" in English (as opposed to "ten thousand and two hundred")?

LjL 22:13, 1 May 2005 (UTC)

How to pronounce Wikipedia?

I think that this is an unanswered FAQ. -- ChongDae 07:07, 25 July 2005 (UTC)

  • I have a possible answer; according to American English rendering of the word, it may be pronounced "wi-ki-pee-di-uh". --SuperDude 22:13, 7 August 2005 (UTC)

popularity

Is Wikipedia the most popular Wiki? --SuperDude 22:14, 7 August 2005 (UTC)

I think so. Everyone uses it.  — Invisible Robot Fish! 18:48, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

Recent negative publicity of Wikipedia

What has been the impact of the recent bad press that wikipedia has had, or is having, on popularity, usefulness etc here?

Length

Is there a max length to a page??? -—Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.109.206.88 (talk)

answered at user page. -Quiddity 23:37, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

Image

How do you change the image in the top-left corner? Tampo 00:42, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

I got it to work but the part that says,

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia is double and it looks messy. If you want to see for yourself, paste this:

#p-logo a { background: url(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b3/Gold-Wikipedia.png/146px-Gold-Wikipedia.png) 35% 50% no-repeat !important; }


into your monobook.css. Tampo 00:50, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

Permanent content

Is there a way to add permanent content at the top? Because everybody keeps removing that line and on HRWiki they have permanent content at the top.  — Invisible Robot Fish! 01:41, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

Taking Back a Barnstar Awarded

I awarded a user a Barnstar but his behavior shortly after receiving the Barnstar completely contradicted the reason for the award. Can I take back the Barnstar? Ptmccain 15:10, 21 July 2006 (UTC)

The Wikipedia:Help desk may be a better place to ask. Zarniwoot 17:25, 21 July 2006 (UTC)

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