Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2015 April 4

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April 4

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Reference help requested.

Thanks, 173.172.38.144 (talk) 00:21, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I have removed the two references to the cite named "credits". No such reference was defined in the article, hence the referencing error. I suspect the reference on the "Original air date" column was the intended one, but you don't really need a ref on each column if they're all covered by the same reference. So just the one reference should be OK. Rwessel (talk) 01:03, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Edited V. Modified

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Hi folks. I have previously asked this question but did not receive an appropriate response. Can you please tell me the difference between an article being edited and being modified. I have four articles on my watchlist that I often update. I may edit an article today and in the ensuing months it says it has been modified numerous times, but still shows my original edit. Thank you. Steve P (@ Spear) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Spear (talkcontribs) 00:47, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

No difference. Those words would be understood as perfect synonyms at Wikipedia. Every change to an article is called an "edit". Such changes modify the text of the article in some way. So there's no difference. --Jayron32 00:56, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
See Help:Page history for how to see the edits to an article. I don't know the circumstances of your case but maybe the edits only made minor changes without touching content written by you, or maybe the article was reverted back to an old version you recognize. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:05, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

pictures on desktop that quit working

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I have several desktop computers that crashed or died a few years ago . I was wondering if the pictures that were on them could still be recovered. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.122.134.165 (talk) 04:27, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

  Have you tried the computing section of Wikipedia's Reference Desk? They specialize in answering knowledge questions there; this help desk is only for questions about using Wikipedia. For your convenience, here is the link to post a question there: click here. I hope this helps. --Jayron32 04:38, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
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I have a url: https://tools.wmflabs.org/glamtools/glamorous.php?doit=1&username=Commander_Keane&use_globalusage=1&show_details=1&projects[wikipedia]=1&projects[wikimedia]=1&projects[wikisource]=1&projects[wikibooks]=1&projects[wikiquote]=1&projects[wiktionary]=1&projects[wikinews]=1&projects[wikivoyage]=1&projects[wikispecies]=1&projects[mediawiki]=1&projects[wikidata]=1&projects[wikiversity]=1

with square brackets which means when I try to link to it from my Commons userpage it comes out badly. From the Help desk archives I have seen that replacing the square brackets with %5B and %5D is one fix, but there are too many brackets in this case for me to fix (unless someone has easy access to a find and replace tool).

So, what is the best way to link to this url?--Commander Keane (talk) 05:06, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I copied the URL into Notepad++ and used Find+Replace there: https://tools.wmflabs.org/glamtools/glamorous.php?doit=1&username=Commander_Keane&use_globalusage=1&show_details=1&projects%5Bwikipedia%5D=1&projects%5Bwikimedia%5D=1&projects%5Bwikisource%5D=1&projects%5Bwikibooks%5D=1&projects%5Bwikiquote%5D=1&projects%5Bwiktionary%5D=1&projects%5Bwikinews%5D=1&projects%5Bwikivoyage%5D=1&projects%5Bwikispecies%5D=1&projects%5Bmediawiki%5D=1&projects%5Bwikidata%5D=1&projects%5Bwikiversity%5D=1 and that seems to work. -- John of Reading (talk) 05:16, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
It also should be possible to do the Find-Replace in the wiki edit window. Click the Advanced tab, look for the icon at the right end of the toolbar. ―Mandruss  05:59, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
URL Decoder/Encoder. -- Gadget850 talk 09:15, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Auguste Corteau

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Dear Sir/Madam,

My name is Auguste Corteau, and I am a writer and avid Wikipedia reader.

I would like to have the Wikipedia page on me removed for personal reasons. I apologize for the bother, but I do not know how to do it myself.

Best wishes,

a.c. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.72.240.165 (talk) 12:14, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Editors here may dispute any decision to deleted the article – indeed, they are already doing so, here. But if your main objection to it is that you consider the picture of you unflattering, you could easily deal with that by providing a better one, which you can offer without copyright restrictions. Maproom (talk) 20:06, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I am surprised by some of the tags on the portrait File:Auguste corteau 5228.JPG. Do either the CC-BY-NC license or (in light of the subject's objection) the personality rights tag prevent its use on English Wikipedia? —teb728 t c 00:49, 5 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Mysterious missing words

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Go to Norway, look in the Gallery and find the beautiful photo from the municipality of Ulvik. Mouseover the wikilinked word "Ulvik" in the caption. Wnen I do this, I can read:

"Ulvik is a municipality in Hordaland county, Norway. The municipality stretches from the Hardangerfjord to the mountains that reach above sea level."

Well, yes, that's practically the definition of mountains - they do generally reach above sea level.

Click on that word, 'Ulvik', and you'll see that the 2nd sentence reads "The municipality stretches from the Hardangerfjord to the mountains that reach 1,800 metres (5,900 ft) above sea level." [Emphasis added.]

That makes sense. Why don't I get that when I mouseover the caption, how can this happen & how do I fix it?

Thanks, --Hordaland (talk) 16:53, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The text 1,800 metres (5,900 ft) is generated by the template {{convert|1800|m}}. Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation popups has several options for templates, popupPreviewKillTemplates defaults to true which disables template processing. -- Gadget850 talk 17:10, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for the explanation. I'm not tech-savvy enough to know if that should tell me whether there is a way to fix the problem?
It is a very general problem with mouseover. If someone finds a way to fix it, millions of articles will be improved. Maproom (talk) 20:10, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Matthew Gordon-Banks

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Dear Sir or Madam,

I am very concerned and upset that someone has edited my page (Matthew Gordon-Banks) putting in items to blacken my name using sources which copy items in national newspapers long since removed by the nationals, as a result of action by me.

Please look and seek to reflect on my comments on the page. To protect my legitimate privacy (eg medical info) and being a victim not a perpetrator of fraud I have felt it necessary to amend the page until it can be moderated properly.

Your faithfully,

Matthew Gordon Banks — Preceding unsigned comment added by Strathisla1 (talkcontribs) 17:52, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I see that a very experienced editor has already been working on the article since you posted here. If you have more comments on the article, please put them in the article's talk page (click on that blue link) rather than in the article itself. Maproom (talk) 20:24, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
As Maproom says, the place to discuss issues with the article is on the article talk page. If discussions on the talk page are not satisfactory (in spite of at least two experienced editors who are good at cleaning up biographies), then you can discuss your issues at the biographies of living persons noticeboard. Robert McClenon (talk) 23:35, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
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Hi,

I am brand new here and was trying to copyedit some articles to get started. I had a question about how I should deal with internal links that do not actually link to an existing page (i.e., internal links that show up red). Should those just be deleted?

Thank you!

Sara2871 (talk) 18:57, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

See Wikipedia:Red link. Basically, a red link should only be included where it is plausible that an article for it will be created. Clearly this is a bit of a judgement call though: if you are unsure, it is probably best to leave it as is, at least until you are confident you can make a proper assessment. AndyTheGrump (talk) 19:07, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The standard I gather most people use is:
  • if the link's subject is mentioned in reliable sources, leave it alone. (Some garage band's Myspace page does not qualify as reliable).
  • if the link's subject is already covered by another article, fix the link to WP:redirect there, using a piped link if necessary.
  • remove redlinks from "see also" sections regardless of the above.
  • it's probably safe to remove links that aren't nouns or the noun form of non-nouns (e.g. ski). We have an article for IS that "is" redirects to, but that does not mean that "is" (as in to be) is "IS".
Ian.thomson (talk) 19:17, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
And removing red links from names of living people is also appropriate. We do not know if the article created about John Doe will be the John Doe who is being mentioned in this article or John Doe the criminal. WP:BLP says be on the cautious side. -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 19:25, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
In addition to what others said, there are classes of articles like lists and comparisons and "navbox" templates at the bottom of articles, where red links are almost never okay. And red links to products or anything else that is apparently promotional (including red links to deleted pages) are also almost never okay. –Be..anyone (talk) 03:05, 5 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Many lists and navboxes are meant to be exhaustive, for example all winners of something, all holders of an office, all editions of an event, all subdivisons of a region. Red links are frequent and acceptable in such cases. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:06, 5 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Links...

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Hi, dear people,

i hope you can help me. I am adding an exhibition to the page of Ivo Ringe. One of the participants was "Matthew Deleget". There is no page with his name yet, but... he is the founder of the art gallery Minus Space - which does have an entry here. I would like to link to this page when one reads the name of Matthew. In german wikipedia terminology this should work (i thought) with Matthew Deleget - but it doesn't work out. Is there a special way to get this link done? I would appreciate help very much, would also like to have a mentor for the art-department here by wikipedia, as i am planning on writing more articles on art also in english, not only in german. Thanks for your answer, --Gyanda (talk) 19:54, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

*grumpf*... it does work now:-). But still, a mentor would be great!!! --Gyanda (talk) 19:55, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

How do I post comments about an article that is being considered for deletion? (AfD article)

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I noticed an article being considered for deletion that I would like to comment on. How do I do that? There are no step by step directions that I can find on the WP help pages. Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Seasylph (talkcontribs) 20:39, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

There is a link to the deletion discussion. You can follow it and post your comments. Ruslik_Zero 20:49, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The link is labelled "at this article's entry" in the message box on top of the article in question. For additional information see also the linked WP:Deletion policy for a summary of Wikipedia's deletion reasons. There are a lot of additional subpages about the topic, but the linked page should provide a first overview, why or why not an article should be deleted. GermanJoe (talk) 21:00, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion can be found here Pemiscot County Does for those curious. Theroadislong (talk) 21:11, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The deletion discussion is in Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Pemiscot County Does. Follow the instructions for AFD discussion, in which the usual !votes are Keep and Delete There are other options that are probably not applicable to this article. Robert McClenon (talk) 23:28, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

How to search deletion log more effectively?

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Wildcard search does not appear to work in deletion log search. Is there a better way to find deleted articles where you're not quite sure what the title was? Dingsuntil (talk) 22:43, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Administrators can use Special:Undelete to find deleted pages starting with a given string. However, it only shows the first 100 matching pages and has no "next" link. Others can only look up an exact title. Or they can try to find red links from other articles, or the talk page of the creator if they know who it was. Their talk page will often have a notification with a link. If you have a specific page in mind then we can try to help if you say what you know about it. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:51, 4 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
In this case, I was looking to see whether there was a deleted article for "Roll, Jordan, Roll," the book by Eugene Genovese.
Given that the facility for doing title search for deleted articles exists, is there some reason why its restricted to Admins/Researchers? Can you point me to discussions of why the policy is that way? Dingsuntil (talk) 04:34, 5 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
A deleted page did exist for the book "Roll, Jordan, Roll" however it was only a redirect to Eugene Genovese#Slavery studies. -- œ 09:15, 5 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know about a discussion – but some pages are deleted for legal reasons, e.g. copyright or defamation. These should not be published by making them available to non-admins. Maproom (talk) 10:38, 5 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
It has been discussed and rejected several times whether non-admins should be able to view the contents of some or all deleted pages. See Wikipedia:Perennial proposals#Deleted pages should be visible. I don't know whether there has been a discussion about more ways to search the names of deleted pages. The admin prefix way is also rather limited. There are much more than 100 deleted page names starting "Roll" but I can only see the first 100. The 100th is currently "Rolland Donnelly". To see more I have to pick a fifth character and only see those starting with all five characters. If there are still more than 100 then I can pick a sixth character and so on. As the name suggests, Special:Undelete is the admin interface to view or undelete the pages. The prefix search of page names is just an initial option where pages are listed with links like "Roll, Jordan, Roll (2 revisions deleted)". This is the only deleted page starting "Roll,". The edits were the creation of a redirect and the addition of {{R from book}}. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:56, 5 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not talking about viewing the articles, just being able to locate them in the deletion log. Dingsuntil (talk) 08:09, 6 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]