Wikipedia:Editor assistance/Requests - Wikipedia

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I recently started trying to compile a list of long (10 years or more) celebrity marriages. I was surprised this wasn't a category I could click on at the bottom of the wikipedia page and it was hard to find the information I was looking for. Is it possible to create this category? I tried reading the rules about categorization, and it seemed to be acceptable, but I'm not sure.

I have already compiled a list of nearly 100 couples. I think it's information people would like to explore. If someone else wants to create the category, I can send the information. Or, if someone tells me it's a legitimate category, I could do it myself probably.

Jessica — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.48.120.67 (talk) 08:35, 2 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

This is just my opinion but I doubt that the Wikipedia community would find such a list to be worthy of a standalone article unless the subject matter of the list — longevity of celebrity marriages — would itself be notable enough for an article. That article probably ought to be written first to establish, first, the notability of the topic and, second, that ten years is the benchmark established in reliable sources to define what is and is not a long marriage. Without that, the list would be subject to being deleted because Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information. Next, writing the list article might itself be more of a daunting task than you might imagine since each entry upon the list would have to be documented by a citation to a third-party reliable source. Regards, TransporterMan (TALK) | DR goes to Wikimania! 22:20, 2 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

Jessica is talking about a category, not a list article. The thing is... I don't think this would work except as part of a list article. What would we put in the category called "celebrity marriages"? Every celebrity who was ever married to another celebrity? Then you just have a list of celebs, which is not what I think we're talking about trying to create. And TransporterMan's concerns about creating a list are valid.

So, I don't think we're looking at something quite feasible. The current practice of having a "personal life" section in the article about the relevant celeb, which in turn contains links to the articles of people to whom that celeb was married, works just fine. —/Mendaliv/^2¢/_Δ's/ 23:13, 2 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

There's also the question of what constitutes a "celebrity marriage". Does it include only TV stars, models, and other famous non-entities for whom the term "celebrity" seems to be reserved; or would it include people who have actually accomplished something, such as religious, spiritual and scientific leaders? Must both partners be "celebrities"? The questions are endless. --Orange Mike | Talk 15:43, 7 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

Up until January 26, 2011 this article read that this monitor grows to 1.5 metres. On February 25, 2011 the length was changed to 2.1 metres by SWAMPDONKEY79. During the time-period leading up to those dates the government of British Columbia was in the process of revising its Wildlife Act to restrict the ownership of lizards that exceed two metres in length. I've been a member of our B.C. Reptile Society for 38 years, and a long-time member/friend has owned an adult lizard of this type for years. It was originally not in the restricted category because, firstly, it is fully-grown at just over a metre, and, secondly, the Wikipedia page for V. A. I. has regularly shown the maximum length as 1.5 metres. But the government suddenly placed my friend's lizard on the restricted list apparently because of the change on the Wikipedia page. I say "apparently" because no other reason has been given. The figure of 2.1 seems too precise to be scientific, and the suggestion of a sudden increase of 60% in the size of a well-studied animal seems incredible. It's as if the maximum height of a giraffe was historically recorded as 18 feet, and then having the figure revised overnight to 29 feet. I don't know enough about Wikipedia to know if you can, or wish to, determine the identity of SWAMPDONKEY79 and request the scientific basis for the huge change in the size estimate, but I can't help feeling that there may be a connection between the 2.0 rule and the almost-unbelievable change to 2.1. I could be mistaken about a connection, but its an unusual occurence otherwise. Is it possible for you to look into the background of this situation to determine the scientific validity of the posting of 2.1? Or, if no scientific information is forthcoming, can the article be changed back to its historical figue of 1.5? Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ylrac (talk • contribs) 08:47, 5 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

If your goverment is basing legislation upon what it finds in wikipedia articles, you have bigger problems. I used 1.5 originally, but a zoo in England lists them at 2 meters. Since that's all I have right now, I am going with that.--Mike - Μολὼν λαβέ 15:14, 5 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

That change was the only edit made by SwampDonkey79 (talk · contribs), so we're unlikely to get any response to the question at User talk:SwampDonkey79. Unfortunately the original figure, 1.5 metres, was not backed up by a reference to a reliable source either, so as things stand neither figure can be trusted. I have left a message at User talk:Mike Searson, who created the article in 2008 and is still active.

If you can correct the article with information from published sources (books, journals...) then please do so, giving the source of your information. If you don't feel confident to do that, I suggest you post the data and sources at Talk:Varanus albigularis ionidesi. -- John of Reading (talk) 09:37, 5 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

Piracy in the Atlantic World (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) This article is currently tagged as being a personal reflection or essay, and I would like some assistance in determning which sections (or the whole article) are in violation of policy and suggestions on how to revise these sections. Thanks.--Michelledavison (talk) 17:58, 6 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

Abghty (talk · contribs)
Martin CJ Mongiello (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

The user created the article. It's a mess. It's been cleaned up by adding slideshare links, youtube links, links to Mongiello's own website, and synthesis of known things with swashbuckling claims. Several users have tried. I'm hoping a patient editor can try chatting with them from another angle. tedder (talk) 04:07, 7 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

I have also attempted to enter into a dialogue with Abghty (talk · contribs) and received bluff, bluster, oratory, unpleasantness just short of incivility, or certainly borderline incivility, and more. I have attempted to clean the article with removal of non WP:RS material and have those attempts reverted by a bewildering flurry of edits done with such rapidity that it appears to me a number of people are using the account simultaneously, something I also infer from the user's own talk page.

I think an editor with infinite patience and sagacity is needed to attempt to mentor this user and to create some sort of order out of chaos. Fiddle Faddle (talk) 10:05, 7 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

Since the company account has been blocked, I'm hoping things will calm down enough that we can trim away the detritus and see whether there's a salvageable article in there somewhere, under the "There must be a pony!" principle. --Orange Mike | Talk 15:49, 7 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

Having run a severe editorial eye over 80% of the article and removed 80% of that as uncited/uncitabe self puffery, I think there may be a Chihuahua under it. I have my doubts about finding the pony. Fiddle Faddle (talk) 16:09, 7 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

Just wondering how the WP:OR policy applies to frequency lists extracted from (or based on) tables. There's a table of award wins and nominations for the Academy Award for Best Director that's been there since early 2008, and based on that I had gone about creating similar lists for for other Academy Awards, including the cited example of Academy Award for Best Picture. Those tables that I have added, identical to the one on the Best Director page, have since been removed from those pages by User:MikeWazowski (who, for whatever reason, has been unresponsive to my queries over the past few days despite being active), and yet the original remains on the Best Director page.

I'm just curious as to how the policy works here, if you'll excuse my ignorance, and I apologise profusely if I've missed some clear and obvious piece of codification. MikeWazowski cites it as OR and synthesis, but to my mind it would be classifed as a routine calculation. It's not a repurposing of the facts to assert a point, it's merely a frequency count of how many times a given name pops up in the tables - I'm not combining two different sources, I'm merely applying simple counting to one (already sourced) table. I don't think this puts across a POV or anything untoward, but provides the data in a valuable and digestible format for the reader. Surely counting from 1 to 10 is not OR, but again, apologies if I'm mistaken on that. Thefourdotelipsis (talk) 23:01, 7 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

At first blush it seems a reasonable thing to do to produce a table of number of nominations. However, it is certainly possible to do a synthesis based on only one source and there are all kinds of traps one can fall into with this kind of thing. For instance, the deleted list counts only from 1951 (on the stated basis that prior to this the award was to the film studio). If the Academy had produced this list, would they have counted on the same basis? There is no way to know unless they actually produced such a table, in which case it could be cited. Another example, the Academy database for 1928/29 in screaming bold letters declares under each nomination that these are not official nominations - there were no official nominations that year. Should those be counted? There may well be more subtle issues as well that are not immediately apparent. In general, it is better not to ourselves process data from a sources database. I cannot offhand think of a reason why Best Director should be an exception to this. If you still feel that these tables belong in the articles the best thing to do is open a debate on the article talk page to try and gain consensus with the editors there - I do not see any discussion of this issue at Talk:Academy Award for Best Picture at the moment. It is open to you to start a WP:RFC (again on the article talk page) to get opinions from more editors. Spinning Spark 00:46, 8 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

Of course, will do, and thank you very much for your assistance. Thefourdotelipsis (talk) 01:26, 8 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

Where can I find the Wikapedia entry for Tarrant County College Southeast, in wikapedia...? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.11.87.59 (talk) 23:04, 7 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

at Tarrant County College Fiddle Faddle (talk) 23:12, 7 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

Free_statistical_software (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) I'm wondering, what is the criterion for indicating that a Wikipedia article is a copy of an article from another source? In particular, this article Free_statistical_software is really a copy of a Citizendium article but the people who posted the Wikipedia article only said they incorporated text from the Citizendium article. Anyone object is I write on the Wikipedia article that it is a copy of the Citizendium article? By the way, I posted the same question on the talk page of that article and got no response. Socialresearch (talk) 00:03, 8 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

Please refer to Wikipedia:Copyright which gives accurate details of Wikipedia policy. If you see a copyright violation you are welcome to flag it at will. Fiddle Faddle (talk) 00:17, 8 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

You do need to understand the licencing of what you perceive to be an original source before flagging a copyright violation of that source. Note the licencing at the foot of the Citizendium page: "CZ is free. All original articles are available under the Creative Commons-Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license or any later." You need to understand this licence. Material appearing form it on Wikipedia is licensed already for Wikipedia to use. Fiddle Faddle (talk) 00:21, 8 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the response. I wasn't asking about copyright violation though. I was asking whether it's acceptable for the header to say that the Wikipedia article "incorporates text from" the Citizendium article, when it actually is pretty much a copy. Shouldn't the header really say that the Wikipedia article is copied from Citizendium? Would it be okay if I re-wrote the header to say it's mostly a copy? Socialresearch (talk) 02:00, 8 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

To do that you would have to be certain of your facts. Do you know whether it is a copy or incorporates the text? Are you certain? And, really,aren;t there better things that warrant your efforts here in terms of improving articles? Fiddle Faddle (talk) 09:16, 8 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

This article clearly was copied from Citizendium as can be seen from the history of both articles. In the early days of Wikipedia a lot of material was copied wholesale from public domain sources. These articles are marked with a template (see for instance {{1911}} or {{FS1037C MS188}}) which is usually placed in the references section (not as a hatnote to the article). The wording is always "This article incorporates text from...". Incorporates means incorporates in whole or in part. One should not use "copied", even if it was originally copied, since Wikipedia articles change over time as other editors contribute. While this was useful early on to get articles established, we have really outgrown the need to do this sort of thing. Spinning Spark 11:07, 8 March 2012 (UTC), partially struck 11:14, 8 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

Actually there already exists a Citizendium template for this, {{Citizendium}} so I have put it in. Spinning Spark 11:38, 8 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the explanation. Yes, Wikipedia should be beyond copying articles from other sources.Socialresearch (talk) 12:20, 8 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

Actually, the coverage of jobs and occupations here is so poor that I'd like to start some articles by porting over content from the public domain Dictionary of Occupational Titles. Is there, or could somebody craft, a template for that? --Orange Mike | Talk 16:32, 8 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

Check out Category:Attribution templates. You might be able to adapt one of those to your needs, although a lot of them seem to be hellish complicated for very little benefit. Spinning Spark 00:38, 9 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

Hi, I watch this article which is regularly prone to peurile vandalism and I recently reverted a swathe of consecutive edits (19) with no edit summary, all by the same editor.[1] The second edit removed the page protection tag and the edits totalled almost 18.5k so I didn't look too deeply into each edit, although a lot of the material appeared to have been copypasted from academic sources, judging by the refs.
So, the user in question came to my talkpage to explain, and I have since replied on the article's tp as well as posting to Emtan1's talk page.
The problem appears to be that the user appears to be hellbent on adding this mass of info to the article so that they can get good grades. They are currently editing away like mad in their sandbox and have not replied or adressed any of the issues I have raised, particularly the copyvio aspect.
This is not a content dispute per se, I am just worried about the user's motivations and their sourcing. CaptainScreebo ^Parley! 17:48, 8 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

Editor has now replied to at least one message, would still appreciate second opinions. CaptainScreebo ^Parley! 18:05, 8 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

In my opinion, it was not justified to mass revert this user's contributions; it seems to be a classic case of biting newbies and I would gently suggest you should be considering self-reverting. The material is all referenced to good sources, it is on topic, and no copyvios showed up in the few spot checks I did. The problems you mention are mostly easily fixed with simple edits: the pp tag can be restored, material can be moved out of the lede by adding a sub-heading (although the majority of the material was not added to the lede), and the lack of edit summaries can be dealt with by a templated message to the user. I see no evidence of the user being "hellbent" on anything: they have made the edit once, and when reverted joined a discussion as required by the guidelines. You are quite right that edits cannot be kept merely to maintain grades, but nor can they be deleted solely because they are gaining grades for the editor. Spinning Spark 23:18, 8 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

Sorry but it was late and the first two edits were a fairly sizeable chunk to the lead and then the removal of the pp-vandalism tag. Thanks for informing the user of this post, although in the refs I checked I did encounter definite copyvios (the three refs for one of the sources). Now the user has replied I will try to help them work the article into shape. I do try to assume good faith but this article is regularly subject to vandalism, section blanking and insertion of spurious material. Thanks for taking the time to look in on this. CaptainScreebo ^Parley! 23:50, 8 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

When you assert copyvio, it helps to provide the relevant diffs and urls. The nearest I found was the fragment "breaks a long message down" which appears in txtng the gr8 db8 but the surrounding text had been rewritten, so not a very serious plagiarism, and hardly a legal copyvio. The editor seems to be aware of the need to use their own words and little slips like this would likely get action if pointed out to them. Spinning Spark 00:32, 9 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

I noticed that the article concerning Planck constant had what appears to be non-factual information added to it earlier today. I suspect (although I'm open to correction) that this is the same user who tried to add the same misleading statements to this article in October of last year (see the talk page), and judging from the talk page was blocked from editing said article because of it. I attempted to rewrite the article to indicate that this claim was dubious, but the same user re-inserted the same information. I'm not sure what the proper procedure is in this situation, and I didn't want to get drawn into an edit war, so I'm requesting assistance here. Johnny Assay (talk) 01:24, 9 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

Yup - the same one, for sure, judging from the edit. I've reverted, and if the IP inserts this again, another block will probably be necessary. AndyTheGrump (talk) 01:43, 9 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

Blocked editor and his socks, reverted Planck constant and Specific relative angular momentum to last good version, and semi-protected both articles. Spinning Spark 14:02, 9 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

I need someone who can translate my delisting proposal into either Spanish/español, Persian/فارسی, or Hebrew/עברית. Here is my English proposal:

This photo is proven to be created in 1955. Nevertheless, regardless of value of this photo, publication of this photograph of Elizabeth Taylor is not yet known at the time of this post. Deletion of this photo is currently discussed in commons:Commons:Deletion requests/File:Taylor, Elizabeth posed.jpg.

I tried searching the delisting section in Hebrew Wikipedia, but I could not understand Hebrew. --George Ho (talk) 04:27, 10 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

You could try asking at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Spain for help with the Spanish translation, and so on. -- John of Reading (talk) 07:14, 10 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

WP:TRANSLATE has a list of editors doing translation work. The focus here is on tranlation into English of course. Spinning Spark 09:52, 10 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

Hi. Some 9 pages related to economics cite views of "world pensions council", but they always read "Think-tanks such as the World Pensions Council". Isn't it a kind of weasel-word?

And, at least one article, commodity, looks misleading, and possibly giving biased advise. This 2012-03-11 version says that investments to "commodities and commodity-related infrastructure" has risen recently, citing this source, written by co-founders of WPC, but the source only mentions infrastructure, not at all to commodity in general. (This section is added to commodity in the last 2 edits.)

What should Wikipedia do? I don't have a good background in ecomomics / finance, so I'm not well suited for dedicated research on this issue, and I'd be glad if my report here could help someone to improve Wikipedia.

I agree that "think-tanks such as..." is a weasely phrase if only one think tank is ever cited, it implies that think tanks in general hold this view. At least a second body should be cited or else it should simply be stated as the WPC's view. This is possibly WP:POV editing but it really needs the attention of editors with an understanding of the status of the WPC. I suggest you bring it to the attention of a relevant wikiproject such as WP:WikiProject Economics or WP:WikiProject Finance. Spinning Spark 11:15, 12 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

Thanks, Spinningspark. "Finance" project looks good. --Ahora (talk) 23:45, 12 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

I have been editing the page

How do I get the warning at the top about citations removed? All the facts in there are accurate and sources are cited.

Edmprice (talk) 19:29, 12 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

I have removed the tag and done a little clean up - caps and external links.--ukexpat (talk) 20:11, 12 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

Please could an experienced and uninvolved editor carry out the following steps;

assess whether it is appropriate to conduct an early close of the discussion here.

if appropriate, close that discussion. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 23:39, 12 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

Please see this article for addressed issues: "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_2012_Republican_Party_presidential_primaries" 1. Conflicting delegate counts for Ron Paul. 2. Someone keeps editing Ron Paul's delegate count to more than 100 less than what is reported. I've tried to fix this, but someone seems to strongly need to falsify these result. If I am correct, Ron Paul also won the Virgin Islands.