Wikiquote:Village pump archive 22

Archives

2003 2004 2005: 01–06 · 07–09 · 09–12 2006: 01–05 · 06 · 07–09 · 10–11 · 12 2007: 01 · 02 · 03 · 04 · 05–06 · 07 · 08–11 · 12 2008: 01 · 02–04 · 05–06 · 07–08 · 09–10 · 11–12 2009: 01–02 · 03–09 · 10–12 2010: 01–06 · 07–12 2011: 01–05 · 06–08 · 09–12 2012: 01–02 · 03–04 · 05–08 · 09–12 2013: 01–06 · 07–12 2014: 01–04 · 05–08 · 09–12 2015: 01–03 · 04–08 · 09–12 2016: 01–03 · 04–07 · 08–12 2017: 01–06 · 07–12 2018: 01–06 · 07–12 2019: 01–06 · 07–12 2020: 01–06 · 07–12 2021: 01–06 · 07–12 2022: 01–06 · 07–12 2023: 01–06 · 07–12

From January till April 2008, originally posted to Wikiquote:Village pump.

Village pump archive 22

(Almost) Empty Pages

Lately there has been a rash of empty or almost empty pages for people of unquestioned notability (mostly songwriters). Typically these pages will have no quotes, or a single (and to my eye not particularly notable) quote, such as "C I A R A ciara from unknown song album?" from a page about Ciara (admittedly, this is probably the worst example). They usually lack intros and are seriously in need of cleanup. One industrious editor at 72.87.57.201 (talk · contributions) created more than 20 of these pages in one day (more than half of which were speedied) in spite of several requests from both kalki (talk · contributions) and me to improve. My policy so far has been to speedy the ones with no quotes at all, to prod the ones with a single dubious quote, and to clean up and fix the ones where the single quote seems worthy. Would others agree this is the best way to deal with these pages? --Ubiquity 12:09, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

This is probably a good way to deal with them. I confess to some suspicions as to the intentions of this editor, and have considered the possibility that he or she might merely be a troll intent on pursuing the petty pastime of irritating others, rather than trying to significantly contributing to the project. Sometimes, though, what might seem the work of a vandal behaving like a young child with difficulties understanding many things, could actually be the work of someone having difficulty understanding, and not simply the work of someone retaining very immature aims. If edits do continue in a manner inconsiderate of the advice given some temporary blocks might be appropriate. ~ Kalki 14:37, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Kalki i'am not a troll i like stubs. --72.87.57.201 14:55, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Stubs are quite okay, but they should be properly formatted stubs, not merely rapidly created postings which leave others most of the work to do to get them up to standards. ~ Kalki 15:33, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

I just spotted two pages with no quotes, both by a brand new user. To avoid BITE, I PRODded both of them.--Cato 22:05, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

No quotes should equal speedy deletion. I don't dispute your decision to prod, but speedy deletion is certainly clearly warranted within our rules as well. BD2412 T 20:49, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

Titles with colons

I recently moved a page called "Hitman" to "Hitman: Blood Money" (because this is the name of the game the page documents), and then deleted the original page, instead of leaving it as a redirect, because I wanted to avoid confusion in the future when someone creates a page on one of the many novels or movies called "Hitman". But now I find that a search for "Hitman" doesn't bring up "Hitman: Blood Money." I assume this is because the colon in the title threw it into a "Hitman" namespace which is not being searched. Is there anyway to escape a colon in a page title so that it doesn't create a namespace? --Ubiquity 12:25, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

It can take a little time for MediaWiki's search to catch up to reality. And I don't think it's confusing a name-plus-colon with a namespace prefix. Searching for "caribbean" finds, among other things, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. Check it again in a few days. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 13:18, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

Long ago, there used to be issues with section headings and colons, but I have not seen any problems occurring lately. ~ Kalki 20:55, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

"Nec tecum possum vivere nec sine te"

This phrase is attributed both to Martial and to Ovid. At least one of these attributions must therefore be wrong. I have no idea which would be the wrong one, however. Neil 15:10, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

Martial said it, but he may have borrowed from Ovid's "nec sine te nec tecum vivere possum". [1] --Ubiquity 15:54, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

Deleting User Accounts

I would like to delete my user accoount here, as it was created accidentally and I do not want an account on WikiQuote. Leamarie411x2 17:08, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

Unfortunately, it is impossible to delete an account. Something we did very recently was to delete someone's user and talk pages and rename the account. Is that OK?--Poetlister 17:27, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

That's good, but if we re-name the account, it's still "mine" but under a different name right? If that's the case, then just delete the pages and don't re-name the account. Leamarie411x2 18:23, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

I deleted your user page, and now the only edits of record by your account are these remarks to this page. ~ Kalki 20:54, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

Innately one-sided Theme pages

Though various imbalances can arise on any page, I deplore all attempts to create innately one-sided pages as has recently occurred with the pages Criticism of the Bible‎, Criticism of Christianity, and Criticism of the Qur'an. I would have similar objections to pages created expressly for "Praise of the Bible", "Praise of Christianity", "Praise of the Qur'an", "Criticism of Atheism" or "Praise of Bigotry". I strongly feel that both criticism and praise of things should occur on pages devoted to a theme, and pages should not be created to separate out any specific attitude or stance.

I have as strong an antipathy towards the fanaticism and foolishness of those who are most inclined to collect criticisms of people or beliefs, as I have towards that which would absolutely censor everything but the praise of something. Though I have not had the time to even attempt to fix many of the imbalances and format messes that have occurred on some of the "theme" pages, I have never supported past moves to break up of theme pages into such artificially imbalanced pages. Though on some theme pages it might be appropriate to split the page into a few sections dealing with ranges of opinion, I long had a tendency to clench my teeth in frustration every time I saw the adjectives "Religious" and "Irreligious" rather absurdly retained as titles of pages. I have just renamed these with the slightly more sensible nouns "Religiousness" and "Irreligiousness", though I do not presently have the time to work much on the pages themselves. If these separate pages are retained, which initially were created in someone's (largely futile) attempt to split up the page on Religion, into "pro-religious" and "anti-religious" quotes, I believe they should include quotes both for and against the subject of their title.

I deplore the increasingly evident tendency of a few editors to primarily dredge up what muck they can on certain subjects or people, and have always found that there are few people more deserving of criticism, and of pity as narrow-minded and bigoted fools, than those who focus primarily on the criticism of other people, rather than the appreciation of them. Personally, I deplore all forms of fanatical condemnation of anyone or anything, even many of the worst of people and traditions, far more than I deplore even the most fanatical praises of even the least deserving. I feel that there are always far more dangers to human progress and happiness in fanatical condemnations than there are in sincere praises, even as there are always far more dangers to human understanding and wisdom from lies than there are from truths.

I propose there should be a policy against having such innately one-sided pages, as they would merely make us more of a magnet for the worst and most extreme agenda-pushers that can arise on the internet. ~ Kalki 10:23, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Total support for Kalki. Even if a page is filled with well-sourced quotes by notable people, it may fail a balance test. Anything called "Criticism" or "Praise" should be PRODded!--Yehudi 12:22, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

I agree that Criticism and Praise articles wouldn't bode well. Perhaps as much to the point, they would also be superfluous. Praise, dispraise and neutral comment ought to be made to share a single theme page. When so many shades of opinion exist on any important theme, it would merely lead to squabbles to decide whether a quote represents praise or condemnation. This is unnecessary when differing views are on one page; the only remaining problem would be with balance and proportion. It could also be argued that it is far more informative and interesting to see a good many views in one article.

At the risk of being a bit pedantic, I would also note that criticism as used in the titles of these pages is synonymous with condemnation (e.g., "Don't be so critical!") instead of the traditional meaning of analysis and opinion (e.g., "drama criticism"). I think that we should stick to the traditional meaning, which may no longer be as common in general society but is still fairly common in work involving the pursuit of knowledge; and Wikis are certainly a part of that pursuit.

Another problem suggested by the pages in question is that we are now getting duplicate or redundant themes. We have Faith, Religion and Religiousness. Although these themes are not identical in definition, they are close enough in usage to suggest that a merger might be in order. Likewise, I am not sure of the need for a page entitled Irreligiousness, which is defined in its introduction as meaning absence of religion, hostility to religion and failure to live according to religious demands. These are discrepant definitions and are therefore not useful in creating a single theme page. Why not just stick to the thematic divisions we already have — Atheism, Skepticism, Agnosticism, Deism, etc? - InvisibleSun 14:29, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

I completely agree with Kalki's (and the others above) concerns, and once I saw these new pages I was planning to bring them up on the talk pages of the main theme pages (e.g. The Bible, etc.). I think such quotes should be placed on the general theme's page and not pulled onto their own page which becomes a one-sided page. This practice should definitely be discouraged. ~ UDScott 16:23, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

First let me oppose to ban all articles including criticism ... if it implies critic is also banned ... then we won't be able to have Critic of Pure Reason or New Criticism and it would be a shame. (joke)

Well seriously I agree with InvisibleSun, the common usage is criticism is somehow abused, and almost lost its original meaning. So we are better to avoid this usage from our naming convention of articles. Shortly,

Completely agreed. We won't have a single-side article like "praise" or "criticism" unless it is a part of work (e.g. CoPR) or a historic and technical term for a notable movement (e.g. New Criticism). --Aphaia 16:51, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Animals: singular or plural?

I have created articles on the hippopotamus and rhinoceros (singular). I see that the insect article is also singular but most others are plural, such as cats and dogs. Is there a policy?--Yehudi 12:48, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

As a general rule, the title of a Wikiquote page should be the same as the title of a Wikipedia article on the same subject, including capitalization and accented characters. Wikipedia uses the singular for the animals you mention, but they hedge their bets with redirects from the plural form in all cases. Perhaps that would make sense for us too? --Ubiquity 13:06, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Excellent idea thanks. I'll do it.--Yehudi 21:47, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Despite what Wikiquote:Manual of style says about titles in general (quote above), our specific practice for theme articles has been to make their titles plural when the noun is countable, which is why we have Emotions, Fathers, Rats, Libraries, Women, and hundreds of other plurals. Mass nouns are in their normal singular (uncountable, collective) form, like Medicine, Tea, Ecology, Acting, and hundreds of others. Of course, some nouns have both mass and countable forms, in which case we typically use the mass (singular) form unless there's a compelling reason not to.

The rationale is that our theme article titles follow the form "Quotes about X". In fact, before we started adding short descriptive intros to all articles, they almost always began with this exact phrase, if anything. The phrase "quotes about hippopotamus" is ungrammatical; thus, our practice of using plurals for such themes.

One problem is that WQ:MoS tends to be very much behind practices, as few regular editors (myself included, I must admit) take the time to ensure it's in synch with practices, many of which predate any meaningful version of MoS. I have no immediate recommendation one way or another right now; I'm just citing actual practice and the reasons. We can keep them or change them as the community desires. Either way, the redirection from one form to the other usually (maybe even always) makes sense. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 22:53, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Oh! I'd nearly finished making them all singular. Still, all the redirects wil be there.--Yehudi 23:10, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Abortion

This is a tough nut to crack. It is an immense page (159kb) and has been the scene of revert wars in the past between passionate proponents of both sides. I have proposed in the past to divide the page up along some neutral line, particularly by date, and by creating a separate page for quotes originating in judicial decisions (see Abortion (pre-Reformation), Abortion (1500-1900), Abortion case law). However, my efforts to include these links on the Abortion page have been reverted. So, I would like greater community input on the handling this delicate topic. Cheers! BD2412 T 22:08, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

How about splitting it into Abortion A-D etc. like the List of people by name?--Yehudi 22:24, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

I concur with BD2412, it is clearly traceable and intuitive. Alphabetical order is less intuitive ... alphabet of which I have no idea (the top of the quotation? Would our readers remember the quote all in a same manner? Some quotation is remembered in a more longer or shorter veresion? Or by the author's name? If the author is known in several different names? Surname? Full name? Well I have no idea which you are proposing already) and not inclined to agree. And more over, the chronological order is generally applied for our theme quotes (see Christianity for example). --Aphaia 23:17, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

I think there are more reasonable divisions of quotes by date. Maybe also pre-Roe and post-Roe. Would we then eliminate the single "abortion" page in favor of a directory of sub-pages? BD2412 T 02:24, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

A simple portal-like page looks me fine. Inclusion can be technically made but it would be too slow to read comfortably, I'm afraid. As for the division, I have no specific preferences, besides that it should be clear and mechanically decisive like "sorted by date". It may give us a side effect: we may avoid unsourced chronologically obscure quotes from the pages ... --Aphaia 15:55, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

It's no easier to find a quote by date if you don't know the date than a quote by author if you don't know the author! Pre and post Roe is meaningless except to Americans.--Cato 22:38, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Virtually all of the quotes on the page are by Americans, and are about the practice as it takes place in America. There are probably magnitudes more abortions performed each year in China, but I don't see much ado about that in the quotes listed. BD2412 T 01:06, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

I really think the alphabetical order by author should remain, as it has been a long standing and somewhat uncontroversial compromise after many periods of much editing and reversion. I also wish to note that though chronologically ordered quotes and sections are standard on our pages for people, Aphaia is wrong to say that "chronological order is generally applied for our theme quotes" — the application of it to the page for Christianity is a rare, and perhaps solitary exception. Personally I would have preferred to stick to a standard alphabetical sortation by author, rather than breaking it up into largely culturally defined sections, but I simply accepted the format change, as I was simply too busy with other things to get into arguments about it when it was applied, let alone do much editing on the page myself. ~ Kalki 03:12, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

After reviewing Christmas I assume it would be your preference, and actually we have no communitywide convention. For your point, I would suggest another example at Eastern Orthodox Christianity. There sourced quotes are listed roughly chronological based on acme of authors, and it is based on the discussion and consensus on WQ:VP. --Aphaia 07:07, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Let me be clear that I am not advocating any reordering of quotes on the page, but the division of the page into subpages. So, a subpage on a particular era could still list quotes from that era in alphabetical order by name of speaker. Or, we could have one set of subpages divided by name and a second set divided by date. Duplicative, I know, but at least it would resolve any "either/or" controversy. BD2412 T 03:19, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

That is an even more drastic suggestion — I don't see any real advantage to breaking the page up into sub-pages of any type, nor any need for it. Despite the warnings given by the wiki software, I don't think there are many modern browsers that have problems editing over 32kb of text, and the currently 162 kb page is divided into 26 editable sections for anyone who doesn't turn off the section editing options. ~ Kalki 04:41, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Yes, but how do you find anything useful in a page that size (and which keeps growing)? BD2412 T 15:02, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

The implied question behind that question is, "What do people use Wikiquote articles for?" Unless we can comprehensively answer that complex question, it's hard to know the significance and import BD2412's basic (and very common) question. We can all come up with some quick answers to the larger question, but I think we need a comprehensive, written list of Wikiquote's uses (which can vary considerably between articles and genres, and include some uses we should or even must discourage) before we can properly address whether and how to change organizational practices. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 17:35, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

There is a US bias in this article and in many others, for understandable reasons. I'm tempted to suggest splitting it into US and non-US quotes. :-) --Cato 22:20, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Note that such a split would also effectively split out all "pre-reformation" quotes. BD2412 T 22:59, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

how can i get started? asap if can

Can someone please help me get started on a new page for quotes? I'am willing to learn thank you for your free time. --Coretega 07:27, 12 February 2008 (UTC) asap if can

I have now left a basic welcome message on this user's talk page, and the make the further comment : On the adding of quotes or the creation of new pages: simply examine a few of the pages which exist, and follow the recommended formats. If you do not have any you wish to add, simply read what is available. ~ Kalki 12:22, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Where is the page for Robert Novak?

Robert Novak seems like an important enough person that there would be a page on wikiquote for him. Even his article on wikipedia links to his non-existent quotes page. I've searched and searched, but I can't find the page for [Robert/Bob/Rob] Novak. Is it possible that this page may have been accidentally/maliciously removed? I find it hard to believe that no one has thought to create this page yet. 22:29, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

The link on Wikipedia is a general Sisterprojects template, which does not imply that he has a page here. Please feel free to start an article.--Cato 22:40, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

Coming milestone

We are reaching 15,000 articles very soon (in this month, so I expect; 20K may be next year). Will we have something special for celebrating that archivement? Like a special celebration logo with the figure "15,000"? Just a thought. --Aphaia 11:49, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

• I'm all for it! BD2412 T 05:45, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

I asked m:User talk:PatríciaR for the special logo, who made us Wikiquote banners for the latest fundraising. --Aphaia 20:34, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Aphaia and I discussed this on IRC and it should be easy to replace the current logo with the special logo with some quick changes to MediaWiki:Common.css that can be reverted after our milestone is over. :-) Cbrown1023 talk 03:20, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

The first draft is here. Give your feedback, if any. :) --Aphaia 17:54, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Neat! The stars are a nice touch. How do we match up to other language Wikiquotes? BD2412 T 18:53, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Size-wise? Check out m:Wikiquote. Cbrown1023 talk 17:30, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

We've got it! Thanks to all for working on it. See also WQ:VP#15,000th article. --Aphaia 07:08, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

Stub types

A reminder to Wikiquotians: if you're creating new stub types for articles, please add them to the list of Category:Wikiquote stubs so that the rest of us will know what is already available. - InvisibleSun 15:38, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

I'd like a few lists.

If someone has the technical ability to generate them, I'd like:

1. A list of all Wikiquote entries for which there is no corresponding Wikipedia article.
2. A list of all Wikiquote entries for which the corresponding Wikipedia article is a disambiguation page.
3. A list of all Wikiquote entries for which the corresponding Wikipedia article lacks a link to the Wikiquote entry.

Any takers? Cheers! BD2412 T 05:45, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Good idea. And how about a list of people not in the lists of people by name, or who do not have a DEFAULTSORT tag?--Yehudi 10:55, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Seconded. --Aphaia 11:12, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Hey, the more tools we have for figuring out where we need to tighten up the place, the better! BD2412 T 15:53, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Is anyone able to act on these suggestions? I would, but I don't know how. Cheers! BD2412 T 07:40, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

Gadgets

Is there any gadgets we would like to have on Wikiquote? (cf. m:wikimedia site feedback/admin)--Aphaia 13:54, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Crash Bandicoot

Not as huge as our old "WH40K" daddy, it seems to be another "all in all" articles. At least I can hardly find it as a muster of quotability. It may be a good example why we need "no fan site" clause. Thought? --Aphaia 13:23, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Prod for having no notable quotes?--Yehudi 18:12, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Prod requested. --Aphaia 18:59, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Looks right - I'd certainly delete if the article isn't improved.--Cato 22:10, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

George H. W. Bush quote

A bit of an edit war has developed on the page for George Bush, Sr. A quote attributed to Bush (about atheists not being citizens) was in a section labeled Disputed. Context was included to show why the quote was unverifiable and doubtful. An IP editor removed this section, with an edit summary to the effect that the quote should not be included because it was the unproven remark of someone with a partisan agenda. I reverted this deletion on the grounds that, having labeled the quote Disputed, we had already declared it unreliable. The IP editor then reverted this action, citing BLP as a reason.

This raises an issue on which I would like some community input. The reason we have Misattributed and Disputed sections in the first place is to deal with quotes we have discovered to be mistakenly or doubtfully attributed. Likewise, if we were merely to delete all these quotes, it would only be a matter of time before they were added once again. If, however, the subject of a page is someone living, it could be argued that the inclusion of these quotes is defamatory. I don't happen to agree with this: if we have declared the quotes to be mistakenly or doubtfully attributed, we cannot be defaming the person in question. Aren't we, if anything, actually doing someone a service when we show that a frequently attributed quote is erroneous or unreliable? Any opinions? - InvisibleSun 18:00, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

It would be defamatory to intentionally misattribute a quote. But to report that a quote has been attributed to someone and include a disclaimer that the attribution is questionable would not be defamatory in the least, so long as we can cite the source for the attribution. BD2412 T 18:52, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Even sound extreme, I would like the community to consider to have more strict rules about QLP (Quotes of/about Living People). I have personally a great interest in German Wikiquote citation rules; basically they accept source-cited quotes only at their living people articles. (Their concerns are mainly copyright as far as I understand, though.) --Aphaia 20:17, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

It is clearly not defamatory to deny that Bush made this remark! On Aphaia's point, I must disagree. For example, I added unsourced quotes to Claus Moser, Baron Moser but nobody would regard them as defamatory and I am absolutely sure he said them.--Poetlister 20:36, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

A bit late reply (sorry), dewiki policy concerns mainly copyright issues, not for avoiding defamation. frwiki has also a similar policy - not to accept any non-sourced quotes. The idea is that if a contributor is sure he or she is absolutely sure the article ubject said those quotes, the contributor should give that, instead of saying "I know that, trust me". I think it is one of important lessons of disinformation of Essjay. --Aphaia 05:49, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

That's why we have "Sourced" and "Unsourced" sections. We should only put something in "Unsourced" if we are reasonably sure that the subject said them.--Poetlister 20:13, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

I wish that were the case, but how could it be so? If we were reasonably sure that a quote had been said by its subject, what point would there be in adding it unsourced — or, at any rate, in not trying to find its source? An unsourced quote, by its very nature, is no more than an allegation. It is a quote that has been neither verified nor falsified. It is there for no other reason than someone having placed it on a page. And there it will sit, in a sort of Wikiquote purgatory, until someone redeems or condemns it. Where do most of the Misattributed and Disputed quotes originate? From the heaps of Unsourced quotes. We have only to look at the Tom Stoppard page, for example, to see how many Misattributed quotes had once been Unsourced. Why had people thought Stoppard the source of these quotes? Did they know? Did they care? Why, then, would they place them on his page? Damned if I know.

I know that your premise was what people ought to do. They ought to cite quotes responsibly. But if they were responsible, why would they be adding unsourced quotes? What is the point, after all, of an unsourced quote? How would I make use of it? "As Tom Stoppard may or may not have said,..." Useless, n'est-ce pas?- InvisibleSun 21:57, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Famous people tend to attract misattributions; many aphorisms have been attributed to the likes of Mark Twain, Yogi Berra, and Samuel Goldwyn for no better reason that that 'it seems like something he would have said'. (I would like to argue, however, that disputed quotes should probably be moved to the talk page until the dispute is positively resolved.)

As for the unsourced quotes generally, these quotes are almost never unsourced (i.e., made up out of whole cloth); the editor may be working from memory, or may not know how to cite the source, or may be quoting fourteenth-hand from a source which does not provide rigorous citation. She or he may even be pressed for time, intended to research the source at a later date. These are all legitimate entries in the category of "attributed to so-and-so but not adequately sourced". (I would rather see such things in the "Unsourced" section—even when some minimal "heard it said" citation is provided—than in the "Sourced" section where its inadequacy may go unnoticed.) One hopes that the WQ community can resolve these issues in a helpful rather than a destructive way, by researching the proper sources. 121a0012 02:38, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Spot on. I have tried to source a few quotes, sometimes successfully. Often, doing so establishes that the version on WQ was wrong, even if it is what "everyone knows". [2] However, what I often find is that the quote is all over the Internet but there is no reliable source. We should then record that the quote is widely attributed to the person but we can't prove it to our satisfaction. In the case of Claus Moser, Baron Moser, I have heard independently from two people I trust that they have heard him say those quotes. This is not verifiable (and would not be even if I asked him myself), so they are not in "Sourced".--Poetlister 11:19, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

We are much better about listing misattributed quotes than most quote-books I've seen. If we keep it up, we'll be Snopes for quotes. BD2412 T 15:57, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Adding "Disputed" does not free us from the obligation to ensure quotes are accurate. If there are serious doubts about the quote, it is best to remove it completely. Inaccurate quotes can still be defamatory, even with that. Superm401 00:49, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

The point is that we have a fairly reliable source that he said it, and evidence of a dispute. We therefore need to report the controversy.--Poetlister 19:56, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

Progress report on Wikiquote:Bartlett's 1919 Index

To date, of the original 658 names listed in Wikiquote:Bartlett's 1919 Index, 264 have been cleared (one was eliminated as an error; for the rest either an article has been created or quotes have been added to an existing article). That means we are about 40% of the way done. In order to finish the list 148 articles need to be created (about half of which currently lack a Wikipedia entry), and 246 existing articles need to be checked to see if we include that content. Cheers! BD2412 T 23:47, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

On Wikiquote:Palgrave's Golden Treasury, I have checked the first 80 of 288 poems. Quite a high proportion (about 1/3) were not in WQ, and I have had to create a few article, most recently Thomas Percy.--Poetlister 18:27, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Could you provide a link on that page to a source for the poems? BD2412 T 21:10, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Yes, will do.--Poetlister 22:06, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. In the immortal words of Borat: very nice. BD2412 T 23:04, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

how to put up a pic

i just edited an article on my business . i need to put up some pics, how can i do that - —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Bulletproof-d (talk • contribs) on February 24, 2008 at 11:31 (UTC)

Your article has been deleted. For the reason, please review Wikiquote's policy about advertising. - InvisibleSun 16:50, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

Attempt to integrate, or lack of

How can we interact with a person who seems to avoid any attempt on his or her side to understand of, collaborate with and integrate to the community? The recent statement is symbolic I feel, that is, "I dont know how this site works but I do know my quotes ARE ok!". On the other hand, nothing of his postings to ns:0 have survived, as the consequence they weren't within the scope of this project, since this account was created last October. And we sure are convinced this person has been around from much earlier. --Aphaia 01:09, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Redirect jiggling

I did some jiggling with some double redirects earlier. Sorry if it was disruptive in any way. Will ^{talk) 00:19, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

Deletion

I was wondering, actor quotes from movies should be removed right?? should it be the same for musicians if their page consists of quotes from their music/albums--McNoddy 09:47, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Depends on whether the musician is the author of the lyrics. Most actors didn't write the words they are speaking, whereas lyrics are usually written by someone in the band. There are prominent exceptions both ways, of course, but a writer of lyrics is really no different than the writer of a poem. BD2412 T 10:18, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

I disagree. A poem is known mostly for its text, whereas lyrics are known mostly for the song in which they're performed. While some lyricist work is well-documented, and nearly all of it can be accurately determined if one has access to the Library of Congress or equivalent, I suspect that most people are not aware of who writes their favorite songs' lyrics, and they're the ones who must choose where to place quotes. This adds yet another level of sourcing problems to the existing challenge of getting any sources for our quotes. (And that doesn't begin to consider how to organize quotes by writing teams like Lennon & McCartney.) I recommend that we generally favor lyrics listed under the performing artist or group who first made them famous, with source lines that indicate lyricists where they aren't clearly tied (either because it's the same person or because it can be stated in the intro that "all lyrics were written by so-and-so except where noted"). ~ Jeff Q (talk) 11:11, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

I don't like disagreeing with Jeff, but I will. There are many famous songs written in the last 100 years where people won't recall who first made them famous. Who even remembers Adèle Astaire say? And people often remember the composer rather than the lyricist, but we'd have protests of we attributed Ol' Man River to Kern rather than Hammerstein. Jeff may be on stronger ground with pop songs of the last 40 years, but even in the example he quotes, people often talk of Lennon & McCartney songs rather than Beatles ones.--Poetlister 13:16, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Disagree away, Poetlister! How else can we thrash out these challenging questions? ☺ Whatever we do, we probably can't make any absolute rules because different songs and even genres are often handled differently, and age does affect the awareness of who did what. I would agree that the lyricists should be credited in some manner wherever possible, as they did indeed create the textual work. Where they may have an article, like Oscar Hammerstein II, it's an easy call. But I'm not sure that creating separate articles for Dewey Bunnell, Gerry Buckley, and Dan Peek serves Wikiquote as well as one article for America (band) that lists which of the band members wrote which song. It may be a bit subjective, but I think we can be flexible here and try to follow what people might expect to be looking for, as long as we have the facts somewhere. (And we can always add redirects where useful.) ~ Jeff Q (talk) 18:48, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

"Dispute on remarks about Jews" (above)

Is the above discussion of this topic resolved? I'd like to archive the discussion (it takes up a huge proportion of this page). BD2412 T 10:20, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Yes, please, archive.--Poetlister 13:10, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Done. Cheers! BD2412 T 05:06, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Stubs

Should you only put one stub on an article, e.g Dick Armey page. Should you just class it under one certain stub--McNoddy 12:39, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

I don't think it hurts to have more than one, when a subject fits into more than one category. The idea is that editors interested in certain subjects might want to look through the list of stubs for that category to find places where they can help out. --Ubiquity 13:21, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Yea I was thinking along the same lines--McNoddy 13:44, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

If you could, please date the stub tags (e.g., {{people-stub|2008-03-05}}) so that editors will readily notice how long the article has been tagged. Thanks. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 18:35, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Request for new CheckUser candidate(s)

I would like to ask the Wikiquote community to consider supporting the investment of at least one more editor with CheckUser (CU) rights. (For those who are not familiar with this, CheckUser rights allow a very limited number of highly trusted editors, usually already admins, to examine the private logs for evidence of pervasive abuse of Wikiquote (typically widespread vandalism and malicious sockpuppetry), subject to the Wikimedia Foundation's privacy policy.) English Wikiquote currently has two checkusers, Aphaia and myself. But my real-world activities have curtailed my work here much more than I'd anticipated when I accepted nomination last year, and I don't feel I am serving the community adequately in this role. Since the Foundation requires a minimum of two checkusers for any project that does its own CU work, we must have at least one more CU if I am to relinquish my rights. (I might stay on for occasional work if we have enough others and the community doesn't mind, but I'd prefer to resign in favor of more active CUs. Aphaia does too much good work for us already; she needs a more active partner in this role.)

Therefore, I would ask experienced Wikiquotians who believe they have (A) the necessary technical knowledge of IP networking; (B) the commitment to the Foundation's privacy policies; and (C) the time and desire to serve the community in this fashion, to consider standing for this responsibility at WQ:RFA#Requests for checkuser. We can have more than two CUs, but it's not generally recommended for projects to have more than they need. I believe our level of CU-related work, plus the usefulness in having more than two so people can take breaks without concern, suggest that three or four total CUs would not be unreasonable. The main challenge is that each candidate must have a solid consensus (70-80%) of at least 25-30 voting participants before CheckUser rights may be approved. (Additional requirements can be found at meta:CheckUser policy#Access to checkuser. Two other important ones are that one must be at least 18, and one is required to provide the Foundation with proof of one's real identity, which will be kept private by the Foundation.)

I plan to stay on as CU as long as necessary to ensure that Wikiquote has the continuity of at least two CUs. I will also answer questions for serious candidates. Thank you for your attention and consideration. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 23:04, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

I fully endorse Jeff at this point and will appreciate all potential candidates for their thoughtful consideration. For just clarification "at least 18" restriction is precisely said "over the age of majority both in Florida jurisdiction, that is 18 old years, and the jurisdiction you reside". The latter condition varies. For example, while it is 18 in many countries though, in Japan it is 20 and in some countries it may be over 20. While you don't need to say where you come from, but please keep in mind you need to expose it to the Foundation. --Aphaia 03:28, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

I have already noted privately to Jeff that I would be interested in this. I believe I have the knowledge, and I am certainly well over 18.--Cato 23:40, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Actually, there's a way round the need to get 25-30 participants. If we set up an Arbitration Committee, then that body has the power to approve applications for Checkuser. So far as I can see from here, all we need to do is have an election and appoint five members.--Poetlister 13:22, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

While I know English Wikinews has chosen the "way round the election", I don't know if it is a good way. --Aphaia 00:05, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

We could opt for a larger ArbCom - say, a dozen. BD2412 T 03:20, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

I don't know if a WQ ArbCom makes sense at this time. If we can't get enough regular-editor participation for ordinary stuff like policy updates and general maintenance, how are we going the handle the formalism of an ArbCom? I'm not so anxious to hand off my CU responsibilities that I would wish a hasty ArbCom creation on our project. I suggest we see if we're committed enough to get some long-overdue items like a Wikiquote:Exemption Doctrine Policy; approved (not just draft) Wikiquote:Votes for deletion and Wikiquote:Deletion policy updates, as well as Wikiquote:Deletion review, Wikiquote:Sourcing, and Wikiquote:Copyrights; and a host of other stuff (like perhaps the next discussion below) substantially improved first. With all this languishing, it seems unwise to create a new authority structure to sap our time and effort. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 07:01, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

As far as I can see, the Wikinews ArbCom is practically a legal fiction; it does very little other than appoint checkusers. It just seemed to me that setting one up was easier than going through another Checkuser vote. But never mind me.--Poetlister 15:59, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Proposal for strict limitations on TV show quotes.

Having just reviewed the immense blather of Barney & Friends, I have in mind to impose a two-step limitation on inclusion of quotes from TV shows.

1. Only include quotes that can be sourced as having been quoted in an external source (in a book, a magazine, even someone talking about on another show, but somewhere else).
2. Impose a one year waiting period between the date a program airs and when the quote may be included (perhaps with an exception for "watercooler moments" that quickly appear in several external sources).

Thoughts? BD2412 T 03:27, 8 March 2008 (UTC) Support for having a written policy (no guideline, but policy).

1. Strongly agreed.
2. Generally agree, but I think the term of "cooling" may be arguable. Currently I don't object to set it one year and won't be oppose to make it longer. --Aphaia 06:07, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

The TV-show dialog fan in me wants to scream, "Noooo!" But the Wikiquotian in me thinks (1) is an excellent parallel to Wikipedia's inclusion guidelines, essentially borrowing their emphasis on secondary and tertiary sources to provide simulataneous notability and quoteworthiness evidence and give us a much easier way to cut down on our absurdly long and often inane articles using objective means. However, it would be important to establish what a reasonable source is, as their are many websites that provide entire show transcriptions (of widely varying accuracy) that fans will inevitably want to cite. We'll still have to have some kind of well-documented guideline of what makes a good TV-show quote for Wikiquote purposes.

I don't think (2) is in keeping with the dynamic nature of wiki work. I'd prefer to allow quotes to be added as soon as we can get a reliable secondary source for them, which should be quick enough for those "watercooler" quotes and give us a less arbitrary and more flexible objective guideline for inclusion. But if we think we had unhappy editors before with our inadequate weeding, wait 'til we start demanding independent sources!

I must also say that our old system of using show titles as sections encourages massive additions of quotes, and can litter the articles with empty sections, all for the sake of making sorting easier for editors. I plan to create an article shortly for another completed TV series with a rather different format style as an experiment. I'll post something here once I've done so, so everyone can discuss advantages, disadvantages, and ideas. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 07:17, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Wiktionary's requirement for inclusion of words is that there be three uses spanning a year in "durably archived media", which basically means in print or on a website that is likely to be there for the foreseeable future (such as a permanent link to a news story). I suppose requiring sources of that nature would eliminate the need for any significant waiting period. BD2412 T 09:40, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

I'm all for cutting down the number of quotes for TV shows - for example, Family Guy/Season 3 is filled with quotes with unmemorable one-liners such as "See, this is why I hate shopping. I have no ass. I'm minus an ass." If we have to have one-liners, we needs ones that everyone's going to remember, for example (biased here), Derek Jacobi saying "I. Am. The Master." in Doctor Who (which, to be honest, passes BD's requirements - nearly every reviewer went loopy when he said that) Things like the "new hat" conversation from "Family Guy Viewer Mail" aren't as good either, whereas the Safety Dance pastiche in Scrubs would be. I think the problem mostly things like Family Guy subpages - the page for its fourth season is as long as the page for Tenth Doctor, and the Tenth Doctor has about 24 hours of screentime (compared to exactly 11 hours of FG screentime). Will ^{talk) 11:00, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

I don't think the waiting period is necessary. I think that simply insisting that all TV quotes be sourced (with the TV show itself not counting as a valid source) would remove all the blather and fat. (It would also eliminate 98-99% of our TV pages. I personally think this would be a good thing.)

In fact, I think we should insist that ALL quotes, throughout Wikiquote, be sourced with a valid, verifiable citation (e.g., not simply with the name of the source). This simple rule would immeasurably improve the quality and usefulness of this site, and would eliminate the need for a lot of our deliberations about whether a person, work, or individual quote is good enough for WQ. --Ubiquity 14:53, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Just the thought of this makes me happy. Think about the application of this rule to games pages -- gone! -- or wrestler pages -- zap! -- or fan pages in general. Think about how much easier it will make determining notability, or distinguishing real work from nonsense. Ahhhhh... --Ubiquity 14:56, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

We ought to do this for films as well. There are a few quotes that don't look right to me but I can't find a source to check and I'm scarcely going to rely on my memory of a film I saw five years ago!--Poetlister 15:55, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

For films, I would give credit for referencing. If a later movie or TV show mimics or parodies a scene in a film, the original was likely quite quotable. Of course, we need quotability guidelines for films as well. BD2412 T 17:53, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

I would reluctantly agree with point 1, but as Jeff said, finding a "reliable" source can be difficult. I would disagree with point 2, since the one-year waiting period seems rather arbitrary to me. What's the point of waiting if you have a reliable source? Besides, many TV shows get released on DVD or other medium long before that and the quotes can likely be sourced before a year is up. I definitely feel that we need to wrangle in many of the TV shows (witness the recent trimming I did on Dawson's Creek and Veronica Mars; and I plan to work on other shows when I can), but I don't see how point 2 will correct those types of problems. There's also the problem of defining what is truly a "watercooler" quote and what is not. ~ UDScott 15:37, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

The way I read BD2412's recommendation, "external source" means something other than the show itself, which would also exclude the DVD for being a primary source (i.e. having no editorial separation, or in other words, using Wikiquotians for editorial selection, which is bad on Wikipedia precisely because it invites subjectivity and interpretation, which is does here as well). This would be a significant departure from our practice, but seems to be an essential ingredient in this approach to significantly reducing the amount of quoting. This way, some independent reliable (text) source would have to find passages quoteworthy for us to include them. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 02:43, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Right, the show itself (including a DVD of that show) wouldn't count for quotability. I think the best evidence that something is quotable is that it has in fact been quoted somewhere by a disinterested party. BD2412 T 03:05, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

I'm rather uncomfortable with putting arbitrary limits on what might be considered a notable quotation. But I don't have much of a feel for the TV pages under discussion here. Agreed that they do have a tendency to devolve into fancruft. On the other hand, I don't think that subjectivity is necessarily a bad thing for a collection of this nature; reasonable people can disagree about the notability of a bit of dialogue. (I would hate to lose half the content of, say, Yes, Minister, just because an editor was unable to find multiple quotations in print media for each entry.) 121a0012 05:22, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Ah, I guess I misunderstood the focus in these "rules" - I was taking it to be focused on accuracy rather than notability - and thus my comment above regarding using the DVD (I meant that it could be used to verify accuracy of a given quote). But I also still don't necessarily agree that a given quote must appear elsewhere before we could include it here. If we try to stick to the rule of thumb that you have previously espoused Jeff regarding the pithiness of a quote and that it should stand on its own regardless of whether or not one has seen the TV show in question, what is to stop us from including a quote even if some other site out there has seen fit to post it? I realize this does not really address the issue of trimming quotes, but to limit the use of quotes from a current show to those that appear elsewhere seems a bit restrictive to me. ~ UDScott 17:27, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

I feel that we must have some objective criteria to support the inclusion of a quote from a TV show. If you can think of something other than citation to an external source, I'm happy to hear it, but we really need to get rid of most of what is on those pages now. BD2412 T 17:50, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

My point is that if the only rule you use is that a given quote must appear on another site before we can include it here is that we are not really addressing the problem - who is to say that any other site has used any rules for inclusion? Just by saying that it must appear on an external site does not really prove its notability. I agree that much of what we have is rubbish, but this does not seem to me to be the best solution. If so (and granted this is an extreme example) someone who wanted to include a quote could very well create their own site (or use one that already is out there for a show) and add the quote, then come here and say that it should be included because this other site is using the quote already. I'm not professing to know a solution, but I think that this rule has just as much chance for abuse as any other and in fact punishes in a way those users who would responsibly place quotes from a current show. ~ UDScott 18:07, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

That is not what I am thinking at all - other quotation websites should be excluded from my equation, I am looking for books, magazines, and other permanent external sources. A website may qualify if it is likely to be stable (e.g. an article reported on CNN's website). BD2412 T 22:52, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

OK, I understand that (and am relieved by the notion of not including other quote sites), but I still have a reservation about the proposal - that being that there are plenty of TV shows that are certainly notable but may never get a "book, magazine, or other permanent external source" that actually lists or discusses quotes from them. By your definition, these would still be excluded. Sorry to be so stubborn, but I again would hate to see some good quotes from notable shows be left out. I realize that there are certainly plenty of people who have abused the notion of an acceptable limit on the number of quotes, but again I think that what is being proposed here is going to too much of an extreme restriction. I would much rather us formally impose a different "strict limitation", one that has already been informally discussed in other places - a strict limit of 5 quotes per episode of a show. Whether or not the five that people put out there are of suitable notability is up to the editors to decide. I don't see how policing this standard would be any more difficult in policing these proposed rules (because after all, no matter what rules are put in place, people can easily violate them - it is up to vigilant editors to correct such behavior). But this would not lead to the exclusion of shows that do not have what you are deeming to be suitable external sources. ~ UDScott 00:32, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

<outdent>Does this apply only to TV shows? If an editor takes a novel by, or the collected poems of, anyone with an article on Wikipedia, he or she can assert notability and then extract any rubbish from it and post it here. Shouldn't we say that you can only do this if the quote has been asserted as notable somewhere?--Cato 23:21, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

I do not think so, but maybe the consensus of editors for what Wikiquote wants to be is very different from what I feel it should be. If Wikiquote were to restrict itself to, literally, only those quotations which some print publication had already quoted, I don't believe it would have much value. Certainly we would lose the majority of the content. I would much prefer a consensus-based process, and that's one of the things wikis are particularly good for. If you don't think something is quoteworthy, then just remove it and see who objects. Have a discussion on the relevant talk page. Use the wiki process for collaborative editing in the way it was intended. If rules or principles are required (probably), then I would put my stake down for brevity and context-independence. Brevity must be judged individually relative to individual style—a brief quotation from Stephen Breyer is naturally going to be longer, in absolute terms, than one from George W. Bush. Context-independence here means that the quotation should stand alone: no (or at least very little) knowledge of the material which was not quoted should be necessary to understand the point of the quotation. (Historical background and dramatis personae details are OK, within reason, and should be subject to the usual WP:V requirements.) 121a0012 01:32, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

I wasn't proposing it as a policy, just trying to get a discussion on whether we treat TV shows differently from the collected poems of some third-rate poet.--Cato 22:59, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

I'd have to say yes we should, because at least we know the third-rate poet was trying to write poetry, rather than fill time until the next commercial. BD2412 T 23:43, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

• Following up on what everyone has written, I would make this proposal:
  1. Carry out an agreed-upon limit to the number of quotes per episode of a series.
  2. After making cuts, we add a template to the TV pages. The template links to a page where the limit is stated along with the following rules:
  3. If someone wants to add a quote where the maximum has been reached, it can only be done by removing a quote so that the maximum will remain the same.
  4. If editors ignore these limits, we delete any excess quotes they have added.
  5. After reverting any edits which have violated the rules, we send their editors a warning. Violating the rules two or more times will result in brief blocking, with greater blocking times for repeated offenses. This step, of course, would not be needed if we conclude that the pages can be managed without blocks for these rules.

  I've done very little work on the TV pages, so I've been reluctant to join in here or make suggestions. But the merit of the above rules, I would argue, is that they work to promote the community consensus that wikis are supposed to involve. Right now there is virtually no incentive for our contributors to work together. A TV article is seen as a potential copy in toto. Editors, instead of working to craft a page, just keep adding and fine-tuning until the copy is complete.

  As to whether these rules are needed for genres other than TV shows (films and video games, for instance), we would impose these limits where limits have been a problem or where limits would make as much sense. Few would say, for example, that a chapter of Walden or a scene in Macbeth requires a numerical limit to quotes. The "classics" are works that, over time, have generated a great many notable quotes; these quotes are by now their own justification. Likewise, we needn't limit the quotes in these works to only the famous ones: which would make us, in effect, merely a replica of Bartlett's and other standard works.

  There are contributors who will complain of a lack of equity in the way we treat different genres. But is there any inherent reason why they should be treated all the same? - InvisibleSun 04:41, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

One problem that TV shows pose is that there are just so darn many hours of TV dialogue out there (far more than the hours of movie dialogue, definitely more than game dialogue). And TV shows (especially kid's shows and cartoons) are produced at a much more rapid pace that the quality of dialogue is severely wanting compared to a halfway decent film. So we have to have a higher standard just to avoid getting flooded with the sheer volume of TV garbage out there. BD2412 T 06:36, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Just a note, I've cut down Tenth Doctor to about 180kb (for about 30*45 minute episodes). Any more help cutting it down would be appreciated. Will ^{talk) 20:39, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

People in Government categories

Zarbon created, and I deleted, a category "Republic of Armenia" for political and military leaders from Armenia. Apart from the appropriateness of the name (it sounds more suited to theme articles about Armenia-related topics), I think that it is redundant. We already have a Category:Armenians and categories for heads of state, etc. However, Zarbon says [3]:

Hi. I actually need Republic of Armenia. It's the third category I need because if I work on all people from all governments, I need to classify them furthermore. I will be adding other governments in the future as well, hence, I will need to specify them furthermore if I am adding more than thirty people in each category and simply, "Armenians" will not be enough to specify because there are musicians, as well as other people of other category in there. The same goes for other nationalities, where I will need to specify them by their governments and living initiations, hence my creation of "Third Reich" and "Soviet Union". That's why I need the category. Is it alright if I could add it again? - Zarbon 15:54, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

I think "Third Reich" is OK and hadn't noticed his category "Soviet Union", which seems to make no more sense than "Republic of Armenia". If we follow his logic, we will also need categories on lots of other countries for their political and military leaders. Comments?--Poetlister 16:06, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

I need specification categories. Here's what I will be doing. I will be adding "Imperial Japan", "Fascist Italy", and other very specific categories. I believe that all the categories are fundamentally stable and all are directly correct iterations of the wikipedia encyclopedic titles. These are very simple and easy to track. The reason why is rather logical. For someone searching for all the military people of WWII Italy, but not recent people, or people of past generations, will find them in "Fascist Italy". The category would work perfectly, hence its structuring. Otherwise, it would be foolish to have one category such as "Italians" and leave it at that, because within that category there would be musicians, artists, poets, and people of other occupations. Since I am working primarily and specifically on military installations and within specific eras, I will need one separate clarification for each of them. Third Reich is perfect for all German military of WWII era. Soviet Union is perfect for all people of WWII during Soviet rule. And at this moment, Republic of Armenia is perfect for all military and political Armenians after the government was created and up until today. I need these categories because they simplify the criteria by a long shot and help me work. It's very hard to find any specification if the only way to find the president is next to "Dolmayan", someone involved with a rock band...where there's no connection but that of a racial connection. I need to specify all military organizations. - Zarbon 16:16, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

There is certainly an argument to be made that the Soviet Union (and Germany during the Third Reich) had both a distinct character and different geographical boundaries from their modern counterparts. BD2412 T 19:00, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

I see a lot of problems with Zarbon's approach. There is the issue of nomenclature; we need a cumbersome title like Category:Political and military leaders of X country. How is Soviet Union perfect for all people of WWII during Soviet rule when WWII occupied less than 10% of the Soviet Union's existence? Are not Lenin and Trotsky, Brezhnev and Gorbachev as much part of the Soviet Union as Stalin? The United Kingdom substantially changed its boundaries when the Irish Free State seceded. Did it become a fundamentally different country? And frankly I can't see how Armenia will ever have so many entries that there wil be the sort of problem he describes, though no doubt he will do his best to prove me wrong!--Cato 19:11, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Yes, Cato, it appears you know by now that if I add a category, it will not go to waste. I will be adding a few hundred people to each category, so each and every one has reason to exist, you can be sure of that. And when it comes to Soviet Union, all be aware that Lenin and Trotsky, as well as Brezhnev have been included there, as I have added quotes for them a very long time ago. They are all in that category. If anyone takes the time to check this out, they will see that no category is non-sensical. I would be the first one to go against a useless category, but I guarantee, categories such as "Soviet Union", will not go to waste, hence my addition of over 70 people in my created "Third Reich". I am planning on adding just as much people to "Soviet Union" and "Republic of Armenia", and yes, my dear friend Cato, it appears I will be doing my best to prove you wrong, no offense, but I have to try to recreate a complete resource for all military people, and what better way to locate specific people than specific categories, best named for the governmental structure of that era. Hence, I really need to continue working, but I'd much prefer to have "Republic of Armenia" back on the current pages if I am to add more people to the category. - Zarbon 22:08, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

OK, maybe we should allow these categories provided that they are correctly titled as Cato suggests and they have a reasonable number of entries. However, to avoid duplication there is no need to put these articles in nationality categories as well. Is everyone content?--Poetlister 20:43, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

Cato's suggestion is limited, and since I am pretty much the only person who will be creating all these military/political entries, it's very important that I receive the timeline clarification, as well as the racial clarification and the occupational clarification. These are all integral to these profiles. Let us look at the breakdown of this status. Let us take one primary example. Let us look at Leonid Brezhnev as a solid example. His occupational clarification is that he is a political leader. His racial clarification is that he is Russian. And finally, his timeline clarification, whether governmental or living condition related, is Soviet Union. Now, for the people I will be working on of recent, Vazgen Sargsyan, for example. Vazgen's occupational clarification is political leader, his racial clarification is Armenian. And his timeline clarification is Republic of Armenia, definitively placing him under the governmental structure which he belongs under. I don't think this needs further deliberation. However, Cato's titling can easily be used under the description for Republic of Armenia, which was exactly what I had up prior. If you would have looked before deleting the category, you would have seen that the description for Republic of Armenia was Political and Military leaders of Armenia. But that is a very long, extensive title. That is why Republic of Armenia is befitting and that was the basic description. Poetlister, let me know if I can replace the category, because it stabilizes how well I will continue to contribute to the categories, and you know that by now, I don't let a category go to waste, especially when I create one. So, once I get your okay, I will put the category back up as was. Soon, I also plan on adding Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy. Let me know if there's any other thought, or is it alright for me to do as I had originally planned. - Zarbon 03:09, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

I must insist that the categories say what they are or aren't. "Republic of Armenia" is not helpful for an article that already says "Armenian", and that could equally be applied to a town in Armenia. If you want to create "Political and military leaders of the Republic of Armenia", go ahead by all means. And please create similar categories for every other country that merits it, for consistency.--Poetlister 10:25, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

The problematic factor there is that its far too long of a title. So far, you are the only person who doesn't seem to agree with me, no one seems to be in opposition, and Cato was merely suggesting something, he wasn't dictating a guideline for which to follow. Actually, this same criteria was brought out in wikipedia and for standard purposes, people agreed that shorter titling is better and much more consistent. The "Political and military leaders of the Republic of Armenia" is way way too long of a category title. In its description, it can have "Political and Military leaders of the republic of Armenia." But, as a simple, simplistic, easy to reach category for people, "Republic of Armenia" is much better as a clarification. You may deliberate further, but I feel its a better terminology and so is "Third Reich"...I'm not changing that to "Political and military leaders of Germany during the third reich"...that's for one, very nonsensical, extremely long, and extremely annoying. No one else seems to be in opposition, so I am going to continue as such and put that as its category and add the description as "Political and military leaders of the Republic of Armenia. - Zarbon 15:50, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Actually, a better representation of the category, in order for clarification purposes would be "leaders of the republic of armenia". That way, it takes out the elongated words, political and military...and it clarifies that they are leaders and distinctly says where they are from. This way, we can have political and military in the description and simply leaders in the title. That seems like a good balance and easy for people to understand. - Zarbon 15:59, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Poetlister, you may once again delete the category "Republic of Armenia". I created another, "Leaders of the Republic of Armenia" to take its place. - Zarbon 16:07, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Mmmm, I am afraid "leaders of (state)" is too broad to maintain? We have "political leaders" and "religious leaders" already (not by nationality though). The new "leaders" category is broader than those two by definition. --Aphaia 09:25, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

I disagree. When I hear, "Leaders of the United States" or "Leaders of Bulgaria", I invariably think of those who lead the country (in the political sense), not of religious leaders. BD2412 T 15:43, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Thank you BD2412, it appears we do think alike. Hence, why we are in agree-ance on many of these issues. Exactly, when I think of leaders that's the same exact thing I'm inclined to think. Just want to let you know that I'm thankful of your supportive ideas BD2412. - Zarbon 02:21, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Cleanup Tag Enquiry

Bobby Fischer article has a Cleanup Tag upon it and am trying to work out what is the best way to clean up this page. I have checked the Wikiquote:Templates/People and from looking at the article am unsure on how to improve it the best way. Is the problem with the article because its been divided into sections such as On Spassky and being World Champion, On the politics and rules of chess etc and that they should be all merged into a section of Sourced and Unsourced instead of how it is at the moment? Advice on this would be appreciated so i can understand what is required before trying to make any changes. Boylo 01:52, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Organization is not the problem. The problems are:

1. Too few sourced quotes for a person of Fischer's stature.
2. Too many quotes in general, especially from Fischer's antisemitic rants.
3. Lots of quotes that don't make sense to a layman (like, for instance all the sourced quotes except for the first. In fact, even the page references don't make sense.)

To fix this, first go through and weed out the dull and repetitious. There really don't need to be 32 quotes about how awful Jews are. For that matter, there don't need to be 46 unsourced quotes about chess. Go through these and pick out the cream, axe the rest.

Second, try to source as many quotes as you can. Fischer was widely published and widely interviewed. It should be possible to track down a lot of these, if he really said them. Unsourced quotes don't really help much, since it's difficult to know if Fischer really said them, or the context in which he said them. Of the ones you can't source, keep only a handful. You may well discover better quotes as you search for sources, and this will help the article.

Third, for the quotes which are insightful to the expert but obscure to the layman, provide some context. For instance, the quote about QP could do with a brief note explaining what QP means and why it's interesting that Fischer eschewed it.

Do all these things and I think you'll find the organization will take care of itself. --Ubiquity 13:06, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Jean-Claude Van Damme quotes

Recently, 216.175.115.250 (talk · contributions) created a page on Jean-Claude Van Damme consisting entirely of unsourced "wacky" quotations. These quotations may be found, in both French and English, all over the web, but I have been unable to source a single one. I have also not been able to find any interviews with Van Damme where he makes any similar statements. (In fact, he seems rather dull, and by no means colorful, in his interviews.) But I have also not been able to find any site which asserts these are untrue. Apparently these were once on fr.wikiquote, but they're not there now (and, given the general quality of fr.wikiquote, they were unlikely to be sourced there anyway). I am tempted to remove all of these as unsourced quotes from a living person, but I wanted the opinions of others. Since Van Damme is notable, and since I added a sourced quotation, it's not something that can be settled with a vote for deletion. --Ubiquity 12:07, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Some of those were potentially defamatory, and I've deleted them. The rest should be sourced quickly or shot. Van Damme is exactly the sort of person liable to attract falsely attributed nonsense quotes. BD2412 T 03:31, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Vote for Checkuser

Can I please ask people to look at the application from Cato at WQ:RfA for checkuser rights. So far, only nine people have commented and we need at least 25. We really need another checkuser.--Poetlister 22:16, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

Would it be in order for someone to approach the people who participated in the last Checkuser vote?--Cato 20:22, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

Merely for catching more eyes, I'm even tempted to make the vote more problematic (Generally a problematic voting attract more attention). The problem of this idea is I have no idea how it could be. Really.

A notice on wikiquote mailinglist would be okay, btw? --Aphaia 07:10, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

I'll repeat here what I just posted at WQ:RFA, because I want to focus community attention not only on Cato's application but also our critical need for another CU because of my own exhaustion:

Once again I apologize for my glacial pace at responding, this time to my own request for CheckUser help. (I'd warned Cato in our offline discussion a while back about this, but I'm afraid I've been even slower than I'd anticipated.) Cato's tireless work here as a user and admin has been exemplary, and his interactions with users, both new and old, have demonstrated both conscientious attempts to improve the project and the willingness to admit and correct mistakes that I believe is essential to the tricky work of checkusering (checkusery?). His efforts to assume good faith in the face of editing that some of us oldtimers would block without hesitation are the kind of caution and patience that I like to see in a CU. His support of BD2412's motion to unblock Zarbon helped convince me to review Zarbon's situation and eventually reverse my earlier block. I feel confident that he will make an excellent and prudent checkuser, and I urge the community to support his nomination so that we can more readily fix the growing problems that only a CU can detect and confirm.

Most people come to Wikiquote to do quotes, nothing more, and that's just fine. But the only way we can continue to work in peace is for everyone to occasionally support these efforts to make sure we can prevent persistent, malicious editors from causing widespread harm to the project. I ask everyone to take a moment of their time to consider Cato's application. (See "Request for new CheckUser candidate(s)" above for more information.) Thank you. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 14:16, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

To increase attention: Wikimania submission is to close today. How about using sitenotice for RfCU advertisement? --Aphaia 16:46, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

Deletion of 1,2,3 maybe even 4 worded quotes, from wrestler pages

I suggest the following, as most wrestlerquotes are small and un-notable. Something needs to be done about these quotes e.g Randy Orton--McNoddy 11:37, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

I don't think there would be too much opposition. I deleted two but there are lots of others.--Poetlister 13:57, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

Theres a lot more pages like this one e.g Maria Kanellis‎ Michael Sean Coulthard‎ Kurt Angle‎--McNoddy 14:19, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

• I would support 1, 2 and 3. With four, there is a small possibility that the quote could be notable ("Let there be light," for example. [Of course, in Latin, that's only two words -- fiat lux -- but we can deal with that when the wrestlers start speaking latin]). --Ubiquity 14:54, 17 March 2008 (UTC)
  • There's an awful lot of quotes (indeed, a lot of awful quotes) about, many more than four words. Still, you have to start somewhere so I support McNoddy. And as Ubiquity no doubt knows, "Let there be light" is "Yehi or" in the original Hebrew.--Yehudi 15:45, 17 March 2008 (UTC)
    • As a general principle, a quote should have to be at least four words to be meaningful (and therefore meriting inclusion) unless it is really famous or really profound (or both): e.g.: "Cogito ergo sum"; "Veni, vidi, vici", "E=MC²" - I really can't think of a shorter one in English! I will add something about length to Wikiquote:Quotability. BD2412 T 18:26, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
    • I have added some proposed language to Wikiquote:Quotability, under the "Quality of the Quote" section. BD2412 T 18:53, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

I've found a one-word quote - "Non" on Marcel Marceau!"--Cato 19:56, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

Rare, and highly contextual. BD2412 T 02:43, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

And furthermore, it isn't Marceau's quote -- it's a line from the script of Silent Movie, which in turn was a committee effort, so we may never know to whom the quote belongs. --Ubiquity 08:47, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

Nor "cogito ergo sum" (3 wds.) nor even "fiat lux" (2 wds) are not the case? We cannot apply the same criteria for different languages whose grammatical function differs. We cannot say their equivalent in same number of words. And anyway while it may be used in English texts, they are originally no English quotes which we are gathering here, their home will be la.wikiquote - while they could be collect here but with translation which might be in more words. --Aphaia 08:55, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

The only recognizable English three-word quote that I could think of is "Eat my shorts". BD2412 T 10:07, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

Hmmm, although there is that anonymous gem, "Eschew obfuscation". BD2412 T 10:08, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

There's a fairly well-known quote from Calvin Coolidge: "You lose." But it doesn't really stand on its own unless one knows what it was in reply to. There's also the legendary phrase of Pheidippides: "We have won" [Νενικήκαμεν]. A number of famous last words are appropriately brief, such as Goethe's "More light!" or James Joyce's "Does nobody understand?" Perhaps these quotes would also be regarded as circumstantial. On the other hand, "War is hell" and "E.T. phone home" are famous without any context. Proverbs are often quite short: "Haste makes waste," "Love conquers all," "Justice is blind," etc. My current favorite among brief quotes, and one which appeared to have gotten a fair amount of news coverage on its own, is the first two words of Doris Lessing upon learning that she had received the Nobel Prize in Literature (you can listen to it here). - InvisibleSun 11:48, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for giving more light. So we'll be safe to limit the case for "wrestler pages" as first proposed? Also for those short quotes as well as other quotes we can set a "quotability" criteria - like "citation needed", then we'll ask the the evidence of quotation (where was it quoted by the third party?), but I would go too far from the current topic. --Aphaia 16:28, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

And video games, certainly. I would definitely require third-party use - all of the above "exceptions" should readily be able to meet that test. BD2412 T 17:24, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

I think what we're talking about here -- and what i think is worthwhile -- is presumptive evidence that a quote is not notable. I'm sure that anyone cleaning up a page who spotted a wonderful gem would let it stand no matter how short it was. What I'd like to propose is that, in the page of a living person (even non-wrestlers!), the burden of proof is on the editor to show that excessively short quotes are notable. --Ubiquity 19:02, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

I'd like to see such proposals worked into Wikiquote:Quotability. I particularly think that a one-word quote should be such that it would be understood without excessive explanation. Maybe supercalifragilisticexpialidocious would be a good example of that. BD2412 T 00:19, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Change username

I would like to change my username from Sasa Stefanovic to Саша Стефановић. I do this on every project. Thanks --Sasa Stefanovic 07:55, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

Done.--Poetlister 14:26, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

15,000th article

A few days ago, I had in mind about 4 candidates for an article to try to slip into that slot, but I only actually had time to begin on two of them a few hours ago. Despite having to make two trips away from home today, I kept careful track of the count as the last dozen or so pages approached it, and when I saw that someone had posted article 14999, I slipped in what had always been my top choice for the position — Horton Hears a Who!, but I added the other I had begun on Nicholas Roerich right after that, which put the count at 15001, but then I subsequently deleted an article that was nonsense, so it seems the Roerich article is actually the official "15000th" article, within the limits of wiki-database precision on the matter. ~ Kalki 01:04, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

As is typical of the article count the precision is extremely debatable, which is why I had hoped to have four fairly good article subjects ready around the time of transition. It seemed to be updating surprisingly well prior to the transition, and when I saw that it had updated to read 14999 with Nicktoons Unite!, I posted the Horton article quickly, did a page purge and saw it read 15000, and then posted the Roerich one, after which it read 15001. I then saw that one of the recent pages, was indeed nonsense by a vandal without any strong likelihood of being a genuine quote of any notable person represented and deleted it, after which the count read 15000 again. Since then three articles have been added, but it now indicates only 15002, which would make it seem that it crossed the 15000 mark with Child welfare, which actually wasn't the case, by my reckonings and observations, though there remain a few recent pages that are possibly or probably headed for deletion for poor quality, which makes any exact reckoning problematic. I would stick with Roerich as the official 15000th, and hope to have some time to expand it within the next week or so, but I know that in any of attempt at specificity regarding the actual article count the exact number of articles will always be debatable. ~ Kalki 03:55, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

Since the Child welfare article ought to be merged with Children, I am going to delete it and place its quote on the Children page. So it looks like Roerich will have the 15,000th article after all. - InvisibleSun 04:21, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

Yay Wikiquote! Congratulations all. :-) Cbrown1023 talk 20:46, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Huzzah! Ripberger 06:44, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

20,000 by August. BD2412 T 06:48, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Procedures for debates on granting CheckUser status

Following my recent appointment as CheckUser (and thank you to all who supported me), I am placing some suggested rules for future debates here. Feedback welcome.--Cato 11:44, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Wikiquote:Academy Award nominated screenplays

I've put this page together on the theory that "Films that have won Academy Awards for screenplays are highly likely to contain memorable dialogue meriting an entry in Wikiquote". Cheers! BD2412 T 02:42, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Prod

It has been six months since the trial of {{prod}} ended. This is still a draft policy, yet many of us (including me) continue to use {{prod}}. Is this OK? --Ubiquity 14:40, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

You're right - we should formally make a decision about its use (which seems to be acceptable to the community) and make it a formal policy and not a draft. ~ UDScott 14:49, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

You're right. After the trial some concerns were raised and not yet solved (see talk). We need to solve them and go to the next step - decide either to throw it away or make it a policy. --Aphaia 07:16, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Portals for Wikiquote

Has there been any discussion about adding Portals to Wikiquote. My suggestion is to replace the first 6 links in the sidebar with a portal for better navigation. --Steinninn 08:32, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

No such discussion as far as I know. I am skeptical if it is a good idea to create six portals now - without people who maintain it, it may be worse than now. And we have already not well maintained big portal - Community portal. One more portal could be a last straw. But of course if you design them and promise to maintain, I'll very appreciate your efforts. --Aphaia 07:17, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

If they are build up in a way that needs little maintenance, then yes, I'll do it. And I hope others will help out. Portals are so much better then lists or categories. --Steinninn 12:05, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

I've started a discussion on a redesign on the Main Page, when that's over I'll start working on a Portal proposal for Films. --Steinninn 15:24, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Really long articles

For example The Office (US) is extremely long. Should I break it up into articles for each season? 99.225.17.20 01:43, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Isn't it already pushing the bounds of fair use under copyright laws? Perhaps cut it shorter, rather than extend it into other articles. Webaware ^talk 03:37, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree wtih Webaware. Before separating it, please clean it up. Thanks. --Aphaia 07:13, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

The Office (US) is currently over 250k and our 16th longest article, though probably there are TV shows split up into series that are in aggregate even bigger. I would oppose any similar splitting up of this and similar articles as it would encourage further growth and increase the danger of copyvio.--Cato 22:48, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm already on record as opposing article splits, especially for TV series, precisely because of their encouragement to copyvio. The time and effort are better spent trimming the articles down a select set of the 3-5 very best quotes in each episode. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 01:39, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

I also definitely oppose splitting long TV pages - we should instead cut the number of quotes down to at most 5 per episode. ~ UDScott 13:24, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Such articles are clear copyvios. I would like to suggest that a comprehensive fair use rationale must be written for each article which contains more than 5 quotations. At de.wikiquote where I am admin again we have simple rules:

• No more than 5-10 quotations of authors who are'nt 70 years dead.

• No new unsourced quotations. --Histo 22:17, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

I think a policy like that would cripple us. Anyway, we presumably work under US copyright law (works published before 1923) rather than European law (death over 70 years ago). That makes a huge difference; for example, the later works of Rudyard Kipling are Public Domain in Europe but not the US, and vice versa for the early works of Bernard Shaw.--Cato 21:39, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Are the German servers in Germany? If they are using the same servers as everyone else, in the USA, they must abide by US copyright. There is a project called Wikilivres which is formally independent of Wikimedia and is in Canada, precisely to use Canadian copyright law.--Poetlister 12:07, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

All Wikimedia projects' DBs are hosted in Tampa, Fl. However it is a general tendency a certain project take the jurisdictions which its major readership resides into consideration. English projects are rather exceptional in this point, while there are also projects which is concerned about only US laws. Generally it is quite common the court apply their laws to a website whose readership is assumed largely to reside in their country or region regardless where the servers are located (for example, Germany, France or Japan ...). German projects therefore take six jurisdictions into their consideration: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxenburg, Richtenstein and of course, USA. It is also the idea behind licensing policy as far as I understand. Even in case the WMF isn't affected or finally win a case, we are better to recall any individual contributor may be sued if they act illegally in the jurisdiction they exactly resides, so I think this consideration is not too much precautions. --Aphaia 01:47, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

List of literary works

The List of literary works now consists of: 1) titles which have their own pages; and 2) titles which link to authors' pages. Should the list include the latter? If so, it includes only a fraction of all the books with quotes on authors' pages; and it would probably be an enormous, if not impossible, chore to maintain. If the list is only to include works with their own separate pages, I could go through it and eliminate inapplicable titles. Before doing so, however, I wanted to make sure that we are agreed on the purpose of the list. - InvisibleSun 02:19, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

My opinion is that it should be the former - only listing literary works that have their own page. ~ UDScott 13:25, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Thirded. Only works which have their own page(s) should be listed on that page. --Aphaia 16:31, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

I can see merit in having a comprehensive list of works with quotations, but agree that it would be an enormous amount of work.--Cato 21:53, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

This entire endeavor is an enormous amount of work! BD2412 T 17:52, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

All the less reason to give ourselves extra tasks!--Poetlister 12:08, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

As the consensus here is to include on the list only works with separate pages, I will now go ahead and remove the other titles. - InvisibleSun 01:52, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Chronological Order?

I was looking at the Final Fantasy XII pages and I was wondering if the quotes for games have to be in chronological order, if it's preferred that way, or if it doesn't really matter. I can't seem to find this in the article I'm using as a reference. I know for movies and TV is should be in the order they appear. And I do realize this article is a draft. Itzjusdrama 15:03, 8 April 2008 (UTC) (sorry didn't sign it before)

Though there's no official policy, we have tended to treat games as if they were movies, and to arrange quotes by character. Chronological order is only the rule for pages based on a particular person -- and even in that case there are exceptions, such as authors whose quotations are often arranged by work. --Ubiquity 14:40, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Actually, since works should be arranged in chronological order in an author's article, that last isn't really an exception (other than the fact that non-work-grouped quotes are typically collected ahead of the work-grouped ones). ~ Jeff Q (talk) 16:31, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

We have a lot of discussion history with electronic games (EGs). Unfortunately, it mostly reinforces the idea that they are among the worst offenders of copyright violations, failure to source properly, and sheer inanity, with a deletion rate probably second only to articles on wrestlers. Clearly there is much community interest in having these articles, but there is also a serious problem that the folks who want them are frequently not the least bit interested in the basic purpose of Wikiquote — to cite only a modest selection of the very best original, pithy quotes from works and people. Instead, many EG contributors treat Wikiquote as the place to dump anything and everything that occurs within games, including the most unoriginal statements and lengthy scene descriptions, using Wikiquote merely as a fan website for reminiscing about events within the games. This is unacceptable.

As a whole, the community has so far failed to address this disconnection between most EG contributors' desires and the project's goals. We still have no Wikiquote:Templates/Electronic games, even a draft version, to suggest basic guidelines. We have not yet figured out a way to provide specific sourcing for individual quotes, which is absolutely essential for practical verification. (By-character organization only encourages this failure, which is also true for film articles, another problem which hasn't been sufficiently addressed). And we just don't seem to have the community interest and activity that would allow us to properly weed out excess and inane material, let alone organize it well (an issue also not restricted to electronic games).

I know I'm contributing my own small failure by not working on this more aggressively, but perhaps I can offer pointers to some of the many discussions we've had that include the question of sourcing and chronological order in EG articles (in rough old-to-new order):

• Wikiquote:Votes for deletion archive/Tales of Phantasia
• Wikiquote:Votes for deletion archive/Warcraft
• Wikiquote:Votes for deletion archive/Splinter Cell Chaos Theory
• Wikiquote:Village pump archive 10#Cleanup sorting
• Wikiquote:Votes for deletion archive/Hercules 64 and Pro Wrestling
• User talk:Fang Aili#newbie questions
• Wikiquote:Votes for deletion/Legend of Zelda: Master Quest
• Wikiquote:Votes for deletion/Wolfenstein 3D
• Wikiquote:Votes for deletion/Tau
• Wikiquote:Votes for deletion/Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War
• WQ:VP#Official format policies (current, not archived; mostly about agendas, but emphasizing chrono ordering)

I did a comprehensive search for pages with "sourcing" and "games", as this is my main concern here (because many others are happy to argue content issues), so I'm sure I've missed other useful discussions.

The point I want to make here is that chronological sourcing is very desirable, perhaps to the exclusion of all other forms, because it is not only neutral, but is also a means to aid people trying to verify quotes. Wikis are inherently unreliable and so must include a reliable, reasonable mechanism to allow editors to verify material. That method is specific sourcing. One cannot expect a reader trying to verify a book quote to read the entire book just to find that quote, so editors need to cite specific editions and pages to make this a practical goal. In my opinion, anything less is an inadequate source. Each medium should have a similar specific-sourcing requirement.

The problem with electronic games is that they do not follow a single chronology. Events are often asynchronous, driven by the choices that the players make. The only semi-practical idea I recall at the moment is to provide a scene description in a context line (which is a sub-bullet under each quote for character-organized quotes, or an italicized, indented heading in dialog segments). But that still fails to address how a verifier is supposed to find their way to the scene, assuming they even have the skill or experience, not to mention the proper equipment and software license, to do so. This makes EGs especially hard to source, which makes their articles' content very dubious, even when unique and pithy. It may be that the only practical inclusion guideline we ultimately can use is to absolutely require prior publication of each quote in an independent, reliable source. This would be no different in effect from using a quote compendium, a news article, or a book from another author to cite a quotation from an ancient-historical person, a book that is no longer available for research, or a speech that was never published, etc. In short, our usual practice of using primary sources to collect quotes is probably an unavoidably bad approach for games.

Sorry for the meandering, but I wanted to collect these ideas in one place to try to encourage others with more time and interest in the genre to investigate how to resolve these serious problems. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 16:31, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Standard of some Articles.

Sweet Medicine, Barney's Great Adventure (film) and Dirty Jobs. these are just some examples of (now can I put this) dead end pages. I put the first one up for deletion, I came across. But I have now checked the Deletion policy and am not so sure whether or not VFD tag should of been added. (am starting to lean more that it shouldn't of been added) These articles would come under Problems that don't require deletion, Article needs a lot of improvement. Am not to familiar with the standard requirements for articles but the standard is so low in these articles its hard to believe they exist. Should articles like this be keep?? --McNoddy 11:58, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

The Barney page should go for having nothing worth quoting. The Sweet Medicine page should at the very least be subject to verification. BD2412 T 15:56, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree, I would of tried to add quotes but its not of interest to me and didn't know where to find them if I was looking. UDScott has done a great job of the Dirty Jobs page--McNoddy 12:38, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Subdivisions of sourced quotes by theme

Our practice has been to arrange sourced quotes chronologically, with subdivisions only for particular works. Should this become a standard — i.e., policy — or would we allow thematic subdivisions in some cases? (The Jesus page wouldn't really be an example of this because the subdivisions involve chronology.) I happen to be all in favor of the advantages of chronological order; but I can see when there might be instances, as in the page on Noam Chomsky, where a long article might possibly benefit from arrangement by theme. All the same, the concern that grouping by theme encourages POV can be seen in the article on Christopher Hitchens, where we have a subdivision actually entitled "Self-contradictions." I would like to take the axe to this subsection, rearranging the quotes chronologically. In doing so, however, I would also deal with the page's other thematic subdivisions (Iraq war, religion, Kosovo, etc.). I would therefore like community opinion on whether such themes should be deleted or kept as well.

The Hitchens page also prompts another question about subdividing sourced quotes. In collecting and arranging the quotes of a journalist, could the quotes be subdivided by publications when there are many from the same publication, as is often the case with syndicated columnists? I would favor chronological arrangement for these as well; but it could be argued that a syndicated column is an entity, rather like a book, and may in any event be treated in the same way. Opinions? - InvisibleSun 23:28, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

There is much to be said in separating types of writing. For example, for H. G. Wells we might distinguish novels, political tracts and history/science.--Poetlister 12:08, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

This topic has been discussed before and I believe that the consensus was that we should not divide quotes by theme because it is inherently POV and people may have different ideas about what theme a given quote belongs to. But the idea of separating by a common source sounds intriguing, especially in the case of a regular column - but within that separation, the quotes should still be ordered chronologically. ~ UDScott 13:59, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

A heading like "Self-contradictions" is clearly tendentious!--Yehudi 15:28, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Wikicomplaint: Lolicon

Hi I have tried two time to create the Article Lolicon on this site and it has been deleted once and being disputed now! That is it is not fair! Have several Quotes for the Article, even from Well-known pricks, I mean people themselves! I don’t like being mistreated like that! I’m not remaking that if it’s removed! It’s too risky to my stay on this site (Which I still don’t know if they will keep me for the reopening)! Do you relies how hard it is to stay up 23 Hour/week, ATLEAST, and research and type up Lolicon Quotes?! On Google there are Billions of sites up! I’m not even through the fist 500!!! I have enough money to keep up with gas prices and food, but my job calls for my undivided Attention or I will be sucked up in a goddamn wall cloud (I’m a Storm Chaser on an Amateur Level! Litterly I’m only 18)!!! I just want my article to stay! But it seems hard to talk to some one who wont play fair! I have not read ANY of the Wikiquote rules yet so I’m goanna get on that and see what I’m doing wrong! I just came to "Village Pump" to get some assistance! Thanks!--Saikano 15:45, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Wikimedia Blog

The Wikimedia Foundation has started and opened its own blog! This is a place for the Foundation and its staff to communicate items to its readers, editors, and donors. See the announcement and the blog. Cbrown1023 talk 20:40, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Noam Chomsky

Just wanted to note that there are several "quotes" on this page that are upwards of a thousand words, and a few in the range of fifteen hundred. Those are more properly called essays than quotes, I think. BD2412 T 17:00, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Presumably these are copyvios.--Yehudi 11:48, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Many of them seem to be excerpts from speeches. If they are not reproductions of a written or recorded event, there is no copyright in them - but conversely they can not be considered reliable. So either they are copyvios or someone's guesswork about what was said. Even if they are not copyvios they are simply much too long to be called "quotes". BD2412 T 12:44, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Let's start by removing everything without a verifiable source.--Cato 22:05, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, I took out a few extremely long selections - some would not fit neatly in two editing screens. The sourcing is not as much of a problem really as the blatant copying of excessively long tracts from books and the like (most of these posts are very well sourced, in fact). BD2412 T 03:37, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

All the long "quotes" (=excerpts from talks) that I added are ones that I transcribed myself (and also translated to Hebrew in the he.wikiquote page). I emailed Noam Chomsky and he approved of them. And violating copyrights of anarchists is usually an oxymoron, he's anti-copyrights (though he compromises with book publishers). There's some more discussion in Talk:Noam Chomsky and VP max quote length. All the sources of long quotes that I added are reliable: either the recording is still online, and if not I also kept local copy of such recordings (see my wikiquote user page). There's one very long quote that someone else (anonymously) added (see here) that might be a copyvio because it's in a book, but I prefer not to remove it without any copyvio complaint from the not-for-profit publisher (I guess in these circles mostly everyone is anti-copyrights). Regarding length, as I mentioned on talk page what I transcribed is quite heavily abridged (for example you can compare length with a talk that someone transcribed on wikisource:Middle_East_Policy_(Chomsky)). If you consider the length of the excerpts that I transcribed unacceptable, then imho a productive option in this discussion would be to show an example of a quote where you trim its length (beyond what I already trimmed) by removing parts that you consider irrelevant (or not relevant enough). iddo999 12:26, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

If you wish to post speeches, the place to do it would be Wikisource. I'm sure they would welcome the materials - completely untrimmed even - so long as you can demonstrate that they are in the public domain. A "quote" should really be something pithy, the kind of thing you can throw into a conversation at a cocktail party or perhaps use in an academic paper. Let me put it this way. If you were writing a paper for a grade in a class, how long of a quote would you feel comfortable putting in there? Certainly the very big ones can be broken down to smaller ones, if each of the smaller ones is independently useful and pithy. Cheers! BD2412 T 16:15, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

I've already responded to everything you write here on the NC talk page, you should at least look there before deleting everything that I transcribed:) I don't want to post a full speech, I want to post an excerpt from a speech that includes everything that's relevant to make the point. I compared the length of the excerpts that I transcribed with an estimate for the full talks, and in most extreme example it was still less than 1/20 of the entire talk. In other cases where the excerpt is part of q&a session, I guess it would easily be less than 1/100 of the entire talk+q&a (note that I also trim irrelevant parts inside the excerpts themselves). You generalize (correctly) that "Certainly the very big ones can be broken down to smaller ones, if each of the smaller ones is independently useful and pithy", but the the keyword is the word "if" in that. Again I'd be happy to review a specific example if you'd like. I agree that the word "quote" to describe such lengthy excerpts is a big stretch with regard to common usage of the word "quote", certainly in a conversation at a cocktail party, but there are plenty of books (or long articles) that contain lengthy excerpts and refer to them as "quotes" or "quotations" or "citations". iddo999 17:18, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Proportional arguments are not helpful. Fidel Castro was known for giving speeches that last four or five hours or more, so a 1/20 portion of such a speech might be fifteen pages of text. I agree, we need some rational standard for what constitutes a quote, but as a rule of thumb I'd go with my above suggestion of how long a passage would you risk putting in an academic paper being turned in for a grade (presumably to a professor who is looking for your original thought). Please note also that I have broken out a separate article for Understanding Power, although I think it needs work, and I am not exactly clear if that is a book, and anthology, or a blog (or something like that). I think it would be helpful to break out separate articles on Chomsky's key works, to the extent that there are numerous passages worth quoting from each. Regarding quotes about Chomsky, please look at the guidelines we are putting together at Wikiquote:Quotability to be sure that the speakers and their remarks are worthy of inclusion. Cheers! BD2412 T 21:05, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

First you write that if I "wish to post speeches, the place to do it would be Wikisource". In response I mention that the excerpts that I transcribed are 1/20 to 1/100 or the entire speech, meaning that I would have to do x20 or x100 more work if I followed your advice, and it's work that I didn't want to do in the first place, because I was interested in the particular point of the excerpts that I transcribed, and not necessarily in the entire speech. In response you write that the proportional argument is no helpful because in case Fidel Castro gave the speech I might need to transcribe 15 pages and do something like x1000 more work in order to follow your advice. Phew, thanks a lot! How much are you paying per hour?:) I think that your proposed criteria is rather weird according to your own words ("professor who is looking for your original thought"), because wikiquote is exactly the opposite of being a place for original thought, it's for quoting existing thought. But again in the case of this imaginary professor, if he rejects my submission because the quoted excerpt is too long, I would ask him which parts of the excerpt he considers not to be relevant enough in order to make the point (and therefore should have been trimmed), and if he cannot provide a good answer to this question then I would consider his criteria to be nonsense. You also raise the question of breaking out the page to smaller pages. It's a separate question from individual quotes being too long. I all in favor of having separate pages in case those are helpful like you said, but that doesn't necessarily mean deleting quotes from the main page. The separate pages that InvisibleSun created don't overlap with the main page. I guess quotes that are less interesting in general can be only on separate pages, and other quotes can be in both. iddo999 22:00, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, I'm jumping back and forth between a number of problems at a time. What I mean to say is this:

1. The page as a whole is much too long. This can be addressed by both eliminating excessively long tracts, and by breaking out subpages on individual works or topics.
2. There were (and still are) many selections that are too long to be called "quotes" in the sense of those usually found in a collection trying to mirror other quotation collections. With respect to the Castro reference, I mean that it doesn't matter if the quote is ten percent or a tenth of a percent of the whole speech, the thing we are looking at is the quote itself. I don't think Wikisource would object to the addition of a 1,500 word passage from a 30,000 word speech. It certainly fits there better than here.

Cheers! BD2412 T 01:30, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

You make sweeping statements that seem bizarre to me: "certainly fits there better" is false I think, because wikisource content has to be full works, not excerpts. Similarly, "much too long" may or may not be true, but doesn't seem to be substantiated by anything other than the fact that you proclaimed it. Also, what do you mean by "were" in "were (and still are)"? You ignore everything in my response and instead just repeat what you said about Castro, so unless you plan to respond specifically to my points, continuing this discussion seems pointless to me. iddo999 02:20, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Hmmm, you are right, we have no set policy on length of quotes. All Wikimedia projects have a general policy on page length, specifically that pages should be split off at around 32kb if possible, as some people have browser problems editing pages longer than that (Noam Chomsky is currently in the range of 250+ kilobytes long. I am going to propose, then, that we as a community must come up with a policy on length of quotes. No limit? A word limit? A character limit? Is something like the second quote under Noam Chomsky#On intelligence agencies within our mission? BD2412 T 04:51, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

I have inquired at Wikisource as to whether they will accept excerpts of speeches, and here is the response I received from Sherurcij, who is an admin there:

"As long as they're verifiable (date, location of speech, proof of PD), then we'd welcome them being added as long as they're long excerpts not quotes (which obviously belong on WQ)! Just be sure to add an {{incomplete}} tag to the article when you add it, and if possible, include a parameter about where we might turn to look for the rest of the speech."

I think the 1,500+ word excerpts would qualify as long excerpts, as they are longer than some complete speeches reported at Wikisource. Cheers! BD2412 T 09:16, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

I created wikisource account and responded there too. If they'd welcome those excerpts as mentioned then we'd be more than happy to provide them as far as I'm concerned, but note that imho this does not automatically mean that those excerpts should then be removed from wikiquote. It might mean that they would be removed from wikiquote, with proper links to corresponding wikisource pages that make it simple for the reader to jump to wikisource from the relevant wikiquote section. Or it might not mean that. Suppose we add an excerpt on wikisource with incomplete-tag, and someone then completes it to the entire speech, so then if I'm interested in emphasizing the excerpt that I was interested in to begin with, then what... I would quote that excerpt on wikiquote?!:) Nice cycle... Also note that the excerpt transcribed anonymously by someone else that I referred to above cannot be added to wikisource under any circumstances according to what they wrote, because technically that book is copyrighted. iddo999 12:11, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

If an anonymously transcribed excerpt can not appear on Wikisource over copyright concerns, why would those concerns not have an equal effect here? BD2412 T 03:01, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Because wikisource has more strict rules than wikiquote. Due to the fact that the nature of what's added on wikisource is full works, their rules forbid adding material from copyrighted works, unlike wikiquote.
We have received interesting replies on the wikisource discussion that you started, so I suggest we continue talking there. iddo999 03:20, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Please note that Wikiquote only permits addition of materials from copyrighted works to the extent that inclusion of such materials constitute fair use. The longer the passage, the less likely it is that an excerpt will be considered a fair use - for example, in in Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises the Supreme Court held that an excerpt of less than 400 words from Gerald Ford's memoir was not a fair use because the infringer took the heart of the book, thereby damaging its marketability.BD2412 T 05:25, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

See what I wrote in my first comment. I don't see a way of replying further unless you respond to the specific points that I mention instead of ignoring them. iddo999 05:38, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

I noted your first comment. The fact that a copyright owner is unlikely to assert his rights is never a guarantee that such rights will not be asserted - do not forget that Chomsky's copyrights will endure for seventy years after his death, and his heirs (or their heirs, even) may assert what he would not. What he expressly releases can not be recalled, but my previous comment is directed solely to the anonymously added passage to which you refer. Cheers! BD2412 T 05:46, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Under the (imho accurate) assumption that the "copyright owner is unlikely to assert his rights" in this case, why should we delete this quote now? In the worst case when the unlikely event (where the copyright owner does assert his rights) occurs, we would delete it then. Isn't this a reasonable stance when there's supportive evidence that the likelihood of such an event is small? iddo999 06:14, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, that is a reasonable stance. My job is to think in terms of worst case scenarios, so that is the basis for my approach. BD2412 T 06:21, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Do you mean your job as a wikiquote editor, or your job in real life?:) iddo999 06:31, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Real life - but it sets my mind with respect to what I do here as well. BD2412 T 07:46, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Goatse.cx and refusal to protect templates

I've just spoken with one of your administrators on IRC, when I asked them to protect {{Rotten-tomatoes}} following an attack by a prolific cross Wikimedia wiki vandal, known mainly under his English Wikipedia username of Grawp (who is known to have used in excess of 250 user accounts to vandalise the English Wikipedia). It would appear that we have already received a complaint about this issue through m:OTRS under ticket number 2008041710040224. Could someone please have a quick look round and protect high visibility templates, thanks. Nick 22:20, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

There was vandalism of several templates, but they were quickly reverted. We probably should begin fully protecting all the most widely used templates. ~ Kalki 23:28, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

There's an easy listing on Special:MostLinkedTemplates. Cbrown1023 talk 00:47, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

All quotes allowed?

I'm trying to understand the concept of Wikiquote. Are only notable quotes that have made some significant impact allowed, or any quote can be added, just as long as it comes from a notable person? Sorry if this is the billionth time this question has been asked, but thanks in advance. BlueAg09 06:53, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

I can't find the official guidlines, they are somewhere in the Community portal. But I believe it's best to only put in quotes that are in some way notable. Also have in mind that all quotes should be sourced. I recommend that you look at Wikiquote:What Wikiquote is not. Thank you for your interest. --Steinninn 01:15, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

see Wikiquote:Wikiquote. --McNoddy 07:23, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

We are continuing to work on more comprehensive guidelines as well at Wikiquote:Quotability. BD2412 T 14:09, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

re-wording

When someone re-words a sentence how are you suppose to know it their doing it for just their benefit or the benefit of wikiquote e.g [Hannah Montana]--McNoddy 07:19, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

If the original source material is not readily available, I guess we just have to assume good faith. Of course, that is precisely why we prefer quotes to be sourced such that everyone can look them up. BD2412 T 14:15, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Some thoughts about articles which tend to be growing to the whole copy of a copyrighted work

See the history of WM40000

1. (cur) (last) 22:20, 19 April 2008 InvisibleSun (Talk | contribs | block) m (Protected "Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War": Returned semiprotected status based on latest IP edit. [edit=autoconfirmed:move=autoconfirmed]) (rollback | undo)
2. (cur) (last) 22:19, 19 April 2008 InvisibleSun (Talk | contribs | block) m (4,608 bytes) (Reverted edit by 69.182.232.151 (talk • contributions) to last version by Aphaia) (undo)
3. (cur) (last) 21:55, 19 April 2008 69.182.232.151 (Talk | block) (113,719 bytes) (undo)
4. (cur) (last) 09:24, 13 April 2008 Aphaia (Talk | contribs | block) (4,608 bytes) (+{{semiprotected}}) (undo)
5. (cur) (last) 09:24, 13 April 2008 Aphaia (Talk | contribs | block) (4,618 bytes) (rv back to 15:32, 14 November 2007 by Jeffq , trimmed after the 2nd VfD (Kalki just rollbacked a vandalism, not cleaned it up)) (undo)

I think we need to do some things proposed in its latest VfD, such as

• deletion of revisions whose size is very huge (or just bigger than the current one, unless its edit summary contains meaningful information)
• semi protection for a long term, even including the perpetual semiprotection, like heaviily disputed articles of ENWP (some politicians, controversial topics etc.)

I think we need also to extend this way to other massive size articles whose editors are mainly anons and not sure if they understand what this website serves and not collection of all quotes just for fun.

Thought? --Aphaia 02:51, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree with the immediate reversion of mass additions with no edit summary. I'd even recommend it if someone tries to claim it's not a copyvio or provides other justifications, at least for huge articles, unless they delete a similar amount of material at the same time. And I'd also support reverting the edit if they just do this so they can include whole scenes or other excessive tracts, regardless of the justification or matching deletions. (But I always insist on manual reversions, not rollbacks, with edit summaries that make this clear, because such large changes, even to keep within policy or practice, should be explained.) I concede that semi-protection may be necessary for articles that seem to attract editors who don't know or don't care about copyright problems.

I'd rather not address the politicians' articles under this topic, because it's rarely a copyvio issue. Political articles have at least two other basic problems — persistently biased editing, and using the articles to document positions rather than to record pithy quotes — and they deserve their own discussion. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 04:11, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

There's a drawback to manual reversions of huge articles: some editors, including myself, will find that their computers can't handle such pages without strain. There are now a few pages, such as Christianity, which I can no longer edit because of this limitation. About three weeks ago I made an edit on the Thomas Jefferson page (about 133,000 KB) which should have taken me about two minutes but instead took twenty-three. For this reason I used a rollback on the Warhammer reversion because I didn't want to risk a similar hassle with a manual edit. As a sysop, of course, it's especially worrisome to find pages that are practically off-limits for me to edit. - InvisibleSun 04:53, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

I'd be more concerned about your network connection, InvisibleSun. 23 minutes for a 133-KB page is a mere 1000 bits per second, which is less than 1/50th of the speed of a standard dial-up modem connection (circa 2000). Either you've got ancient equipment (in which case I can send you a better modem), a poor dial-up connection from your ISP, or an atrocious broadband provider. ☺ Or I guess the ever-increasing complexity of MediaWiki pages could be a rendering challenge for your browser/computer combo, exacerbated by very large pages. But I feel it's very important not to imply with unexplained rollback summaries that the edit is vandalism. Perhaps you could post a note on the article talk page to explain such rollbacks. Many articles could use regular reminders for editors not to cause copyvio problems. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 05:36, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Editing long articles e.g. with firefox (which has spell checker enabled by default) can be strain with older computers. You might want to try the technical options at w:Wikipedia:Text editor support for setting up an external text editor which would make editing much more zippy. For example I've used vim in a long edit recently, that used regexp to remove all the surrounding quotation marks, and macros to change the source links to the more standard format where they're at the end of the line instead of the beginning. iddo999 15:54, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

I would like to have a warning about copyright concerns (why massive "quotes" are no-no"), combined with WQisnot-x (no fansite for collect all things). A question: have we such already or not? Anyone who is willing to volunteer to write it up in a modest but firm and concise manner? --Aphaia 10:22, 22 April 2008 (UTC) (me not, I'm rather sort of "ruling with an iron rod", and my wordings is somehow troublesome due to my limitation of competence even if not intended) :d

Official Election Notice

The 2008 Board election committee announces the 2008 election process. Wikimedians will have the opportunity to elect one candidate from the Wikimedia community to serve as a representative on the Board of Trustees. The successful candidate will serve a one-year term, ending in July 2009.

Candidates may nominate themselves for election between May 8 and May 22, and the voting will occur between 1 June and 21 June. For more information on the voting and candidate requirements, see <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008>.

The voting system to be used in this election has not yet been confirmed, however voting will be by secret ballot, and confidentiality will be strictly maintained.

Votes will again be cast and counted on a server owned by an independent, neutral third party, Software in the Public Interest (SPI). SPI will hold cryptographic keys and be responsible for tallying the votes and providing final vote counts to the Election Committee. SPI provided excellent help during the 2007 elections.

Further information can be found at <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008/en>. Questions may be directed to the Election Committee at <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Board_elections/2008/en>. If you are interested in translating official election pages into your own language, please see <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008/Translation>.

For the election committee,
Kwan Ting Chan

usurpation protocol

We have no clear guideline a/o protocol for usurpation. I proposed a set of rules to Wikiquote talk:Changing username. Your feedback will be appreciate. I think we need to set it up as soon as possible, since we have had many requests already and will get much more when it is opened to the whole community. --Aphaia 08:08, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

Moving Schabowski to Günter Schabowski

Hi there

I'm new here, though I've been around WP for a few years. I'm trying to move as above, because Schabowski in itself is arguably ambiguous. I can't find an equivalent Project:Requested moves page, so I was wondering if someone can direct me. Or, am I unable to find the "move" tab simply because my account is too new? Thanks. --Rifleman 82 08:03, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Hi, welcome to the English Wikiquote. I think you rightly guessed. Come back in a week, and then you'll find the "move" tab. Re: request place, use WQ:AN instead or just WQ:VP as you did. Re: that page, I'll move it to the proposed target. Cheers, --Aphaia 15:43, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Nirmala Srivastava

Hello Villagers, I came across User talk:163.119.105.27 and User talk:124.170.85.216 adding, deleting each others work on this page.Nirmala Srivastava It looks abit of a mess to at the moment. Didn't want to step in and fix it up incase I got involved in anything--McNoddy 13:32, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

FYI, 124.170.85.216 corresponds to IP's used by w:user:Sfacets, a follower of Nirmala Srivastava who was banned from En.Wikipedia and has since been an active sockpuppeteer there. Will Beback 20:48, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

WMF Board reconstruction and community petition against that

Hi, yesterday on April 27 Jan-Bart de Vreede announced WMF wmf:Board of Trustees reconstruction on foundation-l. According to him, its composition will change based on an agreement at their recent meeting in San Francisco. For details, see its archive.

The community reacts in many ways. Some kept silence, some said they needed more time to give a thought, some reacted very negatively. One of reactions is found at m:meta:Community petition. I don't endorse it necessarily, but I'd let you be aware of its existence, because I speedied the similar page from this project based on the discussion on its meta talk (avoidance of duplication and discentralization).

Cheers, --Aphaia 15:20, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Petition on Meta

Hello,

I would like to notify you of a petition against the recent decision by the board to reduce community representation. Please find it here. I am sending this message to most English Wikimedia projects as I think it is important the community is informed. If you have any questions please ask me at my Wikinews talk page.

Thanks,

Anon101 (on Wikinews) 20:24, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

(Note- I did not create the petition)

Moving A Page,

There already seems to be a page called Crash Twinsanity with a capital T so it will not let me move the current Crash twinsanity as the page already excists. Could somebody fix this please, Thanks --McNoddy 10:16, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

Done. Cheers! BD2412 T 16:02, 29 April 2008 (UTC)