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Village pump archive 10

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From December 2006 to January 2007, originally posted to Wikiquote:Village pump.

Anime/Manga Series

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Two Questions:

  • My other question is regarding Sailor Moon. I know a lot of quotes from that show, but they are all from the english dub. The quotes currently up are of the original Japanese show. Should that be separated also? Thought I'd throw it out there for discussion. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by StarryEyedAngel (talk • contribs) on November 29, 2006 at 23:11 (UTC)

For readers, we would be better to make clear what comes from where. In the latter case, you could make a remark either a quote from English dub or translation of the original Japanese show/manga? In the former case (Utena) in my impression the article in question is not so large as to be divided for now.--Aphaia 15:07, 6 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Relevant to recent copyvio articles

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This news story. Fys. “Ta fys aym”. 14:29, 3 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

French Wikiquote reopened

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moved to Wikiquote talk:Other language Wikiquotes

Opposite quotes

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I have been told that many quotes have a direct opposite. For instance: Many hands make light work. The opposite of this could be: Too many cooks spoil the broth. Any others which you can think of? <removed email>

This sort of question is better asked at the Wikiquote:Reference desk but I'll answer it here. They are not really quotes, as no one knows who originally said them, they are proverbs A quick google search for "opposite proverbs" gets http://www.geocities.com/vasudevanvrv/opposits.htm MeltBanana 16:04, 7 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Original Pagan 13th Month Calender

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I want to do some reserch, and would like to have an idea where to start. I found the Roman calender but I an not sure if that is the rite place to start. 

                                                               Quasar

Category:Wikiquote no intro

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There are presently 475 pages without an introduction. How about writing some? It's usually pretty easy—just look at the corresponding Wikipedia article and summarize the most important points. There's never any shortage of cleanup work to be done on Wikiquote! 121a0012 06:54, 10 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your invitation! I'll gladly join this campaign. --Aphaia 15:21, 10 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
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moved to Category talk:Year page placeholders

change username

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How do you change your username? Or can you? Wiki3857 07:04, 12 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

You may ask our bureaucrat on WQ:AN with your preference. Unless your preferred name was already taken or there is something wrong (e.g. brasphemy), requests will be processed in days. --Aphaia 08:16, 12 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Any username change can be requested on my talk page. I will respond to requests as soon as I can verify they are valid requests conforming to Wikimedia policies. ~ Kalki 20:33, 20 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Page Created, Link no longer works

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I created a page this morning, and the link worked fine. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Randy_Discher . But now the page cannot be found, and it doesn't show up in a search. Can someone please help? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by DReeder (talk • contribs) 2006-12-20T19:40:47 (UTC)

The page you created seems to have been deleted because it seemed a collection of personal quotations, of yourself or of an acquaintance, which don't belong in the "project space" of Wikiquote. You are very welcome to post many personal quotes of yourself or acquaintances on your user page - User:DReeder, or your user talk page - User_talk:DReeder. This is a common confusion here, and better notices probably should be made as to policy. ~ Kalki 20:24, 20 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I think we've pretty well updated the main page and various policy pages with statements to this effect, though I'd welcome any improvements we might come up with. My concern would be to avoid overwhelming succinct statements meant for other purposes (like the opening line of Main Page; see Talk:Main Page/old#Posting obvious notability expectation for that discussion). It strikes me that the next most useful place to post such explanations are on the talk pages of new editors. For registered users, this could be an addition to our {{welcome}} message, as long as the handful of us who manually post these welcomes continues the work. For anonymous users, who are far more likely to add personal quotes to articles (as theme-article RC patrollers know all too well), we would need a different solution or a much greater commitment to welcoming. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 02:23, 23 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yale Book of Quotations and Wikiquote

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I have recently published a book entitled The Yale Book of Quotations (Yale University Press). The YBQ is the first major quotation book to emphasize modern and American sources, including popular culture, children's literature, sports, computers, and politics, and the first quotation book of any sort to use state-of-the-art research methods to comprehensively collect famous quotations and to trace quotations to their accurate origins. For a large percentage of the most famous quotations, evidence is provided earlier than that given by Bartlett's and Oxford, often disproving the standard accounts of origins.

My question is, is there any way in which my work can be systematically useful to Wikiquote? Could a procedure be set up whereby, when a Wikiquotian wants to find a real source for a quotation, I could be consulted?

Fred R. Shapiro fred.shapiro@yale.edu

We could perhaps create a single page much like the page at Yale Universtiy Press with links to resources other than our own which could be consulted, but this should probably be a "protected page" with the selections gathered and maintained by admins to prevent spamming and other forms of vandalism. Any information on quotations that you would like to post at Wikiquote under the GFDL would of course also be welcome. ~ Kalki 18:45, 23 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for your interest in collaboration with us, tracing origins is worthy to consider always ... Kalki makes a sense, I would have another way of collaboration ... could we use Yale Book as a reference to search the origins of quotes, specially if it is hard for us to access the original. We could say "according to Yale Book, it was originally in a so-and-so book, 1XXX., and it would be better to leave those quotes "unsourced" or "attributed". Or if Fred wouldn't mind, we could communicate periodically about quotes whose sources are too much unclear or problematic, avoiding misattribution. And last but not the least, we will be more than happy to see you post your quotes to Wikiquote under the GFDL, as Kalki said. In the latter case, it would be helpful if you give us a written acknowledgement or permission we reuse your content; such permission is better to send to the Wikimedia Foundation by email for the record. Contact details are available on Wikimedia:Contact us. Cheers, --Aphaia 08:38, 24 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I like the idea of people referring to "According to The Yale Book of Quotations..." as a way of identifying sources. Periodic communications asking me queries would also be fine.

Fred R. Shapiro Editor, Yale Book of Quotations (Yale University Press, 2006) fred.shapiro@yale.edu

FYI, I emailed Fred Shapiro and requested that he would help us find the source of a famous quote by Bertrand Russell (if you use search engines, you find several variations on the exact wording of this quote, and it's always unsourced). He emailed me back with the source, so I added the sourced version on Russell's page, and mentioned his help in the history edit summary there. iddo999 12:31, 12 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you, Iddo999! I have a question: we are better to create a page dedicated to that collaboration between Yale people (right now Mr. Shapiro) and us and explain what kind of relation exists between us? This discussion will then move to its talk ...
The benefit to have such a page would be:
  • We may give an explanation what is "Yale Book", specially if we are going to cite/refer to it as a trusted secondary source.
  • We may explain what are doing between the involved parties, and who are involved. It may help to avoid any kind of misunderstanding and afraid of conflict of interests.
  • It would be taken others' attraction who may be interested in collaborating with our project.
Thought? If everyone is okay, we can ask the Foundation their opinion - special committee people and Sandy, the new Communication Manager of the Foundation (she is really cool, I assure) will be happy to help us, I convince. --Aphaia 12:21, 27 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Sounds good, though I'm not sure that I understand what exactly you have in mind. But it seems to me like a good idea first to contact Wikimedia Foundation people and come up with a proposal that gives the Yale people proper credit, and then email Fred Shapiro and ask him what he thinks about that proposal. If the Yale people wanted, they could of course just host their own quotes site on their website, so such a proposal should mention that the wiki process is also helpful, i.e. after there is some collaboration with proper credit and more info is gathered, more people may come across it and improve the relevant info further. Also having our pages linked to their matching wikipedia pages is a plus. So I think that having such a page that organizes such a collaboration like you suggest is good idea, but we might need to somewhat publicize it so that people will actually try to collaborate. That Russell quote is one example where for some reason all the info that's available online is no good, which is why it's good to have other means to improve wikiquote. BTW I wonder if I should mention Yale Book of Quotation on the Russell article too, as Fred Shapiro didn't mention if that quote appears in the book or not, and he only gave me a page number for the original book by Russell and not the Yale book. This is another reason why having a page that organizes the collaboration is a good idea, as I could mention it there. iddo999 14:01, 27 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

We need to proceed carefully with this. The Yale Book of Quotations is a copyrighted work being sold for profit. Even if Mr. Shapiro would like to work with us, his legal team will no doubt want to be kept in the loop about how much of this work's value, built by long, hard research, is poured into a free, highly visible, online compendium that anyone can copy and sell themselves.

We should have no problem with citing YBoQ for source information as long as the number of citations and the excerpting is but a tiny portion of its content, per fair-use doctrine. (I don't see this as an imminent problem, as much of our material isn't adequately sourced, nor is it likely to be until we get a huge increase in sourcing editors.) But substantial use of YBoQ could undermine that work's marketabiity, so we really need some coordinated discussion between its publisher and the Foundation to ensure we don't endanger our project by rampant use of YBoQ. Maybe I'm being too cautious, but I would remind everyone that we're challenged just doing basic maintenance here; engaging in legal discussions is likely well beyond our capacity, let alone our competence.

As far as a separate page for the greater discussion, here are some thoughts. We could have a Wikiquote:Yale Book of Quotations policy page to address how we excerpt its details, with discussions on its talk page. Since this issue is not unique to YBoQ, however, it might be better to have a more general policy page — something like Wikiquote:Using quote dictionaries. (Or maybe both.) Whatever we come up with, this should be a subtopic of Wikiquote:Sourcing and/or Wikiquote:Citing sources, whose combined edit activity (including talk pages) to date is a mere 25 edits involving 8 editors, only half of which are currently frequent editors. In short, as yet I see very little community involvement, even among sysops and frequent editors, in hammering out important sourcing issues. This makes me want to tread very carefully with anything that seems like delegation of effort for overworked editors. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 17:36, 27 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Need Bot

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Hallo, I'm Administrator of Georgian wikiquote. I need any Interwiki bot to use for copying Georgian interwiki Links. I have no Experience how to work with bots. please help me. sorry for my English :) Please contact to my on my Georgian tolk page. thanks--Trulala 20:45, 25 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry for the delay in responding, Trulala. We're having a bit of difficulty with bot operation here at the moment. We have two sysops who are bot-experienced, but one (Essjay) is on a hiatus (partly over the bot situation) and the other (Aphaia) is an infrequent contributor, as she is busy on other projects. It may be a while before we get this back on track. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 03:16, 4 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Hello, Trulala ... one apology, I am afraid I cannot help you. I have no experience with bot in the technical side, while I have been involved to make bot policies. For technical helps, you may be happy to talk with the people who are actually running bot. I recommend you to visit pt:User:LeonardoGregianin, who has been running his bot for one and a half years. --Aphaia 12:26, 27 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
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Hello. Do you have any idea what I did wrong in the w: links and the cite newsgroup template in Alan_Kotok? I expected the former to not show the w: and the latter to work like Wikipedia markup but maybe I goofed. Thank you. -76.17.229.12 11:40, 26 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Whenever you see a w: in a link to Wikipedia when you don't expect it, it means you didn't put a pipe or vertical bar character, |, after the article name. The syntax:
[[w:article title | ]]
is actually short for
[[w:article title | article title]]
(I've added space around the vertical bar for clarity, but it doesn't usually have any space around it.) In other words, the wiki editor assumes you want the link label (the text that's displayed) to be exactly the same as the article title (the part immediately following the w:). Notice that your [[w:United States|American]] link, which points to wikipedia:United States but displays "American", doesn't display the w: in your article, because you gave it a specific link label "American". Even if the w: is displayed, the link will still take you to the correct Wikipedia article, but inside article text, of course, we want to use the vertical bar and a link label to disguise the mechanics of the link. (It can be useful to leave the link with a w: in talk page discussions when you want to succinctly emphasize that you're talking about a Wikipedia, not a Wikiquote, article.)
Anytime you see a Template:template-name instead of seeing the template expanded properly, it means that the template does not exist. Frequently this means that you misspelled or had a typo in the template name, or gave it an incorrect set of parameters, but in this case, as often happens, it means that Wikiquote does not currently have a {{cite newsgroup}} template. You are welcome to copy over such missing templates, but be careful — many Wikipedia templates are complex and only work properly in Wikipedia. They often require some simplifying and editing of project names to work on Wikiquote or any other project. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 12:40, 26 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The Wikipedia citation templates also do a lot of things that are stylistically questionable for Wikiquote, although we make do anyway. For Usenet articles, I recommend using {{Usenet article|message-id|date}}. But any citation is better than no citation. 121a0012 19:49, 26 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

1919 Bartlett's Quotes in the public domain

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The 1919 Bartlett's has been reproduced entirely at this website (this link is to page 1 of 1054, including the appendix, so the last page is this one). This being in the public domain, we are free to copy the lot of it and drop it into our book. Cheers! BD2412 T 22:31, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, but we must be careful how we copy it. I am not a lawyer, but I've looked into this issue before in similar situations. The information is in the public domain, but the presentation via Bartleby.com is not. It's a subtle but important difference which has been the focus of lawsuits. (See my comments at Wikiquote:Votes for deletion archive/AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes for some useful links.) As far as I know at the moment, all the text, including the headings, quotes, order, and source information, are copied exactly from Bartlett, 1919, which leaves only the page orientation and the links as copyrightable. Since the quotee-page orientation is not unique to Bartleby (and is Wikiquote's standard, too), and reformatting the material for Wikiquote would lose their links and add our own, we should be okay with using this material. (Note that this means we should not simply copy and paste it; we should add basic Wikiquote formatting to "stamp" it with our own presentation.) ~ Jeff Q (talk) 23:09, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed (and I happen to be a copyright lawyer, although I am just presenting my opinion here and not offering legal advice). Comparing this information to the 1937 version of Bartlett's which I have handy, the difference seems to be in Bartleby's addition of a number over each quote (easily dispensed with). Also, Bartlett's uses their own indentation scheme (source identifiers are far indented and italicized). We should also add dates, which are lacking from many instances from Bartlett's and therefore Bartleby's presentations. BD2412 T 00:14, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
That works well, because we want specific dates and other publication information, anyway, to provide a reasonable opportunity for readers to verify quotes. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 02:25, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Yep. I pulled out a section of a peculiar old Bartlett's appendix, and made X me no Xs. Needs dates as well. BD2412 T 04:08, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]


Cleanup sorting

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Over the past few months, as I've been laid up with a broken knee, I've worked on improving our template infrastructure for requesting cleanup of articles. This has meant two things:

  1. The {{cleanup}} family of templates now take a date (YYYY-MM-DD form, please) as a parameter.
  2. Many of the article types that formerly had no specific cleanup template now do.

This raises a major issue: there are a lot of article types for which we do not have a template or other guidance for users to follow. It's one thing to see "look at another article and do it like that", but the cleanup message needs to point editors at something specific, and right now several of the new ones cannot do that.

For the record, here's the complete list:

Cleanup templates: {{cleanup}}, {{character-cleanup}}, {{comics-cleanup}}, {{film-cleanup}}, {{game-cleanup}}, {{lit-cleanup}}, {{people-cleanup}}, {{theatre-cleanup}}, {{theme-cleanup}}, {{tv-cleanup}}

I have been sorting and dating articles marked with plain {{cleanup}} to the extent that I can. There are still some categories that do not have their own cleanup templates, but the ones listed above cover the vast majority. (Many of the articles which are left cannot yet receive a more-specific template as the text does not identify the subject.)

I'd like to ask everyone to please help in this process, by selecting the most specific cleanup template available and dating it when you tag an article, and of course by actually doing the cleanup. 121a0012 03:59, 12 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for tackling this tag expansion, 121a0012. You raise a very important issue about the lack of guidance for some categories of articles. I would suggest that we create draft policy pages in the form Wikiquote/Templates/GENRE for each of the missing types, and start them by modelling them on the closest existing guideline template. There are, of course, complications. Regular readers will know I've been on the warpath over better sourcing, so I'd like to encourage reasonable mechanisms to provide specific sources. (For example, using "Dialogue" sections in theatre, as we do in films and TV shows, allows chronological ordering to give verifiers a decent shot at finding the quotes, lest we have to resort to timecodes as a page-number equivalent. Musicals have can use song titles ordered by their appearance to quote excerpts. Stuff like that.) Electronic game articles present us with the challenge of how to identify where to find quotes when game play can take the player (or quote verifier) in many different directions. (Remember that this is all because we often resort to primary sources. Some less-than-pithy quote sources, as many video games are, may benefit from requiring secondary sources that would simultaneously remove the need to craft a sourcing mechanism and restrict the quoted material to a non-copyvio subset of truly interesting statements.) These and many other issues await us. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 04:31, 12 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
We have another genre that is becoming increasingly difficult to deal with — podcasting. Podcasts done by ordinary folks aren't so much a question, as they wouldn't be considered notable or reliable sources, but some established organizations are beginning to publish works exclusively by podcast. (The latest I've run into is the New England Skeptical Society.) It seems to me that sourcing and verifying material from these is exactly like doing so for radio programs, which is very much like TV shows. All three are typically organized in a titled series with issues or episodes that can be dated, suggesting the TV-show formatting. Perhaps we can group these under an "audio" category. (This also suggests that film and TV might be combined into "video", or maybe both into "audiovisual" or "av" as a prefix for cleanup tags, etc.) What do folks think about all this? ~ Jeff Q (talk) 08:46, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I struggled a bit with this in terms of sourcing for radio shows. Most radio broadcasts are not archived or preserved in any way, and I think we have to consider these unacceptable as sources (even though they are primary sources) because they are unverifiable-in-principle. (They could still be quoted, but only via reliable secondary sources, as with other ephemera such as private letters. I think most if not all of the programs that have separate pages now are of this category.) Of the remaining programs, some (like Studio 360) maintain permanent archives that are accessible to the public, and others (like BBC Radio 4) have permanent archives but do not make them available except when a program is rebroadcast. The latter situation is somewhat similar to a newspaper like the Boston Globe that pulls articles from its Web site after a week and requires a fee to access the archives. (Apparently some BBC sound archives are available at the British Library.) I think both of these are acceptable primary sources, provided that sufficient information is provided to allow an editor to identify the specific program and, where relevant, segment, and either find it in an archive, or identify it when rebroadcast. 121a0012 16:40, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Keyword pages

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why dosen't somebody go through and make it so that every keyword has it's own page? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 24.59.160.55 (talk • contribs) 20:32, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you're asking, 24.59.160.55. If you mean "why don't we enable readers to click on any word and go to an article about that topic", that is a far-future consideration for all Wikimedia projects which would most likely be addressed on Wikipedia first. If you mean, "why doesn't every significant concept have a theme page", I see three main reasons for this:
  1. Wikimedia projects tend to avoid empty articles, preferring to wait until someone has actual material from which to create an article.
  2. Anyone can create an article at any time, so the lack of an article is simply an indication of a lack of community interest (thus far) in establishing a minimally useful article on the subject.
  3. Theme articles (articles about concepts rather than people or specific creative works) are among the worst examples of proper Wikiquote articles. Their formatting tends to be incredibly variable, they often contain embarrassingly illiterate material, they tend to have little or no sourcing, and editors routinely use them to add personal quotes in contradiction to Wikiquote's goals of collecting notable quotes.
In short, in my humble opinion, they are the dark, dank basement of Wikiquote. The last thing we need is to have thousands more of them — most being effectively empty — unless and until we have enough contributors that we can clean them up to be a valuable, accurate resource.
If you meant something else, please explain further. Thank you. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 09:52, 17 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Early navigation to the Geographic North Pole

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If true north (geographic north pole) differs from magnetic north, and if a magnetic compass points to the magnetic north pole, how then were early explorers able to navigate to the Geographic north pole? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Cwalter3 (talk • contribs) 23:44, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Wikiquote is a project about quotes. You are asking a question about science and/or history. A better venue for this question might be Wikipedia:Reference desk/Science, although you may not get an answer if readers there feel it sounds too much like a homework assignment (which one is presumably supposed to do on one's own). ~ Jeff Q (talk) 11:00, 18 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Military "leaders" & "commanders"

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Currently there are 2 categories that are mostly redundant: "Military leaders" and "Military commanders" — although conceivably there could be distinctions made, they would usually be subtle and contentious. Although there are occasions when military leaders have not necessarily been "commanders" of others, as in the case of tribal leaders of military expeditions, and all people designated as commanders are not necessarily notable as leaders, having these two categories is mostly redundant and confusing.

There are some arguments one could make for retaining either designation in preference to the other, but "leaders" currently has 71 names and "commanders" 48, and as leader is probably the more general and accommodating term — as technically all "commanders" are to some extent supposed to be leaders, but not all leaders, even in military operations, are necessarily supposed to be "commanders" — if no objections are raised I will do a transition of "commander > leader" within the next week or so. ~ Kalki 17:10, 20 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds good to me. Although we have only a tiny fraction of Wikipedia's categories, it's also interesting to note that there is a w:Category:Military leaders, but no "Military commanders" category there. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 18:28, 20 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Agree. 121a0012 04:21, 21 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I forgot all about doing this until today... I will get around to it now. ~ Kalki 01:57, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I'm helping Kalki out as well with the switch. :) Cbrown1023 talk 02:31, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Oops, we're all done (although I did help). Cbrown1023 talk 02:33, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]


Major cleanup needs

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In line with 121a0012's call for no-intro cleanup (see "Category:Wikiquote no intro" above), which currently stands at 436 articles missing intros, we have a huge need for general article cleanup. The total number of genre-tagged cleanup articles is currently 1312, which is 14% (1 in 7!) of our nearly 9000 articles — 1 in 6 if you leave out non-subject articles like our month-year and index/dab pages. This includes 227 TV shows, 266 films, and a whopping 551 people articles. We could really use more eyeballs and typing fingers on this work. Anyone wondering what modest general editing they might do (while bored or procrastinating over real-world tasks ☺) could really help out by reviewing the relevant style templates (whose links are in the cleanup messages) if necessary and picking a few of these articles to bring into shape. Thanks! ~ Jeff Q (talk) 10:02, 21 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'll try to work on some of those when I have some time and the right mindset for the tedium. Sometimes, though, I really wish we could add a speedy deletion clause for "no effort" for when an editor has just dumped a ton of quotes, without any order, sources, or formatting, into an article and expected someone else to fix their mess. —LrdChaos (talk) 17:05, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]


Quick question: If I click on an article marked for cleanup, and as far as I can tell, it has been properly formatted, should I remove the cleanup tag, or is there someone specific I should send a message to instead?--Angel 18:43, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
If it were me, I would look at the page's history and talk page to see if there are any specific comments from the person who originally added the tag. Look at the first version where the cleanup tag was added, and see if it looks significantly different. If not, you might contact the user who added the tag on his/her talk page to ask what the problem was. 121a0012 21:06, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
One somewhat subtle thing that might (or might not, depending on the person, etc.) warrant a cleanup tag is the use of quotation marks around quotes. Wikiquote practice is to not surround whole quotes in quotation marks, which should only be used when the quote itself includes a quote. If you're still not sure, feel free to let us know (here is fine) which page and someone can take a look at it and let you know if anything needs to be done. —LrdChaos (talk) 21:20, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Great advice, thanks for all the help! --Angel 15:05, 23 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]


Display

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The visual presentation could be tweaked to make it clearer. There is equal weight with the font for the quotations (which are the important thing) and the notes. I think the latter need to be distinguished visually from the former so it is obvious they are subordinate. The use of bullet points for both also does not help and creates a kind of ping-pong effect down the page. I suggest keeping the bullet point for the quotes only. Use of italics for the notes would make it clear which was which (not quite sure how you would then show titles - with double quote marks?). This system would appear as (double indent for notes works well):

  • This is the text of the quote which needs to stand out clearly.
This is a note on it which needs to be ancillary in appearance, since it is in value.

Tyrenius 22:12, 21 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The basic idea makes a lot of sense, but there are many complications that arise when one tries to implement this idea. The combination of:
  • The wide variety of kinds of quotes (simple text, multi-paragraph text, dialog, poetry, lyrics);
  • The different kinds of supplemental information (quotee and/or event, published source, alternative versions, translations, context information);
  • The preference of many editors to use bolding to emphasize important quotes or parts of quotes; and
  • The limitations of MediaWiki formatting
makes any single formatting standard nearly impossible. There have been many discussions in the past on these issues. Just in the past year, we've had several with some good ideas here at village pump:
(Apologies to any I may have missed.) Unfortunately, changes to such a complex set of established practices requires considerable work from the community. As of November 2006, we had only 10 frequent editors (>100 edits/month) and 151 repeat contributors (>5 edits/month), [1] probably making major change impractical for now. However, don't let this stop anyone from considering possibilities. Wikiquote talk:Manual of style is probably the best place to discuss them in depth. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 23:08, 21 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Have a look at how French WQ does it (try Une page au hasard for a random page). They actually set off the citation details in a colored box (although this isn't yet integrated with the various style sheets and should be), which allows readers to put their visual cortices to good use. If it were integrated with the style sheet, it would not be hard to provide a Javascript "Show/hide citations" control. 121a0012 04:31, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I took a look at some articles at fr:WQ, and I must say that this source formatting does look attractive and accomplishes Tyrenius's goal of de-emphasizing while clearly displaying the sources. They are currently accomplishing this by wrapping both quotes and sources in live (not substituted) templates, which, based on our experiences at WQ:VFDA, will cease to be practical for them once they get a lot more content in some articles. There is also the problem of making basic contributions too complicated. Wiki formatting was created so that ordinary folks could add material without a lot of HTML coding, but template use isn't much better than HTML, and requiring it for everything would seem to defeat the purpose of simplified formatting. (I still cringe at how complicated our dialog formatting is, even though I was one of the main editors who pushed it, for practical reasons.)
Style sheet changes might be a way to handle this, but this would significantly increase the expertise needed to maintain Wikiquote. Do we know how many regular editors have general CSS, let alone MediaWiki CSS, experience? Furthermore, the multivariate problems I describe above make a hash of semantic representation of quotes, not just the styling. We would first need to carefully review what wiki elements (represented by what XHTML elements) all varieties of quote components would use, then do some heavy-duty CSS work.
I'm not saying we shouldn't do this eventually. In fact, I think this will ultimately be the way to handle formatting changes, just as it's been done for many elements in Wikipedia. But I think we need a lot more regular, experienced editors here before we do this, and I suspect we'll need some expansion of MediaWiki format elements to make the diverse formatting requirements of quote material more practical. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 10:11, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I don't much care for how fr: actually implemented it, to be honest; I was more trying to draw attention to the way they chose to format things. As far as the CSS stuff goes, what's needed is quite basic ("CSS 101", so to speak): we just need a way of writing citations in the WQ text that ends up emitting a "class='citation'" attribute on whatever HTML element ends up containing the citation. This doesn't require a lot of syntax -- could even be in a template. The only CSS that's required assigns the desired formatting to all elements with class "citation" -- no more complicated than the explicit HTML that fr.wq currently generates. The show/hide stuff is more complicated, but we should be able to use the same mechanism as WP already has. I don't think it would be difficult at all, but we would need to have some sort of community consensus before starting down this path. 121a0012 21:01, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I'd like it to be that simple. But the only way I know of to add a class to citation text using MediaWiki (as opposed to the HTML that we try to avoid) without developer expertise is to require the use of a citation template that itself wraps the text in a DIV or SPAN HTML element. Otherwise, we need MediaWiki developer expertise, and I don't know that we have any frequent editors who are up to this. Even if we had one or two, entirely too many aspects of Wikiquote already depend solely on the regular (often daily) work of only 1-3 editors each (VfD closures and archiving, QotD, Main Page updates, welcome messages, bot oversight, major policy revisions, etc.), a bottleneck that constantly worries me. Wikiquote can't afford to allow any of us sysops and/or frequent editors to become irreplaceable. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 00:32, 23 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Just asking in case I missed it.

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I suspect there's not, but there's nothing comparable to a WikiProject here, is there? Dev920 23:52, 21 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

We have a nominal Wikiquote:WikiProject policy page, but we don't seem to have the sustained effort from a large enough number of editors to support actual WikiProjects here. We have one de facto project, Wikiquote:WikiProject Policy Revision, but it seems to have been too much organization with too little end activity, so we continue to do policy revision ad hoc. As Wikiquote grows, of course, we may find this situation changes. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 00:21, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I agree. I'll start a personal project in my userspace, no need to start a WikiProject. Dev920 00:44, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Language order

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Not sure if I am posting at the right place, but here is a minor trouble I have. On the main wikiquote page the order of languages seems wrong. For example, Russian (Русский) follows Svenska, not the other way around as it is on WP. This should be corrected, but the main page is inaccessible to edit. Can someone help? Mhym 00:30, 23 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your notice. Now fixed. --Aphaia 12:09, 27 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Please delete my user page.

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Please delete my user page. Thank you. Smeelgova 21:17, 23 January 2007 (UTC).[reply]

Done. —LrdChaos (talk) 21:27, 23 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]


Talk:John Betjeman

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Some important points are being raised in discussion on this page and I would be glad of wider input. Tyrenius 14:43, 24 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

when is it appropriate to remove a stub

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I was wondering, how many quotes do you need to have before you can remove a stub? --McNoddy 09:19, 25 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Presuming that you are referring to removing the {{stub}} tag.... There is not a definite number. Certainly there should be more than a few quotations, and these should cover a broad range of source material—so even a page with a dozen quotations might still be considered a stub if they are all from a single source (one book, say, by an author who has written a dozen books). That's only counting sourced quotaions, of course—it doesn't matter how many unsourced quotations there are. It's a bit more of a judgment call for a film, TV, or theme page. As a general rule, though, the stub tag is an indication to other editors that the article is incomplate—i.e., there is some material that ought to be there but isn't. If you don't think there is anything obviously missing, then just remove the tag. THe worst that can happen is that someone else will decide for their own reasons to put it back, and then you can discuss with that person what they think is still missing. 121a0012 16:48, 25 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks very much--McNoddy 08:07, 26 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]


Wiki question about linking to wikipedia

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Hello. I am an administrator of a wiki, and I was wondering how it is that Wikiquote has set up something to automatically link directly to Wikipedia articles with a "w:" in the link? Can someone explain how to implement this in my own wiki? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 130.49.60.22 (talk • contribs) 18:26, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

This is a feature of the MediaWiki software, which is popular but far from the only wiki software out there. Are you using MediaWiki for your wiki system? If so, which version? ~ Jeff Q (talk) 21:59, 25 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I am using MediaWiki, version 1.6.9. I can't seem to find anywhere in the documentation that mentions this feature being built in...
nevermind... I got it. Thanks anyway :-)

Placeholders for year pages

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moved to Category talk:Year page placeholders

BJOADN

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Continued from WQ:VFD#The Secret Show...

Okay folks. So a question arised: we Wikiquote needs Wikiquote:Bad jokes and deleted noncence (or somewhat) or not? That is a question ... --Aphaia 15:42, 30 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

My take: no, in the strongest possible terms. There's no need to encourage people to add nonsense; we get enough of it anyway. Nonsense that's funny is still nonsense. —LrdChaos (talk) 15:50, 30 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I'd second that for now, for similar reasons. I see everything that doesn't positively contribute to the value of Wikiquote as a quote compendium to be opportunities to drain effort away from real work. We are still far too small a regular community to get sidetracked into "harmless" amusements. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 18:41, 30 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
And my own ... no, at least now. Our VfD is already filled with obscure materials ... 1) we needn't make more troubles. 2) I looked into WQ:SB if I found something interested worthwhile keeping in a dedicated page ... seems nothing. It is not a good idea we create the page in question when we have nothing to want to be kept there. 3) If someone would like to make a hoax ... then he or she can use their own userpage. So I conclude there is no necessity to have such. --Aphaia 16:14, 1 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I also would vote no, for the above reasons. I just don't see the value in it and I don't see why we would want to offer the opportunity to post things that under other circumstances, we would not hesitate to delete. ~ UDScott 18:46, 30 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]


Theatre Articles/Song Editing

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--I've noticed that several musical/theatre pages are marked for cleanup because they don't match the "film" template. While that works beautifully for plays that are also films, other shows don't seem to fit that very well.

--I've seen some articles that are organized by song, and those make a lot of sense (especially if the show is only songs, like in The Last Five Years), and there's also some that are organized by character, then dialogue, and have an extra section for Songs. The problem is, I'm not sure how those song quotes should be formatted.

--Into the Woods is an article I've added some song quotes on, and I wanted to see if that format is acceptable, and also I wanted to ask if there already is, or someday will be, a separate template for plays, musicals or song quotes. Thanks in advance for any help! --Angel 17:57, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I myself do not have the time to but another editor will. --La gloria è a dio 01:48, 4 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

There should be a separate template for plays and musicals (or perhaps two separate ones), and I asked several weeks ago (when I created {{theatre-cleanup}}) for someone who has worked on these articles to develop something. I'm not in a position to do it myself. Those of you who work on these articles need to be bold and develop a format that's satisfactory to you. You can start by creating a sub-page at Wikiquote:Templates/Theatre, and then when consensus is reached on the format, we can update the cleanup template(s) to match. 121a0012 17:20, 6 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I've added a basic, BASIC suggestion to the site given. Open to changes or suggestions from anyone. --Angel 18:29, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
That's a nice starting point, Angel. I'd give it a few days and then update the cleanup template to match. 121a0012 21:04, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Unless there's any objection, I'm going to go ahead and make this the standard theatre template. That is, of course, if that's alright with everyone. --Angel 18:32, 29 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I've updated the template and the cleanup tag, hope that's okay. Also, I've added the link to the Internet Broadway Database (ibdb.com instead of imdb.com). --Angel 23:25, 30 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, I've just realized another question I have. When there is a musical that is only songs, and no dialogue, such as The Last Five Years, should it simply be divided by song, as this site is, and not character, dialogue, song, as most others are? If yes, should a note be put on the theatre template for this, or should a separate "musicals" template be made? ((not that I think that's a good idea, just trying to see what's best.)) --Angel 18:06, 1 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]


Sourced and Unsourced

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At the moment these headings are given equal weight, which implies equal value, though that should not be the case. As the default should be Sourced, I suggest dropping this heading altogether. This would free up the level 2 heading for purposes currently fulfilled through level 3 headings. Unsourced would remain as a level 2, but given much less weight as it would the just be just another level 2 tagged on the end of all the rest. Tyrenius 21:30, 21 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'd like to agree with you, but practically speaking, I don't think we can afford to do this yet. Most editors still don't seem to be aware that we want sources for quotes. Even having the large, bold "Sourced" heading is often little deterrent for adding unsourced quotes to the section, and we obviously don't have enough regular editors who do know this to clean up the resulting mess across the project. I think we need to retain it so that editors are given a minimal reminder in every article that this is very, very important. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 22:07, 21 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Concur with Jeffq. If and when we ever get to the point where most quotes in most pages are sufficiently-well-sourced to meet even the modest standards of WQ:SOURCE, it could make sense to have a bot run over the collection and delete the "Sourced" headings. On the other hand, I actually like the "Sourced" sections as they provide useful symmetry and help editors manage large articles. (If you didn't have the initial "Sourced" section, then confusion arises over the level of heading to use for grouping sourced quotations from a single source -- and I have no idea how MediaWiki would render a table of contents for an article that started out with two sections at L3 and then backed up to L2 for the "External links" section.) 121a0012 04:50, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
MediaWiki (in my Firefox browser, at least) confusingly aligns TOC entries for higher-level headings that follow lower ones without parents with the same indentation, making them indistinguishable in the TOC. It also renders any lower-level heading than the previous one as a single identation, regardless of how much lower it is. (E.g., an H4 under an H2 looks like the next level in the TOC.) I suspect this is not a MediaWiki problem per se, but actually what happens when you misuse the underlying (X)HTML heading system. For this reason (among others), it's a very good idea to keep headings balanced and following sequential order. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 09:45, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Strike that last — I'm forgetting that TOCs don't have a single underlying XHTML element, so it has to be a MediaWiki problem. But I'm actually happy it is a problem, because it discourages sloppy organization. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 00:17, 23 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

It could be policy that quotes must have sources. After all, the editor got them from somewhere, even if it's a web page of quotes, which could be stated. Having long lists of unsourced quotes weakens the project considerably. They should go on the talk page to make a request for a source, if they are important quotes. Tyrenius 22:17, 21 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

There is a wide gap between what is desirable and what is practical. We may "require" sources, but most quotes in our 9000 articles don't have them. Just as an example, moving unsourced quotes from articles to talk pages would empty most theme articles and all proverbs articles. Even Wikipedia doesn't yet have the editorial commitment to rid itself of all unsourced information in all but a small percentage of its articles. I agree that Wikiquote is weakened by this severe lack of sources, but it's a work in progress, and it's far better than most quote sites in this regard. As far as citing other quote sites, I would have to vehemently object to this, as this merely encourages the spread of bad information. Citing quote websites would give the false impression that the quotes are necessarily legitimate, allowing junk to be misrepresented as fact here. We need to maintain the Wikimedia standard of reliable sources only, if we wish to stand out from all the other garbage out there. At least we make the distinction between verifiable quotes and what I like to call "mere rumor". ~ Jeff Q (talk) 23:24, 21 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Citation style

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The MOS section on citation style gives a link to Wikipedia:Citing sources, where the use of footnotes (cite.php) is recommended. I used this method in Nicholas Serota but it didnt' last very long! I think this system should be implemented in order to upgrade the quality of the project. It would take some of the clutter from the main text, where only essential information for the general reader would be retained. Details of sources would be in footnotes where they belong. This would also facilitate more information (such as the date a web site has been accessed, which is not included at the moment). Tyrenius 21:52, 21 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

My two cents on this topic is that I actually prefer to not use the References section and footnotes. I think it makes it easier to match up the link to the quote cited. When I read Wikipedia:Citing sources, I think it actually does not say that the use of footnotes is the preferred method, instead saying that it is one of a few methods. Here at wikiquote, we have not typically used footnotes as the preferred method of citing sources, and the templates here reflect that. Just my thoughts on this subject. ~ UDScott 22:02, 21 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
For a compendium of quotations, sources are "essential information". I prefer the current style (and I had no idea that WQ:MOS points to WP:CITE rather than WQ:CITE (which I think predates cite.php). FWIW, many citations already have access dates; it's a standard feature of {{cite web}} which was copied over from WQ. ({{cite web}} is one of the few citation templates I actually think fits well with Wikiquote generally, although {{cite news}} is better for sources where it's relevant.) In the far future, we might consider how to implement a user preference for "show/hide citations"; right now, ensuring that quotes actually have adequate citations is a much higher priority, and burying them off in a separate section where most readers will not see them does not further that goal. 121a0012 22:09, 21 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I like to use WP's ref/references (aka cite.php) footnoting here, in conjunction with some imported WP cite templates, for four main reasons:
  1. This encourages collecting as much source information as possible in predefined parameters. This is especially important for web news articles. The accessdate gives readers some idea of how stale the link may be, and requiring article titles helps track down new versions of the article when the links are broken (which happens a lot).
  2. The cite.php system moves the detailed citation data out of the way of the general article text, which is the main value of an article. Sources are necessary, but they don't necessarily need to be so in-your-face. (Note: I usually only prefer cite.php for book sources yielding multiple quotes. I don't think it's as useful for website links, at least for Wikiquote purposes.)
  3. For book sources, by citing the specific page number in a source line and footnoting the edition details, one can use the "pages" parameter of {{cite book}} to show the total page count in the footnote. (See Dean Koontz#One Door Away from Heaven (2001) for an example of how this looks.) With a cited page and the edition's page count, readers with different editions who wish to verify quotes can interpolate the page number of their edition.
  4. It's a Wikipedia standard, so many editors coming from there will recognize it.
Of course, cite.php plus templates is a bit complicated, and anything that complicates work on Wikiquote frequently doesn't get done. At this stage of our development, I believe we need to have acceptable alternatives for basic sourcing that are no more difficult that adding some text below the quote. So I'd prefer not to push for a single formal standard, especially if it's cite.php. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 22:39, 21 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) I think that's what I'm getting at. I only brought this up because my use of cite.php was undone. I think it's something we should be aiming for, but I agree at the moment not enforcing. This is what I was about to post:

I'm suggesting essential information in the main text, and full citation in footnotes. For a book, we have:

  1. author
  2. title
  3. edition
  4. publisher
  5. date
  6. pages
  7. isbn

The general reader might want to know the book title, author and maybe date, but the rest is clutter, which is what footnotes are for. Let's take an example of an interview accessed from waybackmachine. We have this information:

  1. name of interviewer
  2. title of article (linked)
  3. web site it first appeared on
  4. date of article
  5. where it is now accessed (waybackmachine)
  6. date now accessed

Again there is excess technical information of little use to the average reader, but necessary for the researcher or scholar.

Tyrenius 22:50, 21 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

That's an interesting example, Tyrenius, because the only thing I can see in your list that I would consider "technical" is the date the article was accessed. Everything else is pretty fundamental, and it becomes even more so for off-line (or pay-only) references. Remember that readers of Wikiquote are also editors. I believe that there is a place for end notes, and some very extended references may merit their use, but the general identification of the source belongs adjacent to the quotation. (Remember that, for many types of Wikiquote articles, many bibliographic details will only be given once, leaving further citations as just page numbers (à la Harvard style, but without the parentheses) and/or chapters (I prefer both).) It ought to be possible for someone to look at a Wikiquote page, note that a quotation is missing some elements of its citation, and say to herself, "Wait a minute, I have that book, why don't I look it up and fix it?" Using endnotes obscures the relationship between the citations and the quotations they represent, and makes it much less likely that a random reader-editor will come along and notice that something is wrong or missing with the citation. I generally concur with Jeffq's praise for the {{cite foo}} templates, even if I don't like how most of them are formatted, in that they do encourage users to fill in all the necessary details that all too many WQ editors of days past have left out. (In French Wikiquote, their versions of {{cite foo}} automatically include their version of {{fix citation}}—fr:Modèle:Réf imprécise—if mandatory parameters are missing.) 121a0012 04:24, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
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