Talk:Main Page/Archive 3

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There's an article on Wikipedia in the 22 oct. 2002 edition of the Japanese newspaper "The Daily Yomiyuri", available online at the address http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/20021022wo62.htm. Can someone add it in the "Wikipedia in the press" section?

Why are there links to "Wikipedia in other languages" on the top of the page, *and* at the bottom of it? Looks quite redundant to me. Also, not all languages are represented in the group at the top of the page ... for example Swedish. -HBW

The guidelines state: Make only links relevant to the context.... In particular, ... don't link to years and dates ....

Then why does the WikiPedia main page do exactly this in its second sentence? I'd fix it, but the page is protected.

NTF


I think it's the policy that should be updated. We generally link years and dates now, since these lead to pages where readers can find out about other events in that year. -- Tarquin

Make only links relevant to the context is presented as a Rule to Consider. Most people have considered it and rejected it. ;-) --Stephen Gilbert 01:07 Sep 18, 2002 (UTC)

I agree with NTF. Personally I think a link to a page about January is totally inappropriate for the main page. Hardly anyone reading the main page will be looking for facts like 'January has 31 days' and 'January is named after the Roman god of doors and gateways'. Linking it from here is pointless and distracts attention from the genuinely useful links, such as the FAQ. I think it should be delinked.
In general, irrelevant links are pointless, unhelpful and annoying. Enchanter

I agree wit both sides here; I generally see no harm in linking a year in most articles, as people may well want to get a sense of what else happened in that year. But "day" links seem harder to justify, and the January link on the front page is indeed silly and distracting. --LDC

Maybe it is just me, but I consider linking the year as silly as linking the day or the month. When I'm reading an article about an invention done in 1978, I am extremely unlikely to want to see a general list of other things that happened in 1978. Links should point to something that is related and significant to the article. Irrelevant links irritate the user, and make him less likely to use other links. I believe they fundamentally undermine the power of hyperlinks. NTF
But the more links there are the more likely it is that more people will visit possible sparsely written articles and edit them to add more information plus linking the year of an important even gives you the historical context of which it was a part.
I often find it useful to know more about a year or period to place somebody in a context. Unfortunately, most year pages do not (yet) list much information, but that will improve. Jeronimo

I definitely think that linking [Year] is, in general, a good idea. Maybe you don't want to know what else happened that year, but I'm rarely interested in following any of the links on a page. Every once in a while, however, I'm interested; and every once in a while, somebody will want to know what else happened that year.

I usually link [Month day] as well (although certainly not [Month] or [Weekday], since these don't have almanac information), but I could be talked out of that, at least in most cases. But I doubt that I could be talked out of linking [Year]. — Toby 23:05 Sep 19, 2002 (UTC)

At least the year link serves to give some historical context; sure, it's probably irrelevant to most articles, but it can be very valuable in articles about pop culture things, for example. If I'm reading about an album, for example, I might want to know some background about the times under which it was produced to get some idea of the artist's influences. But dates don't give me anything but anniversaries. --LDC

Attempts to access the Recent Changes pages returns an error message "Could not select database wikidb". I can search for and read individual items, I can get to the Main Page and the Current Events page, but not to the Recent Changes pages. -- Zoe 22:41 Sep 20, 2002 (UTC)

Try again, should be fine. --Brion

We seem to be bumping into MySQL connection limits, but the load doesn't seem to be that heavy. I'm not sure what's causing it. --LDC

I suggest changing the wording in the opening paragraph to:

... We started in January 2001 and are already working on 44794 articles, with more being added and improved all the time. We want to make over 100,000 complete articles, so let's get to work! Anyone, including you, can edit any article ....

This is to make it clearer that the number of articles in the count is a number of "articles in progress", rather than a count of "finished, complete articles". Enchanter 23:44 Sep 20, 2002 (UTC)

Guys, please stop putting "U.S. plan..." in the backgrounder list--it's not a backgrounder, it is itself a new story, and is already quite well covered on the current events page where it belongs. The intent of the front page section is to have quick links to articles about people, places, and things talked about in the news. --LDC

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Should the link at Sodiumtheperson be deleted? I'm somewhat new, and this is probably misfiled in the least. Nonsense at worst -- User:Clintp

Hi Clintp, and welcome! Sodiumtheperson is actually what we call a redirect link to User:Sodium, which is a personal Wikipedian page. In the mists of Wikipedia history, personal pages were mixed in with the article pages, and a user named Sodium called his page Sodiumtheperson to distinguish it from the Sodium article. The redirect page there now simply keeps any old links functional. BTW, you have your own personal page at User:Clintp, feel free to introduce yourself! Finally, I encourage you to use the Wikipedia:Village pump for any more questions you may have. --Stephen Gilbert
Actually, I put the redirect after his comment. Sodium's info was still there! It had scaped our eyes :) AN
Ah, well then, everything I said is right except for the redirect part. :) --Stephen Gilbert 02:16 Sep 26, 2002 (UTC)

Why does History of science and technology get its own link alongside History on the main page, when other subdivisions of history do not? --Khendon

Because we're mechanistically biased in favor of Science and Progress? :) --Brion

Hello,

I'm a newcomer. I can't access the page "Pierre Teilhard de Chardin" I was updating. I get a terrific message :

Warning: concat(/tmp/sess_b3efbc1c389ef5f0fa9f4fb9b9089fb2, O_RDWR) failed: Too many open files in system (23) in
/usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/wiki.phtml on line 7
Warning: Failed opening 'Setup.php' for inclusion (include_path='.:/usr/local/lib/php') in
/usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/wiki.phtml on line 12
Fatal error: Undefined class name 'outputpage' in
/usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/wiki.phtml on line 14
Warning: concat(/tmp/sess_b3efbc1c389ef5f0fa9f4fb9b9089fb2, O_RDWR) failed: Too many open files in system (23) in
Unknown on line 0
Warning: Failed to write session data (files). Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct (/tmp) in
Unknown on line 0

Anything to do ? Many Thanks

143.126.201.200

The only thing you can do is try again later; it looks like we might want to tweak the server settings a bit. --LDC

I can't access RecentChanges page several days. Every time I got a message:

Warning: Too many connections
in /usr/local/apache/htdocs/w/DatabaseFunctions.php on line 17
Could not connect to DB on 127.0.0.1

Can anything be done about that?

-- Vassili Nikolaev

I solved the problem deleting all IE cache files. Just refresh did not work.

-- Vassili Nikolaev


It looks like some of the "too many files open" problems are being caused by the large numbers of session files being used by PHP. Is the site maintaining a session for every anonymous visitor? This might cause the problem. (See www.php.net/manual/en/ref.session.php for info on custom session handlers, if you need to store so many sessions but the filesystem is not robust enough, you can move session handling into a database).


Either that, or something in the site is dependant on having a lot of concurrent files open. Good luck with wikipedia. -- octal