Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2024 January 2

Welcome to the Wikipedia Help Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current Help Desk pages.

January 2

Amelia Opie

I have done reference 5 incorrectly I think - please check if you have the time. Thank you 175.38.42.62 (talk) 09:31, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

I tinkered with it. Is it OK now? -- Hoary (talk) 09:48, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

{{cite DNB |last1=Gordon |first1=Alexander |wstitle=Bruckner,_John |volume=7}}

Gordon, Alexander (1886). "Bruckner, John" . In Stephen, Leslie (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 7. London: Smith, Elder & Co.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:29, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

Thank you, O Trappist monk. (My feeble excuse is that none of "my" articles has been about a Brit of the kind who'd appear in the DNB.) -- Hoary (talk) 01:40, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

175.38.42.62, I'll leave it to you to copy 'n' paste the monk's neat solution. -- Hoary (talk) 04:50, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

how to delate new edition

By mistake I edited a page. How to delate my edited content Vishnumayachathan (talk) 10:50, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

@Vishnumayachathan, it seems the problem has been taken care of:[1][2]. WP:TUTORIAL may be of help to you. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 11:19, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

WP:OR

If the source says "the besiegers lost nearly two hundred men every day..", can we calculate the total casualties of the military conflict by multiplying it with the number of days? Wouldn't it be considered as WP:OR? Imperial^[AFCND] 13:21, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

@ImperialAficionado: Hello! I think it would be original research, if the source doesn't explicitly state the total number of casualties and you reach this conclusion yourself. Deltaspace⁴² (talk • contribs) 13:44, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

Thank you. I made this edit on the Siege of Chittorgarh twice and it was reverted. I am afraid that I may get a warning if I remove that again. Could you make a comment on the talk section I started at its talk page? It helps. Imperial^[AFCND] 13:48, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

In many contexts this would fall under WP:CALC, but I'm not sure the "casualties" figure in an infobox is an appropriate context for that. I can't access the source, but from the quote provided, the figure should make it clearer that it is an approximation. If the source's source claims "nearly 200 each day", I don't think it's appropriate to say "about 25,000", when what is meant is "certainly less than 25,000, but it's not clear how many less". Folly Mox (talk) 14:42, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

@Gog the Mild, could you help? I can provide the reference used. See page number 21. But I couldn't find the number of days that the conflict lasted as the reference haven't provided the date which the siege got started. Imperial^[AFCND] 14:55, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

IMO WP:CALC is as applicable to casualties as it is to anything else. Off hand I would go with something like "Up to 25,000" or "Fewer than 25,000" in the infobox. While that is just my personal view I suppose I have enough background in this sort of thing to have a more informed than average opinion. Assuming that the way it is phrased in the source is considered RS, which doesn't seem to be at issue here, then if this were to turn up at FAC I wouldn't bat an eyelid at that sort of statement in the infobox, either as a reviewer or as a closing coordinator. Does this help? Gog the Mild (talk) 16:06, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

Yes. Thank you. Imperial^[AFCND] 16:29, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

@ImperialAficionado:or add a footnote by using {{efn}} to explain that the source actually said 200 per day. -Arch dude (talk) 17:12, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

Request for Assistance in Redirecting Article

I want to write an article about a Japanese music band called "Tuyu", but when attempting to create it, I found that the article "Tuyu" redirects to the "Tuyu Township" article, which is about a town in China. I would like to create an article specifically about the music band Tuyu. Is it possible to redirect the current article from the town to the music band's article? Alvin Valeryan (talk) 16:53, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

@Alvin Valeryan: No. You should create a draft article named "Tuyu (band)". If the article is accepted it will be under that name, and we will decide how to "disambiguate" the two articles, e.g. by turning "Tuyu" into a disambiguation page. But first, read WP:YFA to see how to create your article. -Arch dude (talk) 17:07, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

Draft Question

What is the process of creating a draft in English Wikipedia? I have previously contributed articles to the Indonesian Wikipedia for an extended period, and the concept of "Draft Creation" was not present. Is it a requirement to make a draft before initiating the article creation process on English Wikipedia? Alvin Valeryan (talk) 17:43, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

The best way to create a draft is the Article Wizard. IP users and accounts less than four days old with less than 10 edits must use it, but it is otherwise a voluntary process. It's a good idea if you lack experience in article creation, though, and users with a conflict of interest should use it. 331dot (talk) 17:59, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

@Alvin Valeryan: "Draft" is a friendlier process. You get supportive feedback and lots of chances to retry. A user who just creates an article in mainspace is presumed to know all the main rules and the article will be reviewed more critically, with the possibility of being nominated for deletion. -Arch dude (talk) 18:23, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Subcategorization: Category:Historians -> Category:Biographers -> Category:Autobiographers

While doing some stubsorting, I encountered a curious paradox. From WP:SUBCAT: If logical membership of one category implies logical membership of a second (an is-a relationship), then the first category should be made a subcategory (directly or indirectly) of the second. When making one category a subcategory of another, ensure that the members of the subcategory really can be expected (with possibly a few exceptions) to belong to the parent also. So autobiographers is a subcategory of biographers (they write biographies), and biographers is a subcategory of historians (which is logical, since they deal with a history of other people), then autobiographers is a subcategory of historians - and this is where it falls apart, since almost all autobiographers do not study history, they just write a biography about themselves.

If this were to be changed, then all categories like autobiographers by nationality, by century etc. needs to be recategorized, so it would be a major change across many categories which I don't want to do without discussing it first. And I don't feel like nominating them to CfD since I think it is for deleting, merging and all that stuff and here it is just about changing the parent category.

So, should autobiographers not be considered a subcategory of biographers? What do you think? Deltaspace⁴² (talk • contribs) 23:51, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

I think the best place to discuss this would be Talk:Categorization. Personally I don't agree that a biographer is necessarily a historian, but I'm not going to contribute further to this debate. ColinFine (talk) 12:18, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

@ColinFine: I am afraid that if I post my observation there, no one will stumble across it. And I don't know who to ping and invite there to discuss. Deltaspace⁴² (talk • contribs) 17:27, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

@ColinFine: Oooh, I think you meant Wikipedia_talk:Categorization, because Talk:Categorization is about the article Categorization, no wonder why it's so empty there on the talk page. I'll check it out. Deltaspace⁴² (talk • contribs) 14:51, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

Following chains of logic through the category structure will always result in contradictions. Folly Mox (talk) 13:30, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

Also, it seems to me that the weak link in this particular chain is not "autobiography is a subcat of biography" (which is true even at the lexical level), but "biography is a subcat of history". If a change were to be made here, the one I'd support would be reparenting Category:Biographers. Folly Mox (talk) 13:48, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

@Folly Mox: Woah, I didn't know that there were that many category cycles out there. Will keep in mind when I have nothing to do. Anyway, I think this case is particularly special, because there is no obvious mistake in categorization when you look at individual categories, but when you look at two levels at once, then autobiographers become historians.

I would think that, from purely logical perspective, while autobiographies should be considered a subset of the biographies, autobiographers might not necessarily be a subset of biographers because all autobiographers need is a good memory of their life and biographers need to work with documents and other stuff to reconstruct the life of other people, and this is pretty much what historians do. On the other hand, it seems counterintuitive to just exclude autobiographers from biographers. Deltaspace⁴² (talk • contribs) 17:23, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

Deltaspace42, I understand and agree with your point about biography and autobiography being pretty different skillsets for an author. Also, the category cycles (or category loops, for the search function next time I forget the technical term) probably aren't as bad as the linked bot report shows: it hasn't been run in a few years, and a lot of the larger cycles will have been broken by category deletion and reparenting. Folly Mox (talk) 03:57, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

I think this is more a content question that is more fitting to be placed in category-related pages like Wikipedia talk:Categorization or WikiProject Categories. Regards, Thinker78 (talk) 04:34, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

@Thinker78: Hello! Yeah, I missed that there is a whole WikiProject dedicated to the categories, I'll take a look, thanks! Deltaspace⁴² (talk • contribs) 14:52, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Random Unicode snowmen in my edit

I recently made this edit to the Koala page. As you can see, I replaced a template with Unicode snowmen. But I did not actually do this, and I spent 5 minutes digging through the article’s history trying to find who had replaced the koala’s body length and weight with Unicode snowmen before finally seeing it was me.

Can anyone explain this? I absolutely did NOT do this myself. The only thing I did was the other part of the edit, the bit about whether it’s correct to say ‘koala bear’. The edit in question was done on an iPhone, on Safari. Zanahary (talk) 23:53, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

@Zanahary: Hello! Did you preview the changes (diff) before publishing? Deltaspace⁴² (talk • contribs) 00:02, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

Hi @Deltaspace42! No I didn’t, I just directly published (from the mobile visual editor, by the way, not the source). Zanahary (talk) 00:03, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

@Zanahary: Then it was probably just a browser glitch. I think it would be a good idea in the future to check the diff before publishing to make sure that your Safari doesn't replace something with snowmen. Deltaspace⁴² (talk • contribs) 00:08, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

@Deltaspace42 What kind of world am I living in where my Safari has a tendency to randomly replace text on Wikipedia with snowmen? Zanahary (talk) 00:10, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

An arctic world? Anyway, if it is (or just might be) a Safari problem, Zanahary, then how about trying with a different browser? I haven't used either for editing Wikipedia, but for other purposes Firefox Focus and Ghostery are fine browsers on my Android thingie, and there are probably others besides. -- Hoary (talk) 01:57, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

@Hoary I am much less concerned with preventing this from happening again (I’ll just preview) and much more with discerning how something this weird could happen. I remember seeing an extended-protected edit request asking that some snowmen be removed from another article. What da hell? Zanahary (talk) 01:59, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

I'm familiar with this problem, but I'm just as baffled as you are. It often shows up in the emoji edit filter. Recent example, Example from four years ago. I'm not sure using a different browser will help; AFAIK all browsers on iOS are more or less re-skinned Safari. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 02:20, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

It's on and off visual editor bug. See all the phab results for "snowman": https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/search/query/piVHGUAji7x3/#R. Probably should be reported to phab (especially if a reproducer can be found). Galobtter (talk) 02:46, 3 January 2024 (UTC)