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# Wikipedia chat

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Do you have some personal, idiosyncratic questions or comments about Wikipedia? Use this page! If you have a general question, the answer to which might be of interest to many other people, ask it on Wikipedia FAQ. You could also ask your question on Wikipedia-L, Wikipedia's mailing list.

Some articles are really dull without images, and they are a whole lot less intuitive without those life-bringing and explaining images. Too bad there isnt yet a upload-facility, and too bad that images take more time to make than plain text. :)

  If Wikipedia is to become multimedia, it would probably be best to standardize on bitmap (including animated ones), audio, and video formats, or at least to have preferred types. Perhaps even Flash or Shockwave could be part of said standard. I'm not sure if there's even a decent vector-drawing format for web pages out there, but I'd be interested to hear of one if there is. --Belltower

  Check out http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Overview.htm8 which is an overview of a proposed standard at the W3C. I agree that there ought to be preferred standards, I think it is also important to have size limitations. Those of us w/ slow connections will be much happier w/ a few small images. I disagree about Flash and Shockwave. There should only be open standard formats used.

7-25-01

Would it be possible to put the parent category on the top of a topic page? For example, what topic would Hanlon's law be under? What about Murphy's law? Occam's Razor?

Chuck

Chuck: our convention has been to put cross-references at the bottom of pages. See the Wikipedia FAQ and explore the links...

Just a thought, but why is Wikipedia called that? More of the world uses English than American, so surely the name should be Wikipaedia? Or is the U.S.-centrism unintentional? -- James

  It was started by Bomis, and Bomis is an American company. Besides, I once researched this question, and in terms of sheer numbers, more people speak American English than British English. This question should have been asked on Wikipedia FAQ. --LMS

Perhaps we should have a parent category for Wikipedians, such as I've just done for me? -- Wikipedians/Belltower

a separate namespace for users is a good idea. we all know how tight nickspace is, and when competing with all the human knowledge, its gonna be tight ;) --sandos Wikipedians/sandos

Right now UseModWiki expects the registered user ids to be in the root of the namespace (for example, the RecentChanges display), so I'd be reluctant recommend the practice unless UMW was modified to support it; otherwise we're likely to just wind up with a lot of redirects between the two. --loh (2001-07-27)

  Larry, I didn't know that. The idea is great, though. --LMS
  Actually, most of us have taken Wikipedia nicks that don't conflict with real encyclopedic terms, so I don't think the namespace per se is generally a problem. --Belltower

Is there some kind of style guide for Wikipedia? I have two specific questions: How to write B.C., as I am sure you are aware some (see political correctness have suggested bce (before common era) etc., and there is the problem of multiple spellings of names in languages other than English. For example on the astrometry page I changed the spelling of Hipparcos to Hipparchus because that is how it usually appears in print.

  There is no style guide, but do see Wikipedia policy. We don't care if you write B.C. or B.C.E. Proper punctuation does use the periods (full stops to you Brits), according to Chicago Manual of Style. Even Nupedia leaves this up to the discretion of the writer. The multiple spelling problem will be solved by "REDIRECT" pages.

  I would recommend the use of BCE and CE instead of BC/AD. BC/AD are specifically Christian terms, especially AD (Anno Domini -- Latin for "year of Lord"). BCE and CE are better -- they can mean either "Christian era" or "Common era" and are thus more acceptable to non-Christians. -- Simon J Kissane

  Well, but.... As someone who teaches in a thoroughly politically correct environment, I can attest to the 'feeling' that B.C.E. and C.E. are more 'sensitive', but just wait until the anti-colonialists get around to feeling hurt about the 'C' part. I'm working on a page for Chronology or 'Era'. --MichaelTinkler

  I just found "BCE" used in the Moses article, and rather than go ballistic (I loathe political correctness) I decided to put on my unbiased Wikipedian hat and lay the controversy out in the open. See B.C.E. <>< tbc

  tbc, I am (a) a practicing Christian and (b) a practicing historian. I don't feel very strongly about it. One of these days I'll finish my entry on "Chronology" and you'll see why. Until the 8th century NO ONE much used A.D. or B.C. It just wasn't an issue. I happen to personally in the back of my mind chuckle every time I see someone who thinks that they're solving soemthing by using Common Era - after all, the only thing it has in common _is_ the slightly incorrect year of the birth of Jesus. We're right that B.C. and B.C.E. are both dating from Jesus (I tend to say in class "The Christian Era" and "Before the Christian Era" and no one has ever corrected me - they know it's true). We can bend the knee to weaker brethren, though, in the words of St. Paul, and mean different things by our abbreviations. --MichaelTinkler

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