Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with Wikipedia

Help me start a Roger Corman-focused wiki

filthy light thief — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 19:26:40 -0800

How can I dump data from Wikipedia and IMDb to make a new movie-related wiki, specifically for Roger Corman movies? I'd like to make a Roger Corman-focused wiki, as he has produced and directed over 400 movies, reusing props, sets, and footage, as well as mentoring a number of directors and actors who are now well renowned. Mapping those re-uses and first appearances seems like something that is better suited for its own wiki, rather than add that information into Wikipedia in some more better charted manner.

Given the scope of the database/wiki, I thought it would be quicker to copy IMDb and Wikipedia information instead of crafting this new wiki by hand, to create the rough bones of something that I would then drastically rework. As there are plenty of Wikipedia clones and sites that liberally reuse IMDb information, I figure there's some easy way to copy that material for my own non-commercial adaptation, but I have no idea where to look for ways to do that.

As a bonus question, I'd like input on what Wiki platforms would be best suited for this endeavor. Thanks!

Wikipedia but without wikipedia

stbalbach — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 02:21:35 -0800

How can I work in MediaWiki mark-up language without installing MediaWiki locally or using any of the Wikimedia (eg. Wikipedia) projects? The goal here is to create Wikipedia content but not on Wikipedia, as a scratch page outside of Wikipedia, so once completed it would be a trivial to cut and paste the source into Wikipedia without much conversion needed. (this is for basic markup commands and obviously would not include things like templates). Perferably the space would be private and I would own the content (eg. not a copy-left license).

Should my money go to Wikipedia?

zscore — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 09:14:18 -0800

I'd like to donate some money to a charity. Is there a worthier techno-cause than Wikipedia?

Engineering design mistake

East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 10:32:58 -0800

I can't find a Wikipedia page I saw a while back. It was about a sort of design error or cognitive bias whereby designers or engineers reject as irrelevant (or are unaware of) a relevant factor in the requirements of a design because it is outside of their field. It gave an example which was about designing and providing water supplies in Africa. There were known ways to prevent a certain disease in the water, but the engineers were not familiar with them, so the disease spread.

Why aren't I getting mobile wikipedia?

smackfu — Fri, 25 May 2012 13:02:10 -0800

Why are Google searches now taking me to the non-mobile Wikipedia page on my iPhone, and how do I fix it? After I follow the result, I can switch to mobile view at the bottom, and following links within Wikipedia will keep me in mobile. But the next time I follow an external link to Wikipedia, it will be back to the desktop view.

This used to work and always redirect me to the mobile version on the iPhone, no matter how I got to Wikipedia. Did something change? And how can I fix it?

List of lists, king of kings, turnip of turnips

sciencegeek — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 15:42:59 -0800

After reading the FPP on cephalophores, I found myself on Wikipedia reading a list of patron saints of ailments, illness and dangers. There are many such lists on Wikipedia and I'd like to find more of them. Can you suggest additional excellent lists for me to enjoy? While checking askmes to make sure I wasn't doing a duplicate question, I found things like this list of timelines, a list of unofficial observances, and so on.

Wikipedia has a List of lists, but I was hoping that the hive could identify some particularly excellent ones. I'd also be open to lists outside of Wikipedia. For instance, this Evil Overlord list which lets you know which evil overlord mistakes to avoid is quite nice.

Please recommend software for building an offline, personal Wiki-clone.

iftheaccidentwill — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 21:37:50 -0800

Please recommend software for building an offline, personal Wiki-clone. What I'd like to do is find software that allows me to store information in a format/presentation as close as possible to Wikipedia, but which is not shared with anyone else.

Do you know of anything that might do the trick? Thanks in advance!

Firefox update confusion

revikim — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 06:58:20 -0800

Firefox update change doesn't take me straight to where i want to go anymore. I finally updated my firefox. Before the update, when i searched "whatever" or "wiki whatever" in the address bar, it would take me straight to the wikipedia page for it (if it existed), or the closest thing. Now it only takes me to a google search page.
How can i get things back to the way they were?

How do I create my own Wikipedia?

Pseudology — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 11:07:13 -0800

I'm volunteering at the Whistler Museum, it's just a little municipal museum, and our archives haven't been digitized yet. If it was possible to turn them into a Wikipedia-style database. Example inside. Example:

I'm doing an article about the logging camp/ghost town of Parkhurst and I was hoping it would read something like this.

"Parkhurst was a lumber mill and community on Green Lake(link to article on Green Lake) set-up and run by Ross Barr(link to article on Ross Barr)."

Is there a program that could let me write that, either for a website or just for a private database?

It would also be nice to be able to scan documents and tag them to their relevant subjects (and link to them in citations) as well.

I spent 10 seconds on imdb trying to find the answer, then remembered how awful that place is

Ideal Impulse — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 15:04:09 -0800

I have a stupid question about the Wikipedia entry of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly I can't believe I'm using a question on this topic, but it's driving me crazy.

I've seen this movie three times, most recently about six months ago. I was looking it up on Wikipedia to remember some plot point, and noticed this line in the plot description:

He also fantasizes, imagining beaches, mountains, the Empress Eugenie, and an erotic feast with his therapist.

I could have sworn that the sexy oyster/make-out sesh was with the woman from the publishing house, the one who was transcribing his book, not his therapist. Am I misremembering, or do I finally get to edit a Wikipedia entry?

fix my chrome!

HuronBob — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 19:00:52 -0800

I'm using Chrome (14.0.835.202) on os x (10.7.2). For a while now, I've noticed that, typically, when I do a google search, wanting to just check the wikipedia page for that search term, I type the term in, along with the word wikipedia (such as "whatever wikipedia") in the past this always brought me to a search page with the whatever wikipedia page as the first hit, and now the following happens: for a second or two I get a result page that will show, as the first search item, the wikipedia page for "whatever," but, within a couple of seconds, the search result page changes (with my doing nothing) with other search results at the top (I just went through the first 8 pages of search results for "metafilter wikipedia" and the metafilter wikipedia page doesn't show up at all (although it did flash for a second before that result page refreshed and changed without being asked to!). This used to work like a charm for me, what's changed and how can I change it back? Things are normal in firefox, it responds as I expect it to...

Cached Wikipedia Vandalism

nzero — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 10:18:34 -0800

Why does Wikipedia show an old article revision on my phone? While looking up a quick fact about TNG today, I encountered a strange phenomenon. I went to this page from my Android phone (via Verizon 3G). I've never visited the page previously. There was some obvious vandalism (see this version) which I decided to log in from my computer to fix. Lo and behold, it isn't actually in the article anymore. Odd. So I refreshed the page from my mobile, and it still shows the vandalism (for a moment I thought it had been corrected in the time it took me to pull it up on the PC). Even if I view it in Desktop mode from my phone, or go into the history list and click on the newest revision manually, I still see the vandalized edit. However, if I compare versions I can see the most recent fixed article. So, what gives? Is Verizon caching Wikipedia pages?

Googling did turn up this vaguely related page.

Am I Wiki-Defamed Forever?

Anonymous — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 12:59:01 -0800

Someone wrote nasty, upsetting things about me on the Wikipedia page about me. I edited them out, but they're on the edit history page forever, right? Anything I can do? I have a Wikipedia page, sort of to my chagrin. I did not create this page, but there it is. Someone wrote some upsetting, defamatory stuff about me on the page-- and the remarks were related to what I do for work, so potentially harmful. I randomly found the remarks and edited the page to delete them. Thing is, if anyone reads the page, and decides to poke around the edit history, they'll come across these remarks.

I know this might be very Internets 101, but if I'd like to minimize the potential harm caused here, is there anything I can do? Can I create "noise" by writing other stuff on my Wikipedia page, and then erasing it? How likely is it that someone who comes across my Wikipedia page will poke around the edit history?

Internet estate curation?

progosk — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 09:30:07 -0800

Internet estate curation, or: How to get a better biography of an author "out there"? My granddad was a writer of some standing in Germany. We've put together a better bio than is currently in circulation - better in the sense of more complete - and I'm trying to figure out how best to publish it. Am I right to think of his Wikipedia page(s) as the most stable/official-ish place for it? Is the etiquette for contributing bios to Wikipedia laid out anywhere? Do they need to have been published elsewhere to count? (Ours, written by his daughter as manager of his estate, hasn't been.) Are there alternative "definitive" author resources to tend to (e.g. is his Openlibrary.org entry to be thought of as such)?

Wikiproblemia

hnnrs — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 02:58:34 -0800

What's up with Wikipedia in my Google Chrome? For some completely unknown reason for the past couple of days Wikipedia hasn't been showing most of its content/formatting in Google Chrome. It works fine in Internet Explorer. I've tried reinstalling Chrome to no avail. Screenshot here.

Every other site seems to be absolutely fine, it's just Wikipedia that's playing up. I'm running Windows 7. PLEASE HELP ME.

Wikipedia customs and best practices

kimdog — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 10:19:28 -0800

I have a friend who has asked me for help editing a Wikipedia entry. Well... not so much editing as a complete re-write. He is probably the foremost expert on the topic, which is fairly obscure. It's been years since I participated in Wikipedia, and I am not sure of the current culture and best practices. Someone else has written an entry on the topic, and is the only user to have contributed to it. The entry is rather short (but more than a "stub") and includes some factual errors. My friend left some info on the talk page pointing these things out, but never got any feedback/response. He's now written an in depth entry for the topic from scratch, including sources. Should he just overwrite the existing entry? Or should he make an effort to incorporate some of the original language? Any Wiki editors in the house?

Wikipedia might be a reliable source, surely.

boo_radley — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 20:21:06 -0800

Help me agitate my course facilitator and change his opinion of wikipedia: What are some wikipedia pages that are edited by authoritative professionals or recognized field experts?

Best way to download several hundred Wikipedia articles?

tomwheeler — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 22:03:46 -0800

What's the best way to download several hundred articles (including images) from Wikipedia for offline reading? I want a local copy of Wikipedia's articles on networking protocols so I can read them without Internet access (e.g. on a plane). This totals about 300 articles — too many to download manually with a browser and not nearly enough to warrant downloading the whole static archive. Besides, the static archive lacks pictures, and the diagrams in these articles are pretty important.

Using a tool like curl or wget would be perfect (and I know how to use them), but I want to respect their request not to do it that way.

Any ideas on the best approach to download a few hundred complete articles?

How to add wiki to facebook

Thrillhouse — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 14:15:36 -0800

How do I add a Wikipedia tab to Facebook? ... like this page:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-New-Statesman/103111403061746?v=wiki&ref=ts]

I googled it and there are a ton of people asking the question but nobody answering it.

Is there a Tongan "Just Watch Me?"

mreleganza — Thu, 13 May 2010 21:14:49 -0800

Wikipolifilter: Looking for interesting, primarily non-US political articles on Wikipedia. Occasionally I come across a fascinating wikipedia article that is probably well-known to every citizen of that country (Irish Hunger Strike, Just Watch Me) that is unknown or barely known to me as an American, and I would like to read more.

The problem with these articles is their relative uniqueness makes them hard to classify and find more. I'm interested in political crises, intrique, scandals, and the kind of things you will either read about in a history textbook someday, or already have.

Any suggestions?

How to avoid being sucked into Wikipedia?

grouse — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 15:11:04 -0800

Being sucked into Wikipedia keeps happening to me. What to do? Occasionally there is something I need to look up on Wikipedia or through Google. While I am there I will often find other things I am interested in looking up, or that turn out to be necessary background for the first page. Pretty soon I have dozens of tabs open. It's not just totally random stuff; sometimes it is for my work and I really would be better off knowing whatever is in these pages, although it isn't necessarily my highest priority at the moment. I could make a note to look it up later, but I usually follow the Getting Things Done philosophy that something that only takes a couple of minutes is better done now rather than marked as a task, because once you take into account the amount of time spent prioritizing the task, looking at it every day, and so on, you would have spent more time if you had just done it in the first place. The problem is that some of these short "two-minute" tasks of reading a web page explode and create many others. Another problem is that I am reluctant to add new low-priority items to my task list because it so long already that I think I will never get to it (indeed, there is a low-priority item to look up dozens of things already) and I will have a nagging desire to look up whatever it is for the rest of the day.

I figure that MetaFilter is full of people who have this problem. Really the question is this: how to establish a balance of learning new and useful stuff while avoiding it stopping me from getting other work done for long periods? I'm looking mainly for suggestions on how to think about things and act on them differently, but if you have software suggestions (such as Firefox extensions to save a whole window full of tabs for later examination) I would appreciate them too.

Using Wikipedia content and photos in an iPhone application

furtive — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 12:07:25 -0800

Using Wikipedia content and photos in an iPhone application. How to proceed? I've started an iPhone application, it's a location specific reference, and I'd like to use both info and photos from Wikipedia in addition to my own content. My questions related to this are:

a) Can I charge for this app. My understanding is that yes, I can.
b) What licenses do I have to use or would suite me best?
c) Can I attribute separate licenses based on content?
d) Do I have to notify anyone?
e) What are the risks or what else should I be considering?

Mame-loshn?

ennui.bz — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:07:06 -0800

Is Yiddish a creole? I was thinking this morning that I think of Yiddish as being a creole: a mix or pidgin based on several languages that cemented into a 'language' over time. I'm not a linguist and may be using terms imprecisely.

However, a casual perusal of the internest suggests (in particular the wikipedia article) this is:

a) wrong
b) cruising for a fight.

I guess a lot depends upon what you consider a creole to be and whether you want to clearly demarcate "Eastern" Yiddish from "Western" Yiddish. Is there consensus on this issue or does it all come down to the uneasy position creoles have in linguistics (plus the politics of 21st century Judaism)?

Hacker Blogs?

vostok — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 10:42:21 -0800

Hacker Blogs? Hello. I like some individual hacker blogs e.g:

1. Andrew Hazelden
2. Mike Warot
3. Dan Reetz

Which hacker blogs do you like?

Do see the tags.

Help me troubleshoot Okawix (offline Wikipedia)!

sdis — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 08:37:20 -0800

TroubleshootingFilter: Can anyone help me troubleshoot Okawix (an offline Wikipedia reader) on the Mac, or as a last resort, recommend me a different offline Wikipedia reader? The Software: Okawix 0.7 is an offline wikipedia reader for the Mac. Good idea with a few bugs.

The Bugs: 1. The most important bug is that I can't get it to do anything when I search. At this point I have a working copy of the English wikipedia but you can't look any articles up without trying to click randomly through wikipedia until you get there (Want to find out about Apples? Try Culture-->Cooking-->Food-->Fruits-->etc.)
2. Bug #2 is less significant, but I can't, for the life of me, determine where it stores its preferences, so if I change the settings in Okawix and mess something up, even deleting the app and reinstalling doesn't seem to undo the damage.

Background: This was an attempt at a Christmas gift for my mother in law, who lives in Pennsylvania and only has dialup. I have a (non-searchable) copy installed on her computer. I'm no longer in Pennsylvania, and will be troubleshooting this remotely. Ideally any solutions we come up with here can be walked through on the phone, but if I have to, I can set up a working copy on a DVD and mail it to her.

The Goal: English Wikipedia, offline, working and searchable on her computer.

I haven't had much luck finding any support online. I've posted to their blog and sourceforge seems fairly inactive. Also, might I be able to get this working in Linux or something on her Mac as a last resort?