විකිපීඩියා සාකච්ඡාව:ප්‍රජා ද්වාරය/2007

Articles not deleted

http://si.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Delete - why there articles wasn't deleted? 83.7.79.38 13:15, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

We haven't had an active admin on the site since July 9th. I'm asking for a temporary sysop-bit to correct the backlog. Kylu (speak!) 02:54, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

...I removed the request, btw, as right after I posted it, I came back and noticed Lee started hitting the deletion backlog. I've put up a request below for a permanent sysop-bit so I can stop pestering Meta every time I see more than a couple pages that need deletion. :) Kylu (speak!) 23:46, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Adminship request

On occasion, siwiki needs someone to do purges of the {{delete}}'d articles, and the more people we have working on this the sooner it gets done. To assist in this matter, I'm requesting that the Sinhala Wikipedia community endorse my request for adminship.

I'll be honest, siwiki isn't my primary project. I'm more active on the English Wikipedia than anywhere, but as I've already been granted temporary adminship here once, and I'm a permanent admin on enwiki already, I don't think this will be a problem.

If you'd like to support my request, please add "*Support ~~~~" below. If you oppose the request, please add "*Oppose ~~~~". In either case, please feel free to add constructive commentary. I'd suggest a one-week deadline, but that is of course up to the community. Kylu (speak!) 01:13, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

• Support - We owe Kylu a lot for many things that we have at Sinhala WP today. Lee 14:20, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
• She-Can-Really-Be-Trust-I-Know-Her-From-En-Support I know Kylu from the English Wikipedia and from my experiences with her there, I know she can be trusted with the tools here. :) Cbrown1023 talk 23:59, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
• Support: Why not :) --♪♫ ĽąĦĩŘǔ ♫♪ ^{walkie-talkie} 16:38, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

Well, it's been over a week, and we've managed a whole three votes. Time for a recruitment drive to get more users perhaps? Kylu (speak!) 04:16, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

• Moving request - Apparently adminship requests are to go over on Wikipedia:Administrators, so I'll relist there. The Stewards don't want to promote from this discussion.[1] :)

Message from Nepal Bhasa Wikipedia

Nepal Bhasa wikipedia has recently started developing here . We would like to increase co-ordination between the two wikipedia, share resources as well as to learn from this version. If someone is interested, please visit Nepal Bhasa Embassy. Plus, please consider joining the development of Indian languages here and establishing your Embassy here . Thank you. --Eukesh

Does anyone (preferably si-3+) feel like being an ambassador? Kylu (speak!) 02:05, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

I would like to. Lets hope my knowledge will be sufficiant for this. BTW what does si-3+ means? --Lee 04:53, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

On babelfish templates on various wikis, they rate your language skills on a scale of 1-5 where 1 is "can barely get by" and 5 is "could be mistaken for a native" ... 5 is nearly the same as N. so, si (Sinhala) 3+ would be "I understand Sinhala at a high-school level or better and can contribute encyclopedic pages under my own power" more or less. I think you qualify. :D Kylu (speak!) 02:10, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Kool!!! Thanks Kylu for the explanation. :-) --Lee 12:09, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Adminship requests

Go on Wikipedia:Administrators. The Stewards will not promote someone unless the discussion is on the correct page. Kylu (speak!) 23:47, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

/w/w/index.php oh please make it stop!

I've put a note in to a developer (en:user:gmaxwell) on IRC to please ask Brion about a way of filtering pages so certain strings can't be made into page titles.

Depending on the response he gets, this may translate into a bugzilla request instead. I'll keep everyone informed. See protected pages list (and the deletion history of some of these pages) for reasoning. Kylu (speak!) 21:02, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Quick update: Pagename filters are on the TODO list for MediaWiki. Kylu (speak!) 21:53, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Issues

Hi guys, I came across a few things when going through Sinhala Wikipedia so I thought I'll list some of them here to get a little discussion going

• First up, should I be posting this (and should we be discussing things) here or on the Community Portal talk page? It seems a little awkward if different users post messages to different places. Depending on which one, should all comments be moved to one location?

Navigations templates

• Any one know how to translate the whole thing into Sinhalese? We could easily agree on what "Special pages" should be for example (විශේෂ පිටු maybe), but I'm not sure how to update the interface.
• Also "වෙනත් භාෂා වලින්" is in Sinhalese, but "Navigation", "Search" and "Toolbox" aren't.
• What are the motives of the පරිත්‍යාග section of the navigation template? Direct translation would be "donations", so does that mean we're asking for money, and if so should it be redirected to http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising like in en wiki?
• Current events contains just a link to an external website, and we really shouldn't be endorsing a single news website. I'm not sure how realistic it would be to expect it to be updated constantly, so do we need it at all? Maybe redirect to Wiki News but that really isn't updated either.

Other stuff

• What's the exact difference between these two articles, [2], and [3]? I spoke to Lahiru on this, and he told me that the title of the second article was displayed in a weird fashion. But to me, on Windows Vista (without any Sinhalese font specific updates) and on XP with the Sinhala pack, there's absolutely no difference in the article title of either page. Anyone know what's going on?
• Featured article? Shall we? --snowolfD4 ^{( talk / @ )} 22:08, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

1. Personally, I prefer to have the actual community portal chatter on the talkpage, but others have already started, so I figure eventually one of us will move all the conversation there.
2. I'll tell ya what: I know how to update the MediaWiki interface. If people can give me translations of pages they want modified (special:upload, etc) I'll be happy to do the modifications (assuming the admin thing goes through) provided you can tell me what text to change things to.
3. I'd agree with the wikinews idea, though I'll leave decision to people capable of generating original content here. I'm really just a helper. c.c;;
4. No idea on the article difference, but maybe it'd be best to just redirect the second article to the first?
5. support featured articles! Kylu (speak!) 00:29, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

Welcome template

Okay, so, we've got a number of users, most of which speak either Sinhala or English. I'd happily pop that on new user talkpages, that way they know the community here isn't completely desolate if someone cared to provide one? :) Kylu (speak!) 00:34, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

I could make one something along the lines of the WikiProject Sri Lanka welcome template on en wiki. Should it be in both languages, with emphasis on Sinhalese? I'll also try to keep links to some editing guidelines on the English version, like the cheatsheet and image uploading help. --snowolfD4 ^{( talk / @ )} 20:50, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

On ja.wikipedia, there's a "Chatsubo for English Speakers" where non-Japanese speakers can interact with the encyclopedia without disrupting the project. Perhaps we could have two different templates, one in Sinhalese, one in English? Kylu (speak!) 14:39, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

Articles to write... Please fill these up and Translate - Do we still need this?

I don't think we need this in the Community Portal page, do we? --Lee 14:05, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

Ok, I removed it. :-) --Lee 15:53, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Main Page

I made some changes to the main page. If you guys do not like it voice it here and we’ll revert it back to what it was or if you like it please join in to improve it. --Lee 14:15, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

There are some translation requests on Talk:මුල් පිටුව from an IP (not mine). If you can give the translations for those, I can move them to the correct MediaWiki page, or can show you how to do it if you'd like. Kylu (speak!) 15:30, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

Articles every Wikipedia should have

• m:List of articles every Wikipedia should have

Just a reminder, if you import a text from another wiki, please include at the minimum a link to the revision there that you translated from, so as to continue the chain of attribution of authorship. Kylu (speak!) 04:06, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

Bots

(moved to Wikipedia:Bots) Kylu (speak!) 22:06, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

Do we keep english page names?

A user created the page Mahatma Gandhi and left some text in English there. I moved the page to a Sinhalese title මහත්මා ගාන්ඳි, but now the redirect remians at Mahatma Gandhi. Any opinions on whether we should leave the English redirects or delete them? --snowolfD4 ^{( talk / @ )} 01:09, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

I say, we should leave the English redirect also there for some time. --Lee 13:23, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

But won't that artificially inflate the page count? And personally, given this is the Sinhala Wikipedia, I'd rather there be no English text in site lol --snowolfD4 ^{( talk / @ )} 22:18, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

Right you are my man; I also don’t like to have all those English nonsense in Sinhala wiki. About redirect pages, I don’t think they actually add to page count; do they? If so I’m with you, we should remove them. There is no need to show the world something that is not there. So where should we discuss about the deletion policy? Here or at the කෝපි කඩේ? --Lee 13:10, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm not too sure about that. I guess we may need to ask someone, but yeah, it may be a okay to keep the redirects for the benifit of those who don't have Sinaha typing abilities.

I think the deletion ploicy disussion is good enough for now at Category talk:Delete, cos on the English wiki the standard is to discuss on the realted talk pages, though I'm not entire sure what කෝපි කඩේ is for.--snowolfD4 ^{( talk / @ )} 16:33, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

කෝපි කඩේ is supposed to be our village pump. :-) --Lee 15:51, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Page creation warning

I'm seeing tons of unencyclopedic pages created over the last few days. Unlike in the English Wikipedia, there are no guidelines about creating new pages. (i.e. like what sort of pages are allowed etc.) Anyone know how we can change that? --snowolfD4 ^{( talk / @ )} 01:18, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

For the moment it’s just up to us to clean things up if anyone does something bad. Other than that I don’t think we should discourage those casual users from adding new pages.--Lee 13:12, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

Problem is, the University of Colombo has a program to get students to create articles for Wikipedia. Most of them don't know much about article formatting. Comparing the newarticletext namespace on the English Wiki and here, en directs users to basic editing guidelines while here we just have the standard "type in the box below and save" message. I think directing them to pages which have basic editing guidelines maybe a good idea (whether they read it or not :) --snowolfD4 ^{( talk / @ )} 16:29, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

English articles

I seem to be the only one commenting here, but...

Should we be keeping english language articles like these ගණකාධිකරණය, තානාපති? They don't serve any real purpose cos they are completely in English with a few Sinhalese traslations here and there and only artificially inflate the page count. --snowolfD4 ^{( talk / @ )} 16:51, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

(Talking to myself since there seems to be no one else here) We're getting a bunch of pretty decent articles on Wikipedia which just need to be formatted and wikified correctly. In that light I think it pretty useless to have articles like I mentioned above, or articles like this මහා පරාක්‍රමබාහු රජ which have just one word (usually the title) in them. So I thought I might as well tag them with {{delete}}, to imrpve the overrall quality of the articles we have here. --snowolfD4 ^{( talk / @ )} 03:46, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

You have a good point there. But we can’t be deleting all the pages users put in :-(.I think we should form a good deletion policy. --Lee 13:31, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

Haha yeah :) I guess we need some detailed discussion about this. Since you started the thread over at Category_talk:Delete, I guess we'll contibue it there. Any input from the rest of the community will be welcome. --snowolfD4 ^{( talk / @ )} 21:51, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

Main page improvements

I used some of the decent articles that were created over the last few days to update the DYK section of the main page. On en wiki they have strict rules as to what can go in the section (i.e. the related article should be less than 5 days old etc). Since we don't have as many articles, I suggest whenever we find a suitable article, we update DYK with an entry from it. Just need to make sure the article is sufficienly long and wikified apprepriately.

Instead of "on this day", which will be pretty unlikely to be updated, how about an "on this week" section for now? We could steal the entries from en wiki and update such a section weekly. Most of the stuff though won't have articles to link to, but I guess it'll have to do.--snowolfD4 ^{( talk / @ )} 03:52, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

Well, if we can make more people to join in it won't be a big issue to steal "On this day" section from English wiki. That's my personal preference. But hey this is *our* wiki so we can decide on what's best for *us*. :-)

That's a big "if" machan :D Until then I'll try to get around to making such a section like the one on the English wiki.

Combining letters

I'm not exactly sure what the correct terminology is, but there are some instances where users combine letters, as in තාක්ෂණය and තාක්‍ෂණය. The problem is, for example 2 seperate categories are then created, Category:තොරතුරු තාක්‍ෂණය and Category:තොරතුරු තාක්ෂණය, and differnt articles will go in the two categories.

In order to remedy that, I think it may be a good idea if we make it a standard policy to keep the letters seperate in article/category titles, to make sure overlapping categories aren't created. Any comments? --snowolfD4 ^{( talk / @ )} 16:24, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

Isn’t this too aggressive?

Don’t the new sysops think they are too being aggressive here? I think you shouldn’t be just admins only. You should also contribute in contents to this wiki. --Lee 12:32, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

Some Changes වෙනස් කම් කිහිපයක්

I suppose "project page" can change to "ව්‍යාපෘති පිටුව"! When all others have been changed to Sinhala why should we keep only this title?

Special pages arrived from sinhala wikipedia sites can take sinhala names. For eg. Special:listusers can become විශේෂ:දායක ලැයිස්තුව

Under the Lion Flag in මුල් පිටුව, the short description of the country, the important country name is incorrect: It should read as ශ්‍රී ලංකා ප්‍රජාතාන්ත්‍රික සමාජවාදී ජනරජය

Lot of languages use their characters below the Wiki logo. Can we have : විකිපීඩියා නොමිලයේ විශ්වකෝෂයක් Srimalpunchi 09:18, 31 ඔක්තෝබර් 2007 (UTC)

BTW, නොමිලයේ is not the word for Free here. I think it is නිදහස් as the other ppl refer it. :-) --Lee 14:06, 19 නොවැම්බර් 2007 (UTC)