Wikipedia:Help desk

Welcome—ask questions about how to use or edit Wikipedia! (Am I in the right place?)

• For other types of questions, use the search box, see the reference desk or Help:Contents. If you have comments about a specific article, use that article's talk page.
• Do not provide your email address or any other contact information. Answers will be provided on this page only.
• If your question is about a Wikipedia article, draft article, or other page on Wikipedia, tell us what it is!
• Check back on this page to see if your question has been answered.
• For real-time help, use our IRC help channel, #wikipedia-en-help.
• New editors may prefer the Teahouse, a help area for beginners (but please don't ask in both places).

Ask a question

December 31

Peter Kavanagh (politician)

Reference number 5 is wrong - I have failed again. Please fix; I (or the team I am on) will not be attempting to edit next year - 2025. Thanks you and my apologies againSrbernadette (talk) 00:26, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

✅ Folly Mox (talk) 00:35, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

Again, Srbernadette, you wrote 2024 as 20244. Why is it that you cannot see and correct such obvious errors on your own? Cullen328 (talk) 01:19, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

Could it be that your keyboard is jamming? -- D'n'B-📞 -- 12:09, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

Looking for any policies and guidelines on Portals?

I feel like the answer will be obvious when someone says it, but where are the guidelines or policies on portals? Wikipedia:Portal is an info page with a banner from five years ago saying it needs to be updated. I looked around but only see WP:POG, a failed proposal. Other non-article content has a guideline that at least defines what should be kept or deleted. Is there an equivalent to Wikipedia:Redirect/Deletion reasons somewhere for Portals? Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 04:19, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

The sort of "realist" answer is few people care about portals and they're neglected. A glance at the talk page there will indicate that the answer to your query appears to be "nowhere really". WP is a volunteer shindig and so if no one works on a thing it just doesn't happen. --Slowking Man (talk) 02:35, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

Gotcha, thanks, Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 21:46, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

Iris Sheila Collenette

I have added a file from commons and is far too big. please fix if you can. You could correctly caption it: "Pickenham Hall, Norfolk, home of Collenette's mother" - Thanks Srbernadette (talk) 07:19, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

 Done with this edit. -- John of Reading (talk) 08:50, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

Srbernadette, that article entirely fails to explain why this English gentlewoman ended up as an expert on the flowers of Saudi Arabia. Why is that? Cullen328 (talk) 09:00, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

John of Reading, I don't believe that Pickenham Hall, Norfolk was the home of Collenette's mother, she married in 1923 (Burke's Peerage 1934 via Google books) then Collenette's mother's father "JOHN SMITH MORETON , of Pickenham Hall , Nor- folk ... purchased the Pickenham and Houghton - on - the - Hill estates in 1924" ((Burke's Landed Gentry 1939 via Google books).

Cullen328, Srbernadette didn't write the article so they may not know much about Collenette's biography. TSventon (talk) 15:07, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing that out, TSventon. Cullen328 (talk) 19:13, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

Cullen328, the article is still very short, but I have added a sentence saying that Collenette visited Saudi Arabia while her husband was working there. TSventon (talk) 22:45, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

How to change username?

Is there any way to change my username? I don’t really like it. Cometkeiko (talk) 07:24, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

Yes. See WP:UNC Meters (talk) 07:27, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

Using edit summary to let out personal feelings

How to deal with a user who undid an edit then uses edit summary to just explicitly let know their personal feelings over a constructive criticism like this one then restoring it back? I've been avoiding that user since we were blocked for an edit war but they keep coming to my edits I've made (be it on an article or on my talk page). 𝙳.𝟷𝟾𝚝𝚑 (𝚃𝚊𝚕𝚔) 08:27, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

My personal suggestion is that if their comments or behavior bother you, but they're not impacting the enyclopedia (the reason why we are all here) much at all, to just ignore it, since, does it really matter in the grand scheme of things? If someone is causing trouble impacting numerous editors, they will attract attention and people will "do something about them" sooner or later. If you find editing Wikipedia to be causing stress, a good first step is always to take a short break, do something else that you enjoy, take a walk outside to decompress, anything you might find enjoyable. Wikipedia isn't a job or obligation and there is no deadline. Also might want to try switching gears and editing some other areas: there are plenty of tasks to do and who knows, you may even find some of them interesting!

(It wouldn't be very challenging to have a userscript that "ignores" a user, by just "collapsing" their edits in edit history and on talk pages into something like "1 edit hidden, click to expand". Someone might even have already made one along those lines; if interested you can go looking at what's out there. If not I could take a stab at it if it's something someone might find useful.) Slowking Man (talk) 17:26, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

Well I've been doing that this past few days but when I would come back here to edit a content of an article to make it better, that other user would undo it then put something on edit unrelated to why they undid it then restored back to how I edited it, like "what's the point for undoing it then restoring it back?" Anyways, thanks for those tips, and I will find and use that userscript you suggested. Cheers and happy new year! 𝙳.𝟷𝟾𝚝𝚑 (𝚃𝚊𝚕𝚔) 20:35, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

A user desperate for a war again

How to deal with a user looks really desperate to declared a war to me again. This edit summary is so sensitive to me, and no longer normal for me. I want to go in that user talk page to give some advise but i know this user will lastly revert my edit and said "Vandalism", so what i do is just leave it on the edit summary. Everything i do on this Wikipedia, this user will always appear, like a few months ago, i've created a several draft that is ready to published but in the end all of it is just useless because the all of the mainspace is created by this user, like i didn't even get any chance for my only interest topic in this Wikipedia. — Aidillia^(talk) 08:30, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

Hello, Aidillia. No editor can possibly cause another editor to engage in Edit warring. That is literally impossible. Edit warring is entirely the responsibility of the editor or editors who choose to engage in edit warring, which is a blockable offense forbidden by policy. Nobody is forced to click the blue "Publish changes" button. So, always refuse to engage in edit warring, which is forbidden by policy, which bears repeating. There are many Dispute resolution procedures available to you, which should be used instead. Cullen328 (talk) 08:50, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

Ok thanks. I will have a look at it soon. Aidillia^(talk) 09:07, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

Also you might want to take a look at WP:NFF as this article itself is potentially a candidate for deletion as there has not been significant coverage of this future film. TiggerJay (talk) 20:36, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

I've created Category:Books about Australian rules football

Hi all,

I've created Category:Books about Australian rules football which is pretty obviously wrong, and *I don't know how to fix it*.

Yep I'm an WP:ADMIN with about 58K edits, but also someone who knows their limitations - in this case I'm teh WP:CIR when it comes to templates.

Could someone who groks template coding possibly step in here and fix it up?

Pete AU aka Shirt58 (talk) 🦘 10:45, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

Hi, Shirt58! Please look at the category page and see if it looks like what you expected. :) --CiaPan (talk) 11:03, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

PS. I'm afraid I do not understand what you mean about templates. Do you want some template to be added to the category page? It gets done exactly the same way as in regular articles. --CiaPan (talk) 11:05, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

I usually try to find and adapt a similar existing category. I have checked Category:Books about American football and added two more categories. TSventon (talk) 11:25, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

And thank you to everyone who has replied here and fixed that up. For reference, I've sometimes described myself as a "non-technical" admin. By that I mean I have pretty much no clue whatsoever about the questions that come in at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical). Shirt58 (talk) 🦘 10:42, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

Template edit help needed on Template:Ice hockey team roster/sandbox

I'm editing {{Ice hockey team roster/sandbox}}, trying to add a new column, but have it only show if a parameter equals "yes".

My test implementation using this new column is currently at User:MikeVitale/sandbox. I'm basing the code I added to the Ice hockey team roster sandbox off of {{CIH schedule start}}, which I'm familiar with the usage of.

My end goal here is to combine {{Player7}} into {{Player4}} (love those descriptive names), and eventually TfD both Player7 and {{Ice hockey minor league team roster}}. --MikeVitale 15:06, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

@MikeVitale: I have encoded a pipe as {{!}} [1] so it isn't interpreted as a separator between parameters to #ifeq. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:32, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

Finding a taxonomic error over 100 years old while doing research for an article

What the title says. How should I properly address it in the article, given that it seems to have flown under the radar of actual experts? I'm working on an article on Eoscorpius, an extinct genus of scorpion from the Paleozoic Era first described in 1868, but it appears that some experts used the name, unaware that it was already taken, to describe an extinct Miocene fish of the family Cottidae in 1919. No one seems to have noticed this mistake, and there exist rather recent articles on the two very different organisms using the same genus name. Even the Paleobiology Database is confused; it lists Eoscorpius primaevus, intended as the name of a fish, with the rest of the Eoscorpius species, which are actual scorpions (that was actually what led me to first notice something was off, when I saw that the supposed different species of the same genus were separated by hundreds of millions of years). Anyway, that's my situation. What can I do to address it without falling into original research territory? Anonymous 20:05, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

It seems to me that you can note that the Eoscorpius described by one source is a fish and that described by the other source is a scorpion, and rely on common knowledge that these are different taxa to comment that these uses are inconsistent, but you should not attempt to resolve the inconsistency, or even to account for it, if you have no source that discusses the inconsistency. ColinFine (talk) 20:33, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

ColinFine's advice is right-on. After that, you may want to contact a taxonomist or two, probably ones with expertise in the Paleozoic. Who knows, you just might wind up getting co-author credit on a scientific paper! --Slowking Man (talk) 23:56, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

@User:ColinFine and @User:Slowking Man, here's how I ended up writing the article. I did my best to lay out the facts without putting forward my own interpretation. I also have reached out to an official source, so we'll see how that goes. Anonymous 17:40, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

That looks like the best you can do, @An anonymous username, not my real name. Note that any personal communication you receive from an "official source" will not be usable on Wikipedia. A note in a reputable journal, however, would be citable. ColinFine (talk) 18:12, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

@An anonymous username, not my real name, I see that you have nominated Eoscorpius for DYK, so hopefully a lot of people will be reading the article shortly. I would suggest noting the taxonomic error on the talk page and asking at the relevant wikiprojects if anyone there can help with secondary sources. TSventon (talk) 12:58, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

I already reached out to the PBDB and ICZN, but doing some further asking around within Wikipedia sounds like a good idea. I'll make sure to do it. Anonymous 15:42, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

Subheading alignment

Would someone please advise how to get the 'See also' header on Wartling to align to the left. I've noticed this occurring on a few articles - adding an additional blank line usually fixes it, but for some reason not here. Rupples (talk) 20:28, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

I added clear template before "See also" section, and it seems ok when I view the article. Is this what you wanted? Cmr08 (talk) 20:36, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

Excellent. Thank you very much, @Cmr08, I'll try and remember this in future. Rupples (talk) 20:41, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

January 1

About cladograms on Arabic script

Hello everyone, can someone help me to figure out what is the issue I can't create a correct cladogram on Arabic script? The issue is the branches are reversed. And thanks. سنوببي (talk) 00:26, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

Hah, that's got to be an issue related to right-to-left text handling; on a page in an RTL language such as Arabic, the Web browser will dutifully flip everything by default. So you have to engage in some template wizardry so it doesn't flip the non-text elements of the cladogram. The place you want is Tech village pump, where you are likely to find help from editors experienced with Wikipedia's esoteric syntax. Hopefully that helps. --Slowking Man (talk) 02:43, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

Tom Taylor (Yorkshire cricketer)

Reference number 2 does not have the name of the year it (a medical journal) was published which is 1921. Please fix this up. I have failed. I'm sorry and that's it from me. Srbernadette (talk) 02:09, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

I was about to fix it, but User:Citation_bot beat me too it. There was a line break (ie enter/return on the keyboard) in the middle of the title element of the cite web reference.

TiggerJay (talk) 03:09, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

What's my email address?

The application for newspapers.com asks for:

    "The email for your account on the partner's website"

What is the correct format in this case? Humpster (talk) 08:37, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

This is beyond the scope of the Help desk, as it involves an external website.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 08:40, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

@Ianmacm: I think this relates to an application to use newspapers.com via Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library at https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org/applications/apply/26/ .

@Humphrey Tribble: have you tried example@example.com? If that doesn't work, Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library has a talk page. TSventon (talk) 09:20, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

Language links

Is there a setting in user preferences to change the language links to appear in alphabetical order, all in same page? Now only a few language links to other Wikipedias are displayed. This started when I logged out, and I have not found yet ability to change it back. --40bus (talk) 15:09, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

@40bus: go to preferences, then to appearance and untick the compact language list option at the bottom of the list. I use Vector legacy skin, I don't know if that affects preferences. TSventon (talk) 15:44, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

I now removed the option. I had looked through that page many times and didn't see it. --40bus (talk) 18:24, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

Contacting sources

I created this draft article and it was declined. (I understand why it was declined --- I mistakenly used Original Research and had a severe lack of secondary sources; also WP:42) If I requested a reliable source to write about the said information, or at least part of it, could I in turn use it for citations and references? Thanks! Therguy10 (talk) 18:47, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

Sorry, no. All our sources must be published by some reliable source which exercised editorial control and judgement. So their writing an e-mail to you, or even publishing it on their blog, is generally not going to meet our need for verifiable information. --19:59, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

'Save page' button not appearing

The 'Save page' button is missing when I try to create a new page. This happens whether I create a new article directly, or create it in the Special:Mypage/ format. I'm using Chrome on an iMac, OS is Ventura 13.7.1. Same issue happens in Firefox. Whiterabbit6 (talk) 21:44, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

The button actually says "publish changes", it no longer says "save". 331dot (talk) 21:45, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

Thanks! Various instructions within Wikipedia itself refer to using the 'Save page' button, that's why I was confused. Whiterabbit6 (talk) 21:57, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

The pages which say "save" meaning "publish changes" should be updated. I fixed one here. TSventon (talk) 22:08, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

Please feel free to BOLDLY edit those or post them here for others to correct. TiggerJay (talk) 23:59, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

Antediluvian Crop Tool

Can somebody please install a working crop tool so we can crop pictures easily but leave all the meta data and attribution etc, merely adding a suffix cropped or cropped_ver1 etc? Meanwhile, can someone drop by my talk page and leave instructions. This should be much easier. I'd also like to use photoshop to fix the contrast etc., on existing photos, but I imagine that won't be allowed. Thanks Billyshiverstick (talk) 23:23, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

Billyshiverstick I believe that the crop tool is at Commons:Commons:CropTool on Commons, which is a separate project, so you could ask at Commons:Commons talk:CropTool. There may be practical reasons that the tool does not currently do what you want it to do. TSventon (talk) 23:31, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

Billyshiverstick, I sometimes use GIMP to fix the contrast, white balance, etc, of photos previously uploaded; nobody has expressed disapproval, and I have never feared that they would. I don't see why you shouldn't use Photoshop for the same purposes. -- Hoary (talk) 12:31, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

January 2

Article class changes

Is there any way to check the progress of the number of articles in each class over time within a project? Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 12:54, 2 January 2025 (UTC)a

@Wakelamp: Which project? Many have counts with page histories at Special:PrefixIndex/User:WP 1.0 bot/Tables. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:15, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

How to find out if the number of articles quoting a source has decreased?

There is a great deal of antipathy towards the Murdoch press in Australia. Interested to see if there has been any systematic removal. Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 12:58, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

There have been discussions about the reliability of these organizations on the Reliable sources noticeboard... you can look these up, but I believe that The Australian is listed as "generally reliable", and The Daily Telegraph (Sydney) as "generally unreliable". Regardless, these sources are still used in many articles. You can see this with the following search: Special:Search/insource:dailytelegraph.com.au Reconrabbit 15:34, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

January 3

Automatic taxobox system: Way to display all entries in a page's Template:Taxonomy hierarchy (preferably automatically)?

For pages that use the template {{automatic taxobox}} (and related ones such as {{speciesbox}}), the taxonomic hierarchy displayed in the "Scientific classification" sidebar does not come from the page itself; rather, it comes from a different template which is automatically included. For example, the page Mammal automatically gets that information from the template {{Taxonomy/Mammalia}}. However, it only displays a limited subset of the information from that template, mainly (but not necessarily entirely) of the "Kings Play Chess On Fine Gold Stools" type. So you'll notice that the "Mammal" page displays seven levels, whereas the "Taxonomy/Mammalia" template that it pulls them from knows about twenty-five levels.

I get the reasoning -- it's like a "Greatest Hits" album -- but I like seeing the whole thing. I understand you can click on the editing icon next to "Scientific classification" to go to the associated taxonomy template, but I'm wondering if there's some way to have them displayed inline on the page instead of switching to a new page. Preferably I'd like this to be automatic, like a preference setting or maybe a user CSS setting. Does anyone know of such a thing? Thanks. - Rwv37 (talk) 00:59, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

Question about an article

What is the closest article that has a similar infobox to a country, but for the whole world? Interstellarity (talk) 01:29, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

Interstellarity, do you perhaps mean "Among articles that have as their subject the entire world, which has/have an infobox that is closest to that used for an individual country?"? If not, please elucidate. -- Hoary (talk) 01:55, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

Which place to go to for help in resolving a dispute

I find myself in a disagreement—a dispute, I’d have to say—with other editors of a biographical article on Ian Stevenson, an American psychiatrist who researched cases in which children claim to remember past lives.

I have been seeking to resolve the dispute through polite and constructive talk, but given the responses so far, it seems we may need some help. My question concerns which avenue for dispute resolution would seem most appropriate.

The issue in brief: On December 6, without prior discussion, one editor, being bold, deleted from various parts of the article 16,703 bytes of text. On the same day, he was joined by another editor, who deleted 1,009 bytes more. The edits undid roughly a year’s worth of work by me and other editors. The deletions consisted largely of material from high-quality reliable sources.

To complicate matters: On the Talk page and the Fringe Theories Noticeboard, the first editor went in for what might reasonably be seen as personal attacks.

Given the overwhelming extent of the sudden edits, I suggested on the Talk page that we restore the article to its previous state and then use a process of “talking and editing” to go through proposed deletions. Several editors quickly responded that we should do the opposite: Leave all the deletions in place and then incrementally consider what I might wish to see restored.

It appears to me that the editors responding are like-minded souls, at least some well known to one another—a “local consensus”—and that we would benefit from “outside” input.

My question concerns how to proceed. Should I post an RfC? Should I go to the Dispute Resolution Noticeboard”? Or what? I especially ask because although this essentially seems to me a content dispute, it also involves behaviors, such as personal attacks and disruptive editing, that would seem to deserve review.

I have practically no experience with dispute resolution outside of discussion on Talk pages, so I would be grateful for advice.

Thank you.

Cordially, O Govinda (talk) 02:13, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

If there has been extensive discussion on the article talk pages, and whatever content issue is not resolved by either editors involved (i.e. no consensus was able to be reached), than the DRN is the place to go. If behavior issues are in play, and such editor(s) fail to respond accordingly and with no regard for our policies and guidelines, than report it to admins. 2601AC47 (talk·contribs·my rights) Isn't a IP anon 02:20, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

BTW, I took a good look at the talk, and I would suggest taking into consideration what Psychologist Guy has told you for the last year and a half as far as that is concerned, especially about fringe theories. If it's a simple dispute (at this rate unlikely) between you two, than try getting a 3rd opinion. 2601AC47 (talk·contribs·my rights) Isn't a IP anon 02:32, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

O Govinda has repeatedly attempted to rewrite the article about Stevenson to present him in a more favourable light spanning over half a decade, and been repeatedly opposed every time. Govinda should probably WP:DROPTHESTICK at this point. Hemiauchenia (talk) 04:01, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

Page incorrectly marked as extended-protected

I have the user preference set to see hidden categories on pages like Wikipedia:Articles for creation/Redirects, which is part of the Category:Wikipedia extended-confirmed-protected pages, despite not actually being protected. I was wondering how this could have happened, and whether a request over at WP:RFUP would do anything. Cheers. LR.127 (talk) 03:19, 3 January 2025 (UTC)