Portal talk:Current events/June 2003

Is that Mike Tyson story really news? Now, if one day he would shut up for a second, THAT would be news. The fact that he's still spouting off nonsense is not worthy of a news headline, is gossip, and is merely docmenting the rantings of a rather sad mental midget. Marteau

Agreed, it's stupid. -- stewacide

---

'Monkeypox' (which wiki has no article for) has crept into the US. Is this newsworthy? It has spread from African rats to prairie dogs in American pet stores where a few individuals have been affected. Usedbook 12:49 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)

It certainly is. Stick it in: someone will make an article. The Anome 12:54 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)

---

What was wrong with having the death of Richard Cusack on this page Mavric?

It is not an event so I moved it to recent deaths. Now if he was killed then that would warrent listing here because the act of murder would be an event. --mav

---

Mav, that may be ugly in your browser, and hopefully there's a different way we can do it; but right now it's horrible. The text won't scan; I'm getting lines like:

record and lend support to the "out of Africa" single origin War in Iraq

people. A helicopter attack in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli Afghanistan timeline

announces that his government will conform to yesterday's Related Pages

- Hephaestos 03:22 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

What browser are you using? It sounds like your browser is not able to view vertical lines. That is bad. Perhaps more spacing between the box and the text will help? --mav 20:13 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I'm using Omniweb (probably explains the vertical lines, one of the reasons I chose it is because Explorer et al. put lines between CSS divisions here, which also looks bad).

Does this look good in your browser? It looks good in mine. --mav

That looks great in mine. - Hephaestos 21:30 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Done. I'm glad we are both happy now. :) --mav

What the hell are you people doing to that poor box? In case you didn't notice I copied that formatting DIRECTLY from the front page. Also, it rendered exactly the same in IE and Mozilla. Having lines all the way around is ugly and pointless: what are you seperating it from on the other sides? -- stewacide 06:26 14 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I slightly favor the single vertical line too but appently Hephaestos' browser can't see a single vertical line and thus the words form the events and the items in the box are only separated from each other by a larger than normal space. So we have to balance the way it looks. --mav

If his broswer can't render something are basic as vertical lines perhapse he should pick a better browser. IE and Mozilla both render them exactly the same (I'm going to assume Opera does as well), which together account for ~99.987% of all users. I'm betting there are LOTS of perfectly correct pages on this site that OmniWeb cab't render correctly as well.

I simply don't understand the logic of picking a browser BECAUSE it doesn't render something it should, and then complaining... that it doesn't? I'd point out that the main page uses a line made in the same way - so I'm guessing he can't view that either... I guess we should draw an ugly box around it then just for him! :)

Just on principle alone, I don't think we (at Wiki) should start designing around the faults of non-compliant browsers. -- stewacide

Ahem. Whenever possible we should make sure our pages at least work in whatever browser a person is using. Sometimes that means we have to do things that are not as elegant or as pretty as the most recent browser can handle. Navigator 4.x, for example, sometimes has trouble with relative links (messing up which directory to look into for files). So to combat this I have had to copy the same files into many different directories for a website at work in order for Navigator 4.x to find the files it is looking for (it is looking in the subdirectory instead of the directory where the file is supposed to be). So I hacked a solution instead of being a prick and telling my users that they should upgrade their browser. From the user's point of view if the page doesn't work in their browser then the page is broken, not their browser. No amount of holier-than-now statements will change that - it will just make your users go away. --mav

Am I not typing loudly enough?

"How do folks feel about just using the smaller text size?"

Hephaestos 07:00 14 Jun 2003 (UTC)

If the smaller text alone is good enough to differentiate things for you then we can kill the slightly-ugly box and reinstate the more elegant vertical line. --mav

Hm. Perhaps a png of the previous line would work? On second thought then there would be problems with text-only browsers. --mav

Besides being an ugly hack, and possibly messing with text browsers/screen readers, a one-size bar simply can't fit all. In many cases it will be to short or too long depending on the users browser, resolution, font, etc. The way it was was nice looking, elegant (in that it would re-size itself to fit the user), and AFAIK 100% correct and valid html/css. -- stewacide 06:56 14 Jun 2003 (UTC)

How do folks feel about just using the smaller text size? - Hephaestos 06:50 14 Jun 2003 (UTC)

That could work, but I don't think Wiki allows it (can you imagine how messed up looking this site would be if it did? :) -- stewacide

I'm hoping I reached a point with that last tweak where everybody's happy... :) -- Hephaestos 07:20 14 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Actually, Mozilla for some reason won't recognize the small tag on Wiki, so it looks the same as before (all the same sized text). It is smaller on IE though. I don't know if this is a deal-breaker (it's not like it's the first such bug: IE akready creates a grey line and Mozilla a black line for some reason).

Not a deal-breaker for me; looks fine. (As an aside, I might mention I picked this browser not because it doesn't show explicitly-placed lines, that's a rather annoying side-effect. I picked it because it doesn't render large bars between divs on all the wiki pages. Example screenshot at [1]]; what I see in my usual browser is at [2]. I checked on my friend's Windows box and it does the same thing in Explorer.) - Hephaestos 07:51 14 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Those lines aren't some 'weird' thing that IE does - they're part of that "theme". If you don't like them you can go to preferences and pick, for instance, "Cologne Blue", and they'll be gone.

Rather than re-design Wiki, I think you should write to the makers of OmniWeb and ask them to add that very basic feature ASAP. If OmniWeb can't render the basic interface elements of the default theme correctly that's an issue for Wiki as a whole (not to mention Omni) - I only want to keep the style consistent. -- stewacide

Maybe there's some way to use CSS to make the text slightly smaller that will work on all browsers? (although all that REALLY matters, I guess, is that it works on OmniWeb or whatever flaky browser this whole thing started over). -- stewacide

Best Solution: I remember that when I first implimented the one-line style, I messed around with offsetting the box from the top to see how it would look (I ended up not using it).

If the problem is that without the vertical black line the lines of text are running into each other, Hephaestos could offset the box from the top untill the text in the box and the main text are staggered on his system (I don't think it should take more than ~3 pixles). It's still a hack, but at least the other 99.99% of us won't notice any difference. -- stewacide 08:50 14 Jun 2003 (UTC)

---

Does the latest US sporting events really count as news? I don't think anybody would be impressed if I posted the results of last night's NSW v. QLD rugby league match ... Tarka 06:07 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

• This particular baseball event is news worthy because it is unprecidented. Nothing of its kind has ever occurred in 127 years of Major League Baseball. Kingturtle 07:05 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

---

Please, people, be careful with how you phrase things. All too often what has happened, is happening and is going to happen are being mixed up, giving completely false impressions. For example, someone put in the Lord Chancellor is replaced by a new Department for Constitutional Affairs. Wrong! The Lord Chancellor is going to be replaced by the new Department of Constitutional Affairs. The new department has been created. The Lord Chancellor has not yet been abolished and probably won't be until the next parliamentary session at the earliest (Oct/Nov 2003-June 2004) when the legislation to do that is passed by both Houses and receives the Royal Assent. And should the House of Lords try to block it and Blair have to resort to the Parliament Act it might be delayed for over a year, possibly longer, conceivably not happening before the next general election. Far from the Lord Chancellor being abolished as our story suggested, the new Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, was on the Woolsack today chairing the Lords, then as Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs back in his office. Please be careful about language. FearÉIREANN 03:25 14 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Yes, sorry, that was my fault. I got a bit carried away while the news was still filtering in. --rbrwr

---

"Joan Laporta is elected as the new president of FC Barcelona."

Maybe it's because I'm an ignorant North American, but is this really important news? Anywhere? There are X-thousand professional sports teams in the world; are we going to start reporting every time one gets a new president/general manager? -- stewacide 05:50 17 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Please no. --mav

I imagine someone was just following the general example being set; it's getting so it's a live sports broadcast here :) Seriously though, shouldn't this page be for news items with potentially international or future ramifications, not every item that comes up, especially ones that make no sense outside of a single country? Tarka

By that logic, the following items should not be on the Current Events page:

• Cabin Fever
• Abud Sarhan (which I think personally is POV anyway)
• Mainline Airways
• Monkeypox
• Tony Blair
• Ulan Bator

• Orthodox Jew
• Same-sex marriage
• Donald Regan
• Silvio Berlusconi
• Maaouiya Ould Taya
• Erkki Tuomioja
• Space shuttle Columbia
• Martha Stewart
• Dow Jones

• Zimbabwe
• Federal Communicatons Commission
• Three Gorges Dam
  • And that's just for June. -- Zoe
    • Most of these are of have international ramifications or are of international interest. Think of it this way: would the story appear on the news in another country? Tony Blair, monkeypox, Columbia and Abud Sarhan (to pick a few) all do or did. But a baseball player having cork in his bat? Tarka

I'm a little surprised that Abud Sarhan's 200 dead sheep weren't added to the Iraqi death toll pages... Tweak

I think this soccer manager thing is a new level of pointless tho'. I can understand noteing if a very important player (e.g. David Beckham) was traded or something, and the Sosa thing was pretty big news, but who seriously gives a f**k about a management change at some Spanish soccer team? -- stewacide

There's a simple solution, of course -- create a separate Current events in sports page. --Eloquence 14:24 17 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Well, that'd mean we'd have to create another front page section too :) -- ilyanep 14:35 17 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Not necessarily; it's harly important enough to warrant a link from here, let alone the main page. It's only sport, FFS! ;-) James F. 18:42 18 Jun 2003 (UTC)

---

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the English edition of the fifth installment to the Harry Potter series, starts selling worldwide. - does this mean that editions in other languages appeared earlier? RickK

No, it means that other editions of this volume in other languages haven't yet appeared, but the English version is selling all over the world (the French edition is due out December 3 according a piece in The Guardian yesterday). --Camembert

---

Which Real fired its manager? I would think it's Real Sociedad, given the context, but it ought to be clarified. -- John Owens 04:39 25 Jun 2003 (UTC)

---

Moved here, just in case the baby's non-fatal plummet turns out to be of international importance:

• In Peekskill, New York, a 10 month old baby girl survives a seven story fall. Her father, Willie Williams, takes her to the hospital, where she was treated for bruises and cuts, but Mr. Williams is later arrested on charges of attempted murder. [3]

James F. 16:43 25 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Start a discussion about improving the Portal:Current events/June 2003 page

Talk pages are where people discuss how to make content on Wikipedia the best that it can be. You can use this page to start a discussion with others about how to improve the "Portal:Current events/June 2003" page.

Start a discussion