January 13

From the videos you can clearly see that he does not rest his left hand on the Bible, but keeps it attached to the body. Was the oath equally valid? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.41.100.198 (talk) 20:34, 13 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

According to the constitution (Article II, Section 1) [1], he just has to say the words. The bible, the judge, and all the rest are just ceremony.

A few presidents have skipped the bible altogether. Oath_of_office_of_the_President_of_the_United_States#Use_of_Bibles.

ApLundell (talk) 21:34, 13 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed, see the No Religious Test Clause of the U.S. Constitution: "…no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States." --47.146.63.87 (talk) 23:59, 13 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

When Keith Ellison was sworn in as the nation's first Muslim member of Congress, he chose to place his left hand on a copy of the Quran. To hear the right-wingers whine, you'd have thought he'd committed treason. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 05:55, 14 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Methinks Trump's minions were more afraid he'd commit reason. Clarityfiend (talk) 07:33, 14 January 2020 (UTC) [reply]

And the boy gets a cigar! ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:12, 14 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

January 14

... that William Goldman secretly assembled a collection of photographs of prostitutes in Reading, Pennsylvania, in the 1890s? I note that the picture has been removed. Was there a complaint? Also who decides which articles will be featured? Thanks. Anton 81.131.40.58 (talk) 18:06, 14 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

If it was secret, how does anyone know about it? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:13, 14 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

There are plenty of illustrations in the article. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:37, 14 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding your second question, featured article requests are made at Wikipedia:Today's featured article/requests where you will find more information.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 18:20, 14 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The article is not a "featured article" but instead an article which is featured in the Did You Know... segment of the Main Page.

To answer the questions though, yes, there was a complaint. You can read about it on the Talk page for the Main page. Just click on the Talk tab of the Main Page as you would any other page. You'll have to scroll down a bit to find the conversation. And that Talk page includes a header which explains where to find information on the selection process for not only the Did You Know segment but also the In The News and Featured Article sections. †dismas†|^(talk) 19:09, 14 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• The discussion about the picture appearing on the main page is at WP:ERRORS, and you are welcome to contribute there. DuncanHill (talk) 21:31, 14 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • It used to be there, but was then moved to the relevant Talk page. --142.112.159.101 (talk) 09:17, 15 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • Even though the objection was reasonable, the aptly-named user Crusader316 is clearly here for one purpose: to push a religious agenda. (John 3:16 and all that). Also, his peculiar comment about users and calendar pages suggests he's one of the endless socks of the banned user VXfC. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:01, 15 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

January 16

This is related to the "link chains" where one claims that any two WP articles are at most six links apart, or where you usually end up at the same article if you click the first link of an article, then the first link of that article etc. So it's an entertainment question, a humanities question, sort of a graph theory question, and a (very tangential) question about Wikipedia at the same time. Part of the question is where it actually belongs; posting it in all places at the same time would look spammy.

I'm not using any links, but the disambiguation syntax of WP articles, which makes it a language question as well. I start with a title which comes with a disambiguation phrase, say, hamlet (settlement), and the rule I follow is that the next article must start with "settlement (", i.e. one of the articles about settlements with a disambiguator attached. For example, I could pick Settlement (finance). The next article could be Finance (Bhutanese football club) but it's unlikely that there's an article starting with "Bhutanese football club", much less a disambiguation. Finance (game) looks more promising.

My questions are if that has been tried before, and how long those chains can get. Without a lot of searching (just picking phrases which looked promising), I got the following, which uses some redirects:

Hamlet (settlement) → Settlement (trust) → Trust (business) → Business (song) → Song (album) → Album (magazine) → Magazine (band) → Band (channel) → Channel (broadcasting) → Broadcasting (networking) → Networking (disambiguation) → Disambiguation (disambiguation),

all in all 12 articles, including the fixed point at the end. Exhaustive search looks too inefficient, but if one wanted to attack the problem more seriously, one could cull all articles without disambiguators (like Finance) from a list, followed by all articles with disambiguators which don't lead to new articles (like Finance (Bhutanese football club)). The resulting list should be much shorter . . . but is it short enough? 84.148.240.150 (talk) 13:27, 16 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

1) I haven't heard of anyone attempting that; 2) I seriously doubt the resulting graph is connected--the "six links" claim is obviously false since there are articles with no outgoing links, so the article link graph is not even connected, much less with such a small diameter; 3) You can pull dumps of Wikipedia content and/or metadata from dumps.wikimedia.org if you want to play with this stuff offline. 2601:648:8202:96B0:0:0:0:DF95 (talk) 21:13, 18 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Re 2) IIRC, it's allowed to traverse links "backwards" e.g. by opening the "What links here" page of an article and use its links; the only restriction is that you only use the article proper. Clicking the Wikipedia logo on both endpoints would be a trivial way to get a 2-link connection. Another sensible restriction would be "null-space only", e.g. links to "Wikipedia:" namespace like Reference desk → Wikipedia:Reference desk would be outlawed.

At any rate, there could be "islands" of few, possibly even single, articles. In that case, one would have to weaken the claim to the biggest "continent" of articles, which should inclode almost all "good" and featured articles. 84.148.240.150 (talk) 10:47, 20 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Re 3) Those look very useful, both to search for long chains and to set a "fixed" target (e.g. articles at a certain date). Good job using 7zip instead of zip, btw.

To have a truly fixed target, one would have to define some border cases, too, e.g. if it's possible to re-use popular disambiguators like (song). Thanks! 84.148.240.150 (talk) 10:47, 20 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

7z is only used for the meta history dumps that contain the complete content of every page in the wiki. Uncompressed it is some tens of terabytes so I'd only download it if you plan to do something with all that data. For the other dumps, 7z isn't used because it is much slower than bz2 without beating the compression ratio by much. 7z is basically the same as xz fwiw. I fooled around with zstd for these dumps a little, but it doesn't seem to be a significant win. 67.164.113.165 (talk) 01:07, 21 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

January 19

I already asked on Wikipedia:Village_pump_(miscellaneous), but perhaps my question is more appropriate here. Yesterday, I uploaded this historic view on the Genesee River from 1859. Unfortunately, I have no clue where it was taken exactly. I would guess somewhere in the Letchworth State Park. Does anyone know these falls? --Zinnmann (talk) 15:39, 19 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The bridge in the background looks like the first wooden version of the Letchworth Portage Bridge - since burned down, rebuilt in steel, and rebuilt again a few years ago. The falls are about a kilometer north of the bridge. The falls have changed shape since then and probably moved a bit upriver due to erosion. See aerial view. 85.76.77.44 (talk) 16:19, 19 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The "Lattice Bridge" in foreground.—eric 03:16, 20 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Who can I contact to ask to release a DVD that had not been released, yet or never? 86.128.233.252 (talk) 20:33, 19 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

That seems relatively futile, bearing in mind that the preferred format for release is now a digital download, and physical media is, for better or worse, deprecated. Elizium23 (talk) 20:45, 19 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Let's not be naysayers. DVDs and BluRays are still selling well. Many people want a show they can watch whenever they want, not when Netflix decides to rent the rights for a few months. 89.172.58.25 (talk) 06:50, 20 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Assuming you're referring to movies rather than music (or even if), you could try contacting whoever owns the rights to it. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:34, 19 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Whoever owns the rights to it? Like who? 86.128.233.252 (talk) 00:08, 20 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Find the movie's article here and see if you can deduce who might own it. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:16, 20 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Is the questioner asking about feature films? Maybe TV movies, or films that were screened at film festivals but never received distribution? More detail would help us answer. Temerarius (talk) 01:10, 20 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Find out the production company, distribution company and/or who was director on IMDb or TMDb and try contacting them.

Keep in mind printing a batch of DVD-ROMs is a costly process and won't be done for just a few fans. There isa website somewhere that held petitions for some old TV shows that never had a DVD issue and a few of these shows were even released on DVD, I found it a few years ago but I can't remember its address. 89.172.58.25 (talk) 06:50, 20 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

If you're a member of certain private torrent sites you can download films that have not been released on DVD. Of course I wouldn't condone such behaviour. --Viennese Waltz 08:18, 20 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

According to the film Schindler's List, why were all the female Schindlerjuden not gassed upon mistakenly arriving at Auschwitz (despite some of them being too elderly, younger, weak and sick for work/hard labour and that the disinfection chamber looked like a shower-like gas chamber as they expected) and that they were allowed to wear their own clothes instead of prison ones? 86.128.233.252 (talk) 21:38, 19 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Is there any evidence that this actually happened this way? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:55, 19 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

According to the film, Schindler bribes Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, with a bag of diamonds to win their release. More here: [[2]]. DroneB (talk) 01:22, 20 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

That would seem to be a rather obvious plot point. I wonder how long it's been since the OP saw the film? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:42, 20 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Films that are intended more for entertainment than for exact Historical re-enactment often contain anachronisms and collecting the goofs in Schindler's List keeps some people occupied. DroneB (talk) 14:08, 20 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

According to film, myth, and accounts are in Crowe, David (2004). Oskar Schindler: The Untold Account of His Life, Wartime Activities, and the True Story Behind the List. pp. 388–402. Hopefully you can see the most part in the google preview.—eric 03:08, 20 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Here's a more detailed account, including quotes by some of those rescued. As for their clothing, in that article it says "Thomas Keneally tells in his famous book Schindler's Ark how the women were marched naked to a quartermaster's hut where they were handed the clothes of the dead." Clarityfiend (talk) 08:28, 20 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

January 20

I know about deep-cycle batteries but this question is about ordinary car batteries. It's well-known that one should not deep-discharge a car battery as that messes them up. Sometimes it happens by accident though: someone leaves the lights on and you have to jump-start the car. My questions:

• Just how bad is an accidental full discharge, like above? That happened fairly recently with a car that I sometimes drive (other people drive it too), and I'm not sure exactly how. The lights weren't on and the battery wasn't very old, but assuming it was accidental, did that probably decrease the battery's starting ability? Is there some common problem with batteries that can cause this to happen spontaneously? That incident was some months back and it hasn't happen again since.
• How bad is it for the battery to partially discharge it on purpose, for example to recharge a laptop through the cigarette lighter without the motor running? Counting inefficiencies, let's say about 100 WH (8 AH, or maybe 10% of the car battery capacity) is withdrawn. This is somewhat related to my earlier question about off-grid power. It would be an occasional thing, not repeated frequently. Of course it would not be done twice without running the car for a while.

Thanks. 2601:648:8202:96B0:0:0:0:4FFF (talk) 23:15, 20 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]