Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2014 November 5

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November 5

Junk Mail

People avoid junk mail like its a cancer. I feel the opposite way, I adore junk mail, not the email kind though. Could someone inform me of a way to get on a ton of mailing lists so that tons of people will send me junk mail? I have a PO box where I live which is at a college dorm and we don't have mail boxes how would I go about getting on junk mail lists? The junk mail doesnt have to be like crappy stuff it could be interesting magazines that are free and the sort. I hope I made my point, I am not very good with English yet since I moved to USA. Thank you very much. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 204.42.31.250 (talk) 01:35, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

Donate small amounts of money to various charities. My Mother receives about a solicitation a day in the mail because she has occasionally given to charities. She also receives endless phone calls, and just the other night while I was visiting she had a children's cancer charity call her three times within two minutes when she said she was not donating to charities other than the Wounded Warriors. If you register an account and email me your address and phone number I'll have her pass it along. Of course I'll want to verify your identity before I do so. μηδείς (talk) 02:15, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

Don't know where you are, but in the UK, typically completing a lifestyle survey is the way to go. They sell their very valuable data on. Make sure you indicate that you don't mind your data being passed on. Another way is to make sure you're on the UK electoral roll. Finally, request some catalogues, especially from the types of mail-order companies that advertise in magazines, eg those that come with weekend newspapers. In all jurisdictions, by proving yourself responsive to direct mail (ie buying stuff) will encourage direct marketers who know their stuff to target you by mail. --Dweller (talk) 11:47, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

When one vote really mattered?

Is there a list on Wikipedia or elsewhere of cases where the final result of an election or other ballot was literally resolved by a single vote? The odds of it happening in any particular ballot are low, but across the world we vote so often that I assume it must happen at least occasionally. Dragons flight (talk) 02:18, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

List of close election results is an article at Wikipedia that (while not pretending to be comprehensive) does list many elections that would fit your criteria. Indeed, there were several listed there that were a literal dead heat. --Jayron32 02:35, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

Also found this article which notes the 1910 election for New York’s 36th Congressional District, NOT mentioned in the Wikipedia article. (in case anyone wants to add it). --Jayron32 02:39, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

According to my battered old 1984 edition of the Guinness Book of Records a national election has been swung by one vote: "In Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania) on 18 Jan 1961...the Afro-Shirazi Party won by a single seat, after the seat of Chake-Chake on Pemba Island had been gained by a single vote." --Antiquary (talk) 13:19, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

Ah, such memories. <rant alert> <lamentation alert> Even by 1984 it was starting to go down hill, but the older editions of Guinness were so much more pleasurable (hence readable) and actually useful than the modern-day ones, which are all about flashy pictures and graphics and zillions of confusing colours, at the expense of quality. I used to read and re-read Guinness because it was so engaging. Now, I can't be bothered. And there are huge chunks of fascinating detail that is no longer included, presumably because they think it wouldn't interest modern readers. So sad to see what's become of a great institution. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 19:24, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

I liked when they would slip little editorial comments in. My favorite was the record for divorces, held at that time by the late Thomas Manville. They said, "He made his fortune in asbestos, which he unfortunately could not take with him." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:29, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

E-mailing your articles

How can I e-mail your articles? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Alaskatexas (talk • contribs) 17:31, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

Send the recipient the URL for the article. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:56, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

This question would be better on the Help Desk (WP:HD), but, for an individual article, click on "Download as PDF" under "print/export" in the sidebar. You can then download and e-mail the article in PDF format. To download more than one article at a time, you can create a PDF "book" containing multiple articles - see Help:Books for details. Tevildo (talk) 17:58, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

I'd generally go with Bugs' method, as cutting and pasting the address of the page into your email is quicker and less of a burden on the system. The recipient can then click on it, if your email system makes it into a link, or they can cut and paste it to their address bar otherwise.

The only reason I can see to go the other way is if you want to create a snapshot of the article as it was at the time, say to show somebody an example of vandalism. The link, of course, will show the current state of the article, whenever it is clicked. It's also possible to send a link to any point in the article's history, but I won't go into the details of how to do that, unless you are interested. StuRat (talk) 23:26, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

There are places where Wikipedia access is blocked (some businesses, for example - people living in Cuba) - in those cases emailing an article might make sense. SteveBaker (talk) 00:00, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

Also I'm not sure if it's worth considering something being "less of a burden on the system", although it depends what you mean.

If you mean for wikipedia, well we have a page Wikipedia:Don't worry about performance which discourages editors from giving much concern about performance, except as it relates to improving readers (and other editors). While as I said, it's written for editors, the gist of it applies to readers as well. Sysadmins will generally set limits if and when needed but when they explicitly provide a function like the save to PDF one, the fact using it is a bigger load on the servers shouldn't be a concern. (There may be exceptions where you should at least speak to the sysadmins first. Also, limits here includes not only hard coded limits where you simply can't do something, but soft ones where you're asked not to do something by sysadmins like robots.txt and the stuff mentioned in Wikipedia:Database download for any scraping bots.)

If you mean less of a burden on the sending and receiving email system, that often that isn't worrying about either, unless whoever is hosting your email system has told you to, or you have reason to think the receiver may want to worry about it. It is worth remembering that while many of the popular email systems like gmail allow large storage capacity and relatively large attachments, some people may still have fairly limited systems. Also anyone who downloads all emails including attachments will have to download your PDF, and not everyone has super fact connection.

In fact that's probably the biggest reason why you should consider a link, it may be the person is not particularly interested in your article, if you send them a link they can choose whether or not to retrieve it. If you send it by email, in some ways and cases, they're forced to retrieve it. With many systems and people, they won't care much more than the annoyance of receiving the email with link or PDF although it may mean they're more likely to delete your email than just archive it, but this won't always be the case. (Note that this also applies to censorship cases. If you don't have good reason to think the person may want to view the article, consider that if you send it by PDF while it's possible you're bypass censorship restrictions, it's also possible you'll trigger some sort of red flag. This could happen with a link as well, but I suspect in many cases it will only happen if you actually try to view the link.)

The other reason as somewhat hinted above to use a link is that a link will mean the person gets to see the latest (or close to the latest in some cases) version of the article which will hopefully be (but not always) the best. Note that if you do want to send a specific version with a link, there's no reason to complicate matters. Just either copy the link under "permanent link" on "tools" to the left or open it then copy the link from the address bar. If you can work out how to save to PDF from the wikimedia interface, you should be able to work out how to get a permanent link since they're both just under different sections of the same menu. There is one issue namely that the permanent link won't necessarily give you the exact same page due to the effect of templates (and also the risk of deletions). However there's no way to do that other than to print or save to PDF, or use an external archiving service (or save the HTML locally).

Nil Einne (talk) 18:13, 7 November 2014 (UTC)