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user:maveric149 Talk archive 2: Tuesday, May 28, 2002 through Wednesday July 24, 2002

NOTE: The following is out of date as of the move to wikipedia:Software Phase III. The counter for all pages was reset and user pages no longer included in the list.
User:Sodium has informed me that my user page is (for some reason that completely escapes me) one of the most popular.

Yeah, just for chuckles on February 8th, I checked the most popular page and saw that my little ol' neck of the woods is right next to: Vulva (since I am gay, this seems funny as hell to me), Wikipedians (makes sense -- I am logged in contributing here and there about 10 hours a day now), Pornography (damn! How'd you guys find out? ;), September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/City of New York casualties (heavy; kinda bums me out...), Beryllium (also makes sense -- I've been working a great deal on this article), user:Maveric149 (:thats me:), Mercury/wiki.phtml (don't have any idea what this is for...), Fire ant (a cool article mostly written and maintained by User:SteveSmith), Lupercalia (luper-what? Sounds like something I should have learned geting my BS in BS), Playboy (Well, at least I am more popular than Playboy. tee-he!) and finally, Music (a subject I am very fond of; especially musicals -- no just kidding).

Since this page is one of the most un-imaginative ones I maintain, the fact that it is one of the most popular is rather embarrassing. It's kinda like having a really messy living room and keeping the curtains open at night. Unfortunately, I can't just pull the curtains here -- I'll have to put some effort into tidying things up around here. Until then, pardon the mess....

I think it is my "fault" that your page is one of the most popular actually... when you listed the case-insensitive user contributions bug on Jimbo Wales Minor Issues With New System, I added a link to your contributions, so naturally people would follw that link and then go back to your user page... Funny how things get popular on the Internet... (quite funny really!) --Chuck Smith

Thanks Chuck. Hopefully when the bug is fixed I will get fewer visitors -- and therefore have less pressure to clean-up my page. --maveric

I generally respond to inquiries placed on this page by placing my comments on the talk page belonging to the submitter. Therefore many of the comments that follow appear to have gone unanswered - this is not the case. (Well, at least not necessarily the case.)

Other messages are in talk archive 1, talk archive 3 and User talk:maveric149

Just popping by to say thanks for the name switch on Musee d'Orsay. -- Tarquin

Hi Maverick, thanks for the feedback on Ulysses. The reason I have the chapter links point to their own pages rather than the existing topics is that, for example the Hades chapter of Ulysses has no literal relationship with Hades. I'm not sure if I'm writing a separate page for each chapter, or whether I should write one long page. I guess I'll know once I've written it!

You might want to include the euro symbol in your cheat characters. --Daniel C. Boyer

Thanks for the welcome, Maveric149. I hope I'll get used to Wikipedia real soon. As a newcomer I'm bound to make mistakes, so please tell me when you discover something I should or shouldn't have done. Thanks! Guy

Thanks for creating the new article Quantum Leap. It's probably a good idea to make sure the names of different articles differ in more than just capitalization. If there's already an article on the phrase Quantum leap, then a new article on the T.V. show should probably be called something like Quantum Leap (tv series) rather than just Quantum Leap. This is the way some other TV articles have been named, and it's less likely to confuse people.--LC

Vaguely possible, but there is an obvious note at the bottom of each page linking to the other uses if someone gets lost. Use of parenthetical disambiguation should only be used when two terms share the same name and capitalization and there are no valid alternates that can be used. This is to ensure easy linking from within other articles so that somebody does not have to write [[Quantum Leap (tv series)|Quantum Leap]] each and every time they want to link to that article -- this would only tend to discourage participation on related articles. Use of the the physics term With Capital Leters Looks Rather Silly And Is Incorrect English Unless You Are Talking About A Proper Noun -- such as the television program. So a disambiguation page at either capitalization would not be appropriate because they mean different things with different capitalization. Therefore there should not be much confusion. --maveric149

Can you erase my password? I deleted my cookies and none of the dozen variations I've tried work. -- Ark

Wow, fancy meeting you here. It was nifty getting a greeting on my talk page...and then to see your name in the diffs for Nirvana, well, I just had to stop by and give you a big shout-out. Looks like you're doing a nifty job here on the 'pedia. --charleschuck

Maveric149 -- I appreciate your recent comment on the talk page for Early Infanticidal Childrearing. If it is within your power to restore more of the deleted talk section, I would appreciate it -- I am specifically concerned with an exchange between Ark and myself involving an excerpt from a book by Suggs. The reason this is useful, I think, is that it provides a concrete example of a text that Ark refers to as proof for his position; by quoting the excerpt, readers can decide for themselves... slrubenstein

Maveric149 -- I went over the reinsertion you did and realized it was from the older "Neolithic Childrearing" page. But the EIC page actually had a couple of feet worth of talk (talk since the page was renamed or moved) as of yesterday that someone -- I assume, but perhaps wrongly, Ark -- somehow deleted. If you can figure out what happened and track it down I would be grateful; it was I admit at times excessive, but I also think it was revealing and informative and ultimately useful.

For various reasons, this issue is very important to me both morally and intellectually. Frankly, I am getting tired of constantly reworking a clearly controversial peice to have a modicum of NPOV. I assume this is the sort of thing the Wikipedia Militia was formed for, and do appreciate you and your comrades attention, slrubenstein

Mav, does Doug (of Reciprocal Theory fame) have a user page? Or does he know how to use Meta? I'd like to work with him on npov-ifying RS of T, but I'm mentally handicapped -- oops, er, I mean I don't know enough physics to understand what the heck he's talking about. I just want to see an NPOV treatment of RS of T.

It should be clear to traditional physics lovers (1) that scientists dismiss it outright, and (2) why scientists object to it. But I'd like it to also show a bit about why RS of T advocates are so fond of it.

Is there any way to do this? Or should I just admit to Doug that it can't be done, and withdraw? Ed Poor, Thursday, June 6, 2002

Mav, You'll excuse me for picking you, but I've been away from the Wikipedia for a while, and yours was the first name I recalled. Last time I was here the Stats page said we were over 33,000 non-sub-pages, but now the figure has dropped to around 28,000. What happened? Cheers, user:Verloren Update: Thanks for the answer!

Can you tell SolKarma to lay off? He's created about a dozen different pages, each containing maybe one or two sentences and links to every other page, instead of a single article about hard drives.--Ark

Thanks for the welcome on my userpage. How was your field trip? a small question, is there anyway a user can tell how many readers have read a page? special:PopularPages only shows the top 50. Would it be possible to put the number of reader in the History? Cheers. user:Ktsquare

Thanx for the answer. I'll make the sugguestion myself so more wikipedians will know about me.--Ktsquare

Sure thing. --mav

(in the former Wikipedia commentary/Wikipedia camaraderie you wrote:) Content moved to meta at Wikipedia camaraderie. Can somebody who knows how to delete / pages delete this page and also tell me how to delete them?

Do the regular delete thing; click the "if you are sure, click here"; when you get the 404 error (which I am pretty sure is a problem with Apache's URL rewriting or the configuration thereof), go to the URL bar in your browser. You fill find a "%2F" -- change it to a "/". Hit return. Bingo! (At least, this works in Mozilla.) --Brion VIBBER

Concerning the new title of Table of Chinese Sovereigns, when will the bugs of the move feature be worked out as history from the previous page will be preserved? --user:Ktsquare

When a page is moved using the move feature, the entire history of edits to that page should be kept under the _new_ name. A page with the _old_ name is then created that redirects to the _new_ name, and that redirect page won't have any old changes in its history because it's actually a new page. If something other than that is happening, I certainly want to hear about it! --Brion VIBBER
GODDAMMIT!!!!!!!!! I shoulda noticed that before... Okay, everybody please don't use the administrative "move page" feature until it's fixed. It resets those automatic-updating timestamps the current time for every single edit in the history... this screws up the sorting when they're displayed in the list, and the half-assed handling of the linked list pointers tends to prematurely cut off the list. Note that the old edits are _not_ missing from the database, and once this is fixed you'll be able to see them again, but with the incorrect date for pages that have already been moved thus. --Brion VIBBER, Sunday, June 16, 2002
I will inform the other sysops I know of that are also using this feature. --maveric149

Yeh man, I didn't even know how to use the "move" command or where to find it. Where can I find it (I'll use it after the software's updated)? I want to help move the rest of the country subpages, since it's something I set into motion (before we all knew better). Cheers, Koyaanis Qatsi, Sunday, June 16, 2002

Hi, Maveric. As you already noticed I tried to work on some kind of standard for the country entries (similar to your work on the beryllium). Once a "fixed" format has been agreed upon (which is not yet the case of course), would it be possible to make it a "policy" or something like it? It will give the Wikipedia a more authorative look if articles on similar topics have the same information build-up, and this can be achieved for the country and elements pages, since there are only so many of them, and all the pages already exist, in one form or another. Other candidates for such establishing an editing policy are plenty: the planets, US states (or maybe sub-divisions of countries in general).

The country pages should contain most of the relevant information in short form, which is mostly available from the World Factbook data. We can structure this information. For all the details, there's still more than enough work on all the subpages - which reminds me; the /Transnational issues pages don't appear to be very useful in common, and if they are, they'd be better of at the main country page or in history.

Any ideas on this? Greets, jheijmans

Thanks for the note, which I just found! You may have answered my first question.

1. Where do I ask for help? Is there a general location, or do I ask an individual, like you?

2. Sometimes I have a great deal of trouble connecting. Actually wiki doesn't respond. Is this usual? When's the best time to work here?

Thanks for the nice words about the articles I've submitted. Actually my keyboard has chronic diarrhea and I just add the periods. Sometimes I do what seems correct and hope somebody else'll do the nitty gritty. I won't tell you how long it took to learn about the pipe = | . I use HTML when the wiki shortcuts don't seem to work for me.

stepnwolf

A question : why fertilisation instead of fertilization ? Where is it written that american language is the one that goes over the british one ? Please, do not change the fertilization I used (I redirect it to fertilizer to avoid ambiguity) until you gave me a proper answer (another page of recommandations ?) :-)
user:anthere

You have it reversed: the "z" spelling is American and the "s" spelling is British. The reason it is the British spelling is because a Brit is the first one to have created the article. I don't know what you are trying to say about ambiguity and fertilizer.... --maveric
Sorry I was not clear. When I write a page dealing with agriculture or soil, one of the issue is fertilization : meaning input of nitrogen, phosphorous... in the soil to feed the crop. But if I use the word fertilisation (I mix the spelling for google :-)) in the text, and somebody click on it, it leads to a nice picture of a sperm fertilizing an egg. Which as nothing to do with the fertilisation I am talking about. So, to solve the pb right now, I put fertilizer instead of fertilization. OK ? However, what are the options if somebody wants to create a page dealing with fertilisation in agriculture ? --anthere
Oh, and btw, the z and s thing, I misunderstood what you were doing. Please, accept my apologies. -- anthère

RE: your knot greeting me to 'pedia

Thanks for your offer of Q&A. Picking up a little Wiki editing here and there. I am interested in your opinions: am I adhering to the page naming and capitalization conventions, should link entries for 'knot' be 'knot|knots' (with the double brackets of course), any other editing tips I could start using that would assist?

Just figured out #REDIRECT and how to embed my handle Satsun this evening. That gives you an idea of the low voltage I'm at presently.

Would I be wise to back up each page. Are content attacks common? (not talking about real input of course)

I consider a goal of 300+ articles (with pics) on knots for a start reasonably ambitious so I want to prevent any easily avoided oversights.

Satsun 18 JUNE 2002

If someone saw a violation or vandalism on a page, where is the link for putting an IP under close inspection ? as seen here: History of Indochina Thanx. --- Ktsquare

Maybe an addition for the elements template: a short history of its discovery, its uses and maybe an etymology of its name. There's some stuff on this at Discovery of the chemical elements that you might use for this. -- jheijmans

Another remark on Calcium: in the template discussion on Periodic table/Temp, it is said not to include isotopes with a half-life of less than a week (have no idea why, though). At the Calcium table, there's one of 4 days. jheijmans

Yeah I know -- I just didn't want to leave a gap in isotopic succession. Also compared to the milisecond lifespan of nearly all the unlisted isotopes, 4 days is pretty long. --maveric

Again on the elements template: why is the density given at 293 K, and not 298 K (which would be ST)? jheijmans

Opps! Thanx,i will change that. --mav

Hey, maveric149, I've been meaning to post a "Thanks!" for nominating my English grammar rewrite to the votes for article of the day queue. I'm flattered by the compliment! Pgdudda

Dear maveric149, you may delete this as soon as you read it, but I seem to have inadvertently caused some kind of problem in the Cajun entry by trying to help the author make it better. See the Cajun/Talk page for evidence. I guess I'm better at entries than Talk, but I feel really bad about this.Ortolan88


Hi maveric,

what's the status on the (city, state/country) debate? It seems that some have figured out that all cities should be moved to articles name thus. Is there a page with a debate on this going on - if so, I'd like to donate my two cents as well... regards, jheijmans

Hi maveric, thanks for the redirects of Scheele. H. Jonat

Mav, I just happened to come across that. No problem. To the spelling of names. Carl, Casimir or other names with C or CH was the earlier spelling in the German language. These names are now spelled with a "K".

sample, place names: Coeln=Koeln (Cologne), Crossen=Krossen, Culm=Kulm, Chemnitz Churfuerst= Kurfuerst or Chur (city in Switzerland) Celtic in German spelled Keltisch. The C or Ch's were and are pronounced just like a K.

Spelling the name Carl , with a C is now the American (English) way. H. Jonat

Yep, and that's why I changed it to the "C" spelling and redirected the others there. The "C" spelling also got about 20,000 more Google hits too. --mav

Mav, please help me out. I have managed to write from an acceptably NPOV on homosexuality, despite being 100% against it. I contributed to articles on sexual orientation and another (whose name temporarily eludes me) on the state of research into a possible genetic bases for homosexuality. Even though you are (as you say) gay, you have not objected to these of my contributions.

On the other hand, when I have written on global warming, you and especially AxelBoldt object frequently. You have called my mention of troposphere temperature measurements (from weather balloons and satellites), which contradict the IPCC model predictions, "harping". But I am operating on the assumption that if a theory X predicts phenomena B and C -- but only phenomenon B apparently occurs while C does not occur at all -- then there is a serious problem with the theory.

There are also problems with the placement and reading of thermometers in weather stations, especially those in inhabited areas. And also the selective use of data.

The worst problem is the apparent abuse of the peer review process by the IPCC. I have read reports by prominent scientists and researchers that after the technical portion of the 1995 IPCC report was peer reviewed, it was changed to make it conform to the Summary for Policymakers which the national representatives voted for. This in itself would seem to indicate that the Summary is nothing other than a political consensus. Moreover, a survey of the scientists who contributed to the technical part of the report showed that 60% disagreed with the Summary for Policymakers.

Crucial sentences deleted from the peer-revieved technical portion of the report directly contradict the "balance of evidence suggests a discernible human effect" pronouncement of the Policymakers Summary. A lead writer said that such changes were made to make the technical part conform to the Policymakers Summary. Shouldn't it be the other way around?

I care about the environment as much as any man. If there is scientific evidence for warming, or for a warming trend, or for harmful anthropogenic warming, I certainly would support its being in the Wikipedia.

But if there is faulty or suppressed data, or if predictions fail to conform to later observations, shouldn't these facts also be in the Wikipedia?

Larry's not here any more, so I'm asking you to clarify Wikipedia policy. I may be a gadfly and a whistle-blower, but I'm not a troublemaker. I will follow whatever guidelines your website requires: just clarify them for me, will you?

Ed Poor, Wednesday, June 26, 2002

That's alot to take in right now Ed -- I'll have to get back to you this weekend when I have more energy to respond. BTW, this isn't my website, or Axel's or even Jimbo's -- wikipedia belongs to all the contributors. --maveric149


The problem is, that in addition to the IPCC there is a large and growing body of evidence in support of the theory (some would argue fact) that the release of man-made greenhouse gases have had a positive thermal forcing in the atmosphere. The scientific literature is full of such accounts (many of which I have already stated to you before) -- it is the rare study or report that goes counter to this body of evidence, and almost always in some minor way, that gets greatly exaggerated and simplified by the time it gets on the cover to the New York Times (such is the media).
Although I strive not to be, scientists are largely specialists in niche disciplines, and trying to get scientists to 100% agree on any non-scientist readable executive summary of a huge body of evidence is bound to oversimplify data, especially their own data, in the report -- so I am not surprised that 60% of IPCC scientists have issues with the summary for policy makers (in the same way as a doctor would have major problems with a patient report that stated the patient suffered a heart attack instead of a minor myocardial infarction with 93% blockage of the third branch of the left anterior descending coronary artery).
If what you state is true, then the public at large, the news media, I, and nearly every other scientist in the world must either be part of a huge conspiracy or they have been duped by a conspiracy -- so you can understand both my, and Axel's extreme skepticism (scientists in general have knee-jerk reactions against allegations of conspiracy theories anyway). If were some conspiracy, then some upstart news reporter would have made his or her career years ago by breaking the story. Please go ahead and provide links to your evidence and I will review this.


BTW, most of what I have done in the homosexuality-related articles is fill in omitted facts and clarified issues where you and others have presented datasets that obviously have major selection bias. Just because I have not destroyed those entries and rewrote them does not mean that I don't still have major issues with them. All it means, is that I have other interests and things I would like to do with wikipedia -- I am an American, male, Caucasian, biologist who just so happens to be homosexual.
Besides, much of the controversy over homosexuality is based on opinion with some, but still scant evidence to support the claims of gay rights activists and very little evidence supporting the other side. So given the quality of data on both sides, it is still appropriate to have large chunks of those articles stating the anti-view. The same is not the case with global warming -- there is no comparison. Even though there are some issues with the climate models (and these are already mentioned), these conclusions are almost certainties: that the earth has warmed significantly in the last 100 years or so (urban heat island effect or no), human derived greenhouse gas concentrations have substantially risen, and that this trend is projected to increase in the future causing environmental harm.
The policy of NPOV is to give weight to all sides of issues so as to reflect the state of knowledge of an issue. If Axel and I let you, you would tip the balance in favor of a view this is a highly controversial issue with scientists and a great many earth scientists don't agree that humans have had any discernible effect on the radiative properties of the atmosphere == which is not an accurate reflection of the situation. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you lie -- its just that you are highly selective in which data you choose to present (just as with the homosexuality articles) and your presentation of that data oftentimes gives it more weight than it should probably deserve.

--mav

Maveric, should there be redirects to the elements articles with their common abbreviations? Don't know if it'll be of any use, plus that many (especially the single-letter ones) may conflict with the letters. Just a thought. jheijmans, Thursday, June 27, 2002

I don't think that would be possible -- every one I can think of would end-up being a disambiguation page (which might be interesting in and of itself). --mav

Just in case you didn't notice (I'm sure you did :), I made a very minor tweak to the element format; I replaced the font-and-boldface headers with wiki-coded "===" headers. The result looks exactly the same, but is more semantically meaningful and looks "cleaner" for future editors to work with. Bryan Derksen

I wish you hadn't done that. That particular issue was discussed and it was decided to go with the format that was agreed on. Now the text under "Notable Properties" does not line up with the top of the table. The whole idea of having a template was to make table and heading creation a snap. Please change this back to what was agreed on. --mav
I did it for you. In general, I agree that using wiki headings is the best thing to do, but this is a special case where wiki headings didn't cut it. --mav
Well, whatever; I guess it's mainly just my dislike of font tags showing through. I did change the teplate over, so it would indeed have been a snap to stick with wiki headings, but since I'm not the one doing the element articles it's no biggie. Bryan Derksen
Oh, I should note, my dislike of font tags isn't that they're "illegal" (though "font" has been deprecated in HTML 4.0, so I expect they will be one day :), but because they're purely presentational tags that have no semantic meaning. It's an aesthetic thing, so I don't expect everyone to share my dislike. :) Bryan Derksen
I understand that you only had good intentions. It is important to encourage the use of wiki headings by making sure they are used wherever they make sense, but sometimes the ease of their use isn't needed -- like in this case where I have coded them once for a couple specific reasons and will reuse them 109 times. No hard feelings. :) --maveric149
Heh. I would have asked before changing, but Wikipedia had just woken up after a loooong and boring freeze-up and I felt a rush of accomplishment. Anyway, to make up for this and our disagreements over disambiguation philosophy, I think I'll see if I can complete the Isotope tables tonight. I've got the last set very nearly colored, and then I just need to swap the colors around with search-and-replaces. Then I can try to figure out where to put them. :) Bryan Derksen
Cool, I look forward to seeing the finished table. --mav

Hi Maverick,

At the very bottom of the knot page I give an ISBN for a book. It has picked up a strange link to an external web page some how. Please visit knot. I'm curious how is this happening since the text has no such link. Any insights are appreciated. I've copied it here for your convenience.

All The Knots You Need Lee,R.S. Algrove Publishing I've only been t ISBN 0-921335-47-4

Thanks, Satsun

What time zone are you in? I'm in EST (& suffer from chronic insomnia). Cheers, Koyaanis Qatsi

PST -- 3 hours ahead and getting ready for bed. I also suffer from insomnia, but I have to force myself to go to bed soon -- I have a 7:40 Amtrak train to catch for a meeting in Oakland, California. Night! :) --mav

Eh, I'm going to call it a night soon too. Have fun in Oakland. I've only been to Palm Desert, Palm Springs, Hollywood, and central L.A., and found each of them repugnant in their own special way. SanFran seems like it might be cool though. What's in Oakland? Koyaanis Qatsi

Not much really -- there is the Oakland Coliseum where the A's and Raiders play, and a former Governor of California, Jerry Brown is the city's mayor. Brown has done a great job -- before his mayorship, the city was kinda the armpit sister city of San Francisco (which is across the bay) with the supper rich living in Oakland Hills (also the site of a devestating firestorm several years ago) and the supper poor living near the city core. Much redevelopment has gone on and I am going to attend a meeting in one of those redeveloped areas. --mav

Hi Mav. I found your message regarding naming conventions for pre-Roman rulers. I then looked at the naming convention pages, but couldn't find any reference to the limitation that you mention. I guess I just missed something! Your point about why the Xxx of Yyy format is not required for the pre-Romans is well taken. Nevertheless, there are times when our post-Roman conventions might even be helpful for pre-Roman times. I didn't start my changes with Cleopatra but with an article on Ptolemy III Euergeter I which I redirected to remove the cognomen. I then proceede through everything I could fint in the Ptolomaic philadelphiocracy. (I mostly avoided the other dynasties.) For now I would tend to consider that applying that naming convention to pre-Romans is an option to be considered on a case by case basis where change still implies responsibility for broken links. Eclecticology, Sunday, July 7, 2002

Thanks, Mav. It was getting kinda tedious already to keep removing that. Danny

NP --mav

I'm at a loss. I honestly don't know how to progress with my film entries, and don't even know if I should continue, because I honestly don't understand what I've done that's wrong. Can you PLEASE enlighten me? -- Zoe

It's alright - you haven't done anything wrong. All you have done is create some great articles! :) Other users are just slightly reorganizing them so that they look like other great film articles they have seen in wikipedia. I left some more coments for you in Talk:The Thin Man. -- mav

Mav - thanks for the assist on ObjectPAL, I'm brand new to Wiki, and love the idea. Obviously, it'll be a little while before I actually know what I'm doing. Was the external link to Corel.com a bad idea? (I saw that you edited it out). Thanks again for the nice welcome to a total newbie! - Gjalexei
p.s. I can see how cool an open-source encyclopedia can be. In my short time here, it's totally addicting!!!!

LOL - Been bitten by the GNU wiki bug too eh? I've come to accept that fact that I am a hopelessly addicted wikipediholic. --mav

7.11.02 1610 - Mav: This open source encyclopedia is an awesome living example of the viral growth of living information. Thanks again for being gentle with a newbie... btw, at times the server seems to be v-e-r-y slow in serving pages. Are there plans to upgrade the host? --Gjalexei

I'm not overly critical, all I said was that having two articles called "Tale of Two Cities" had confused me, which it had, and that I thought one would be better, which I do. I thought the talk pages were the place to discuss things with authors. Other people have been landing all over that contributor and changing her contributions right out from under her without so much as a by-your-leave. I didn't do that. I raised what I still think is a reasonable point. I certainly didn't expect to hear from you before the contributor had a chance to reply. She didn't seem that upset.

I commend to your attention the following from philosopher Sidney Hook: "Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments." And why not do it on my talk page, not hers? It would be impolite for me to make any answer to your remarks there. Ortolan88, Saturday, July 13, 2002

I put the table in the Salmonella page before I realized that we were using different colours for different kingdoms. I have no problem with the concept. Be that as it may, the gray that you suggest for Monera ended up being a dark blue. Eclecticology, Sunday, July 14, 2002

Thanks for rearranging the Sainfoin page - it looks great. I'll use that as a template for my future submissions. Ramin Nakisa.

I've been learning to use the classification boxes and the results have been interesting. Being outside the box is sometimes the best influence for thinking outside the box. Of course, I tried to push the system a bit. I chose to workn on a small order Callitrichales with its two families of one genus each. I tried to include all the common names and synonyms that I could find for the species with the result that the table spread across the entire page in the Callitrichaceae article. (I didn't even try to reconcile the different combinations of hyphens, spaces and nothings that I saw in "water-star-wort")

One thing that I questioned as I played in my user sandbox to make the template work foir me was turning all the classification names into wikis. These terms will repeat on every page. If somone wants an overview of what these terms mean it should be sufficient to clisk on Scientific classification. Furthermore, since these terms all require disambiguators, it becomes just one more problem in trying to keep things simple.


Please look at what I've done and comment accordingly. Eclecticology, Sunday, July 14, 2002

I have absolutely no idea which of the common names for water starworts is most widely used. My impression is that different names are used in different places, or (based on my reading of the Latin) the different names at one time applied to the different synonyms. At one time they may have been considered as separate species.

Callitrichaceae is a family not a class. There does seem to be some uncertainties over wher you show a one genus family. I chose to put it into a family page, because it's more important to have article for all familie rather than all genera.

The problem with the piping approach is that hides the common names from the list. In the approach that you suggest, where common-name problems are resolved at the species page that could work quite well. Realistically, we may wait a long time before those species articles are written, and it will take a lot more manpower than the four of us that have been active in this thread recently could ever provide - even if we all abandon our many other topics of interest. After consideration, this is why I didn't bother to treat the species as links at all.

I have no problem with the "C. (species)" format, but earlier today when I put the table in the Salmonella table usinf "S. (species" somebody saw fit to expand them. I can live with either approach.

I'll wait until the "real template" is functioning, before I say anything more about the classification links. I'll give them a chance to work. Thanks Eclecticology, Monday, July 15, 2002

New standards digest in place for your vote! JHK

Thanks for the welcome, mav! You commented on my title for the Department of Energy entry and I have a question. The entry has that name because I created it from the "Most Wanted" page and that was the way it was beign referred to. What is the best way to deal with that? I imagine I can RTFM for how to make redirections or what-have-you, but I don't know what the unofficially appropriate way of dealing with the situation is. Marknau

I found garbage on Bennelong and erased it. Then I checked and found that it's a place in Australia and added that. But in the meantime, the Epopt had deleted the page. Had he been a bit later, he would have deleted the stub. -PierreAbbat

I admit, it was a close call, but nothing bad happened. --mav

Mav, you might want to cut back on the page renaming for a bit, there's a new and even funner bug that munges the edit histories! --Brion VIBBER

Will do. Sigh... --mav
Bug has been fixed! Huzzah! --Brion VIBBER 12:12 Jul 22, 2002 (PDT)

Hi Mav, sorry to bother you, but please take a look at the new Copernicus piece by Helga. If this is her original work, I am the long-lost heir to the Prussian throne. (Oh, and thanks for the help with the bald eagle the other night. Thought I would take a shot at the taxonomy tables. Maybe we could use a template for things like that.) Danny

Mav, someone (not logged in) put this in a recent summary:

"Prefer visible URL's for printable and 'paperback' version of Wikipedia"

I have been carefully "prettifying" external links by making the URL's invisible whenever I edit something. I do think visible URLs are ugly and also that a paperback version of the wikipedia is a chimera. As for the printable version, I can see the point, but wiki is a web creation. Print is an add-on. Comment? Ortolan88 18:56 Jul 22, 2002 (PDT)

I'm not Maveric, but I do have an opinion on the matter: the software should be quite capable of automatically adding a "webliography" as endnotes to the for-print version. There's no reason to do this manually. --Brion VIBBER
I agree - Keep on "prettifying" external links Ortolan and let the software gurus figure out just how to make this work better for the printable versions of articles (besides a simple Google search of the visible title of an external link will yield the article anyway). BTW, at this point a "paperback version of wikipedia" is far off indeed (if not a complete joke) and I don't think we should be thinking that far ahead when basic things like the elements in the periodic table still need to graduate from definition status (sadly, many of them are not even stubs yet). --mav
I concur, we shouldn't care about things like the print appearance when that can easily be fixed by the software. Maybe the "prettifying" can even be done automatically (that is, only show [1] instead of an URL)? Jheijmans 00:56 Jul 23, 2002 (PDT)
I would prefer we just let humans decide what if the best way a URL should be displayed in an article since there are valid reasons why it is sometimes best to display an actual URL. --mav

If the software could make little anonymous links like [1], that would be cool. It would be cooler if, lacking any other identifying string, it popped out to the URL and picked up the page title (but let's don't slow things down right now). If anyone has a reason to display the URL, maybe they should note it in the talk page. I'd be interested in hearing the reason. Ortolan88 07:16 Jul 23, 2002 (PDT)

Hi maveric, saw you moved the article Van to Van, Turkey. Is that to make ready for disambiguation with the vehicle, or has putting regions in this format also become Wikipedia policy (like with cities)? Regards, Jheijmans

Mav -- when did we move from naming conventions -- which have always been strongly suggested but unenforceable (except by peer pressure and the fact that some people are willing to do cleanup work) GUIDELINES to a "this is how we do things here so you have to do it that way, too" POLICY? I think that, if you read through all the early stuff put out by Jimbo and Larry, as well as really old-timers like LDC, Magnus, and Malcolm, the consenses was that the only really hard and fast rules were NPOV and respect for other wikipedians. Granted, it's hard to give a lot of respect to some of the more crackpot types, but that's usually because they refuse to follow NPOV or even listen to, if not participate in, discussions on generally accepted conventions and standards. Some of these seem to have been pretty much unilateral on your part, for example, and actually go against earlier agreements that this was an English-language, not an American-language, wikipedia -- like the movie title thing. Film and Movie are used interchangeably in the US, but not necessarily in other English-speaking countries, yet you've been pretty heavy-handed in telling people not to use "Film". I know it could lead to aesthetically annoying inconsistency, and even duplication of pages, but that's easily remidied with redirects, etc.

anyway, you can give this whatever value you think it's worth, but I'm of the opinion that we should concentrate on good content, rather than focusing on rules for rules' sake (except NPOV, of course)-- especially when most rules are really only guidelines. This doesn't mean not calling people on crap contributions (Lord knows I have no problem with that), but there's a great danger in allowing a set of artificial constructs to box in the contributions of others. Take Care JHK

From the top of Recent Changes: "Wikipedia policy (especially naming conventions, neutral point of view),..". Furthermore I wasn't the one who developed the movie naming convention and do not go seeking about for articles to enforce this convention on -- I merely change the ones I happen to see. Besides, the word "film" has more than one valid meaning in English whereas "movie" only has one (and with the advent of digital movies the word ?film? may become an anachronism). Therefore "movie" is a superior disambiguator. But this is not something I feel strongly about (If I did then all the (film) articles would have been changed over by me some time ago -- as were most of the Improperly Capitalized Page Titles) and I am willing to discuss changing to the more international ?film? ? but this should be discussed on the mailing list, not here. Consistency is more important than a particular usage is and conventions are needed so that article naming and linking can be consistent and predictable without the need for redirects as a general rule. Otherwise there will be either broken links or worse duplicated articles. When the project first started-out naming conflicts were rare and naming conventions were in flux and were not particularly important. But as the project grows consistent naming of articles that they are naturally disambiguated will increasingly be important to avoid conflicts. --mav

I don't disagree with any of that, Mav -- I'm just saying that you often seem to be a bit heavy-handed in applying "the rules" -- in a way that could scare off newbies. Also, you have to remember that we wrote the policy/guidelines. They are vague because they are unenforceable -- except by Jimmy. I also am all for correcting, but in less of a "my way or the highway" tone. Rmember, we're not correcting someone who has less expertise or is NPOV -- just helping people who may not have noticed that there are conventions to take a step back and get to know the community and its standards. JHK
OK, valid point I will tone things down some more so as not to seem blunt (remember the rampage I went on with the Improperly Capitalized Page Titles? -- I have definitely improved from that time and will try to improve more). It is a personality trait of mine to sometimes not consider the feelings of others and to only focus on what I think is logical (I have to force myself most of the time to be nice so that my point can come across). --mav
JHK, if you read the article on naming conventions, you will actually see the word "policy" mentioned there, but also "guidelines". The difference between the two seems to be very vague, since if you do not follow the "guidelines", you are usually corrected by somebody that want Wikipedia to remain consistent (and helping the ease of creating links). Pointing out these conventions/guidelines/policies to new people helps, because live becomes easier for them (writing articles will be easier) and for the already existing authors, since they have less work to do, and maybe some helpers around.
Personally, I don't think all of the conventions are the best solutions, but they are all good/reasonable ones that were written down after discussion between knowledgable and reasonable people. Therefore, I find it reasonable to keep up with existing policies, try to contribute to forming new ones and encourage others to follow them as well. In that way, Wikipedia will become what - I hope - everybody wants: an encyclopedia. Jheijmans 09:54 Jul 23, 2002 (PDT)
Thanks for the vote of support -- I know we often disagree on what the specifics of conventions should be. :-) --mav

Vicki and Mav, don't fight! I disambiguated van. Like it? --Ed

Looks like a good start -- although I haven't heard back yet about the city or region status of Van in Turkey. If it is only a region in modern times I would prefer it not be in the [Van, Turkey] format since this format is used for city names (yes I was the one who made the move but there was an objection to it). --mav

I made van point to [[van (vehicle}]] and Van (Turkey). Hope this helps. Ed Poor

Maveric, the first external link in your dipluran article (and maybe several other classification articles?) isn't working, it says something about being restricted. Jheijmans 00:42 Jul 24, 2002 (PDT)

That's weird - Although it was Eclecticology that put that link in so I am clueless. I wouldn't be surprised if public access to that page was only recently pulled for some idiodic "Homeland Security" paranoia crap (yeah terrorists are going to use a taxonomic database to do their thing). --mav

Could be, though this http://www.ncbi.nih.gov/Taxonomy/taxonomyhome.html/ link appears to be working (at least I get a page), so maybe the link simply changed? Jheijmans

Yep - Eclecticology just fixed the link. --mav

Maveric, I just put up a proposal at Talk:China, and I guess you have something to say about it - at least I'd like you to :-) In case you miss it because of the messy Recent Changes, I remind you here. Regards, Jheijmans 07:14 Jul 24, 2002 (PDT)

Talk continued at user talk:maveric149/archive 3
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