User talk:Mav/archive 4

User talk:Maveric149 Archive 4 covering Friday September 7, 2002 through Monday September 30, 2002

Previous talk: Archive 3, Next talk: Archive 5

Hey....Rodney is going to be staying in Santa Rosa tonight, so he wont be coming by tonight. Talk with ya soon. Laterz

Sure. Love ya. -- mav

Might be time for a talk archive #3, mav. The page does take quite awhile to load and to save. --KQ 13:50 Sep 7, 2002 (UTC)

Yup - it's a time to do that yes it is! Done. -- mav

Mav, could you put your 2 cents in on birth/death date format over on Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style? I'm a little confused about what's being recommended. --Brion

Well, at least 1 and a half. ;) --mav

Hey Mav, I'm planning to put maps into all the CA county articles that show their locations within the state. I put a sample in Los Angeles County; I'm hoping for a little feedback before I save and upload 58 of them and discover they're all wrong and/or hideous. :) If you have any thoughts on the matter, please let me know. --Brion

I like the idea -- very much so. However, it just may be me but the extended lateral line at the top of the map and the other trailing lines at the bottom bug me. I love the idea and the simplicity of the map otherwise though. -- mav

(Snip, snip) How's it now? --Brion

How about a state plane projection in NAD 1923 -- just kidding, it looks great. --mav

Hello Maveric, are you the Wiki cop? I can assure you I am neither a miscreant nor a vandal. But I am a newbie. I thought I was doing something useful in de-orphaning about 70 pages. I fully intended to add stubs as I went along, as I have now done with Thule Society. Yesterday I wrote a full article in Sea of Tiberias. The flood of information contained in the plethora of help pages will have to be assimilated by me bit by bit. I'm not as young as you *g*. And any help / tips you can give me will be gratefully and gracefully received. Best wishes Renata

No cops here - just Wikipediholics who really should go to bed before they get too grumpy. :) Generally us old-timers do hate minimal stub pages and we often delete them outright. You might want to develop these short pages in your own personal sandbox (at maybe user:Renata/Sandbox) and then loose them on the 'pedia as soon as they have some encyclopedic info on them. Here is also a neat trick: Type three tildes in a row to sign your posts to talk pages (like this: ~~~). Then see what happens when you type four. Cheers! -- mav

Maveric, I'm also something of an old-time Wikipediholic (who realized he was spending too much time here and took a few months off :)

In the time that I was gone, a lot seems to have changed. For instance, when I was last posting, stub articles were not actively discouraged. Furthermore, when somebody spent a bunch of time doing something slightly controversial, it was generally considered courteous to post to a Talk page and give them some time to defend their decision before summarily undoing their work-- unless that work was something unquestionably harmful like erasure or spamming.

I appreciate your enthusiasm for keeping Wiki together, but there's nothing that can screw up a voluntary community like this more than people stepping on each others toes. Please, in the future, just post something before you undo a chain of editing decisions. Thanks, -Dachshund 05:35 Sep 11, 2002 (UTC) (<-- yet another new thing I discovered upon my return)

I explained things rather clearly in the edit summary and on the associated talk page. Munster is a large geographic body whose only name is just Munster. Furthermore another user added her support. This has been explained already. I do not like to waste time talking about edits when I can just do them (See my INTJ statement above). Parenthetically disambiguating a province will cause more work for anybody who is trying to link to that page. --mav

On second thought I will take your statement under consideration. Perhaps one simple sentence in a talk page by me would have prevented all this unproductive chit-chat. --mav

I've answered your question on my talk page. --Brion 07:12 Sep 12, 2002 (UTC)

Cool, thanks. --mav

Hi Maveric, Who should I talk to about resetting my password. Unfortunately, I do not have an email address associated with my account, so I can't get a new password emailed to me. I haven't been able to access my account for several months. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks, sfmontyo.

The person to talk to about that would be someone with developer access, e.g. user:Lee Daniel Crocker or user:Brion VIBBER or others on a short list I can't remember.

Thanks, I've added an entry to Lee Daniel's user talk page. user:sfmontyo

Mav. ..... "(duplicate names are alreay covered by disamgibuation guidelines)(please don't add conventions without list consensus first)" -- no, they're not, otherwise the commotion at John Brown wouldn't have hapenned. And I wasn't adding a convention, I was putting in a pointer to a random part of wikipedia where discussion had happened -- remember? someone said "make links, don't reorganize meta data into something that's too complex" -- the idea being that when the discussion is raised on Wikipedia:Naming conventions (common names) or on Wikipedia:Disambiguation, people involved will be able to find earlier suggestions and decisions on the issue. Because if they don't, they may decide on something else, and John Brown may end up out of sync. Now could you go back and restore the links I put in, and maybe one on Wikipedia:Disambiguation, now you mention it? ta. -- Tarquin 17:58 Sep 13, 2002 (UTC)

What was placed in the main page of those Wikipedia pages is really talk and should be placed in the corresponding talk for those pages. We needn't clutter the main Wikipedia pages with current issues -- those need to be discussed and worked on on appropriate talk pages and if need on the mailing list. --mav

fair enough. I suggest the talk on John Brown be moved or copied to give background -- Tarquin

Sounds good to me. This is just what I have done before at Talk:Linda Lovelace. --mav

Hey, you seem to be pretty knowledgeable--I have a question but the Village Pump won't let me add it to the bottom--is the page full or something? Anyway, I want to know how to move the contents of one article (Bacchus) to an article that currently redirects to it (Dionysus). All the other Greco-Roman gods have their primary article under the Greek name; Dionysus is the only exception and it irks me. --Tucci528

There are other exceptions too -- most of the Olympian gods for example. These should probably be moved and merged from there parenthetical Latin names (eg Mars (god)) to their Greek names (eg Ares). Those moves/merges move would then make is possible to have the planets at simply [[Mars]], [[Jupiter]], [[Neptune]]... with a disambiguation block on top. --mav

I don't know if that's such a good idea--while the vast majority of the information about either Mars or Ares applies to both, some information about temples, cults and festivals would only apply to Mars. While the stories associated with the god were usually identical, the method of worship was not necessarily. Of course, we could still do as you suggest and just include information on Mars in the Ares article, clearly labelled as applying to Mars and not Ares, but I thought I should point out a downside. Any others' ideas? --Tucci528

Good point. This is one of the reasons why they are now separate. But I do beleive that the two should still be merged - when it comes to the mythology itself there is enough overlap to warrent this. In fact having one article that mentioned the differences between how Greeks and Romans viewed, worshiped and wrote about the gods would be most interesting. If the specific stuff that onely pertains to one or the other gets too long then sub-articles would take care of that. --mav

I suppose it depends on the god. I made a few redirect now, but not Mars, for example. As the state god of the Roman Empire, he probably deserves his own article; he plays significant parts in the founding of Rome, for example, and its early history. Jupiter, though, was identical to Zeus and is currently a redirect page. I suppose, now that I've thought about it a bit, except for Mars, all of the gods could be redirects and nothing would be missed. Of course, that would be confusing and inconsistent--since Ares was not very popular in Greek mythology, maybe Mars could redirect too. -- Tokerboy (who is person you were conversing with out of the three that used the id Tucci528; Tucci himself is no longer using this computer and rarely did much on Wikipedia anyway)

All of the old user pages that just redirect to new user pages should be deleted. Sure things link to them, but they are taking up space in the main namespace, rather than where they should be, which is in the User namespace. I tried to prepair them for deletion, however you didn't seem to agree with my motives. What if one of those old user pages is the same name as something that could make a useful entry? Why should they take up space in the 'pedia so that they can just redirect to their user page? I find quite annoying when I am looking for something relovant in the 'pedia, by using the Random page link, and I get some outdated user page redirect! -- Mbecker

User:The_Cunctator
User:Kpjas
User:Matt Stoker
User:Eob
User:Taw
User:PaulDrye
User:MMGB
User:SJK
User:Simon J Kissane

I agree it would probably be better to just delete them rather than having redirects; but the best way to "prepare" for that is to fix the pages that link to them. Then they can be deleted with little objection. But until then, they should remain redirects. --LDC

Mbecker what you are trying to fix is a bug. If you don't like the fact that the random page function brings you to redirects then file a bug report. If and when something else comes up that has the same name as an old user name then we can worry about fixing ancient talk links. I don't think we would ever have an encyclopedia article named The Cunctator or kpjas or maveric149 and I don't know of anybody of encyclopedia interest that shares the real names you list (except maybe Lee Daniel Crocker and Larry Sanger but those two are Wikipedians). As LDC says, at the very least each old user page link must be fixed before the pages are deleted. --mav

What is the rationale for using titles like "Biological cell" and "Mathematical group" rather than "Cell (biology)" and "Group (mathematics)" ? The second form looks better to me, since no one says "biological cell" or "mathematical group". Mathematicians says "group" in a "mathematics" context and they know what they're talking about. "Group (mathematics)" reflects that usage. -- Is there a Wikipedia page where this policy is discussed ? --FvdP

No "biological cell" and "mathematical group" are not due to any policy. The reason they are titled that way is because the original software Wikipedia used did not have the ability to have parenthetical page titles. As a biologist "biological cell" sounds very wrong to me, but then "mathematical group" doesn't sound so bad. If you feel strongly about this I will make the move (although in general I do not like parenthetically titled pages in order to preserve easy linking -- but I can't think of many cases where "biological cell" would be correct usage). --mav

As a (former) mathematician my feelings mirror yours... "mathematical group" sounds more like an association of mathematicians than a notion in mathematics. I do not feel too strongly about the issue, but "notion (domain)" sounds definitely better to me. --FvdP

Hi again, just read your second entry. Thanks for the tip. I should really have worked that out for myself, but I've only been here less than 2 days and still in a fog. But I'll try and slow down my brain and start thinking logically..... It's a wonderful project to be involved in! thanks again, -- Renata

Yep, this is a cool place indeed. If you need any help don't hesitate to ask. -- mav

Hi, it's Octothorn here. I saw your changes to my pages. Thanks. I am still getting the hang of the rules, but I am enjoying myself. -- Octothorn

No prob. The only real hard and fast rule around here is that this is an encyclopedia and that we should all have fun creating it. :) --mav

Hey man, this is eco. Thanks for the introduction. You'll probably find my historical views are very different than most but I assure you I will always do my best to support anything that I put in the Wikipedia. Hmmm, I can be a little over aggressive in the context of historical debate, I guess that's about it. I'll be adding much more to the martial arts section and likely making a few changes here and there to the history section (in the interest of objectivity and neutrality, of course). This is an awesome project. Keep up the good work!

--Eco

Objective and neutral adds and edits are always most welcome and encouraged. Yep, this is a great project and thanks for the compliment. You keep up the good work too! :) --mav

thanks for the welcome and the tips on editing...i'll try to do a better job! BTW...do you know of any wiki drawing tool? something for drawing maps or diagrams? similar to the twiki draw environment? thanks again--dennis daniels

Nope - I didn't even know about the twiki one. I'm going to post your message on the village pump. --mav

Hey Mav, how am I doing now? --PattonZarate

Looks good to me. --mav

Thanks for the warm welcome. I'm already hooked on this thing, so I guess I'll stay... Damn it made me do nothing constructive for 1/2day!! =) Kynen

But editing Wikipedia is constructive (you must repeat this to yourself 5 times a day while facing the direction of the Wikipedia server in California). ;) --mav

A quick question. I noticed you use the actual character for ² rather than <sup>2</sup>, so why use the actual character instead of the latter option. Is there a reason? Obviously the actual character is simpler, but does it work for all character sets (I don't know, i'm asking)? Just curious. -- Ram-Man

No real reason, just personal preference. It is also a standard I established for several table types. The only real advantage of 2 is that it doesn't mess-up line spacing. I'm not aware of it not working in any browsers. --mav

The "2" character also works in article titles (cf orders of magnitude). As far as problems... I remember someone's browser eating the characters on one page... some 5.x version of Internet Explorer on Macintosh, I think. (Probably did naïve character set conversion; the classic MacRoman character set does not include a superscript 2 character, so they got converted to regular 2s to be put into the edit box.) I don't know if that's a problem on other browsers or more current versions of IE. --Brion 23:03 Sep 21, 2002 (UTC)

Cool. Thanks for the info. --mav

Thanks for the nice message. What an absolutely amazing idea this place is! :) Nevilley

No problemo. This is a great place -- the reason is that we have great people working on it. From what I've seen so far you are just the type of person we need around here. --mav

mav, when you get a chance, could you take a look at Dragonfly? I had a hell of a time trying to hack the table into shape (I pulled it off Odonata and modified it). There are two things to check: 1) does the table look the way it's supposed to? and 2) Is there anything else that should be in the taxobox? I looked dragonfly up on the 3 sites listed in the wikiproject tree of life & none had results on it. Thanks very much, --KQ 01:17 Sep 22, 2002 (UTC)

I have set-up an interim solution at the artilce. --mav

Yeh, but I'm not sure what you're proposing on the talk page. --KQ

Answered on talk page in question. --mav

Mav: please restore my PBP page, which I own copyright on or I *would not* obviously have contributed it.

Thanks! -hkingman

-- "Academic politics are the most vicious precisely because there is so little involved." --Saul Bellow

All you have to do is click on the History link for the page, navigate to your version and then save it. You should also mention that you own the copyright of the page in the edit summary and state that the text is also at your personal webpage. --mav

So are you going to restore the article I submitted Maverick? Or you have more "new user greeting patrol" activities and your busy schedule to keep you frojm it? ;-)

It's really a sad commentary on the state of the 'Net that you actually assume that people violate copyright here, despite ALL the warnings everywhere not to. I hope you haven't completely lost your faith in humanity as part of the "militia" or whatever you call it.

-Hkingman

-- "shoot first, ask questions later."

-- See my statement above. It is in your power to restore the page. Unless an administrator deletes the whole page anybody can restore text. This is a vital skill to learn around here. As for the state of the 'Net comment. Just look at Page titles to be deleted and marvel at all the copyright violations. --mav

I really think you're deleting too many pages. Your definition of "junk" is overbroad. For example, impulse noise is a valid entry name, and its contents somewhat accurate. Thus your deletion violates one of the basic rules for deletion. Similarly, the Flushing Meadows content was not junk--it was largely offtopic, perhaps, but not "s92irfg945ufol P@#IUG#opfg0h(#jo". That's junk.

Also, impulse noise was on the Votes for Deletion page for less than half an hour before you deleted it. That is bad. --The Cunctator

If you consider "Unwanted low-quality loud sound(s)." to be a encyclopedia entry then by all means recreate it. In my book a stub is useless if it does not offer a decent definition and what was provided in impulse sound was not a decent definition (35 bytes doesn't even equal one sentence). We needn't fill our database with completely sub-par entries. These micro and off-topic stubs are created at a rate which is way faster than we have resourses to fix them. --mav

That's not the point. The point is that you're violating the deletion policies. You shouldn't do that. --The Cunctator

What? Deleting useless crap is part of the policy. Stop making unfounded accusations. --mav

From the Wikipedia:Votes for deletion page:

Page titles should stay listed for a minimum of a week before a decision is made

and

In particular, do not add page titles of stubs that at least have a decent defintion and might in the future become articles

You violated both (I hope you can see that the second implies that one should not delete such stubs, even if someone else added it to the page).

And from Wikipedia_policy_on_permanent_deletion_of_pages nowhere does "delete useless crap" appear.

I'm the one that wrote that -- you just have a idiodic notion of what "useful definition" means. The intention was to only list page titles that may not require outright deletion (the "when in doubt" clause). I only use that page when there is some question whether an article should be deleted outright - and that is reflected in the policy. Gesh, all this for an 35 byte stub. --mav

In my opinion this hits the nail on the head - the sentence says "useful definition. Something that could become the first line of the first paragraph of an article is a good stub, and will be kept (I would like it differently, but just like you I do not make the policy on my own). Something that cannot be extended to a good stub or article, but only replaced by it, gets deleted. Andre Engels 13:56 Sep 23, 2002 (UTC)

That policy is long outdated. Common practice is to delete pages that are not articles. Everybody who can delete pages does it, so does mav, so do I. If you don't like it complain about it on the mailinglist. Anyway, we're just "being bold". Jeronimo

Thanks for jumping in on my behalf. You restored my blood pressure to normal levels. :) --mav

My two cents; I would in fact prefer a slower trigger finger on deletions of non-obscene, non-fkasljklsdfjd material -- from time to time I'll expand a sub-stub I saw in Recentchanges into a real stub, only to discover that in the few minutes I've been writing, someone has deleted the page! If I hadn't caught it just in time, I'd never have seen it, would never have been stimulated into writing a stub, the next guy to see it wouldn't have been stimulated into expanding the stub into a short article... and we'd have nothing instead of an article. I know that Cunc has a way with people that makes them defend to the death the opposite of whatever he says, but there is a certain useful core in there from time to time; just because you don't have the time or inclination to expand that sub-stub doesn't mean that no one else does, and it's very presumptuous to make the decision for the rest of us about what is or isn't a waste of time. If it's too small for you to bother with, list it in "votes for deletion"... and wait a while. Somebody might pick it up. It's "votes for deletion", not "list of articles to be immediately removed". --Brion 07:10 Sep 23, 2002 (UTC)

True, but almost every piece of crap could, at some point, be rewritten. However, general opinion appears to be that a non-existing page (the question mark) is much more inviting (at least more people will notice it doesn't exist) than a page saying nothing. I also think that not having pages will be more inviting to editors than having crappy pages (I felt more comfortable in the beginning editing new stuff than rewriting somebody else's, no matter how crappy). Anyway, sometimes I also pick up an article voted for deletion and write it into a stub (although yet some other people oppose stubs...), but usually I just delete crap and copyright violations unless I really think some people might think otherwise. Jeronimo

I agree completely. --mav

I do do that most of the time Brion (and when I deleted the page in question I didn't know it was listed). This deletion happened after a couple of hours of going through the new page list fixing several dozen stubs, finding copyright violations, wikifying new articles and deleting about a dozen junk pages. I do have to admit that the micro-stub in question was the best of the junk bunch but it still is useless in my book. Perhaps others would view that micro-stub deserving of inclusion on the deletion queue, but not me. I will consider this for the future (if for no other reason to prevent unproductive chit chat). Maybe The Cunctator should put his money where his mouth is and clear the new page list every day before I get to it. --mav

I find a stub much more inviting as an editor than a blank page. Why? A) it literally sends an invitation on Recentchanges, so I know that it exists! B) it has particular deficiencies in things that it does not cover or does not cover well, so I have immediate direction on what to write, and C) if it's really dreadful, I'll be inspired to replace it with a complete rewrite.

A deleted page, on the other hand, A) doesn't announce its presence once another deletion knocks it off the top of the log, B) gives no hint towards specific improvements, and C) a continued absence is less offensive than continued presence of a substandard work, so the state of absence is more likely to be tolerated to continue (ie, there is less impetus to improve the work by writing additional text).

The same when dealing with links from other pages; if I see a link to an existing page on a subject I have interest it, I'll probably follow it to see what's there! If it's substandard, I'll probably work on it. If there's a question-mark link, I'm much more likely to simply ignore it. Maybe that's not how you work, but it is how I work, and I doubt I'm the only one. Please don't actively work against us. --Brion

Lets see, Recent Changes has an average of 40 edits an hour and the deletion page gets maybe a couple dozen entries a day. It looks like Recent Changes is an inferior way for useless micro-stubs to announce their presence. There is a reason we have edit links; ? = no useful content. If a stub is useless I will delete it. --mav

Obviously it's working pretty well or they wouldn't be getting seen by the voracious deleters. ;) --Brion

This is probably bordering on thread hijacking, but ... would it be possible to have a marker for stub articles, and a special way to highlight links to them (similar to the links to nonexistent articles getting the '?')? Having '!' would be cute, but then it'd look like there wasn't an article, so ... maybe a dashed underline instead of solid? Is that even possible in standard html? Maybe there could even be an option not to display them? (Apologies for bringing this here, but I really miss a faster, threaded discussion forum for general issues and assistance - this is where I was seeing what brought me the idea, so I put it here. If it's been discussed already, well, I just don't know how to find it, newb that I am...) -- Olofe

Yep - I think that would be a most excellent idea and have already proposed something very similar on the Wikipedia mailing list (please join if you want to help shape Wikipedia's future -- I'll find the thread for you later). And don't worry about thread hijacking; this is a time honored tradition here in Wikiland (esp. on this page; whenever I'm gone for a couple of days I often come back to find a thread on my page between two other Wikipedians. One person asks me a question then somebody else answers it for me). --mav

Got it. Not sure if I'll be signing up for that. I'm still so new here I want to see if my interest lasts. -- OlofE

Hi Maveric, I saw you asking for programms for creating chemical structure formulas. I use two different ones:

"Formeleditor" from http://www.martin-buchholz-online.de/strukedit.html . It is rather simple but sufficient for small diagrams. This one is in German only, so you would have to know that:
- Linke Maustaste is the left mousebutton,
- Rechte Maustaste is the right one,
- Neu zeichnen means redraw,
- Einzeln löschen deletes the last item you draw,
- Datei is the "File"-Menu.
A little more complicated but also more powerfull is ACD/ChemSketch. It's freeware version is available at http://www.acdlabs.com/download/chemsk.html . This one can even draw 3D-diagrams. -- JeLuF

Very cool! Thanks for the info. This also partially answers a question I recently got from a newbie. --mav

Hi mav, I wrote to you in Talk:Famous Belgians. Under Biographical Listing all national lists are now listed as "Famous...), not "List of famous"...). Because you reverted, the Belgians are now sticking out like sore thumbs (don't they ever....I don;t know if you know, but the Belgians are a bit of a joke in Western Europe).

Are you having yet another sleepless night? --- Renata

Instead of "sticking out like sore thumbs" it would more correct to say "leading the pack". That is just one of the first bio lists to be moved - the others will follow. But alas, I must go to bed now. --mav

When putting a copyright violation notice on a page, why do you put a link to the Google cache of a web search, instead of a link to the page itself? -phma

Personal preference. That is the way I found the violation and I want to show the way I found it to everyone - esp. the offender. --mav

Ok, I'll give it a shot. I'm not so good at doing several things at once, though--better at one task at a time. :-) --KQ

Slave to the wiki too, eh? One of us, one of us... ;) --mav

Hi Maverick !
I've got a "technical" question. When one does change the name of a page (a move), is there any way it shows ? Does the change appear anywhere ? Does it show in the recentchange list ? If not, how can we know somebody changed the name of a page unless we just stumble on it and wonder ? If there's no way to know about it, do you think it is correct ? user:anthere

Good question. I just moved Goscinny to René Goscinny. The way it works is that the database changes the name of Goscinny to René Goscinny. Thus the history of Goscinny is moved to René Goscinny as if Goscinny never served as the name of the article. To further complicate matters, Goscinny is simultaneously "created" and turned into a redirect to René Goscinny. I suggested that there should be a "moved pages log" but such a log does not exist yet. What I do is search the last 5000 edits in Recent Changes for the words "moved to" and see if the moves are in fact good ones. To my great surprise the vast majority of them are valid moves. So there really is nothing to be worried about. However, if a move mistake is made it can only be correctly fixed by a admin. --mav

Hum. Okay, I tried. So if I understood well, unless one see the modification in the recent changes, there's basically no way any other can know it was done, unless he was "really" looking carefully at this page. Better than on the phase I we are still using in french (when I rename a page, it doesnot appear anywhere) but still rather discreet (considering the nomber of changes made per day on the en.wiki). That is coherent with some surprising changes I noticed here. Glad to hear I probably am not crazy.
I believe a moved pages log would be interesting indeed.

True for tildas use, but the ~ and the | are not available on my keyboard at home, and I keep forgetting the shortcuts. Okay, I give it a try, where's my popchar ? :-)

Maybe a five tilda in a row could lead to the talk page of the wikipedian rather than to his personal page ??? It would gain time when answering on somebody else discussion page... Anthere

Regarding Amphibian, the intent in making it a disambiguation page was to support all possible meanings of that noun, as per http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=amphibian . I don't think that Mr. Engels greatly improved on my previous effort by removing the link to aircraft... Regards, R.C. Ingham.

The link to aircraft served no function, in my opinion. A disambiguation page should link to the various pages that it can be disambiguated to, so that the reader can choose which one he meant (or which one the writer of the referring page meant). I don't think anyone searching for information on amphibious aircraft would be helped by a link to aircraft. Andre Engels

Don't want you to think I ignore your comments on my talk page about September 11. I figured that how I've edited such entries made clear my strategy. It's evident that everyone isn't happy with the current situation (putting tributes on the respective talk page) or even the premise that it's possible for there to be valid entries for the non-famous victims (I'd argue there can be, since enough media has been produced on just about every one to fill in an individual story). So I'm certainly open to suggestion. --The Cunctator

At this point, whatever is done will have to be debated on the list first. Sigh... --mav

Thanks Maveric for the kind welcome! --John

No problem. :) --mav

Mav, I'm trying to keep up with the diffs between the competing Jehova Witness versions. Unfortunately, the diff-er seems to do a really poor job of it. Large segments of the two versions are identical, but the wikipedia diff puts them in red. It is picking up on trivial words "the" "as" "of" and claiming they are enough to form a match between paragraphs. See especially the paragraph with the very unique identifier "144,000" is misrepresented as having completely changed, when it has hardly been touched. I pester you because I don't know if this a known issue or if I should go to the trouble of writing a bug report. Advice welcome. --MimirZero

This happens whenever paragraphs are moved and is often a tactic of people who want to hide their edits. I've been trying to make sense of the diffs too but it has been difficult. I don't think this is a bug but I will keep check recent diffs of less controversial articles to see if the same problem is happening there. --mav

Really? People do that to hide changes? I've done it to reorganize topics I thought were presented poorly; I never noticed that it made a big mess (of course, I'll continue anyway if the article needs it). Anyway ... damn, that's sneaky. --KQ

Perhaps I should have added that it "seems" to be a tactic used by some. This is a noted limitation of the diff function. --mav

Eh, well, that's a problem, though. --KQ

About the boilerplates on the county articles. You originally told me not to put them in because there wouldn't be enough information. After you said that, I got the whole idea about adding all this data to the counties (and there will be more to come in the future). So the idea that there will never be enough information seems very naive. I alone have planned on adding stuff, and I am hardly the only one working on these articles. Thus it is not strange to view them as an important part as these articles grow. When I started, I never would have even considered doing any particular standard for these articles had not those notices been there at the very beginning. If we stick them in talk pages, many people will never look at them, people like myself. So I ask, what is the point of the Wikipedia manual of style telling us to put boilerplates in certain articles? I'm not trying to contradict you, just trying to understand their purpose. It seems to me that if this *is* going to be in print someday, it would *far* easier to remove the boilerplates when it is done then to go back and reformat every single article to look in a standard format. In fact I am sure there is some way to write some sort of script to remove the boilerplates. I will comply if you so desire, but I currently don't agree (for what it's worth). Maybe you can explain? -- Ram-Man

Where does it talk about boilerplates in the Manual of Style? Anyway, perhaps I didn't fully explain the reasons for my original objection. What I just stated on your talk page is merely an extention of that. Having boilerplates like that are way too self-conscience and considerations on how Wikipedia articles will look in print form are important.

I see little need for us to ever have to go through and reformat everything to conform to a WikiProject. That's not what WikiProjects are for. The idea of WikiProjects is for a group of users to start-up basic guidelines on how they will create a group of articles. Only those people who know about and agree to the conventions of the WikiProject are bound to its guidelines. Everyone else should feel completely free to hit edit when they see something to contribute and they should not in any way whatsoever feel obligated to first read and agree to the WikiProject guidelines before editing the article. The boilerplate in effect asks potential contributors to do this. Everytime I think of this, I think of yet another way why this is a bad thing. --mav

So then, shouldn't we remove the boilerplates from *all* countries as well as counties? I guess a related question that bothers me is how important is consistency here? I have not always agreed with what some people want and have felt free to experiment, especially with respect to the Wikiprojects (which I do not neccesarily follow, like it suggests). Yet people obviously made those projects for a reason, and I suppose it is partially to have a standard look. Does this encyclopedia feel that having a similar look is not so important? For instance, someone put a lot of work into the California state and county articles, yet they very different from most of the other articles. Should we just leave them be or should we try to modify the format (not the content) to have them all be similar? Oh, I'll stop with the boilerplates this time. :) -- Ram-Man

Yes. There should be no WikProject boilerplates in any article, just the talk. I don't place them the WikiProject Elements or WikiProject Tree of Life articles and Jheijmans doesn't place them in WikiProject Countries or WIkiProject Sport articles. I see that the administrative subdivision articles are copying the ancient boilerplate used for WikiProject US States. I know I should have removed those boilerplate months ago so I guess it is my fault. I didn't notice the boilerplate being used for the other WikiProjects simply because their submission rates are very low.

It is important for an encyclopedia to have a similar look but not at the cost of having boilerplates that intimidate potential contributors and are out of place in print. Besides, WikiProjects are supposed to be built-up over a period of time before major additions are added. It took over a month of collaboration with many Wikipedians to refine the beta-level layout for the elements articles and another month after that to perfect it. The other major WikiProjects (Countries and Tree of Life) took similar amounts of time and collaboration/input before much real work was done with them. --mav

Thanks for the info. You've been more than helpful. I'll be sure to act accordingly (now that I finally understand the purpose and all) -- Ram-Man

I'm glad I was able to help but I fear I was too pushy. PS The number one Wikipedia convention is inertia -- people more or less copy the style they see in other articles naturally. Since you are doing the work of formatting and creating all these county articles you are setting up a major amount of inertia for the particular formating you use. People will naturally copy this style. In short, there really is no need for a boilerplate anyway (yet another reason to not have it). However, I do watch each of the WikiProject articles I create in order to modify any contributions to those articles that do not conform to the WikiProject (I'm rather liberal in what I let through though - no need to stifle innovation). For you, simply watching pages that link from the county list pages will work fine. --mav

Emailed answer. --AN

woah dude I expect an explanation from you-yor heavy-handed censoring is totally uncalled for-I understand the sentiment but you are squashing things a little too quickly--lir lapollutionestsimauvaise@yahoo.com I am an INTP and I DO NOT appreciate your J interference-try adding a little more P to your life hmm? --Lir

Perhaps. However I did leave a note on your user talk page about this. No answer. I also left a note on Talk:Anarcosocial-communist. No answer. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and as such can't have entries on ordinary people. --mav

HOW DARE u pretend to run a site that is objective and then censor the content of a definition of anarchism-why dont you read the entry a few times. --Lir

The entry in question did not have any Google hits. This has already been noted in the talk for the page. Our NPOV policy prevents us from having original research. We are also not a homepage provider. But there still is Metapedia at http://meta.wikipedia.com where you can be as POV and as ideosyncratic as you want - so long as you don't break any laws. ;)--mav

Well, have you dreamed about wikipedia yet? ... Somebody should add that to the wikipediholic test & assign it a point value, if it hasn't been done already. --KQ

Yeah - probably every night since I stay up late thinking about Wikipedia. Of course it's all in black and white. --mav

You dream about it in black and white? Interesting ... Because you're dreaming about editing articles, or ... ? --KQ

What's the order for the listings on the year pages? Events // Births // Deaths or Births // Deaths // Events. I notice they're not all consistent. Also, I hope not to have to redo several hundred pages. :-) --KQ

As I understand it, Events // Births // Deaths is correct and Births // Deaths // Events 'outdated'. I know no official policy about this, but I conclude it from three points I noticed:

The year pages in the last two centuries and the day pages all have Events-Births-Deaths. The Births-Deaths-Events order appears only at earlier years with usually only very few events
I see pages being converted from BDE to EBD (both by myself and by others), but not the other way around
Looking in the history of the day and year pages, it seems that many EBD pages were created as BDE, and changed later.

My own policy is to convert BDE to EBD if I am editing the page anyway (in those cases I will also delete the 'Years in Review' link, and if necessary correct the sequence of decades shown to have the decade of the year itself in the center). Andre Engels 11:22 Sep 29, 2002 (UTC)

User:Banshee doesn't seem to be noticing that there's a problem with Beloit College. I don't want to be too quick on the trigger, so I'm asking you to do it: If you agree it's warranted, would you please move the text from the subject page to the talk page in hopes that will get Banshee's attention? -- isis 07:37 Sep 29, 2002 (UTC)

I'll go ahead and replace the text with my kinder, gentler possible copyright violation notice. At this point, we don't want other Wikipedians to edit the text just to have their edits lost when/if we remove the text for good. --mav

Mav, have you seen the layout of oxygen? If you're trying to put more into the element data table, maybe a full-width design would be worth considering. (just sen your sandbox page. great pic!) -- Tarquin 08:54 Sep 29, 2002 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm already aware of the oxygen table. That table was created by Magnus way back in the Nupedia chalkboard days (that was a wiki hosted at Nupedia before Wikipedia was created). The merits of both tables were debated back in Feb and it was decided that a vertical, list-like table would be best - thus the current table. Besides there are 20 elements that have already been converted (and this has taken me many months). Thanks for the compliment on the pic (all it is really is just a cleaned-up screenshot of our perio table made with the GIMP and an added diagram from Kontour). --mav

At lithium, I expected an image map (no, please don't add one--that would be very intimidating for newbies). That's quite an interesting idea, though. --KQ

Thanks. I agree that having an image map would be a bit much. I do plan on having good expanatory notes on each of the image description pages. Otherwise they can navigate using the included group and period nav bars. --mav 18:35 Sep 29, 2002 (UTC)

Hi mav. If you have a minute to spare could you have a quick look at User:G_from_B/Sandbox where I'm trying to set up a fact table for the WikiProject Protected Areas. Above the upper left corner I have this "µ" character and I can't get rid of it. Can you tell me what I'm doing wrong? If it takes too much time, don't worry, I'll try to find it myself. Cheers -- User:G_from_B

No need to do this anymore, mav. Bth found the mistake. Guy

Hi mav. I'd just like to draw your attention to Talk:Carbon/Temp where I posted a couple of things (for some reason I couldn't edit Wikipedia Talk:WikiProject Elements, I think maybe it was too large for my browser to handle). Ta. --Bth 15:32 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

Response at the indicated page. --mav

Talk continued at user talk:maveric149/archive 5