User:Derek Ross

Derek is 43 and lives in the town of Arbroath on the East Coast of Scotland. He has a wide range of interests.

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Work in Progress

I am interested in adding to the following articles

• Hogmanay
• Roman calendar
• Scotland
• Edward Lear
• 11th century
• Mary I of Scotland
• Jacobite
• Radar
• Burns supper
• Robert Burns

and in copyediting just about anything.

See also : Derek Ross

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Hi Derek--welcome to Wikipedia!

On the David Hume article, you de-CamelCase'd some links (AnEnquiryConcerningHumanUnderstanding became An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding), but in doing so you didn't change the latter link to one that actually works. You could do this in one of two ways: by redirecting the former to the latter page (and moving the scanty text of the former to the latter), or else by writing the link like this: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. In this particular example, by the way, I don't think it matters very much that the link was broken, because there's nothing there but the text of the Enquiry, and nobody, I imagine, is going to come to Wikipedia to read an outdated text of a philosophical classic. But, well, it's the principle of the thing--we don't want to make links broken. I haven't checked the other articles that you've de-CamelCase'd, but if you could check and reinstall the links, that would be good. Thanks. --Larry Sanger

Sorry about that. I wasn't intending to make any changes to the links and I'm not sure why it did what you said. As a fan of Hume, I wouldn't want to discourage anyone from reading his work! I was just trying to change existance to existence. I'll go back to all those pages, check out the links and fix them if necessary.

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Nice work on the translation of the Declaration, Derek. Thanks! -- Paul Drye

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Hi Derek -- among the very necessary changes you've made to article names for various rules, I noticed you were changing the names of some articles (like for Roman Emperors). I know that that kind of fits in with some of the discussion on nomenclature, but frankly, the "of the Roman Empire" sounds just WRONG to me. Could you hold off on the renaming till we can discuss it on the History talk or nomenclature or whatever it is page? We've got a couple ancient history and classicist types that I'd love to hear from on the subject before anybody goes to the trouble of revising all of these article names!! Thanks -- JHK

No problem. I'll hold off. I only did the Constantines because they were clashing with the Scottish kings. To be frank I'm not too happy with of the Roman empire either and I did consider using of Rome. In any case I'm perfectly willing to wait until this has been properly thrashed out. I've no wish to do a whole lot of tedious renaming then find out that nobody likes the new names! -- Derek

Thanks! JHK aka J Hofmann Kemp

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Derek, I notice that you have changed the format of the years pages. I do like the +5 and -5 date range, as it is useful to browse through years. I created many of these pages by hand, and am frustrated that I need to now go through all of these pages again and put in the 'Year in Review links for the previous and next centuries. I also note that you deleted the hierarchical summary links which doesn't make sense to me either.

ie: 1951 1952 1953 - 1950s - 20th century

I know how much work is involved in what you have done, just regret the work I have ahead of me to fix the pages to the more useful format. -- BenBaker

Ben, my reasons for changing the format and deleting these navigational links were as follows.

• The navigation part of the page was taking up more lines than the information in some cases.
• Even where it wasn't, it had an undue prominence. People don't go to the timeline so that they can find out how to reach other parts. They go there in order to find out about Events, Births and Deaths during a given year. So the navigation shouldn't take up more than a couple of lines on the screen. Even the format which I settled on is arguably too large and should probably be moved below the real information.
• The links which I deleted were all present more than once apart from the Year In Review links and redundant links take up precious screen space. I don't feel that there is as much utility in the Year in Review for the previous and next centuries as there is for the other links and that is why I decided to remove them. It is still easy to get to them by going through the previous and next century links in any case.
• The navigation links were inconsistent from year to year. I realise that this is because several different people have been working on them.

I'm not quite sure what you mean about deleting the hierarchical summary links since each of the links still exists in an obvious position somewhere else on the page. I've actually introduced an extra level of hierarchy with the millenia pages for use in prehistory where timing is vague.

In any case I have no great love for the current format that I've been using. I'd prefer something more compact but at least as useful. Before you start changing everything back, I think we should agree on something better than what we have at the moment, so that we can work together on making a consistent, easy to use bit of navigation that doesn't take more than three or four lines. That way it'll halve the amount of work that we each have to do and keep both of us happy. -- Derek

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Derek, thanks for cleaning the vandalism from my page, i never even noticed it till i checked RC just now! cheers! -- Asa Winstanley

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Hey Derek. Thanks for the welcome. I found the Decades and Centuries pages about 19 seconds after I posted my query about "wouldn't it be neat if...". As soon as I posted it I said, wait a sec... hmmmm... and sho nuff... there they were. GMTA I guess! :) -RobertL30

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Many thanks for the kind compliment re Budapest, Derek - I wouldn't have worried if I'd known you were starting an article. Have you any plans to tackle Belgrade? (I imagine we're both working through the "most wanted" list", and I'm putting off "Cotton" and "Wheat") One query, though: I incorporated your AD 198 for Aquincum, but another source indicates 106 or earlier. Any preference? Cheers, David Parker

No real plans to do Belgrade. The only reason that I did a stub for Budapest was because I'd visited on business last week and I had my guide book handy to pull a few facts from. It was a nice city to visit. The Roman remains at Aquincum are well worth seeing and the city as a whole has some great buildings going back to the Turkish occupation and before. As for Most Wanted, I only plan to do stuff that catches my eye. Re the 198 date, that's what the guidebook said for the date when Aquincum became an official Roman colony. The same guidebook says that the Celts founded the settlement soemtime in the 1st century BC and that Aquincum is from the Celtic for Many Waters referring to the local springs and spas. So your source for 106 may well be better since I'm pretty sure that the ancients Celts didn't write my guidebook and it didn't say where it got the info from! -- Derek

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Per your comment about the kings pages in relation to the British Monarchs article: All I was doing was providing redirects to the British Monarchs article. The reason why, was to fix several broken links I have created over the months. It would also be odd to have a direct link to "British Monarchs" within a king or queen article - that term just doesn't flow like, king of England, for example ("king of England" is a redirect to "British Monarchs"). I didn't make any queeny broken links, so I didn't bother with that (there weren't that many anyway...). And while we are on the subject, the term "British Monarchs" sounds and looks like a proper name of a sports team. I would suggest changing that to British monarchs or beter yet the singular (and therefore easier to link to in an article) of British monarch to avoid confusion - I will fix the redirects I created to match the new article name if it is changed. -maveric149

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Hello, Derek

Yes, there is something funny going on with Mary Stuart, isn't there? But I think it's part of the general wikipedia problems, and nothing personal!

Nice to see Scotland getting a bit of expert attention, anyway - from you, that is. user: Deb

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Hi Derek. Thanks for the changes you made regarding the Gregorian calendar (October 5 - October 14). You made me look into the subject and I learned something. That's a good thing about Wikipedia. Thanks! -- G_from_B