User talk:SMcCandlish/Archive 9
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August 2007
Template:WQA in progress
ResolvedHi
Thanks for your help with the moving of Template:Work in progress to Template:WQA in progress. I see that it's now listed at Wikipedia:Requested moves.
I've modified the instructions on the WQA page to refer to the new template title. As far as I can tell, there's nothing else to be done on this, pending the administrative move, is that correct? Thanks --Parsifal Hello 05:26, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
- Far as I know. I was surprised that the closer didn't do the move. Anyway, this should resolve the abuse of the template (which was worse than I thought; I found at least 5 articles using it on the article page. Ick. Sorry for the TfD alarm, too; I had no idea it'd been created for WP:WQA issue tracking purposes. I've removed mention of it from the "See also" sections of the documentation of {{Resolved}}, etc., so this doesn't happen again. The general talk page uses people were putting it to are now dealt with by {{Unresolved}}, which I think is well documented enough that confuseable types won't do something boneheaded like put it on 47 topics on the same page, etc. Heh. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 07:07, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
- No problem on the TfD. You informed me about it on my talk page, so I had a chance to explain the situation and it worked out fine. I hadn't thought about ways it could have been misused when I made it. What a surprise that people would put it on article pages! --Parsifal Hello 08:54, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
My Talk Page
ResolvedSince the last comment you contributed on My Talk page, I cannot create a new topic. Also, when I sign my name with the four thingies, it does not work either. Please help. Thanks in advance. RailbirdJAM 11:36, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
- Hi, in order for some of us to help you better, perhaps you can be a little bit more specific about when the problems occur. When you try and create a new topic on your Talkpage, what happens? Does it go to a new screen where you start the topic, or does it give you an error? When you sign with the Tildes(~), what happens? You can also try 3 tildes (~~~) which gives less information. Rfwoolf 11:58, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
- Thank you so much, Rfwoolf, for your helpful assistance. Now everything is back to normal. I appreciate you taking the time to help me. RailbirdJAM 12:05, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
- Hi SMcCandlish, just so you're aware the problem was that in your comment on RailbirdJAM's usertalkpage, a nowiki tag had been left open, which created problems, the tag has now been closed. Anywho, helpmetag has been resolved. cheers Rfwoolf 12:15, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
- Thank you so much, Rfwoolf, for your helpful assistance. Now everything is back to normal. I appreciate you taking the time to help me. RailbirdJAM 12:05, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
- D'oh. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 03:36, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
Mike Godwin
ResolvedThere isn't anything broken. Calton, instead of insisting on flagging a problem without explaining what problem you think you see, try gaining consensus on the talk page.
Let's see:
- ""fictionalized" =/= "important". This isn't important, it's trivia, and a single piece at that. Incorporate it if you like, but the tag stays until you do." [1]
Clearly, you must have read this since you seem to have figured out how to leave edit summaries, so it must be a question of understanding the words. Now, were any of them difficult to understand? If so, let me know and I can supply definitions.
Also, take a glance at this -- although I should think common sense would suffice, maybe this will help you out. --Calton | Talk 12:03, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
- There appears to be consensus at the article that the passage in question isn't trivia. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 03:36, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
MOS
ResolvedCould you possibly be a little less disparaging about the editors who work day in day out contributing articles and edits to animal related articles? If you wish to get us to see reason and logic (something which English, I feel the need to point out as a lifelong sufferer of dyslexia, lacks in spades) calling us grammar-ignoring renegades who need to get with the same program as the rest of the darned world isn't the way forward. Sabine's Sunbird talk 12:32, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
- Noted. This is something I feel very, very strongly about, however. This silly "Germanization" of regular Nouns in Articles about Animals makes the Encyclopedia look really amateurish and unTrustworthy. We haven't done that in English since the early 1800s. Also, reason and logic speak for themselves. To reject them just because the person pointing out the reasonability/logical issues was irritating, is itself unreasonable and illogical. That said, I'm not here to piss anyone off, and I'm sorry if I have, but I'm not attacking animal article editors. I am criticizing those who think that English grammar and spelling rules do not apply to them because they are "special" in some way (are zoologists, for example, in this case; they are not alone, and improper capitalization is one of the most common typos I fix in Wikipedia, being quite rampant in sports and games topics as well). — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 19:13, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
Snooker light manangement
ResolvedIn response to the exclusion of my comment ragarding importance of lighting above snooker tables (Ref: 23:49, 10 July 2007). I was merely trying to stress that table lighting is an intrinsic part of the snooker, or any other cue sport for that matter, and that is as important as the ball colours themselves. Link was intended to give the reader some idea of how it may be done. Therefore, I hope that some form of my comment can be included in the future.
Rgds, Dalibor
—Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.6.18.239 (talk • contribs) 13:16, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
- Lighting is a good point, of course, but should be explained in the text if at all possible, not by an external link (this is an encyclopedia, not Yahoo, after all). Also, the material would probably be better at Billiards table#Snooker tables since it is rather technical discussion with regard to table conditions, not about the game itself. And that's only if snooker tables in particular have unique lighting concerns, something I'm pretty skeptical of. More likely, snooker tables share the same lighting needs as other forms of cue sports tables, and so information about this should be added to the general part of the article, probably at Billiards table#Parts and equipment. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 18:52, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
Plan II Honors nominated for deletion
ResolvedYou had objected to the {notability} tag, so I thought you might want to participate in the deletion discussion. Guanxi 17:11, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
- Thanks for the note. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 19:07, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
ResolvedThank you for taking the time to participate at the discussion in my Request for Adminship. Unfortunately the nomination did not succeed, but please rest assured that I am still in full support of the Wikipedia project. I listened carefully to all concerns, and will do my best to incorporate all of the constructive advice that I received, into my future actions on Wikipedia. If you can think of any other ways that I can further improve, please let me know. Best wishes, Elonka 03:45, 5 August 2007 (UTC)
- WP:GRFA: 'Consider not posting "thanks for voting" messages to the voters' talk pages. This is unneeded and probably not a good use of your time. Consider posting a thanks message instead on your own talk page and/or the talk page of your RFA page instead.' Not a huge deal, but if it looks like you didn't pay attention to WP:GRFA some editors may remember that next time you are up at RfA. :-/ (And yes this is a stock message; every RfA respondent here gets this; it's not surly, it's advisory). — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 08:12, 5 August 2007 (UTC)
Albinism correction
ResolvedOops, I misread that bit of the Albinism page as "Albinism is a condition that can be "cured" or "treated" per se, but small things can be done to improve the quality of life for those affected," and added a "not" in an attempt to fix the grammar. However, clearly I'd just misread it in the first place. Thanks for the fix. 70.112.0.238 03:26, 5 August 2007 (UTC)
- Ah so. Expect amendment at your talk page then. I'd thought it was a silliness edit. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 08:14, 5 August 2007 (UTC)
- Nevermind; you blanked that page anyway. I'd encourage you to a) not do that; it sets off alarm bells in a lot of us, and b) be one of "us", i.e. register a real user account instead of being an anonymous IP address editor. You'll get a lot more traction as a "real" editor. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 08:17, 5 August 2007 (UTC)
Minor edits at Kevin Trudeau
ResolvedI've noticed your edits on the Kevin Trudeau page. My interest in that article is his activities related to health fraud, so I've been staying out of the pool league debate. I hope most, if not all, of the pool material can be moved to the IPT page. Anyhow, your edits are invariably marked as minor. There's an option in the "my preference" page under "Editing" that allows you to change this - arguably you've been making major edits that are marked as minor inadvertently. Cheers, Skinwalker 00:36, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
- Such as? I wouldn't consider any of my edits there to be major. The IPT merge I'm going to do would be major. I guess this is a very subjective issue, but I don't mark edits as major unless I think they might freak someone out. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 00:42, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
- Ah, you're right - whether or not an edit is minor or major is a very subjective issue. I just looked at your recent contributions and saw all were marked minor. In the past, this has been correlated with the automatic minor flag being set, which is what I assumed. I typically use the minor button only for vandalism reversion and grammatical fixes. You just have a different idea about major vs. minor - nothing wrong with that. Cheers, Skinwalker 00:53, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
- I do in fact have that flag set, because I'm mostly a gnome, but I turn it off when I need to. Of course I also admit I forget to sometimes. If it's really a blunder, I usually do a non-minor followup null-edit with an edit summary that my last edit should not have been flagged as minor. You are right that I use/perceive "minor" differently; my rubric is that if I don't think it is something I would terribly care about, I don't want to bother other editors who have their watchlists set to not show minor edits. I'm unaware of any consensus discussions about what should and shouldn't be minor-flagged, but there probably should be one so we're all on the same page about it! — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 01:05, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
- Ah, you're right - whether or not an edit is minor or major is a very subjective issue. I just looked at your recent contributions and saw all were marked minor. In the past, this has been correlated with the automatic minor flag being set, which is what I assumed. I typically use the minor button only for vandalism reversion and grammatical fixes. You just have a different idea about major vs. minor - nothing wrong with that. Cheers, Skinwalker 00:53, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
Quotes in XML
ResolvedA while back I left out the quotes in the "ref name=" and it worked fine so I haven't placed them in the last few references I've done. It worked fine in Wendeen Eolis. I assume by your comment that there's some situations where leaving out the quotes would be a problem for use with XML. Where would that come up? Just curious.--Fuhghettaboutit 05:17, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
- Oh, it's just that in any "x=something" in an XML construct (anthing of the form <foo...></foo> or <foo />), the "something" has to be quoted. The old HTML specs were "loose" about this, but since XML has become ascendant (XML being the sort of subsumer of HTML, which is now XHTML, or HTML reformed as XML, yaketty yak, can I throw another acronym at you), this quoting is no longer an optional thing. Good: <ref name="Foo">; bad: <ref name=Foo>. Wikipedia itself works without the quoting, but other more XMLish adaptations of it may not (WP is after all open content, and is being repurposed in many ways, from WML cell phone pages to, well, whatever. I don't even really know what is happening with it all). The gist is that the modern markup requires "quotes" around parameter values, verus old-school style where it was optional. This is only in reference to angle-bracket <XML> constructs, not WP templates. In a WP template you'd still do
{{Cuegloss|Object ball|object balls}}not{{Cuegloss|"Object ball"|"object balls"}}, or{{Fact|date=August 2007}}not{{Fact|date="August 2007"}}. Different markup systems. I'm actually surprised that things like <ref> and <nowiki> still exist, instead of "subst" and "DEFAULTSORT" style "magicwords" like {{REF:...}} and {{nowiki:...}}. Our current system is a mishmash of XML structures like <ref...> and <nowiki>, on the one hand, and strictly wikicode markup like {{subst:...}}, on the other. A bit of a chimera, really. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› f06:48, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
- PS: Really, the summary version is that for "future-proofing", anything after a '=' inside the '<' and '>' confines of a markup structure that has a '<x y="z">...</x>' or '<x y="z" />' format (as opposed to WP templates and such) should be quoted, the way that "z" is quoted in those examples. WP won't fall apart if this is not done, but some human or bot will have to quote them later if it isn't, because it will cause XML application problems down the road.
- Okay gotcha (sort of), and see no problem with keeping with the use the quotes in any case!--Fuhghettaboutit 12:32, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
Infoboxes Person & Biography: merger proposal
ResolvedYou might be interested in commenting on, or assisting with, this proposal to merge {{Infobox Person}} and {{Infobox Biography}}. Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 14:48, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
- You might be right! If templates can be sanely merged, I'm usually a fan of merging them. Heh. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 19:46, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
ResolvedYou reinstated this change, but it does work for me both with and without the capital letters in fact. Extremely sexy 12:54, 7 August 2007 (UTC)
- That's just a peculiarity in your particular browser; it either has a bug, in that it does not realize that XHTML name= and id= parameters are case-sensitive, and always have been, or it is intentionally doing some internal logic in which it looks for the case-sensitive string, and when it doesn't find one, it looks for the case-insensitive version in a guess that maybe the URL was written incorrectly (i.e. it is trying to be "helpful"). I can (have, actually) confirmed that this is not the case with most browsers: this test fails in Safari (Mac), Mozilla family Mac browsers (SeaMonkey, Camino, Firefox, etc.), Firefox (Win), Opera (Mac), etc. The only one I can find thus far that does this pseudo-helpful guesswork is (of course) Internet Explorer (Win). — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 18:35, 7 August 2007 (UTC)
- Indeed so: I've got that one, but isn't this in fact the most commonly user browser too? Extremely sexy 16:31, 8 August 2007 (UTC)
- Irrelevant. Wikipedia is not just for Windows user of MSIE (and FYI, Firefox is fast gaining on MSIE even on Windows.) — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 17:19, 26 August 2007 (UTC)
- Indeed so: I've got that one, but isn't this in fact the most commonly user browser too? Extremely sexy 16:31, 8 August 2007 (UTC)
"Replace me" silhouettes
StaleI think it may be appropriate to have a discussion about the progress of the Fromowner campaign. I remember someone at the MfD suggested that the issue be revisited in three months. I have been trying to assemble some statistics on how to measure the "success" of the campaign. Here's what I can tell:
- Replace this image1.svg has roughly 1,194 hits in the main namespace
- Replace this image male.svg has roughly 517 hits in the main namespace
- Replace this image female.svg has roughly 308 hits in the main namespace
Which, if my math is correct, means there are about 2,019 pages currently on Wikipedia with the images. Category:Fromownerviewed indicates 70 images have been generated by the campaign. (A cursory glance at Category:Fromowner looks to me like almost all of the 65 images to be reviewed are not free, so I'm not going to bother trying to count those at this point.)
I think one argument has been that any images generated from the campaign are contributions, and 70 new images seems like a significant improvement. On the other hand, 70 of 2,089 is about 3.4%. Is the WP:SELF breach worth it for such a small ratio of uploads? Any thoughts? user:j 03:39, 8 August 2007 (UTC)
- I strongly believe it is not worth it; the productivity to disruption ratio of the "project" is utterly attrocious. I think the entire thing should be WP:MFD'd again. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 17:21, 26 August 2007 (UTC)
My essay
StaleIf you have anything to add to my WP:WEB essay, go right ahead, I don't mind. Kwsn(Ni!) 03:54, 8 August 2007 (UTC)
- Can you remind me where it is? — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 17:24, 26 August 2007 (UTC)
An apology
ResolvedIt's been a long time, but I want to apologize to you for causing trouble months ago. I think you'll remember me as Honda Pilot. The point I was trying to drive home was that indef blocking often provokes sockpuppetry. Create multiple accounts often indicate an act of revenge against the blocker or a feeling that if everyone is invited to edit, why shouldn't he? Jeff Defender 21:38, 20 August 2007 (UTC)
- Understood, but by engaging in sockpuppetry yourself to make this point, you violated WP:POINT as well as WP:SOCK. I trust that the fallout of this was a good lesson. :-) It has already been long known that indefblocked users will often create socks, and there are methods in place for dealing with this, such as WP:CHECKUSER and WP:SSP. I also didn't appreciate one of your socks attacking a perfectly notable stub I was working on, in WP:AFD to make another WP:POINT, nor sabotaging my WP:RFA with a false report of me "attacking" one of your socks at said AfD. But I appreciate the olive branch. WP:NOT a battleground, and I'm sure we can all get along henceforth. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 17:30, 26 August 2007 (UTC)
Snooker player bios
ResolvedHi, this is D-Weaving, the guy who previously editted the Marco Fu, David Gray and Anthony Hamilton pages and defined the "round robin" and "session to spare" phrases.
Just like to say thanks for cleaning up those sections, in truth I had not noticed until after I re-read them that they (in particular the David Gray-Stephen Lee final of 2002 at the Scottish Open) were somewhat POV. If that is the case then I welcome other users to rephrase them into a more neutral tone wherever they occur
- Keen. WP:WEASEL, WP:PEACOCK and less specific WP:NPOV problems have been quite rampant in the snooker bio articles. Mostly because the majority of them appear to begin as direct WP:COPYRIGHT violations by being copy-pastes of (decidedly PoV and aggrandising) bios from World Snooker. If I were really "on the warpath" I would flag many of them as copyvios and just have them deleted until people get the point, but it's been more rewarding in the long run to tag them with cleanup tags and work on them myself until they improve. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 17:35, 26 August 2007 (UTC)
Italicizing military citations
ResolvedFor an example of one in italics see Jason Dunham. For an example of one not in italics see Gary Gordon. I think it looks better in italics and I think for the purpose of this the text within the citation should not be wikilinked as it is in Gary's article.----Kumioko 16:34, 31 August 2007 (UTC)
- Contrariwise, I think it looks ridiculous. Italicization is a form of emphasis, just like boldfacing. We do not emphasize entire paragraphs like that. It is also completely redundant, as the passage is already blockquoted, indicating that it is a separate, quoted passage. The Gordon article should also have the citation text blockquoted. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 22:42, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
- Update: The Manual of Style expressly forbids this, actually: "An entire quotation is not italicized solely because it is a quotation." — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 10:41, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
My biggest complaint is that there is no standard, or at least that the standard is not being followed. Some are Cquoted, some are blockquoted, some italicized (even before I started doing it), etc. I am just trying to clean them up and fillin the missing pieces.--Kumioko 00:58, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
- Chicago Manual of Style, etc., say blockquote. Wikipedia's own Manual of Style also calls for blockquoting long quoted passages (period). Template:Cquote is for pull quotes (a.k.a. callouts), not for quotations, as the template's own documentation states clearly; it should be terminated on sight and replaced with blockquote where ever it is being used as a blockquote substitute. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 01:37, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
- See above; WP:MOS does provide standards about this. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 03:36, 28 September 2007 (UTC)