User talk:Bill Thayer/archive1

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[edit] Welcome

(The standard welcome; signed by User:Meelar).

A more personalized kind welcome appeared very quickly after, thanks:

Sir, it’s an honor that you are contributing to wiki as I’ve found your great website far above and beyond enlightening on many occasions. It’s really a priceless research-tool. GeneralPatton 16:54, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] LacusCurtius

BTW, there are dozens of copies of WP content, with varying degrees of GFDL compliance - we have a list of them somewhere in the "Wikipedia:" pages, but I can't find it right now. Anyway, we just maintain the list of them, no need to note in articles that they've been mirrored all over the place (it's a feature, not a bug :-) ). Stan 02:32, 14 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Library editing

Dear Bill, Please note that i have now spent many, many hours compiling a selection of books in Sir T.B.'s library using the facsimile of 1986 E.J.Brill publications edited by J.S Finch. If there are any incorrect titles it is from those who listed the library contents in 1711 for auction. Also i really am not sure whether the usage of speech-marks to highlight titles makes the page actually look any better just simply more cluttered. Yes by all means be bold in editing pages but also please be aware that some pages have taken other wikis many many hours to compile! Also it is with some irratation i have noted that you have now made titles of Latin books indistinguishable from those written in English through your editing i shall revert this . Please consult me before any more 'helpful' editing . Regards Norwikian 10:32, 25 Sep 2004 (UTC)

On the Library, no question you've done a stellar job digging up the actual information.
First item, I caught it before I read you, and have now reverted it, sorry: you're absolutely right, I didn't understand Wiki style conventions, and should not have changed double-apostrophes to single-quotes!
I am, as you realize, no Browne scholar (although I've at least read him all, some of him repeatedly, probably my favorite English book is Garden of Cyrus/Hydriotaphia). I come at this page as someone with an interest parallel to Browne's, in many of the same texts: I've input online -- hand-typed, not scanned -- 6 of the ancient texts mentioned; and others not mentioned but which he must certainly have had, like Plutarch, Aelian, Cato, Frontinus, Vitruvius.
As for the actual content of this page, I didn't realize the typos and manifest errors were copied verbatim, but the reproduction of uncorrected errors is germane not to "Library of Sir TB" but to "1711 Catalogue etc." If the article were the latter, we would have to revert them right away and I'd feel very stupid for having edited them. But our concern here is with elucidating what Sir Thomas read, so there can be no harm in correcting accidental nonsense words due either to reading errors -- e.g., "Differtatio" (clearly long esses); or to uncorrected scanning -- e.g., "Sidereus Nuricius"; or to typos of unknown origin -- e.g., "Umbrare". Disabbreviating some of these titles would probably be useful for the audience this page is likely to reach, but there, I've been very cautious
There are still a pile of minor errors, and I've snagged a few more that I could clear up without reference to the original. But for example I've passed on the flexible spellings of 16c-17c French which might allow certain items, then maybe not; for example, most French words that would have an accent today, I've left unaccented, because accents were newish then and the actual books very likely had unaccented titles, although again maybe not. Despite being half-French, French-educated, and with many years experience as a French translator, I still haven't managed to figure out "naises traits" -- the closest reasonable emendation I can come up with "autres traits" but have failed to convince myself. Other cruxlets, in the matter of which I've been very cautious and changed nothing of course, include:
  • "de Cive", which is not Latin nor any reasonable abbreviation;
  • "Serpent and Draconum historica", where "Serpent(ium) & Draconum historia" looks probable;
Much more probable, but I've also been cautious and done nothing:
  • "Questions in Genesis"; the work was published in 1623 alright, as "Quaestiones in Genesim"; was there an English translation that fast with our title? It seems very unlikely to me. (In general, if we want to get to the actual titles of the books -- fair nuff -- quite a few others ought to be changed: Plautus' Comedies, Martin Luther, etc. Right now at any rate we have an inconsistent list, opting partly for the original titles, partly for modern English translations.)
I removed the link to Philology by the way because in the work by Martianus Capella the allegory of Philologia has very little to do with what we now call philology.

[edit] Thanks

Many thanks Bill for reverting your edit. It looks as if you have the knowledge to contribute a great deal here. You have certaintly made some good points about titles, on the whole i am simply checking whether the title existed or not before placing it. I shall consider carefully your other points. Yes translations from Latin to English to Latin were extremely quick in 17th c. As Sir T.b. wittily remarks in the intro to Pseudodoxia And indeed , if elegancy still proceedeth, and English Pens maintain that stream we have of late observed to flow from many, we shall within few years be fain to learn Latine to understand English, and a work will prove of equal facility in either . I shall come to your other points about the page when less tired but in the meantime thanks, sorry if i was a bit abrupt, people round here can be sometimes, but also jolly helpful too!! Norwikian 21:49, 25 Sep 2004 (UTC)


Thanks from me too, Bill, for updating the wikiLink at my User Talk page :-) dionyziz 10:40, Feb 27, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] In Vergilii carmina commentarii

Hi, Bill, I'm sure you know a lot more Latin than I do, so I'm delighted that you took a look at my Lucus a non lucendo, thanks very much. The comentarii spelling is from the German edition that I refer to. I wonder a little about them getting it wrong in the title. Could it be an acceptable alternative spelling? What do you think, mm or m? (I definitely want to avoid the pedantry of putting m and [sic].) --Bishonen 16:41, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Got a kick out of your Bishonen/Lucus a non lucendo connection...! The correct Latin is 2 M's, no doubt about it (as in Koptev's page, the line above the quoted title). But if the title page of the actual edition has one M, then, for the purposes of referring to that edition, my edit would have to be reverted. Alex Koptev is approachable, speaks English and answers his e-mail, write him! I do suspect a typo of his, though, rather than a curious spelling of the print edition. Bill 22:50, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)
    • Hey, thanks for noticing about Bishonen. Frankly that was what I created the Lucus a non lucendo entry for, to have it to refer to about my username. :-) Mmmm... about the number of m's, I guess writing e-mails about it may be a little excessive. I'll just leave your correct version. Thanks for your help! It's good to know there are real Latinists on the site (I'm not even a fake Latinist myself). --Bishonen 23:15, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Italian provinces

I put a list of what I think are the recommended names and synonyms at Talk:Provinces of Italy, but Italian spellings, where different, are handy redirs to have too. I do think we should favor "Province of Florence" rather than "Province of Firenze" for article titles, for consistency with the Anglicized city names and so as not to mix English and Italian within a single term. As for the statistical data, I've been pretty minimal so far, because what I would really like to do is to steal the nice tables from Italian and German WPs - a little automated translation and voila, the most detailed info available in English anywhere. :-) Stan 03:05, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Lacus Curtius

Your website has often come in handy for my amateurish edits here. You're a natural Wikipedian, and it's good to notice your name among "Recent Edits." Wetman 16:20, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Your Vfd listings

Wow, that's a lot of articles you've found! Thanks for helping clean up Wikipedia. It's an often thankless task, but we all appreciate it. --Slowking Man 21:04, Oct 6, 2004 (UTC)

Yes, agreed. Please take my comments there as intended... they're intended to help Wikipedia run more smoothly. And I'm not always right! You have got the hang of VfD very quickly, and your efforts are much appreciated. Andrewa 12:34, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Re: Vfd editing

Hi, Bill. I'm glad to hear that I didn't insult you at all, I guess you're just a good-natured person at heart. The Internet, though marvelous, is somewhat lacking in the respect that it cannot convey aspects of communication that we often take for granted: mood, tone, or body language, etc. I've found that because of this lack of entire layers of "normal" communication, people sometimes fill in the blanks in ways that are unintended. When I re-read what I had written, I cringed at how some people may have read it. Again, I'm glad you didn't.

Best regards, ClockworkTroll 18:24, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Noj as redirect to Oxenfez -- why?

I speedy-deleted Noj, whose content was simply ""See Italic text'Oxenfez'". You re-created it as a redirect to Oxenfez. Although that would seem to have been the original author's intent, "Noj" isn't a word and only appears by accident in the Oxenfez article. Why did you re-create the deleted page? [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 00:54, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Because the Oxenfez article specifically says that Noj is another name for Oxenfez, and the original author's intent in his Noj page was to redirect to Oxenfez (in an unWeblike way, the way one does in a print work). It's exactly similar to redirecting Scriptores Historiae Augustae to Historia Augusta. So if Oxenfez is a valid name — which I still doubt, and see the Lincolnshire residents who weighed in on it — maybe Noj is too. Well-intended and logical on my part, at any rate. Best, Bill 10:51, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)
You're right. I was trigger-happy. I didn't read the Oxenfez article carefully enough. Sorry. I shouldn't have deleted your redirect. If Oxenfez does survive I'll try to remember to put it back. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 14:28, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Biopoiesis

I recently created a candidate for the encyclopedia named biopoiesis. Before having time to update the page, you nominated the entry as a candidate for Wiktionary. Is there any reason you did this? It is much more than a dictionary definition and represents a good biological theory for the origin of life. For a brief encyclopedic article on the subject, go here. And for information on the differences between the old theory of abiogenesis, go here. The entry for biopoiesis effectively solves the ambiguity of abiogenesis, and I'm confused as to why anyone would oppose the need for clarity and accuracy. --Viriditas 01:34, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Well now you've fleshed it out, couldn't agree more. What I've seen people do to forestall the zealous to mark it "(a start)" in the Edit summary; or else of course wait to post the entry until they have a bit more. Best, Bill 10:54, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Good point. Maybe I should try that? Thanks for the helpful tip. --Viriditas 06:15, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Julia Venissa

Can you help with this entry? Wetman 09:14, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Not much, as you can see. Never heard of her, but that just means she's not attested in classical sources, which you knew. I know next to nothing about post-Roman and Roman-period tribal Britain. The article, a first contribution, looks like the beginning of an Arthurian genealogy and has an air of POV about it, which, along with simplicity, seemed to me a good enough reason to retitle it. Sorry to disappoint.... Bill 09:38, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Categorization

I see you're making "sharper cats" for a lot of things, however it's not so helpful to create those tiny little one-member categories - it reduces the usefulness of categories for grouping similar articles. Also, some people have a habit of emptying and deleting very small categories, so you're risking having somebody else come along and undo your work. Creating a category because you think it might become large eventually doesn't work, because it might be years before it picks up sufficient articles. My general rule is to leave articles in bigger categories until there are at least 10 or so articles to be the "seed" for the new category. Stan 15:26, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Was wondering who'd be the first to comment.... Depthwise vs. breadthwise, the old question! Seriously, I find the large categories drowning in loosely categorized articles (Category:Italian people is my focus), and very, very many people and places either uncategorized or populating "X-ian people"/"Country X". I do agree to some extent that some few categories I made are not the most useful in the sense of having only 1 or 2 members right this minute; the source of it is that I create or navigate to a Category, say Category:Italian painters, and find Category:Painters has either no subcats or lots and lots of national subcats — because they're easy to mark — and few on such things as by style/period, by medium, etc. What I feel I'm doing is clearing out the brush. The eventual aim for Categories, I expect the computer whizzes behind the architecture here will wind up doing it, is smooth Java crumbs, where, from a main Category, instead of navigating thru layers of cat pages, you'll run your cursor over the category, a silent menu will drop down, with submenus, etc., and in one operation you'll navigate to 20c Provençal painters or whatever.
The competition is Lists, which I view as worthless.... Why list items with no articles? So I'm starting from the bottom and tying it all together; mindful of the nonsense of having single-article or single-subcat categories, I'm scouring for the nearest item that comes to mind that will make the 2d or 3d (and if on my way I see that a page of a dozen items can be reduced to 1 or 2, so much the better, even if it means I get distracted); then back to Italy. — Bill 15:55, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)
The problem is that there's no way to know when this future software will be written; none of the developers I know of is working on anything like that. I'm sure you've seen half-constructed and abandoned infrastructure all over WP; small categories, or categories constructed for orthogonality, are kind of like that, where you're hoping that something will happen, but without any assurance. It's so unpredictable as to what will get attention from one day to the next, I tend to prefer doing things in a way that looks right today. Now lists are a bit of an anticipation; for instance list of battleships of the United States Navy listed all such ships when it was created, but there were many red links, and we painstakingly filled them all in. Another thing that I've done with lists is to find orphans; list of garden plants found a bunch of forgotten articles for instance, plus it's also 100% or nearly so, so you can see how much is done and how much remains. Similarly, list of ancient Romans is everything in OCD; when they're all filled in, we'll be ready to challenge P-W next... 1/2 :-) Stan 13:29, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)
You got my chuckle with P‑W.... (although if Wikipedia has gone this far in barely 4 years, can P‑W really be that far off??) But let me be sensible about Cats then: I'll continue to create tighter cats for European and North American places and people, and even then not all of them (Places in particular are more problematic, since they don't stay put, so to speak! especially in Mitteleuropa; and then yer right, "Ethnologists of Liechtenstein" prolly not useful). But there can be no doubt after all that clearing the brush from "England", "English people", etc. will then allow useful subcats like Category:English people by counties, Category:English painters of the 17th century, and all those harder-to-categorize things like Tribes and Ethnology and Dialects, Currency. I guess I'll drop the Brazilian places, I'm just getting swallowed up in Pumpie‑ism anyhoo.... — Best, Bill 13:45, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Hi, you explained me about categories for cities and counties, specifically for Hungary. I haven't really thought much about optimal categories, your suggestion about the counties of the Kingdom of Hungary is good. I think a category Category:Cities in Hungary over 100.000 would be pretty small (there's only 9). The present category Cities in Hungary contains all municipalities I think (Hungary isn't so big), which leaves Category:Towns in Hungary obsolete. I suggest we leave it like that, and remove Towns in Hungary. Markussep 10:29, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Good morning (or I think, afternoon?) — I admit immediately that I am no expert on Hungary, but it looks like we have 3 different things going on here: (1) Cities; (2) the comitatus and/or municipalities (which look to me like a form of commune??); (3) small towns and villages. From looking at your work, I get the impression that my "towns" corresponds, or ought to correspond, to places that are not municipalities, i.e., that are within them; of which there must surely be hundreds and hundreds. Granted right now they're not onsite in such vast numbers, but they will inevitably creep on: Wikipedia is not 4 years old yet! || Also, a second concern: in other countries, the distinction is being made between the land units (provinces, counties) and the towns by the same name. It would be nice if, to the extent reasonable, the geographical units tree could be homogenized.
To sum up, I agree with you that Cities could be narrowed down to the 9 biggies; I think there should be a Category:Comitatus of Hungary, which should probably include districts no longer in modern Hungary; that Sopron, yes, should be removed to Category:Comitatus of Hungary; and that villages and towns not seats of a comitatus should be filed under Category:Towns of Sopron, a subcat of Comitatus.   ??? — Bill 12:05, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Good afternoon. As you may have noticed I created a category Category:Counties in the Kingdom of Hungary, which contains all the counties/comitatuses of the former Kingdom of Hungary. A comitatus is a county, which is like a province, département or canton. Sopron is Sopron-city, Sopron (county) is the former county. The 216 cities (or communes) that are listed at List of cities in Hungary may be actual cities or villages, but since there's only 43 with an entry right now, I think that's a problem for the future. I suggest removing Towns... altogether. The difference between city and village is usually arbitrary and historical, for instance in the Netherlands the smallest city has about 400 inhabitants, and the largest village over 100.000. Would you suggest making categories for the cities/villages in every separate county? Maybe nice in the future. Markussep 10:34, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)
You're right. After looking carefully, I do agree. And as you point out, even when the time comes — as you say, not yet — there is one problem: the difference between a "City"/"Village" historically/officially, and a neutral Wiki-geographical categorization by just plain size. In Italy, which is what I know about and work on mostly, fortunately they don't use the words "city", "village", etc., but "municipality" (comune), so it doesn't matter what we call a town/city, there is no confusion. Many comuni though are 400 people, some non-comuni are 20,000.... Metadata is not easy stuff. — Bill 13:40, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)

To finish off our little discussion here: I noticed that there is still a lot of confusion about categories for cities, towns and villages. For instance, according to the categories: Denmark has only towns, Hungary has a lot of cities and a few towns, the Netherlands have a lot of cities, 3 towns and a lot of municipalities. Do you know whether a decision has been reached about this somewhere? Markussep 16:50, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, I haven't; I've been pretty much out of the loop. The "town" vs "city" question has been made intractable, in my opinion, by nominalists battening on what is called a Town and what is called a City (whatever that means once one starts translating from other languages, which, as a professional translator, I'm of course acutely aware of). The original idea, that I was happy to work with and expand, was to differentiate smaller places from larger, in Italy for example Rome from Treia; the latter, however, though 1000 times fewer inhabitants than the former, was granted a patent of Città by a pope, so bingo! if nominalism has its sway, and there is a wave of it, with all the concomitant nonsensical results, there is nothing to be done. So — I've just pulled out of the whole thing altogether.... Best, Bill 18:18, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I also noticed this in wine regions. I would rather you didnt do it there at the moment, because as wine is expanded (it was in a sorry state), I am adding articles in some places such as Alsace wine rather than putting under Alsace so it will have to be changed. Also very few places are listed as wine regions so far. Also a few are cross border (eg Moselle in France and Luxembourg), though they could be listed as both. And the German wine regions are a mess because of different naming. Justinc 13:43, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Just to say hi

Dear Bill, nice to see your name pop up here. You are just the sort of person this project needs. You may recall I have sent you a few emails some months ago about your site. I wonder if anyone will run with that fascinating realization about the consistent error in the latitudes of the Roman cities. There is a good paper in that. Anyway, welcome. --CloudSurfer 19:19, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Polish heraldry

Thanks for the thumbsup, the project is really worth the effort. As you probably know it's going to be huge since the Polish (and Lithuanian for that matter) heraldic system is fairly complicated and at times up to 12% of people had their CoA here in Poland, so there's really lot of separate coats of arms (as opposed to Western Europe that bases its heraldic system mostly on joining several coats of arms into one or variations of the same CoA). Anyway, I'm starting right away. [[User:Halibutt|Halibutt]] 04:32, Oct 16, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for the corrections at Łabędź Coat of Arms. As you might know the Polish heraldic traditions are quite different and I'm still learning the Western blazon system. In Poland and Lithuania usually the name of the coat of arms (or the battle cry) is usually enough since the emblems were rarely divided and by "Łabędź" everyone understood that the bird is Argent, the beckground Gules and so on. Thanks again. [[User:Halibutt|Halibutt]] 20:00, Oct 18, 2004 (UTC)

Łabędź is interesting heraldically as a pure example of a class of arms that in England at least are called "punning arms", since Łabędź means "swan" , doesn't it? (I speak no Polish, but some Russian, and the word in Russian is лебедь.) Anyway, there is no article punning arms, but I'm collecting examples.... By the way in French heraldry, the more famous arms are occasionally referred to in other blazons by a similar shorthand: one speaks for example of "semé de France" to mean a blue field with a fleurs-de-lys pattern, etc. — Bill 21:50, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Frye

Hey, thanks for the bio-stub on Walter Frye! It's funny when two people grab a dumb stublet and try to expand it simultaneously. I incorporated yours into mine. Happy editing! Antandrus 20:19, 17 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Kind of you; you obviously know a good deal more about him, but I figured the dumb comment would consign the page to Speedy-meat unless I did something! — Best, B.

[edit] Bonnie Bernstein

Dear Bill: Hi! Thank you for reading the article I originated about Bonnie Bernstein. Although I dont neccesarily think that "famed" is a point of view word, your help is greatly appreciated. I probably wrote some points of views without meaning to or realizing they were point of views.

Since you dedicated yourself to that, I would also like you to help me in paying attention to the Lauren Jackson page. I keep making it NPOV, but the original writer keeps reverting it, to the version where he says that she is Australia's best basketball player of all time, blah blah blah. I love the WNBA and have seen the girl play, she's got mad skills, but to say shes the best Australian player of all time? Thats stretching it..lol.

Thanks for everything, and God bless you!

Sincerely yours, "Antonio Love is a wonderful wonderful thing! Martin"

[edit] Shannon Gilligan

You listed this as a Speedy Delete. I would have just taken out the exurberance and left it as a sub-stub. I verified and expanded it instead; you might like to take a look. Rmhermen 15:27, Oct 19, 2004 (UTC)

  • Oh thass much better; the perils of inserting a minimal stub, ya got a bunch of guys doing New Pages patrol only too eager to toss stuff.... Best, Bill 15:30, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Category:Toponymy

Other than category:Roman toponymy do you think this category will ever end up with more articles (or subcategories)? I'm trying to resolve category:orphaned categories by connecting them to "parent" categories. This one strikes me as a "why bother" (currently it has no parent and only the one member) but didn't want to summarily remove the reference (effectively deleting the category) without checking. What do you think? -- Rick Block 01:27, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

category:Roman toponymy would have been a bad idea, since toponymy is inevitably a mix of influences, even in Romance countries. The natural parents of Toponymy are in geography and in language (etymology if we have one). Whoever pitched category:Toponymy just now — someone did it, who wasn't you apparently — did something less than useful.

   I too have been concerned about Categories, my approach being (a) to fill categories, (b) to connect them to their parents; but working from below. I notice that one of the categories I struggled over (since I had to leave it parentless, not being able to figure out a good parent) has been deleted, and not well, either: Category:Polymaths has been moved to "Mathematicians"!!!! I'll have to go back and undo that: Leonardo da Vinci, for all his gifts, was not a mathematician. Best, — Bill 11:00, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Speedy deletions, Wiktionary

Hello. I'm at a loss to know why you made taut submanifold a speedy deletion: exactly which category at Wikipedia:Candidates for speedy deletion did you think? (I can assure you that it was not patent nonsense.) Also I think it is not helpful to label as Wiktionary candidates stub mathematical articles.

Charles Matthews 18:14, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Boone

Thanks for your reply. I misinterpreted your remarks, and I apologize. The debate over that put me in an over-hostile mood. I shouldn't have snapped at you like that (especially when your point has some validity, and isn't aimed at me personally, as I thought it was). Sorry about that, and I hope to continue to see you. You've been doing excellent work!

Apologetically yours, [[User:Meelar|Meelar (talk)]] 23:34, Oct 20, 2004 (UTC)

Think nothing of it; usually people react oddly to something of mine because (a) I'm one of the least clear writers I know; (b) there really are a lot of awful people on the Net, so our natural first assumption is that someone is saying something awful to us! I've done it myself. Best, Bill 09:05, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] categories for New York

Bill, FYI the category for the state of New York is category:New York (the category for every US state is the state name, except for category:Georgia (U.S. state)). I've moved the towns you categorized into category:Towns in New York State to category:Towns in New York and listed category:Towns in New York State in WP:CFD. -- Rick Block 00:10, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Thanx; I should have checked.... Bill 01:29, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Tracklistings of albums

By all means, if you see one, then please list it on VfD, or merge it into the article about the band (maybe in the discography). That's what VfD is there for. I mainly listed that article on VfD because I beleive a proper community voted delete process is required. - Ta bu shi da yu 13:50, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Williams-Sonoma photo

I didn't agree with your assessment of the VfD comments. Some people thought that the photo added some useful content to the Williams-Sonoma article (Smerdis and Meelar expressly, Gamaliel by admittedly vague implication). You and AlainV disagreed; Geogre was on your side but would apparently let the photo stay if someone did some research on the company, which I've now done. I don't feel strongly about the photo but I lean toward including it, so I've restored it in the course of adding some corporate information. JamesMLane 06:04, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Category:Americans by occupation vs. Category:American people by occupation

Bill, I've listed Category:Americans by occupation under WP:CFD. There's also an existing (and fairly well populated) Category:American people by professions. Seems all three of these should be merged, but clearly only one of the "by occupation" categories should be used. -- Rick Block 23:22, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Good catch: Category:Americans by occupation was clearly an OOPS. And yes, as for the other two, to be consistent with the other countries, Category:American people by professions should be the one deleted. Best, Bill 23:38, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] VfD

Sorry for snapping at you, but after reading through VfD for too long, the negativity of the whole thing starts to have an affect on me. Anywho, i would hazard a guess that in korea and japan as well as germany and scandinavia, the internet usage among teens/tweens would be equal if not higher to that in the US, and that internet usage among the same demographics in Australia, New Zealand, UK/Ireland and canada, would be either close or only slightly lower than the US. As for southern europe, i have no direct knowledge of it, so cant comment. The bellman 00:54, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Not to worry about it! It's a weird thing about the Net, we're all a bit edgy because there really are some awful people out there taking advantage of the anonymity. Asfer the subject at hand, strictly speaking, I'm talking thru my hat: short of a careful statistical study, who knows? Anecdotally, though — my website is large, much used by schoolchildren, and until recently had a French-language section as well as as Italian and English — the proportion of self-identified young people to adults is much higher among US-originating e-mail than elsewhere, so being Boobykins and liking things simple, I generalize.... Best, Bill 10:21, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)

My personal theory as to why the net is so edgy is cause you cant see other ppls faces, and so much emotion and meaning is conveyed by the face that you lose in text. As for the thing about kids from the US maybe there are not actually more younger users, but just more immature users :P The bellman 07:30, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Want more work?

Hi, Bill. :) Forgot to get back to you when you left a message on my talk page. I've been finding Wikipedia to be very frustrating, so I've decided to avoid any page that might be in even the slightest way controversial. It's going to be hard, because it seems that almost every page on this site is controversial, but I'm going to give it a shot anyway. :) Hope to see you around. func(talk) 00:41, 30 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Deletionist campaign

Hi there. As someone who has displayed a fairly rational and objective attitude towards micronation articles in the past I thought you might be interested to note that the rabid deletionist lobby is on the march against them again.

The latest target is New Utopia, which although a poorly written article in its current form concerns a subject that is eminently encyclopaedic, being the latest in a long line of libertarian "new country projects" (and therefore representative of a notable social/historic phenomenon), being the subject of dozens of international press and TV stories, as well as the subject of a widely-known US Securities & Investment Commission investigation for fraud.

You might want to take a look at the VfD and respond accordingly.

For future reference you might also want to note the articles in the Micronations Category, in order to keep an eye on its contents; I’ve been adding a number of well-researched, illustrated, fully referenced articles to this category in recent months, but there are moves afoot thanks to a highly suspect ongoing arbitration of process to have me banned completely from writing anything at all about micronations on the basis that as the founder of one, anything I write is somehow self-promotional and/or controversial. --Gene_poole 22:29, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)

As far as I can judge — and I admit it's not crystal-clear to me — that's lunacy. See my comment on the talk page. — Bill 23:37, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Thanks for your support. Increasingly, the deletionist lunatics here are running the asylum. As you can tell by reading some of their comments, wildly POV fact-free emotion-clouded judgements are pretty much the order of the day, and objectivity doesn't get much of a look-in. --Gene_poole 23:41, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Category:Jewish terrorist organizations

Please reconsider your vote on Category:Jewish terrorist organizations in Wikipedia:Categories for deletion in light of recent comments. 172 12:45, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Category:Slovakian people by occupation

Hi! Over at Wikipedia:Categories for deletion, we are trying to figure out what to do with the Slovak/Slovakian categories. (The consensus, truly, is most likely "we are confused about the distinction"). Slovak language suggests that the difference in terminology is an American/British English usage question, but it's still rather ambiguous.

Since you created some of those categories, could you give us some input? See Wikipedia:Categories_for_deletion#Slovak_vs._Slovakian—I'm trying to clean up some of the backlog at CFD and am primarily interested in coming up with a consistent naming scheme. -[[User:Aranel|Aranel ("Sarah")]] 19:00, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] I've been nominated

I just wanted to drop you a quick note to say that I've been nominated for adminship. Since you've been unfortunate enough to have dealings with me, I thought you might want to see what was going on there: Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/ClockworkTroll.

Many thanks, ClockworkTroll 07:48, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia:Forum for Encyclopedic Standards

Sir, you should definitely think about joining us at Wikipedia:Forum for Encyclopedic Standards, and helping us push for some reforms, rather than abandoning this noble cause. GeneralPatton 12:44, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Category:Patriarchs of Constantinople

I removed Category:Byzantine Empire, since none of the post-Byz Patriarch-of-Constantinople articles are Byz-Emp articles, as making it a sub-category Category:Byzantine Empire would require. But i can't tell whether the likewise seemingly inappropriate Category:Prelates reflects your confusion abt Cats or the inadequacy of the Prelate article. Are all past and present Patriarchs of Constantinople prelates? If not, that Category tag should go as well.

I added Category:Hierarchs, which should directly or indirectly include Category:Patriarchs of Constantinople, since those partriarchs are all hierarchs. If as i think some prelates are not hierarchs, Category:Hierarchs should stay even if Category:Prelates stays. But if all past and present hierarchs (not just Const. or other E. Orthodox ones) are prelates, then Category:Prelates should be a tag in Category:Hierarchs, in place of Category:Religious leaders. Let's talk further if this is confusing.
--Jerzy(t) 23:16, 2004 Nov 17 (UTC)

[edit] Categories: Botanists by various nationalities

Hi Bill - these are not useful. It breaks up the complete list of botanists at Category:Botanists, thereby making pages much harder to find when one needs to know (a) if a particular botanist has a page, and (b) what the page is titled, when adding links at e.g. a plant named by that botanist. Botanists are also highly international in their work, and the their nationality is often completely irrelevant to the areas they worked in, making it hard to predict what their nationality might have been (e.g. Siebold worked mainly on Japanese plants while based at a Dutch mission, making it very hard to know that he can only be found listed at Category:German botanists). I think these subcategories would be best deleted, or at the very least, any botanist listed at one of these subcategories must also be on the full list at Category:Botanists - MPF 14:22, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] The Humungous Image Tagging Project

Hi. You've helped with the Wikipedia:WikiProject Wiki Syntax, so I thought it worth alerting you to the latest and greatest of Wikipedia fixing project, User:Yann/Untagged Images, which is seeking to put copyright tags on all of the untagged images. There are probably, oh, thirty thousand or so to do (he said, reaching into the air for a large figure). But hey: they're images ... you'll get to see lots of random pretty pictures. That must be better than looking for at at and the the, non? You know you'll love it. best wishes --Tagishsimon (talk)

[edit] Article Licensing

Hi, I've started a drive to get users to multi-license all of their contributions that they've made to either (1) all U.S. state, county, and city articles or (2) all articles, using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-by-sa) v1.0 and v2.0 Licenses or into the public domain if they prefer. The CC-by-sa license is a true free documentation license that is similar to Wikipedia's license, the GFDL, but it allows other projects, such as WikiTravel, to use our articles. Since you are among the top 1000 Wikipedians by edits, I was wondering if you would be willing to multi-license all of your contributions or at minimum those on the geographic articles. Over 90% of people asked have agreed. For More Information:

To allow us to track those users who muli-license their contributions, many users copy and paste the "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" template into their user page, but there are other options at Template messages/User namespace. The following examples could also copied and pasted into your user page:

Option 1
I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:
{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}

OR

Option 2
I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions to any [[U.S. state]], county, or city article as described below:
{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}

Or if you wanted to place your work into the public domain, you could replace "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" with "{{MultiLicensePD}}". If you only prefer using the GFDL, I would like to know that too. Please let me know what you think at my talk page. It's important to know either way so no one keeps asking. – Ram-Man (comment) (talk)[[]] 14:43, Dec 9, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor

My Latin's bad (back-formed off of modern Romance languages), but isn't Principium the plural genetive, and therefore correct? -- Jmabel | Talk 22:18, Jan 11, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Parrina entry

Hi, Bill. Noticed that you took an interest in the Parrina entry a few months back. I happened to come upon it, and completely rewrote it, moving it to La Parrina since that is what the original contributor was writing about. (Parrina will stay, since it is an Italian DOC -- I'm working on it!). I took out the stub identification, since I cannot imagine it needs any elaboration beyond this. HowardB 12:42, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)

  • Thanks for that. I'm new to all this, so had not done anything about a user page so far. Maybe you'll now inspire me. Question: is it usual to reply to someone on their user page, or on one's own? (i.e., I post a comment on your user page, you reply to me on mine -- do I reply on yours or mine? -- what is the etiquette?)HowardB 03:51, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)
  • Appreciate the etiquette pointers. See what you mean. I looked at your site -- extremely impressive. Will return to do some reading when I get bored with Wiki! HowardB 14:45, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Talk:Varro Atacinus

Vould you vet my epigraph? --Wetman 18:06, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Removed legal threat

While I agree that User:216.102.6.176's vandalism is wrong, there is no reason for you to use personal attacks and legal threats. You called the user an idiot twice. More troubling is your threat to report the user to his school administrator, implying that he/she has the tendency to murder classmates. Many people block users on sight for making frivolous legal threats against Wikipedia. Legal threats against users are similarly a big deal. Please don't do it again. Rhobite 20:29, Mar 25, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] S. Maria di Collemaggio

Good job of fixing it. RickK 21:05, Mar 25, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Potheinus

The reason that I switched it is that although Cleopatra had Pothinus, Ptolemy XIII (with more information on him) had Potheinus link too.

Regarding the spelling, if you seach for the spelling as Pothinus, you'll see that there's no articles that use that. Even looking at links here, you'll see that the only reference is to a 2nd century French bishop. Potheinos also has no links. On the other hand, Potheinus is linked in a number of places, including the Ancient Egypt template. If these are actually refering to a number of different people, maybe you could write the article at Potheinus, Pothinus, Potheinos, etc and work out the redirects since you seems to know more about this. --Ricky81682 (talk) 22:49, Apr 23, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Censorinus

Hmm, Censorinus is linked from List_of_Roman_usurpers. For me it means that this article should be expanded on both wikipedias. You are right, expansion can be done only manually ;-). To be serious, I try to check all inserted iwiki manually. Margospl 12:14, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Ponte di Cerreto

Bill: Saw your note on Ponte di Cerreto...I was cruising the new pages list to kill time and saw the article, thought it might be helpful to stub it. If you don't think there is other information to add, feel free to "de-stub" it. Thanks for your contributions! Essjay 12:03, May 16, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] lots of edits, not an admin

Hi - I made a list of users who've been around long enough to have made lots of edits but aren't admins. If you're at all interested in becoming an admin, can you please add an '*' immediately before your name in this list? I've suggested folks nominating someone might want to puruse this list. Thanks. -- Rick Block (talk) 23:15, Jun 11, 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads-up Rick. Bill 23:38, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] VfD nominations

Annoyingly, nominating an article for deletion is actually a three step process. Please follow the steps at Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion#How_to_list_pages_for_deletion. Also, make sure to use the vfd2 and vfd3 tags listed there to enter your reason for deletion and place the page on the deletion log. That's how other people will be able to see the nomination even if they don't happen to go to the page in question. I've gone back through your edit history to format the entries you've already tagged and added them to the log. Thanks for helping to keep the place clean.

--Xcali 18:12, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I'm well aware of all this, having spent a few months last year on Vfd Patrol; I didn't nominate the Lion page for deletion, just voted/made a suggestion; the original nominee should do their own laundry. I am VfD'ing the similar Shark page, and am working at it now. Bill 18:18, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

My mistake. It looked like you were the first editor of the vote page, so I thought that you nominated it.

--Xcali 19:40, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Think nothing of it; all the more so that even Wikipedia's software believes I was!! I really have been getting a lot of odd server snafu's recently, and am wondering if it's my own system somehow.... Best, Bill 19:54, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Ongoing Vandalism

You warned User:62.171.194.44; but he's back at it in spades. If I knew exactly what to do, I'd do it myself.... Best, Bill 23:18, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Someone seems to have already handled this case, but for future reference: You can find a user's contributions by going to their user or user talk page and clicking the User contributions link. There you can view all their edits, and if there's ones you think are wrong you can Wikipedia:Revert them (Wikipedia:How to revert a page to an earlier version). Remember to make it clear on the talk page or in the edit summary why you're reverting if it's not simple vandalism.
If vandalism from a single source really becomes annoying and they ignore warnings, you can add them to Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism or Wikipedia:Vandalism in progress in order to get an admin to look into blocking them. --W(t) 10:43, 2005 Jun 16 (UTC)

[edit] Pipe sorting

Well, it does matter if there are two Kovalenkos. As it is a very common last name, that could very well be the case. Or would Wikipedia just put "Andrei Kovalenko" above "Dema Kovalenko" automatically since the title of his page comes before? In that case, I am wrong. --Dryazan 14:10, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Yes, in theory it would matter — but here we bump into a bug or a "feature" (depending on how you look at it) of the Wiki software. No matter what you put after "Kovalenko", within the Kovalenkos, if there were several of them, the pipe sort will alphabetize by the name of the article.... Nothing's perfect. But then, as I said, you do no harm by adding ", Dema" — and I do no harm by removing it. I'm not chasing your edits, by the way; the latest was an Italian and I do mostly Italian stuff on Wikipedia, because of my own website: the others I was editing people born in Kiev/Kyiv.... Best, Bill 14:16, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Double redirect cleanup award

For your help with the May 16, 2005 double redirect cleanup project you are given this award.
For your help with the May 16, 2005 double redirect cleanup project you are given this award.
OK; thanks, Triddle. It was relatively painless, and a good thing to do when bored.... I'll prolly be back. Bill 11:15, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Thru a misspelling?

Yes, "thru" is an acceptable if minority American spelling; rather than anglify spellings — newbies are warned about correcting "honour" or "honor" (either one), else with the many backgrounds of people, we'd never stop revert wars — wouldn't it be best to contribute some substance, if you can? Bill 23:44, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Hi Bill,
The official OED website (which I have access to through my university), says thru: now used informally as a reformed spelling and abbreviation (chiefly) in N. Amer.
The New Oxford American English Dictionary 2nd edition (which ships with MacOS X 10.4) also says thru: informal spelling of through.
I've been mostly focusing on 'spidering' through Wikipedia cleaning up random spelling, capitalisation, punctuation, and grammatical mistakes that I find. I've been told on #Wikipedia that this is regarded as a useful activity.
I've no interest in Anglicising/Americanizing the English on Wikipedia (except sometimes within individual articles to keep them internally consistent), but given the informal nature of 'thru', I thought it was fair game.
Cheers, Cmdrjameson 00:23, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)
(Yeah, I get the OED thru the University of Chicago that hosts my website too: no argument there.) Anyhoo, one spelling or another, as long as they're OK, makes very little difference; I was sorta hoping to spur your well-attested energy into something a bit more useful.... Actual spelling mistakes of course is a different matter, although even there, quite honestly, most of the time I just leave them, since there is so much substantial stuff to do. Bill 00:29, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Joseph T. Underwood

Thank you for helping to maintain the integrity of Wikipedia by listing articles you see as requiring speedy deletion. Please note, though, that 'vanity' is not a criterion for speedy deletion, and such articles should be listed at votes for deletion. If you are not sure of the criteria for speedy delete, please look here. Denni☯ 2005 July 6 23:37 (UTC)

Thanks; was wondering about that — Bill 7 July 2005 09:21 (UTC)

[edit] Template:SCD - Tacitus inscription

Hi Bill, several months ago you changed the SCD template from

This category may wrongfully label persons. [...]

to

This category may label persons incorrectly. [...]

noting

"wrongfully" doesn't mean what the writer thought!

in the "edit history".

I wondered what you meant by that, since there's new talk about that template.

Another question I've wanted to ask you for some time (only I didn't know it was so easy you being a wikipedian) regards an inscription about Tacitus found at Mylasa: do you know of any source where an image or a transcript of that inscription might be found (i.e. on the web, preferably free of copyright)?

I ask you this since your LacusCurtius website (which I value very high!) shows you have some intrest in Roman inscriptions. The first footnote on the Tacitus page says "OGIS 437, first brought to light in Bulletin de correspondance hellénique, 1890, pp. 621–623." as a reference for that inscription. Well, I don't have access to these paper sources, or can they be found on the internet somewhere?

--Francis Schonken 9 July 2005 09:30 (UTC)

"Wrongfully" was just a (glaring) misuse of English; it's someone's idea of "wrongly", because it sounds better.... Another very common example is "amphitheatre" where "theatre" is meant. "Wrongful" is in fact a legal term of very specialized application.
Well, "incorrectly" was not what was intended by the template. I had first written "unrightfully labeling persons". Then a native English speaker (Seth, taking part in the "Categorization of people" discussion at the time) had changed to "wrongfully", saying that "unrightfully" was bad English. I have to rely on native English speakers here, which I am not. the Categorization of people guideline does not advise to apply the SCD template when there are obvious material errors ("incorrectly"), but when wikipedia categorisation is not used in the most appropriate way. Do you think something like this would do better:

This category may label persons inappropriately. [...]

It's about the meaning of "label" too, which I intended to use in the meaning of racists inappropriately labeling jews, not in the meaning of a secretary making an error and putting the wrong label on an incoming letter. So if there's any suggestion to have a better and less ambiguous word for "label", I'd lend my ear too.--Francis Schonken 9 July 2005 11:40 (UTC)
"improperly", "inappropriately", or "wrongly" would all do, with various nuances of meaning. Yes, "incorrectly" is not what's meant, I see that now. (And "label" is just fine, or has become so by now: everybody knows what it means.) Bill 9 July 2005 11:43 (UTC)
Tx for the input, I copy this part of this talk to Wikipedia_talk:Categorization_of_people#Template:SCD now - and for the time being I choose "inappropriately" to be put in the SCD template. We'll see where that leads us. --Francis Schonken 9 July 2005 12:09 (UTC)
On OGIS 437, it's bad enough trying to find a Latin inscription online, let alone a Greek. I've found nothing, save for a coupla lines (the inscription is at least 90 lines long!) quoted in (PDF document); the best source for Greek texts is LATO, but it doesn't carry inscriptions last time I looked. Jona Lendering (Livius.Org) hasn't written his Tacitus article yet, but may well have the full info or even a photograph, since that's his playing field, and he's probably been to Mylasa, altho there again I'm not seeing an article "Mylasa" on Livius yet. But ask, he's very accessible.
Best I can do; I should point out I have only the most tenuous and indirect access to a University library, which I need to manage very carefully, else I have none! ("La plus belle fille du monde ne peut donner que ce qu'elle a . . .") — Bill 9 July 2005 09:48 (UTC)
Tx, puts me in the right direction. I didn't even know the inscription was in Greek (although I could've guessed). --Francis Schonken 9 July 2005 11:40 (UTC)

[edit] Classicist required

You might like to take a look at Tiberius Junius Brutus. It is up for Vfd - it looks like a hoax to me, but a classicist might shed some light. --Doc (?) 13:10, 10 July 2005 (UTC)



[edit] Welcome

(The standard welcome; signed by User:Meelar).

A more personalized kind welcome appeared very quickly after, thanks:

Sir, it’s an honor that you are contributing to wiki as I’ve found your great website far above and beyond enlightening on many occasions. It’s really a priceless research-tool. GeneralPatton 16:54, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] LacusCurtius

BTW, there are dozens of copies of WP content, with varying degrees of GFDL compliance - we have a list of them somewhere in the "Wikipedia:" pages, but I can't find it right now. Anyway, we just maintain the list of them, no need to note in articles that they've been mirrored all over the place (it's a feature, not a bug :-) ). Stan 02:32, 14 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Library editing

Dear Bill, Please note that i have now spent many, many hours compiling a selection of books in Sir T.B.'s library using the facsimile of 1986 E.J.Brill publications edited by J.S Finch. If there are any incorrect titles it is from those who listed the library contents in 1711 for auction. Also i really am not sure whether the usage of speech-marks to highlight titles makes the page actually look any better just simply more cluttered. Yes by all means be bold in editing pages but also please be aware that some pages have taken other wikis many many hours to compile! Also it is with some irratation i have noted that you have now made titles of Latin books indistinguishable from those written in English through your editing i shall revert this . Please consult me before any more 'helpful' editing . Regards Norwikian 10:32, 25 Sep 2004 (UTC)

On the Library, no question you've done a stellar job digging up the actual information.
First item, I caught it before I read you, and have now reverted it, sorry: you're absolutely right, I didn't understand Wiki style conventions, and should not have changed double-apostrophes to single-quotes!
I am, as you realize, no Browne scholar (although I've at least read him all, some of him repeatedly, probably my favorite English book is Garden of Cyrus/Hydriotaphia). I come at this page as someone with an interest parallel to Browne's, in many of the same texts: I've input online -- hand-typed, not scanned -- 6 of the ancient texts mentioned; and others not mentioned but which he must certainly have had, like Plutarch, Aelian, Cato, Frontinus, Vitruvius.
As for the actual content of this page, I didn't realize the typos and manifest errors were copied verbatim, but the reproduction of uncorrected errors is germane not to "Library of Sir TB" but to "1711 Catalogue etc." If the article were the latter, we would have to revert them right away and I'd feel very stupid for having edited them. But our concern here is with elucidating what Sir Thomas read, so there can be no harm in correcting accidental nonsense words due either to reading errors -- e.g., "Differtatio" (clearly long esses); or to uncorrected scanning -- e.g., "Sidereus Nuricius"; or to typos of unknown origin -- e.g., "Umbrare". Disabbreviating some of these titles would probably be useful for the audience this page is likely to reach, but there, I've been very cautious
There are still a pile of minor errors, and I've snagged a few more that I could clear up without reference to the original. But for example I've passed on the flexible spellings of 16c-17c French which might allow certain items, then maybe not; for example, most French words that would have an accent today, I've left unaccented, because accents were newish then and the actual books very likely had unaccented titles, although again maybe not. Despite being half-French, French-educated, and with many years experience as a French translator, I still haven't managed to figure out "naises traits" -- the closest reasonable emendation I can come up with "autres traits" but have failed to convince myself. Other cruxlets, in the matter of which I've been very cautious and changed nothing of course, include:
  • "de Cive", which is not Latin nor any reasonable abbreviation;
  • "Serpent and Draconum historica", where "Serpent(ium) & Draconum historia" looks probable;
Much more probable, but I've also been cautious and done nothing:
  • "Questions in Genesis"; the work was published in 1623 alright, as "Quaestiones in Genesim"; was there an English translation that fast with our title? It seems very unlikely to me. (In general, if we want to get to the actual titles of the books -- fair nuff -- quite a few others ought to be changed: Plautus' Comedies, Martin Luther, etc. Right now at any rate we have an inconsistent list, opting partly for the original titles, partly for modern English translations.)
I removed the link to Philology by the way because in the work by Martianus Capella the allegory of Philologia has very little to do with what we now call philology.

[edit] Thanks

Many thanks Bill for reverting your edit. It looks as if you have the knowledge to contribute a great deal here. You have certaintly made some good points about titles, on the whole i am simply checking whether the title existed or not before placing it. I shall consider carefully your other points. Yes translations from Latin to English to Latin were extremely quick in 17th c. As Sir T.b. wittily remarks in the intro to Pseudodoxia And indeed , if elegancy still proceedeth, and English Pens maintain that stream we have of late observed to flow from many, we shall within few years be fain to learn Latine to understand English, and a work will prove of equal facility in either . I shall come to your other points about the page when less tired but in the meantime thanks, sorry if i was a bit abrupt, people round here can be sometimes, but also jolly helpful too!! Norwikian 21:49, 25 Sep 2004 (UTC)


Thanks from me too, Bill, for updating the wikiLink at my User Talk page :-) dionyziz 10:40, Feb 27, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] In Vergilii carmina commentarii

Hi, Bill, I'm sure you know a lot more Latin than I do, so I'm delighted that you took a look at my Lucus a non lucendo, thanks very much. The comentarii spelling is from the German edition that I refer to. I wonder a little about them getting it wrong in the title. Could it be an acceptable alternative spelling? What do you think, mm or m? (I definitely want to avoid the pedantry of putting m and [sic].) --Bishonen 16:41, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Got a kick out of your Bishonen/Lucus a non lucendo connection...! The correct Latin is 2 M's, no doubt about it (as in Koptev's page, the line above the quoted title). But if the title page of the actual edition has one M, then, for the purposes of referring to that edition, my edit would have to be reverted. Alex Koptev is approachable, speaks English and answers his e-mail, write him! I do suspect a typo of his, though, rather than a curious spelling of the print edition. Bill 22:50, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)
    • Hey, thanks for noticing about Bishonen. Frankly that was what I created the Lucus a non lucendo entry for, to have it to refer to about my username. :-) Mmmm... about the number of m's, I guess writing e-mails about it may be a little excessive. I'll just leave your correct version. Thanks for your help! It's good to know there are real Latinists on the site (I'm not even a fake Latinist myself). --Bishonen 23:15, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Italian provinces

I put a list of what I think are the recommended names and synonyms at Talk:Provinces of Italy, but Italian spellings, where different, are handy redirs to have too. I do think we should favor "Province of Florence" rather than "Province of Firenze" for article titles, for consistency with the Anglicized city names and so as not to mix English and Italian within a single term. As for the statistical data, I've been pretty minimal so far, because what I would really like to do is to steal the nice tables from Italian and German WPs - a little automated translation and voila, the most detailed info available in English anywhere. :-) Stan 03:05, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Lacus Curtius

Your website has often come in handy for my amateurish edits here. You're a natural Wikipedian, and it's good to notice your name among "Recent Edits." Wetman 16:20, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Your Vfd listings

Wow, that's a lot of articles you've found! Thanks for helping clean up Wikipedia. It's an often thankless task, but we all appreciate it. --Slowking Man 21:04, Oct 6, 2004 (UTC)

Yes, agreed. Please take my comments there as intended... they're intended to help Wikipedia run more smoothly. And I'm not always right! You have got the hang of VfD very quickly, and your efforts are much appreciated. Andrewa 12:34, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Re: Vfd editing

Hi, Bill. I'm glad to hear that I didn't insult you at all, I guess you're just a good-natured person at heart. The Internet, though marvelous, is somewhat lacking in the respect that it cannot convey aspects of communication that we often take for granted: mood, tone, or body language, etc. I've found that because of this lack of entire layers of "normal" communication, people sometimes fill in the blanks in ways that are unintended. When I re-read what I had written, I cringed at how some people may have read it. Again, I'm glad you didn't.

Best regards, ClockworkTroll 18:24, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Noj as redirect to Oxenfez -- why?

I speedy-deleted Noj, whose content was simply ""See Italic text'Oxenfez'". You re-created it as a redirect to Oxenfez. Although that would seem to have been the original author's intent, "Noj" isn't a word and only appears by accident in the Oxenfez article. Why did you re-create the deleted page? [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 00:54, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Because the Oxenfez article specifically says that Noj is another name for Oxenfez, and the original author's intent in his Noj page was to redirect to Oxenfez (in an unWeblike way, the way one does in a print work). It's exactly similar to redirecting Scriptores Historiae Augustae to Historia Augusta. So if Oxenfez is a valid name — which I still doubt, and see the Lincolnshire residents who weighed in on it — maybe Noj is too. Well-intended and logical on my part, at any rate. Best, Bill 10:51, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)
You're right. I was trigger-happy. I didn't read the Oxenfez article carefully enough. Sorry. I shouldn't have deleted your redirect. If Oxenfez does survive I'll try to remember to put it back. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 14:28, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Biopoiesis

I recently created a candidate for the encyclopedia named biopoiesis. Before having time to update the page, you nominated the entry as a candidate for Wiktionary. Is there any reason you did this? It is much more than a dictionary definition and represents a good biological theory for the origin of life. For a brief encyclopedic article on the subject, go here. And for information on the differences between the old theory of abiogenesis, go here. The entry for biopoiesis effectively solves the ambiguity of abiogenesis, and I'm confused as to why anyone would oppose the need for clarity and accuracy. --Viriditas 01:34, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Well now you've fleshed it out, couldn't agree more. What I've seen people do to forestall the zealous to mark it "(a start)" in the Edit summary; or else of course wait to post the entry until they have a bit more. Best, Bill 10:54, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Good point. Maybe I should try that? Thanks for the helpful tip. --Viriditas 06:15, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Julia Venissa

Can you help with this entry? Wetman 09:14, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Not much, as you can see. Never heard of her, but that just means she's not attested in classical sources, which you knew. I know next to nothing about post-Roman and Roman-period tribal Britain. The article, a first contribution, looks like the beginning of an Arthurian genealogy and has an air of POV about it, which, along with simplicity, seemed to me a good enough reason to retitle it. Sorry to disappoint.... Bill 09:38, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Categorization

I see you're making "sharper cats" for a lot of things, however it's not so helpful to create those tiny little one-member categories - it reduces the usefulness of categories for grouping similar articles. Also, some people have a habit of emptying and deleting very small categories, so you're risking having somebody else come along and undo your work. Creating a category because you think it might become large eventually doesn't work, because it might be years before it picks up sufficient articles. My general rule is to leave articles in bigger categories until there are at least 10 or so articles to be the "seed" for the new category. Stan 15:26, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Was wondering who'd be the first to comment.... Depthwise vs. breadthwise, the old question! Seriously, I find the large categories drowning in loosely categorized articles (Category:Italian people is my focus), and very, very many people and places either uncategorized or populating "X-ian people"/"Country X". I do agree to some extent that some few categories I made are not the most useful in the sense of having only 1 or 2 members right this minute; the source of it is that I create or navigate to a Category, say Category:Italian painters, and find Category:Painters has either no subcats or lots and lots of national subcats — because they're easy to mark — and few on such things as by style/period, by medium, etc. What I feel I'm doing is clearing out the brush. The eventual aim for Categories, I expect the computer whizzes behind the architecture here will wind up doing it, is smooth Java crumbs, where, from a main Category, instead of navigating thru layers of cat pages, you'll run your cursor over the category, a silent menu will drop down, with submenus, etc., and in one operation you'll navigate to 20c Provençal painters or whatever.
The competition is Lists, which I view as worthless.... Why list items with no articles? So I'm starting from the bottom and tying it all together; mindful of the nonsense of having single-article or single-subcat categories, I'm scouring for the nearest item that comes to mind that will make the 2d or 3d (and if on my way I see that a page of a dozen items can be reduced to 1 or 2, so much the better, even if it means I get distracted); then back to Italy. — Bill 15:55, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)
The problem is that there's no way to know when this future software will be written; none of the developers I know of is working on anything like that. I'm sure you've seen half-constructed and abandoned infrastructure all over WP; small categories, or categories constructed for orthogonality, are kind of like that, where you're hoping that something will happen, but without any assurance. It's so unpredictable as to what will get attention from one day to the next, I tend to prefer doing things in a way that looks right today. Now lists are a bit of an anticipation; for instance list of battleships of the United States Navy listed all such ships when it was created, but there were many red links, and we painstakingly filled them all in. Another thing that I've done with lists is to find orphans; list of garden plants found a bunch of forgotten articles for instance, plus it's also 100% or nearly so, so you can see how much is done and how much remains. Similarly, list of ancient Romans is everything in OCD; when they're all filled in, we'll be ready to challenge P-W next... 1/2 :-) Stan 13:29, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)
You got my chuckle with P‑W.... (although if Wikipedia has gone this far in barely 4 years, can P‑W really be that far off??) But let me be sensible about Cats then: I'll continue to create tighter cats for European and North American places and people, and even then not all of them (Places in particular are more problematic, since they don't stay put, so to speak! especially in Mitteleuropa; and then yer right, "Ethnologists of Liechtenstein" prolly not useful). But there can be no doubt after all that clearing the brush from "England", "English people", etc. will then allow useful subcats like Category:English people by counties, Category:English painters of the 17th century, and all those harder-to-categorize things like Tribes and Ethnology and Dialects, Currency. I guess I'll drop the Brazilian places, I'm just getting swallowed up in Pumpie‑ism anyhoo.... — Best, Bill 13:45, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Hi, you explained me about categories for cities and counties, specifically for Hungary. I haven't really thought much about optimal categories, your suggestion about the counties of the Kingdom of Hungary is good. I think a category Category:Cities in Hungary over 100.000 would be pretty small (there's only 9). The present category Cities in Hungary contains all municipalities I think (Hungary isn't so big), which leaves Category:Towns in Hungary obsolete. I suggest we leave it like that, and remove Towns in Hungary. Markussep 10:29, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Good morning (or I think, afternoon?) — I admit immediately that I am no expert on Hungary, but it looks like we have 3 different things going on here: (1) Cities; (2) the comitatus and/or municipalities (which look to me like a form of commune??); (3) small towns and villages. From looking at your work, I get the impression that my "towns" corresponds, or ought to correspond, to places that are not municipalities, i.e., that are within them; of which there must surely be hundreds and hundreds. Granted right now they're not onsite in such vast numbers, but they will inevitably creep on: Wikipedia is not 4 years old yet! || Also, a second concern: in other countries, the distinction is being made between the land units (provinces, counties) and the towns by the same name. It would be nice if, to the extent reasonable, the geographical units tree could be homogenized.
To sum up, I agree with you that Cities could be narrowed down to the 9 biggies; I think there should be a Category:Comitatus of Hungary, which should probably include districts no longer in modern Hungary; that Sopron, yes, should be removed to Category:Comitatus of Hungary; and that villages and towns not seats of a comitatus should be filed under Category:Towns of Sopron, a subcat of Comitatus.   ??? — Bill 12:05, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Good afternoon. As you may have noticed I created a category Category:Counties in the Kingdom of Hungary, which contains all the counties/comitatuses of the former Kingdom of Hungary. A comitatus is a county, which is like a province, département or canton. Sopron is Sopron-city, Sopron (county) is the former county. The 216 cities (or communes) that are listed at List of cities in Hungary may be actual cities or villages, but since there's only 43 with an entry right now, I think that's a problem for the future. I suggest removing Towns... altogether. The difference between city and village is usually arbitrary and historical, for instance in the Netherlands the smallest city has about 400 inhabitants, and the largest village over 100.000. Would you suggest making categories for the cities/villages in every separate county? Maybe nice in the future. Markussep 10:34, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)
You're right. After looking carefully, I do agree. And as you point out, even when the time comes — as you say, not yet — there is one problem: the difference between a "City"/"Village" historically/officially, and a neutral Wiki-geographical categorization by just plain size. In Italy, which is what I know about and work on mostly, fortunately they don't use the words "city", "village", etc., but "municipality" (comune), so it doesn't matter what we call a town/city, there is no confusion. Many comuni though are 400 people, some non-comuni are 20,000.... Metadata is not easy stuff. — Bill 13:40, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)

To finish off our little discussion here: I noticed that there is still a lot of confusion about categories for cities, towns and villages. For instance, according to the categories: Denmark has only towns, Hungary has a lot of cities and a few towns, the Netherlands have a lot of cities, 3 towns and a lot of municipalities. Do you know whether a decision has been reached about this somewhere? Markussep 16:50, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, I haven't; I've been pretty much out of the loop. The "town" vs "city" question has been made intractable, in my opinion, by nominalists battening on what is called a Town and what is called a City (whatever that means once one starts translating from other languages, which, as a professional translator, I'm of course acutely aware of). The original idea, that I was happy to work with and expand, was to differentiate smaller places from larger, in Italy for example Rome from Treia; the latter, however, though 1000 times fewer inhabitants than the former, was granted a patent of Città by a pope, so bingo! if nominalism has its sway, and there is a wave of it, with all the concomitant nonsensical results, there is nothing to be done. So — I've just pulled out of the whole thing altogether.... Best, Bill 18:18, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I also noticed this in wine regions. I would rather you didnt do it there at the moment, because as wine is expanded (it was in a sorry state), I am adding articles in some places such as Alsace wine rather than putting under Alsace so it will have to be changed. Also very few places are listed as wine regions so far. Also a few are cross border (eg Moselle in France and Luxembourg), though they could be listed as both. And the German wine regions are a mess because of different naming. Justinc 13:43, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Just to say hi

Dear Bill, nice to see your name pop up here. You are just the sort of person this project needs. You may recall I have sent you a few emails some months ago about your site. I wonder if anyone will run with that fascinating realization about the consistent error in the latitudes of the Roman cities. There is a good paper in that. Anyway, welcome. --CloudSurfer 19:19, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Polish heraldry

Thanks for the thumbsup, the project is really worth the effort. As you probably know it's going to be huge since the Polish (and Lithuanian for that matter) heraldic system is fairly complicated and at times up to 12% of people had their CoA here in Poland, so there's really lot of separate coats of arms (as opposed to Western Europe that bases its heraldic system mostly on joining several coats of arms into one or variations of the same CoA). Anyway, I'm starting right away. [[User:Halibutt|Halibutt]] 04:32, Oct 16, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for the corrections at Łabędź Coat of Arms. As you might know the Polish heraldic traditions are quite different and I'm still learning the Western blazon system. In Poland and Lithuania usually the name of the coat of arms (or the battle cry) is usually enough since the emblems were rarely divided and by "Łabędź" everyone understood that the bird is Argent, the beckground Gules and so on. Thanks again. [[User:Halibutt|Halibutt]] 20:00, Oct 18, 2004 (UTC)

Łabędź is interesting heraldically as a pure example of a class of arms that in England at least are called "punning arms", since Łabędź means "swan" , doesn't it? (I speak no Polish, but some Russian, and the word in Russian is лебедь.) Anyway, there is no article punning arms, but I'm collecting examples.... By the way in French heraldry, the more famous arms are occasionally referred to in other blazons by a similar shorthand: one speaks for example of "semé de France" to mean a blue field with a fleurs-de-lys pattern, etc. — Bill 21:50, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Frye

Hey, thanks for the bio-stub on Walter Frye! It's funny when two people grab a dumb stublet and try to expand it simultaneously. I incorporated yours into mine. Happy editing! Antandrus 20:19, 17 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Kind of you; you obviously know a good deal more about him, but I figured the dumb comment would consign the page to Speedy-meat unless I did something! — Best, B.

[edit] Bonnie Bernstein

Dear Bill: Hi! Thank you for reading the article I originated about Bonnie Bernstein. Although I dont neccesarily think that "famed" is a point of view word, your help is greatly appreciated. I probably wrote some points of views without meaning to or realizing they were point of views.

Since you dedicated yourself to that, I would also like you to help me in paying attention to the Lauren Jackson page. I keep making it NPOV, but the original writer keeps reverting it, to the version where he says that she is Australia's best basketball player of all time, blah blah blah. I love the WNBA and have seen the girl play, she's got mad skills, but to say shes the best Australian player of all time? Thats stretching it..lol.

Thanks for everything, and God bless you!

Sincerely yours, "Antonio Love is a wonderful wonderful thing! Martin"

[edit] Shannon Gilligan

You listed this as a Speedy Delete. I would have just taken out the exurberance and left it as a sub-stub. I verified and expanded it instead; you might like to take a look. Rmhermen 15:27, Oct 19, 2004 (UTC)

  • Oh thass much better; the perils of inserting a minimal stub, ya got a bunch of guys doing New Pages patrol only too eager to toss stuff.... Best, Bill 15:30, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Category:Toponymy

Other than category:Roman toponymy do you think this category will ever end up with more articles (or subcategories)? I'm trying to resolve category:orphaned categories by connecting them to "parent" categories. This one strikes me as a "why bother" (currently it has no parent and only the one member) but didn't want to summarily remove the reference (effectively deleting the category) without checking. What do you think? -- Rick Block 01:27, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

category:Roman toponymy would have been a bad idea, since toponymy is inevitably a mix of influences, even in Romance countries. The natural parents of Toponymy are in geography and in language (etymology if we have one). Whoever pitched category:Toponymy just now — someone did it, who wasn't you apparently — did something less than useful.

   I too have been concerned about Categories, my approach being (a) to fill categories, (b) to connect them to their parents; but working from below. I notice that one of the categories I struggled over (since I had to leave it parentless, not being able to figure out a good parent) has been deleted, and not well, either: Category:Polymaths has been moved to "Mathematicians"!!!! I'll have to go back and undo that: Leonardo da Vinci, for all his gifts, was not a mathematician. Best, — Bill 11:00, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Speedy deletions, Wiktionary

Hello. I'm at a loss to know why you made taut submanifold a speedy deletion: exactly which category at Wikipedia:Candidates for speedy deletion did you think? (I can assure you that it was not patent nonsense.) Also I think it is not helpful to label as Wiktionary candidates stub mathematical articles.

Charles Matthews 18:14, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Boone

Thanks for your reply. I misinterpreted your remarks, and I apologize. The debate over that put me in an over-hostile mood. I shouldn't have snapped at you like that (especially when your point has some validity, and isn't aimed at me personally, as I thought it was). Sorry about that, and I hope to continue to see you. You've been doing excellent work!

Apologetically yours, [[User:Meelar|Meelar (talk)]] 23:34, Oct 20, 2004 (UTC)

Think nothing of it; usually people react oddly to something of mine because (a) I'm one of the least clear writers I know; (b) there really are a lot of awful people on the Net, so our natural first assumption is that someone is saying something awful to us! I've done it myself. Best, Bill 09:05, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] categories for New York

Bill, FYI the category for the state of New York is category:New York (the category for every US state is the state name, except for category:Georgia (U.S. state)). I've moved the towns you categorized into category:Towns in New York State to category:Towns in New York and listed category:Towns in New York State in WP:CFD. -- Rick Block 00:10, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Thanx; I should have checked.... Bill 01:29, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Tracklistings of albums

By all means, if you see one, then please list it on VfD, or merge it into the article about the band (maybe in the discography). That's what VfD is there for. I mainly listed that article on VfD because I beleive a proper community voted delete process is required. - Ta bu shi da yu 13:50, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Williams-Sonoma photo

I didn't agree with your assessment of the VfD comments. Some people thought that the photo added some useful content to the Williams-Sonoma article (Smerdis and Meelar expressly, Gamaliel by admittedly vague implication). You and AlainV disagreed; Geogre was on your side but would apparently let the photo stay if someone did some research on the company, which I've now done. I don't feel strongly about the photo but I lean toward including it, so I've restored it in the course of adding some corporate information. JamesMLane 06:04, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Category:Americans by occupation vs. Category:American people by occupation

Bill, I've listed Category:Americans by occupation under WP:CFD. There's also an existing (and fairly well populated) Category:American people by professions. Seems all three of these should be merged, but clearly only one of the "by occupation" categories should be used. -- Rick Block 23:22, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Good catch: Category:Americans by occupation was clearly an OOPS. And yes, as for the other two, to be consistent with the other countries, Category:American people by professions should be the one deleted. Best, Bill 23:38, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] VfD

Sorry for snapping at you, but after reading through VfD for too long, the negativity of the whole thing starts to have an affect on me. Anywho, i would hazard a guess that in korea and japan as well as germany and scandinavia, the internet usage among teens/tweens would be equal if not higher to that in the US, and that internet usage among the same demographics in Australia, New Zealand, UK/Ireland and canada, would be either close or only slightly lower than the US. As for southern europe, i have no direct knowledge of it, so cant comment. The bellman 00:54, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Not to worry about it! It's a weird thing about the Net, we're all a bit edgy because there really are some awful people out there taking advantage of the anonymity. Asfer the subject at hand, strictly speaking, I'm talking thru my hat: short of a careful statistical study, who knows? Anecdotally, though — my website is large, much used by schoolchildren, and until recently had a French-language section as well as as Italian and English — the proportion of self-identified young people to adults is much higher among US-originating e-mail than elsewhere, so being Boobykins and liking things simple, I generalize.... Best, Bill 10:21, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)

My personal theory as to why the net is so edgy is cause you cant see other ppls faces, and so much emotion and meaning is conveyed by the face that you lose in text. As for the thing about kids from the US maybe there are not actually more younger users, but just more immature users :P The bellman 07:30, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Want more work?

Hi, Bill. :) Forgot to get back to you when you left a message on my talk page. I've been finding Wikipedia to be very frustrating, so I've decided to avoid any page that might be in even the slightest way controversial. It's going to be hard, because it seems that almost every page on this site is controversial, but I'm going to give it a shot anyway. :) Hope to see you around. func(talk) 00:41, 30 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Deletionist campaign

Hi there. As someone who has displayed a fairly rational and objective attitude towards micronation articles in the past I thought you might be interested to note that the rabid deletionist lobby is on the march against them again.

The latest target is New Utopia, which although a poorly written article in its current form concerns a subject that is eminently encyclopaedic, being the latest in a long line of libertarian "new country projects" (and therefore representative of a notable social/historic phenomenon), being the subject of dozens of international press and TV stories, as well as the subject of a widely-known US Securities & Investment Commission investigation for fraud.

You might want to take a look at the VfD and respond accordingly.

For future reference you might also want to note the articles in the Micronations Category, in order to keep an eye on its contents; I’ve been adding a number of well-researched, illustrated, fully referenced articles to this category in recent months, but there are moves afoot thanks to a highly suspect ongoing arbitration of process to have me banned completely from writing anything at all about micronations on the basis that as the founder of one, anything I write is somehow self-promotional and/or controversial. --Gene_poole 22:29, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)

As far as I can judge — and I admit it's not crystal-clear to me — that's lunacy. See my comment on the talk page. — Bill 23:37, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Thanks for your support. Increasingly, the deletionist lunatics here are running the asylum. As you can tell by reading some of their comments, wildly POV fact-free emotion-clouded judgements are pretty much the order of the day, and objectivity doesn't get much of a look-in. --Gene_poole 23:41, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Category:Jewish terrorist organizations

Please reconsider your vote on Category:Jewish terrorist organizations in Wikipedia:Categories for deletion in light of recent comments. 172 12:45, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Category:Slovakian people by occupation

Hi! Over at Wikipedia:Categories for deletion, we are trying to figure out what to do with the Slovak/Slovakian categories. (The consensus, truly, is most likely "we are confused about the distinction"). Slovak language suggests that the difference in terminology is an American/British English usage question, but it's still rather ambiguous.

Since you created some of those categories, could you give us some input? See Wikipedia:Categories_for_deletion#Slovak_vs._Slovakian—I'm trying to clean up some of the backlog at CFD and am primarily interested in coming up with a consistent naming scheme. -[[User:Aranel|Aranel ("Sarah")]] 19:00, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] I've been nominated

I just wanted to drop you a quick note to say that I've been nominated for adminship. Since you've been unfortunate enough to have dealings with me, I thought you might want to see what was going on there: Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/ClockworkTroll.

Many thanks, ClockworkTroll 07:48, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia:Forum for Encyclopedic Standards

Sir, you should definitely think about joining us at Wikipedia:Forum for Encyclopedic Standards, and helping us push for some reforms, rather than abandoning this noble cause. GeneralPatton 12:44, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Category:Patriarchs of Constantinople

I removed Category:Byzantine Empire, since none of the post-Byz Patriarch-of-Constantinople articles are Byz-Emp articles, as making it a sub-category Category:Byzantine Empire would require. But i can't tell whether the likewise seemingly inappropriate Category:Prelates reflects your confusion abt Cats or the inadequacy of the Prelate article. Are all past and present Patriarchs of Constantinople prelates? If not, that Category tag should go as well.

I added Category:Hierarchs, which should directly or indirectly include Category:Patriarchs of Constantinople, since those partriarchs are all hierarchs. If as i think some prelates are not hierarchs, Category:Hierarchs should stay even if Category:Prelates stays. But if all past and present hierarchs (not just Const. or other E. Orthodox ones) are prelates, then Category:Prelates should be a tag in Category:Hierarchs, in place of Category:Religious leaders. Let's talk further if this is confusing.
--Jerzy(t) 23:16, 2004 Nov 17 (UTC)

[edit] Categories: Botanists by various nationalities

Hi Bill - these are not useful. It breaks up the complete list of botanists at Category:Botanists, thereby making pages much harder to find when one needs to know (a) if a particular botanist has a page, and (b) what the page is titled, when adding links at e.g. a plant named by that botanist. Botanists are also highly international in their work, and the their nationality is often completely irrelevant to the areas they worked in, making it hard to predict what their nationality might have been (e.g. Siebold worked mainly on Japanese plants while based at a Dutch mission, making it very hard to know that he can only be found listed at Category:German botanists). I think these subcategories would be best deleted, or at the very least, any botanist listed at one of these subcategories must also be on the full list at Category:Botanists - MPF 14:22, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] The Humungous Image Tagging Project

Hi. You've helped with the Wikipedia:WikiProject Wiki Syntax, so I thought it worth alerting you to the latest and greatest of Wikipedia fixing project, User:Yann/Untagged Images, which is seeking to put copyright tags on all of the untagged images. There are probably, oh, thirty thousand or so to do (he said, reaching into the air for a large figure). But hey: they're images ... you'll get to see lots of random pretty pictures. That must be better than looking for at at and the the, non? You know you'll love it. best wishes --Tagishsimon (talk)

[edit] Article Licensing

Hi, I've started a drive to get users to multi-license all of their contributions that they've made to either (1) all U.S. state, county, and city articles or (2) all articles, using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-by-sa) v1.0 and v2.0 Licenses or into the public domain if they prefer. The CC-by-sa license is a true free documentation license that is similar to Wikipedia's license, the GFDL, but it allows other projects, such as WikiTravel, to use our articles. Since you are among the top 1000 Wikipedians by edits, I was wondering if you would be willing to multi-license all of your contributions or at minimum those on the geographic articles. Over 90% of people asked have agreed. For More Information:

To allow us to track those users who muli-license their contributions, many users copy and paste the "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" template into their user page, but there are other options at Template messages/User namespace. The following examples could also copied and pasted into your user page:

Option 1
I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:
{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}

OR

Option 2
I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions to any [[U.S. state]], county, or city article as described below:
{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}

Or if you wanted to place your work into the public domain, you could replace "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" with "{{MultiLicensePD}}". If you only prefer using the GFDL, I would like to know that too. Please let me know what you think at my talk page. It's important to know either way so no one keeps asking. – Ram-Man (comment) (talk)[[]] 14:43, Dec 9, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor

My Latin's bad (back-formed off of modern Romance languages), but isn't Principium the plural genetive, and therefore correct? -- Jmabel | Talk 22:18, Jan 11, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Parrina entry

Hi, Bill. Noticed that you took an interest in the Parrina entry a few months back. I happened to come upon it, and completely rewrote it, moving it to La Parrina since that is what the original contributor was writing about. (Parrina will stay, since it is an Italian DOC -- I'm working on it!). I took out the stub identification, since I cannot imagine it needs any elaboration beyond this. HowardB 12:42, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)

  • Thanks for that. I'm new to all this, so had not done anything about a user page so far. Maybe you'll now inspire me. Question: is it usual to reply to someone on their user page, or on one's own? (i.e., I post a comment on your user page, you reply to me on mine -- do I reply on yours or mine? -- what is the etiquette?)HowardB 03:51, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)
  • Appreciate the etiquette pointers. See what you mean. I looked at your site -- extremely impressive. Will return to do some reading when I get bored with Wiki! HowardB 14:45, 8 Feb 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Talk:Varro Atacinus

Vould you vet my epigraph? --Wetman 18:06, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Removed legal threat

While I agree that User:216.102.6.176's vandalism is wrong, there is no reason for you to use personal attacks and legal threats. You called the user an idiot twice. More troubling is your threat to report the user to his school administrator, implying that he/she has the tendency to murder classmates. Many people block users on sight for making frivolous legal threats against Wikipedia. Legal threats against users are similarly a big deal. Please don't do it again. Rhobite 20:29, Mar 25, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] S. Maria di Collemaggio

Good job of fixing it. RickK 21:05, Mar 25, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Potheinus

The reason that I switched it is that although Cleopatra had Pothinus, Ptolemy XIII (with more information on him) had Potheinus link too.

Regarding the spelling, if you seach for the spelling as Pothinus, you'll see that there's no articles that use that. Even looking at links here, you'll see that the only reference is to a 2nd century French bishop. Potheinos also has no links. On the other hand, Potheinus is linked in a number of places, including the Ancient Egypt template. If these are actually refering to a number of different people, maybe you could write the article at Potheinus, Pothinus, Potheinos, etc and work out the redirects since you seems to know more about this. --Ricky81682 (talk) 22:49, Apr 23, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Censorinus

Hmm, Censorinus is linked from List_of_Roman_usurpers. For me it means that this article should be expanded on both wikipedias. You are right, expansion can be done only manually ;-). To be serious, I try to check all inserted iwiki manually. Margospl 12:14, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Ponte di Cerreto

Bill: Saw your note on Ponte di Cerreto...I was cruising the new pages list to kill time and saw the article, thought it might be helpful to stub it. If you don't think there is other information to add, feel free to "de-stub" it. Thanks for your contributions! Essjay 12:03, May 16, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] lots of edits, not an admin

Hi - I made a list of users who've been around long enough to have made lots of edits but aren't admins. If you're at all interested in becoming an admin, can you please add an '*' immediately before your name in this list? I've suggested folks nominating someone might want to puruse this list. Thanks. -- Rick Block (talk) 23:15, Jun 11, 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads-up Rick. Bill 23:38, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] VfD nominations

Annoyingly, nominating an article for deletion is actually a three step process. Please follow the steps at Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion#How_to_list_pages_for_deletion. Also, make sure to use the vfd2 and vfd3 tags listed there to enter your reason for deletion and place the page on the deletion log. That's how other people will be able to see the nomination even if they don't happen to go to the page in question. I've gone back through your edit history to format the entries you've already tagged and added them to the log. Thanks for helping to keep the place clean.

--Xcali 18:12, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I'm well aware of all this, having spent a few months last year on Vfd Patrol; I didn't nominate the Lion page for deletion, just voted/made a suggestion; the original nominee should do their own laundry. I am VfD'ing the similar Shark page, and am working at it now. Bill 18:18, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

My mistake. It looked like you were the first editor of the vote page, so I thought that you nominated it.

--Xcali 19:40, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Think nothing of it; all the more so that even Wikipedia's software believes I was!! I really have been getting a lot of odd server snafu's recently, and am wondering if it's my own system somehow.... Best, Bill 19:54, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Ongoing Vandalism

You warned User:62.171.194.44; but he's back at it in spades. If I knew exactly what to do, I'd do it myself.... Best, Bill 23:18, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Someone seems to have already handled this case, but for future reference: You can find a user's contributions by going to their user or user talk page and clicking the User contributions link. There you can view all their edits, and if there's ones you think are wrong you can Wikipedia:Revert them (Wikipedia:How to revert a page to an earlier version). Remember to make it clear on the talk page or in the edit summary why you're reverting if it's not simple vandalism.
If vandalism from a single source really becomes annoying and they ignore warnings, you can add them to Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism or Wikipedia:Vandalism in progress in order to get an admin to look into blocking them. --W(t) 10:43, 2005 Jun 16 (UTC)

[edit] Pipe sorting

Well, it does matter if there are two Kovalenkos. As it is a very common last name, that could very well be the case. Or would Wikipedia just put "Andrei Kovalenko" above "Dema Kovalenko" automatically since the title of his page comes before? In that case, I am wrong. --Dryazan 14:10, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Yes, in theory it would matter — but here we bump into a bug or a "feature" (depending on how you look at it) of the Wiki software. No matter what you put after "Kovalenko", within the Kovalenkos, if there were several of them, the pipe sort will alphabetize by the name of the article.... Nothing's perfect. But then, as I said, you do no harm by adding ", Dema" — and I do no harm by removing it. I'm not chasing your edits, by the way; the latest was an Italian and I do mostly Italian stuff on Wikipedia, because of my own website: the others I was editing people born in Kiev/Kyiv.... Best, Bill 14:16, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Double redirect cleanup award

For your help with the May 16, 2005 double redirect cleanup project you are given this award.
For your help with the May 16, 2005 double redirect cleanup project you are given this award.
OK; thanks, Triddle. It was relatively painless, and a good thing to do when bored.... I'll prolly be back. Bill 11:15, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Thru a misspelling?

Yes, "thru" is an acceptable if minority American spelling; rather than anglify spellings — newbies are warned about correcting "honour" or "honor" (either one), else with the many backgrounds of people, we'd never stop revert wars — wouldn't it be best to contribute some substance, if you can? Bill 23:44, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Hi Bill,
The official OED website (which I have access to through my university), says thru: now used informally as a reformed spelling and abbreviation (chiefly) in N. Amer.
The New Oxford American English Dictionary 2nd edition (which ships with MacOS X 10.4) also says thru: informal spelling of through.
I've been mostly focusing on 'spidering' through Wikipedia cleaning up random spelling, capitalisation, punctuation, and grammatical mistakes that I find. I've been told on #Wikipedia that this is regarded as a useful activity.
I've no interest in Anglicising/Americanizing the English on Wikipedia (except sometimes within individual articles to keep them internally consistent), but given the informal nature of 'thru', I thought it was fair game.
Cheers, Cmdrjameson 00:23, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)
(Yeah, I get the OED thru the University of Chicago that hosts my website too: no argument there.) Anyhoo, one spelling or another, as long as they're OK, makes very little difference; I was sorta hoping to spur your well-attested energy into something a bit more useful.... Actual spelling mistakes of course is a different matter, although even there, quite honestly, most of the time I just leave them, since there is so much substantial stuff to do. Bill 00:29, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Joseph T. Underwood

Thank you for helping to maintain the integrity of Wikipedia by listing articles you see as requiring speedy deletion. Please note, though, that 'vanity' is not a criterion for speedy deletion, and such articles should be listed at votes for deletion. If you are not sure of the criteria for speedy delete, please look here. Denni☯ 2005 July 6 23:37 (UTC)

Thanks; was wondering about that — Bill 7 July 2005 09:21 (UTC)

[edit] Template:SCD - Tacitus inscription

Hi Bill, several months ago you changed the SCD template from

This category may wrongfully label persons. [...]

to

This category may label persons incorrectly. [...]

noting

"wrongfully" doesn't mean what the writer thought!

in the "edit history".

I wondered what you meant by that, since there's new talk about that template.

Another question I've wanted to ask you for some time (only I didn't know it was so easy you being a wikipedian) regards an inscription about Tacitus found at Mylasa: do you know of any source where an image or a transcript of that inscription might be found (i.e. on the web, preferably free of copyright)?

I ask you this since your LacusCurtius website (which I value very high!) shows you have some intrest in Roman inscriptions. The first footnote on the Tacitus page says "OGIS 437, first brought to light in Bulletin de correspondance hellénique, 1890, pp. 621–623." as a reference for that inscription. Well, I don't have access to these paper sources, or can they be found on the internet somewhere?

--Francis Schonken 9 July 2005 09:30 (UTC)

"Wrongfully" was just a (glaring) misuse of English; it's someone's idea of "wrongly", because it sounds better.... Another very common example is "amphitheatre" where "theatre" is meant. "Wrongful" is in fact a legal term of very specialized application.
Well, "incorrectly" was not what was intended by the template. I had first written "unrightfully labeling persons". Then a native English speaker (Seth, taking part in the "Categorization of people" discussion at the time) had changed to "wrongfully", saying that "unrightfully" was bad English. I have to rely on native English speakers here, which I am not. the Categorization of people guideline does not advise to apply the SCD template when there are obvious material errors ("incorrectly"), but when wikipedia categorisation is not used in the most appropriate way. Do you think something like this would do better:

This category may label persons inappropriately. [...]

It's about the meaning of "label" too, which I intended to use in the meaning of racists inappropriately labeling jews, not in the meaning of a secretary making an error and putting the wrong label on an incoming letter. So if there's any suggestion to have a better and less ambiguous word for "label", I'd lend my ear too.--Francis Schonken 9 July 2005 11:40 (UTC)
"improperly", "inappropriately", or "wrongly" would all do, with various nuances of meaning. Yes, "incorrectly" is not what's meant, I see that now. (And "label" is just fine, or has become so by now: everybody knows what it means.) Bill 9 July 2005 11:43 (UTC)
Tx for the input, I copy this part of this talk to Wikipedia_talk:Categorization_of_people#Template:SCD now - and for the time being I choose "inappropriately" to be put in the SCD template. We'll see where that leads us. --Francis Schonken 9 July 2005 12:09 (UTC)
On OGIS 437, it's bad enough trying to find a Latin inscription online, let alone a Greek. I've found nothing, save for a coupla lines (the inscription is at least 90 lines long!) quoted in (PDF document); the best source for Greek texts is LATO, but it doesn't carry inscriptions last time I looked. Jona Lendering (Livius.Org) hasn't written his Tacitus article yet, but may well have the full info or even a photograph, since that's his playing field, and he's probably been to Mylasa, altho there again I'm not seeing an article "Mylasa" on Livius yet. But ask, he's very accessible.
Best I can do; I should point out I have only the most tenuous and indirect access to a University library, which I need to manage very carefully, else I have none! ("La plus belle fille du monde ne peut donner que ce qu'elle a . . .") — Bill 9 July 2005 09:48 (UTC)
Tx, puts me in the right direction. I didn't even know the inscription was in Greek (although I could've guessed). --Francis Schonken 9 July 2005 11:40 (UTC)

[edit] Classicist required

You might like to take a look at Tiberius Junius Brutus. It is up for Vfd - it looks like a hoax to me, but a classicist might shed some light. --Doc (?) 13:10, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Honorifics for dead monarchs

It is not Wikipedia policy, as you stated, not to use styles at the start of articles. They have been used at the opening of articles to show what an individual's style was or is. A user tried to get a consensus to remove them and failed. The agreed consensus, to avoid endless editing wars, was to leave styles where they currently are. In trying to remove them you broke the agreed compromise and tried to enforce a non-existent rule on Wikipedia. I have reverted your changes. Please don't unilaterally try to change an agreed compromise on the basis of a non-existent Wikipedia rule. Any attempt to break that compromise will simply be reverted automatically by those involved in agreeing that compromise.

The current policy is

If the person has honorifics, these should be used in the initial reference and/or elsewhere in the article where appropriate, but not in the entry title. (Manual of Style)

FearÉIREANNImage:Animated-union-jack-01.gif SOLIDARITY WITH THE PEOPLE OF LONDON\(caint) 17:48, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

Seems like you and I were on each other's talk pages writing messages. lol. Anyway, as I said, your understanding of Wikipedia policy is mistaken. That is why I reverted the changes. Given the edit wars that erupted on the issue, everyone pretty much agreed to leave the issue alone. It might be revisited some day, but right now it would only trigger one mother of an edit war, as there are still too much bitterness and rivalries generated by the recent battle. Everyone needs to cool down and take a long break from the issue. (I only hope it hasn't triggered it already!!!) If so, time to reach for the valium!

FearÉIREANNImage:Animated-union-jack-01.gif SOLIDARITY WITH THE PEOPLE OF LONDON\(caint) 17:54, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

I was aware of no agreement on that, folks; some minority decided it in some obscure place, and from now on to the end of time no matter how many feel it's not right, it'll stay. Well then, I won't revert, but it really is plain silly; it must have got started when somebody got it in their head that the recently dead were somehow being dissed by this universal editorial practice — which would account for people being invested in this point: time and time again I bump into some childish thing of this type (articles uneditable because of vandal wars, etc.). It's this kind of idiosyncrasy (flying in the face of all accepted practice, look at any other encyclopedia you please, and almost all of Wikipedia as well) that makes Wikipedia look bad, and keeps better contributors away; more generally phrased, it belies Jimbo's axiom that "Wikipedia is not an exercise in democracy"; and offers ammo to them that knowledge, like art, is not a sphere for democracy. Anyhow, the immediate effect on me now, for example (I thoroughly dislike controversy), will be to keep my edits and new articles down, because I'll feel somewhat assaulted, and why bother.
I'll agree heartily with you on one thing: I hope I haven't accidentally fueled more infighting. Best, Bill 18:00, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

I am against using honorifics and styles in articles - I regard the best to only explain such once in the article. Thus, a bio shuld not begin "His Majesty King Edward", "His Holiness Pope John", but there would be only an explanation, something as follows: "Edward was king of xx. As heir apparent, He was styled as His Royal Highness, and as king, His Majesty...". I think an enactment of a policy to enforce that would be needed now. What do you think? Arrigo 18:16, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

Since you ask, and for what it's worth — very little, I fear, since the minute something gets controversial I just go away — that seems reasonable to me. I believe some of the royalty biographies do just that, even going so far as to list, in a special section, the various styles thru the life of the person. It still seems like a bit of overkill (read, really: excess column-inches devoted to the matter), but as they say, Wikipedia is not print, and disk storage is cheap. I would except current monarchs; Elizabeth II, by my lights, quite properly starts with "Her Majesty".
The use of "His/Her Majesty" in relation to a dead person by the way, in addition to not being customary, is also inaccurate: "Le Roi est mort: Vive le Roi !" is usually the official view of the monarchies themselves: the Majesty resides in the living Monarch, not elsewhere. Anyhoo, nobody should look to me for support, and I'll leave to others the time spent on such things. Bill 19:23, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] SpeedStep

Thanks, Bill. Nice edits.

- Dave Suffling - dsufflin (--at--) uoguelph (--dot--) ca

[edit] Thomas of Celano

Google appears to prefer Celano over Celaeno by a ratio of approximately 5:2. I say move it to Celano, with a redirect at Celaeno. "Celaeno" is the first spelling I think of, mostly because it was the spelling H. P. Lovecraft used, and as such was the one I encountered first. May want to also add a redirect at "Caelano" as well, since this may have been what HPL meant to write. Smerdis of Tlön 14:01, 17 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Argentine cardinals

Hi Bill. When you create a Category (Like Category:Argentine cardinals), please don't let it hang to a non existing category (Argentine prelates). Since there are still not much articles about Argentine cardinals, I'll link it directly to Argentine Religion. Thanks, Mariano 07:26, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

I usually don't, and link up to an existing root; as in this case, I did (see creation date and time of Category:Argentine prelates). I'll fix your move now. Bill 10:13, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

Sorry! I guess I got you right in those few seconds that it took you to create the other one. Sorry again for being annoying. Good wiking, Mariano 11:17, 19 July 2005 (UTC)

Think nothing of it, and better safe than hanging, like you say. (As for Argentine cardinals and prelates, those are awfully thin categories right now! but I'm sure can be fleshed out from existing articles; the bugaboo of consistency —) Best, Bill 11:52, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
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