User talk:Father Ignatius

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Welcome!

Hello, Father Ignatius, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome! Just H 21:58, 25 December 2006 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Changing the "Show Preview" button pop-up message

{{helpme}}

When I mouseover the "Show Preview" button when editing a page, the yellow Post-It pop-up says "Preview your changes, please use before saving! [alt-p]".

This is a comma splice, and so surely painful to many Wikipedians. Also, many editors frown on gratuitous exclamation marks. In my opinion, the pop-up should say:

"Preview your changes [Alt-P]. Please use before saving."

But how do I go about getting it changed?


Thanks

Nat 16:55, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

These messages reside in the MediaWiki namespace. Using Special:Allmessages shows that the relevant page that needs editing is MediaWiki:Tooltip-preview. MediaWiki pages can only be edited by administrators, so you'll need to go to MediaWiki talk:Tooltip-preview, place {{editprotected}} on that talk page, and write a description of the change you want. (Editprotected requests often take a while to go through; it's unlikely it'll be changed instantly). Hope that helps; feel free to put {{helpme}} back up if you have any more questions. --ais523 18:16, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Date settings

In Elizabeth Thackery I noticed you piped date links, which forces the way you prefer to see dates. Instead, you can change your own date settings under "My preferences" at the top of your screen, letting you see it your way and me see it mine. NickelShoe (Talk) 23:43, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Minor changes

Please note that the minor tag should be used only for "only superficial differences exist between the current and previous version: typo corrections, formatting and presentational changes, rearranging of text without modifying content, etc. A minor edit is a version that the editor believes requires no review and could never be the subject of a dispute." If you changes make any alteration to content, they should not be flagged as minor. -- Beardo 18:31, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Useful stuff

{{peacock}}
{{weasel}}
{{calm talk}}
{{notaforum}}
{{controversial3}}
{{sprotect}}
{{current}}

[edit] Ann Coulter

Nat - Good point about differentiating the talk shows from their hosts. I made an attempt at this, but maybe there's a better way. The shows are The Sean Hannity Show, The Rush Limbaugh Show, and The Mike Gallagher Show. SH and RL have their own articles, with separate articles for their shows. MG has an article, but there isn't one for his show.

Thinking it too verbose to say "The SH Show, The RL Show, and The MG Show," I left it saying "SH, RL, and MG," but made the links for SH and RL point to the articles for their shows (SH already pointed there, I think). Maybe better would be to verbosely state the full name of each show, though I decided not to. Also maybe better would be to say "shows hosted by SH, RL, and MG," and have the SH and RL links point to the shows as they do now.

This is minor stuff, but anything that can be done to improve the Ann Coulter article SHOULD be done, IMHO, and any rational new editor of that article should be paid attention to, consulted with, etc. Lou Sander 17:19, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Re: Block

With regards to your question to User:Can't sleep, clown will eat me, I can tell you that you are not blocked, as can be seen from your block log, and you can tell by the fact that you edited his page to ask the question! However, checking the block log for the IP you provided shows that it was indeed blocked (see this), but since the block is not anonymous users only, if you attempted to edit from that IP address you would be unable to. Since your IP has obviously now changed, since you can edit, I suggest you don't worry about it. That block was targeted at the IP address, not your account. I hope this clarifies the situation. --Deskana (Alright, on your feet soldier!) 21:07, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Hello Father Ignatius. To reiterate what Deskana has said above, you were not personally targeted in this block. It is possible you are either on a rotating IP address or a transparent proxy of sorts. If it is the latter, we may want to pursue discussion with your internet service provider to enable X-Forward-For headers which would likely prevent this issue in the future. Please accept my apologies for any inconvenience, and have a good weekend. Can't sleep, clown will eat me 23:13, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Blocking of IP no. 198.54.202.250

I am spelling out this situation in detail, as it seems to me that Wikipedia administrators need to understand more about how IP numbers can work, and I hope that whichever administrator responds to this knows how better to inform the group of Wikipedia administrators.

On 2nd March 2007, User:Can't sleep, clown will eat me applied a block to IP number 198.54.202.250 in response to repeated vandalism by anonymous editors. It was a blanket block, and not a block against anonymous editors only. As I hope will become clear below, it should have been.

Here's why: 198.54.202.250 is one of several Cape Town servers of SAIX, the South African Internet Exchange. SAIX is the single conduit through which every ISP in South Africa sees the Internet. That is, we're not talking ISP-level here: we're talking national. So this is not a question of "We may want to pursue discussion with your ISP to enable X-Forward-For headers which would likely prevent this issue in the future".

At any given moment, very many users — hundreds? thousands? tens of thousands? — are sharing this IP number. This means that User:Can't sleep, clown will eat me's action blocked out from Wikipedia every one of the very, very many Internet users in a city of four million people, plus surrounding provincial hinterland — and spanning across every ISP that South Africa has — who are currently using this regional server.

It gets worse. There are several such servers, and a single user's Wikipedia packets might be routed out through any one of them. Of course, each has its own IP number! That is to say, the block will sometimes affect those at whom it was aimed, and sometimes not. And it will sometimes affect whole swathes of other people at whom it was not aimed at all! I saw this effect myself when editing last night: when I clicked "Save Page", sometimes it worked normally and sometimes I get the pink "User is blocked" slap-in-the-face.

I hope this information helps to explain why, from the Cape Town POV, it feels like supervisor privileges have been inappropriately invoked, and that innocent bystanders have been unproductively alienated and antagonised.

The message you wrote above has a bit of an accusative tone, which isn't necessary. You are right that in a situation like this the block should be anon-only, but administrators cannot be expected to know all the above information when blocking the IP address, and administrators should use the anon-only blocking feature at their discretion, as they see fit. User:Can't sleep, clown will eat me has done absolutely nothing wrong, but you seem to be accusing him like he has done. My point is that you could have worded the unblock request in about one sentence, and I would have been convinced. Either way, I unblocked the IP address, since the block was due to expire in about an hour, so there was no point in changing the block to anon-only. Have a nice day. :-) --Deskana (Alright, on your feet soldier!) 13:09, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
<editor>Not accusative, but accusatory</editor>. Observation on human behaviour: If one approach is tried, and does not does not work, then there is a strong tendency to try another approach. You will be able to confirm this from your own observations.
Your statement "You are right that, in a situation like this, the block should be anon-only" [my punctuation] contradicts your statement "User:Can't sleep, clown will eat me has done absolutely nothing wrong". He has, in fact, made an error of judgment needlessly affecting many innocent bystanders without achieving his goal.
Yes, administrators should indeed use their discretion with the anon-only blocking feature. So, if they don't use it, or don't have it, it's a problem. Whether this accusatory or a statement of fact is presumably a matter of opinion.
By making a detailed explanation, I was trying to do some good in the world by better informing the community of Wikipedia administrators in a relevant area. I am disappointed that my seed appears to have fallen on stoney ground. You say "administrators cannot be expected to know all the above information when blocking the IP address"; I feel that, on the contrary, they can and should be expected to be informed and have relevant expertise in the area of what they do. I guess we must agree to disagree.
Nat 13:48, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
With all due respect, you're being ridiculous. How exactly can administrators be expected to know everything about every single IP that they block. There is no contradiction in what I said- the block should be anon-only but CSCWEM couldn't have known that he would affect so many users from the start. You appear to just being complaining because you were accidentally blocked, rather than accepting that people aren't all-knowing. I see no further need to continue any conversation with users just out for an argument. It accomplishes nothing. --Deskana (Alright, on your feet soldier!) 13:56, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
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