User talk:Karen Johnson (old)

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This isn't too important, but several of us have decided on what to rename the / pages of countries. Here it is:

History of *
Geography of *
Demography of *
Government of *
Economy of *
Communications in *
Transportation in *
Military of *
Foreign relations of *

Note the signficant name changes for the former /People and /Transnational issues. --mav

Karen, you said you steer clear of maths, but you worked on the pentomino article, which is most certainly maths!!

Or is it just math notation that you hate? I am like that too.

Anyway, cool pentomino graphic. -- User:Juuitchan

That wasn't maths... that was a drawing task to go with a game I rather fondly remember having when I was a kid :) I thought that a proper graphic would do more justice to the article than the original asci art set that wouldn't display right on my screen. Thanks for the compliment :) KJ

That's a great dandelion photo you found.  :-) --KQ 19:37 Aug 19, 2002 (PDT)

Isn't it just! I wish I could say that I took it, but it came from the GIMP photo library - there are some great images in there but you have to know what you're looking at, because they're not indexed! KJ

....

You're finding some great photos, Karen. If you find a better one for marigold, feel free to upload over the one I put up. I'm not completely happy with it myself--that's how it looked, though. And if you don't find a better one, that's fine--don't go out of your way for it--I'll reshoot the plant when I get a chance. Best, --KQ 20:19 Aug 19, 2002 (PDT)

Thanks for the compliment KQ, but I'm not really much of a photographer... I'm raiding the GIMP copyright free photo library to find these images! One photo of mine that I WAS going to put up was my canna lily because I had a picture I was proud of... but you beat me to it and yours is much better! KJ


Oh ... sorry about that. I've liked the pictures you've put up so far.
Last time I visited the GIMP, it was a mess and so I decided DIY would try my patience less. I think I'll revisit now, to browse and to see if it accepts direct contributions.  :-) --KQ
You're right... GIMP is a massive mess! But it also has fantastic photos hidden in the junk heap. I wish somebody who really knew what they were doing had catalogued it... but such is life. When I want a particular subject picture I try doing a search for it, and sometimes it brings up a decent image. This afternoon I typed in 'plant' and I'm just running through the images trying to see what I recognise and can use... so far I've recognised a pitcher plant, a night-blooming cactus, a pinecone and a couple of flowers. I'm still trying to fully identify an iris I downloaded. It was labelled 'flag iris' but I don't think it IS one and I want to put it in the right place in the pedia! When it comes to my own photos I've got 6 boxes of them sitting on top of my cupboard waiting for a rainy day. I started scanning useful images but only got a couple of rolls done in a day because it just takes so long! KJ
Well now we're even. I was going to go take a picture of an iris down the street tomorrow, actually.  :-) And I could have shot some great pitcher plants when I went home (there's a swamp down the street) ... oh well. So many subjects, so little time.  :-)
Yes, scanning does take a long time. And then if you adjust levels in Photoshop and burn the corners, it's about 20 minutes a picture. But I'll do it in the sacred name of wikipedia. But piecemeal, at my leisure. --KQ

Since you mentioned in the Dandelionlarge.jpg article that you didn't know how to link an image without displaying it, here's how; use a media: namespace instead of an image one. [[image:picture.jpg|alt text here]] will display an image with the text after the pipe as its alt string, and [[media:picture|click here!]] will create an ordinary link to the image using the text after the pipe. Bryan Derksen

Thank Bryan :) KJ

Hi, good work on fixing that nonsense Fen article. I noticed it, but didn't know what to do other than just deleting it. Is there a page to list suspected nonsense pages that you can't be bothered to action yourself? -- WillSmith (Malaysia)

Hi Will. There are a few things you can do with a garbage article - a)move the contents of it to Wikipedia:Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense if you think it's mildly humorous; b)replace the garbage with a stub of real information instead; c)just delete the junk and leave the article blank; or d)list the article on wikipedia:votes for deletion and someone else will take care of it. KJ


There's Wikipedia:Pages needing attention. See also Wikipedia:Utilities -- Tarquin

If you can't edit the Village Pump in Netscape, download a new browser... -- Anonymoues 10:14 Oct 27, 2002 (UTC)

That's a wrong-headed and snobbish attitude - if Karen is having trouble then many other people are too. We needn't limit people's freedom to choose their browser over something that can be easily fixed via an archive. It is normal around here to archive old talk anyway. --mav
When I saw the recent changes page I wondered why you thought I was rude Mav... now I see :) I may be a stubborn holdout, but I am generally quite happy with netscape 4.79. In most ways it meets my needs quite adequately, and I don't often have problems with it. When a page gets particularly long it overflows the buffer of the edit box and Netscape won't let me add anything to it. However, at this point the page is usually getting too long and tangled it to be easy to follow the conversation, or to find the particular part of the article that you want to add to/edit, so I don't see anything wrong with a request for the page to be split. Just because I was the person who noticed the problem and made a note of it, that doesn't mean that it's just MY problem! KJ
This is true. I'd recommend mozilla now over netscape 4, but it uses about 50MB while running: it may not be suitable for an old machine.

Re: longest word in the English language - I have added the IP address on Wikipedia:Vandalism in progress. -olivier 07:05 Oct 28, 2002 (UTC)

Dear Karen: When a person convicted of a crime is still alive, I feel it is better to put alleged or allegedly because, even if convicted of a crime, that person could still sue our website, claiming he or she didnt do it and that we are effectively accusing he or she of something he or she didnt do. Besides, accusing someone of doing something here is not NPOV and also, you have to remember that, unless we are the actual victim, a witness or the victimizer of the crime commited, there is no way 100 percent to assure that a person commited that crime, unless the person actually confessed. Therefore, when a crime has been commited and people not involved say that someone did it, it is basically an opinion and not a fact.

Take the murder of Nicole Simpson and the pizza delivery guy who was murdered alongside her in that famous murder case. I could say OJ did it, but I could also say that the 4 guys OJ claims to have seen walk off her house did it. Since I wasnt there, if I say something about it here, accusing someone btw, it's an opinion, not a fact because there is no way to prove 100 percent that whoever did it did it, unless the person saying it was actualy there.

Thats why I think it;s right to say Dominique Dunn's boyfriend allegedly killed her, even when he was convicted of her murder.

Thanks for reading my articles, and I hope I can enjoy reading many new articles by you very soon.

Sincerely yours, User:AntonioMartin.

I have to say that I HATE the way that the media (and apparantly everyone else now) dances around the subject of who did what for fear of being sued. The lawsuit apparantly runs the world... or at least the American part of it. In Australia hardly anyone sues anyone, but in the US there are laywers wanting you to sue because your hamburger arrived cold!

If you must avoid saying that somebody 'did' it then don't use the word 'alleged' - saying she was 'allegedly' stabbed means maybe she was stabbed but maybe she got run over by a bus instead... if you MUST use the word then it should be 'she was stabbed, allegedly by her jealous boyfriend.' Or better, avoid the jealous boyfriend bit altogether - the fact is that he was sentenced and convicted, so presumably there was reasonable cause to believe that he did indeed do the dastardly deed. In Australia, that's enough proof. The court found him guilty so therefore it's okay to say that he was. You could say 'she was stabbed to death and her boyfriend was convicted and sentenced to six years in relation to the crime' if you really want to. 'Alleged' is just plain bad english.

America - the home of the fee and the land of the lawsuit... and I'm planning on moving there? :) KJ

Lyme disease is no joke Karen.
http://www.academicpress.com/inscight/11181997/lyme-di1.htm

Excuse me... did I say it was? If you looked at the recent deletions log, I'm in the process of removing blank and garbage pages from the database, and the sole contents of that particular page was that question. I didn't write it thank you. KJ

Why did you delete Aleksey Nicolaievich Romanov, an imperfect article needs improvement...not deletion Lir 08:44 Nov 18, 2002 (UTC)

Then you make a stub out of it Lir. --mav

It was a stub. Lir 08:53 Nov 18, 2002 (UTC)

Since when do stubs have improper spelling, no punctuation, and 'add your text here' in them? I didn't delete the text either - somebody else did. I just removed the empty article because it was not worth the bother of restoring such a feeble little tidbit of text. Anybody coming to write the article would do better without having to correct it first. KJ

Welcome back! The short article list has grown significantly since we lost your deletion service. ;-) --mav

lol! So I see... (guess what my first stop was after the recent changes list? - the winnowing has begun! :)KJ
Have fun. Its all yours! :) --mav

Welcome back. I trust Canberra was exciting and pretty and full of wacky Australians who wrestles rattlesnakes or whatever it is Australians do when they're not busy being Australian. Potly yours, Tokerboy


I hope that the children had fun arguing on my talkpage while I was on holidays... These comments have now been removed and the argument is closed. Please take it to the relevant Atlantium article/s if you wish to continue the debate. KJ 07:49 Jan 2, 2003 (UTC)

As one of the children involved in the debate I would like to apologize. My initial response was to defend you from a nasty message left by George. --mav
He was rather unprovokedly nasty, wasn't he... thank you for defending me when I wasn't here to defend myself! I'm glad I wasn't here actually, because I would have gotten rather upset about it at the time... but since I wasn't here I didn't read it until it was all over. :) KJ

Thanks for your typo correction :-) -- Youssefsan

Hello, & welcome back! I look forward to seeing the pics.  :-) best, KQ

Thanks KQ! I've been back for awhile but this was the first day I've actually been inspired to add useful new content intead of just dithering around correcting typos :) I was actually surprised that these basic 'skeletal' entries haven't been done long agoKJ
Yes, wikipedia has some odd omissions still. Just a few days ago I was surprised to see on Outkast that Erykah Badu still has no article. (and, having just done a fair amount of research, didn't care to write it myself). --KQ

A complaint!!!!!! How the @#!@## am I supposed to wikipedia-weed if all of the access pages are disabled? And how the !#@$%^%% am I suppose to know when 02 UTC is in Australian time? I am NOT impressed... my major method of wikipedia contribution (correcting typos, editing badly spelled articles and mending/deleting stubs) have all been disabled for 12 hours of the day. KJ

See UTC and Time zone for help with times. If the fact that our database performance crashes to *utter unusable crap* when we leave the heavy lifting functions enabled during the busiest times (day in North America, evening in Europe) bothers you, I suggest you remember that this project is maintained by volunteers, very few of them, who have other things to do in their lives and receive not one penny and little thanks for their efforts here keeping this site up and running for you. --Brion 23:59 Jan 19, 2003 (UTC)
Hey - I try to thank you every so often. Here it is again: Thank you Brion! :) --mav
Karen, if you're in Eastern Oz, add 11 hours at the moment, 10 normally, to UTC to get local time. It's 10.5 hours in SA/NT (9.5 out of daylight savings), 10 in Queensland (all year), and 8 in WA.'

I'm a volunteer too, doing a job that nobody else can be bothered with (or has the time to do)... and if you want me to bloody well go away and leave you all alone I WILL. I'm pissed off at the world today and ready to tear my hair out or to hit somebody very VERY hard.

I would argue that slow access is better than no access, and that disabling functions for any reason other than that they plain don't work is a bad bad BAD idea. KJ

The trouble is that when these options are available then the whole website goes down - including the other language editions. I vote for having these functions static during what are now blackout periods. This would mean that right before the site is hit with heavy traffic a static page is made of the current view on each maintenance page. This should allow people to do what they need to do while at the same time keep the server load minimal. Of course, there needs to be a note saying that the page will not be updated until x hour. --mav
I see your point. And I think I agree with you Mav. One of the most frustrating things is coming to do a job and not being able to even start (hence my explosion)... If there was a static display I'd have some kind of starting point and some idea of what was going on. Couldn't these pages be updated maybe once an hour or once every two hours intead of constantly? It's always seemed kind of unnecessary that it updates the 'short entries' page every single time you make a change to it. To avoid that I try to remember to right-click and open stuff in a new window until I've made 20 or thirty changes to the original listing. KJ
Mav just said everything I was gonna say. :) Note that the other day Magnus put in an experimental static result display for Special:Wantedpages; we hope to get this or a smoother system rolled out to the other pages as well soon. --Brion 02:00 Jan 20, 2003 (UTC)
Hey Karen,
Hi!
Thanks for being here.
Please don't be angry.
Please don't be hurt.
Love, Love, Love (is that part of a beatles song?)
with friendliness and joy,
Me. :-)
Thank you Me... (boy, that sounds schizophrenic :)) I'm sorry I'm in such a foul mood today... the whole city is wreathed in smoke from the bushfires in north-eastern Victoria, and I think it's poisoning my mood as well as my lungs :( I promise to stop screaming and having tantrums, for today anyway... and Brion, of course I appreciate everything you do for the project - without you there wouldn't BE a wikipedia. I'm just being an ungrateful b##ch today, but I'll try to stop. KJ

Back to the disabled page subject - now it seems that the function pages have been permanently disabled. Or at least every time I come to try to use them I can't access them and get the 'this is temporarily disabled during peak hours' message, which now doesn't say when those hours are at all. Are 'peak hours' 23 hours a day? I've tried at nine o'clock in the morning and it's 'peak hours', I've tried at midday and it's 'peak hours', I've tried at five o'clock in the afternoon and it's 'peak hours' and I've tried at about ten o'clock at night before I got ready for bed and it was STILL peak hours... Right now it is 6pm on a Friday night in Australia, which is about three or four am Friday morning in America, so the majority of internet users are sleeping like babes... (and no, I'm not going back to the mailing list to raise this discussion because there was too much 'discussion' there that was of zero personal interest to me and that I didn't BEGIN to understand.) If the function is permanently disabled then please change the message to reflect that fact, and I'll stop trying to do anything useful... KJ 07:18 Jan 24, 2003 (UTC)

I'm sorry to hear that you are upset - I would be too. But the load on the server has quadrupled since we were Slashdotted and received other press attention. As a temporary measure many special features have been disabled so that at least people can still view pages and edit (see Talk:Main Page). If these features hadn't been disabled then the server would bog down and nobody would be able to use Wikipedia. I'm sure you've noticed that every minute there are anywhere from 3 to seven new edits on Recent Changes now. Previously during "slow" times there would be up to 10 minutes between edits. Please understand that the developers are doing the best they can. --mav
There still is Wikipedia:Votes for deletion and Wikipedia:Find or fix a stub if you are bored. I know it makes me feel good sometimes to nuke crappy non-article pages. ;-) --mav
I'm not upset Mav. I'm just frustrated! I've noticed that server access time has slowed to a crawl... and I appreciate that the shutdowns were essential, but it's STILL driving me up the wall not to be able to do any real work on the wikipedia because of the vast flood of curious passerbys (it took about ten minutes and three tries last night to save a simple page correction!)... I'll stop trying to access the 'forbidden' functions because obviously they're going to stay shut down until something can be done. I've found a (slow) way to check for garbage too - I'm lurking on the 'new pages' listing and checking out all the pages made by an anonymous IP address to see whether they're real articles... I might go back to my 'cat' project instead though - I'm getting bored with new articles! lol btw how do you go about setting up a wikiproject? I was wondering whether maybe the 'cats of the world' should become one of them instead of being a singleperson operation...

Something that's occurred to me is wondering whether the wikipedia crew had ever considered setting up a mirror site or two to ease the traffic load? I know that that leads to the difficulty of updates, but what about a static mirror for the merely curious and information-seeking? They could read to their hearts content, and flip over to the 'real thing' if they decided to contribute. The mirror could be updated once every 24 hours or something to keep it relatively up-to-date. KJ

The idea has certainly been ponied about, but no one's yet offered up a host for such a mirror so there's been no serious talk. --Brion 15:40 Jan 24, 2003 (UTC)
RE WikiProjects: Just fill out the template and spread the word on related WikiProjects (like WikiProject Dog Breeds and Tree of Life). --mav 16:33 Jan 24, 2003 (UTC)


Hi Karen. Is there any reason that you know about why Canberra was moved to Canberra, Australia? Or, putting it the other way about, why it should not be moved back? There seems to be no chance of ambiguity (as discussed on the talk page), but maybe there is something I haven't thought of. Cheers -- Tannin 12:14 Mar 15, 2003 (UTC)

There was a push to have Australian cities preemptively disambiguated a while ago (just as American and Canadian cities are), but that movement seemed to loose steam. I'm not sure what the Aussies want now. --mav
Okay, I had a quick look at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (city names). Wow, lots of talk. Anyway, here's something I thought is relevant to us:
As an American, I don't normally say the full name "Chicago, Illinois", just as I don't normally say the full name "John Aschcroft". There's essentially only one "Chicago" in my life and only one "Ashcroft", and their importance to me isn't idiosyncratic either. Nevertheless, if somebody says either of these full names, it doesn't sound at all weird, it just sound a little bit more precise. Is "Toronto, Ontario" like that to Canadians, or does it just sound wrong as (I've read) "Oslo, Norway" sounds wrong to Europeans? — Toby 21:35 Aug 9, 2002 (PDT)
I think Tannin and Karen would agree that an Australian would never answer a blunt "Maleny, Queensland" to the question "where are you from". They would say "Maleny, you know, about 100 km NW of Brisbane", or "Coonabarabran, in outback NSW", or "Morisset, just south of Newcastle". Unlike in America, state names aren't very useful in tracking down just where someone comes from, because our states are so damned big. Also, about the only things which are ambiguous in Australia are suburb names, since we have far fewer cities and large towns than America.
Here's what I propose: names which (according to Wikipedia) exist only in Australia should have the plain name, e.g. Canberra and Fremantle. If some day discover a Fremantle in Denmark, and some Danish people want to write an article about it, we can move our page to Fremantle, Australia to avoid offence. I also vote for block disambiguation of Brisbane, and any similar cases (see Talk:Brisbane). Suburb names need more aggressive disambiguation, but that's not really a problem at the moment, since AFAIK we only have one or two. What do you think of this proposal? -- Tim Starling 01:19 Mar 17, 2003 (UTC)
Sounds good to me, Tim. Tannin 12:01 Mar 18, 2003 (UTC)
I think the moving is a job for a sysop. Pity neither Karen nor Robert Merkel are around. -- Tim Starling 12:30 Mar 18, 2003 (UTC)
Quite so. I wasn't starting a unilaterial campaign just now, just an individual one which happened to be easy (which was what reminded me to check over here.) Tannin
This issue was gone into MANY times when the pagenaming conventions were being set up. I actually argued for using plain names, with (Australia) in brackets as an identifier, but the other faction won. I've been busy... and I'll continue to be busy for the foreseeable future (I just came back tonight to make a note on my user pages that I won't be here for the next four months because I'm travelling! If you can persuade people to agree that Canberra should be the main page for the city, then go right ahead and move the article there... (make Canberra, Australia and Canberra (Australia) into redirects. KJ 11:42 Mar 21, 2003 (UTC)
OK. Thanks. Have a great trip! Tannin

Thanks for the info Karen, it's nice to have an old hand around, relatively speaking ;) I had a look at the mailing list archives on this subject -- I noticed you actually had some good arguments for the Canberra, Australia convention -- a wiki-wide city naming convention would help with the creation of new articles by contributors who don't know whether or not the name is ambiguous. However in my experience, most contributors don't think of disambiguation at all when writing articles. The Canberra, Australia convention seems to lead to a neverending workload for the regulars, who are left to modify many Canberra-like links made by infrequent or newbie contributors.

I think I'll take this to wikien-l. I'll be pushing for simple names such as Canberra and Brisbane. I'm a sysop now, and if there's no serious objections, I'll make the move myself. Have a good trip, Karen! -- Tim Starling 12:51 Mar 25, 2003 (UTC)

So this is where Tim has been discussing the fate of Brisbane. I DO have serious objections and feel that discussing any proposed change on Talk:Brisbane, Queensland would have been the proper way to move his opinions forward. Karen, your previous postings on the subject indicate that you favour Brisbane, Australia. Have you changed this view? - Gaz 16:27 Mar 27, 2003 (UTC)

Not particuarly... unless it was to use the following [[Brisbane(Australia)|]] and let the wikipedia pipe quietly disappear the bracket bit leaving us with an apparant link to 'Brisbane'. I don't see any problem with 'Brisbane,Australia'. It's simple, straightforward, and obvious to even the stupidest Tom, Dick and Harriet... I still think that all countries should follow the same principle as much as possible for the sake of clarity. But I don't have the time or energy to argue this out again! I said my piece first time round... KJ 11:19 Mar 31, 2003 (UTC)

See also http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-March/subject.html under the subject "City names argument resurrected" and "Re:City names argument resurrected". I'll leave Brisbane half-done for the moment. Are you also objecting to the other category of suggested moves, i.e. Canberra, Australia -> Canberra and the like? -- Tim Starling 23:09 Mar 27, 2003 (UTC)
Yes I am, but let me get up to speed with the mailing list discussion first. I have looked through all the links you posted on my Talk page. I am at work now so I'd like to continue this later. Thanks Gaz 03:13 Mar 28, 2003 (UTC)
Tim, I have continued this on my Talk page. Please read. - Gaz 05:31 Mar 29, 2003 (UTC)

Hi KJ - I've explained a bit about the problems with the search on Wikipedia talk:Searching, though I daresay others know more about the grizzly details than me. I hope you don't leave, or at least come back when everything is fully functioning again - it'd be a shame to lose you. --Camembert

I agree - we are just going through some growing pains. But another server is on its way and the Wikimedia Foundation should also be set-up soon to manage donations. --mav
It may be growing pains but I hope they are past by the time my US trip is over in 10 weeks time. I had some digital photos that I was going to try to upload before I left, and I just don't have the time to monkey around with the wikipedia when it's as 'broken' as it is right now :( A new server would certainly ease matters - I hope it works out because this is a great project and I support the IDEA of the wikipedia 1000%... the only problem is the execution (or rather, keeping it functioning once it's reached this size.)

One idea that occurred to me last night would be modifying the search engine temporarily by telling it to ignore the message bodies and only look at the headers. So if you typed in 'kangaroo' it would find 'kangaroo' and 'kangaroo rat' but not 'marsupials of Australia'. At least that would be better than nothing! ATM I can't think of any way to navigate the wikipedia other than using the random button... which won't help me check whether somebody else has uploaded a picture of a 'fig' etc.KJ 03:23 Apr 5, 2003 (UTC)

Hi KJ. I replaced a picture of yours with one of mine. (The wallaby in the Kangaroo article). sheep

hmmm... that would have to be the most unkangaroo-like kangaroo I've ever seen! I guess it's the peculiar angle it's standing at - the picture is very foreshortened. I don't think that anyone who didn't know what a kangaroo was would recognise it from that pic... the side view or 'hopping roo' is the most distinctive - you don't happen to have one of them do you? KJ
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