User talk:RockinRob

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[edit] A welcome from Sputnik

Hi, RockinRob, Welcome to Wikipedia!

- Sputnik^{CCC P} 03:08, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Hi back, from zowie

Hey, Rob, nice to run into you again. I'm sure we interacted a lot as I used to run MDI from '95-'99. The chocolate was Julia's idea though... :-) Are you still out there at Goddard? (I've been in Boulder since '00 -- married with a kid on the way these days.) zowie 23:58, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Gunpoint

I always try to follow the rule around here that we would always explain what we do. I am glad to have found someone new who takes the trouble to "find stuff out". Happy editing! David91 02:56, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

You are correct. With small edits, it is usually sufficient to put a single sentence of explanation into the edit summary. But, if you are proposing anything major, you should check the talk page before you act. If there is no talk and, in the history, there is no active traffic, confining a remark to the edit summary is sufficient. But, if there are active editors around, it helps to keep the peace if you explain yourself at greater length. Some people get a little excited if you start bolding going through their prose with a red pen without offering some justification. I hope you stick around. Wiki needs people with technical expertise to correct the mistakes and set better standards in new articles. David91 04:41, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

Wiki is supposedly iterating to a higher standard as an increasing number of people edit and re-edit. Actually, I spend a lot of time firefighting the newcomers who, more often than not, adjust the standard down. If you see something that needs fixing and you have the expertise and verifiable authority, improve it. If you explain yourself to any bodies trying to defend the current page, they will usually give way. If they do not, ask for guidance from an older and impartial resident. Improving the standard is the prime directive. When you get a bit more experience, you can join in the policy discussions at the Village Pump and elsewhere. It is all a bit frustrating because this place supposedly works by achieving consensus (like trying to herd cats). To actually get things done, you have to be a bit subversive and reasonably thick skinned. David91 05:00, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

Leaving things on talk pages is a bit slow — not everyone is on-line all the time and while you wait, incorrect or misleading information is on public display. Just change the words back and then leave a message somewhere relevant explaining it. And, yes, I started reading horror/fantasy in the 1940s and SF in the 1950s, so Trek was added to the "must see" list when it first aired. Sadly, the endless repeats have killed much of my interest. David91 05:41, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

"Copyright in Europe is rather different. The specific answer to your question is that no European material is in the public domain in U.S. terms unless it expressly waives copyright or the original term of years has expired. Thus, with modern material you should always attribute the source unless you are going to completely rewrite the source material into a new form (which would then have its own copyright except that you have already agreed to waive your rights in that labour by publishing it here). David91 02:30, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

It depends on how much you are taking. The general rule is that a small portion, properly attributed, is acceptable because you are respecting the copyright. But it will be a breach if you take a material portion unchanged, even if attributed. In such cases, you should either invest your own labour to rewrite it (there is no copyright in the ideas), or you should get consent. David91 02:46, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

Although UCL always used to be very open-minded about granting permission, times change and I am not sure how a separate entity like Mullard would react. Why do you want to take such a big chunk of stuff that you feel you have to ask for consent? Why not rewrite it (which will probably be a quicker process than getting permission)? David91 02:59, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

Give me the page reference and, if I understand it, I will rewrite it for you as a model. And: us old 'uns don't have to sleep. It's one of the perks (!?!) of getting old, You get to sit around and look at the walls for longer. David91 04:06, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

Do you mean the web page? I haven't posted anything on Wikipedia yet, but I can an point you to it. Rob 04:13, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

So much for my leaving it ambiguous so that you could point to either the Mallard URL or somewhere else electronic. If you have it to hand, cut and paste it to my talk page and I'll have a look at it. David91 04:21, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

I hate red links so I hope you are going to work like a [fill in appropriate metaphor]] to build on Mullard Space Science Laboratory which I have posted for you even though it still reads a bit like an advertisement. David91 05:06, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

So now you have your first page on Wiki, albeit by proxy, I expect to see a growing mountain of edits by a rising new star in the firmament. David91 10:57, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

Good that MSSL are positive. If we can only get them interested in contributing good material to the Wiki, the credibility of the entire "enterprise" will improve by leaps and bounds. Keep up the good work. David91 01:47, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Dab

Usually the only pages that link to dab pages are when you specifically are discussing the fact that multiple things share the same name. The Maize article has a link to Corn for this reason. Otherwise it isn't a good idea to add an extra step between the article and the information the user is trying to reach. Rmhermen 23:38, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] PSU

Thanks! There are actually a number of us Penn Staters around, but we're not as organized as the folks from the University of Michigan or Michigan State University, for example. At the time we started the wikiproject, it didn't generate too much interest (really only me and one other person did anything), but now, more people are starting to show up. People are randomly creating PSU-related articles, so I have to stay on my toes and make sure that things are properly categorized, etc. Hopefully the interest will continue to grow and we'll eventually have enough users to tackle the original goal of getting the main PSU article featured, but we'll see what happens. —Spangineer^[es] (háblame) 03:51, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

Well, I've started it up again. See for yourself at Wikipedia:WikiProject Pennsylvania State University, and feel free to work on stuff or suggest articles to create/improve. —Spangineer^[es] (háblame) 02:05, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Re: Thanks

RockinRob wrote:

Thanks for catching my spelling errors in the US section of the convenience store article. I edited that during my first two days on Wikipedia. I have since started using a text editor with a spell checker. Rob 00:11, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

Good idea! If only everyone did that, my correction project would be much easier – Gurch 13:14, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Samit damnit

Good to see you back at work.David91 04:10, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Image licensing

Sure thing. There are decent arguments on both sides for and against multi-licensing—more than one license means more flexibility in use, but could also lead to some complications if people make a derivative work and choose not to multi-license the resulting work. Personally, I multi-license under the GFDL and the cc-by-sa, but if only want to use one license, I recommend using the cc-by-sa license from creative commons. It's simpler to understand than the GFDL and I think better suited for images.

As for your concern about someone cropping images and changing the license, that isn't possible if you use the GFDL or the cc-by-sa. The "sa" in cc-by-sa stands for "share alike", which means that anyone making a derivative work (like cropping) must release it under the original license. The GFDL works the same way. If you multi-license, then the person making a derivative work gets to choose whether or not s/he wants to use either license or both licenses. So go ahead and upload the original versions, and then people can crop them from there.

Moving images to commons isn't possible with the current software. The best thing to do is to upload the same image to commons using the same filename, and then letting me or another admin know so we can delete the Wikipedia version. That way there's no need to edit any pages to change the image filename. Of course, you can also upload the image to commons with a different filename and then change all of the pages that use the image on Wikipedia to use the image on Commons. In that case too, let me know so I can delete the images that were here. Hope this helps; any other questions let me know. --Spangineer^[es] (háblame) 12:11, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

Sure, fire away with your questions! --Spangineer^[es] (háblame) 04:29, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Frank Rizzo

Good questions. I guess I would recommend that you post the article you've written to Frank Rizzo/rewrite, and then leave a note on Talk:Frank Rizzo and on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Philadelphia to see if anyone is interested in taking a look at it. I'll read over it as well. Once that's done, it'd be perfectly fine to replace the existing article with the one you've written. It's OK to post stuff that isn't "finished", because in reality, nothing here is really finished. People have found spelling errors in my featured articles months after they were promoted. There's always more to do. Now to answer your questions:

• Don't worry about size at this point. Anything you have references for and you feel is worth including, put it in. If people think it's too long, it's easy to create something like Political career of Frank Rizzo, copy the content there, and then summarize it somewhat in the main article. That probably won't be necessary though until hitting 40-50kb. Also remember that references are usually not counted in that number, so the article might be smaller than you think.
• Once you post it, you can always contact the person who added the POV tag and ask him/her to review it. If s/he doesn't respond, it's probably OK to remove the tag. I'll look over it too, so there shouldn't be a problem.
  

  Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

  Frank Rizzo
• Using wikiquote and wiktionary as references is probably not a good idea. It's pretty rare for our articles to link to wiktionary, and to link to wikiquote, we usually stick a box in the external links section like the one on the right. If you want to include his quotes in the article itself, it's better to use the original source as the reference.
• As for images, yes, unfortunately such images are copyrighted. Often, however, it's relatively easy to find a picture of major political figures that was taken by an employee of the US federal government, in which case it's public domain. I'm not sure if the same is true of pictures taken by the PA government; that'd be worth looking into. So maybe somewhere there's a picture of Rizzo with the president or something; chances are that that would work. However, if you can't find anything, it's probably OK to upload a copyrighted image here (not the Commons) and tag it fair use (see Wikipedia:Fair Use).
• Sorry about that :). I saw the pictures you put up; some of them are really good. The aerial shots of Beaver Stadium are pretty nice; one of them should probably go in the beaver stadium article. Don't worry about the license thing; when I upload pictures the little drop down menu says "No license". So long as the information appears somewhere, there isn't a problem. The information template on Commons is relatively new, so not everyone is used to it yet.
• As for the PSU cheerleaders, how well known are they? I mean, do we do well at competitions and stuff? Any news coverage other than the Collegian? If so, creating the article wouldn't be a problem, though some might suggest that it be incorporated into the Penn State Athletics article (which still needs to be created).

Hope that helps. Let me know when you post your version of the Frank Rizzo article. --Spangineer^[es] (háblame) 13:00, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Stub and questions

I'll see what I can do about reading that Frank Rizzo article--hopefully in the next couple days. As for the stub, I'm not sure that we should start it--seems like there's a fair amount of opposition on the Stubs page, and I'm not sure if we can generate enough stubs. The project has done a pretty good job of turning stubs into real articles, so we might not need it. Perhaps we could start a list of short PSU articles so that project members can improve them, but I think that's covered by the "articles to improve" list.

Commons pictures can be any size; the bigger the better. Some of them are panorama pictures over 10 megs. We're not going to run out of disk space anytime soon. Regarding Medlar Field at Lubrano Park, nice work, but I don't think we can get it on the main page. "In the news" is only for big geopolitical events, and "Did you know" only works for articles created in the last 5 days. As for the images, keep uploading them—we can make a separate category on commons for Medlar Field images; that's easy. The more we have, the better chance that someone else will find one of them useful.

The University Park, Pennsylvania article is something on an anamoly. Virtually all census-designated places on Wikipedia have articles, and UP has its own zip code, so we figured that we should keep the article. It might be better to redirect it to Penn State, now that it looks like the main PSU article is going to focus on the UP campus (like most other university articles do) and not try to cover all of the branch campuses. Worth thinking about anyway. I don't think it's a good idea to create articles for all PSU buildings—probably only the most important ones should have them, and as such, there probably aren't too many buildings at branch campuses that should get their own articles. A much better idea would be to make lists of all PSU classrooms and all PSU dorms. Another project would be to make a trace of the PSU campus map and upload it to commons... but that would be a ton of work. I'll have to think about that... --Spangineer^[es] (háblame) 21:53, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] User:David91

Per a request on Wikipedia:Deceased Wikipedians, I'm trying to find out if anyone knows what happened to User:David91. He stopped editing around April 12, 2006, when he was admitted to the hospital for some tests. He possibly lived in Singapore (likely in or near Ang Mo Kio which he edited 3 times--but with enough detail to suggest a strong familiarity with the place), and was probably the oldest Wikipedian at the age of 94 (based on a reference from 2003 when he said he was 91). Based on his numerous contributions in law it is possible he was a retired lawyer of some kind. He also contributed to linguistics, sociology, and science fiction articles. He was part of Wikipedia:WikiProject International law (though it didn't really get off the ground) and he made nearly 5000 edits. He evidently was also a well-respected member of other Internet communities he was involved in during his retirement. Any information on David91 would be appreciated. Thanks, --Alabamaboy 13:22, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

I appreciate the thought of a cash reward but I'd avoid mentioning cash around Wikipedia b/c it ticks off some people :-). However, perhaps we can spread the word more. Since no one has any info on him, I'm going to post a request on Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard and see if someone knows something. I'll also post a request for a checkuser ID on David91. Perhaps we can get his IP number and narrow down his location some. Best, --Alabamaboy 14:25, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

Well, I am too much of an opptimist to assume he's dead just because he was admitted to the hospital for some tests and hasn't posted in the weeks prior (perhaps they revealed something that required treatments that left him a bit drained, and he chose to take a few weeks off, after all. Or maybe somebody he knew died, or whatnot).

However, thank you very much for informing me of the possibility. I do hope he's all right, not just because I was hoping for his help, but because, well, who really wants such an obviously good, intelligent, dedicated person to die like that? Hopefully, there's a reason for his not editing or logging in recently very much other than his being dead. Runa27 07:12, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Copyright problems with Image:James_A_Beaver_Marker.JPG

Also Image:George W. Atherton Marker.JPG . I really enjoyed your image gallery, but the problem with these two images is that they exactly reproduce copyrighted text by the Penn State Alumni Society. Thanks, GChriss 03:53, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

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