User talk:Sam

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[edit] LGBT WikiProject Newsletter

The LGBT studies WikiProject Newsletter!
Issue III - February 1, 2007

Announcement: If someone requests help or feedback on an article, please try your hardest to help them out if you are able. Thank you.

Project News
  • The LGBT Portal has once again been revamped and a work rota started. Efforts towards Featured Portal status are slowly coming together.
  • The assessment system has been a great success, we have tagged over 4000 articles! Please tag any LGBT related articles you come across by adding {{LGBTProject | class=}} to the talkpage. Please see the Assessment Department for how to assess an article according to the grading system.
  • The Translation department has changed its focus, to LGBT articles about non-English topics and people on which there may be more information on the relevant foreign Wikipedia. Please add your name if you are fluent in any language other than English.
  • Jumpaclass is picking up slowly, with nine people having entered. With over 2000 stubs we need to improve our article quality. Please sign up and get it going! Challenge another user to see how far you can jump a stub!
  • There is an ongoing discussion about the current LGBT categorisation system here, here, and a little bit here. A special page has now been set up here to deal with this.
  • A Watchlist has been set up to monitor controversial and/or highly vandalised articles. It can also be used for article disputes, just add a note explaining the nature of the dispute.
  • With the influx of so many active members, there is now enough support for a LGBT studies peer review, which may be found here. It's in the beta phase at the moment, so bear with us if we make any mistakes. Feel free to peer review any articles you have been working on.
  • It was agreed this month to start reducing the uses of the Notice board, as many members felt that it was not effective. An open tasks template has been created, bringing together important announcements, FAC/FARs, Peer reviews, XfDs, the COTM, and requested articles. You may desire to watchlist it. A Deletion sorting subpage is also now working to bring together XfDs - this should be bot-driven, but we have not currently tagged enough articles to make this fully automated, so please update the list with any LGBT-related XfDs you come across.
Article news
Member News

To stop receiving this newsletter, or to receive it in a different format, please drop me a line.
If you have any news or any announcements to be broadcast, do let Dev920 know.

[edit] Re: Homophobic people

As much as I'd like to deal with "Anti-Semitic people" through the usual channels, everytime I try it's either completely ignored or drowned out by abuse from other editors (I was borderline threatened just today; see "anti-semitic people discussion." If you keep "anti-semitic people", you have no justification to delete my new category. Treybien 16:40 3 February 2007 (UTC)

I guess I can't stop you from deleting the category, and I appreciate your asking me first. However, I would remind you again that there is no rational justification for deleting this category and keeping "anti-semitic people". Treybien 14:31 4 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Category types (II)

Sorry I haven't had time to work on starting to implement Wikipedia:Category types yet. It's still on my radar, and I still want to work on it. My slight misgivings are still there, though I recently found Category:Category header templates. Were you aware of this. I realise your category headers would apply to categories only containing articles, but it is a similar principle. Carcharoth 10:29, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply. Sorry to hear you've not been well. Hope you are feeling better now, or will be feeling better soon! I've also made a suggestion over at Wikipedia talk:Category types to actually use a page-specific link to Special:CategoryTree at the top of certain categories that are suitable for taxonomic downwards browsing. Maybe you could comment there if you have time? Carcharoth 10:43, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] categories/tags

Hi SamuelWantman -- I applaud your efforts at Wikipedia:Category types although I'm still thinking them through. However, I have a more modest proposal which might solve some of the problems. What if we just wrote up a Help document for categorization that explained the difference between categories and tags?

I suspect a lot of the problems come from people who are used to "tags" and keyword systems, and are trying to use WP:Categories as keywords/tags. These are the people who are the most argumentative about the system, and I suspect it's because they just don't quite get it. Based purely on anecdotal experiences, the folks who are simply confused about different kinds of taxonomies are not so argumentative and are just trying to get things in the right subject hierarchy. So, if we could write up something that would clearly distinguish between tags & keywords, we would solve the the majority of problems leading to arguments, and perhaps the majority of problems, period.

Then we would have more leisure to consider your proposal simply on the merits of making things more clear & helpful, without having to also use it to solve the annoying problem of people trying to coopt categories into tags.

Thoughts?

(PS I proposed this at Wikipedia talk:Categorization#"tags" & tagging versus categorization --lquilter 18:12, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] San Jacinto Monument

Was there a reason for replacing the old picture with one that was nearly identical? Just curious. Tijuana Brass 00:03, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Nah. Just wondering. Tijuana Brass 00:12, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] WP:LGBT Coordinator Election Notice

This is just a quick, automated note to let you know that there is an election being conducted over the next 7 days for the position of "Coordinator" for the LGBT WikiProject. Your participation is requested. -- SatyrTN (talk • contribs)

[edit] Small favour

I've just noticed that a number of members of the LGBT WikiProject seem to have needed to revert vandalism to Template:LGBT by IP editors and new accounts. Often it takes about 10 mins for the vandalism to be spotted and reverted and its a fairly high profile template. It doesn't happen all that often but there seems no reason for such contributors to edit the page. I asked for semi-protection at WP:RFP but the response was that there wasn't enough activity to justify protection. This would be a good reason to refuse to protect an article but I'm not sure its a good reason not to protect a template such as this one. Would you have a look and, if you agree with me, semi-protect it? Thanks, WjBscribe 05:08, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Would you mind making a minor change to Template:LGBT now that it's protected? There should be a space between the bullet and Sodomy law. ShadowHalo 18:56, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Category types are great. What can I do...

...to help, show my support?

Froggy 000 01:29, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments.

A couple quick questions if you don't mind:

  1. Are there any other existing categories that have the templates applied?
  2. Is there any way to mark a category with a type without adding the template (or anything else visible)?
  3. Is it possible to make edits to a page and then "propose" the changes without commiting?

Froggy 000 03:10, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks again for the quick response.

I'm actually doing a variety of computerized processing on the en-wiki database dumps and the fact that categories are used so loosely makes it very difficult to leverage this information. I am now starting to toy with the idea of writing a module to suggest a category type for any category in the system. This will require use of various different heuristics, for example, "Navigation categories contain no (or few) articles and often have ' by ' in the name" or "Subject categories contain relatively more articles and don't have long chains of subcategories. I would certainly provide these category type assignments to you or anyone else who might be interested and depending on how well the mapping works, it might end up saving you a lot of time and effort.

Along those lines, I was hoping that given your experience with this topic you might have some good suggestions for other heuristics to use in order to distinguish between the different category types.

Froggy 000 01:03, 16 February 2007 (UTC)


[edit] Template:Listify

Hello there. I've prettified the above template a little, making it a little more in keeping with other WP message boxes. I've also set it to add all tagged categories to Category:Categories to be listified then deleted—although that can, of course, be changed.

Best wishes, Xdamrtalk 14:08, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Saw this birthed red link to blue

re: Category:Categories to be listified then deleted... thought you may want to clear the cat's appearing on Wikipedia_talk:Categories_for_discussion. Cheers! Never saw the harm in another way to track things though! I'd do both--Long live WP:Btw! Cheers! // FrankB 20:16, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Actor by series CFDs

You might be aware of this already, but CFD Feb 16 and CFD Feb 15 have a good number of Actor by series CFDs currently running. You might care to speedy close them?

Best wishes, Xdamrtalk 15:29, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Your opinion, please

Mr. Wantman,

I hope you might be willing to provide some guidance. I've re-read WP:SUBCAT and I remain uncertain about doubling-up on categorisations. If someone is listed under Category:Canadian immigrants to the United States, should they also be listed in Category:Canadian Americans? I am not sure whether the Secondary categorization rule applies.

I'm trying to come up with a consistent rationale for a bunch of bios. Compare Eric McCormack and Michael J. Fox. Both are Canadian actors who have had successful careers in the U.S. and have become U.S. citizens along the way. This qualifies them both to be categorised in the subcategory Category:Canadian immigrants to the United States. But McCormack is also listed in the main category, Category:Canadian Americans, and Fox is not. Either they both should be, or neither should be.

This question turns, in a way, on how the category "Canadian Americans" is defined. I confess that I have a problem with the category. Is it a catch-all that encompasses immigrants and expats and people of Canadian descent? Or should each of these be broken out into subcats? I've been told that "Canadian American" is the label for Canadian who have become U.S. citizens, but I think the sub-cat "Canadian immigrants to the U.S." is clearer and more obvious. Also, what about the sub-cats "Canadian expats in the U.S. (for those who have not become U.S. citizens) and "Americans of Canadian descent" (born in U.S. to Canadian parents)? I lean towards sub-categorising here.

I would appreciate your feedback. You have obviously given the subject of categorising and overcategorising a lot of thought. Please note that there is a current Cfd related to this question that calls for merging Category:Canadian immigrants to the United States into Category:Canadian emigrants, thereby essentially deleting the category.

Thank you!--Vbd | (talk) 22:15, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

  • Just wanted to say thanks for your response to my query. I, too, wish you had an easy answer to offer. I guess we'll just have to muddle along until a clearer system is adopted. Cheers!--Vbd | (talk) 19:13, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] disney voice actors

ok, thanks! didn't realize that.Bouncehoper 02:53, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Question tangentially related to your proposal

Hi! I hope you don't mind the intrusion. A recent commment on your categorization proposal suggested that the example of "People killed by poisoning" could be used as a test case for speedy deletion. Perhaps you can help clear up my confusion about what qualifies as a category for SD. The SD policy says it has to contain "no articles," which I have been taking literally. So can the poisoning category, which contains one article, still be listed for SD? I recently put up a bunch of under-populated categories on CFD because thorough lists already exist. Some of these categories contain only one or two articles, some contain a few more more. Could I have done this, at least in part, on the CSD page instead? Thanks.--Vbd (talk) 14:47, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] LGBT WikiProject newsletter

[edit] Just want you to know someone agrees

re: this -- agree with you up and down on that pov. Perhaps it comes from mature judgment? <g> Look at what just happened in Navigational templates... a perfectly good browsing category collecting things is now scattered, albeit in useful ways in some respects. But what the hell is wrong with collection or collation categories here and there? Unions as you put it in math-speak. It's merely another sort of schema, one a computer is certainly able to handle.

On a brighter note, I've been working the category problems from a different (and interwiki) perspective. So you may want to take a peek at the category links listed in Template:Catlst (edit talk links history) (all some trials I've been running--haven't really settled on a standard yet, as is both a community issue, and a back-burner project I've only been able to dabble with since Christmas in spurts), which in the latest 'ease of use' evolution: ({{wpd-catlist-up}} and {{cms-catlist-up}} will at least solve the problem of bottom links on category pages with large populations. Cheers! // FrankB 05:38, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Classifications looks good, given a 'fried brain' and a quick skim--I believe I saw that in a few places. <g> I'll give it a better look when I'm more functional. Is there a general category or template (whatlinkshere stuff)?
What the hell are we doing up so late anyway? <g> Actually, the 'what I've been up to' is WP:TSP, the category work is a spin-off of This effort begun last spring, spurt worked, dropped while David Kernow and I were both away from Wikipedia, and now creeping forward again slowly in a planning mode for a fresh assault. That got me into tagging categories with main articles and cross-links to the commons (main workhorses: {{Commonscat1A}} and {{Wikipediacat1A}}) and pending reactions, including a few adverse ones protective of commons category schema, I started playing with the idea of standardized templates and a much better system of documentation with CBDunkerson. That indirectly lead to WP:DPP/M:DPP and now a more formal proto-project ('TSP'), which has sucked up most of my time since the end of January. So half a year on these grandparent, parent and children projects! And the politics and talks take up even more. Shrug... keeps me off the streets and out of the bars! T'care! // FrankB 07:29, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Poor Excuses

Sorry about that. My obnoxious boyfriend logged on to my account and made the change. Though I admit I helped out with the edit, he came up with the edit summary.  :-D No harm intended. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Vandymorgan (talk • contribs) 13:24, 6 March 2007 (UTC).

[edit] Suggestion for Template:LGBT

Just wanted to point out it might be best to center the "view, edit, talk" links at the bottom of the navication template. Right now it's alligned to the right. ― El Cid ∴∵ 09:12, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

You recently closed a Cfr that I had proposed. The first category was renamed by a bot and appears to be fine. The other two are messed up. Please see my query at the help desk and, if you can, provide some answers. Thank you.--Vbd (talk) 19:09, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Superpower cats

Since you were earlier involved in the meta-discussion on superhero categories, please comment on the issue now that it's ended up on CFD again. Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2007_March_14#Fictional_characters_by_power. >Radiant< 13:24, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Indefinitely blocked user is back

As indicated at user talk:69.252.158.32 and at User_talk:SamuelWantman/archive_7#69.252.158.32, you've been involved in blocking user 69.252.158.32. I'd like to make you aware that (s)he's back; see Wikipedia:Help_desk#Blocked_user.--Niels Ø (noe) 14:37, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Image copyright problem with Image:Matthew Shepard head shot.jpg

Thank you for uploading Image:Matthew Shepard head shot.jpg. However, it currently is missing information on its copyright status. Wikipedia takes copyright very seriously. It may be deleted soon, unless we can determine the license and the source of the image. If you know this information, then you can add a copyright tag to the image description page.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them at the media copyright questions page. Thanks again for your cooperation. Alex Spade 20:55, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

Comment: to the public doesn't mean public domain. But I think, the {{fairusein|Matthew Shepard}} can be possible. Alex Spade 20:55, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] The example

It was in reference to WP:ATT/P. I had some problems with the wording myself. Basically, at that link, there are four or five different questions (should two pages be merged, and what about the third, and should the result need work, and do the originals, individually, need to be locked, redirected, or not). Please take a look at the poll and the history, you'll probably see what I mean. >Radiant< 07:51, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Out of order

If you must know it was an edconf :) Software does that automatically. >Radiant< 09:19, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Robert

No, I was not aware. This is very unfortunate. I would like to have your comment on Wikipedia:Community_sanction_noticeboard#Personal_attack_parole_for_CalJW. >Radiant< 08:57, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Thanks

Thanks, Sam. I am leaning heavily toward delete on this one, but am going to look at the arguments in full. User:A Musing (07:05, 31 March 2007)

[edit] LGBT WikiProject Newsletter

[edit] LGBT WikiProject newsletter

SatyrBot 05:19, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia talk:Do not write articles using categories

I replied to you -- Cat chi? 23:24, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] welcoming newbies

Hi. Just wanted to let you know that you may want to welcome anons with {{anonwelcome}} instead of {{welcome}}. The first one recommends them to get a username.--ROASTYTOAST 19:28, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

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