User talk:T J McKenzie

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Welcome!

Hello T J McKenzie, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

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 have any questions, check out Wikipedia:Where to ask a question or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome!  -- KHM03 11:36, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Thanks very much for the welcome! I've had a look at some of those pages already, and I think I might have a look at another now. I'm impressed how well this Wikipedia thing works, given how open to vandalism it is. T J McKenzie 08:39, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] AEJ Collins

Thanks. I've moved the link. To be honest I'm not sure I want the credit for it, it was such a terrible recording, but it's sweet of you to offer it. And, I guess, welcome to Wikipedia! By the way, just because I'm from the same country doesn't mean my accent's even vaguely relevent to a Bristolian subject! Flowerparty■ 02:20, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

Ha. Well I'm not really planning on doing any more recordings just now, but it sounds like you should definitely try and patent that contraption. Really, it's good to see someone putting some effort into the spoken Wikipedia, wherever your accent is from. I actually kind of wish I had an outrageous French accent, then I'd go and tackle Sesame Street or something. Flowerparty■ 02:08, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Cicada

I think the inclusion of the recording of cicada song in your spoken version of this article was a great touch, and wordlessly demonstrated just how loud these fascinating little insects can be! Macropode 08:04, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

It'd be a shame if your other commitments prevented you from continuing to contribute spoken articles. Your light-hearted rendition of the McGillicuddy article was particularly well suited to the material. :)
With regard to people recording a few articles then losing interest, I think lack of critical feedback from listeners may be one of the main reasons for this. People with obvious experience in, or flair for oratory tend to attract immediate feedback, but for the rest of us mere mortals it's often difficult to know if many are even listening to our efforts, let alone gaining some utility or enjoyment from them. It's hard to hone your skills in a vacuum. I anticipate, however, that this will change with time as the Spoken Wikipedia project becomes more widely known, and with the implementation of some kind of peer review system to encourage listener feedback.
As for me, I'll keep doing spoken articles whether anybody indicates they're listening or not (at least until the day an angry mob of Wikipedians descends on me and demands that I cease abusing people's ears), because it's fun! Macropode 11:07, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
I'm listening to your article right now too. I hope to record some of my own articles some day, when I've had time to learn how to make them.
Thanks for recording it, we all appreciate it! Richard001 11:34, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] update about the sound icon

Is there anything new about the small sound icon location? Lately our discussion in Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia has ended when you suggested to ask an admin to edit Mediawiki:Anonnotice. What did happen then? CG 20:04, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Spoken Wikipedia Article in progress tag

First off, Thanks for your help with the template!

I've got a sample of it up on Talk:Bicycle. For Bicycle, I left the old template up for comparison's sake. But ideally, we would just replace it.

I think I'm going to start placing these on Talk pages (I used to think they should go at the top of the article page, but I've changed my mind--I think they would be too distracting for the non-Spoken people.) Looking at the "editing stage" list on the main page, it seems that people have not been very active with their spoken projects lately. I'm hoping that once I get the new templates up, some of the other contributors will take advantage of them to nag the people with shelved projects ;o) Since they're templates, we can edit the original and the new template should be updated on all of the pages.


[edit] Issues/To Do

  • Do you think we should include a link to the original requester--even though we decided to remove the reason? I'm slightly in favor of that. But I don't feel too strongly about it.
  • Make the date format work where people enter it in Wikipedia's ISO format: YYYY-MM-DD. That way, people can have their account preferences reformat the date when they view the page (I'm almost certain there's a way to do this) and it's not country-specific. I took care of that too. Now if people enter the date in YYYY-MM-DD, date prefs work and the date is reformatted if a) you've signed in and b) you've set them on your my preferences page.
  • Improve the sound icon. I don't like it. I think I'm going to move the faded part down and shrink the icon back to its former size. The larger icon looks too big when compared to the icons in other templates. I can do this bit. Fixed (at least to my liking)... though I was thinking a clock (like for the "this article is going to be on the main page" template) would be a good addition to the icon.

Take a look at this: Template:Cvgproj What if ours did that. It could say

T J McKenzie is currently recording or editing an audio version of this file, as requested by Ckamaeleon. details

If you click the "details" link, the box expands down to include something like: 


This notice is dated 2006-03-16. If a significant amount of time has passed, 
please check with T J McKenzie to see if he or she is still working before removing this message.

Ckamaeleon ((T)) 08:37, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Two Different Versions?

I'm happy with the changes you've made so far. Actually, I think the date link is quite a good idea. As for the link to the original requester, I don't have a strong opinion. What if there is no original requester, though?

I was thinking about this. According to the template name, it's for articles with no request. So we will either need to change the name or make a different one for articles that DO have a requester. Ideally the template would have an If/then thing written into it where it takes out that part if there is no requestor...but I don't think Wikipedia can do this. I'm concerned about creating a separate template, because it seems like the burden on Spoken Wiki project members is mounting. Right now, they have to:

  1. Choose an article
  2. Record and edit the articles (easier said than done!)
  3. Fill out all of the upload info correctly using the form we've developed
  4. Choose the correct template (and fill in the required info) and add the recording(s) to the text article
  5. Add a notice to the talk page
  6. Add the article to the Spoken Wikipedia article list, with special instructions for Featured articles.

That's a lot of stuff to do for just one recording! I wish we had a way to automate this...maybe someone could write a bot or some software. I should check with the bot request page to see if I can find someone to help with this.

So naturally, I don't want to confuse (new) wikipedians by defining yet ANOTHER step to the process (choose the appropriate "article taken" tag, fill in the correct info, and add it to the talk page, replacing the request tag there.)

The bottom line: I think the requester info is a good idea b/c that way, people can also contact the original requester with questions or whatever. I'm in favor of anything that keeps people from having to dig through the article history/old versions. But I also don't want this to get too complicated for the project members. I wish I knew people who have written a lot of templates and were familiar with the style guidelines. they could tell us the best way to handle this. Right now, I think maybe including instructions/Default text that says "nobody in particular" or something like that. It would look kind of silly in the Template text, but better than, say, "null" or "UserName"

Oh, and congrats on your new job! the project has been a bit slow in general lately. I think everyone's been busy in the real world.

[edit] A Possible Solution

What if we combined the cool Template:Cvgproj template with the form style that we use for uploads? The person doing the article could fill out a tag like:

{{Spoken article in progress
|RecordedBy=
|RequestedBy=
|NoticeDate=
|}}

And the template would display something that looked like this:

Speaker icon with sound waves comign out. The top of the image is faded out and distorted. T J McKenzie is currently recording or editing an audio version of this article...
More Details:

The "...in response to" line could simply be removed if there is no requester. But I don't know if it's possible for the tag to look like that and the result to still look like this. Ckamaeleon ((T)) 20:12, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Redirect

Template talk:T J McKenzie/Spoken article entry is a redirect that claims it exists because another template links to it. However, at last check, nothing links there except for two lists of questionable redirects. Can this redirect now be deleted? --Russ (talk) 16:25, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../t/_/j/User_talk%7ET_J_McKenzie_b8ff.html"