User talk:Teratornis

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Welcome!

Hello, Teratornis, 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 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! ßlηguγΣη | Have your say!!! - review me 05:24, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

1 Greetings!
2 simple links
3 Index to Wikipedia
4 Mountain Biking on Mount Tamalpais
5 Editor's index - thanks
6 Yes, yes, yes, your post was brilliant
7 Aerial Photos answer on Help desk
8 Cincypedia
9 Detecting articles added to a category
10 MediaWiki training videos
11 Thanks
12 Peacocks
13 I think it's done
14 Template:User WikiProject Open Source
15 E-mail

[edit] Greetings!

Greetings, Teratornis!

Saw your page because of your work on my Middletown and Cincinnati Railroad page. I also did the Cincinnati, Lebanon, and Northern Railroad article. I've written a number of southwest Ohio articles and am glad to see another contributor. Let me know if I can help you out. Good work on the Lebanon Countryside Trail article, by the way. PedanticallySpeaking 15:11, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the kind words. I'm new at this, I'm sure I'm flubbing up something, so if you see that my fly is down, be sure to let me know. (I routinely ride a bicycle in traffic, and if I can handle that, I doubt any criticism could be worse. Tell it to me straight, doc.) My main early consideration is to do no harm. That's why I started with the Lebanon Countryside Trail; it didn't appear to intrude on anyone, and it filled an actual gap in other articles that mentioned the trail. As you can see from the May 13, 2006 version (I don't know how to hyperlink to a specific article version yet, other than maybe this ugly brute-force way), my use of the geolinks template in the article appears to be incorrect. Evidently a page should only have one instance of that template. So I will try the {{coor d}} template instead. I'm not sure of the best article layout to describe features along a trail (especially a long trail with lots of features to describe), and I haven't found any clear winners elsewhere on Wikipedia yet, not that my review is anything like comprehensive. Judging from the comments on User_talk:Tom_guyette, there seem to be some questions about whether bike trail articles are even valid Wikipedia articles. I think they are, but my point of view is hardly neutral on that.

Anyway, just a bit of rambling there. Yes, I did look at your user page to see whose articles I was tweaking, and I'm so new at Wikipedia that I didn't even know yet how to contact you. Please see my comments on the Little Miami Bike Trail talk page. I suggest moving the article content to Little Miami Scenic Trail (which I made initially as a redirect to Little Miami Bike Trail) and making Little Miami Bike Trail a redirect to Little Miami Scenic Trail, for the reasons I listed in the talk page (especially the disparity in Google search result counts). (I'm probably referring to this page-moving process much more awkwardly than a fluent Wikipedian would. I have some nerd credentials, but not yet in this domain.) Since I'm so new at this, I refrained from being bold and unilaterally moving it without asking the earlier author(s) first.

I downloaded a copy of Google Earth yesterday to give myself a convenient way to look up latitude, longitude coordinates of geographic objects (I guess using the WGS 84 datum), and now I would like to go around adding map links to articles about various objects I personally see when I ride my bike (for example, the Jeremiah Morrow Bridge---I had some trouble finding the exact location of the Golden Lamb Inn, however; I know it to within a block, but I think the geocoded position from the street address that the map sites return is a block or two too far south. Next time I ride to Lebanon I will have to note the exact position).

I have a dilletante's interest in mapping, because I have found route planning/navigation to be a surprisingly significant barrier to the smooth functioning of group bicycle rides. A typical recreational group ride on secondary roads may have from 25 to 75 named intersection turns, resulting in a level of complexity that baffles most people. This forces all participants on a group ride (on roads lacking painted marks) to ride within sight of someone who knows the way (for example, me), but the typical distribution of speed preferences is wide enough to make that difficult if the group is at all large. There are several possible solutions to the navigation problem, each with its own set of undesirable tradeoffs. Ultimately, GPS technology might solve the problem, but prices must come down, and there must be at least one cyclist who knows some nice routes and can put them into a format usable by all the others. That's the long-term goal driving my interest in mapping now. It's also just cool to click on a hyperlink and see where something like the Middletown Junction (which article I just updated with a geolink template) is on a map, and marvel at the satellite and aerial photos. Maps seem to make otherwise dry topics come alive in a way words alone rarely do, especially for things that are inherently geographical. Perhaps someday, someone will integrate Wikipedia into Google Earth, so users can fly around geographically and pop up articles on things by location. Then eventually it will all get integrated into ultra-miniaturized computers we can wear in contact lenses, to provide pop-up explanations on whatever we happen to look at in the real world, assuming the current situation is safe enough to permit the distraction, which the smart contact lenses must of course be smart enough to judge.

If we need to discuss anything at length, I'd find e-mail possibly more convenient, and if you agree, I think I have set my user preferences to allow me to receive e-mail. Teratornis 21:17, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

I recently stumbled across OpenStreetMap. This looks useful as a way to build up geographic information via the Wiki model. Teratornis 20:54, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

I see you've done some work on an article I began, Jeremiah Morrow Bridge. Good to see your contributions. PedanticallySpeaking 17:12, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

I gazed up in quasi-wonder at the Jeremiah Morrow Bridge from the Little Miami Scenic Trail, many times, before I knew its name. So it was natural for me to add some info and links about the Jeremiah Morrow Bridge from the Trail perspective. Thousands of people bicycle, inline skate, or walk under the bridge(s) each year, and it's possible they are more aware of the scale of the bridge(s) than the thousands of people who drive over them on I-71. I think bridges are cool. I noticed some of the bridge articles do not have coordinate templates yet. It's easy to locate the larger bridges in Google Earth, and get their coordinates with the method I described here. When I read an article about some fixed object or place, and it does not have coordinates yet, I just add them. It only takes a few minutes, and it improves the articles with those great coordinate template links. Teratornis 20:54, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] simple links

Hello. You really don't need to write [[Misnomer|misnomer]], as you did at quantum leap. Just writing [[misnomer]] suffices. Also, just writing [[hyphen]]ated, [[logic]]al, [[cat]]s, [[evolution]]ary, [[rabbi]]nical, [[Egypt]]ian, [[dogma]]tic, [[apocrypa]]l, etc., makes the whole word, not just the part in the brackets, appear as a clickable link, which links to the article whose title is in the brackets. The more complicated thing can be used for things like [[philosophy|philosophies]]. Michael Hardy 22:36, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

I'm aware of that. I make a habit of linking to canonical article names because I do a fair number of edits to computer software articles, in which many terms are regrettable overloads of common words such as find, cat, web, log, more, less, tar, gnu, zip, compress, patch, hash, head, tail, etc. (for more examples, see Category:Unix software); and even seemingly innocuous case variations in a link can refer to a different article than I intended. What's worse, new computer programs continuously appear, further eating into the namespace of ordinary terms. Thus there is no guarantee that case variations on an existing article will continue to point to the canonical article in the future. It's easier just to stay in the habit of linking to canonical article names, rather than have to check to see whether all the variations of case and so on link to what I want, and to keep checking forever. Besides, who suffers if the markup is a little longer than the theoretical minimum? Most Wikipedia visitors are merely readers rather than editors, and they never see the markup. — Teratornis 10:09, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

Hello. I added an image for your Wikipedia user:Teratornis page, mostly for practice as the image upload has taken some learning on my part and since it was a wiki task that we had discussed. You may also be interested in viewing my first image upload attempt in the article Brittany (dog). If this image edit on your page is unsatisfactory, certainly feel free to delete it or modify it. To view recent images uploaded, go to [1]| Gallery of new files. I will be glad to share any pointers on image editing. Marycontrary 21:09, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Index to Wikipedia

[edit] My index

Interesting post to my talk page. The reason you didn't find any indication of anyone else doing (or thinking) of doing indexing, when you looked at what I've compiled, is that I've found nothing myself. I've left notes at a couple of user pages where the user had done a lot of work on their own personal directory, asking if they knew of an index (so I wouldn't be reinventing the wheel); no success. I admit to not thinking about searching meta for capabilities of the wiki software, however.

As to what generated my interest in an index - I started writing a user manual (for editors), and realized that organizing information about Wikipedia pages into a "logical" sequence was essentially impossible - exactly where does one put pages about edits, or manual of style - beginner, intermediate, advanced user chapters? (I've found several attempts to write what appears to be a "logical" guide to Wikipedia, abandoned.)

I then realized that rather than a table of contents, which I'd tried, or a directory (a page gets listed in just one slot), that an index provided the flexibility I needed - and, to boot, it was useful while I built it.

[edit] Meta and automatic keyword generation

What you found at m:Help-style indexing (and I'd never known about) was a built-in index (of sorts) for meta help pages, using keywords. For example, for m:Help:DPL, if you look at the source, you'll find the following:

Looking at Help:Edit summary, this is in the source:

And looking at a very recent policy, Wikipedia:Canvassing, which has no antecedent at meta, this is in the source:

Where do these keywords come from? From wikilinks; they are automatically created by stripping off "Wikipedia:". (The software is smart enough to also strip off a the front of a full URL when a URL is used rather than a wikilink, in the text.) In fact, keywords are generated for every page in this wiki, I believe, based on my looking at a regular article and at my user talk page, though the rules appear to be different for different types of pages.

[edit] So, what next?

But are keywords used for anything that a normal editor might encounter? I can't find any indication that they are. A search of Wikipedia namespace found only one thing vaguely related to keywords, this very unusual WikiProject, which survived two deletion attempts (in the first, no one voted; in the second, a couple of users said - essentially - "I have no idea what this is, but it could be useful.") (Related page: User:Tractor.) And while the founder and sole member of that WikiProject is aware that source pages include keywords, he apparently isn't aware of their potential power (or has a totally different focus).

So, to summarize, we have (a) automated keyword generation; (b) a existing feature in meta that I'm guessing was designed for programmers looking through "m:Help" files, which uses keywords found on a subset of meta pages, and (c) nothing else, apparently, that takes advantage of these (except, possibly, outside search engines?). Interesting. -- John Broughton (☎☎) 23:21, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Mountain Biking on Mount Tamalpais

Hello, An article that I created as a part of Wikiproject Cycling called Mountain Biking on Mount Tamalpais and linked to the Mount Tamalpais article, has been listed for deletion. If you are interested in the deletion discussion, please participate by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mountain Biking on Mount Tamalpais. Thank you, Bob in Las Vegas - uriel8 (talk) 10:34, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Editor's index - thanks

Thank you for moving the indexing discussion, and for suggesting better navigation. I'm thinking about using three-character links (that is, span id = "Con") (generally, for Wiki, it may be five letters) instead of full names, a modified approach, which has the advantages of (a) requiring fewer anchors; (b) requiring less typing in the piped links, and (c) degrading gracefully. The last is particularly important - if in the index I change "Articles" to (say) "Articles (general)", then I break every anchor in index that points to "Articles" (true, I could leave multiple anchors in place); if I anchor to "Art", it doesn't matter. And then perhaps (d) - if I get the index entry slightly wrong (say, it's "Stubs" but I think it's "Stub"), it doesn't matter (just as now it doesn't matter because the link goes to the top of the "S's.)

I'll take a pass, for the moment, on your offer of help; it's useful for me to inventory the trees, so to speak, every once in a while so that I'm current on what's in the forest; but I may come back on that. I want to play around a bit with the modified approach.

And, finally, apologies for missing your posting of the 13th. I'm starting to get in the habit of checking my talk page history to see if I've noticed everything, but that's recent - I've been used to just checking the bottom, but the volume is starting to pick up and that's no longer working well.

P.S. I've added navigation immediately below each letter, as you suggested - good idea. When I've been using the index, I've constantly had to go "top of page" to navigate; irritating. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:54, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, that is impressive. I'm going to be using your page even more now. --Teratornis 21:40, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Yes, yes, yes, your post was brilliant

Your post regarding the nonsensical policy on IP editors was excellent, keep it up. I am coming to the view that the illogical a priori thinking on this issue must be visibly challenged when it come up. See this example of an exchange with admins as an example. The silent majority must speak up. Buddhipriya 20:23, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Here is yet another example of a public wiki which formerly allowed anonymous edits, and switched to requiring user registration in response to the inevitable deluge of vandalism and SPAM:

DocBook Wiki

Supporters of the Wikipedia policy to allow anonymous edits claim that requiring user registrations will do nothing to reduce vandalism. And yet the experience of many other wikis disagrees with that claim. I find this peculiar. However, I would not go so far as to call the existing policy "nonsensical." Some of the problems it causes clearly are, but Wikipedia is the world's largest and most popular wiki, indeed Wikipedia is almost single-handedly responsible for driving the current explosion of interest in wikis, so the current array of policies here cannot be entirely nonsensical. I do, however, think the powers that be should continuously re-evaluate every policy, rather than mindlessly evoking the Appeal to tradition, to see if the reasons for the policy still apply. As I mentioned in my essay, Wikipedia is progressively requiring user registrations, by applying levels of protection to more articles over time. It seems inefficient to end up individually protecting a million articles from anonymous edits when we could just protect the whole site and be done with it. --Teratornis 21:37, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Yes, of course. This is like living in a city that has prohibited the use of locks on doors. People are annoyed by burglars, so they urge putting more police on the streets. We should not be exchanging claims about things, we should be examining data together to see things like what percentage of edits that remain unreverted for more than 24 hours come from IP accounts. I am not aware that the Wiki software has the tools available to answer statistical questions of that sort, perhaps it is somewhere I have not seen. And I do not want to see data analysis from 2005, which is a long time ago. I want to see data from the current 30-day period. We must demand that these people cite reliable sources for their claims of how wonderful it is to let every adolescent on the planet participate in the authoring of an encyclopedia. Perhaps we could create a category for Articles where it does not matter if the content is correct and allow open IP editing of that class of material. Buddhipriya 21:43, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

You make some dangerously good points. I hope you do not get banned for being too persuasive.

Here's a link on the editor's index:

Special:Contributions/newbies - edits by new editors

which is not exactly a statistical study of the type you mention, but is perhaps a vague first step in that direction. I've looked at the workings of the MediaWiki software a bit, while installing and running some corporate wikis; the information you want to collect is almost certainly available in the underlying Wikipedia database. Getting it out would require some database programming.

The editor's index links to other possibly useful pages, such as:

Wikipedia:Wikipedia in academic studies

which links to some studies that attempt to quantify some aspects of Wikipedia. Perhaps you could find some researchers who would want to investigate the questions you mention. --Teratornis 22:09, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

And to comment on Articles where it does not matter if the content is correct, I think it would make sense to partition Wikipedia somehow into a zone where the newcomers can edit freely, and another zone where editors must have proven their competence in some way, even if just by having been around for a while and demonstrating a serious desire to contribute. It's interesting to see how few of the articles in WP:VITAL are featured or good. Having looked at that list, I see some obvious ways to improve Information technology, if only by adding links to articles that define the jargon terms and expand on the short summaries in what is essentially a survey article. --Teratornis 22:56, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Aerial Photos answer on Help desk

Great post. Just thought you should know that. Xiner (talk, email) 04:46, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. For the record, I added some more comments. --Teratornis 17:16, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Cincypedia

Personally, I'm partial to Cintipedia, like the postal abbreviation, but I'm too far upstream from y'all to have much of an opinion on the topic. Cheers. youngamerican (ahoy hoy) 14:14, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Another option might be "the 'nati pedia" but a phrase would be awkward, particularly one beginning with an Article (grammar). And speaking of upstream, I like to say Cincinnati will never experience a water shortage as long as Pittsburgh keeps flushing its toilets. --Teratornis 17:16, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm actually in-between the two (Pitt and Cincy). youngamerican (ahoy hoy) 17:37, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Detecting articles added to a category

Hi - I noticed your post at Wikipedia:Help_desk#Article_addition_to_a_Category. Related changes does a pretty good job of this, as described at Help:Category. -- Rick Block (talk) 17:56, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

I thought of that, but when I looked at the Related changes for a category, I could not see an easy way to distinguish the articles newly added to the category from all the other changes to articles already in the category. Unless maybe editors typed an edit summary to that effect. --Teratornis 18:12, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] MediaWiki training videos

Very good find. I watched a couple - the guy knows what he's doing, though it's just a bit unpolished. It's also unfortunate that the breakpoints are (it seems) so arbitrary.

As for adding to the index - I'm happy to do that, but I'd prefer to link to Wikipedia namespace page rather than to a section of your user page, or, failing that, to a separate subpage of yours. For a Wikipedia namespace page, I'd suggest Wikipedia:Instructional material, as a more generalized name; that would cover, for example, a book about editing Wikipedia, and would be a good catch-all for a resource list (which I'd be happy to add - links to internal pages with coaching and classes, and to help/FAQ pages). If you're interested, just put the page up with what you have on your user page (which I thought was nicely done), and I'll edit the page to expand it. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 13:16, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Thanks

Thanks for the advice Coricus 16:29, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

If you refer to my edits here, you must be joking. --Teratornis 17:03, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

LOL! No, I meant the advice about the Michael Bloomberg article. I was begining to think I was violating DBAD because I wanted to talk about the fact that all criticism is being edited from it and no one else seems to think it matters. (For example, the critical section "2004 Republican National Convention" has 3 sources in 4 paragraphs and yet it's still got an NPOV notice on it, yet it's probably already the best sourced section in the article... sourcing being a relative thing. And this bit has been removed completely, despite having 3 sources too). Oh well, he's not my mayor - I'll let someone else go through the drama of an edit war. Coricus 04:31, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

It looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger needs a similar campaign of reputation-cleansing. I'm finding that Wikipedia is so huge, and so naturally inconsistent as a result of all the different people editing various parts, that any rule anyone cites to justify doing anything to any article is simultaneously being violated on any number of other articles. Lance Armstrong has never been proven guilty of doping, but the sheer number of allegations and Lance's history of litigating his accusers is clearly notable. Another way around the edit wars is to start (or add to) articles which are specifically about the controversial bits that have been cleansed. For example, there might be some list-type article about allegations of sexual harassment against politicians. Allegations against a particular politician may or may not belong in an article which is primarily about the politician, but it's harder to claim they don't belong in an article which is about allegations against politicians. A similar controversy erupted around whether it was "NPOV" or "notable" to mention that an anti-apartheid activist in South Africa was robbed and beaten by three black men. See: Talk:Nadine Gordimer#attack on Nadine Gordimer & attackers' race (cont'd) (or the link which will survive archival). --Teratornis 17:42, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Peacocks

If you think that was using peacock words, try the rest of it on[2]

I think I was perhaps a little easy on this. Notinasnaid 17:54, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Wow, that's a stampeding herd of peacocks. --Teratornis 18:07, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] I think it's done

Thank you for your help.

I've finished my main copy-edit of User:The Transhumanist/Virtual classroom/Yuser, on fighting link spam. Please take a look, and touch-up anything that needs it. It goes live on Wednesday (tomorrow). The Transhumanist 22:22, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Template:User WikiProject Open Source

I am trying to design a userbox for WikiProject Open Source. This is what I have so far -

Template:User WikiProject Open Source

Template:WP:UserboxTl

WikiProject Open Source

This is a Template:WP:UserboxTl.

The following code is entirely inside the {{ }}:

Is it OK to ask this here on your talk page and is this what you meant? Thanks. Marycontrary 13:13, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Your question would make more sense if you cited what you are replying to. I don't memorize everything I send to people. For information on userboxes, see Wikipedia:Userboxes. I'd expect a userbox to be smaller, like the ones in Wikipedia:Userboxes, and to say something like "This user is a member of WikiProject Open Source." --Teratornis 18:44, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Too bad for you since I memorize everything that I send to people. You typed the following in an email - "You could try to design a userbox for WikiProject Open Source. Call it: Template:User WikiProject Open Source with the code: {{User WikiProject Open Source}}."

If your instructions simply meant to create a userbox without that Tl code, then it could look like this:

Image

This user is a member of WikiProject Open Source.

What could be a good image for this userbox? I am still trying to find the color codes. The WikiProject Open Source article infobox contains a lime green and a pale yellow, not the standard green, yellow or orange shown here. Marycontrary 19:41, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Open-source software shows a logo: Image:Opensource.svg. Unfortunately, it's copyrighted according to the image page, so we can't use it in a userbox. --Teratornis 20:15, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] E-mail

Your Barracuda Spam Firewall is blocking email from me and possibly others (?) today. Marycontrary 16:47, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Well, I'm still getting my daily SPAM barrage, so perhaps you should just send me SPAM. --Teratornis 18:16, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

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