User talk:Timtrent/Archive 1

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Welcome!

Hello, Timtrent/Archive 1, 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!  Flowerparty■ 12:43, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

Contents

Nice article you have written (Guild of the Poor Brave Things)

But please provide something about yourself at User:Timtrent. People think that you are a vandal-editor if your create a username without filling in anything about yourself. Even a 1-sentencer will do! Cheers, and happy editing! :) Msoos 22:55, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

I think I managed 2 sentences :) Fiddle Faddle 06:11, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Context and copyvio

Hi Timtrent, Nice articles you have written. :) Do you think you could add a bit more context, for those of us who are not familiar with the subjects you are writing on? Particularly things like years - Dates of birth for people, dates founded for institutions - and a brief introduction for each article; the first sentence of the article should explain why a person is famous or what an institution does.

Also, please do not copy information verbatim from other sources (eg the Guild of Play and Guild of the Poor Brave Things articles are copied from [1]), as this is a breach of copyright - anything added to wikipedia in this way will be deleted. Please rewrite information in your own words if you can. FiggyBee 14:46, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

Rewriting is underway. My objective was simple. Get the bulk in and then edit, refine and rewrite. Fiddle Faddle 14:58, 9 April 2006 (UTC)
Personally, I'm not convinced that the changes are sufficient (especially GotPBT); in any case, starting with copyrighted material and then making the bare minimum changes necessary to avoid copyvio is not a very good way of writing articles.
The pages are listed in CAT:CSD, so an administrator will decide in time whether they'll survive or not. If you want me to remove the CSD notice, you'll have to remove the offending paragraphs and start from the ground up. Sorry. FiggyBee 02:22, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Kathy Kirby

Happy to rewrite article on Kathy Kirby if necessary. Comparing my version with the the current version, there is very little difference, so if there is a violation is must be down to me. Can you tell me which copyrighted source I have apparently plagiarised? JMcC 12:03, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

I made an error. An obvious and easy error to make, because I did not know that answers.com was a formal licenced mirror of Wikipedia. I was corrected properly by a more experienced editor who reverted the article to the state before my own revert, for which I am grateful. I have put a request on Wikipedia talk:Copyright problems to make life much easier for newbies such as myself. I've also documented my humble acceptance of my error on the Kathy Kirby discussion page.
If you are willing to look at the article, though, I feel it would benefit from section headings and extension. I recall evenings in front of the TV and pleasant sounds and pleasant entertainment, and I think there is more that one could say, though I have not the knowledge to say it. I suspect I am not alone in being interested in reading it. However there is, currently, an editor there who resists most strongly any attempt to request section headings etc
Fiddle Faddle 14:57, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

Tide mills

Sorry, I have shut down Tide Mills (UK) as an unwanted fork. With over 500 edits behind you, I think you should be doing a little less fiddle faddle and a little more concentration on Wikipedia standards. (Sorry I could not help that wording - you asked for it!) For example, in Tide Mills (UK):

  • "Objective" and the next section are far too self-referential - stuff like that goes in HTML comments or in the talk page.
  • The title should have been Tide mills in the United Kingdom (note the lower case m on mills) for symmetry with the existing article
  • You had not even added those already listed in Watermills in the United Kingdom
Dude, give me a chance! That page was up for almost no time at all. Heck I'm good humoured, but I had to go out! I was planning on quite a bit more work now.... Fiddle Faddle 18:05, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
  • We usually have separate sections "See also" (with a lower case a) for wikilinks and "External links".

Incidentally, I don't know whether you know it but Thorrington Tide Mill does not look like a tide mill to me. It is a conventional water mill which happens to be just above high water mark.

One learns :) Not even heard of Thorrington (yet) Fiddle Faddle 18:05, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
Essex County Council website: The county mills seems authoritative, though Fiddle Faddle 18:50, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Don't mind me! Keep up the good work! -- RHaworth 14:49, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Well done for using {{GBdot}}. Why not be a little more precise and use {{GBmap}}?

The answer, like all such things, is knowing about it. Now I do, I can Fiddle Faddle 18:05, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Clockwise from Newhaven seems arbitrary. List of rivers of Great Britain offers a well-established precedent of anti-clockwise, from Land's End. -- RHaworth 15:20, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

At risk of repetition, The answer, like all such things, is knowing about it. Now I do, I can Fiddle Faddle 18:05, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Sorry - I failed to notice that Tide Mills (UK) was very recent. I suppose a list in geographical order would be different from alpha so I won't interfere if you try and create it at Tide mills in the United Kingdom. Thorrington Mill seems to be unlucky: the link you gave above ain't working at this moment and two others I found [2] and [3] have gone away. -- RHaworth 21:11, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

try [4] Seems pretty definite. Also [5] shows a tidal segment of water below the mill. One would need to see for sure how it worked before coming to a definite conclusion. It may be that this mill is at the "tidal divide" on the river, so has a non tidal head of water from a river, rather than a "tide refilled pound" to power it. If that is the case does that make it a tide mill, or just a watermill? Fiddle Faddle 22:57, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

I take your point about an unwelcome fork, though. What do you think instead about flagging the actual tide mills with a note to say that to make them distinct from the "regular" watermills?
By all means. I might email Essex CC some day to see if they will admit it that it don't have a "tide refilled pound". Can't today - their entire website seems to be down. -- RHaworth 00:35, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

Tide Mills, East Sussex

Is this the article you refer to? Rich Farmbrough 11:41 25 April 2006 (UTC).

Hi Rich,
I'm assuming you are responding to my note on your talk page? It is one of several articles you have been using AWB on recently. And I naturally have no objection to your fixing issues with the page(s) - indeed where there is an issue, either factual or of standards then "fixed" is what should happen.
I am simply pleading for blank lines that cause no issue in the published article to be left for ease of editor navigation. I know one can edit each section, but it is often easier to edit the totality of an article. I also know that many articles are inconsistent because some editors leave a blank line between a heading and the text and others do not. And some editors are not "self consistent" either.
Especially where headings are nested, blank lines after them make an editor's life easier when editing the entire article. Hence my plea on your talk page. I was interested that another editor had commented so joined with them in my request.
Fiddle Faddle 11:52, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
I was surprised, because the article in question I had actually added blank lines. Where I have removed blank lines it has been pretty much all manual, so your coming across one or more of these as well as Tide Mills, East Sussex seems coincidence. Regards. Rich Farmbrough 22:18 25 April 2006 (UTC).
I'm always happy to be proved wrong. I looked, though, at a large number of articles that I've written or contributed to where you had deployed AWB. You seem to have hit the lot, today, for one reason or another. Again no objection where something required correction. While I may be wholly incorrect, the blank lines seem to have vanished rather than appeared. Fiddle Faddle 22:34, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
Further to your response on my talk page, sure. Rich Farmbrough 11:16 26 April 2006 (UTC).

Help needed re disambiguation pages

"ICCC" is a page that currently redirects to the Imperial College Caving Club. It is also the formal abbreviation of the International C Class Catamaran Championship. Both pages have value, obviously.

I'm OK so far, but I looked at the wiki disambig instructions and started to glaze over. Please spoon feed me and the also consider whether that spoon feeding needs to go to the formal wiki pages of instructions.

I know what I want to do:

  • make ICCC a disambiguation page
  • create simple text referring to each article
  • not upset anyone

I'm not asking anyone else to do the work. And I know that teaching me is a little more lengthy than just doing it, but I'm likely to come across this once or twice more in my life, and would appreciate the help to learn, especially since nothing currently links to ICC and it appears to be a simple case..

Fiddle Faddle

In that case, I don't think you would upset anyone if you just turned the redirect page into a disambiguation page, per Wikipedia:Disambiguation. It is generally accepted that most acronyms have multiple meanings and should thus be dealt with in that manner. As for teaching, I find the best method of teaching on wikipedia is direct examples, if you find yourself a current disambiguation page, just copy the method that is used - it is pretty simple: Mention ICCC is an acronym which could mean: and then bullet list each link, and use the disambig template at the bottom to designate it as a disambiguation page. -Dawson 17:20, 27 April 2006 (UTC)
Grateful for that, Thank you. And I have achieved it. I just glazed over because the iinstructionn page made it look woefully complex. I have a more complex example (I bet you knew that was coming!): ICCT and ICCt, different capitalisation and different topics. Each is a redirection page in its own right, and seekers for one would not be seeking the other. One has multiple pages that link to it and the other does not. I think I have the following questions:
  • Do I need to bother at all? It is likely to be typists of my appalling calibre that hit the wrong place anyway! If so:
  • How do I handle a disambig page for different capitalisations?
Fiddle Faddle 18:10, 27 April 2006 (UTC)
Article names are case sensitive, after the first character. So if someone searches for or types in ICCT, they won't even know about ICCt and vice-versa. What I would consider, personally, to be the best solution would be to write ICCT as a disambiguation page, make ICCt redirect to it, and then list off every page which would be suitable - with the proper capitalization. This method is done with various disambig pages, such as Silverwing, where it also disambiguates "Silver Wing", "Silver Wings" as well as "Silverwing". If there were enough entries to make the page confusing, such as with MacNeil and McNeil, they can be split into two seperate disambiguation pages, which refer to each other as a "See also" type of case. -Dawson 18:24, 27 April 2006 (UTC)
Once written down it is easy to see what to do. Thank you. This gives me good guidance for the future. I am heading in to do precisely that thing. - Fiddle Faddle 18:58, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Thames A Class Rater (scow)

Thanks for the invitation but what I knew would be mainly inappropriate to an encyclopedia article. In any case it has to be dredged up from nearly fifty years ago and that without the help of notes, so even if true, would not be reliable. I was working for Eric Willis' firm called Classcraft from late 1957 to early 1960. The work on the raters was done mainly during the winter, in the boathouse at TSC, though the spars were done in Kingston.

Just before I arrived on the scene, they had done a couple of major jobs. There was a new mast for Viva and the GRP sheathing of Kingfisher.

Eric Willis used to sail Ulva for Mr Stowell. I don't know the latter's first name but his son was Rodger. They lived by the river on the Lower Teddington road. More or less the only thing I did for Ulva was a jib boom. I recall that somebody, I think Willis, made her a tiller.

Dainty Too was varnished and still quite smart.

I did some work on a lazy boom, I think for Estelle.

I did very little on Kingfisher although we put an aluminium centre board box inside the old one in one of the boats. The original one had become eroded, weak and leaky. I may have been Kingfisher. I forget the owner's name but he was connected with the Fishmongers' Company.

Caprice (no serial number was ever used) was in a poor state. We must have replaced about a quarter of her planking. Some of it was well under 1/8" thick. A lot of the decking too, was replaced.

Tony Osborne made a smart, rather gothic-looking tiller for one of them; I think Kingfisher.

I understand that, at the start of the 39-45 War, a relatively large number of the boats were laid up in Burgoine's yard by Kingston railway bridge and were destroyed when the place burnt out as the result of an air raid.

That is about all I recall. (RJP 18:39, 18 May 2006 (UTC))

I think I got the fire story from Tony Osborne and Eric Willis, neither of whom was there at the time. They will probably have had it from Jack Eastland or Pat Retter. All but Tony will be dead by now. Pat certainly told me about the frequent rattle of AA shrapnel on Gridley's shed roofs. I just believed what I was told. Normally, it would be possible to seek information about a fire in the local paper but that might not be so easy when dealing with a war-time event. Perhaps there are fire brigade log books or air-raid wardens' reports in the archives. I don't know. Burgoine's yard was in Middlesex so that would be the more likely archive.
It is clear on two counts that the sail numbers do not go back to the origin of the formula. The oldest boat, Ulva comes in at number 8, for example. Secondly, there are boat names with successional numbers, Caprice IV and ScampII without a ScampI or Caprice II. This could have arisen from someone's attatchment to a name though his earlier boat was of a different type but that is not likely, even once. I don't remember sail numbers in the late 1950s but I didn't see the boats under sail as often as I saw them on the moorings. I suspect that it may have been around 1960 that the present numerical listing was made. If I remember rightly, the commodore sailed Kingfisher which might account for its number 1 position. However, I don't think the boat was in a fit state for sailing much before 1957. That was why the GRP sheathing was needed. (RJP 21:21, 18 May 2006 (UTC))

table help

To answer your question:

  1. I came across the article because it had the {{stub}} tag on it, and I am a stub sorter. I took a look at the article and noticed that the table was in HTML instead of wikimarkup.
  2. In my own personal, aesthetic opinion, wikimarkup looks neater to me than HTML. I will have to give you kudos to your very well-formed HTML table (I've seen some pretty nasty ones). I just think that using wikimarkup uses less characters and therefore the table will load slightly faster and the article size stays small. You are absolutely correct that tables can be in HTML or wikimarkup, but it is generally recommended to limit the amount of HTML in an article. Below is a quote from Help:Editing that is relevant.
However, you should avoid HTML in favor of Wiki markup whenever possible.

I hope that answers your questions. If you need anything else, feel free to leave a message on my talk page. Have a great day and happy editing! Amalas =^_^= 20:20, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

I think the point here is that each format is good for its own purpose. For a simple table, wikimarkup does fantastic, while a more complex table would do good to use the power of HTML. In this particular case, I think it could go either way. I would definitely agree, however, that it is much better to be able to preview the HTML table without troubling a wikiserver. That is something I hadn't thought of. Thanks for your insight.
Also, while the content is not what initially draws me to a particular article, I find that I learn a lot about a lot of different things while sorting stubs. I'm glad that I was able to come across your article and learn something from it. Thanks again. Amalas =^_^= 20:52, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

Template request

There is a reply to your request for a template on 'sea cadets'. --CBDunkerson 23:19, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

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Template request

Please see the reply to your request at Wikipedia:Requested_templates#King_George.27s_Fields. --CBDunkerson 19:33, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

NPFA

Sorry to spam your page, but i didn't know about the King George thing, very interesting!

Knowledge is power. Jump in and help me research more; that way you learn more. The topic ould be dull as dull, but it bring sup odd little facets of history :) 471 of the things is more than one guy can do, especially when he has a living to try to earn Fiddle Faddle 14:33, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

Royal Canadian Sea Cadets

Hi there. I just saw your message concerning the history of the RCSC. I am a former Sea Cadet and a former NL cadet. I am now a CIC officer of the Canadian Forces working of course for a RCSCC.

I am also a student of history, therefore when I will have the chance to, I will start typing all the historical information that I have concerning the RCSC.

Good day! Chris Stevenson

That sounds absolutely excellent :) I got involved with this because I once taught kids to sail in the UK at Raven's Ait and, while never a eea cadet nor officer I appreciated the UK's Navy League and everything it did for kids, privileged and underprivileged alike. Fiddle Faddle 07:54, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

Pole (object)

You are quite right; if pole is itself a disambig, then there is no need for a separate disambig for pole (object). Smerdis of Tlön 18:02, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

Hugh Price Hughes

Sorry about that. It's not that I think there is anything wrong with the way the article looked before. I just came across the article, noticed it was in a non-standard format and set about standardizing it. I suggest you have a look at Wikipedia:Manual of Style (biographies) for more guidance. If you would like to see the conventions changed, you need to argue it out on the talk pages and get a consensus in favour of your view. Deb 21:30, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

Well, there's also the Wikipedia:Guide to layout, which tells you to write in paragraphs and complete sentences, not bullet points. The biography guidelines mention that the dates of birth and death should come in the introductory paragraph, which was the other thing I changed. If you look at the other biography articles, you will see that almost all of them are formatted this way. If you see any that aren't, it's usually because they are either older than the guidelines and have been missed by editors, or because they have been written by newcomers. Deb 21:59, 4 June 2006 (UTC)
PS. I always reply on other people's talk pages, so that they know they've got a message. Sorry, old habit.
The article was written in bullet points, which is non-standard. The dates were not present in the first paragraph. This too is non-standard. I corrected these aspects of the article. I can only reiterate that if you want the standards changed, you need to take appropriate action. Alternatively, you can make further amendments to the article yourself to try to achieve a compromise between what the standards say and the effect you are aiming for. Deb 22:24, 4 June 2006 (UTC)
Hi, Tim. I'm trying hard not to let this turn into an edit war, but I have made a few minor amendments (removing duplicate links and duplicate information). Here is one of the relevant sections of the layout guide:
"The number of single-sentence paragraphs should be minimized, since these can inhibit the flow of the text. By the same token, paragraphs become hard to read once they exceed a certain length.
Articles generally comprise prose paragraphs, not bullet points; however, sometimes a bulleted list can break up what would otherwise be an overly large, grey mass of text, particularly if the topic requires significant effort on the part of readers. Bulleted lists should not be overused in the main text, but are typical in the reference and reading sections at the bottom."
If you really feel you are complying with this, I guess you'd better carry on. Deb 12:00, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

Greek Sweets of the Spoon

Hello, please see Talk:Greek sweets of the spoon for my reply on "spoon sweets". Regards. ~ Mallaccaos, 8 June 2006

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