User talk:71.251.180.113

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] Welcome

Hello, 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:

Here are some other hints and tips:

  • I would recommend that you get a username. You don't have to log in to read or edit articles on Wikipedia, but creating an account is quick, free and non-intrusive, requires no personal information, and there are many benefits of having a username. (If you edit without a username, your IP address is used to identify you instead.)
  • When using talk pages, please sign your name at the end of your messages by typing four tildes (~~~~). This will automatically produce your username (or IP address) and the date.

If you have any questions, check out Wikipedia:Where to ask a question, ask me on my Talk page, or type {{helpme}} on this talk page and a user will help you as soon as possible. I will answer your questions as far as I can. Again, welcome!

Thank you again for contributing to Wikipedia. I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian. -- Jim Douglas (talk) (contribs) 05:38, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Event format on the day of the year pages

I just glanced over the changes you're making. Most of it looks fine, but I did notice one problem. You seem to be removing the verb ("is" or "are") from various entries. If you review those pages, you'll see that the standard is for each entry to be phrased as a complete sentence in the present tense. For example, in this edit, you removed the word "is"; the modified version isn't a grammatically complete sentence. -- Jim Douglas (talk) (contribs) 05:38, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Hi! Thanks for your very thoughtful response to my note. I hope I was clear that most of your edits were helpful; I mentioned this small point because I wanted to let you know why I was reversing your change.

I still disagree with your reasoning about passive voice. :-) Here's why:

This is the original version of that sentence from April 8, written in present tense to conform to our house style:

And here's another version that is also syntactically valid, but written in past tense:

As you mentioned, both of those sentences are written in passive voice. Who ratified the 17th Amendment? We can infer the who in general based on what we know about Constitutional law. There were 48 states in 1913, so presumably the 32nd state ratified it on this date. (And in a review of the article, we find that the who was actually Connecticut.)

Here's your modified version:

Note that it's still in passive voice; the removal of "is" didn't cause a subject (i.e. the state of Connecticut) to appear in the sentence. The only affect of removing the "is" was to turn a grammatically correct passive voice sentence into a grammatically incomplete sentence.

As a general policy, I agree with you that we should tend towards active voice. But in this case, it's really not that important that Connecticut happened to be the 32nd state to ratify the amendment. All that really matters is that on this date the amendment became law (was ratified). In normal conversation, you would say "The amendment was ratified". In Wikipedia's house style (think of it as "on this day in history"), we say "The amendment is ratified". But the sentence fragment "The amendment ratified" doesn't make sense. You could put it into active voice by saying "Connecticut ratified the amendment", but that over-emphasizes Connecticut.

Maybe one of these would be slightly better?

-- Jim Douglas (talk) (contribs) 04:28, 3 December 2006 (UTC)