User talk:Bryan Derksen

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[edit] Tucker's kobolds

I have nominated this article (which you created) for deletion as part of the current drive to remove the cruft from the D&D topics on Wikipedia. Comments regarding this and other related articles welcome. J Milburn (talk) 20:54, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] AfD nomination of Tucker's kobolds

An editor has nominated Tucker's kobolds, an article on which you have worked or that you created, for deletion. We appreciate your contributions, but the nominator doesn't believe that the article satisfies Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion and has explained why in his/her nomination (see also "What Wikipedia is not").

Your opinions on whether the article meets inclusion criteria and what should be done with the article are welcome; please participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Tucker's kobolds and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~).

You may also edit the article during the discussion to improve it but should not remove the articles for deletion template from the top of the article; such removal will not end the deletion debate. Thank you. BJBot (talk) 20:59, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Novikov self-consistency principle

When you originally created this article you included the sentence "Novikov found that the probability of such consistent events was nonzero, and the probability of inconsistent events was zero, so no matter what a time traveller might try to do he will always end up accomplishing consistent non-paradoxical actions." Do you have a source for this? I was under the impression that Novikov just argued that as long as self-consistent solutions were possible they would be the only ones allowed by nature, but that actual calculations of probabilities of different outcomes using quantum mechanics were done later by Kip Thorne and Gunnar Klinkhammer, as discussed in Thorne's book Black Holes and Time Warps and also in reference 11 in [1]. And I'm not sure if this approach actually proved that QM would give inconsistent outcomes probability 0, or if they just assumed that only consistent outcomes were possible and used QM to find the relative probability of each one. Hypnosifl (talk) 22:55, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Hm... I vaguely remember writing the article, but it was six years ago so the details are lost. I think I dug up the Friedman paper, the title is familiar, but not the original by Novikov that first proposed the principle. If you've got sources that contradict what I wrote then by all means go with those sources, I'm hardly an expert on this. Just a dabbler. Bryan Derksen (talk) 23:10, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Winebox

Hey, no problem, although due to my inexperience with these things, I was a bit baffled. But, considering your competence with such stuff, do you think you could take a peek at it and check that I haven't left behind novice mistakes? MURGH disc. 12:24, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Looked good, the only problem I found was some leftover table HTML that probably didn't make any difference to the displayed infobox. I split off the documentation into a doc subpage, but that's not a "novice mistake" it's just a bit of stylistic standardization. :) Bryan Derksen (talk) 19:13, 8 March 2008 (UTC)
Great. Thank you. MURGH disc. 00:04, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Rollback request

Hello! I have returned for a long wikibreak and i saw the improvements on Wikipedia! Wow! I'll get straight to the point, can i request rollback? --Lolipod (talk) 01:02, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

Sure. On which article, to which version, and why? Bryan Derksen (talk) 01:14, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
Oh, you mean the rollback bit. Sure. Bryan Derksen (talk) 01:14, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] "merge and delete is a violation of the GFDL"

This is, as near as I can tell, a novel claim. Do you have a reference for this claim? Nandesuka (talk) 20:56, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

From the GFDL, under the requirements for producing a modified work: "List on the Title Page, as authors, one or more persons or entities responsible for authorship of the modifications in the Modified Version, together with at least five of the principal authors of the Document (all of its principal authors, if it has fewer than five), unless they release you from this requirement." From further down, in the section on combining multiple GFDLed works together: "In the combination, you must combine any sections Entitled "History" in the various original documents, forming one section Entitled "History"; likewise combine any sections Entitled "Acknowledgements", and any sections Entitled "Dedications"." Basically, the GFDL requires that you must maintain the authorship attribution of a work under the GFDL when you copy or modify it.
Under the history of the Tucker's kobolds page you can see that my contribution of the text is properly attributed. That text, which I hold the copyright to but have licenced to Wikipedia under the GFDL, is now in the Kobold (Dungeons & Dragons) article. However, if you look at that article's history, you won't see my attribution under it. Wikipedia "gets away" with this by considering itself to be a unitary work, so the fact that my attribution remains under the old article's history means it's still compliant. However, the moment you deleted Tucker's kobolds my contribution was no longer attributed to me anywhere in Wikipedia. That meant that Wikipedia was violating my license terms, making the article Kobold (Dungeons & Dragons) into a copyright violation. This may seem like quibbling, but really, the GFDL is fundamental to making Wikipedia work and so compliance is very important.
This is a subject that I've raised before on the wiki-en mailing list, where I've met with general agreement, so I'm quite certain that this is the correct interpretation of the GFDL. Have you closed other AfDs as merge-and-delete in the past? If so, we've got some cleanup to do. Bryan Derksen (talk) 21:29, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
Let me get this straight: you used your admin tools in order to undelete a page that you were the creator of, and your rationale for this is that if Wikipedia doesn't make the page history available, we're violating your copyright? Is that about the size of it?
I have re-deleted the page under CSD G4 (the AfD closed as delete, not "merge and delete"). I have also removed the material on "Tucker's Kobold's" from the Kobold article until its copyright status can be established. I will contact WP:OFFICE and ask them if they agree with your novel interpretation of the GFDL. I note that no discussion of this novel interpretation is on any of the pages discussing our deletion policy. I trust that if you disagree with this decision you will open a discussion on the issue, rather than unilaterally using your admin tools to restore "your" copyrighted material. Nandesuka (talk) 23:20, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
The copyright status of Tucker's kobolds is not under any dispute that I know of; I wrote it myself and released it under the GFDL. The problem is now with Kobold (Dungeons & Dragons), which contains the text that I wrote without any attribution that I wrote it. This is a violation of the licence under which I released the material. If anyone should be taking this to OFFICE it should be me, I'm the one being wronged here. I'm going to take it to WP:AN instead, though. See Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard#A case of merge and delete and the GFDL Bryan Derksen (talk) 23:29, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
If you believed your copyright was being violated, the correct course of action was to mark it as such and get an uninvolved admin to assist you, not to use your admin powers to arbitrate the status of an article that you (essentially) wrote. Kobold (Dungeons & Dragons) does not contain the text you wrote at the moment, because I removed it. We can selectively delete past revisions, if needed, if the office deems it necessary. Nandesuka (talk) 23:40, 14 March 2008 (UTC)
You'll note that I didn't restore the article itself, I turned it into a redirect to where the material had been merged to. I don't see why having a redirect there is such a big deal that you'd wheel war over it. Bryan Derksen (talk) 23:45, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Your note

Okay, thanks, Bryan. SlimVirgin (talk)(contribs) 23:35, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Would you care to comment on a related GFDL issue?

Bryan, I noticed your comments at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#A case of merge and delete and the GFDL and I've started a thread at Wikipedia talk:Summary style#GFDL concern regarding GFDL issues from splitting articles, in case you are interested.--Doug.(talk • contribs) 14:03, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, I had an operator head-space and timing problem (aka brain lock) I guess. I replied there further on that issue. The other issue that overlaps both of these (this one and the one brought up at AN) is copying from one page to another. Certainly an appropriate edit summary is necessary but do you know of anywhere that editors are so instructed?--Doug.(talk • contribs) 17:51, 17 March 2008 (UTC)
Afraid not, I haven't read any guideline pages in a long time. You'll probably need to ask someone newer to Wikipedia than me. :) Bryan Derksen (talk) 18:11, 17 March 2008 (UTC)
Well, I'm afraid it doesn't exist. I'll keep checking but there are such a mess of pages about copyrights that you can't get a straight answer to most common questions. Thanks.--Doug.(talk • contribs) 20:57, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Edmonton meetup

Hello - I'm contacting you with this message because somebody once told me that you were from Edmonton - if you are not actually in Edmonton, I apologize for bothering you. Anyway, I am investigating the possibility of creating a Wikipedia meetup in Edmonton for sometime during the spring or summer of 2008. If you're interested, please visit Wikipedia:Meetup/Edmonton, add yourself to the list of interested editors, and watchlist the page. Cheers, Sarcasticidealist (talk) 00:07, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] {{Infobox}} edit

Hi Bryan,

Thanks for making this change. Much appreciated. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 17:54, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Re: Motorway sign images

I have replied on my talk page. — cBuckley (Talk • Contribs) 08:28, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] HD 24040 was created

I saw that you created the article HD 24040 on February 25, 2008 and saids that this planet was published, but The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia says it is currently unconfirmed. BlueEarth (talk) 22:31, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

I didn't put that there, it appears that the template defaults to "published". That's probably not the appropriate default to have, I'll go change the template so that it doesn't assume anything. Bryan Derksen (talk) 23:03, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

I added defaulting Published back and added unconfirmed to HD 24040 article, because when you removed it, most published extrasolar planets articles saying "Published" in planetbox discovery would have been disappear. BlueEarth (talk) 23:32, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, shouldn't those boxes be updated to actually say published, then? This isn't particularly robust behavior for the infobox, there's no way to know which ones are published and which ones are just showing the default value. Bryan Derksen (talk) 04:42, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
There, I've just fixed it. I went through every article that used template:planetbox discovery and, if it lacked a discovery_status parameter, added one with "Published". It's now safe for me to create articles on extrasolar planets without having to find out their publication status first. :) Bryan Derksen (talk) 05:59, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Category colons

Ooh, great spot - thanks for pointing that out! I'll reconfigure my bot. Verisimilus T 09:40, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] CfD nomination of Category:Royal Australian Navy ships

Category:Royal Australian Navy ships, which you created, has been nominated for deletion, merging, or renaming. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the Categories for discussion page. Thank you. — Bellhalla (talk) 13:58, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Template:Infobox Film

Your recent switch of this infobox to the {{Infobox}} meta-template isn't entirely uncontroversial - at least not for a protected template with tens of thousands of transclusions - and has raised several negative comments on the talk page. The main point of contention appears to be with regard to the font size. I won't ask you to revert the change, but a bit of discussion at Template talk:Infobox Film wouldn't go amiss. Regards. PC78 (talk) 23:00, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Various event templates

A few templates you created, Template:EventRecordBottom, Template:EventRecordRow, Template:EventRecordBronze, Template:EventRecordSilver, Template:EventRecordGold‎, and Template:EventRecordTop‎ , have been marked for deletion as deprecated and orphaned templates. If, after 14 days, there have been no objections, the templates will be deleted. If you wish to object to their deletion, please list your objections here and feel free to remove the {{deprecated}} tag from the templates. If you feel the deletions are appropriate, no further action is necessary. Thanks for your attention. Bryan Derksen (talk) 01:21, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

If they aren't being used anymore, then by all means, proceed. Thanks for the notice! tiZom(2¢) 03:55, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Apology

I owe you a big apology for the way I acted when I reverted all those templates. I got a little carried away, and it was really rude of me. While I still think some of the infoboxes don't need to be converted, I will try to keep an open mind and consider your viewpoint. In the very least the system does a heck of a good job at improving consistency and cleaning up some of the somewhat ugly ones. But yeah, I don't know what I was thinking that night, and I feel bad about it. -- Ned Scott 03:00, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

It's okay, I know how the heart can get racing and the edits start flying when one sees something one strongly disagrees with. I went right up to the abyss of simply rolling back your reversions en masse myself, which I'm sure wouldn't have helped matters any. :) In this case there's a balance to be struck between customizability and consistency. I tend to be quite strongly on the consistency side of things, myself, but since compromise is a necessary part of life here on Wikipedia I do my best to accommodate. Would you like to go through those templates you reverted and see if there are any specific issues with the way they got converted that I could perhaps address? Or issues with {{infobox}} in general? Finding infoboxes that can't be cleanly converted to use it has been a good way for me to finding things to fix. Bryan Derksen (talk) 04:06, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Hey, Bryan. I don't have anything to particular to say, I just wanted to thank you for being on Wikipedia and being you. --Kizor 13:39, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Aw, shucks. Thanks! You do a great job too. :) Bryan Derksen (talk) 15:33, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Bug included

Bryan,

Thanks for your help in categorising the subtemplates of {{convert}}. This may now be a non-issue now but there seems to have been some sort of bug which put the category in <noinclude></noincluded> tags (note the verb tense in the closing tag).


some of the affected subtemplates


JIMp talk·cont 00:23, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Probably just a copy-and-paste error, made subtle by the fact that the template page itself looks correct once saved. Since it took until now to get fixed I hope that means it wasn't a major problem. Bryan Derksen (talk) 04:32, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] CfD nomination of Category:Fictional species

Category:Fictional species, which you created, has been nominated for deletion, merging, or renaming. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments at the category's entry on the Categories for discussion page. Thank you. – I knew our paths would intersect at some point. :) Cgingold (talk) 02:23, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Re: An empty category deletion

Thanks for the heads-up. I tagged the category description page with {{go away}}, which should stop me (and any other admin) from deleting the page again. Cheers. --MZMcBride (talk) 04:50, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Woodling/Busbey coaches

The following articles Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Homer_E._Woodling were nominated for deletion. You are welcome to share your opinion on if they should be deleted or not. Thank you for your time. --SportsMaster (talk) 16:54, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Proposed deletion of Corpsicle

A proposed deletion template has been added to the article Corpsicle, suggesting that it be deleted according to the proposed deletion process. All contributions are appreciated, but this article may not satisfy Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and the deletion notice should explain why (see also "What Wikipedia is not" and Wikipedia's deletion policy). You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{dated prod}} notice, but please explain why you disagree with the proposed deletion in your edit summary or on its talk page.

Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised because even though removing the deletion notice will prevent deletion through the proposed deletion process, the article may still be deleted if it matches any of the speedy deletion criteria or it can be sent to Articles for Deletion, where it may be deleted if consensus to delete is reached. Do you want to opt out of receiving this notice? Judgesurreal777 (talk) 19:15, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] AfD nomination of Corpsicle

I have nominated Corpsicle, an article you created, for deletion. I do not feel that this article satisfies Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and have explained why at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Corpsicle. Your opinions on the matter are welcome at that same discussion page; also, you are welcome to edit the article to address these concerns. Thank you for your time. Do you want to opt out of receiving this notice? Judgesurreal777 (talk) 22:37, 2 June 2008 (UTC)