User talk:Civil Engineer III

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[edit] States

I notice you are removing info from the opening sections of the U.S. States articles, and making it just a one sentence description ("____ is a state in the ____ region of the US"). Is that really Wikipedia policy? I think there should be some sort of general info in the opening. --JW1805 (Talk) 19:39, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

  • Thanks for your edits to United States state articles; bringing the states all into consistent formats is an important task, which I applaud. However, one thing I would like to note is the deletion of the opening sections (like above). Established well-followed guidelines and policies in Wikipedia, namely WP:LEAD and WP:WIAFA (the latter being the selection guide for featured articles), suggest strongly that the lead of an article be sufficiently long as to be a brief overview of the article, and in fact should only contain information that is discussed later in the article ( a concise lead section that summarizes the entire topic). Generally, leads should only be summarized repeats of information found later in the article. Thanks, AndyZ t 00:08, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Talk:George Washington

First, I want to thank you for edits to the George Washington article. Enlight of the rampant vandalism done the forementioned article, I would like you to comment on the discuss I start on the talk pages entitle Fully Protected. Please read my statements carefully and voice your opinon. Thanks for everything!--

[edit] Abraham Lincoln

I think you are doing a great job cleaning up the Lincoln article. Keep up the good work! Rklawton 19:49, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

Thank you! It is good to get feedback. I'm relatively new so one question: when replying like this to a message on my talk, do I answer on my talk page or yours? Civil Engineer III 11:57, 24 May 2006 (UTC)
"My talk page our yours..." sounds sooo much like a wiki pickup line. At any rate, I don't know. I've seen both done. I think it makes more sense to reply beneith the original message. It keeps the thread together. Rklawton 15:05, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Barnstar

For your copyediting, it is my privilege. You managed to get both Tennessee and Benjamin Harrison within a few edits, both of which I link to on my userpage and watch. Keep up the good work! Teke 03:39, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

Hey hey, thanks man! this is much appreciated! Civil Engineer III 17:22, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Hello

Hello, I am also a born again Christian and a Michigan Wolverines fan! I am a member of WikiProject College football, and if you would like to join, you would be welcome. Bornagain4 18:06, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, I just swiped those userboxes from your site! Thanks for the invite Civil Engineer III 18:17, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

u r welcome Are you from Michigan? Bornagain4 18:40, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Thanks for the great copyediting

Noticed it specifically on the Mennonite and Batenburgers article. I've put in work on both those articles and its great to see someone take the time to read the whole way through the and give them a good style tidy up and edit. I see you've already got a barnstar for copyediting, so I'll just affirm that its well deserved. Keep up the great work! mennonot 00:34, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

I'll second that with respect to the Mennonite article. The article is slowly improving and there is much yet to do! Thanks for your work. JonHarder 13:44, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Thanks for the wikification help on the "democracy" article

appreciate the help

please keep an eye on this article it needs attention from experienced wikipedians.

thanks Esmehwk 23:57, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] due to

Thanks for changing "due to" to other wording in "Great Lakes"! — President Lethe 20:22, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] whoops

Sorry, didn't mean to revert your copyedits to American Revolutionary War, which I didn't catch. • Kevin (complaints?) 13:05, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

Hey, no problem. It's all fixable! Civil Engineer III 13:15, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Michigan football all-time record

Why did you revert Michigan's record from its correct post-Vanderbilt game 850-280-36 to 849-280-36? I know this isn't a news page, but there is no point in deliberately making the information on the page less timely. I've now updated it to 851 victories. Please do not revert it again. Funnyhat 21:08, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

Pardonez-moi. I was reverting an anon edit, and unintintionally included that as well. Civil Engineer III 12:11, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Appalachian Trail by state

Would you mind looking at Appalachian Trail by state to make grammar corrections? There is a lot of overlap between that article and Appalachian Trail (for now), and you came right in the thick of the transition. Thanks for whatever you can do.--Esprit15d 16:51, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

I noticed that; let me know when you're done with your swaps and updates and I'll see what I can add to the party. Sorry if I messed up any of your edits; I don't think I did but one or two may have slipped by me. Civil Engineer III 17:11, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
It's all good! Thanks for the help.--Esprit15d 17:19, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Copyediting

I somehow stumbled upon your userpage while going about my business, and I noticed you copyedit articles. Assuming you have the time/motivation, would you be able to run through Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater sometime? It's pretty much at FAC standard save for a copyedit. Thanks for considering, at any rate. -- Steel 13:49, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Sycamore Shoals

Wow, thanks for improving the Sycamore Shoals article, great! Pfly 00:12, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Countries format

Yes, the Wikiproject has a standard infobox, layout, and is generally the central hub of discussion for any major changes to the country format: Wikipedia:WikiProject Countries. Hope this helps. :) --Golbez 19:28, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Phil Bredesen

Nice job cleaning up the Phil Bredesen article! Kaldari 18:46, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Stuff

Hi, I noticed you made some fixes on Hurricane Huron, and left your thoughts that there wasn't a need for the article (which I do agree with). Just wondering if you were interested in joining either Wikiproject (tropical cyclones or meteorology). Anyhow, a note that I fixed the overlapping on your userpage with {{Clear}}. Cheers, – Chacor 14:26, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Antietam

Those quote boxes look nice. I hadn't encountered that template before. I am supportive of the deletion of the trivial alternate history novel information. Let's see if other editors go along. (There is a special class of WP editor that has nothing to say about history other than modern references in novels, movies, and the Simpsons.) Hal Jespersen 21:03, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Squirrel

The article looks much better now. Removing all the idiotic trivia was a great thing. Joyous! | Talk 12:24, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Due to

Thanks for the information on "due to" (from your userpage). Although I don't like Burchfield, his explanation is helpful. I can't say "due to" is entirely ugly because Ambrose Bierce used it. Rintrah 18:40, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Fort Fisher

If you are seeking an article to copyedit, try Fort Fisher. It is such a mess that I have not have the stomach for it. Hal Jespersen 19:36, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Assassination of Franz-Ferdinand

Most of the changes you made were not helpful. The opening sentence was the classical way of introducing the assassination, found in some of the great historical works. I would understand your change better if you had decided on the active voice: "GP shot dead FF and SC on June ....", but you settle on an even more passive voice than the original and classic introductory sentence. New links are meaningless. For example, in the section mentioning the disputes involving Russia, etc., the links link you to the countries rather than the key disputes involving those countries. It will waste readers time. It gets worse as you go down further in the text where you revise a list to include multiple instances of the word "and", where one would do. Frankly, it changed the meaning of the sentence for the worse. The implication of "not only" was intentional and meaningful for those who have an understanding of kriegschuld. Tankosic and Ciganovic were not just providing weapons, they were also providing additional assistance consistent with a clandestine military intelligence operation. Then, where you said that Major Tankosic agreed to transport the weapons, that was either an accident of the edit or a falsehood. There are many other problems. If you want to edit the text please edit it in small blocks so I can reedit easily. Right now, the old text and new text are not well aligned due to your changing the name of one of the sections. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Werchovsky (talk • contribs) 17:49, 28 April 2007 (UTC).

[edit] 2A edit

By and large, I like your recent edit to the Second Amendment article, but something is broken, in that the bottom part of the article is truncated. I don't know exactly why, I am guessing there is an unbalanced 'ref' '/ref' tag pair. SaltyBoatr 15:42, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Henry Ford

Overall, I like your edits, but I've modified a few. One, the Curcio quote can't be tampered with, or it can't be a quote, so I restored it. I replaced the Philip Roth note under pop culture, instead of under see also. I removed a lot of passive voice stuff that you'd added, replacing it with active voice. You yourself made a few similar edits later in your edit, but had gone for passive in the eearly part. I doubt it's fully consistent yet, but it's better than it was by far. As for the call that your work was vandalism, please don't take it too personally. There are a number of editors on Wikipedia who believe that ANY statements disparaging Ford for his antisemetic views are a direct reflection on the nation itself, are treasonous, slanderous, and so on. Despite numerous discussions explaining that no one judges Ford as 'evil' overall, and that his contributions to america and the war were amazingly good, but all aspects of the man should be covered critically, both negative and positive, these editors continue to insist that reporting on his antisemitism isults the entire auto industry, all of detroit, the nation, all veterans of WW2, and on and on, and on. as a result, there's probably a hiartrigger response in some editors to revert major overhauls. I'll leave a note on ben's page stating I support the spirit of your work, if not every conjugate verb you used, and that I'll hang around and help you continue to improve the page and so on. thanks for the good work on it, he's high profile and you did some nice fixing up. ThuranX 22:44, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Vaudeville edits

I'm a bit confused on some of your vaudeville edits. What scholarly sources support your claim, for example, that vaudeville was either a theatrical "style" (it was a theatrical genre and business model) or that whatever you might see as this style (juggling dogs or opera vocalists? Shakespearean monologists or tap dancers?) "continues today"? The lead needed to be shortened, yes, and the article is still in need of a major overhaul, but many of your edits don't seem to reflect an expertise or mastery in the field. --Patchyreynolds 15:34, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

None of the work is mine; I merely rearranged what was already there. No, I don't have any expertise in the field, only trying to make the article flow better.Civil Engineer III 15:37, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Edits

Why did you change my edit on the prohibition page? It was relevant trivia from popular culture. I am getting sick of people like you deciding that pages belong solely to you and no one else can have any input. It's annoying. I suspect your only interest in the article is due to your religious extremism anyway. Mixino1 18:39, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

I just don't see the relevance in adding every reference that the Simpsons cartoon makes to any thing in history. It does not shed any importance on the Prohibition in the United States, and I'm not sure as to the importance of it. And please refrain from the attacks.Civil Engineer III 13:15, 4 June 2007 (UTC)
I am not attacking. You edited again without a discussion entry. Why should you alone decide what's important? Do you have a God given right? You're no different to an extremist of any other religion. You're unbelievably arrogant. Mixino1 08:29, 5 June 2007 (UTC)
well, then, start a discussion...Civil Engineer III 13:18, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Copyedits

Hi. A couple of things came to mind, reading your Pacific War copyedits:

  • It's not necessary to put the USS prefix on every ship name when context makes it clear they're USN ships e.g. "Task Force 18 (TF 18), under Rear Admiral Robert C. Giffen, which consisted of heavy cruisers USS Wichita, USS Chicago, and USS Louisville; light cruisers USS Montpelier, USS Cleveland, and USS Columbia; escort carriers USS Chenango and USS Suwanne; ..."
  • The miles given are presumably nautical miles (1.852 km), not statute miles (1.609 km). So, e.g., 250 miles is 460 km, not 400.

—wwoods 15:20, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Johnson City city limits

That list of counties for Johnson City, in List of cities and towns in Tennessee, came from http://www.state.tn.us/sos/bluebook/05-06/48-data.pdf , which I have to assume is a very reliable source. Do you have a reliable source for your change? --orlady 12:19, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

After you told me about your Kingsport map (on my talk page), I poked around online and found some cartographic evidence that Johnson City does spill across county lines. http://tnatlas.geog.utk.edu/tea/thematic.asp?county=Sullivan and http://tnatlas.geog.utk.edu/tea/values.asp?county=Sullivan show a little bit of JC in Sullivan County (not on the Kingsport side of JC), while http://tnatlas.geog.utk.edu/tea/thematic.asp?county=Carter and http://tnatlas.geog.utk.edu/tea/values.asp?county=Carter show a little bit of the city in Carter County. --orlady 20:09, 31 July 2007 (UTC)


[edit] Thank you

[1]Xpanzion 23:32, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] The phrase "a number of" in written English

In [2] you changed

A Montana writer and lawyer named Cornelius Hedges, who had been a member of the Washburn expedition, proposed that the region should be set aside and protected as a National Park; he wrote a number of detailed articles about his observations for the Helena Herald newspaper between 1870–1871.

to

A Montana writer and lawyer named Cornelius Hedges, who had been a member of the Washburn expedition, proposed that the region should be set aside and protected as a National Park; he wrote numerous detailed articles about his observations for the Helena Herald newspaper between 1870–1871.

It is incorrect to substitute "numerous" for "a number of" in a sentence unless you intend to change the meaning of the sentence. Do you have any evidence that Hedges wrote many detailed articles for the Helena Herald? There is nothing wrong with using the phrase "a number of". It is a very widely used and widely accepted phrase, and it is perfectly correct English. Numerous expert authors on English usage have used it many times.[3] I myself have used it a number of times. - Neparis 13:58, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] New user

Civil Engineer III,

I am a new user to Wikipedia and am looking for some feedback on an article on free machining that I have developed from a stub. I would appreciate any suggestions you may have concerning the subject or just developing the article even more.

Thanks, Blapcewi 05:09, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Combined refs

On the de-combining of tags, is there a technical reason for that (are they looking bad on your screen)? They were combined to reduce the spraying of tags on the article. ("The use of more than one note reference at a single text location (such as 5, 6) should be rigorously avoided. Instead the notes referred to should be combined into a single note." CMS.) If this is just a matter of taste, I wonder if it is the right thing to change them on that basis.

I am going to change a few things back (not that: it is too laborious). Please don't regard this as unappreciative, because much that you have done has improved the article (particularly the removal of the quotation cruft). I will take out some of the changes to American-English style, for example, which go against the overall British-English style. Perhaps we don't need to refer to Burghley by his full title after the first instance (in fact, the "1st/2nd/3rd" duke thing is something of a Wikipedia peculiarity, relating to the necessity for precision in page titles). I disagree with your removal of some transitional phrases, though I won't change them back, since this is a matter of taste (but they were based on the phrasing in the sources). By making the sequence of information more abrupt in a few places, I do, however, feel that you have made the flow of information read less well; but you have tightened things up in places, too, to be fair. By the way, I agree that "was/were to" can be a bad usage, but sometimes it is essential—for example in the sequence of tenses concerning Elizabeth's removal to Woodstock: she was cheered along the way before she spent a year there. On the question of hanging apostrophes and other connected words and parts of words outside of wikilinks, I am confused, because corrections have gone in the other direction up to now; I personally feel it is unnecessary to have a black apostrophe s at the end of a blue word. Certainly, the article has now become inconsistent on that matter; and I always think that consistency comes first where technical choices are concerned. The matter of when titles like "duke" and "archbishop" should be capitalised is also inconsistently addressed, but it was that way already because editors rarely edit to one convention (both styles are accurate in themselves). qp10qp (talk) 18:12, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Wars of the Roses

I don't know why you removed my edit, but I added it back. The section is for the appearances and references to the war in works of fiction, and the video game in question is based on the war. Albiet loosely. The Clawed One (talk) 23:00, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Season

That was a really great cleanup of Season. I looked at it the first time and thought I'd better flag it as needing cleanup but leave it alone myself as I didn't want to mess it up. You did a good job sorting it out so its much more readable for passerbys.Trilobitealive (talk) 01:58, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Comanche language

Re Comanche article: Numic is a branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. So it does match. However, the paragraph you deleted doesn't belong in the lead. I have incorporated it within the "Language" section and made the relationship cler, I hope. --Bejnar (talk) 17:07, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Benchmark comparison

Okay, maybe the Netherlands are no good. But it's useful to have some sort of benchmark comparison, especially since the article has no image where Lake Superior can be usefully compared with the rest of the US. What would you accept as a comparison? Mr. IP (talk) 05:31, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

For the record, I am an American, not some crazed Dutchman trying to insert my country into the article :D Mr. IP (talk) 05:36, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Personally, I am against benchmarks in general; they are too ambiguous, and what kind of frame of reference is it if the person reading the article has no better inclination of what the benchmark is? What good does that do? That's why we have measurements and not comparisons.

I also think it's silly when people use ball or fruit sizes to indicate the size of hail. Why not just use a 1/2" dia. for example? But now I'm getting way off track...;) Civil Engineer III (talk) 12:23, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Great Lakes Storm of 1913

Good work on the overhaul! — BRIAN0918 • 2008-04-14 15:58Z

[edit] Due to

Even though you have been changing Canadian spelling to US spelling in Canadian articles, which I assume is because you are unfamiliar with our odd ways, I am a huge, huge fan because of your crusade against "due to". And because of your cleaning up of repeated links. Keep up the excellent work. Regards, Ground Zero | t 23:19, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

If I misspell something in Canadian English, please overlook that as my ignorance; I am not on a crusade to convert your country. My crusade however does involve consistency, excessive linkage, and the ever-loathful due to. Thanks for the kudos.Civil Engineer III (talk) 11:32, 12 June 2008 (UTC)