User talk:France3470

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[edit] Welcome to Wikipedia!

Hello, France3470, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. My name is Hdt83. I just wanted to say hi and welcome you to the free encyclopedia anybody can edit. If you have any questions about Wikipedia, feel free to leave me a message on my talk/chat page or by typing {{helpme}} at the bottom of this page. Here are some pages to help you. The left column contains tutorials and introductory pages while the right shows ways to help out Wikipedia.

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Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. I hope you like the place and decide to stay.

Again, welcome! :) -- Hdt83 Chat 05:05, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Not Vandalism

You are wrong. I did not vandalize the Tom Leykis page. I have reverted your reversion. 24.80.117.217 20:38, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Grim

Thanks for fixing the Grimsay disambiguation page. My attempt was rather sloppy I'm afraid. Ben MacDuiTalk/Walk 18:43, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Not a problem.(: France3470 18:47, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] London Meetup - January 12, 2008

Hi! There's going to be a London Wikipedia Meetup coming Saturday January 12, 2008. If you are interested in coming along take part in the discussion over at Wikipedia:Meetup/London7. The discussion is going on until tomorrow evening and the official location and time will be published at the same page late Thursday or early Friday. Hope to see you Saturday, Poeloq (talk) 01:50, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Dab pages

You wrote (but i've added #s for convenience of reference here):

  1. I've been noticing you've been doing quite a bit of dab cleanup recently, mainly to articles I’ve recently tagged for cleanup. Which I applaud because the never seem to manage to be to zero. Though there are just a few things, with some of the pages you've edited, namely Leave and Cerberus (disambiguation), that don’t fit with what’s in WP#MOSDAB and common DAB formatting practise.
  2. I've noticed you like to remove item descriptions and/or shorten them one or two words. Though MOSDAB states “The description associated with a link should be kept to a minimum, just sufficient to allow the reader to find the correct link”, one word usually doesn’t suffice. I look to the following examples on the page as to the general length and amount of detail that should be included. This usually means a short sentence fragment. Just this bit more information makes it clearer for the reader, and there isn’t much harm in added a few more words and it doesn’t clutter the pages as long all fits on one line. For instance in Cerberus (disambiguation), the descriptions I had before [6] your edit, would have been following more by Dab convention. Though I admit some of them were overly long, and do need shortening.
  3. Also, it’s unnecessary to add lots of spacing between sections, simply for consistency purposes. I know it's something the MOS specifies but it's just common practice to only use one space between sections.
  4. Finally, titles should either use section headers or bold subject area headings. (:
  5. Hope I'm not sounding insanely nitpicky. I'm by no means an expert, so feel free to address anything you disagree with. Meanwhile, keep up the disambiguating.
France3470 (talk) 21:03, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

I appreciate the needed critique.

As to 5, you're not at all over-specifying. I think the MoS works pretty well, and generally a lot of thot has gone into it, mostly in non-obvious areas. If you notice a pattern of deviation from it, a reminder is almost certainly constructive.
As to 4, thanks for bring this to my attention. I fixated on the tendency of non-MoSDab-reading editors to bold the individual entries, and i think unconsciously identified the bolding of titles and of entries as being treated the same. IMO our brains are more impressionistic than literal, and it takes effort at least for me to achieve the literality that we consciously seek.
As to 3, i honestly wasn't sure what the doc says, but i think two blank lines (preceding a title) are needed so that the titles and the [quasi-]sections below them appear to the eye as a unit, instead of all the quasi-sections running together, with the titles distinguished only by bolding and lack of bullet, but all beginning at the left margin. (IMO, that visual chunking of the entries into sections helps the reader focus on a title, and make "ignore the rest of the section and find the next title" for most of them, until a title is relevant enough to care what the subdivisions are. Now, it may be that the consensus would shift if we actively discuss the existing spec on that MoS page's talk page, but my theory is that editors spend so much time looking at the edit pane, where one blank line above a non-section title looks adequate (and two looks enormous), and too little previewing and noticing that that blank line essentially disappears in the rendered version, and that the two blank lines render as more like one, and very suitably to function.
As to 2, i think i disagree pretty strongly, in the spirit (paraphrasing from memory) that often the lk on the dab-suffixed title suffices. I admit that the purely visual clutter doesn't start until the line wraps, but i think that every additional word creates mental clutter: with prose, i think effective scanning sort of works by ignoring the words that mostly just make the syntax precise, while giving a sense of what the subject is (based on the nouns, verbs, an modifiers) without engaging the recursive processing that makes clear the relations among them; with lists, the unfocusing that you do with prose is likely to blur the terms from one entry together with those of the next, and this is best avoided by keeping the words few and essential. To me a good dab'n, when, say, there are multiple American politicians named Tom Johnson, is just vital stats, plus a state (or something like "cabinet" or "Supreme Court" if they went beyond representing part or all of one state) in most cases, and some i've rarely seen where you'd be helped to know whether he was the one in Congress or state legislature, or even in which house. To me, the real question is what information are they almost sure to have when they come looking for the article: if there is one distinguishing characteristic of a topic that appears in 80% of mentions that will inspire WP consultation, and another that occurs in 40%, including the 20% that don't mention the 80% characteristic, then those two characteristics (usually reducible to a word, maybe two, each) are all that's needed. I'd welcome the chance for us to tackle together some of the specific cases we disagreed about; would you care to identify a few for that purpose?
--Jerzy•t 10:07, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Your dab comment to User talk:Jerzy

Hi, France3470. I inserted a colon into the link to Category:Disambiguation pages in need of cleanup that you placed in the first paragraph of your comment on Jerzy's talk page, so that it no longer made the page show up in the category itself. Just wanted to let you know, so you didn't think I was messing with your comment. Best wishes. Gwguffey (talk) 04:27, 26 February 2008 (UTC)