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Talk archives for Glossary of cue sports terms (current talk page)
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Contents 1 General, 2007 1.1 Commonwealth English 1.2 Broken ref citation 1.3 2007-02-1 Automated pywikipediabot message 1.4 Idea 1.5 Webby sources 1.6 The page number problem 1.7 Merge proposal: Kick (snooker)

General, 2007

Commonwealth English

If someone has a problem with the concept of Commonwealth English they should take that up at that article's talk page, not by making factually incorrect edits to this article. If anything we should be using this term a lot more, instead of "UK" or "British", when it is known that a term is broadly used in Commonwealth not just UK English (i.e. by English in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Hong Kong, etc., etc.) — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 01:14, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

In the interests of avoiding an editwar with JackLumber (a review of whose edit history shows that he is trawling WP to remove all references to "Commonwealth English"; a personal bugbear it seems), I'll back down on this because the C.E. article is unsourced, as he pointed out in edit summary.

This leaves us with a major problem: The Glossary is now factually incorrect as to usage distribution in many, many places, and we don't seem to have a short-hand way for rectifying that. What are we supposed to do now? "Chiefly British, Irish, Australian, New Zealandish, South African, Singaporan, Hong Kongian...[insert dozens more]...British Virgin Islander English"? Or "chiefly non-North-American, except for the British Virgin Islands...[insert every other British-dominated Carribean territory]..."? (NB: Just "chiefly non-US" won't cut it; most Canadians, by far, use US not British pool/billiards terminology, for the vast majority of terms). — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 01:34, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

How about going to the root of the problem and sourcing and expanding Commonwealth English? shouldn't be too hard but I have no time tonight. A quick google book search looks promising--Fuhghettaboutit 04:34, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

Marking this "Resolved" since article intro text now just gets around the problem entirely. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 22:11, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Broken ref citation

Can someone look at this issue with new eyes? I've tried everything I can think of. If you page down the article, there are two instances of LARGE red error messages about one of the reference citations not working in its shorthand <ref name="whatever" /> form. I can't for the life of me figure out what the issue is. If you are not seeing these errors, please tell me; it means my cache or session or something is hosed and the article is actually just fine. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 14:15, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

Fixed. See the edit summary for the problem.--Fuhghettaboutit 00:16, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Good eye! — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 07:47, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

2007-02-1 Automated pywikipediabot message

Do not archive this, or the bot will come back.

This page has been transwikied to Wiktionary.

The article has content that is useful at Wiktionary. Therefore the article can be found at either here or here (logs 1 logs 2.) Note: This means that the article has been copied to the Wiktionary Transwiki namespace for evaluation and formatting. It does not mean that the article is in the Wiktionary main namespace, or that it has been removed from Wikipedia's. Furthermore, the Wiktionarians might delete the article from Wiktionary if they do not find it to be appropriate for Wiktionary. Removing this tag will usually trigger CopyToWiktionaryBot to re-tag the entry.

--CopyToWiktionaryBot 16:17, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

[modified by — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 16:01, 11 February 2007 (UTC)]

This tag was sorely misplaced here. Evidence:

• "The article has content that may be useful and possibly more appropriate at Wikipedia's sister project, Wiktionary.": It may well be that Wiktionarians will like having a copy of this to examine for potential entries in the dictionary, but it is highly doubtful that much of this material would make it into Wikt. any time soon if at all, because of its highly jargonistic nature, and much worse, even if every term were actually accepted, the vast majority of the encyclopedically explanatory, cross-referencing material relating to these terms would be lost in the process of Wiktionarifying.
• "The final disposition of this article on Wikipedia has not yet been determined.": Rubbish. In one sense, the final disposition of this article on WP is the same as that of any other - it gets expanded, better sourced, more comprehensive and continues to improve as editors continue to work on it. In the other sense, the final disposition of every single non-Featured article on Wikipedia is in precisely the same amount of doubt as this one, since any one can propose an article for deletion at any time, and a debate will ensue about its merits. Which brings us to:
• "nominated for deletion": Hasn't happened, isn't likely to, and I'm quite confident it will be Kept, with an admonishment to source it better, which is what we've already been working on.
• "or expanded if possible.": This is precisely what the editors of this article have been doing, since before it was even a separate article. Please have some idea of the history of an article before you drive-by tag it with deprecating dispute templates.
• Given that this article is not a dicdef, nor even a collection of nothing but dicdefs, this tag does not apply at all. The article is an exclopedic, not dictionarian, exploration of the terminology of cue sports, the interplay between the terms, the specific cue sports subcultures that use them and how, their history (not in the etymology, but the cultural, sense), and much more. The list may contain some dicdefs in it, in the case of terms which do not need much exploration or for which sourceable historical, etc., material hasn't been located yet, but that is irrelevant. It does not make the article nonencyclopedic. Virtually every article on any term-of-art (or multiple such terms), be it medical, legal, technical, whathaveyou, also contains a dicdef of the term, in addition to more exploratory material.
• The TWCleanup tag puts tagged articles into Category:Redirects to Wiktionary, which is self-documenting as follows: "The pages in this category are Soft redirects from an article title with a less-than-encyclopedic scope. Pages linking to any of these redirects should be updated to link directly to the Wiktionary definition that the redirect points to."

• This article is not a soft-redirect, nor does it contain one (just a wikilink to a Wiktionary page that is not labelled a soft-redirect)
• This article has no Wiktionary target to soft-redirect to (other than an already outdated copy of itself, which of course would be counterproductive and rather silly)
• This article does not have a less-than-encyclopedic scope
• There is no Wikitionary definition that the (imaginary) redirect points to, ergo these instructions cannot possibly be complied with

• There is no policy or guideline forbidding or even discouraging the creation of encyclopedic glossaries like this one. Those who have a problem with glossaries existing in Wikipedia should take that up at the Village Pump as a general issue, not incorrectly dispute-tag articles that they don't like.

— SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 23:11, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

PS: A very short example of the difference between an encyclopedic and a dictionary definition:

Baulk: Also baulk area. In snooker, English billiards, and WEPF/UK eight-ball, the area between the baulk line and the baulk cushion, which houses the "D" and is analogous to the kitchen in American pool.

No dictionary would convey even 1/5 of that information (while it would convey radically different information such as the etymology of the word, which an encyclopedic glossary entry generally would not unless there were something especially encyclopedically interesting about that fact). The dictionary definition would read something like "An area on a pool or billiards table in certain games, at the breaking end of the table." There are much richer entries here than "Baulk"; I just picked this one because it was concise as well as illustrative. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 23:28, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Hear, hear. I don't know if you're aware, but a while back there was a lot of talk over moving many glossaries to Wiktionary and removing them from Wikipedia. Got my dander all up, but then it died down. You have posted a preemptive strike if it crops up again.--Fuhghettaboutit 00:58, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Hope so! Embarassingly, I did not notice that the tag was bot-posted until after I wrote this. But it's a good screed to dissuade future manual additions of it. I've contacted the bot author to have him excempt this page from the bot (I see similar request on his talk page, answered in the affirmative, so it shouldn't be an issue.) — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 01:07, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Apparently your request was not seen or at least not acted upon as I just had to revert the tag again. See my exemption request here.--Fuhghettaboutit 02:15, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm sorry but I don't have time to respond to each of your points above; rest assured that I disagree on most of them.

I'm distressed by the misconception of what a transwiki is. At any rate, for now, as long as the {{transwikied to Wiktionary}} tag remains on this page, it will not be automatically attempted again. (I'm looking for a better solution for that, as well.) --Connel MacKenzie - wikt 02:34, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

I have to concur with every point raised by Fuhgehettaboutit about this here. No one is saying anything about the value of transwikiing. We are saying something about the value of a highly non-neutral tag that is making automated, blanket value judgements about the articles it tags. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 15:54, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

PS: I will attempt Fuhghettaboutit's category idea in an attempt to get the bot to stop tagging here. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 15:56, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

PPS: Actually, I just commented out the highly PoV "auto-judging", uncommented the actually informative neutral material, and left the category in place, so hopfully the bot won't ding us again. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 16:04, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

In the interests of transparency, part of the discussion above refers to an exchange on my talk page, found here.--Fuhghettaboutit 17:57, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

since that seems to be the longer conversation, I've replied there. --Connel MacKenzie - wikt 23:09, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

A delayed postscript. If there were a true general consensus that all glossary material should move to Wiktionary, I'd could live with that. What I couldn't live with is no glossaries at all, i.e. simply merging the glossary-contained definitions into the Wiktionary definitions of the words (e.g., merging our "rack" related definitions into wikt:rack and then deleting the glossary from both Wikipedia and Wikitionary. So long as the glossary were preserved, I personally don't care what namespace it is in; the {{Cuegloss}} tag would only need a minor edit to handle the change. That said, I do not agree with the "get all glossaries off of Wikipedia" people, and will resist any such movement. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 19:00, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Idea

It strikes me that it would be helpful to the reader if wikilinks to other terms in this glossary were somehow visually distinct from wikilinks to other articles, perhaps by use of a font change, such as to monospaced. This could be done with a {{Cuegloss2}} that works much like {{Cuegloss}} but is only for use in this article. It would be a very simple matter (with my text editor, anyway) to substitute all instances of:

[[#Something]]

and

[[#Something|something]]

with

{{Cuegloss2|Something}}

and

{{Cuegloss2|Something|something}}

respectively.

If there's any interest in this at all, it should probably actually be taken up at the Village Pump before being implemented, either because it may go against the Manual of Style too much, or it might be something that should be implemented more broadly, for use in all glossaries, e.g. a {{Gloss}} template. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 11:09, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Webby sources

What's our rede collectively (and with WP:RS, WP:WEB, WP:EL, etc., in mind) on the value of citing billiardsforum.info and other bloggish online forums? One thing I've noticed about Featured Article/List status is that such sources generally have to go, in favor of "hard" ones. Then again, if the particular one being cited is at least semi-authoritative it at least makes the article more reliable in the short term. Hmph. I really don't know where I stand on this one. I think the anti-web slant of some of these guidelines is off-base, ironic, and hypocritical given what WP is, but sometimes they raise good points too. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 22:53, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Agree, and think we should only use it where we can't find a better source (and have looked). With that in mind, I am leaving it in for on the lemonade but removing it for on the snap, which already has three book citations.--Fuhghettaboutit 22:59, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Right. Copying this to WP:CUETALK and replying further there. I think it's important to start kind of archiving this stuff over there, because general consensus on what to do about this or that with regard to all these articles is spread around, well, on all these articles' talk pages! Kind of a mess.  :-) — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 00:17, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

The page number problem

On a tangent but in the same area. Is there any way to fix what I have come to think of as the "page number problem"? In most articles where I use "TIEOB", even if citing it multiple times such as in carom billiards, it's not enough that my listing of the pages used is a problem. Here it simply wouldn't work. Listing page numbers would be absurd because the reference would just contain half the pages in the book. I've been trying to think of a solution and...bubkis. Listing each page as a separate reference would be even worse. The references section would then have 100 separate entries just for that book. The only compromise (if this is necessary at all; am I worrying over something that I needn't?) is that after each use of <ref name="TIEOB" /> or <ref name="BCA" /> a page number could be listed in commented out text not in the reference but after the reference markup. Once again, I see a problem in that it wouldn't really function with the reference exactly, and it would add greatly to the article size which is quite large (but large by necessity). Is there a solution? Is there no need to address it?--Fuhghettaboutit 06:27, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

I honestly don't know. I'll add this to my wikiresearch list — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 16:23, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

PS: Yes, it is important - nothing can get FA status (and often not even GA status) without citing specific pages. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 18:45, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

After reading WP:CQR, WP:CS, WP:FN and related stuff in-depth, it appears that the only way around this problem would be with WP:HARVard referencing:

Blah blah blah.{{Ref harv|Shamos1999|Shamos, 1999:27-28|1}} ... Yak yak yak.{{Ref harv|Shamos1999|Shamos, 1999:87|2}}

...

==References==

<references />

• {{Note label|{{Cite book|(Shamos's book details here)}}|Shamos1999|}}

Aside from the fact that it produces longwinded and distracting citations all over the rendered prose, I'm not even certain I have that formatted correctly. The ref label/note label system would be incredibly tedious and error-prone to use for a super-cited reference like this. I have an idea for a solution and am working on implementing it. It will work like:

Blah blah blah<ref name="Shamos1999">...</ref>{{rp|274-5}}<ref name="Tarsier2005">...</ref>

...

Yak yak yak<ref name="Shamos1999 />{{rp|89}}

==References==

<references />

Will get back to you. It blows me away that no one's already fixed this, but I've been reading this reference citation and footnoting stuff for 3 hours now, and it's just not there. Cite.php should never have been deployed in the state it is in. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 18:45, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Template:Rp is now up and running! — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 21:13, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Talk about tackling a problem and coming up with an innovative solution! I hope you're considering advertizing this somewhere, because it seems to me it fills a need that may be useful across many, many articles. Might I suggest {{Announcements/Community bulletin board}} which appears on the Wikipedia:Community Portal.--Fuhghettaboutit 21:29, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Just posted it to WP:FN's talk page and added it to that guideline as a "See also" with a brief explanation. I'm sure some crank will attack it, but am confident that the majority will see its value, and it may help get Cite.php fixed by broadly advertising one of its massive and really, really irritating flaws. NB: It might be helpful if you watchlisted WP:FN for a while and helped defend the addition. That page among many others (esp. MoS pages) that *ahem* certain editors, expecially a particular tendentious admin, are watching are subject to frequent "because I said so!"-style revert warring. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 21:36, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Working like clockwork. First entry at angled, and about ten others for BCA entries.--Fuhghettaboutit 22:04, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Merge proposal: Kick (snooker)

Unbearably pointless as a separate article, but after cleanup a good glossary item expansion, with a reference. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 01:34, 13 May 2007 (UTC)