User talk:H2O/Archive

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[edit] Re: Wallace Pratt

You're quite welcome! It's a pleasure to meet and assist constructive Wikipedians such as yourself. I hope you find yourself at home here, and decide to stick around. Cheers, -- Hadal 21:51, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Dust storm

I put the source URL in the info for the picture. Just click on the picture in the article and look at the text information. It shows http://gimp-savvy.com/cgi-bin/img.cgi?noabU7tT7yk5VKc5780 - Bevo 20:10, 15 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Please consider visiting Wikipedia:Featured pictures candidates and voting for whether that picture should be considered as a "Featured picture". - Bevo 00:27, 18 Mar 2004 (UTC)

See the other image that's now at Dust storm. - Bevo 20:19, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

I missed out on the video that's linked to Dust storm. It seems to have gone missing. - Bevo 23:13, 19 May 2004 (UTC)

[edit] A friendly suggestion

I would like to suggest to you that it would be good for you to calm down over the sex pages listed at VFD. The issues surrounding nudity and sex have gone back and forth here a long time, but the bottom line is this -- if we're going to supply information in a neutral fashion, we have to neutrally describe the world as it is, not as some of us think it ought to be. That includes neutral descriptions of some sexual activities. We don't say "anything goes", but we try to limit our censorship to the absolute minimum. You won't see graphic depictions of sex acts here, for instance, though you will (if you hunt for them) find clinical images of human genitalia. We try to make the site child friendly where we can, but ultimately this site has to respect its own NPOV policy, which means some of these articles stick around. I advise you not to go nuts over it, but to improve and expand other areas of the site so that the content you object to becomes a smaller and smaller fraction of this massive encyclopedia. You identify yourself as a follower of Christ, according to your user page. I'm one too, and so are a lot of other people here -- many of us try to add to articles about our faith (reporting on it neutrally, of course, but still building other people's knowledge of Christianity). I would humbly suggest that focusing on that will be spiritually meaningful for you, and if there are enough of us, it will radically outweigh the sexual content here. I don't know if it will work for you, but I'm seeing your anger on VfD, and I felt you should know that you're not alone here, but that getting furious about this won't help. You'll just end up alienating yourself (I've seen it before), and that would be a shame -- this project has the chance to bring knowledge of many good and wholesome things to the world, and I hope you'll be a part of that. Leave a note on my talk page if you want to chat, and if I've offended you or overstepped my bounds, please forgive me. Thank you, Jwrosenzweig 19:28, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Hello, I just read your introduction on the new user log and it made me chuckle, so I thought I'd come and welcome you as well.  :) We're just one big group of know-it-alls, so you'll fit in very well.  ;) fabiform | talk 03:16, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Heh, when I say "bean-shaped" it's all a big lie. I am (but I'm telling you this in confidence) human-shaped. Sorry to shatter your illusions like that.  :) fabiform | talk 22:56, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

"Rose branch", actually, but he was close. :-) I am indeed proud -- you knew I am a current CoG attendee? Ashamed I didn't get to Warner before you: excellent work there. Yes, oatmeal is a controversial one....watch out for it. ;-) Thanks for your contributions, and keep them up! Jwrosenzweig 22:50, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Stub message on pork rind

Why did you remove the stub message on pork rind? It's not very long, or detailed, and I think it still qualifies as a stub. I'm tempted to re-add it, but I'd rather not get into an edit war. Eurleif 03:23, Apr 24, 2004 (UTC)

All right, I read your response on my talk page; sorry if I sounded too harsh in my message. I'll try to contribute something to pork rind tomorrow (I'm going to sleep now), but I don't have any first-hand knowledge as I'm a vegan. Eurleif 03:43, Apr 24, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Texas

Do you think those "official" things would look better as a bullet list? RickK 02:57, 2 May 2004 (UTC)

[edit] IBS links

Thanks for your talk page message. Frankly, AFAIK, there is no immediate wiki-policy on the inclusion of commercial links. There is, however, a severe epidemic of anonymous users simply adding links of dubious nature to articles. I've become allergic to them :-) and generally end up removing links that smell of link-spamming.
In the IBS article, I would not link to the manufacturer's site, as these tend to be somewhat optimistic. I would recommend Googling for a page that compares various IBS drugs and gives some pros and cons. Also, titling the link differently might help: simply using the drug name gives it the smell of a spammed link, while Zelnorm manufacturer's site states clearly which POV you'll be encountering.
The "external link" issue is far from settled. Please discuss if you feel differently on the issue. JFW | T@lk 09:21, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for your response. Actually, I was wondering if we could improve the IBS page. Indeed, it is a "trashcan" of various ill-understood intestinal motility disorders, but the Rome criteria and the subdivisions, as well as related conditions such as proctalgia fugax should certainly be mentioned. I'm secretly hoping we can convince our wiki-gastroenterologist (Dr Steven Holland, M.D.) to involve himself... Are you aware of any good review articles that I could use? JFW | T@lk 14:05, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Hi H2O. I'll see if I can find a recent review article from NEJM or The Lancet. In my experience, those journals publish the best stuff. (Review articles condense and categorise earlier original research, and are supposed to reflect "state of the art"...) I might put some work in the IBS page and ask Dr Holland (mentioned above) to review the matter for inconsistencies and mistakes. JFW | T@lk 08:05, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)

[edit] IBS discussion

Sorry, I did not mean my IBS remarks personally! I have assisted an IBS outpatient clinic for quite a while and I know how hard this is. I only want to prevent the IBS page from making people worrying more. I think the possible differential diagnoses should just be listed. Dbach 20:38, 4 Jul 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Loperamide

I am not a pharmacologist, and they would regard me as a layman in this field, but I can think of two explanations: 1) loperamide is not supposed to get into the bloodstream at all. But this and also not being able to pass the blood-brain barrier are always relative statements - if you take a lot of loperamide, it can surely get into the brain. Does it cause disorientation then? I dont know. 2) Wanted effects of drugs are to a certain degree placebo effects - the drug does what you expect it to do. Even with antihypertensive drugs, this can under certain circumstances and with certain drugs account for the bigger part of the overall effect. The same is, of course, true for side effects ... Side effects stated in drug lists are side effects that occur in a certain number of individuals - and many side effects (especially unspecific effects like dizziness etc. )occur also in a placebo group. Hope this satisfies your curiosity. For better info ask a pharmacologist Dbach 17:02, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Fruitcake

I'm not a big fan of fruitcake, although I don't have the hatred for it some people do. I wrote fruitcake mostly because it was listed on Wikipedia:List of encyclopedia topics as not existing, and it seemed like an easy enough subject to get a stub written on.

I've never spent any significant time in Corsicana, so I wasn't even aware of the bakery. If you're knowledgeable enough about it, you might want to add a mention to the article on the city. It's a spartan Ram-bot stub at the moment.

I'll keep it in mind for the next time I'm passing through the area though. -- Cyrius|✎ 22:23, 10 Jul 2004 (UTC)

If you do decide to write an article on Collin Street Bakery, be careful to include plenty of historical information and reasons it's notable. You wouldn't want it deleted as an ad. -- Cyrius|✎ 04:49, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)

[edit] County name etymologies

My basic problem with keeping the same data in two locations is that inevitably it will get changed in one location but not the other. Once the two locations are out of sync, who's to say which one (if either) has the correct information?

Here's an example: Aransas County, Texas, may be named for a Native American tribe, the Aransas, or it may be named for another tribe's name for that particular tribe, since there's some evidence that they never referred to their own tribe by that name. Let's pretend for the moment that current prevailing wisdom is that the county is named for the word other tribes used. So that goes into Wikipedia in both the county and the county name etymology locations. Now in a few months, someone finds an old document that makes clear that it's not named for the tribe at all, but for a common plant that grows in the area that was called Aransas by all the tribes in the area.

So what get's changed? Well, maybe both locations, but maybe not. And if not, then one location says it was named for A, while the other location says it was named for B. Which one's right? (shrug)

It's a truism of database design: never store a piece of data in two locations. (It's called Database normalization.) Store it once, and refer to it from anywhere it's needed. And in the end Wikipedia is a database. Worse, it's a database contained in another database. :-) Kenwarren 01:05, Jul 29, 2004 (UTC)

While it's certainly possible to achieve what you suggest, I don't think it's going to be practical. I'm not a Wikipedia developer, but I would guess that Wikipedia is built on a very general "text block" storage model. (I am a developer, BTW, and a specialist in large database design, so I'm not talking entirely through my hat here.) Given that, it would be difficult (at best) to get at the innards of one text block from another. Templates are an example of how that's currently done, BTW: they're just articles that you reference from other articles, whereupon the contents are displayed as part of the referencing article. As for cross-referencing, Wikipedia alredy supports it in the form of internal links. It would be possible to create an internal link in the etymology pages for every county. Of course, that's a few hundred counties, but you could then reference them and go directly to the county etymology.

All the above is theoretical to a degree. Given the current state of Wikipedia, there are really only three answers. The best one for readers is to put the data where a reader would expect to find it, and only there. I contend that that's on the individual county pages. The best one for editors, and not bad for readers, is to put it on a centralized page and reference that page from the county pages. The worst one for everyone is to maintain it in two locations, for reasons I've already stated elsewhere. I can live with the second option, though I strongly prefer the first. I can't live with the third option, when I know it's in use. When I've had those problems pointed out to me by others, I've fixed them if I could.

But that's probably just little old sorta-deletionist me. :-) Kenwarren 03:35, Jul 29, 2004 (UTC)

See the Florida county names talk page. It is, indeed, called Miami-Dade County legally. Mike H 12:20, Aug 24, 2004 (UTC)

Oh yeh? I'm in Tampa right now. Going to USF. Mike H 12:48, Aug 24, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Stamps

It's my understanding that even though USPS stamps are copyrighted, they're pretty public-domainy with them. I, of course, have absolutely no cites to back that claim up ;), but I read that somewhere around here...Maybe fairuse not pubdomain? jengod 23:05, Aug 28, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Why did you remove the feedlot link?

H2O, in the feedlot article, I provided an external link to a page describing a real live feedlot. You have now removed it twice, first because the link was not working, which was my fault (but which you could have easily fixed by removing the trailing slash), and the second time, you removed this link because it was "commercial".

Wikipedia recently featured an article about the Coca-Cola company, and numerous articles on Wikipedia have external links to web sites that actually sell products directly to the public (checkout the articles on software, such as Microsoft Excel, Doom, or Counterstrike), so I find your behavior rather puzzling.

The link I provided was to a page that does not offer to sell anything (in fact a feedlot is a business that does not normally interact directly with the public). This page offers an interesting explanation of how a real business operates a feedlot.

When I took my family to visit this business on our last vacation, my children found it very educational and asked lots of questions about it later on.

What gives? Is there some subtle nuance to Wikipedia policy that I am unaware of?

Here is the link once again if you want to check it out in more detail:

Harris Feeding Company

I do not work in the beef processing industry, so if there is something else at work here, please educate me.

--DV 13:39, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Thanks

Great catch on Jacob -- see my comments at Talk:Jacob. Looks to me like an anon in July made a hash of the article, and rather than revert, people have continued to edit as though nothing happened. I'd love to revert prior to the anon and then add back the useful changes, but that's pretty immense, so I'm soliciting feedback first. :-) Thanks again for your note! Jwrosenzweig 21:27, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] WikiProject Texas

You don't need anyone's permission to sign up, please feel free to add your name to the list of participants. I like your work at West Texas, I see you have already found the Marshall article, you may also want to see Houston, Great Galveston Hurricane, and Northeast Texas are all sizable articles. -JCarriker 19:59, Sep 4, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] NPOV issue on factory farming

Hello I just noticed that you changed the text on Factory farming in a way that I feel is POV. I feel that if you wish the text to say 'an example of animal rights propaganda' then you should justify that statement. Propoganda has conotations of misleading information or incorrect information. Whilst I agree that the link has a definite agenda I would like to see an example of misleading or incorrect information before it is designated as propoganda. I am quite happy to have 'Some think this is an example of animal rights propaganda' as this is true. I am not willing to enter an edit war with you over this but I do not regard this link as propaganda anymore than I regard films made of the sudan by aid companies as propaganda. Let us leave this matter and concentrate on finding good sources of information on the issue instead. Barnaby dawson 10:42, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Article Licensing

Hi, I've started a drive to get users to multi-license all of their contributions that they've made to either (1) all U.S. state, county, and city articles or (2) all articles, using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-by-sa) v1.0 and v2.0 Licenses or into the public domain if they prefer. The CC-by-sa license is a true free documentation license that is similar to Wikipedia's license, the GFDL, but it allows other projects, such as WikiTravel, to use our articles. Since you are among the top 1000 Wikipedians by edits, I was wondering if you would be willing to multi-license all of your contributions or at minimum those on the geographic articles. Over 90% of people asked have agreed. For More Information:

To allow us to track those users who muli-license their contributions, many users copy and paste the "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" template into their user page, but there are other options at Template messages/User namespace. The following examples could also copied and pasted into your user page:

Option 1
I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:
{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}

OR

Option 2
I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions to any [[U.S. state]], county, or city article as described below:
{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}

Or if you wanted to place your work into the public domain, you could replace "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" with "{{MultiLicensePD}}". If you only prefer using the GFDL, I would like to know that too. Please let me know what you think at my talk page. It's important to know either way so no one keeps asking. -- Ram-Man (comment| talk)

[edit] University of Texas at Austin

I disagree with your edits and am reverting them. It's not academic boosterism to include verifiable information on rankings etc. Please come to the page's talk page to discuss your changes if you disagree. · Katefan0(scribble) 15:08, May 7, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] stuff

Thanks for the message, I appreciate it but it wasn't necessary. I never took your comments as a personal attack. I'm not sure why you feel it necessary to justify your educational decisions to me, since I never criticized them -- you seem like a fine person and I respect you for whatever choices you've made. You seem to feel that listing a school's prestige or rankings reflects poorly on someone who didn't attend there, but this seems to me to be more reflective of peoples' own opinions of themselves... perhaps they have a measure of self-loathing or self-consciousness about their choices, and that's a shame, but I don't see it as a good reason to censor or water down truthful and verifiable information. There are plenty of universities more prestigious and better and whatever other adjective you want to use than UT, but I don't feel inadequate because I didn't go there when I read the article on Harvard.

I'm the absolute last person who would judge someone based on material wealth, or where a person's from (hell, I'm from hicksville Pasadena, Texas), or any of that. And I certainly would never equate educational level with a person's worth -- my grandparents were good old country farmers and they were the finest people I'd ever care to know. Education doesn't have a license on dignity or decency -- there are plenty of assholes up here who have a fistful of degrees that you couldn't pay me to be around. But listing the facts about UT doesn't demean people who didn't go there unless they let themselves feel that way. I'm not sure why you keep insisting on painting me as someone who thinks prestige and rankings are "all there is to life itself," but that's half of the problem. It seems to me that you've already shoehorned me into your own preconceived notions simply because I wear burnt orange, but they just don't fit. Cheers · Katefan0(scribble) 18:55, May 10, 2005 (UTC)