User talk:HuskyHuskie

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[edit] Welcome

Hello HuskyHuskie! Welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. If you decide that you need help, check out Getting Help below, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking or using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. Finally, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field. Below are some useful links to facilitate your involvement. Happy editing! Mermaid from the Baltic Sea 02:21, 8 February 2007 (UTC) Getting started Wikipedia tutorial • The five pillars of Wikipedia How to: edit a page • upload an image Getting help Frequently asked questions Where to ask questions or make comments Request administrator attention Policies and guidelines Neutral point of view • Reliable sources Verifiability • Citing sources • No original research What Wikipedia is not • Biographies of living persons Manual of Style • Three-revert rule • Sock puppetry Copyrights • Fair use • Image use policy External links • Spam • Vandalism Deletion policy • Conflict of interest • Notability The community Building consensus • Resolving disputes Assume good faith • Civility • Etiquette No personal attacks • No legal threats Community Portal • Village pump Signpost • IRC channels • Mailing lists Things to do Be bold in editing • Help develop an article Pages needing attention • Peer review Join a WikiProject • Translating articles Cleaning up: General • Spam • Vandalism Miscellaneous Categories • Disambiguity • Stubs User pages • Talk pages Useful templates • Tools • User scripts

[edit] Stubs

Thanks for marking articles as stubs. If you can, please use a specific stub instead of the general {{stub}}. To help there is a list at WP:WSS/ST. If can't find the stub you need then {{stub}} is ok. Thank you. Ksbrown^talk 11:37, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Life on Mars

Hi, thanks for your edit, but the section in the Life on Mars article is about *liquid* water - the presence of water *ice* on Mars has been known for a long time, kind regards sbandrews (t) 21:17, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Please give your opinion at talk page of Controversies about the word niggardly

Hi HH,

Since we share (at least some) interest in the "niggardly" article and I respect your opinion, could you take a look at the Talk:Controversies about the word niggardly#Sappy personal story - really needed? discussion at the bottom of the talk page about deleting the little episode about the Ohio newspaper guys? It's not a big thing either way, but I think it shows how some people get offended, so I think it's worth keeping. Please add your opinions/ideas if you have any. Best, Noroton 23:58, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] WP:OFFICE

Hi! You appear to have recreated a WP:OFFICE-deleted article in your user space. Is this something that the "office personnel" should check that it's ok, or are they maybe aware of this already? Weregerbil 05:58, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

I'm really sorry, but I don't understand what you're talking about. Could you explain? HuskyHuskie 16:27, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, now I think I'm getting a little bit clued in about this. I meant User:Unlearned hand\Glass .45; now I see there is a deletion review on it. I was concerned something that was deleted by WP:OFFICE was getting recreated in user space; but the DRV explains it. Never mind, sorry. Weregerbil 04:50, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Dr. Spam barnstars

Why is it important to belittle the barnstars which were awarded to people. Even if you are right, I think this does more harm than good. This might have been someone's first or only Barnstar. It probably seems silly to you, but I think that your efforts to be truthful may end up being hurtful. I ask you to delete your comments on people's talk pages before they read them. --Kevin Murray 15:38, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the note, HuskyHuskie. It was quite a few months ago, and the good doctor has already stopped. Let's assume Dr.Spam meant no mockery, and let bygones be bygones. -- PFHLai 07:43, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Kevin, you may indeed have a good point. It was not my desire to hurt people. Of course, some of the comments I have read since my post indicate a sincere upon appreciation learning the truth. It is not a black-and-white issue, and if I had thought about it the way you have, I may not have done it. It was simply because I knew that, had I been such a recipient, that I would have wanted to know the truth. To me, it's a bit like having someone point out that your pants are unzipped. It may be a bit embarrassing when it happens, but the longer you walk around with it unzipped before it's pointed out or you make the discovery, the more embarrassing it becomes once you do learn of it. So as a child I was taught to impose the quick embarassment on someone to save them longer-term greater emotional pain. But . . . that's not the only way to look at it, I realize.

As to your suggestion, PFHLai, to assume good faith, that's a little hard to do. After writing my piece, I not only found a number of these posted to editors with only one edit, but I even found a barnstar awarded to an editor with zero mainspace edits—all he had done was to create a user page. I think that the mocking intent was reasonably clear. HuskyHuskie 20:14, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

Well, HuskyHuskie, if we can't assume good faith, we can't assume Dr.Spam's intent, either. I agree that some of Dr.Spam's barnstars were given in a peculiar manner. It seems to me in some instances Dr.Spam might be mis-using the barnstars as a way to break the ice and say 'Hi!' to fellow Wikipedians. It appeared as a nice gesture and IMO should be taken as such. I have no clue why Dr.Spam awarded barnstars to contribution-less editors. Maybe Dr.Spam personally knows the contributor and is aware of anonymous edits worthy of a barnstar contributed under an IP address. Maybe (s)he meant to give the barnstar to someone else listed in the edit history of some article and mis-clicked on the adjacent line. I don't know. Not everyone in Wikipedia knows what (s)he is doing, and maybe Dr.Spam, a newbie with less than 50 edits at the time, is one of them. Or maybe not. I don't know. Dr.Spam has already stopped giving out barnstars quite a while ago. Let's give this fellow Wikipedian the benefit of the doubt, and leave things as is. Your concern about the apparent 'smudge' on my userpage is appreciated. I'll probably revamp my userpage in the near future. When the time comes, I'll think about this again. Thank you. Happy editing. --PFHLai 06:39, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

Nothing better to do with your time but to dig through the history of my user page? HOW BOUT THEM APPLES, BITCH?! Mr. Vitale 00:16, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

• Since User:VitaleBaby forgot to leave his signature, I thought I'd be a nice guy and put it there for him. Anything to help. :-) HuskyHuskie 02:41, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Hi

Hi, do you by chance live in the Quad Cities, or would be interested in helping clean the city pages up? Ctjf83 ^talk 04:19, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Left the area years ago. No major interest in the articles, other than to correct the misunderstanding of some young people about the history of the name "Quad Cities". I've corrected that now. HuskyHuskie (talk) 06:53, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Don't stop positive edits! I also posted a reply on the QC talk page Ctjf83^talk 18:55, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Thanks

Thanks for the barnstar and the note on my talk page. I don't think I've contributed the most to Illinois related articles, but I have edited quite a few of them, hopefully for the better. Thanks for noticing. --Dual Freq (talk) 00:55, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] UIUC edit

Bvjrm, With all respect, the word "prestigious" does have a dictionary definition, and UIUC, in this context, meets it. Without doubt this word can be used a weasel word, but it can also be used properly, as it is in this case. UIUC is the only campus within the UI system to be listed on any of the national rankings, and in fact it ranks high on all of them. The other campuses don't even appear. Please understand, this isn't grandstanding; I'm not even a UIUC alumnus, but I recognize the reality of this. Yours truly, HuskyHuskie (talk) 05:30, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

I just wanted to make it clear that I am not questioning the quality of UIUC at all. The school is world renowned and is no doubt among the best in the county. However, if you look other flagship school pages, they do make an effort to avoid terms and phrases such as "highly selective" and "prestigious" simply because they are hard to define. I've seen people here on Wikipedia argue that MIT isn't prestigious and only the Ivy League should be considered so. Of course that isn't my opinion, but you can see my point. It's a fluff term which cheapens the article and really should not be used in cases like this, especially in the opening paragraph. Bvjrm (talk) 16:17, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure I understood your point; as I said, the terms do have the capacity to be used as "fluff" terms. I myself at one point deleted the term "highly selective" as clearly being subjective; come to find out that it is one of a continuum of terms used by common college ratings services. (I'm not sure that that is still sourced, however) No, I respect your motives, I think where we disagree may simply be that I think that the term "prestigious" is not inherently POV. For example, I think it's more prestigious to be a US Senator than a member of the US House of Representatives, I think it's more prestigious to play Major League baseball for the New York Yankees than it is to play Double-A baseball for the Carolina Mudcats, and I think that anyone who would call these claims POV is simply being ridiculous. It is similarly ridiculous to question that UIUC is more prestigious than the bastard off-shoots in Springfield and Chicago. HuskyHuskie (talk) 03:55, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

I see your point and I do agree that UIUC is the most prestigious campus in the UI system (and I always have). Its just seems that the opening to the UIUC article goes out of its way to use the term "prestigious" rather than "the flagship campus of the UI system". If you take a look at other college articles that are comparable to UIUC, for example UVA or Berkeley, you'll see rather than bombarding you with a bunch of subjective rankings and statistics about admissions they open up with a brief history and then mention a few well known achievements. In other words, in the opening you should let the school speak for it's self and then deeper in the article back it up with rankings and other outside recognition. It just seems like the article is putting heavy emphasis on rankings and fluffy terms (specifically in the opening) to justify calling itself a top school, when in reality it is not a no name school and has plenty of accomplishments, enough so that you don't need US News to tell you its a good school. The whole opening should be rewritten, but I really don't know enough about the school to be able to do that.Bvjrm (talk) 04:42, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

And I now see your point. I would be open to a rewrite, but as it is now, I doubt the people who "own" the article would allow it. Thanks for patiently making your point. HuskyHuskie (talk) 05:26, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for leaving a comment on my page instead of simply reverting what I edited. Let me first preface what I'm going to say with the following. I am a student at Illinois, and I naturally am concerned about its reputation and how it is regarded by the general public. With that in mind, I feel that it would be in bad taste to call any school "prestigious", no matter what kind of rankings and awards it has. I think that even Harvard, obviously the most prestigious college in the US, should not mention "most prestigious" in the opening paragraph. Sure, prestige is something that can be measured to a certain extent. Also, there's no doubt that Illinois is the best school in the University of Illinois system. However, I think it's just tacky to pin that on the opening paragraph like a medal for everyone to see. The article would then move from being plainly informative to being boisterously informative. Paerra (talk) 03:39, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

I respect your reasoning; it is similar to that which Bvjrm makes above. I only brought it up because I do disagree with some POVniacs who think that any adjective that can be subjective in a particular context must be expunged. I shall leave it as it is, and I thank you for sharing your thinking. HuskyHuskie (talk) 03:43, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Re: President still living...

There was absolutely no content on the deleted talkpage. Yours, east.718 at 14:57, April 13, 2008

Okay, thanks. HuskyHuskie (talk) 17:06, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Congrats

		The Original Barnstar
		For making great contributions to several articles on Wikipedia. Keep up the good work! Eustress (talk) 22:21, 21 April 2008 (UTC)