User talk:Jerzy

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Deceptively Short, Fake, Overview Mini-ToC

[edit] Welcome to the Page for "Talking" to Jerzy

Follow this link to this page's Table of Contents. You may find a section in it where a message from you, intended for my attention, could fruitfully be placed.
But the end of this page is always a good place to leave messages to me, especially if you start a new section by

  • starting a line with two equal signs,
  • typing its title, and
  • closing the line with two more equal signs.

[edit] Guide to What Else is Before the ToC

The material between here and the ToC consists of

  • A warning about a highly idiosyncratic aspect of my grammar, and
  • Help finding things that were previously on this talk page, but have been moved.

(These are some people's top priority, but most will prefer to jump to the Table of Contents, or add a message at the end.)

[edit] Note to Non-Native Speakers of English

Years ago, i got stuck in my brain the idea that there's something wrong about modern English singling out the first-person singular pronoun to be spelled with a capital letter. So i spell it without the capital -- except at the beginning of a sentence, or when i'm not the sole author. If you follow my example, native speakers will just figure you're ignorant of the basics.

(I also say the above, and a bit more on my User page.)

[edit] Links to my Archives

[edit] Topical Archives

These all concern one area of interest, sometimes orient toward an article or articles with the same subject matter, sometimes otherwise connected

[edit] Multi-topic Archives

These are more chronological than my Topical Archives listed in the immediately previous section.

[edit] TABLE of CONTENTS

Contents


[edit] More-or-Less Current Messages and Discussions

[edit] Notifications of Comments on Other Talk Pages

[edit] Forrest Gerst

You recently deleted a link referring to my name and possible biography.[1]I was slightly offended in the verbage you used in calling my editing attempts an "experiment" and that my "test worked". I would like to inform you that I am very serious in my attempts to create a biograpy concerning myself and should you delete anything in the future that you are more succinct with me and simply inform me that my addition has been deleted. Thank you.--Fg1234567892000 15:35, 15 March 2007 (UTC)


March 28, 2007--folowup Your accusations of "vandallism" are compleatly unfounded. I am in no way intending to undermine Wikipedia's validity and find that your claims are compleatly invalid. I can see your point of view if say, maybe I deleted all of an article, but come now--vandallism? You need to reconsider my notability and worthiness--I of all people need to be on Wikipeda. I don't ask for fame or fortune. I don't ask for anything I am involved in to receive any promotion or attention. All I ask for is to be a part of the website.--Fg1234567892000 14:44, 28 March 2007 (UTC)


April 2-- Although you may continue to assert your opinion of my work as "vandallism", in my opinion, it is not. However, this is only an opinion and I am sure that many would argue against me. However, I would like to clarify the fact that I do not wish to have an autobiography written--I would like a biograhpy. I am forced to attempt an autobiograhy simply because it's people and administrators, not unlke yourself, who feel that I am not good enough for Wikipedia. I am more than noteworthy, and intend to pursue more acceptable means of meeting my goal. I understand that vandallism is wrong, however, I must say again that I was driven to it by people who constantly barrate me and continously delete any attempt I make at modifying the site. The only reason I continue my crusade is because I want my voice to be heard and I don't want to be put off like some uneducated dumbo who doesn't know what he's doing. I thank you for your constant feedback and critisism, however negitive it may be at times, and I want you to know that I try my hardest to do the best I can.

April 3, 2007 Understood.

[edit] == Popes Stephen ==

Please present at Talk:Pope Stephen whatever evidence you have for your change there and at List of people by name: Step. Don't repeat it, as it merely sows confusion even if you are correct in thinking a change is needed.
--Jerzy•t 02:33, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

All is explained in details on the article Stephen (ephemeral pope). What else must I add to this? Švitrigaila 10:49, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
Sir,
Thank you for your post in my talk page. I must confess a mistake : after you reorganized the page Talk:Pope Stephen, I have "watched" the differnt subpages you have created, but I forgot to watch the page itself. So, I didn't see you and John Reid have written such long paragraphs and I thought the whole discussion was forgotten. I tried then to relaunch it somewhere else, and it's why I proposed Pope Stephen II for deletion.
Now I must read all what you wrote... I think I have a long night before me...
Švitrigaila 22:05, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Your post on my talk page

Hi Jerzy, I have no idea what exactly you tried to explain on my user talk page [2]

Anyhow,

  1. if you think you can improve the common names guideline, and you need to talk about it, please use Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (common names). It's not as if such things need to be discussed between you and me as only participants in the discussion.
  2. I'm not convinced by your digression regarding the English language. Might be so, might be not, I've got no idea. If I write guideline I usually ask a native English wikipedian to check. I can't remember if I asked expicitly for the passage you find at fault, but be assured that enough native English wikipedians read it before you found it to be faultive.
  3. I'm going to revert your changes to the common names guideline. I can't see where exactly you improved it: on the contrary I think your version reads less fluently. If you think I shouldn't do that revert, please use the guideline's talk page as suggested above.

--Francis Schonken 22:41, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] post on Poxie's talk page

Hi, Jerzy. Thanks for the comments and encouragement. You are right. I am brand new at this, but find it addicting. Since my first article was a biography, I found my way to the WikiProject Biography and followed the "11 Easy Steps to Producing at least a B Article" instructions there. I then visited pages of noteworthy people in similar industries to see how good articles were constructed and learned the formatting conventions that way. Poxie 18:48, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Nonvanity

Either someone has changed the speedy deletion policy again or the previous shortcut "vanity" for "Unremarkable people or groups. An article about a real person, group of people, band or club that does not assert the importance or significance of its subject" has somehow changed. - Skysmith 14:28, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

  • "Vanity" is often used in Afd, yes, and sometimes without justification. I mainly mark clear-cut cases of self-promotion (even in third person) as "vanity" - Skysmith 15:02, 24 February 2006 (UTC)
  • Fine with me - Skysmith 15:29, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Hitler briefs and Hitler controversy

The delete tags were clearly not invalid and the {{hangon}} text allows for deletion in such cases; criterion R1 (redirect to nonexistent target) applied in this case. (ESkog)(Talk) 15:50, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

  • Replied further at my talk page. Thanks for your civility - it makes all the difference in the world. (ESkog)(Talk) 20:25, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] WikiDefender Barnstar

Image:WikiDefender Barnstar.png
For your contribution in exposing suspected hoaxes, I award you the wikiDefender Barnstar. Thank you!--Vsion 06:35, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Rwanda

Hi Jerzy. Thanks for letting me know. I've no objection to the edit, and it's a credit to you that you felt the way you did about it. I actually didn't intend the description to be heavy-hitting (I thought it was just the natural way to describe him) but I can see how that kind of thing taken in general can lead to edit wars and overly-verbose descriptions.

But the "extra-neutral" policy for LoPbN does cause some logistical issues. There's no trouble with calling Kabuga a businessman, and that's even sort of connected with his more unsavoury role. But for some of the genocidaires, there's just nothing especially remarkable about them other than that. Any ideas? I guess "Rwandan man" will do. --Saforrest 05:08, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Images

I really don't see the harm of putting images on the LoPbN pages. Errabee 09:55, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Dear Jerzy

Hi! Thanks for your comments on my page about the politician. The reason I made the edit was not to upset you, but simply because I have never heard the phrase "American Puerto Rican", specially among those that were born in the island. If a person is Puerto Rican but born outside, specially when it comes down to the United States, they are nicknamed "Newyorrican".

I didn't try to make a point of view. It's simply that you hardly ever hear native Puerto Ricans, even those who vote for the PNP, describe themselves as "American" and even those born in the States usually identify themselves as Puerto Rican, even if they know they are widely known as "Newyorrican" in the island.

I hope this doesn't hinder our friendship. I didn't try to make a point of view.

Thanks for letting me know on my user page and God bless you! Your friend, Antonio Flying Man Martin

[edit] rembrandt

replied on my talk page. —Charles P._(Mirv) 06:16, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Revert

Thanks for the nice message on my talk page. I'm not quite sure how that revert managed to not catch all the vandalism. as you can see here [3], it reverted one of that IP address's edits, but not both of them. my only explanation is that i had just put in a new javascript revert button and it didn't seem to be working properly at the time (i didn't actually write that edit summary, it was automatic). It's working fine now, so I'm not sure what the problem was originally. Anyways, thanks for noticing and fixing the problem. I'll be sure to double check next time i make a revert where there are two edits by the same IP address since the last good version. Cheers, --B.U. Football For Life|Talk 12:52, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Mike

Jerzy, I noticed that our friend is still around and still hasn't grown up. Should you or others want to, feel free to update User:Isomorphic/Minions of the Church. Isomorphic 04:08, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Lawnmowerman

I almost moved your msgs to your shorter talk page, so we could keep it all together there, but on second thot, let's leave it & keep it all together here; i'll leave you a msg on yr tk to look here.
--Jerzy•t 22:55, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Trusty Help, What is a mock battle?, Period Places

Jerzy, thanks for editing & disambiguating Crawford Castle (and all the other related projects you found that I had touched). Please let me know how I attracted your attention so I can get such trusty help again. What was "mock" combat when David Lindsay won "a single (mock) combat with the Englishman Baron Welles"? Also, shouldn't a period be inside an end quote when it occurs at the end of a sentence? It seems to me Americans (who are not trying to put on heirs to be more like their UK brethren) put the period inside the end quote and Brits put it outside. I have several American grammars that insist the period goes within.--Lawnmowerman 07:46, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

  • Thoroughness
    I don't recall making a point of checking everything you did, but i have vague memories of thinking the two dabs you'd mentioned implied other things needing attention. So maybe it amounted to "looking over your shoulder"/"stalking you".
    --Jerzy•t 22:55, 13 March 2006 (UTC)
  • When LMM met Jerzy:
    _ _ Not much to it. (Glancing at yr contribs, i see that it was on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Disambiguation that i noticed you. I think i caught your requests bcz i was looking at the page for the first time, and at least scanned the ToC to get oriented. I think most editors would avoid a request for Dab'g help there as off-topic (look at WP:VP for better ideas), so i looked at the content. When i did, the dates suggested the wrong end of the page.) We add msgs at the end of page, as you've now picked up, so it's a shame when someone asks a question at the wrong end (and is likely to go unnoticed). I moved yrs to where they'd be seen by more of our colleagues, without deciding whether i was interested enuf to answer.
    _ _ There's a "don't bite the newcomers" ethic here, but not that strong a "train them" one; on the other hand, the lifeblood of WP is collective editing. In this case your (list-server-style) additions at the top marked you as someone who might (however innocently) have left some messes in the course of your article edits. Indeed, they included such a thing: a suite of the longest disambiguating phrases i've ever seen, which very much needed another editor's attention (for the sake of WP, whether or not for yours). (It sounds like you see why they needed it, but if you don't, please do ask me.)
    --Jerzy•t 22:55, 13 March 2006 (UTC)
  • Lindsay/Welles:
    I don't remember the exact phrasing of what i found, but when i tried to reconcile it with what you wrote, it seemed clear to me that the event was not what i'd inferred from your editing, but the one-on-one equivalent of a medieval "tourney" or tournament (medieval). I feel sure that you'll quickly find whatever i did if you search on
    Lindsay Welles English chivalry
    (or if necessary use quotes and ORs to put in fuller names for one or both men).
    --Jerzy•t 22:55, 13 March 2006 (UTC)
  • "to put on heirs " & one way of doing that
    _ _ I actually started my Google test, in order to check my own spelling, before it occurred to me that the logical way "to Wiktionary:put on airs" in genealogy is to put on not heirs, but ancestors who are not your own. Clever of you, but there's of course nothing new under the sun: Genealogy Shoppe for $7.50 each.
    _ _ In any case, i was aware, from a WP discussion, that putting the period outside was a Briticism. Its appeal to me, however, was its being more logical (unless the quote is direct and includes the end of the quoted sentence), and i hope for both increasing familiarity with formal grammars and increased written communication between Brits & Yanks to erode the use of the "always inside" approach. Despite the clear policy that WP is not a specifically American 'pedia, my doing it is still a bit of resistance to WP:MoS. When we get to the point when (to paraphrase the dialog between Dr. Zhivago's commander & his zampolit) the war against lack of content has been won and the one for uniform punctuation can be undertaken, we'll presumably find out if my hope is reasonable.
    --Jerzy•t 22:55, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Frustrating About WP

Jerzy, perhaps you can help me understand something about WP. Why are footnotes used infrequently? I used them in my article on Crawford Castle for an obvious reason - I have no personal knowledge of those events and wanted everyone to know where I got the information in case I was in error or to further someone else's research effort. In addition, I much appreciate the work you did, but I do not know where your information comes from. I now know (or think I know) that there was some "mock" battle but don't know where you have that from. I also know something about John de Welles, 5th Baron Welles (1352–1421) but have no idea where you got that either. Bibliographic references should not be good enough for the WK project, we need footnotes. Clearly there are many recurring phrases in WP that are lifted directly from some other published text (and I want to know precidely where). Best regards, --Lawnmowerman 08:05, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

  • Dearth of footnotes
    _ _ Y're probably right, and WP is probably wrong (-- or at least in a stage that will eventually have to pass). In my casual opinion, there's more urgency being given, except in specially intense controversies, to increasing coverage of topics. That doesn't necessarily mean that any individual has decided to put off proving the verifiability of what they are satisfied is verifiable, in favor of more, longer, and more diverse articles (tho i conjecture that many have done so, to varying degrees).
    _ _ I've been known to joke about my assignment editor, and the underlying truth is that WP thrives on editors working on what gives them a kick. Individual editors' commitments to meeting the overall goals that are routinely attributed to the project as a whole may actually be much less significant. That means that we do some prohibiting, and more of discouraging, but in very few cases to we say "Yes, A is good, but if you don't do B to complement it, you're a bad colleague." The strongest exception i can think of is the "code of honor" about bypassing the Dab you create in everything that lks to it. I tried doing that for battery in my first month or so, and have pretty much not bothered since. (Note that this is distinct from something much more important, bypassing the double redirects you create in a move, including a move needed to set up a Dab.) In fact i think discussion of dbl-rdr bots at Wikipedia:Double redirects may explain my failure to find the "code of honor" language; i may still be apologizing for acts that are the subject of an amnesty.
    --Jerzy•t 22:55, 13 March 2006 (UTC)
  • Welles data (an example for my point as well)
    _ _ One reason i didn't bother to record my source was that i didn't have much trouble finding it. If you're good with Google (or as, probably, you become so as you work on WP), here's the only info from me that will help you: i put a high priority on getting a date for Welles, to confirm my suspicion that that paragraph described a later period from that of the capture of the castle: you know what info i was working from (by being more familiar than i with the last revision before i started), so you're closer to finding the same source that i did than i am to re-finding it.
    _ _ I'm not very comfortable with the footnote scheme, and hope that if it becomes more used, there'll be a switch and a preference setting for "hide footnotes", as there already is for the ToC on pages with enuf sections. But in any case, you like them and i can't see anything wrong your adding more, e.g. after using my results to help you find, more quickly, the same support i found, or its equivalent.
    --Jerzy•t 22:55, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] OK Now I'm Intrigued

Being a lawyer, I thought I was good for something (e.g., research, writing) but not I see I am not nearly as good as I thought. I really need your help retracing the steps you went through to find the dates and the "mock" you added to the following sentence in the Crawford Castle article - "In 1398, Robert II gave the castle and the title of Earl of Crawford to David Lindsay, who had won great praise in 1390 for bravery in single (mock) combat with the Englishman Baron Welles." I have now spent almost 2 hours at work (I bill $320 hour) trying to figure out where you got that information on google using pre and post edit information and still have not found it. That doesn't mean you shouldn't make me keep trying but I am intrigued at how and where you found that information. Can you take a few moments to do either or both of the following, the first being the quickest but the latter being the more important: (i) send me the link to where that info comes from, and/or (ii) tell me how you found it. Best regards, --Lawnmowerman 15:51, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

More to come, but in the spirit of chivalric preening, i wanted to show a quick result (despite the dentist's receptionist calling to interrupt) at 16:22, 14 March 2006 (UTC):
Hit #3 of the search i suggested looked promising so i clicked on it. It doesn't seem to be one i saw before; in any case i MS-IE searched within the page, for chival, IIRC, & landed in this 'graph, with more info than i saw before:
It was Sir Alexander Lindsay of Glenesk who, during John of Gaunt’s invasion of Scotland, attacked and put to the sword the crew of one of the English ships which had landed above Queen’s Ferry, and his son, Sir David, was one of the most famous knights of his time. It was he who rode the famous course at the tournament at London Bridge in May, 1390. John, Lord Welles, the English ambassador, we are told, had at a solemn banquet ended a discussion of doughty deeds with the declaration: "Let words have no place; if you know not the chivalry and valiant deeds of Englishmen, appoint me a day and place where you list and you shall have experience." Sir David Lindsay accepted the challenge, and Lord Welles appointed London Bridge as the place of trial. At the first course, though Lord Welles’ spear was broken on his helmet, Lindsay kept his seat, at which the crowd cried out that, contrary to the laws of arms, he was bound to his saddle. Upon this he dismounted, mounted again without help, and in the third course threw his opponent to the ground. Another of Sir David Lindsay’s exploits, which ended less happily was the encounter with the Highland marauders under Duncan Stewart, son of the Wolf of Badenoch, at Gasklune, in which many of the gentry of Angus were slain and Sir David himself was grievously wounded, and narrowly escaped. Sir David, married Elizabeth, daughter of King Robert III., and in 1398 was raised to the peerage as Earl of Crawford.
I'll see if i can come up with a more direct answer to yr question, tho.
--Jerzy•t 16:22, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
  • _ _ OK, i'm pretty sure that i read hit #2, & maybe #3, from searching with the search spec
"David Lindsay" Baron Welles
_ _ I either reconstructed that search (the likely case), or hit on another with similar results, by getting close enuf & catching a little luck. My method was rereading your revision that i started from, which i picked out from the page history (by clicking on the " 15:04, 8 March 2006" link). I asked myself "What search would i do in this situation?", and knowing myself reasonably well, decided that the exact name of Lindsay should be expected, since his title seems to have come later, but that i couldn't count on "Baron" immediately preceding "Welles", which is why i used no more quotes in the search spec.
_ _ Hit #2 seems to be one of the first i succeeded with, and i may have been smarter the first time in searching at an early point for "1390" since it appeared in the extract. (This time, i don't understand why some of the in-page searches i tried failed, but never mind.) That gave me
DAVID LINDSAY, 9th Feudal Lord of Crawford, b ca 1360, d 1406 (or perhaps 1412), fought famous duel in 1390 with JOHN 5th Baron WELLES on London Bridge, created 1st Earl of CRAWFORD, m ELIZABETH (CATHERINE) STUART, dau of King ROBERT II (see under Scotland, Kings, for ancestors)
-- enuf to satisfy me that i had the right encounter.
_ _ In hit #3, my successful search this time was for "lost" within the page, which got me to
At a banquet in Edinburgh and presumably after too much alcohol he issued as Champion of England the challenge: “Let words have no place; if ye know not the Chivalry and Valiant deeds of Englishmen; appoint me a day and a place where ye list, and ye shall have experience”. This resulted in a memorable jount on London Bridge the following St George’s Day, 23rd April 1390, in which he lost to DAVID LINDSAY, afterwards 1st Earl of Crawford
(I don't recall reading about the alcohol, perhaps just bcz of skimming. On the other hand, i know my research in preparation for editing produced something with "third course" in it, that i haven't since found again, so i'm not sure i read this one then.)
_ _ (The word "mock" was my own paraphrase, and hope i didn't lead you to assume otherwise.)
_ _ I gave you bad advice bcz i remembered "the Chivalry and Valiant deeds of Englishmen" as "English Chivalry and [something]". Sorry about that. (Hmm, or what i recalled was not directly from there: i thot i recalled "chivalry" being much more explicitly stated as the purpose, and not just of the word being at the inception of it, but that comes to just speculation, as i'm not turning up any hits that support it, after significant effort.)
_ _ So: i haven't studied your wording carefully enough to know whether your skills fell short, or i doomed your efforts by trusting my memory about the exact word "English". My apology in any case, and i hope your $640 of effort produced some valuable experience. (The possibility receiving bills in the event of my behaving tortiously was not one of my reasons for being pseudonymous on WP, but.... [wink])
_ _ I'm gladder for that exercise than i expected; i think i implied "the same sources can always be easily found again", but the gaps in my second try suggest i've been overconfident.
--Jerzy•t 18:44, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
Now, having knowledge, it is impossible to go backward, but I don't recall coming up with your hits 2 and 3 at all in my searches. Which made me think google doesn't produce the same results in every country, but I tried it here in the US and it does. Perhaps I was too specific in my searches. I don't know where you're from but I suspect the UK because of your ". usage and because you have the kind of mind that wrote the OED. In any case, I don't know how you would have known to search for "chival" or "English" or where you came up with "the Chivalry and Valiant deeds of Englishmen." I also don't know if I would have been as tenacious. Thanks for the education. Have you read The Professor and the Madman? Come to think of it, the OED was perhaps the first publication assembled from free contributions, much like WP, except without the help of computers, just scraps of paper sent in from all over England. The analogy stops there as the free will contributions were then sold to the public in the form of the OED.--Lawnmowerman 20:13, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
This may also support the point that footnotes are needed in WP (as you allude to above). If we want to make all human knowledge accessible, we need footnotes. Knowledge is not knowledge unless it can be verified and sources weighed for persuasiveness. WP should not be a place to regurgitate and cut and pase all hearsay on the web. The article for Crawford Castle already included a cite to Blaeu Atlas of Scotland, 1654 which I am confident only recently became available on the web in digital form. Now, I can make reference to "ANCIENT ANCESTORS with MODERN DESCENDANTS (7th Edition)" at www.pcug.org.au/~ronwells/index.htm but would still like to know where he got his information - he doesn't even have a footnote! :-) I am now quite aware that my searches must be done very carefully to avoid queering results. Curious - How long did it take you to find the information on the duel and edit Crawford Castle?
  • OED:
No, not read, but heard of the bk several times, so i appreciate the reference. Not Brit, but Yank, and i question your cultural determinism. In fact it makes you sound Latin American to me. Whoops!
Chival:
_ _ Sorry to be obscure. You asked where i found it was a tournament or mini-tournament, and i couldn't remember. But i did (mis-?)remember a phrase like "for the sake of English chivalry and honor", and felt sure you'd find the same source by including the two words "English" and "chivalry" along with appropriate names in yr Google search.
_ _ (Note that didn't say search, or shouldn't have, for "chival" in Google, bcz Google seldom finds whole words when a portion of the word is used as a key. I am unsurprised when it's asked for "artistry" and finds "artistic" (neither word part of the other, but two standard words known to have closely related meanings): Google apprently tries to exploit such relationships of meaning. I have never seen Google find a real word when i specified a non-word as a key -- except in cases where it detects a spelling error, and in that case, it asks whether meant "trivial" when i typed "trival", before serving up the hits on it.
_ _ (On the other hand, once i was viewing a very long page, i didn't want to scan it by eye and MS IE is not smart enuf to equate chivalic, chivalry, and chivalrous, but it will find any of the three for the key "chival".)
_ _ "The Chivalry and Valiant deeds of Englishmen" was a surprise to me, since i was so confident of a different thrust to the passage with "chivalry" in it. I think i retain a relatively large amount of detail, but not as much as i tend to imagine that i do.
Time spent searching: To answer that beyond "more than i expected", i'd have to look back at my "user contributions" log, which other users can also do re me. I'm not sure it will have useful info, but it could be a valuable exercise to see what you could deduce about that search.
--Jerzy•t 08:08, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] List of people by name confusion

Why did you replace the contents with List of people by name: Gar with those of List of people by name: Gam-Gaq? What does your cryptic acronymic edit summary mean? JIP | Talk 08:47, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Disambiguation

Jerzy, I need some help. First, where do I go to request help with a disambiguation? Here's where I'm at. I wanted to create a page for CANMORE - its a database maintained by The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland but there was a page redirecting me to Canmore, Alberta - a city. I deleted the info on the redirect page but can't seem to get rid of the page itself. Can't create the CANMORE database page til I hear from you. Thanks --Lawnmowerman 20:04, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

  • _ _ I'm inferring that your worry was that since typing "CANMORE" or "canmore" takes you to Canmore, the existence of that page was a problem. The deletion of Rdrs is rare, largely on the premise that "if someone thought it was useful",
  • it's likely to be bcz they tried getting to something by typing it in, and it would have been useful to them, and
  • even if they had some other reason for expecting it to be useful to someone, they're probably right even if others have trouble seeing that usefulness.
Also because Rdrs both get copied by other sites and become hits on search engines; both will lead people to try to use them on WP (in their old context), so they shouldn't disappear.
_ _ I put a Dab "on top" of the old Rdr; the dab does the Rdr's job (except for the automatic transfer part), but gives the choice of your sense as well. You could have done the same, but it sounds like you wanted a different title, perhaps CANMORE, for the dab.
_ _ CANMORE can be a rdr to the Dab, or a rdr to the article you want to write, or can be the article itself. If it's a rdr to the Dab, i doubt it accomplishes anything; if it's a Rdr to the article, it may have a bad effect and have to go thru the Dab; if it's the article, it may need a top-of-page Dab line to the town (but not to the Dab unless the Dab gets more than these two entries). (However, me fine Scotiophile, be aware that the capital D inside MacDonald means that Macdonald is needed as a redirect to MacDonald even tho the obvious rdr at kevin stewart would serve no purpose.)
_ _ I put a rd lk into the rdr i made. (I hope that's not the title of the article; forget legal names: WP:MOS calls for common names, and a bad guess at the common name is far better than a name that long.)
_ _ I may be missing the point of your question; if so write again.
--Jerzy•t 23:39, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Re: Byp rdr vs byp Dab

A Dab is not a form of redirect, as you seem to assume in yr edit summarized as "Redirect bypass from William Burges to William Burges (architect) using popups". If yr popups enforced that summary, please don't use that tool in that way, and tell me where you got it so i know which toolmaker to complain to. Plz don't confuse your colleagues with false terminology.
--Jerzy•t 06:34, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

I moved William Burges to William Burges (architect) in order to make room for a disambiguation page. The act of moving created a redirect from William Burges to William Burges (architect). Before I overwrote the redirect with a disambiguation page, I used popups to bypass the redirect. It was convenient to use the tool in that way, and the summary was perfectly reasonable. Snottygobble 11:11, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Young Authors Question

Hi Jezy. I also left this question on Wikipedia:WikiProject Categories. I have an idea and was hoping someone could give me some guidance on whther its a good one, whether its permitted in WP, and if so, tips on how to do it. I have recently begun helping my children write some articles and stubs on WP. I would like to create a notation for articles that denote them (or flags them, if you prefer) as having been written by a "young author." I see WP as a fantastic way to educate my children in significant ways and hope perhaps the movement will catch on. In connection with the effort, I would like to have a special page for the "young authors project" etc. I would define young authors in some very generic way so as to protect identities. What do you think? Do you have any tips on how to do this or an "administrator" that would be particularly knowledgeable about how to do this? Thanks in advance for your help. --Lawnmowerman 14:45, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Let's put your response here as well as on my talk page:

_ _ Not remotely feasible -- in contrast with your concern abt documentation, which merely has no clear path to reality, even tho you may help it take place as the nature of WP evolves.
_ _ I recommend you concentrate more on studying WP documentation & looking at how experienced editors handle the situations you encounter in yr own editing. (In particular cases, recognize them by looking at least at their earliest contribution (for the date), and perhaps learn to use the edit-count tool tho you should take the cautions & reservations seriously; there are also 2K+ of experienced eds listed at WP:1000.)
_ _ In the long run you may find a role in improving verifiability standards, but Young Authors is the smoking gun re what was already my opinion. (That doesn't make me prescient; it's virtually inevitable for someone with so little experience in this unique environment.) Namely, you have far too little insight into the WP process to soon have any role in the kind of ambitions that you're feeling about the future of the project. And at this point neither you nor i has the remotest idea of what your long-term prospects for that are. But i hope you'll stick around and find out.
--Jerzy•t 15:22, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Your unfortunate response to my question is truly disappointing. Please consider Cactus.man's response as more appropriate and helpful. You should also consider a role in life that limits your contact with people. Your arrogance is a black mark on the WP community. Though I have appreciated your edits and help in the past, you are clearly an editor that should be marginalized. You are the type I hoped not to find in WP, but unfortunately those who exaggerate their own worth are everywhere, even in the best of communities. Your value may lie in trying not to author articles, but sticking to the most banal aspects of the project. My opinion of you should of course have no bearing on your continued efforts, as yours of mine will not. I hope you will keep trying to make a meaningful contribution to life. Your editing skills are outstanding but you are deficient in the kind of character that will make you a success in life and give you a meaningful legacy. Best regards, --Lawnmowerman 16:20, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Similar username

Hello, sorry for late responding. If your kind offer to block any potential use of the Buldozer username, I would appreciate this. Re: John Fisher descripions, if that has nort been corrected yet, I'll do it right away. Many tahnks for your valuable advice, offer and comment. Buldożer 10:02, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Those edits were certainly not mine. Well, OK, let's leave that as it is. Many thanks for your interest and help, but it looks that we just can't do anything with it. Cheers, Buldożer 21:38, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Thanks for the page move

Thank you very much for moving Islamofascism (term) to Islamofascism. You've made my day. -Silence 03:53, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] That bloke what had it off with Eloise

Er, should this article really be called Peter Abélard? Pierre Abélard, fine. Peter Abelard, also OK (I'm sure the MoS tells us which). But Germanic first name, French second? Uh-uh. Do you mind if I fix this? Cheers, JackyR 21:52, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

_ _ As a matter of mechanics, it looks like anyone can make a move back to Pierre Abélard, but it may take an admin to get it to Peter Abelard.
_ _ I don't find your reasoning conclusive: i think there is a greater tendency to anglicize given names than surnames, and w/in WP, i think the Zürich debate shows we don't think a dicritical mark makes a name anywhere near as foreign as a foreign-language spelling does. But i'm not settling on any strong opinion.
_ _ Bear in mind also that like Confucius and [[Copernicus], his English-language familiarity is probably mediated via Latin -- not sure which of the three sides of the argument that leans toward.
_ _ You might want to consult with User:Ceyockey, whose LoPbN edit led to mine there, and thence to the move you are concerned about; my guess, based on their edit, is that they'll probably agree with you. Also, consider some Google tests restricted to English-language sites, so at least you'll be in a position to anticipate criticism from others who may feel more strongly about it than i.
--Jerzy•t 04:28, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
Replied there. Cheers, JackyR 18:36, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
And there. Cheers, JackyR 23:45, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Pages with no content

I've been looking over the "short pages" list, and I see that User:EGGS has tried to nominate some pages for deletion. They seem to have no content, so why do they need to still exist? Thanks, Ardric47 06:33, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Owain Glyndŵr

Wow! Whatever happened to assuming good faith!? Regardless of your personal suspicions, bandying phrases like "disingenuous", "troll" and "nationalist PoV vandal" around are very unlikely to achieve anything, and I resent your using them.

Getting back to the main point, though: insisting on keeping the listing at "Owen Glendower" instead of "Owain Glyndŵr" is untenable, I think, since the article is at Owain Glyndŵr, and which is also the name used almost universally these days (much has changed since Shakespeare's time). Having a duplicate listing might be tolerable, but if everyone were listed at every possible spelling of their name, the list could get very cluttered indeed (e.g. Shakespeare, Shakspear, Shaxpir, etc.). I assumed there was one listing per person, and moved "Glendower" to "Glyndŵr". I thought you must have overlooked the second copy when you reinstated the "Glendower" listing. There must be, at least, a listing at "Glyndŵr"; any further spellings are optional. That said, the current situation is fine by me. --Stemonitis 06:24, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Stewart

Well, shit happens. I did look into some recent history, but recent users like AndriuZ (talk · contribs) were not at all vandals. Fortunately there are many of us here. `'mikka (t) 20:30, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

By the way, don't you find that having this huge name list in two places leads to troubles? I suggest to leave it only in the "List of..." article. `'mikka (t) 20:42, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] John Carroll et al

Image:WikiThanks.png For fixing that dab page Just Like That! JackyR 21:54, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I'd slowly worked out that the "Carr" page must have been the trigger. Deleting the history is not offered to non-Admins, so it's great to know this is one of your missions: I may call on you in future! Thanks again, JackyR 14:43, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Nin

Hello, I noticed that you moved the disambiguation page to Nin proper, but what happened to the article on the Croatian town? It isn't linked and I can't seem to find it. --AHrvojic 03:20, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Thank you! For the search tips as well :) --AHrvojic 12:00, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Spam

Hi, you may like to check Wikipedia:Vandalism#Types_of_vandalism. Spam is vandalism. HenryFlower 11:51, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Well, if you want to wade through a hundred spam edits and weed out the spam part, more power to you. I'm not that fluffy. HenryFlower 12:22, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Apologies for speaking somewhat loosely. My concern however, is not with the effectiveness per se of talk page spam, as with its temptingness. Since it works (or rather, since they think it works) it will happen if we allow it, so we shouldn't allow it. If you're volunteering to lovingly edit any future talk page spam, then I'll happily point you towards it rather than dealing with it myself. HenryFlower 10:09, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Simple

http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Simple_talk/Archive_2#bottom_line - I have written an answer. Yes, a little bit late, but if you're interested. -- Amtiss, SNAFU ? 16:05, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] descendents

Hiya. Doing "speeling petrol" on 'descendents' and variants (like 'decedents' !) I came across some templates you were (are?) experimenting with (I think you noted a problem with too many names on your user page). Anyway, if you get back to it, the word is 'descendants'. One example I found was Template:List of people Cons descendents.

And if you might get irritated at the nit-picking, take a look at the link from my user page to Simple. I'm amazed anyone can learn English. Its tu mush, y'no? Shenme 01:15, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

Permanently? You're better than me then. I edit with www.dictionary.com open at all times! ;-) (I know when to stop correcting misspellings for the night, when even www.dictionary.com isn't enough reassurance as to what is 'correct'. So many possibilities ...) Shenme 01:36, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] re:LoPbN

Apologies for the red link deletions on the LoPbN. I was merely following the general "rule" of most Wiki compendiums of people. I understand your point. However, with "red" links there is also the issue of people vandalizing the page and adding people who are not the least bit notable - as a few of the names I deleted were (i.e. "Joe So and So (born 1987), student and musician"). It becomes rather difficult on such large lists if there is not a biography to sort out who is indeed noteworthy and who is not if there is no reference.

Also, these lists tend to become extremely cumbersome, with people adding nearly everyone who ever existed who may have marginal ties to the Wiki subject. But, I do understand your point and will only delete names in that section that I am sure are non-notables or vandals. Sorry, once again. I also did add a number of names of individuals with Wiki bios to the list. Cheers. ExRat 07:16, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] John Carroll

Hi Jerzy, I'm about to do that stub about the astronomer John Carroll. All the refs I can find for him call him "John Carroll", rather than "John A Carroll": do you remember where you got the format of his name? (I suspect it's just a US back-formation from his full name, in which case I'll entitle the article by the form he would have used himself, ie no "A".

Btw, I'm hoping to make a page move: Margaret Rumer Godden to Rumer Godden, which is the name she published under (and was generally known by, as far as I can tell). The latter is currently a redirect to the former: what should I do? Many thanks, oh sage one... JackyR 22:55, 25 April 2006 (UTC)


[edit] basilwhite

_ _ Hopefully you're already aware that WP autobiographical articles are held to especially high standards. I confined myself to very routine chgs to yours, but there may be some of that "merciless editing" coming up, from others who undertake judging notability and relevance more fluently than i -- perhaps even from comedy fans. But i suppose you're used to hecklers. [grin] _ _ Let me add to your welcome, to what i hope will be a broader role as a colleague here. --Jerzy•t 14:56, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your welcome. I'm addicted. At least with WP I can add myself to the heckler chorus!!! :P

"Basil White sucks" should be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of suck. basilwhite 15:05, 03 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] John Herbert

Looks like we landed in the same place, which I think is good -- I have learned to be meticulous about checking referring pages when creating new pages (especially for names). A question, however -- since you deleted the original article John Herbert, why did you re-create it instead of just restoring it? Restoring seems a nice solution that doesn't destroy edit history. Thanks, Cleduc 00:55, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Brandon Crisp

I agree. You'll note the only edit I've made to the article was to remove the link to Brandon Crisp. It seemed like a clear vanity edit by an anonymous IP. The edit summary was mainly to avoid a lengthy explanation of notability to the IP involved. I am not about to undertake a campaign to remove redlinks :-) Gwernol 05:00, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

You're right of course, my edit summary should have been more explicit. I'll keep that in mind for the future. Thanks for the advice, Gwernol 15:55, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Template:User2 plus, and possibly others

The template syntax of separating words of a user's name as different parameters has been obsoleted by a new function called {{urlencode:}}.

Example: {{urlencode:Slobodan Milošević}}
Produces: Slobodan+Milo%C5%A1evi%C4%87

In addition to converting exotic letters, it also changes spaces into "+", which is interpreted the same as an underscore (a literal plus sign becomes "%2B"). — May. 26, '06 [10:04] <freak|talk>

Wow, I'd never seen that page before (WP:TPFR), but it looks like a bot task more than anything. It would be relatively easy to create a bot to propose possible ([[Redirect]] → [&91;Target]]) pairs on some sandbox page, so that a human could go through and create the ones that actually make sense, if I interpret the purpose of that page correctly. I'll take a closer look at it tomorrow. I'm going to sleep now. — May. 26, '06 [10:23] <freak|talk>

[edit] Solomon

Hi Jerzy, this is regarding your recent renaming. I decided to set up a vote to move it back, and I don't want to do it behind your back. Please reconsider. Cheers. ←Humus sapiens ну? 00:38, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Finished LoPBN T

I've done all the T pages with mergenames. And didn't make many changes for the last dozen or so - it even handles the non-heading separators I dislike. Now I'm going to meditate on the result for a while (and do some editorial cleanup / manual editing) before figuring out what to do next. --Alvestrand 15:45, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

I already thot this was great, before i realized how far you'd gone. I'll be continuing to try to catch up with the subdividing of pages and sections as demanded by the wealth of remedies to prior neglect that you've provided. As to what i call the non-section headings, i've been meditating, & experimenting with larger groups at the deepest level, which may or may not strike you as addressing the aspects of your objections that i hadn't tried to address before. Thanks!
--Jerzy•t 23:35, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Private John Fredreick Brill Wartime Mural Artist

I thought I had read all the relevant sections for testing the validity of creating a page, and I would like to dispute your contention that J Brill is a worthy deletion candidate. What I am continuing to build sources of material on John Brill and his Bardia Mural. With the publication of the letter from his mother and his being referred to in the Daily Mirror, I believed I had proven "broad interest" and showing the other websites that show tours to his Mural as well as interest in him and his mural I thought the case was proven. Can you help me understand what I missed. My fear is that this is the thin end of the wedge the next step will be to have the Bardia Mural Page proposed for deletion.

Libya is only just reopened as tourist destination so in terms of "previous potential" interest in John and his Murak, there cannot have been any.

I am not a relative of Mr Brill and have no intent to try and promote him. My goal is a simple one to help enable Wikipedia to be the most usefull complete Web Source of Knowledge.

What are the reasons for your proposed deletion? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 40.0.96.1 (talk) 16:17, 2 June 2006

Response in progress, plz watch this space in a few minutes.
--Jerzy•t 17:04, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
_ _ Hi. I confess to not having read more than the bio; i'm not sure whether that was neglect on my part or if you failed to lk to it.
_ _ Please register as a WP user and use your ID whenever you edit, and even until you do, please sign with --~~~~. Have you gone thru the tutorial?
_ _ If you don't know how remove the ProD markup, leave me a lk to the article, in this section, and i will do so while we talk abt it, in order to take off the time pressure. You may be right; i have been wrong before. More than once, actually. [wink]
_ _ Re "[your] fear is that...", yes, i'll be surprised if the two articles don't survive or fall together (possibly surviving together by being merged).
--Jerzy•t 17:04, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] en dashes

Hey, what's up? I thought I was being a good little Wikipedian by reading and heeding the recommendations spelled out in Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)#Dates of birth and death and Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dashes), and duly converted many of my previous edits painstakingly to include the en dash. Then you come along and get rid of the "edit-impeding n-dashes" on List of people by name: Hua-Huf. Is this a new movement among some editors, or is it just a personal preference? -- Muffuletta 07:03, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Proposed Georgia Move

As a past participant in the discussion on how to handle the Georgia pages, I thought you might be interested to know that there's a new attempt to reach consensus on the matter being addressed at Talk:Georgia (country)#Requested_Move_-_July_2006. Please come by and share your thoughts to help form a consensus. --Vengeful Cynic 04:03, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] candelabrum or candelabra

no, they are the the same. http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=candelabra%20. doens't make a difference to me.
Jon513 16:33, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

sorry, my mistake, you are right.
Jon513 16:35, 18 July 2006 (UTC)
I'll admit that the error is common enuf to be considered an alternative singular form. Even in that light, i think the second set of scenarios is preferable:
  1. Candelabra
    Semi-informed user: "Ignorant fucks!"
    Uninformed user (and thoroughly informed user, having thot thru fact that usage rather than origin defines language): no reaction
  2. Candelabrum
    Semi-informed user: no reaction
    Uninformed user (and thoroughly informed user, having thot thru fact that usage rather than origin defines language): "Pretentious fucks!"
... because IMO we do enuf to counter the stereotype that we are pretentious (and in any case you have to do a bit preten-ding to be infallible anyway, in striving for accuracy), but we can never do enough to overcome the stereotype that that we are ignorant.
--Jerzy•t 16:56, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] LoPbN stuff

Thanks for the informative comments to my talk page, as well as your contributions to the talmud/tractate issue.
I think that LoPbN is an important project, and so I've been contributing to it in spurts. In terms of formatting, I've tried to follow your lead, since you obviously have some seniority in the project. I did take a look at the various talk pages for LoPbN, but they are so very long that I guess I didn't have the patience to sift through them all. I appreciate your clarifications on my talk page, which I'll try to keep in mind in future edits. --Eliyak T·C 06:03, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

I've created a template for LoPbN name entries. My main motivation for it was the annoyance involved in copying large numbers of names twice so that they show up correctly (last name first). I thought I'd get your approval before actually using it in the list --Eliyak T·C 22:29, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Sorry

Apparently I made a mistake again. Sorry! --Sangak12:37, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] ToP Dab

If you find support in the Dab documentation for a ToP Dab on Dee L. Brown, pls let me know. (For the sake of fixing my understand, or fixing the documentation.) My argument is that people who want Dee L. Brown will go to Dee Brown but not (to any extent worth the clutter) the reverse. Thus Dee Brown must be a Dab or have a ToP Dab, but Dee L. Brown may have one only it if is to help reach other people named "Dee L. Brown" (including e.g. Dee Lamont Brown).
--Jerzy•t 20:17, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

If there is more than one person whose name could be entered as "Dee L. Brown", then a top dab is a good idea in my view. This does appear to be the case, Dee Brown (football) has a middle inital of L. for example, and, even ignoring that one, by having the dab in, if another Dee Brown is added with a middle inital L, the article does not need to be changed. Also, if someone hits the article via random article and recognises the name, but not the person, it's useful to have the dab to go to the main name page. All in all, there are more reasons to have the top dab link, then not to have it, so I'd suggest putting it back in. Regards, MartinRe 22:42, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
_ _ Thank you for the additional information, which indeed calls for a ToP Dab, but a more specific one than the one i removed. Dabs are too distracting to be used in the way your second argument implies.
_ _ If you care to read up on the Dab-related portions of the WP:MOS, WP:MOSDAB and Wikipedia:Disambiguation are the bulk, and perhaps all of it. I have the strong impression that the mutually-linked example that starts Wikipedia:Disambiguation#Top links is logically inconsistent with the predominant (main page dab) practice, and is seldom complied with. I'll be collecting examples of compliance with it as i run across them, and if you or i come up with enuf of them, i'll start a discussion to change the guideline. Thanks again,
--Jerzy•t 23:09, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
I am familiar with all the MoS articles, but none of them say much about top links on actual articles (mostly concentrating on the format of Dab pages themselves). However, as a guideline, dab headers are there to reduce confusion if someone reaches that page when expecting to get something else. In many cases, where the article title includes a disambig, it's unnecessary (e.g. Dee Brown (novelist)) but where the name is not disambiged with a "+ (topic)" I suggest a link to the main page so I still think the top dab dab should be to "dee brown", and not just the one "dee L brown" we know about - for all we know Dee Brown (novelist) or Dee Brown (Illini) could also have a middle inital of L. Or in two weeks time, someone else could add another Dee (L) brown, and we should not expect them to have to edit every other dee brown to do so, just the dab page. Regards, MartinRe 23:37, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] List of people by name and, e.g., Allen (surname)

There is some discussion currently taking place about lists of people by surname on the surname pages at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (disambiguation pages)#Hndis needs its own Manual, if you are interested.
-- JHunterJ 12:45, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

_ _ Thanks for the heads up. I fully expect to be interested.
_ _ BTW, i endorse the work you describe in 2nd 'graph on yr user page. Drafted before my AfD cmts and thus Charles's cmt, but saved only now; out of sequencing protocol for clarity.
--Jerzy•t 17:42, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
Having said that, i'm mystified as to how that 'graph's sentiment led you to the AfD that i've since read and commented on. What could LoPbN have to do with why "{{Hndis}} for human names" "reads the way it does"? Or what other part of WP:MOSDAB did you have in mind and why?
--Jerzy•t 20:14, 27 August 2006 (UTC)
(Thanks for the ping -- I had indeed missed this second response.) A few separate issues. I was going through the given names category, and I followed Alan to the Allen surname page. Removing the entries there that did not follow WP:MOSDAB (that weren't for people who were known by just Allen) would have emptied the page except for the statement like "Allen is a surname," and rather than turn it into a Wiktionary entry, it seemed like it should just be deleted. Little did I know.... LOPBN doesn't have to do with the template; my comment on the {{Hndis}} template was made because it says that the pages might otherwise share the same title, which is clearly not the case: Whoopi Goldberg would never have had Johnson as an article title; an extreme example, but it holds for anyone not known by one name. -- JHunterJ 12:25, 28 August 2006 (UTC)
_ _ First, tnx for yr good catch w/ "(and move one of your signatures up?)". I won't bore you with the dumb explanation.
_ _ Now i finally take your point, and yr analysis of the applicability of that MoS to removing the names is sound. IMO, tho, the problem lies in our unfortunate failure to get the MoS in step with well-established and effective practice, rather than in failure to comply: attention during drafting was mostly on more contentious issues, and that aspect got neglected & its undesirable wording went uncontested. While my priorities probably preclude my diving into negotiating that aspect of the MoS, my view is that use of the See-also section permits Dabs to do useful things by way of navigation, that are not properly part of Dab'n, and do so without impairing the Dab'n, bcz they are down there at the bottom. (It's important to add that this is in contrast to info on the subject, especially above the entries, or as part of the entries, that is not typically useful in Dab'g: it is bad bcz it interferes with navigation. Thus i'd like to see
  1. the description of "See also" widened,
  2. the Dab notice put just above the "See also" heading, and in fact, i think,
  3. {{Disambig}} renamed to {{Dab-noSa}} with the new {{Disambig}} having the heading markup & a sentence, built in after the current message, something like
    While the following topics could not bear the title that this page disambiguates, they may nevertheless include the article(s) most sought by some readers who reach this page.
If you think doing so will help, please feel free to copy this 'graph into the discussion, and mention me as source; just include this disclaimer & bear in mind that i will not feel the same obligation to defend it or expound further that i might, if i had been the one to post it elsewhere.
--Jerzy•t 16:23, 28 August 2006 (UTC)
Another solution (and one I like, naturally) would be to use a new, different template for surname disambiguation. {{Hndis}} puts the article into Category: Lists of ambiguous human names, but these articles should be in Category: Surnames instead. So maybe {{Surnamedis}}?
--JHunterJ 18:03, 28 August 2006 (UTC)
Huh? is there more than one person named Sur-nam-edis? [wink] But seriously, as a name change it sounds like another rarified quibble; you may want to focus, in presenting this to those who unlike me are engaged with the issue in an ongoing way, on what difference you think that name will make in the benefits that users get.
--Jerzy•t 22:09, 28 August 2006 (UTC)
Rarified quibble? I thought would just serve the same purpose as making a new dab-nosa -- the descriptions for the two types would match the articles they're applied to. -- JHunterJ 00:51, 29 August 2006 (UTC)
In the light of your comments at the AfD (helpful, thx) you might possibly be interested that software support for surnames is part of my 'platform' for the Board elections (meta:User:Charles Matthews/WMF Board Election 2006, Anthere's final question 'Vision', #3 out of 5 things I'd want to undertake).
-- Charles Matthews 16:26, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
I've said still more (but possibly less helpful, i guess) on the AfD page since, most of it writ before your note. We've got plenty to talk abt, mostly starting in 3 days. I'm delaying further comment to collect hard copy of the relevant materials to read, as it were, by candlelight, in the interim. Fascinating; thanks; if i end up moved to endorse you, would you like me to coordinate with you in maximizing the benefit to your campaign?
--Jerzy•t 17:42, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
Omigod - someone who appears to want me elected, maybe. Not sure this was part of the plan. Tell you what - it would do no harm at all to get this type of concrete issue discussed, rather than airy generalities. Charles Matthews 21:38, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
Let's just say that you're the first one who's brought my interest to the race this time. I 'm back early due to lousy weather, & will have a couple of substantial responses of my own to the Allen discussion that happen to bear on new support for efficiency re person-entries.
--Jerzy•t 19:51, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Re: LoPbN ToCs

Thanks for pointing out my mistake. I was removing those ToCs directives so that one does not need to scroll down for every other page esp. when there are only a couple of entries. I understand the presence of empty pages, but felt that the ToC dirctive is unnecessary (because I think that wikipedia adds a ToC automatically when the number of sections increases beyond certain number). Anyhow it doesn't make a significant difference and I will try to aviod that next time. YashKochar 05:41, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Response to your message

Did you by chance mean that WP:V is not part of WP:PROD instead of WP:CSD? I didn't mention verifiability in the speedy delete nom; I just used {{db-group}}. I realize now that I shouldn't have put it in the {{prod}} tag, but I was ennumerating some of the many issues with the article (and was admittedly frustrated that the speedy tag was removed). I'll be more careful in the future. Thanks! -- Merope 02:09, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Darren Kane

Well I looked it over and spent some time trying to find proof of his notabilty and couldn't but with two others thinking he might I decided to prod it. If I'd seen it before the speedy was on I would have probably deleted and then waited for someone to yell at me (again). Sorry I couldn't give you better news. CambridgeBayWeather (Talk) 05:11, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

I usually have no problem in deleting stuff and it made me feel bad to have to keep that for a few days. CambridgeBayWeather (Talk) 05:35, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Thank you

For this. Best. notafish }<';> 11:12, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Thank you for the reference to "The Naylor Sonnets""

Thank you for the reference to "The Naylor Sonnets"" in the article on James Naylor. However the article on Kenneth Boulding doesn't mention his poetic and creative side, or his remarkable wife. Hope someone can do something about that!Vernon White 22:27, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Polish Cz... painters

Jerzy, I must thank you. My edits concerning the three painters was - simply put - wrong. I'm pleased that this error was caught. I've reverted. Again, my thanks. Victoriagirl 16:12, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] This was the version me and Lmz00 created an edit war on

This was the version I worked on September 21, 2006. No vandalism, no weasel words, sourcing, and no copyright violations. This edit war with Lmz00 has gotten to a point where I refuse to answer to the user. The user cannont resolve this dispute without using inactive comments toward myself and others. It's just simplified just to compromise a fair look at the article without using too many links and notable likeness. And for the user to use 50 instead of 50 Cent, that just another way of saying a number said this instead of a rapper. Just look at the current version. The last time I edit this article was about at least a week ago. I asked for a protection to inactive users who choose not to compromise, and refuse to work as a community. I hope this version (I left above in the link) is used on this article.

This is the current version that User Lmz00 left after I ceased the edit war. And yes, this is what is on the article (and you can decide)!

Multiple use of name of Sean Combs. Here the list of words, Diddy, Puffy, P. Diddy, Combs, Sean "Puffy Combs is located throughout the whole article. All I suggested was to used was mogul or rapper, to cease the constant use of the person's name. (Inproper use of proper names)!

Mase still claimed the status of a pastor. The album contained no curse words and was not derogatory in any way towards females. (Weasel words)!

'50 was in talks with Diddy to buy Mase from Bad Boy in order to sign him to G-Unit. However, those talks fell through, prompting 50 to make a diss record towards Diddy titled "The Bomb" (which accuses him of stalling said negotiations). In addition, 50 also mentions no longer wanting to make a deal. (Inproper wording of proper names, weasel words, and not neutral in explaining feud with rappers)!

Mase's desire to leave Bad Boy is primarily due to his third album not selling so well. (This is an example of weasel words)!

This has been discredited however, by the wider hip-hop community. Mase has also been called a hypocrite by former G-Unit member, The Game, who called out the pastor (as well as other G-Unit members) on his anti-G-Unit DVD, Stop Snitchin', Stop Lyin'. (Another example of weasel words)!

Ok that it. Thanks. LILVOKA 15:46, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Rectifier

Hello, pardon for typing in this editbox. Do not know how to add the comments proper way. Have a suggestion to make about the diode bridge rectifier. Having arrows on each alternation (where current leaves and enters in diagram)for students getting it first time helpful. Otherwise nice article and can be expanded. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.247.91.201 (talk) 10:01, 3 October 2006

_ _ Your edit on this page was fine (tho improvable!); more about editing below.
_ _ I haven't worried abt that article that article that article for years. Let's discuss it.
_ _ You can add to this section easily by clicking here, which is the same (probably until i next reorganize the page) as clicking on the "[edit]" section-editing lk to the right of "Rectifier", roughly as you did when you left your message for me.
_ _ When you reply, and in general, don't use consecutive equal signs for anything except creating headings (as i did with
== Rectifier ==
above). If you want to draw a horizontal line, position 4 (or more) hyphens at the left margin. You'll find it useful to use colons, asterisks, and pound-signs (":", "*", and "#"), in various quantities and mixtures, always starting at the left margin and without spaces or other chars interrupting them, to create, bullet, indent, and number paragraphs. (I supplement them with underline chars, since otherwise there's no first-line-of-paragraph indentation, but that makes me odd.) And (even before you register) always sign your talk-page contribs with
--~~~~
-- or with what i prefer,
<br>--~~~~<br>
_ _Thanks, & hope to hear from you.
--Jerzy•t 14:59, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
BTW, here's a handy tool: the before & after of the things that changed when i did that edit; you could find it by consulting the "page history", via the page's "history" tab (or other lk).
--Jerzy•t 15:21, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Intervention"

_ _ An editor undertook what they described as an intervention, and attempted to sustain it in the face of my insistence they go away. While there is no support in the WP community for such behavior, and i chose not to permit the distraction to continue, my personal outlook and WP's outlook both support the idea that recording controversy and keeping it accessible is better than suppressing it, when information-disrupting effects like distraction and clutter are not, or are no longer, an issue.
_ _ So here's

  • the original section
    (that was never removed),

followed by

  • another message under a similar heading
    that was removed at least once by either me or one other registered editor, and was restored once, e.g. at 5 October 2006, with summary
    "please do not revert user comments to your discussion page; it is considered vandalism":
    (via a different AOL IP address, 205.188.117.72 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · block user · block log)).

--Jerzy•t 19:55, 3 November & 20:07, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Without boring colleagues about the circumstances of my late realization of the fact, there were two other restorations by the original IP, and the one i mentioned above fell between them.
--Jerzy•t 20:07, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] YOUR PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEMS: SOME ADVICE

_ _ Dude, I am looking over your extensive edit history, and I want to share some guidance that no one else may have the guts or, more likely, care enough to do. You are quite obviously a very, very, very sick person. I can't even begin to imagine the scene: you sitting in your closet of a house editing this site all day with intensity and your eyes glued, looking for the next battle and declaring these little wars over nothingness. What posseses you to waste your life this way? Do you get laid? Do you need further explanations as to why you are wasting oxygen and DNA with your efforts? Do you have anyone who knows you waste your life like this? Please don't be offended. But please just stop. You have a very serious illness. See a psychologist but, for God's sake, peel yourself away from this web site and do something with your life before it's over and you are forgotten for the nothing you ever did and the nothing you ever became. You need to end this now, cold turkey.
_ _ Please respond, and not defensively, here. No sane person would look at what you do, day and night, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year and not conclude that you need a massive intervention. I have to think you are a very lonely, unhappy person, so no one probably knows of the depth of your sickness. So it falls to a stranger like me, I guess. You are so engrossed that I can't envision you just admitting what has become of you, but I am willing to start to introduce you to reality. Let's start with this question: How many hours of your short life have your poured into this wasted foolishness at the expense of actually living a life?
—Preceding unsigned comment added by 152.163.101.12 (talk) 15:20-:34, 4 October 2006 152.163.101.12 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · block user · block log)

_ _ Thank you so much for your valuable professional advice. Further communication from you, however, would be harassment, and result in blocking of your IP and/or any account of yours that has not demonstrated a constructive role in WP. ATTENTION R.C. WATCHERS: Your assistance in the event of such harassment would be welcome. Thanks,
--Jerzy•t 15:53, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] YOUR SERIOUS MENTAL ILLNESS AND ADDICTION

This is the most "contructive" thing that can ever be contributed as it relates to you and your involvement here: Please stop and think about the depth of your sickness, sitting there, with your face glued to your computer screen, uncompensated day after day, week after week, for YEARS, tinkering with the biographies of people you don't even know, who actually are out living real lives while you are imprisoned by your addiction. You have literally wasted years of your life with this lonely, self-destructive addiction and illness, which has been at the expense of living your own life. The depth of your mental illness must make it difficult for you to see the extraordinary insanity of your actions and how your addiction has stripped you of the life that was given you.

I know a few others have evaluated what you do here and laugh at you and your sickness. It's something of an inside joke, and I guess few share it with you because they consider you hopeless. That's not right either, and I'd ask them to please stop that and try to help you. Don't laugh at this person behind their back and then just communicate with them on routine matters. That lacks all caring for a person who has an obvious and very serious illness. Something is very wrong with him/her, and while it may not be for us to diagnose the exact problem, we should pause to help with advice. Please share with him/her what we all know. It's only humane to do so.

I will do so now too:

Jerzy (or whatever your name is--consciously concealed, I'm sure, to keep your illness as private as possible), please consider some uncomfortable facts: Years of your life have now been totally consumed and absolutely wasted by your deep, deep sickness and obvious addiction. Please don't make excuses for yourself. You cannot go on like this any longer. You need to stop, and you need to stop today. Reject this advice, and I worry that your sickness will probably only deepen and your addiction will waste whatever is left of your life. Please stop. It's over. Enough. Move on. I do wish you the best and hope you will take this friendly advice seriously. It will be the first and last time I share it, and I hope you know that I share it only with your best interests in mind. It's sad what has happened to you, but I wish you good luck and hope this advice is helpful. But please take it--and do so today. You cannot go on like this.
—Preceding unsigned comment added by 152.163.101.12 (talk) 18:26-18:33, 4 October 2006 152.163.101.12 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · block user · block log)

[edit] James Leach

James Leach -- Leach -- Leach (disambiguation) --James Leach (soldier)

Thanks for your comments on the Leach dab page. I was in two minds about deleting at first, but I spent quite a lot of time looking him up, and also saw the news article you mentioned. I would point out that the subject of the project page is one James Hess Leach, still alive and well, and did not die of AIDS. As proof, he bough Malbone Castle & Estate in 1995, five years after the other James Leach died.

User:Jhleach was the originator of the article, which was very poorly written and already tidied it up considerably by yours truly. You will be aware that he attempted to hijack the 'James Leach (soldier)' article.

No doubt someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but the subject appears to be a little rich boy who was left his fortune (and a company) by daddy, and does not seem to have set foot outside of New England. He is a member of boards and associations in Providence, which may or may not underline his claim to be a philanthropist. Due to the mistaken identity, I can inform you that he certainly did not give $200k to Stanford. However, I tagged his article for lack of independently verifiable information, and even if he were notable, I still challenge someone to justify his using the label "Philanthropist". Ohconfucius 03:16, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

_ _ The James Hess Leach bio is a mess, and may be AfD material. However:
  • The apparent entrepreneurial role with the Raybestos site may be sufficient notability.
  • Being on that many boards seldom happens without philanthropy (but that is a hint of verifiability, not verification). I think it probably takes more philanthropy to be a notable philanthropist than it does to get on that many boards.
_ _ I doubt the "Family History and seat" section can be made encyclopedic, and if i were working on the article, i'd probably move that to the talk page saying "i doubt this is useful, unless it helps to identify otherwise ambiguous sources as refering to him."
_ _ I can't tell whether you refer to my two edits, or to the Dab i created, which you overwrote with a Rdr and which i have restored.
Overwriting anything with a RdR (unless it was another Rdr) is highly frowned upon. Plz tell me what you thot, at the time, would justify your doing so. Thanks.
--Jerzy•t 06:36, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
I'm sorry, but just didn't see the point with having successive dab pages. Unlike some other namespaces, where n individuals share the same name, say like John Edwards, there are only 4 James Leaches on the 'Leach' page, who could all have been distinguished by adding their middle names, geogaphical seats or occupations. From the angle of someone wanting to look for James Leach under 'Leach', I would be slightly perturbed by having to go hrough 2 dabs. Furthermore, James Leach as a dab page should probably have been 'James Leach (disambiguation)' per convention. This has now been moved.
—Preceding unsigned comment added by Ohconfucius (talk • contribs) 07:26, 7 October 2006 [I have struck thru the first three sentences of the preceding contrib, since i can find no relationship in it with what i've done and said re Leach, and cannot foresee it having any relevance to succeeding discussions here. (The author is of course welcome to say something less mysterious with the same intent.) --Jerzy•t 01:09, 9 October 2006 (UTC)]
_ _ Even in a running two-way discussion, you need to sign your posts.
_ _ You have made no comment that seems to be responsive to my concern about your putting a Rdr over a Dab, so i am proceeding with correcting that without your input.
_ _ I have no idea why you're talking about to me about these new things that have no obvious connection to our previous discussion, and which you've made no attempt to explicate by including lks to anything. If you haven't clarified before i finish repairing the problem you created, to which i already referred, i'll take another look in light of whatever i have to expose myself to in the course of the repair.
--Jerzy•t 20:26, 8 & 01:09, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
A search of my Contribs since 20 September suggests that you had no reason to discuss Dabs w/ me at 07:26, 7 October other than my 06:07, 6 October reversion of your Dab-creating edit, which you effectively endorsed in your rename & edit of 07:22 & 07:39, 7 October 2006. I have struck thru that note from you, with an annotation that it seems to be meaningless -- lest it appear to others to be an unaddressed matter. If you still have whatever concern made you write it, please start over if you want my attention for it.
--Jerzy•t 01:09, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
_ _ You have completely misread our Dab-page naming practices. James Leach (disambiguation) is the wrong title, since James Leach is in use only to rdr to it. No bio is the predominant contender for the title James Leach, so that is the proper title for the Dab. You also don't seem to have adequately absorbed WP:MOSDAB. I have rectified the Dab page in both respects.
--Jerzy•t 01:09, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
_ _ The Stanford U benefactor is, if notable, a contender for James Leach (philanthropist). And JHL remains one, at least bcz his bio has had the title & copies under that title are out there on the 'Net. So that title is now a Dab.
_ _ I also agree that a less questionable means of disambiguation than "philanthropist" is worthwhile, but if he is notable enuf for an article, there should be more than 1 non-WP Google hit for his commonly used name. I.e., if he's notable, James Hess Leach is the wrong title. I've renamed again accordingly (and bypassed the double rdrs).
--Jerzy•t 01:09, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Jose Rizal

José Rizal

I don't know why there should be a POV tag on this article. Which part of the article? If someone is questioning a sentence or paragraph, he/she should tag it with {{fact}}. I don't see it anywhere.KaElin 00:37, 8 October 2006 (UTC) Illegitmate use of tag converted to mention.Jerzy•t 03:25, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

See talk:José Rizal#NPoV.
--Jerzy•t 03:25, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Test edit so you think

Copied from User talk:Lincher

Thank you for experimenting with the page List of people by name: Mo on Wikipedia. Your test worked, and it has been reverted or removed. Please use the sandbox for any other tests you want to do. Take a look at the welcome page if you would like to learn more about contributing to our encyclopedia. --Jerzy•t 06:15, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

I don't understand why you are reverting this edit as when these pages were invented, they were used to repertoriate all of WP's biographies and in such I was adding on in order to populate that page's What links here for the guy is notable but unrelated to any other page so this is a way to help that article being read by some other users. If I don't understand something just reply on my talk page as I do this in good faith and not to disrupt/make more work for you. Lincher 13:10, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
Just to give you more insight on this, why didn't you revert such edit [4]? Lincher 13:12, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
I got nothing of what you said ... could you write a bit more clearly and with less abreviations in order to let me know what that jibberish (no offense ;) was?
What I think I understand is that this is a page that was split into several articles because it held too much bullet pointed items and was in itself unuseful for the user and the split gave enough material for multiple articles and that by doing that the resulting page is intended only to peruse through the system but not as a collecting information page anymore, is that right? Lincher 19:54, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
I haven't laughed at the way you wrote, I haven't tried in anyway to ridiculised you or anything, I just thought that the way you answered my sounded weird, I'm really sorry in having hurt you if I have in anyway for it was not my intent. I had forgotten the way gibberish was written and in order not to get a dictionary to repair my mistake I had placed it in italic with a smiley beside it. I wouldn't be trying to speak or write german for ich kann nichts auf deutsch, und du bist besser als ich. Sorry again if I have offended you in anyway. BTW, I speak French, learned English in primary school and had a class or 2 in german. Hope I can contribute to wikipedia with you more than having a rival/opponent in you. Cheers, Lincher 20:20, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
You answered my question with your two previous posts, and I understood you first lets show that newb how it works-post which led me to tell you I wasn't doing my first edit on WP. All is well that ends well. Good luck with your work on WP, and I hope our next encounter will be as enlightening (for I have learned through your explanation of the word jibberish). I have no questions as of now but I'll come around as soon as I have some. You be sure to do the same if I can come in handy. Ciao (as they say in Italian), Lincher 21:53, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] RESPECT coalition politicians

I went through reverting your edits removing these activists and candidates and the like from this category. I've added a reason on the category talk page but I thought I'd leave a personal message here to let you know in case you don't watch these pages. Briefly, these people are politicians, whether they've achieved office or not - one of them is a sitting councillor by the way, I assume his removal was a mistake - Wikipedia's definitions must be the point of reference for this, however failing to class these people as politicians is also massively counter-intuitive. Sorry to be a stickler for this, mate. Driller thriller 22:29, 12 October 2006 (UTC) P.S. What's with the dummy edits?

[edit] Seymour Knox dab

Thanks for taking some time with my Seymour Knox dab page. I pretty much agree with your suggestions. I feel I might want to add something about the Warhol however. I do think that a visitor to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery might ask "Is the Seymour Knox on display" Likewise, a Knox admirer might attend a Warhol exhibit and ask the same question. I do not see anything explicit against the portrait. TonyTheTiger 18:49, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

Additionally, placing this on the dab page with the proper wikilink disambiguates which Seymour Knox is the subject of the portrait. TonyTheTiger 19:12, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your thoughts. I guess you are saying that a dab page should disambiguate all likely wikipedia uses of a phrase as opposed to all likely uses by wikipedians of a phrase. Is that it in a nutshell.

Also, you imply that there are high standards for portraits. It annoys me that such common bands can get albums pages that aren't deleted and you would tell me that an Andy Warhol of a notable wikipedia article subject from a family of likenamed notable wikipedia article subjects does not in your opinion belong on a wikipedia dab unless an article is forthcoming and that such an article is likely to be unnotable. What are the standards for paintings? Would a Warhol Campbell's Soup Can or Warhol Marilyn Monroe get deleted? Do you know of this having happened? What about similarly significant work? Do you think there is enough info on the following page to generate a lasting wikipedia page Portrait of Seymour Knox TonyTheTiger 22:11, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

Great explanation of the purpose of a dab page. It will make me rethink most of my dab pages. Your inference that Portrait of Seymour Knox should get equal treatment with the "Campbell's Soup" and "Marilyn Monroe" did not mean I felt it was equally notable, just worthy of similary notability consideration. If neither of these has an article or even article section, neither should "Seymour Knox". However, if neither of these is absent because it has been unsuccessful in an AfD discussion, then I am not sure what conclusion to draw. I think that as you mentioned

In your response you mentioned G-tests on

   Warhol "Campbell's Soup"

       762 of about 85,800 (which means 85K pages, with 76% of the most significant thousand differing significantly rather than appearing to be clones of another of the first thousand)

   Warhol "Marilyn Monroe"

       803 of about 538,000

   Warhol "Seymour Knox"

       17 of about 21 (which means that there are about 21 pages, 17 of them looking unique)

I am not sure I understand precisely although I get the picture. Please elaborate.

Also, you mentioned They are also useful (without compromising that fundamental mission) where XYZ is likely to be casually used as a title for article 3, even tho there is a better title for article 3; in that case we are likely to include the title of article 3 on the Dab page, often in a "See also" section. That is the case here as I explained. The question is merely of the notability of article 3 in this case.TonyTheTiger 17:29, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

<<But am i clear in having illustrated that some works by the same artist are much more significant than the one we are disussing. (Trivia: your guy's portrait is not the bottom end of the scale; Warhol, presumably before his breakthru, painted a signed LP-record jacket for a recording of Swan Lake; i'll bet that's not verifiable on the Web.)--Jerzy•t 19:30, 19 October 2006 (UTC)>> I have always been of the opinion that "Seymour Knox" is less notable than "[[:Image:Warhol-Marilyns.jpg]" (probably because he is slightly less sexy:-) and "Image:Warhol-Campbell Soup-1-screenprint-1968.jpg". This is not a point of contention. This is no different from the fact that Seymour H. Knox I is less notable than his cousin Frank Winfield Woolworth. If you told me that people have posted articles on Woolworth that have not survived AfDs, I would not have tried to post Knox I. However, if you said no one has posted a Woolworth article and I don't think it is a topic worth posting I would contend otherwise and try to post Knox or both. I really want to understand why something that is artistically notable like "Marilyn Monroe", is not wikipedia notable in terms of being likely to survive an AfD.

The bottom line is this. I believe I could post a Marilyn Monroe that would survive an AfD. Less sure about "Seymour Knox".

<<_ _ In your response you mentioned G-tests on

   Warhol "Campbell's Soup"
       762 of about 85,800 (which means 85K pages, with 76% of the most significant thousand differing significantly rather than appearing to be clones of another of the first thousand)
   Warhol "Marilyn Monroe"
       803 of about 538,000
   Warhol "Seymour Knox"
       17 of about 21 (which means that there are about 21 pages, 17 of them looking unique)>>

I have a masters in Statistics and still do not understand what you are saying. I do understand you are teaching me something someone who has a masters in statistic should know about search engine technology today. When I put Warhol "Campbell's Soup" in Google, I get: 1 - 10 of about 86,300 for Warhol "Campbell's Soup". (0.24 seconds)

The bottom line is this: Where does the 762 and the 76% come from?—Preceding unsigned comment added by TonyTheTiger (talk • contribs) 23:25-:27, 19 October 2006

I will probably attempt a Campbell's Soup can article next week. I will let you know when I do. I will then possibly follow with Knox and possibly Monroe if it survives. TonyTheTiger 18:27, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

I have decided that I will likely just do Warhol Campbell's Soup and Portrait of Seymour Knox. I will not likely get to Marilyn. I have seen Campbell's Soup Cans at both the Museum of Modern Art in NYC and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in the last 6 months. Thus, I find them more relevant. I don't actually recall if Marilyn was at the MCA or the MOMA. You can see I have marked off my Warhol turf. I just clicked through your redlink on my discussion page to create the page. I am considering retitling it "Warhol Campbell's Soup Cans", however. I warn you. I am no art scholar. I will do what I can. I realize Marilyn could use some attention. I guess I liken it to the Coors family. I think their whole family should be cleaned up. I prefer Bud to Coors. I almost always drink Bud or Bud Light if available. Thus, I chose to do the work to clear up the Anheusers and Busches, but not the Coorses. I may get back to the Coorses if I can find the info and I might get back to Marilyn. I guess like all good wikipedians I will just have to prioritize my work. TonyTheTiger 21:55, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

I am off and running on Campbell's Soup Cans. I will let you know when I have exhausted my own limitations. TonyTheTiger 16:27, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

I wouldn't say I am done, but the page is probably 80 or 90% finished. I would like to find an image from the 3rd phase of his Soup Can work to represent this series more completely. Let me know if there is anything specific you think I should address. Also, give me your assessment of its viability as a stand alone article. TonyTheTiger 21:15, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Google Test

Great response. If that is a common technique for wikipedians, googlers or internet users you should cut and paste that response into an article or at least a section of an article. You should then disambiguate it from the G test article. TonyTheTiger 18:27, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Puzzled

Hi. I recently redirected your recent creation List of people by name: name Rob to List of people by name: Rob. But looking at your contributions you seem to be very active on lists of people, so I don't quite understand what it is you're trying to do. Also I don't understand why you would delete info such as "backstroke swimmer" to have only "swimmer" or why you would have Roseanne Barr as an actor rather than an actress. Thanks. Pascal.Tesson 05:05, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] talk: Jose Rizal

Jerzy, please read my reply: talk:Jose Rizal#NPoV.
KaElin 15:07, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

talk:José Rizal#NPoV

[edit] G Linnaeus Banks

Sorry for the download link, copy of my post to Talk:G Linnaeus Banks re: download of The Manchester Man

:sorry the link is from a japanese college who use it in the english course. i presumed that the pdf was the full book. if it is of interest i can scan a copy of the book and send it in DOC format (its no longer in copyright). Mike33 03:55, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Vilhelm Hammershøi

Coppied from here everything is derived from that and thus falls ander the derivativew works section of copyright law. You may want to review this WP:AN#Plagiarism_Detector_Bot.
Geni 17:27, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

No you undeleted it. Article is now your responsibility.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vilhelm_Hammersh%C3%B8i&diff=78166832&oldid=14426799
Does not show substantial changes And I can't go to your stub versions without violating the GFDL
—Preceding unsigned comment added by Geni (talk • contribs) 17:36, 23 October 2006

[edit] LoPbN Entry

Looking at yr recent List of people by name: Hen work, i continue to like what you've been doing with {{LoPbN Entry}}; not sure if the optional piping is new or if i just was too cursory in looking before. You might like to look at {{List of people sequence Oh}} (What lks there); i can imagine integrating the {{Inv-prfx}} functionality into {{LoPbN Entry}}, tho it's low-priority for me compared to LoPbN tasks like getting rid of the few remaining non-bio lks, completing the addition of the "Access to rest of list" sections, maintaining stylistic consistency, and perhaps aggressively participating in adding entries from Category:Living people (and probably fixing unpiped names first). Hope you'll not be too discouraged by my distraction from your good work/ideas.
--Jerzy•t 04:45, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

My first reaction is that it would probably be overkill to integrate yet another parser function (#if) that will only rarely be utilized into {{LoPbN Entry}}. Another possibility would be to create another branch of LoPbN Entry (e.g. {{LoPbN Entry p}}) which does have the functionality. Is this something that you see a lot of use for?
By the way, you may be interested in an effort to get "Labeled section transclusion" as a feature in future versions of Mediawiki:
--Eliyak T·C 01:16, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Cat Piping

Hi, thanks for your advice. I will try to fix the article cats piping. Regards, --Carioca 22:32, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

Hi, if you want to learn how to correctly pipe Brazilian bio articles, check the Alphabetising section of the Portuguese surnames article. Regards, --Carioca 22:39, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] List of people

You changed "actress" to "actor" (in the case of an actress).

  1. Why?
  2. What does lo-res terminology mean?

Thanks.
Orbicle 08:18, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

I have a question. Explain your reasoning on why you relinked Dave Schawrtz and Warren Madden? The reason why most OCM articles were redirected to The Weather Channel was to prevent these articles from being recreated. This was partially discussed on TWC's article page. The reason for the delinked was to avoid redirects, although I see that you added the prod. templates on the articles (which I totally agree with). see: Talk:The Weather Channel/Archive 1.
--Moreau36 08:31, 30 October 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Kristina Abernathy

Hey, first of all, thanks for responding back! :) I know we'll make mistakes and it's totally understandable. I replaced the (prod) with (db).

There's another article (Kristina Abernathy) in which I intinally slapped a (db) tag, due to the same reasons as Dave Schwartz and Warren Madden, but it was challenged, so, I replaced it with a (afd). If you don't mind, at your conveinece, take a closer look at the article and vote on the linked section I just posted above. In my opinion, non-notable people doesn't warrant a standalone article. I doubt it that she is known ouside the circles of TWC.

Much Thanks Again! :)

--Moreau36 23:01, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

In case you didn't know, the Kristina Abernathy article is now redirected to The Weather Channel. So was Heather Tesch, which I did earlier this morning. Feel free to post a similiar comments in their talk pages as you did with Dave Schwartz and Warren Madden? Good move on your part! Thanks and cheers! --Moreau36 13:29, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Campbell's Soup Cans

Thanks for the category suggestion (Modern Paintings). I found similar categories to what I believe you intended: Paintings Category:20th century paintings TonyTheTiger 18:37, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

I was a little unsure on the categorization. Although the original 32 canvases are 1962 paintings some of the other Campbell's Soup Can paintings are from the 1960s. I guess you suggest to categorize based on only the original 32 and then only at the most detailed subcategory. Is this correct? TonyTheTiger 19:12, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Cat name piping

Thanks for catching my mindless overlooking of name piping in the cats for Col Joye. Tvoz 18:30, 5 November 2006 (UTC) Whoa, first comment on your user page, I better get that heading capitalization right.....Tvoz 18:32, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

I think I may faint- have I actually encountered someone on Wikipedia with a sense of humor?? What a relief! So many are either overly earnest, too in love with their own (mediocre) words, or about as mature as a two year old, no offense intended to little children. Tvoz 03:38, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

(By the way, that last was my way of saying 'thanks for your note'...) About trolling for piping errors and the like, I actually don't mind doing that kind of work either, for similar reasons to what you mentioned on your user page about wandering into biogs - do you have any tips on how to spot problems or is it just a matter of opening the edit page article by article and looking ofr missing ones? Tvoz 16:58, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! OK, deep breaths, I will go back a little later and read that again. If you happen to have the shortcut handy, yeah, that might help!Tvoz 17:58, 6 November 2006 (UTC)


Thanks! Actually, I wasn't doing too badly following your instructions, but I ended up reading some interesting stuff about how to alphabetize Dave Brubeck in a record store - anyway, I'll read the link you just sent me. (Btw, pop-up tools sounds neat - I haven't come across that one yet. Will look - anything to make it faster.) Tvoz 18:31, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Oh God, I think I understood that. Now I'm getting worried.....Tvoz 18:34, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Cat name piping (Eritrean)

Hello, and thank you for welcoming me to Wikipedia. Allow me to summarize your comments to make sure that I have it all clear, and then I will get on to my response.

Eritrean people articles should be alphabetized according to last name, first name convetion.

This is a very interesting point. To be honest I did not even look up other cutlures when I went about fixing the Eritrean names throughout all the pages. I find that the Eritrean naming convention is in fact quite similar also to the Arabic name convention and so I looked up famous people whose name would qualify under that. They are all categorized in a manner you are suggesting.

However, as another user once told me, Wikipedia should be "descriptive" not "prescriptive". This brings a sort of challenge to mind though because amongst Eritreans who speak English and are educated abroad, when it comes to our names we still file and organize by our first name and progress through the system. For instance, when I go to the Eritrean Consulate in California and they are to look up my file they ask for my name (Merhawie). When they find that under the M's the move on to my father's name if there would be more than one file. The naming convention is very similar to the Pakistani naming convention, except in marriage the woman does not change her name.

However, I imagine the people in the American Embassy would not. So then we have to ask whose fashion of organization should take precedent. I cannot answer this question although I am sure it has certainly been discussed before. If you could let pass on such a discussion to me I would appreciate it. Otherwise I think we should consider starting a discussion at the Village Pump, because this issue really goes to the international core of wikipedia.

Thank you for reminding me and bringing my attention to this important subject. -- Merhawie 23:05, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Excessive speedy tags

Hello. Am very sorry for the apparently excessive speedy tagging, and will cease immediately. I feel it is probably the result of my current emotional problems. Once again, I am very sorry, and thank you for alerting me. Until now I would consider myself a positive contributor, and wish to remain so.

Thank you for your much-needed advice. Makron1n 04:22, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

well, there was that, and there was the alcohol, I must admit in retrospect. Anyway, thanks for putting a stop to it, as I said. Makron1n 04:38, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] List of people by name, etc.

It looks like all these pages are now unused, replaced by categories. Can these be deleted? —Centrx→talk • 03:35, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Piping Thai names

I appreciate your attention to the Petchara Chaowarat categories. I would like to be able to point you towards a better explanation as to why Thai names need no sorting tweak, but I can't. It's just the way it is, I've been told by other editors of Thai articles. And, living in the country, I've come to accept that that's the way it is. Even in record stores, albums by all artists are grouped according to the artist's first names. I leave this note here, just to say I'm willing to try and help answer any questions. -Wisekwai 11:09, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your detailed reply. No offense was taken by our initial meeting in the edit summaries. I appreciate the time you've put in this. I'm going to repost it at Wikipedia:Thailand-related topics notice board so that others who are dealing with Thailand-related articles can have a look at it. -Wisekwai 05:54, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Not cool....

You people really get mad when others mess around with Wiki?

Seriously, how often does somebody make a vanity page? Or adds a little BS here and there for fun? Probably every Friggin' minute of every day! Doesn't it ever just drive you crazy! So then why worry? Why threaten? Don't you ever just ignore it?


I mean seriously! You people are on the ball, EVERYTIME! I can't have something up for more than ten minutes.


Just let it slide. We will all be happier! Geesh!

[edit] List of people by name: Tur

Hello Jerzy Thanks for cleaning up the Turner section of the List of People by Name. I took a stab at it earlier when I updated the disambiguation page for Jack Turner. It's so nice to see people like you who help to standardize things and make them even more like an encyclopedia. :-) I did have a few questions as to why you made certain changes. I'm not arguing, but attempting to understand for future edits.

  1. For Jack Turner (writer), which is the main entry that I created, you changed the description from "non-fiction writer and television documentary host" (which I had supplied) to "Australian writer". Turner became notable only after his several years studying at Oxford. He is probably better known for his Science Channel documentary series (of which he is the host and a co-writer) than he is for his one book (so far). He self identifies as a "writer", which is why I set that as his article heading, but I think that leaving out the TV documentary host from his description is not technically inaccurate, but somewhat misleading to people trying to disambiguate all the Jack Turners out there. I have no problem with adding Australia to the description (I left it out because I wasn't sure how best to phrase it), but I do think the TV documentary host (or some rephrasing of that clunky term) is important to add back in.
  2. Why did you break the section into a smaller subsection? By your own earlier archived discussions, 25 people seem to be your cutoff for splitting a section. There are only 13 in the new Turner, Ja-Je section, and the preceding Turner, J section only has one person. I like being able to jump quickly from the TOC to the closest name, so I am guessing that's why you did it. On the other hand, I just noticed that you also created a Turner, Ji-Jo, which would have been J-Jo before the split, and that would have been over 25. I guess that answers my own question, doesn't it?
  3. Why did you change Welsh to British for [[[Jack Turner (engineer)]]? I realize that Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and England are all a part of the United Kingdom, but I thought that British was more to do with Britain being a geographical area, and Welsh would seem to be more specific, and more specicifity would be preferable here. Then again, that could just be my limited United States understanding of all things British. I know from reading other talk pages and movies (and we know how authoritative movies aren't), that the specific part of the U.K. people are from is very important to them.

Again. I'm not arguing, and with the exception of adding back Jack Turner (writer)'s hosting work, I totally agree with your edits. I'm just trying to learn and become a better Wikipedian. Have a great day! --Willscrlt 00:13, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] We are smarter..

There were only 2 edits: the first was a complete copyvio, the second was tagging the copyvio. So I don't think there's much point in undeleting that. The text was taken from www.wearesmarter.com. Good job creating a new article! --Fang Aili talk 14:30, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia:Catholic Encyclopedia cat Euro Dioceses

This seemed like a pretty obvious g7 in that the article was created, and all revisions had been made, by the same editor, whose last edit was to put a prod tag on the article. Are you saying that in all g7 situations (99% of which are like the above, where the author is the only editor), I need to type out why the deletion is a g7? That seems like fairly pointless formality. NawlinWiki 13:12, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Moved from user page

Please stop harrasing people who make valuable additions to Wikipedia. Without the freedoms of a user-friendly site, Wikipedia will lose the grip it has on the internet at this time. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 129.171.233.27 (talk • contribs) 04:39, 2 December 2006.

[edit] Don Carlos and Don Carlo treated as two distinct operas

Hi. I have commented on your recent editing on the talk page of Don Carlos. Perhaps you would like to have a look? The original introduction was not ideal, as you know, but I don't think your solution is going to work, especially as it would create an awkward precedent. Many operas exist (and are performed) in multiple versions, treating them all as separate works would not be helpful. - Kleinzach 18:18, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Re:LoPbN

I'm sorry I have no experience with that particular set of articles. I was just confused as to why a relatively obscure musician and a bunch of fictional people were singled out for inclusion on the main Hamilton page when there are plenty of more notable people. Your reasons for not including fictional people are fine but I would contend that the musician is not notable enough to display on the main page. And perhaps change the wording of the link to reflect that the article doesn't only include people with Hamilton as a surname? Axem Titanium 20:12, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Philanthropist

I've added the "{{prod}}" template to the article Philanthropist, suggesting that it be deleted according to the proposed deletion process. All contributions are appreciated, but I don't believe it satisfies Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and I've explained why in the deletion notice (see also "What Wikipedia is not" and Wikipedia's deletion policy). Please either work to improve the article if the topic is worthy of inclusion in Wikipedia, or, if you disagree with the notice, discuss the issues at Talk:Philanthropist. You may remove the deletion notice, and the article will not be deleted, but note that it may still be sent to Articles for Deletion, where it may be deleted if consensus to delete is reached, or if it matches any of the speedy deletion criteria. — Sebastian (talk) 03:33, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Hi Jerzy! I just read your contribution on Talk:Philanthropist. I was at first a bit confused by your link behind "proceeded to a ProD", because it looked like you referred to the fact that you had to restore something. Would you mind replacing that with http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Philanthropist&dir=prev&offset=20061208022000&limit=4&action=history? That would avoid any wrong impressions. Thanks, — Sebastian (talk) 05:46, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Richard Steele (politician)

Sorry about that mess. I realised my mistake and reverted it, but from the look of Wikipedia:How to fix cut and paste moves, that may have made things worse. Thanks for fixing it, I'll be more careful in future. Thanks, — User:JohnAldis 17:44, 10 December 2006 (GMT)

I wasn't trying to add any extra information to the article, in fact, just add a disambiguation page. Thanks for the welcome back. User:JohnAldis 22:35, 11 December 2006.

[edit] Notice

Tomorrow, I will be self nominating for admin. I am notifying you that our lengthy debates about artwork are a major part of my controversies essay. You may recall that these inspired me to produce Campbell's Soup Cans and Haystacks (Monet). If you look at me at [5] you can see these are two of the most important articles during my editorship. Don't be alarmed that you are named specifically.
--TonyTheTiger 16:15, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

I was just looking you up here. I see you are quite active on the list of people by name work. Do you work with the dab people? I like to do hndis work. I see List_of_people_by_name:_John high on your list of pages by edit count. Some of my best work has been Robert Johnson, William Johnson, and Samuel Johnson (disambiguation) followed closely by E. Normus Johnson. I have to get more diligent about taking hndis work to Surname and people by name pages. Is there any project or army of people doing such work. Do you work with WikiProject Disambiguation?
--TonyTheTiger 17:35, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

<<On the topic of {{hndis}} you said: For a while, i diligently replaced the tag by {{Disambig}} when i encountered it, and i continue to question the idea of treating human-name and ship Dabs as special cases. >>

Personally, I thought the purpose of having hndis was to make it easier for surname dab page and LoPbN researchers if people use the {{hndis|name=Surname, Given name}} format. I have been trying to switch tags the other way when I see them paying attention to add the name= part. Obviously, not all entries on hndis pages are human names. This week I plan to work on Ed, Eddie, Edward, & Edgar Jones. I know Edward Jones Investments exists and should be included on the page. However, I like the fact that I can go to Category:Lists of ambiguous human names and look up E Joneses. Why should I be against hndis? P.S. I have current queries to WP_Disambiguation and MOSDAB. Your comments would be appreciated.

--TonyTheTiger 19:56, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

_ _ I may be mistaken, but i was trying to follow the discussion at least in the period when allowing use of the tag was being debated. Altho i may have missed crucial parts of the discussion, or there may have been explicit changes since, i got the impression at some point that a (the?) principal purpose of the concept was to separate the disambiguation among those sharing a surname from disambiguation of the corresponding common noun, especially on the argument that Dabs are for articles that are each a reasonable contender for having the name as its title, which is almost never the case with a surname: John Smith is such a case and Smith is not, since there's no inclination to regard Hegel or Hitler (let alone Smith) as a reasonable title (in place of one that includes a given name as well) for any of the corresponding people. By this argument, a list of people with the same surname is a list page (a legitimate navigational tool, tho neither a true article nor a true Dab), and it's reasonable to argue from that alone that clarity of purpose justifies keeping the Dab and the surname list separate. I thot, more specifically, that it was argued that long lists of people with the surname cluttered Dabs to the detriment of the Dabs' core purpose. (BTW, my inclination is to say instead that, e.g., "Stein" is more likely to be typed as a quick means of either avoiding typing or compensating for uncertainty re the accepted given name (Ted, Teddy, Teddie, Edward, or Theodore Kennedy?) or its spelling (including, e.g., Johnathan, Jonathon, and the other two combinations that they suggest), but i'm not inclined to press the issue.)
_ _ Anyway, i was talking about removing them when their use was contrary to WP:MOSDAB, and that page has since been changed to make them an accepted variant. My most recent glance there suggested that ships and people are not being treated as parallel cases as i had assumed there were being.
--Jerzy•t 23:21, 14 December 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Robert Larson

I've added the "{{prod}}" template to the article Robert Larson, suggesting that it be deleted according to the proposed deletion process. All contributions are appreciated, but I don't believe it satisfies Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and I've explained why in the deletion notice (see also "What Wikipedia is not" and Wikipedia's deletion policy). Please either work to improve the article if the topic is worthy of inclusion in Wikipedia, or, if you disagree with the notice, discuss the issues at Talk:Robert Larson. You may remove the deletion notice, and the article will not be deleted, but note that it may still be sent to Articles for Deletion, where it may be deleted if consensus to delete is reached, or if it matches any of the speedy deletion criteria. TheRingess 07:21, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] LoPbN rem you did

Actually, I generally don't have great consideration for the edit summaries I write upon deleting references/links to articles that have been deleted, mostly because I do it too often and I'm lazy to add a fully explanatory justification for my removal. :-/ Usually it's just WP:COI that was spread along with the (deleted) article, so I don't think many would really bother if those non-notable mentions were simply removed. Regards,--Húsönd 03:37, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] template:Stub-group

Hi - I've just speedily deleted Template:Stub-group - it was identical to a previous template which was deleted after it proved to be an absolute nightmare for stub sorting about a year and a half ago. Please use the standard stub templates rather than creating one of these things again! Also, in future, if you wish to create any stub templates of any kind, it'd be good if you proposed them in the standard way at WP:WSS/P. Grutness...wha? 09:44, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

S'alright. Sorry if I seemed a bit heavy-handed with the speedying. Stub-sorting is one area of WP that is pretty organised (though that isn't often met with approval by people outside the project!). It's very much a case of herding cats, though. Grutness...wha? 22:12, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
Interesting idea, but I don't really think it would solve some of the problems. One of the bigger headaches in might cause is with substing - WP:WSS relies quite heavily on "What links here" when calculating the potential size of categories for currently upmerged template types. Thanks for the kind words about the stub sorting project, BTW! Grutness...wha? 23:20, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
Ah - I think i've got you now. Hm... not sure. I must admit to being pretty naive of the workings of the markup language and the like used by WP - I'm very much an "end user" - so I'm only reporting what I think was the reason for the problems. One thing that probably would be a concern though is that it would basically become a very very heavily used template - if you consider that probably about 1/3 of stub articles are doublestubbed, that would be about 125000 articles. If some form of multistubbing template like stub group was being used it would probably rapidly become the single most used template on WP, and that could conceivably cause hardship on WP's servers (this page talks about some of the issues faced with metatemplates in the past, and I think similar problems might occur here). One of the advantages of stub sorting using loads of different templates is that there aren't one or two really heavy-drain templates in use. I'm not 100% sure this would also be a problem with {{stub group}}, but I suspect it might be. In any case, you're now at the stage where you're getting a bit too technical for me to be able to comment too much :). Grutness...wha? 07:47, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Gary Roberts

I noticed you removed my move of Gary Roberts from Gary Roberts (ice hockey player) to Gary Roberts (hockey). Having looked at the article again, he definitely plays ice hockey, not hockey, so surely my move was correct...? robwingfield «T•C» 11:09, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

  • Thanks for discussing, but no. To paraphrase Lenin, the purpose of dab'n is to dab'ate. And it should do that as tersely as possible. If "hockey" is sufficient to distinguish a contender for the title "Gary Roberts" from all the others, it is a successful dab'g sufx, and any elaboration on it would pervert the Dab'n mechanism, from its purpose as a navigational device, into some kind of substitute for the text of the article. The titles of books are primarily for marketing (George Washington: Hero of Independence) which can justify including some storytelling in them, but those of 'pedia articles are solely for identification. I'm not even looking at ice hockey and hockey, bcz i'm a native speaker of modern English, and i don't need a dictionary (let alone an encyclopedia, which is a poor substitute as a source of information on the usage of words) to tell me what matters here: saying "ice hockey" (since there are no air-, field-, or knock-hockey equipment, games, players, or teams around to be confused with the matter at hand) would provide no benefit, and would have a (small) direct cost and a large indirect one (contributing to the impression that terseness in dab sfxes is unnecessary or even undesirable).
(BTW, the dates in the other Gary Roberts titles are even worse, and having invested this much (away from my normal LoPbN-tree concerns) will probably get me to fix them as well, tho the correct approach is not in that case so immediately apparent: it will require reading the bios involved.)
Disambiguation work is necessary, and not a lot of fun. I appreciate your taking part in it!
--Jerzy•t 18:27, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
Okay, good points well made...! As far as the footballer articles are concerned, I used the year of birth as that seems to be an approach that's used in the same scenario for other footballers with the same name. Both players are English, so nationality can't be used, which is the other common attribute used to disambiguate players of the same sport of the same name... happy to hear any alternative suggestions you have, though! robwingfield «T•C» 19:48, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Mephistopholes

Sorry about that! It was a good faith mistake. Thank you for catching my mistake. I de-orphan article and i usually hone in on key words (mostly words that are the names of other articles) In this case, i just misintepreted the relation between the two. The word was in the article, and i understand it was used in a dergotaory sense but I had not seen it used before in that context. Hence, why I linked it. Again, I appreciate you catching that! Thanks. -- Chrislk02 (Chris Kreider) 21:16, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the kind response to my stupid mistake! I will take more care in the future. You are a wikipedian that others should look up to! Keep up the good work. -- Chrislk02 (Chris Kreider) 21:49, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] barnstar

100px The Editor's Barnstar
I, Chrislk02, award you this editors barnstar for reverting my mistake to the article on Mephistopheles, and how cool and calm you were in handling the reversion! You are an asswet to wikipedia -- Chrislk02 (Chris Kreider) 14:12, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

I usually like to put awards on the main page but you did not have an award section so i put it here. Pelase feel free to move it wherever you desire or even delete it if you feel so inclined. Thanks again! -- Chrislk02 (Chris Kreider) 14:12, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

And thanks to you in return, Chris, for your kind compliments to this curmudgeon, and your concern for the crucial matter of civility on WP. I'm not much for x-large and graphics, but the sentiment is heartily appreciated.
--Jerzy•t 20:12, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Re: Brill

I have no problem with you handling all of the process. I am not an admin. I think that you will be fair in how ever you handle it.

--Kevin Murray 01:44, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of people by name (2nd nomination)

Hi, I just wanted to alert you to this. Happy new year! <KF> 00:33, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Re:New AfD LoPbN

Jerzy, just wanted to wish you and your loved ones a Happy New Year. Tony Jr. hasn't been doing much lately in Wiki because he's colaborating with articles in "Ringside" magazine, which at times are featured in HBO Boxing. It takes a lot of his time. As for myself, I write for various cultural magazines, but I always keep an eye on my stuff in Wiki. I took a look at the issue and expressed my opinion. It was nice hearing from you. Take care. Tony the Marine 06:14, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] LoPbN canvassing

Are you aware that it can be considered disruptive to consensus to "lobby" for keep in an AFD, as you did recently for the second nomination here? You may have made your task harder going forward, if it looks like this has tainted the natural balance of the discussion. -- nae'blis 20:34, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

Because of my stated concerns above I wanted to go ahead and make the decision myself on the AFD, which was to keep. I have left a note on the list's talk page about how to go forward and make this more usable/manageable. While I understand your concern about people not knowing about "yet another nomination", and it didn't seem to present a problem in this case, please understand that I only wished to see consensus upheld and not subverted by either side. Good luck in the future. -- nae'blis 22:45, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] British/Irish

OK I'll bite, having had my first/only wikipedia edit remodified by you on the LoPbN Hamilton page.

It is arguable that William Rowan Hamilton be called British since, during his lifetime, Ireland was part of the British empire. However what is to be gained by saying that? Britain at one time held dominion over 2/3 of the globe. If we say that all those people were 'British' we arrive at some stunning incongruities: Ghandi as British; Ben Franklin as British. Just because no Irish passports were issued doesn't mean that Ireland didn't have a national identity. Italy didn't exist until the 19th century, but Leonardo Da Vinci is listed as Italian.

What is to be lost, however, is precision, which I would think would be one of the primary goals of a wikipedia article. I'm not going to remodify the page since you clearly are quite an active member of the community however I do invite you to actually click on the links of the people named on the page. Click on the main William Rowan Hamilton page and you'll see him identified properly as Irish.—Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.23.27.114 (talk) 13:32, 3 January 2007

_ _ I really appreciate that question, bcz i thot i had it thought thru as far as possible, and now find otherwise. You catch me at a busy (week-long) moment, when i'm unwilling to undertake research, but i think i got my notions on this subject somewhere in WP:MOSBIO (or a lk from it), specifically where style for the lead sentence, (para-) 'graph, and section of a bio is specified. Hopefully the unstated subconscious distinction i have been making between (i'm largely joking here in naming them!) manifest-destiny expansionism and frank overseas colonialism, is either recognized or deprecated there. I feel sure that LoPbN is roughly analogous to the lead, in that we can't make all those nuanced distinctions in what are supposed to be brief entry points into the relatively exhaustive bio articles.
_ _ Part of my concern is a slippery slope one, that there are so many nationalities that fall short of passport status, and that are likely to be impediments rather than aids to navigation. E.g., there are bios about some Indian people that mention the ethnicity ("Gujarti" sticks in my mind) corresponding to one of the Indian states but never mention "India" or "Indian", despite the growing number of states, which even some Indians refuse to keep track of; i think few Americans understand what "Catalan" means (or have ever heard of "Homage to Catalonia"), or (on the other side of the coin!) know where Eritrea is or the history of its national status.
_ _ User:Dale Arnett has been exhibiting a similar interest in LoPbN-entry descriptions, which i've promised to respond to, and i hope that will turn into a discussion on Talk:LoPbN or one of its sub-pages, and thence into style guidelines as definitive as i usually try to make my opinions on the subject sound. If you're interested enuf to register a username & start participating regularly in editing, i'd expect you to become a valuable voice in that effort.
_ _ Thanks for a good question!
--Jerzy•t 17:38, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Air-soldier / airman

Greetings. I've added a little more to Talk:List of people by name: Sti and I would be grateful for your thoughts. Thanks. Greenshed 01:53, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] AWB & LoPbN

Uh, what was that? - I have no idea like this took place, whether it was a fault of me or a bug by the AWB, but since it seems to have happened only one times, I suspect the first case. However I will watch the AWB in any case if I use it again. Thanks for the correction and the notice. By the way I was very surprised as I read the German word 'schmutz'. I did not know that it has found its way into the English language. Greetings ~~ Phoe talk 11:35, 5 January 2007 (UTC) ~~

Hi, no need for an apologise, it could absolutely have been that way.
  • In Germany we divide between "Comedians" (similar to your stand-ups Kevin James, Ray Romano or Jerry Seinfeld) and "Kabarettisten" (what would be translated as revue performer best). While the first ones are rather using the simple humour which everybody understands, the second ones represent the profound humour about which one must always think. As a rule, Comedians make fun of everyday situations, and Kabarettisten about the politics. The former would like to maintain, second provoke.
  • I don't know many Americans so I can't decide whether your German is good for them. My hometown has housed about 10000 Canadians more than 20 years and I must then, if I compare your German with their, say that you come off very well. You make very few mistakes (sometimes at the word endings). Best wishes ~~ Phoe talk 16:49, 6 January 2007 (UTC) ~~

[edit] Merge help

I have a conference in town this week and have to reformat my HD next week. I have been quite limited on WP time of late with the holidays and all and will be so for the next week. If it O.K. if I don't get to the merger for a week or so I will do it. It is only tangentially of interest to me, but I would undertake the task as a learning experience in much the same way I produced the 3 art articles. BTW, I just put Campbell's Soup Cans up for FA after going through PR and GA review. TonyTheTiger 14:51, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Regarding Steven Leyba

Jerzy- While you clearly have more experience as a wikipedia user than I, I feel it is unfair of you to propose to delete my work based on an assumption on your part that happens to be incorrect. Steven Leyba is a legitimate painter, performance artist, published author, and musician. He is well known in many circles, and for you to say that creating an article about him and his work is akin to "self promotion" is completely unfair and also completely untrue, as I am not him. Perhaps Leyba doesn't interest you on a personal level, but surely you must know that others have differing opinions and tastes than you. Now, on the other hand, if my formatting is incorrect (i.e. not citing sources accurately, etc) then that is another matter. I admit that I am still learning and fine tuning my wikipedia skills, and I am more than willing to rectify any technical mistakes. But to write him off entirely as unworthy of an article, etc, seems unjustified. Furthermore, your harsh manner is confusing and seems wholly unnecessary, in my opinion. rebecca 07:37, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Bardia Mural

I would have voted to keep unmerged in the John Frederick Brill debate. I think the artist is fairly interesting and mildly notable for his combined military service and artwork. TonyTheTiger 21:37, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

I see the merger remains unresolved. Why don't you try a {{expert-subject|Visual arts}} tag or some other notification of the WP Visual arts people. TonyTheTiger 19:38, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
I spent some time at the Main Downtown branch of the Chicago Public Library today. I spoke with the art reference librarian about the Bardia Mural and John Frederick Brill. Neither is notable enough for inclusion in any print materials she could find. There does exist a Frederick Brill, who is in different Dictionaries of British Art who lived from 1920-1984. There are numerous internet citations. I may attempt to expand the article a bit from these, but many seem to be referenced in the article. I have not heard from you and hope you are not disappointed in me that no progress has been made. TonyTheTiger 18:35, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
P.S. Campbell's Soup Cans is really just awaiting some image consents before going up for FAC2. It has come a long way. TonyTheTiger 18:37, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Recipients of formal honors & related categories

Hi Jerzy - I've been working on the various Awards categories for a while now, and have proposed to merge Category:Recipients of formal honors, Category:Prize winners, and Category:Award winners together. It looks like you're one of the very early editors of the Category:Recipients of formal honors, so if you have some thoughts about the proposal please join in. Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2007 January 9#Category:Prize winners and Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2007 January 9#Category:Prizes . Best, lquilter 04:26, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] El Malcriado

Thank you for the information you provided on El Malcriado. You are correct, it was the newspaper of the United Farm Workers. Would you please tell me where you came across the info? It will be helpful in writing the article. Thanks, --Rockero 05:53, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Steven Johnson Leyba

The way you've laid out your argument makes it very hard to follow. It would be a lot easier if it was just in plain prose. Tyrenius 18:45, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the response. I will leave you to clarify... I was going to post a comment on the AfD and ended up talking myself into a keep... Tyrenius 22:39, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wilhelm Schmid (disambiguation)

The books that I employ contain only one Wilhelm Schmid who was born in 1859. As I wrote his bio, I may have hastily placed a link to an improper page. I tried to straighten out the links by erasing them. Currently, there is a very popular philosopher with many connections to Internet URLs. His name is Wilhelm Schmid, too; he was born in 1953. He has no bio in Wikipedia. There is also a Wilhelm Schmid, born in 1892, who was an artist. He has no bio in Wikipedia. SA Men lists a Wilhelm Schmid (a soldier in WWI), but information on him is unavailable. One or two others may have existed in the 17th and 18th centuries. I was surprised to find so many of them. GhostofSuperslum 21:08, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for the information. I won't add any extra and unnecessary details to the descriptives from now on. Basically, I knew that I was taking a risk by adding in those unnecessary enhancements. I shall stop as of now. GhostofSuperslum 23:00, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] In response to your comments

Well at last, I get a message from the one and only Jerzy, the chief custodian of the LoPbN, a lonely and honorable profession! Thanks for the helpful comments regarding months and making distinctions between similar list entries. Yes, you get the gist of my "project", just skimming down the list of all articles and adding all entries that look like people. For a reason, I have a lot of free time on my hands now, and figured this is a good way to spend (a portion of) it, as it needs doing. I sure don't expect to get most of it completed any time soon, but as this seems to be a task that does not extend itself well to automation, it falls to someone with the will and general lack-of-life (humble moi) to take charge and populate the list. Thanks again for the help, and for your hard work! --Slyguy 01:03, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your extensive comments and suggestions. About nationality, in the last week I've learned that saying "(country 1)-born (country 2) etc." easily resolves the multiple nationality issue. Also, I've never thought about editing sections before, but now it seems like a good idea and I will incorporate it in my process. (Click on "edit" on the right-hand side, correct?)
Currently, I would estimate that the (English) LoPbN contains no more than 15 per cent of all the bios in (the English) Wikipedia, and that's a generous estimate. If the list grows to contain, say, 50 per cent, then creating sections with a higher granularity and finding faster ways to navigate may become an issue. This problem could be averted by arguing for only "notable" additions to the list, but in my case, I figure that if they are sufficiently notable to have an article at all, then they are sufficiently notable to be included in the list.
FWIW, I often check your lo-res changes to the list to get ideas about proper format.
--Slyguy 15:40, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
The 15 per cent figure (for number of bios already in the list) was just a rough estimate, as for that and the other estimates you were curious about, I could take a chunk of time and do a sort of informal "survey" of how many bios are stubs, etc. I'll do some thinking on this. (The bios should probably be picked at random from all of WP instead of using a "clump" of them, since the nature of that clump might influence the results. E.g., if I surveyed from all people with given name "Nigel" then that would probably return mostly British bios.)
Do you agree with my labeling edits as minor? In each case, it's usually just one bio added to the list.
--Slyguy 17:42, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

One method of random sampling might be:

1. Clicking on "Random article"

2. Seeing if the article that comes up is a bio

3. If it is, use it as a data point

4. Do this until 1000 (or however many) bios are sampled.

Obviously, this is not efficient and labor-intensive.

I think that, after reading your thoughts, and seeing others add entries without tagging them as minor, that I will drop marking my adds as minor. After all, as you wrote, every entry adds substance. I doubt anyone will complain.

--Slyguy 14:29, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Morrison

With regards to the many, many names I have been adding to the List of people by name: Morr, are we only supposed to add names if they have a bio article? In the case of those three you removed, I only added them in the first place because the names exist as redirects to those articles. It doesn't really bother me one way or the other, but it would be useful to know. Incidently, I spotted a couple of red links on that very page - I take it they're a definite no no? PC78 16:24, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Like I said, I don't really mind. For the sake of a couple of links my own preference is to be inclusive - obviously someone felt it necessary to create those names as redirects - but I'm happy to follow your lead. PC78 17:27, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Uhhhhh...

If got no idea what you're talking about, but "Wikify" refers to changing the appearance of an article to reflect Wikipedia's Manual of Style. It's uncommon to see it in edit summaries, but seeing as how edit summaries aren't requires in the first place, I highly doubt that anyone cares. --Captain Wikify Argh! 21:12, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Brad Listermann

Jerzy said: Please take another look at your deletion of Brad Listermann, Bollywood newcomer producer & returned Californian.

The prime reason I followed through with the Speedy request is that - on top of the speedy deletion tagging it received - it looked like an autobiography, and it's very difficult to keep the Speedy deletion patrollers away from something like that.

If you want to restore the article to its previous state, you have my okay to do so, and if you feel it necessary to take it to AfD following this restoration, I'll leave that up to you. Bobo. 06:14, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Incidentally

I know it sounds really corny to say this, but it's awesome to finally get in touch with the first person whose userpage I ever visited on Wikipedia, all that time ago in 2004 when I was so scared of taking the plunge and joining. Your essay about non-native speakers, despite being one myself, got me interested in the real open-ness, visibility, and collaborative nature of this project. Thank you. Bobo. 06:28, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Count & transclusion

Thanks for the detailed analysis of the progress I've been making on the LoPbN. To be honest, though, (as you know) I am (for now) skipping over some tracts of names that are non-Western and difficult to alphabetize. To give a ballpark figure, I've probably included 75 per cent of names that I've come across so far, so you can factor that into your figures. Eventually, I may go back over the ones I've skipped, figure them out (for example, by seeing how they are alphabetized in categories they are in), and then include them. (I am keeping track of names I've skipped -- e.g. "Abu"s, "Aga"s.) I believe it makes little difference at this point, since with the sheer volume of people to add, 75 per cent of a zillion is still a zillion.  :-)

Thanks for the info on the transclusion reduction. I'll tell you if I notice any difference in response time. --Slyguy 15:40, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] George Peel

Are you kidding, how would I remember that? To be more serious, no, I'm not sure. I would assume very strongly that the two George Peels are one and the same. As far as I know, the names and dates given by me are from the Norton Anthology of English Literature. Sadly, my copy of the Norton is 100 miles away at the moment, so I can't look it up. john k 05:27, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] "List of people by name" uncat-tagging

Hrm, that's very odd. The 'bot should have skipped that, since it's now checking for "live" category membership, as well as "category:" in the wikitext; and it shouldn't even have been looking at it in the first place, since the list it was working from was all (supposedly) uncategorised in the last db dump. Mystery upon mystery. I'll certainly see what I can do to prevent this, but currently I'm baffled as to why it'd do it in the first place. What was the other such article you noticed? Alai 10:49, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

OK, no problem, I think I've (partly) worked out what was going on on the more recent page. There was indeed a bug, and a pretty blatant one at that: it was pattern-patching against "Categories" in the live page, whereas if there's just one, it's "Category". D'oh. I hadn't noticed that until now as it only happens when the article is on a list of candidates (meaning, supposedly, that until recently it was indeed uncategorised), and it's now in exactly one category transcluded via a template. However, the part that confuses me is why this was on the list, as it seems that it was categorised at the time of the db dump, but said categorisations doesn't appear therein. Odd. Hopefully won't happen again now that I've modified the 'bot code: please let me know if you see anything similar again. Alai 21:16, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Felix

I'm curious about this edit you made, with the edit summary "fix broken link." I tested the link before I saved and it worked, and I tested it again via the diff page after you made your change. Why do you say it's broken? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Matchups (talk • contribs) 02:00, 31 January 2007 (UTC).

[edit] Cat People

How bad an idea would it be to run PockBot against Category:People, in light of

  1. the unknown number and size of cycles,
  2. performance impact, given the 6-digit scale of real people descended from Category:People (Category:Living people alone has 152K entries), and
  3. the difficulty of weeding out descendants, on that scale, that are not real people?

--Jerzy•t

Hi. It wouldn't be a bad idea so much as it wouldn't be particularly useful to you - PockBot has code built in so that it will cut out after a cycle if the article number has reached a certain threshold (i think about 2000). It would then notify you of the articles fetched thus far and that this reresented a subset of all the articles in that category. So you would see the list and status of a certain number of articles but, for a category of that size, nowhere near all of them. The bot is only really intended to be used on smaller, manageable cats, in order to give an indication of article statuses that can then be investigated or graded manually etc. - PocklingtonDan 07:06, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

OK, thanks; better to know than to continue mulling over whether you're likely to have implemented outputting the difference between two Cats' descendant sets. (I'm now lighthearted enuf abt it to think of it as Undead Mode, since it could be used to find descendants of Category:People who are descendants of neither Category:Living people nor Category:Dead people -- something more useful than it sounds like it should be.) Thanks for your attention, and keep up the good work.
--Jerzy•t 07:26, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Cycle handling; descendant-Cat reports; setting crawl limits

Several matters that may be worth covering on or lk'g to from User:PockBot:

  1. I believe it is now regarded at least as inevitable that the structure of the Cat system should not be a DAG. Is it feasible to provide a brief statement on the bot's reaction to fully traversing a cycle?
  2. At some point, the Cat system was enhanced to dynamically explore on a single page the descendant (quasi-)tree of a Cat. But can PockBot provide usable output reflecting the full descendant (quasi-)tree that it visits for a given request?
  3. Long preface: It would AFAI can see require significant extensions of the Cat system if it were to support touring algorithms aimed at including only what i might call "common sense" descendants of a Cat. (For example, Spain is probably not be a child of Category:Countries, but is surely a descendant, and is also a common-sense descendant bcz it is a country. On the other hand Category:Spain surely has many descendant articles whose topics are not countries but rather aspects of the country of Spain: e.g., Bullfighting is presumably a descendant, but not a common-sense one, of Category:Countries.
Short question: Can/could PockBot be instructed against following Cat memberships that would include non-common-sense descendants? -- i suppose with some syntax like
Exclude/Include <Cat>/<Catlist> [Except <Cat>/<Catlist>]
and an include-the-parent-but-not-the-children option, if that's not implicit in what i said.

--Jerzy•t 23:38, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Hi. PockBot's operation works as follows - it fetches a list of all subcats in a category, and then all subcats of each of those subcats, and then again and so on. Then it starts fetching articles on a hierarchical basis (ie, first from the master cat, then fromt he subcats, then the sub-sub-cats and so on).
PockBot is a bot and so is stupid. It would be hopeless to try and program it to make common-sense judgements about category descendants. I have noticed the phenomenon you describe of sub-sub-cats being related to their parent cat, but not to that parent's parent's cat. However, in most cases, I have found that this is simply a case of mis-categorisation at some level, and something I have then corrected. In a lesser number of cases I have found that it is not miscategorisation pre se, but rather different interpretations of what a category should be. For example, for the category "People", I would expect to find only real historical or contemporary human persons. However, subcats might contain cartoon, or fictional people such as "Jessica Rabbit" and "Zorro". This is really more a problem to do with category names being too vague, and one person interpreting people as "real people, alive or dead" and another as "anything that can be considered a person, fictional or real"
In the ideal world, based on my experience with PockBot, I would like earch article to be placed in one, and only one, hierarchical category, and for each category to have an auxiliary name or tag that states what elements should be in it. For example, "bullfighting", should NOT be listed under a subcat of Spain, because its parent is a country, it should clearly only be listed under "sports" or similar.
In conclusion, PockBot shows up a lot of the flaws with the current categorisation system, but sadly doesn't really have a way of working around them.
Would it be useful to have an "ignore subcats and get only articles in root cat" option or only to have a fully-specifiable tree selection option?
Thanks - PocklingtonDan 07:20, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Ath to he

Hey uh, just wanted to say thanks for picking up my typo and that you are, by a large margin, the best a blowing things out of proportion that I've ever seen. Thanks again Electriceel 13:06, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

I like the phrase "Reckless Laziness", but unfortunately it (as much as it would appear to) doesn't apply to me. I distribute my laziness in specifically thought out portions, with great care to give as much laziness as possible to every situation (within reason). But on this occasion, it seems I overindulged in laziness. I must have had a rough day or something, and I... well, it's like a beer, or a block of chocolate - laziness as a reward. And so, the typo (which indeed it was) of Antheunis instead of Atheunis was made. Now, as you point out, it did lead to massive incorrectness (you better believe you can have degrees of incorrectness!), but it was from a typo, not on that page, but the one I copied the name from, which I'm going to fix soon... I've alotted a significant amount of laziness to it : )
As for my understanding of the English language, my written grammar, syntax and vocabulary are impeccable, but for your own safety, STAY AWAY WHEN I SPEAK OUT LOUD! If for nothing else, to save yourself from being showered in saliva. But that doesn't really apply on WP.
Uh... where was I?...
The fact was, your "over enthusiasm" did disgruntle me, but that's ok - at least you can talk about it reasonably.
So thank you Mr. Harmless Drudge (which I did get without the link actually), I only hope that one day I can return the typo correction favour : ) Electriceel 22:57, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Red Links

Each and every time that I place a name into the lists, it means that I am looking at a biography of the person in New International Encyclopedia. I use the lists to fulfill the "What links here" part in the toolbox. I am trying to grasp how to place a name into the lists so that it fits without generating any objections. The lists of people by name is a sideline activity that I perform whenever I'm otherwise unoccupied. My main use of the lists is the creation of Red Links which will conveniently serve to satisfy the "What links here" requirement after I have started a biography of a person. I noticed that years are not written (0000-00) but are written (0000-0000) using four numbers for the YOB and four numbers for the YOD. Henceforth, I will follow that model. Also, I will keep the descriptives short. No more of the "Chancellor of the German Empire 1894-1900" types. By the way, "Politician" is a word that is commonest in the United States. Other nations may not use the word. Please leave my Red Links in place because I may (or may not) create an article that makes use of them (sooner or later). I don't know who removed my Red Links from the name Jones but I was frustrated after having typed them in only to find out that they had been obliterated. My Red Links were destroyed! GhostofSuperslum 01:48, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Matt Beaumont

Thanks for your message on my talk page, which I found after I had finished my reply at Talk:Matt Beaumont. All the best, <KF> 00:56, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Vandalism matter???

Hi there, you left a message on my user talk page saying that I made wreckless edits to wikipedia articles (List of people by name and List of people by name: Sd) however I did not make any changes to the first article mentioned above, if you do not believe me then please sheck the page history). I admit that I made some changes to the List of people by name: Sd and I admit that I made a mistake there by changing it'sd title so it sdaid disambiguation at the end and I spelt it wrong first time so I had to correct it and at the time I believed that all dismabig pages need to have disambiguation in brackets after the title so I can undersatannd your reversion of that but you also said on my talk page that this was one of my first page moves, well clearly this is not the case per the user move log under my user name This was also not my first edit, I have made of 6,000 contributions to wikipedia and have been here for six months. Aswell as this I do not edit under any other user accounts or anyonymous IP addresses as you mentioned on my user page; Tellyaddict is my only user and edting name on wikipedia. Finally you seem to be in violation of WP:AGF (to make this worse you seemed to think I was new here therefore in strong violation of this). You also warned me saying I will be blocked without further warning if I vandalise anything else which I haven't anyway you have then skipped to a Template:test4 when you are meant to start at a Template:Test1 and move up appropriately depending on the severity, even though I didn't vandalise anything and my edits were in good faith, I am quite annoyed at this matter, sorry for the long message but I needed to sort this out. If you've anyother comments please leave them on my talk page.TellyaddictEditor review! 12:53, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

  • Also with respect it seems another editor has commented on this saort of thing directly below my comment.—Preceding unsigned comment added by Tellyaddict (talk • contribs) 12:57, 13 February 2007

[edit] Dave Kleiman

In reference to your edit in the List of People by Name for this person, he is a computer forensics person and not a computer scientist or a programmer. Perhaps you are not familiar with what computer forensics is. --Kimon 12:55, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Removal of Pages for "Bennet Wong", "Jock McKeen" and "Wong and McKeen"

Thank you very much for your detailed note that you left for me. I appreciate your suggestions and tutoring. My learning curve is steep ... this is the first effort for me in Wikipedia ... and I want to get it right. I left a posting on the "Talk:Wong and McKeen" page responding to another editor, and outlining my intention to create a proper biography for Wong, for McKeen, for the "Wong and McKeen" partnering (they are a team in the Rogers and Hammerstein tradition) and ultimately to create a page for "The Haven Institute" which they co-founded. I understand the necessity for rigour in such matters .... I will bring myself up to speed on the proper approaches to documenting the articles. Meanwhile, thanks for the human touch and the information. William Meyer 21:33, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Kelisha Osborne afd

I noticed you pruned that article rather substantially. I've put an afd, if you'd like to weigh in with an opinion. Joyous! | Talk 23:45, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Re: John Harvards

You're welcome. I noticed there was definitely something amiss when the names suddenly jumped from Harvard, John to Harvey, Brian, under the Harva heading. Now, usually when there are comment brackets around a name (or, more rarely, a group of them) it's meant as a signal that the name shouldn't be added to the list, but that obviously wasn't the case here, so I took the liberty and closed the comment.

Thanks for the census list of common names -- I've actually looked at it before, a long time ago, but it's always interesting to look at. I never thought it would take so long to go from the Alberts to the Alexes, but there were a lot of Spanish and Slavic variations of Alexander (Alejandro/a, Aleksander, Aleksei, etc.) between them. You've probably noticed I'm using the LoPbN template now -- I haven't noticed a significant improvement in the speed of entry from doing that, but it should probably be done that way, as it makes the data more "structured".

--Slyguy 19:33, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Jose Bonifacio d' Andrade e Silva

Please see if you can fix "Andrade e Silva, Jose Bonifacio d'" which has two pages (one is a stub). The entry needs to be worked over by someone who is capable of repairing it. I cannot fix it. He is either "Jose Bonifacio" or "Bonifacio Jose" d' (Astrada or Astrade) e Silva. A redirect exists. GhostofSuperslum 03:11, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

I tried to employ Unicode, too, but nothing resulted except another red link. Thanks for intervening. New International Encyclopedia always employs upper-case lettering at the start of its articles. "ANDRADA E SILVA, Bonifacio José d'" is the initial entry. (The a in Bonifacio has no accent mark). I suspected that the entry might be a generator of uncertainties. The E is actually a lower-case e. His two names are switched, with "Bonifacio" preceding "José." I am going to place him into the article called Wikipedia:Errors in the New International Encyclopedia that have been corrected in Wikipedia. Non-English names are generators of uncertainties because of accent marks and variant spellings. In will erase the red link called "Astrada E Silva." GhostofSuperslum 04:11, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
My error was that I overlooked the "de" part of his name. There is no "de" in New International Encyclopedia. Things appear to be shipshape, now. GhostofSuperslum 04:21, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] "Martial artist" & template question

I agree about martial artist vs. martial arts practitioner, now that I've read your reasoning. It's actually one of the many things I've wondered about how to phrase -- I've actually listed people as m.a.p.s in the past, but then I switched to m.a. because it was more "compact", but since you've pointed out the ambiguous nature of the term (which I never really considered in depth), m.a.p. appears preferable even though it's a bit of a mouthful.

Feel free to take your comments on my talk page and incorporate them into the Talk:LoPbN pages any time -- I certainly don't "own" them and they're useful for the general public.

Hey, I have a question. When using the LoPbN template, I can't seem to make it work well with article titles that include info after the family name -- i.e. John Smith, Jr., or Mike Jones (architect) and Mike Jones (politician) -- because if I entered it in that way ({LoPbN Entry|Mike|Jones (politician)|(etc.)}), it would show up as "Jones (politician), Mike" (etc.) on the list, and we obviously don't want the (politician) to show up in that spot. Is there any way around this? Or should I just enter it the old-fashioned way, as I have been doing for such cases?

Thanks for the extensive commentary -- what I like about your remarks is that they give lots and lots of background and you present such a good, solid case for why things should be put in the way you think they should. Are you a rhetorician, by any chance?  :-) As I write on my page, I appreciate hearing constructive suggestions.

--Slyguy 15:40, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Ho man, am I ever embarassed. I didn't bother searching for documentation of the LoPbN template before you gave me a link to its talk page. Using computers for so long, you think I would have learned the importance of RTFM by now.  :-) I only learned how to use it by examining how others have made use of it, which works just fine for most occasions, except for the ones I asked you about. Well, now I've added Template_talk:LoPbN_Entry and User:Jerzy/LoPbN_Tools (another page I didn't know about, but came across after seeing what linked to the first link above) to my bookmarks. I'm sure there are more things to discover when I dig deeper!
Thanks for the diversion into sexual-selection theory; an interesting read!
Sincerely,
Count Sly Cardinal Guy, Sr.  :-)
--Slyguy 18:43, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Talk:Kelisha Osborne

See my comment. Should Elite be reinstated now? Tyrenius 04:49, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Requesting clarification re LoPbN

Hi, Jerzy, I'm Lini, a member of the Biography Wikiproject. First I'd like to ask, were you aware that "Adding one's (biography) article to LoPbN" is included in Step 9 of WikiProject Biography 11 easy steps to producing at least a B article ?? :) So, I have begun checking some of the biography articles that I am interested in, for a link from the LoPbN.

As you probably noticed, I recently edited List of people by name: Sf-Sg, adding the description "Empress of the Holy Roman Empire" to the entry for Sforza, Bianca Maria. I see that you have since then changed the description to "Italian-born royal-family member". After carefully reading What Belongs in an Entry besides the Link?, I would deduce that your rationale is that "royal-family member" is more general than "Empress" (as in the politician vs. president example), and that "Italian-born royal-family member" better fits the standard of <nationality> <occupation>. So, that is probably enough to go on to better inform any future contributions that I might make to the LoPbN. However, I would ask you to clarify your edit summary notation "lo-res trmnlgy".

Also, I am interested in adding the members of the Este noble family to the LoPbN, for example Ippolito d'Este. I've checked, and believe that they are not yet listed either under D Prefix or under Est-Esz. In your opinion, on which of those two pages should they be, or on both?

A final comment; having discovered the LoPbN, I am impressed with the work that has been involved, and, being an organizer, and a "list/index type of person" :) myself, I like it very much.

Cheers, Lini 01:40, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Another Question

In the process of checking Est-Esz for the presence of members of the Este family, I noticed the absence of author Eleanor Estes, so I decided to add her name. On the Estes dab page, I found several people with surname Estes. I've added them all to the Est-Esz section. There are now 32 names in that section. Would I normally need to alert people interested in the LoPbN that a section may now be too long? Do I take steps myself to split it? In Talk:List of people by name/Intra-page structure, I see some mention of 25 items as a threshold for splitting, for both lists of people and TOC entries, but did not see a confirmation that this number, was definitely decided upon, or that the Experimental Bullet-List Heirarchy was definitely going to be adopted. Also, where do things now stand as far as the "Great Leap Forward"? Thanks, Lini 03:00, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for your time and effort to answer my questions. I believe that I will make a beginner's attempt at the section split for the Est-Esz section on the Es page; however, I will add the members of the (d')Este family first, since they fall into the same section under the current arrangement. I hope to accomplish this sometime this next week (I try to limit time spent on Wikipedia on any given day to small doses, otherwise, it actually is too addictive for me). Hopefully that is not too long to wait for the split to happen. If real life intervenes too much and I do not get it done within the week, then please feel free not to wait for me to have my chance to attempt it. Thanks again, Lini 05:04, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Est-Esz has been split

I've completed the addition of the d'Este names and my attempt of the split of the Est-Esz section on the LoPbN Es page. As a learning experience, if you have time to look it over, I'd appreciate your feedback either as comments on a talk page, or directly, as edits of the Es page (with edit summary remarks). Note: I've discovered (by Search) at least 6 more d'Estaing articles which could be added to the Esta section - so that section need not remain so small (currently only 3 people). I will plan on adding the d'Estaings to the page, but that is a task for another day. Cheers, Lini 05:23, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Alexander Hegius von Heek

Thanks for the encouragement to list Alexander as both "Heek, Alexander Hegius von" and "Hegius, Alexander" in the same section. I do agree that this is in line with the intended usage of the LoPbN.

Along the subject of duplicate entries in general, in the process of working on comprehensively adding LoPbN entries for Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples (with the multiple variations of his name, both French and Latin), I discovered a duplicate article (Jacobus Faber), which had already been listed under Faber. ( I posted "merge-to" and "merge-from" tags, intending to perform the merge after leaving it open to discussion for 7+ days; however, actually another editor has already taken care of it :) Anyway, I share this anecdote because for me it illustrates one aspect of the value of the LoPbN! Cheers, Lini 11:59, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Dale, a disambig page

I'd appreciate your opinion. I started to clean up Dale (a dab page), (see the Feb 26 version to see what a mess it was), ended up creating Dale (origin), Dale (part of place name), and unloaded a bunch of stuff to these backwater pages. There are a zillion Dale given names, so I put a pointer to the Special:Allpages. I put a link to LoPbN for the surnames, after augmenting them from 9 to 30. I know, big mistake; later on, I read the archive 26 of the talk page for MOSDAB (August 2006), and I see how shaky a LoPbN pointer is. To fix this, I plan to do Dale (surname) or put the section back in the main Dale dab page. While I was on the LoPbN, I added a bunch of Daleys and then boosted the Dalys fom 4 to 60. I tried to read up on resubdividing and it is over my head, at least on first reading. Did I mess up by adding about a hundred names to it? I wrote some code in an external editor so I could format the LoPbN entries from an excerpt of each article's opening sentence. Should I stay out of these LoPbN, or learn how to resubdivide? Any other thoughts or suggestions? I read the Talk pages on LoPbN, impressive amount of thought behind this, but couldn't find any succinct guidelines on what to do and what not to do. Chris the speller 04:38, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

I think part of what sent me astray was this from MoS:DP -"People who happen to have the same surname or given name should not be mixed in with the other links unless they are very frequently referred to simply by the single name (e.g., Elvis, Shakespeare). For short lists of such people, new sections of People with the surname Title and People with the given name Title can be added below the main disambiguation list. For longer lists, create a new Title (name), Title (surname) and/or Title (given name) page, or a List of people named Title." That last option seems never to be used, so I thought it may have been a suggestion to use LoPbN. Now I know better. Chris the speller 04:42, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

_ _ OK, yr talking abt Dale, Dale (origin), Dale (part of place name) but not Dale (name), Dale (given name), nor List of people named Dale, AFAI can see. And you created Dale (surname) subsequently. You also mention MoS:DP NTBCW, a funky name for WP:MOSDAB. And i see that your Special:Allpages lk has something in the half-thousand ballpark of relevant articles and Rdrs. I didn't track down that WP:MOSDAB talk archive.
_ _ Reply is on your talk.
--Jerzy•t 20:03, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the info. I had somehow missed Talk:List of people by name/Intra-page structure, so I will look it over and see if I can wrap what's left of my mind around it. But first, I am going to go over to "Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation pages with links", section "Bonds - 107 links, over 300 edits" and warn a couple of editors about trying to use LoPbN instead of creating a Title (surname) page. Seeing their discussion may have been part of the reason for my wandering around in the woods. If you come up with ideas for documenting the subdividing of LoPbN, I will be glad to help. Chris the speller 20:24, 4 March 2007 (UTC)
It's starting to make sense now. As for my fixing "People named Daley" when you hadn't broken it, it was halfway meant as bait for you, and it worked fine, as you provided the answer without my having to explicitly ask. I added Edwin Reade to the Rea-Rem page (after my imperfect subdivision) to justify my previously unnecessary "People named Read" heading. Please take a look and see if there is anything else wrong there. Thanks. Chris the speller 20:29, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Campbell's Soup Cans

I thought I should tell you Campbell's Soup Cans is up for FAC2.TonyTheTiger (talk/cont/bio) 23:34, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] LoPbN - checking the alphabetical order

You might like to know that I slapped together a program, using an external editor, for checking the alphabetical order. It can check even the largest LoPbN page in a second, once I copy and paste the page source into the editor. It handles LoPbN Entry template lines, too. If you have any large pages that have seen a lot of activity, and you're suspicious, no sense getting eyestrain, just drop a request on my talk page. I've already found and fixed a handful. Chris the speller 04:45, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

I answered many of your recent questions on my talk page, by interspersing them (preceded by $$$) with your questions. I thought it would be clearer that way. Chris the speller 23:13, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
A further update: I did R-T, then added header checking (e.g. flagging section Ula-Ulw if it includes Ulysses), then checked U-Z and A, and now I'm doing B. It now handles such things as ß to ss, æ to ae, þ and ð to th, and & #233; to e. While doing B, added a check for sections larger than 25 entries. I will soon be doing not much other than than subdividing, and few other editors will find any to subdivide, unless there is a place I can post most of these for other editors to handle. I don't want to have all the fun. BTW, please look at Bennett, which I resubdivided from 3 to 5 sections. I think the "People named Bennett" level is unneeded, both before and after I created the Bennet section (just one 't'). Hope you had a nice weekend. Chris the speller 18:29, 11 March 2007 (UTC)
Finished B. The tool now checks bulleted headers as well as Wiki section headers, and it nailed one on the first try, on Caa-Cal. Those looking for work may want to check Brown to see if it has grown too large for one page. Chris the speller 04:23, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

I finished sequence-checking the whole thing, having made corrections to the alphabetization, or made some other improvement on about 430 pages. If my efforts had instead been applied to cleaning out stables, the Hercules article would have a "See also: Chris the speller". I might take a break from LoPbN for a while, but will gladly take requests for pages with high activity. Thanks for all the education I picked up on the way. The most notable person that I added was Cicero (yes, the Roman). That I could add 5 dozen people named Daly shows how much more work is left. Keep up the good work! Chris the speller 01:05, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] LoPbN removal from March 7

Sorry about making more work for you. I will do more research and better describe that research, before I remove people in the future. Clerks. 13:33, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] American/Commonwealth spellings in LoPbN

I've thought of a question relating to LoPbN that, as far as I can tell, isn't addressed in either the talk pages of the list or your talk pages. I thought it would be a good idea to raise the issue on your talk page instead of the list's talk page, to avoid cluttering up the latter before any final decision is reached. What should the policy be regarding American vs. Commonwealth English spelling variations? What specifically brought this issue to mind was my adding people to the list who were labor leaders, and referring to them as such in the descriptions. A couple of recent examples I added are Alexander Bustamante and Alexander Barkan. (First of all, I hope you think that "labor leader" is an appropriate description.) Should it be spelt labor, or labour? This section of the MOS gives a few guidelines in this regard, but for our purposes, some of those guidelines are in conflict. The MOS suggests the same spelling system should be used throughout, but then again, since there are "strong ties to a specific region" (for example, Bustamante was Jamaican, which is Commonwealth, whereas Barkan was American), we should "use that dialect" (labour for Bustamante, labor for Barkan). And I'm sure that similar situations will arise with other terms besides labor, though I can't really think of any good examples at the moment. As an American living in Canada, I often feel conflicted about which variant to choose when writing -- usually it depends on who I think will read what I write. Now, I've done Google searches on the LoPbN combined with labor/labour and found that most descriptions use the American spelling, but there are a couple uses of the Commonwealth spelling. It seems that, so far, people have just been allowed to use whichever spelling they want, no big deal. Do you think this is important enough to make a guideline for, or just keep things the way they are?

--Slyguy 17:39, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply. Since I'm already generally following the cultural-sensitive approach (e.g. using "footballer" for Brits/etc. and "football player" for Americans (although I'm really only doing it that way because I'm generally following the opening sentence of the bio, not because of an explicit rule)), I'll probably apply that approach to spelling variants (in the case of the Jamaican Bustamante, I used "labor" because I hadn't given this much thought yet.) Chances are no one will complain, but if someone does, then it might be time to give the issue some attention on the LoPbN talk page.
--Slyguy 16:14, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] LoPbN and piping

Thanks for the words of encouragement on Gim-Giz. I feel pretty confident about most splits, except when the page includes a lot of patriarchs and popes, monks and monarchs (sounds like a song title). My sequence checker now also highlights piping flubs. Of course, some eyeballing is also needed to detect and allow intentional misspellings (like Penn Gillette for Penn Jillete). But I have been putting missing portions back into the piped description, as in "John Lewis Gervais|Gervais, John", changing it to "John Lewis Gervais|Gervais, John Lewis", following the reasoning that if the article is correctly titled after the most common form of the name, using anything less in the piped description is not really helping the reader. On the other hand, adding information, as in 'Anne Louise Germaine de Staël|Germaine de Staël, Anne Louise, "Madame"' doesn't hurt, and may very much help, so I leave those alone. If I see "José" piped to "Jose", I generally put the diacritical marks back into the piped name. If you see a problem with any of this, let me know. Chris the speller 21:03, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

I realphabetized Gim-Giz. I know what you mean about the eyes glazing over. Chris the speller 03:39, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
A quick question - On Hoa-Hoe, I subdivided a 3-letter prefix straight into 5-letter prefix sections, and there are no 4-letter prefix sections. Is that cheating, and if so, why? If another 3-letter prefix on that page later needed 4-letter prefix sections, should we go back and add a 4-letter "Hobb" section so that the 5-letter prefix sections are at the same depth? Chris the speller 20:29, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
I have changed Hoa-Hoe to include the 4-letter prefix level. I thought there might be some value in the avoidance of deeper levels than necessary, but I understand your concerns about how it might confuse editor later on. Looking back and forth at the two versions, now they BOTH look a little strange to me. "Hoa - Hobbe" really looks unbalanced.
Back to the entertainment side,
  • You must be one of the finest lyricists in the LoPbN genre.
  • The joke was on target. I just ran agross "Huge - Hugg" on the Hug page the other day.
  • If you are computer-literate, and enjoy humor, song lyrics and messing with the English language, you should investigate the works of Stan Kelly-Bootle, who mixes all of them with immense skill. His Devil's DP Dictionary, written in 1981, had lost very little of its punch by the 1990s, especially for people who knew how to joggle a 6-inch stack of punched cards, and it can still get me to laugh uncontrollably. It defines "computer science" as "a study akin to numerology and astrology, but lacking the precision of the former and the success of the latter". Somewhere in there is "Science is to computer science as hydrodynamics is to plumbing". His The Computer Contradictionary is still available. He is also a successful songwriter. Chris the speller 16:32, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] BROWN

I placed some names at BROWN that are still broken (red) links. After I submit as many articles at those broken (red) links as I possibly can, I shall henceforth refrain from introducing broken (red) links into the lists. It generates too many discombobulations within the lists. The lists are far too complex for me to understand. GhostofSuperslum 01:21, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] FA

Campbell's Soup Cans was promoted today. TonyTheTiger (talk/cont/bio) 19:34, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Tim Anderson

See Talk:Tim Anderson (Ananda Marga Three). Guy (Help!) 09:15, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Re: Alexander Wong

Thanks for the help on Alexander Wong. Looking back, I should have at least seen that he was a jurist, although the bio doesn't exactly make that immediately evident as recommended. (Am I too lazy/uninterested to fix that right now? Yep!  :-)) When I read about his work in scouting, I probably (though I can't remember) considered calling him an activist, but so far I've usually associated "activist" only with political activities, however I'll take your recommendation and expand the scope of the term.
--Slyguy 17:52, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] John Hickman

Re the LoPbN entry for John Hickman: Thanks for second guessing me in this case :) It was debatable to me, whether to remove his entry or not; I did take a look at the weblink - he did not necessarily seem "more notable than the average college professor"; also tried Google but maybe gave up too easily bc it returned too many different John Hickmans. (It appears that you were more patient and persistent with the Google searching than I was :) The final factor was that the editor who made the entry had very few contributions, and there seemed to be a tie-in with another user name that also had few contributions, the same one that had added the entry for the fictional character, Yuma Hickman. Common factor: both were editing Yuma and LoPbN for Hickman, on Apr 9-10, and had not edited much else. So, I questioned the reliability of the editor, and therefore his/her entry in this case.

But I approve your strategy of keeping the entry in LoPbN, and adding the comment to the John Hickman talk page, because he is a real person, and may be notable enough for Wikipedia. And I view the process - my decision to remove, and your subsequent decision to keep and your providing feedback, as a learning experience - gives me one more example on which to base decisions about the threshold of what to keep in LoPbN, in the case of possibly questionable notability.

Thanks again, Lini 22:00, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Does this count?

See my talk. --Stemonitis 06:46, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Re: Virtual champagne

Thanks for the toast! Yes, it's been a long road... but still barely begun. Alexander and all its variations was definitely the largest block of similar names to date -- but, just think, now we have what is arguably the world's most centralized, extensive database of notable people named Alan, Albert, Alexander, etc.! A notable achievement in itself.

My pace has slowed since February, but I still have every intention of keeping it up (at least a couple hundred names added per week). Right now, I'm branching out into other things, mainly reverting vandalism, but updating the LoPbN is what I work on first in my sessions.

Thanks again, and cheers!

--Slyguy (talk) 19:44, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Re: Speedy deletion of Evan Cushion

I take your point, but I didn't put the "re-creation after deletion" line; that was already placed on the speedy deletion tag on the article, and this confused me too; I simply added this statement to the talk page. I think I get what you mean about the difference with the notability/no claims of notability tag. I'm new to new page patrolling, and I just saw that this article seemed unnecessary and tried to get it removed by an admin as soon as possible. Thanks for the advice, and I'll be more careful next time. :-) --J. Atkins (talk | contribs) 15:24, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Heh... tend to over-use Twinkle a bit... ^_^; I usually write such things if the article was re-created shortly after being deleted, with the same content (and usually by the same user); I keep an eye on both Special:Newpages and the deletion log, so I can easily notice if such things happen. Won't make a mistake! ^_^; Oh well... will try to use normal speedy tags... 夢の騎士Yume no Kishi - Talk 21:30, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
Ok. Btw, to Jerzy: I'm archiving my talk page for chats from August 2006-April 2007. That's where it is. --J. Atkins (talk | contribs) 16:31, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Adultism

Hi Jerzy. After reading your past contributions/concerns regarding the article on adultism from a few years ago, I would like to hear a current opinions about the current condition of the article. I would particularly be interested in reading your current thoughts regarding redirecting the article. Thanks. - Freechild 19:53, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

  • Per your talk-page request, i am responding here. Thanks for the heads-up. I think i suggested the likelihood of merge & Rdr, but don't seem to have had anything specific in mind at the time. And the less so a-year-and-counting later. Possibly other discussion of it would trigger some useful reaction from me; if you can point me to a discussion to join, i'll consider that. But my interest is sparse, and i don't generally find it worthwhile to participate in articles as contentious as this one may inherantly be.
    --Jerzy•t 01:44, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Vandalism on LoPbN

Well, it looks as though the exhaustive page index was vandalized, with someone removing entire sections. I reverted it, and preserved your additions of the "Rus" and Russ" links.
--Slyguy (talk) 17:55, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Well, (s)he, or someone at that IP did also remove a lot from List of rivers in Idaho for no apparent reason, and they left no edit summaries, so... it seemed suspicious enough that I left a "please do not delete content" warning on their talk page.
BTW, did you see the q. posted on T:LoPbN by Ceyockey? I didn't know the answer.
--Slyguy (talk) 23:33, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] (Sigh) Here we go again...

Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/List_of_people_by_name
--Slyguy (talk) 20:07, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Hi. As an uninvolved admin (and a total outsider to this debate), I have over-ruled the suspension and unprotected the page. See my enclosed comment for detail. Thanks. El_C 10:50, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] {{Pr-US-bio-stub}}

Hi - a stub template or category which you created has been nominated for deletion or renaming at Wikipedia:Stub types for deletion. The stub type, which was not proposed at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Proposals, does not meet the standard requirements for a stub type, either through being incorrectly named, ambiguously scoped, or through failure to meet standards relating to the current stub hierarchy or likely size, as explained at Wikipedia:Stub. Please feel free to make any comments at WP:SFD regarding this stub type, and in future, please consider proposing new stub types first. Valentinian T / C 07:22, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Leonard Peltier

I noticed you left a set of comments about Arguments for the pardon of Leonard Peltier in 2005. I am attempting to expand the article and fix things up in general. Watch this space! --Edwin Herdman 06:41, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] LoPbN Deletion

Matters related to the 2007 May closed-as-Keep AfD/MfD of LoPbN, the closed-as-Reverse-and-Delete DRv, and the deletion of the pages of the Tree

[edit] Condolences on LoPbN

Hi Jerzy. This removal of the entire LoPbN took me by surprise. I just added some of the most common Dutch family names to it (Jansen, de Jong). Had I realized they were after the pages again (I suppose I would have had to have the discussion page of the LoPbN main page on my watchlist; but who would have guessed) I would have voted a very strong keep, though I agree that the format of the list was becoming unsatisfactory. I would say that the absence of people sorted by surname (and alternative surname, pseudonym, etc), is one of the major oddities if not plain weaknesses of wikipedia. The self-important and uninformed commentary on the deletion discussion page make for some very depressing reading. Your argument that the previous N requests for deletion had all been defeated, but as long as they keep coming (perhaps even by sock poppets) the page will of course at one point lead to its deletion, no matter how narrowly, was a very astute one (and one that you have made before probably). Administrator Srikeit (doesn't that sound Orwellian) just created 156528 red links.

Carcharoth, who also had not seen this coming, has made a nice, and amazingly calm argument today on WP:ANI -using both my "van" and "x" list as examples of information that can't be obtained elsewhere (I know ;-) - but all he got were some links to (already outdated) wikipedia mirrors and google caches. I hope you will find a way to undelete the information and have it perhaps transformed into a less expensive and more manageable format.

You saw this coming probably. Did you store a local copy? Keep me informed on any progress.
Afasmit 04:20, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

  • Add my condolences, too. The appellation Chlodwig, Prince of Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst is the proof that names may be baffling, especially when written across different languages. He's had four or more versions of his name become re-directs. I think that he leads the field in number of re-directs.
    Velocicaptor 13:40, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks to both of the condolers.
--Jerzy•t 21:34, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

Add my belated condolences, too. I just recently found out that the LoPbN project has been now destroyed. I would have voted strong keep, had I known that a deletion process was in progress. It is a sobering experience to see thousands of one's edits vanish and to read the same uninformed "Delete. unmaintainable" votes by newbies who have not even bothered to read the earlier 6-7 AfD discussions. Must have been a surprise for the closing admin to find out that there are nearly 1000 more pages (that were never marked with any deletion tag to begin with) to delete. And to only realize this after the closure! I'm beginning to think that the deletion review process is getting out of hand. As you know, it used to be called "votes for undeletion", with emphasis on overturning an occasional wrongful deletion. Today, it has become a general appeals court with its own regular voters who, in many cases, don't even follow AfD that much but still insist to participate to the "final round". We need a wiki supreme court of deletion (not!). Oh well, please let me know if you have any ideas to salvage LoPbN content or get the DRV overturned somehow. jni 07:45, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Initial Post-Deletion Steps

_ _ Re Afasmit's question on preservation of LoPbN content: source & rendered versions of deleted pgs are accessible by admins, and in light of deletion not revoking its GFDL status, i presume providing either to anyone would be no problem; also, preventing that is IMO antithetical to WP ideology. I think the two feeding-frenzy processes are less than definitive, and perhaps irrelevant, re creating a Wikipedia:List of people by name tree from deleted source, but i'm not ready to start that without significant prior discussion.
_ _ BTW, i would argue that we've got (anywhere short of repudiation of the deletions) enough of a clean slate that the page- and section-titling scheme illustrated by simple:List of people by name: Aa - Ak... should be retrofitted onto WP:LoPbN. Note that for years we were using pages like List of people by name: name Smith for people named "Smith" and WP:List of people by name: Smith as the parent of, e.g., pages like the one with James Smithson on it.
Old way:

List of people by name: Smith, AKA "Smith" has child List of people by name: name Smith, AKA "Name Smith"

New way:

WP:List of people by name: Smith... AKA "Smith..." has child WP:List of people by name: Smith, AKA "Smith"

That would let us avoid the hazards of users misreading or being confused by the doubled word.
--Jerzy•t 23:48, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Any news?

I hope you managed to retrieve the deleted pages. Did you get in contact with Carcharoth? He appeared to have plans to create a new surname index extracting (hopefully all) information of the LoPbN. Afasmit 21:05, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick response. No, I don't have a need for any part of the list right now, but just wanted to be sure that the information was indeed retrievable. Srikeit wasn't very positive about it. The "catoid" scheme sounds good. The main differences with a normal category would have to be the possibiliy of categorize under multiple names (spelling variations, pseudonyms, +/- prefixes, etc) and the piping of basic info (birth death, 2-3 word description). Sgot to be possible ;-) Afasmit 23:51, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] NPH, etc

Thanks for the comment. The trouble is that I'm sure all WSS/P and SFD participants do consider that they're considering such things on their merits (albeit one also sees some expressions of annoyance at the lack of proposal, or at other aspects of unproposed creations), so that suggesting that the motivation for such discussion is "not invented here" has distinct AGF implications. Even where they disagree sharply on said merits. Of course, it's not impossible that there are some nominations that are inspired partly out of such annoyance, etc, but it's rarely (if indeed ever) going to improve the quality of the discussion to assert that's the case. Alai 13:21, 31 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Redirect of Sd (disambiguation)

Hello, this is a message from an automated bot. A tag has been placed on Sd (disambiguation), by Mschel, another Wikipedia user, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. The tag claims that it should be speedily deleted because Sd (disambiguation) is a redirect to a non-existent page (CSD R1).

To contest the tagging and request that administrators wait before possibly deleting Sd (disambiguation), please affix the template {{hangon}} to the page, and put a note on its talk page. If the article has already been deleted, see the advice and instructions at WP:WMD. Please note, this bot is only informing you of the nomination for speedy deletion, it did not nominate Sd (disambiguation) itself. Feel free to leave a message on the bot operator's talk page if you have any questions about this or any problems with this bot. --Android Mouse Bot 2 00:24, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] A Grizzly Murder up for deletion

A tag has been placed on A Grizzly Murder, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done for the following reason:

Page created solely to ask if Ed Beagly was in the episode (see talk page)

Under the criteria for speedy deletion, articles that do not meet very basic Wikipedia criteria may be deleted at any time. Please see the guidelines for what is generally accepted as an appropriate article, and if you can indicate why the subject of this article is appropriate, you may contest the tagging. To do this, add {{hangon}} on the top of the page and leave a note on the article's talk page explaining your position. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the article that would confirm its subject's notability under the guidelines.

For guidelines on specific types of articles, you may want to check out our criteria for biographies, for web sites, for bands, or for companies. Feel free to leave a note on my talk page if you have any questions about this. Ipstenu (talk • contribs) 15:00, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] A Grizzly Murder CSD

A tag has been placed on A Grizzly Murder, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done for the following reason:

Page created soley to ask if Ed Beagly was in the episode (see talk page)

Under the criteria for speedy deletion, articles that do not meet very basic Wikipedia criteria may be deleted at any time. Please see the guidelines for what is generally accepted as an appropriate article, and if you can indicate why the subject of this article is appropriate, you may contest the tagging. To do this, add {{hangon}} on the top of the page and leave a note on the article's talk page explaining your position. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the article that would confirm its subject's notability under the guidelines.

For guidelines on specific types of articles, you may want to check out our criteria for biographies, for web sites, for bands, or for companies. Feel free to leave a note on my talk page if you have any questions about this. Editus Reloaded 15:40, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Presidential Range (Green Mountains)

Hi. Back in 2004, you started the Presidential Range (Green Mountains) article. Is "Presidential Range" the official name of this section of Vermont's Green Mountains? I don't see it on the topo map, and peakbagger.com doesn't have it. The USGS GNIS database doesn't have anything named "Presidential" in VT. Maybe it's an unofficial name? Obviously someone did name those mountains after presidents.
—wwoods 16:33, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Biographical project notification

I'm finally following up my plans that followed the deletion of "List of people by name". In case you are interested: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Biography#Sortkey and birth/death categories standardization project. I'm also contacting the others on this page who left notes about LoPbN, but if you know of others that might be interested, could you please let them know? The ultimate aim would be (if people remember to use DEFAULTSORT) to have something like this, but for all people, not just living people. That wouldn't have the subtleties of your list, or the annotations, but it would be a start in keeping things organised. eg. Lots of Mac... names. What do you think? Your input would be appreciated. Carcharoth 14:04, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

I replied at my talk page. Carcharoth 21:36, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] The trashy gossip

Hi, Jerzy. I've replied to your post on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Biography, trying to clarify, here. Bishonen | talk 18:57, 20 July 2007 (UTC).

[edit] Definition of "Politician"

Hi, Jerzy. I just determined that you are the editor who authored the definition of "Politician" for Category:Politicians -- which has remained unaltered for the last 2-1/2 years -- and I thought perhaps you might like to contribute to a little discussion about Category:Atheist politicians which is under way on my talk page. I'd be very interested to know your views on the subject. Cgingold 22:29, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Hello, again. I spotted your ghostly footprints on my talk page. :) I was hoping you'd have something to add to the discussion. I really can't go along with lumping the atheist/Communist politicians in with Western/democratic atheist politicians without any distinction between them. Seeing as you put some thought into defining the parent category, do you have any thoughts as to a good name for this subcategory? Cgingold 12:47, 2 August 2007 (UTC)
I responded on my talk page, not sure if you have it watchlisted. Cgingold 22:46, 2 August 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for your response. (he said tersely :) I will slowly digest your thoughts. Cgingold 09:15, 4 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Your LoPbN subpages

In May, there was a MfD on the List of people by name article (and its subpages). The consensus was to delete. Since anything related to LoPbN now would be rendered pretty useless, could we delete your subpages as housekeeping (there's no reason to take them to MfD also)? Singularity 17:01, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Tom Smith Article up for Deletion

The article Tom Smith (filker), which you have contributed to has been listed as being considered for deletion. Please add your comments to the discussion. Shsilver 12:25, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] User1 plus

Can you explain why we need this? I think the proliferation of {{User...}} templates needs to be cut down, not increased —Random832 17:21, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

I've started a discussion here. —Random832 17:39, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

It sounds like something i've occasionally used, but without research i have no answer for you. Warum mich? I.e., why are you asking me? (Hmm, red lk. "'Hello, Dr. Jones. ... Um,' he said, 'should I free-associate or give you background material or just what?' // Dr. Jones said, 'Perhaps you could begin by telling me who you are und warum mich--why you have selected me.' ")
--Jerzy•t 18:09, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Sorry for never following up - my question was about the template Template:User1_plus, which you created. —Random832 20:40, 18 December 2007 (UTC)
I guess lying about it would be fruitless in light of the history page for it and the related one with 1 changed to 2, but i will plead ignorance: i don't remember why i wanted them. The discussion seems to have disappeared into an archive, and in any case i'm happy to trust their fates to others.
--Jerzy•t 10:48, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Your labour is not in vain!

Hi Jerzy, just thought you might be interested to know that I found the old page which you created People with Zack as given name and moved it to Zack (given name), which I was going to create anyway (leaving Zack as a pure disambiguation page). So, it wasn't wasted, and a little bit of page history ends up where it should be! - Fayenatic (talk) 19:27, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

_ _ Well, i created the page so that the contents could, in an orderly fashion, be considered for deletion as unencyclopedic, without (until deletion or in spite of retention) getting in the way of the encyclopedic tasks of
  1. helping readers find the bios of people who are either
    • known as "Zack" (beyond intimates and fans),
    • referred to that way in out-of-context passages (e.g. a secondary figure introduced by full name or title and name, a few pages before the short quoted passage),
    • remembered by surname after our reader has forgotten their given name, or
    • misheard/misremembered as "Zack" without our reader both learning and remembering the correct spelling of a similar surname.
  2. presenting information on the name itself:
    • etymology;
    • notable families bearing it, if multi-generation or especially large (Medici, Borgia, Fugger, [spits] Bush);
    • associations with the name that are not obvious, as with
IMO, lists by given name (beyond exceptions like Elvis and Madonna) serve only vanity and crossword-puzzle solving.
_ _ And i wouldn't have put my hand on the plow based on the expectation that any monument of my direct making would be left standing. The Spanish are said to say "The road is better than the inn." IMO, WP is a process, and i'm satisfied to take my pride in, say, pumping the water that lets the stones of the monument be floated into their proper positions.
But thanks for taking the trouble to mention it, and happy editing.
--Jerzy•t 21:24, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Template:Deln trk LoPbN Entry

Hi, I just noticed that a template you created, Template:Deln trk LoPbN Entry, is unused and appears to be abandoned. I've marked it as deprecated, meaning it'll be deleted in two weeks' time if nobody objects. If there's a reason to keep it please leave a note at Wikipedia talk:Deprecated and orphaned templates and feel free to remove the {{deprecated}} tag from the template. Thanks. Bryan Derksen (talk) 10:21, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Category:Surnames

I did a lot of subcategorizing in this category. But the Category:Surnames page needs some work. It lists some subcats twice. For example, Category:African surnames is listed in the "subcategories by region" and then again in the "subcategories" section. I assume that the ideal would be to get rid of the "subcategories" section. But I don't know how to do that without removing it from the subcategory page. Any suggestions? --Brewcrewer (talk) 04:25, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Cat pages are a special kind of beast, and your wording get rid of the "subcategories" section suggests you don't grasp all of the distinctions between Cat pages and all other namespaces. The "subcategories" section cannot (and i don't mean "must not") be removed.
"It lists some subcats twice." must mean that two subcats exist where only one is needed, as is IMO the case with Category:Azerbaijan surnames and Category:Azerbaijani surnames. Decide which name is more suitable, remove the unsuitable Cat tag from all the pages in that Cat, and visit Wikipedia:Category deletion policy to see how to delete the unsuitable one. (But do this near the end of the major portion of the project you contemplate, to avoid wasted effort in case you guess wrong about which naming convention for these subCats will be settled on.)
IMO, the redundancy between the "subcategories by region" listing exists to work around the swamping of the subCats by the articles that rare each on a specific surname. My (former) project of maintaining and expanding the LoPbN did not involve me significantly with those who designed (or "just growed") this Cat, so you would probably be better advised to consult with them than with me. But one approach might be to create Category:Surnames by language of origin. (Not by "region", since e.g. surnames of Arabic-speaking and English-speaking countries are far from being limited to nations or even "regions". And BTW, Category:Arabic surnames should include, e.g., al Khowarizmi, who was probably not an Arab and certainly not from Arabia, as the piped lk Arabia seems to assume.)
There is an alternative (but i am a compulsive, and others may not be as comfortable as i in taking seriously the idea that almost no article should be tagged with a Cat that is a Cat-tree ancestor of another Cat that that article belongs in): By the anti-redundancy criterion, virtually all of the articles in Category:Surnames should be tagged with some SubCat of Category:Surnames, and have their Category:Surnames removed. That would pretty well depopulate the Pages in category "Surnames" "section", and let the Subcategories "section" do its job, obviating the inevitably poorly maintained hand-built list. (In the A entries alone, i note "African" is out of alpha order, and "Argentina", "Australia", and Azerbaijan are omitted, at present.) If you like that approach, you might start by looking at WP:CFD and Wikipedia:Category deletion policy for a sense of how Cat renaming and many-Cat reorganization projects are currently being handled.
--Jerzy•t 17:23, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Merge histories

Could you merge the histories of User talk:Moe Epsilon and User talk:Save Us 229? Moe Epsilon is my old account. Thank you. — Save_Us_229 06:24, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

--

Hello, I posted a response to the message you wrote. It is on my talk page. Shannon bohle (talk) 20:36, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] spoofing

I have replied to your msg on my talk page. Thanks for visiting me. NoSeptember 23:57, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] burn

Thank you for fixoring the talk pages/disamb stuff and moving my comment. :) Gront (talk) 09:15, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Gary the Rat, Ren and Stimpy Adult Party Cartoon and Stripperella are gone and they're not coming back!!

Gary the Rat, Ren and Stimpy Adult Party Cartoon and Stripperella are gone and they're not coming back. Get used to it. AdamDeanHall (talk) 16:44, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

... and i would give a shit either way bcz.....?
--Jerzy•t 18:41, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Go look up...

"voodoo lounge strings arranged by david campbell" on the search engine of your choice. Stan weller (talk) 00:47, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

You'll be happy to know that a ref has been added and the day has been saved. Good job. Stan weller (talk) 00:58, 18 January 2008 (UTC)


[edit] Apostrophes and MOS

Jerzy, thanks for fixing that wikilink at MOS. Yes, I accidentally altered the link. There was a system anomaly that upset my editing at the time, and I did not correct it properly. Considering that I wrote a good deal of both affected sections at Apostrophe, I should have checked better. :)

– Noetica♬♩ Talk 20:45, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Watson

Thanks for your response, I have replied on the Watson page, but I did remove the bit about me ranting as I considered it a personal attack (all personal attacks can be removed per WP:NPA). Thanks Gustav von Humpelschmumpel (talk) 14:53, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Hi, describing someone's contributions as an "intermittent rant" is a personal attack. If you looked at my edit I actually merged the section with the one it was originally related to as it had become isolated by the expansion of the article name thread in between. Gustav von Humpelschmumpel (talk) 17:18, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
To be honest I am bemused why you chose to take such an aggressive tone when I have never interacted with you before. If we could all go around making blatant attacks on the value of each others contributions this place would soon descend into mayhem. Gustav von Humpelschmumpel (talk) 17:54, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
Right, now you seem to be deliberately drawing attention to the personal attack that you made in the first place so I am just going to revert you again. Regards Gustav von Humpelschmumpel (talk) 23:52, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] AfD nomination of Sophia Danenberg

I have nominated Sophia Danenberg, an article you created, for deletion. I do not feel that this article satisfies Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and have explained why at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sophia Danenberg. Your opinions on the matter are welcome at that same discussion page; also, you are welcome to edit the article to address these concerns. Thank you for your time. Guy (Help!) 18:04, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Prod warning

[edit] Mark Bowen (writer)

A proposed deletion template has been added to the article Mark Bowen (writer), suggesting that it be deleted according to the proposed deletion process. All contributions are appreciated, but this article may not satisfy Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and the deletion notice should explain why (see also "What Wikipedia is not" and Wikipedia's deletion policy). You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{dated prod}} notice, but please explain why you disagree with the proposed deletion in your edit summary or on its talk page. Also, please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Even though removing the deletion notice will prevent deletion through the proposed deletion process, the article may still be deleted if it matches any of the speedy deletion criteria or it can be sent to Articles for Deletion, where it may be deleted if consensus to delete is reached. If you agree with the deletion of the article, and you are the only person who has made substantial edits to the page, please add {{db-author}} to the top of Mark Bowen (writer). --Dweller (talk) 15:32, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] AfD nomination of Mark Bowen (writer)

An article that you have been involved in editing, Mark Bowen (writer), has been listed for deletion. If you are interested in the deletion discussion, please participate by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mark Bowen (writer). Thank you. Dweller (talk) 20:31, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Heck, I'll be delighted to call for the AfD to be closed because notability is shown. That's what we're here for, after all. And I'm certainly no deletionist! --Dweller (talk) 21:32, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
Yes and no, I suppose. I just thought that it would be a better use of everyone's time if a decent notability claim could have been inserted at the time of removing the prod, rather than just inviting the tediousness of listing at AfD (I wish the developers would make that more streamlined). I took it from what you said that he is indeed notable, which makes me feel Pointy in listing the AfD (which I hate) but I kind of felt boxed in; the article as I found it was borderline speediable in my opinion. Anyway, let's hope the stub gets significantly improved as a result of all this. --Dweller (talk) 23:39, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Speedy deletion of Template:General Index only

A tag has been placed on Template:General Index only requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section T3 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is a deprecated or orphaned template. After seven days, if it is still unused and the speedy deletion tag has not been removed, the template will be deleted.

If the template is intended to be substituted, please feel free to remove the speedy deletion tag and please consider putting a note on the template's page indicating that it is substituted so as to avoid any future mistakes (<noinclude>{{transclusionless}}</noinclude>).

Thanks. --MZMcBride (talk) 05:30, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Speedy deletion of Template:OPbN Entry

A tag has been placed on Template:OPbN Entry requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section T3 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is a deprecated or orphaned template. After seven days, if it is still unused and the speedy deletion tag has not been removed, the template will be deleted.

If the template is intended to be substituted, please feel free to remove the speedy deletion tag and please consider putting a note on the template's page indicating that it is substituted so as to avoid any future mistakes (<noinclude>{{transclusionless}}</noinclude>).

Thanks. --MZMcBride (talk) 04:10, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] to gradually fill

Thanks for the note, though I'm not quite sure how to interpret your remarks. I don't think the MOS takes a position on split infinitives, and referring to split infinitive isn't very helpful, since it doesn't dictate Wikipedia's style. I'm a bit puzzled by your reference to "slow-paced edit warring." I don't think reverting an es-less anonymous edit to improve readibility qualifies as an edit war. Yes, it was 3 days after the change, I was a bit behind. I think it would take some sort of statement from those in opposition to qualify as a "war." I'd say this was just Being Bold.

I worry that trying to pre-empt an argument by citing split infinitive would just have the appearance of throwing up weak arguments to support a bad position. In fact it's a subtle stylistic judgement on which people can disagree, and there's no one right answer. I wouldn't want to give the appearance of pretending otherwise. jhawkinson (talk) 20:45, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

Wow, thanks for that extremely detailed answer. I hope that level of detail wasn't really necessary, but it is appreciated. I certainly didn't mean to imply I thought the edit was "vandalism," merely not-well-thought-out. jhawkinson (talk) 00:57, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Thanks for putting a halt to non-consensual changes of the Buddha page

Jerzy - Thanks so much for stepping in and halting the non-consensual changes of the Buddha page. You are like an "invisible hand" making WP work thoughtfully, progressively. Your stabilizing influence definitely helps prevent non-admins (such as myself) from becoming demoralized at times. Thanks once again so much, Larry Rosenfeld (talk) 01:17, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

Hi Jerzy!
You wrote:
I'd be interested in your sense of whether the difficulty lies in wiki tech issues, or disagreements about which distinctions are NPoV, etc.,
If you've the time and continued interest, I was hoping you could elaborate on what you mean by "wiki tech issues," etc. Are you referring to the difference between myself and User:Abtract or the issue of why the current Buddha page does not look like a typical dab page or why it is a dab page at all?
Whether or not you get a chance to clarify, I very much appreciate once again your appropriate oversight and goodwill to all. Best wishes, Larry Rosenfeld (talk) 04:32, 20 February 2008 (UTC)
Hi Jerzy!
Thank you so much for your excellent response. Your thoughtfulness, knowledge and diligence are really evident. Also, I greatly appreciate the wise, well-reasoned, caring approach you use in introducing your changes. I have no further questions at this time. Given my limited time and the most recent developments on Buddha, it's not clear to me that it is fruitful for me to continue participation on this matter. I've found User:Abtract's actions repeatedly disempowering and ill-advised. But I guess such is life on WP. I truly wish you (and even User:Abtract :-) ) the best. With metta, Larry Rosenfeld (talk) 16:21, 20 February 2008 (UTC)
Hi Jerzy - I just wanted to quickly drop a note thanking you for your efforts to pursue positive discussion. I'll try to follow-up further after the current Uposatha day (it's a biggie: Magha Puja). Best wishes, Larry Rosenfeld (talk) 15:10, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
Hi Jerzy -
It seems like I missed a lot of talk in my day or two away. Honestly, I wish I had the time to address all your thoughts to a degree you found satisfactory and in a manner respectful and representative of Buddhism's complex history and cultures. Perhaps you can appreciate that I do not have such time or perhaps even the knowledge to do such. (The latter lack on my part is one reason I find it important to build on the consensus of long-time WP Buddhism participants -- in terms of WP article content, I personally do not think that any one of us can truly represent the WP and broader world Buddhist community by ourself.)
To address some issues I saw raised (perhaps in talk page content that has since been deleted?) a mid-process summary of the WP Buddhism's past discussion and deductions can be found in the second entry at Talk:Buddhahood/renaming#Renaming_this_article_and_moving_current_Gautama_Buddha_article_here.3F. I think it might also be helpful for you to see how other non-WP resources address the issue of "Buddha" at Talk:Gautama_Buddha#Other_on-line_encyclopedia.27s_.22Buddha.22_entries. Sincerely, I am not presenting this information to you to try to be persuasive; I thought one or the other might just be helpful to the path you are pursuing at this time.
I also get the sense that those from the WP dab community are content with the changes that have been made. Since no one else from the WP Buddhism community has barked at this time, I'm inclined to let this go from my end and pursue things closer to my heart. Perhaps if you would like focussed feedback from the WP Buddhist community a post to Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Buddhism would be appropriate?
May you be safe, healthy, happy and at ease. Best wishes,
Larry Rosenfeld (talk) 16:56, 22 February 2008 (UTC)
Hi Jerzy - thanks for the note. Honestly, I'm not sure I follow what you say. Is there something in WP:MOSDAB that would overrule the WP Buddhism group's consensus to make Buddha a dab page? As I tried to broach on Talk:Buddha, I can understand one saying that the consensually agreed upon Buddha page needed to be modified to comply more with WP:MOSDAB; but, to move the dab to Buddha (disambiguation) (which was previously a redirect) and to leave a problemmatic prose statement on Buddha seems to me to be violating WP:CONSENSUS without meeting any of the conditions of WP:CONEXCEPT. Is there an error in this reasoning? Perhaps I am missing your point? I hope you are doing well, Larry Rosenfeld (talk) 06:30, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Trunk and Trunks

I bolded Trunk and Trunks, mainly because I've seen most dabs do this. Was the colon supposed to be in bold as well? Please respond below, Lord Sesshomaru (talk • edits) 21:27, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

I think you're right on the bolding but wrong on the single blank line above a hdg. Look at the longer discussion above or below this, where i answered on the other editor's talk page.
IMO, most Dabs are expanded mostly by inexperienced editors who don't look at any MoS pages, don't understand what Dabs are really for, and are likely to fall into confusing a dictionary and an encyclopedia. All of these contribute to reading Dabs being a bad way to grasp how to edit them.
--Jerzy•t 10:16, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
Could you demonstrate? On Trunk and Trunks I mean. Lord Sesshomaru (talk • edits) 05:16, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Dab pages

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 list 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.

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.

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.

Finally, titles should either use section headers or bold subject area headings. (:

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)

FYI: I added a colon to the category reference in the first paragraph of this comment so that this page no longer appears in the category. Best wishes. Gwguffey (talk) 04:24, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
No worries. glad to help. Take care. Gwguffey (talk) 14:47, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography/1.0-List v.0

Another editor has added the {{prod}} template to the article Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography/1.0-List v.0, suggesting that it be deleted according to the proposed deletion process. All contributions are appreciated, but the editor doesn't believe it satisfies Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and has explained why in the article (see also Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not and Wikipedia:Notability). Please either work to improve the article if the topic is worthy of inclusion in Wikipedia or discuss the relevant issues at its talk page. If you remove the {{prod}} template, the article will not be deleted, but note that it may still be sent to Wikipedia:Articles for deletion, where it may be deleted if consensus to delete is reached. BJBot (talk) 21:02, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography/1.0-List v.1

Another editor has added the {{prod}} template to the article Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography/1.0-List v.1, suggesting that it be deleted according to the proposed deletion process. All contributions are appreciated, but the editor doesn't believe it satisfies Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and has explained why in the article (see also Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not and Wikipedia:Notability). Please either work to improve the article if the topic is worthy of inclusion in Wikipedia or discuss the relevant issues at its talk page. If you remove the {{prod}} template, the article will not be deleted, but note that it may still be sent to Wikipedia:Articles for deletion, where it may be deleted if consensus to delete is reached. BJBot (talk) 21:03, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Bird dog (disambiguation)

This is an automated message from CorenSearchBot. I have performed a web search with the contents of Bird dog (disambiguation), and it appears to be very similar to another wikipedia page: Bird dog. It is possible that you have accidentally duplicated contents, or made an error while creating the page— you might want to look at the pages and see if that is the case.

This message was placed automatically, and it is possible that the bot is confused and found similarity where none actually exists. If that is the case, you can remove the tag from the article and it would be appreciated if you could drop a note on the maintainer's talk page. CorenSearchBot (talk) 14:06, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Vamp

Thanks for catching the extra 'see also' section. Yup, it was a cut-n-paste overlook. I appreciate it. Gwguffey (talk) 14:45, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] AfD nomination of John E. Pike

An editor has nominated John E. Pike, an article on which you have worked or that you created, for deletion. We appreciate your contributions, but the nominator doesn't believe that the article satisfies Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion and has explained why in his/her nomination (see also "What Wikipedia is not").

Your opinions on whether the article meets inclusion criteria and what should be done with the article are welcome; please participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/John E. Pike and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~).

You may also edit the article during the discussion to improve it but should not remove the articles for deletion template from the top of the article; such removal will not end the deletion debate. Thank you. BJBot (talk) 19:59, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Move of Watershed (South African band)

Hello,

can you please kindly undo your move of Watershed (South African band) to Watershed (African band) for the following reasons, in no particular order

  • We do not disambiguate bands by their continent.
  • The band is not African (read: black racial group)
  • The band's genre/style is definitely not African, it's alternative rock.
  • In case you didn't know, and I think this may have been the cause of confusion, there is a country called South Africa. This refers to the Republic of South Africa, and not the region Southern Africa. Watershed are a South African band in the same way that U2 are an Irish band (not European band)

I would undo this move myself, but it seems to require administrator privilages.

Faithfully
Rfwoolf (talk) 15:19, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

---

Your crucial point is almost certainly the first one, since none of the assumptions you hypothesized was present in my mind, let alone the basis of the change i made. If

  1. you are correct that
    We do not disambiguate bands by their continent.
  2. and the "we" you are speaking for reflects a consensus that has been accepted as overriding the relevant portions of WP:TITLE and WP:DAB (and conceivably WP:MOSDAB, tho i doubt that is relevant) then i will promptly accommodate you.

I considered immediately changing the dab'g suffix from (African band) to (Africa band) (without prejudice to any different change, or to a change back to either of the immediately previous titles), since it would seem to me to ameliorate the 2nd and 3rd points you cite (which i assume you find bad as sources of confusion). But if my inevitably poor response time until the US polls close on Tuesday is frustrating, perhaps it would ease the process more if i restore your preferred version (likewise without prejudice to other outcomes), at least until that eve.
My view, based on occasionally reading relevant portions of the pgs i cite above (but never carefully checking them in this regard), and thinking a lot, in the context of both policy formation and experience with individual cases, about what underlying model in my colleagues' minds seems to exist, is that the stated purpose and the examples given on the pages i cite, of titles with dab'g suffixes, supports the common-sense approach that the purpose of a dab'g suffix is to dab'ate with the most quickly readable text that will do the job. That makes me want to reduce the words devoted, beyond name and the fact of being a band, to one if feasible. If a band played in both Belgium and Luxembourg and had equal numbers of players of those nationalities, i wouldn't title its article Watershed (Belgian-Luxembourgish band); if it played throughout Belgium, i'd go with Watershed (Belgian band); if played equally in both countries, i might like Watershed (Luxembourgish band) -- but only bcz those would respectively stay short while catching what was distinctive (not a perfectly accurate statement). I don't mean to equate your request with the presumably promotional intentions that lead some editors to something like Watershed (white South African alternative-rock band). On the other hand, that differs only in degree from what i removed. Both provide

  1. more information than necessary to distinguish it from Watershed (Columbus Ohio band),
  2. at the cost of putting extra words in, which will waste the time and attention users.

The expansion of the dab't sfx is a bad way to provide additional information (the article content has that job, and is organized to get the most important info first), and anyone who concludes that Watershed is a black band is only likely to be harmed by that if they know the band they are looking for is white but don't realize it's from Africa. But a sensible reader says "that's ambiguous" and looks at the article content, not the mechanics of dealing with duplicated names, to get info.
Mistakes get made all the time as a result of editing boldly, and AFAIK, a WikiProject is likely to get confused about what its scope of decision making is, and set up a standard, contrary to the sensible overall guidelines and policies, for, say, dab'g band names, in an effort to provide more info, or less ambiguous info, or the same amount of info in multiple instances. Your expectation that continent names not be Dab'g sfx's sounds to me like that.
On the other hand, the full policies and guidelines are probably too much for most admins to have straight in their heads. I infer the approach i've described to you from the general thrust of how we do things, but i'm prepared to hear evidence that i'm mistaken. Tell me, or tell the talk page for the article in question, if you like, what your assertion is based on, and what evidence you find that the broader policies intend to leave that room. I've been wrong before "and it could happen a second time" [wink]. So i'm open to being convinced.
--Jerzy•t 06:14, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

---

You have asked me to supply evidence to simply say that the current wikipolicy does not encourage a "shorter is best" naming convention and you know that this is not possible - but of course there is the ignore all rules policy, and there is no policy specifically covering band names, but I'm afraid this all seems to be moot, since I could not find the policy that encourages the "shorter is best" naming convention in the first place. Perhaps you have misenterpreted the policy as saying "short is best" instead of "shorter is better". While shorter is better, surely accuracy and how the band is known as plays a significant part? Would it help you if I sent you press clippings and links to places describing Watershed as "South African band, Watershed, blah blah blah" ?

I find your implementation of the apparent policy (if the policy is true) problematic, at least in this case. The ignore all rules policy even part of the Manual of Style page for Disambiguation Pages found at WP:D states that there will always be articles where the application of its policies is inappropriate. You renamed the Columbus, Ohio band to just Ohio band (a state), therefore, should the South African band be renamed to the state that they're from? How well known do you think the state/province they're from is? (that state is "Gauteng". Very few people especially their fans in Germany where the band had a chart topper there) would have ever heard of Gauteng. Also, is the South African band even known as the band from that province? (whereas the band from Ohio is known to be from Ohio). The answer is no, Watershed is not known as the band from Gauteng, and nor are they known as the band from Africa. They are known as the band from South Africa.

Finally, I'm afraid the "shorter is betterbest" policy would be wrong in principal if it outright shortened all disambiguation names, simply because a) it ignores what those articles may be "known as" (e.g. Watershed is not known as African band) and b) while the new shorter disambiguation name might technically be "correct" you can easily lose accuracy. (e.g. "South African band" is more accurate than "African band". The reverse can also be true, you could disambiguate a band by the city they're from when the state or country they're from would actually be accurate enough and its popular name.

Rfwoolf (talk) 12:35, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi Jerzy, still waiting your response on this... Would you prefer I open a discussion about this on the Village Pump Policy desk? However, this is assuming we aren't in agreement and at this point I'm not sure that's the case until you respond. Even if you are still undecided, if you'd prefer to defer this matter to there that's also an option. Rfwoolf (talk) 09:47, 6 March 2008 (UTC)
I indeed owe you a response at this point, and i did review your last before awarding myself much needed sleep, after being short for several nights running. I expect to get in a few more hours of it before the day's tasks, which will include a harder look than i took yesterday at the relevant WP-namespace pages (which in fact i don't know by heart). I've just added you, as i write, onto my physical to-do list (i don't know enuf about the species to be sure nicknaming you aRdWOOLF on that list is inoffensive -- have to look that up!), but on the mental version, you were already behind acknowledging the EMail reunion with my new comrades of Monday and Tuesday, and making the overdue appt for my evaluation for oral surgery (literally -- not intended to imply "i'd rather go to the dentist than answer you!"). And you're ahead of the other campaign-related followup, motor-vehicle compliance, and (de facto, i am sure) before the meeting i promised to attend about 12 hours from now. Thought i'd look around before taking my Rxs & hibernating some more, and i'm glad to have caught your latest promptly; it'd have still been a shame even if you'd had to wait only this long for my substantive reply.
Let me know if you're not OK with our both replying at my talk, since that is now the more complete record of the substantive discussion. Thanks,
--Jerzy•t 12:10, 6 March 2008 (UTC)
Impromptu albeit probably only partially relevant essay: I understand that it's not possible nor expected that admins know their policy inside out, and indeed it would be incredibly refreshing to meet an impartial admin that knows their relevant wikipolicy off by heart - instead we either find that admins don't thoroughly understand all the relevant policy, or they do but the policies they've mastered could be published in a book entitled 1001 easy excuses to delete an article - A companion for deletionist admins by the same publisher that brought us Rouge admins - we might not all wear rouge, but that doesn't mean we're not whores - a handbook on creating an above-the-policy defacto cabal, blatantly bragging about it, expecting everyone to think it's a joke, when really it's an actual cabal. No, admins aren't expected to know all their policy, in fact we need to count on the fact that they don't and won't. It's for this reason that we have noticeboards for a variety of issues, and village pumps and discussion boards on various genres of wikipolicy, it's for this reason that we have the "assume good faith" policy, and it's for this reason that we have a rather arduous and complicated dispute-resolution polic. All of this, mind you, is in the name of consensus and not on beaurocracy and a system of wikilaws, but, no doubt, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to predict problems with a system based on consensus - for example the consensus you might be getting may be from a subsection of Wikipedia with vested interests - e.g. AfD debates tend to be held amongst pro-deletionists - or how about peer-admins that turn a blind eye when prominent admins host off-wiki attack sites, or are consistently being incivil and throwing personal attacks - admins are very hard-pressed to come down on their own kind. Clearly, it's not always about consensus, instead it's oftentimes about power. Again, that might be just fine if those in power had more respect for policy. All of these 'problems' with the system and much more that I haven't listed have by now caused many users to give up on the Wikipedia system, many have moved to competing wikis, others no longer make large contributions, others have lost faith in the system that they are no longer bold -- in part because the beaurocracy is all in the wrong place - instead of being around policy, it's about which admin you happen to find, what their vested interests are, and what policies they're familiar with. But just because there are problems with a system doesn't mean there is always a feasible better alternative. We could asign admins to certain pages of policy, we could create a 'courts' system, a hierarchy of power based on knowledge and experience on particular issues and areas, we could create different levels of admins, we could give admins different privilages, we could encourage that all admin tasks cite a specific policy governing the reason for the action -- and a host of other related ideas to control how power is executed by admins and other users. And of course some of these issues are editorial ones, where policy should be over-rided by common sense - but how common is common sense, or more accurately put, sometimes people still can't agree in a consensus-system. And what about the policies itself: what do we do when there is no policy on a particular issue? Perhaps consensus is the best way to deal with such matters? Or would the wisdom of someone that's well-versed in the policy surrounding the issue be better informed to make the decision? After all of this, it would seem, Wikipedia should probably continue to keep its pseudo-consensus system, but improve its oversight and its access to and implementation of policy.
I've gone and read through Wikipedia:Naming conventions, Wikipedia:Naming conventions (precision) and Wikipedia:Disambiguation. While I did find a few things that are relevant, the interesting thing is that there doesn't seem to be any policy directly relating to this issue at hand. I assume (and I assume you would be aware) in such cases where policy doesn't cover something we go for common sense, and where there is dispute, consensus. So the easy thing to do is just invite consensus on the matter - we can go to the Village Pump policy page -- or as an admin perhaps you can recommend a better forum. We could try get consensus from users that edit Watershed (South African band) or even those that edit Watershed (Ohio band) but frankly there aren't too many editors. The thing is, that beside the consensus factor, you either have to justify the name Watershed (African band) being better than Watershed (South African band) using policy, or common sense, and my gut is that policy is going to be a problem. Below are tidbits that seem to be relevant. Please note that I am only saying these are relevant, I'm not necessarily arguing all of these issues, I am trying to see all sides to this issue...
Had a read-through of Wikipedia:Naming conventions ... found some things that certainly do apply IMHO: Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(precision) and Wikipedia:Disambiguation. There was also this line under the Controversial names subsection: "The purpose of an article's title is to enable that article to be found by interested readers, and nothing more" - this philosophy again favours not just accuracy, but what people would expect to find an article under. In the case of Watershed (African band) you should ask yourself "Would people expect to find them under this name" and "If people saw African band would they know it was referring to the band Watershed which is South African"
Wikipedia:Naming conventions (precision) suggests "Be precise when necessary; don't title articles ambiguously when the title has other meanings" and then of course goes on to favour precision in article names. In this case the term 'African' has other meanings.
In Wikipedia:Disambiguation, under Page naming conventions under Specific Topic, it says "When there is another term (such as Pocket billiards instead of Pool) or more complete name that is equally clear (such as Delta rocket instead of Delta), that should be used." (emphasis mine). This implies the more complete name should be used.
In Wikipedia:Disambiguation, under Page naming conventions under Simplicity, it says "If there is a choice between disambiguating with a generic class or with a context, choose whichever is simpler. Use the same disambiguating phrase for other topics within the same context." -- and in the very next subsection it says ":For example, Sam Biguation (guitarist), not Sam Biguation (rocker), Sam Biguation (music), Sam Biguation (rock music), Sam Biguation (the Southwest Spice Band), Sam Biguation (1974–2006), nor (per the simplicity principle above) Sam Biguation (rock guitarist), unless Sam Biguation (guitarist) itself needs to be disambiguated between Sam Biguation (classical guitarist) and Sam Biguation (rock guitarist)."
-this implies that if there was only one Watershed band then it should be Watershed (band), but when there are more than one band it should be further disambiguated to Watershed (something band). We could choose to disambiguate by country, or by genre, but it fails to make sense if you disambiguate by continent on the one, and by state on the other. IMHO if you're going to disambiguate, disambiguate in a uniform way as per "use the same disambiguating phrase for other topics within the same contect"
Rfwoolf (talk) 18:10, 6 March 2008 (UTC)
I've done considerable work toward responding, but two things have derailed my hope of making the quasi-deadline i described:
  1. You came up not only with things i didn't know from the "Wikipedia:" namespace, and things i consider relevant to this, but also with something having both properties. Thus i want to look at the history of the confusingly located use-the-same-choice-elsewhere sentence, for hints about its intention. (That may be quick, if the specific language is discussed on the talk page, or may take dissecting the edit-history of the WP "quasi-article", a process i will commit to undertake myself unless you are confident you can do it without frustration by using the pop-up tools and binary searches.)
  2. My mouse cursor froze, and i had to invent a new means of rescuing my edit in progress.
I'm now 3/4 dressed for my meeting, which i expect to last an hour or less, and in light of my failure to fulfill my prediction, i won't walk to it. I'll be gone in less than 40 minutes, but i may post a further progress report before then.
Be well,
--Jerzy•t 23:18, 6 March 2008 (UTC)
Wow, you should be pleased. Look at introduction of the sent in question to the page! Perhaps more clarity will ensue. Now i'm really gone.
--Jerzy•t 23:40, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Your last is long, and i'm going to reproduce each portion, in italics, in order to respond to it, creating gaps, often within 'graphs, to comment in. And if (in the belief that this is your definitive position) i ignore any points you made in previous edits and don't feel i've implicitly answered here, please bring them to my attention again.

I've gone and read through Wikipedia:Naming conventions, Wikipedia:Naming conventions (precision) and Wikipedia:Disambiguation....
Good step. And i reviewed MOSDAB with this topic in mind, and satisfied myself that it could help (at most) only if it happens to implicitly offer an example or two.
.... While I did find a few things that are relevant, the interesting thing is that there doesn't seem to be any policy directly relating to this issue at hand....
On the contrary, i think it is clear that WP:NC#Album and song titles and band names, part of a policy page, is applicable, bcz the obvious function of forgoing to "use further disambiguation" is, in the context of the first two un-boxed paragraphs, to speed the reader's recognition of the Dab'g phrase as relevant or irrelevant to their interest. That is a process that can be unconscious and probably fast enough for the conceptual simplicity of "of" as compared to "by", and certainly the character count of "of" compared to "through", to make a difference. I also find the guideline language under "Simplicity" at Wikipedia:Disambiguation#Page naming conventions quite to the point, and believe its intent is largely the same as that of those two WP:NC 'graphs.
...I assume (and I assume you would be aware) in such cases where policy doesn't cover something we go for common sense, and where there is dispute, consensus....
I'd say that policy is seldom to the point on a specific article (tho we have a exception here), unless there's PoV or bad faith, and that the guidelines are therefore crucial in specific cases. Both policies and guidelines embody established, and often long-standing, consensus; guidelines are more susceptible to exceptions based on common sense that is within the spirit of the corresponding guidelines. Where no policy or guideline clearly applies, i think that in general self-proclaimed common sense that appeals to analogies with, and the spirit of, WP policies and guidelines is, and should be, more persuasive to admins and other experienced editors, who usually in practice judge a consensus. If you think i'm wrong abt that, tell me what in the "Wikipedia:" namespace makes you think so, and we'll discuss further.
...So the easy thing to do is just invite consensus on the matter - we can go to the Village Pump policy page -- or as an admin perhaps you can recommend a better forum....
As a more experienced editor (my mop and bucket don't add significant expertise to what my experience has supplied), i think going to Requests for comment first has a good chance of wasting less editor time; if after that, you still think a policy change has a good chance, but can't get me or another admin to reverse that move until there is an explicit guideline supporting you, IMO WP tk: DAB would be an efficient place to seek a consensus for change, esp. since the page accompanying it would be the one where any new language would be reflected. If you have to go beyond there to something like VPP, i'd be comfortable describing you as pursuing a lost cause (which however wouldn't make your doing so offensive).
...We could try get consensus from users that edit Watershed (South African band) or even those that edit Watershed (Ohio band) but frankly there aren't too many editors....
While it's hard for me to prove a claim like mine, that you're seeking a new consensus counter to a long-standing consensus, i think a consensus at the narrow article level would just set you up for repeated claims that i was right, and that therefore WP:CONEXCEPT still required your new consensus (that i misinterpret WP:DAB#Specific topic) to be judged at the broader level where that old consensus was arrived at: where it's visible to those who remember how broadly they meant it to be applied, in participating in that consensus -- and those who have stepped into their empty shoes.
The thing is, that beside the consensus factor, you either have to justify the name Watershed (African band) being better than Watershed (South African band) using policy, or common sense, and my gut is that policy is going to be a problem. Below are tidbits that seem to be relevant. Please note that I am only saying these are relevant, I'm not necessarily arguing all of these issues, I am trying to see all sides to this issue... [ellipsis in orginal]
I applaud your judgment in taking such an approach to choosing the evidence to marshal, and i also thank you for the effort.
  1. Had a read-through of Wikipedia:Naming conventions ... found some things that certainly do apply IMHO:
    1. Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(precision) and
    2. Wikipedia:Disambiguation.
    3. There was also this line under the Controversial names subsection:
      The purpose of an article's title is to enable that article to be found by interested readers, and nothing more
      In the context of that subsection, all the quoted sentence means is "If you're advancing a PoV about the nature of the thing as a reason for your favored title, you're probably in the wrong."
      - this philosophy again favours not just accuracy, but what people would expect to find an article under. In the case of Watershed (African band) you should ask yourself
      Would people expect to find them under this name and
      If people saw African band would they know it was referring to the band Watershed which is South African
      Transplanted into other contexts, i think the sentence remains true, but its logic supports a defense of satisfying user expectations only bcz some articles are reached by keying in their titles. It is neutral twd articles reached via lks in other articles (our meat and bread), since it is the context and often the piping that cue the user to follow the link, and it can justify meeting expectations only as to the un-Dab'd portion of the title: Dab'g-phrase portions of titles can be made to conform only to very well-instructed users' expectations, or the Sam Biguation examples you copy below would not cite so many alternatives to "guitarist". To find Peter Green (musician) by typing in the Dab'd title, you have to remember that he shares his name with at least one of four little known people, but not with any drummers or vocalists, or learn the title by rote -- in either case, instead of sensibly saving a lk to the article, or typing the name and following the lk from the Dab page.
  2. Wikipedia:Naming conventions (precision) suggests
    Be precise when necessary; don't title articles ambiguously when the title has other meanings
    and then of course goes on to favour precision in article names. In this case the term 'African' has other meanings.
    Excuse my bluntness, but that is just silly. If it were really "favoring precision" without qualification, it would support Watershed (North end of Pretoria, South Africa) or something even more precise. It does say "when necessary", and since one of the meanings of "African" excludes the Ohio band but includes the South African one, there is no need for more precision.
  3. In Wikipedia:Disambiguation, under Page naming conventions
    1. under Specific Topic, it says
      When there is another term (such as Pocket billiards instead of Pool) or more complete name that is equally clear (such as Delta rocket instead of Delta), that should be used.
      (emphasis mine [Rfw's]). This implies the more complete name should be used.
      No, it doesn't. The reason for preferring "pocket billiards" is because "pool" describes several topics in WP, such as snooker. Watershed (African band) describes only one.
    2. under Simplicity, it says
      If there is a choice between disambiguating with a generic class or with a context, choose whichever is simpler. Use the same disambiguating phrase for other topics within the same context.
      This is a tough one, and the more so bcz those two sentences have had that relationship and that wording for 6 years, since WP was under 15 months old and there were under 100 Dab pages. Their juxtaposition in the same 'graph suggests, however (i mean, the long-standing juxtaposition makes no sense otherwise), that the second sentence has no force except to disapprove mixing generic-class and context Dab'ns for topics whose context-naming Dab'g phrases would be identical. That is, for instance, if suit (law) were an article, law court could not be (and if court (law) were, lawsuit could not) -- probably irrespective of simplicity considerations.
    3. -- and [under Biographies] in the very next subsection [bold-headed group] it says
      For example, Sam Biguation (guitarist), not
      Sam Biguation (rocker),
      Sam Biguation (music),
      Sam Biguation (rock music),
      Sam Biguation (the Southwest Spice Band),
      Sam Biguation (1974–2006), nor
      (per the simplicity principle above) Sam Biguation (rock guitarist),
      unless Sam Biguation (guitarist) itself needs to be disambiguated between
      Sam Biguation (classical guitarist) and
      Sam Biguation (rock guitarist).
    -this implies that if there was only one Watershed band then it should be Watershed (band), but when there are more than one band it should be further disambiguated to Watershed (something band). We could choose to disambiguate by country, or by genre, but it fails to make sense if you disambiguate by continent on the one, and by state on the other. IMHO if you're going to disambiguate, disambiguate in a uniform way as per "use the same disambiguating phrase for other topics within the same contect"
    You've made the argument for such consistency all along, but this citation does not support it at all; on the contrary, by saying, following "unless", that the length of the Dab'g phrase should depend on whether the length is needed to dab'ate from actual other topics with the same un-Dab'd title, it serves to imply that "the simplicity principle above" is not restricted to choosing "between ... generic class or ... context" in dab'g phrases (which is all it explicitly says by itself), but also embraces reducing complexity of generic-class Dab'g phrases, such as we are discussing.
    BTW, as alternatives, i'm not sure we can rule out Watershed (band something), e.g. Watershed (band, Africa), or Watershed (band in Africa), both of which are quicker to read than what i replaced, without raising most of your objections.
I regret leading you on with my optimism about my quickly responding. I thought your effort deserved thorough responses, and your arguments were more subtle than i first realized.

In your most recent, i see no point in responding to the long initial paragraph, whose principal virtue in this matter is that we are free to regard it as irrelevant here, so that

  1. we don't need to judge the degree of offensiveness in your putting it here, and
  2. i felt free to ignore it while responding to what follows it above.

--Jerzy•t 09:42, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
Serendipitously, i just ran across this new guideline (apparently resulting from the acceptance as a guideline of an essay on m:Voting is evil), in a vain attempt to find the previous versions of the 2002 "simplicity" discussion. It probably says better what i was trying to get at in our discussion of consensus.
--Jerzy•t 10:05, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for expounding on all of the above. If nothing else, it is interesting to analyze policy to this extent. I'll begin by saying that no, this was not my definitive position because I am only engaging in discussion. If this were a more formal forum I would have to be far more formal and concise in my argument (something I'm not 100% in the headspace for at the moment), and if this were an adversarial system I would have strived to strictly supply concise arguments that make my 'case' and shoot down your case. Instead I'm not 100% certain of exactly what's relevant to the issues here or not, I'm trying to justify for you and for me, and you too should be trying to see my point as well as your own - and I can only assume that this is so. Anyway, it seems we have been unable to conclude anything here; of the excerpts I quoted from the various policy and convention pages, most -- if not all of it -- you deemed to be irrelevant (with justification provided it must be said), or in favour of your choice to rename Watershed (South African band) to Watershed (African band); if you've managed to reach any conclusions, please share. As conclussions go, I suppose we managed to find some of my excerpts unpertinent, i.e. there are a few of my excerpts that you overrided that I agree were in context of a different issue and cannot really be called relevant no matter what they seem to favour.
So what do we do? What is the over-riding policy here? Is there even an over-riding policy here?
Well, keeping that in mind... I'm surprised I missed the Naming Convention on band names - I was obviously glossing too much over it. However in your post you simply say that the Naming Convention guidelines on band names cover much the same as the Simplicity convention, whereas in my eyes it gives two examples of disambiguating "when necessary" by using the name of the country, i.e. X (U.S. band), X (Australian band) (not by continent) -- don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it doesn't suggest simplicity, but I also see its guideline being by country. Of course, the problem here is that Australia is a continent as well as a country, and I don't think the intent here was to show a continent -- but these two examples also fit with the simplicity doctrine, i.e. [[X (North American band)]] is not as simple as X (U.S. band). But let's also be accurate here: either way this naming convention / piece of policy does not explicitly give us any answers here! It doesn't say "use country not continent" and doesn't say "use simplicity even if that means putting the continent". It just lists 2 countries, and to me that implies we should disambiguate by country, but to you it implies disambiguate by simplicity. The naming convention cannot be said to be clear here, can it?
I'm happy to say that that (Wikipedia:NC#Album_and_song_titles_and_band_names) is the over-riding convention here, and that our over-riding convention is too ambiguous to help us. What do you think?
If that's the case, we need to move on to the next step - you have suggested an RfC and I'd welcome that to get some more opinion in on the matter. Let me know if we can proceed to that - or perhaps my reasoning below will move you to overturn your decision before then.
Finally, policy aside (think ignore all rules), this doesn't seem right to me, that a band should be labelled and classified by its continent just seems wrong and doesn't do justice to this musical group. I cannot recall any other music group / band on Wikipedia that has been classified by their continent - and I will demonstrate this, and, in fact, I would say the classification by country is very familiar to me -- there seems to already be a nomenclature to disambiguate by country for bands on Wikipedia - again I will show sources. The band is neither black (read: African) nor is their genre African. They aren't identified as African by anybody, and to disambiguate them in this way would be only based on a technicality in that it disambiguates and the disambiguation term (African) is technically shorter in length (read: simpler) than the country (South African). More than this they are identified as "South African" in press clippings and the like. We don't really even need policy to tell us that this band should be disambiguated by their country. I'll bullet this:
  • All bands / musical groups I've encountered that are disambiguated by location have been disambiguated by country (e.g. Play (Swedish band), Why? (U.K. band), Hi-5_(Australian_kids'_band), Untouchables_(D.C._band)) Sources: [7]
  • No other bands / musical groups disambiguated by continent - indeed nothing I could search for was disambiguated by the African continent!. Sources: [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13]
  • The naming convention lists band / musical group disambiguation by country in its example (albeit this is not explicit)
  • The Watershed band is not black (read: African)
  • The Watershed band's genre is not African
  • The Watershed band is identified as "South African" (in press clippings, interviews or whatever -- never as "African band, Watershed, ...")
  • To disambiguate by country would be more accurate than by continent
and regarding the policy/philosophy (that we still haven't explicitly found yet) that all article titles that are disambiguated must be disambiguated in a way that the disambiguation is as simple as possible is clearly problematic when it leaves out accuracy and what the thing is actually identified as -- let's see if I can string up an example -- Korea Medal (South African), William Smith (South African), Giri (Japanese), Dano (Korean festival), Yubikiri_(Korean), etc etc -- none of these are disambiguated by continent (granted, these aren't fantastic examples) - but it seems we do not disambiguate by continent on wikipedia, at least not yet, perhaps you can craft a search that shows otherwise (there are cases where the article's name has a continent in it, this is not disambiguation).
Rfwoolf (talk) 18:29, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
I'm gonna say two things, quickly, w/o absorbing or responding to everything in that valuable- and temperate-looking response.
  1. "Definitive" was the wrong word; i was trying to say i was assuming for the moment that you repeated the points that are most important to you at that point, so i didn't go back looking for older points and guessing which you omitted bcz you don't much care abt them or you have changed your view on.
  2. I'm going to be off-line for abt 48 hours, starting in a few hours. If you want me not to make an interim change, probably to Watershed (band in Africa), again w/o prejudice to further changes, say so ASAP, 'cause othewise it'll be up there for the weekend (barring third-party moves).
Thanks,
--Jerzy•t 18:51, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
After a reading-and-a-half, i'm pleased that we've progressed so far in understanding of the background to this matter and of each other's position. My sense is that
  1. as you suggest, we're close to going as far as we can in dialoging this out,
  2. i've said most of what i usefully can (tho perhaps i should respond to some as yet unidentified portion of what you said early on, and be clearer abt my narrow conception of the role of the "dab'g phrase", which IMO is analogous to the very limited role of the Dab page),
  3. i think there's not much remaining need for me stay active in advocating for my view, and it might be best to treat my presentation to you as speaking for that view, when you seek to overcome that view, and
  4. i'd like you and i to consider my mentoring you in your continued pursuit of the matter, since you have turned out to be so open to reconsidering and to widening your knowledge and insight about This Thing of Ours. Perhaps, since you sound ambitious to get an at least more final resolution than i think i'm going to offer you (and perhaps a more satisfactory one, since it is entirely possible my view will be rejected), i can point you in directions that my experience suggests will be efficient.
I'm off now to dress and pack, before making the interim move, or simply closing my activity until a Sun-eve/Mon time frame. Let's talk, in due time.
--Jerzy•t 19:42, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi Jerzy. I'm back after taking off some time to focus on some intense work -- I'm now taking an "upkeep" day. Again, looking at a strictly disambiguation point of view, I can certainly see the value of being short and simple, but considering the article (Watershed (band in Africa)) and just the article, I still cannot agree to its title, again because of another factual inaccuracy (what makes the band "in Africa" -- are they trapped there or something) and because again, an article's title is part of its definition and classification and therefore you should not be classifying this band because it is "in" Africa when it would be more accurate to classify them as South African.
Another issue here is that I think we have actually gone backwards: you went from "African band" to "band in Africa": you went from simple to less simple, inaccurate to more inaccurate. Now they aren't even an African band - they're some roaming nomadic band in Africa!
Whatever guideline you have adopted for your disambiguation naming -- whether enshrined in wikipolicy or not -- is certainly myopic, if it causes accurate article names to be inaccurate, and changes the final name of an article to something that seems out of sorts with an encyclopedia.
In closing, through this discourse we have managed to express our views, understand eachother's position, and considered changing position. Perhaps now it would be appropriate to open the issue to a request for comment, as you have suggested earlier. As an admin -- "mop and bucket" and all -- I am open to other forums that you may suggest - and I know we've already discussed that but I'll re-iterate it. Let's proceed with that. Thanks Rfwoolf (talk) 16:30, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

This already comprises 41 KB, and it's tempting to refuse to add anything further to that. But i do think it is more than wordplay to distinguish between accuracy and precision. Your complaint of inaccuracy is false, and you mean "imprecise, due to ambiguity": to say "inaccurate", you'd want to be speaking of something involving an unambiguous falsehood.
I say that's not just a word game, bcz it goes to the heart of our disagreement: the base title (in this case "Watershed") must reflect common usage, and will not change unless what they are called in common usage changes. (E.g., if they change their name to a symbol that i would misread as "The artist formerly known as Prince", the article's base title almost certainly will remain "Watershed".) In conrast, the dab'g sfx has no function significant enuf to affect its selection, other than (in the case you are interested in, of the musical ensemble based in South Africa) the function of helping someone who knows the name "Watershed" (from some context we can't anticipate, but which in fact would turn out to refer to the topic of the article we're discussing) find the article using whatever they have, on the scale from the full understanding of the band's history to vague contextual hints. You would be right if there were encyclopedic topics on a "roaming nomadic [group of hunter-gatherers] in Africa" named "Watershed", or if there were a musical group named "Watershed" whose personnel's origins were restricted to Africa but impractical to describe more precisely than that. But there are no such articles now, and when they come into being, no formalities, and probably no evidence beyond adding the corresponding new entries to the Dab, will be required to rename the article to the extent of modifying the Dab'g sfx to do the new (and in practice impossible to anticipate) job of Dab'g the enlarged group of "Watershed ..." topics.
And hopefully i've already made it clear that the balance between precision and terseness is found at the point of minimum average time spent on the Dab page, by those the Dab page is intended for. (Screw the users who go around reading Dab pages just looking for something interesting.) When adding a word would slow down reading more than it reduces head-scratching and re-reading, and subtracting a word would increase head-scratching and re-reading more than it sped up reading, the Dab's length is perfect (unless some of the words are pooly chosen).
So go for it on WP:RFC.
--Jerzy•t 17:25, 26 March 2008 (UTC)
I don't think this is a slam dunk for either of us, but IMO User:Kevinkor2/Research into names of Wikipedia articles, a year-old survey of Dab'g sfx's, suggests the de facto preference for very short ones.
--Jerzy•t 20:13, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] RFC

Hi Jerzy. I have set up a RfC at Talk:Watershed_(band_in_Africa)#Request_for_Comment_-_Proper_title_for_article. Please note that I do have a bias here (that the article should be called Watershed (South African band), so your views might not be fully reflected. I hope I've setup the RfC correctly, I chose the policy RfC portal. Let's see what other editors think Rfwoolf (talk) 10:36, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

I'm working on reply; please let me know when you've stabilized the content. (I'm not inconvenienced by the template issues.)
--Jerzy•t 18:30, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi. Just a very minor note (not purely sure why I'm giving it to be honest): Even though you are mentioned in the RFC, you are not obligated to post a reply (as perhaps your own part of the RFC summary where you outline reasons why the article's name should by x or y), but of course are welcome to do so.  :) Rfwoolf (talk) 04:45, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Yup, thanks.
While yr on, i'm abt to reformat what you've done, tho i've more i want to include in actually responding; maybe you can hang on a moment and be sure we don't need to discuss the reformatting.
--Jerzy•t 05:35, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

I understand your want to provide a response, but right now it looks like more of a debate - instead of providing reasons for the change of article title, you have instead provided rebuttles for all my reasons, hense for want of a beter word, a "debate". I was expecting you to perhaps add your own subsection like "Reasons why the article should be renamed", or at least a concise comment. Of course perhaps you do want to rebuttle some of my points, but right now it would be good if you demonstrated reason TO make the change. Granted, I was not overly concise myself in my posting of the RfC -- I could have simply put the first section "This issue in brief", but it is my experience in these discussions that people need more or else the RFC runs amuck with no direction.
You will note that it has already been almost 24 hours without a single response. Of course RFCs can run for a month, but right now I'm worried nobody's going to be eager to chip in on this. Perhaps after a few days or more I can try the village pump (where gets a lot more traffic and people don't seem to be bothered if you go there as a first resort). I will then - in fairness to you, make my post a bit more concise and to the point, and get independant thinking. Rfwoolf (talk) 11:55, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

I think yr fair in saying "debate", but i think it's inevitable, and in fact desirable, that we present the cores of our respective cases, rather than leave discussants to plow through our earlier dialog here.
You probably have a good idea, tho, in suggesting i present a distillation of the case that was implicit in my making the original change, and i'll work on that promptly.
--Jerzy•t 17:44, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
If no such "distillation of the case" can be made, and you still feel justified in the change, this would indicate that policy / convention / consensus does not yet stipulate to such a policy, in which case the course of action would to go to village pump and and RFCpolicy and propose the policy you would like to implement / change. From what I've read on the RFC pages that's the way it's supposed to work in cases where policy isn't clear on an issue, and I submit that the policy isn't exactly crystal here, although I will stand my by assertion that the article should be named (South African band) over (African band) or (band in Africa). Rfwoolf (talk) 17:36, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
Whether i can make such a distillation is about me, but not about the disposition of this issue, especially since my peculiarities suit me, e.g., to fixing details rather than writing articles beyond stub size. If your account of the situation is indeed that the guidelines (there is not and will not be policy on this) are unclear, i can respond fairly succinctly to that:
You've contributed about 170 main-namespace edits, at the rate of about a dozen a month. Your third main-namespace edit was the creation of an article, about a band from your country (whose musical groups' sub-100 WP-article count makes it musically fairly unnotable), which you turn out to follow closely enough to assert what country its personnel are currently in. You've been the sole substantive contributor, except for two sentences of updates, and one remedying an omission (or perhaps making a quibble). There's been no disagreement abt the base-title of that article, but for technical reasons the dab'g sfx has been changed, and you are giving the appearance of being convinced that your article, about a topic that mainly you among editors are interested in, has somehow been damaged by the possibility that some reader will treat the ambiguous terms "African" or "in Africa" as definitive information about the race, style, or location of the band. (I had forgotten you already knew about the article formerly Dab-sfx'd "(Columbus Ohio band)" (and had to search for it!), but it is an excellent example of the tendency of writers, of band articles at least, once they've discovered that Dab sfx's exist, to load a title down with what may be valuable for giving the entity in question the attention the editor thinks is due to it, but burden both the article page and the Dab page (whose existence a dab sfx implies) additional, prominently placed material, that serves no valid WP purpose and distracts from the task at hand: getting the reader from Dab page to article, or subliminally reassuring them that reaching the page sought is going smoothly. Your persistence about this, and apparent deafness to the considerations that are routine to your more experienced colleagues, raise the question of whether that is going on here.)
You're concerned that this RFC is drawing no responses, and you sound as if you think your important concern is drawing no attention on RFC, that RFC is broken, and that it has to be addressed by considering new guidelines at VPP. A more reasonable response by you would be to continue waiting for comments. You have no evidence that no one has noticed your concern, as distinct from the far likely situation where your concern has gotten attention from a typical number of editor s who comment on RFCs, and none of them have found your concern worthy of comment. And this in spite of the fact that i have not made a succinct statement, but only done my best to cut yours to ribbons.
I urge you to finally give serious consideration, now, or next week, or next month to the possibility that you are not the wisest editor on WP, and that the most of the rest of us know what we are doing. Maybe not me. (I've been wrong before, and it could happen a second time. [wink]) But probably most of those who are quite happy to see this go no further than it has gone between us two. Keep reading, and editing when the spirit moves you, and consider the possibility that your attention will be elsewhere after another few hundred article edits. Or if you can't do that, what the hell, take it to VPP -- after you've given Ahab's example some thot. (I've had a handful of good ideas ignored there, and there's no reason to believe that that's what's driven me into the madness in which i now rave.[smile])
Oh, and i was reviewing the dab'g sfx' i've tried out on you, and realized that i've gotten fixated: "South African band" is a generic category, so is "African band", so is "band in Africa", so is any short phrase with "band" in it, ruling out the alternative of a context of the term. But who says you can't have both a context and a category in the same Dab'g sfx. Relax yourself, then get the feel of how the new title Watershed (band; Africa) really grabs you.
--Jerzy•t 07:32, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
I'm surprised at this turn in your character, and you are now taking this discussion off its course.
  • The number of mainspace edits I make has nothing to do with the matter at hand. The new straw-man attacks are unbecoming of your up-til-now level-headed, amicable and rational approach...
  • The fact that I am one of the main contributors to the article has nothing to do with whether or not I am correct or that your change was incorrect, or both
  • Even if I am the main contributor to the article, have I not tried to be amicable, reasonable, have I resorted to wheel-warring, making demands, violated WP:POINT by inviting dozens of other admins to give their feedback? I do not understand how you can say I am behaving as if I "own" this article? I do monitor this article and keep it on my watchlist, but here my behaviour is perhaps more than acceptable.
  • You seem to have misinterperated my RFC/Village pump comment - You see, up til now we have been trying to find the relevant policy and say "You see, I'm right, because policy X says Y" and the other says "No, you're not right, because policy A says B" and so forth. But what if policy simply doesn't properly cover the issue at hand? In such a case the course of action is to go to Village Pump and propose new policy or policy changes. Where did you misinterperate this? Well, you accused me of saying "Let's drop the RFC and go straight to Village Pump" - but I didn't say that. I said if you can't find policy to support yourself, then you can propose changes to policy on Village Pump. Again, another attempt of mine to give your position some credit.
  • "Your persistence about this, and apparent deafness to the considerations that are routine to your more experienced colleagues, raise the question of whether that is going on here" - just how many "more experienced colleagues" are there in this matter? Just you. And you are accusing me of being deaf to your considerations. This is another straw man attack. Can you try stick to the merits of the matter, especially your own.
  • "A more reasonable response by you would be to continue waiting for comments." - that is what I am doing. If I implied otherwise I'm sorry. There's still the chance that after a few days I'll want to go to Village Pump, but I'm willing to give RFC a chance, even though I am still rather dubious it will get much of a response.
  • "I urge you to finally give serious consideration, now, or next week, or next month to the possibility that you are not the wisest editor on WP, and that the most of the rest of us know what we are doing. Maybe not me"" I do not appreciate the rest of the tone in your comments, and am now -- perhaps for the first time so far -- found you to be unreasonable. I recommend you hold off from me, and I you.
  • Final point: if (band; Africa) is ever to make it in as an article title it would really prove that policy isn't clear on this. I'm sure you can see how this pseudo-policy of "simple disambiguation at all costs" isn't great. Perhaps this is something policy will have to adapt to. I think "band; Africa" is perhaps the best of 3 options you are providing simply because somehow there is less ambiguity here; less inaccuracy; it says "this article has been clasified as a band, in the "Africa" category (which is better than saying is an African band or a band in Africa - there is a subtle distinction, but one nonetheless), but it's attempt at conciseness goes beyond reasonability - there are extremes of simplicity, and it seems you're trying to go to that extreme.
Rfwoolf (talk) 11:51, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
I wrote abt 7k today along those lines, but on reflection it's no surprise to me that i was more fluent in addressing points directly one at a time, than in trying to balance an essay on the overall issue. I'm going to continue, but i'm not confident of succeeding with the model you're looking toward, so no promises.
--Jerzy•t 02:43, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Hello. I notice you haven't placed any objection under the requested move section on the article's talk page. Are you still objecting to the proposed move? If so perhaps we should think about what other steps can be taken to reach consensus; if not I'll make the move since it's gone five days without comment. Cheers. Olaf Davis | Talk 14:03, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply. I'm just sorry all your obvious work in the discussion was unfruitful in the end! All the best, Olaf Davis | Talk 18:34, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Notability of Kevin Taylor

Hello, this is a message from an automated bot. A tag has been placed on Kevin Taylor, by another Wikipedia user, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. The tag claims that it should be speedily deleted because Kevin Taylor seems to be about a person, group of people, band, club, company, or web content, but it does not indicate how or why the subject is notable: that is, why an article about that subject should be included in an encyclopedia. Under the criteria for speedy deletion, articles that do not assert the subject's importance or significance may be deleted at any time. Please see the guidelines for what is generally accepted as notable.

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[edit] Ware Group

I see you have a history of working on the article Ware Group. I am looking at it from the project Wikipedia:Unreferenced articles where it is one of the longest {{unreferenced}} tagged articles that does not meet at least the barest minimum of verifiability. It has been tagged and completely without references since June 2006. It would be extremely helpful if you had some references you could add to the article to help support its verifiability and notability. Thanks for any help you can give. BirgitteSB 17:00, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Quick note

I commented on your response to my Milo & Otis edit here: Talk:The Adventures of Milo and Otis...hopefully we can reach a compromise. --The lorax (talk) 03:35, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] JJ1 is located at Museum of Man and Nature

Jerzy, thank you for the note. I deleted the J11 code from the dab page, and added a citation for Bruno, which I knew of before I used the erroneous J11 code, to the Museum of Man and Nature. --Ancheta Wis (talk) 02:18, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Watershed (Norwegian band)

Dare I ask... I see you've added Watershed (Norwegian band) on the 30th March to the Watershed disambiguation page Watershed, but as of yet no such article seems to exist. If after a while no article is created, will you remove the link? Furthermore, I have noticed that Watershed (European band) is shorter/simpler than Watershed (Norwegian band) and under the convention that you have adopted (that you know I disagree with) it should be the former. If not, then please explain your policy to me again. Rfwoolf (talk) 15:30, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Jack O'Brien

Thanks for your attention to this matter. MusiCitizen (talk) 12:13, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Based on the vandalism template you placed on my talk page and your comments on User Talk:MusiCitizen#Dab "Jack O'Brien", are you saying that I vandalized pages or tried to purposely mislead other editors as to what I was doing? Flowanda | Talk 23:11, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Jaan

I've dabbed that page properly now. As it is I think it is valid ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ $1,000,000? 11:01, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] About your redirects for dab pages

There is an alternate method. Please look at this discussion. Lord Sesshomaru (talk • edits) 18:07, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Apologies...

For the reversion on Jackson County Courthouse, and not explaining better. I was afraid anything I said might come out snippy, and I try very hard not to be uncivil. It's why I asked others to chime in, who could explain the whys and wherefores better, and more politicly than I was afraid I might do. I should have discussed it first, I admit, but it's easier to just hit the undo button, ya know. I'm glad the results turned out well, fortunately for all. Continued happy editing from now on, eh? :)

Btw, have you considered archiving your talk page? It's kinda long. I use MiszaBot III, which does it automatically. Just a helpful suggestion, I hope. Cheers! :) --Ebyabe (talk) 19:19, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] DMZ Cyprus

Where should this link be placed on DMZ? Couldn't find a place for it. Please reply on your talk page. Lord Sesshomaru (talk • edits) 06:54, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

  • My opinion hasn't changed; am i missing something that keeps it from being obvious for you? If so, point it out and i'll think further.
BTW, you've led me to freshly review yr ed summaries following my work on it, and that being fresh as i comply with your request, i have to say this: unless someone has mucked with long-standing MoSDab supposed consensuses on Rdrs and Rdlks, it seems to me you must be blind to the guidelines' non-prescriptive language, which IMO should commend to you that project page's final appeal for the sort of common-sense arguments i either made in my ed-summs on the Dab in question, or found too obvious to mention.
--Jerzy•t 07:38, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
Thanks I guess. I've done an update. The only reason why I took off "D.M.Z" (song), DMZ (UK band) and DMZ (club) is because they do not meet the requirements of WP:MOSDP#Red links. Nothing more, nothing less. Lord Sesshomaru (talk • edits) 08:14, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
  • I recall the RdLk passage as calling for a judgment about the potential for an article, rather than blind deletion of useful RdLks, and the long-festering Cyprus situation and the UN peacekeepers seem to me obvious indications of some kind of gap in WP (rather than a non-topic). Do we need some instruction creep in the form of adding "as informed by reasonable topic knowledge, research, or attention to colleagues' judgements"?
    --Jerzy•t 09:30, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
May you reiterate? I can't tell whether you're upset, surprised, or baffled. Lord Sesshomaru (talk • edits) 18:02, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
  • (I assume that by "may" you mean something like "could", so, yes, i don't mind reiterating to some extent, by reading and quoting from the passages i referred to, and saying what i might have said, if i had recently done so 14 hours ago.)
In re-reading WP:MoSDab#Red links, i find that i was mistaken about its explicit content: I thought there was a more explicit instruction with the same thrust as the qualifications (emphasis added) that lie within
There is no need to brainstorm all occurrences of the page title and create red links to articles that are unlikely ever to be written, or likely to be removed as insufficiently notable topics.
By "more explicit instruction" i mean that i thought it was clear that an editor should not remove even an orphaned rdlk, if good evidence existed that a corresponding article would be expected to survive AfD, once written; in fact, my reading the sentence i quote to that effect is (at best) an interpretation of the parallels between it and WP:MoSDab#Break rules.
Nevertheless, for your part, i think AGF put you under the obligation to assume (pending evidence beyond your own unawareness of the topic) that the ed who placed DMZ Cyprus on the list did not do so recklessly, and that you were obliged, before undertaking either the removal from the Dab or starting the RFD, to take the obvious and rudimentary measure of reading at least the lead section of Cyprus, where mention of
  1. "invaded and occupied"
  2. "separate ... political entity"
  3. "partitioned"
  4. "UN-controlled Green Line"

would have or should have each further inhibited you from both of those steps, and eventually made you abandon them, even tho you weren't obliged to choose to distract yourself from your goals, by taking the effort to retarget the Rdr. BOLD has to be much more permissive re addition of material than re its removal.

I may be making a mistake, and taking your question about my mental and emotional state too literally, but IMO you shouldn't trouble yourself with that -- especially in the case of my complicated state of mind (see the page's third non-addressable item).
--Jerzy•t 02:09, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Supplement (publishing)

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[edit] Doctor (comics disambiguation)

I'm confused. 1) That qualified as a speedy anyway, as one of those "Recently created redirects from implausible typos or misnomers"; and 2) Sesshomaru asserted that it was a non-controversial housekeeping delete, since while it was actually a redirect, its title said it was a dab page, and it linked to only one place. --Orange Mike | Talk 04:15, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] frwiki usurp

Hello

The local account has now been usurped.

On a side note, please keep in mind that until bugzilla:14330 is corrected and go "live", it is not advised to merge if any account to usurp is left.

DarkoNeko x 08:40, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] pl.wiki usurpation

The user has been notified. He now has seven days to object. If he doesn't (and we'll be very surprised if he does), the usurpation will proceed. Sir Wolf (talk) 10:42, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Template:Mel Gibson Films

I tweaked it again. I was fixing it when you edit conflicted me. Check Mel Gibson and see what you think. IP4240207xx (talk) 02:40, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes, that is why I got edit conflicted, trying to spot that dang "})". That took me to long. IP4240207xx (talk)

[edit] Archive

Thought about archiving your talk page? IP4240207xx (talk) 02:40, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] TfD nomination of Template:Tuck surnames

Template:Tuck surnames has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for Deletion page. Thank you. MBisanz talk 21:01, 9 June 2008 (UTC)