User talk:Slyguy

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Contents 1 Notability of Baila Funky Band 2 LoPbN 2.1 Months in LoPbN 2.2 Long-term LoPbN Matters 3 barnstar 4 Siklós & Sikorsky 5 John Harvards 6 LoPbN "Lo-res termnlgy" issues 6.1 Martial artist 7 LoPbN Entry 8 American/Commonwealth spellings in LoPbN 9 Alexander Wong 10 Virtual Champagne 11 Subst User Warnings 12 Exh list 13 Date formats 14 Animation 15 Copyedit 16 OK 17 Cynthia Manley 18 Scope of Colorado's anti-discrimination law 19 Thanks 20 Notability of Tom Teahen 21 Rick Yu

[edit] Notability of Baila Funky Band

A tag has been placed on Baila Funky Band, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done because the article 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 Wikipedia. Under the criteria for speedy deletion, articles that do not assert notability may be deleted at any time. Please see the guidelines for what is generally accepted as notable, and if you can indicate why the subject of this article is notable, 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. Chris 73 | Talk 15:33, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] LoPbN

[edit] Months in LoPbN

_ _ Thanks for the excellent summary re the two footballers, of course as well as for your determined work on LoPbN. (WTH are you doing, glancing articles that look like names on the list of all articles, to be sure they are bios of real people, and then adding the missing ones? Great idea, that i wouldn't dare to undertake without more automation than i have ever mustered. Are you keeping a list? Hmm, i suppose your contribs & Watchlist come close to doing that.)
My pref is to read up on them both, and find some more widely known distinction, probably position played, since that is less likely to change than team. The style i currently use is

• Smith, Adam (born 1985), British footballer -- tackle

[wink], in order to clearly demarcate the inclusion of player's position, or politician's office (if dead or retired), state, or city, or novelist's genre, as the kind of detail that none of the surrounding entries have need of. I guess that syntactically this is a little like the difference between

football (sport)

football (equipment)

vs

football sport

football equipment

_ _ IMO the Dab'g suffixes are a similar issue; i'm not sure if dates for Dab'n are officially deprecated, but i think the usual ones i see (much moreso than these!) are misguided. (But peek at (mostly) my work, The boxers Davey Moore.)
_ _ IMO dates are usually useful only to distinguish generations, people needing LoPbN to find the bio probably have less information than the entries do, and those knowing an exact year are unlikely to fail to get to the bio directly or thru a Dab page. And those make more sense than LoPbN (for those who don't treasure the chance, as i do, to add an entry when no existing LoPbN one gets me to the bio). If i'm right, that implies we need something besides a month on the LoPbN entries, so why not instead of it.
--Jerzy•t 21:07, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

• _ _ FWIW, here are the changes i made related to the footballers Adam Smith. (I don't know if anyone else converts Rdrs that get created when a Dab'd title is changed into what i think of as "double Dab'ns", but it seems to me they are logically required, since it is our policy to support entry into our articles via inward lks that may be out of date, rather than deleting an RdR that has been discovered to be too narrow.)

_ _ I read your user page this time [smile]. As you say, it needs doing, and when you find you need to slack off substantially, i hope you'll copy that discussion onto Talk:LoPbN or one of its subpages, and indicate the point you've reached: it probably is more efficient to tackle it as steadily as you are, when no one else has been doing it in the same neighborhood recently. (I think "recently" goes back to 2001 Jan. at the moment, and will continue to until the point where one pass has been made thru the 1.58M-&-counting articles.) If there is enough interest, perhaps workers should sign up there as exclusive S-g-method editors, for limited lengths of time, of specific stretches of the A-Z "page" -- of course, in parallel with all the myriad other strategies (& non-strategies) for adding names.

_ _ BTW, my guess was bcz i can't imagine anyone putting up with inspecting in alpha order by (usually) given name and having to add the entries alpha by (usually) surname, if the two megalists were not so firmly committed to those orders. But it has a nice side effect: graceful rather than catastrophic expansion of LoPbN-tree pages, such as occurred with the mergenames expansion of the T sub-tree. (That was not a disaster, but it was fairly demanding until i caught up.) I do think i am going to have to start a cyclic alphabetical patrol of the tree, seeking overgrown sections and pages, at least until (i think "unless" would be overcautious) i get the page-subdvn task well enough supported by templates that entry-adders undertake it.

_ _ In the spirit of your user-page request, here are three inputs:

• I wasn't sure if you were apologizing for/excusing using or not using "actress", whose elimination is typical of my own "lo-res trmnlgy" edits. I think it's fair to summarize my approach roughly as avoiding all distinctions that fail to serve the goal of aiding navigation to the bio being sought; such failures IMO occur when they

1. are matters of judgment ("mogul" will never have a clear boundary vs "entrepreneur", nor if it did, would our editors let alone our users be aware of it)
2. tax the cross-cultural knowledge of users by using terms too specialized to provide more clarity as to which bio is the desired target than a more general term. (The titles of religious leaders, heads of state and government, and lawmakers seem to be the most frequent offenders). by excessive specialization.
3. embody what may be considered the other side of the same coin, making a distinction that makes too little difference to justify the attention burden of another word or of a more elaborate idea, e.g. by dividing a larger category into a very few parts (actor vs actress when simply "actor" in the broad sense is seldom less useful; (notable) lawyer vs judge when just "jurist" will do as well) or so lopsidedly as to almost always be useless (since notability is a given, prefixing a term with "professional" tells only what we should assume if "amateur" is absent;
4. generally change in the course of a career -- e.g., "politician" is usually sufficient to distinguish those it applies to from others of the same name; not all their notability stems from their highest office (my poster-children for lo-res trmnlgy are Calvin Coolidge and Jimmy Carter: they are less notable for their presidencies than what came, respectively, before (breaking the Boston police strike as governor of Massachusetts) and after ("using the presidency as a stepping stone to greatness" as an activist/quasi-diplomat); users may seek them without being aware of their highest office; and such users may even be more likely to quickly find the bio without the red herring of the entry pointing out their highest office.

IMO (tho i anticipate having to make more than the usual case), several of those criteria call for using sailor or soldier for both the officers and non-commissioned personnel of the respective services, especially since so few of them, even medal winners, are notable without being officers.

• Non-Western names are an issue IMO worthy of the concern you are showing about it. Some of the issues may not need definitive answers, since IMO (which i reflect in my practice), duplicate entries, that collectively cover all the places where a range of savvy and naive users are likely to look for a given name, are the best outcome; we need to accommodate all of them. (Note that whatever wisdom we can accumulate on name formats belongs in the bios and articles on the practices of the respective cultures, and attempts to conform LoPbN's style to the most correct practices are antithetical to its purpose of getting users to the bios they have in mind.)
• I treat nationalities under the influence of point 3 of WP:MOSBIO#Opening paragraph (and my long-standing belief that it included the word "passport" to clarify "citizen or national"). But i either advocate, or grudging accommodate, the following variations:
  1. hyphenating nationalities has no fixed meaning, but when i find it in an existing entry or the lead of the bio, i use a mentioned nationality that differs from birth place only if (presumably formal) change of nationality is asserted in the bio and use xxx-born ahead of it if apparent residence has changed, and birth nation is asserted as part or all of nationality or no nationality is asserted.
  2. using a more general term than a nationality, when it conveys more information to a substantial fraction of users: "African", perhaps (or "West African", if it motivated me enough to check that) in place of "Burkina Faso" (obscure enough that i was not the first to misspell it "Burkino Faso" in using it as an example of obscurity, but was the first to create a misspelling Rdr to it); "Pacific" or "Caribbean" in the case of a few island nations (Nauru, Vanatua (hmm, Google << 346 of about 1,330 for Vanatua>>, and i'm creating the Rdr to Vanuatu), and Barbuda (OK: as i feared, not a country) come to mind).
  3. following "American" or "Canadian" with "Puerto Rican" or the name of an Indian tribe, rather than argue with advocates who'd prefer dropping the fully-sovereign nationality.
  4. analogous treatment for Basques, Catalans, and Sardinians, even tho no active editors seem to care,
  5. no consistent approach to the sub-nationalities (if you'll permit that neologism) of British, probably mostly because shifting to "British" sometimes gives an impression of ending a dispute that a double term didn't.

I don't see these as mandated beyond the fact that they've been applied often enuf that ad hoc deviations amount to introducing stylistic inconsistency: i urge dissidents either to sit still for my changing them (or reverting back to them), or to mount a Talk:LoPbN discussion aimed at changing to an alternative backed by a formal consensus. But note that you are doing enuf entries, and responsibly enuf, that i'll be reviewing them less and less, and if you have any style agendas, you probably deserve the chance to assert them piecemeal (as i have) if you don't choose to initiate formal discussion; i'm not at all certain to do so if you precede without doing so, in part bcz i think any sufficiently promoted, consistently applied, reasonably functional system is better than the former chaos or an informal struggle among the heavy contributors.

_ _ I applaud your choice to forgo extensive research, since it should increase your efficiency on the part of the task that can't be done effectively except by someone doing a lot of entries. I am usually even more cold blooded with my extractions from Cat LP, usually doing just the fields of Template:LoPbN Entry that are needed for generating the link, and leaving to subsequent editors the parts that can be efficiently done one by one, whenever the spirit moves someone.
--Jerzy•t 08:05, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

• Oh, it seemed to me that you were doing most or all of your LoPbN edits as whole-page edits, and perhaps you are using a tool that makes that more convenient. Most sections that have no subsections are of a length that makes them less confusing and laborious to edit than the whole page. I imagine you already know how to edit sections, but ask me it's somehow unclear.
  --Jerzy•t 08:15, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
  
• Do you use the "exhaustive list" for access to pages? Its purpose was to reduce the number of page fetches to get to the desired LoPbN-tree page. I understand that time to load it is an issue, and i'm working (mostly thinking for now) on how to speed it up; don't know if this bears on the scalability issues you imply.
  --Jerzy•t 19:32, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
  

[edit] Long-term LoPbN Matters

_ _ Gosh, of course your procedure naturally provides access the stats on the whole population of bios.
_ _ I'd be, well, at least curious as to all the high, low, & "best" estimates you find it worthwhile to make, whenever they become available:

•  % of articles that are bios
•  % of bios on LoPbN
•  % of bios dead/living
•  % of bios tagged with Cats descended from Category:People
•  % of bios that are tagged as stubs
• any cross-tabulations (random example: dead-subject bio-stubs missing from LoPbN) you find interesting.

_ _ Any thots you've had about scalability problems and their solutions would interest me, including their potential for shaping the structure mechanisms that i'm currently upgrading.
_ _ Thanks for all of this discussion!
--Jerzy•t 19:32, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
_ _ Yeah, the sampling is a more serious issue than i'd thot about, and probably the benefit is not great enuf to go beyond your previous (perhaps impressionistic) numbers. I think serious statistics would be a big enuf project to interfere with the task you've started, which can be efficiently done only non-randomly.
_ _ As to marking edits as minor, you may have noticed i never do so. So i may be the wrong person to ask. But my sense is that in general, the most logical line to draw between "minor" and "[not]" is that punctuation, spelling, and grammar are minor, and perhaps so is everything else clearly specified in WP:MOS. If LoPbN (a nav facility akin to Rdrs and Dabs, not a bunch of articles) is different from articles in this regard, i would say that

every new entry adds substance,

adding dates, nationalities, and callings found within WP doesn't, and

it's a matter for either debate or case-by-case judgment whether such info, when derived from outside research, is minor or not, and likewise for correction of errors of fact.

(But i think that including summaries is much more important than what one does in good faith about minor, and that your inclusion of the lk to the bio is exemplary. It's quite valuable to me, and probably many RC patrollers and the like, as a means of checking -- as i hope you don't distract yourself by doing, unless it helps stave off boredom-induced nausea -- whether a bio article, whose visibility has just increased, is of reasonable notability and quality.) I also think that a line should be drawn between all-cases-in-section-or-page edits that reflect either the de facto MOS or a new consensus, and those that in effect propose new stylistic stds. For example, an editor argued that my distinction between people known by surname and by given name (ask me for my recent thots if interested) is artificial & an impediment, and redid the Thomases accordingly. While i considered that a valuable experiment and stimulus to discussion, i think it's a change in MOS which can't be minor (and i think it probably could legitimately have been reverted as overly bold, since it leaves the organizing principles of the list inconsistent).
--Jerzy•t 21:27, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

• _ _ While i've neither researched nor tested it, i've long speculated that "random article" would turn out to be random from the user's point of view but favors under-edited or under-read articles.
• _ _ I'm not a great colleague, as i suggested in my "acceptance speech" for admin nom; in particular i've done damn little to respond to the request to archive my talk page (despite its kind and prominent source). But i don't believe i've ever gotten (or seen anyone else get) any hint of a request to use the minor-edit box.
  --Jerzy•t 16:53, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
  
• _ _ Thanks again for your massive effort via the list of all articles. And congratulations on winding up the Ad... names! It has impressed me that you've been churning out so many new entries, without more progress thru the alphabet. I admire your endurance.

_ _ It's true that mergenames produces results that are inferior in several respects, so this is at least another important, probably more important, demonstration of feasibility, that will be crucial even if you have to break off tomorrow: i expect users (noting that letters at the start of the alphabet are more heavily used) will say, perhaps for years of repeat sweeps for new names, "If Slyguy working alone got thru more than six 26ths of more than a 26th of the two-letter combos, i can have a real impact too."

_ _ BTW, here's another number or two that i have: within about the last month, i counted abt 170 parent nodes, and each parent node almost always indicates at least one full-ish page. Now, the distributions of given names and of surnames among regions of string-space corresponding to common head strings won't be the identical, but probably will be fairly similar. So you've probably knocked down very roughly one 170th of the total with the Ad... names alone, and if you last thru the Al... ones (3 parent pages), over one 36th. The whole of the A pages embraces 10 parent pages, or a 17th.

_ _ I don't put much stock in counting leaves of the tree (name-entry pages), bcz they vary so wildly in size, but for completeness, you've gone thru digraphs (at the heads of given names) that parallel 7 out of what seem to now be 870 leaf pages (i.e., actually or potentially (mostly-sur-) name-bearing pages).

_ _ On another LoPbN subject, i just made a change last nite to Template:List of people by name exhaustive page-index (sectioned), losing two levels of transclusion, and i'm working toward losing transclusion of 15 of the last 25 templates you'd see listed at the bottom of the edit page for that template, hopefully in the next week. That next batch should make some difference in response time for the pages of the tree, whereas last night's change will affect just that Tl's and the root page's response times. If you experience changes, i'd be glad to hear abt it.
--Jerzy•t 18:10, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] barnstar

		The Working Man's Barnstar
		For your work on Lists of people by name! –Outriggr § 07:49, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

My. I don't know what to write. Except thanks!

--Slyguy 15:09, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

I noticed at random that "LoPbN" has been deleted. How does this strike you? You deserve to rant, rave, threaten to leave! But seriously, every time my opinion of WP starts going back towards a balanced one, I run across something like this deletion. It's a shame. –Outriggr § 01:55, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Siklós & Sikorsky

Your alpha-order "correction" to Siklós > Sikorsky has to be momentary distraction on your part, so i'm undoing it without awaiting your reply.
--Jerzy•t 07:35, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Whoops! Sorry about that. Thanks. --Slyguy 15:38, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] John Harvards

_ _ Thanks heartily for the effective & well summarized rescue of my mess from abt 8 wks ago. I hunted it down, & i guess i half-finished the task of harmonizing the old entries and the new ones that overlapped them; not sure why i wanted to save the old entry, but did it again (properly!), in case i had something sensible in mind. (WP is always a WiP, right?)
_ _ I've been watching with pleasure as you laid the Alberts to rest and move on to the Alexes, with the Alexanders on the horizon. Hmm, Alfred, Alison, Allen, Alma (Mahler, Werfel, Gropius, but not Nietzsche, IIRC; think i'll do those dupes now.) hmm, Alston?, Althea, Alva, Alysa maybe. Curious to see which big ones i'll have missed. In case you're curious, was it to you that i mentioned the lists of American male & female given-name frequencies?
--Jerzy•t 18:53, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
Yes, i think so; i'd be sure if the pop-up tools and the summary line would expand (small) templates.
--Jerzy•t 21:40, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] LoPbN "Lo-res termnlgy" issues

It occurs to me that you're the most useful person to discuss these with, including the one whose opinions i'm most likely to take seriously, since you also have immersed yourself in them and IMO had some occasion to take the practicalities of them seriously. (In the long run, it may make sense to copy this material to the Talk:LoPbN pages.)

Of course, i don't intend to distract you from your quest, if you're not looking for such breaks, so don't feel the need to comment.

[edit] Martial artist

Your use of this term (perhaps extracted from a bio) offers me the occasion to put down some of my thots, tho i'm guessing they'll be incredible overkill as far as talking you out of that term goes.

The term "art" has senses that describe a range of practices far broader than the range of people described by "artist". Examples are "School of Arts and Sciences", "term of art" (a legal concept), The Art of War, Zen and the Art of Archery, Manual Arts High School, JNA Institute of Culinary Arts, Intenational Institute of Culinary Arts, Pacific Institute of Culinary Arts, Robert Morris College Institute of Culinary Arts, California Institute of Culinary Arts.

The 8th Collegiate gives as first sense of "art"

skill acquired by experience, study, or observation [as in] the art of making friends

and gets to

the conscious use of skill... esp. in the production of aesthetic objects

only in sense 4a.

All of that means that "martial arts" is a reasonably natural term, and for someone who hears it for the first time, the fact that it user "art" as a countable noun ("the martial arts", "a martial art", "a martial-arts discipline", "various martial arts") in contrast to "art school", "high art", "quattrocento art" makes them likely to understand "skills of a martial nature".

In contrast, the first sense of "artist" is

one who professes and practices an imaginative art

with 1b shifting only slightly by mentioning "the fine arts".

In Miller's Crossing Albert Finney's character is described as "an artist with a tommy gun", and what that sounds like is a metaphor implying "he handles a tommy gun with the precision and expressiveness that a fine-arts painter demonstrates with a brush"; if someone spoke of a "tommy-gun artist", many if not most people would picture someone producing decorative pieces by painting the surfaces of tommy guns, or turning them into flower pots, or even producing paintings depicting tommy guns.

In a line, "artist" has a far stronger focus on what art schools teach than does even "art"; this is heightened by "artist" giving up the syntactic clues that make "art" (art-school-related stuff) distinguishable from "arts" (skills of unspecified kinds)

"Martial artist" is a term likely to seem logical to those inculcated with the ethos of the martial arts. But others understand "martial arts" almost exclusively as marketing-like term embracing the few specific martial-arts disciplines that they happen to know something about, say karate and judo and tai chi, and "martial artist" without context may have no meaning to them without wracking their memory. Even having done so, they are not fools if they conjecture that "martial artists" are colleagues of military historians, and concern themselves with recording battle scenes.

It is with that in mind that my conception of lo-res trmnlgy includes substituting "martial-arts practitioner" on LoPbN where i find "martial artist". I'm not sure the two-word version is a bad idea in an article, where detail is likely to make the distinction clear, but as i never tire of saying, Dabs and LoPbN are not articles (and barely closer than Dabs are), and there are plenty of cases where what's good in an article is lousy on LoPbN.
--Jerzy•t 01:57, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] LoPbN Entry

1. Incorporation elsewhere: Of course. My tone of asking your indulgence was about using your talk page as my notebook of first drafts, something you'd IMO be entitled to complain about.
2. The template: (Re)read the documentation on its talk page. There are two almost identical syntaxes for such situations. I'm going to describe my editing steps, and leave the syntax for you to study.

   _ _ Suppose i copied & pasted a bunch of entries from Category:Living people. Depending on how similar the surnames are, i edit them in the edit pane or in a separate editor, usually Wordpad (but i'm looking into the RegEx-editor-above-the-edit-pane add-on). Let's use

   Mike Jones (politician)

   as our example. If i'm cutting & pasting on the edit pane, i get

   }}

   ({LoPbN Entry|

   in the paste buffer, and go down the page (until i hit an exceptional case such as you ask abt) alternating between

   • replacing the NewLine (and any other crap) between titles with the paste-buffer content, and
   • replacing the blank before the surname with a "pipe" char.

   When i get to Mike, i paste, type "ttl=", jump to the end of the line, hit enter to hightlight it as an exception, and deal with the next line (select the NL & crap, and paste). When i come back to do an exception, i'm starting from e.g.

   {{LoPbN Entry|ttl=Mike Jones (politician)

   I copy

   Mike Jones (politician)

   and jump to the end of the line's non-blank text, type a "pipe" and paste. Now i have

   ({LoPbN Entry|ttl=Mike Jones (politician)|Mike Jones (politician)

   which i change to

   ({LoPbN Entry|ttl=Mike Jones (politician)|Mike|Jones |politician}}

   Then i go back & either add data from the bio article, or struggle to get the right number of consecutive pipe characters; it's a shock, the first few times, when you proof-read the preview, and the template hasif t so cleanly formatted it with

   (died British)

   [Huh??!]

   _ _ P.S.: I hate typing, so in the discussion near the bottom of the tl's talk page, i went so far as to as to specify a further-extended version that would let you build the equivalent of

   [[Count Sly Cardinal Guy, Sr.|Guy, Sly, Cardinal, Count, Sr.]] (or something vaugely reasonable) without retyping any of the bio's title, but that would probably not be worth the trouble of remembering which variable-names to insert.

3. Rhetorician?: Hey, aren't we all? (I'm serious; one view is that the human brain is like a peacock's tail, heavy, energy-draining to build or maintain, and harmful overall to the individual's survival, but boy does it get you laid. Peahens like peacock feathers bcz them that can grow them successfully must have lots of good survival genes to stay alive despite supporting that damn tail. Women like guys who can write poetry, tell a joke right, explain constellations, and create or solve puzzles for the same reason, and they have big brains too, bcz you need that to tell those abilities from faking it.) In my case, i think i'm actually an asshole extremely compulsive, and find it hard to say anything w/o beating the subject to death. I'm glad you don't find it too burdensome.
   --Jerzy•t 17:53, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
   

[edit] American/Commonwealth spellings in LoPbN

(In response to your Q.)
_ _ Excellent question, and it is not too far off topic, i hope, to mention the similarity to another question: how do regional meanings of terms affect LoPbN entries? (My general answer to that is to avoid such terms in favor of more widely understood, usually more explicitly descriptive words. "Politician" instead of specific offices, and "religious leader" for over a hundred terms that appear in my thesaurus, are my poster-kids; "jurist" for both lawyers and judges, avoiding more than just the solicitor vs. barrister confusion that i think most Americans have is another fairly non-controversial one, and my lumping of all military personnel of all ranks as soldiers, sailors, air-soldiers and marine-soldiers is an example of an unresolved controversial one. Football/soccer/rugby is a toughy, and i dislike the suggestion that football means "soccer" everywhere but US (& Canada?), and that there (but nowhere else) "football" and "soccer" should be used American style. If it worried me more, i'd stop using all those terms in favor of "kicking-game player", seriously. But for lack of commitment to those sports, and of a perfect answer, i'm diffidently deciding, perhaps inconsistently, as i go.)
_ _ Your question does not have a completely simple answer either. Note that LoPbN pages are not articles, nor do i think the whole LoPbN tree has the status of an article: it is more akin to Dabs & even Rdrs, in being navigational devices within the main namespace. I think suiting the LoPbN spelling to the bio-subject's context is a virtually harmless, offense-avoiding approach (tho, in a perfect world, better to demonstrate a single style for the benefit of the vast majority of readers, who read articles without reading instructions for using WP so we gain a way to reinforce the avoidance of dialect meanings). (The context-sensitive approach corresponds to using "football" for what Yanks call "soccer", avoiding the offensiveness of the presuambly less ambiguous "soccer", which i assume is understood by most English speakers even if it is not part of their active (speaking & writing) vocabulary -- i don't object to some inefficiency, even tho WP is not the place to educate us arrogant Americans, much tho we need it.) The other position i can sympathize with is that the size and traffic ratios between en: and de: or jp: suggest to me not just that English-speakers are rich and tech-equipped, but also that English is the language of world culture, and that even if it has peaked in that role (i doubt it has), it's still way ahead of Chinese and Spanish. I know i'm not able to be fully objective, but i argue that international English is primarily American English, bcz of economics and bcz you give up much of your potential influence on international English when most of your countrymen learned Swahili or Hindi (for instance) before English: you can't care enough about English to have the same impact on it as one Yank or Brit etc. does, if you're busy caring about your society's first language. So my other answer is that there's nothing wrong with using Yank spelling in LoPbN entries for Commonwealth people. And yes, i know i didn't answer your deserving question. (And BTW, i think you and are especially influential on these matters by working on LoPbN this much, but i'm not going to suggest we can do more than tilt the initial direction of the discussion.)
--Jerzy•t 19:11, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Alexander Wong

You annotated his LoPbN entry with the cmt

unsure what to write here for him that's low-res

An excellent question, IMO. My answer is

jurist & activist

I use "activist" to cover a wide variety of "sins", from

delivery of charitable services and

political work that doesn't provably affect governance, to

private educational/propaganda efforts directed at the general public (including social, philosophical, or factual ideas), and

all manner of revolutionary activities and terrorism.

In all of these areas, it's hard to be notable, so that there are few enuf of them that IMO that's usually as much as a user is likely to need to distinguish them from others with the same or confusable names. --Jerzy•t 17:03, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Virtual Champagne

I think i implied that getting all the way to Alf would be a noteworthy accomplishment.

Here's a virtual authentic Champagne bottle, and a couple of virtual alcohol-free ones, with my congratulations!
--Jerzy•t 18:59, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Subst User Warnings

Thank you for your contributions to Wikipedia. When using certain templates on talk pages, don't forget to substitute with text by adding subst: to the template tag. For example, use {{subst:uw-test1}} instead of {{uw-test1}. This reduces server load and prevents accidental blanking of the template. Thank you. -- pb30<c.t> 00:01, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Exh list

Tnx! But at least pending looking at it (only 22 min left here), i don't rule out some WP:AGF latitude, since the section-edit lks don't work. That may set up editors for section destruction, AFAIK.
--Jerzy•t 22:25, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

• Curiouser & curiouser. I get an error msg when attempt a secn edit, but i'm skeptical abt a vandal hand-building a section-edit markup in the summary, to match the section removed. I jus dunno. & i don't have time to look at the editor's sparse contrib history.
  --Jerzy•t 22:44, 10 May 2007 (UTC)
  

[edit] Date formats

Thank you for all your effort maintaining Wikipedia. Changing date formats in this way is redundant because Wikimedia sequences the day and month according to each user's preferences as set in their options. Consequently [[23 May]] and [[May 23]] are seen the same way by any individual user. For example, I see all dates as DD Mon; others see all dates as Mon DD. Changing one sequence to the other in an article wastes your energy and time. —Theo (Talk) 12:55, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Animation

This is very cool. Is there any way to speed it up? On my computer (hardly old or slow) it takes about a minute to watch the whole thing, which is asking a lot of readers' patience. Fireplace 20:02, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Copyedit

I wrote the article on Alexis Christoforous and you tagged it. Could you please tell me what I did wrong, that caused the article to deserve a copyedit tag? I do not see anything wrong with it at all.

69.121.68.125 20:48, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

(Responded to on user's talk page --Slyguy (talk) 01:23, 4 July 2007 (UTC))

[edit] OK

No offense. Just wanted to know what I did. I strive to fix such problems, but I make mistakes, also.

69.121.68.125 02:44, 4 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Cynthia Manley

Since you created the Boys Town Gang article, I thought you might be interested in this:

Cynthia Manley wrote to me!!!!!!!!!! Oh My God!!!!!

Sent: October 10, 2007 Read: October 11, 2007 Subject: Thank You For The Music! Message: Dear Cynthia,

Just a note to say that your music has made me happy since I was a teenager. remember Me/Ain't No Mountain High Enough is probably one of the greatest singles ever released. Even now, almost 30 years later, I have it downloaded into my iPod and listen to it on a regular basis.

Your voice just gives me chills, and moves me with its depth of feeling.

I'm happy to see you're still going strong and touring. I hope Europe is on your itinerary (specifically Amsterdam). Thank you for your contributions to both musical culture and gay culture.

Love and respect,

Jeff Woloson

Sent: October 11, 2007 Subject: Re: Thank You For The Music! Message: hello jeff, thank you so much for your kind words and support. the music biz is brutal and it is always nice to hear positive things .... i love my job and it is the only thing i know how to do , so i KEEP ON KEEPIN' ON !!! SPREAD LOVE, CYNTHIA Jeffpw 19:33, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Scope of Colorado's anti-discrimination law

This is the first time using this method of communication-- I apologize if I'm "doing it wrong". This is a response to you about a change I made to Romer v. Evans, indicating that a law passed this year finally includes protections for sexual orientation, but only for government workers. You are right, it was incorrect. I'm not sure how I had it in my head that it was only for public employees. In any case, I have corrected it over on the Romer v. Evans page. Thanks for the note.

Mtnkodiak (talk) 18:29, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Thanks

		The Geography Barnstar
		I award you the GEOGRAPHY barnstar, for your excellent contributions by creating maps of Canadian electoral districts. Ground Zero

[edit] Notability of Tom Teahen

You state that Teahen's notability is "well-established" - how so? From what I can see, he's a one-time defeated candidate who has held a few miscellaneous public positions. In addition, every article that links to him concerns the 2007 election, in which he was not elected. I'm sure information on Teahen would be better merged into Liberal Party candidates, 2007 Ontario provincial election. Morgan695 (talk) 00:16, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Rick Yu

You said putting Rick Yu under notable alumni on Malvern Collegiate Institute is vandalism?? He is in fact a notable alumni. You are wrong. Stop making false accusations. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.141.21.212 (talk) 17:19, 1 April 2008 (UTC)