User talk:StuffOfInterest/Archive 1

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Contents

Welcome

Welcome!

Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia. Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! By the way, please be sure to sign your name on Talk and vote pages using four tildes (~~~~) to produce your name and the current date, or three tildes (~~~) for just your name. If you have any questions, see the help pages, add a question to the village pump or ask me on my Talk page. Again, welcome! --Phroziac (talk) 17:58, 15 July 2005 (UTC)


Thanks

Thanks for expanding Template:User cmd to add class-3 Xaosflux 05:40, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

You're welcome. It was some what of a motivated self interest. For many in the Windows era, batch and cmd file programming seems to be a lost art. --StuffOfInterest 20:33, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Democratic User Box

This wouldn't be included in the babel format since Babel is only for languages, and we don't speak a different language, regardless of what Rush Limbaugh may say. There are many shades and varieties of userboxes on Wikipedia, check my user page for some examples. Karmafist 23:55, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
As someone with many more edits than myself, I'll defer to you on the template. I'll just go ahead and hard code the format on my user page to get the consistent look I desire. Still, if you really wanted the donkey logo, you could have used the {{User dem}} template. --StuffOfInterest 02:16, 22 November 2005 (UTC)


Perhaps then you're talking about a lower case "d" democrat (someone who believes in democracy, as in the form of government). I'm going to open Request for Comment on this at Wikipedia:Requests For Comment/Democrat userbox. In the meantime, i'm putting back the way it was. karmafist 20:56, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Jonathan Tien High School

I've removed the nn-bio speedy tag from this article; it's not a speedy delete candidate. Try an AFD if you like, but it might be better to just make this into a decent stub. Harro5 22:37, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

Umm, OK, but it looks like someone else went ahead and deleted it. --StuffOfInterest 22:43, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

Category:Historic libraries

Could you please reconsider your vote on this matter. You are confusing "Historic" and "historical". Historic does not mean "no longer existing", it means "famous or important in history or potentially so" (concise OED). Therefore it does not match the likely intentions of the creator of this category. CalJW 14:20, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, but there is no way I can support categorizing the Library of Alexandria as defunct. If the proposal was to change the name from "historic" to "historical" I would be more inclined to vote for it. --StuffOfInterest 19:08, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

Featured article for December 25th

I noticed that you have listed yourself as an atheist Wikipedian. You will probably be interested to know that Brian0918 has nominated Omnipotence paradox as the front page article for December 25th. You can vote on this matter here. The other suggestion being supported by others for that date is Christmas, although Raul654 has historically been against featuring articles on the same day as their anniversary/holiday. AngryParsley (talk) (contribs) 08:20, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

Mid-ocean ridges

You happened to add {{nonsense}} to Mid-ocean ridges just as I was redirecting it to Oceanic ridge; hope you don't mind my taking down the speedy and redirecting. Peyna 23:46, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

Not at all. Your's was a better option than just deleting. --StuffOfInterest 23:48, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

y the hell did u delete my page jerk? (left unsigned by 24.60.205.181)

about the technoillogical myopia

Please, excuse my ignorance but I do not understand the terminology used in the discussion about deleting the article about the technoillogical myopia.

I would like to ask you if there any way I can delete it straight away as I did it myself and don't want more people wasting their time on thinking about if it should be deleted (if it is not relevant, it is not relevant).

Thanks very much for your time. independientix (posted by anonymous user 86.10.208.225)

If you created the article, it will be easiest to just put in a vote on the AfD page asking for deletion and citing yourself as the original author (which I believe you did). An admin will probably come along soon after and grant your request. Also, when you post messages, please sign your post with four tildes (~~~~). Don't let one experience discourage you. Consider setting up an account and keep contributing! --StuffOfInterest 15:56, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

Ok. I'll do that. Thanks again --independientix

more on technoillogical myopia

Sorry, this is last time I bother you, I promise. Could you please explain to me what does this mean? (non-notable band, makes you wish that there was 1% more support in the vote to add this to CSD) I did not understand your post either ('A' for effort on the page). Thanks again --independientix

Regarding notability, there are guidelines on Wikipedia on what makes a band notable (see WP:MUSIC). Regarding the A for effort, your page was actually built very well. Most of the non-notable band pages are very sloppy, contain only one or two sentences, or are a direct copy/paste from a website. --StuffOfInterest 16:35, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

thank you. --independientix

HTML help on wiki software

Hi there, I was just randomly clicking on usernames on the recent changes page, and I came across your page, noticing you're an Advanced HTML user.

I'm from Memory-Alpha, the Star Trek encyclopedia site. I was wondering if you could help me. How do you resize pictures that have been hosted on other sites? Usually, you'd just use <IMG SRC="link" HEIGHT="number" WIDTH="number" ALT="name">, wouldn't you? For some reason, this doesn't seem to work, because you can simply write in a web-address to the picture link, and the picture appears without any need to use HTML. I need to resize a picture, but not host it on our site. Do you think you can help? Thanks, Zsingaya.

Zsingaya, I don't believe wiki will support externally hosted images to avoid copyright issues. Of course, I could be wrong there. As for regular HTML image display, you have it right in your code sample above. If you had an image on "foo.com" you want to show this a code such as <img src="http://foo.com/image.jpg" width="150" height="100" alt="foolish image"> should work fine. Please let me know if I'm not understanding you correctly. --StuffOfInterest 23:31, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
Yeah, thats what I mean. For some reason, it just displays the image from the website and the rest of the HTML appears around it, for example: <img src="Image appears here" width=....>. Its actually for a friend, who wishes to display the image on his userpage. I don't know if he's got the right to do it or not, thats up to the admins to work out :-) Anyway, you can see our little conversation here [1], thanks for your help -- Zsingaya.
<img src="http://www.geocities.com/zsingayasynovial/Enterprise-07-june.gif" width="150" height="100" alt="Starship"> For some reason, this code acts differently here than it does at Memory-Alpha, see here again -- Zsingaya.

Tamagotchi

It wasn't nonsense... it was a fact. Just because you didn't know it, doesn't make it untrue. (posted by anonymous user 65.216.254.98)

If it is a valid name then I'm sorry I deleted it. Still, when you post two word, "Lucky Poop", into a page it looks very much like vandalism. To keep from drawing attention you might consider two things:
  1. Create a user account and sign your contributions. Contributions by signed-in users are less likely to draw scrutiny than anonymous posts.
  2. Explain your contribution inthe edit summary. Just having a few words of explanation may keep your entry from being reverted out.
Finally, when you post to someone's comments, please sign with four tildes(~~~~). It is bad manners to leave unsigned messages. --StuffOfInterest 11:27, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Hopefully That Solves Things

I assumed Wikiacc was agreeing with you, but that's alright, I hope there are no hard feelings either way. A tip to you as a newcomer, you're going to get into alot of disputes where there may be misconceptions like that, and you're going to need to keep your cool. That rfc was about the user box, and to a lesser extent, our perceptions of it, not you or me. karmafist 22:24, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

I've struck out the acusation of an acusation. When you read the RfC, you do claim you had an edit war with me (even if only a mini one) when I reverted the template only once, and with an explanation, before surrendering it over to you. Claiming an edit war makes it look like I was pushing my views on others which I did not. --StuffOfInterest 22:30, 8 December 2005 (UTC)
Wow, you are new. Edit wars happen all the time. Sometimes they're with POV problems, sometimes they were just people having a disagreement. This was number two. Please don't let something as small as a userbox make you want to leave the Democratic Party. karmafist 18:44, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

Chaosfeary talk page

Interesting. I'm not going to bother restoring it because the majority of that stuff is old, and the more pressing issues still reaming on the page.--Sean|Black 23:48, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

Userbox debacle

Here is a rundown of why I've decided to stay away from user boxes and user categorisation for a while. Sorry, but it is a bit of along read.

Episode 1, a single revert

A while back I ran across the user categorisation project. This led me to add myself to a few categories which represented my skills and interests. I even did a little template work of my own to try and clean up where I saw problems. It seemed like a good idea at the time but now I'm not so sure.

My first frustration with this started over a template for a political party. I created a democrat template when I noticed that it was referenced by the Democratic Wikipedians category but didn't actually exist. I tried to follow the format I had seen for Babel boxes in using a short text identifier followed by a longer textual description with links to both the referenced category and the named political party's article.

Episode 2, the RfC

This was well and good for a while. A few other users even started linking to the template. Then someone decided to make it better. Karmafist decided to add a party logo and radically change the colors without any discussion. I reverted the change and put a comment on the article's talk page. Karamafist decided to revert my reversion. Doing some research and seeing that he is a much more active editor than myself I decided to let it drop. I copied the template format I liked directly into my user page and moved on with other things.

A couple of weeks went by until Wikiacc decided to remove the image citing fair use concerns. Karmafist's reaction to this was to file an RfC regarding the template citing an edit war with me (later retracted). My response to the RfC was that he was misdirected and that I don't use that template any longer and had not made the recent edit leading to the RfC.

At this point I left the discussion but still kept an eye on it. It became apparent that there was a larger issue at hand over the template (and associated category) representing the concept of democracy or the institution of the US Democratic Party.

Episode 3, the real edit war

A couple of weeks after the RfC a real edit war broke out over the template. Best I could tell there were three issues being fought over by numerous factions. There were groups fighting over the image (or lack of), the colors, and the association (philosophy vs. party). The template was locked at least twice by administrators, interestingly each time immediately after Karmafist reverted to a version he wanted. At one point there was even an attempt to rename the template to make it clearly associated with the US Democratic Party. Alas, all this history was lost as someone decided to blank the edit history for the life of the template.

Also of note during this edit war, a new category was created which attempted to make it clear that the association was for the political party. This category almost immediatedly ended up with a CfD note at the top.

Through this edit war I never did edit the template itself but did post on the discussion page. That led to more comments by Karmafist. It was also during this time that I found out there was a project to create and organize userboxes.

Episode 4, a concept to reorganize

After seeing the edit war over a template and the lack of consensus on what a category stands for I decided to make a proposal. Under the super-category "Wikipedians by politics" discussion page I made a suggestion that the category be split in two to group by belief and by association separately. To date there have been a few comments related to it but not enough of a quorum to justify taking further action. Had things not progressed in a more disturbing direction I had planned to pole people in the related categories to solicit their opinions.

The next action was something I really never expected. Jimbo himself posted on the main category page (rather than the discussion page) stating that he doesn't really like these types of categories and would discourage their use. Although I don't necessarily agree with his thinking on it the post was enough to cause me to step back and think about this some more before proceeding. Unfortunately, what happened next was truly disturbing.

Episode 5, the mass deletion

On New Years Eve, Kelly Martin, an administrator and member of the arbitration committee, possibly influenced by Jimbo's earlier mentioned statement, decided to take it on herself to mass delete many political party user boxes. When confronted with it she took on a rather high-handed and dismissive attitude towards others. This led to a Request for Comment being issued. The discussions which followed showed a really ugly side of Wikipedia. Factionalism and elitism showed themselves to extreme measures.

Later, Snowspinner, possibly inspired by Kelly's actions, deleted more user boxes. The failure to reach consensus on RfC's against either person led to a Request for Arbitration against both parties. Seeing the very first opinion on accepting or rejecting leaves me wondering if even the arbitration committee has been corrupted by power.

Finale, disillusionment

All the events listed above have led me to suspend any actions on userboxes or user categories. The process of grouping politics has become far too political for my taste. Perhaps, when things settle down, and a consensus is reached, I'll reengage on these areas. Until then I'll stick to article space cleanup and the occassional vandal fighting.

The activities over the last month have led me to a few unfortunate conclusions:

  1. Administrators often think of themselves as more important than regular editors.
  2. Cabals exist in the admin ranks which are dangerous to the survival of Wikipedia.
  3. Even the ArbCom is tainted by elitism.

Feedback is welcome, but proactive work on the problems is better.

Thanks.

--StuffOfInterest 18:09, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

Template

The template I use is Template:anon. Remember to use {{subst:anon}}. :) - FrancisTyers 21:53, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

About the encyclpedia of technology.

Hello. I found you through category search for wikipedians interested in technology, as a result of our discussion on the recent Wiki project (http://en.howto.wikicities.com), you might be interested in contribution to a project with an idea to create a free and open know-how resource for everyone. (Project is recently on).

Are you one of the Wikimedia staff members?

--Inyuki, 16:12, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

Leaving a message when I block.

You're right, thanks. I've since learned about {{3RR3}}, so I can use that next time. (With subst:, I understand.) – Quadell (talk) (bounties) 21:59, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

Hey, no problem. Thanks again for watching out for that stuff. If you ever decide to try to be an admin, let me know. All the best, Quadell 12:54, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Vanadlism on the Abramoff page

Hi, thanks for writing back. I did report him to the Vanadlism page, and when he persisted, reported it to the Vandalism_in_progress page. It's since been removed there. As I am pretty new to Wiki, I'm not sure what this means or what the status is now. Sholom 14:35, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Toplessness

Hello.

Can you please explain the necessity of having a picture of a topless woman with a caption that only says 'topless woman'?

Please understand that there are readers who come across this article, and may be surprised/offended by that -considering that it's unnecessary anyway, since it does nothing further the reader's knowledge.

I don't know of anyone who might be offended by the pictures of the topless men, but if there are such people, then I suggest removing those pictures as well, as they too are basically unnecessary.

I apologize if my removal has bothered you. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 70.29.238.15 (talk • contribs) .

I believe discussion has been held about this topic on the article's talk page. Oh wait, it hasn't on this particular article. It was discussed on the Nudity article. Still, before removing content from an article please check the talk page and see if there has been previous discussion. Removal will always draw attention.
In general, photos present for illustrative purposes have merit. You are talking about an article regarding toplessness which has both a male and a female picture. Seems highly apprporiate and within context.
Also, when you leave any comments on a talk page (either article or user) please sign your comment with four tildes (~~~~). Thank you. --StuffOfInterest 02:34, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Signatures, etc.

Sorry, was not aware what the signature could do. Has been toned down accordingly. - 21:03, 20 January 2006 (UTC) The Great Gavini lobster telephone

Thanks. Much, much better now. --StuffOfInterest 22:16, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Yippee, Ham #2!

I hope your adding the category amateur radio operator will get teh ball rolling! Steve Kd4ttc 22:31, 22 January 2006 (UTC) Please add to the talk under Talk:Amateur_radio Kd4ttc 23:23, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

signing.

We are watching the ABRAMOFF page for antisemitism. Its not really important who we are. We are in touch with Jimmy Wales and the Wik board. And they have been very helpful in this. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 62.0.181.94 (talk • contribs) .

On a talk page it matters to sign and on a user's talk page it matters even more. I highly recommend you create an account and start signing your posts with it. Large activity by IP only users is often construed as vandalism. --StuffOfInterest 13:19, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
for the record: reverting a page blanking or clear in bad faith vandalism does not count towards your "3RR" breaking. The 3rr is broken during content disputes and pov pushing for the most part. If you get yourself blocked for vandalism reversion, feel free to email me and I will unblock you.  ALKIVAR™ 14:53, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for the clarification. I tend to be fairly conservative here being that one man's vandalism can be another's revert war. --StuffOfInterest 14:55, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the edit help

I appreciated how you edited the category link in the discussion of the amateur radio categorization and left the hidden inline comment. Cute! Kd4ttc 15:27, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

No problem. Just following the request you left. --StuffOfInterest 15:34, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Your note...

Thanks for the good thoughts. It bothered me a lot for about a day, then I decided that it could only bother me if I let it. Moving onward. Cheers, KWH

My, have you been busy!

Saw all the categories you have applied! Kd4ttc 03:06, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

I figured that it needed to be done and I had a few minutes to take care of it. All I did was look for individuals linked to the Amateur radio article and investigated from there. --StuffOfInterest 11:27, 26 January 2006 (UTC)