User talk:Taemyr

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Welcome!

Hello, Taemyr, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question and then place {{helpme}} before the question on your talk page. Again, welcome!  --AW 13:32, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Fair Use

The image is fair use ONLY in articles about Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, not in articles about Warhammer 40,000 factions. Take a look at WP:FU for more information.-- JediLofty User ¦ Talk 09:38, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Ah... sorry! I see what you mean now. Well as long as the image has a Fair Use Rationale that mentions that article it should be okay. -- JediLofty User ¦ Talk 11:38, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] 3-3 invasion

Sensei's library does support my claim. But one reference may still be sufficient. Please see my Talk page. Gaav42 23:34, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Re: Assume Good Faith

Thanks for the Tips/Advice you gave me :) PookeyMaster (talk) 09:05, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Thanks

Thanks for adding the tag. For some reason twinkle did not do it. Oh well, Brusegadi (talk) 11:57, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Your recent edits

To CelticGreen's talk page have been removed as vandalism. Try being civil when dealing with people and do not behave in such a manner or your edits will be reverted, including uncivil comments left on talk pages. FYI, to factor a percentage is easy. You take the lower number and divide it by the higher number. Any messages left to cause problems for the sake of causing problems, as your were, are considered uncivil.IrishLass (talk) 14:38, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

If I leave you a message here, you can reply here. All I'll say is I'll remove your comments from my page too because CG sees them and will likely tear you a new one. SHE gets really pissed being called a he. It was a friendly warning. CG has one hell of a temper. And I, and MS Excel, disagree with your calculation. I'm just trying to keep the peace. I've seen the temper. As you weren't involved and most who were involved last night are really pissed at AnteaterZot, making more out of the situation really isn't going to help. Believe me. It really won't. Tempers are already hot on this, lets try and defuse, not infuse, please. IrishLass (talk) 14:52, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
How much is 100% of 10? Taemyr (talk) 14:51, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
About the warning, rather than about percentages. It is noted, I did not try to cause problems, although I agree that the tone of the edit in question left things to be desired. Taemyr (talk) 15:00, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
I'm going to move on. It's obvious we disagree (about the percentage)but I don't want tempers to flair unnecessarily and I think we can agree to end with a "ooops" factor and move on. I will move on and hope you do the same. Have a good day. IrishLass (talk) 15:04, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
This exchange is related to WP:ANI#Severe incivility from User:IrishLass0128. —Random832 16:15, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] TfD nomination of Template:Rescue

Template:Rescue 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. — Benjiboi 21:53, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Joyeux Noël

The composer of my favorite Christmas carol.
The composer of my favorite Christmas carol.

I just want to wish my fellow Wikipedians a Merry Christmas! Sincerely, --Le Grand Roi des CitrouillesTally-ho! 02:50, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Madison Street (Manhattan)

I've found and added more sources. Bearian (talk) 16:02, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] TfD closes

When I close a particular TfD, it is in the vast majority of cases the first time I have read it. Read, determine, close. In most cases it takes less then two minutes. RyanGerbil10(Говорить!) 17:43, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Verifiability rather than Notability.

The wikipedia guidelines on notability are about a level of notability, rather than any notability. To be able to verify that something exists or that a statement is correct, you simply need a good quality source. Notability guidelines restrict this to either several such sources, or a few certain major sources (such as award nominations, or certain major publications). Verifiability is a product of the trustworthiness of a source, notability a product of the fame and perceived importance, rather than the accuracy and technical quality. LinaMishima (talk) 00:45, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Redirect of instantiation

Around 20 pages link to it, so instead of letting it be deleted, I redirected it. --Uncle Ed (talk) 21:35, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for this tweak. I probably cut the intro too severely. --Uncle Ed (talk) 22:30, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Asymptotic time complexity

You asked why it was deleted. Answer: the redirect target does not define the term. Such redirects have double harm. First, they do not help a person who does not already know what the term means. Second. The red link is a prompt to write an article. The blue link makes experts to fail noticing that something is missing. `'Míkka>t 19:05, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

I will write a reasonable stub. It has more to be said. `'Míkka>t 23:52, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] You're welcome.

It's no problem at all. :) By the way, both links in your signature link to your talk page... why not make one link instead of two (seems a bit redundant to me...)? · AndonicO Hail! 13:20, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

Ah, fair enough then (oh, and I knew about the redirect, but it's pretty much the same thing as linking directly). · AndonicO Hail! 13:37, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Logistic versus exponential growth.

I don't doubt this is true, because of the shortfalls in user growth on http://stats.wikimedia.org/ shortly before statistics stopped being collected. However, I really wish we had some solid statistics on this.

I noted elsewhere that the statistics we so heavily relied upon for the original essays aren't even necessarily dependable themselves, because they were somewhat sloppily collected. The outside collection has been good, but not a full, single collection and compilation, so there isn't enough stuff there that we can use.

Somebody needs to kick Wikimedia in the butt and tell 'em to spend more on tech and less on whatever else. The inability to collect basic stats is, in and of itself, a big failure. To say, "Wikipedia is failing," isn't a defeatist position which asserts it has to fail.

Lastly, in WP:NOTFAIL, it was argued that WP:FAIL had to explain the success of German Wikipedia. I have since done that here: Wikipedia:FAIL#Speculations regarding German Wikipedia

What's your opinion on that? And if that's not true, then what is your opinion as to why German Wikipedia may have done better?

  Zenwhat (talk) 22:29, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

I am not completely convinced that the German wikipedia is doing better. de:Wikipedia:Wikipedistik/Wachstumsprognose implies a linear growth rate, which is fundamentlly different from any considered for the English. WP:NOTFAIL points to de to shows a wiki where FA proportion is not decreasing. FA growth on en. is apparantly linear, so it's portion of wikipedia will be decreasing during times when article growth on en. can be approximated with exponential models. Taemyr (talk) 08:06, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

You're right, but based on that, why do you deny German Wikipedia's success? Success is both quantitative and qualitative. So, it is best defined by growth in articles overall (a basic measure of quantity) and an increasing percentage of FA (a basic measure of quality). Based on these two criteria, German Wikipedia is doing better, because although it is growing far more slowly than English Wikipedia, it is still growing and it is capable of growing without a decrease in quality. Theoretically, if there was a wiki out there with, on average, only 1 new article a day, but with an FA proportion that was steadily increasing, this would be even more successful than German Wikipedia and eventually, it would probably put Britannica out of business.   Zenwhat (talk) 19:11, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

I do not deny German Wikipedia's sucess. I am saying that the arguments presented merely states that Germany has a flat proportion of it's articles as FA. Until I see evidence that the German wikipedia produces more than 1 FA/day then I see no convincing argument that Germany is doing better. I agree with WP:NOTFAIL in that as long as our FA production is constant then there is no grounds to say that Wikipedia is decreasing in quality. The hypothetical wiki presented I would rate as less of a sucess than the English wikipedia. For the simple reason that articles such as Vertex (graph theory) has value. Taemyr (talk) 23:28, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

Oh, I agree with you. They do have a flat proportion of FA articles increasing, which is why we can't really say they're "succeeding," just "not failing," which is a form of success. Just like every other wiki, they need to increase their percentage of FA articles, also.

Comparatively, though, why do you deny that German Wikipedia is doing better? Small growth and a flat proportion of FA articles is better than huge growth and a decline proportion of FA articles. The latter could easily be established by allowing businesses to spam Wikipedia and abolishing policies on vandalism.

Vertex (graph theory) looks very nice, but why hasn't that article been rated yet, in terms of quality? I suppose you could make the argument that FA isn't a good measure of quality, since so many good articles simply haven't been looked at yet, but then that itself is a problem on Wikipedia that needs to be addressed and it can't be used to argue for Wikipedia's "success," just as a defense against the claim that it is failing.

Lastly, again, absolute production of FA articles is not "success." You're using the same quantitative (rather than qualitative), absolute (rather than marginal\proportional) definition of success in WP:NOTFAIL. The absurdity of that definition is laid out in the analogy of this image: Image:Wikipedia_absolute_accuracy.png.

Even assuming that non-featurable content isn't as bad as "garbage," the analogy still fits because it isn't generally good enough stuff to be included in an ecyclopedia. It doesn't matter if the landfill and the shiny red book are both growing constantly. The shiny red book should not be buried in the garbage and, if it is, that's not "success."

  Zenwhat (talk) 07:26, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

I disagree with the statement that an article being non-FA means it would be of to low quality to be included in an encyclopedia. Any paper encyclopedia, including EB, will have articles that would be rated as stub if the same article was in wikipedia. This is a simple fact that follows from the constraint placed by available space in a paper encyclopedia.
Secondly our featured articles is in no way burried under the "garbage". A reader looking for our article on ASCII would reach this just as fast on the current wikipedia as it would on a wiki that was solely WP's featured articles. He would type ASCII into the search bar and press go.
FA is the showcases of wikipedia, it is the articles that are clearly the best of all our articles. If the proportion of FA class articles got very high (10-15 %) I would argue that we would need to tighten the criteria.
For these reasons I do not see why proportion of FA is a good indication of our success.
Vertex fails Wikipedia:Featured article criteria in that it lacks a lead section, a system of hierarchical headings and table of contents, and inline citations. Lack of a lead section also means that it fails Wikipedia:Good article criteria. To go further down on the quality scale we can put forth stubs such as Action semantics as still being helpful to an unfamiliar reader.
My point is that a reader looking for Action semantics would type Action semantics into the search bar, press go, and get Action semantics. This is clearly better than a reader typing in Action semantics and getting something Like this one.
Taemyr (talk) 11:20, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Your first main point: it doesn't particularly matter how accurate FA is as a "true" measure of encyclopedic quality, only that it's a fixed measure of quality that we can use to pinpoint trends in quality on Wikipedia. If the quality of articles on Wikipedia rises, in general, the percentage of FA articles should rise as well. For these same reasons, economically, it doesn't particularly matter that statistics on poverty, economic growth (real GDP), the consumer price index, the UN's human development index, the Heritage Foundation's economic freedom index, etc., are all "perfect" measures of the statistics they're trying to measure. You could make specific arguments against all of these statistics, that they don't fully capture the concepts they're trying to study, but they are still widely respected and used. They're meaningful in discovering trends provided that they have reasonable, roughly static definitions over a long period of time, which "The percentage of FA articles represents Wikipedia quality," does.

Your second main point: When I say "buried," I don't mean in terms of the ability to access them. I mean in terms of what defines Wikipedia, that is, how credible it is overall. Bad edits encourage bad edits, because Wikipedia, just like public education and research, is a feedback loop. See Image:Wikipedia feedback loop.jpg.

The rest of your points seem to all center around your first main point. I don't follow why you'd object to % of FA articles of 10% to 15% (assuming that we kept the same quality standards that we have now). In other words, the idea we would need to loosen the FA criteria if we have 10% to 15% of FA articles is true. However, if we have rigid criteria, maintain those same criteria over a long period of time, and our % of FA articles increases to 10% or %15, that's definitely a good thing.   Zenwhat (talk) 02:14, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

If the quality of articles on Wikipedia rises, in general, the percentage of FA articles should rise as well. No, this only works when the number of articles is constant. For it to work without further caveats then, when new articles is added you would have to assume that the average quality of a new article was the same as the average quality of an established article, a state of affairs that I would view as worrying. That is, the fact that FA proportion is decreasing is indicative that we are getting wider faster than we are getting deep. Considering that our aim is to be a repository of all human knowledge this is a good thing. If it can be shown that the FA proportion of a fixed random sample of articles was decreasing then this would be cause for worry.
Bad edits encourage bad edits. Yes, to a great extent this holds. However a stub is not necessarily a bad edit, or the result of a bad edits. I created the article Generalized Ozaki cost function. And I genuinely believe that the current state of this article is better than a red-link, this despite the fact that it offers no context on the formula and is largely written by a person that does not know anything about what he is writing about.(The first follows from the second, if I could have given anything more than the formula I would have). And this holds for would be editors as well as readers since the article got the proper reference within 2 days of me creating it. As such it is a starting point.
assuming that we kept the same quality standards that we have now. Well I made no such assumptions, I simply feel that 10% is too high a number of articles to define as the best we have to offer. If you assume rigid criteria there would still be a ratio that I would feel was too high, although then I would say about 50% or so. This because the current criteria calls for a topic to be comprehensive, in that all significant facts and details is included. This means that for poverty to reach FA, a whole lot of articles needs to be created. (Otherwise said content would have to be described in detail in the main article). Those articles would also need to be meet the current FA criteria, otherwise the whole set would drag the average down.

There will also be articles that can never reach the current FA criteria, eg. the topic being narrow enough that getting it past stub would be problematic or articles where our current fair use policies prevents images from being added. Taemyr (talk) 16:35, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Human population and other various variables are not constant, yet the economic statistics above are still meaningful. Also, you again repeat the claim about how some articles will never meet FA criteria. This is true, but again, since the percentage of FA articles rises in tandem with overall quality, it's still a meaningful statistic, just not very precise.

In other words, it still measures Wikipedia quality -- it just isn't quite clear by how much, since it only measures FA articles which, as you've pointed out, are limited. Unless there's a particular reason to believe, though, that non-FA articles are somehow improving at a subtantially greater rate than FA articles (not quite sure why that would happen -- it sounds totally implausible), trends in quality are still captured by the statistic used. You can cite specific examples of articles not captured by the FA stat, but then what leads you to believe that FA articles could decline in quality, while overall Wikipedia quality goes up, due to being offset by the quality of non-FA articles?   Zenwhat (talk) 23:11, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

At the time notfail was written there was a reason to assume that development of non-FA articles was developing at a substantially higher rate than FA. This because total number of articles grew with an increasing rate while number of FA articles grew with a constant rate.
As already stated I refuse to accept the argument that the average quality of wikipedia is a measure of the total quality of wikipedia. This because I feel that we should measure our ability to cover specific topics. So if we should take an average then it should be the average quality of our articles on all possible topics, not just those that are already on wikipedia. And FA proportion in such a set is increasing. Taemyr (talk) 13:45, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Just reading this past discussion. There doesn't seem to be the realisation that FA quality criteria has risen considerably. It's NOT a fixed measure. Take an example. Garry Kasparov was a feature article in December 2003 and a today's featured article in April 2005, check what it was like when it first became a FA here. It's quite dire by today's standard of a Featured article. The article today, has more then twice as much content, infoboxes, images, a navigation box, fully categorized(was none in 2003), over 50 references(compare to 2003 it had none!) and it's Class today, well it's a B-Class meaning below a good article. I suggest if the standard of FA was today as it was here in Dec 2003, then a check through the slightly over 2500 Chess topics suggest to me that at least 100(4%) and maybe up to 200(8%) (depending on how you would compare) would be FA class. Guess how many of chess articles that are actually FA class today? Well it's whopping great number of two!!. SunCreator (talk) 20:27, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

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[edit] Notability

I'm a relative newbie here and am a little confused. I hope you don't mind my approaching you for advice, as I have a question about WP:notability. I read you comment on Talk:Mind Champions Academy where you said 'It's not how important something is that is the criteria used. This is because importance is highly subjective. To pass as notable a topic needs to be covered in multiple independent sources'. That makes good sense to me. However many places I look there are editors saying it's about importance and citing pages linked from notability like WP:BIO, WP:ORG etc. If the notability of a subject was based on 'multiple independent sources' then I don't see why those guidelines exists, nor also why there would be so much subjective discussion about what is and is not notable. Perhaps you can see my confusion and perhaps clear it up. Thank you. PS will add this talk page to my watch list. ChessCreator (talk) 15:49, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

I might not be the one to ask, I have fewer edits here than you. However as for your questions;
  • Editors citing WP:BIO or WP:ORG to argue that it is about importance of the subject is flat out wrong. Both these guidelines explicitly points out that notability is different from importance.
  • We have subguidlines such as WP:BIO or WP:ORG for the same reason that any guidelines exists. Ie. we see that the same arguments is repeated frequently in similar debates, and therefore feel that it's advantageous to see if we can derive general guidelines on these concerns from these debates. We also feel that there is instances where the requirements of notability should be either disregarded or assumed met, eg. WP:PROF assumes notability for any scientist that has received a major award. There is two reasons for this, for the first, if a person have received a Nobel prize then it's almost a certainty that he has received independent coverage by multiple reliable sources, and secondly even if he has not it would be seen as a cap in our mission of creating an encyclopedia if we did not cover every nobel prize winner.
  • There is much discussion around WP:notability because deletion is a drastic step. The decisions taken is more important than most other decisions that are made. While our notability guidelines is one of the less subjective guidelines we have there is issues for which sharp lines are unlikely to receive consensus. These are what does it mean that a source is reliable, most would agree that New York Times is and that a random blog is not, but smaller newspapers is harder, especially if they written in another language. Similar concerns is raised over what constitutes independent and non-trivial.
It's also worth noting that one of the criteria for speedy deletion, WP:CSD#A7, calls for deletion specifically based on importance. But this is separate from issues of notability. I hope this helps. Taemyr (talk) 06:43, 15 March 2008 (UTC)
Thank you for the reply. Don't be mislead with my higher edits, that's from repeatable doing simple things and correcting all my typos. :) I'm still a newbie and still have much to learn. ChessCreator (talk) 19:40, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

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[edit] Copyvio

Response at my talk Jeepday (talk) 14:08, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

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[edit] My mistake

I got your message. Thanks for pointing that out. I've run into so much trouble with IP vandals at the Naruto section that sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between vandalism and good faith. That and I was making the edit on the way out the door, so I had to move fast. Thanks for reverting my mistake. Sasuke9031 (talk) 09:01, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

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[edit] Fiction wikiphilosophy

Good evening. You seem knowledgeable about the debates that deemed out-of-universe fiction coverage preferable to in-universe coverage. If you can answer this, I would be interested in knowing whether the two were deemed mutually exclusive, and whether in-universe material was deemed to have negative value - to be worse than nothing, removable even when not replaced.

I also have opinions about one of the mentioned reasons behind the decision - lowering Wikipedia's utility to polish its image - but going into them is not productive, not least because I'll have to block myself if I express those opinions before rephrasing them into more polite forms. Cheers, Kizor 19:10, 4 May 2008 (UTC)


The two are not deemed mutually exclusive. Rather the opposite, for meaningful coverage of the real world impact a brief description of the in-universe context is often considered needed. So when WP:NOT says that wikipedia is not the place for plot synopsis it goes on to say that such coverage might be appropriate as a part of an article. The point, the way I see it, is that the focus of the article should be on the real world of the fictional element. This rather strongly implies that in-universe material should not automatically be judged to have negative value, however when there is exessive plot detail this tent to drown out the content that we are after, ie. the content that the plot was supposed to prop up, namely the real world impact of the fictional element. And when this happens then the plot summary have negative value. Jedi is an article that IMHO is an example of this, considering that we here are dealing with a fictional element that have spawned it's own religion.
The argument that this makes us look less like a serious encyclopedia is one that one should be careful about using. Wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedia, and one of the benefit of this is that a reader gets to the article he is looking for without having to look at a lot of other articles. That means that he gets what he asks for, to the extent that we are able to deliver. So articles in which there is no real world importance to cover will not suffer in this respect, the user searching for Force lightning was probably looking for plot summaries anyway. User looking for something else is not going to see the article. The question is why should we cover topics with no real world impact? As such it ties in with what we consider of encyclopedic interest. Is Force lightning really more interesting than Joe Cortazzo? And the reason we need to put limits on what is considered of encyclopedic interest is that articles that very few people are interested in is very prone to insertion of false material, since there are fewer people able to verify them. Taemyr (talk) 20:47, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] List of Mandalorians

This list is currently being discussed at WT:FICT under the topic Undue weight on groupins. Your input would be welcome, as there is some debate as to whether the list is sufficiently notable for inclusion in Wikipedia. --Gavin Collins (talk) 13:20, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Notice

Wikipedia operates on the principle that every contributor has a right if they wish to remain completely anonymous. Wikipedia policy on that issue is strictly enforced. Posting private information about a user with the intent to annoy, threaten or harass, specifically their (alleged) name and/or personal details, is strictly prohibited as harassment, and users who do that are often immediately blocked from editing Wikipedia. Such posting can cause offense or embarrassment to the victim of the posting, not least because it means that their name, and any personal criticism or allegations made against them can then appear on web searches.

If you have posted such information, please remove it immediately. Please then follow the link to this page and follow the instructions there, including emailing this address. It will then be removed from the archives of Wikipedia.

If you do not ensure that the personal information you posted is removed from this site you will be blocked from editing this site. Remember: Wikipedia's privacy policy is there to protect the privacy of every user, including you. MBisanz talk 07:15, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

I have posted no such information. Taemyr (talk) 11:56, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
Its a semantical thing that really the only way people can get across that they are serious about not having their old name which contains personal information revealed (and is findable in the user rename log) is to invoke the RTV. Saying "I've been renamed and don't want my old name posted because it has personal information in it" is a bit on the WP:BEANS side making it seem like its only a personal preference, and not part of our WP:OUTING guideline. My main reason to post the warning was to preclude a "well X doesn't seem like a name you'd want to hide from" or a "and per this rename log, you haven't vanished" which would've been disclosing personal info. MBisanz talk 18:31, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
Hmm, interesting idea, might I suggest that since people who have issues with a former identity are usually touchy on the subject, Emailusering your idea (which is reasonable) might get a better answer (and cut bitey people like me out of the picture). MBisanz talk 01:15, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

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