User talk:Thumperward/Archive 11

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
← Archive 10 Archive 11 Archive 12 →

Contents

Scott Thomas Beauchamp

Thank you for bringing some reason, and perspective, to the page. I hope you'll watchlist it. Your voice is needed. --Eleemosynary 07:53, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

I watchlisted it months ago, but I'm trying to keep my blood pressure down rather than getting into perpetual edit wars. The best thing for both of us to do is keep our heads and stick to the rules. Evidence needs to be conclusive and directly traceable to a reliable source, and the article needs to ensure that it only advances arguments made by such sources (for instance, not the "hoax" thing, which is only sourced to random people's blogs and opinion columns). Chris Cunningham 09:39, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
Now you're being attacked for archiving the page.[1] I restored your edit. --Eleemosynary 07:31, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
And the usual suspects have removed the archive again. Would you mind restoring? I would, but I don't know how to create the archive box. --Eleemosynary 01:24, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
Also, this. --Eleemosynary 01:26, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
There's not much that can be done about it right now. Assumptions of bad faith are par for the course here. Let's not have an edit war about this; the only way this situation is ever going to improve is if "our side" continue to act in good faith and eventually build up enough of a credibility / behavioural gap that RfCs and community sanctions aren't simply brushed aside as partisan bickering. SAM's goading me is nothing new, I put up with it from User:Isarig for plenty long before he was hit with community sanctioning. Chris Cunningham 07:54, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Improper open-proxy block

{{192.18.1.36|{{blocked proxy}}: Sun Microsystems Hosting servers|Ryulong}}

Y

Your request to be unblocked has been granted for the following reason(s):

Autoblock of 192.18.1.36 lifted or expired. (As far as I can tell, MrZ-Man unblocked you.

Request handled by: SQLQuery me! 19:41, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Modchip article do-over

Thanks for your attention towards the Modchips page. I'd really like to contribute rewriting the article page, is there a Wikipedian way to do such major changes as a collaborate effort? I have already started rewriting in a local text file, but I'm not ready to commit the (quite radical) changes on my own.

Also thanks for correcting my archive edit, I guess I did it wrong even though I followed WP:ARCHIVE, especially with adding talkarchive templates to top and bottom. (BTW, when I tried, the auto-archive templates weren't working as intended.) --FreddyTalk 16:36, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks :)
You can create sub-pages under your own user page to try out major changes; have a look at user:thumperward/infobox CVG, which is what I've been using to experiment with changes to template:infobox CVG. Once the changes are complete, you can replace the page with {{db-user}} to have an admit come and delete it.
As for archives: I personally don't bother with the {{talkarchive}} banners at the top and bottom. Anyway, you did fine :) Chris Cunningham 07:53, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
FYI: As recommended by WP:SUBPAGES, I have started a Temp page for this major revision draft as subpage to the Modchip article talk page. May I invite you to have a look? It's not completely done yet, but I think one can see the direction I would like to go with the article revision. Cheers! FreddyTalk 02:45, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
Much better already. I'd support a broad move to that version. Chris Cunningham (talk) 18:24, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
Being the only one working on it, I think I brought it to a stable point by now. It could really use some external input now, looking over the article and my style of writing. FreddyTalk 15:08, 25 November 2007 (UTC)
It definitely looks good to go from my perpective. Please go ahead and replace it; I'll stick around to help convince all the inclusionists who will doubtless demand it be reverted because it "removes useful informatioN" or whatever. Chris Cunningham (talk) 16:06, 25 November 2007 (UTC)
Will do. Doing. Done. Here goes ... FreddyTalk 17:52, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

Potter's Wheel and tags

Removing the tag may not have been necessary but it was certainly satisfying. I am generally against almost all tags (except those, like the merge, which invite discussion), as well as several other recent "innovations" on this site. Tags and templates simply seem authoritative and impersonal to me -- and generally give me the impression that the editor "tagging" the article is either too "good" to do the work himself or too lazy. I do not believe tags promote "community" among editors. So, I'll probably end up removing the tag again, and trying to find the time to rewrite the section. These ongoing authoritative changes are probably a major reason why my edit count and time on Wikipedia has significantly dropped during the last year. WBardwin 03:53, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

It's not an "authoritative change". I seriously don't know why people get so wound up about tags; they're not intended as personal slights, they're meant to give Wikipedia's copy editors something to do. The howto tag in particular is great because it puts things in Category: Articles containing how-to sections, which I track and try to clean up when I can. And I find it difficult to be sympathetic when people take the opportunity to ascribe the problems of tagging to me personally, by making personal comments about me just because I follow documented WP procedure. Chris Cunningham 07:48, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
If tags exist only to give "Wikipedia's copy editors something to do" -- I have a long list of other more productive things. How about producing requested articles? How about lengthening stubs? How about making sense of our unorganized and badly indexed category system? How about investing time in a little research. Or -- why not try some comprehensive writing? I never attacked you personally but complained about these authoritative procedures imposed by a minority of editors. I did not take the tag personally. However, you brought the issue to my talk page and "lectured" me about the need to restore a tag. If any editor can place a tag on an article, any editor should be able to remove such a tag without censure or "commands". I will continue to do so when I believe it to be appropriate. WBardwin 02:06, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
I've got 2000 pages on my watchlist and over fifteen thousand edits under my belt, spread out over all of Wikipedia's various namespaces. I'm not exactly concerned that I'm failing to contribute positively in other ways. If you want to see tags as a minority trying to impose their rule over Wikipedia then I suppose I can't stop you. As for your talk page, it was a snap decision to bring it to your attention before I'd seen that you'd replied on the article talk. Sorry if it seemed like I was singling you out. Chris Cunningham 07:54, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

Template breaks

Hi Thumperward! Earlier today, you reverted my edit to Template:Fourth Balkenende cabinet, with the edit summary "rv. per talk, until a better solution is devised, we need these or the template is broken on many screen resolutions. it's a hack, but a needed one". I was curious to see the discussion, but Template talk:Fourth Balkenende cabinet only shows a WikiProject tag. Which talk page discussion were you talking about? AecisBrievenbus 13:13, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Whoops. It's at Template talk:Navbox/Archive 1#Problem. Chris Cunningham 13:16, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
I see. That's a strange problem. Do you think it could be fixed using non-breaking spaces? Aec·is·away talk 14:49, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
Actually, the problem is the exact opposite: the template treats too many spaces as non-breaking, thus pushing long entries out of the template bounds. Chris Cunningham 15:09, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
I've had a look at your problem. It is caused by the "white-space:nowrap" inline style on the table cells, set by the navbox template. Firefox' reaction is correct, treating any blank as non-breaking, leaving only very select characters to allow a line break. FreddyTalk 21:14, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

List of non-IBM-PC-compatible PCs

Why does there need to be an article in Wikipedia for this? The article is just a list of PC types.-- Mumia-w-18 15:38, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

it was split from personal computer as part of a cleanup job. If people object to it I'm not overly concerned if it's deleted. Chris Cunningham 15:51, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
Maybe someone can fix it up into being a real article--rather than just a list. Otherwise, I would say this article should go away.-- Mumia-w-18 22:24, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Infobox Football club

Hi, just thought I'd mention that with the current parenthesised version of ground capacity, any citation reference number is forced inside the brackets, which is inconsistent with the citation placement style used on most (English, anyway) football club articles. Of a sample of 6, 5 club articles do have a citation reference against the capacity. cheers, Struway2 11:17, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

How'd you mean? I thought in general that parentheses were an exception to the MoS in that references were placed inside them. Could you give me an example of what you think the right style should be?
Working copy of future changes is at user:thumperward/infobox football club, by the way. Chris Cunningham 11:20, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
Sorry didn't reply sooner. Perhaps it's just me, then, but I've never noticed parentheses being an exception to the citation-after-punctuation style. Not that it matters that much anyway, guidelines not being set in stone, common sense to be used, etc...
Now the capacity figure's big enough to read, I think your layout looks OK when only the ground name is present, but it does look odd at the bottom of several lines of address like on Arsenal F.C. As a matter of interest, what reason did you have for changing it from a line of its own? cheers, Struway2 13:09, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
It looks weird assigned to the club as opposed to the ground: the two should be more obviously related than by simple juxtaposition. As for the multi-line text, I'm of the opinion that we shouldn't be including addresses in the infobox anyway. It's meant to be at-a-glance info, and can happily sit in the article's introductory prose. Chris Cunningham 13:14, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
Makes sense now you explain it. As to addresses, I'd agree entirely. cheers, Struway2 13:33, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

Iguana in captivity article

Sorry if I messed up your pictures, tags, or prefs. The other night I did a huge copy edit....rewriting almost the whole thing and my PC went wacky the browser window went to Babelfish(thanks to some junk yahoo is hosing people with these days) and I lost all the stuff I had been editing. My apologies if I messed it up while trying to fix it. I think I've done what I can with it, but agree it still needs work if it needs to stay on wiki.--Mike Searson 14:14, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

No problem. Thanks for all your help. I'm going to try to work on this soon. Chris Cunningham 11:28, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

Eleemosynary comment

Since you referred to your position in content disputes as being "our side" to User:Eleemonsynary, but seem to have no problem with correcting his violations of policy, I'd hoped that you would have some comment regarding User:Eleemosynary's behavior, either for Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#More_User:Eleemosynary or, if you don't feel like entering the fray, for me. It seems to me (although I didn't mention it in WP:AN/I), that his antics reached a fever pitch after the infinite ban on Bmedley Sutler, and have been rather unrelenting, though he's clearly tried (with limited success) to stay just on the right side of certain policies (especially WP:3RR). By the way, regarding User:Mattsanchez, is the assumption that he's actually Matt Sanchez proven, or just assumed? Since User:Eleemonsynary has been trolling for Sanchez through extraneous insults for weeks, it seem to me a bit too convenient that "Sanchez" should suddenly drop in just to attack Eleemonsynary, violating WP:NPA and the block resulting from WP:LEGAL at the same time. Sanchez's timbre was always a bit much, though, so perhaps it is him. Again, no need to bring this up on WP:AN/I — I have no reason aside from this to doubt it's Sanchez — but it was a thought I thought I might as well share here. Calbaer 18:08, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

I've no idea if it was the real Sanchez. I'm sure Sanchez's block will be overturned at some point anyway, because the reasoning that using the word "lawsuit" next to a winky face is threatening legal action is very silly indeed. As for Eleem, I'm in full agreement that I'd rather the "dirty sanchez" comments etc. had never happened, but his edit warring with Steven Andrew Miller is just that: partisan edit warring. Wikipedia simply doesn't have a good system for dealing with this at the moment. A more lightweight sanctioning system which would prevent editors from warring over particular pet subjects without requiring the procedural overhead of full sanctions might work in the future. For now, the best I can do is try to watch over Eleem; it's be nice if someone watched over SAM for the same reasons. Chris Cunningham 09:33, 3 November 2007 (UTC)
I'm not sure what you mean by "watching over," but if you look at SAM's talk page, you'll see I warned him about 3RR minutes before he violated it (since it seemed E was trying to get him to violate 3RR through using edit warring rather than using the talk page to settle the dispute). I guess I'll continue to "watch over" him in this fashion. I still maintain that E's comments fit in with his overall M.O. of being disruptive (which, unlike Miller, he has been working at being on the Beauchamp article for months). If he merely wanted to keep the article in agreement with WP:RS, he'd find me an ally, but instead he's sensed that my politics don't agree with his — and that I'm not willing to stand by idly while he violates WP:NPA — so I'm an enemy and thus I, like Sanchez and Miller, must be attacked. Fending off his personal attacks of — and allegations of being personally attacked by — so many users is not the best use of our time. Again, if you have more time to work on and/or watch the article, perhaps he'll calm down, seeing that someone has taken the mantle of "his side," and things can get a bit more civil. Calbaer 07:03, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
Sure thing. Once upon a time I couldn't really control myself on political articles either, so there's no reason to assume this won't cool down over time. Chris Cunningham 11:25, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

Homeopathy

I think I'm as compulsive about references as you are. Good job on the article in cleaning up some of the references. It makes the article smaller and better when you can refer to the same reference with ref name. Thanks again. OrangeMarlin Talk• Contributions 17:41, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

No worries :) Thanks for helping out. Chris Cunningham 17:44, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

Template:Infobox Philosopher

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template%3AInfobox_philosopher&diff=169012736&oldid=161115205

Hi again — My impression is that these infobox templates are named "Template:Infobox [Subject beginning with capital letter]" as a surrogate for "Template:Infobox:[Subject...]" (itself probably a surrogate for "Infobox:[Subject...]"). Hope you won't mind, therefore, if I return the template to its previous name. Sardanaphalus 21:47, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

Sure thing. I broke the documentation anyway, by the looks of things, so I'm not sure what I was thinking. Chris Cunningham 07:52, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

Homeopathy

You can't remove all criticism from the first paragraph of something almost defined by its criticism. But I did try to work it in better. Adam Cuerden talk 08:11, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

I'm not trying to "remove all criticism" from it. I'm trying to reduce the amount of times the lead repeats itself over how unscientific the topic is. More than once and it looks like the article is biased, regardless of the obviousness of the claim. In fact, possibly even because of the obviousness of the claim. Chris Cunningham 17:24, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

Interesting times OR tag

I can't figure out how one could do OR on an old saying if you tried. I.e., I can't see how trying to find the origin of the saying would be OR. Historical research maybe, but that's permitted as far as I know long as you can cite your sources. Can you go into a bit more detail why you tagged the article? I might take a chance and update the article from the info on the talk page if you think that would be OK. (I am the guy who found the 1950 Eric Frank Russell story with the saying in it.) Keith Henson 20:25, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

It's the lack of inline citations which does it for me. Much of the text could quite easily be OR just from reading it; inline citations on any claims and inferences made would go a long way to remedying that. Chris Cunningham (talk) 18:26, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Furbuntu

Please do not delete content from pages on Wikipedia, as you did to List of Ubuntu-based distributions. Your edits do not appear to be constructive and have been reverted. If you would like to experiment, please use Wikipedia:Sandbox for test edits. Thank you. Theyain Riyu (talk) 19:04, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Vanispamcruftisement at its finest. This isn't staying in. And don't template the regulars, kthx. Chris Cunningham (talk) 19:09, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
The only reason why you have removed it is because its furry. That is an attack.Theyain Riyu (talk) 19:13, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
Its yiffness is the least of its worries. Come back when said project has a website, an installed user base and some external references. Chris Cunningham (talk) 19:15, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
If thats what you want, fine. I'm sorry for acting 'noobish'. Its just that your only original reason for removing it was because it was furry ("Just say 'no' to furries.").Theyain Riyu (talk) 19:40, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Paul is Dead

That was a very reasonable response, removing the phrase - it does read fine without it. - DavidWBrooks (talk) 23:28, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. Better than having an edit war about it anyway :) Chris Cunningham (talk) 23:35, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Second AfD for Software that uses Subversion

I've nominated this article for a second AfD. I've cited my reasons on the nomination page. Mindmatrix 15:10, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

I've got a horrible feeling that it'll remain a cruft-zombie for the rest of time. My own fault for caving and not just deleting it in the first place, I suppose. Bah to inclusionists. Chris Cunningham (talk) 17:25, 21 November 2007 (UTC)
Nah; even if it's not deleted, it can certainly be trimmed with respect to WP:EL and WP:NOT. In fact... Mindmatrix 15:55, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Archie McLean edit

Re the edit I made. I feel both scotland and brazil would be approppiate. (there is a {{Brazil-footy-bio-stub}} which i'll add to the page. Waacstats (talk) 14:16, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! Chris Cunningham (talk) 14:17, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Invisible Tank removal

Thanks. I was wondering about whether that was true. I was going to wait and see if the editor would provide a reference, but I should have removed it myself .--Mumia-w-18 (talk) 17:50, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Similar camouflage techniques have been experimented with, but seeing as the entry in question was anonymous, full of misspellings and completely unsourced I didn't think it'd been too close a call :) Chris Cunningham (talk) 18:49, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

SC wikip

It is because the project is not ready to begin any work that it should not have tags out, and as such it counts as advertising. The fact that the project was created arbitarily without any attempt to inform other editors, let alone get consensus for the need to create such a project, does not help the situation. Until the project is in a position to actually work on articles, or as in this case considering it's lack of pre-discussion if it actually survives, it shouldn't put out tags on the articles, especially when the project's page hasn't even been completed and the full intentions of the project haven't been established. -- Sabre (talk) 19:36, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Ah, cool. Still, there must be a better way of resolving this than manually undoing the edits in question, no? Chris Cunningham (talk) 19:53, 23 November 2007 (UTC)
The editor who created the project could have discussed the potential of such a project on the StarCraft talk page. The fact he's simply gone ahead and created it without consultation presents problems: if it had been discussed and found useful to have a Wikiproject, it would already have people who are interested in it working on it. Sticking up tags on articles isn't the way to go about getting people onboard when the project still isn't in anyway functional or even potentially unviable. -- Sabre (talk) 20:08, 23 November 2007 (UTC)