User talk:Thumperward/Archive 12

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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.

LANG=en_US.FunkyTown

Does [this] mean that the template can't be fixed? -- Carol 00:14, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

Heh, the signature is still broken also. This is getting to be not what I wanted. -- carol Carol 00:16, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

Even if it could be fixed, the result would probably be that some admin on sockpuppet patrol would come along and remove it again, with a similar message to mine. You can get a similar result by just using HTML to build the template and leaving out the category links; this would get the joke across without causing admin problems (and the link to your commons page would work). Chris Cunningham (talk) 08:16, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

Thank you

For tidying up the hay box article. It is MUCH better this way. As you may have figured out, I am very new to wikipedia as a contributor, so the help in getting this to look right and BE right is much appreciated.

Sue Alexander

Suenestnature (talk) 04:45, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

My pleasure :) Have fun! Chris Cunningham (talk) 17:07, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Admin

Hi. I just wondered if you'd consider letting me nominate you for adminship, as I think you're experienced enough. Thanks. Epbr123 (talk) 16:12, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Sure thing. Thanks! Chris Cunningham (talk) 09:39, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Homeopathy

I think we'd best keep the lead referenced: We don't need to include every one of the references for each statement, but we probably need to include at least one. References, in my experience, are the only way to keep a controversial article's lead from being the subject of endless challenges. Adam Cuerden ^talk 13:11, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Hmm. That said, what if we instead commented out some of the refs? That'd keep them there if they're needed, but would make it easier to read? Adam Cuerden ^talk 13:12, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

I'll take that with both hands if it's the presented compromise. Chris Cunningham (talk) 13:15, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

This is an interesting time on homeopathy. I too am not pro homeopathy yet I find myself agreeing with that side more often than not on this article. I think people have been fighting this so long there is a tendancy to go too far the other way. To keep on topic, I agree that uniqie references in the lead are not helpful. This implies that the LEAD is too dense or the article is too light. One has to be adjusted. David D. (Talk) 15:56, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I definitely picked the wrong week to go stepping on toes there, by the looks of my RfA, but your support is appreciated. Here's hoping we can get some productive discussion going on the issue. Chris Cunningham (talk) 18:12, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Sorry your Rfa isn't going so well

Turning into a real struggle session. Keep your chin up. Ra2007 (talk) 22:46, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. It's still only Tuesday, and I'm still above 70%; no big deal anyway, eh. We'll see! Chris Cunningham (talk) 23:04, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Can I vote? I'll support you. It appears that some are a little sensitive, have WP:OWN issues, and are using your Rfa as a soundboard. Ra2007 (talk) 23:09, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Any registered user can vote. I'd advise civility, though; no use there being even more acrimony. There are basic guidelines here. Thanks a lot for your support. Chris Cunningham (talk) 23:11, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

I will think about it. I wouldn't want to have my support hurt you. Ra2007 (talk) 23:44, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Sure thing. Moral support is good in any case :) Chris Cunningham (talk) 23:46, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

I reiterate that. I haven't come across you before but you seem like a solid editor with a self critical attitude and a bit of common sense, which are all the qualifications one ought to need for adminship. You seem to have had the misfortune to offend a small group of editors who have a style of address and comment that shall we say is very...direct. You are not the first to have experienced a similar situation and I doubt if you'll be the last, unfortunately. These things happen. Anyway, keep your chin up, you haven't done anything wrong, and even if your RFA is not successful this time I'm sure your day will come again. All the best, Badgerpatrol (talk) 01:20, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. If nothing else, I can look at the confirm votes and see that I must be doing something right. :) Chris Cunningham (talk) 01:33, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Hi there, I have to say that some of this criticism seems unfair to me. You stepped into what was a slow-moving edit war and made some very bold edits to a contentious article at a bad time. This was unfortunate and perhaps unwise, but not a justification for such strong and negative comments on your character. It doesn't look like this current RfA will pass, but if you wish to try again in a few months I will be happy to nominate you myself. Tim Vickers (talk) 00:15, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

If it's any consolation, i reconsidered my support given the barrage of opposes and still found you to be a good candidate. You have thoughtful input to these articles, don't stop what you do. David D. (Talk) 00:22, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks to both of you. So it looks like a big part of the problem was that I torpedoed myself by making bold edits at a bad time. That's fair enough, but it's not like I'm being barred from editing; it just means I miss out on some additional privileges which I think would have helped the project out. And I got some candid critique as to my general attitude towards editing, which can only really help me in the long run. We'll see what the future holds, but this week hasn't put me off contributing. Chris Cunningham (talk) 01:11, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

While a lot of the discussion on that RFA is starting to get off topic there is some good advice in there too. The main take home message for me is to not push the bold edits too close to 3 reverts. Sometimes the most effective strategy to shape the long term changes in an article is to hang out on the talk page letting others run with your suggestions (not to mention they get all the flak for making the changes too :) ). I'm not sure what happened with Willow but that's an example of where the talk page would have helped a lot. Hope this perspective helps you improve. David D. (Talk) 02:56, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

The Willow thing was a conflict of editing styles, but - as I said in the RfA - without any feedback other than what was essentially a farewell message I can't see how I could have established that there was opposition to my edits in order to resolve them. As for the 3RR thing, yeah, I think I'm going to voluntarily restrict myself to one rv per day with mandatory discussion. Nobody likes an edit warrior. As for the continuing OT nature of the RfA discussion, I think it's going worse for my detractors than it is for me to be honest. Chris Cunningham (talk) 08:12, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Clearly I have no idea what really happened there (willow), besides its water under the bridge now. With regard to the OT stuff, I have to say, I'm have been surprised by many of the comments. David D. (Talk) 09:20, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Order_of_External_links_sections

Your reply is at User_talk:Lentower#Order_of_External_links_sections. I prefer all discussion take place on one page. Lentower (talk) 00:04, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

As do I :) Replied there. Chris Cunningham (talk) 00:05, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Adminship

Aloha! I supported you with the belief that I would not be subjected to a templated "thank you", and hope you refrain from including me on anything of the sort. Good luck. Mahalo. --Ali'i 15:53, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. Don't worry, wasn't planning on it. :) Chris Cunningham (talk) 16:02, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

Glass art

Hello Thumperward, thanks for transferring the studio glass movement to the article about Glass art. But do you know that there is still a large Glass art section in the article on Glass ? What to do about that? Greetings, --GerardusS (talk) 09:19, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

I think most of it should be moved across eventually. Chris Cunningham (talk) 10:24, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Your RfA was unsuccessful

I am sorry to inform you that I have closed your RfA as not demonstrating a consensus that you should be made an administrator at this time. I hope you won't be too disheartened and will take onboard the concerns raised by those opposing with a view to running again in the future. Best wishes, WjBscribe 16:34, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

Apropos of not much at all

Greetings Thumperward. For completely unrelated reasons (testing editor names using UTF-8 encoding) I came across this archive you made wherein you placed the tag "please do not modify". An IP editor decided to ignore the tag - this confused my software, which is why I saw it.

The same editor (with a different IP) put apparently the same comments into the current talk also I believe. I won't comment on the added content (ahem! chuckle - it's a big world), just thought I would point it out.

Also, since the archive confused my software, I'll ask you how I would go about getting the edit history for this page? Or rather, the original contributions to the archive's contents? I have a little tool that can rapidly search page history under development for phrases and it will eventually have to deal with archives, so this is a new area for me. Aren't all WP pages supposed to preserve the history of the GFDL contributors? No big deal, I'm just trying to learn where I should be going, so I can teach my software to follow along. Franamax (talk) 14:25, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

The page doesn't have any history: it was manually created by taking a chunk of the current talk page and cut-and-pasting it into a new sub-page. There's no mechanical way of linking said archival to a particular point in time other than to check the date when the page was first created, having a look at the history of the main talk page and looking for the point when said page got shorter. All the original history of comment placement is held on the original talk page. Chris Cunningham (talk) 15:03, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Hmmm... There are other archives with a single edit (or someone added edits, which I would still think is dirty pool), and it seems the ones with history are generally bot archives, wonder how they do that?

In any case, for my purposes with wpW5, it looks like the edit history in the original page is continuous no matter how it is archived, so I can still promise you that wpW5 can tell you within 1-5 minutes who put the search phrase in there. I need to go back through my notes to verify my original testing target.

As far as your edit summary "whoops" goes, I would disagree, transferring the history with the archive would certainly be desirable, but one or other of us would have to know how to do it - as you say, the contrib history is available - not easy, but it's there.

Thanks for the illumination! Franamax (talk) 16:34, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Archives with history are done by actually performing page moves / renames I believe. This is tricky to get right and I don't think archive bots do a particularly good job right now. Anyway, cool, glad I could help. Chris Cunningham (talk) 17:06, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

National teams infobox

I'm sorry to have reverted changes that I could see that you had made, but use of the template itself is impeded by this transclusion. Because I am currently updating FIFA rankings, I was alerted to the fact that something was awry by the superscript appearing next to that field in the infoboxes: I have edited this in the template, but it is still appearing; I can only assume that this has somehow been forced by the transclusion.

I cannot see what advantage is served by this transclusion: the /doc page makes clear that it is a subpage, and inviotes the reader "to view the template page itself, see Template:Infobox National football team.": all one sees by following that link is another copy of the same page.

So: how can the stray character be removed? What is the advantage of the transclusion? (I can see that many, but by no means all) of the infoboxes listed carry a documentation page, so this is an enquiry rather than an accusation) Kevin McE (talk) 19:25, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Sorry: I'd assumed this was the accepted style of doc pages these days. The template itself is hidden on its own page by the <includeonly></includeonly> tags; removing these will show the template when one views its page. Chris Cunningham (talk) 19:29, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Have a look at that and see if it's better for you. Note that the template hides lots of non-mandatory fields by default, though. Chris Cunningham (talk) 19:31, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Football infobox

This infobox I've just placed in UEFA Champions League article is the same which is used in Copa Libertadores article. It's a more complete infobox, with much more information. --Mrzero (talk) 20:39, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Please add this to {{infobox football tournament}} instead. It's much better to have a proper infobox for this than to hand-craft one for each article. I didn't notice that there was much additional infomation in the hand-crafted version anyway. Chris Cunningham (talk) 20:42, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Template and category stuff

Where is the discussion to which you refer in this edit summary? I looked through Template talk:Navbox, Template talk:Ambox, and Template talk:In-universe and didn't see anything about categories. The way you were changing {{WH-in-universe}} (see this version) was including the parent category as well, a consequence of not using the category parameter; this wasn't the intended functionality of this particular template. As category= is supposedly depreciated I just subst'd in-universe, and now the template is working the way I intended, without a category parameter. Does that work for you? I care more about the proper functioning of a template than any arbitrary rule.

Keep in mind that category is a parameter in {{in-universe}} and doesn't appear to be depreciated. If it was, it should have some discussion to that effect on Template talk:In-universe, and there should be some remark to that effect in that template's documentation. However, an optional parameter doesn't hurt anybody, so I see no reason why it would be depreciated, given the lack of discussion on the subject. It also simplifies the template, as a change to the parent template (for example, a phrasing change in {{in-universe}}) propagates to its children.

Wait, I just came across Template talk:Navbox/Archive 1#Categories (discussion and non-inclusion). Are you proposing that all category template parameters be removed from all templates? If so, two people on an archived template talk page don't make a consensus for that type of thing. I can understand their decision to do it with {{Navbox}}, but {{Ambox}} is more related to cleanup tasks, which make good use of variable categories included onto articles. See {{cleanup}} for an excellent and well-accepted use of that. You don't see anyone trying to remove category at Template talk:Cleanup. Why should this be any different? —Disavian (^talk/_contribs) 07:21, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

To be honest, I think I just had a bit of a brainfart. Go ahead and make the change. Sorry about the confusion. :) Chris Cunningham (talk) 13:35, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Slight homepage theft

Hi, I've stolen your homepage slightly. I hope this is ok ^_^ --Robhu 22:59, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Flattered. :) Chris Cunningham (talk) 23:02, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Celestia

Chris, could you go to the Celestia discussion page, please? ElChristou (talk) 11:02, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

Mozilla Firefox Infobox

I felt that it is important to include the latest and beta version. Illegal Operation (talk) 21:40, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

Hmmm. That shouldn't have broken; I'll look into this. Chris Cunningham (talk) 21:44, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

i've fixed the infobox. Thanks for bringing this to my attention. Chris Cunningham (talk) 21:47, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, it corrected now. Illegal Operation (talk) 22:06, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

Re: Template talk:Talkarchivenav#Redlink to the next archive?

I saw your response on the template talk page, and was wondering if you'd be able to talk to me more in-depth about it over an IM client. My contact information is available at User:Ioeth#Contact Information if you have the time. Thanks! Ioeth _{(talk contribs friendly)} 19:42, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, but I'd prefer to keep discussion on-site if possible. Chris Cunningham (talk) 10:11, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Archive splitting

I'm sure there is a good reason, but I'm curious as to why you split the talk archives of that game with a round ball into ~32kb chunks. Oldelpaso (talk) 12:09, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Huge archives are an absolute pain to work with. I frequently consult archived talk pages, and it's much easier to do if they're kept to sensible lengths. Unless the archives are so huge and crusty that it's impossible to do in a sensible time frame, I usually take the opportunity to refactor archives when I come across them. Chris Cunningham (talk) 12:13, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

I guess my mileage varies on that one; I find it easier to find what I am looking for if there are less pages to search through, provided they're not so large (say >256kb) that they have a TOC the size of a large mammal. Oldelpaso (talk) 13:00, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Article move

I would like to move the article, but as you say, I was involved in the discussion, and therefore would not feel comfortable doing so. Perhaps you could ask an uninvolved admin to do the job? пﮟოьεԻ 57 14:13, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Where's the best place? I was going to put it on ANI, but thought I might get told off for seeming to lecture people on the backlog. Chris Cunningham (talk) 14:22, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

You could pick someone at random from Category:Wikipedia administrators, or put a request on the talk page at WP:RM. пﮟოьεԻ 57 14:33, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Cool, I'll post on the talk. Cheers! Chris Cunningham (talk) 14:39, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Infobox Writer

I saw you have edited the Template:Infobox Writer. I've reverted your edits, because there were some problems with the template. Please use the sandbox template (Template:X1) for experimenting. Thanks, Ilse@ 21:21, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Where?

You said the subgroups were discussed. I don't see them in the archive... I'm calling you out, McFly! :p Foofighter20x (talk) 14:10, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

D'oh! I somehow managed to lose this section while I was archiving the page. It's now at Template talk:United States presidential election, 2008/Archive 4#democrats and republicans. Chris Cunningham (talk) 15:06, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

List of early non-IBM-PC-compatible PCs

I have removed the "confusing" tag you placed on List of early non-IBM-PC-compatible PCs, after I (re)-wrote an introductory text about the purpose of the article, I hope you will appreciate. I will also try to put some references in the article asap. Mahjongg (talk) 20:56, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Awesome! That actually makes it likely that the article could become something other than a list in future. I'll look into making that happen. Thanks! Chris Cunningham (talk) 22:40, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Re: Personal attacks and innappropriate articles

Hmm, welcome to my world. Sorry about that. That sounds interesting Chris, or Thunperward or whatever you want to be called. I would do a link to the Crash Bandicoot Wiki however being something of a newbie I'm afraid I don't know how to do links. --Illustrious One (talk) 22:11, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

The {{Wikia}} template which I've provided an example of on your talk page can be used to generate links to external wikis. Anyway, yeah, I definitely think this is the right solution. Chris Cunningham (talk) 03:36, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

User:Reginmund

You're right - that's why I stopped replying to him on Talk:Association football. I guess, according to him, our current vernacular is a bastardisation of Shakespeare's true pure language :) EuroSong ^talk 22:14, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

British English, football articles, and general consensus

Interesting, I checked Manchester United F.C. and West Ham United F.C. before I reverted..! I also checked that in the article's history, it hadn't changed for several thousand edits, so consensus for this article, at least, appears to be "is a club". Is there any citation you can point me at? Stephenb (Talk) 00:15, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Just for fun, I checked all the Premier League club articles. It's about 50:50 - some are "XXX is a club" and others are "XXX are a club"... so there doesn't appear to be any consensus at all! Stephenb (Talk) 00:21, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

As I say, the authorities (I could dredge up some Fowler for you) don't go any further than to point out that in general plural is used in the UK and singular in the States. But if you want an informal example, have a read at the sports sections of any British media outlet; Everyone from the Beeb to the Times uses the plural exclusively. There are a dozen "they"s dotted around the Man U and West Ham articles too, and I rather imagine that the Man U article has about ten times as many non-Brits editing it as most Premier League articles anyway :) Chris Cunningham (talk) 00:27, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Well, I wouldn't say "exclusively": [1] and [2] both have "Manchester United is" rather than "are" (and there are other examples, too), though these are business articles, so I'm not sure whether business journalists are better acquainted with English grammar than sports journalists :) It may be that one is referring to the club as a business (in the singular) and the other as a group of players (in the plural)? But, seriously, if you can point me at something I can read up on on-line, I would be grateful - I'm always interested in improving my knowledge of English, as my education turned out to be rather lacking. Stephenb (Talk) 00:36, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Ah, but - the important point here is that those are business articles, not sport ones. The papers universally use the singular when referring to companies. So when you've got business writers writing the articles, they use the singular. Nuance, yes, but again it's internally consistent. As for online resources, I can't think of anything offhand, but Googling for "collective noun" and "plural" gives some results. Chris Cunningham (talk) 00:48, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Re: On "holy wars"

You wrote: "On the contrary, we've discussed this exhaustively on Talk:Linux over the years, and the project as a whole has a consensus that the term "GNU/Linux" is not a "technical distinction" so much as it is a minority term."

I could care less about "consensus" of nontechnical fanboys; in programming, like in other engineering disciplines, right and wrong isn't decided by popular vote. And the technical distinction is very obvious to a coder.
See, userspace code doesn't call into kernel directly - it calls the libraries instead. And the foundational library on any Unix system is libc.
From userspace program's standpoint, the difference between "operating systems" is the difference between featuresets of the respective libc's; no more, no less. And mtPaint in particular is written to, and debugged on, MSVCRT.DLL on Windows, and GNU libc on Linux - and just happens to be compatible with BSD libc too at the moment. Technically, mtPaint should be able to run on GNU/BSD, GNU/Hurd and GNU/OpenSolaris just the same as on GNU/Linux, and not know the difference - but is unlikely to run on, say, uClinux without some tweaking.

Just like one doesn't call Wine "Linux" just because it happens to be able to run on (some of) Linux-based OSes, one should not rename GNU system into "Linux" for that reason. Still, you're partially right - the more precise OS designation for mtPaint will be "GNU system (for example GNU/Linux)".
wjaguar (talk) 01:38, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

We're not renaming GNU; however, the RMS-centric version of what constitutes GNU (i.e. basically anything the FSF has ever seen an opportunity to co-opt) doesn't sit well with such "non-technical fanboys" as, like, the guy who ported glibc to Linux, the guy who wrote Linux, or most of the community. When it comes down to it, "free software operating systems which use the Linux kernel" are referred to by approximately everyone except fanboys as "Linux", and that's how Wikipedia names them. Technical minutiae as you've given above doesn't come into it, because unlike "other engineering disciplines" there's no authority in place to formalise the naming process. Chris Cunningham (talk) 01:47, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

By this round of FSF-bashing, you've pretty much made my point - a holywar by any other name is still a holywar, even if one side paints it as a "consensus". Even those guys who actually wrote something of value, can say all they want but they cannot unmake the hard fact that without FSF and GNU, we won't have a Linux (neither the OS nor the kernel). Trying to rewrite history in the Internet age is silly.

Still, your last edit is actually an improvement, semantic-wise. :-) wjaguar (talk) 02:17, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Despite the obvious difference in opinions we have on the subject (as far as I'm concerned, the FSF's primary export since ~1992 has been history-rewriting), I'd rather the article had an acceptable compromise position which didn't obviously contradict the terminology used by 100% of Wikipedia's other free software articles. So I hope we can both be happy. :) Chris Cunningham (talk) 02:21, 6 January 2008 (UTC)