User talk:Waltpohl

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hello, welcome to Wikipedia. Here are some useful links in case you haven't already found them:

If you have any questions, see the help pages, add a question to the village pump or ask me on my talk page. I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian!

Tip: you can sign your name with ~~~~

Dersonlwd Talk 04:25, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Hi, thanks much for filling in Angkor. Have been wanting to get around to it, but glad you did it! Fuzheado 03:19, 5 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Thanks, it was my pleasure. I was just impressed that all of those places already had pages.

Removing redirects just because one page has more links is a poor reason. It just so happens that most of those links came from US military articles. Eventually, there will be many articles on the cities and municipalities of Leyte and Samar (the provinces) that it will match the military articles for links. I'm sorry, I should've used the summary box. --seav 21:51, Mar 15, 2004 (UTC)

BTW, the same thing goes for Bicol, the language Bikol deserves to be linked from a disambiguation page because an alternative spelling to the language's name is Bicol. --seav 22:14, Mar 15, 2004 (UTC)

I don't think that they're really very ambiguous. For example, Samar province is part of Samar. If someone links to Samar, and they meant the province and not the island, then all they have to do is click on the Samar province link that's prominently displayed under the list of provinces. This is exactly as much work as you have to do with the redirect page. But if you meant the island then you're already in the right spot. I agree that the truly correct link for the island is Samar (island), which is why when I wrote the page for it, I put it on the island page. But if someone links to just Samar, they're going to mean the island most of the time anyway, since the island is intrinsically more interesting than the province.

Likewise, for Bicol, I think it's sufficient to add near the top that Bicol is another name for the language, followed by the link to the language page.

Wikipedia already has a lot of situations handled this way. For example, the state of New York is under New York, while the city of New York is under New York City, with a prominent link to New York City at the top. I added a page for the Great Lakes (Africa), but rather than turn Great Lakes into a disambiguating page, I added a link at the top of the page. It just seemed politer to both users and writers. -- Walt Pohl 08:04, 16 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I don't agree that most people will link to Samar, the island, instead of Samar the province. It's the same thing as Leyte. Both the island and the province of Leyte are mentioned in almost equal times in local news that I read. The same goes for Samar. The reason why there are many articles that link to both the island right now in Wikipedia is because of the US Military stuff, and the WWII stuff.

Have you read the Wikipedia:Disambiguation page? Look under the Types of disambiguation section. There it says that for multiple article that share the same name, they are either equal in importance or one is overwhelmingly used. That's why Paris is about the French capital with a pointer to Paris (disambiguation) which points to other Parises like Paris, Texas and Paris (mythology) (the Trojan War character). Most will agree that the French capital shouldn't be just under Paris, France.

But there is equal disambiguation: which Mercury is more important? Is it the planet? The chemical element? The Roman god of trade? In this case, most will agree that the Mercury page is itself a disambiguation page.

I am contending that Samar and Leyte (and to a lesser degree, Bicol) will fall under the latter type of disambiguation. Just because the provinces are within the island doesn't mean that they are less important than the island.

But look at this rule on the same page.

Specific instances

On a page called Title, generally do not disambiguate:

* Title County

* Title City

* Title Hospital

* Title University

Don't you think this applies here? It's exactly the same situation. Importance is not the only criterion. What's more important? New York the state, or New York City? Yet, we manage without a disambiguating page.

For examples like Paris and Mercury, it's not just that they're ambiguous, it's that the different examples have nothing to do with each other. Here, if I say something is a city in Samar province, and I link to the top-level Samar, have I even gotten anything wrong? Samar the island and Samar the province are just not different enough to impose on everyone the work of disambiguating every single link to Samar.

There's also a point of etiquette here. Look at this comment from the disambiguation page:

A code of honor for creating disambiguation pages is to fix the mis-directed links that will be created when the disambiguation page is made.

I think that's an important consideration. -- Walt Pohl 23:17, 17 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Ok, I will concede. What convinced me was the way Ireland was handled. Ireland the country (i.e., the Republic of Ireland) occupies just a part of the island of Ireland, but the two are somewhat equivalent in importance. In fact, the country is probably more important (when current news simply says "Ireland", usually the country is meant). Wikipedia, however, chose to do what you did for Samar and Leyte. --seav 15:45, Mar 18, 2004 (UTC)

Hi, welcome to Wikipedia:WikiProject Protected Areas. I keep an eye on it and contribute from time to time. I note that all your "to-dos" are done so you might find something in this project to occupy your talents. Tiles 07:18, 16 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Tragically, they're only "done", i.e. they're really minimal stubs I hope to rewrite. But don't worry, I'm planning on working on parks pages anyway (primarily for Africa). -- Walt Pohl 08:04, 16 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for your comments on List of Late Antique, Early Christian and Medieval art monuments. I agree, to a point. If nothing else, the title is atrocious. However, if one were to take an Art History course on medieval art, about 80% of these monuments would be covered. I do think that a list of this sort is needed. (Actually I think that an even more comprehensive list is needed.) The list could organized differently (It is now in roughly chronolical order. The many links to nowhere is a problem, but I intend, in the fullness of time, to start many of these articles.David Stapleton 14:24, Mar 18, 2004 (UTC)

At "pages needing attention" you wrote this:

Complex number - reads like it was originally copied from an old source. --Walt Pohl 18:19, 13 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Can you be more specific as to what you had in mind? Do you object to its having been copied, or to the age of the source, or what? I have some experience teaching most of the material on this page in classrooms at MIT and elsewhere. The page is clearly not intended to bring people up to speed on current research or anything like that -- if it were, it would be on any of a great number of narrower topics. I don't see why a source written in 1930 would be any worse than one written in 2000 just because of its age, in an article of this kind. But maybe if you mention more specific points I'll understand what you're trying to say. Michael Hardy 21:47, 28 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I had two concerns. First, that it was taken from a source still under copyright. Second, that since the source is old, that the terminology or the history might be out of date. (For example, I've never heard the term "direction coefficient".) Walt Pohl 19:29, 29 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Hi, I just wanted to say thanks for the initial articles for the missing sporadic groups. -- Schneelocke (cheeks clone) [[]] 22:37, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)

You're welcome. I was sick of seeing those entries on the list of year-old requests. -- Walt Pohl 08:32, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Dsadfsdfasljk

See my talk page --KayEss 05:47, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)

You'd best do it. I have no idea how to list things for deletion... --KayEss 22:54, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Article Licensing

Hi, I've started a drive to get users to multi-license all of their contributions that they've made to either (1) all U.S. state, county, and city articles or (2) all articles, using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-by-sa) v1.0 and v2.0 Licenses or into the public domain if they prefer. The CC-by-sa license is a true free documentation license that is similar to Wikipedia's license, the GFDL, but it allows other projects, such as WikiTravel, to use our articles. Since you are among the top 1000 Wikipedians by edits, I was wondering if you would be willing to multi-license all of your contributions or at minimum those on the geographic articles. Over 90% of people asked have agreed. For More Information:

Multi-Licensing FAQ - Lots of questions answered
Multi-Licensing Guide
Free the Rambot Articles Project

To allow us to track those users who muli-license their contributions, many users copy and paste the "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" template into their user page, but there are other options at Template messages/User namespace. The following examples could also copied and pasted into your user page:

Option 1

I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:

Option 2

I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions to any [[U.S. state]], county, or city article as described below:

Or if you wanted to place your work into the public domain, you could replace "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" with "{{MultiLicensePD}}". If you only prefer using the GFDL, I would like to know that too. Please let me know what you think at my talk page. It's important to know either way so no one keeps asking. -- Ram-Man (comment| talk)

[edit] Finance

Can you please discuss your changes on the talk page for that article? That is a pretty radica change, and while I don't think it currently helped, I welcome your edits and hope you will keep working on it. - Taxman 14:32, Dec 14, 2004 (UTC)

But you're not Walter Pohl the Late Antique Scholar? Or are you? Oh wait -- are you the Walt Pohl that comments at CT, Dr. B, etc.?

I have an active dream life, so I can't rule out that I'm a sleepwalking Late Antique Scholar. Is CT Crooked Timber? Then that's me. -- Walt Pohl 01:38, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Administrator nomination

Hello & happy new year. I see that you are a contributor since early 2004 and you've made a lot of edits on many topics, and equally important you seem able to get along with other editors. I will sponsor you for administratorship if you are interested. You may reply here or on my talk page. Regards & happy editing, Wile E. Heresiarch 07:08, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I would definitely be interested. I appreciate you noticing my contributions. -- Walt Pohl 18:22, 2 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Terrific! Please reply at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Waltpohl to accept the nomination. Regards, Wile E. Heresiarch 01:37, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Congratulations!

Congratulations! It's my pleasure to let you know that, consensus being reached, you are now an administrator. You should read the relevant policies and other pages linked to from the administrators' reading list before carrying out tasks like deletion, protection, banning users, and editing protected pages such as the Main Page. Most of what you do is easily reversible by other sysops, apart from page history merges and image deletion, so please be especially careful with those. You might find the new administrators' how-to guide helpful. Cheers! -- Cecropia | explains it all ® 02:33, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Thanks! -- Walt Pohl 02:55, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Congratulations, Walt. Use your awesome powers wisely! I'm sure you will continue to be a credit to the project. Regards & happy editing, Wile E. Heresiarch 04:26, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)

[edit] New Mathematics Wikiportal

I noticed you've done some work on Mathematics articles. I wanted to point out to you the new Mathematics Wikiportal- more specifically, to the Mathematics Collaboration of the Week page. I'm looking for any math-related stubs or non-existant articles that you would like to see on Wikipedia. Additionally, I wondered if you'd be willing to help out on some of the Collaboration of the Week pages.

I encourage you to vote on the current Collaboration of the Week, because I'm very interested in which articles you think need to be written or added to, and because I understand that I cannot do the enormous amount of work required on some of the Math stubs alone. I'm asking for your help, and also your critiques on the way the portal is set up.

Please direct all comments to my user-talk page, the Math Wikiportal talk page, or the Math Collaboration of the Week talk page. Thanks a lot for your support! ral315 02:54, Feb 11, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] A message to the Wikipedia:WikiProject Rivers participants

Would you, please, consider participation in the discussion about the naming of the articles on rivers? Certain users suggested that the word "River" should be omitted from the title. Currently the discussion is held at User talk:Markussep#River naming, but it will hopefully be moved to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Rivers soon. Thank you for your attention.—Ëzhiki (erinaceus europeaus) 21:09, Mar 10, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] New Mathematics Project Participants List

Hi Walt.

In case you didn't follow the discussion on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics here: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics#Reformat of Participants list, I'm writing to you to let you know that I've converted the "WikiProject Mathematics Participants List" into a table. It is now alphabetical, includes links to the participant's talk page and contribution list, and has a field for "Areas of Interest". Since your name is on the list, I thought you might want to check and/or update your entry.

Regards, Paul August ☎ 15:10, Mar 20, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Talk page changes

I've been removing links to a disambiugation page; so that Special:Whatlinkshere/mercury isn't so polluted I can't figure out what's linking to it. Because I've been changing so many pages (I don't watch them otherwise I'd have thousands of pages being watched), I hadn't realised you'd changed it back, which is why the changes were made a second time. Do you have a burning desire to link a year old conversation directly to that disambiguation page rather than indirectly via an external link? Josh Parris ✉ 23:37, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] L(R) and large cardinals

I've added the dependency on large cardinals to the section header. Hope this addresses your concern. The point is that a coherent picture emerges in the presence of large cardinals, and that's what I want to get across, not lose it in a lot of graphs of what depends on what.

[edit] Wikipedia:WikiProject Protected areas

Howdy...we've been making some alterations to infoboxes and the project that you may wish to be aware of and have an opportunity to discuss in the protected areas project. Link to the "general" and the "status" subpages to see what's going on.--MONGO 05:09, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Please vote on list of lists, a featured list candidate

Please vote at Wikipedia:Featured list candidates/List of lists of mathematical topics. Michael Hardy 20:46, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Henry the Navigator

An article that you've edited before (Henry the Navigator) is nominated for Biography Collaboration of the Week. If you want go there and vote. Thanks. Gameiro 20:44, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Co-recursion

Thanks for catching my error with regard to the redirect. I was only familiar with recursive/co-recusive with regard to computability. Since you seem to have a much better understanding, could you create an article (or at least a stub) to replace the redirect I created. Thanks. Kenj0418 07:06, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Computational algebra improvement drive?

Hi, Walt, looks like you are semi-retired, but you might like to know that I have been thinking of trying to improve articles on Gröbner basis stuff, including Syzygy, where I think a much more intuitive discussion should be possible, and also adding other stuff as per Ideals, Varieties, and Algorithms and other textbooks, including

Schenck, Hal (2003). Computational Algebraic Geometry. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-53650-2.

plus the books of Sturmels. I had a pretty awful time trying to improve general relativity articles, but some have suggested that I might find pure math less crank infested. Reply by email, perhaps?---CH 00:11, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

I tried sending you email, but I might have the wrong address. (It did not bounce, though.) Did you get any? -- Walt Pohl 03:58, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

Hi, Walt, good to hear from you. Can you try again, this time putting your name in the subject line? I am trying to debug after some recent changes.---CH 19:35, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

Please bear with me, if this doesn't work you might need to try again after I have shot the trouble with a sysadmin, which could take a few days. ---CH 19:49, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

Email: never mind, the problem was at my end and I am fixing it. I did get your email and have replied. ---CH 20:54, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Question about the Zande in Sudan

Hello, Walt,

I've tracked you down as the culprit who wrote that the Sudanese Zande live in the area of the Uele River. Isn't the Uele in the DR Congo only? Do you have any other info about where they are? I had a Zande friend from Aba in southern Sudan, but I have no info that's more specific. Cheers. Dblomgren 03:56, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

I was just changing links from Uele to Uele River. I have no information on the subject, sadly. -- Walt Pohl 06:49, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wikiproject Finance

Seeing some of your editorial interests, I'd like to invite you to join and help form Wikipedia:WikiProject Finance. --Leifern 20:35, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] World Heritage template

Hi! I created a template for World Heritage Sites: {{Infobox World Heritage Site}}. Since many of the protected areas are also recognized as World Heritage Sites, I thought that it will be appropriate to forward this template here, and hopefully, for the community to help improve the template. Someone mentioned that the footnotes are unclear (i.e. why the need to emphasize "official" there). It's because the official name (or the name as inscribed on the List) is different from what we usually know. And the Region also has footnote to tackle specifically the classification of those regions which may fall ambiguously between two continents (e.g. those in Russia, Turkey, Cyprus, etc.). In addition, I think that the info provided in the template is much like a jargon for most readers since it box is more of use for internal references in the World Heritage program. I hope that the community will help improve the template and make it more relevant to the readers of wikipedia in general. Thanks. Joey80 13:50, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Prime rings

Hello, I slightly changed the definition of prime ring, see Talk:prime ring. I hope that was ok. Cheers, AxelBoldt 15:01, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Mathematics CotW

Hey Walt, I am writing you to let you know that the Mathematics Collaboration of the week(soon to "of the month") is getting an overhaul of sorts and I would encourage you to participate in whatever way you can, i.e. nominate an article, contribute to an article, or sign up to be part of the project. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks--Cronholm144 00:22, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Subnet

Please, have a look at Talk:Subnet (mathematics). (The article you have created.) --Kompik 10:47, 28 October 2007 (UTC)