User talk:Mav
In the full swing of things. Still have a huge back-log of digital photos and field notes to contribute, but I can't get away from the blasted RecentChanges page.
If you've been frequenting the RecentChanges page, you might already expect that I am a Wikipediholic -- yep, I admit it.
Problem now is, sleeping has switched from a full (i.e. normal) to part time occupation.... oh well - you only live once, there's plenty of time to rest later...
(Well, at least this is not necessarily the case.)
Mav, somebody has removed all the one-line comments from the List of novelists without any comment or discussion whatsoever and moved it to Authors. I don't mind the latter, but to me it is barbaric vandalism to remove valuable interesting information from the wikipedia. He isn't logged in but he shows up as 209.105.200.36. I am royally ripped. I'll put it all back by hand if I have to, but I'm sure there is a way to revert.Ortolan88 19:44 Jul 24, 2002 (PDT)
- Yes -- any attempt to make lists less useful than they already are is a sin in my book. I think I fixed everything for you but this was made difficult due to a weird bug in the wikiware that amended my revert of List of novelists to authors. Please check to make sure I didn't miss anything or reverted the wrong version. --mav
I'm glad you agree, but the version control work doesn't seem to have brought them back. Here is where the crime occurred
- Revision as of 01:59 Jul 23, 2002
The versions in the history used to have numbers to make it easier to refrerence them, but I assume you can find this.
I didn't complain about the redirect because I knew that some of the people on the novelist list weren't novelists, but on reflection list of authors is way worse than list of novelist, so I now complain about that too.
This is a very unpleasant experience. Not everyone digs the list-annotation, some of the opera lovers, for instance, but they discussed it civilly. I never expected this. Ortolan88 21:13 Jul 24, 2002 (PDT)
- From this morning's edit of my talk page: "I am coming to the conclusion that it is the lists themselves that are at fault and that no list that stretches on past three screensful is worth the effort to maintain it. Someday the software can make lists if we need them, but it seems the impulse to make long lists is genetic and cannot be ameliorated by annotation, re-organization, or any other tool of information science." Ortolan88 09:37 Jul 27, 2002 (PDT)
- Latest 209 vicious actions on List of novelists fixed. See Revision as of 17:14 Jul 27, 2002
- Ortolan88 20:29 Jul 27, 2002 (PDT)
Maveric149, Thank you for your words of welcome on my 'home page'.
You say, "thanks for moving the Australian city articles to the standard format for Australia". Actually, I tried not to touch anything on that node (page? wiki?) other than adding my question.
I hope you don't mind some more questions. I would like to post (wiki?) these to everyone, but yours is the only page I could find that seems to be for questions.
- How is it that this massive site is free of pornography and foul language? This seems very odd for a site that can be edited by anyone. I happen to think it is wonderful, better than everything2 (a very tiny and not very easy to edit encyclopedia of sorts), which has lots of foul language.
- I've read a number of articles and I wonder why they are so professionally written. I think it is amazing and wonderful (brilliant, if you're British).
- I'm curious about the fact that anyone can edit almost any page. Suppose I work for hours creating a good article about an interesting or important topic, then someone deletes it or highly modifies it and no one else restores it? Does this mean that my work might go to waste? I would like to contribute, but I want my contribution to stick around :o) .
David 7/25/02
- Not to worry, there's a History link on every page. You can retrieve a previous version, in case of vandalism. Also, constructive wikipedians outnumber vandals by at least 10 to 1 at all times; and that's usually 50 to 1. Ed Poor
- Lots of us are professional writers and lots more write well. It may be that no one would pay us to write about some of the things we want to write about. Ortolan88 12:51 Jul 25, 2002 (PDT)
- Also, if you've invested a lot in an article and wish to watch it, you can simply click "Watch this page" once you're logged in; the article is added to your watchlist, which you can access in the sidebar. That list will keep track of the most recent changes to the pages you are watching, and you can drop in and see if they are to your liking or not. Cheers, and welcome. :-) --KQ
- And, of course, if you don't like the changes, you can change them back, start a discussion on the Talk page that is associated with every article (like this one), or come back here and inform the sometimes brusque, but devoted and energetic Mr. Maveric and the others who watch this page (which once was his and is now the village pump) of what is going on. Ortolan88 13:03 Jul 25, 2002 (PDT)
- Wow! My talk page is being put to great use while I'm at work! I think you guys answered David's questions very well. Thanx! --mav
Maveric, is it true that there's an easy tool for moving pages available to administrators? If so, I'll probably apply for "admin-ship" - fear of me abusing the power to delete pages has kept me from it, but this would change my opinion. Regards, Jeronimo
Hey mav, there's discussion on Talk:Countries of the world/Status of the porting of Dept of State info about how to desubpage the country entries, or whether to do so; if you're still interested in getting WikiProject Countries off the ground you should go vote about what to do. :-) --KQ
Hmm, well I don't know why you're being blocked, but that's definitely an error due to a typo in the function that spurts out a message warning you that your IP is blocked. I've submitted a fix for that part; send in a bug report about the rest... --Brion VIBBER
Whipping you with a wet noodle for moving Institutional Mode of Representation without first checking to see if it's not always capitalized (1 entry out of 3 pages of google results has it without caps) and for then also not changing the links. But you make it easy enough to move it back without breaking anything. ;-) --KQ
Re the IMR: No, not lowercased 1/3 of the time; it's lowercased 1/40 the time, according to the Google results. And since Burch seems to have coined the phrase, I suppose he determines whether it's capitalized or not. Anyway.... What are you doing on wikipedia at this hour on a weekend? --KQ
- OK -- I admit I made a mistake (when was the last time you heard that from me?). Since the term is a very minor one, used in a narrow context, I guess capitalization is fine and probably superior to the uncapitalized version (This is same reason I did not change Reciprocal System of Theory). BTW, I'm doing the same thing you are doing -- feeding my wiki internet addiction. ;) --mav
- I prefer it lowercased, actually, not that it matters. :-) And yes, I've got an addiction. I took some more pictures today; one of them for an article that could use it, another for one that couldn't (illustrated already), and a third for an article I guess I'll have to write. Odd the little gaps in the 'pedia you stumble on periodically. Amazing growth, though--and we're quite far along for only a year or so of volunteer work. --KQ
Re the deletion queue - I wasn't disagreeing with you this time - I deleted the pages you suggested! :) Re the country pages, I saw the debate - I thought it was ancient news though. There isn't really any way to tell! Demographics of sounds like such a dishwater-dry title... 'people of' is much more intuitive, but hey, whatever people have decided. I spend enough time disagreeing with you :P. BTW, perhaps you can answer another question for me mav? What is the 'signature' option in the user preferences for and how do I use it? Is it a way to avoid writing user: etc every time I leave a comment? I've been wondering whether to make a user page for KJ and redirect it to mine because I'm so damned sick of the extra typing ~ KJ
- Re the name of the deletion log; presumably LDC is the one who changed it to "Article deletion log", though I could be wrong. So, what is the difference between a wikipedia page and an article? As far as the software is concerned, "page" and "article" are synonymous. It's not smart enough to tell what's an "article" and what's just a "page full of text". Note also that we have a "Save article" button rather than "Save page", and the search results show "Article title matches" and "Article text matches". Internally, the class that implements various page functions is called "Article" rather than "Page". Maybe that's the wrong terminology, I dunno... it can't be much worse than calling ogg vorbis files "image"s. (cough cough) --Brion VIBBER
- I agree on the weirdness of the image:namespace terminology and also really think most uses of the word "article" be replaced by "page". As Larry often said, every page in wikipedia is a page but not every page is an article. We needn't add un-needed confusion by loosely using the word "article" for evey page. This also effects the proposed new wording of the front page which will read "anyone can edit any article" -- which is a completely true statement if we stick with Larry's definition (anything in the wikipedia:namespace would also not be considered articles -- this is how the statistics work, no? --mav
- Sounds good to me; put in a feature request and mention it on wikipedia-l. --Brion VIBBER
In this software, I've generally used "article" to refer to the collection of data (title, text, history, etc.) that represents an entry in our encyclopedia. In one case I narrowed that even further: on the special pages dropdown I use "article" to refer to those only in the primary namespace. That was just a matter of convenience--I wanted to know which of those special pages restricted their results that way (as many do). In general, though, I don't use the term "page" for anything except the entities served by the web server. What the "delete" function deletes are articles--it deletes all of the title, text, and history a particular encyclopedia entry, which might also be an image and its associated text. I suppose I could have a separate log for images if that would be useful.
If you think a different set of terminology would be better for presenting to users, I'm open to suggestions. --LDC
- Hum -- I see now why "article" was used internally. Since there is already a long history of the use the word "article" to mean "encyclopedia article" I think we should stick to that for general discussion. As for what is presented to users I would suggest we replace "article" with "page" for the deletion log, the save button and in most other cases (What was wrong with simply "save" and "preview" anyway?). I know this causes a conflict with the internal names used by developers but the developers of all people won't be nearly as confused as non-developers (perhaps the developers can think of different terminology for their own use). --mav
- We've already got "Edit this page", "Main Page", "Random page", "Watch page" (actually changed *from* the "Watch this article" of phase II), "List recently updated pages", "Talk page", "Subject page"... --Brion VIBBER
Yeah, I was pretty sloppy about such things. Every piece of text that actually gets shown to users, though, should be isolated in Language.php, so it should be an easy matter to make these consistent. --LDC
Thanks for the greetings, I've a couple of questions you or one of the other keepers of the wikifaith might be able to help me with. First, what constitutes a "minor edit" and does anybody really care? Second, is there a standard way of transliterating names, places etc from Cyrillic or other alphabets? There's been a discussionette about this over at Talk:Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - I can't decide myself if it's best to use the most common English language spelling (which is this case would turn Pyotr into Peter), or the spelling most often used by scholars and other reference works (which I suspect would keep things as they are). Thanks -- Camembert
- Minor edits are sort of unadvertised changes. They don't show up on the list of articles you've contributed to, and people have the option of turning off display of minor edits in the Recent Changes page. Ortolan88
- Actually, they do now show up on the contributions list. I'm not sure if this is a bug or an intended change on someone's part. --Brion VIBBER
Yes, that's the intent; a "minor change" is one that you are certifying doesn't deserve greater attention. If you never mark the box, nothing will really be affected; you might consider marking it a courtesy for those who follow recent changes looking for content changes and don't want to be bothered with things like spelling, grammar, and punctuation fixes. It is conversely matter of personal integrity not to check the box if you made a real substantive change to the article's content: if you make a significant change to the content of an article, especially a controversial one, and "hide" your change by marking it as minor, that is an overt act of deception meriting an IP block.
As for the contributions list, I agree that excludiing minor changes by default is probably a good idea--it was simply an oversight on my part not to do that, and it's an easy fix. --LDC
- Is there a way for the software to automatically check to make sure if minor edits are in fact minor? Then if somebody tried to hide a non-minor edit they would be greeted with an error message or something. --mav
- It could internally run a diff and count the number of different bytes or something, I suppose. How would you decide a cut-off point? I'd prefer to just silently drop the minor mark or include a tiny note after 'page successfully saved' rather than an error message; I tend to mark my edits minor by default except on talk pages, and sometimes I forget to uncheck it when I get into a larger typing frenzy than I intended. --Brion VIBBER
Lee says:
- if you make a significant change to the content of an article, especially a controversial one, and "hide" your change by marking it as minor, that is an overt act of deception meriting an IP block.
KQ says: no, usually it's a matter of deception, but I'd lay money that all of us have at one time or another checked it intending to change punctuation or spelling etc. and then shuffled sentences; and some of us in a copyediting phase check things by habit and then decide to add to articles and forget to uncheck it. But no, I'll agree that it's not honest to try to 'hide' edits that way. --KQ
Not the I mind the attention, but since my talk page is becoming a kind of wikipedia chat forum for newbie questions and answers I think I will change my standard newbie greeting to say "If you need any questions answered about the project then check out Wikipedia:Help or post a message on Wikipedia:Help desk". Does this sound like a good idea to everybody? Of course then we would all have to watch that page for questions. --mav
They should be pointed to the mailing list. It's probably OK for them to know about "Help" and such as well, but a Wiki really isn't the right technology for interactive Q & A. -- LDC
- Hmm... That would require the newbie to expose their email address to a bunch of people they don't know just to ask a question. I personally would be terrified to ask what might be seen as a stupid question to a group of people -- but then posting a message on a wiki help desk is technically the same... I will think about this some more. Anyway, thanks for making the article -> page switch so soon. I apologize in advance for sending a post to the mailing list on this. --mav
You mean you don't WANT your talk page to be the Complete Newbie Guide to the Wikipedia? We could always start a new page "Ask Mav" and you could answer their questions there :) (resists the temptation to link it)
Re the minor/major edit thing a few stops above this, I always forget to mark my changes as 'minor'. I usually only remember when I save an article and then see that I made one or more mistakes in it - oops! My second and/or third passes in succession get marked minor. I think that an automatic byte counter would be a good thing - it could see if you've changed more than say 40 or 50 characters (or however many characters are in your typical sentence) and automatically mark it accordingly KJ
- LOL -- Anyway... I submitted a feature request for the software to automatically determine the "minornise" of edits. You can see it here --mav
- I think it would be good to have a Wikipedia:Village pump (quote Ortolan88) page, where (new) users can just write down their questions. I would separate the more "sophisticated" issues from beginners' questions on your page. And more people may be tempted to go and help these people. Jeronimo
Mav,
I don't have permission to use the text from the British Dragonfly Society. I will rewrite in my own words. I am still getting the hang of what qualifies as an acceptable size fragment under copyright fair use rules.
What is 64.126.80.159 doing? Check out his edits at Talk:Characters (The Simpsons):
- software => "chicken" (the meaning is a bit abstruse...) --Ed
- Looks like a drive-by vandal. Those were the only two edits that were made by that IP. --mav
Hi Maveric,
I tried updating the Erysimum 'Chelsea Jacket' page to incorporate the standard format for the tree of life, and found that renamed links like [[image...|image:...] don't work. Any idea how we could include a link to a full-size image? image:ErysimumChelseaJacket.jpg|
- The easiest way is just to include the full-size image in the description page for the small image. (Which I've just done for this one.) Thus, you click the small image and are presented with the large image. --Brion VIBBER
Hi again, I've started adding credits for the photos, which are taken by my wife and I. I'm fully versed in GPL and GFDL, so I know what these mean and love them dearly. But what's the point of having a check box for uploads when there's no sign of whether the image was submitted under GFDL?
Mav--I see you're working on the Wikiproject Tree of Life. What kind of advice would you give someone who's not knowledgeable about biology? I'm taking pictures of flowers, veggies, and fruit periodically, and wanted to contribute them, but I don't want to make things more difficult for others. For instance, I just wrote a brief article on canna lily so the picture had a home, but it's an orphan and I'd love it not to be. --KQ
- Ok, well nevermind the bits above, answer me this: are the tables always green? If not, why not, and when? (I see to remember one that had cells filled in pink.) Also, is it the intention to put the taxoboxes in all plant articles, including edibles? I notice many fruits and veggies don't have it, though many inedible plants do. --KQ
- Thanks for the answers. We should put the info on colors in the tables on the wikiproject page; in fact, I think I'll paste your explanation in now. I'd like to help when I can, but I am not a biologist; however I can google search for the info and plod along methodically much the way I did with the countries awhile back.... Oh yeh, and there's that other wikiproject, too. So much work, so little pay. ;-) --KQ
- No problem. --mav
- Thanks for the answers. We should put the info on colors in the tables on the wikiproject page; in fact, I think I'll paste your explanation in now. I'd like to help when I can, but I am not a biologist; however I can google search for the info and plod along methodically much the way I did with the countries awhile back.... Oh yeh, and there's that other wikiproject, too. So much work, so little pay. ;-) --KQ
When you upload a picture there's a checkbox in the HTML form that says "I affirm that the copyright holder of this file agrees to license it under the terms of the Wikipedia copyright." By ticking this I assumed that it would be recorded that the images I upload are under GFDL. So it seems a bit redundant saying in the image details that the file is released under GFDL. The image pages already list who uploaded the picture and when it was uploaded. Would it be possible to also display whether the license box was ticked when the upload occurred? --Ramin
- If you don't tick the box, your upload is denied. Therefore every uploaded file is assumed to be under GFDL (as it must be to be included in this work, which is under GFDL as a whole), because the person who uploaded it necessesarily explicitly checked a box to that effect. (This is more than we do for article edits, where there's a little note but you don't have to acknowledge it...) --Brion VIBBER
Darn, you beat me to it. I was just about to change it back. Danny
- LOL. She really is bugging me. --mav
Mav, do you have a URL for that Washington portrait from the LBJ library? I can't find it there, and I'd like to make a better quality reduction of it from as high-quality source as they have--and from the looks of that site they probably do have a high quality source. --LDC
- Sorry, I wasn't the one who uploaded it -- all I did was put the thumb in the table and the larger version in the thumb's image page. Is there a copy of the old upload log around? --mav
Hey, Mav. Please take a look at the Marina Tsetaeva delete that I did. Although there were some cosmetic changes, I found that for the most part the text was a straight copy of the source I gave in Talk. I can restore it if you or anyone else thinks it is okay, but I think there may be serious copyright issues there. Danny
- Mav, I recovered Taliban article from vandalism as requested.
- The talk page for Palestine is too long for my browser to handle. Can we refactor or archive some old talk? --Ed Poor
Hey, thanks for the welcome words! I definitely like this place, though I can already envision it eating all my time :( Anyway, see you around. Ppetru
Mav, I see you changed the non-wiki headings in the element articles. You think that should be done elsewhere as well - e.g. the formatted country article? Jeronimo