Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 06:39, 9 January 2015

to one and all,
Have a prosperous, peaceful, productive and enjoyable New Year, and thanks for your contributions to Misplaced Pages. GregKaye

Archives

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“	Jim Jones, David Koresh and Meir Kahane do not typify Christianity and Judaism in the eyes of the civilized West, but those same eyes are prone to see Osama bin Laden and Mullah Muhammad Omar as typifying Islam	”
— Richard Bulliet

WP:TALK#USE: "Explaining why you have a certain opinion helps to demonstrate its validity.."

Persecution

Thank you. I also created categories concerning the persecution of Copts, Greeks, Kurds, and Sami. If you wanted to nominate these categories for renaming, which I would be supportive of, perhaps they could be renamed something along the lines of Category:Anti-Assyrian sentiment, Category:Anti-Yazidi sentiment, etc? There are already a number of categories with that naming convention, such as Category:Anti-Chinese sentiment or Category:Anti-Polish sentiment. Would that work? Solar-Wind (talk) 18:17, 3 January 2015 (UTC)

Solar-Wind I'm figuring this out myself. It seems to me that the anti-Xxx formula is pretty Misplaced Pages friendly and I think that it's a matter of juggling this with the way terms are used in sources. I guess that categories are forms of article titles so I guess that uses in reliable sources also become relevant. Thanks for getting back on this. GregKaye 18:24, 3 January 2015 (UTC)

Help in taking over arbitration of a dispute?

Hello GregKaye, Based on my reading of your user page, I have gotten the impression that you may have expertise on Israel. Therefore and together with the fact that you are the only person whom I know to have an interest in Israel, I thought you may be able to provide some much needed perspective in a dispute. I was hoping you would help take over arbitration on an article where I feel my limited experience means that I am no longer able to help in carrying the discussion forward. I think if I carried on I would be doing a disservice to the other editors but mostly to readers as it is regarding insertion of a statement into the lead. I am also starting to question if I am using wiki policy in the right way when deciding if a sentence is a statement of fact. It is a very hot issue and the article is part of active arbitration remedies. I will not discuss the merits of the issue here but just ask that your read through the dispute and provide some valuable insight. I understand you may be busy so I completely understand if you say no. If you decide to go for it, let me know so that I can disengage from the conversation. The issue is the inclusion of a statement into the lead of the main Israel article. It is being discussed here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/Talk:Israel#Discussion_on_actual_wording

Regarding your post on my talk page, I will reply when I catch my breath. Mbcap (talk) 14:23, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

Mbcap Thank you for this. In the occasionally fast moving world of WP it can be important to keep breathing. GregKaye 14:38, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

January 2015

Hello, GregKaye. After you were banned from interacting with P-123 just a few days ago, you have "thanked" the user twice, and also thanked some other editors for P-123-related edits. It's difficult to take that as simple gratitude, and it's certainly interaction. You need to stop poking holes through your IBAN right now. Bishonen | talk 19:56, 5 January 2015 (UTC).

Understood. My edits, while breaking rules, were all in good faith. GregKaye 08:07, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

Some falafel for you!

Thanks for you efforts to make the Israel article a NPOV article. Gouncbeatduke (talk) 01:54, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

Thank you Gouncbeatduke and בתאבון to you to. I am personally all for the fair highlighting of the Criticisms of Israel but this needs to be done in fair ways and with fairly presented guidelines based content. GregKaye 08:04, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

Edit count

Something you said got me digging in the tools. On one article you have 468 edits (5.68% of total) and I have 432 edits (5.25% of total) right now. Your first edit was 8 Sept and mine Aug 10. I checked several other users and found one recently active one at almost 3%, several at 0.5% and the highest I could find was at 28.74%. http://tools.wmflabs.org/usersearch/index.html Legacypac (talk) 04:29, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

Legacypac I can't specifically remember what this relates to. My personal view is that the content of your edits has been consistently good. GregKaye 07:57, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

We've both been accused of owning the same article - those are the real stats. Tonight, I just used the same tool and found 55% of the edits on Boko Haram - an astonishing 2438 edits - are by one user. It's missing a bunch of stuff (UN Security Council designation as terrorists, links to al-qaeda pledge to ISIL, declared a caliphate to start) and needs a serious fact check and rewrite. Legacypac (talk) 08:18, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

Legacypac I think that such statistics may be relevant in substantiating any specifically asserted allegation of own but that the statistics, in themselves, proves nothing. Relevant OWN issues for you have related things like consultation issues such as when you made good faith and I think beneficial changes to article structure (which have largely been kept) but without consultation or when you've acted on suggestions in talk page on issues like archival settings. I appreciate that other editors may break these rules left and right but reporting back I think is a good practice ideal. I did not think that your previously expressed views on responses to gratitude were appropriate. My personal view has long been that there should be an emphasis on resolution and reconciliation in regard to editor and administrator intervention. There are editors that come who seem to me to be extremely prone to conflict and unreasoned argument and I think that, sometimes, it can be all too easy to respond in kind. Especially in a case where your argument may be right it can be easy to, contrary to your normal behaviour, respond harshly. GregKaye 09:07, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

I've taken such comments to heart and have moderated my approach to sound much calmer. I think that shows in the ANi just closed for example. Don't harp on stuff from months ago. I changed archive settings to longer once at your suggestion. It didn't stick - no big deal. I don't archive threads as quickly as before or if I've been involved in the thread. I'm not holding your ill conceived suggestion to impose sanctions against me, or your encouraging a disruptive highly offensive editor to engage in areas I edit when I've being ignoring him for months. I pointed out the stats after you almost called me the primary editor of an article and because we get accused of own regularly. Look we think very much alike on policy and there is no reason we need to criticize each other. There are plenty of editors who are happy to do attack us both and they seize on any perceived criticism by anyone to build on. Legacypac (talk) 09:38, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

Legacypac In many cases I regard you as the benchmark against which calmness should be measured and the issue for which you gained the diplomacy barnstar or whatever it was I regard as stunning. I only mentioned the issue of the archive settings to illustrate the point which I hope, as a friend, you can get. I agree with your idea of the move but not the way it was conducted. Please be aware that this kind of thing has been known to grate with editors and I am mentioning this with good faith in the hope that you get the point. Yes it was ill conceived. A genuinely highly disruptive editor has no place in Misplaced Pages. The article is very widely contributed to by many editors and I regard you as one of the greatly valued movers and shakers of the article. Your infobox and headings developed have, IMO, been second to none as far as contributions to the article go but, in the second case, I don't think that it should be down to other editors to establish consensus approval of the changes made. The stats tool looks really useful. In talk page stats, while you make a moderate 6% of contributions I possibly came as second highest contributor at ~16% of total contributions. I can live with that. Other editors may edit and argue in extreme ways and this lays people open to criticism. The best way not to have criticisms stick is to do no wrong. When I asked for reasons that I might be given a topic ban I do not think that there was anything that any editor would have had to say. I have made my mistakes, which I think in the Misplaced Pages scheme of things, were relatively minor, and have learned my lessons.

I have seen other editors work in a partisan type of way which sickens me. My hope is that Misplaced Pages will take a firm line on issues like canvassing and other abuses. We will see.

There have been times of pressure in WP and I have previously left messages saying things like thanks for the thanks. Hopefully those times have past. Its a new year. I foresee that we may have a less confrontational talk page. Let's see what happens. GregKaye 18:06, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

Signature

GregKaye you still need to change you signature to your new name, at the moment it links to your old name User:Gregkaye and User talk:Gregkaye and then is redirected back to your new name User:GregKaye. -- PBS (talk) 12:09, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

Sorry PBS. I think that I made the wrong changes when looking at this last time. Do I need to go back over old edits to make changes? Some discussions have been/ may have been collapsed. GregKaye 07:52, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

Everytime I click your name to get to your talk its redirected correctly, so I see no value in editing old comments. Legacypac (talk) 09:42, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

Only if you want to. As Legacypac says the redirects work. -- PBS (talk) 12:33, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

A question for you

see Talk:2014 Iranian-led intervention in Iraq#Requested move December 2014 -- PBS (talk) 12:35, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

Good call, thanks. GregKaye 13:01, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

MOS:DASH

Hello. Please consider moving the two pages, 'Category:Islamist terrorist incidents, 2000-2009' and 'Category:Islamist terrorist incidents, 2010-2019' to 'Category:Islamist terrorist incidents, 2000–2009' and 'Category:Islamist terrorist incidents, 2010–2019', respectively. --Omnipaedista (talk) 15:24, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

• Omnipaedista I have no objection to other's making the moves but, while my writing formating of the category wording was not intentional, you are asking the wrong person. I think that substantial content in MOS is utterley unsubstantiated especially in regard to the hyphenation of years. See the thread I started, Misplaced Pages talk:Manual of Style/Archive 161#antiquated use of dashes?, for more details. GregKaye 15:40, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

For the moment this policy is the status quo. You simply choose to arbitrarily ignore it. --Omnipaedista (talk) 15:45, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

Omnipaedista there is policy on clear issues such as NOR and NPOV that makes coherent sense and there is policy such as in the case of MOS:DASH that, in many cases, seems to me to fly in the face of real world usage. Surely the editors breaking NOR and NPOV are those that continually push for the preservation of the use of dashes in MOS against real world usage. GregKaye 15:58, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

There is a clear distinction between core policy and style guidelines. MOS:DASH is a style guideline, so violating it is not a big matter. I just want to note that as long as a style guideline (part of Misplaced Pages's "house style") is the status quo, not following it is technically a violation of it (see also WP:JUSTDONTLIKEIT and WP:CON). --Omnipaedista (talk) 16:03, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

Omnipaedista I honestly think that there are better things for editors to do than to spend time chasing after and changing grammatical issues that fly in the opposite direction of real word use. It makes no sense to me. I just don't like things that I personally think make Misplaced Pages look antiquated and silly. I don't object to the use of the dash if that's what people choose to use and am happy to support editors in this choice. GregKaye 16:24, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

Style is not just about making articles look pretty. Style has semantic meaning. There are always good reasons behind English Misplaced Pages's guidelines. --Omnipaedista (talk) 16:36, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

Omnipaedista The only difference that I see between "2000-2009" and "2000–2009" is that the first is readily searchable. I don't see that making a change at this stage will be worth the effort. GregKaye 17:09, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

The semantic meaning here is "range value": Dash#Ranges of values. --Omnipaedista (talk) 23:00, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

Omnipaedista You have supplied a useful reference to both "En dash range style" and "Hyphen range style". I agree that, the semantic meaning here is "range value" but, as is clearly indicated by trawls of sources, it is a semantic meaning that is most commonly conveyed with the use of hyphens. GregKaye 06:28, 9 January 2015 (UTC)

Well, according to the APA style manual and the Misplaced Pages style manual, it is conveyed with the use of en dashes. The entire point of having a standard for such things is so that we do not have to argue about them all the time. Si fueris Romae, Romano vivito more; si fueris alibi, vivito sicut ibi. --Omnipaedista (talk) 06:39, 9 January 2015 (UTC)