Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 10:17, 3 July 2007

This is a Misplaced Pages user talk page. For the fictional wolf of the same name, see Carcharoth.

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DRV

Sorry, I thought you would have noticed it on your watchlist. You can probably still find the list in the google cache, though, or on the wayback machine. Unfortunately not many people responded to your proposal, despite it being mentioned on the DRV as well. Your index page looks pretty good, didn't we have templates to do that automatically for categories? >Radiant< 08:30, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

No probs. Thanks for explaining. We do have templates. {{largeCategoryTOC}} is an example, but the layout of that and the one I copied from the LoPbN layout are different. Carcharoth 16:16, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

I nominated my article Tompkins Square Park Police Riot for FA status

From the nomination page:
(self-nomination)This article is simply excellent. Excellent writing, interesting subject matter, improved during its Good Article trial, and eye-witnesses have left notes on the Talk page that talk about the article being so accurate, it's like they were living it all over again. Written in a NPOV and heavily cited with the highest of sources, it includes GFDL media, is wikified to the fullest, a fantastic "See Also" section, and looks at the story from every angle. --David Shankbone 18:37, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the note. Not sure why you left it here though. :-) Carcharoth 16:14, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Cool Cat MFD on DRV

Misplaced Pages:Deletion review/Log/2007 May 30#Misplaced Pages:Miscellany for deletion/User:Cool Cat -- Ned Scott 05:15, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

Hmm. I actually think my vote in the original MfD was wrong, as David Levy's arguments and Cyde Weys inadvertent recreation persuaded me that keeping a redirect is best. Pity I missed the DRV disucssion though. Thanks for the note anyway. It made interesting reading. Carcharoth 16:19, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Messier Objects

I got all the images from here which I believe is actually public domain, but which asks for attribution, so I uploaded them as attribution. You can use them in any article you like - they're free. I didn't put them into other articles just because I didn't think of it - I see no reason not to. As for the images on the list, if you prefer the 2MASS images, feel free to switch them - I see no reason not to. Personally, I'd prefer visible light images where possible - but I found a sorted stack of free images so I went for it. Galaxies and Nebulae aren't really my thing, so otherwise I'm not sure how much I can help, but I've been working on getting free NASA images into articles where appropriate recently. Since some are very nice. WilyD 17:41, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

As an aside

On the subject of animal populations on the move, see this (IMO) brilliant idea: . Marskell 17:54, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Amazing! Thanks for that. The concluding bit here is great: "In the coming century, by default or design, we will constrain the breadth and future evolutionary complexity of life on Earth. The default scenario will surely include ever more pest-and-weed dominated landscapes, the extinction of most, if not all, large vertebrates, and a continuing struggle to slow the loss of biodiversity." - reminds me of the best phrases from Profiles of the Future. Carcharoth 18:03, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

RE: Aagh! :-)

So far I have been assessing all of the peerage articles, like the "Duke of..." as lists, as most of the article consists of a chronological list of the Dukes/Earls/etc. - • The Giant Puffin • 14:34, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Haydn

Thanks for spotting my mistake - I should've noticed the lack of a star on the page, sorryabout that! Walkerma 17:24, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Squeaky wheelz

Hey, thought I might let you know: "the squeaky wheel" is I think a metaphor for like a wagon wheel or some other older device using multiple wheels. Like, even if all the wheels suck, only the one making the noise will be remedied. Like how even if a bunch of people are being jerks, the one making the most fuss will be iced. My elementary teachers used to say it to me when I'd get in trouble, hahahahahahaha. Hope that helps ^_^ Milto LOL pia 23:23, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Re: That RFAR

Thanks for appreciating what I tried to say at that mess of an ArbCom. Now I've come to find out that an article I tried to salvage has been one of the things put through the ringers. More and more, I'm finding this case impacting on my editing, even though I've barely ever interacted with its actual parties.

Sigh. Serpent's Choice 21:30, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

Talk:Wizard (fantasy)

Sorry not one I can help with as far as edit history is concerned, as you will see by my edits at the time I found it very confusing. --Philip Baird Shearer 23:56, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

Your reward for adding links to all the letters for the assessment drive...

Give Tux a hug!

--Psychless 01:44, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! But I have to be honest and say I only added it for some of the letters. The majority were added by User:Mahanga with this edit. Carcharoth 08:15, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

Oops, well I didn't look over the history well enough. Thanks for telling me. I'll give one to Mahanga right now. --Psychless 15:15, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

Re: Introductory style in articles

Thanks for the comment about the Egyptian dynastic articles; if nothing else, it served as a welcome reality check for me. I probably wouldn't feel so frustrated in this situation if: (1) said person responded to questions on her/his Talk page, (2) was not editting in good faith, & (3) was not so obviously (well, at least to me) wrong. If I may ask your advice, can you think of a way to begin a conversation with this person that does not require someone to perform an indef block? I suspect this will only cause this contributor to either leave or open another account & continue to edit in the same manner. And no, this person does not have email enabled for this account. -- llywrch 17:44, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

PS -- About multiple forms of names in an article. Probably the best example of what you are thinking would be almost any article on a person or place related to Ethiopia: there is no standardized practice of transliteration, so spellings can vary widely & confusingly for them. (One example is the former province of Illubabor: I've seen it transliterated as Illu Abba Bora & Elubabore by different authorities.) Add to that the complication many settlements & ethnic groups have multiple names (e.g., Addis Ababa is referred to as Finfinne), & many Ethiopian articles require a line or two to list all of the possible alternative names. But my point in mentioning this is to suggest that if you can find one of these articles, & re-write the lead paragraph to fit more in line of what you'd prefer to see -- I'd be interested in the result. I may even adopt it & revise as many other articles that I can find to conform to the example -- I'm always open to new ideas. -- llywrch 18:01, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

I prefer to use Islamic physicians and scholars as examples. Usually at least three names there. Try Al-Razi for starters. You have a whole paragraph of confusing names, followed by two different dating systems as a bonus. To be fair, the very next paragraph immediately introduces the subject and his notability, so it's not something I've ever made a tremendous fuss about. Carcharoth 18:28, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

What a sad problem

Yep, we're hopefully going to deal with him. If he won't see reason then, unfortunately, Wizardman will have to take action against him. --Psychless 15:29, 10 June 2007 (UTC) 01:13, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

Response posted in the wrong place...

Here! :) Jenolen 03:44, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

re: Nice portfolio

I wondered over to your user page, after replying to your comments at WT:NOT, and found Billy (pygmy hippo) among other gems of articles. Nice going! I love the userpages design as well, with the tabs. Might imitate that one day. I dunno, I find articles like those you wrote so interesting, but the line with people and tabloid-style journalism articles feels different somehow. Writing about a person should, I think, require a different style to that when writing about a magazine article (the Sinatra one), or a famous pygmy hippo. Collating from different sources to write the definitive article on something like that is OK, but doing it for a person can be an invasion of their privacy, or a short stub that can't really be expanded. I suppose the closest thing I can find in your collection is John Dau, which could be merged to God Grew Tired of Us. For example, why does John Dau have an article and not Daniel and Panther? Hope you don't mind me using this article as a discussion point! Carcharoth 21:19, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

Hi Carcharoth, thanks for the nice comments! I want to be clear that I'm not a fan at all of tabloid-journalism and internet memes, which are the causes of 90 percent of our BLP issues here at Misplaced Pages. But I do think it is being approached as censorship. Personally, I have no interest in these kidnapped babies and 15-kilobytes of fame pole-vaulting hotties. It's not something I like or really care about which is why I've mostly avoided the heated debates on the topic. But, I think it is censorship when we delete the handful of these articles which are well-sourced. I'm not necessarily saying it's wrong to delete them, I'm unsure. I wouldn't say that censorship, in any possible context, is a bad thing. Broadcast television for example is censored; I don't really think anyone has a problem with that. But I'd raise the same objection if somebody said "TV is not censored, it's just editorial discretion!" As for John Bul Dau, I think it's the first article I created and my understanding of Misplaced Pages has evolved a lot since then. But the reason I made an article for Dau and not the other characters in God Grew Tired of Us was 1) that Dau was the more prominent character, 2) Dau had also been featured in National Geographic and the Washington Post so there were multiple independent sources and 3) Dau's charity has received media coverage. Thanks again for the nice comments, and feel free to use my userspace design! I was teaching myself how to use tables and such and just got carried away! --JayHenry 21:47, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

Not much to add, but wanted to thank you in turn for the nice reply! I'm afraid I rather expect people to be defensive, but it is nice to be able to discuss things calmly like this. BTW, I haven't seen the film God Grew Tired of Us, I presume you have? It sounds good. WOuld you recommend it and is it generally available? I noted the year of release in the article, though at the bottom it only said "planned for release". Do you know what happened with that? Carcharoth 21:53, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

I believe that I saw God Grew Tired of Us in one of those indy movie theater in January. It's very well done; given the subject matter it's unsurprisingly very hard to watch at times, so very depressing to know that we live in a world where people can do this to each other. Good catch that the article needs updating about the release date. I'll try to discover if it ended up released in the fall or the winter and I'll see if I can't find how wide of a release it was. According to Amazon the DVD is being released in August of this year. --JayHenry 21:49, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

Good morrow

I'm reading some books about Catherine de' Medici at the moment, so she's a possible. To be honest, I've been spending more time reading books and reviewing peoples' articles at peer review recently. I did knock up John de Critz en passant—murder trying to find anything about him, I must say. I'd be grateful if you'd give it one of your lookovers (I expect I'll do Robert Peake the Elder soon, too; same sort of chap). Now, here's something that might interest you (as one of our foremost links detectives) to look into: who the heck is "John de Critz the Younger", if anyone? You'll see from my note on the talk page that I have a growing hunch that two John de Critzes have been conflated by historians and critics into one: either that or he was a right vigorous old geezer. Our man is often called "John the Critz the elder", but I'm blowed if I can find anything material about any John the Younger at all, as such. Tis an enigma on the cathedrals-of-Oslo scale, and no mistake.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed your wikibreak. qp10qp 22:40, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

I thought the one you read was Paul van Somer I: thanks for your edits to that (I don't know, Jacobean painters, eh, once you've seen one, you've seen the lot). You are right that the article is highly padded around a tiny few actual facts about de Critz, but I looked high and low for that padding and I was determined to stuff it all in, right down to the last duck feather, if it was the last thing I did; anyway, I like to give people something to read when they click a link, I suppose. I have thought about doing an article on Jacobean painters, but I need to get hold of some of Roy Strong's books first (he practically rediscovered William Larkin)), not that he's likely to have much on poor old John de Critz, forced to paint barges at the age of eighty (I don't think).

By the way, that policy of red-linking in Anne and James has worked a treat: apart from your John Chamberlain (letter writer), Egil's Old Bishop's Palace in Oslo, and my van Somer and de Critz, someone has done a Kirk o'Field article (though they've chosen the less classy gap-after-the-apostrophe style), and there's even a stub on Conrad Vorstius now. It's satisfying. qp10qp 23:31, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

I will definitely get round to adding to John Chamberlain (letter writer) and Conrad Vorstius one day. And I intend to do a full article on Darnley's murder (intentions, intentions), which I have some corking sources for. John Guy's moment-by-moment analysis of it is electrifying; and once you add the David Rizzio murder as a prologue and end with Mary Queen of Scots and the casket letters (rubbish article: another one to improve), you have a potentially gripping article, full of action and mystery, better than fiction. Incidentally, well spotted about the connection between the two pictures: you're quite right; and I do think he was indoctrinated a bit. Oh, I love looking at pictures: have you read Yomangani's wonderful An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, which is at FAC at the moment? qp10qp 00:12, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

All partief

Here you go. --Tony Sidaway 00:22, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

Ah. No double ff's. That would be the German ff. Thanks! Carcharoth 00:23, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

Oh and you muftn't miss the sequel: . --Tony Sidaway 00:26, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

LOL! Carcharoth 00:27, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

Magic cloak

I was trying, rather unsuccessfully, to cheer Bishonen up by pointing out that her The Country Wife is one of our best articles and that featured status is worth something, because we put all that we love into all that we make (you'll recognise the reference). Someone had stuck one of Bishonen's best articles up for review and someone else was being offensive to ALoan during the discussion over it, and Bishonen had clearly had enough, I think rather for ALoan's sake than her own. What I was trying to put over, though I expect it seemed wishy washy, was that when you put the amount of time and care into an article that gets it to featured status, that is a beautiful thing, a beautiful thing that no longer belongs to the maker because it has been given. You have made something special, which exists apart from you. The love and care you invested will reach people, and they will sense it. I'm dismayed to find top-quality article writers like Bishonen, ALoan and Geogre becoming worn down by the dreary fusspotting over citations that goes on; but what they did remains: the people who appreciate their articles outnumber those who fuss by far and will want to defend those articles. I think of the Lothlorien thing sometimes when I am stitching away at articles: it's the only way I can make sense of why I am going to so much trouble. qp10qp 01:26, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

I don't know if you could answer ALoan's relatively incomprehensible comment on my talk page. At first I thought something odd must have happened to the dear chap during his wikibreak—abduction by one of those sects who talk in tongues, perhaps—but then I realised this was only Tolkien in tongues, and so quite up your street.

I'd also be interested in your take, if you have one, on an issue I've raised on the Talk: Anne of Denmark page. qp10qp 19:37, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/Oxford University Chess Club

Hi, you might want to convert your Comment into an action recommendation? BlueValour 01:11, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

LoPbN

Sorry, it's a busy day. I'll get back to you on that, give me a few days. Cheers, >Radiant< 17:00, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

No problem. Maybe by then I'll have consolidated my thoughts somewhat, and drawn up an even more detailed plan! :-) Carcharoth 17:32, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

discerning to fulfill / This labor, by slow prudence to make mild / A rugged people

Hi Carcharoth,
(Wow, I did almost leave a message on your not-a-talk-page.) I can reply with questions, general points, and thoughts, but I'm not in the bot business. What you're proposing though sounds doable, but it's a big project, and I think a variety of technical opinions will be helpful in finding the best solution.

I'm trying first to get a sense of your overall goal: to create an essentially automated biography index? Do you want to use categories, or you're open to whatever works? The following are random thoughts and I haven't really examined their consequences:

• Is there a precedent for putting DEFAULTSORT on talk pages? I don't suppose it really matters, but generally there isn't "stuff" at the bottom of talk pages so the text is more likely to go missing. I suppose the defaultsort keyword could be placed anywhere. Inside the WPBIO template, maybe? If other templates followed this course, the system would contain redundancy and would have the potential to cause competing (different) sorts, in which case I'm sure nothing horrible will happen.
• What math project does: interesting. I didn't follow all the transclusions involved, but I doubt their method would scale to WPBio.
• If we're in the biography metadata business (indexing, basic bio information), why not store it all in one place: the WPBio template? By that I mean moving PERSONDATA from article pages to the WPBio template. The category sort would, if possible, come from PERSONDATA. Big change!
• I am willing to update my article assessment script (do you know of it?) to start adding DEFAULTSORTs to the talk page instead of or in addition to the "listas" parameter. The assessment factory is so busy that by the time I do it, they may have assessed everything!
  –Outriggr § 04:07, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments! I don't know what is usually put on talk pages, but I realised that the aslist parameter of WPBiography is duplicating what should be used as a DEFAULTSORT key on the article page. Knowing how Misplaced Pages works, I reckon there are plenty of articles where only one or the other is used, so sorting that out is one goal (and finding out how widespread such inconsistency is would be one of the first steps). There is also existing data in the Persondata template, as the "name" parameter there is in the DEFAULTSORT format already! Possibly tweaking Template:Persondata may simply integrate the two. Persondata should probably remain on the article page, though I like your idea of putting persondata in the WPBiography template, there may be disadvantages to that.

As for the overall goal: "to create an essentially automated biography index" is exactly right. Using DEFAULTSORT allows this to be done using a category. Other methods, I'm not sure about. Anyway, asking the assessors to fill in the listas parameter might be a good first step. Doesn't matter what it is called, as long as the information is there (it can be tweaked later). I saw someone (was it you?) say that listas already involves the DEFAULTSORT magic word. Does that sound right?

To complicate things still further, there is another metadata format called Hcard. See Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject Microformats#Persondata and hCard.

Anyway, I'm encouraged by your response. I'll try and bring all the discussion together over the next few days and start up a proper page somewhere. Would you have any ideas for name or location? WPBiography seems like a good location to me. Carcharoth 09:27, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

PS. Where doe the section title quote come from? :-) Carcharoth 09:27, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

Let me answer the easy question: the other day I was quoting Ulysses in my edit comments. Every one of them I think was apropos; wouldn't you agree that your project is to "make mild a rugged people "? :-) –Outriggr § 23:02, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Maybe I should try reading Ulysses again... :-) Carcharoth 23:29, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Oops. I thought you meant Ulysses (novel). The Tennyson poem is brilliant! I read this and immediately thought of Misplaced Pages: "I mete and dole, Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me." LOL! Carcharoth 23:31, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Ha! (You'll know I've gone over the edge when I start leaving quotes from Ulysses (novel) in my edit comments. "The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea." :-) –Outriggr § 10:08, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

I agree that information at the bottom of a talk page is always vulnerable. On the other hand, embedding useful data inside the (already complicated) WPBiography template is not optimal either. In my view, these common data should be read from a common source. The most obvious way to do it is to transclude them from a subpage, as discussed on my talk page. I have now produced a "proof-of-concept" at Alexander Grothendieck. Here the DEFAULTSORT for the article and the listas parameter in the template are both transcluded from Talk:Alexander Grothendieck/Persondata. This subpage is also used to provide some of the infobox information and to fill out the Persondata table at the bottom of the article.

I've commented further at Template talk:Persondata#Persondata on a subpage. Geometry guy 16:35, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Biographical articles

After reading your edit on the subject of how people approach the writing of biographical articles, I think that you might be interested in what I wrote in the pretty coloured box at Misplaced Pages:Deletion review/Log/2007 May 23.

You might want to read about cargo cult encyclopaedia article writing too. It isn't quite the same thing as you are discussing, but the "I know. I'll add a bullet point to a Misplaced Pages article." approach is a similar one. Uncle G 15:44, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

• Thanks for that. I agree wholeheartedly with what you wrote there (I wish we could link directly to DRVs - well, we could if people would set the system up properly). I especially like the bit about education. There are editors out there who will adopt correct practices if the point keeps getting (politely) hammered home. There are those who won't, but that is always the case. The cargo cult comment was even better: "Simply amassing raw data, and hoping that an encyclopaedia article will magically arise from it, doesn't work". I've actually done my fair share of this adding of snippets of information, but over the couple of years or so that I've been here, I've come to realise that this approach is OK for a while, but eventually someone needs to actually write the article and give it substance with real content and sources. Another approach, is to get a moderately well-organised category of fairly good articles, and then use material from those articles to write a summary-style overview of the wider subject area. I wonder what the name for that is, and whether that is any better (in the long run) than what you describe.

  Anyway, you should write essays based on those two items you pointed out, and point many more people at them. Those that weren't aware of the issues, but stick around, will benefit, and the churning mass of new editors ariving all the time might benefit as well. Even if not essays, maybe a collection of diffs to some of the mini-essays? Carcharoth 16:10, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

  • I've been mulling over how to write up the second for some time, now. But It's not actually necessary to write an essay for the first. I wrote it as something that we should consider elaborating and adopting. It seemed to me that it was something that a lot of editors were progressing towards. I, for example, had already covered the ground of presenting things in the way that the sources do at User:Uncle G/On notability#Dealing with non-notable things.

    After writing it, I went to the Village Pump and to several other talk pages to advertise the idea and trigger some discussion. By the time that I reached Misplaced Pages talk:Biographies of living persons I found that other editors had already added it to the policy and a discussion was already underway. You can see the result at Misplaced Pages:Biographies of living persons#Articles about living people notable only for one event.

    What I find interesting is that Fred Bauder reported here that Jimbo and others had been working behind closed doors on a "major initiative". As far as I can tell, that initiative was this. As I said, a lot of editors appeared to be progressing towards the same thing. ☺ Uncle G 12:12, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

    • I'm sure I saw your notability essay somewhere before, but I've now added it to my bookmarks page so I won't lose it again! Some great stuff there, and some amazing examples. I liked Mill Ends Park! As for the cargo cult encyclopedia writing essay, well, you probably need to find a better name for it first! (What does "cargo cult" mean?) Maybe "Different ways of writing encyclopedia articles" and cover other approaches? The essay does strike deep at the concept of wiki editing, so you might want to find a balance that preserves the advantages of wiki editing to produce aggregates of raw material, which can then be knocked into shape by a writer or a subject expert. Would the concept of article incubation help? Obviously not everyone can write perfect articles from scratch, but the point you make about how addition of trivia decreases as the article gets better, is extremely relevwant. Also, what do you think about the idea that if a category contains lots of good, well-written, reliably-sourced articles, but the overview article is rubbish (or non-existent), that a summary-style overview article can be written using the earlier efforts that wrote the subsidiary articles? The usual model is the other way around, to spin smaller topic articles off from a broader article, but I think it can work well the other way around as well. What do you think? Carcharoth 12:54, 15 June 2007 (UTC)
      • You've very probably seen it before. There are also User:Uncle G/On sources and content and some others. As for what a cargo cult is: See cargo cult. I'm not sure what I think about your idea yet. I'll keep mulling this whole area over.

        One interesting talk page to read, if you are thinking about article development in this area, is Talk:Phenomenon. See also the article's edit history over the past 5 years. Uncle G 15:13, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

        • I don't think I have seen that before, actually. I remember something, but not that one. Do you have many more of these essays hidden away? :-) I used the prefix index to find User:Uncle G/Describe this universe (I never knew that was the precursor to WP:WAF), and User:Uncle G/On having a user page (I was about to ask why your user page is so bare - though just having the contributions links is a strong statement in itself). Having read that essay, I found it very instructive, and it explains why you have just the contributions links and nothing else. Would you ever consider adding links on your user page to these essays you have written? Or maybe at the top of your user talk page? While meandering around those essays, I found Help:Modifying and Creating policy (via the cross-namespace redirect Misplaced Pages:Policy thinktank) - which was interesting - 7 polices created, at least 80 rejected. Finally User:Uncle G/Wikipedia triage seems like a start at outlining the cradle to grave finished product process for articles, focussing on the birthing pangs rather than the adolescent or finishing school stages, but still on the same theme. Anyway, I've enjoyed reading those essays, so thanks for that. Only thing left now is to look at Talk:Phenomenon. Carcharoth 15:49, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

• PS. Is cargo cult programming more relevant to explain the analogy? Carcharoth 15:55, 15 June 2007 (UTC)
  • Well the basic ideas are those of mimicry and of belief in the magical creation of articles. Uncle G 19:38, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

:)

I'm glad someone took a chance to look at my page :). I suppose I'll put {{editprotected}} on the page and hope everyone doesn't start yelling at me later. Also, I've noticed you aren't part of the assessment drive. Go here if you want to be... --Psychless 18:03, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

I found it too: very funny, and a very flattering portrait of yours truly!! Geometry guy 19:43, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Re: category flattening

I responded on my talk page, but should probably mention here as well that I used a java class that I wrote myself to do the category flattening; anyone can run it if they compile it (using, for example, BlueJ, which in turn uses javac) and then run the bytecode (BlueJ can also be used for this). Both require the Java Runtime Environment. Gracenotes § 02:56, 16 June 2007 (UTC)

Kirk o' Field

I liked your amusing summary suggesting some form of Jacobean tabloid journalism - made me smile. I would pretty much agree with your assessment, but would hesitate to classify either Darnley or Bothwell as non-notable :) How bizzarre that this modest little article about the scene of one of Scotland's great unsolved murders appears on the talk page of an ArbCom case dealing with BLP issues!!! Misplaced Pages never ceases to amaze. Cheers. --Cactus.man ✍ 13:52, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! Carcharoth 14:01, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

DEFAULTSORT key

I responded to your post on mw:. You might also want to know that there is a setting on mw that sends you an e-mail when a page you're watching has changed. I guess Misplaced Pages has this disabled due to the massive number of e-mails that would need to be sent. --Catrope 18:45, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. If you see this reply, there is a bot being written to do a similar thing here - see Misplaced Pages:Bots/Requests for approval/Polbot 3. If your API script could be a simpler way to do this, please comment there. Thanks. Carcharoth 21:11, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

Re: Misplaced Pages:BLP Admin

I've been keeping an eye on the talk page, and so have at least some of the other arbitrators.

As for your specific points:

• The "BLP Admin" thing seems like extra hoops here; I don't think that reducing the pool of people available to nuke BLP vios really helps matters, and I don't see why "regular" admins wouldn't be trusted to do so responsibly.
• As far as blanking goes, it'd have to be a blank+protect to have any effect at all, since we'll just be provoking edit-warring otherwise; and once you've forced admin involvement, I think it's cleaner to simply delete the thing.

Kirill Lokshin 01:13, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

Carcharoth, do start a proposal page; that Kirill Lokshin doesn't see the advantages of keeping the history accessible just suggests that one of the problems here is that he's been an admin so long he's forgotten how Misplaced Pages looks to the rest of us. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:37, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

Edit intro

I saw your post to Portal talk:Current events. I've replied there, but you might want to test it out yourself:

http://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=User_talk:Chacor&action=edit&section=new&editintro=User:Chacor/editintro

– Chacor 12:50, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

I don't know. Since it says that there has to be the additional &editintro in the URL... – Chacor 13:05, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

Hmm, now my talk page is acting up after I added that link. Clicking it seems to make the archive box bigger and the link doesn't open... – Chacor 13:12, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

I'm almost certain I didn't have that problem before. I wonder if editintro caused it? But that can't be, because if there isn't editintro= in the link it still adjusts the box position... – Chacor 13:25, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

My WPBio bot

I finally answered your questions on my talk page. :-) – Quadell 17:33, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

More like this?

I don't know how similar it is to An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump but I have another FAC with an artistic leaning up at Misplaced Pages:Featured article candidates/Four Times of the Day. It's somewhat ground to a halt, so, if you are interested, your comments and/or support would be appreciated. Cheers, Yomangani 23:23, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

Re: Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park

Y Done on both images. ^demon 11:59, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Both look good to me. ^demon 13:46, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Royal burials

Hi, I noticed a post of yours from a few months ago about creating a list of royal burials, and I thought you might be interested in this that I've been working on. Burial places of British monarchs - I've sourced it from Misplaced Pages articles at the moment - the only general source I could find contains quite a few mistakes.--Sandy Donald 13:07, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Wow! That's great work there. Thanks for letting me know, and good luck with getting more pictures. I live in the UK, so could take/replace some pictures if you wanted. Carcharoth 13:16, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Any help is appreciated. I'd quite like to have pictures of the tombs themselves where possible, rather than generic ones of what the building looks like today. I also need to find more sources.--Sandy Donald 13:20, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

BLP

No, thank you; SlimVirgin is allergic to me, and I want to get back to editing real articles after this bath of unpleasantness. If I do any projects, it will be a genuinely light process of article evaluation, intended to supplement GA. Let me know when your computer gets better. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:09, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

OK. Good luck with the article editing (I want to get back to that as well...) Carcharoth 15:16, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

LoPbN

Hi there! I don't mind at all if you move those index pages to the relevant Wikiproject. Perhaps it can be of some use to them. I think some plans for extended meta-data would be very useful; you may want to try contacting one of the devs for that, but failing that there's always the pump and the bot request forum. I'm not convinced that generating lists is such a good idea unless you have some way of keeping them current. HTH. >Radiant< 15:32, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

I think if ever such a list reappeared, it would work with metadata like Misplaced Pages:Persondata. That could generate "name, birth date, death date, short description" for a list, and would be edited in the article (or on a page tightly associated with the article). Thus the maintaining of a separate page would no longer apply. Some of the more detailed LoPbN features, like distinguishing people named John, and those with surname John, might get lost, but theoretically you could get that distinction entered in the metadata somehow (slightly different fields like "known name" and "sort key" and "surname"). Of course, this designing of databases for biographical information has all been done before, but I don't know which is the best system to use. Anyway, thanks for the response and the idea to move the pages to a relevant WikiProject. I'll see how things go. Carcharoth 15:38, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

Dear Carcharoth

Dear Carcharoth, I'm so sorry it took me a full week to get back to you; real life issues kept me away from WP altogether, and only now I'm able to reply my backlogged messages. In case you don't remember, sweetie, it was about the issue that was mentioned at CharlotteWeb's RfA regarding fair use quotes, more specifically at my Today's Wikipedian campaign. You mentioned your concerns regarding said quotes, tho your kind words of appreciation are most welcome, and I thank you for them wholeheartedly. Currently, it's possible to browse through all of them here, which is linked to my userpage; but the matter that worries you is fair use, so I'll focus on that. You see, after CW made her post at the mailing list, I've used only PD stuff and nothing but that.My friend AnonEMouse went even further and, after I deleted the fair use poems I had used until then, he replaced them with PD stuff of his choice. So right now, only material of author who have been dead for more than 70 years is acceptable to be gifted at my campaign. I hope this helps and puts your mind at rest :) I hope we talk more in the future; nothing would please me more. Love, Phaedriel - 21:05, 25 June 2007 (UTC)