Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by ObiterDicta (talk | contribs) at 00:37, 11 July 2006 (A course in miracles). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Archive	From	To
Archive 3	Tue, 04 Jul 2006 09:22:37 +0000	Fri, 07 Jul 2006 12:01:09 +0000
Archive 2	Mon, 26 Jun 2006 19:30:10 +0000	Tue, 04 Jul 2006 09:22:37 +0000
Archive 1	Sun, 25 Jun 2006 06:04:20 +0000	Mon, 26 Jun 2006 19:30:10 +0000
Archive 0	Sat, 17 Jun 2006 05:01.00 +0000	Sun, 25 Jun 2006 06:04:20 +0000

Thanks for your message about the ACIM articles

Thanks for your recent comment regarding the ACIM articles. A followup comment/ reply to your comment has been posted at my talk page.

-Scott P. 12:10, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your recent comment regarding the ACIM articles. A followup comment/ reply to your comment has been posted at my talk page.

-Scott P. 13:56, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

PS: This black text over a black background formatting on your talk page makes it a bit of a task for me to read it, but to each his or her own.

It's not black, it's maroon, like wine. Perhaps you should adjust the settings on your monitor if that helps. Ste4k 14:01, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps my monitor or Graphics card are outdated (from 2000 16 bit High Color). I tried tweaking it but to no avial. No problem though. When I select text and increase the text size bytwo sizes, I can still read it. I've left another reply for you at my my talk page and also emailed you. Cheers. -Scott P. 23:17, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Oh my, yes, that must horrific. My monitor is a Sony 22 inch LCD and my graphics card is an ATI 9800 AIW Pro. My resolution is set at 1600 x 1200 32-bit color, but also I use transparent windows so I can generally read three to four overlapped windows at a time. There's enough landscape on this box to normally have about 7 or 8 windows open to Wiki, still keep an eye on two or three channels of IRC, my e-mail, a couple blog sites, and my actual work, of course. Ste4k 00:36, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Say what?

I decide to check out the AfD articles, not something I normally get involved in. I come to an article for deletion, A Course in Miracles (book). I look over it -- I see it's been documented and footnoted almost to the very last comma. I observe a tremendous argument ensuing over one word, "cult", that's being interpreted multiple ways. Multiple editors are squabbling over whether User:Ste4k is being "POV" for using it. I change the wording to eliminate the troublesome word while meeting what I see as the intent of the original author of the quote, Garrett. I think I do an adequate if not very eloquent job. I go to a lot of effort to explain what and why I made the change, citing the dictionary, etc. I do screw up and forget to sign some of my work, which you helpfully catch and fix.

I then vote in the AfD to delete the article but to keep its content and merge it into the main article. I explain my reasoning, but without going into detail as to my views of both articles as they presently stand. If I had, I would have said something along the lines that the main article flows well and is comprehensive; I think it's generally well written. At the same time, it screams out for about 200 {{fact}} tags. It's not clear to me how reliable it is. The book article, by contrast, is not as pretty and, as the principal author herself more or less says, reads like a U.S. District Court decision. There's a reason judges' decisions are not high literature and that's because they're shooting for reliability and precision, not memorable prose. There's considerable overlap between both articles with much discussion as to whether there should be a book article and a movement article or just one combined article; there's even discussion as to whether the word "movement" should be used. It seems to me as it all this talk of different articles is putting the cart before the horse (reliability), so I vote "merge and delete" so that the overall Misplaced Pages coverage can get fixed and streamlined with some sort of consensus built.

Now I wake up and I find that you've spent hours during the night sarcastically mutilating your own article. It appears that one word, "cult", and my good faith editing of its usage may have been your tipping point to go into a frenzy. That or my one vote in the AfD process. If you don't like my cult edit, just reverse it and explain how I got it wrong.

Then there's this message on my talk page:

"I'm not originally from the U.S. I was born in Kharkov. In our country, we beat liars, and if one wants to eat, they work. The only POV in that article I wrote was that I wanted to find out the truth, did research, marked it with citations for verifiability, refused to consider any source that came from some primary provider, and all I found out for my trouble was that this encyclopedia isn't even worth quoting. You should be ashamed to have your familiy member's name on this medium. Ste4k 07:17, 7 July 2006 (UTC)"

What do I make of this? Are you saying that I'm a liar and should (or would) be beaten? That I should be working harder to eat? And what's this about my family?

And as for Misplaced Pages, being flawed, it certainly is that. It is profoundly flawed in terms of the reliability of some of its material. In fact, if so many millions of people didn't use it, I'd say forget about it. But the fact is, Misplaced Pages is very important and growing in importance everyday. Every day, more people abandon traditional sources of reliable information such as Britannica and turn to Misplaced Pages. Every month, Misplaced Pages's Google rankings move up higher and are often in the top 5 for a given search. The fact that so many other sites such as answers.com mirror the content makes what's written in Misplaced Pages seem all the more "reliable" since to the undiscerning, it looks like other sites are agreeing with Misplaced Pages.

So like it or not, Misplaced Pages is here to stay and further grow in importance. You can fume and I can fret, but our children and grandchildren will use it more and more as their first source of knowledge, reliable or not. That almost pessimistic view of Misplaced Pages's growing role is what motivates me -- not some idealistic, Woodstockian notion that "information longs to be free" or so much of the other idealistic stuff that motivates thousands of mostly earnest, smart but very young editors on this project.

--A. B. 13:32, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Color scheme

I accidentally clicked on this page in my watchlist, and the red-on-black color scheme blinded me. A trained parrot is typing this for me, which is very inconvenient, because the parrot only understands Spanish and my Spanish is quite poor. Please send replacement eyeballs. :) Kickaha Ota 17:54, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

snide

I was not trying to be snide, but I am startled to discover you have signally failed in understanding the point I was making. THe point is this: the Saihya Akademi Award exists to honour the most prominent cultural figures in various Indian vernaculars. This would have been apparent - or at least suggested - by reading the google results for the award. Next, the fact that 757 ghits exist is pretty decent. "Ramdhari Singh Dinkar", the most famous modern Hindi poet of all, gets a mere 1000 or so. This is known as WP:BIAS. There are certain cultures not as much on the internet as yet, and the world's most populousn nation is one of them. This should have been apparent to even the meanest intelligence.

I was further making a point that, even if you had doubts about the notability of a subject, if you are unwilling or perhaps incapable of carrying out even basic research and coming to simple conclusions, be a little humble when you recognise that you know nothing about the particular cultural, social, or political context that allows you to place this person. It means that this is definitely a BAD WP article; but you seem to have assumed it was an UNENCYCLOPAEDIC article, and that leap was unwarranted.

Finally, I pointed out that on WP we are all both readers and editors. That is the point. If you are capable of bringing this article to AfD, you should be capable of the basic research that everyone else put in. If not, dont bring articles to AfD and waste our time and energy. Hornplease 03:11, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

I think you miss the point again, by a mile. I didnt actually have anything to do with the article, and the first time I saw it was on your AfD, so it would have been difficult for me to put references in before you nominated it. So although "I" dont establish any notability, my point is that "you" should realise that there are some places where you are just not qualified - or, it appears, able - to judge notability. Hornplease 14:45, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

You make the absurd and self-serving claim that nobody would have believed the information contained in the article. As I said, it was a bad article. You had three options (1) Think "someone thinks this guy is a really major Hindi poet. What do I know about Hindi poets? Nothing. What might the internet tell me about Hindi poets? Nothing that I am capable of deciphering. So why dont I move on and nominate for deletion something else?" (2) Think "this article does not establish notability. Let me slap a nn template on it and dump it on the Indian administrators noticeboard." (3) Think "This article does not establish notability. I am clearly capable of judging notability. Let me nominate it for an AfD."

You picked the third. This was the wrong choice. Accept that, fix your behaviour, and move on. I am not 'making it personal', I would just like more people to realise that nominating articles for AfD is not the right way to try and clean them up, but a last resort. And people should not nominate articles about subjects about which they know absolutely nothing.

Finally: thanks for informing me about "India's tech standards." If you had had any experience of it at all, you would realise that 90 year old vernacular poets are not the kind of people who tend to get on to even a developing domestic web, which has a penetration till today of less than 4%.

As I said, learn from this, and move on. Hornplease 15:30, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Contacting

Ste4k, my MSN Messenger handle is lucas5w4@netscape.net if you would like to talk. Naturally I want to understand and do what I can. Take care, —Antireconciler 05:35, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

I have responded to your criticisms at User talk:A. B.#My final comments to Ste4k on my edits, demeanor, general morality, etc.

--A. B. 20:59, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the note. You put so much work into A Course in Miracles (book) -- I hope you'll either restore that content and sourcing or merge it into A Course in Miracles

--A. B. 21:52, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

for you :)

The Original Barnstar For improving Allerton High School even though you preferred it's deletion. Inner Earth 23:05, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Top-notch QA

The Barnstar of Diligence awarded to Ste4k for tirelessly ensuring neutral and verifiable articles and stomping out ignorance and original research. Never say "no one will check my references anyway." Ste4k will hear you. She'll hear you think it, even before you do. —Antireconciler 00:03, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Apostrophe use

In the phrase "for itself and all processes and software running under its control" (Runtime environment), its is correct, because it is a possessive pronoun (see table at personal pronouns). "Under it's control" would be incorrect because it's is a contraction for it is. Thanks for checking. Jim 00:20, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Reshaping Course-related articles

Hi Ste4k. I'm not sure how you read anything on this talk page the way you have it set up, but I want to suggest that if you want to improve A Course in Miracles, Endeavor Academy, and other articles related to the Course, you will probably save yourself considerable time and energy by simply taking out a notepad, doing some research, and then simply replace the entire artcile with a more reliable one when you're done, keeping anything that meets WP's standards from the original. No one can contest replacing unverifiable articles with verifiable ones. It looked like this was what you wanted to do (largely) with A Course in Miracles (book), and I think you were on the right track doing that. If the articles are not the way you want them, this is a much better method than posting numerous tags on pages and slowly reshaping them 1 edit at a time. If they aren't quality pages, it's better to either nominate them for deletion and let them go or write your own article. —Antireconciler 18:13, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Talk:A Course in Miracles (book)

I've fixed the tag, my bad. Anyway, the reason I'm leaving the talk page is that it contains discussion relevant to the topic. The community didn't reject inclusion of the topic in the AfD, so it's of some value. Mangojuice 18:45, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

By the way, I've gotten rid of your message box. The messages on your talk page are unreadable with it (in my browser, anyway). Mangojuice 18:47, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

thanks for the concern, however, now the characters are so large I can barely read but a single message or a part of one. Ste4k 18:59, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Deliberately inaccessable for the handicapped

I'm red-green color blind and this page is black on black to my eyes. I have to click edit to read it. If you wish to respond, please do on my talk page. It's kinda like stairs-in-the-front and a ramp-in-the-back to someone in a wheelchair. I don't feel welcome on this page. WAS 4.250 20:45, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Effective Communication

In case you don't realize, to many users, your page looks like this:

Obviously, it's very difficult to read. Could you consider changing the color scheme and font size to help put the effective back in effective communication? Thanks in advance; we'd all appreciate it. joturner 23:07, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

I have removed the formatting as it makes it pretty much impossible to use this page. Please think of other users when designing your page. --mboverload@ 00:06, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

Talk: A Course in Miracles

Per your request I reviewed your comment. I have also left a message. I am again able to spend larger chunks of time editing and plan on working on some ACIM articles. As a personal observation, I do not think that the true believers over there are trying to POV-push, they just do not realize that they are in fact being POV. Their disregard of sources could also be explained by their New Age worldview rather than by bad faith. JChap (Talk) 00:37, 11 July 2006 (UTC)