If you've been frequenting the RecentChanges page, you might already expect that I am a Wikipediholic -- yep, I admit it (score = 82). 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...
I am not sure how to use the message feature, so I wound up doing a page edit here. Just wanted to say sorry for my original goofiness yesterday. I found a new toy, I played, and now I will leave it alone. {G}I will behave now. :)
Ayla
Oops... "They should be on sourceberg.wikipedia.org, (when brion sets it up) but Wikiquote would like the documents on sourceberg." thats should be link not "like" :-). -fonzy
OK. --mav
Thank you for welcoming me to Wiki. Thanks for the links they were very informative. ~AndrewHarris
Not a problem! :) Type three ~ and see what happens when you save. Then try four ~. --mav
Heh, I only finished Indo-Pacific half an hour ago, and I only wrote it to sort out the confusion caused by yesterday's near simultaneous creation of White Dolphin by Heaphastus(sp?) and Chinese White Dolphin by a Chinese contributor.
My Dorling Kindersley book (hardly a scientific text or expert guide) capitalises dolphins, so does the online source I used for the dolphin list.
(I wrote several more sentences, deleted them all in the spirit of goodwill!)
Fair enough. I'm still warming to the idea of capitalizing species but need to see more evidence. No hurry, I'm not going to go on any moving frenzy (but I may get a bit pissy when down-style redirects are not provided), but do keep your eyes open. --mav
To me, capitalisation avoids ambiguities like "female red crossbills are green" and "common dolphins are rare in ...". If I come across species' articles without redirects I put them in, and make sure that new regular contributors, like User:Big iron are aware too. Indopacific is a bit of a nightmare anyway in terms of alternative names, hyphenation etc. I suspect that most dolphin contributors (they're not all Tannin and me) are using the DK book anyway, although the Chinese contributor may be using another source. Jim
I suggested another name for the wikitextbook on the main page of talk. -fonzy
Mav, are you really "still waiting" for evidence? I have no idea why. There is ample evidence around. Aside from the substantial amount that I and other have provided long since (which has been conveniently swept under the carpet and forgotten about, it seems) let me add a few more (not that this should be needed - the case has been made by me and by others long since). The Mammal Society of New South Wales (which is the senior Australian state mammal society, just as the umbrella body Birds Australia is headquartered in Victoria) explicitly mandates captialisation. All three of my mammal field guides use it. (Yes, I bought another one last week - can't help myself.) The Australian Mammal Society uses it. Even in that strange and illogical heartland of spurious decapitalisation, the United States, we see that no less an authority than the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History capitalises mammal species names. No need to wait, Mav, the evidence is there for anyone who cares to look for it, and the rationality of using normal capitalisation to set aside species names from other describing text, so as to provide clarity and avoid ambiguity has (despite many attempts) never yet been challenged. No-one has yet provided a way (other than by standard capitalisation) to avoid the ambiguity problem. So, please, just give it a rest, heh? Things are going along well right now, there is no need to stir up old troubles. Tannin
Have no idea why? Up to now the best cite you had was the Mammal Society of New South Wales which is hardly anything conclusive. And you never did dig yourself out of the massive heap of cites for the downstyle. The rationality has always been to follow existing standards -- the greatest number of cites thus far favor the downstyle as the standard (proving that if anything is spurious then it is the capitalization). I do find the Smithsonian cite to be very interesting, however. Is that the only internationally-recognized and respected institution that favors capitalization? I wouldn't want us to be accused of following an American standard or anything. ;-) --mav
Hoolie Doolie! You have a seriously selective memory. But you are quite right. The entire nation of Australia doesn't have a respected mammologist or institute of mammal study anywhere, does it. All those state museums and the mammal societies and the universities and the professors on exchange with Harvard - sorry - I must have dreamed them. All that evidence I brought up in the first place all those months ago - obviously, I dreamed that up too. I'm so sorry for breathing. (The above is the most astonishingly arrogant bullshit I've come across in quite a while. What is it with you Americans?) Tannin
To compare a state level entity with the Smithsonian Institution is hubris. Even though the state I live in (California) has a larger population than the entire nation of Australia I wouldn't dream of pretending that what the California State University (or even the University of California) has to any really significant say in and of themselves. But I guess arrogance comes with the territory when a good quarter to third of the states in your nation are in many ways more important to the world economy than most other nations. Vicki Rosenzweig (a professional copyeditor) had this to say. And Ec's refutation of the capitalization argument but acceptance that birds may be capitalized. Here is another post from Ec [1] talking about why field guides often capitalize species common names. Again, I do find the concept of using capitalization as a means to be more explicit but I cannot in good conscience support such a thing when it is not already commonly practiced in publications similar to encyclopedias (or their primary sources). The Smithsonian cite does very much help your case - all I want is a similar cite from a similarly respected institution (Oxford would be an example) and that will further help your cause. --mav
I also have to agree with Tannin. To dismiss the senior organisation for mammals in Australia is very arrogant. Australia is one of the major places in the world where English is spoken as a first language. It is therefore one of the places that we should look to for guidance on technical uses of English, along with the US, UK, New Zealand, Canada and Eire. I don't know what the equivalent organisation would be in the UK, but personally speaking, I would support the capitalisation of species names from a strictly grammatical point view. They are proper names, and should thus always be capitalised. David Newton 15:27 16 Jul 2003 (UTC)
According to the Chicago Manual of Style, the Globe and Mail Style Book, and the Style Manual for Biological Journals the down-style is the way to go. But what do they know. Oh and I almost forgot to mention that no other encyclopedias, dictionaries, textbooks, or other general reference works that I have seen use the upstyle. But I guess all those publications are also wrong.--mav
Well, the fact that those say otherwise does make something of a difference. However, out of those sources, I would trust the biological journals one more, since it is far more connected with the field concerned. I have heard of the Chicago Manual of Style before, but I am not sure exactly how important it is. The Globe and Mail Style Book is something that I have never heard of. How important is that publication? David Newton 12:43 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Howdy woody doody, but I agree with Tannin. Pizza Puzzle
All I want is a respectable body of international institutions to point at and say "look they capitalize, so we should too." So far the best cite has been the Smithsonian with possibly the NSW cite to back it up further. If we do not have such a list then the already mentioned majority usage of the downstyle wins. --mav
Could you look over the current revision of creationism, and address the "further arguments" in the last section? --Eloquence 09:17 16 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I'll take a look at it later. --mav
"Nice work on Jefferson Davis! The previous state of that article has bothered me since I first joined Wikipedia over a year an a half ago. --mav"
Thanks. But aren't you supposed to do that, being on the Fire Department and all? P.S: Could I get your feedback in the =Trivia= thing on talk:? -Smack
Oh oh! 31K. Danger time. Time for that 12 hourly archive:-)
I've put forward some other ideas about how to make the VFD page more user-friendly and more decisive. They are on the Wikipedia talk:Votes for deletion. I'd welcome your observations. lol FearÉIREANN 00:35 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
About grouping events on Year pages --
Mav, what I did at 1945 was more or less an experiment, to see how it worked out. (And because I try to focus on the years before 1000, where there aren't as many entries, I wasn't about to start making similar changes to year pages until I had some feedback.)
The reason I'm saying this is not because I was offended (although your message came over as a bit curt for some reason), but that after I saw your message, I looked in the usual locations for a discussion on the format of year pages -- & found nothing discussing using subheadings under dates as I had odne at 1945. (I probably would have not seen it until after committing my no-no, but it would be useful if this was stated somewhere, because I suspect I won't be the only one to try to create lists under the days of a given year.) -- llywrch 18:09 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
See Talk:Historical anniversaries/Example. Other than that the only documention I have is the edit histories of all the day and year pages I've been working on since December. --mav
Mav you know my suggested name Wikiscrinium/Wikscrinium (Wikibookcase) for textbook wiki. Then u said not the right thing, we could use it for sourceberg, as it will have full e-texts of public domain books an other documents (which you may find it the draw of a bookcase), what do you think? -fonzy
We should probably stay away from Latin - only geeks like us will get it and most people will have a very hard time remembering (or even pronouncing!) the names. Back to the chalk board... Wikibookcase.org might work for Sourceburg (or even wikibook). --mav
What i am trying to do is get rid of teh domination of the english names for Wiki-"name" dictionary is not very international, quote is not very international. etc. -fonzy
English is the de-facto lingua franca of the Internet, business commerce and the sciences. It is also the second language of over half the nations on earth. Latin is spoken only in churches and in classrooms. --mav
IMHO "no lists" is too simple a criterion for the new article selection. Instead, I suggest using the "degrees of separation from brilliant prose" standard. Some work went into List of famous duels, so it would have been OK as a new article (although your current selection is better). But typical lists often consist of unformatted, unspecified stuff without even a decent intro, so in most cases, they should not be, uh, listed. --Eloquence
Fair enough. --mav
On another note, one disadvantage of the new layout is that we have even less space for the selected articles .. --Eloquence 06:26 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Not really. We lost half a word to a word each on the "In the news and "New articles" section but gained a bit of space for the Anniversaries. But the negative is overshadowed by the fact that the whole selected articles area is now easier to read. --mav
Who cares about anniversaries? I want more new articles! ;-) Unless someone else does it, I'll probably try to come up with a design that uses the best elements of the current one and of Martin's design, which gives more space to the dynamic stuff (IMHO a good idea, especially when the category feature goes live, where we can just link to the first 10 top categories and be done with it). --Eloquence 06:39 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Anybody who cares about history. And updating our older articles is a good thing too, no? Do present your design on a temp page and I'll look it over (but I really did not like Martin's design - way too much space devoted to a huge selected articles area that did not have as many links as our current compact design). I doubt any one of the new contestants will get a majority vote so they won't see the light of day. It's always good to experiment and play though. --mav
With average voting, the design with the highest rating will win -- that may be the current design, of course. The advantage of Martin's design was that it actually explained the content of the featured articles. Learning about history is nice and good, but if you don't know about the anniversaries listed, they are just links that give you little incentive to follow them. For example, as someone only remotely familiar with US civil war history, the term reconstruction does not trigger any memories for me.
Now, you may say that people are supposed to just explore the things they don't know, but that's not how the human brain works -- people will click on links when they have an idea what the links are about, or when they need the links to explain the context in which they stand. Isolated links about separate subjects thrown into a list don't mean much -- they need to be connected to memories, thoughts, emotions to be interesting. Yes, that applies to the "new articles" section as well. You said earlier that you should read Wikipedia more -- the question is, why don't you? Having links with context not only invites visitors to read more, it also encourages our regular authors to do so, as they need to summarize existing articles for the Main Page. In that case, I do prefer quality over quantity.
As for giving attention to our old articles, please do also check out Special:Ancientpages. There are quite a few pages there that could really use some editing. --Eloquence 06:58 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)
But the Main Page is not an article - it is an index. When was the last time you saw a verbose index? There is a great deal for us to cover in each section of the Selected Articles so many links are preferable to a single sentence about one thing. Why, BTW, would maintain such a thing? Picking 4 or 5 things in each area is hard enough but 1 or 2? Simple links are best and I do very often explore naked links - it is very easy to find out the content from within the article - all one has to do is do a find on the current month's name. Big deal. I am getting more and more opposed to Martin's idea with each passing moment. --mav
Um, who gave you the idea that the Main Page is an index? This is an index. The Main Page is an entry point that should provide the most important links and interesting descriptions. Who would maintain such a thing? Who wrote more than 140,000 articles? Wikipedia is a collaborative experience, and if we can't create a better Main Page with the current protected page scheme, we need to change the way protected pages are handled (this has already been discussed and would not be hard to do). I do appreciate all your work on the MP, but I feel that you have developed something of a sense of ownership of it, which is fine within our current scheme, but not very scalable. Take a look at the "Main Pages" of Encarta and Britannica -- they're both closer to Martin's scheme than to ours. --Eloquence 07:13 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I've always hated those pages because there are far too many no-linking words. So in order to find what I want I have to swim through a whole bunch of prose I may not be interested in. And Allpages is just a machine-generated index - that doesn't negate the fact that the current Main Page (at least) is a listing of topics in a particular organization. In my world that is an index. --mav
Because Wikipedia is so highly cross-linked, every page is partially an index to other pages. In fact, using "Related changes" you can even treat each page as an index for the RC function. So whether a page is an index or not is a matter of degree. Currently the Main Page is very index-like. Martin's design is very unindex-like, which makes it harder to find certain pages, but can make those links which are there more appealing. I think we need to find the right balance. --Eloquence 07:25 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)
With nearly 150,000 articles that balance will favor more links (aka access) rather than content at the top-most levels. --mav
That "aka access" is a highly problematic notion. Links do not equal access if people have no incentive to visit them. Doubling the number of links when we reach 300,000 articles will not give people more "access". The question of accessibility is, in fact, almost completely independent from our number of articles. I think what you mean is structure.
Oh, and one more thing: One of the worst things to do in design is to extrapolate from yourself. Your own preferences may be vastly different from the preferences of the majority of users. You are the most active editor of the MP -- thus, for you it is very important to be able to quickly locate and update links. But the average viewer of the MP may have entirely different expectations from it. --Eloquence 07:33 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I didn't suggest that we should double the links on the Main Page when we hit 300,000. I did speak against the reduction in the number of current links. IMO they are sufficient to provide access to the great majority of our content and our processes (not to mention good coverage of topics of current interest). But I await your proposed new solution in the form of a mock-up - we can then return to this debate. Oh and I'll yell and scream if the vote this time isn't approval voting or is set up badly. --mav
As I said, links do not equal access. Because if they did, we just would have to add more of them. I'm not particularly fond of approval voting; how about the method used for m:Article count reform? Most people seemed to be happy with that (except for me, because it's a bitch to count). --Eloquence
I have no problem with links and explore them often but I'm an inquisitive geek... Can we agree to disagree then on the access issue? I still don't understand the article count vote so I can't say if I like that system better. Automation may help in the counting (an optional voting module turned on for meta would be nice...) Of course we have to evaluate a bunch of different voting systems first - direct/simple vote seems to be least popular for anything controversial (which is just about everything around here). What is needed is a voting system that minimizes both the tyranny of the majority and minority with a tendency to favor the status quo. It's late and I'm babbling - I need to go to bed. --mav
Dear Mav:
I apologize for the main page mess. I guess Im speechless after that (about that subject) cause I might be a good writer but a writer critic, definitely Im not..LOL!!!! (and I mean critic in a good way, Im not saying you 'critizize' others or anything, matter of factly youre one of the most respectful people Ive met here)....
Thank you for saying my articles are great. So are yours. I didnt know mine were so good to tell you the truth.
It is always a real pleasure working with you Antonio - you are just so darn nice. :-) --mav
Hi
I am looking for a program to load a mass of articles (batch load) to Wiki.
I try to add new articles to the newly born Hebrew Wikipedia. Can U pl. give me some directions? -- Dod1 BTW I also sent this message to Egil.
You would need a bot to do it, but bots are contraversial. -fonzy
Can U B more specific (I don't under. what bot is). -- Dod1 11:46 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I didn't say that - I said that if there is to be a merger then everything from linnaean taxonomy should be put into Scientific classification. But if linnaean taxonomy is to still be an article then it should concentrate on Linnaeus' actual proposal and not all the modern stuff. --mav
Why are you insinuating that I am paranoid. You must have ulterior motives :) Seriously, I am NOT paranoid generally speaking. It is just in certain stages of hangover that the shadow of my bookcase turns into my mother watching over my bed, and the dirty laundry on the chair is a hobgoblin. -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo-stick 14:26 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I'd like to rewrite the Great Depression article completely, but shouldn't get distracted from completing my other massive projects, such as the history of the United States series.
Right now, this is the least NPOV article of which I'm aware. One rightwing user single-handedly hijacked this article, determined to stifle any Keynesian analysis. Granted the previous version was in bad shape, but the current version belongs on the talk page until it can be balanced. Until then, the old article should be posted.
Even monetarist economists acknowledge that many factors were involved; this user was just determined to only elaborate on the points that monetarists emphasize the most. Other issues were the lack of diversification of the US economy, a maldistribution of purchasing power, the credit structure of the economy, and America's position in international trade. Many non-monetarist economists would emphasize these four points, and rebut much of the arguments in the current version.
Your insistence that the article stay sets a bad precedent too. One user cannot be allowed to post a one-sided tract just because several users decided to edit for spelling or style.
Reverting all the work of others is a far worse sin. Most of the junk you speak of could have been taken out of the current version without reverting. --mav
Thank you for your support. (Now I need to write an article on Bartles & Jaymes.) *smirk* - Hephaestos 02:20 20 Jul 2003 (UTC)
LOL. I thought is was Blue Diamond that said that? Both businesses are located in my part of California though. --mav
Thanks for the 411 (information) about editing the main page
Smith03
No problem - the current layout of the Main Page is rather fragile... --mav
Go ahead. Restore the ancient History of the United States article. But it should follow the format of the History of Germany series, with broad introductions linked to the main articles. That's where I got the idea for the history of the United States series. And you know what? Before you rudely dismissed my work on that series on the free-for-all 172 lynch mob New Imperialism talk page, I was planning to do exactly what you proposed: restoring the old history of the United States page, but in a way that would allow it to work with the rest of the articles in the series, like the History of Germany page. I'd welcome that. A little help on the main page will enable me to finish 1918-45, 1945-64, 1964-present at a much faster rate. 172
Great minds think alike then! I very much like how History of Germany is organized. I'll see about doing exactly what you suggest this weekend. Sorry for being rude - that was uncalled for. :-( --mav
I'm sorry too. I got a little testy on the New Imperialism talk page as well. But thanks for the message! Having some help with US history is the best news that I've heard in a long time on this site! 172
I like summaries. :) I'm the person who wrote the intro to the United States article - it is very difficult to capture the essence of a topic (which is all you possibly could have in the intro of such an important subject!). --mav
We have stumbled upon an excellent idea during this battle/pax. I'm going to start working on a summary for the main US history page right away based on the old article. Before posting it, however, I'll let you go through it on a talk page. Let's see where this goes. 172
Go ahead and post it on the main page - I'll take a look at it there. --mav
Hi Mav,
Nice modification of the wikipede for a logo. Might it raise fears of plagierism? Maybe have two or three books open to emphasise the research is decoupled from the writing. Later
--user:mirwin
