subject: [WikiEN-l] wordwrap your posts please

body:
You need to get a little more specific as to whose messages you are having
trouble with if you expect them to do something about it. For example this
wordwraps as I compose it, but does it wordwrap on your end. Probably, but
I'm not certain how it desplays on my computer is reflected in your display.

Fred

> From: "Tony Wilson" <list at redhill.net.au>
> Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2003 17:12:57 +1000
> To: "WikiEN" <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] wordwrap your posts please
>
> Please, can those who don't have wordwrap switched ON in their email
> clients do something about it? This horizontal scroll caper is getting
> beyond a joke.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] wordwrap your posts please

body:
I suggest you speak to Zoe, Danny and Ed Poor. How else would they know?

Fred

> From: "Tony Wilson" <list at redhill.net.au>
> Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2003 21:23:38 +1000
> To: "WikiEN" <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] wordwrap your posts please
>
> It's easy to tell, Fred. Just look at your post in any web browser.
> Start with:
>
> http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-April/date.html
>
> For examples of unwrapped email that scrolls of the side of the page,
> see:
>
> http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-April/002283.html
> http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-April/002300.html
> http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-April/002313.html
>
> (Just random examples from the top of this month's list).
>
> Yours, by the way, are fine. It's only about one poster in 20, and
> sometimes posts that quote the un-wrapped ones as well. Mostly, I just
> ignore the post unless it seems particularly important. But it's a
> reasonable guess that, human nature being what it is, most of the
> others who read the list via the web interface do the same: i.e.,
> ignore non-wrapped posts because they are too hard to read.
>
> (PS: to anyone wanting to fix the problem. It is usually very easy.
> Most (all?) email clients have an option to wrap text. Look for it in
> "tools" or "options" or "preferences".)
>
> Tony Wilson
> (Tannin)
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Classification of China?

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Fred Bauder wrote:
| We get all over those who would deny the holocaust; no reason not to not
| adopt the same sort of disrespect and impose the same restraints upon
those
| who would deny the sins of Marxism-Leninism.

At last!  An example of authoritarianism we can all understand!  Deviate
from the canon, and you will be disciplined!

- --
~ Sean Barrett     | Just because everything is different
~ sean at epoptic.com | doesn't mean anything has changed.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQE+qpg7v/8xpnvE6M8RAo76AJ9P1psYVIFHMONLWXmS1tGrnBkvNQCcC3f5
0GGhz2U7htu4TRHWnivIotM=
=PVup
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: Anthere

subject: [WikiEN-l] Mea culpa

body:
--- Zoe <zoecomnena at yahoo.com> wrote:
> OK, I have to admit it.  Hephaestos and anthere have
> shown me the light.  I'm just a terrible person.
> They are so right, I don't have anything positive to
> add to Wikipedia, I'm only here to cause trouble.
> Darn, why haven't I seen this for so long? If you
> really think I'm nothing but a horrible person,
> please let me know, and I'll happily leave. Zoe

>since I >appear to be nothing but a vandal and a
useless >appendage to Wikipedia, what do I know? Zoe

Just for the record, I have *no* memory of having
*ever* said you were a vandal and a useless appendage
to Wikipedia.
Ever.

As far as I remember, the only disagreements we had
together are about anti-americanism and anti-frenchism
(that was the word yes ?). I consider you are
displaying waves of agressivity toward french people,
totally displaced on Wikipedia, and hurting the
wikipedia spirit. Your comments on Wikipedia, added of
those of Big Budda also caused me to show a very
inappropriate agressivity toward you, and toward other
people as well. Which I badly regret, and apologize
for. We should both try to back up on these topics.
You. And I. Comments on talk pages included.

However, I never said you were a vandal. I never
worked with you on *any* topics (except those
mentionned above), never had any complaint toward you
in terms of abusive deletion, stupid redirections, and
endless disagreements.

In fact, I have *no* idea on which topics you are
contributing, so I would be unable to say whether what
you do or not do is bad or good.

So...keep the light for Hephaestos please.

>Disagreements are not vandalism.  You are being to
>sound too much like Lir and his cast of thousands.

His edits were *very* detrimental to the prospective
quality of the encyclopedia, and disrupting the
natural flow of edition. It was vandalism. Perhaps was
it not malicious.

I try to stay away from edit wars as much as possible.
Hence, I know very little of Lir, except for what was
written on the list about him/her. I don't think Lir
and I could be confused.

Regards

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [WikiEN-l] Little budda is a vandal

body:
Anthere--

I think you should try not to take it personally. I suspect what may be
going on is the BFB is editing aggressively, not maliciously. He goes in and
edits what other people have been working on, I suspect, mainly because it's
what's on the Recent Changes pages. Because he makes so many, such
aggressive edits, it can be very frustrating.

The real question is whether a discussion, say, on his talk page, can allow
everyone to come to some sort of understanding.

He does have a nasty predilection for deleting content as he makes these
very strong edits.

But I suspect (hope) he's not trying to attack you. What I don't know is
whether he cares at all that he's effectively attacked you. I hope he would
care, if it's brought to his attention.

--tc


subject: [WikiEN-l] A plea for sanity in capitalisation from the coalface

body:
Though I do not edit birds, I *absolutely* agree with
Tannin and co on the capitalisation topic.

I wonder who made the initial rules on the
capitalisation to respect.

I also understood that *a rule could be changed*,
should the participants agree on the change. So, the
answer : do not capitalise because it is not coherent
with the rules decided on wikipedia lead me to say
"If the rules are not good, let's change the rules".

I agree english tends to add capitalized letters quite
often to stress out the importance of a word. But, in
this case, the capitalisation is what is done by those
caring with birds issues. That is the rule most widely
respected in the world in this topic. Why should
wikipedia impose new rules over the way things are
named, just because of an old rule nobody can justify
really.

Also, stating this capitalisation is only for
professionals, so not to be respected necessary,
because wikipedia is not professional, is a idea that
I find a little bit easy. Either wikipedia is
professional enough and goes to the end of it to
respect proper naming, or wikipedia is not
professional enough, then birds entries are not
welcome on it.

Of course, this is absolutely similar to the "Theory"
and "theory" debate. Two very proper and clearly
identified articles should not be *merged* under one
unproperly capitalized name "theory", just for some
old and unjustifiable convention. When a concept is
identified - outside of wikipedia - with a big-t or a
small-t, wikipedia should reflect the difference.

This is also a similarly debate of naming plural or
singular. When a concept is known with singular, by
all means, let's prefer to singular. When a concept is
plural, let's respect the plurality.
I am pretty sure the convention on plurality was set
up, *only* for facility of linking (ie, farm naturally
lead to farms, but farms do not lead to farm).
However, the facility of linking should not be an
excuse for articles to be forced singular, when they
are used in plural in life.

And finally, I think referring (budda can not delete
this one) to other encyclopedias to set our
conventions is not necessarily a good move. Other
encyclopedias can make mistakes (confer Saddam
Hussein), that is no excuse to stick with these
mistakes.

Wikipedia should not copy other encyclopedia,
Wikipedia should be *better* than other encyclopedias.

--- Tony Wilson <list at redhill.net.au> wrote:
> Let's walk through the feelings of the people who
> are doing the actual
> contributions, shall we?  In the massive task of
> documenting the
> 9000-odd species of bird, the active contributors
> are:
>
> * Jimfbleak. Jim has done an incredible amount of
> work on birds,
> probably more than everyone else put together, and
> he's only been here
> a few months. Take a look at his user contributions
> page, it's a huge
> and ongoing effort. How does Jim feel about this?
> "The normal
> convention is that English names of species begin
> with capitals, eg--
> Magnificent Frigatebird, but groups are lower case".
> He thinks the wiki
> practice of editing out correct species names is a
> right pain.
>
> * I have done 50-odd myself, and not many itty-bitty
> stubs amongst
> them. I work more slowly than Jim, but it's adding
> up to a fair slab
> just the same.
>
> * Steve Nova has only been here a very short while
> (though he was
> contributing species accounts as an anon before
> that) and he's doing
> quite a lot: working his way through the crows and
> ravens and now into
> other families. He has had problems with the silly
> practice of not
> using the correct names too.
>
> * Kingturtle joined not so long ago, and like me has
> wide interests,
> but has already made a good start on American birds.
> His feelings?
> "Through my dozens of bird reference books dating
> from 1939 to 2000,
> all but one use the Ruby-throated Hummingbird
> convention." Or, on the
> ambiguity problem: "in order for this signal to the
> reader to succeed,
> the species article ... needs to be called
> "Red-throated Diver." And so
> on.
>
> * The ONLY  person who is regularly contributing
> anything of substance
> to the bird entries that has NOT spoken out against
> the name-change
> mania is Montrealis, who has started making a modest
> number of bird
> edits lately. I don't know what his view is on this.
>
> So there you have it: with the possible exception of
> Montrealis (who is
> the least active of the active contributors in this
> field in any case)
> EVERY ONE of the people who actually do the work in
> the bird entries
> agrees.
>
> Now, please, will the back seat drivers get out of
> our hair and let us
> get on with the job?
>
> Tony Wilson
> (Tannin)
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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from_name: Daniel Ehrenberg

subject: [WikiEN-l] Mea culpa

body:
You're not a horrible person. You're great at
identifying trolls. That contributes to wikipedia,
even if it is only indirect. I'm sure you have good
edits, I just haven't noticed any yet.

--- Zoe <zoecomnena at yahoo.com> wrote:
> OK, I have to admit it.  Hephaestos and anthere have
> shown me the light.  I'm just a terrible person.
> They are so right, I don't have anything positive to
> add to Wikipedia, I'm only here to cause trouble.
> Darn, why haven't I seen this for so long? If you
> really think I'm nothing but a horrible person,
> please let me know, and I'll happily leave. Zoe

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


from_name: sannse

body:
Tannin wrote:

> Over and over again, a small number of good, decent Wikipedia
> contributors are causing difficulties for those of us who are actually
> doing the hard yards in the fauna articles. All the major contributors
> to the bird entries, for example, have complained about this on the
> talk pages, but nothing is ever done. People keep claiming that, for
> example, the Common Raven should be written as "common raven". One need
> only reach to the bookshelf and pick up a reference work to discover
> that this just ain't so. All we ask is that we follow our own naming
> convention:
>
> I quote: "Unless the term you wish to create a page for is a proper
> noun OR IS OTHERWISE ALMOST ALWAYS CAPITALISED." Species names for the
> higher orders (and possibly the lower ones too) are indeed "almost
> always capitalised" and rightly so, as to do anything else is to court
> ambiguity and lose clarity.

I'm in agreement here.  One of my own areas of interest, dog breeds, has a
similar issue.  So far the capitalised versions have (mostly) held here, but
it would be nice to clarify the issue and be sure of a consensus.

In the case of dog breeds, all my books on the subject (five) capitalise, as
do the various kennel clubs.  I've been careful to check in each case - it's
"Airedale Terrier" but "Maltese terrier" for example.  I would like to move
"Chesapeake Bay retriever" back to "Chesapeake Bay Retriever" to follow this
principle.

Regards,

sannse


from_name: Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz

subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: A plea for sanity in capitalisation from the coalface

body:
On 26-04-2003, Daniel Mayer wrote thusly :
> Tannin wrote:
> >Over and over again, a small number of good,
> >decent Wikipedia contributors are causing difficulties
> >for those of us who are actually doing the hard yards
> >in the fauna articles. All the major contributors to the
> >bird entries, for example, have complained about this
> >on the talk pages, but nothing is ever done. People keep
> >claiming that, for example, the Common Raven should be
> >written as "common raven". One need only reach to the
> >bookshelf and pick up a reference work to discover
> >that this just ain't so. All we ask is that we follow our
> >own naming convention:
> You mean a specialized publication that only covers birds. Pick up a
> dictionary or another encyclopedia and you'll see those species names in the
> lower case. As I have stated many times before ; specialists /almost always/
> overcapitalize the terms they use but Wikipedia is not a specialist
> publication. Also Ortolan has pointed out that style guides on this issue
> state that when there is significant doubt in these matters we should use the
> "downstyle."
> >I quote: "Unless the term you wish to create a page for
> >is a proper noun OR IS OTHERWISE ALMOST ALWAYS
> >CAPITALISED." Species names for the higher orders (and
> >possibly the lower ones too) are indeed "almost always
> >capitalised" and rightly so, as to do anything else is to court
> >ambiguity and lose clarity.
> Perhaps I was rash when I changed:
>  Unless the term you wish to create a page
>  for is a proper noun, do not capitalize second
>  and subsequent words
>
> To your quote of the current convention (Hm - I could revert myself since I
> didn't make that edit based on any consensus...). Nah - the caveat is a good
> one but "almost always" to me means way more than a simple majority of usage.
> I usually think of that term meaning "greater than 90%" of usage. I've
> already stated that these terms are /very often/ not capitalized outside of
> specialized publications.
>
> >We, the people WHO ACTUALLY WRITE THE ENTRIES
> >have had a gut full of it. Please stop before the real contributors
> >in this area get sick of the whole damn thing and take their
> >effort elswhere.
>
> Nobody wants that but at the same time we cannot add spurious capitalization
> to articles Or Else Sentences Begin To Look Very Odd When They Are Wikified -
> not to mention grammatically wrong and inconsistent with longstanding
> Wikipedia naming conventions.
>
> Hopefully this will clarify the distinction between common and proper nouns:
>
> Common noun (Gram.), the name of any one of a class of
>       objects, as distinguished from a proper noun (the name of
>       a particular person or thing).
>
>  Proper noun (Gram.), a
>       name belonging to an individual, by which it is
>       distinguished from others of the same class; -- opposed to
>       common noun; as, John, Boston, America.
>      n : a noun that denotes a particular thing; usually capitalized
>
> So we are only dealing with common nouns here which means the default style is
> to /not/ capitalize unless the term is almost always capitalized for some
> reason.
>
> It is true that the specialist bird authorities are an excellent source of
> information on this subject - but those bird publications are not a useful
> source of information on English grammar as it relates to our unique
> circumstances on Wikipedia or for encyclopedias in general for that matter.
>
> These experts are experts in their respective fields whose subjects in this
> particular case are birds, not grammar. So for our naming needs the
> references we should use are dictionaries, style/grammar guides and other
> encyclopedias. Encyclopedias have different naming conventions and needs than
> do specialized publications. BTW, just because the top transportation
> planners in the United States write Transit Village with caps does not mean
> that that capitalization is correct in our context.
Another area of possible problematic capitalization are names of diseases and syndromes. I feel especially Americans tend to excessively capitalize every word in these names. Diabetes Mellitus, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, etc etc

Can this be clarified and the proper practice added to naming conventions
please ?
Wikipedia:Naming conventions (capitalization)
Wikipedia:Wikipedia medicine standards

Regards,
kpj.


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
Tannin wrote:
>Or, we can take a look at how the recognised authorities
>do thgings.
>....

Since we are a general reference and not a specialized publication then
ordinary English grammar and how similar publications do things are our
guides. And down style is the rule for this.  BTW my biology textbooks also
use down style for species names.

>Why are we (according to the name-change people)
>supposed to use different rules for dogs, and aircraft
>on the one hand, and birds and mammals on the other?

Because aircraft are proper nouns, dog breeds are very close to being proper
nouns (as explained in my last email) while birds and mammals are common
nouns.

Our audience is the general public. As such we need to use general rules of
grammar and capitalization NOT specialized rules of grammar and
capitalization used in specialized publications. That is why other
encyclopedias use down style for almost all common nouns. But since we are a
wiki and page titles are also the way we link to pages, we need to be extra
careful not to overcapitalize.

I understand that there is a strong tendency for specialists to capitalize
their terms but Wikipedia is not a publication for specialists, it is a
publication for all of the world.

For example there are specialists for almost everything so the result would be
that Almost Everything In Wikipedia Would Be Capitalized:

Anyone know where the Clam Dip is?
Hip Hop is a form of Rap Music.
Some say that Global Warming and Ozone Depletion will kill us all.
What type of Map Projection is that Topographic Map in?
The Crystal Structure of lithium is Cubic Face-Centered.
John Doe is a Computer Science pioneer in Integrated Circuits.
At work I help to design Roundabout Intersections for Transit Villages.

In fact something close to this was the case when I started the project over a
year ago. Over time these Incorrectly Capitalized Articles were moved to
their proper down style names.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't have exceptions like dog breeds - that is why I
added "almost always" to the convention. I'm willing to entertain the
interesting proposition that theorems should also be counted as proper nouns.
They are very specific things that have been formulated by very specific
people (just like dog breeds). But species names are, by definition, common
nouns. Here are the definitions again:

Common noun (Gram.), the name of any one of a class of
      objects, as distinguished from a proper noun (the name of
      a particular person or thing).
      n : a noun that denotes any or all members of a class

 Proper noun (Gram.), a
      name belonging to an individual, by which it is
      distinguished from others of the same class; -- opposed to
      common noun; as, John, Boston, America.
     n : a noun that denotes a particular thing; usually capitalized

Cheers!

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Zoe

subject: [WikiEN-l] wordwrap your posts please

body:
Fred, I read in Yahoo (which causes me to post replies on top -- grr.  But I digress.)  When I read your post, every line was line wrapped so that a single word showed up in the next line, then ther was a line break.  It doesn't show it that way below with the ">" marks, but you can see that it did oddly wrap when I did my reply. Zoe

Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:You need to get a little more specific as to whose messages you are having
trouble with if you expect them to do something about it. For example this
wordwraps as I compose it, but does it wordwrap on your end. Probably, but
I'm not certain how it desplays on my computer is reflected in your display.

Fred

> From: "Tony Wilson"

> Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2003 17:12:57 +1000
> To: "WikiEN"
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] wordwrap your posts please
>
> Please, can those who don't have wordwrap switched ON in their email
> clients do something about it? This horizontal scroll caper is getting
> beyond a joke.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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body:
No.  This is Wikipedia.  You do not own an article. Zoe

Tony Wilson <list at redhill.net.au> wrote:
Now, please, will the back seat drivers get out of our hair and let us
get on with the job?

Tony Wilson
(Tannin)

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subject: [WikiEN-l] wordwrap your posts please

body:
Mine are among those?  How odd.  It's a problem with Yahoo, apparently (whose email I don't really like, by the way.) I'll research and see what I can do. Zoe

Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:I suggest you speak to Zoe, Danny and Ed Poor. How else would they know?

Fred

> From: "Tony Wilson"

> Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2003 21:23:38 +1000
> To: "WikiEN"
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] wordwrap your posts please
>
> It's easy to tell, Fred. Just look at your post in any web browser.
> Start with:
>
> http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-April/date.html
>
> For examples of unwrapped email that scrolls of the side of the page,
> see:
>
> http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-April/002283.html
> http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-April/002300.html
> http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-April/002313.html
>
> (Just random examples from the top of this month's list).
>
> Yours, by the way, are fine. It's only about one poster in 20, and
> sometimes posts that quote the un-wrapped ones as well. Mostly, I just
> ignore the post unless it seems particularly important. But it's a
> reasonable guess that, human nature being what it is, most of the
> others who read the list via the web interface do the same: i.e.,
> ignore non-wrapped posts because they are too hard to read.
>
> (PS: to anyone wanting to fix the problem. It is usually very easy.
> Most (all?) email clients have an option to wrap text. Look for it in
> "tools" or "options" or "preferences".)
>
> Tony Wilson
> (Tannin)
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Word wrap

body:
I just checked.  My preference is to word wrap at 55 characters.  I don't know why my messages aren't wrapping, but I have no idea what to do about it. Zoe

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Classification of China?

body:
There still must be different meanings of the word
authoritarian. For example, studies show that if
parents use "authoritarian methods", meaning not too
passive and not too punishing, then their kids will
grow up to not be criminals. If there is not even an
official definition, than what definition are you even
reffering to? Maybe the definition you're using for
authoritarian is "controls several aspects of life,
including free speech." Maybe Joe (apoligies to Joe if
he is on this mailing list, I just needed a name)
thinks authoritarian means "Disobeying the every
article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
with the goal of restoring order." Who's right? What
if China is in only one of those definitions?
everything has two sides to it. You can't present one
side and call it fact.

--- Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> No there is no official body of definition, there is
> simply what most of us
> mean by "authoritarian" as the concept is used to
> refer to certain patterns
> of behavior.
>
> Fred

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Classification of China?

body:
Who decided that? Did you just make it up?

--- Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> The criteria are control of the press, repression of
> political speech,
> imprisonment of those who atempt to organize an
> opposing political party or
> a union, etc.
>
> Fred
>
> > From: Vicki Rosenzweig <vr at redbird.org>
> > Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> > Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2003 19:31:58 -0400
> > To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> > Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Classification of China?
> >
> > At 05:16 PM 4/25/03 -0600, Fred Bauder wrote:
> >> I intend to speak truth. China (and the Catholic
> church, for another
> >> example) are authoritarian. \ It is not merely a
> matter of the opinion of
> >> vague critics. There are objective criteria which
> if met constitute an
> >> authoritarian government.
> >
> > This concerns me, not because I disagree, but
> because I don't know
> > what objective criteria Fred is using, and because
> almost anyone who
> > promotes a point of view sincerely believes that
> he or she is speaking
> > truth.
> >
> > The determination to speak truth, while admirable,
> is not the same as
> > NPOV, which is our policy.
> >
> >
> >> Fred

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Little budda is a vandal

body:
Can I ban BigFatBuddha? I've never tried to ban
someone, do I need to be a developer? Developers seem
to be the people that usually ban people, but I
thought it could be any sysop.

--- Anthere <anthere6 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I found the stupid hidden misdirection budda made
> fortunately. I think nothing is lost, I just lost my
> temper I guess. But I know I can lose everything, so
> I
> will temporarely save them in meta, before securing
> them somewhere else.
>
>
> Which leave all the *very* unprofessional
> redirections
> budda made, and which have to be fixed one by one.
> These redirections are impairing the quality of the
> encyclopedia. Better an empty link that to make
> believe to someone the concept of post-consumer
> waste
> is similar to the concept of recycling.
>
> What sense does it have to delete gaia theories to
> redirect them to gaia hypothesis ????
>
> or to redirect sustainable agriculture to just
> agriculture ???
>
> who are we trying to convince here ???
>
> If noone is disturbed by leaving someone ruining the
> quality of an encyclopedia that way, I think there
> is
> nothing else to say, and no point in doing anything
>
> But for a professional in the agriculture field or
> waste treatment field, these edits and redirection
> are
> insulting, and very very very very much lowering any
> interest in wikipedia
>
> I am going to spent hours repairing all that mess,
> probably to find every thing ruined tomorrow again.
> At
> this point, I 'll give up unless someone help me
>
> I don't really want to be sysop. I already have the
> french wiki as a area to keep clean. Besides, being
> a
> sysop on this issue will change nothing. I have no
> possibility to stop somebody destroying the whole
> sector of agriculture in this encyclopedia. Being a
> sysop would not change this.
>
> but thanks to your support tc
>
>
>
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo
> http://search.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Little budda is a vandal

body:
What if he's not logged in? And what is your opinion
about banning him? Should Jimbo ban him?

--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> > Can I ban BigFatBuddha? I've never tried to ban
> > someone, do I need to be a developer? Developers
> seem
> > to be the people that usually ban people, but I
> > thought it could be any sysop.
>
> Don't even think about it. Logged in contributors
> can only be banned by
> decree from Jimbo Wales.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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from_name: koyaanis qatsi

subject: [WikiEN-l] testing something; ignore

body:
--- wikien-l-request at wikipedia.org wrote:
> Send WikiEN-l mailing list submissions to
> 	wikien-l at wikipedia.org
>
> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web,
> visit
> 	http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> or, via email, send a message with subject or body
> 'help' to

so all that above is a mess and I'm typing here below
the mess, though I could as easily type above it, or
clean the mess up with new line breaks and forward
marks if I felt especially kind, but I don't right now
so I'll just fire this off and go check the web
archive to see if this sucker wrapped or not.  Because
I haven't heard any complaints about my emails not
wrapping and I'm also using yahoo.

kq

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from_name: Andrew Smith

body:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Daniel Mayer" <maveric149 at yahoo.com>
To: <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Saturday, April 26, 2003 11:01 AM
Subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: A plea for sanity in capitalisation from the
coalface

> Tannin wrote:
> >Over and over again, a small number of good,
> >decent Wikipedia contributors are causing difficulties
> >for those of us who are actually doing the hard yards
> >in the fauna articles. All the major contributors to the
> >bird entries, for example, have complained about this
> >on the talk pages, but nothing is ever done. People keep
> >claiming that, for example, the Common Raven should be
> >written as "common raven". One need only reach to the
> >bookshelf and pick up a reference work to discover
> >that this just ain't so. All we ask is that we follow our
> >own naming convention:
>
> You mean a specialized publication that only covers birds. Pick up a
> dictionary or another encyclopedia and you'll see those species names in
the
> lower case. As I have stated many times before ; specialists /almost
always/
> overcapitalize the terms they use but Wikipedia is not a specialist
> publication. Also Ortolan has pointed out that style guides on this issue
> state that when there is significant doubt in these matters we should use
the
> "downstyle."

But I think that most of the people writing the bird articles are going to
be either specialists or get their information from specialist sources.
Imposing the Wikipedia article naming on these articles would then make the
article name inconsistent with the article contents.

Examples of this can be seen in the articles on mathematics, some of the
people writing the articles capitalise a lot of named things like theorems
and conjectures. For example [[Twin Prime Conjecture]] redirects to [[Twin
prime conjecture]] but there are 13 articles which link to Twin Prime
Conjecture and only 5 to Twin prime conjecture. In the [[Poincar?
conjecture]] article text Conjecture and conjecture are freely interchanged
and also the  Geometrization Conjecture, the Hyperbolization Conjecture and
the Elliptization Conjecture are all mentioned. Unless an attempt is made to
ensure consistency throughout the articles I don't really see the point of
being so anal about article titles.

Other inconsistencies include articles entitled [[Fast Fourier Transform]],
[Discrete Fourier transform]] and [[Continuous Fourier transform]] which
isn't consistent but has presumably happened as FFT is used outside of
maths. Also [[Monte Carlo method]] has lots of links in it to things like
[[Rejection Monte Carlo Sampling]], why should Sampling be capitalised but
not Method?

Convention, Committee and Pact are all regularly capitalised in titles but
what makes them any different from Theorem, Conjecture or Hypothesis? If the
Riemann hypothesis article should have a small 'h' then shouldn't the Geneva
Convention have a small 'c'?

Unless we are going to be equally picky about article contents then I don't
think we should be so forceful about article titles, especially if there is
a group of people who strongly believe it should be done a particular way.

Andrew (Ams80)

>
> >I quote: "Unless the term you wish to create a page for
> >is a proper noun OR IS OTHERWISE ALMOST ALWAYS
> >CAPITALISED." Species names for the higher orders (and
> >possibly the lower ones too) are indeed "almost always
> >capitalised" and rightly so, as to do anything else is to court
> >ambiguity and lose clarity.
>
> Perhaps I was rash when I changed:
>
>  Unless the term you wish to create a page
>  for is a proper noun, do not capitalize second
>  and subsequent words
>
> To your quote of the current convention (Hm - I could revert myself since
I
> didn't make that edit based on any consensus...). Nah - the caveat is a
good
> one but "almost always" to me means way more than a simple majority of
usage.
> I usually think of that term meaning "greater than 90%" of usage. I've
> already stated that these terms are /very often/ not capitalized outside
of
> specialized publications.
>
> >We, the people WHO ACTUALLY WRITE THE ENTRIES
> >have had a gut full of it. Please stop before the real contributors
> >in this area get sick of the whole damn thing and take their
> >effort elswhere.
>
> Nobody wants that but at the same time we cannot add spurious
capitalization
> to articles Or Else Sentences Begin To Look Very Odd When They Are
Wikified -
> not to mention grammatically wrong and inconsistent with longstanding
> Wikipedia naming conventions.
>
> Hopefully this will clarify the distinction between common and proper
nouns:
>
> Common noun (Gram.), the name of any one of a class of
>       objects, as distinguished from a proper noun (the name of
>       a particular person or thing).
>
>  Proper noun (Gram.), a
>       name belonging to an individual, by which it is
>       distinguished from others of the same class; -- opposed to
>       common noun; as, John, Boston, America.
>      n : a noun that denotes a particular thing; usually capitalized
>
> So we are only dealing with common nouns here which means the default
style is
> to /not/ capitalize unless the term is almost always capitalized for some
> reason.
>
> It is true that the specialist bird authorities are an excellent source of
> information on this subject - but those bird publications are not a useful
> source of information on English grammar as it relates to our unique
> circumstances on Wikipedia or for encyclopedias in general for that
matter.
>
> These experts are experts in their respective fields whose subjects in
this
> particular case are birds, not grammar. So for our naming needs the
> references we should use are dictionaries, style/grammar guides and other
> encyclopedias. Encyclopedias have different naming conventions and needs
than
> do specialized publications. BTW, just because the top transportation
> planners in the United States write Transit Village with caps does not
mean
> that that capitalization is correct in our context.
>
> -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


body:
--- Zoe <zoecomnena at yahoo.com> wrote:
> No.  This is Wikipedia.  You do not own an article.
> Zoe

Quite true

Nor do you own conventions

You might also consider that no author means no
article

> Tony Wilson <list at redhill.net.au> wrote:
> Now, please, will the back seat drivers get out of
> our hair and let us
> get on with the job?
>
> Tony Wilson
> (Tannin)
>
>
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Do you Yahoo!?
> The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.

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from_name: Tony Wilson

subject: [WikiEN-l] re: Little budda is a vandal

body:
Erik wrote:

> I also don't remember BigFatBuddha being made a sysop

No way! That would be a complete disaster for the 'pedia.

Even as an ordinary user he has is *very* difficult to work with. He
already wastes an inordinate amounts of good contributors' time, and
rarely conributes anything constructive (as opposed to destructrive and
disruptive). Someone needs to have a quiet word in his ear and tell him
to pull his head in and learn to cooperate with other users. The
thought of a user like that being given administrative powers makes me
shudder.


from_name: Lee Pilich

subject: [WikiEN-l] Classification of China?

body:
Could the interested parties in this discussion please take it off this
list and onto a talk page on the Wikipedia ([[Communist state]] or
[[China]] or wherever you fancy)? That way, people interested in the
subject but not on the mailing list can take part in the discussion, and
those on the mailing list but uninterested in the subject don't have to hit
"delete" quite so often.

lp (Camembert)


subject: [WikiEN-l] wordwrap your posts please

body:
Couldn't be. I use Yahoo, but my texts are word
wrapped, aren't they? I'm not on that list.

--- Zoe <zoecomnena at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Mine are among those?  How odd.  It's a problem with
> Yahoo, apparently (whose email I don't really like,
> by the way.) I'll research and see what I can do.
> Zoe
>
> Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:I suggest
> you speak to Zoe, Danny and Ed Poor. How else would
> they know?
>
> Fred

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body:
The Cunctator wrote:
>Look at those straw men burn! "Clam Dip" is a
>generic food; if it were a specific recipe, like "Martha
>Stewart's Famous Clam Dip", then it would be capitalized.
>"Global Warming" and "Ozone Depletion" are not specific
>scientific phenomena, nor would they be capitalized as
>such by specialists in climatic and atmospheric science.
>"Map Projection" also is a class, not a particular thing, as
>is "Topographic Map". Etc.

I choose those examples for the exact reason that they have spurious
capitalization - and I agree with you on why those terms should not be
capitalized. Thanks for explaining the reasons.

>The irony is that the one thing that could *almost* be
>plausibly capitalized above (other than "John Doe"), is
>lithium, which you didn't capitalize.

I should have capitalized that too because I was trying to show examples of
incorrect capitalization. All element names are common, not proper nouns in
the same way as "diamond" is a common noun. But the Hope Diamond is a
specific rock of diamond and is therefore a proper noun. The word "diamond"
is a "kind" while Hope Diamond is a very specific thing - there is only one.

>...
>On the other hand, for uncommon or somewhat ambiguous
>species, it would be odd to write "Shy albatrosses greeted
>Sir Putney Drake when he first set foot in Newfoundland." instead
>of "Shy Albatrosses greeted Sir Putney Drake..."

In textbooks newly-introduced terms are either bolded or italicized /and/ at
least the textbooks I've used almost always use the down style for common
nouns (I have had a couple course texts which were not textbooks but highly
specialized field guides employing up style though). So since the first use
of the new terms stand out as a unit there is no ambiguity as to wether
adjacent adjectives are part of the new term or just happen to be next to the
term. In Wikipedia we link at least the first occurrence of a
newly-introduced term - this has the same effect.

>Whatever the case, I don't think we'll be hurt either
>way, and I don't think it's worth antagonizing useful
>contributors by changing their work (and making no other
>contributions) and then implying that they're elitist bastards
>for complaining.

I have tried to make sure my tone is respectful in these matters - if I have
given a negative impression then I apologize. My point is that in order for
Wikipedia to be useful to the largest possible audience we should use general
rules of grammar and not specialized ones (which are different from
discipline to discipline and not predictable by non-specialists).

And copyediting, formatting and moving articles per standard English grammar
rules and Wikipedia conventions (which aim to make linking predictable and
resulting sentences look natural) /are/ useful ways to contribute. Or have I
been wasting my time for the last year and a half?

--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: wordwrap your posts, please

body:
--- Zoe <zoecomnena at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> Mine are among those?  How odd.  It's a problem
with
>> Yahoo, apparently (whose email I don't really like,
>> by the way.) I'll research and see what I can do.
>> Zoe

Daniel Ehrenberg writes:
> Couldn't be. I use Yahoo, but my texts are word
> wrapped, aren't they? I'm not on that list.

KQ writes:
I think if it's a problem with clicking "allow HTML
tags"--that might explain both the rampant < div >
tags and the inclusion of the message twice, once
without wrapping, and once with the code displayed
rather than parsed.  In the 2nd message you can see
that Zoe is using line breaks in a typical way, but
they're all within < div > tags and essetinally being
ignored.  Take a look at
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-April/002815.html
for an example.

I have no clue what might cause Ed's email to fail to
wrap.

best

kq

__________________________________
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The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
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subject: [WikiEN-l] wordwrap your posts please

body:
Please, can those who don't have wordwrap switched ON in their email
clients do something about it? This horizontal scroll caper is getting
beyond a joke.


body:
On Sat, 2003-04-26 at 16:33, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> For example there are specialists for almost everything so the result would be
> that Almost Everything In Wikipedia Would Be Capitalized:
>
> Anyone know where the Clam Dip is?
> Hip Hop is a form of Rap Music.
> Some say that Global Warming and Ozone Depletion will kill us all.
> What type of Map Projection is that Topographic Map in?
> The Crystal Structure of lithium is Cubic Face-Centered.
> John Doe is a Computer Science pioneer in Integrated Circuits.
> At work I help to design Roundabout Intersections for Transit Villages.

Look at those straw men burn! "Clam Dip" is a generic food; if it were a
specific recipe, like "Martha Stewart's Famous Clam Dip", then it would
be capitalized. "Global Warming" and "Ozone Depletion" are not specific
scientific phenomena, nor would they be capitalized as such by
specialists in climatic and atmospheric science. "Map Projection" also
is a class, not a particular thing, as is "Topographic Map". Etc.

The irony is that the one thing that could *almost* be plausibly
capitalized above (other than "John Doe"), is lithium, which you didn't
capitalize.

The second irony is that by and large I agree with his position on
capitalization. Looking, for example, through the American Birding
Association checklist
( http://www.americanbirding.org/checklist/chklst1.htm ) I see basically
no names that in general publications are capitalized. One doesn't
normally write "The Corn Crakes chattered as Bobby Talmidge walked down
the dusty road" or "The Turkey Vulture, counter to popular stereotype,
attends to its young with tender care."

On the other hand, for uncommon or somewhat ambiguous species, it would
be odd to write "Shy albatrosses greeted Sir Putney Drake when he first
set foot in Newfoundland." instead of "Shy Albatrosses greeted Sir
Putney Drake..."

Whatever the case, I don't think we'll be hurt either way, and I don't
think it's worth antagonizing useful contributors by changing their work
(and making no other contributions) and then implying that they're
elitist bastards for complaining.


body:
Tannin wrote:
>...[Kind words - thank you :-) ]...
>
>Bluntly, we, the people who actually WRITE the fauna
>entries, are sick and tired of being buggerised about, for
>no good reason, by people who do NOT contribute to them.
>Over the last month or so there has been a massive
>improvement to the bird sections in particular. There is a
>huge amount more still to do, but the concentrated efforts of
>three or four regular contributors is really starting to show
>results. Please, if you don't want to help with this project,
>at least stop interfering with it.

But I'm trying to do just that - help with the project and make sure that the
project is consistent with the rest of the encyclopedia. I've helped Jim with
the formatting of the great public domain pictures and helped him attribute
the source of those images correctly on the image description pages.

The taxobox tables that you are using I also helped develop (and in fact I'm
more proud of these tables than the element tables). Readers are contributors
in Wikipedia and I read a lot and contribute a bit here and a bit there. The
goal is to make Wikipedia a cohesive whole and greater than the sum of its
parts.

In the big picture view it is more important for us to avoid the use of
specialized grammar rules and concentrate on general rules - rules known,
used and expected by our general English-speaking audience and are used by
other general reference works (encyclopedias, dictionaries, and most
textbooks).

Thus common nouns (those that tell the "kind" of something) are not
capitalized but proper nouns (those that name a singular, specific person,
place or thing) are capitalized. Anything other than that complicates
matters.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Little budda is a vandal

body:
What did I miss?  What did Buddah do to even have us contemplate banning him? Zoe

Daniel Ehrenberg <littledanehren at yahoo.com> wrote:What if he's not logged in? And what is your opinion
about banning him? Should Jimbo ban him?

--- Erik Moeller wrote:
> > Can I ban BigFatBuddha? I've never tried to ban
> > someone, do I need to be a developer? Developers
> seem
> > to be the people that usually ban people, but I
> > thought it could be any sysop.
>
> Don't even think about it. Logged in contributors
> can only be banned by
> decree from Jimbo Wales.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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body:
Over and over again, a small number of good, decent Wikipedia
contributors are causing difficulties for those of us who are actually
doing the hard yards in the fauna articles. All the major contributors
to the bird entries, for example, have complained about this on the
talk pages, but nothing is ever done. People keep claiming that, for
example, the Common Raven should be written as "common raven". One need
only reach to the bookshelf and pick up a reference work to discover
that this just ain't so. All we ask is that we follow our own naming
convention:

I quote: "Unless the term you wish to create a page for is a proper
noun OR IS OTHERWISE ALMOST ALWAYS CAPITALISED." Species names for the
higher orders (and possibly the lower ones too) are indeed "almost
always capitalised" and rightly so, as to do anything else is to court
ambiguity and lose clarity.

We, the people WHO ACTUALLY WRITE THE ENTRIES have had a gut full of
it. Please stop before the real contributors in this area get sick of
the whole damn thing and take their effort elswhere.

Tony Wilson
(Tannin)
list at redhill.net.au


from_name: cprompt

subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Justin_walsh

body:
Justin_walsh had posted what appeared to be copyrighted material on
"Categorical imperative" (which now redirects to an original article).
At the time, I replaced it with the boilerplate "copyright violation"
text, and added the page to Votes for Deletion. When Justin_walsh edited
my copyright violation, I reverted, and left a comment on his talk page.
I'm not really sure what to make of his talk page. At first, I thought
he was new to the Wikipedia, and did not understand our policy on
copyrighted materials, or on what the user page and talk page are for. I
tried to help him out, but I'm not sure I grasp the meaning behind his
replies. I'd appreciate it if some of you would check out his talk page,
and see if I had done the right thing.

[[User_talk:Justin_walsh]]


subject: [WikiEN-l] wordwrap your posts please

body:
Are you perchance using an old client which doesn't comprehend
"format-flowed"?

No. I read on the web interface. In my job I get ~150 emails a day, so
I pipe the Wikilist digest stuff straight into the trash and read it at
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-April/date.html

Try it for yourself. Some posts you have to horizontal scroll all over
the place.

Tony Wilson
(Tannin)
list at redhill.net.au


subject: [WikiEN-l] Little budda is a vandal

body:
On Sat, 2003-04-26 at 19:19, Erik Moeller wrote:
> > What if he's not logged in? And what is your opinion
> > about banning him? Should Jimbo ban him?
>
> If he's not logged in, a sysop can ban his IP for vandalism or other
> egregious Wikipedia rule violations (Wikiquette, NPOV).
>
> I don't really see his contributions in those categories. If I'm
> skeptical, Jimbo will be doubly so -- in 2 years of Wikipedia, we have
> only really banned a handful of logged in contributors. Lir, Clutch, 24,
> Helga Jonat. With all the Lir pseudonyms it may look like more though :)

I really don't think BFB should be banned. He's obstreperous and an
aggressive editor, but I don't think he's malicious. I could be wrong
about the maliciousness, but still, we need to get away from the idea we
can ban away all our problems rather than working to fix them.


body:
Tannin wrote:
>V-1 Flying Bomb: This is a *kind* of aircraft,
>but it is capitalised Labrador Retriever: This is a
>*kind* of dog, but it is capitalised Splendid Fairy-
>wren: This is a specific *kind* of fairy-wren, which
>is why it too is capitalised. (A non-specific kind is
>written as plain"fairy-wren".)
>....

I've already explained why dog breeds can reasonably be considered to be
proper nouns -- they are a specific product of selected breeding with
pure-bred dogs having complete family histories. Aircraft are also specific
products with specific histories. But the real reason why we capitalize dog
breeds and aircraft is because they are almost always capitalized in nearly
every context (specialist or otherwise).

Your hierarchy distinction does intrigue me but it has also been demonstrated
that the common names of species are usually written in the lowercase outside
of specialist publications (most notably in encyclopedias, dictionaries and
textbooks):

Thus my ecology textbook writes "bald eagle" not "Bald Eagle,"  a
generally-focused field guide on Yosemite of mine writes "peregine falcon"
not "Peregine Falcon", Princeton University's Word Net writes "chinook
salmon" not "Chinook Salmon", The Columbia Encyclopedia writes "yellow
jacket" not "Yellow Jacket", Encyclop?dia Britannica writes "sabre-toothed
cat" not "Sabre-toothed Cat", Webster's Dictionary writes "mountian lion" not
"Mountain Lion" and my intro-series biology textbook writes "sea otter" not
"Sea Otter" etc, etc....

Given this, I'm part of the camp (that includes well-respected manual of
styles) that says we should use down style for the common names of species.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [WikiEN-l] more testing, please ignore

body:
Doubtless, much of this was down to the subject matter, but Strauss had also used dissonance in a way that was rare at that time in the opera house.Strauss' next opera was Elektra, which took his use of dissonance even further. It was also the first opera in which Strauss collaborated with the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal. The two would work together on numerous other occasions. For these later works, however, Strauss moderated his harmonic language somewhat, with the result that works such as Der Rosenkavalier (The Cavalier with a flower) (1910) were great public successes. Strauss continued to produce operas at regular intervals into the 1930s.There is much controversy surrounding Strauss' role in Germany after the Nazi Party came to power. Some say that he was constantly apolitical, and never cooperated with the Nazis completely. Others point out that he was an official of the Third Reich, and that although his post was largely ceremonial, he should have spoken out against the Nazis.Tonight I saw _Blind Spot_.  Pity it was out of focus, since it was essentially an [[oral history]] on film.

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body:
JT wrote:
>...
>If an expert on an area writes a page that shows that
>that expert knows what s/he is talking about, why should
>someone who knows nothing on the topic and may not
>have heard about the topic until s/he saw the article, have
>the right to decide that THEY know the correct capitalisation
>and change everything?
>....

Becasue we are a wiki. I also don't like the premise of your statement; our
many copyeditors do have a good deal of expertise on the normal rules of
grammar, what a proper noun vs a common noun is and also the needs of a wiki
like Wikipedia. We also know to defer to well-respected manuals of style on
this issue (which prefer down style in mixed environments like an
encyclopedia or other general reference). When in doubt we know to read other
similar publications and see how they capitalize certain terms. They also use
the down style. I'm also a biologist. So your presumption that we "know
nothing" is a bit insulting.

>....
>...accurate articles I have seen on wiki which
>have been reduced to semi-literate gibberish
>by clumsy illinformed editing and screwed capitalisation
>based on questionable wiki conventions on capitalisation.

And Tannin and I were being so polite to each other. Thanks for reducing this
polite discussion to name calling.

Good day.

--mav


body:
Let's walk through the feelings of the people who are doing the actual
contributions, shall we?  In the massive task of documenting the
9000-odd species of bird, the active contributors are:

* Jimfbleak. Jim has done an incredible amount of work on birds,
probably more than everyone else put together, and he's only been here
a few months. Take a look at his user contributions page, it's a huge
and ongoing effort. How does Jim feel about this? "The normal
convention is that English names of species begin with capitals, eg--
Magnificent Frigatebird, but groups are lower case". He thinks the wiki
practice of editing out correct species names is a right pain.

* I have done 50-odd myself, and not many itty-bitty stubs amongst
them. I work more slowly than Jim, but it's adding up to a fair slab
just the same.

* Steve Nova has only been here a very short while (though he was
contributing species accounts as an anon before that) and he's doing
quite a lot: working his way through the crows and ravens and now into
other families. He has had problems with the silly practice of not
using the correct names too.

* Kingturtle joined not so long ago, and like me has wide interests,
but has already made a good start on American birds. His feelings?
"Through my dozens of bird reference books dating from 1939 to 2000,
all but one use the Ruby-throated Hummingbird convention." Or, on the
ambiguity problem: "in order for this signal to the reader to succeed,
the species article ... needs to be called "Red-throated Diver." And so
on.

* The ONLY  person who is regularly contributing anything of substance
to the bird entries that has NOT spoken out against the name-change
mania is Montrealis, who has started making a modest number of bird
edits lately. I don't know what his view is on this.

So there you have it: with the possible exception of Montrealis (who is
the least active of the active contributors in this field in any case)
EVERY ONE of the people who actually do the work in the bird entries
agrees.

Now, please, will the back seat drivers get out of our hair and let us
get on with the job?

Tony Wilson
(Tannin)


body:
Please disregard the last sentence of my last post. It was not at all helpful
and I apologise for writing it.

--mav


body:
People need a little remindering about [[m:Wikipediahimsa]].

Namely--it is an act of himsa to hurt others through word or act if you
can avoid it; and it is also an act of himsa to feel hurt by others if
you can avoid it.

Or in simpler language, we shouldn't piss off each other, and we
shouldn't let ourselves be upset unnecessarily.

So Mav shouldn't ask petulant questions like "Have I been wasting my
time for the last year and a half?" and Tannin shouldn't write rude
comments like "Please, if you don't want to help with this project, at
least stop interfering with it."

Even if both are writing from the heart, it's still not right.

Rather, both should admit that they don't know everything, that each
other is attempting to only act to improve Wikipedia, and that conflict
is an inevitable consequence of our mutual imperfection.

Yes?

(Not that I'm saying anyone needs to eat American Crow).

--tc

On Sat, 2003-04-26 at 20:30, Tony Wilson wrote:
> Mav wrote:
> > I have tried to make sure my tone is respectful in these matters
> and
> > copyediting, formatting and moving articles per standard English grammar
> > rules and Wikipedia conventions ... /are/ useful ways to contribute. Or have I
> > been wasting my time for the last year and a half?
>
> Indeed, you are always respectful, and you have made a massive
> contribution to the 'pedia. Everyone knows that, and we all respect it.
> I for one am grateful for it. But your stubborness on this matter,
> though undoubtedly well intentioned, is not adding to that respect.
>
> Bluntly, we, the people who actually WRITE the fauna entries, are sick
> and tired of being buggerised about, for no good reason, by people who
> do NOT contribute to them. Over the last month or so there has been a
> massive improvement to the bird sections in particular. There is a huge
> amount more still to do, but the concentrated efforts of three or four
> regular contributors is really starting to show results. Please, if you
> don't want to help with this project, at least stop interfering with
> it.
>
>
>
>
> Tony Wilson
> (Tannin)
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] wordwrap your posts please

body:
It's easy to tell, Fred. Just look at your post in any web browser.
Start with:

http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-April/date.html

For examples of unwrapped email that scrolls of the side of the page,
see:

http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-April/002283.html
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-April/002300.html
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-April/002313.html

(Just random examples from the top of this month's list).

Yours, by the way, are fine. It's only about one poster in 20, and
sometimes posts that quote the un-wrapped ones as well. Mostly, I just
ignore the post unless it seems particularly important. But it's a
reasonable guess that, human nature being what it is, most of the
others who read the list via the web interface do the same: i.e.,
ignore non-wrapped posts because they are too hard to read.

(PS: to anyone wanting to fix the problem. It is usually very easy.
Most (all?) email clients have an option to wrap text. Look for it in
"tools" or "options" or "preferences".)

Tony Wilson
(Tannin)


from_name: Richard Grevers

subject: [WikiEN-l] wordwrap your posts please

body:
On Sat, 26 Apr 2003 17:12:57 +1000, Tony Wilson <list at redhill.net.au> gave
utterance to the following:

> Please, can those who don't have wordwrap switched ON in their email
> clients do something about it? This horizontal scroll caper is getting
> beyond a joke.
>
Are you perchance using an old client which doesn't comprehend "format-
flowed"?

--
Using M2, Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/m2/


body:
Tannin wrote:
>In a novel or in a work of general non-fiction,
>it is perfectly acceptible (and indeed correct)
>to not capitalise, as the intention of the work is
>to highlight some thing other than the creature
>in question. ....

And that is my very point - Wikipedia is a general reference and many of the
links to the bird/mammal articles will be from articles that "highlight some
thing other than the creature in question." In those articles it is most
correct to have "bald eagle" in the running text of the article and not "Bald
Eagle".

>In summary, there are three possibilities:
>
>(a) That we always use binomial names if in the
>slightest doubt about the identity of a species.
>This would be, strictly speaking, correct, but
>unreadable for the vast majority.

This would be the least desireable option. I took 2 years of Latin already and
didn't like it - all it did was screw-up my Spanish. :-)

>(b) That we abandon the attempt to create a scientifically
>correct body of work, and become a light-weight, non-auhoritive
>place that is little more than a glorified chat room. (Not that there
>is anything wrong with chat rooms, it's just not what I think Wikipedia
>ought to be. Nor you.)

Nobody is trying to make the articles scientifically incorrect. As I've stated
all my biology textbooks use the down style for the common names of species.
This does reflect a bias towards normal rules for English grammar and against
the artificial rules developed by birding societies/organizations (which, as
you have stated, have been developed to overcome subtle ambiguity issues). I
guess I should admit my own bias - I am a generalist who is often mistrustful
of specialists and other people who claim academic authority. In fact I
purposely did not choose a concentration for my biology major becasue I
feared that doing so would result in me becoming a specialist - thus I would
not be able to see the big picture on how things inter-relate.

>(c) That we adopt the same solution as is used
>by the vast majority of works that aim to be factual,
>comprehensive, scientific, and accessible to the
>general reader too - i.e., we use the correct capitalisation
>for species names.

Like most encyclopedias, dictionaries and textbooks which employ the down
style?

>I would be delighted to return to crafting factual, readable,
>accurate entries about fauna of all kinds. I have greatly
>enjoyed doing that over the last few months.

I would also like to see you return to that - I really enjoy reading your work
and the work of your compatriots.

>But, fair dinkum, I have had a gutfull of constant hit and
>run edits that do nothing but spoil the result of all the
>effort I put in.

Certainely there is more info in the articles you have written that is not
codified in the particular capitalization of the title?

>I don't want to be unreasonable or petulant, but let's face
>it, we all only work on articles because we enjoy doing it
>and find it rewarding. I am no longer enjoying it, and it's no
>longer rewarding. As I have documented elsewhere, everyone
>who is doing bird entries on any significant scale has similar
>problems. It's not just me. I just happen to be the one who has
>reached the end of his tether first.

I'm sorry to hear that - the work that you and other people have done in this
area has been great.

So after reading what you have written and what tc wrote to me in an off-list
email I have decided to a compromise: Have the bird and mammal articles
follow the capitalization convention deemed appropriate by the specialists
and enthusiasts working on them BUT a down style redirect MUST be pointed to
the up style article title.

I also think what is needed is to make redirects far less ugly than they are
now. People seem to get real pissy when they follow a term they know and use
only to get a result that in effect screams "the method you are using to
access this page is depreciated". A technical fix here should solve a great
many naming disputes since, as it is, nobody seems to like to have their pet
spelling/method of capitalization/etc be a redirect becasue the resulting
page after following that redirect is ugly.

When a user accesses a page through a redirect it could be possible to change
the displayed H1 page title of the target page to match the title of redirect
(or at the very least move the redirect message from below the H1 title to
the very top of the page - as it was in Phase II).

But then we would either have to orphan misspellings and truly depreciated
redirects (like / pages) or have a two-tier system of redirects. That system
could use the #OBSOLETE syntax for depreciated page title redirects and
#REDIRECT for alternate and valid ways to express the same term.

That way users can link [[bald eagle]] in an article on US National Parks and
not be greeted by an ugly result that implies that the capitalization of
"bald eagle" was incorrect from where it was linked (when in fact that
capitalization was totally correct from where it was linked - but at the same
time it would not be correct to have a lowercased "bald eagle" linked from
[[eagle]] per the specialists' convention).

The correct capitalization here depends upon the grammatical context and
intent from where a term is linked. So if specialists will allow down style
links to their articles I can live with those articles following the up style
and other conventions deemed appropriate by those users - so long as the
resulting titles are still common names and if the ugly redirect problem is
fixed.

Alas it is getting late - I need to work on my WikiKarma.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] i'm blocked again

body:
Hi

Can we figure out a better way to block users. I keep getting messages that I
am blocked because I am Michael. I can understand the need to block Michael,
but I don't think I should bear the brunt of the punishment because I happen
to use the same server as him.

Danny
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body:
Or, we can take a look at how the recognised authorities do thgings.
Here is what the Audobon Society has to say:

There are rules governing the capitalization and hyphenation of birds'
names..... It might be helpful to go over a few of the general rules of
written bird names. When writing your own name you always capitalize
your first and last names, e.g., Sam Spade or Lucy Brown. When writing
the English name of a bird species, you should always capitalize its
first and last names, e.g., Scarlet Tanager or Winter Wren. This avoids
confusion with other modifiers in the sentence. For example, "the
secretive, tiny, Black Rail..." If you are referring to unspecified
birds use lower case letters, e.g., "those herons over there," or "that
sparrow on the ground." If a species has a three-word unhyphenated
name, all three words are capitalized. For example, "the graceful
American White Pelican..." Many birds have compound or hyphenated
"first" or "middle" names. Only the first letter of the compound name
is capitalized: Red-throated Loon, or Long-billed Curlew. However, if a
bird has a compound "last" name, then both parts of the compound name
are capitalized: Eastern Screech-Owl or American Golden-Plover.

Can't get much clearer than that.

If we are to fly in the face of recognised convention in the case of
bird and mammal names, why is the so-called "rule" so
self-contradictory?

Why are we (according to the name-change people) supposed to use
different rules for dogs, and aircraft on the one hand, and birds and
mammals on the other?

Tony Wilson
(Tannin)


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [WikiEN-l] Little budda is a vandal

body:
> Can I ban BigFatBuddha? I've never tried to ban
> someone, do I need to be a developer? Developers seem
> to be the people that usually ban people, but I
> thought it could be any sysop.

Don't even think about it. Logged in contributors can only be banned by
decree from Jimbo Wales.

Regards,

Erik


body:
Jim wrote:
>Tannin has a lot more patience than me. I would be more
>inclined to pack in the whole thing than argue at such length
>over an issue where the views of the incorrect majority take
>priority over those of the well-informed.

Again - I mistrust smug statement like this made by specialists when they are
writing for a general reference encyclopedia.

>....
>Tannin is right, 95% at least of the literature capitalises.

Which literature? Not other encyclopedias, not dictionaries, not textbooks,
not other general reference works. Well-respected style guides also prefer
down style names in mixed environments. Wikipedia is such a mixed
environment.

>Although nobody owns articles, I'm sure the capital-changers
>would be annoyed if I made ill-informed changes to their pet
>articles, assuming they write any.

Yes we do - by the scores. Before you spew out such an insulting statement
perhaps you should visit my user page to see a partial listing. Your attitude
here is less than helpful and smacks elitist to me.

>I don't know why this is an issue. Capitalisation should be used
>where it is correct, proper names and species names, and not
>otherwise.

Exactly my point - in most articles links to species names need to be down
style. This is normal English grammar/capitalization. As I've said the
national bird of the US is written as "bald eagle" NOT "Bald Eagle" whenever
that term is being used in a non-specialist context (such as a page on the US
park system).

>I can't understand why people who make no contribution
>to these articles are so determined to undermine those who do.

Copyediting and correcting grammar/capitalization is a very important way to
contribute. Also developing the taxobox was also a contribution I've made
along with helping you format the bird images and correctly attribute them.
I've already stated my compromise proposal which should make you less grumpy.

Please read it:
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-April/002848.html

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


body:
I regret the tone of my last post and have emailed Jim an apology.

--mav


subject: [WikiEN-l] Little budda is a vandal

body:
> What if he's not logged in? And what is your opinion
> about banning him? Should Jimbo ban him?

If he's not logged in, a sysop can ban his IP for vandalism or other
egregious Wikipedia rule violations (Wikiquette, NPOV).

I don't really see his contributions in those categories. If I'm
skeptical, Jimbo will be doubly so -- in 2 years of Wikipedia, we have
only really banned a handful of logged in contributors. Lir, Clutch, 24,
Helga Jonat. With all the Lir pseudonyms it may look like more though :)

If you want to make a case for banning the buddha, better start collecting
evidence of
- violations of NPOV -- "the French stink"
- violations of Wikiquette -- "you stink"

Collect these in a file, preferably with the URLs to the specific diffs,
and send that to Jimbo. He'll probably get back to you a couple of months
later and ask for more data ;-)

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Stephen C. Carlson

subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Like a Virgin

body:
Is Like a Virgin another incarnation of Lir/Adam/etc.?

Stephen Carlson
--
Stephen C. Carlson                        mailto:scarlson at mindspring.com
Synoptic Problem Home Page   http://www.mindspring.com/~scarlson/synopt/
"Poetry speaks of aspirations, and songs chant the words."  Shujing 2.35


subject: [WikiEN-l] Again I am blocked

body:
I understand why it is necessary to block Michael. However, it is absolutely
unnecesary to block me! Furthermore, the answer that the block against
Michael (and by extension, against me) will be lifted in a day or so is
absolutely unsatisfactory.
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from_name: JFrost8401 at aol.com

body:
Tannin has a lot more patience than me. I would be more inclined to pack in
the whole thing than argue at such length over an issue where the views of
the incorrect majority take priority over those of the well-informed.

I welcome amendmends, and sometimes, as in a recent  discussion with
Montrealais over Crow/Corvus, even if I disagree, it helps me clarify my
thoughts.

Tannin is right, 95% at least of the literature capitalises. Although nobody
owns articles, I'm sure the capital-changers would be annoyed if I made
ill-informed changes to their pet articles, assuming they write any.

I don't know why this is an issue. Capitalisation should be used where it is
correct, proper names and species names, and not otherwise. I can't
understand why people who make no contribution to these articles are so
determined to undermine those who do.
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from_name: james duffy

body:
I agree totally with Tannin on capitalisation. If an expert on an area
writes a page that shows that that expert knows what s/he is talking about,
why should someone who knows nothing on the topic and may not have heard
about the topic until s/he saw the article, have the right to decide that
THEY know the correct capitalisation and change everything? I have lost
count of the number of good, accurate articles I have seen on wiki which
have been reduced to semi-literate gibberish by clumsy illinformed editing
and screwed capitalisation based on questionable wiki conventions on
capitalisation. Many editors do a very good job, but some are appalling. If
you trust people enough to write articles, can you not trust them enough to
know that if they say bird 'x', office 'y' or voting system 'z' is written
in that form, they KNOW what they are talking about. At least query the use
with them. Don't unilaterally dump their work when you don't know the facts.

Last week we had a talk in my university about the ever dropping standards
of english among students. Students are docked marks for making a mess of
capitalisation in key areas. And many of the errors condemned by the Heads
of Department were things wiki practically enforces in its illinformed and
inaccurate conventions on capitalisation. If a student writes about 'Vice
president', 'First minister', 'Prime minister', 'First past the post',
'Proportional representation using a single transferable vote', they are in
grave danger of failing their exams. Most of these have been corrected on
wiki, but in some cases I had to fight edit wars to get the correct
capitalisation rules followed.

I do not doubt but that some of those enforcing the wiki rules, and some of
those making up the rules, are well meaning, earnest and capable. But they
have got to realise that wiki should follow the best standards of accuracy,
not the lowest common denominator in what we can get away with. If it cannot
capitalise properly, and mislead students into how to use formal names of
terms that are treated as proper nouns, then academics are simply going to
say to their students: 'avoid Wikipedia. It is simply too unreliable'.
Wikipedia deserves better than that but it will have itself to blame if it
gets that reputation.

JT

_________________________________________________________________
Add photos to your e-mail with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*.
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail


subject: [WikiEN-l] Again I am blocked

body:
sannse wrote:
>If I remember rightly, daniwo59 at aol.com is User:Danny,
>a longstanding contributor and a sysop

Just an FYI: The "unban" function is not disabled when a sysop's IP has been
banned. I know this because I banned my work IP several times last year for
days at a time in order to get some, er, work done. Having to first unban my
workstation's IP before editing kept me from wasting work time editing
Wikipedia.

Now the state has spyware on all computers so I hardly edit at all while at
work (expect during breaks).

-- mav


from_name: Anthere

subject: [WikiEN-l] Little budda is a vandal

body:
--- tarquin <tarquin at planetunreal.com> wrote:
>
>
> The Cunctator wrote:
>
> >I really don't think BFB should be banned. He's
> obstreperous and an
> >aggressive editor, but I don't think he's
> malicious. I could be wrong
> >about the maliciousness, but still, we need to get
> away from the idea we
> >can ban away all our problems rather than working
> to fix them.
> >
> >
> >
> I reverted some of his redirects which ANthere
> wasn't happy with, and
> wrote quick stubs.
> He helped me with those, saying he had nothing
> against a stub for that
> article.
> I think he was trying to make "ghost links" go to
> something that was in
> the same subject area -- Anthere disagreed (and so
> do I).

I must state here that Fat Budda has been making many
stubs to replace the redirects, which I deeply
appreciate.

> I find his habit of signing in funny squiggles VERY
> irritating, and it
> certainly adds weight to the recent request to
> disable the
> nickname-signing feature.
> (I've been tempted to apply CommunityPressure and
> just go round changing
> his signature to his real username)

Agree. His sig only appears to me as squares. This is
a bit disturbing, in particular since one or two other
users also choose that type of approach, and appear to
me with squares in their sig as well.

Imho, names were initially an attempt to disimbiguate
people, to improve communication. When names appear
the same (as squares), they are no more names.

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


body:
Believe it or not, Mav and I do agree a lot on this. But we disagree on the
nuances. I agree we need a universal approach (I was the one with the help
of other people who overhauled our naming conventions on names and titles to
create a universally - well almost universally - applicable template. )

>I'm also a biologist. So your presumption that we "know
>nothing" is a bit insulting.

The LAST thing I would ever want to suggest is that someone like Mav, Zoe,
Deb, Michael Harty or others "know nothing". What I meant was that some
editors don't know enough about a specialist area to be able to know how to
apply the capitalisation rules there. I'm a historian and political
scientist (and a few other things thrown in) but I know absolutely nothing
about biology. (I slept through most biology classes in secondary school!)
So I would not go near a page on biology for fear of inadvertently mucking
up content because I would not know what I was doing. It is all double-dutch
to me. All I am asking is that, if someone edits a political science article
I wrote, and they themselves don't much about the topic, presume that I know
what I am doing and that if I write PR.STV, if I write Taoiseach in one
place and Taoisigh in another there is a reason (the latter is the Irish
language plural for the former, though I link that to explain) and if I
write 'King of the Belgians' there is a reason and don't change it to 'King
of Belgium', 'pr.stv', 'taoiseachs'. Or at least ask me first why I wrote
that.

But some editors sweep through an article like someone clearing a rain
forest, cutting down capitals and changing names left right and centre, on
occasion showing that they don't know what they are doing (someone changed
an article on the 'Prime Minister' to 'Prime minister' recently, and the
correct plural 'governors-general' to 'governor-generals', leading to a
string of expletives and a muttering of 'what the fuck have they done?' when
you see the sorry mess left of a carefully worded article. (Example: Someone
keeps changing [[Lord John Russell]] to [[John Russell]] every so often.
Under the [[naming conventions (names and titles)]], courtesy titles CAN be
used where the person is universally known with it and unrecognisable
without it. 100% of history students know Lord John Russell, MP as a British
prime minister in the 1840s. 0% have ever heard of a pm called John Russell.
As a courtesy title 'Lord' was treated like part of his name, unlike a
peerage (like Earl of Ardbraccan) that is separate from someone's name. Even
worse is the person who occasionally turns it into 'lord John Russell'. Or
tried to turn [[W. T. Cosgrave]] into [[William Cosgrave]]. NO-ONE ever
referred to him (bar his wife in the bedroom) as William. 100% of people
know him as W.T. And Gladstone as W.E, William E. or William Ewart, never
William Gladstone! And the next person who turns 'Charles
Mountbatten-Windsor' (as confirmed by Buckingham Palace) into 'Charles
Windsor' because Google says so (Google, believe it or not, is NOT always
right!) will get an anonymous phonecall to the White House claiming Saddam
Hussein is living in their basement: please send in the Marines & some B52s.
(JOKE!!!)

In other words, if it isn't your are of expertise, be cautious. Don't get
the chainsaw out and chop down every capital letter you can find if you
don't KNOW FOR A FACT it is wrong. In many cases, the person who wrote it
KNEW FOR A FACT it is right. If in doubt, ASK the author 'why 'PR.STV' not
'pr.stv'? 'Why the T with Cosgrave? Why use the Lord with Russell? Otherwise
a lot of time is wasted correcting illjudged incorrect 'corrections'. And my
usual response when something 100% correct is 'corrected' to something 100%
wrong, 'Oh, not a friggin' again!' and a line of expletives.

JT

_________________________________________________________________
Protect your PC - get McAfee.com VirusScan Online
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list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

subject: [Wikipedia-l] capitalization of birds

body:
I just double-checked my reference shelf. The field guides (Peterson's
and Audubon Society) capitalize names in running text, but Peterson
also prints names in ALL CAPS both at the head of the entry and on
the pages with the illustrations. It looks more like a design choice than
an editorial one. (I should also admit that I'm skeptical of using, as an
authority on English spelling/capitalization, a volume that consistently
spells "juvenile" "Juvenal".)

The Audubon Society Encyclopedia of North American Birds lower-cases
species names.

I don't know if this reflects a recent tendency among birders to capitalize
for clarity, or a difference between field guides and references that you're
expected to use at home.

Does anyone have Sibley's? (It's more recent than any of my references,
and I mean to buy it when I can afford to.)

As a side note, I both write and copyedit Wikipedia entries, and wrote the
entry on the red-winged blackbird.

Wikikarma: random copyediting last night.
--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org


subject: [WikiEN-l] Again I am blocked

body:
Hi

It seems to be working again. For Tim Starling, Sannse is right. I have had a
user name since February 2002 and have been a sysop since April 2002 or so,
which makes it at least a year. It is not a question of an anonymous IP being
blocked.

On the other hand, I do have a problem with anonymous IPs being blocked in an
effort to block problematic users. Imagine how it looks for a new user, just
getting her feet wet, to receive a message that she is blocked because she is
suspected of being someone else. I do not know the solution, but some effort
should be made to find one. BTW, I am an aol user, but I generally sign on
through my Verizon account.

Well, in any event, it's good to be back.

Danny

Wikikarma (I like the idea): a bunch of articles on the first few prime
ministers of Iraq--the 1920s are done.
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from_name: Jason Williams

subject: [WikiEN-l] Word wrap

body:
On Sat, Apr 26, 2003 at 01:58:34PM -0700, Zoe wrote:
> I just checked.  My preference is to word wrap at 55 characters.  I don't know why my messages aren't wrapping, but I have no idea what to do about it. Zoe

At the risk of stating the obvious, why not just press enter at the
end of every line?

--
jason at jasonandali.org.uk    http://www.jasonandali.org.uk/jason/


subject: [WikiEN-l] (no subject)

body:
Zoe wrote:

> I just checked.  My preference is to word wrap at 55 characters.  I don't know why my messages aren't wrapping, but I have no idea what to do about it.

Thanks for checking, Zoe. I just signed up for a Yahoo account to have
a look for myself and I don't blame you, they don't make it obvious!

It turns out that what you have to do on Yahoo is _un-tick_ the 'Allow
HTML tags' box. That's on the basic free version. I guess it's the same
if you are using one of the premium services.

Tony Wilson
(Tannin)


body:
Mav wrote:
> I have tried to make sure my tone is respectful in these matters
and
> copyediting, formatting and moving articles per standard English grammar
> rules and Wikipedia conventions ... /are/ useful ways to contribute. Or have I
> been wasting my time for the last year and a half?

Indeed, you are always respectful, and you have made a massive
contribution to the 'pedia. Everyone knows that, and we all respect it.
I for one am grateful for it. But your stubborness on this matter,
though undoubtedly well intentioned, is not adding to that respect.

Bluntly, we, the people who actually WRITE the fauna entries, are sick
and tired of being buggerised about, for no good reason, by people who
do NOT contribute to them. Over the last month or so there has been a
massive improvement to the bird sections in particular. There is a huge
amount more still to do, but the concentrated efforts of three or four
regular contributors is really starting to show results. Please, if you
don't want to help with this project, at least stop interfering with
it.

Tony Wilson
(Tannin)


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>Tannin wrote:
>
>>Bluntly, we, the people who actually WRITE the fauna
>>entries, are sick and tired of being buggerised about, for
>>no good reason, by people who do NOT contribute to them.
>>Over the last month or so there has been a massive
>>improvement to the bird sections in particular. There is a
>>huge amount more still to do, but the concentrated efforts of
>>three or four regular contributors is really starting to show
>>results. Please, if you don't want to help with this project,
>>at least stop interfering with it.
>>
>The taxobox tables that you are using I also helped develop (and in fact I'm
>more proud of these tables than the element tables). Readers are contributors
>in Wikipedia and I read a lot and contribute a bit here and a bit there. The
>goal is to make Wikipedia a cohesive whole and greater than the sum of its
>parts.
>
>In the big picture view it is more important for us to avoid the use of
>specialized grammar rules and concentrate on general rules - rules known,
>used and expected by our general English-speaking audience and are used by
>other general reference works (encyclopedias, dictionaries, and most
>textbooks).
>
>Thus common nouns (those that tell the "kind" of something) are not
>capitalized but proper nouns (those that name a singular, specific person,
>place or thing) are capitalized. Anything other than that complicates
>matters.
>
I mostly support Mav on this issue, but I don't go along with the
exception that he would make for dog breeds.

After looking at several publications in my own library I find the
situation inconclusive.  Mammalogists tend to prefer lower case, but
ornithologists tend to prefer capitals.  Notably, some years back the
National Museum of Canada published two companion books: "The Birds of
Canada" and "The Mammals of Canada".  That distinction is maintained
between those two books.  Entomologists tend to favour the consistent
use of the Latin binomials, and make very little use of common names.

The fact that a certain cohort has currently been concentrating its
attentions on the bird articles does not imply that it has any rights to
insist on its own peculiar format.  We do have Wikipedia rules which, at
least in this case, tend to be consistent with the usage of grammarians.
 The burden of proof falls on the shoulders of those who seek to
institute an exception to those rules.  I don't think that they have
carried that burden, and their approach is "for the birds". ;-)

I have not been recently involved in the flora and fauna articles, but
when I happen to wander there again I havew every intention of using
lower case for the names of all animals, including birds.

Eclecticology


from_name: tarquin

subject: [WikiEN-l] Little budda is a vandal

body:
The Cunctator wrote:

>I really don't think BFB should be banned. He's obstreperous and an
>aggressive editor, but I don't think he's malicious. I could be wrong
>about the maliciousness, but still, we need to get away from the idea we
>can ban away all our problems rather than working to fix them.
>
>
>
I reverted some of his redirects which ANthere wasn't happy with, and
wrote quick stubs.
He helped me with those, saying he had nothing against a stub for that
article.
I think he was trying to make "ghost links" go to something that was in
the same subject area -- Anthere disagreed (and so do I).

I find his habit of signing in funny squiggles VERY irritating, and it
certainly adds weight to the recent request to disable the
nickname-signing feature.
(I've been tempted to apply CommunityPressure and just go round changing
his signature to his real username)


body:
I've read Tannin's and Mav's recent contibutions, and I'm happy with the
redirect solution. Can this be displayed somewhere obvious, because I still
think that Tannin, Kingturtle and me are still going to get capitals within
the articles removed?

Jim
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body:
Tony Wilson wrote:

>Everyone
>working in the area knows perfectly well that species names are
>capitalised,
>
Arrogant sophistry!

This is the logical fallacy of [[Appeal to common practice]]

Ec


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] Capitalization and redirects

body:
I missed the email discussion, but for the people who are frustrated
by the lack of agreement, why do I see nothing about species names
under [[Wikipedia:Naming conventions]]?  I apply a specific set of
conventions to navy ship articles for instance, but if I haven't
written one of them down, I don't feel like I have much grounds for
complaint if someone doesn't follow it when copyediting.

I get the sense that people have now reached a compromise involving
redirects, but please, let's get it written down where the
less-informed like myself can read it and know what the rules are
going to be.

On redirects in general, I keep hearing the suggestion that the use
of a redirect is somehow insulting to the reader, and should therefore
be discouraged.  Has anybody ever talked to an actual user (not another
Wikipedian), and gotten that sense of insult?  My own reaction is more
like "oh, I didn't know that was the full/proper name" or "oh yeah".

My own bit of survey of users showed that a) my wife thinks
Wikipedia is lame because it doesn't state that "W" has a 91 IQ
(although she likes the picture of Rumsfeld shaking hands with
Saddam), and that b) my father lost interest when in four clicks
of "random page", he got the same page twice (not in a row), thus
conveying the impression that wikipedia was kind of small.
Neither had an opinion on redirects.

Stan


from_name: sannse

subject: [WikiEN-l] Again I am blocked

body:
Tim Starling wrote:
>>I suggest you get a username, if you don't already have one, and tell us
>>what it is. The development team will be able to override the IP blocking
>>for you personally. This will allow us to continue to block Michael, and
>>will also give us an obvious course of action if you turn out to be just
>>another Michael pseudonym trying to get the previous pseudonyms unblocked.

>>If you're currently an anonymous contributor and you're anxious about
>>getting a username, keep in mind that users with usernames have much
better
>>privacy protection in place than "anonymous" users.

If I remember rightly, daniwo59 at aol.com is User:Danny, a longstanding
contributor and a sysop

The problem is that a block will stop all users on that IP, logged in or
not.  The only reason sysops can't block logged in users is that they don't
know the relevant IP numbers (aside from the policy reasons of course)

I know the cookie idea will hopefully help with banning people like Michael,
bypassing the need for an IP block - but could it work the other way too?
I'm not technical so I don't know if this is feasable or not, but could we
have a "trusted user" cookie.  One that allowed trusted users to skip any
block on the IP they are using?  It woldn't be needed for most users, but
would overrule an IP block in cases like Danny's.

Anyway, as I say, I have no idea if this is possible or desirable

Regards,

sannse