This is an archive of past discussions with User:Bryan Derksen. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

When is the stub msg removed from a page, when is a stub no longer a stub? sry to bother, thanks. Star controller 03:50, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Whether an article is a "stub" or not is a highly subjective thing, as far as I am aware. An article is no longer a stub when you think it's too big or detailed to be called a stub any more. :) Bryan 03:52, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I changed your edit back because as it stands there is at least a link to some info about Ashoka. Changing it to Ashoka pillar without even bothering to create a stub for it seemed to decrease the information content of the article. mahābāla 11:01, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

But there is already a link to Ashoka just a line or two before the pillar is mentioned. Creating a link to the empty article invites future addition on that subject, whereas having two links to Ashoka in the same paragraph adds nothing that having one link doesn't already provide. Bryan 14:35, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I'll be on vacation for the next week, and will only check Wikipedia occasionally in that period. Just in case anyone wants to argue anything in that period. :) Bryan 06:09, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC)

actually I was just thinking, maybe we should have a bot to change all the uses of 'diety', 'dieties' 'God' and 'gods' on the wiki to 'Jehova, the one and only, original gangsta'. I'll take any silence on your part as enthusiastic support, and will do you the favor of signing your name to any votes/posts on the subject. Don't bother yourself replying, I'll just assume that if you don't get back to me in the next couple days here... ;) Sam Spade 06:43, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I don't leave the house for half an hour yet. I'm still watching you. :) Bryan 13:35, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Oops. Long day at the office Bryan. Sorry for dopey edit. Squirm. Cheers Moriori 09:16, Apr 15, 2004 (UTC)

No problem, that's what the watchlist is for. :) Bryan 15:02, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I thought you might be interested in Wikipedia:List of disambiguation pages without msg. -- User:Docu

Oo, lovely! I've been working from the what-links-here of Wikipedia:Disambiguation, but it doesn't show a complete list. My long-term plan has been to switch everything over to the one uniform msg format, and then get a database query of what links to that and then add them all to the "links to disambiguating pages" in one fell swoop (minus the multiple-place-name articles). This list you just pointed me to will be very useful in the interim, thanks! Bryan 15:02, 15 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Well, there are just about 4538 of them. -- User:Docu

Excellent. Will take me a little while to cull out the ones that shouldn't be added. :) Bryan 18:45, 25 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I noticed your edits at Mu, Met, and UMC. Was I wrong to follow 'Disambiguation and abbr. expansion page' at Wikipedia:Disambiguation and abbreviations#Sample Wiki markup for abbreviations? This states that 'Abbreviations pages' replace 'disambiguation pages'. Please let me know. Thank you, Pædia | talk 04:39, 2004 Apr 28 (UTC)

I had no idea that page and the guideline listed on it even existed. Not sure what I think about it; I personally prefer the notion that abbreviation disambiguation should be treated no differently from regular disambiguation. Is there a MediaWiki message for this? Bryan 05:04, 28 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Docu created the page 02:43, 2003 May 10, and revised the guideline 07:48, 2004 Jan 8. Please see bottom of Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation and abbreviations.

To my knowledge, there is no current MediaWiki message for 'abbreviation disambiguation'. Pædia | talk 06:29, 2004 Apr 28 (UTC)

Soon as I have some time I'll look into making a msg: for that, then. Thanks. Bryan 14:38, 28 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I once experimented with {{msg:TLA}}, e.g. at AAB, but it probably has too much formatting on it. There is some advantage for queries if we keep msg:disambig as well, but there is a slight difference in scope of them, so the usual msg may need an addition. -- User:Docu

Thanks for the heads up. I'm new to this, obviously. :) I'll remember this in future. --khaosworks 00:05, 24 Apr 2004 (UTC)

No problem. One thing to watch out for when using the "move this page" function, BTW, is that it won't work when there's already an article with the new name - even a redirect. In such cases the article you want to replace will have to be deleted, which can only be done by a sysop. You could put it on Wikipedia:Redirects for deletion to get a sysop to do it for you, or you could put your name on Wikipedia:Requests for adminship and do it yourself. Though you might want to wait until you've had a few months of editing history built up before trying that, to reassure everyone you're not a devious maniac who's come here to destroy us all. :) Bryan 00:16, 24 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Now we have a page about Wilson Loops. It would help immensely if you went in and asked lots of questions about them on the talk page. — Miguel 21:10, 2004 Apr 24 (UTC)

Will do. At the moment I'm just killing time until someone arrives for a meeting, so I'll wait until later to get more deeply involved. :) Bryan 21:13, 24 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Hi there. Apologies for the intrusion, but as you have been a positive contributor to the ongoing review of the Empire of Atlantium article recently I thought you might be interested to note that this article has been listed for deletion for the second time in several months, by a user who appears to have targeted it in some sort of POV-push. If you believe this article is worthy of continued inclusion I'd encourage you read my comments in response on the VFD page, and place a vote accordingly. --Gene_poole 08:39, 27 Apr 2004 (UTC)

In the changelog for spacecraft propulsion:

Right margin is better for images, IMO, since the text is easier to follow with the eye.

I don't know if I agree with this. Certainly left-hand images should occur at breaks in the text, and the image will be "read" before the text, so the text should be directly related to the text. But given these criteria, I think a judicious few images on the left can give the page a little more visual interest. I wouldn't go so far as to use the zillion sidebars and floating boxes you find in the average magazine, but I think that having all the images on the right, almost the same size, one per section can be a bit dry, so I tried to liven up the page a little. Do you have any suggestions fo giving the page a little more visual appeal? (Or perhaps I'm worrying too much about MTV-addled teens?)

My only issue with left-side images is when they're "floating", so that the text flows around them. Since English is read from left to right, I find it easiest when there's a consistent margin for the eye to jump back to when it finishes the line. The right margin can be a lot more "ragged" without being noticeable, since the eye simply scans along the lines until it hits the end of the text. If the text doesn't flow around it, then left-side images are fine (though perhaps consider centering it instead). It makes the article a little bit less "artistic", true, but I think that can actually be a benefit in the case of an encyclopedia article; your comparison to magazine articles is apt. :) However, this is clearly verging over towards the area of personal taste, so I don't generally go far out of my way to change things; if every second image on that page had been floating left instead of just one I would have been more hesitant to radically remodel.

It would be nice if Wikipedia:image guidelines were a little less about technicalities and more about "does this article really need yet another picture?" As is probably obvious, I tend to err on the side of too many pictures. --Andrew 02:43, May 7, 2004 (UTC)

Hm. The only pages I can find with guidelines, on a cursory search, are Wikipedia:Picture tutorial (which suggests alternating left and right floats if the images are close enough together to "collide" othewise) and Wikipedia:Image use policy which I assume is the one you were referring to. Yeah, could use a little bit more there about overall presentation. Anyway, since a large dose of personal preference is involved in my tendancy to float everything to the right, I won't complain if you try floating some of the images left to "spice things up" a bit. I recall that I used to do that myself at some point in my history here, so it can't be too bad. :) Bryan 04:29, 7 May 2004 (UTC)__DTREPLYBUTTONSCONTENT__-->__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"2004-05-07T04:29:00.000Z","author":"Bryan Derksen","type":"comment","level":1,"id":"c-Bryan_Derksen-2004-05-07T04:29:00.000Z-Images_on_which_side","replies":[],"displayName":"Bryan"}}-->

For spacecraft propulsion, I think the only images that can be on the left is the solar sail one, and I'm not convinced it helps. (I don't think a section should start with a left image). Anyway, I don't really have strong preferences here, so I'll leave it as is unless I start to wake up at night thinking about it. --Andrew 05:09, May 7, 2004 (UTC)

Hi there, I saw you reverted some of the vandalism against Human rights situation in post-Saddam Iraq and checked your user page because I am always interested in who the reasonable people around are. I noted you have skills in computer science, so I wondered whether you might be interested in a project about learning that I am starting and where I need some help with programming. Please check my user page and let me know. Get-back-world-respect 21:37, 9 May 2004 (UTC)__DTREPLYBUTTONSCONTENT__-->__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"2004-05-09T21:37:00.000Z","author":"Get-back-world-respect","type":"comment","level":1,"id":"c-Get-back-world-respect-2004-05-09T21:37:00.000Z-Hello_from_Berlin","replies":[]}}-->

You don't need to do anything else. I put See also: into the footer, so we don't have to type everything over and over again (which, after all, is the whole point of the msg functionality. -- hike395 02:35, 15 May 2004 (UTC)__DTREPLYBUTTONSCONTENT__-->__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"2004-05-15T02:35:00.000Z","author":"Hike395","type":"comment","level":1,"id":"c-Hike395-2004-05-15T02:35:00.000Z-Fixed_Template:Saturn","replies":["c-Bryan_Derksen-2004-05-15T02:37:00.000Z-Hike395-2004-05-15T02:35:00.000Z"]}}-->

Actually, I'm about to take out the See also: and try to make the Saturn more like the other footers in use throughout Wikipedia shortly. :) Bryan 02:37, 15 May 2004 (UTC)__DTREPLYBUTTONSCONTENT__-->__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"2004-05-15T02:37:00.000Z","author":"Bryan Derksen","type":"comment","level":2,"id":"c-Bryan_Derksen-2004-05-15T02:37:00.000Z-Hike395-2004-05-15T02:35:00.000Z","replies":["c-Hike395-2004-05-15T02:43:00.000Z-Bryan_Derksen-2004-05-15T02:37:00.000Z"],"displayName":"Bryan"}}-->

Can we discuss it briefly, first? I think that people have gone berserk making footer lists with > 50 items in them, which I believe is reader-unfriendly. I don't think we need a long list of all possible moons of Saturn on every moon article. I figured that all you need is a link to Saturn, and a link to a list of moons --- that only requires one more click than having a list inside the footer. -- hike395 02:43, 15 May 2004 (UTC)__DTREPLYBUTTONSCONTENT__-->__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"2004-05-15T02:43:00.000Z","author":"Hike395","type":"comment","level":3,"id":"c-Hike395-2004-05-15T02:43:00.000Z-Bryan_Derksen-2004-05-15T02:37:00.000Z","replies":["c-Bryan_Derksen-2004-05-15T02:51:00.000Z-Hike395-2004-05-15T02:43:00.000Z","c-Bryan_Derksen-2004-05-15T02:56:00.000Z-Hike395-2004-05-15T02:43:00.000Z"]}}-->

Okay, putting my proposal over on MediaWiki talk:Saturn. Bryan 02:51, 15 May 2004 (UTC)__DTREPLYBUTTONSCONTENT__-->__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"2004-05-15T02:51:00.000Z","author":"Bryan Derksen","type":"comment","level":4,"id":"c-Bryan_Derksen-2004-05-15T02:51:00.000Z-Hike395-2004-05-15T02:43:00.000Z","replies":[],"displayName":"Bryan"}}-->

BTW, I'm also of the opinion that footers have been proliferating wildly on Wikipedia; I'm hoping that when categories are implemented in Wikipedia's code we'll be able to obsolete most of them entirely. But until then I try to keep the footers as tidy as I can. :) Bryan 02:56, 15 May 2004 (UTC)__DTREPLYBUTTONSCONTENT__-->__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"2004-05-15T02:56:00.000Z","author":"Bryan Derksen","type":"comment","level":4,"id":"c-Bryan_Derksen-2004-05-15T02:56:00.000Z-Hike395-2004-05-15T02:43:00.000Z","replies":[],"displayName":"Bryan"}}-->

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm still trying to find my way around this cyber "library of alexandria" :-) Just finished putting out the "Autobiography of a Yogi" ed. 1946 Pub domain on Wikisource. If you have a moment maybe you can take a look at it and let me know if anything should be changed etc. I will move the Sutras to Wikisource and then provide some text in Wikipedia and a link to wikisource. While you're still on the line.. how does one create a link to a wikisource from wikipedia? Autobiography of a Yogi in a wikipedia document justs puts me in wikipedia new page. thanx --robert_wh 09:37, 2004 May 17 (UTC)

No time to look at anything right now, I'm just zooming through before heading out for the day; I'll take a look when I get back this evening. But in quick response to the interwiki link question, I never figured out how to do a wikilink to Wikisource so the one time I found myself needing to do that I just did it manually; try [http://sources.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobiography_of_a_Yogi Autobiography of a Yogi] Autobiography of a Yogi. There might be a better way that I don't know about, though. Bryan 15:32, 17 May 2004 (UTC)__DTREPLYBUTTONSCONTENT__-->__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"2004-05-17T15:32:00.000Z","author":"Bryan Derksen","type":"comment","level":1,"id":"c-Bryan_Derksen-2004-05-17T15:32:00.000Z-Source_texts_on_Wikipedia_-sutras","replies":[],"displayName":"Bryan"}}-->

As stated Wikipedia is an International website, viewed both by Americans and non-Americans. And as such, pages often contain both [SI] and [Imperial Measurements]. The biggest reason that Americans give to resisting the adoption of metric [and being an American, I can say this], is that they're "'not used'" to metric. The only way that they are going to become "'used to'" metric, is to see and to be required to use it. The rest of the world is not us any favors by including non-SI measurements in their definitions.

It is not wikipedia's job to enforce change on others, Steggall, and it certainly isn't your job to do so here. Please don't do this again. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 01:47, 18 May 2004 (UTC)__DTREPLYBUTTONSCONTENT__-->__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"2004-05-18T01:47:00.000Z","author":"Finlay McWalter","type":"comment","level":1,"id":"c-Finlay_McWalter-2004-05-18T01:47:00.000Z-Metric\/Imperial_References","replies":["c-Bryan_Derksen-2004-05-18T04:36:00.000Z-Finlay_McWalter-2004-05-18T01:47:00.000Z"]}}-->

Quite. And even if we were in the job of teaching Americans to intuitively grasp metric measures, removing the imperial conversions of metric values would have the opposite effect. Someone who doesn't know metric won't know what "2 meters" is unless you also throw in "6 feet" as well. Bryan 04:36, 18 May 2004 (UTC)__DTREPLYBUTTONSCONTENT__-->__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"2004-05-18T04:36:00.000Z","author":"Bryan Derksen","type":"comment","level":3,"id":"c-Bryan_Derksen-2004-05-18T04:36:00.000Z-Finlay_McWalter-2004-05-18T01:47:00.000Z","replies":["c-Finlay_McWalter-2004-05-20T13:17:00.000Z-Bryan_Derksen-2004-05-18T04:36:00.000Z"],"displayName":"Bryan"}}-->

Exactly. I wouldn't be at all averse, however, to someone methodically adding the metric equivalents to US articles, which would have far more "educational" effect that deleting stuff. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 13:17, 20 May 2004 (UTC)__DTREPLYBUTTONSCONTENT__-->__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"2004-05-20T13:17:00.000Z","author":"Finlay McWalter","type":"comment","level":4,"id":"c-Finlay_McWalter-2004-05-20T13:17:00.000Z-Bryan_Derksen-2004-05-18T04:36:00.000Z","replies":["c-Bryan_Derksen-2004-05-20T15:07:00.000Z-Finlay_McWalter-2004-05-20T13:17:00.000Z"]}}-->

Oh, definitely. When I went around restoring the pages Steggall had removed imperial measures from, I always made sure to leave in the metric measures (though in a few cases he'd rounded the metric measurements to the nearest 5 for some reason, perhaps to make them seem more "natural". I undid those changes). The only major problem to keep in mind is precision; if an article says "one million miles", it's not correct to add "(1609344 kilometers)" after it. :) Bryan 15:07, 20 May 2004 (UTC)__DTREPLYBUTTONSCONTENT__-->__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"2004-05-20T15:07:00.000Z","author":"Bryan Derksen","type":"comment","level":5,"id":"c-Bryan_Derksen-2004-05-20T15:07:00.000Z-Finlay_McWalter-2004-05-20T13:17:00.000Z","replies":[],"displayName":"Bryan"}}-->

Uh, it was decided a while ago to name rocket and missile articles with the format "[name] (rocket)" as they tend to conflict with other more normal names (think Thor, Delta, Atlas...). see Wikipedia:WikiProject_Rockets. Is there a compelling reasion to avoid this naming convention? Audin 02:24, 18 May 2004 (UTC)__DTREPLYBUTTONSCONTENT__-->__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"2004-05-18T02:24:00.000Z","author":"Audin","type":"comment","level":1,"id":"c-Audin-2004-05-18T02:24:00.000Z-Moving_Saturn_Rocket_Family_pages...","replies":["c-Bryan_Derksen-2004-05-18T04:25:00.000Z-Audin-2004-05-18T02:24:00.000Z"]}}-->

I wasn't aware of that decision, but if I'd noticed it being discussed at the time I would have opposed it; putting categorizations in brackets like that should only IMO be done when disambiguation is necessary. Since there's nothing else in Wikipedia with an article that goes by the name "Saturn V", putting (rocket) at the end is completely redundant and should not be done. I note that Wikipedia:Naming conventions (common names) would seem to agree with me on this, too. I'll go over to that WikiProject and make note of my disagreement there. Bryan 04:25, 18 May 2004 (UTC)__DTREPLYBUTTONSCONTENT__-->__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"2004-05-18T04:25:00.000Z","author":"Bryan Derksen","type":"comment","level":2,"id":"c-Bryan_Derksen-2004-05-18T04:25:00.000Z-Audin-2004-05-18T02:24:00.000Z","replies":[],"displayName":"Bryan"}}-->

Hi. I note your edits to B & S. Could we discuss. 1) I'm not sure I agree that tweaking the headers so that on wide monitors the columns take on the width of the explanatory text, rather than of the column data content. In data terms, Column 2 is never more than 8 characters, but is forced to about 43 characters wide. Column 3 is never more than 13 characters wide, but is forced to, I dunno, about 70. 2) You've wikicoded 2 out of the 22 or so tables. Could you tell me what you see the advantage of doing this is? I note the comments in [Wikipedia:How to use tables]; this doesn't appear to me a case where the tables are now more easy to edit than they were. Indeed, candidly, I'll tell you, as the person who has put ridiculous time into these pages, that for me they make the whole thing more difficult to edit. All told, then; not thrilled nor dancing on the table.  :( --Tagishsimon

I was on a Special:longpages binge, working my way down through the list looking for articles to shrink, and hit those two. By that point I'd become quite efficient at converting HTML tables to wikimarkup using a couple of search-and-replace techniques, so I tried it out to see how well the page's byte count would reduce. In this case not very much; those external links accounted for most of it. I'd been planning to go back and make sure the other tables in that group of articles got formatted the same over the next few days, but if you're deeply opposed to what I did go ahead and revert; since there wasn't much space saved I'm not going to complain. As for why I changed the headers, that was simply due to my personal "table philosophy"; I try not to force tables into any sort of predefined layout or formatting unless there's some pressing reason for it, instead preferring to let browsers handle them however they prefer. Bryan 00:13, 19 May 2004 (UTC)__DTREPLYBUTTONSCONTENT__-->__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"2004-05-19T00:13:00.000Z","author":"Bryan Derksen","type":"comment","level":1,"id":"c-Bryan_Derksen-2004-05-19T00:13:00.000Z-Railway_Station_pages","replies":["c-Bryan_Derksen-2004-05-19T01:24:00.000Z-Bryan_Derksen-2004-05-19T00:13:00.000Z"],"displayName":"Bryan"}}-->

Thanks. I guess I can cope with the wiki table - time I got my head around that, and your cause is good. I guess I do have a preference for constraining the column widths roughly to that of the data - or, at least, not giving browsers the opportunity to put up stupidly wide columns. Can we meet half way on this? best wishes --Tagishsimon

Sure, fiddling with the headers like that was actually just an afterthought I didn't spend much effort on. If you like I could go through the other pages and convert them all to wiki table markup that produces a result exactly identical to what's currently there, and leave issues of formatting up to you? I was a reluctant convert to wiki table markup myself, BTW, but I've since taken a shine to it because it means the wiki software will automatically generate "correct" HTML code and I won't have to go hunting for where I forgot the / in a </tr><nowiki> or something like that. :) ~~~~

Hah! I forgot the / in the nowiki tag! That was totally unintentional, but it's so appropriate that I'm going to leave that mistake in there. :) Bryan 01:24, 19 May 2004 (UTC)__DTREPLYBUTTONSCONTENT__-->__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"2004-05-19T01:24:00.000Z","author":"Bryan Derksen","type":"comment","level":3,"id":"c-Bryan_Derksen-2004-05-19T01:24:00.000Z-Bryan_Derksen-2004-05-19T00:13:00.000Z","replies":["c-Bryan_Derksen-2004-05-31T14:47:00.000Z-Bryan_Derksen-2004-05-19T01:24:00.000Z"],"displayName":"Bryan"}}-->

Yeah, if you're still up for it, converting all the tables to wikiformat would be a good thing (tm). They are, I come to find, *much* clearer than the HTML table. Thanks for changing the header format back. For some reason, the P tag in the header of the third column didn't work (on B and H, so I changed it to a BR, which did. Wikicode. Go figure. best wishes --Tagishsimon

Heh. I suppose I can tear myself away from the Category feeding frenzy that's gripped Wikipedia since the upgrade and do that when I get home this evening, yeah. Glad my changes didn't turn out to be disruptive after all. :) Bryan 14:47, 31 May 2004 (UTC)__DTREPLYBUTTONSCONTENT__-->__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"2004-05-31T14:47:00.000Z","author":"Bryan Derksen","type":"comment","level":6,"id":"c-Bryan_Derksen-2004-05-31T14:47:00.000Z-Bryan_Derksen-2004-05-19T01:24:00.000Z","replies":[],"displayName":"Bryan"}}-->

Wikipedia is rather a mirror on the soul, what with its audit trail & all. No matter how I kid myself, I do seem to be somewhat reactionary & fractious. Apologies for giving you the blunt end of it; the wikitable layout is a breeze compared to the clunky HTML. Thanks for doing the remainder of the tables. Meanwhile you may be in the vanguard of categorisation; I'm more towards the let's key the people entries on familyname not first name conservative cranky sweep-up squad... --Tagishsimon

Took me quite a while to warm up to the wiki table markup too, and I must admit that for a while I'd made it my holy mission to run all HTML table code on Wikipedia through HTML Tidy solely to ensure that all the td, th and tr tags were properly closed. Also in the process replacing all non-ASCII characters with their HTML entity equivalents. In hindsight, that was really obsessive. :) Bryan 23:30, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I tweaked your description of phased array in antenna. Do you agree with the wording? I hope it's clearer and more accurate. --ssd 05:39, 20 May 2004 (UTC)__DTREPLYBUTTONSCONTENT__-->__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"2004-05-20T05:39:00.000Z","author":"Ssd","type":"comment","level":1,"id":"c-Ssd-2004-05-20T05:39:00.000Z-phased_array_antenna","replies":["c-Bryan_Derksen-2004-05-20T05:52:00.000Z-Ssd-2004-05-20T05:39:00.000Z"]}}-->

Looks great to me. :) Bryan 05:52, 20 May 2004 (UTC)__DTREPLYBUTTONSCONTENT__-->__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"2004-05-20T05:52:00.000Z","author":"Bryan Derksen","type":"comment","level":2,"id":"c-Bryan_Derksen-2004-05-20T05:52:00.000Z-Ssd-2004-05-20T05:39:00.000Z","replies":[],"displayName":"Bryan"}}-->

Hey, Bryan. I'm kind of in shock with v1.3 of the software. I see that you are adding all of the Solar System articles to its own category. This seems like a good idea. Are you thinking that categories replace the footer? Or we should move the information from the footer into the category meta page? I'm not sure what is the best thing --- would like to hear what you are thinking of. -- hike395 05:42, 30 May 2004 (UTC)__DTREPLYBUTTONSCONTENT__-->__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__{"threadItem":{"timestamp":"2004-05-30T05:42:00.000Z","author":"Hike395","type":"comment","level":1,"id":"c-Hike395-2004-05-30T05:42:00.000Z-Category:_Solar_System","replies":[]}}-->

I was mainly just thinking "Neat, Categories! Let's see what they do!" :) I stopped after adding categories to just the planets because I started to ponder whether this would be a good opportunity to change the way these things are organized a bit; rather than dumping everything into one category I was thinking perhaps we could use "planet", "moon", "asteroid", etc. instead. I'll bring it up on Category talk:Solar system.

See Category talk:Solar system, question about Category:Moons

Any reason the Philippine-American War can't be both [[Category:United States history]] and [[Category:United States wars]]? jengod 23:51, Jun 4, 2004 (UTC)

Because Category:United States history has a vast number of articles in it already, and Category:United States wars is a direct sub-category of United States history so it's needlessly redundant to have them both. I'm a believer in categorizing articles as specifically as possible, allowing the network of sub-categorization to take care of larger groupings automatically. Bryan 23:55, 4 Jun 2004 (UTC)

You may want to look closely at some of those rollbacks. Some of them are editorial material like [1]. Guanaco 06:23, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I've been erring on the side of restoring deleted text. I figure it'll be much easier for the regular cycle of editing to spot text that shouldn't be there than it will for it to notice stuff lost in the edit history that needs to be restored. I don't have time to read and evaluate the validity of it all myself, especially since I'm not familiar with many of these subjects. Bryan 06:29, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I've been checking the diff of every page that I restore. Most of the edits were just adding categories, moving interwiki links to the bottom, etc. A few are more substantial additions, and I haven't been reading them in detail; if they seem "encyclopedic" when I skim through them I've been bringing these back too. I don't know anything at all about the Trollkien controversy, aside from hearing his name being argued about in the background sometimes, so if he's got some sort of subtle agenda it'll have to be rooted out the hard way. Bryan 06:42, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Bryan, I'm unhappy that Alarodian languages, Caucasian, Hurrians, Hurro-Urartian languages, Iberian-Caucasian languages, Laz language, Megrelian language, Nino Burjanadze, South Caucasian languages, Svan language and Zviad Gamsakhurdia appear to be gaining de facto semi-permanent protection due to the repeated vandalism by the former User:Levzur. I've posted a comment about it on Wikipedia:Protected page - I'd be grateful for your views. My feeling is that rather than block the entire Wikipedia community from editing those pages, we should instead block Levzur's proxy servers indefinitely. What do you think? -- ChrisO 07:53, 11 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I totally agree with you, it's clear that it's this one particular user that's the problem and he's the one that should be the focus of the solution. I only reprotected those articles because edit warring was going on right at that moment. Bryan 07:59, 11 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Unfortunately Hcheney has been unblocking Levzur's proxies (in good faith, I'm sure). I've added a comment to User talk:Hcheney so if you want to chip in, you're very welcome to do so. -- ChrisO 10:23, 16 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Sure. Chip in how, though? Next time Levzur vandalizes and I block him I'll make sure to provide a more detailed description in the block explanation so that hopefully he won't get unblocked like this again. Other than that, can't think of anything more to do. Bryan 14:45, 16 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for your supportive comment - that was fine. Camembert (of the Arbitration Committee) has given some advice on the situation (Wikipedia talk:Requests for arbitration/ChrisO and Levzur) which I think we can use as a green light for an extended ban. We will need to keep an eye on the blocklist to make sure that other admins don't unblock the proxies prematurely, and let them know the situation if they do. -- ChrisO 21:05, 16 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I noticed you cut and pasted the article to Steven Morrissey, whilst it would seem to make the most sense to have the page there, there aren't many Neil Morrissey or Paul Morrissey references that would link only to the surname. But Steven Morrissey now no longer uses his forenames and most musical references to him would link only to Morrissey. I have created a page Morrissey (disambiguation), so that hopefully there will be minimal confusion.
SimonMayer 04:02, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other, since I don't know much about the guy. I did that simply because it seemed to be the correct Wikipedia standard for articles about people and because it preserved more of the article history associated with the text. Wish there was some way to merge the histories, but I guess the edit summaries will tell people where to find the rest of it if necessary. Bryan 04:19, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I had surmised that the data on Europa was left over from a previous incarnation of the Europa article, so in fact I was just cleaning up in an uncurious state of mind. That's just in case you were curious about my curiosity…
—Herbee 18:37, 16 Jun 2004 (UTC)

question: APOLLO or ALINDA type ?? I will ask an expert still active in asteroid work; and then inform you corespondingly

see you HES (Hans-Emil Schuster)Desertsky

It's an Apollo, according to the man who discovered it - http://www.astrosurf.com/maury/asteroides/toutatis.html . -- ChrisO 09:07, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)

exellent information, I assume the problem is solved and no further investigations necessary, HES (Hans-Emil Schuster)Desertsky

I left a comment on User talk:ChrisO, I think it could be both an Apollo asteroid and an Alinda asteroid. I believe the categories can overlap.

Apollos would be defined by how they approach the Earth, Alindas would be defined by a 3:1 resonance with Jupiter which also usually produces a 1:4 resonance with Earth.

See for instance http://www.phys.utb.edu/~johnston/astro/rpt4179-u.html for what seems to be a list of Alinda asteroids.

-- Curps 19:29, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)

You are probably right about the link here; my change was merely to make some kind of improvement & hope if it wasn't correct, someone with the proper knowledge would come behind me & fix things. (Originally this was "magnesia", which linked to a Prefecture in Greece, which was obviously wrong.)

You may want to look at my other fixes magnesia ==> magnetite, & fix any other mistakes I made. Thanks! -- llywrch 03:35, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)

No problem. I'll have a look, but I'm not exacly an expert either so don't consider it reassuring. :) Bryan 03:39, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)

To overcome my uncertainties, there's now a magnesia (mineral) and magnesia (disambiguation) to point to instead of trying to figure out exactly what some of these references might mean. :) Bryan 04:05, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)

There, think I've got them all now. the only one I was certain enough of to point to something other than magnesia (mineral) was the chromatography one, the others are now pointed to magnesia (mineral) for others to deal with later. :) Bryan 04:20, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Do we need a distinct category for disasters, as opposed to Category:Natural hazards ? I see that they are different (for example, a disaster can be a non-natural hazard), but I wonder if having both is informative. Should Category:Natural hazards be a sub-category of Category:Disasters? -- hike395 04:24, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)

There are a lot of non-natural disasters that I was planning to put into there, but got distracted from for the time being. Specifically, I was going to start with List_of_accidents_and_incidents_on_commercial_airliners as soon as I worked out a good set of sub-categories to divide them up into. I'm not sure what other category those would all be grouped under (some would fit under "Terrorism" and such, but there are a lot of non-terrorist airplane catastrophes in there too). I don't think Natural hazards fits very well as a direct subcategory under Disasters, due to contents like Category:Volcanoes (which includes Olympus Mons, for example) and the other generic stuff. Bryan 05:19, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Sorry for not checking the template first! I knew there was somewhere to check.. anyway, here's my argument for using mean diameter. First, mean (as opposed to equatorial). Many of the sizes I found were mean, and listed as equatorial, which may be quite a bit off, especially for smaller moons. As for diameter.. it's just a matter of preference. But I did it for half the moons anyway, so.. :P. I did forget to record the dimensions of some moons in their text before deleting them, but I know some reliable sources where I could recover them, later. As for my sources, I'm using JPL's Solar System Dynamics page except where info isn't available there, in which case I'm using Scott Sheppard's page. Anyway, I'll change the template, and I have some plans to put the data box on some moons that haven't been updated within a few days.. I'm a student, and I'm on break. I have plenty of free time to work on it. :P --Patteroast 15:40, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Heh. I wasn't exactly objecting to your change (though I must admit a moment of panic when I saw you were tampering with my preciousss tables, mine, MINE! :), in fact I agree that mean diameter probably is better as a "general single number" than equatorial. I just like to keep everything standardized where possible, and figured giving you a heads up on that might make it easier to do. Amalthea was the only irregular moon whose article I spot-checked, so I didn't see that you were preserving dimensions elsewhere and was worried you might not have considered such information to be relevant. Bryan 00:28, 23 Jun 2004 (UTC)

You're totally right. The first disambig for stargate I saw was Jaffa when I first started to alter the pages. So I stuck with the format... I totally agree (Stargate) really should be the disambig.

I wasn't gonna. But if you wanna, go for it.  ;) Just wasn't sure if there was a proper way. Figured the list was sufficient, but I suppose the ideal solution is that every single article on Wiki is categorized. :) --Golbez 05:34, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC)