User talk:Grutness/archive01

This file is an archive - please do not add new discussion here - add it to my Talk page

Welcome

Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia. Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! By the way, you can sign your name on Talk and vote pages using three tildes, like this: ~~~. Four tildes (~~~~) produces your name and the current date. If you have any questions, see the help pages, add a question to the village pump or ask me on my Talk page. Again, welcome!

Whosyourjudas (talk) 23:13, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Glad you decided to get a user name - makes things easier for everyone. I think New Zealand is pretty underredpresented here, so first-hand info about it will be great. But wherever and whenver you contribute, it's great to have you! Regards, Whosyourjudas (talk) 23:41, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Milton et al

Welcome to WP, James. Good work on the Taieri River.

I thought your name was familiar, then I remembered a "James Duignan" in my past, before 1975, so - that wasn't you. Then I looked at your own site. Penny dropped when I saw your Milton page. I had profiled it as part of my work constructing categories for every city and district in New Zealand on Zeal:

http://zeal.com/category/preview.jhtml?cid=10116744

There's plenty of "duty" that we Kiwis can offer you! An early duty could be to appear on Wikipedia:Wikipedians/New Zealand. Then enliven that Milton link, please! After that, Music of New Zealand will probably keep you busy...

Kia ora, e hoa! - Robin Patterson 00:31, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Hi Robin... no sooner said than done. Not only is there a nice shiny new article on Milton, but much of South Otago is now firmly on the Wiki map. I'm slowly working my way through other Otago places, too - as well as adding in a few small bits on Dunedin music (although it does seem very odd, in one or two cases, to be writing articles about people I know personally). It's a small world as regards my website - I'm glad it's been useful to someone! Grutness 11:30, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Nice one on Cargill's Castle, James! And we seem to have another suddenly active southerner who is a bit too keen on giving us extra work. See my contribution to Talk:New Zealand and the Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_New_Zealand_places.

E noho ra. Robin Patterson 04:15, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I don't think we've met

Hi, in answer your question on my talk page, I don't think we know each other in real life (although I also studied at Otago - BA and LLB from 94 to 99. I found that the NZ science fiction awards were named after Julius Vogel after they popped up when doing a bit of googling to flesh out his entry a little. I must admit I hadn't heard of them before that. Lisiate 19:45, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Thank you

I just want to say to you "thank you", cause of your great articles about New Zealand geography. I am from Czech Republic, so reading interesting articles about beautiful New Zealand is great for me.

Darwinek 9:35, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

:) Thanks! I'm glad they're appreciated!Grutness

How to win prizes

Hello again. I was skimming through the substubs category, starting at the "Z" end, looking for something I could improve to win a prize with, when I found Tapanui. Although I once stayed in the pub there, you started the article and should have first crack at making it into a prizewinning article. Remember to mention Tapanui Flu! (Incidentally, regarding a recent email, I see from further up this page that I DID tell you about my Zeal categories for every city and district in New Zealand; I hope your categories are reasonably close to them, because they represent 60 years of learning and travelling!) Robin Patterson 09:59, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I'd forgotten about that... yes, I'll definitely have a look. As for the substub competition, I'm busy working on the Coromandel Peninsula at the moment (the article, that is - I'm still at St. Clair), which was a substub until a few minutes ago - and I didn't even know there was a contest running until you mentioned it! Grutness

Maori people

Hi there, I have been meaning to drop you a line to say how much I was appreciating your work on NZ geography. You seem to have got all the Maori wars into categories but I found a few more people and added them. Cheers ping 09:15, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Thanks - the geog's a long job but I'm getting there! Thanks for categorising the people. Grutness

Te Puea Herangi

I have made a start and will continue later. Suggestions of topics are always welcome, I have been a bit short of ideas lately. Cheers ping 08:25, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Hi back at ya

Hi, and I've been meaning to thank you for the amazing work you've been doing on the geography of New Zealand. Every day I seem to notice a little bit more, I wish I was as disciplined as you to produce a whole bank of useful articles, but I just flit from subject to subject as the mood takes me. OK, I'm about to try and do Western Springs in your style. P.S. Shouldn't you be in bed! I'm actually in Aussie so its only midnight here! cheers - Drstuey 13:14, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Grutness, thanks for your good work. You're getting thru a power of good articles. Nurg 10:03, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Capitalization in song titles

Thank you for being the only person (so far) to register opinions on my proposed changes to List of songs whose title includes geographical names. Seeing as how you have two perspectives that I don't have on the issue of capitalization in song titles (i.e., coming from a British background and performing in real bands), I'd like to get more information on your statement that full capitalization "isn't song industry practice - at least not in publishing". As suggested (at least partly) in the cited discussion Talk:List of songs whose title includes personal names#Capitalization, my information comes from my huge music library (i.e., album covers and liner notes on released recordings) and online (e.g., AMG) and library (e.g., Library of Congress) research on songs, all from American sources. Are things different in the Commonwealth? Are you referring specifically to publishing of catalogs or indices of songs, or is there more to it? I'm not wedded to the idea of full-capitalization, and expect not to perform that particular surgery on the list based on your statement, but I'd like to take advantage of your different perspective to learn more about this subject. Thanks again. — Jeff Q 07:20, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC)

My experience comes from working in bands too, and from registering songs with APRA (Australasian Performing Rights Association). They ask songwriters to only capitalise the first word of songs and any proper nouns, or to use capitals only. I haven't thought to check my whole album collection (it would take a while - 2000 CDs), but the handful I looked at at random seem to have no set pattern. The other thing is that I'm almost certain that we're supposed to use APA guidelines in Wikipedia with references, and they clearly stipulate only capitalising the first word and any proper nouns. I'd have thought it would make sense to do the same with songs. Grutness|^hello? 09:46, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick reply on your experiences. (Your CD collection is about 30% larger than mine.) You said you noticed no pattern, but is there perhaps the same pattern I've seen in American CDs (that I mention in the above "Capitalization" link) — that most CDs practice one of three patterns, none of which follow APA guidelines: all uppercase, all lowercase, or all capitalized? There are certainly exceptions to that pattern set, as I also noted in the cited discussion, but this seems like solid practice on album printing, at least in the U.S.

Also, can you recall where Wikipedia says anything about using APA guidelines? I haven't found anything from my initial searching. From what I've seen, Wikipedia has no policy on song titles, only an inferred one from Wikipedia:Naming conventions#Album titles and band names, which follows the more cumbersome and poorly understood "Capitalize everything except articles, prepositions, and conjunctions" rule, which has many uncited exceptions. (That's precisely why I advocate full capitalization, which is the closest thing to industry practice that people are likely to do correctly.) At the very least, policy seems to favor non-APA capitalization for artistic work titles in everything except possibly classical music, whose policy has an entire article to itself.

I had no idea that you were referring to the American Psychological Association until I'd tracked down the APA style article, which suggests a scholarly bent not necessarily shared by Wikipedia and, as far as I've seen, not cited as a Wikipedia source for style information. I do notice that this appears to be the style used for Wikipedia article titles, although I found no explanation of where that came from. It also appears to be what American libraries use in creating indices of titles, not only for songs but for any indexed material. (Thanks for letting me know what to call that!)

If you get a chance, could you let me know (A) if your CD collection shows the same patterns as mine does, and (B) if you know where the APA style is cited in Wikipedia style guidelines. (Oh, and sorry about the rude American spelling of "capitalization" in this section title. I'm delighted that I now have the British version in the one on my page. ☺) Thanks again! — Jeff Q 11:16, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC)

The Humungous Image Tagging Project

Hi. You've helped with the Wikipedia:WikiProject Wiki Syntax, so I thought it worth alerting you to the latest and greatest of Wikipedia fixing project, User:Yann/Untagged Images, which is seeking to put copyright tags on all of the untagged images. There are probably, oh, thirty thousand or so to do (he said, reaching into the air for a large figure). But hey: they're images ... you'll get to see lots of random pretty pictures. That must be better than looking for at at and the the, non? You know you'll love it. best wishes --Tagishsimon (talk)

I might do some, but the NZ geography project's taking most of my wiki time at the moment! Grutness|^hello?

Article Licensing

Hi, I've started a drive to get users to multi-license all of their contributions that they've made to either (1) all U.S. state, county, and city articles or (2) all articles, using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-by-sa) v1.0 and v2.0 Licenses or into the public domain if they prefer. The CC-by-sa license is a true free documentation license that is similar to Wikipedia's license, the GFDL, but it allows other projects, such as WikiTravel, to use our articles. Since you are among the top 1000 Wikipedians by edits, I was wondering if you would be willing to multi-license all of your contributions or at minimum those on the geographic articles. Over 90% of people asked have agreed. For More Information:

Multi-Licensing FAQ - Lots of questions answered
Multi-Licensing Guide
Free the Rambot Articles Project

To allow us to track those users who muli-license their contributions, many users copy and paste the "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" template into their user page, but there are other options at Template messages/User namespace. The following examples could also copied and pasted into your user page:

Option 1

I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:

OR

Option 2

I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions to any [[U.S. state]], county, or city article as described below:

Or if you wanted to place your work into the public domain, you could replace "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" with "{{MultiLicensePD}}". If you only prefer using the GFDL, I would like to know that too. Please let me know what you think at my talk page. It's important to know either way so no one keeps asking. – Ram-Man ^{(comment) (talk)}[[]] 14:44, Dec 9, 2004 (UTC)

Quoth: Does "Articles" in this context include the images within them?

No they do not. The links to the pictures are included, but not the images themselves. In fact when you upload images you have to put a copyright tag on them. There are a wide number of choices available for this and they are not required to be GFDL, unlike the text articles. Articles in this context refers to all textual contributions. So if you are ok with releasing textual contributions under the CC-by-sa, that would be great. At this point I am not even working on pictures unless people choose to do so on their own initiative. I don't know what this means for a print version of Wikipedia, but in the case of multi-licensing, images are not included and the template banners will say so. – Ram-Man ^{(comment) (talk)}[[]] 13:31, Dec 10, 2004 (UTC)

Re: Manawatu

Hiya. Thanks for the heads-up, I will indeed set aside some time to look at / add to the new Manawatu articles (although truth be told I'm not very knowledgeable in local geography). I've appreciated the spruce-up work you've done on the Manawatu Gorge article, too!

Ziggurat 20:16, Dec 9, 2004 (UTC)

Category:Fictional trains

This category seems to have survived categories for deletion. Since you seem to know something about the topic, would you be willing do do some clarifying and perhaps reorganizing? (I must admit that my understanding of rail terminology is practically nonexistant.) -Aranel ("Sarah") 00:59, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)

any chance of a photo for power strip

any chance of a picture of a AU/NZ power strip with a neon indicator to go against the Indication section? Plugwash 19:31, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Tireless Contributor Barnstar

Please see your user page.gadfium (talk) 06:50, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Many thanks! I'm honoured! Grutness|^hello?

"Top speed wiki-ing"

Thanks. I wouldn't normally be so quick, though — I just noticed your linking of Aotearoa in the New Zealand article, which is on my watchlist. (I was just thinking the other day that an article on Aotearoa, the word, would be useful... good work, and thanks for writing it.) -- Vardion 08:18, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Place-name songs

Hi Jeff - I've got a suggestion about the List of songs whose title includes geographical names - thought I'd ask you what you think before suggesting it to everyone on that page, since you're a leading organiser of that page. Would it be worthwhile linking not only the name of the group, but also the place? So, for instance, the first exact A is listed as "Abergavenny" by Marty Wilde. It's currently linked to Marty Wilde, but could also be linked to the article on Abergavenny. Worth doing? [[User:Grutness|Grutness ^hello? ]] 06:25, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)

This has been discussed on the various song-list talk pages in the past. The general consensus has typically been to create links for songs only when the song itself has an article, for three basic reasons:

Hyperlinks should link to the most specific thing described by the link. This would favor linking to articles on the songs themselves. (This is the strongest reason, since an increasing number of songs do have pages, and it would be confusing not to know whether the link would take you to a song or a place until you followed it.)
Creating links for each geographical name, when each line has a geographical name, would be massive overkill, and maintaining a subset (say, only the first occurrence) would be a significant effort. (On the other hand, most of the discussions occurred before the lists were grouped by names rather than titles, so first-only is more logical and easier to maintain than it once was.)
Some believe that all these links would make the pages looks rather messy.

That said, there is still merit to the idea. I would suggest that you give everyone a few days to get used to the new organization (which I hope to have finished within a day or two), then go ahead and make your proposal. It doesn't seem to have been discussed yet on the geo names page, and it's worth considering. — Jeff Q 07:34, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I just finished reverting, on the geo names list, a massive number of links that not only broke the "link song titles to song articles" policy, but also destroyed a number of actual song article links for the sake of linking to geographical places and even simple nouns. It was, I think, an excellent demonstration of how one can abuse the mechanism of hyperlinks to render an article absurdly confusing and messy. HOWEVER, the general case of linking geo names is still worth considering. I posted comments on the talk pages of the two users who performed this considerable feat (possibly just one user who created a username during the process) to encourage him/her to discuss the issue on the article's talk page, as I did for you. So far, no reply. It might be a good time to make your case, since it's obviously a current issue. — Jeff Q 06:48, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Tables made easy with WP syntax

{As shown on my userpage) - http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User%27s_Guide:_Using_tables
Robin Patterson 09:11, 19 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Images in signature

Heya. Have you seen Wikipedia:Username#Signatures? You're free to use images in your sig if you want to ofcourse, but it is perceived as unpleasant for some people (if you'd already read that and decided to anyway, please ignore this message). --fvw * 17:25, 2004 Dec 26 (UTC)

I hadn't seen that. I use my sig this way for a reason (the horse is how I sign my name when writing). I have made it a little smaller in the last few days bacause I realised the length of the sig was a bit much. What I'd really like - and haven't found any way to do - is to use the image as the link to my talk page. If that were possible it would cut the size of the sig and keep my 'real signature' there. Grutness|^hello?

I don't think that's possible I'm afraid, for consistency's sake people are always taken to the image page when clicking on the image. I suppose you could turn the image page into a redirect to your talk page if you're the only one using it, but it's a bit of a hack. --fvw * 13:18, 2004 Dec 27 (UTC)

Category:Headlands of New Zealand

Hi Grutness, Sorry, I was a bit sleepy this morning when I added Category:Headlands to all those New Zealand headlands. In the train to work I thought it wasn't such a good idea after all and that it would be a good idea to remove them again. Alas, you noticed first. Thanks! Paul 19:26, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

No problem Grutness|^hello?

Re:Interesting

Thanks for your comments on my talk page! That's exactly what I like about wiki: people who otherwise would never meet in their lives, have the possibility to exchange views, opinions, share their experiences, commit mistakes and correct them - together.

As to my grandpa - I've been planning to write an article on him for quite some time now. After the war he became a notable university professor and the head of the Wood and Lumber Technology faculty of the Warsaw Agricultural University. He was also a notable social worker, building many social living areas (not sure how to call a borough constructed entirely by and for a group of university workers in English), two schools and a culture club that later (long after his death) became one of the best known pubs and students clubs in Warsaw. He definitely deserves a mention on Wikipedia (I never met him since he died some 5 years before I was born) and some of the turning points of his life resemble a film scenario, ready to be filmed and sold to the Hollywood. I'll let you know as soon as I'm finished with the article, hope you'll find it interesting.

As to the articles - we do what we can ;) --Cheers, Halibu tt 11:41, Jan 8, 2005 (UTC)

Hi! I'm the annotated bible guy,

I do have the Quran ready to go. It is a very sensitive issue, however, as it is very, very holy to Muslims, and the directions, contained within it, are that one must be very sober and pure before reading it. However, if Wikipedians want to give it a go, I can work in that direction. The key phrase is "true believer." The whole idea of Islam is to separate the true believers from everyone else. If it is the will of Allah that you should die (or kill) to prove that you truly believe, that's what you must do. As you can see, such a faith opens the door for all kinds of extreme acts. However, Bible study (the old Testament) is also high on the Prophet's (Muhammed) list of ways to prove your belief in Allah (Yahweh, God, Jehovah, Dio and Dios, Theo, Etc.) So we might still proceed as Holy and noble in purpose when publishing the Koran alongside, but we're going to need help from True Believers, whether converts to Islam, or born into their "father's religion."

Well, yes, that much is obvious - I wasn't suggesting that a Christian do the work - it's the sort of thing that needs to be worked on by people who are very sure of what they are doing and already know the Qu'ran well. In fact, it would probably be better if it was first transcribed using one of the partner wikipedias rather than English (I believe there is an Arabic Wikipedia). As to the "extreme acts", that is hardly simply the domain of Islam - as the story of Abraham and Isaac shows. Grutness|^hello?

Mt Eden image

Thanks for your improvements to my photo of Mt Eden. Your version is considerably better than mine. For future reference, I'd like to be able to improve my own shots. I've played with the contrast and brightness in mine and been unable to come up with anything as good as yours. What's the secret? I got better results, though still not as good as yours, adjusting the gamma correction, but I figure you would have mentioned it if you'd adjusted that. I'm using Paint Shop Pro 6, but have access to Photoshop 7 or the Gimp if that's what you're using.-gadfium 05:47, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The geo-stub categories, part 1

France-geo-stub

Hello! Great job with the france-geo-stubs! Since you are going through most of the French cities articles, why don't you add the "cities of France" category at the same time? That would save a lot of work for the future, and would be only a marginal additional work for you. Thanks again. olivier 06:43, Jan 10, 2005 (UTC)

Okay - I'll try to remember. I may miss a few (I'm doing Africa, NZ, and UK-geo-stubs at the same time, so it's likely to get a little confusing...) Grutness|^hello?

Great, thanks! olivier 07:07, Jan 10, 2005 (UTC)

Geo-stubs

You're going to hate me...complaining twice in a row! I've been going through the geo-stubs, putting them in their correct subcategories. I've just been back and there are a load more, all headlands, that should have been marked UK-geo-stub, Africa-geo-stub, US-geo-stub... you're doing loads of good work (which is why I hate to be a grouch) but please check there are regional geo-stub categories next time :) Grutness|^hello? 14:09, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC) (PS - I like the new name!) (copied here by me from my talkpage!

Yeah, I do hate you now! ;-)

Sorry, when I created the Category:Headlands and started filling it with all the headlands I could find on wikipedia, I did indeed change lots of stub messages into geo-stub messages. I overlooked the existence of those geo-stubsubcategories... Did you already replace the messages? Else I'm very willing to go over the headlands myself and replace them where appropriate.--Hippalus 07:13, Jan 13, 2005 (UTC)

No, don't worry about it. My current wiki-work is going through all the geo-stubs and subcategorising them where possible, so I'll come across them as I go (there were over 4000 of them! It's down to about 2900 but there's a long way to go). It's also possible I'll be putting in two or three more subcategories in the next couple of weeks anyway. Just don't do it again ;) Grutness|^hello?

Geo-stubs (again)

Thanks for the note about geo-stubs. I will try and look for appropriate stub templates in future - though there do seem to be an awful lot of them.

There are... and there are likely to be more. If you look in category:Geography stubs they're all listed at the top. Problem is, until recently there were over 4000 geo-stubs - far too many for anyone to comfortably wade through to find what they were looking for. With the subcategories there are now just under 2000, and hopefully that will reduce a little further still with two or more subcategories. it makes it a little harder to remember the correct stub (although most of them are of the standard form "country-geo-stub"), but it makes it much easier for people working on articles from one country to know what need to be worked on.

I note you took out two 'Rivers in ...' categories from Beverley Brook. Are you aware of the discussion at Wikipedia:Categories_for_deletion#Rivers_of_the_world? Or is it just that you feel the links should not be created until the Categories are moved?

Both aware of and actively part of :). Standard procedure is to keep using the old categories until a decision is made. After that there are automated processes ("bots") to change the categories on existing articles.

Changing the subject, Do you by any chance know where on the web I can find list of river gradients? For example, I was brought up near the River Kent which was reported to be one of the steepest rivers in the country.
I would like to check before I go to the Wandle article, strike "~~approximately 26.7 km in length and unusually steep for its size~~" and replace it with "falls 35 m in its 14 Km length".

RHaworth 06:49, 2005 Jan 22 (UTC)

Sorry, but I've no idea. Short of checking up ordnance survey maps to find the height of the source and outflow and work it all out manually, I can't think of any way of finding that out. Grutness|^hello?

And thanks for the note to me too! :o) — OwenBlacker 01:08, Jan 25, 2005 (UTC)

:) 'salright. Hope I didn't sound too grumpy (wading through thousands of stubs can do that to you...). If I did, just remember that I wouldn't have even mentioned it if you weren't doing good work by putting stub messages on in the first place! Grutness|^hello?

Stub granularity

Sorry I hadn't gotten around to replying to your earlier message. I had kinda noticed the rampant proliferation of ever-increasingly specific stub templates, but I haven't really tried to memorize them all, because I doubt I could. If I mostly editted specific areas, it would be one thing, but since the VAST majority of my edits are from newpages patrol, I end up editing pretty much every topic Wikipedia covers, so it would be pretty challenging to try to keep up with all the applicable stubs (included in just my last 25 article edits are education in Cameroon, New York free theater, an east Asian dispute, modern Indian politics, ancient Indian politics, pro soccer teams, amateur ice hockey, Canadian politican, Dutch poet, American composer, file-sharing software, mathematics,journalism, English geography, science fiction, and a couple music CDs). It also is hard because the specificity seems to vary pretty widely by topic and county/continent, etc.--after your last message I tried {{us-bio-stub} and a bunch of variations, but they all were red, so I stuck with just bio-stub. But I'm pretty sure I've seen country specific templates for other countries (Canada, I'm pretty sure). I can try to remember to use the US and UK geo-stubs, especially if I create any more San Jose-related articles, and I'm sure I'll learn the others as they continue to show up on newpages, but I think Wikipedia is better off with me occasionally using a less-than-ideal template than taking 30-60 minutes a day, for as long as it takes, trying to memorize every stub template, that I could spend editing. BTW, if I do go back to doing San Jose, a bunch of the redlinks are TV and radio stations--do you happen to know if they are also geo's, or some other specific stub? Niteowlneils 01:48, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

The "granularity" is only on geo-stubs. Almost all of them (all but two, I think) are in the form "Country-geo-stub", so memorising them should take about one minute in total (a full list is at the top of Category: Geography stubs). As far as I know Canada is the only country to have a separate bio-stub. The granularity has a good reason - up until a month ago the Geo-stubs category has over four thousand stubs in it - it was a mind-boggling task to try to find stubs if you were looking for one particular country. Now, thankfully, I've got it down to about 1200 (once it's below 1000, I'll stop making new subcategories... it should take about four more). It is good that you and others are putting geo-stub messages on, and they are definitely better than no stub at all - I think what's going to need to happen is for me (or someone) to go through all of Category: Geography stubs once every couple of weeks to sort out which of the new ones need to go elsewhere.

Thanks for the pointer to the Station-stub and other info. Hopefully you will be happy to know I've used {someplacespecific-geo-stub} several times the past few days. Today I took some pics of another San Jose attraction, so I guess I have at least one more new {US-geo-stub) in me. :) Niteowlneils 06:02, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Yet more geo-stubs

You're welcome! I'm a compulsive organizer. (Sometimes.) Do you have any great secrets for finding the articles for these? It seems like you're always finding the last few that I'm missing. -Aranel ("Sarah") 02:37, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Heh. Sounds like me - compulsive organiser sometimes. My "secret" is that when I started I painstakingly went through all the geostubs and made a spreadsheet of name and country - that's how I knew which countries had over 40 stubs. Every couple of days I compare it with the category to see what new ones have turned up. For the record, other than Serbia-Montenegro, Philippines and Thailand there are a handful of countries with 30 or more (mainly eastern European ones - Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, and the like). Just seemed to me that 4200 geo-stubs was too many for anyone to look through to see what articles from a particular country needed work. The number of un-sub-categorised geostubs is down to about 1000 now. Grutness|^hello?

Thanks for the tip about {{US-Geo-stub}}. I tried a couple of permutations, didn't guess the right one. -- hike395 04:31, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Hi Grutness, are you still going through all the Geo-stubs, changing them to their appropriate location stub? If so, you might be interested to know that I created a Netherlands-geo-stub template just now (Template:Netherlands-geo-stub). By the way, how do I get this template on Wikipedia:Template messages/Stubs?--Hippalus 18:07, Jan 28, 2005 (UTC)

See my answer on your talk page Grutness|^hello?

Heh, still getting used to the (good) idea of per-country geo-stubs... Stan 18:44, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)

fair enough... it'll take a while, and the parent category still works. The more people who use the separate categories, the less often the main one will need purging, that's all. Grutness|^hello?

Thanks for the note on country-geo-stubs Grutness. I'll make a point of trying to be country specific. --Bookandcoffee 02:01, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for the note on geo-stubs, though I have noticed that there are some geo-stubs that might be needed, either they aren't located in the geo catagory list or they don't exist...mainly these involve South American countries, I know for certain there is no stub for Peru, but simply having a stub for South America might be helpful. --- Thanks! Ganymead 20:59, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Hello, I changed geo-stub to BiH-geo-stub for Orahov Do. Thanks for noticing! --romanm (talk) 23:43, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Re: Kyle Chapman

"Removed category - Chapman is not a politician." "...despite standing for the mayroalty? He might vaguely qualify as a person."

I just thought that just because someone has run for a mayoral/parliamentary position doesn't make them a politician - I would consider that someone would have to have had political influence from within a position in order to qualify... although there are other people listed in the category that I wouldn't consider politicians as such (e.g. Michael Appleby (New Zealand) - but in this case he is a leader of a party that has existed for some time and has stood for election. I don't really mind either way if you want to add the category back :) porge 01:32, Jan 19, 2005 (UTC)

No, that's fair enough, and I'd agree that the definition politician does seem a bit vague - I'd be happier if it was only people who have held office who had that category. (And I'm still annoyed at my typo in the edit summary :) Grutness|^hello?

05:24, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Character-set problems

Turweston

May I ask why, in Turweston, Þorfrøthr was changed to <THORN>orfrøthr? It doesn't look right. -- Francs2000 | Talk [[]] 15:32, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Fixed after discussion on Village Pump Grutness|^hello?

<caron>

Why are you (or your browser) replacing valid diacriticized characters with x<caron>? Please don't do that, it breaks them. --Joy [shallot] 09:14, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I'm not doing it - my browser is doing it automatically, and there's nothing I can do about it (I wish there was!). The reason is that characters with carons on top are unsafe characters which stuff up with several different browsers. They shouldn't really be used for that reason (you'll probably find lots of people whose edits do the same - it's simply that I've been doing a lot of work on Eastern European geography lately). The same problem came up recently with the Icelandic letters thorn and eth being replaced in exactly the same way. Whatever the standard HTML write-up is (x&number;) should be used instead. Grutness|^hello?

09:25, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Yes, I know that they're vague, but at least they show up. When your commit subcategorizes a geo-stub and garbles 25 diacriticized characters due to a largely minor misfeature, it does more harm than good. IE and Firefox don't try to change s<caron> and z<caron> (the letters in question, which are both Latin1 and Latin2) every time they see them, please don't have your browser do it. --Joy [shallot]

I use IE with Latin1, so you're wrong there. As for "please don't have your browser do it", as I said, it does it automatically when it hits an unsafe character and cannot be stopped.

I used IE with the default settings (inherited from the page, so Latin 1), and it never did any such thing to the diacritics. It's possible that for some reason this also requires having different regional settings, although I can't see why. --Joy [shallot]

The problem only arises when people use unsafe characters, which should not be used. If the articles were correctly written, the problem would not have occurred, and would not occur again. Blaming me for a problem caused by an incorrectly formatted article doesn't get at the root of the problem. What would you rather I did, simply stop editing for fear of having someone else's bad typing show up after my work? Perhaps you'd prefer it if the articles remain lost among the myriad other stubs, rather than being easily found. Use html rather than unsafe characters. Grutness|^hello?

09:45, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Yes, I know that in an ideal world we'd never have this problem, but we do, and I'm suggesting that you handle it more gracefully, rather than ignoring it just because it's not completely your fault. I'm currently going through those edits and fixing them — those other people's browsers caused the problem, but I'm not cleaning up after them, I'm cleaning up after your browser. --Joy [shallot] 09:54, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

(a) Until you brought the subject up, I didn't know that anything had gone wrong with the edits in question. All I was doing was changing stub messages, and didn't notice any changes to the articles themselves.

(b) I'd love to be able to fix it myself, but because of other people's sloppy work, I'm unable to do so - if I open up any of those files, they will go back to having <caron> written on them.

(c) In the last week, I have edited some 1700 files. Which files need fixing? You've never mentioned any individual files, so even if I could fix them - which I can't, for the reasons given above - I wouldn't know which ones needed fixing. Presumably they are some of the Hungarian, Romanian, Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Croatian, Russian, Serbian, Bosnian, or Polish geo- or bio-stubs I've been looking at, but which ones?

(d) I am simply pointing out that when the files are fixed, they should be fixed properly, and not with the kludged unsafe characters.

(e) I was responding gracefully until your attack on my work. You asked me not to do something, I replied that it was my browser's fault and I wished there was something I could do about it. If my later replies have seemed ungraceful, I apologise, but your sentence When your commit subcategorizes a geo-stub and garbles 25 diacriticized characters due to a largely minor misfeature, it does more harm than good. was ungraceful to start with. What is it you claim I have committed? Grutness|^hello?

Well, for example these:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sibenik-Knin_county&diff=9820957&oldid=9809794

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Poljica&diff=9817855&oldid=9809753

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dubrovnik-Neretva_county&diff=9821235&oldid=9809385

I fixed two out of those three, another user did the third. It's likely that there are others, too.

I can see how these few breakages may seem insignificant compared to the other two thousand, but it's not like you couldn't have used a bot that has been proven to work and avoid this kind of collateral damage... that would be a graceful way to handle this IE bug, that's what I meant (being graceful in replies is nice, but it can't replace doing the right thing). --Joy [shallot]

The breakages don't seem insignificant - I'm sorry they happened. What I'm saying is that since I don't know which pages they were on, I'd need to check a LOT of files to find where they were, and even then I wouldn't be able to do anything about it.

Since I've no idea how to make bots, all I can do is edit by hand. And if my browser breaks these pages, it would probably have done the same with a bot. Personally, I would have thought that personally going back and fixing things would be much more graceful than getting an automated routine to do it for you. Grutness|^hello?

gruntness what are you regional settings? and what is your version of IE? my guess is you are using a local code page other than latin1 or latin2 and IE is doing a round trip conversion to that code page for some reason. I would think the first thing to try would be using another browser to edit wikipedia. Plugwash 17:13, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

That's Grutness, thank you :)! I'm using IE 5.2 for Mac. My default character set is Western Latin1, although when working on articles from east of the Adriatic I often change that to Central European Latin2. When this problem arose I went back and looked at several pages using these and several other settings (including Central European Mac and Universal Alphabet UTF-8), but the problems remained. Grutness|^hello?

With regard to the signature, that idea occurred to me, too :) but I am reluctant to do it, because the shallot note is just for backward compatibility (that was my alternative nickname used here previously) and it should go away in a few months time. --Joy [shallot]

Hello Grutness, thank you for your message regarding fixing special characters. I was glad to help. I will try to use HTML entities next time instead of unsafe characters, although they are much more difficult to edit. Do you know about any simple way? -- Brona 03:40, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Sadly no - what I did is I made up a WP document with the most used unicode codes on it for things like Ž - I keep it handy and cut and paste from it when doing Eastern European articles. I still haven't managed to find a way to do y+acute - that one glitches even when I use the unicode codes. Grutness|^hello?

Wikipedia:WikiProject Cricket

Hi

I see you're a fellow cricket-lover. I thought I'd invite you to Wikipedia:WikiProject Cricket, a corner of Wikipedia where cricket-loving Wikipedians can chat about what they're doing on cricket articles, etc., ask for advice on linking in their articles, discuss how England will regain the Ashes this year (ok, I made that last one up). You're more than welcome to come and join. All the best, jguk 00:06, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Hm. Interesting. I might wander over there occasionally, although I do very few cricket articles (I have been doing some, though). Thanks for that. Grutness|^hello?

North Taranaki Bight

In the entry for North Taranaki Bight, I find the following:

With stunning originality, it is matched by the South Taranaki Bight to the south of Cape Egmont.

I'm very unclear on what this means. Does it suggest that South Taranaki Bight is nearly identical (a match to) North Taranaki Bight? If so, what does "stunning originality" mean? If the two Bights are not more similar than any two randomly selected bights on average, does "stunning originality" refer to the naming? And if so, is the nomenclature worthy of comment in an encyclopedia article since such a wry observation can be made of any two north-x and south-x geographical name pairs?

Jeff Medkeff 01:09, Jan 25, 2005 (UTC)

Originally it read, "With stunning originality, this name is echoed by..." I must have dropped part of it in a rewrite and not noticed the rest. Grutness|^hello?

01:12, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Nice to be in an area where no-one is likely to leap in and scribble NPOV by gut reaction against "stunning originality". -- RHaworth 01:23, 2005 Jan 25 (UTC)

:) true... Grutness|^hello?

Thanks - I've got it now. Jeff Medkeff 08:46, Jan 26, 2005 (UTC)

Waltham, New Zealand

Then again, I've just discovered Opawa. What other suburbs did you do at that time, Alan? Grutness|^hello? 22:54, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I cannot recall which ones I had created. It looks like an unfinished project! I have not even added by own suburb of St Albans. Alan Liefting 10:52, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I went back through your contrib history. I think they were the only two I didn't catch when putting Chch suburbs in the Christchurch urban districts category. The problem was probably that the "What links here" pages only list 500 links, so when I checked what linked to Christchurch (which is how I found the rest) those two must have missed the cutoff. Sorry if I sounded annoyed - just caught me at a bad moment :) Grutness|^hello?

I will leave you to do the geography of NZ since you are doing a wonderfully thorough job. My token stubs are embarrassingly stubbie! . I will concentrate on NZ botany which needs work to give a little balance to NZ articles on Wikipedia. Alan Liefting 11:14, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the compliment! I'm taking a rest from the NZ articles at the moment, but still concentrating on the geography. I will get back to them later though... there are one or two that definitely need work. Keep up the good work with the plants! Grutness|^hello?

Myth Stubs

Thanks for the mythology stub format on the Enkidu article.... At what point is is fair to remove a stub from a stubbed article, and who decides? I'll continue working on the Enkidu entry, since I'm interested in Sumerian mythology and the Epic of Gilgamesh in particular -- but I am interested in knowing at what point an entry moves from being a stub to being a full article. Andrew Watt 23:26, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Good question... somewhere in the Wikipedia rules there's probably an exact definition of when an article stops bein a stub, but I don't think anyone follows and hard-and-fast rule. Anything that is under a paratraph is definitely a stub, but many things far longer which don't cover all aspects of a topic are stubs as well. I tend to think that if an article fills the "Editing window" twice and isn't simply a list of links then it's no longer a stub, but it's all pretty arbitrary and will also depend on the subject. Enkidu is already close to the two window limit, but at least some more is needed for it to be a well-rounded article.

I guess what I'm really saying is that common sense should tell you when an article feels useful enough to be called a "real" article, and when that happens then you can feel free to remove the stub template.

One final point, I wouldn't remove a stub template unless the article has at least one category, otherwise it might be difficult to locate for editors in future (In the case of the Enkidu article, it's already in Category: Sumerian mythology, so that's not a concern). Grutness|^hello?

This file is an archive - please do not add new discussion here - add it to my Talk page