User talk:80N

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Welcome!
I find that activating the preference "Add pages you edit to your watchlist" makes for a more dynamic Wikipedia experience. Ground 03:25, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Welcome to the "Every Place On Earth Deserves An Article" Club
Thanks for your email. I hope you don't mind me replying here, it's just that my email inbox is like a minefield at the moment, and I go there as infrequently as possible.

The basic sources I used for the Buckinghamshire articles were:
 * The Oxford Dictionary of Place Names
 * Genuki (which admittedly has good info about Bucks on it, don't know about Rutland though)
 * A decent road atlas

In every article I used the same format and stuck to it. The format basically went like:


 * Place is a (hamlet/village/town) in Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom. It is located (distance from nearest big towns and direction). Other important facts about place in first paragraph.


 * The village name is (whatever language) in origin and means whatever. In the Domesday Book of 1086 (or whenever the place name first appeared) it was known as whatever.


 * Brief history of place and other interesting facts, written succinctly and in good prose.


 * Any information about nearby hamlets, rivers, or other facts not already mentioned.


 * An external links section including the place website if it has one.


 * if the article is less than four paragraphs of text.


 * Category:Hamlets in Buckinghamshire, Category:Villages in Buckinghamshire or Category:Towns in Buckinghamshire as appropriate.

The other sources that I used were books from my own personal library (I'm a local historian) or stuff from other internet sites is OK as long as you're not copying word for word and you include the site in the ext links section. Other than that it was done by the seat of my pants mostly. -- Francs2000 | Talk 02:06, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)

The Humanity Disaster Recovery Plan
There are any number of events that could cause a significant reduction in our current level of civilisation. An asteroid, avian flu, SARS, AIDS, nuclear winter, germ warfare are a few that we can imagine. There are almost certainly many, many more that we can not.

If 98% of the human race were to be wiped out over a short period of time, where is the disaster recovery plan that the remaining 2% could use to rebuild civilisation? There are many things that we take for granted that would quickly become impossible in a world with electric power, access to refined oil, communications, supply chains, etc. Chaos and a collapse of civilisation would be a swift outcome.

In the middle ages much knowledge was recovered by studying and reading texts from the ancient Romans and Greeks. Following an apocalypse today what sources would be available to the survivors and their descendants? We are a very information rich society today and so there would be a lot of material, but increasingly it is only available in an online form - which might become totally inaccessible post apocalypse. Additionally, the information that would be available may not be well structured, nor may it be geographically local and may be useless if some key element is missing. A detailed circuit diagram for a Pentium processor would be totally useless if there was no information about how to manufacture silicon chips, or even how to make electricity.

What is needed is a disaster recovery plan for Humanity that would allow civilisation to be bootstapped from a very low level all the way back up to today. In the worst case scenario a plan may take decades or even generations to complete, but without it humanity might as well be starting back in the stone age.

The key elements are:
 * A plan.
 * Geographically diverse. Civilisation might need to restart anywhere in the world.
 * Complete. There cannot be any fundamental gaps in the knowledge recovery process. If one of the steps requires fire, then its no use assuming that a box of matches will be handy.
 * Resilient. Recovery may be in an adverse or hostile environment.  How to cope without sunlight for five years.
 * Obvious and accessible. The survivors must be able to recognize the DR plan when the see it even if they were unaware of it before the event.  And equally they must be able to find it and get to it.  Its no good if the only copy is stored on the far side of the moon.

What's all this got to do with Wikipedia? Well it seems to me that Wikipedia has the potential for fulfulling significant parts (but by no means all) of the requirements of our DR plan. I'm even wondering if the other parts could be marshalled under (yet) another Wiki project.

Comments?

80N 18:11, Feb 23, 2005 (UTC)

Election templates
Hiya 80N, nice job on the templates, I have just one comment - there are already many template pages existing for the colours of the various UK parties, see for example British politics/party colours/Liberal Democrat. Something needs to be done to either use these templates, or change these templates to use your version. Talrias (t | e | c) 18:16, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)
 * Talrias, Thank you. I agree about the colour templates. The /meta/color template contains just the color name (eg gold) whereas the British politics/party colours/Liberal Democrat contains , so I'm contemplating changing these to bgcolor="" , if it works. 80N 18:28, Apr 25, 2005 (UTC)


 * I don't think they should be subpages of article namespace - since they are templates they should be in Template:something. Maybe just Template:Labour Party (UK) colour would be OK. What do you think? Talrias (t | e | c) 18:39, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)


 * What happens to sub-pages when an article is renamed/moved? If they get moved as well then that's a good reason for having them in the article namespace.  I kind of think they belong with the article anyway.  While they are referenced using the template mechanism these pages contain data, not templates, and so I don't really feel they belong in the Template namespace.  Do you know of any precendents that would help us decide? 80N 18:48, Apr 25, 2005 (UTC)


 * Well, they are more templates than articles, in my view. Perhaps you could ask at the village pump. Talrias (t | e | c) 18:50, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)


 * My suggestion is to use Template:Political Parties//color (and /shortname too) - This way it's in the right namespace and it's not limited to just the UK -- Joolz 22:26, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Please stop creating constituency articles
I've already got it in hand, and you are using different names, leading to duplication. Your Aberdeen North duplicates the real Aberdeen North (UK Parliament constituency). Your Banff and Buchan (constituency) duplicates the real Banff and Buchan (UK Parliament constituency). (Notice the naming convention. This is because there are also parallel "(Scottish Parliament constituency)" articles.)  By the end of the week, Wikipedia should have an article for every constituency in the 2005 election, as listed at Results of 2005 United Kingdom General Election, ready for the election results. Please wait until then. Uncle G 03:38, 2005 Apr 26 (UTC) Please see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject UK Parliamentary Constituencies/Progress for an explanations I have made to the progress page. Thanks Greg Robson 19:06, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)
 * UncleG, I've been working from a different list (at WikiProject UK Parliamentary Constituencies/Progress). I'll bring this up on the project page as I have no idea which is correct.  There's a lot to do in only a few days so we really don't want to be working at cross purposes. 80N 08:32, Apr 26, 2005 (UTC)
 * The lists at WikiProject UK Parliamentary Constituencies/Progress and List of Parliamentary constituencies in the United Kingdom are both wrong for 2005. I've just completed the task of going through them and checking their bluelinks, which is why I don't want you to create any more, and I've seen a number of errors.  In at least one instance, for example, the only reason that the article is bluelinked on the UK lists is because the Canadian constituency article project has created an article about a Canadian constituency of the same name.  I forsee the same thing arising in more cases in the future, especially if the Australians, New Zealanders, and Indians get into the act.  This is one of the several reasons that I'm creating the new articles with the "(UK Parliament constituency)" suffix straight off the bat.  Uncle G 13:37, 2005 Apr 26 (UTC)
 * Uncle G, personally, I really don't care what the pages are called but I do know that this can get to be a hot issue. I think general Wikipedia policy is to not qualify the name unless it is ambiguous.  Hence Airdrie and Shotts would be OK, but Ashford (constituency) to avoid conflict with Ashford.  You might want to gain some consensus before you go too far.  80N 13:53, Apr 26, 2005 (UTC)
 * That might not be the best of examples. If Airdrie and Shotts is a Scottish Parliament constituency as well as a Parliament of the United Kingdom constituency, then it would be best as a disambiguation page, as Aberdeen South is.  Also note that there are a lot of things to conflict with.  One of the things that I noticed when fixing up redirects is that several parliamentary constituency articles were referenced by pages talking about football teams. Uncle G 01:12, 2005 Apr 27 (UTC)
 * Now I'm willing to create all 500-odd missing 2005 constituency articles within the next few days. I regard getting the 2005 constituency articles created as the highest priority task at the moment, so that we have a complete system in place for our 2005 election news coverage.  (The old 2001 constituencies that don't exist any more can have articles created at leisure afterwads.)  You're welcome to follow me around at Special:Contributions/Uncle G and add the 2001 data to the articles.  (Better: The boilerplate that I'm using categorizes the articles into Category:UK Parliamentary constituencies, so you could look at related changes there, instead.)  We can fix the links in List of Parliamentary constituencies in the United Kingdom and WikiProject UK Parliamentary Constituencies/Progress afterwards. Uncle G 13:37, 2005 Apr 26 (UTC)
 * You lead, I'll glady follow. 80N 13:53, Apr 26, 2005 (UTC)
 * I've finished wikifying the Wikinews article. The creation of constituency articles in earnest starts tomorrow. Uncle G 01:12, 2005 Apr 27 (UTC)
 * That's Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales done, and ready for you to play with. England next.  Uncle G 02:11, 2005 Apr 28 (UTC)
 * Note that my boilerplate differs from yours inasmuch as I have an at the top.  A lot, most likely almost all, of the Wales constituences require disambiguation articles along the lines of Neath (disambiguation).  I've done some, such as Vale of Glamorgan (disambiguation) and Rhondda (disambiguation), but there are a lot that I haven't done.  The same is going to be true of England, where there are lots of conflicting towns, boroughs, rivers, and football teams. Uncle G 02:11, 2005 Apr 28 (UTC)

Template:Infobox England place
Hello. Thanks for your message. I tried using this for Poyle but it is in a Unitary Authority so the borough / admin. county are one entity. I would suggest creating another template for places in UAs (or making the admin county field optional somehow). Also the district field needs to be changed so you can enter 'Borough' for those districts which are boroughs, metropolitan boroughs or London boroughs. I guess that isn't so difficult - just a case of adding a further field. Kind regards, Mrsteviec 08:41, 1 May 2005 (UTC)

Erroneous disambiguation headers
I notice that you have reformatted several hundred articles. Unfortunately the disambiguation headers you have placed at the top of each one are wrong. For an article entitled Upper Twisleton (UK Parliament constituency), then the correct disambiguation header should point to Upper Twisleton (UK Parliament constituency) (disambiguation), and then only if the article title Upper Twisleton (UK Parliament constituency) is ambiguous, which it clearly isn't.

Pointing to a disambiguation page Upper Twisleton (disambiguation), is not only unnecessary, but also almost certainly incorrect. If there is an ambiguity in Upper Twisleton, then the most likely title for the disambiguation page is Upper Twisleton, not Upper Twisleton (disambiguation). And even more likely, given the compound nature of many constituency names, there is no ambiguity at all, and no disambiguation page exists.

For concrete examples, look at what you have done to my local constituencies. Reading East (UK Parliament constituency) claims there is a disambiguation page at Reading East (disambiguation), but in fact no other article about anything called Reading East exists, so there is no disambiguation page. On the other hand, Reading West (UK Parliament constituency) claims there is a disambiguation page at Reading West (disambiguation). This does not exist, but in fact there are two articles on Reading West subjects (the other is Reading West railway station), and the two have long been disambiguated by the dab page Reading West.

I havn't corrected these, as I'm hoping the reformating was done using a bot you can simply rerun. If so, I suggest you do so, and simply remove the from the articles. -- Chris j wood 22:48, 2 May 2005 (UTC)
 * Chris, see Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_UK_Parliamentary_Constituencies/Progress for a rather extensive discussion on this matter. Sorry to have messed up your constituencies, we are trying to get a lot of stuff done before Thursday.  I'm sure Uncle G will sort it all out in due course. 80N 22:54, May 2, 2005 (UTC)
 * Yup. I've taken a short break to set up the WikiNews coverage for the British Columbia general election, and disambiguation is next on the agenda. I might have to sleep sometime, though.  &#9786; Uncle G 22:58, 2005 May 2 (UTC)
 * Ah. I had no idea such a project was underway; my interest in the constituencies is from a local history POV rather than because of any particular interest in UK parliamentary subjects. In cleaning up the Reading constituency articles, I made a change to the Template:Election box begin, so as to make the different election results show up in the contents (see Reading East (UK Parliament constituency) for effect. If you don't like it, revert it. -- Chris j wood 00:06, 3 May 2005 (UTC)
 * Chris, I have, reluctantly, reverted the template for a couple of reasons. a) It is used in a lot of places and the impact of adding a section header may be detrimental on some pages, b) there is a techical glitch in Wikipedia that causes the Edit button to open the wrong section in some cases when there is a section header inside a template.  If you really want a different look then you could always create Template:Election box begin2 to suit your needs, although I'd advise staying away from having a section heading inside the template. 80N 10:45, May 3, 2005 (UTC)
 * Yes, I'd just noticed the edit glitch myself. A shame. -- Chris j wood 12:48, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

2001 election results
I found the code pages for 2001 election results you created very useful. Would you be able to replicate this work for earlier elections? thanks, Warofdreams 10:17, 3 May 2005 (UTC)
 * It's possible. It depends on having a good enough source and a small bit of time to process the data.  Once this election is over I'll do a bit of research and see what I can do. 80N 10:20, May 3, 2005 (UTC)

North East Fife
I noticed you added the result for North East Fife (UK Parliament constituency) in 2001, yet the article states it was created for the 2005 election. I know that the boundaries were redrawn, but if the name has remained the same and the area similar, it hardly makes it a new constituency. Do you have an earlier date for the creation of the constituency? Chris talk back 00:08, 8 May 2005 (UTC)
 * I really don't know anything more than what is there. The boundaries commission web-site might be able to help.  80N 11:45, May 8, 2005 (UTC)

Template talk:Infobox England place
I've posted a suggestion for improvement on the above talk page. Please let me know if you have any comments. Bhoeble 01:05, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

UK geog COTM
Thanks for the note re UK geo COTM - after editing Rutland I thought I'd better sign up. &mdash; Rod talk 21:28, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

Expired Mapping Party notices
Hi 80N - good to meet you last weekend. I removed one of the banners for the Mapping Parties, and then wasn't sure if that was what you'd intended, so reverted it... There are a few for past events...  Cheers, --Leigh 13:41, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Yeah, they should be removed. Shouldn't leave stale stuff lying around.  80N 23:55, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

WikiProject Munich
Would you be interested in helping out atWikiProject Munich? Kingjeff 21:17, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

MfD nomination of WikiProject OpenStreetMap
I've nominated WikiProject OpenStreetMap, a page you created, for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; please participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject OpenStreetMap and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes ( ~ ). You are free to edit the content of WikiProject OpenStreetMap during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you.  SLSB  talk  •  contrib   18:49, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

Nomination of Cardiff North (geographical area) for deletion
A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Cardiff North (geographical area) is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Articles for deletion/Cardiff North (geographical area) until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. Sionk (talk) 22:22, 14 August 2013 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:49, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

October 2017
Hello, I'm Zackmann08. Thank you for your recent contributions to Harlequin syndrome. I noticed that when you added the image to the infobox, you added it as a thumbnail. In the future, please do not use thumbnails when adding images to an infobox (see WP:INFOBOXIMAGE). What does this mean? Well in the infobox, when you specify the image you wish to use, instead of doing it like this:

SomeImage.jpg

Instead just supply the name of the image. So in this case you can simply do:

SomeImage.jpg.

There will then be a separate parameter for the image caption such as Some image caption. Please note that this is a generic form message I am leaving on your page because you recently added a thumbnail to an infobox. The specific parameters for the image and caption may be different for the infobox you are using! Please consult the Template page for the infobox being used to see better documentation. Thanks! Zackmann08 (Talk to me/What I been doing) 23:24, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

Maps for Surrey Hills AONB
Many years ago you had some involvement with a mapping party. Any chance of a useful map of the perimeter of the area to add to the article?SovalValtos (talk) 18:45, 23 June 2020 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Election box end
Template:Election box end has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Gonnym (talk) 14:08, 12 July 2020 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Election box metadata
Template:Election box metadata has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. Gonnym (talk) 01:55, 13 December 2021 (UTC)