User talk:AlanBarrett

Wrench
Alan, sorry about overwriting your changes to the Wrench page. I concur whole heartedly with your position. Please check and make sure I retreived all of your change. Drover

Alan, in reference to the Wrench page, I moved the image to the Pipe Wrench page in order to give some information for it. I would not be opposed to accomdating it on the old page however. Another thought, I'm thinking of changing the section Common Wrenches to Common Wrenches/Spanners but do not know if Sockets would fall under that section or Other Common Wrenches. Would you have an idea? Drover 21:51, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)

at the Opentask .....
Hello, AlanBarrett, I don't understand the codes you've added to the Template:Opentask, but I like the way the frame keeps it neat and tidy. Thank you. I've widened it a little bit (I think that all I've done) so that the lines don't get truncated. May I ask how you decide on the dimensions ? I hope the template is not too wide now. -- PFHLai 21:59, 2004 Aug 28 (UTC)


 * See my reply at Template talk:Opentask. &mdash;AlanBarrett 10:07, 29 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Tables
Thanks for the help on the tables on the Military of the United Kingdom. To further demonstrate my lack of understanding of tables, I found this <>> in Palme d'Or but can not figure out what is causing it. Any ideas? Rmhermen 03:40, Sep 20, 2004 (UTC)
 * Fixed. There was a " |-'' " instead of "|-" between 1955 and 1956.  However, my browser damaged the non-ascii characters in 1946; can you fix that?  &mdash;AlanBarrett 09:07, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)
 * Thanks and fixed. Rmhermen 13:03, Sep 20, 2004 (UTC)

Template section numbering now screws up TOC
Please see my followup comment at Wikipedia talk:How to edit a page. - dcljr 17:55, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)

aggressive edit summary
"Reinstate alt="" which was recently removed by Netoholic. Please do not hide changes like this under a misleading edit summary like "formatting".)"

Its usually considered bad form to say something so accusatory. You may disagree with the changes, you may even revert them, but edit summaries go into the permanent record of the article history. Use the edit summary to describe your changes, and use Talk page for your justification and commentary directed to a specific editor. Take a read of Edit summary if you think this isn't a community standard. -- Netoholic @ 20:11, 2004 Oct 30 (UTC)


 * I do think your edit summary at Template:Wikiquote was misleading, because you did not simply change the formatting. For short once-off complaints, it's much more convenient to use the edit summary than anything else.  As soon as I realised it was not a once-off thing, I commented on your user page.  &mdash;AlanBarrett 20:29, 30 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * Note that I did not say (or think) that your edit summary was deliberately misleading, just that it was misleading, and I wished you would describe your changes better. Sorry if you took it as an accusation.  &mdash;AlanBarrett 20:38, 30 Oct 2004 (UTC)

vim
Hi Alan, thanks for the tip on global search and replace! I was wondering how to do that... which is why I used that dodgy macro hack to fixup wikilinks. I'll use that command in future - much easier! Maybe I should use sed... hmmm. Don't know if I can be bothered. - Ta bu shi da yu 12:17, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC)

imatinib
Hi Alan, the purpose of the  tags is mainly for Gecko-based browser (Mozilla, Firefox, Netscape, Camino, etc) which, for some reason, don't seem to break at hyphens in any of the longer IUPAC names I've entered into Wikipedia drug infoboxes; so the drugbox can sometimes become wider than the entire screen. Gecko-based browsers do break at spaces, though, which is why I had those spaces in the name - but the  solution probably looks more accurate to more people. It seems to work out okay this way for Internet Explorer, but it does look a bit strange in Safari - probably just needs a bit of tweaking with regards to where the linebreak is placed. I haven't had a chance to test it out in Opera yet unfortunately. Techelf 13:09, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)
 * See my response at User talk:Techelf. &mdash;AlanBarrett 16:01, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Requests for adminship/GeneralPatton
Hello Sir, you wrote: "Oppose. Does not make proper use of edit summaries. &mdash;AlanBarrett 16:59, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)"


 * I really can't see how can that affect my performance as an administrator as I primarily focus on CONTENT and regularly talk the things through on talk. If you want an example you can take a look at my Erich von Manstein article that is now a FA, Battle of the Bulge article also a FA, or the David Irving article. As an administrator I can assure you I will do my choirs by the book. GeneralPatton 18:56, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)
 * "By the book" includes making proper use of edit summaries to describe your changes and the reasons for them. If you can't do it now, I don't expect you to magically improve if you become an admin.  &mdash;AlanBarrett 19:07, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * Sir, do you really think that one thing is more important than contributions to articles? I mostly focus on adding actual content, but I can assure you I&#8217;d certainly describe all my actions as an administrator and voluntarily resign if I failed to do so. In fact, I can promise you to start adding editing summary to everything I do, if you want me to. I always respond to input and suggestions by other users, I just never saw this as a major issue until now. In fact, if you give me your vote, and I fail to make one single editing summary on any content I add, I'd also voluntarily resign. GeneralPatton 23:24, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * Good edit summaries make it much easier for people who watch the Special:Recent changes page, or people who have articles on their watchlist, to see why you made a change. If I agree with the change that you describe in your edit summary, and if I trust you not to write misleading edit summaries, then I can save the time that it would otherwise have taken for me to check your work by viewing the diff.  Checking people's work is an important part of quality control (which is much more than just checking for vandalism), and editors should strive to make it easy for others to check their work.
 * Good edit summaries also make it much easier for people in the future to research how a page changed over time. For example, I recently wanted to find out when a date was changed in the Che Guevara article.  If the person who changed the date had said "changed date of birth" in the edit summary, my work would have been easy; instead, I had to view many diffs between different versions until I found the one I wanted.
 * Thank you for promising to start using edit summaries. I will consider changing my vote after a few days.
 * &mdash;AlanBarrett 07:26, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC)
 * Thank you sir for you time and discussing this with me. I will try to do my best. GeneralPatton 23:33, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC)

The Humungous Image Tagging Project
Hi. You've helped with the 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)


 * We'll have to agree to differ on that. --Tagishsimon (talk)

Wiktionary
Oooh, thanks for the pointer. Noel (talk) 01:27, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Template:Stub
Hi AlanBarrett, Template:Stub has been unprotected as per your request on WP:RFPP. Please make any edits to it that you want to now. Regards, silsor 01:02, Jan 5, 2005 (UTC)
 * I have tried many times. I seem to be able to edit other articles, but whenever I edit Template:stub, I get an error.  Database errors from the Wikipedia PHP scripts, "Sorry we have a problem" errors from the Wikipedia squids, timeouts from local web cache at my side, etc.  I have tried at least 20 times (probably more like 50 times) over the past 3 days.   All I need to do is change the ugly alt="Wiki letter w" to alt=" ".  &mdash;AlanBarrett 13:05, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)
 * Yay! 17 days and several hundred attempts later, Wikipedia has finally allowed me to edit the page.  I hope that this is an indication that the servers are no longer quite so overloaded.  &mdash;AlanBarrett 06:48, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Blocks
I know of no way to block an anon and let others who use the proxy to edit. The user was repeatedly vandalizing last night. I'll check to see if the block is still there, and if it is, I'll unblock it. RickK 20:36, Jan 25, 2005 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I wasn't sure whether it was possible or not.  &mdash;AlanBarrett /talk 21:07, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * Alan, I'm sorry you got caught in the crossfire. For your information there was no vandalism from this IP.  I was simply removing some of the old messages in my own talk page.  With all the old messages it often confuses newbies when they see a lot of old messages that are not directed at them personally. 168.209.97.34 08:16, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Alt tags on metapicstub
You removed the tag with this edit. Could you direct me to the pages on which you found the problem and we can fix the alt text to something more suitable: I don't like having blank tooltips pop up, and I don't think it makes Wikipedia more usable. --Phil | Talk 08:36, Jan 31, 2005 (UTC)


 * For example, Template:Bio-stub used to say "David's face This biographical article is a stub" (when viewed in a text browser), and that isn't even a proper sentence. The guideline is: If an image has a caption, then choose a good caption, and don't worry about bad alt text or bad title text; else choose good alt text, and don't worry about bad title text.  See Alternative_text_for_images and en:Wikipedia_talk:Extended_image_syntax. The real problem is that there's only one place in the image syntax to specify what should be three different things: a caption (displayed below the image), alt text (displayed by text browsers instead of the image), and a title (displayed as a tooltip by many graphical browsers).  You just can't get good tooltips without getting bad alt text, and the alt text is more important for accessibility, so the tooltips suffer.  There is a feature request on file asking for the three things to be individually controllable.  &mdash;AlanBarrett 17:30, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)
 * The above comment has been copied to Template talk:MetaPicstub. Further discussion should probably go there.  &mdash;AlanBarrett 19:34, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Cantus
I noticed your comments on the talk page of Cantus's new Images unsuitable for inline display. I'd also appreciate if you could look at my Template deletion proposal for his template:offensiveimage which he's been trying out lately on one or two articles.

The discussion is here.

--Tony Sidaway|Talk 19:11, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)

meta:Www.wikipedia.org portal/Catherine
Hi. I just reverted your last edit on the page, since it messed up all the foreign characters. Not sure if this is on my computer only, but i just rolled it back to the last version, which works fine. Please check and if necessary re-introduce the modification you wanted to do. -- Chris 73 Talk 00:26, Feb 3, 2005 (UTC)
 * Thank you. I left a note on the talk page asking for somebody to revert, because I was using a browser that messed up some of the non-ascii characters.  &mdash;AlanBarrett 08:40, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I have now unprotected the pages Www.wikipedia.org template and Www.wikipedia.org portal so you can work on it if you like to do. I am garding those pages. I am now online whit Jabber; walter@jabber.belnet.be, ICQ 85153582, MSN wvermeir@hotmail.com and IRC freenode user "WalterBE" in #Meta if i need to do something. --Walter 19:54, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Sandbot and moved pages
What does Sandbot do if one of the pages it wants to clean has been moved? Does it follow the redirect and edit the new target page, or does it edit the redirect page itself, or does it give up and report an error? Sandbox was moved to Creep (Radiohead) today, and I wondered what Sandbot would do I think that reporting an error would be best. &mdash;AlanBarrett 07:43, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)
 * It doesn't care. It would forcibly replace the sandbox heading anyway.  Although dealing with the history is something else. -- AllyUnion (talk) 08:05, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Unwise arbcom policy change
I did not write those proposed amendments to the policy. I strongly oppose them as they are written. If you are aware of anyone else who thinks I wrote them, please correct them and note to them that I strongly oppose them.

I did note that there was merit in splitting personal and official capacity. However, I oppose all four of the proposals which make the arbcom follow the directions of and report to the Foundation instead of this community. It's a massive and, IMO, very unwise change. Jamesday 13:18, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Alt text for images
I responed your comment on my talk page. --Cool Cat Talk 21:57, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

RFA/you -- would that be amenable to you?
Alan, I am not sure if you would appreciate a nomination for Mop+Bucket. Would that be onerous for you? I am well aware that public scrutiny is not pleasant for many of us, me included. Please do not worry if you are not ready to answer; I am taking this action at the request of others, namely Taxman. If you were to agree then I would simply be following the actions templated by BD2412. I would also be relying on their advice to ensure a reasonable chance at success for the outcome of RFA/you. If you want a higher probability of success, then we could probably work something out to increase the chances, but it would be a learning process. ---Ancheta Wis 21:24, 27 December 2005 (UTC)


 * I haven't been active at all the past few months, so I suspect that an RFA would fail. However, if I do become active again, I would appreciate a nomination.  Thanks.  &mdash;AlanBarrett 18:13, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Language order on www.wikipedia.org
Hiya, I recall that you helped sort out the page, and particularly the ordering of the languages on http://www.wikipedia.org. What's the order based on? Mutante is currently trying to write a script that would create this page automatically (thereby making the numbers a bit more up to date) but he's struggling with this issue. Can you please help? GeorgeStepanek\talk 08:39, 21 March 2006 (UTC)


 * The sort order didn't ever make sense to me, and I didn't change it. So I don't think I can help, sorry.  (My personal preference would be to sort by the language code.)  &mdash;AlanBarrett 18:17, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Country
What country do you live in? I read your comment about not knowing what Nickelodeon was on the Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide talk page and was wondering where you could possibly live. Oh, and is Alan Barrett your name? Because if it is, wouldn't you live in America or Britain where they get the Nickelodeon television channel? I thought the channel was world wide! Please respond on my talk page. Thefreakshow 22:47, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
 * on your talk page. &mdash;AlanBarrett 17:24, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Possibly unfree Image:Cosmos_tubulaire.jpg
An image that you uploaded or altered, Image:Cosmos_tubulaire.jpg, has been listed at Possibly unfree images because its copyright status is disputed. If the image's copyright status cannot be verified, it may be deleted. You may find more information on the image description page. You are welcome to add comments to its entry at if you are interested in it not being deleted. Thank you. MECU ≈ talk 13:51, 15 April 2008 (UTC)
 * The image was originally uploaded by Anthere, who said that it was licenced under the GFDL (see the notice at the top of her user page). She was very upset last time it got deleted without anybody informing her.  See  that I made on her talk page when I uploaded another copy that I found on a mirror site.  &mdash;AlanBarrett 20:21, 27 April 2008 (UTC)
 * you know... I gave up :-) The person who gave them knew nothing about licenses, and at that time, most of us did not really insist on this. She said "yes, take it, do whatever you want with it"; and I am sure she would see them fine under a free licence. But she did not tell me "yes, put it under the GFDL", so I do not dare put words in her mouth. Since there was a second spree of deletions, I gave up. I think there are probably now much better photos for these 3-4 flowers. So, it went down the drain. That's okay.
 * But I *really* appreciate you taking the time to drop me a word. That was very nice. Anthere (talk)

Herman Hoeneveld
Hi Alan, Thank you for your criticism. I did not take "the Herman Hoeneveld note" out but placed it in a more appropriate context: in the chapter Articles. But we can also keep the note in in the chapter biography/career and just mention it twice. PF (Professionele Fotografie) Magazine is a very good magazine. I am still wrestling with getting the copyrights and the name of the photographer right in the picture box otherwise they are going to delete the picture!. The photographer is Piere Ferron and the copyrights are with Errol Sawyer. I would also like to ad some images in the chapter career and I wonder how I can exactly determine their size and place. Kindly provide your advise. Username: Mathilde Fischer —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mathilde Fischer (talk • contribs) 04:03, 18 January 2009 (UTC)
 * I will reply at User talk:Mathilde Fischer. —AlanBarrett (talk) 09:02, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

Removal tag?
Hi Allen. After getting the notes of Herman Hoeneveld in the right position, I hope that you can remove your tag as it is jeopardizing the integrity of the article of Errol Sawyer. I have a lot of problems with another editor Barrett? But I am not the only one it seems. As I am an academic, I apply academic rules. The weak side of Wikipedia is, that anyone can edit it without any qualification. Also people who are only interested in picture models and fashion like Mister Barrett. But Errol Sawyer is not a fashion photographer so why does he want to destroy him? Mathilde Fischer (talk) 14:36, 20 January 2009 (UTC)


 * I assume that you are talking about the Errol Sawyer article, and about the articleissues tag that was added . That tag is not intended to be any kind of accusation against anybody, or to jeopardise the integrity of the article; it's intended to draw the attention of existing editors (such as yourself) to a problem that somebody perceived, and  to draw the attention of new editors to help improve the article.  Please use Talk:Errol Sawyer to discuss any disagreements between yourself any other people who are editing or interested in that article, including to discuss whether or not the article deserves to have that tag.  The tag can be removed as soon as the discussion on the talk page reaches a satisfactory conclusion and the perceived problems are fixed.  By the way, it's not my tag; it was added by User:Mbinebri.  I also have no idea which "Mister Barrett" you are talking about who is interested only in picture models and fashion; are you confusing me with somebody else?  —AlanBarrett (talk) 15:17, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

purpose
Were you trying to add something to the discussion on my talk page, or just formatting it for me? If the later, I appreciate the attention, but it is not necessary, and some people prefer to deal with such things themselves, even if they don't deal with it optimally. DGG (talk) 15:09, 28 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Sorry, my browser did something unexpected when I pressed enter. I had started adding a comment to your page, but then decided not to.  —AlanBarrett (talk) 15:12, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

Archiveurl in cite web template
Is there an ongoing discussion about solving the misfeature, as called it in the WebCiteBot discussion? I totally agree that it should change and I'd be interested in hearing what you think is the optimal format. - Mgm|(talk) 10:47, 16 February 2009 (UTC)


 * I have seen small discussions scattered around; for example at Template talk: cite web. It might make sense to start a new discussion at Template talk:citation or Template talk:citation/core. —AlanBarrett (talk) 14:03, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Nomination for merging of Template:Catmore1
Template:Catmore1 has been nominated for merging with Template:Catmore2. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Thank you. — ξ xplicit  04:53, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

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