User talk:Arctic Gazelle

Looking north
I hope you are not put off by the reception your idea got at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Images. As it happens, a couple thousand of my pictures are in various articles, the majority being outdoors where the compass matters. Click on the picture and the "more information" button, and you will see the geographical coordinates and the direction my camera was pointing, even sometimes on indoors pictures. For outdoor pictures the heading tends more to the north than in any other direction though many are looking east; I suspect the mean heading might be about 20 degrees. That's not for any principle of northerliness but because that's where I generally get the best light for photography. Whatever direction makes a good picture.

I have also put headings and coordinates in a thousand or two pictures made by others, including old paintings of outdoor scenes. I think this information only occasionally belongs in the article, though perhaps it ought to be more quickly or more prominently displayed for those readers who click the picture. And we could add mapmaking templates to articles where a map of places would be a good thing. Jim.henderson (talk) 17:22, 22 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Thank you for your kind words. Certainly it was not the reception I expected. I am still trying to understand it. I am so new to Wikipedia editing. I have spent a lot of time reading Wikipedia, over the years, maybe several hours a day on average. For example, I had already read several years ago, the Statue of Liberty article, which I found very interesting, especially the fact that when collecting money (or trying to get support) for the construction, they showed people a much more sexually attractive looking statue than actually got built in the end there on that little island that was renamed Liberty Island.
 * I thought I was being super considerate and careful, and avoiding even being 'bold' by mainly only adding comments to talk pages. I liked you user page cartoon captioned 'Yes, be bold. What could go wrong?'. Why does Wikipedia tell you to be bold, but Wikipedians tell you the opposite, or more likely chastise you after being bold, or just not cautious enough. I've done a lot of thinking about Wikipedia during the last few days, and I'm sure I must have had some insights, but I'm not sure what they are. I guess I've mainly learned how little I understand Wikipedians. I think I get why the articles are the way they are. It's the talk pages and user pages that I find puzzling. Is there something I can read to understand what on earth happened on that MOS talk page?
 * How do I see your list of contributions so I can look at some of your photographs with coordinates attached? Arctic Gazelle (talk) 19:51, 22 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Here's what the Statue or Liberty was originally intended to look like, if I'm not wrong: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/91/U.S._Patent_D11023.jpeg/340px-U.S._Patent_D11023.jpeg Arctic Gazelle (talk) 20:25, 22 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes, I thought your proposal was reasonable (though implementing it would be difficult, so a guideline prescribing it would not be very helpful). If it's known, and orientation matters (like for statues), I don't see any harm. Feel free to add the direction to the caption yourself if the photo indicates it! But in any event, I offer my two cents: stay away from MOS and other areas that have fanatics who almost exclusively edit in that area; waste of time, and you will not be treated well for encroaching on their turf. Urve (talk) 00:23, 24 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the kind words. Much appreciated. What are the 'other areas' that you referred to, User:Urve? I think I would indeed like to stay away from all such areas. Arctic Gazelle (talk) 03:17, 25 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Sorry to be so late. Excuses? Busy. I was remote teaching at a Wikipedia editing event operated by Yale University, also categorizing mid 20th century pictures of an almost-ghost town in Kansas and various astronomical pictures, trimming overgrown prose in several articles, and a few things in real life. Odd that a useless old retired guy is busy, but it seems I had more time on my hands in past years when I worked for a living. And then I plain forgot. However, I'm going to forego finishing reading WP:Wikipedia Signpost for the moment.


 * gave you some good advice though perhaps being a little too harsh on the people who protect the Manual of Style. Oh, notice I pinged by one of the more obvious methods. There are too many ways to ping, probably because those who studied the craft of making WP:TEMPLATEs were experimenting and didn't kill their experiments. Too many ways to do a lot of things; our meagre supply of discipline goes into articles instead. Anyway, it's too close to my bedtime to assemble a dynamic analysis of that sect, and not important anyway as your current understanding is close enough for what you are doing.


 * Wikipedia is among other things a big sprawling cult, with many fanatical little sects organized by topic or other basis. And that's just ENWP itself; there are hundreds of non-English Wikipedias and a few dozen auxiliary sites. I teach ENWP because that's what our wannabes want, but most my own editorial efforts go into Wikimedia Commons, an auxiliary which is, among other things, the main picture bureau for the others. My own pictures are part of that; you can see them in reverse chronological order in |here if I've got the link format correct. The majority are now also organized two different ways in subcategories of Commons:Category:Photos by Jim.henderson. It's one of the things that have kept me busy when hiding from COVID-19 keeps me from snapping so many new pictures. You can see my latest activities of all kinds at this time I'm using raw URL rather than figure out the proper format. All these things can be pretty easily found for any fellow editor including you, but I'm giving them to you as absolute links.


 * I have been swimming in the Wikipedia goldfish bowl so long, I don't notice the lack of privacy. We do some communication by other means such as Facebook and Twitter groups, Quora, Slack, Telegraph, and various ways of using E-mail including the rather uncommon classical one on one E-mail. But mostly we communicate on-wiki so the world can look over our shoulder and toss in their two cents worth. Actually these parts of the wiki are not quite so transparent, as Google and other search engines pay little attention except to articles. Searching the wiki for specific things besides articles takes certain skills. So, to some degree it's a goldfish bowl, and to some degree we're sort of inside the castles and other hiding places in the aquarium.


 * Oh, this is about which way north is. Forgot about that. No, it does not belong in MOS because the picture page of MOS is already too big, and it is general and applies generally. For the majority of pictures, direction is unimportant. Indoor things by artificial light, for example, seldom care. Outdoor pictures, yes. As it happens that's mostly what I do, so over the years I've become an expert at latitude, longitude and heading. Even for my own pictures, this information is only seen in the picture description or as a dot or other symbol on a map. Some pictures indeed ought to say in the caption that this is the north side of the mountain or the east face of the capitol building or whatever. If the specific use needs discussion it can go into the WP:WIKIPROJECTs that are relevant to that picture, but the main thing is simply to go ahead and put this information into whatever captions ought to have it. If reversions and complaints ensue, discuss it in the article talk page, and expand the discussion to one of the Wikiproject talk pages when it becomes a somewhat more general issue. Umm, reviewing I see that my prose has confused the cases when to use the article talk page and the wikproject one. That means my drooping eyelids are a sign of a drooping mind and it's time for me to quit nattering, relax with some stupid TV and get to sleep. See you later. Jim.henderson (talk) 03:07, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
 * I hope you had a good sleep.


 * "Looking north as someone walks into the project on a sunny afternoon", you wrote in this interesting photograph:https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Little_Island_Pier_55_2020-09_jeh.jpg, like you said.


 * Why didn't I see your edits to my talk page, in your list of contributions that you linked to in your latest message to me?


 * Am I free to write what I want about my ideas about north facing photographs in my talk page and my user page?


 * What is "one E-mail"?


 * I like your idea of editing captions of photographs and explaining why and discussing when necessary. Arctic Gazelle (talk) 06:55, 2 March 2021 (UTC)


 * :) Made me smile. Urve (talk) 03:14, 1 March 2021 (UTC)


 * Would you mind telling me what made you smile? Arctic Gazelle (talk) 06:56, 2 March 2021 (UTC)


 * I directed you to various Wikimedia Commons pages that say something about me. All our wiki sites have a User Contributions feature, which is described in Help:User contributions. This way, you can see every edit any user ever made, going back over a dozen years for me. You can see all the dreadfully dumb missteps I made in my early days, as well as my often more sophisticated errors of more recent years.
 * These pages are separate for each of the few hundred Websites operated by Wikimedia foundation. Thus, to find what I edited in the German, French, Russian and Spanish Wikipedias you must go to them. You'll see that my contributions there are very small, because my competence in those languages ranges from modest to none. We are here discussing in your WPEN user talk page, but I use my COM talk page almost as much because that's where I do the most editing. Each of those websites is interested in what happened there, so in Commons you can see what I did there but not what I did in ENWP. Oh, we abbreviate English Wikipedia both ways.
 * Wikimedia Commons (COM) is a few things but mostly it's the picture collection for all those Wikipedias and related sites.
 * Pictures can get a whole lot of metadata. The Commons picture page has a name, a caption, a few categories and usually a description. Mine usually have a geographic template where you can click to see it on various maps. The template usually shows a direction arrow because I gave a heading; the map usually does not show it. The description can contain a hodgepodge of information. Mine usually is mainly photographers notes. Where I stood, what was the lighting, things like that. Not much standardization in the description; it's just free prose. Most readers of Wikipedia never see any of the metadata because they don't click on the picture. They just see the caption in the WP article. That caption is written for that particular article's use of the picture, and when several articles use the same picture each article is likely to have a different caption. Hmm, maybe I should have put this discussion into my Commons talk page. Whatever. Jim.henderson (talk) 14:33, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

How to discuss
Made a break even if this isn't the best name for the new section. We are using software that's intended for writing an encyclopedia. It has always been poorly suited to discussion, and this shortcoming is exacerbated now that the Visual Editor is the usual way of writing articles. Attempts to make a better discussion editor have thus far failed. Meanwhile, we've got conventions instead of proper automation.

First, we don't insert our replies next to the relevant paragraph, but add on to the end of the stream. If this becomes too complex, we make a separate section for each subtopic. In this case I have separated this discussion of discussion, removing it from the northern picture discussion.

Yes, our own personal user pages (and subpages) are pretty much our own toys to use as we please. Within limits. No y'know, slander, copyright violations, pornography, threats of bodily harm, stuff like that, but if we are merely foolish, arrogant and annoying in our personal pages then we will be less respected but that's pretty much all. Hmm, I thought I had more to say.

Oh. "What is "one E-mail"?" That was incoherent writing, excused by drowsiness. I meant the old-fashioned use of E-mail in the "one on one" mode. I to you and a few selected Ccs, you to me and the same friends, pretty much private. Unlike the slightly more advanced use of echo lists and similar methods of sharing with a more open group, yet not as indefinite a group as the use of public forums all over Wikipedia, Quora, Facebook and elsewhere. Notice I did not write a full sentence there; it's one of the ways to distinguish our forum drivel from the stuffy, formal "Voice of God" tone we use for articles. Notice also I used a "stream of consciousness" form. That suggests, watch out, this is not a case where I'm careful to avoid contaminating the facts with my own personal feelings. Jim.henderson (talk) 14:03, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

September 2021
Please refrain from using talk pages such as Talk:Escape velocity for general discussion of the topic or other unrelated topics. They are for discussion related to improving the article in specific ways, based on reliable sources and the project policies and guidelines; they are not for use as a forum or chat room. If you have specific questions about certain topics, consider visiting our reference desk and asking them there instead of on article talk pages. See here for more information. Thank you. - DVdm (talk) 19:32, 1 September 2021 (UTC)

Help me!
Please help me with... I have not been getting notifications when people have replied to my contributions on talk pages, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:SARS-CoV-2_Lambda_variant where I was replied to but got no notification. What should I do to fix this? Thank you in advance. Arctic Gazelle (talk) 19:20, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
 * It does not look like you have been pinged to any of the discussions in question, so you may want to check and see if the page is on your watchlist. You might also want to check your user preferences to see how you are currently receiving notifications of page changes. If you want more help, change the help me-helped back into a help me, stop by the Teahouse, or Wikipedia's live help channel, or the help desk to ask someone for assistance. Primefac (talk) 19:26, 27 September 2021 (UTC)