User talk:Avalon/Archive 1

Answer to request for help

 * I'd be more than happy to help. Don't hesitate to ask. :P Ryan 12:51, August 2, 2005 (UTC)


 * I had a similar problem and made my own which you may prefer to the one currently on your page in terms of colours. The colour of the background I used was #093A80, and matches the blue of the logo. It's a minor change so I'll edit it for you - if you think this makes it worse or is ugly, don't hesitate to post on my talk page and I will revert it painlessly :-) Leon... 03:45, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Can I change factual inaccuracies?

 * Good evening/morning. You can change it. You might want to put in the edit summary "See talk page" and explain it a bit on the talk page. You also probably should put one of the source right next to it, like this:


 * So and so was killed at this battle.


 * Unfortunately, there is no spellchecker at this time. That's why copyediting is so important. Wikiquette can be found here. Take care. Ryan 10:16, August 3, 2005 (UTC)

Welcome from Cyberjunkie
Howdy Avalon. As a fellow Australian, I'd like to welcome you and let you know about the Australian community on Wikipedia. Be sure to check out Australian resources, like The Australia Wikiportal, Australian Wikipedians' Notice Board (AWDB), Australian Collaboration of the Fortnight, New Australian Articles and Australian stub articles. You can also list yourself at Australian Wikipedians. If you have any questions, you can post a question on AWNB or ask me on my Talk page. Again, welcome, and happy editing, --Cyberjunkie | Talk 11:01, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

RE: What to do?
Hi Avalon. When one comes across an article that appears to be un-encyclopædic or un-intelligible, it should be proposed for deletion. This is done under a process called Vfd or Votes for deletion. Only articles and some Wikipedia-space pages are deleted under Vfd. Templates, images and categories are deleted via Tfd, Ifd and Cfd respectively. Some pages qualify for speedy deletion, including inappropriate or vanity articles. However, it is best to use that process only if you are familiar with what qualifies for speedy deletion.

Deletion can be quite an emotive issue on Wikipedia as it can only be carried out by Administrators and is in most cases irreversible. At present, Vfd is having quite a polarising effect, with Wikipedians forming "like-minded" groups such as the Inclusionists, the Deletionists and the Mergists. Generally, I shy away from Vfd lest I become involved in one of the more controversial deletions. I typically only voice my opinion on Australia-related Vfd's. However, don't let this perturb you. The great majority of deletions pass without even a smidgen of discontent.

But I digress. To get back to your query, I have nominated Kayserispor for deletion (see Pages for deletion/Kayserispor to vote). It might have qualified for speedy deletion, but foreign language pages on this English Wikipedia are best put to Vfd with the hope that someone can translate them.--Cyberjunkie | Talk 09:00, 28 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Looking at my watchlist, it seems my explanation of Wikipedia deletion procedures was un-necessary: I see you've voted several times already ;-). Happy editing, --Cyberjunkie | Talk 09:25, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

RE: Question
See Revert. Go to the page history, click on the date of the version you wish to revert to, once loaded "edit this page" and save. --Cyberjunkie | Talk 03:34, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

District attorney
Thanks for putting the DPP link in the District attorney article. I don't go around thanking people for every good edit, but this one was particularly useful, cheers. While I'm here, I don't quite understand your "6 generations" comment on your userpage. I assume you have a British accent, so peole ask you how long you have been in Australia, how are you claiming this 6 generations? --Commander Keane 16:30, 30 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Thanks for clearing that joke up for me.--Commander Keane 06:07, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Re: Request for Help
Hello, I'm reasonably new to Wikipedia and I'd like to ask you a question.

You wrote/made(?) the Category: Orders of knighthood in Jan 05. I think it ought to be divided into sub-categories by nation. Two questions:
 * What do you think?
 * Fully agree Saga City 08:59, 23 October 2005 (UTC)


 * How do I do it?

Thank you Avalon 00:42, 23 October 2005 (UTC)


 * I only know the one way, and it may not be the approved way as I find the guidance pages here almost incomprehensible, however as it works I'll set it out:


 * Find an order of knighthood for country XYZ and put it into a category called Orders of knighthood of XYZ. As the category does not (yet) exist it will be red-linked. Click on the red-link and create the new category in the same way as you create new . Your new category's entry may minimally include only 2 categories itself namely Orders of knighthood by nation and XYX. At the first time Orders of knighthood by nation will itself be redlinked. All you need to do is create that as a category is put Category:Orders of knighthood into it to link it the one I created back in January.

By the way, I'd only been contributing to Wikipedia for about six weeks then, so don't let being new discourage you. I did some sorting out the categories for awards and decorations and this was part of it.

Let me know it works (or doesn't work) Saga City 08:59, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

Sir, defend your honour!!
I am appalled at your claim: "Australians are so supine you can do anything to them." I challenge you to a duel at 40 paces. You have choice of weapons. Maybe the Meetup/Melbourne would be the appropriate venue.

I also notice that you "practice" law. Is that the accepted spelling of the verb "practise" in Australian legal circles these days, or are you simply lying down like a good supine Australian and letting the Americans walk all over you, or are you too apathetically Australian to know or care about the difference, or ... (please insert alternative explanations here). Cheers JackofOz 07:17, 29 October 2005 (UTC)


 * Just go that page and add your name to the date(s) on which you're available. Hopefully a consensus will soon emerge.  Or, more likely, somebody will suggest a particular date, and all the rest of us will just roll over and say "OK, fine by me, see you there".  Whatever works.  JackofOz 08:00, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

--dude australia never owned the american colonies, wtf are you talkning about?

Titled people on LoPbN
Thank you for your diligent efforts at adding titles like Lord and Sir in LoPbN. Sometimes such a title is the quickest way for a user to be sure which among similarly named persons they are after.

On the other hand, it is in general important to realize that the list, like many of those on WP, exists for the purpose of navigation rather than information. It is a list of people with biographical articles (or for whom there is a reasonable hope of bios being added). It is absolutely not a reference for information on the correct forms of names. (That worthwhile info has its proper place in WP: primary name for a person is part or all of the title of their bio, and other correct names, and erroneous but common ones, appear in the body of a good bio, where there is plenty of room for information on how good or bad those versions are.)

In particular, in a LoPbN entry, the piped version (what is to the right of the vertical-line character inside the link markup) of a name that includes a surname must have the parts of the name in the order used for alphabetizing that entry. A dramatic case could be Jim ap John, who could well have (since the use of "ap" is so little understood) three entries: Which versions of the name are right or wrong is completely irrelevant to LoPbN: they are there solely to get both the expert reader and the clueless ones to the article, where everything can be made clear without its explication getting in the way of the navigational task.
 * ap John, Jim among the Ap names
 * Jim ap John among the Ji names
 * John, Jim ap among the Jo names

Your edit of the At names, like many (at the least) of your LoPbN contributions miss this point. "*Richard, Lord Attenborough" may not appear among people named "Att..." thru "Atw..." bcz that version of his name makes him a person named "Ric...". (Tho, BTS, that version of his name cannot appear on Ric, bcz anyone misguided enough to look up a modern title-bearer that way will quickly see that we do not let such formality interfere with access, and take the obvious stop of looking under "Att...".)

A little less disruptively, "*Attenborough, Sir David" should be "*Attenborough, David, Sir", for the same reason that no one will look for him under D or S: the surname is indipsensible in identifying him; the next step is not to separate the knighted Attenboroughs from hoi polloi, but Davids from all other given names, and then finally the Sir Davids from the other Davids. "Attenborough, Sir David" is harmless as to its effect on that page, but it is unacceptably harmful in undercutting the confidence that Sir David Jones will be found before, and not after, Samuel Jones.

As i say, though, there's no question in my mind that the information you're adding is good; i don't want to discourage you. Thanks. --Jerzy•t 19:22, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

What Will Work Well on LoPbN?
_ _ Well. I wrote you with the hope that your edits reflected simply bold editing: shooting from the hip & getting a change out there where it can act as a concrete example to stimulate discussion of what is or isn't productive. (This process is inefficient, but crucial to the underlying concept of WP.) That working assumption underlay what i chose to say: my description of part of the consensus that i started working within two years ago, about how the list should work. (The experience of my edits on the list and its infrastructure -- edits numbering in the thousands, i'm sure -- has, BTW, only strengthened my confidence in that basic approach.) _ _ In replying, you begin
 * I cannot accept your contentions.

as if you were closing, not opening a discussion. You continue, ambiguously but troublingly,
 * I note you do not support them with any Wikipedia guidelines.

You have thereby described a fact. It's a fact that is irrelevant to the discussion i was (& am still) trying to start (although my initial heading left my intent merely implicit). _ _ The new heading i've added above makes it explicit: it's worth asking what will work well. That's what i gave you my informed opinion about, seeing that as leading into a collegial discussion. (And one thing an ethical jurist learns is to recognize situations when conciliation serves a common interest that may be harmed by rushing into explicit clarity about who has what unilateral power of resolution. In fact, lest i stifle that process, i'll forgo speculating here about why your agenda gave explicitly documented practice such high priority.) And while your response led me twd some sense that we were in two different discussions, that could be wrong, and i think i can set all of that aside for now. _ _ It's probably worth my assuming you considered responding more directly to my logic. (E.g., i wish i had some sense of the extent that you agree or disagree with me, that this is about navigation and that conveying information (about correct names and the like) can be left to the bio articles.) You may well have found the stress of my verbal style too great an impediment. (One extremely hostile editor has described me, with some justice, as a "grammatical hurricane". I'm sympathetic, tho i'm not very good at making it easier to follow me.) _ _ You made two closely related points that seem fertile ground to me. One was
 * ...“Bloggs, John, Sir” simply looks clumsy.

Well, yes, of course, though i thought i had adequately disposed of any relevance of that fact in my (as yet unchallenged) focus on navigation. In any case, you were good enough to let me know that we agree about the order entries should have relative to each other, which is very helpful. (BTW, i find you astute in pointing out both the orders of name elements you do for Bloggs; i considered only one order -- e.g., in my edit (re R.F. Burton), soon after the first reversal of yr work re "Sir" that i made a non-default summary for. FWIW, i have not yet found any reason for significantly preferring one over the other. [smile]) _ _ But i digress. You made "clumsy" sound like an esthetic concern, but the word's underlying sense is about inefficiency of action. _ _ The other "fertile" thing you said is
 * I am concerned, on reflection, about what i'll call the 3rd of these 3 elements of navigation:
 * Mobility is built into the server & browser: following lks & scrolling move you around in the data.
 * Directional guides: the indexes at the tops of LoPbN pages, and the ToCs on all the medium to large pages, provide sign posts that get you closer to a small group of entries; then the entries themselves support homing in, visually, on the entry you came looking for.
 * What i would compare to the nameplate next to the doorbell, i.e., the means of confirming that you've reached your destination.
 * I think (my) "many commas" format is IMO the least clumsy means of seeing which direction to move the eye next, in each of the several times (per entry sought) that the user unconsciously glances up or down. My new concern is that that format neverhtheless leaves a clumsy final mental step (one-time per entry sought) for the user to go through. That is to say, if we're talking about your General Sir John Bloggs, it is ideal, for that final step, to have the name there in (your) "no added commas" order, i.e. in exactly the order used in this sentence; in contrast, the many-commas format forces the user to permute "Bloggs, John, General Sir" back into the doorbell nameplate version, possibly via a little of trial and error. Unfortunately, having it in the no-extra-commas order (or to be precise, having the neighboring entries in that order) multiplies the (unconscious) processing that must be done as the user homes in on Bloggs, by glancing at Bloags and Blongs entries, and then at, say, Blogge and Blogguman entries.  (If that really is completely uncompelling to you, we can talk more explicitly about the cognitive psychology and the implicit binary search algorithm that i see as inherant to the process.)
 * For me, the current bottom line is that you've drawn my attention to the hypothetical value of having a no-extra-commas version in the entry, for that final third element, but i can't imagine how it can make up for the loss of efficiency from giving up the advantages of many-commas format on the repetitive second element. And, nevertheless, i'm tantalized by the possibility of replacing the 2nd element by something other than the many-commas formats in the entries. Take a look at List of people by name: Wv-Wz, rather than my describing it, and if you want a few more examples (some larger), follow lks from User:Jerzy/Argus for LoPbN Templates. I am imagining the section hdgs & lk-less text lines providing element 2, and converting the lk'ed lines (bio entries) to no-extra-commas format to optimize the 3rd element.
 * See List of English people

which (at the risk of being a smart aleck) makes me want to say "See List of people by name: Brow". I did look at the English list (which is not a list of people by name, but a couple dozen quite small lists by name, and one four-screenish list of Eng. authors by name). It looks quite workable to me, with the possible exception of the authors: those authors have the only list that remotely begins to hint at a question that is crucial to the ones you are raising:
 * Is this list scalable?

LoPbN has gone thru 2 levels of metamorphosis whose evidence survives; perhaps it started as 26 pages of names and an index, or perhaps there have been 3 metamorphoses. Each metamorphosis reflects the previous non-scalable design reaching its limits. (Someone counted the names as being in the low 20 thousands, about 15 months ago, with probably less than 10% increase in pages (to abt 670 now), tho i guess the numbers are not very useful. In any case my expectation is that it's still scalable for a good while yet, but there could be a surprise in store for me. In contrast, IMO the List-of-English-people format is (unless its growth is stagnating) awaiting the breakdown in usefulness that will be resolved in its first metamorphosis.  _ _ Your suggestion to consult that list makes me think that you haven't really grasped the difference between the 100 or 125 writers and lists two or three orders of magnitude larger.  The John Brown section is AFAIK unique so far, but i don't believe we are anywhere near the goal of getting all bios lked from LoPbN, so i take no bets.  In any case, "enough quantity means a change in kind", and i urge you to look at that page on one hand, and on the other hand, at LoPbN sections of 15 to 25 names where all the names have several letters in common but no more than two or three people share any one surname. I think you'll get some feel for the human-factors element of the scaling problem. --Jerzy•t 04:53, 11 November 2005 (UTC)