User talk:Bdell555/Archive 2011

Photograph of China's Sea-battle museum
I would very much like to use this image in my forthcoming book:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sea_Battle_Museum.jpg

I was wondering if the photographer had a higher-resolution version of the image that I could use.

Many thanks and best wishes

86.27.178.244 (talk) 12:08, 21 January 2011 (UTC)


 * Unfortunately the higher resolution version is on a computer that I don't expect to have access to for another month or so. I'll try to remember to upload a higher resolution version when I return to Canada about that time, although even then the image will not be especially outstanding given the limitations of the camera.--Brian Dell (talk) 18:48, 25 January 2011 (UTC)

Thank you very much indeed. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.27.178.244 (talk) 21:19, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

I was wondering if you'd had time to find the higher-resolution image of the Sea Battle Museum yet. Many thanks!

86.27.178.244 (talk) 21:45, 3 March 2011 (UTC)


 * My travel plans ended up changing and I will not have access until Saturday, March 19. Thanks for the reminder, however - if there has not been a new upload on Sunday, March 20 please send another reminder.--Brian Dell (talk) 18:43, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

OK, see Category:Sea_Battle_Museum. I think the photo should get the "auto adjust colors" treatment in Irfanview or "auto color correction" in Photoshop because it too grey as it is. But I have not done this because these sort of enhancements cannot be done losslessly and I don't know what your needs are. I also have a photo that zooms into the middle of the photo more (just the entrance and sign in gold letters above it, more or less) if that's of interest.--Brian Dell (talk) 00:43, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_response_to_the_Fukushima_I_nuclear_accidents
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_response_to_the_Fukushima_I_nuclear_accidentsGeofferybard (talk) 02:05, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Africa Videos
Hello,

I am an exhibit developer for a museum currently working on an exhibit about our African collection. I stumbled across your video footage from Africa on Wikimedia Commons. I think the video would make great reference material for the exhibit. I was wondering if you had any other footage that you could upload or send directly to the museum. I'm looking for shots showing scenes of daily life from sites across Africa in the same vein as the others you posted. Any additional locations in the same vein that you would be willing to share would be extremely helpful.

If you have any questions please let me know and I can give you more details on the project.

Best,

TheLastShot (talk) 15:57, 6 May 2011 (UTC)


 * OK. My most colourful video may be of the Timkat ceremony in Gondar, Ethiopia but have not yet uploaded it, in part because I think there is some quality loss with the Theora codec and I have been waiting for the Commons to support the WebM codec, which Google's Youtube uses and is now not proprietary.  I suppose I could upload WebM or original MP4 to a file sharing location and then direct you to the URL.  I wouldn't advise others of the URL such that you could describe the video as first displayed by your institution.  I have some video from Djibouti, Malawi, Mozambique, Egypt, and possibly Zambia that I have not uploaded yet so if there is a priority amongst those feel free to advise.  I have another problem at the moment in that I am in China and expect to be here for a few months yet and my bandwidth for uploaded video is limited...  I may have timeout problems uploading.--Brian Dell (talk) 16:47, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

ibid
Hi, I'm fixing articles that contain ibid at the moment. You add here in Wojciech Jaruzelski the ibid. Can you explain me this edit correctly? Did you mean: Malcolm Byrne, "New Evidence on the Polish Crisis 1980-1981," Cold War International History Project Bulletin 11 (Winter 1998), p. 165 citing 24 Session of the CPSU CC Politburo, Document No. 21.

Or? Please don't do this any longer. It can be easily broken by another reference in the middle of the two related. mabdul 15:04, 25 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Normally I would use cite< /ref > for the first and then for the second but this case the second ref was merely cited by the first. I decided to separate the two completely since connecting the two may just create confusion.--Brian Dell (talk) 00:22, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

A kitten for you!
For your comments on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Holocaust_denial#Denialism_vs_Revisionism Thanks for not being afraid to show scepticism and challenge the conventions!

DarklyCute (talk) 23:13, 6 September 2011 (UTC) 

1RR Violation
You are in violation of the 1RR on International law and Israeli settlements. . I suggest you self-revert or you could be blocked for edit warring. This article and all other articles relating to the Arab-Israeli conflict are subject to discretionary sanctions. See WP:ARBPIA. Thanks. -asad (talk) 09:53, 7 September 2011 (UTC)

Irish presidential election, 2011
Thanks for your imput, it clarifies the context in that part , there was a discussion on it after an editor removed the incident (I replaced). With your addition I can see no problems. Thank you .Murry1975 (talk) 09:57, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

1RR violation
See Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement. 2 lines of K 303  09:18, 14 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Fixed a bracket above to make the link work. EdJohnston (talk) 15:28, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

On the day the Barack Obama article was created, the article said that Obama is "regarded as a liberal". This was subsequently "reverted", given that seven and a half years later "liberal" does not appear anywhere in the body of that article. According to the logic here, should the person who edited the Obama article in March 2004 return to the article in October 2011 and add any reliably sourced phrase containing the word "liberal", that person is "[u]ndoing another editor's work — whether in whole or in part... It can involve as little as one word," and thus is guilty of "reverting" as defined by the rules against edit warring. The absurdity of this sort of wiki-lawyering should be apparent from the fact that this hypothetical edit warrior would not even know who he is warring with without reviewing thousands and thousands of intermediary edits. If there were full disclosure in the complaint about me, then "Revert#2, within 24 hours of the previous revert" would have been preceded by "Revert#1, within 16 months..." but that bit of info wouldn't help create the impression I'm edit warring like "within 24 hours" does, would it? Even if Revert#1 is, in fact, a edit warring "revert", note that "Revert #2" attempted to answer the WP:LINKVIO objection to my edit. "Ah, but you didn't address the WP:SYN objection," you might say. If the objection was, in fact, just WP:SYN the material I added could have simply been moved somewhere else instead of deleted. WP:SYN can be a perfectly valid objection but generally some explanation and elaboration of how and why the WP:SYN rule applies to the particular case it hand is needed before the editor you are taking issue with is likely to find your view very convincing. In my experience WP:SYN, like WP:BLP and WP:OR, are frequently misapplied and are instead just used as substitutes for WP:IDONTLIKEIT. This explanation has now been presented, but the question is why not present this on the article Talk page so not only I but our fellow and future article editors can appreciate your perspective, instead of in a complaint template? I've got more than 1500 edits to Talk pages over the last six years so it is not like you can't discuss with me instead of edit warring if that's what you are interested in.--Brian Dell (talk) 08:04, 15 October 2011 (UTC)
 * The complaint which is mentioned above is about your edits at Martin McGuiness. You can still respond at WP:AE if you wish. Thank you, EdJohnston (talk) 19:18, 15 October 2011 (UTC)
 * I find it difficult to believe that you, Ed, truly believe I'm ignorant about which of my edits are at issue, since I would not have been able to note the time span between my "first" and "second" attempts to add material (over 15 months) if I did not know which attempts were being complained about, would I? I understand that someone can revert 10 times in 10 days and not be deemed to be in violation of the letter of the rules against edit warring, while I can be deemed an "edit warrior" by an officious admin because of the timing between the "second" and "third" attempts within the 16 month period between the first and third attempts.  In my view my "second" attempt ("Revert#1" - my "revert" of my 15 month old reversion) is not, in fact, the "second" attempt in a 1 - 2 - 3 log given as documentation of an edit war because this supposedly incriminating log was assembled to create a phony "edit war" not document a real one.  Believe me or not but in fact it never occurred to me that someone would consider such a move fair play: if the complainant was up against a real edit warrior instead of manufactured one, he would not have 15 month gaps in his log of incriminating edits!  The common sense view is that any edit war here started on October 13 when RepublicanJacobite reverted my addition, not in the middle of last year.  I've provided examples to illustrate how absurd the situation can become if one is going to insist on a technical view of what constitutes an incriminating edit log instead of common sense one.  Whatever the technical factors that go into determining whether an editor is being a problematic edit warrior, the common sense ones include the frequency with which the the editor attempts to undo another editor's work, a willingness to try something other than just bang away at the exact same response (e.g. making an effort to rework, move, add context, or otherwise edit another's contribution vs just deleting it in its entirety over and over again), and a willingness to explain why one is insisting on undoing another's article changes on the article Talk page.  But I believe I've already provided the essence of this response.--Brian Dell (talk) 18:26, 16 October 2011 (UTC)
 * If you look at Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement you will that the filer complained about two of your edits, one on October 13 and one on October 14, that were within 24 hours of each other. What is the deal about 15 months?  There is no time limit stated in WP:Edit warring: "A revert means undoing the actions of another editor."  The phrase "to the other side" was originally added by you at some previous time, and your October 13 edit restored that phrase to the article (after it had been removed by others). So your October 13 edit was a revert. Since we are in the realm of 1RR, and Martin McGuiness is an important figure, who has connections both to the Troubles and to current Irish politics, you should have been aware this was a sensitive article. The question is, why did you think it was reasonable to test the limits of 1RR here. If you will agree to stay away from Troubles articles for some period of time, the AE might be closed, in my opinion. EdJohnston (talk) 18:44, 16 October 2011 (UTC)
 * "There is no time limit [associated with one of the definitions used in determining whether someone is edit warring]... So your October 13 edit was [edit warring]" is certainly a technically valid argument, but take a step back here and it's obvious, at least to me, that the absence of an explicit declaration that the time interval is relevant is a technical loophole, since generally the time intervals between edits are not just relevant to determining whether someone is deemed to be edit warring but central. If it's not a loophole in your view, you could address the examples I've raised in order to indicate just how far you are willing to let it be exploited.  If you wish to insist on bad faith on my part by claiming that I intended to "test the limits", I can't stop you, but the fact remains I did not expect my October 13 edit to be construed as edit warring, whatever its technical status, and even if it was, that someone would seek a bureaucratic sanction before taking issue with me on the article Talk page.  I indeed wasn't "aware" and accordingly got blindsided with this complaint, in large part because my thinking was that since most editors know that they are likely going to end up trying to reason with the other editor on the Talk page anyway, they'll generally make that their first resort instead of their last.  In hindsight I should have better appreciated the extent to which certain groups of editors are prepared to get their way by simply intimidating others into backing off the topic of the interest to them.  Given that I already stay away from Troubles articles - like many other topics - for many months at at time on my own volition, it seems to me that the practical gain to Wikipedia from any coercion here would just be to give some satisfaction to the complainant.  With regard to which particular satisfaction should be granted, I'd best leave that up to the parties who can better appreciate what's needed on that point.--Brian Dell (talk) 20:48, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

NATO attack
You are welcome to express your concerns of the article 2011 NATO attack in Pakistan on its talk page. However, please be more specific and relevant as to what you specifically object to within the article, in a way that avoids WP:NOT. Thanks, Mar4d (talk) 15:54, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

A courtesy heads-up
Hi Brian.

Just a heads-up that an edit you made to Cedric Belfrage has invited comment and a request for documentation at the Historians of American Communism news list that is part of H-Net. I will try to amend your assertion with more appropriate footnoting or will be deleting it based upon the results of that inquiry. The H-HOAC log may be viewed at http://www.h-net.org/~hoac/

best regards,

Tim Davenport //// Carrite (talk) 21:23, 20 December 2011 (UTC)


 * OK.--Brian Dell (talk) 03:46, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

Political positions of Newt Gingrich
Hello Mr. Dell, I appreciate your considered edits to the Newt Gingrich 2012 article today, based on my recent note. If you are willing, would you consider another request regarding the "Political positions of Newt Gingrich" entry, as I've explained on that discussion page? Last week, another editor offered apparent consensus for the change (fixing a clear error in representing Mr. Gingrich's policy views) but chose to wait. And that's been the last of it. I hesitate to make any edits directly, because of my close connection to the subject matter but I'm concerned that no one has yet fixed it. I would appreciate it greatly if you would look into the matter. Thanks, Joedesantis (talk) 16:36, 27 December 2011 (UTC)
 * OK, I think you'd have a green light to edit yourself having raised the matter on the Talk page and having had an editor largely agree with you, but if it were, in fact, a "clear error" it would probably be at least partially fixed earlier... because of the citation to The Hill, which is generally considered reliable, there isn't an obvious error and so requires some more review. The page isn't going to receiving a ton of editor attention as page views have dropped below 1000 since mid-December to an average of 500 to 600... the main Newt Gingrich article is also attracting fewer readers but that one is still 15 to 20 000 a day.--Brian Dell (talk) 19:23, 27 December 2011 (UTC)