User talk:Blythwood/Archives/2021/August

DYK nomination of Rusher's Patent Types
Hello! Your submission of Rusher's Patent Types at the Did You Know nominations page has been reviewed, and some issues with it may need to be clarified. Please review the comment(s) at your nomination's entry and respond there as soon as possible. Thank you for contributing to Did You Know! David Eppstein (talk) 00:22, 13 August 2021 (UTC)

DYK for Vincent Figgins
Cwmhiraeth (talk) 00:03, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

I have unreviewed a page you curated
Hi, I'm Whiteguru. I wanted to let you know that I saw the page you reviewed, Wenzel's, and have marked it as unreviewed. If you have any questions, please ask them on my talk page. Thank you.

(Message delivered via the Page Curation tool, on behalf of the reviewer.)

Whiteguru (talk) 09:26, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

Garamond article
I understand your concern about removing the reference names. I do not like names on references used only once and I admit that this is a personal preference. I need to perform additional checking when editting. I do not consistently remove names in articles but I found these unusually long names especially annoying and removed ones that I encountered this time. I did remove some short ones as well for "consistency". I apologize if you were the contributor that put them in initially. There is no great way to assign names but I have a preference for SFN-like "AuthorDate', short and sweet. If you want to create and name references for possible use later, I would recommend listing them in "refs=" parameter available in the reflist template. However, other editors often consider moving named references a change in referencing "style". I consider it a change in "method". Changing references from in-line (now deprecated) to or SFN is a change in "style". Existing methods/styles are often ingnored by contributors.

I am pretty sure I would not have been annoyed by the long names if the references were in the "refs=" parameter. And source title is not a bad naming technique.

This "style" vs. "method" debate has kept me from doing mass changes like to. I was once critiqued for changing to. I posted a question if this was an inappropriate change, and got an answer of no.

The Wikipedia "Manual of Style" says that multiple styles should not be used. My personal attitude is this is ridiculous. SFN is very clumsy for sources that do not have authors, dates, pages (like web pages) and it often is not done properly.

Just so you know I have editted thousands of pages and have encountered all types of methods. I am sure some are from a long time ago before better templates were developed. I feel responsible to update obscure methods to newer ones so others can contribute easier as you did with the SFN reference.

Again I apologize if I undid some of your work. User-duck (talk) 03:11, 22 August 2021 (UTC)

PS: I often attempt to fix messages/errors like "Carter 1970, pp. 15–16. Harv error: link from CITEREFCarter1970 doesn't point to any citation." (I do not know how to change the "Harv error:" to orange nor do I care to know.) But I don't want to fix this one, maybe you could try.

Ignore that ping from AIV
I looked myself, it was all vandalism back as far as late March, blocked for six months. Cheers Girth Summit  (blether)  20:25, 9 August 2021 (UTC)
 * , thanks! It looked static as going back to March all the edits were similar. Bizarre to spend that much effort vandalising with obviously false info. Blythwood (talk) 23:01, 9 August 2021 (UTC)
 * , TBH, I've had a week of bizaare stuff - this isn't even the strangest one I've dealt with this evening. No point giving you diffs as I've been mashing the 'revision delete' button, but I've dealt with 'the Emperor of Earth' who intends to have all Wikipedia editors executed, a creepy stalker who has been edit warring under multiple accounts for more than a year to add an unsourced date of birth to an article about a female journalist, a school kid from India who is on his seventeenth account trying to create the exact same hoax page about his fantasy life, and an edit war between a seemingly infinite number of IPs who were willing to direct the most egregious sexual threats you can imagine towards one another's family members, all about the precise figure given for the budget of a Bollywood movie. There are some strange people who come here, and I've given up trying to figure out what the hell they're trying to do... Girth Summit  (blether)  23:17, 9 August 2021 (UTC)
 * , tell me about it. I wrote a long long essay in 2017 to explain my experience of dealing with hoaxes on Wikipedia. I imagine your experience in education will give you a lot of experience of people who are IT-literate but, how do we put this, not fully mentally developed yet, if they ever will be! Blythwood (talk) 23:19, 9 August 2021 (UTC)
 * , that puts me in mind of one I came across way back when, about an island that was apparently a holiday destination off the west coast of Australia. There were pictures, some reasonably well-formed text, some sources - but they looked dubious. After a bit of digging a satisfied myself that the place didn't exist, but someone had put a lot of work into making that page - like, why would you do that? I spent quite a bit of time investigating it, but I'm sure the person who made it spent more time putting it together - how's that a win from the troll's perspective? As I say, I've given up trying to work out the mentality. Girth Summit  (blether)  23:25, 9 August 2021 (UTC)
 * I've just read that (excellent) essay properly, and a thought surfaced in my mind. I am assuming that someone has already approached you about this and you have declined; I also recognise that my screed above isn't exactly selling the job, and I can tell you that the pay stinks. But, FWIW: I believe you would be a first-rate admin. Girth Summit  (blether)  23:45, 9 August 2021 (UTC)
 * , it's incredibly kind for you to say. I've thought about adminship quite a few times; I've felt there's a lot I could help with like responding to AIV and CSD. It's definitely something I'd be interested in future if and when I have enough time to commit to being ready for an RfA and reading through what RfAs are looking for. Blythwood (talk) 22:03, 21 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Multiple GAs, thousands of articles patrolled, hundreds of reports to AIV, consistently active for years... I've only skimmed your contribs, but I'm not seeing any red or even yellow flags jumping out at me. Feel free to email me if you want to discuss anything, or if you would like a nomination. I'd also be happy to discuss it with my own RfA nominators if you'd like a second/third opinion? Girth Summit  (blether)  07:58, 22 August 2021 (UTC)

Garamond: FA status.
I just remembered what FA was short for. To that end, I have started to look at the article for other edits, e.g. layout, additional citation shortcomings, etc. Personally, I think the article has too much fluff, images, etc. Does the Plantin portrait add anything? Does info about download availablility really belong in an encyclopedic article? Tweets are poor sources. My opinions are not worth much and you should get some advice from the evalulators. Let me know is you want assistance, I am pretty good at grunt work. I found the article mildly interesting but I am easily amused with trivia. Off to improve citations! User-duck (talk) 20:50, 22 August 2021 (UTC)


 * , Don't worry, there's nothing wrong with your eyesight. Frankly when I upgraded it to GA I was much younger and maybe standards were lower, I didn't put in the effort to view top-quality sources I would now. Compare it with my Vincent Figgins GA which was built from the ground up using sfn citation. I've been slowly upgrading by stripping out weaker sources and switching to sfn, but the FMoC haven't helped by deleting their website which was a major source. I'm very glad you've enjoyed it, and I'm grateful to you for thinking so hard about ways to improve it. One thing the article doesn't really reveal is the stunning sharpness of Garamond's engraving, except for the Great Primer image which I'm very grateful to you for enlarging. I am also looking at ways to add better images. Blythwood (talk) 21:28, 22 August 2021 (UTC)

DYK for Rusher's Patent Types
Cwmhiraeth (talk) 12:03, 25 August 2021 (UTC)