User talk:Bobby Doorknobs

Welcome!

Hello,, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful: I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on, or ask your question on this page and then place  before the question. Again, welcome! Royal broil 02:47, 14 July 2007 (UTC)
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Motorsport WikiProjects
Your interest in Formula One is obvious, so I highly recommend that you join WikiProject Formula One. You may also be interested in joining me in WikiProject Motorsport, a wikiproject set up to coordinate common themes between various motorsports wikiprojects. Royal broil 02:47, 14 July 2007 (UTC)
 * I was happy to welcome you, and I hope that you continue to find Wikipedia an interesting thing to do. No experience is necessary or expected before joining a WikiProject. Wikiproject Motorsport mainly exists to coordinate the common aspects between the differing genres of racing, not necessarily for article creation or development. It helps to have a standard for articles on tracks, drivers, sanctioning bodies, teams, etc. We Wikipedians aim to present a world view in articles, so it is helpful to have contributors from around the world determine some of the standards. One topic that we are currently discussing is having a single infobox for all tracks of the different genres of motorsports, including everything from F1, NASCAR, off-road racing, motocross, rally, etc. If you are only focused strictly on F1, then the WikiProject may not be for you. In any case, happy editing! Royal broil  02:41, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

Re: Results & References
Hi Bobby. Welcome to Wikipedia. Sorry for not having replied sooner - I had a fairly busy weekend. I see you have already joined WP:F1, so welcome to that too! I like your idea about some kind of label for approved/checked F1 results tables. I agree that what I am currently doing (i.e. a blanket reference to www.formula1.com plus individual references to cover inaccuracies within www.formula1.com) isn't ideal, but I thought any sort of references would be better than nothing! A little bit of history for you: It was before my time, but I believe the F1 results tables were originally generated from www.formula1.com by User:BillCook (That's why I've used www.formula1.com as the primary reference). We have discussed references for race reports on the WP:F1 discussion page, but without any real resolution. I suggest you add what you wrote on my talk page to the end of that discussion, so it can be discussed by the whole project.

Regarding taking information from old magazines: I think you should be OK taking results from the magazines, but if you copy race report text word-for-word, that would be a copyright violation. You would have to rewrite the text in your own words. I've never really understood exactly how much you have to change the text for it to count as "your own words" though.

Regarding linking to circuit maps and other pictures; the preference is for articles to include images from within Wikipedia rather than to link to external ones. The drawback of course being that all images within Wikipedia have to be copyright-free. I think there are maps for all the F1 circuits already within Wikipedia (although that could be wrong).

Hope this helps. DH85868993 08:33, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

F1 race report talk pages
Hi Bobby. I notice you've recently been updating some F1 race report article talk pages with relevant WikiProject tags. Good work! One point to note is that if the talk page has a WP:F1 banner (indicating that the article "belongs" to the WP:F1 project), then (with a few exceptions) it doesn't need a WP:Motorsport banner as well - the general WP:Motorsport banner is used for articles which either don't fit into one of the child projects (such as WP:F1), or which span multiple child projects (e.g. articles like Mario Andretti, Juan Pablo Montoya, etc) - see the discussions here and here. But apart from that, keep up the good work! DH85868993 08:37, 24 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks for mentioning those banners! I came across some reports with the Motorsport banner, and it hadn't occurred to me yet that they're not needed. Bobby Doorknobs 17:47, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

F1 race report category edits
Hi Bobby. FYI, I've just reverted some of the edits you made to some categories in some of the 1999 F1 race reports. As you are no doubt aware, most of the F1 race report articles are included in the relevant "xxx Grand Prix" category. But the Argentine, Australian, Austrian, Bahrain and Belgian race reports are currently included in categories named "xxx Grand Prix race reports". One editor started changing them all over about 3 months ago, but then ran out of enthusiasm when they got to Belgium(!), so we currently have this inconsistent state. I'm about to raise the topic for discussion on the WP:F1 discussion page, but for the moment I have reverted your changes so that all the race reports for a given country are in the same category. -- DH85868993 12:07, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Hi DH85868993. About the category edits: thanks again for keeping an eye on things. With so many different race reports it is sometimes difficult to see which standard is the right one :) Bobby Doorknobs 18:32, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

Race Reports Edit
Hi Bobby. Hope you don't mind me using the to-do list. I just thought it was a useful tool to help edit the race reports. Hope you complete all of the 1999 reports soon :). Eddie6705 17:24, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Well i only joined the project a few days ago and i just presumed it was the standard thing. I will continue to help with the 1999 season and then i will try the 1997 season.Eddie6705 18:28, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
 * I read on the Wikiproject discussion page that you were planning to remove the national flags once the race info boxes have been added. I have removed the flags as all of the race info boxes for 1999 have been added. Eddie6705 01:19, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Lap Charts
As far as I know, the 1999 San Marino GP is the only article that has one. I originally planned to do some more afterwards, but making them is quite time-consuming, and I prefer making team results tables. The issue of lap charts was raised a couple of times at WP:F1 - here and here, which established that no-one had any objections to them. The only problem is that long races won't fit in the width of the average computer screen, but this can be fixed using an overflow bar (as can be seen in the existing lap chart). Thanks for taking this on, and I hope you enjoy making them! ;)--Diniz (talk) 20:03, 13 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the quick reply. The overflow bar seems to work fine but there's one thing I can't figure out. I had initially improved the overall look of the chart by using the same with for each column, but that no longer seems to work once the table gets too wide. Adding an overflow bar allows scrolling but doesn't seem to fix this problem with unequal column widths. It's just a detail but perhaps you know how to make this work? Bobby Doorknobs 20:15, 13 August 2007 (UTC)
 * I believe the problem is just because the lap chart in your sandbox hasn't been completed yest - the maximum width of each column will eventually be two numbers. In the one that I made, I initially gave each column a fixed percentage of the overall width, but leaving the widths unspecified turned out to be preferable, as it made the chart narrower without distorting the widths of each column.  On this page, the top chart has the column of each lap set to 2% of the total width, whilst the bottom chart's columns are unspecified, yet they look very similar.--Diniz (talk) 11:19, 14 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Mmh, I think you're right :) Thanks for helping out; I'll post a message about the lap charts on the project talkpage again once mine is finished. In the meantime if you have any other comments on my chart just let me know. Some thoughts on my work in progress:

Bobby Doorknobs 20:07, 14 August 2007 (UTC)
 * I haven't found all the right background colors yet - some of them are still too dark (Zanardi, Alesi, Panis) or too similar/not appropriate for the team.
 * In the chart, I'm not really sure yet about how to show pitstops and retirements. You use red numbers for pitstops, I'm currently using bold & red numbers for retirements, while pitstops are indicated with a black square (borders). That looks ok to me; I also added a red square for 'retired in pits' - but I'm not sure if that's such a good idea because it's not official (?) and it's not in my original lap charts either. Using red squares for pitstops is not a good idea I think, because of the other red lines for lapped drivers and safety car periods.
 * Something else is that, for races with few laps like Spa or the old Hockenheim, it's possible to use larger font sizes but I'm not sure exacxtly how to judge that: all I know is what it looks like on my screen. Would you opt for using the same font size for all races or not?
 * My lap chart was based on one in the 1999 AUTOCOURSE annual, which uses similar features. The problem with the "traditional" method of compiling lap charts, i.e. using numbers, is that it can be hard to follow, so I think it's a good idea to give every driver a different colour (although finding the right colour can be a challenge!).  A potential future problem would be that the lap charts I have access to don't show lapped runners or pit stops before a certain year, although I guess you have quite a comprehensive collection of race report details! ;)  As to your last point, I would recommend keeping the font size the same for all lap charts, as consistency is valued in wikipedia.  I'm sure the rest of WP:F1 may well have some more ideas as well.--Diniz (talk) 21:51, 14 August 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm not (yet) familiar with AUTOCOURSE but from the article it looks like a good source that goes way back. My own 'archive' is a collection of dutch f1 magazines that started in 1994 when Verstappen made the headlines quite a few times here :) so basically I have detailed reports, results and lap charts going back to 1995. They changed the lap charts to 'new style' after 2004 (with lines instead of numbers, I assume that's what you mean) and converting this to 'traditional' style is not always a good idea (try Nurburgring 2007). With things like pitstops etc I think it should be included if the information is available. Bobby Doorknobs 18:40, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

Welcome back!
I just noticed an edit of yours in my watchlist. Good to have you back! :) -- Diniz  (talk)  22:31, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!
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