User talk:Ceyockey/LoPbN archive

Material here was originally on User talk:Ceyockey and all relates to discussions around List of people by name.

Overdue response
Well, i'm making a royal mess of this. Sorry for the false alarm; my overdue response is in preparation & didn't mean to save yet.

Also thinking abt what you've said on this page & not yet sure whether or how i can be helpful, and whether to try to fold that in to the already planned msg.

In any case, more coming from me. --Jerzy•t 05:08 & 07:18, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

I had a long response in preparation, a bit over a wk ago, in an edit window; i somehow closed it before being satisfied w/ what i'd writ, and it took a while to have the energy to start over. And i have some thot that that is serendipitous, and that my new response may be more constructive than whatever the other would have become.

First and foremost, i wanted (without sugar-coating it) to acknowledge your change of tone, which i considered valuable and presume to have been difficult and thus have reflected good character on your part. There's no point complaining about the previous tone, and IMO our new situation is a good one.

For my part, most importantly, i wanted to clarify some unsuccessful communications i made:
 * 1) I had not mentioned my "outrage" to e.g. give offense, by making sure you knew i was angry with you (which i was not when i wrote that). What i thot i was doing was to communicate that i recognized my sometimes taking myself at least a little too seriously.  I don't remember why i saw that need (tho i'd be glad to look in yr archive to refresh my recollection, if you'd like), but i'm pretty sure my general thrust was, having noticed your edits in LoPbN several times (and did you perhaps put back something i'd partially or wholly reversed?), to be sure you realized that discussion is feasible even if i don't explain in the summary every modification or reversal of recent edits by others.
 * 2) I had assumed neither that you were highly ignorant abt WP nor that you were unlikely to quickly enhance your usefulness as a colleague.  I was fairly sure i your handle was familiar, and your immediately preceding response to me on VP (which i referred to) confirmed and strengthened my impression of your being pretty well oriented overall to WP (which BTW has little bearing to your facility on LoPbN).  What i said was intended to encourage rather than to discourage; i regret that it seemed at least initially to have discouraged you, and it seems to me (again, i could review) that i had found reason to blame myself to some extent for that.
 * 3) _ _ I presume i at least sowed some confusion by singling out your statement
 * Otherwise, please consider the pages in the main part of Wikipedia and prone to the same costs and benefits of that placement.
 * and i may have further distressed you in that. A handful of rereadings eventually clarified it slightly, and revealed to me a source of my confusion that is unlikely to have occurred to you:
 * At the point where one has read "consider the pages in the main part of Wikipedia", nearly any reader but you has a grammatically ambiguous sentence fragment in hand, and is due to make an unconscious resolution of the ambiguity. You clearly intended (but clearly only with hindsight) one corresponding to "consider the pages as being in the main part of Wikipedia". Unfortunately, other readers may be unable, in light of the availability of less tricky alternatives, to imagine themselves beginning that way if they intended that syntax.
 * I am among those readers, and i had reached a point of needing powerful reasons to give up the alternative syntax corresponding to "turn [the reader's] attention to the pages that are in the main part of Wikipedia". That understanding ruled out  syntactic integrity  for the sentence as a whole (or required the assumption that you might use "prone" as a verb). But in light of the level of casualness typical in WP talk pages, and your personal level in that note, that problem was insufficient, without a lot more attention, to force me into reconsiderating the synactic approach i've described.
 * _ _ Having discovered what i now take to be your intended syntax, i still (FWIW) find that sentence too vague to respond to. But i expect it seemed inexplicable to you (who knew exactly what you meant and had some justification for expecting others to come close) that i labelled it as being so thoroughly incomprehensible as i initially found it; i regret that i probably put you off by having so labelled it.

I have urgent commitments in the next 12 hours, and others over the next 72, so i must stop here for at least the former and perhaps even the latter. I expect i'll say at least a little more, soon after one or the other period, whether or not you respond to this partial comment. --Jerzy•t 07:18, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

_ _ OK, i couldn't keep from re-reading your statements above, and without trying (at least yet) to tackle the other points, AFAICS
 * the philosophy of "you don't know how to edit [ LoPbN ]correctly, so don't"

probably refers to our interaction. But that isn't what i was trying to communicate, and i'm surprised if you've heard that from me. My "philosophy" as applied to the edits of yours i've noted is
 * It's not obvious how to edit these pages correctly, so don't be discouraged when i reverse or tinker with what you've done, and please feel free to ask me why i did whatever i did, if you aren't able to infer it without asking.

and i regret leaving a different impression. _ _ IMO, you've picked up important aspects of the style i apply. It may be frustrating to you not to know why i think those differences matter, and i welcome yr questions abt that. I'm not going to try to present a coherant overview of that (bcz i don't do that sort of thing well let alone efficiently) and you would be far from the first if you find my way of expressing myself irritating or frustrating. You may be justified in ignoring my invitation as impractical, but you are mistaken if you characterize it as an attempt to discourage you from edits by you. In actuality i see your edits as both valuable, and increasingly consistent with my experience and analysis of what will work well in LoPbN. _ _ And BTW, i don't foresee your asking being an imposition or evidence of your failure to think deeply enough or come prepared enough or try hard enough -- partly bcz i've been working on it enough to have done a lot of things that i now regard as having been bad ideas. (Some of the bad ideas are recent, but the first that comes to mind is that it took 6 months from actively treating å as equivalent to aa when alphabetizing to my shift to treating it like a. I initially found it obvious that knowing what Scandinavians do is valuable for LoPbN.) _ _ So i couldn't break off writing as quickly as i insisted to you on doing (and promised myself i would). --Jerzy•t 08:17, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

Dabs with names
What was the outcome of the discussion about using the LoPbN in dabs - is there a good model somewhere I can use?--Commander Keane 01:37, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

Micro-bios
I've obviously created confusion by my use of the term "micro-bio", since you've adopted it in, i'm pretty sure, a contrary sense. (I intended, by "rm micro-bio" to imply
 * the entry was not satisfied to assist the user in reaching the bio, and instead was hopelessly trying to do, in less than a sentence, a job that deserves a whole article -- so i cut it back from being an inadequate (or "micro-") bio to just the typical minimal description, like "American farmer and politician", that is almost always adequate to fully disambiguate

but obviously i chose a bad term.) I'm going to come up with something more evocative, or perhaps keep watching your style of expressing that, so i can imitate your terminology. Thanks! --Jerzy•&#91;&#91;User talk:Jerzy&#124;t]] 02:56, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, i know the feeling re watch list. (BTW, "my contributions" can sometimes solve that, but probably not in this case, since the pages are in the main namespace.) Consulting related changes for  User:Jerzy/Links to Most Cleaned LoPbN Pages (via which i noted most & probably all of your usages of the term), i find on the 19th
 * m 03:42 List of people by name: Hag-Hah (diff; hist) . . Ceyockey (Talk | block) (→Hah - expanded microbios, mostly to include nationality)

was the most recent instance, and the one that i had in mind when i wrote. While i have that page before me, it's easy enuf, on the chance that you would want more examples, to add these & ensure not having to give them later: Hmm. I thot i had seen several times two cases, but i find only those two and my own in searching for all three variants of "micro-bio" that occur to me, for 500 edits and 30 days (which i think are non-stretchable limits). Thanks for your attn. --Jerzy•&#91;&#91;User talk:Jerzy&#124;t]] 18:18, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
 * 12th 14:26 List of people by name: Can-Caq (diff; hist) . . Ceyockey (Talk | block) (→Cant - Canz - added Jim Cantore; rev microbio for N M Cantarero; rev name for Georg Cantor; rev link/name Itatí Cantoral)

Mobuto footnote
I credit you with admirable innovation in the two edits connected w/ Mobuto; i think you showed good sense in minimizing the distraction of the information you chose to add. And BTW, your description of him is just the kind i favor: whether he was a dictator or not, there are shades of dictatorship, and probably people who are dictators without that being a notable aspect of their political bios, e.g., the dictators who really do try to achieve an orderly transition to a less authoritarian society by fostering independent dialogue & negotiation among interests. LoPbN, as a navigation tool for getting people from a name they have roughly in mind to the corresponding bio, is not the place to describe the status of people as dictators, non-dictators, and the many shades between those: that is the job of the bio, where there is plenty of space to NPoV the nuances and views of dictatorhood.

That being said, i think the endnote works against that proper role of the LoPbN page, by creating the expectation that nuances do have a role on the page: that LoPbN can in itself be an authoritative reference on people (and in this case, on peripheral issues related to them). For LoPbN to do its job efficiently, IMO it must vigorously avoid being authoritative. Andrew Lloyd Webber, for instance, must appear in both the Ls and the Ws, (and probably under Weber), and the place to correct the misunderstanding on the part of those who look under W is in the bio, not where the clarification clutters the page & impedes navigation via the eight adjacent entries (if not to him). Common misspellings and pseudonyms and titles that the person uses but is not entitled to, all need to be listed. Trying to nuance those on the LoPbN page involved is not only clutter, it is misrepresentation, bcz it communicates to users that we intend the pages to be authoritative, and therefore to state, by the absence of qualification, that the name shown is the correct name. (In a page-tree where we often can't even reflect the fact that our own bio says someone is dead! In a page-tree where "Lionel Hamptom" stayed for (IIRC) over a year after someone fixed the spelling on the page that the entry came from -- simply bcz they failed (probably justifiably responding to priorities different from mine) to look at the What-links-here of the rd-lk would have revealed the repetition of the error.)

For purposes of getting users to Mobuto's bio, "Congo" or "Congolese" is just fine. Everyone knows that Africa is full of countries that have changed their name at least once, and everyone is capable of taking any specific statement of African nationality with a grain of salt, and of not giving up bcz they're looking for a Mobuto from "Zaire", not from "Congo". And no, there's no problem in this LoPbN context with confusing Zaire with the Congo whose capital is Brazzaville. (And there's no problem labelling all the people from the island of Dominica and half the people from the island of Hispaniola both as "Dominicans", nor omitting the compass point when speaking of Germany, Korea, or Timor. In all these cases, the bio and/or the country article can sort that out; it's going to almost always speed users' path to the bio, and almost never even slow anyone down. It will, sometime, prevent someone from getting to an article, but that person is not someone we could hope to adquately accommodate.) The minimalist spirit of the Dab MoS is also applicable with these navigational pages. --Jerzy•t 21:05, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Adminship
You put this on my talk page:
 * I will not congratulate you but rather express my disappointment at your having accepted the adminship nomination. From what I've seen to date of your editing activity around LoPbN there is no admin-related tool that is required for what you have either proposed or done to date.  Getting admin powers in order to reduce the burden of work on existing admins is less productive than using the vast editorial powers that non-admins wield in a practiced, judicious and thoughtful manner.  That's just my 2-cents of unsolicited input based on what I've observed to date. Courtland 17:38, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

So let's try this: I've taken it back off for two reasons. First, it does nothing to further the work that we are to some extent engaged together in. Second, the only effect it could have on that collaboration would be to impede it, unless i forgo responding to it beyond this. I'm done with it; you do what you like with this copy. OK? --Jerzy•t 04:41, 22 November 2005 (UTC)