User talk:Colonies Chris/Archive/2012/May

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Regarding your edit to Get Your Sting and Blackout World Tour
For the most part I applaud your recent edit to Get Your Sting and Blackout World Tour to fix some links and removed overlinking of well-known geographic places. My only concern is your handling of U.S. cities because right now the article is inconsistent with how they handled. I think the cities need to either be listed as just the city names or with the city, state names. Since the articles on U.S. cities are handled differently this would either mean the use of piped links, for example Nashville or redirects, for example Chicago, Illinois. In this article, it used to use postal code abbreviations redirects that I got rid of in this edit,, and I figured if someone thought the state abbreviation was needed, that having the state names for all of the links would be preferred so I went with the redirects. I do not have a preference for piped links or redirects, just as long as the article is consistent. I would appreciate your opinion before I edit the article. Thank you, Aspects (talk) 13:37, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

WikiThanks
In recognition of all the work you’ve done lately! 66.87.0.212 (talk) 20:01, 27 April 2012 (UTC)

Re: Template:Island-town
Hello, all I did to that template was fixing its wording. There's no need to notify people who just made minor edits to templates about their deletion. Graham 87 10:11, 29 April 2012 (UTC)

edits to MSW3 templates
Hi Chris, I'm somewhat puzzled by your removal of the links to the publisher of Mammal Species of the World as "unhelpful" in the various MSW3 citation templates. Is this a reflection of some Wikipedia policy that I am not aware of? After all, what is helpful is entirely a function of what one is curious about. Is there any reason to assume that no one is curious about the publisher of the book in question? Would links to a journal in a journal article citation, or to the authors or editors of a publication being cited also be considered unhelpful? Thanks, WolfmanSF (talk) 17:54, 7 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Surely, spending your time going around various citation templates and removing wikilinks is unhelpful, no? It's not like the links to the publisher are cluttering anything. RobHar (talk) 02:39, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

I am aware of the policy you quoted on my talk page. I think it's pretty clear that that policy is talking about the prose of the article. I'm sure WolfmanSF is also aware of WP:OVERLINK, but has still asked whether your actions are a reflection of Wikipedia policy. Is there a policy or some sort of discussion with some sort of consensus that says that links to publishers in bibliographic data is unhelpful? Or is this your own call? RobHar (talk) 13:59, 8 May 2012 (UTC)


 * To me, a bibliographic citation is already a clutter of information and an extra blue word isn't going to push it from clutter to unintelligible. This is in stark contrast to the prose of the article. The goal on wikipedia is to write clear prose and cluttering that with wikilinks can be counterproductive. This is what that guideline is describing. For instance, having a too broad wikilink in the prose can divert the reader's attention and somehow make them think that that word is closely related to the article's subject. That kind of confusion is just not likely to arise when it comes to a link to a publisher in the bibliography section. Take as an another example the fact that the citation template puts wikilinks to isbn, oclc, mr, etc. though these are completely unrelated to the article's content. It is clear to me and probably to many others that the bibliographic data in the bibliography section is not intended to be covered by WP:OVERLINK. Do you have any indication that your point of view is a significantly held opinion? RobHar (talk) 15:18, 8 May 2012 (UTC)


 * I am not referring to the fact that the isbn *of the book* is wikilinked, but to the fact that the term isbn itself is wikilinked, i.e. there is a link to International Standard Book Number in every instance of the citation template for which an isbn is provided. RobHar (talk) 16:22, 8 May 2012 (UTC)


 * While it is true that isbn is hardcoded in mediawiki (and presumably is hardcoded because it is believed to not cause overlinking; and presumably you could choose to not use the hardcoded option, I dunno), it would be very easy to edit the citation template so as not to link mr. It is currently linked because in the citation template (more specifically in Citation/identifier) they use the mr template. All they would have to do is not use the mr template. They use it because they think it's helpful to have the term mr linked/does not cause overlinking issues. Just like I think it's helpful to have the publisher linked/doesn't cause overlinking issues. RobHar (talk) 17:06, 8 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Again, linking years is in the prose. Anyway, it seems from your responses that you are not doing these mass unlinkings with consensus. Is this true? RobHar (talk) 17:31, 8 May 2012 (UTC)


 * I wouldn't call it "conspicuously failing to answer" a question when you've only asked me once and I've asked you the same question 2 or 3 times. Also, the time you asked me that question was at the end of a paragraph in which you had misunderstood my argument, so my response was to that more important fact. Another reason I haven't answered the question is that I don't see any downside to having the link, so I don't feel like there needs to be an upside. But here's a reason: while it's true that most people will follow an isbn link to look the book up on google books or amazon, I have on occasion wanted to look a book up on the publisher's website, which I can do by clicking on the wikilink and then looking in the infobox on the publisher's article.


 * Anyway, the point is that you're the one whose made the edits against consensus so you are the one that is supposed to be justifying things. If this were one edit, I would go ahead and revert and you'd have to show consensus to redo your change, but because this is a mass edit, I'm just not going to go through and personally revert all those changes. While it's true that there's a lot of overlinking on wikipedia, these are mostly due to inexperienced users editing pages. You've removed a whole bunch of links from templates, and editors of templates are generally more experienced. Given the number of various templates whose editors saw fit to link the publisher, I think it's pretty clear that there was a consensus that those links belonged. RobHar (talk) 00:57, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Deleting "publisher" field from "Cite web" templates
I was wondering what the rationale was for removing the "|publisher=" field from the "Cite web" template in a number of recent edits you've made. It isn't an across-the-board removal from all such templates in an article; affected works include the online Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, the Wall Street Journal (both in the Dow Jones and News Corp eras), and a few others. Do you have an official list? Are you removing ones where the listed publisher is no longer accurate, even if it was at the time? (In which case I'd expect a replacement, not a removal.)

I'd like to understand the rationale and rules behind the changes, because you've edited a trio of articles on my watchlist today, and I expect there will be more in the future. Thanks! BlueMoonset (talk) 20:55, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
 * I second this, you are actually removing vast quantities of info from articles, many of which are GAs and shouldn't be tampered with to the level which you are tampering with them by removing publisher and work parameters, things which must be apart of the template. Consider this an informal warning. Aaron  &bull; You  Da  One 19:29, 9 May 2012 (UTC)