User talk:DuncanHill/Archives/2010/December

Ref desk
User:Keraunoscopia has cut-and-paste in a past thread from January; it's quite confusing unless it's very clearly marked as "dead"... AnonMoos (talk) 13:31, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

List of artificial whitewater courses
Your Nov 17 edits to this article make no change in what the user sees, however the table is now very confusing to edit. Before your change, every entry had the same style, and I could easily update the list as new information became available. Now, since you "Disambiguated: Penrith, Itaipu, St. Joseph River using Dab solver," whatever that means, it's a confused mess (at least to me). Do you mind if I revert your change? Thanks. HowardMorland (talk) 17:22, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
 * If you want to replace correct links with incorrect links, go ahead. Disambiguation refers to the fact that there are sometimes more than one place with the same name - for example, Penrith could be a place in Cumbria or a place in New South Wales. What I did was to change the links to make them point to the correct article, instead of to the disambiguation pages. For more information, read Disambiguation. DuncanHill (talk) 17:33, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
 * That's helpful. I will make sure the links are correct.  Thanks.  HowardMorland (talk) 18:00, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

UMm yeah
I get carried away sometimes. And check out my enlightening response to a 2 year old comment on the page for St. Austell. When I made those Edit Summaries...I was...kind of having an argument with someone in the same room as me. Could explain it. --Τασουλα (Shalom!) (talk) 21:49, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Oops, I should point out that I'm going by the Cornwall guideline. I'm certainly not an English nationalist. I would treat Jewish related issues (As I am Jewish) the same. --Τασουλα (Shalom!) (talk) 21:52, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Child contact centre name
Hi Duncan, Now that the cut and paste move is fixed, is there any reason not to just remove the indefinite move protection on the pages, and see where they end up? I only suggested WP:RM because it look contentious, but no one seems to be contending. I obviously like the names they're at now, so I'm not going to go through the paperwork to get a discussion going if no one cares. Thoughts? --Floquenbeam (talk) 23:27, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Sounds fine to me. DuncanHill (talk) 23:38, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Georgia
Oops! I dread disambiguating Washington (U.S. state), now I guess I'll dread Georgia, too. I should have realized... Thanks. :D 75.203.197.240 (talk) 02:06, 7 December 2010 (UTC)


 * No worries, DuncanHill (talk) 12:36, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

Handicaps
Hi,

I just don't know how you got that I was saying WP excludes the handicapped based on what I wrote. Of course I never thought that. I meant exactly what I wrote, though I could have explained it in more comforting tones. He obviously wanted special treatment, and I was just telling him that WP doesn't have a mechanism. I know of lots of people who don't have what it takes to edit here. Anyway, no hard feelings I hope. BE——Critical __Talk 05:27, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

WP:AN
I removed your comments from the administrative section. Normally I would have moved them elsewhere in the discussion, but since you've already stated this opinion, I felt it would just duplicate things. If you feel that there's another appropriate place to add them though (not in the admin comments section), please do:
 * I too object, it is anti-collaborative and makes a big deal out of adminship, something which admins claim it should not be. DuncanHill (talk) 16:45, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

--Elonka 16:56, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

Elk, or, what is a wapiti?
I agree with you, & have raised the point at FAC talk, as I think there is a wider issue here. Johnbod (talk) 17:42, 14 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks - the thing is, I was already aware of the existence of a large deer called a wapiti which is native to North America. I was also aware that North Americans call an elk a moose. I was completely surprised to discover that they call a wapiti (a perfectly good Native American word) an elk - and the edited lead used on the front page does not make it clear that it's not about what we call an elk at all. DuncanHill (talk) 17:48, 14 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Well you were a bit ahead of me there, as I'd never heard wapiti, which sounds like the Finnish for moose/Elk to me frankly. I suspect most non-North Americans are like me; the animal has a very low profile "in popular culture". Johnbod (talk) 19:01, 14 December 2010 (UTC)
 * We learnt about the flora and fauna of the Commonwealth at primary school (well, I did, I had free rein of all the old books) :) DuncanHill (talk) 19:03, 14 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Duncan, what do people in the UK (those who know it exists) call this animal? Wapiti?  North American Elk?  Not sure I can solve this without stirring the hornet's nest further, but this is a useful data point I haven't yet found. --Floquenbeam (talk) 19:45, 14 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Wapiti. Chambers 20th Century Dictionary, 1983 ed., does list wapiti as a US and Canadian meaning for elk, the main entry for Cervus canadiensis is under wapiti. OED has Alces alces as the primary meaning for elk, listing the usage for the wapiti alongside the use for e.g. the Irish elk. It also gives Canadian Deer for wapiti, and has wapiti as the main entry for C. canadiensis. So, based on my personal experience, and those two dictionaries (rather different in style as they are), I would say wapiti is the British English for C. canadiensis. My "Collins Gem" Wild Animals (admittedly a small book, which only contains all European mammals) makes no mention under elk of the word's use in North America to mean C. canadiensis. My feeling is that almost nobody outside North America would know that the word elk can be used to refer to anything other than Alces alces.
 * Personally, the confusion around elk, moose and wapiti seem to me to be an excellent example of the advantages of having articles under the binomials, rather than under "common names" which can so often differ from region to region and dialect to dialect. It's interesting to note that the earliest versions of the article at elk were about red deer, yet my 1983 Chambers recognised it as distinct from red deer. DuncanHill (talk) 19:59, 14 December 2010 (UTC)


 * I've proposed a wording on WP:ERRORS. If it were up to me, all biology articles would be under their scientific name, with redirects or disambiguation pages as needed at the common names.  Same with geographic articles; all would be at City, Country (or where there are several, City, State/County, Country, with redirects at famous ones (i.e. Paris--> Paris, France, not Paris, Texas, and not to a dab page at Paris.)  Seems like it would solve all kinds of pointless arguments.  But alas, I am outnumbered. --Floquenbeam (talk) 20:05, 14 December 2010 (UTC)
 * One does encounter a surprising number of articles which assert that Athens is in Georgia. DuncanHill (talk) 20:19, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

Duncan...the elk was a naming mistake made possibly by some of my ancestors who got thrown out of England...specifically from here almost 400 years ago. The English colonists to North America, familiar with the native Red Deer, encountered the bigger, very different (both behaviorally and in appearance) deer in North America and not knowing actually what a moose (elk in europe) looked like except from drawings or hearsay, wrongly gave the common name for the European elk to the North American deer. Now, the overwhelmingly vast majority of North Americans call the deer in question an elk, not a wapiti. In fact, wapiti is almost never used as a word to name this animal....in my 15 years as a park ranger, I never once heard any naturalist refer to the animal in question as anything other than an elk, but like the article, they would discuss the Native American name of wapiti...which even amongst these tribes, is a word infrequently used. For the record, to make matters even more confusing, the Whooper Swan also used to be called elk, and that was in Europe...how the Europeans could confuse a moose and a swan is beyond me...--MONGO 04:09, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
 * To me (see FAC talk section linked above) the whole issue is about messing about unwisely with the article text in making the main page extract. The situation at the article itself may not not be felt ideal by everyone, but with a hatnote and the confusion explained in line 2, no-one could be confused for long, whereas the main page extract was almost guaranteed to throw most non-North Americans. Johnbod (talk) 04:29, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I commented there too...I think to create the blurb which summarized the article content, Raul, due to space constraints, simply didn't go there...I can definitely see why this would be a problem though for Euopeans glancing at the mainpage FA and seeing a picture of a "wapiti" instead of a elk.--MONGO 04:40, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

Cefn Golau
Thank you for reverting my edit on Cefn Golau.

I had not appreciated that because I had used the new article wizard for starting that article, my User/Cefn_Golau was no longer available for my own personal use for developing a new article, in this case on Encarsia perplexa. So I eradicated the Cefn Golau article instead of the copy I thought I still had in my user space. Apologies! Cwmhiraeth (talk) 06:39, 16 December 2010 (UTC)