User talk:GregLoutsenko

Welcome
Hello , and welcome to Wikipedia. Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers: I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! By the way, you can sign your name on Talk and vote pages using three tildes, like this: &#126;&#126;&#126;. Four tildes (&#126;&#126;&#126;&#126;) produces your name and the current date. If you have any questions, see the help pages, add a question to the village pump or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome! You 20:44, Jun 10, 2005 (UTC)
 * The Five Pillars of Wikipedia
 * How to edit a page
 * Editing tutorial
 * Picture tutorial
 * How to write a great article
 * Naming conventions
 * Manual of Style

I sent you a message the same way you sent me a message, by editing your talk page. This is generally how messages are sent on Wikipedia. You 20:53, Jun 10, 2005 (UTC)

Response to your comments/suggestions
First of all, let me say that I have no power to implement any of your suggestions here, but feel free to run more by me on my talk page. What you're suggesting may already be implemented or another solution to the problem your suggestion would fix is implemented.

''i recon that in a decade all other encyclopedeas will be obsolete or will have to merge in order to keep up with wikipedia's growth rate. even encarta has now began allowing user editing, although any editing has to be approved by an editor first.'' See Errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia. While I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say that I think traditional encylopedias will ever be totally obsolete (I can still see a place for them in the future,) I think they may be much less widely used.

already there are many article which are basically on the same topic but are placed under slightly different names. Articles as such are frequently merged, see Duplicate articles.

''i certainly hope that the community and the designers will be able to come up with solutions for these problems. i would really hope that wikipedia will be able to expand into more technical topics, like details of complier error messages and specific, very technical, medical topics, i dont c why it cant happen. wikipedia has no limits on space so pretty much any article is acceptable. if only wikipedia can get a wider community of users.'' List of bad article ideas. There are limits to what we generally accept. Also, see Deletion policy.

i also would really like a spell checker for the editing section and a more visual editing environment. I agree with you on this, but for now, I just paste it into Word and use its spellcheck and I use the "Show Preview" button.

i also think that there should be a simple 10 star review system of articles, a review for quality of language, review for point of view, and correctness. We have something like this. See Featured articles. Also, myself, I consider any article a work in progress at all times, what may be a poor article now may wind up worthy of being a Featured Article a month from now.

the "discussion" section should be made into a standard forum type, because at the minute the layout does make it difficut to read through suggestions, or at least more difficult then would have been if it was a standard forum, like phpbb. The current method works something like this, just be sure to sign your posts. If nothing else, it uses the same Wiki software for consistency.

''and why not have google ads?! it will bring in more cash to speed up the servers...'' We don't really need them, we're doing just fine on donations. I forget where I read this, but Wikipedia is commited to staying ad-free.

''there should really be a more organized layout of the help section/rules section and stuff on templates and stubs. it took me like days to figure all the stuff out needed and i still dont think i know all the formatting tricks and the way wiki works/where to find stubs to write on and so on. its just a mess of links.'' I agree with you here too. I've been here since December 2004, and I still mess up formatting sometimes. But, I've just been figuring it out as I go along.

also i would really like way more statistics for each article, or at least a reorganization of stat section coz at the minute it takes me far too long to find stats i am looking for, most of the time these stats dont even exist. I haven't seen much of these myself, so I'm not sure what to say.

Also, I'd like to say, thanks for your enthusiasm for the project!

You 14:43, Jun 11, 2005 (UTC)

Re: female to male ratio of wikipedeans
I'm not sure if anyone knows this ratio. For example, I'm male, but other than now, I had never once directly indicated this. It does seem that there are more males than females here, although there are several female sysops and at least one developer. You 17:29, Jun 13, 2005 (UTC)

P.S., I've been noticing that you haven't been signing your posts on talk pages. While on my talk page, I can go back and add the date and time you added your comment using the history function, it is generally considered good style to sign your posts with four tildes "~" to add the date and time. Three tildes "" adds only your name, which I generally seldom use. You 17:29, Jun 13, 2005 (UTC)

re: stable articles
I would say that there's no such thing as a "stable article" here (see The perfect article.) At least in theory, articles can ALWAYS be improved somehow. As for spoken articles, it is always noted which version they are based on. Even if they are based on an old version, they still probably have good information in them. All old versions of an article are saved and can be reverted. There's a tab beside the "edit this page" button that says "history," from which past versions of an article can be accessed, and edits can be made based on those past versions. To revert vandalism, one accesses one of those old versions, and then uses the "edit this page" button, then clicks on "save page." All past versions of an article are saved and accessible, except for articles that are deleted by the Deletion Policy.

I'm not quite sure I understand your last question, the closest thing I would say to articles where "the nuts and bolts" of them are there are Featured articles. These are considered especially well-written and complete. You (Talk) 21:28, Jun 14, 2005 (UTC)

re: wikinfo, is that really needed?!
Hmmm... I think the idea of Wikinfo is that instead of making one article about a subject from NPOV, they try to create many articles about a subject from many points of view. Actually, I can see some use for this, although having ten articles about a particular subject from different points of view may take as much effort as having at least two articles here from the NPOV (since NPOV can be difficult to implement, just look at the debate and page history for the Computer_and_video_games_that_have_been_considered_the_greatest_ever you mentioned on my talk page. For example, in my version (the original,) I cited several games.  I made a particluar effort to avoid games that I personally thought worthy of the list, even though the article was probably still biased towards console games and RPGs in general.  Other people developed this into an article, in fact, I can't call it "my article" at all.  Also, see Films that have been considered the greatest ever.  You (Talk) 17:55, Jun 16, 2005 (UTC)

re: what is this?
It's a series infobox I think. If you want to make one for a series of articles, go ahead. I made Template:SaGa series, which I had no idea how to make one except for copying the format of Template:FinalFantasy series and changing the links to SaGa articles. If each alien race has its own article, than I'm sure that would be a great navigational tool. Just look at a few templates, find one with a format you think would work, copy and paste it into a new article called something like Template:Star trek races. Then, if you put   at the bottom of each article that the template links to, you'll have one. Just be absolutely sure to preview your template a few times to make sure you get it right before you save it. You (Talk) 23:39, Jun 21, 2005 (UTC)

History of Painting
 I noticed you called it a very important topic. So I was wondering if you could vote for it. Falphin 15:01, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

re: spliting up wikipedia
I really don't think so. While Wikipedia IS huge, Wikipedia is not paper. The whole idea of it is to write an encylopedia, biographies and geographical articles would be found in a traditional encylopedia. You (Talk) July 6, 2005 21:46 (UTC)

Image:Russian_white_house.jpg
You didn't provide source and license information with this image, I've marked it as nosource. These images are currently being deleted, so you should update it with source information if you can. --Gmaxwell 11:19, 18 September 2005 (UTC)