User talk:Greyengine5/footer related comments ofRL in my talk

What "vauge reference to other resolved incidents"? If anything, I refrained from pointing out that your insistence on bloat as far as the footer goes is part of a general tendency I believe that you have towards bloat in general. To qualify that comment - I can't recall a single instance where you have proposed cutting something down to make it more concise or compact, only where you've wanted to pack more and more into any given element of an article. I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing - one of the major tensions across the pedia in general is between so-called inclusionists and deletionists. I'll freely admit to being a mild form of the latter, while your behaviour suggests the former to me.

Like I said on the actual project page - if you've contributed more than a stub- please point it out and I'll gladly retract the remark and apologise for making it. In any case, you haven't contributed very many. Despite your taking this as a "slap in the face" I believe it's relevant here, since you simply lack the experience to know how well the footer is working (or not).

As usual, I would find it more useful if you can point to specific examples of problems rather than indulging in hand-waving along the lines of "but there might be some plane out there that this doesn't work for". I'll reiterate my position that there's no footer (or other article element) that works equally well for all examples all the time. But I think that the standard footer works more than reasonably well in every example I've seen it used in.

I'll admit to having misunderstood your position during the footer creation process - I thought you were reasonably happy for this to be used as a standard element across the project. Seems like we weren't as close to consensus as I thought. --Rlandmann 08:46, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I'll add that I find it highly ironic that your enthusiasm for incremental change or customisation doesn't extend to include Bobblewik's work on your skyscraper table. --Rlandmann 08:57, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Its was the type of change not the idea of it. I suggest you check things out before posting this kind of crap. Greyengine5 21:23, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * Likewise, it's not the idea of changing the footer that I'm opposed to - just the type of change. I've made it clear that I'm not particularly dedicated to this footer. If, by consensus, we can come up with a better footer that's applicable across the project, then you can be sure that I'll be leading the charge to implement it. --Rlandmann 01:03, 9 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * Yet another change of topic from what being discussed. The footer is issue is resolved and I have no interest in reviving this debate. Greyengine5 02:07, 9 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * Perhaps - but only in (an apparently futile) attempt to get you to see a different perspective. --Rlandmann 22:51, 9 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * I already know your perspective. Its your understanding of my perspective thats wrong. I dont want to change the stadard footer ( at least not for a long time, and even then it wouls be in the manner you suggest. The only things that futile is this endless, useless, waste of time debates you pursue. Greyengine5 23:13, 9 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I have to confess that I'm not really too concerned with how pleasant or otherwise you find my comments - I'm not here to please you and I prefer to call a spade a spade. I don't believe that I have expanded the issue beyond what's at hand, and I believe that I haven't made any personal comment beyond what I feel to be relevant to the issue at hand. You are free to disagree, but I'll only apologise if I've made a factual error.

If you feel that you're being treated harshly or unfairly, I suggest you select another WikiProject of your choice and start monkeying with its standard elements and examine the reaction you receive.

Finally, I point out the apparent contradiction that you're very keen to espouse the idea of anyone being free to change anything on the wiki, while at the same time not so keen to defend changes when they operate against your agendas. I find this position disingenuous to say the least and under the circumstances find it impossible to have any respect for your personal version of "the freedom of the wiki".

Again, you're not alone in your anarchic approach, which is why the idea of appointing topic editors for different parts of the wiki is now gaining momentum.

Despite all this, I affirm again that I think you make many valuable contributions here. I am especially impressed with the excellent job you did on the airlistbox, and, more recently, with the List of military aircraft of Sweden. --Rlandmann 01:03, 9 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * For what it's worth - I've never set out to insult or inflame you, but neither am I going to temper my remarks any longer on an issue where considerable debate had already taken place, compromises had been reached, and which has resulted in a product that was (and is) being rolled out very smoothly across the project. If you can nominate specific issues or problems with the standard footer (beyond simply asserting that some people might want to implement the footer differently), then please say what they are.


 * I feel frustrated when I read your comment that compromises "must be reached sooner and with less wasted time,effort" when from my perspective, it seems that no sooner has compromise been reached and everyone's reasonably happy than you want to re-open it all over again. That's how I experienced part of the data table "debate" and how I'm experiencing the footer fiasco at the moment.


 * If I may be so bold - the real strengths that you have demonstrated so far have been in the areas of systematising information in tables and lists. I may very well be overstepping bounds by suggesting it - but there's a lot of work in that area that's still needed for WP:A, including creating article templates and/or data tables for air forces, airlines, engines, and weapons. Not to mention rolling out something like what you've done for the Swedish aircraft across the other aircraft "inventories" that we have. I'd be all too keen to work with you in any of those areas, and/or aid you in implementing them. On the proviso, of course, that once a standard has been agreed on, we stick to it! --Rlandmann 05:03, 9 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your continuing advice - you can be quite sure I'll be ignoring it. I'm not letting this issue go until we have come up with a compromise acceptable to both of us - rather than just the one that you find acceptable. --Rlandmann 22:51, 9 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * I'd much rather have a debate (even one that you personally find "protracted") than just engage in a pointless edit war. This way leads to a way forward, edit wars achieve nothing but bad blood.


 * The first thing I'm going to ask for, though, is that you restore the standard footer to the pages that you altered it on. Then we can discuss the pros-and-cons of the other footer that you've put there. My problems with it are actually very specific and have already been spelled out, but I'll gladly distill them down into a more workable form if you can show the good faith to restore the footers first. --Rlandmann 03:36, 10 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * I'm really puzzled by your last remark - I'm not forcing you to waste any time at all - if you don't want to participate in discussion, you don't have to. What would you rather me do when I strongly disagree with you? Just revert your edits without any explanation? ...(which is about the treatment you'd get on most other projects, from what I've seen - maybe I've been too conciliatory?)


 * I say again that I've never set out to insult - maybe you need to learn to be a little less thin-skinned if you're going to continue to lock horns with people in areas that you know will be contentious. Not an insult - just an observation since you seem to keep going on about being somehow insulted.


 * The combination of Fikri's footer and the standard footer that I'd be most happy with is the one that you reverted (ie with Fikri's footer developed into the more general tu-civ-trans box). As I see it, the only worthwhile information contained in Fikri's footer that wasn't already covered better elsewhere on the page was the closely-related types that I copied into the tu-civ-trans box - which I think is an excellent addition to navigation.


 * The biggest benefit I see in that approach is that it presents linking material in a hierarchical fashion - Closely related types > Broader categories (standard footer) > Broader Categories still (airlistbox). If and when WP Aircraft becomes a division of a broader WP Transport, then a WP Transport footer could be added below that again (broader still).


 * The biggest problem that I have with your piecemeal approach to simply re-arranging the standard footer anyway it tickles one's fancy any time that one likes (for good reasons, or no reasons at all) is that it quickly ceases to be a standard, at which point there's no real advantage in it over just a bunch of "see also" links - which is where we started from before the footer. If nothing else, it leads to misunderstandings, such as Fikri's belief that the "Related Development" row was somehow only applicable to Eastern European aircraft, all because someone had neglected to implement this row in the Boeing 7x7 and Airbus articles - something that could quite easily have happened by accident because they copied it from someone else who had "customised" the footer.


 * The proof of the pudding is in the eating - the standard footer is working, and while I'm the first to admit that there are improvements that could be made, I continue to argue that these should be made systematically, project-wide. --Rlandmann 05:31, 10 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I agree that telling lies about people is insulting. Based on your previous complaints, you can only be referring to my observation that you've never contributed a single article on an aircraft type that was more than a stub. I still believe this to be true. If it's not - I'm simply mistaken, not lying, and one I would be all to happy to retract if I'm shown otherwise. So - unless you've made those contributions under a different user name (unlikely, since your writing and spelling styles are very distinctive) I'm very confident that I'm correct. The open-ness with which I'm make that observation is commensurate with my certainty that the observation is true. I'm not one to make baseless accusations, or to make any accusation lightly.

Since you state that you don't have a problem with my restoring those footers to the current standard, I will go ahead and do so. As for Fikri's footer, let's examine it element-by-element.


 * Design Bureaux: please tell me why on Earth we need this. Like I said, it's like insisting that Boeing 747 really needs to link directly to Northrop.


 * Type Designation: also completely superfluous and redundant - if the reader hasn't worked out that the article's about the Tu 214 by the time they've hit this footer, then something's badly wrong, no?


 * NATO "Codename": as an alternative name, this belongs (as per general Wikipedia style guidelines) at the top of the article. Why does such special attention need to be drawn to it here? IMHO, this is the single most pointless line of the footer.


 * Primary Designation Series: the one element in Fikri's footer that gives us something new and useful on the page, which is why I'm so keen to see it implemented and advanced across the project.


 * Comparable Aircraft: since this is one-to-one identical information with what's contained in the standard footer, why do we need this?

I have no doubt as to Fikri's credentials, nor to his good intentions. But neither of those things, on their own, mean that articles that he creates shouldn't fit the same standards as the others that form part of this project.

As an inclusionist, I know that you're keen to adopt every new idea that anyone comes up with. I suggest to you that not every new idea is a good idea, let alone one worth implementing. I hope that I've shown that I don't think every new idea is a bad one. --Rlandmann 10:25, 10 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * OK now I think we're getting somewhere :) FWIW, I really, really appreciate the frankness of your last reply.


 * I was correct, then, in thinking that Dornier Do 10 was the longest aircraft article you've contributed. "Stub" refers to the amount of content, not how long it took the contributor to research the material, so I stand by my observation. To clarify, I don't think there's anything wrong with stubs per se(although there's a whole school of thought out there on the wiki that hates them). On the other hand, I do think that as a measure of your contributions here, writing a few stubs doesn't really put you in a position to be trying to tell other people how to do a job that you yourself aren't doing (ie - how to structure and lay out the full-fledged aircraft articles).


 * I agree with you that some of the aircraft articles are a little over-long and over-detailed for a general encyclopedia like this one. Heinkel He 112 springs to mind - but I don't think the time is yet right to start trimming.


 * I did also sense that there was some issue about "ownership" of material happening here (Fikri's footer disappearing, text you've written reworded). But that's the nature of the wiki - as the edit page announcement puts it, "If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly... then don't submit it here". For many people, the hardest part of the wiki experience is letting go of what they've written. The sanest approach to it (that I've seen a few people spell out here and there) is to regard it as a compliment - it means that someone else is interested enough in what you've written and shares your interest in a topic enough to want to work on it too.


 * If I can also be completely frank and forthright - I think we both know that the longer articles you've contributed tend to leave a lot to be desired in terms of style and presentation. I don't mean that in any way to dissuade you from contributing more of them - but when you do, you really do have to expect that others are going to quickly jump in and "fix" them. I'll go out on a limb here and say that if when you contribute longer articles, if you think of them more as seeds that are going to get other people fired up and editing, the wiki experience will become a happier and happier experience for you...


 * Early flying machines was an interesting exception - a much more substantial article, and largely devoid of many of the mechanical (spelling, grammar) errors that are typical of your work. It looked much much more polished, and I suspect that this one was actually put together on a word-processor and checked (originally a school or college report?) before being cut-and-pasted here. You might find that a similar approach would stand you in good stead in other articles too. I'll also sing your praises once again as to the work you do on lists and tables - as the original contributor of list of aircraft of the Israeli Air Force, I'll quickly admit that your revamp of it is vastly superior in presentation to what I put there.


 * Wikipedia is a community - and in most human communities, people tend to gravitate towards specialising in things (are you familiar with the idea of comparative advantage in economics? - I think it is relevant to the wiki experience...) Bobblewik has chosen to make standardising units his/her "thing". I'm drawn towards writing in connected prose and in obsessing over how we present the information we're presenting. I can only encourage you to think about where your talents lie with regard to the wiki.


 * Heh - that's quite an essay. But on to the matter at hand:


 * We agree that type designation can go.


 * We agree that Comparable Aircraft can go, but that this is actually a better name for the row that's in the standard footer.


 * We agree that the "Primary Designation Sequence" is definitely valuable and worth keeping as the heart of a new footer.


 * I think your idea about the Design Bureaux is a great compromise. I can see two ways to implement it - either by
 * including links to lists of aircraft by manufacturers who've produced similar aircraft (so, tu-civ-trans should link to list of Antonov civil transport aircraft, list of Ilyushin civil transport aircraft etc - but note that Sukhoi and Mikoyan-Gurevich have never produced aircraft in this class)
 * or, I think better (because it's lower maintenance), just including a link to list of Russian civil transport aircraft
 * Both of these solutions would preserve the hierarchy within the footer - ie, the lists linked to would be more specific ones than say list of airliners or list of Russian aircraft, both of which (being very general) would belong in the standard footer.


 * I'll dig my heels in over the NATO reporting name though - the footers are about navigation, not presenting information about the particular type per se and this doesn't seem to fit. Besides, the NATO reporting names (and Allied reporting names for Japanese aircraft) are POV issues for Wikipedia - they're worth including in the article because, as you say, people are familiar with them and will encounter these names elsewhere, but they're names that hostile forces "branded" these aircraft with - which is why the naming conventions on WP A have shied away from using them in article titles. If this was to go anywhere outside the first line of the article itself, I'd suggest that it would be more appropriate to the data table, but as you know, I also think that that's already over-stuffed.


 * Like I said a few hundred words back (!) I think we're close to a resolution here - something I don't think that a mindless edit war would have brought us... Cheers --Rlandmann 00:59, 11 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * I'll try and be brief this afternoon for a change! and confine my comments to the two specific footer categories we're trying to reach compromise on:


 * Manufacturer lists - If I understand correctly, you're suggesting that instead of (for example) linking to list of Antonov civil transport aircraft, the footer could just link to the Antonovs in the existing list of aircraft airliner section? I agree that's by far the most elegant solution, but for some reason, this feature isn't working well in wiki at the moment - clicking on such a link will actually just dump the reader to the top of the list of aircraft. Apart from that, I think that the days of that big list are probably getting to be numbered anyway - whilst it's still of a manageable size for now, it's getting increasingly difficult to actually find anything on it. I think we really need at least a 2-way split between civil and military sooner rather than later.


 * List of airliners will probably eventually be its own list (it just redirects to the main list for now) but, I feel, is too broad for the "close relatives" footer - this belongs in the standard footer (where it is already anyway...)


 * Bottom line - I have a slight preference that this goes to list of Russian civil transport aircraft, but have no problem with it going to list of Antonov civil transport aircraft and list of Ilyushin civil transport aircraft. Either way, if you tell me you're happy with either of them, I'll create appropriate lists straight away, and develop a similar footer that can go on the Ilyushins and Antonovs that we already have articles on.


 * NATO reporting name - My problem with this being in the footer is not primarily the POV issue - it's the issue of using the footer to present or summarise information rather than just provide navigation. I fully agree that this information should be prominently displayed in the article however - I wasn't suggesting that it should be "written out of history". Many of the NATO reporting names are indeed well-known (sometimes better than the designation) but many are quite obscure. With your agreement to leave it out of the footer, I'll go through each and every Soviet and Japanese aircraft we have articles on an ensure that this information is prominently in place in the article, hopefully meaning that my desire to see this left out of the footer and your desire to make sure this information is clearly included are both met.


 * As an aside, I suspect another source of friction here may be that you are perhaps more a visual person, where I am definitely more of a words person - In light of that, I'll ask specifically whether either of these is an acceptable solution to you:

1

2


 * Note that Antonov, Ilyushin, Tupolev, and Yakovlev are the only design bureaux that worked on aircraft of this type (a few others had projects that stalled, or are currently working on them). Let me know what you think - I'm keen for us to wrap this up so we can both switch attention to engine table issues and also draw up some different templates from the main data table.


 * I also hear what you're saying about the value of being able to implement as much as possible via mediawiki and either of the options above could easily be done this way. I don't think this will ever be possible with the data table or standard footer though.


 * Another idea about "stepping releases", though - perhaps we can create a page in WPA to keep track of suggested changes (such as changing "designation series" to "designation sequence" and "similar aircraft" to "comparable aircraft") and once every couple of months hold a poll to see which should be implemented. Just the beginnings of an idea to make sure that we keep refining our approach but keeping the project from being in a constant state of flux... Cheers --Rlandmann 06:31, 11 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * I don't see why you say "1 was already rejected" - did you note that this was different from the first tu-civ-trans box in that it provided a link to a list specifically of Russian civil transport aircraft? That link (or the links to specifically Antonov and Ilyushin civil transports) were offered in place of the design bureaux, and as I said, I'm prepared to put the work in to make it work as long as it will keep the general design bureaux links out of that footer.


 * "Related Variants (civil)" is completely superfluous - this information is already contained in the Similar Aircraft row of the standard footer. If anything, this would be ideal material for the "subtypes" box discussed some time ago, since this is basically how Soviet/Russian designations work.


 * We went through this footer *line by line* until we distilled it down to the couple of rows still causing contention, and now you go and fill the thing up again.... I guess we're back to square one. :( -Rlandmann 23:32, 11 Apr 2004 (UTC)

The "See also" was offered as a way of turning the Design Bureaux line into something that made sense. Far from being simply a matter of personal taste, I simply can't see the logic of wanting to link a specific aircraft type to an article about a completely unrelated designer. As I've said, it's like insisting that Boeing 747 needs a direct link to Northrop, or that VW Beetle needs a direct link to Holden. I do take your point that, at the moment, many of the manufacturer pages are dominanted by lists, which is why I was offering to actually go and create more tightly focussed lists that would let these navigational elements make sense. As I see it, you're arguing that the design bureaux line should stay in there because


 * a) most of the articles are predominated by lists at this point in time (I've offered an alternative solution to this) and
 * b) because you think that since Fikri contributed the article, his original idea of what should go in the footer needs to somehow be protected.

If there's some other reason you want to link specific aircraft to unrelated manufacturers, please clarify it for me...

You still seem to be having problems with "ownership" of articles - Fikri had every right to contribute whatever he wanted in those articles - and I or you or anybody else has every right to change it to anything at all - for whatever reason, or no reason. This isn't about "rights" - this is about standardising articles within the framework of a WikiProject. The only reason we're having this debate at all is to prevent a mindless edit war - if I felt reasonably certain that you wouldn't just keep reverting them, I'd have just gone ahead and implemented a solution long ago. Fikri's status as an aviation professional give his opinion no more and no less weight when it comes to issues of layout and navigation, whereas, of course, it makes him very qualified to speak out on issues of terminology, common usage, and of course, factual information about whatever branch of aviation he's involved in.

I guess the best thing to do now is to outline our positions carefully, because you're right - beyond this there is only mediation - and if you thought that dealing with me has been a drawn-out and painful process, then you've seen nothing yet. I really hope that it won't go that far, because frankly I don't want to invest the time and energy, especially since we seem close to some kind of compromise just on our own. I also note that you only seem to recognise compromise when it's you who's doing the compromising, so - my position:


 * 1st preference - the tu-civ-list box that I implemented and you reverted. I think this option has the greatest potential for further development into something useful project-wide.


 * 2nd preference - no additional footer at all. I think that, while elements like this hold promise for the future, it will be a long time before this kind of intra-Project navigation becomes necessary. I think that links to other closely related types


 * 3rd preference - the tu-civ-list box with the heading turned into a link to a general list of Russian civil transport aircraft. (option 1 from recently)


 * 4th preference - the tu-civ-list box with links to lists of other related bureaux's similar aircraft. (option 2 from recently)

Beyond that, I'm still willing to negotiate on most points, but will not accept any version that includes:


 * the designation of the aircraft itself as an independent element - this is redundancy at its very worst.


 * the NATO reporting name - a footer (any Wikipedia footer) is not the place to include new data or summarise the article - it's a navigation tool.


 * links to other variants of the aircraft - this belongs in the Variants box (as discussed on the data table discussion page of WP A). Moreover, this duplicates the "Related Development" line of the standard footer.

My greatest concern is to keep things as simple and as standardised as possible. Other WPs are becoming a maze of footers, but the situation here is even worse, since we're talking about footers that need to be implemented manually rather than through Mediawiki. Standards should be clear enough so that new contributors to the project can very quickly pick them up and implement them in a consistent fashion. The more complexity that's added, the less likely this becomes.

Please likewise spell out your preferences, "not negotiables" and rationale. I still hope we can sort this out soon. --Rlandmann 04:43, 12 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * Bureaux - since you say that you're only concerned with this linking to other Russian aircraft - are you willing to have this link just to lists of aircraft by other Russian design bureaux? Why are you insisting that this has to link to all other aircraft manufacturers - even ones who didn't build any even vaguely similar aircraft?


 * Useful information - as long as variants are covered in a variants box and the NATO reporting names are correctly in place at the start of the article, are we losing any useful information by going with the second option I suggested the other day? I've volunteered to actually go do this work...


 * As you say - there are a variety of things that we agree, disagree, and agree to differ on - that's why I hoped you could state a few preferences. I still believe that there has to be some sort of middle ground acceptable to us both - as you say, it's just 9 pages. I guess that my willingness to pursue the point is because I think that whatever comes out of this will pretty much set the precedent for how series within WikiProject Aircraft should be handled in the near future.


 * I'm just asking you to be open about what you'd prefer to see here, so that we know where the goalposts actually are. --Rlandmann 08:14, 12 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * Alternatively, please state your position here and we'll get formal dispute resolution going. --Rlandmann 09:12, 12 Apr 2004 (UTC)