User talk:Hamletpride

Adoption
Hey there, I saw your note on my talk page. I'd be happy to adopt you; I don't generally run formal lessons (though I can if there's specific area's you'd like to learn about) but I'm always available to answer any questions you might have. If you can start out by telling me if there are any particular areas of Wikipedia you'd like to learn more about, I'll be happy to show you around. You can reach me via a lot of different avenues; details are on my contact page. Thanks. Shell   babelfish 05:10, 6 May 2008 (UTC)


 * I'm guessing when you're asking about categories and subcategories, you want to know how you know what categories to put on an article? Even very experienced users some times have a difficult time with that same issue and there's even still some debate on the best way to do it.  Generally, you should go for the most specific category possible - for instance, John Wayne would fit in Category:Film actors, but there's a more specific one Category:American actors, so most people would put him in that one instead.


 * There's a lot of detail information on getting around categories at FAQ/Categorization - reading that might help answer some of the questions you have, and feel free to ask any others (or let me know if I was totally off base with what you needed). Shell    babelfish 18:32, 6 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Yep, American actors is a subcategory of Film actors. Basically, when you put something in a category, the idea is to look for the most specific possible which usually means its a subcategory (or sometimes even a subcategory of a subcategory of a subcategory and so on).  If you want to see what Categories another category is in, you can look at the bottom of the page, just like in articles.  Shell    babelfish 18:55, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

Creating categories
The easiest way to get a category started is to add it to an article. Categories are added at the bottom of the article text with the format - it goes after everything in the article but before any stub templates and interlanguage links.

Once you've done that, scroll to the bottom of the article and click the red link for the category you added. This will take you to a page which you can edit to add a description to a category.

Things to remember:
 * Categories follow the same general naming conventions as articles, for example do not capitalize regular nouns. For specific conventions related to categories, see Naming conventions (categories).


 * Before creating a category, look to see if one already exists. One way to do this is to think of the parent category for the new category. Search for it and then look at the subcategories in the parent. You may find that a category already exists that is similar to the one you are thinking about creating.


 * When writing the description for a category try to give it at least two parent categories. For example, Category:British writers should be in both Category:Writers by nationality and Category:British people.

That's really all there is to it - to have more articles show up in a category, you just add the category appropriate articles. Shell   babelfish 16:16, 8 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Categories actually cannot be moved like other pages. To change a category name, you actually have to go in to each article and change the name of the category - in fact, this is such a problem some times that bots often do this work.


 * To put a category in a parent category, you do it the same way you would put an article in a category. Edit the category description page and add  after the text.  Shell    babelfish 17:14, 8 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Yep, I'm positive only templates use {{ - categories are surrounded by Shell    babelfish 18:32, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

Commendation
It's nice to see an edit of the D.C. that is actually constructive, and isn't some reference to Beef - thank you for your edits, I hope you will be able to contribute more to the article. Well done! Timmccloud (talk) 23:54, 6 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks! {¦:-)} Hamletpride (talk) 15:35, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
 * What's with the "beef" stuff on the article then? Did you go to Dane Court? Hamletpride (talk) 15:26, 7 May 2008 (UTC) (Retrieved from User_talk:Timmccloud)
 * God only knows about the beef - someone has a Beef with the school apparently ;). Personally I just put it down to sophmoric pranks by disgruntled students, of which any school has an abundance. Actually I did not attend Dane Court - I watch about 80 pages, including my home school's Eagle Rock High School (Los Angeles, California) page, and one day I was surfing using the "random article" link on the left sidebar, and I came across Dane Court while it was vandalized.  I cleaned it up, and put it on my watch list to make sure it stayed that way, and since then, I've kind of adopted the page.  Besides, I like a good laugh now and then, and the "beef" thing has staying power - go through the article history and you can see what I mean.  Good to talk to you, it's things like this intersection of our interests that introduce me to people around the world - take care - Timmccloud (talk) 16:40, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

Disputes over editing
It looks like User:Stnickvillager disagrees with you on the use of Thanet instead of Kent and believes that the term "west thanet settlements" is incorrect. It does appear that this editor has strong feelings about these articles, and calling other editors vandals is inappropriate and should never been done lightly. That said, the best way to handle these sort of things is to try to talk it out with the user. There's some ideas and explanation of how disputes are usually handled on Wikipedia at dispute resolution.

I've added a welcome for User:Stnickvillager with links to policies, so hopefully they can read up a bit and resolve their concerns properly in the future. I'll try to keep an eye out and see how this editor reacts.

In the meantime, it wouldn't be a bad idea to either speak directly with this editor or leave a note on the talk page of the articles that are being questioned. If you leave the note on talk, other editors involved in those pages can comment on the issue too. Shell   babelfish 18:05, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Reply
I've no problem with valid edits, in fact they are most welcome - I've added a lot of information about the area we live in. The St. Nick page had a lot of vandalism done to it - adding of unsavoury terms and minor profanity. Whether this was you or someone else did this I unfortunately can't be sure (edit - almost certainly not - see edit below). The page as it was is best for now unless more facts can be added. What I object to regarding your edits is the following:

1) Using local-authority-style terms for Thanet which do not exist. Lets keep Wikipedia factual without colloquialisms - it is in all of our interests.  Try Googling "West thanet settlements" - the term does not exist.  Readers of Wikipedia may well believe this is an accepted term - thus creating misinformation.  A parliamentary and local council term does already exist - Thanet Villages.  This is acceptable for the area around St. Nick's and Minster - perhaps use this term or research to find a correct one.

2) Please use capital letters where necessary and correct punctuation before saving edits.

3) Basic factual errors that might be seen as an attempt to sabotage Wikipedia. Stating that St. Nicholas, Monkton and Minster were all one settlement is surely fantasy.  I have copies of medieval maps and documents which distinctly show the area used to lie much as it still does now.  Again, if you have valid information it is most welcome, but please check and correllate data, and provide links and sources.  Was it yourself who made edits to rename St. Nicholas as a hamlet and alter the population?  I don't know if it was as a lot of vandalism was done (edit - almost certainly not - see edit below).  These two edits were again incorrect and it all leads to a lot of work needing to be done on the local pages for no real reason at all.

4) The moving of pages from Kent to Thanet is unnecessary. Thanet is not a county, and not applicable as any part of a postal address.  Like it or not (I do agree we are still in many ways an island community) we are Kent.  There are two villages in Kent called Minster, one is in Sheppey.  For this reason the village goes by the name Minster-in-Thanet.  There are not two villages called Monkton in Kent, so the page should really stay as Monkton, Kent.  I would like to repeat I do sympathise your reasons for doing this, but it will confuse a reader trying to find out more about Kent and Thanet.  We need to stick to the facts.

5) Notes on the St. Nicholas page vandalism. The Court Farm sentence - 'chapel' was changed to 'torcher chamber' (sic), another sentence was amended to 'the channel in Roman times was naughty'.  Various words were altered to give a schoolboy-humour element.  You may not (edit - almost certainly not - see edit below) have been that vandal (the term acceptable in this case I think) as I've not been able to trawl through comparing all the many edits done on the page, but I think when your edits were made on this page you made no attempt to correct these serious problems.  This might show a less than methodical approach to editing an encyclopedia page visible to the world.

6) I will not revert any more of your edits or report your username if you can address these points which I hope are in the spirit of this website - surely we should be serious about what we're doing here. I have only the best interests of East Kent and Wikipedia to heart - I'm not here to start a 'revert war' with anyone. Stnickvillager (talk) 20:05, 12 May 2008 (UTC) 7) Edit - I've gone through the edits and the vandalism was done by 88.108.49.200. So basically we don't know. A lot of edits were done by all sorts of users and they all missed it too - so I'm perfectly willing to accept you are free of any wrongdoing on this point of vandalism. It would be nice if people could check the whole article (when they are this small anyway) so I'll leave the point above as an idea of what happens on this site and the responsibility we all have to remove errors. I'd still like to engage in a conversation with you about my other points though. Stnickvillager (talk) 20:19, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Second edit - corrected what I think are ambiguitues in my own tone here and linked to above edit to make plain I am not accusing yourself of vandalism on the St. Nick page. Stnickvillager (talk) 20:37, 12 May 2008 (UTC)


 * I do not like the way that after seeing my edits, you broke several policies with your behaviour, including WP:CIV and WP:AGF. Calling me a vandal was most certainly innapropriate, especially without even having spoken to me first. You were also told about this on the Noticeboard of Incidents, and on the Vandalism in Progress page, which you left comments about me on. If you had a problem with what I wrote, you should have come to me, instead of voicing your assumptive thoughts to the rest of the community, without any real solid evidence anyway, and then being told off by them.
 * I did no such thing. The term was simply meant to be a geographical description used as an umbrella term of the small settlements in the West of Thanet, hence the name "West Thanet Settlements". At no point did I mention that this was an official admnistrative name, simply (and common sensively) a factual geographical statement.
 * Please refer to where you mean.
 * Before you go making wild assumptions, please check the history of the page. I have at no point mentioned anything about the population in St. Nicholas.
 * The page moves are for consistency. If one is going to be called XXX, Thanet, then it is innapropriate to have some called XXX, UK; XXX, England; XXX, Kent, etc. Thanet is the most local administrative region, and as such, is the most correct naming.
 * Surely we are not trying to say that the name under which a place goes by is not the correct one? Minster-in-Thanet is what it calls itself, so why do we have to change it for the sake of "consistency"? Thanet might well be the local "administrative region" - by which I take it you mean the second tier of local government set up in 1974 - but that is all it is. Parts of it were never on the island; they were added to make up numbers so that Kent was divided "equally" - a purely statistical effort. Peter Shearan (talk) 05:22, 27 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Again, I would appreciate it if you actually made the effort to check the history of the page. Those edits were not by me, as a simple review of the page history will easily reveal - something you apparently failed to do. Additionally, the fact that I did not identify these edits and remove them does not make me a vandal either. I was concentrating on more important parts of my editing area, and do not consider being called a vandal for not discovering someone else's vandalism, very acceptable behaviour.
 * Something you should not have been doing without raising the issue with me first anyway.
 * I am glad to see that perhaps, now you realise what you did was not the best way to go about things. For future reference, discuss with the person in question, and actually check the page history. I am bearing in mind WP:BITE, since you appear to be even newer than me, but please learn for next time. And yes, if you are prepared for discussion from now on, I will be more than happy to do so. Hamletpride (talk) 20:30, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanet/Isle of Thanet
Hi, Sorry if this seems to be getting at you - twice in one day! I am however concerned that you apparently ignored the following two very important observations regarding these two different places:
 * I think the age difference should be taken into account, as a district it's a relatively new development but as an Isle it's much older. Historically the district is not very important, but as an Island it is. PhilipPage 22:21, 15 April 2006 (UTC)


 * I do not believe they should be merged. However, I do think that the information on both pages needs to be carefully looked at to make sure this entry focuses on the geography and history (including the exteranl links) of the geographically defined area and the district page focuses on the modern day district with little history or geograpy.Ksbrown

These are my feelings exactly: and simply point up what I said in my previous comment. You are taking the administrative convenience of the 20th century and ignoring the geographical importance of an area of England. The article on Thanet should concentrate simply on what it is now - its governance; its demography; its economy; maybe general notes about transport and the like. This article has far too much in the form of lists (frowned upon in Manual of Style). the long sections on Political history (what exactly is that?) and Geographical history (why "history"?) are unusual in their headings. Why not simply History - which is entirely about the island - and Geography - and there is already one headed that, which talks about clean beaches: part of a Tourism section surely?

It would seem that the merge was taken very hastily, without complete understanding of the implications. Peter Shearan (talk) 06:37, 27 September 2008 (UTC)
 * and no-one seems to have noticed the repetition in Thanet District Council: now there is a case for a merge if ever there was one!Peter Shearan (talk) 09:55, 27 September 2008 (UTC)
 * I see that you did - why did it not occur to you that this repeated much of what now appears in the District Council? I notice your talk page begins in May this year: may I recommend that you do not undertake such mergers until you have thoroughly mastered the fact of the local government set-up? Peter Shearan (talk) 14:12, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

xxx, Thanet vs xxx, Kent
I have another bone to pick with you! You have made a new rule for yourself, and in general for Wiki, by insisting that a place is recognised by the district it is in rather than the county. Few if any other places in Kent are designated so: I suggest you look at the List of places in Kent, where you will see that, for example Hythe is Hythe, Kent and not Hythe, Shepway; and that Barham is Barham, Kent and not Barham, District of Canterbury. The article will make the point as to where exactly the place is. Why do you suppose that your original moves were reverted? Peter Shearan (talk) 15:07, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

Request to participate in University of Washington survey on tool to quickly understand Wikipedians’ reputations
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