User talk:Horologium/September 2007

Hello
Hey man, I see that you have whipped the Ft. Lauderdale page into shape! It looks great. I think I need your help and support. I go an e mail from an editor asking me to look at the List_of_gay_porn_stars section. These articles are riddled with POV, advertisement and spam. I tried to do a simple prod tag but oh my did I get the thrashing of my life! These subjects are the actual editors of their pages. So, when an editor goes in to try and edit the articles, they jump on them and remove any edits they do not like. The way the WP:PORNBIO is written, all these people have to do is to win an award or be able to write something about themselves in a web page and it can be entered into WP. When you click on the links for these pages, they take you to websites that you either have to agree to enter in on adult content or it takes you to their porno stores. The only way to get around these people is to put them up for AfD. I need some help here. Do you think you would like to join forces with me to rid WP os some of this crap? Let me know. I certainly could use the support and help Junebug52 18:10, 3 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Actually, while I feel that a lot of the pr0n bios are ridiculous, the criteria for inclusion, which are discussed in detail at WikiProject Pornography, are fairly consistent and (believe it or not) tend to eliminate a majority of the "performers"; there are thousands of porn films, with hundreds of performers, released every year. No award nomination=no wikipedia page. I don't monitor articles under that topic, but there are a number of editors in the WikiProject who stay on top of new articles there, and work to nuke the ones that are really non-notable. The only person I have encountered in that group is User:AnonEMouse; he's a straight shooter (and an admin), so you might want to talk to him about specific concerns you have about edit warriors.


 * If you are running into people editing their own articles, slap the notable Wikipedian template Notable Wikipedian on the talk page, and remind them of Wikipedia's Autobiography policy; problem editors can be reported at Conflict of Interest Noticeboard. Links that lead to sites with disclaimers (agreements/registration) or that exist primarily for commercial purposes fail WP:EXT and can be deleted; however, "official" websites that contain bios or other relevant material buried in adult content might be permissible; use a bit of common sense.


 * Above all, remember that some of these people have identities outside of their porn careers; I have been involved in a long-running, slow-motion battle over Matt Sanchez, who is one of the people on the gay porn stars list you cited; his past is being used to discredit him now for partisan gain. The Biography of Living Persons policy has to be applied fairly, whether it is to retain an article or to delete it. Porn star bios, by their nature, will appear to be somewhat PoV to those who don't have an interest in the genre, but going on an AfD spree won't accomplish much. Involving someone who is familiar with the issue may help identify bios that are non-notable, masquerading as notable, or they may identify articles that need to be expanded and sourced.


 * I know that you may be aware of some (or all) of this, but I wanted to give you my rationale for declining to participate in this endeavor. I'm working on a couple more Florida city articles (particularly Gainesville, Florida and Sebring, Florida, and getting into a contentious topic such as porn bios would occupy more time than I am willing to spare.


 * Horologium t-c 01:51, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

Category:User bat-smg
Hi. Given the cleanup you did with the language categories, I'd like to ask your opinion on Category:User bat-smg. It's a category for the Samogitian language, a dialect of Lithuanian. It does not have a distinct ISO 639-3 code and the "bat-smg" code seems to have been made up by an editor. Thanks, Black Falcon (Talk) 16:26, 4 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Yeah, the categories in the dialects are a mess, and I'm going to go after them soon. (Ultimately, I'd like to eliminate Category:Wikipedians by regional dialect and all of its subcats, which are junk like all the cruft I deleted from the parent category; they at least have the benefit of being sorted out of the main language space.) Some (such as the "es-es" or "fr-qc") are simply regional variants of the parent language (such as the annoying "national" varieties of English I pruned back last month), and then there are headaches like Category:User nds-NL, which is a grab-bag of disparate, separately classified languages like the Alemannic nightmare. (I created a new template and user cat for gsw—Swiss German—but I haven't proposed nuking the (depopulated) als template yet; I'm girding myself for a battle over that.)


 * Take a look at some of the subcats of Category:User be (Belorussian), Category:User ru (Russian), Category:User tt (Tatar) and Category:User uk (Ukrainian); I think that eliminating the Russian creole user cats of those languages is going to be a hassle as well. (If you've followed the debate over the Moldovan language Wikipedia, you'll understand my concern.) There's at least one more writing system merge to accomplish (for Phoenician, which is listed twice, once in writing systems and once—improperly—as Category:User phn; the userbox discusses the alphabet, not the language). And I really want to remove the programming languages out of languages; since they are listed in two other parent cats, I think a case can be made to remove them from the language project. And if you want to be really scared, take a look at the startling number of subcats of Category:User zh (Chinese), of which many have subcats of their own. I haven't really taken a good look at that mess, but I suspect that there is a lot of excess junk in there as well. The Norwegian and Swedish cats have some (legitimate, ISO-recognized) variations buried inside; they probably should be pulled out too. Horologium t-c 18:46, 4 September 2007 (UTC)


 * I suspect that Category:Wikipedians by programming language also contains a lot of clutter (of minor or outdated programming languages) – for instance, I speedily deleted 6 categories today – but I don't have the technical knowledge to go through it in detail. Sometimes I get the impression that Category:Wikipedians by language is like a complex underground cave ... multiple intersecting layers, winding and rocky paths, and dozens of chambers of varying size. ;) I'm considering nominating the English dialect categories, but will probably postpone that for a while. So far, I've only proposed a few merges at WP:UCFD. Black Falcon (Talk) 19:37, 4 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Yeah, it's also like a game of minesweeper; most of the nominations are uncontroversial, but some blow up in your face. I've been holding off on that last set of nominations (the Russian mixes) for a while because of the potential for strife; they were among the first "problem" cats I identified. As to the English cats, we're down to only a few (US, Canada, UK, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, South Africa, Ireland, Scots English (which needs to be merged as a separate issue), and Englog/Konyo and Runglish (which both need to go away). BTW, sorry for the stuff-up on the Lakota cats, and thanks for catching and renominating them. Are you going through all of the language cats too? Horologium t-c 22:33, 4 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes and no. I'm going through all user categories via Special:Prefixindex, but I'm able to give only superficial treatment to various groups of categories. In a sense, because I'm looking at categories grouped by letter, there are times when I may be missing the forest for the trees. For instance, I passed over Category:User ru-be without considering that it should be nominated. I want to eventually get around to Category:Wikipedians by interest, which has many categories populated by "user likes" and "user loves" userboxes, but am as yet unwilling to tackle that huge category sytem (700+ subcats). Black Falcon (Talk) 01:42, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

What's your opinion on language categories that are legitimate user cats, but are effectively empty? For instance: Also, Category:User gsw (which you recently created), is currently empty and I couldn't find a corresponding template. Is this part of the process for fixing the mess with the Alemannic categories? Thanks, Black Falcon (Talk) 18:34, 5 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Category:User gil and its four subcategories correspond to the Gilbertese language, but they only contain the userboxes and one userpage which is actually a repository of language userboxes.
 * Category:User glk is the category for the Gileki language, but the only user in the category edited en.wikipedia only once (see contribs).
 * Category:User gmh contains 4 subcats, of which three contain only the userbox.


 * I can support the deletion of empty (but valid) user cats, but it wasn't something I was going to pursue on my own. I've been going after the invalid categories, which (to my mind) are far worse than unused cats. As to the Alemannic mess, the userbox is part of the user cat page; I didn't want to create a new template in the main space, and I refuse to have a page full of userboxen for others to use. I can create a template if you feel it is appropriate to do so, but I've created enough hate and discontent as it is over the user language cats, and it's going to get worse when I nominate the als templates for deletion (I'm thinking I'll start that discussion on Friday, so the whole weekend can be devoted to hurling invective towards me, and questioning my parentage, and so forth.) I don't want to create a template in the main space that is going to get nuked or moved into my userspace. Horologium t-c 19:01, 5 September 2007 (UTC)


 * OK, I might nominate some of the less useful empty categories later on, but I don't think I'll make any more nominations today. I just nominated Category:User pt-B (Brazilian Portuguese) for deletion/merging and am bracing myself for potential nationalist outrage.  As for the Alemannic language templates, perhaps you could create them as subpages of User:UBX if you don't want to place them in the mainspace or your userspace. From what I could gather from the UCFD discussion, you want to rename the 'als' templates, replace all transclusions with the new/appropriate names, and then use the 'als' templates for Tosk Albanian. Is that correct? Black Falcon (Talk) 19:35, 5 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes, you have a pretty good handle on what I want to do with the Alemannic templates, but since "Alemannic" covers five separate ISO classified languages, I want to delete the als templates outright, and then have the users recategorize themselves in the appropriate category (I am not going to wade through ≈130 user pages trying to figure out if they are Swiss or not). I created the GSW cat first, because I suspect that most of the people with the userbox will want that one, but I am going to create cats (and templates) for the rest before I nominate the als template for deletion. I will take you up on your suggestion to use the UBX page, when I come back tonight. (I will be away from the computer for about eight hours, as soon as I finish typing this...) Horologium t-c 19:43, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

Hello Horologium
Hey, I hope I am doing this correctly. New to this site. I'm trying to add things to some pages. I guess I need your help. They keep getting deleted. Thanks so much! I'm not sure how to message on here either, so if you could email me, msp2733@hotmail.com. Thanks again! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.191.125.130 (talk) 05:04, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

A category issue
Hi, some time ago you nominated this CfD, which led to the deletion of Category:User ke and subcats. Now, a friend who was on wikibreak at the time, NikoSilver, tells me he would like it back. His point, which I think has some merit, is that "Ancient Greek" and "Koine Greek" are sufficiently different that many people would classify themselves as knowing Koine without knowing A.G. to the same extent. I guess this applies especially to many native speakers of Modern Greek, for whom Koine is significantly easier than "real" A.G. Indeed, there are a good number of users who give themselves higher Babel ratings for Ke than for Grc (see besides User:NikoSilver e.g. User:Kimon, User:KRBN, User:Brianbeck, User:Kupirijo, User:KaragouniS).

This has quite a practical significance for Wikipedia: if you seek a fellow editor who can verify a Greek quote from the New Testament for you, you might want to turn to somebody different than if you need someone who can translate a line of Homer.

Is the lack of an ISO code a serious problem? I'm not aware if there is a general consensus that only ISO-coded languages can be Babelised; I guess practical Wikipedian considerations should always take precedence.

I'm not sure this is an issue for WP:DRV, because it's not a procedural challenge of the deletion closure, which was obviously valid. It's rather just an application of "Consensus Can Change". Would you mind terribly if he just re-created the category? We have no standard "official" process for allowing such recreations, I think. Fut.Perf. ☼ 07:10, 14 September 2007 (UTC)


 * When I went through the language categories, it was with an eye towards cleaning out much of the cruft that had built up since the last cleanup (which had occurred some time before I began editing regularly). I discovered the ke cats in the first round, and nominated them since they didn't fit into the standard babelization scheme. It is true that there is no set-in-stone requirement to limit the categorization to ISO 639-classified languages, but not coming up with some kind of standard of recognition could lead to an explosion of cats for all sorts of dialects, minor variations, and user-created drivel, which would make navigating the babel cats unmanageable. As it is, even after deleting all of those cats that I tagged last month, there are 257 categories directly beneath the parent cat, and some of those are further subcategorized.


 * I see your point about biblical translations, but when I went over to Ethnologue's entry for Ancient Greek, I noted they have an extensive bibliography, much of it references to translating New Testament verses from Ancient Greek. This is significant, because SIL originated as an religious organization, which aimed to translate the New Testament into as many languages as possible. If SIL considers Koine to be the same as Ancient Greek (They consider Ancient Greek as any of the varieties previous to Modern Greek, c. 1453), and the ISO also considers them to be the same, perhaps they are on to something. (That sounds a lot more dismissive than it is intended.) SIL is all about plurality; the most recent version of Ethnologue (based on the ISO 639-3) has separate listings for 6,912 linguistically distinct languages, which is why I (admittedly, a non-speaker of the language) find it hard to buy into justifications to recreate the cat. In fact, they list (as separate ISO 639-3 varieties) four of the dialects of Modern Greek (Cappadocian, Pontic, Yevanic, and Tsakonian, the last of which they consider to be Doric Greek rather than Attican from which Modern Greek is derived).


 * I think the difference is akin to Elizabethan English (which is also not recognized); a modern English speaker would be able to understand William Shakespeare much more easily than Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote in (ISO 693-3 classified) Middle English.


 * FWIW, I am not an admin, and cannot delete the category if it is recreated; I would have to tag it an find an admin to do the deed. I noted that you also left a note on After Midnight's talk page; let's see what he has to say before we go any farther on this. I'll not flip out if this goes to DRV (as I expected with some of my noms), but I will use the justification I provided above to support the deletion. Horologium t-c 15:10, 14 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Okay, I get your point, and let's see what others say. By the way, if needed we could also discuss it again at WP:CFD rather than DRV, it's "categories for discussion" rather than "categories for deletion" after all. As for your analogy with English, I guess the parallel is really more like Old English vs. Middle English (the fact that ISO includes seperate codes for those two but not for Classical vs. Koine Greek just goes to show how little consistent they are...) As for "standard of recognition", would it move you if I told you that classical and koine Greek are typically taught as separate subjects in university language classes? (in my experience, that is.) Fut.Perf. ☼ 15:32, 14 September 2007 (UTC)


 * (re:Your edit summary for the last edit) Ethnologue apeears to have a bit of a bias against English (possibly because SIL was founded by an English speaker, and its efforts have focused on "missionary"-style work in non English-speaking regions of the world). Then, too, Middle English is dead and buried, and (unlike Ancient Greek) there is not a huge interest in translating texts written in the language, nor is there any currency for the language (Ancient Greek, although extinct, is still used for some Greek Orthodox church rituals, according to Ethnologue's data). If you type "enm" into the Ethnologue search engine, you will get a page that states that enm is not in the scope of Ethnologue, which seems to indicate that they recognize the existence of the code, but don't plan to do any research or work on the subject.  and the interesting  (which primarily concerns ISO 639-2 codes and the 14th edition, but is still relevant since many languages retained the same codes in both iterations of the standard (the ones that didn't were moved out of more-inclusive classes into specific classes).


 * Your comment about Classical and Koine Greek being taught as different class subjects is interesting. Are all three classes (Classical, Koine, and Modern Greek) taught concurrently? If so, it might be interesting to wait until January of next year, when a revision to ISO 639-3 is due to be released; perhaps Koine will be awarded its own classification. Horologium t-c 17:43, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

Request for Comment on User Conduct - Matt Sanchez / Bluemarine
Hello, may I ask for your participation in an RFC established for user Bluemarine/Matt Sanchez? The reason for the Request for Comment is set out in the RFC summary here. Whether you support or oppose it, your input would be appreciated.Typing monkey 18:15, 18 September 2007 (UTC) ++

Hello
Can you please tell me why you have removed Barry Biffle as a notable resident of Weston, FL? Mr. Biffle is a senior officer at Spirit Airlines, which is among the largest employres in Broward County, and is responsible for all scheduling, pricing, and marketing decisions at the largest airline that serves Fort Lauderdale airport. The decisions he is responsible for affect the lives of over 7 million passengers a year, many of whom live in Weston. That certainly seems notable to me. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Diemacher (talk • contribs) 20:15, 27 September 2007 (UTC)


 * I deleted him from the list because he doesn't have an article in Wikipedia.


 * Write up an article on Mr. Biffle, and include references from reliable sources. Expect for the article to be nominated for deletion (although not by me; I'll not get involved in the article or any discussion revolving around it.) While he has a position of substantial responsibility, he is not notable on his own. AFAIK, none of the executives at Spirit Airlines (from the CEO and COO on down) have articles, and while that is not always a gauge of importance (or notability), it does raise the question of whether or not he should be included. Further, I don't think any marketing director of any airline (including American, United, or Delta, the three largest in the US) have articles on them, because the position is really only of importance to the company itself, and not something that belongs in an Encyclopedia.


 * In any case, though, without an article, he should not be included in the list on the Weston page unless he has an article in Wikipedia. Horologium t-c 20:33, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Miami Edit
Thanks for fixing my edit, I know the ref got messed up, but I didn't realise what had happened. Looks great now, cool. Oh, and gay porn stars? Damn dude, I'm from Wilton Manors, but I prefer Wilton Womanors, you know, ;-P but still, gotta love them gays, they scared off the gangs!ReignMan 23:09, 27 September 2007 (UTC)


 * (smiles) I thought you were gay, since you were from Wilton Manors...you know what they say about assuming things. As to the gay pr0n thing, I didn't get involved in that particular issue; Junebug52 was familiar with me from my work on the Fort Lauderdale article (to which you have contributed as well). I'm flattered that he asked me for assistance, but I have been too busy with other stuff to get involved in what looked like a potentially long and vituperative battle. Cheers. Horologium t-c 01:23, 28 September 2007 (UTC)