User talk:Kevyn/Archive 2004

Welcome to Wikipedia
Hello, welcome to Wikipedia. You might like to start by reading the tutorial and introducing yourself at the new users page. For ideas of what to put on your user page, see User page.

If you have any questions, you can ask at the help desk or on my talk page. Two useful tips are that you can sign your name using four tildes ( ~ ) and you can preview your changes before you save using the show preview button. You can regularly find new tips on the Community Portal. I look forward to reading your great articles and I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian. :) Angela. 11:26, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)


 * Thank you Angela, I appreciate the welcome. I have been enjoying editing -- I find it addicting! ;-)Kevyn 08:55, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Haddon
I just wanted to let you know that I reverted your edits to Haddon and Haddon, New Jersey. Since Haddon, New Jersey is not a town, the disambig page should not link to it. Haddon, New Jersey is a common error made in looking for the three "Haddons" so I made it back into a redirect page to the disambig page. Thanks for your hard work, and best regards --H. C HENEY 05:19, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Are you sure it doesn't exist? The USGS Nameserver lists it as a populated place: []
 * And it is also referenced in the article, New Jersey State Highway 76C
 * Kevyn 05:29, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * I'm positive. I grew up in Haddonfield, which borders Haddon Township and Haddon Heights. Furthermore, New Jersey has a very odd naming convention for municipalities that are townships, and under some circumstances the "township" is dropped from the name. Also, some populated areas/placenames/localities, like Blackwood, New Jersey are not municipalities - Blackwood is located in Gloucester Township, New Jersey. Since New Jersey does not have any unincorpated areas, you can associate any placename with a municipality, in this case Haddon would refer to any one of three municipalities: Haddonfield, Haddon Township, or Haddon Heights. --H. C HENEY 10:59, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Very well then, thank you. Also, thanks for fixing New Jersey State Highway 76C so that the link pointed to the right place. Kevyn 00:58, 9 Jul 2004 (UTC)

VfD listings
Good evening, Kevyn. You just listed a whole lot of ACDC songs on VfD with a recommendation to merge and redirect. You actually do not have to list them. Just be bold and do the merge yourself. If someone feels strongly opposed to your decision, they can always come along later and revert it. The only reason we have extra controls on the deletion process is that when a page is deleted, information is lost. That's one of the only decisions that can not be easily reverted.

I'll try to help with the merge and redirects, but I'm not enough of a fan to know what to keep. Happy editing. Rossami 04:43, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Thanks. I'll be more bold about such moves in the future. Kevyn 15:02, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Hindustan Motors
You put a {delete} tag on it, but I don't see any explanation on Talk pages. If you are planning to move the content of Hindustan (car) there, that probably makes sense. Otherwise, I don't see a reason to delete the redir. Also, I don't understand why you completely removed the info about H. ambassador and AMC ambassador from ambassador automobile, without making the latter into a full disamb page (unless it's because it's quite challenging to find info on the 'yellow ambassador'), especially since someone looking for a car named ambassador is more likely wanting one of the other two. (PS I've got to applaud your willingness to do the clean up after the page move--not everyone does.) Niteowlneils 14:52, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Regarding Hindustan Motors : I had put an explanation on Speedy_deletions, but didn't think about doing so on the talk page. I've remedied that now.
 * Regarding ambassador automobile: check again, I did make it into a full disambig page, you must have just seen it before I had hit "save".
 * Regarding cleanup after move: Thanks! I'm kind of anal that way. ;-)
 * Kevyn 15:01, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * OK, the redir is gone, so you can do the move. After I left the note it occurred to me that I should have added something like "Maybe this is a work in progress?" since it was all near the top of your edit history. Looks good. Happy editing. Niteowlneils 15:26, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)


 * Thanks! Move completed. Kevyn 15:44, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)

BJAODN Next Page Title
Come on, place a vote as well as adding your ideas! --Luc "Somethingorother" French 17:45, 26 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * OK! OK! Done! Kevyn 05:57, 28 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Star Wars minor characters
Always nice to see someone else that hates little mini- fiction stubs. Combining into one article is a great effort. GL! -- Netoholic @ 06:20, 29 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * Thanks! This came about because of the stubs that kept appearing on VfD. So I took matters in my own hands and stared creating the meta article. I'm also responsible for creating Minor races in Star Wars. And, I'd love to see Minor planets in Star Wars done as well! Kevyn 06:47, 29 Aug 2004 (UTC)

To Anacreon in Heaven
I was told a while ago that the page was real, and I restored it, having deleted it. Thanks. A pub song? Maybe that's why it looks rather odd. :) -- Merovingian  &#9997;  Talk  14:00, Aug 29, 2004 (UTC)

dab ordering
Not that I really care that much, but it actually is quite common to use whatever natual phrasing is most appropriate for a particular disambiguation. There are many many many disambig pages where the title is not the first word. But makes little difference to me. older &ne; wiser 18:58, 31 Aug 2004 (UTC)

primary disambiguation -- it's OK!
Hi,

After our discussion at Talk:RC4, I noticed your comments on disambiguation pages on your user page. Since they're on your User page, I guess you might be interested in discussing it, so I thought I might be bold enough put forward some counterarguments, and suggest why the current Wikipedia primary disambiguation policy is quite reasonable.

First, what is the purpose of disambiguation? Disambiguation currently addresses two problems, and, eventually, should be needed only for one. When a user enters a topic name in the Search Box, the name might be ambiguous and refer to several topics. The disambiguation procedure helps him locate the article he's actually after. Similarly, internal links are sometimes (often!) not correctly disambiguated &mdash; this should eventually be fixed, but the disamiguation procedure handily helps here in exactly the same way.

Second, what makes for a successful strategy? Well, in my opinion, the best disambiguation strategy is that which helps the reader find the article that he wants to read as fast as possible; this is measured (primarily) in the number of page clicks.

The reason the primary disambiguation strategy is a good one &mdash; in my opinion &mdash; is that it minimises the number of clicks a reader needs when averaged over all readers. Let's take an example. If 90% of readers are looking for the encryption algorithm RC4 (reader type I) when they type "RC4" it into the search box, and 5% are looking for "Route Coloniale 4" (reader type II), and 5% are looking for "Racy Concubines IV" (say) (reader type III) we can measure the effectiveness of each strategy.

Currently, there is a disambiguation page at "RC4". So both "type I" and "type II" (and "type III") must expend one click to reach their desired topic. The expected number of clicks is, obviously, 1 per reader.

However, if we had the strategy of putting RC4 (cipher) at RC4, and including a disambiguation header at the top of the article to RC4 (disambiguation), then the number of clicks differs for each type: reader I has 0 clicks; and readers II and III have two clicks: first at the cipher page, then at the disambiguation page. However, given the distribution of readers above, the expected number of clicks for a random reader is: 0.90 * 0 + 0.05 * 2 + 0.05 * 2 = 0.20 clicks. So, averaged over all the readers, this latter strategy (favoured by Wikipedia policy) leads to five times fewer clicks for readers than the first strategy (favoured by yourself).

(The real world case of RC4, which doesn't require an "X (disambiguation)" page, is even better, of course.)

You say:
 * "A second reason...is that "most" users typing in a search term are looking for meaning X, and so they should be taken straight to it, instead of having to have to go through a disambiguation page, first. Codswallop, I say, in part because the minority of users looking for meaning Y now have to go through two pages - from the primary meaning, which points them to a disambig page, which then points to their desired destination."

Both the second reason and your comment are true. But, as argued above, it turns out that you can save a lot of clicks by making "minority topic" readers do more work. This is like in Morse code, where common letters like E and T tend to have one or two dits and dashes; less common letters like Z and Q have four dits and dashes. This is merely a strategy to make the code more compact.


 * "Disambiguation notices at the top of articles are ugly."

I can't really argue against this, as it's a subjective issue, but I don't have any aesthetic problems with them myself.


 * "Decisions about what is the primary definition can be entirely subjective. For instance, a very strong argument could be made that the meaning of club is just as equally a weapon as it is a group of people, but it is the group of people who get primacy on Wikipedia. Often, I think these decisions are made simply by "which article was written first""

Yes, in practice, the choice about which article is primary can be subjective or an accident of Wikipedia history. I think the choice of primary article (if any) should not be made on such criteria; this is not so much an argument against the policy of primary disambiguation per se &mdash; in cases like these something should be fixed. The policy says that we primary disambiguate when a topic is "clearly predominant"; chance or whim are not good methods for establishing whether an article is clearly predominant.


 * "Primary definitions change over time."

Yes, but relatively slowly. Wikipedia is more than sufficiently flexible to adapt to follow suit &mdash; page moves are cheap.


 * Primary definitions change from place to place.

Then, when establishing if a meaning is "clearly predominant", we should consider whether the meaning is primary when taken over an average of all readers. If there are two large comparably-sized groups of readers which use two different predominant definitions, then yes, primary disambiguation is inappropriate. Again, this doesn't seem to be a problem with the policy.


 * Some editors use the number of links to an article to gauge which article is primary, but I think this is pretty shaky justification.

Yes, it's quite possible that this could lead to mistakes. But this is a problem with how some users judge whether an article is primary, not with the policy itself.

It is true that people sometimes make mistakes when choosing primary articles", but I believe that for 95% of cases common sense lets us make the right decisions. There is also objective data, for example, RC4 (cipher) has received 308 hits so far this month. Route coloniale 4 received 9. Clearly, there's always going to be debatable cases, but we can debate them.

&mdash; Matt 11:41, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)

In practice...
I have moved RC4 as Matt suggested. I hope that is OK, if not tell me and let's talk.

But assuming I have correctly interpretted your views, may I say that I greatly admire the way you have enabled a consensus decision to go ahead? Consensus is not an easy concept to grasp. True consensus is generally only possible when those in the minority say OK, we can see how the group is thinking, let us move on for the sake of the common goal.

The minority have an enormous responsibility here to communicate and avoid errors of groupthink. They must never pretend to have changed their minds, just their votes!

In any case, great to have you in this discussion. Andrewa 19:49, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Lomonosov Prize
Hey Kevyn!

It looks like there used to be two kinds of awards bearing Lomonosov's name - Lomonosov Prize (Lomonosovskaya premiya in Russian) and Lomonosov Gold medal (and there are two kinds of medals - one for the Russian scientists, the other one for the foreign scientists). When I translated the article about Lodygin, it mentioned the Lomonosov Prize, which had been established some time after his death by the Russian Academy of Sciences. KNewman 22:35, Sep 25, 2004 (UTC)

Red-link recovery
Howdy and many thanks for your work on that list of mis-punctuated links. The list's pretty much completed now - I'll be generating a new version of it in due course, taking all the lessons learned from the last one into account. In the meantime, if you enjoyed working through the list (or at least found it a worthwhile distraction), you may want to have a look at the similar list of plural discrepancies which highlights red-links that might be red because they (or the article they are aiming for) are improperly pluralised. Again, thanks for your efforts - award yourself a wikimedal for janitorial services if you haven't already got one! - TB 11:28, 2004 Nov 8 (UTC)

Article Licensing
Hi, I've started a drive to get users to multi-license all of their contributions that they've made to either (1) all U.S. state, county, and city articles or (2) all articles, using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-by-sa) v1.0 and v2.0 Licenses or into the public domain if they prefer. The CC-by-sa license is a true free documentation license that is similar to Wikipedia's license, the GFDL, but it allows other projects, such as WikiTravel, to use our articles. Since you are among the top 1000 Wikipedians by edits, I was wondering if you would be willing to multi-license all of your contributions or at minimum those on the geographic articles. Over 90% of people asked have agreed. For More Information:
 * Multi-Licensing FAQ - Lots of questions answered
 * Multi-Licensing Guide
 * Free the Rambot Articles Project

To allow us to track those users who muli-license their contributions, many users copy and paste the " " template into their user page, but there are other options at Template messages/User namespace. The following examples could also copied and pasted into your user page:


 * Option 1
 * I agree to multi-license all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:

OR
 * Option 2
 * I agree to multi-license all my contributions to any U.S. state, county, or city article as described below:

Or if you wanted to place your work into the public domain, you could replace " " with "  ". If you only prefer using the GFDL, I would like to know that too. Please let me know what you think at my talk page. It's important to know either way so no one keeps asking. – Ram-Man (comment) (talk)  14:12, Dec 9, 2004 (UTC)


 * I have released all of my Wikipedia work into the Public Domain. Kevyn 02:51, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)