User talk:LiniShu/Archive2

I thought you might find this interesting...
The categorization system is having growing pains. There seem to be several different view about what our category system should be; a way to browse, an index of articles, a classification system, and/or a database search tool. Each of these views leads editors to different conclusions about how categories should be populated, and many conflicts result. To deal with these problems, Rick Block and I have been working on a proposal to add the ability to create category intersections. We think our proposal will address these problems and add some very useful new features. We are asking editors and developers concerned with categorizaton problems to take a look. We'd appreciate your feedback. Thanks. -- Samuel Wantman 06:08, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

WikiProject Iowa
Hello, I noticed that you edited an article related to, or expressed interest in Iowa. Therefore, I was wondering if you would be interested in joining (proposed) WikiProject Iowa? If so, please add your name to "Interested Wikipedians" at Proposed WikiProject Iowa --Tim4christ17 03:41, 5 September 2006 (UTC)
 * The WikiProject has been created. Feel free to join it at WikiProject Iowa.

X in literature watchlist
Hi. I notice that you have recently edited a few of the X in literature articles (like 1874 in literature). Several of those articles are not in anyone's watchlist which means they are vulnerable to attacks of vandalism and incorrect information. I was hoping maybe you would put those in your watchlist and babysit them a little. Thanks! :) —Wknight94 (talk) 19:43, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your note about the desirability of having the X in literature articles on people's watchlists. Firstly, I agree with your point that it would be good to have them all "babysat". Secondly, these articles figure highly in the niche I've found for myself on Wikipedia.  So, yes, I'd be willing to monitor some of them in my watchlist.  Is there any kind of concerted plan to "divvy" them up among a group of editors? --Lini 12:03, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Hi. No, there's no real "plan" as such for divvying up articles.  Basically whatever articles you can put on yur watchlist would be an improvement.  Unwatched articles is what caused the John Seigenthaler Sr. Wikipedia biography controversy and we don't want a repeat of that.  —Wknight94 (talk) 12:30, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Well then, I'll get things started by taking a century - the 1600's (1600-1699). I'll begin adding them to my watchlist, and monitoring them.  One hundred articles may be a lot, but I don't expect a whole lot of new activity in the 1600s articles.  If we get a lot more editors involved and want to subdivide into smaller sets to watch, then I'll be glad to do so.  --Lini 12:58, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Okay, great! I don't know anything about literature but I'll respond in kind by taking the 1700s.  Yes, it's a lot of articles for a watchlist but watchlist space is cheap!  :)  BTW, is there a Wikiproject for literature or anything?  It seems like the category structure for literature is backwards and incomplete.  For example, 1704 in literature is in the category Category:1704 books.  Shouldn't there be a Category:1704 in literature which would contain the article 1704 in literature and then contain Category:1704 books as a subcategory?  The X in literature articles contain a superset of the books categories, not a subset.  Has this been discussed anywhere that you know of?  I'll be glad to fire up WP:AWB and fix it myself if we can generate consensus somewhere. —Wknight94 (talk) 13:31, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
 * (BTW, this vandalism is why I brought this up to you. That little ditty sat in that article for more than two weeks because no one had it on their watchlist). —Wknight94 (talk) 13:59, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

Howdy!
Hello to you too! Right now I'm slogging through the literature categories, so we might bump into each other now and then. Hope you're well. Cheers, Her Pegship 00:32, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Pastoral opera: a new opera category
Hi. I see you have started a new opera category. Would it be possible to underpin it with an article and sources? Grove etc. - Kleinzach 20:02, 10 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks for getting in touch. This has all moved on a bit since my message and I think it would be best if I handed over your message to Folantin who has been working on early French opera. (I am in France at the moment - but without any reference books!) - Kleinzach 19:44, 11 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks for writing to Folantin. Meanwhile we would be delighted if you liked to join the Opera Project. it's probably the most dynamic of all the arts projects and also very friendly! Best. - Kleinzach 08:19, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Hi. Good to hear from you. My advice is to go ahead and write the "Pastoral opera" page if you have the sources to do so (I only have info on the French side of things). Then we can see whether it's worth merging Pastorale héroique into your article. BTW I'm a bit exhausted at the moment, having just finished a total rewrite of French opera, so I don't envisage making any major contributions to WP for the next few days! But I'll get round to expanding Pastorale héroique eventually. Yours. --Folantin 17:35, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
 * OK, thanks. I'll get back to you after Christmas. Good luck with the article. --Folantin 16:57, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

No problem. Grove has got quite a decent article on the genre, so I can add bits from time to time. See you round. Cheers, Moreschi Deletion! 20:10, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

Helping out with the Unassessed Wikipedia Biographies
Seeing that you are an active member of the WikiBiography Project, I was wondering if you would help lend a hand in helping us clear out the amount of [unassessed articles] tagged with. Many of them are of stub and start class, but a few are of B or A caliber. Getting a simple assessment rating can help us start moving many of these biographies to a higher quality article. Thank you! --Ozgod 21:18, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Requesting clarification re LoPbN
Thanks for your notes on my talk under this heading. Es freut mich, Ihnen kennenzulernen. Thanks again for the pertinent questions and your interest. --Jerzy•t 11:03, 4 March 2007 (UTC)
 * No, i don't follow that project to any significant degree, but i'm pleased to hear it. It's been suggested more than once on WP:AfD that the list is redundant to the other bio tools, and it may be i pay too little attention to the Bio WProj: this is the first i've been aware of explicit support for LoPbN from that direction. Thanks for the good news!
 * 1) As to Ms. Sforza, you have my drift. (But let me comment that monarchs (as opposed to their spouses) are for me still a special case, and one to which i give low priority for changing or coming to firm opinions about, especially since it is a low-population area.)
 * 2) As to the rest, i hope you are asking for general principles such as follow below, and not for longer summaries!
 * 3) "Lo-res trmnlgy" (Low-resolution terminology) is intended to capture the idea of a minimal standard of description that will almost always suffice to distinguish the WP-bio-worthy people who share names sufficiently close for at least occasional confusion, without encouraging the inclusion of detail that would is suitable in the corresponding bio but on LoPbN amounts simply to clutter that is likely to interfere with LoPbN's job of getting a reader to the bio they are interested in. I haven't made an effort to explicitly state how low the resolution should be in the case of cause of notability (usually an occupation), but let me take the opportunity to talk about the three components beyond the name, at least giving examples:
 * "Vital statistics". In the ideal case the exact year of birth, and for dead people, the exact year of death. Where either is unknown, i use (for decreasing levels of certainty) e.g.
 * the two possible years of birth (usually based on knowing date or year of death and age at death), as in "(1949/50 -2000)" for someone who died in 2000 at the age of 50;
 * an approximate decade of birth or death, where one decade appears to likely to include the correct year, e.g. "(c. 1940s -2000)";
 * an approximate year of birth or death, where the decade is uncertain, but the likely range isn't much more than a pair of decades, e.g. "(c. 1950 -2000)". (Yes, it's a paradox, but even tho, side by side, "c. 1950s sounds less precise than "c. 1950", "circa" is vague enuf that "c." with a year following equally can serve for within either the surrounding 10 years (or less), or the surrounding two decades (or more).);
 * an approximate several decades, e.g. "born early 20th century" (or "late", or "mid-");
 * "fl." with a year, decade, third to half century, century, or even millennium, where a period of activity is known but birth and death dates would be just guesses derived from that.
 * Nationality: For moderns,
 * _ _ passport they carried during their notable activity, if known (or if (passport-issuing) country of birth is known, and we lack evidence of emigration);
 * _ _ name of (passport-issuing) country of birth, followed by "-born", if birth country is known and emigration appears likely but naturalization elsewhere is not asserted in the bio;
 * _ _ constructions like "Polish-born American" where country of birth & naturalization are both in evidence.
 * Where borders have changed drastically (notably Poland and Ireland) i have no hard and fast rules, and my rough and ready ones are perhaps better unstated here, to encourage other approaches to evolve.
 * Where a non-passport issuing "nationality" or ethnicity seems to be of interest as at least a candidate for some kind of sovereignty, i use e.g. "Spanish Catalan", "Canadian Chippewa", "American Sioux", "American Puerto Rican".
 * I'm inclined to treat obscure (mostly small) countries as exceptions: central African & some Saharan countries like Mauritania and Burkina Faso and Central African Republic, low-population island nations like Vanuatu and Dominica (especially troublesome bcz of confusion with the Dominican Republic) and Palau differently, usually by using the name of their region in place of the country name, to avoid uninformatively cryptic names.
 * Cause of notability: This is the area where your question is most substantial, and my answer most vague.
 * My most fundamental principle is that people who would have the same label if their names were different enuf to avoid confusing them are still labeled identically, but with further information that distinguishes them tacked on after a pair of hyphens. This is with the hope of making it as visible as possible that they are a special case bcz of the potential for confusion, and minimizing the temptation to add more detail to the entries of people not subject to confusion with others.
 * _ _ I give more detail, e.g., with sports figures than political, bcz there seem to be more pro (or otherwise notable) athletes than politicians, and bcz details in politics are so likely to be cryptic or even misleading (president of US is far more significant than any other American pol; presidents of most countries are mostly overshadowed by PM's; presidents of Israel are more honorary than political figures). So all elected officials and viable candidates i call just "politician" (unless there is an opportunity to confuse similarly named people from the same period, and in that case i put their constituency and/or office as a modifier on "politician", after a double dash so that they stand out as exceptions to the general rule that "a politician is just a politician").
 * _ _ With religious offices below popes and patriarchs (who along with monarchs constitute a special class whose issues i don't feel i've come to grips with), there are so many terms (around a hundred in my thesaurus), so bound to particular cultures or even sects within the same culture, that i treat them all as "religious leader"; the bio articles can sort out the details.
 * _ _ As to sports figures, i try to group sports: runners, jumpers, throwers, climbers, swimmers, shooters, and "players" of various team sports. (I say "martial arts participant", but i'm not sure boxers are numerous enuf to requires separation from them and wrestlers, rather than lumping them all as "fighters".)  While i don't consider this sufficiently talked thru, my inclination is to lump soccer, rugby, and other ball-kicking games (especially since the meaning of "football" is so culture-sensitive), perhaps as "kicking-game player" rather than "football player" -- again adding more detailed specifications after "--", only when needed to differentiate people with similar names.
 * _ _ In business, there are "business managers" and "entrepreneurs" (managers with a major equity stake), and i'm inclined to put a word before those terms, specifying a very broad area of business, like "energy" or "food" or "land".
 * In the long run, i think it may be worth considering completely suppressing nationality and cause of notability into comments, for almost all entries, and making them visible only when similar names suggest a need for more, well, disambiguation. But i think that is unworkable with current levels of LoPbN editing and maintenance work, and the impending expansion implied by the current low level of inclusion on LoPbN of existing bios.
 * Don't hesitate to ask more specific questions in this area, with the caveat that i don't (yet [snicker]) have all the answers.
 * 1) IMO, "d'Este" has two very defensible possible positions, which you name, and both should be created. Yet another position, incorrect but IMO desirable in light of the separate prefix-page being easy to overlook, would be List of people by name Der-Dez; note in all cases that the rdr should be bypassed, and the desirability of a cmt on that page's entry for her, acknowledging that construing the surname as equivalent to Deste is mistaken, however understandable.
 * 2) Thanks for your interest and support. It's a niche, since Go, Rdrs, Dabs, and Search are often sufficient & easier to use, but it's a damn big, niche, since bios are so numerous, and i think it's worth the work it needs.
 * 3) I think alerting anyone about a section split would be overkill; i don't notify anyone even with page splits.
 * 4) That sounds (without peeking) like a good first split for an interested editor to undertake; if you ask or i notice anything interesting about it, i'll comment on yr talk page.
 * 5) I think the 25s pretty good numbers, and that suggestion was enuf to take off the pressure in my mind for surveying systems in order to estimate the percentage of users better served by smaller numbers.
 * 6) The bullet hierarchy is for now off the table, due to the present labor intensiveness of expanding such pages. Automated aids for that, or maybe even a nested template scheme that would adjust the bullet levels according to how deep the nest was, could make a difference. Watch for more on this front after i get the page splitting scheme to where someone dares to be the second editor to split a page in the last 3 or more years.
 * 7) As to a "Great Leap Forward", you may mean user:Alvestrand's mass additions, which he seems to regard as pretty much limited to a demonstration in principle. However, in the last two months, User:Slyguy has added most of the bios with given names thru Alex, with a much lower garbage rate, and anyone with similar patience can continue when he leaves off, or do the same in a later stretch of the alphabet.

Est-Esz
As you may see by comparing my contribs page to the history of the Es page, i became free to review your changes there about 4 minutes after you finished adding, and 3 minutes before you finished subdividing. I think i did so quickly enough to see the additions before your subdivision of the sections, and IIRC to be momentarily confused when i opened an edit of it, intending to subdiv it myself. (I don't remember stopping to think whether you'd said you wanted that experience for yourself.) I found you'd done so, and inspected, arriving at a two-character correction, as to a matter that is confusing bcz of a stylistic inconsistency between page and section titles: the potential width of the navigational rows of the "access to rest of list" boxes is a reason for avoiding unnecessary spaces in those lines, and consequently in the page titles: legibility be damned. You probably were imitating that practice when you keyed the section heading markup, and IMO you're entitled to blame my inconsistency for the only part of your work on that page that i saw reason to change: you've probably got the whole thing down, via careful observation and interpretation, which is great. You'll also see i wound it up a minute before you put your question onto my talk page. How odd; how neat. --Jerzy•t 06:52, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Alexander Hegius von Heek
I recommend duplicate entries. The purpose i see for the list is navigation, and those seeking him have very little basis for knowing whether to look under Heek or Hegius. If they were only a few lines apart, one entry might cover both possibilities adequately, but those two might as well be on different pages for all the likely that the searcher's eye will fall on the other. (For that matter, speaking of different pages, i wouldn't hesitate to put another dupe entry under Von Heek. This is especially valuable for US figures, where names like van den Berg have often become e.g. Vandenberg.) --Jerzy•t 14:07, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Excellent result, indeed. And it sounds likely that the merge was adequately considered, especially since in light of WP:BOLD two pair should qualify as many eyeballs for such cases, in the absence of signs in the history of really horrible confusion; you may (or not, which is also fine) find that with increasing experience your own comfort level for such boldness increases.
 * If you're interested in thoroughness, look at the history pg of the resulting Rdr to see whether old revisions are hidden under it, and read Fixing cut and paste moves, esp'ly a troublesome case; my own belief is that history merges are desirable (if done right; maybe i should add my views about this to that page), not just for repairs of the type the page title contemplates, but also to complement content merges. Especially if you're not an admin, i'd be glad to undertake that one if asked. --Jerzy•t 17:37, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Music manuscripts categorization
I saw your work on Category:Medieval music manuscript sources and was wondering if you could examine the newly created Category:Music illuminated manuscripts. That category was created to group the 10 articles in Category:Illuminated manuscripts together that all dealt with music. I was wondering if the new cat was helpful, and if it could also fit somewhere in the Medieval music categorization tree (right now it is in the "illuminated manuscripts" tree and the "music books" tree). A more centralized discussion has been ongoing at Talk:Illumianted manuscripts, but feel free to reply where ever. Thanks for your consideration.-Andrew c 16:00, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

I deserved that
Apologies. Thanks for the reminder re civility. Cheers, Moreschi Want some help? Ask! 13:34, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Madrigals a5
Thanks for your question. It's true that I included that on purpose. The notation means "for five voices". It is a kind of shorthand, based on the original Italian name of the books. I noticed you were making edits concerning Monteverdi. With him it doesn't matter so much, because he only wrote a certain number of madrigal books, but saying how many voices the book was written for is more important in the case of someone like Philippe de Monte, who wrote a number of books for five voices, and a number for four voices, etc. I don't know if a5, etc. is the best way to write that, but I saw it in a source, and figured it would do until we can enter the original, Italian, name of the book. - Geoffg 14:05, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

John Hickman
One of the strengths of WP is the likelihood that someone will second-guess you -- so you don't have to be right. See Talk:John Hickman re my second-guessing you re List of people by name: Hi. Thanks again for all your good work -- including this one. --Jerzy•t 18:44, 15 April 2007 (UTC) Yeah, you've got a good attitude abt it. And if we maintain that attitude long enuf, it seems logical we'll reach a point where we've made all the mistakes once, and become perfect editors. I've decided to be patient about that. [wink] --Jerzy•t 23:27, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Francis Schaeffer
Yeah, no worries :). --TimNelson 14:18, 3 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the alert about the re-removal; I think I would've missed it.
 * --TimNelson 23:41, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

Composer infoboxes
You recently spoke, on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Composers or Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Opera, against the blanket removal of infoboxes from articles about composers, or on an attempt to reach a compromise solution. Despite around a dozen people doing so, there are claims that consensus for their blanket removal was reached. You may be interested in the ongoing debate on the former talk page. Andy Mabbett 10:23, 20 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Hi there LiniShu. You may like to know that the comment above, and others like it, were reported at WP:AN/I for canvassing.  Please check it out here.   L.J.Skinner wot 14:47, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Edit conflict
Not to worry. Nothing has been lost! Cheers. --Folantin 15:43, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

Assessment tagging ... apology, etc.
Hi LiniShu,

I apologize for snapping at you here. You are one of the ones who not only is making conscientious assessments of composers articles, but then actively improves them. Indeed you are an example to us all, and I thank you not only for your hard work but for your obvious efforts to maintain civil discourse at all times. Not all of us are that way, alas.

Not that it matters, but I have been frustrated by the 15-second "this article is start class" taggers who are tearing through articles on my watchlist; for a while I was changing them to "B" class where I thought I had written thoroughly from existing sources. I've left them alone for a few days though, since I feel like I'm shoveling sand against the tide. The only reason I haven't left a note on the assessment drive talk page saying what I think about this tagging drive, largely carried out by people ignorant of the subjects they rate, is that it seems like an unnecessary conflict to me: it would be easier to clean it up after they're all done.

Thank you for your excellent work on Cavalieri, and I hope you stay around Wikipedia for a good long time. Best wishes, Antandrus (talk) 03:40, 12 June 2007 (UTC)