User talk:Matt Deres/Archive 1

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(Sam Spade | talk | contributions) 09:18, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

deus ex machina
Matt, I offered a short contribution to the deus ex machina Talk page, that more or less reinforces a number of your points from several months ago about the DEM page having evolved into a list rather than a well-written Wikipedia article. If you are still at all interested in the DEM topic, you might want to check it out. N2e 14:30, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

United States article nomination

 * The size. Yes, the US is a complicated place, but that's all the more reason to create a good summary article. This article is nearly twice as long as the article on China, which is just as complex, but with a history ten times as long. The US history section could probably stand some pruning, which might help reduce the number of references cited on the page.
 * If you want to compare the US article with that of China, you should take a look at People's Republic of China because the article on China is actually on the Chinese civilization or Ancient China(a different article). The article on the PRC is about the same length as that of the US.--Ryz05 t 01:08, 4 June 2006 (UTC)


 * The history section also weighs too heavily on the recent stuff - fully half of it is from the 20th century onwards.
 * The United States's history spans more than two hundred years; how can it not be long. Also, a lof have occured in the 20th century, arguably more so and better documented than the 19th century and the 21st century (which has just begun).--Ryz05 t 01:08, 4 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Do we need to have a map and a list of the states? I would remove the list since it's redundant (there's also a list at the bottom), but I realize nation articles typically list their divisions in the article itself.
 * The list is important and the Political divisions section will appear incomplete without it.--Ryz05 t 01:08, 4 June 2006 (UTC)


 * The Foreign Relations section might work better if it was reworked into the military and economics sections somehow.
 * Foreign relations has nothing to do with Economy, and the section on United States military is best be kept by itself. The PRC article has a similar format.--Ryz05 t 01:08, 4 June 2006 (UTC)


 * I urge you to change your vote or offer more explanations for the objection. Thank you.--Ryz05 t 01:08, 4 June 2006 (UTC)


 * I would like a response as to what you think. Thank you.--Ryz05 t 19:00, 4 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Hi, I still would like a response as to what you think. Thank you.--Ryz05 t 23:08, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

Judy Garland
Removed from GA list I have unlisted this article from the GA list. As detailed in the Drug Use section above, it is my contention that any article with unreferenced and potentially libellous statements cannot be a good article. The allegations that MGM introduced her to drugs needs to referenced and presented as just that - allegations. The Biography section at least gives a TV show citation for some of the assertions, which is a start, but there needs to be proper referencing (preferably of resources available online or on paper) throughout the Addictions section. Matt Deres 02:42, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Although I agree with your need for improvement and the de-list from GA until a fix is made, it is impossible to libel a dead person. Davodd 20:16, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Judy is not the one being libelled - MGM is. I don't have any great doubts that studios did provide drugs for their stars to "perform better", but we can't say that without citing the source. Besides being poor writing, we are basically accusing MGM of some pretty shady, perhaps illegal, activity. Matt Deres 23:46, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Hoop snake
A template has been added to the article Hoop snake, suggesting that it be deleted according to the proposed deletion process. All contributions are appreciated, but the article may not satisfy Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and the deletion notice explains why (see also "What Wikipedia is not" and Wikipedia's deletion policy). You may contest the proposed deletion by removing the  notice, but please explain why you disagree with the proposed deletion in your edit summary or on its talk page. Also, please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Even though removing the deletion notice will prevent deletion through the proposed deletion process, the article may still be deleted if it matches any of the speedy deletion criteria or it can be sent to Articles for Deletion, where it may be deleted if consensus to delete is reached. 172.149.41.100 21:45, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

Docklands FPC Vote
Hi Matt. Thanks for your comments re my (almost expired) FPC nom for Melbourne Docklands. I have tried to address your concerns re the lack of encyclopaedic info by adding more detail to the caption and summary. Just wondering if you would like to take another look and reconsider your vote if you think I have addressed your concerns adequately. Cheers, --jjron 16:13, 10 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the speedy response. Glad the caption is now more informative; of course I know what I'm looking at so left the caption brief, but can see the issue for people that don't know, so the expanded caption does improve the value of the pic. --jjron 17:11, 10 July 2007 (UTC)
 * No problem at all. Good luck with the FP.  As I said, my concern was only with some of the info; as far as the shot itself, I think it's one of the most gorgeous city shots I've seen.  Great job.  Matt Deres 17:26, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

Seagull on Snopes...
Thanks very much. I remember seeing that reported on the news over here. check it on Youtube. :) There was a reference desk thread about it too... Pretty cool. --Kurt Shaped Box 14:46, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

crepuscular rays
Hi, Matt Deres, May I please ask you to take a look here: http://www.spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=08&month=12&year=2007 Please take a look at 3D SUNBEAMS and please see how they call them. I guess what I'm trying to say is that it may be a good idea to learn something about the subject before strong opposing the image. Thank you for your time and no response is needed. Regards--Mbz1 (talk) 15:24, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Bladder thing
Thanks. It's some comfort to know that at least one person actually understood what I was trying to say with that. I'm often too "smart-assed" for my own good. Merry Christmas, by the way. --Milkbreath (talk) 17:47, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

Talk page editing guidelines.
Sorry - I was a little bit slow getting back to you - I've been a bit busy and I wanted to give you a decent response. You asked whether I thought the existing guideline for editing other people's posts on talk pages "in general" needed improvement (in addition to the RD proposal) - and I think it does.

The proposal I made on the RD should apply absolutely everywhere IMHO - and for a Wiki-wide policy, I'd go into a little more detail:

-- Rationale: Someone's signature at the end of a post means "I hereby certify that I wrote these exact words.". Changing something that's been signed by someone else is deeply wrong. Just as you don't change the numbers on a cheque or the words in a legal contract after it's been signed, you must not change a Wikipedia post.

Guidelines: --
 * 1) If someone writes some words and signs them - then nobody should change those words for any reason whatever no matter where on the Wikipedia site they appear.  Unsigned or automatically signed or anonymous posts are not covered by this - although posts signed by IP's are.
 * 2) It is allowable to apply formatting fixes where these are minimal and necessary to maintain the page on which they are displayed.  This should generally be limited to adding or removing HTML/MediaWiki markup symbols - and must done in such a manner as to not introduce new text or hide any of the original text.  For example: you must not use HTML comments to remove some words from the original post - or introduce a template that adds words in such a way as to make them appear to be a part of the original post.
 * 3) Under certain, limited, circumstances, it is OK to completely remove a post.  This means removing ALL of the words AND the signature AND any contained images, etc.  You may remove an abusive or inappropriate post, you may remove posts from a user's own Talk: page.  Archiving of complete posts is also permitted.  The important thing here is to avoid partial removal of a post - no matter how extenuating the circumstances.
 * 4) Interposing your own remarks within a multi-paragraph, signed post is OK - so long as you make it crystal clear which words are yours and which belong to the original author.  At no time should you break up a complete paragraph in order to comment on it piecemeal.

The main thing here is not to chop up, mangle or otherwise mess with the actual words the person wrote. If I read something and it has someone's signature on it - then I want to be assured that this is precisely what they wrote - without someone else diving in and dinking around with them. If I can't read it at all because it's been deleted - then it's no big deal - but if I CAN read it then I want to see exactly what the person wrote.

In article space, you are not supposed to sign things - so the issue shouldn't ever arise there. If someone does add a signed comment into an article - then your sole recourse is to remove the entire thing - again, you can't do it piecemeal even though it should not have been signed.

The existing guidelines almost say all of this already - but not quite - and they are not written from a point of principle. There are a couple of ikky consequences of this. It is common (as a courtesy almost) to remove people's email addresses from their posts on the grounds that they'll probably get spammed into oblivion. Well, tough luck - and in any case, anyone mining Wikipedia for email addresses will find it's pretty barren soil - and if they are determined - they can write their spidering tool to look into the edit history and find the email address even after you deleted it. So let's leave it there. The other problem is if someone is using Wikipedia to place their URL in as many places as possible in order to push up their Google pagerank score. Firstly, that doesn't work anymore because Google doesn't allow outgoing links from Wikipedia to improve pagerank - and secondly, it may be handled by removing the entire post on the grounds of abuse.

So, there you go.

SteveBaker (talk) 22:52, 3 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the reply. I've been considering what you're written here and on your talk page and I think I can support what you're talking about. It seems to me that maybe you were thinking too small when you tried to get this proposal over on the RD folks; this needs to be an amendment (or amendments) to the existing guidelines. As a personal thing, I much prefer rules to be as simple and clear as possible; to me, having one set of rules for talk pages and a similar but distinct set of rules for RD (and theoretically still more sets of rules for WP:FPC and WP:AfD, etc.) is not a good thing. Much better to have one set of rules for everything. With that in mind, I think we're looking at a two (or three) step process:


 * Amend the guidelines here so that they specifically cover all signed comments, not just those on a talk page. I admit a great deal of naivety about WP rules, but I don't think that change would be too difficult. As I've mentioned before, I think it's more an oversight than a real exclusion.
 * A second amendment to the guidelines that more thoroughly expresses the harder line that you're talking about. I imagine this is where we'll have a more difficult time. There appear to be folks that feel they should be able to edit other people's comments in 'minor' ways; I guess this will be where we see how strongly they feel about that.
 * The last and probably most difficult move is to promote the new set of rules from being "mere" guidelines to being actual policy. I'm not sure this step is strictly necessary, but based on your previous comments I assume it's a step you'd want to take.


 * Am I making sense with this? I've been on WP for a reasonably long time, but I don't have a lot of exposure to the inner workings of policies and guidelines. Does the process I've outlined seem reasonable to you? More importantly, does it meet the needs of what you're concerned about?


 * The more I thought about it, the less I liked the idea of people 'correcting' something I've written. I'd much rather they mock me a follow-up edit! My only reservation, as I think I've explained above, is that only covering RD comments only does half the job; personal signed comments in other places deserve the same protection. Also, while I'm new to WP policy-changing, I've found that real world policy changes are easier to effect if you alter existing rules rather than writing new ones up. Matt Deres (talk) 17:31, 5 January 2008 (UTC)


 * I agree with you 100% - but my personal tolerance for red tape and Wiki-politics is rather low and while I'd very much like to see the present mismash of guidelines on this subject cleaned up and replaced with a single, simple, clear policy - I'm not going to be the one to push it through the system. SteveBaker (talk) 22:22, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Re: vandalism revert
Hey, no problem. I had my first userpage vandalism the other day too. *Sniff* I feel like I belong too.... Thingg &#8853; &#8855; 19:35, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

Messenger Dates
Replied on my talk page. — Nicholas (reply) @ 18:01, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

Sinbad the Sailor
Yep, I was going to rollback but noticed you already had. Then you meant to manually revert but I did that for you. I'm not familiar with the subject, I just noticed that Sin-aria's edits were POV-pushy, unreferenced, etc. --Merovingian (T, C) 01:42, 24 January 2008 (UTC)
 * The changes really range, from the real stubborn pro-Persia POV to changing "wealth" to "wealths". Very incongruous all around.  However, looking at the changes now, Sin-aria mentions something about Islam prohibiting alcohol.  Now that I think about it, this might be interesting given the context, but I don't know if we can establish that the Old Man that Sinbad tricked was necessarily a Muslim.  --Merovingian (T, C) 01:51, 24 January 2008 (UTC)
 * That's a good idea. --Merovingian (T, C) 01:59, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

Green (town), New York
Thanks for helping clean up the nonsense in this article. I do, however, disagree with your comment about people only being famous if they have an article. Stepp-Wulf (talk) 03:05, 27 January 2008 (UTC).

Calday
It Really cant be constituted as vandalism, wehn i believe 95% of people you asked at the school would agree. Thankfully I dont go there any more, but he has not allowed the U6 students to take resits which for me is a tad hypocritical On the schools website it claims the school's aim is to allow students to "realise thier full potential". By not allowing them to resit exams in january when they may not have other exams to worry about, it increases pressure for the summer exams. Students having to do more work for revision in the summer will inevitably perform worse. I could argue on for many more pages, having an entire catalogue of complaints about his and the schools attitude, however i dont have time si i shall leave it at that. -The "Vandal" —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.153.11.219 (talk) 09:14, 30 January 2008 (UTC)


 * That's pathetic. Your contribution (here consisted of writing in all capitals "HEADMASTER IS A GIANT BELL" with "(anyone who disagrees - can't. It Would be denying the truth)" written underneath. Do you seriously believe that's something you should see in an encyclopedia? WTF does it even mean? Headmaster is a giant bell? What are you trying to prove by coming here and complaining? Did you picture me at my computer, gently nodding my head as I read your words, going, "Hmmm, even though the statement is unsourced, ungrammatical, completely nonsensical, and written in a non-encyclopedic style, I'd better put it back?" Not a chance.
 * This was your first edit. Lots of people screw up and it's not a crime; you've still got a chance to make a real contribution here. Check out WP:WEL for a good starting point. Come on back here and ask me anything you'd like about editing - I will help! Matt Deres (talk) 11:53, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Re Thanks
No problem, I would expect anyone else to do the same for me if they saw it happening. -- Roleplayer (talk) 13:46, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Rollback
You have been granted with the rollback permission on the basis of your recent effort on dealing with vandalism. The rollback is a revert tool which can lessens the strains that normal javascripts such as twinkle put on the Wikipedia servers. You will find that you will revert faster through the rollback than through the normal reversion tools such as javascripts and the undo feature, which means that you could save time especially when reverting very large articles such as the George W. Bush page. To use it, simply click the link which should look like [ rollback ] (which should appear unbolded if you have twinkle installed) on the lastest diff page. The rollback link will also appear on the history page beside the edit summary of the lastest edit. For more information, you may refer to this page, alternatively, you may also find this tutorial on rollback helpful. Yamamoto Ichiro 会話 20:30, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

full moon vs partial moons
In my brief stint as an astronomer, I was surprised to learn and then have it demonstrated to me that the full moon would be the least desirable photograph of a moon image to get -- second only to the new moon.

The reason is the unsharp terminator line -- the line between moon day and night. This line is probably still the best way to know the surface details of the moon. One of my favorite astronomy labs was about the crater called Kepler -- there is a little back splash mountain in the middle of it. It has been so long now, but if I remember correctly, we measured the shadow of the center protrusion (I am typing on a web thing dedicated to information -- yet I look none of these words up here....) and the shadow of the crater wall, did some unit conversions and got the phase of the moon or something like that (it has been 20 years, I remember loving it more than details).

It is the difference between a disc and something interesting. Without the phases (and before we landed on the moon), if we had only the full moon to go by or look at, we would have had no evidence of surface features. Mountains, craters, rills. Only evidence of coloration differences -- the 'man in the moon' might be an actual debate still raging!

Any phase other than full or new is infinitely more interesting and more scientific. I don't know about if it is more encyclopedic though, the way the word has been redefined and self-referenced here so much. -- carol (talk) 10:08, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Barnstar Thanks
Thanks for the Barnstar and comments. It's ended up creating a fair bit of work for quite a few others though! What I don't get is that he went to all that effort to try to get FPs promoted that weren't even his own photos, like the latest butterfly. Seems odd to me. Cheers, --jjron (talk) 13:49, 9 March 2008 (UTC)
 * LOL. That's hilarious! Five barnstars plus the 'all seeing eye' in three days, including an amazing three in six minutes!! (And then another one 16mins later - he must have been feeling it was too long since he got one). I actually thought Sathmar may have been a different user, a close friend, family member, or something, but it's probably just him. Can you remove them any more than's already been done? --jjron (talk) 14:15, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

Schrödinger's Cat
I do know what a featured picture is. I got bored and wanted to do something funny. TheKillerAngel (talk) 01:19, 24 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Yay.TheKillerAngel (talk) 01:47, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Valued Pictures Proposal
Hi Matt,

I wasn't dodging the Valued Image/Pictures discussion, I'd just gone away. Anyway I've detailed my thoughts on FPC talk. Not sure if it's the right direction or not. See Valued Pictures Proposal. Your input would be valued.

Cheers, --jjron (talk) 09:05, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Arm bone and GGB pillar on COM:VIC
Hi Matt, You mentioned an arm bone diagram and an image of a pillar of the Golden gate Bridge as examples of images which you would like to get some credit for their value. As a test I have nominated them at commons:COM:VIC just to try and see what happens. If they are shot down you can use it against my idea, if not, well you can probably use that against my idea too ;-). Anyway, just wanted to drop by and mention it, not that I expect you will be overly enthusiastic about it. You are of course invited to comment and even vote on the images there. Although people will probably suspect you are a suckpuppet I will fight them off if they intimidate you ;-) -- Slaunger (talk) 21:20, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

April 2008
Constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, but a recent edit of yours has an edit summary that appears to be inaccurate or inappropriate. Please use edit summaries that accurately tell other editors what you did, and feel free to use the sandbox for any tests you may want to do. Alexius08 is welcome to talk about his contributions. 02:06, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Replied here.