User talk:Omegatron/Archive/June, 2008

Annoyed by top-posting recurring argumentative comment
About Posting styles

I'm annoyed by your recurring comment "though top-posting does not alternate quotes and replies". That is your personal argument to dismiss the whole usage of that signature block.

Not only is your personal argument, it's not widely used, and it's not valid.

Consider the following work-flow (new posts in blue):

Q. What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

A. Top-posting. Q. What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

Q. Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A. Top-posting. Q. What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

A. Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q. Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A. Top-posting. Q. What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

There you go; top-posting does alternate quotes and replies. That's the whole point of the example; to show how top-posting messes up with the text. Do you see it? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Felipec (talk • contribs) 04:12, 28 May 2008 (UTC)


 * The joke sig makes it out to be reversed interleaved posting, which would indeed be pretty stupid. But in real top-posting, the entire previous message is quoted in its entirety, and the reply is added above it.  There are dates, delimiters, etc. separating the messages.  See Talk:Posting_style for an example.
 * Anyway, this joke is not notable enough to appear in the article. See Notability — Omegatron (talk) 16:27, 31 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Then you should change the text to: although usually in top-posting the text is quoted. And I'm saying usually because I've seen cases when the quote is in a different color, but when displayed as text the quoting is gone. However, I haven't seen any sources for that reasoning against the example, can you come up with one or is it something you personally feel is worth adding?. Moreover, you keep saying it's not notable, but I haven't seen any reasoning to why; there are at least 2000 mentions in Google of this exact text; it's used. -- Felipec (talk) 07:07, 2 June 2008 (UTC)


 * 21,600 hits for "A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text" (there are variants) -- Felipec (talk) 07:24, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Complaint about you to Seicer
It’s not a formal complaint, but I thought it fair to alert you to the fact that I’ve complained to Seicer (here) regarding what I perceive as your abuse of the Wikipedia system and flouting of rules. Greg L (talk) 19:23, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

request for comment

 * Hello. I would appreciate your comments here and here. Thank you. Thunderbird2 (talk) 18:34, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

Interesting happenings at Wikinews
I thought you might be interested in, as it appears that the folks at Wikinews are really giving the anti-fairuse trolls the boot. Noteworthy is a statement by foundation member Anthere. What is more, Wikinews even has successfully fought off attempts to remove "grant of license" images. Look at some of the other requests, as well. The nominator earned a lot of scorn for what he did. There may still be hope, it just might take some time. The thing I really want to work on getting rid of is that absurd "reasonable creation" of free images clause. Speaking of which, right now I'm fighting the fairuse namespace restriction clause in NFCC, currently being policed by a bot that fails to assume good faith and is biting editors who use sandboxes to do article work. Last week an editor complained bitterly to AN/I that the dumb bot kept on removing the image transclusion from his userspace sandbox, an article he was trying to clean up in good faith. He made a reasonable request for it stop, so that he could properly format and do other work on the article, but they refused. Their rationale was: you can simply put a ":" in front to prevent transclusion. However, that defeats the point of trying to clean up an article, right? They say they needed the ban so that bot-work could be facilitated. But how is this productive? We aren't here to facilitate bots, we are here to facilitate editors. IMHO, fairuse in userspace poses very minimal harm since, by all reasonable standards, a court of law isn't going to distinguish between main article space and user space. If you are doing article work, you need to be able to see the image as it would appear on the page. Therefore, I want to make it so that transcluding fairuse images into userspace is allowable. To do that, I will be doing everything short of 3RR to remove that bogus line from our policy, per WP:BRD. See the NFC talkpage for the current discussion, which I will be taking to the village pump soon. I might need some help trying to organize my thoughts and arguments into something concise that is airtight against wikilawyer Gmaxwell. I want the presentation to the community to be precise, sympathetic, and yet legally sound as possible. I'm convinced the project is posed no harm if the side-effect of allowing sandbox work with fairuse is that ~40px fair-use images get transcluded into hundreds of userboxes or other such decorations. After all, isn't Google indemnified from lawsuits by keeping the images to a thumbnail size in their image search? Wikimedia is exactly like Google, in that it is a service provider. I don't see how the safe harbor provisions that allow Google to host thumbnails in image search can't apply to us, too. Who cares if people use them as decorations? That isn't the point and it seems like a straw-man argument used to distract. Just as ip editing allows tons of vandalism, we still allow it so those small percentages of good ip edits are facilitated. More is expounded on the NFCC talkpage. I know you are trying to avoid these folks, but Carcharoth seems much less sympathetic to fairuse these days, so I don't really know who to turn to. I look forward to your input on this matter. --Dragon695 (talk) 16:11, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

RFHelp
Greetings, I am having two separate issues with the AT Attachment article's talk page. I would appreciate your comments here and perhaps participation there, if you have a bit of time.

One, there is an open rename proposal -- really a proposal to revert a recent rename, which I feel was done without proper procedure. You can read all the details there.

Two, there is a new user named Ramu50 who has posted a large block of personal observations and commentary to the talk page. I think he means to develop this into revisions of the material on the main page. Unfortunately most of what he has written is wrong; some of it is "not even wrong," and all of it is nearly incomprehensible (I suspect English is not his first language).

When I provide references he dismisses them as invalid, and has become increasingly abusive. He has also weighed in on the rename question with arguments equally based in wrong information.

Nobody else seems to be paying any attention. I've solicited comments from some of the past contributors to the page, but none have paid much attention besides making a remark or two about the rename.

I want to do the rename "right" - but it doesn't look as though consensus will be achieved on that. Re Ramu50, I don't want his screed remaining, even though it is on the talk page, as it is misleading in the extreme. But if I answer him point by point there he will just get more angry. Jeh (talk) 19:09, 27 June 2008 (UTC)