User talk:Randywombat

Recent talk
Hello there, welcome to the 'pedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you need pointers on how we title pages visit Naming conventions or how to format them visit our manual of style. If you have any other questions about the project then check out Help or add a question to the Village pump. Cheers! --maveric149

Hello, and welcome! I notice that you've been signing your name as "Toby" in talk pages and so on. Of course, this is perfectly logical if that's your name, but I thought I'd better let you know that there is a Wikipedian of long standing and great reputation by the name of Toby Bartels, who has the accounts User:Toby~enwiki and User:Toby Bartels, and who most people think of when the name "Toby" is mentioned round here. This doesn't mean that you have to change your signature, of course, but I just thought I'd better forewarn you, so that you know what's going on if people start talking to you as if you are someone else... :) -- Oliver P. 09:30, 12 Jan 2004 (UTC)


 * Hi. Thanks! I'll use Toby W in future. Toby 11:55, 12 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Older talk
Randy, I left a note for you at Talk:Musical notation. - Rlvaughn 22:03, 4 Mar 2004 (UTC) --

Re: International law.

The reason I took this out is that it is manifestly not true in the case of the United States. There are numerous cases in the Supreme Court which has ruled that in the United States, American domestic law (particularly the U.S. Constitution) overrides international law. Of course where possible, U.S. domestic law should be interpreted in harmony with international law, but the Court has made it clear that Congress has the power to pass U.S. law which contradicts international law, and if there is an manifest contradiction, U.S. law wins. Normally this isn't a problem since a treaty is considered part of the corpus of American law, but it could come up in cases where the treaty contradicts the United States Constitution or more importantly in cases of customary international law where the assent of the nation isn't formally necessary for it to be valid.

I can find the case citations if you want. One thing that is pretty clear is that Americans have a completely different notion of the relationship between international and domestic law than Europeans do.

Roadrunner 17:12, 8 Jul 2004 (UTC)

See

Reid v. Covert, 354 U.S. 1 (1957)

http://www.constitution.org/ussc/354-001a.htm#t33

Roadrunner 17:22, 8 Jul 2004 (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 2000 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)

Conducting
Regarding entrance/entries, maybe it is a US/UK thing, since I can't recall hearing "entries" myself... TrbleClef 17:39, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Hello! I saw your name in wikipedians by field of interest - philosophy - and i wonder if you can give a help. I'm trying to address comments in Featured article candidates/1755 Lisbon earthquake, but the objections are mostly due with things that i, as a geoscientist, hardly understand. Could you give a look? Thanks, muriel@pt 19:51, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)

European Constitution
Hello. You may have noticed I've been doing some work on the European Constitution article recently, including splitting off the history and detailed ratification stuff into another page. It's occurred to me that if, with a whole year to go until the British referendum, the article is currently getting several edits by several different people per day, by the time the real campaigning gets underway and people are looking for information or looking to insert their point of view, it will get a huge amount of traffic (we are already in sixth place on Google for "European Constitution") and a huge amount of editing. I think it's a good idea then for there to be a few people who can keep an eye on the article and have broadly similar ideas about how it should be structured, what should be included, etc. As you appear to have been the most active on the talk page in recent months I thought I'd come to you first.

I split the history section off firstly because the page was getting long, but also because I think it's important to make the distinction between "European Constitution the news story" and "European Constitution the encyclopedia article". Because it's in the news, there's a tendency to overdo talk of how ratification is progressing, when really (in my humble opinion) the article should focus on the Constitution itself, what's in it, what it will mean for Europe, etc, and leave most of the current affairs talk to the history article. Of course, it makes sense to tell the reader about ratification, so I left in references to the various referendums, the fact that Spain have just said yes etc, but clearly someone didn't think this was enough and has added a big table (I think the map did the job very well), including links to articles like Cypriot Ratification of the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe for all of the parliamentary ratifications, none of which are really worthy of articles or likely to have one written. I wonder how much detail you think we should go into in the main article?

There's also the problem of people adding strange things to the bit about what's in the Constitution, or what's controversial about it. I wonder how much space we should give to simple description of its provisions and how much to discussing allegations that have been thrown at it. As time passes Wikipedia will probably end up with quite a lot of useful material on this subject spanning more than just this one article, but I think we need to have an idea of what each page should be about and what belongs in it. Some of what people will add will be of dubious relevance or factual accuracy, and of course it's always important to cite sources. If you can think of any other users who know what they're talking about when it comes to this topic it would be good to get them more involved. It would be great to see this as a featured article one day. In the meantime I'd be interested to hear your thoughts. Cheers.

&mdash; Trilobite (Talk) 22:58, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * Great, thanks for the response. I've put my comments on Talk:Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe so that all this talk is kept in one piece. &mdash; Trilobite (Talk) 21:59, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Codecsion procedure
Thank you for the rewrite of the Codecision procedure. I think it is very helpful to have this summary, it was not very good organized and some details were not put together, and it was really neccesary to have a simple and easy description in the codecision article. In addition I think that the details on the steps should be kept alife and I think it would have been best if these details would have been put into a separate article which then only cares about these details like many other articles like the Article on the EU and on Countries do. I created such page for the codecision procedure now and I'd like it if the detail information there stays accessible in this detailed form there, outside of the main codecision article. Thanks. --NoSoftwarePatents 09:31, 10 May 2005 (UTC)


 * Agreed, thanks in turn for your work on this. The detailed article looks pretty good too. Wombat

Directive rejected
Please cite your sources about the rejection by the Parliament of the Directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions. The information is pretty useless if not confirmed. --Edcolins July 6, 2005 10:48 (UTC)


 * Thanks Ed. My source was the vote itself (I was there) but I can't see it in the media yet. Will add a reference as soon as it appears! Wombat 6 July 2005 11:54 (UTC)


 * It is updated now, and I reverted my reversion. You were ahead of everybody. See (Forbes) and Current events. Cheers. --Edcolins July 6, 2005 11:58 (UTC)


 * I do my best! :o) I was lucky enough to be able to update the wiki from Parliament as the vote went through. After the dust settles, I guess the article will need some heavy revision: perhaps a new section discussing the historical/constitutional significance of the debate and the outcome should push the detailed 'history' into second place? But not just yet - it's too current. Wombat 6 July 2005 12:19 (UTC)

New European Union collaboration
Hi Randywombat, this is just a note telling you that I have created the European Union collaboration (the first collaboration is Eurobarometer). I'm looking forward to your contributions! Talrias (t | e | c) 12:10, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

Exchange with User:Mortypsmith
Me: Hi! Welcome to Wikipedia and thanks for your contributions so far.

You'll see that some editors (including myself) have made changes to some of the content you've contributed so far. In general, this is something to get used to on Wikipedia - everything you submit moves into the public domain and others can, and will, edit and improve it.

You'll also see that some of your contributions have been reverted (that means the pages you've edited have been returned to their previous state, before you edited them). Please don't worry or be offended - this is quite common, especially for new users who are still just finding their feet.

You can get more of an idea about why this has happened here:
 * Writing your first article

For instance, you added a passage to several EU-related pages which discusses the European Commission's policy towards elements of the draft EU constitution. This is a valuable contribution, but unfortunately it's not usable in its current state. This is because:
 * You make controversial claims - claims which other users, including myself, would dispute - but you don't cite your sources for those factual claims. In Wikipedia, always cite your sources if you can. Wikipedians also strive to present a balanced argument: if one editor adds information that is not written from a neutral point of view (NPOV), you can expect that other editors will quickly make changes.
 * You added links on lots of pages where those links don't belong. Specifically, you added links to one heavily eurosceptic website on many different pages about the European Union. But Wikipedia is not a links repository. If this link belongs anywhere, it belongs in one place: on the article about Euroscepticism. It should not be added indiscriminately to any page about Europe. (If you review the history of these pages, you'll see that an anonymous user has already tried to add this link many times to many pages, and it has been quickly removed by other users.)

So some editors, including myself, have temporarily removed the content you added, and/or moved it to the talk pages of the articles in question. The talk pages are an area where users can discuss the content of an article before making changes. I'm sure that much useable material will be salvaged from your first contributions; indeed, you may well want to re-read what you've written and have another go yourself!

Anyway, once again, welcome to Wikipedia, thank you for your contributions so far, and please do continue to get stuck in! Wombat 14:15, 21 October 2005 (UTC)


 * Mortypsmith: Thanks for your welcome message and explanation of why some the material I contributed to Wikipedia has been removed. I see from your personal page that the European Union is one of your areas of interest, and indeed part of your job.


 * As you might have guessed, the anonymous user who tried to add the Democracy in Europe site in the past was me before I became a registered Wikipedia user. I note you say that other users removed it - is this in fact the case, or was it removed by editors such as yourself?


 * Now, about my recent additions. To deal with your first point - you say that I make controversial claims which I don't substantiate. Presumably these would be the claims 1) that many things which only the Constitution would have given a legal basis to are being introduced anyway, and 2) that the Commission is seeking to introduce a directive which would, in effect, discriminate against eurosceptic parties by giving a huge financial advantage to federalist parties. Well both of these things I know from MEP Daniel Hannan, who recently (along with others) went to the European Court to protest that this directive goes against the EU's stated aims of democracy and pluralism (the case was, of course, thrown out on a technicality). If I were to include links to the relevant parts Hannan's site, would that be substantiation enough?


 * Secondly, the more general point about links. Obviously it makes sense for the Democracy in Europe site to be in the links section on the Euroscepticism page - it is an example of what the page is talking about. But I can't agree that it has no place on, for example, the European Commission page, when there is a link to their own site. The Democracy site is extremely relevant as it has a lot to say about the Commission, so I can't help feeling it has been excluded purely because its point of view doesn't coincide with the party line. Are we to allow only the view the Commission would like to present of itself, without dissenting voices?


 * Similarly, in the section on the British press on the Euroscepticism page, why allow the allegation that the Eurosceptic press is motivated by xenophobia (rather than, say, a belief in democracy) but not the fairly obvious fact that the British press at both ends of the market is divided more or less half and half on Europe? After all, the xenophobia allegation is not in any way substantiated - the link is just to Wikipedia's page on xenophobia, not to any proof (or even the source of the allegation) that it is what motivates the Eurosceptic press.


 * If as you say you "would dispute" the claims I make about the European Commission then please do so, but this doesn't give you the right to prevent anything but the party line being heard in the first place.

Kind regards - Mortypsmith

Me: Thanks for your message.

In reply to your queries:

(1) I'm not sure what you mean by editors "such as myself", so I don't know how to answer your question directly, but the added links were removed by a variety of editors. I removed it from some pages that I watch (e.g. the constitution and Parliament pages); others removed it from other EU-related pages. By the way, you can find out who has edited what when, if this interests you, by clicking on the "history" tab at the top of any page.

(2) Please do re-add your edits, with a link to the relevant parts of Dan Hannan's site as reference - I think I also saw something on the BBC about this too, which would also be a good source. I suggest that you might want to tone down the wording a little (something like "Some commentators have argued that..." or "Concerns have been voiced by some that..."), though that's up to you; if you choose not to adopt NPOV wording, I'm sure other editors will modify it accordingly anyway (yes, including myself!). That's the nature and the great strength of Wikipedia.

(3) As I indicated before, I think it would be fine - in fact, a good idea - to link to the Democracy in Europe site from a page such as 'Euroscepticism'. I'm sure you'll agree that adding it indiscriminately to a large number of pages related to the EU is unnecessary (and contravenes Wikipedia policy - did you have a look through the links I added in my welcome note?). But you have a valid point that there may be a place for it on selected other pages too, if the information on the site is relevant.

This is a matter for general discussion on Wikipedia - as is everything, really - so I'm certainly not claiming to be authoritative. But my judgement is that it would probably be most useful to link to the Democracy in Europe site as a reference from those parts of EU-related pages where specific eurosceptic claims are made which the D-i-E site substantiates. Another option would be to create a subsection of links on (e.g.) the Commission page headed "Criticism" - if there isn't one already, there should be - and include the link there. Just my 2p's worth; what do you think?

(For what it's worth, I don't think that a link to the European COmmission's site from the European Commission article is enough reason in itself to require 'balancing' links from eurosceptic sites. But that's a separate discussion.)

(4) I have no intention of preventing "anything but the party line" being heard! IN fact, if you survey my past edits you'll find I've done a great deal of toning down of _pro-EU_ arguments in the past, in order to make them more balanced towards scepticism.

In general, one of the great strengths of Wikipedia is that it's populated by a large number of editors with a very wide variety of different views on virtually every subject. But another great strength is its NPOV policy, which is zealously maintained by thousands of contributors. Every viewpoint is welcome - but every viewpoint must also be flagged as exactly that, a viewpoint. Factual claims must be referenced with factual sources; divergent opinions can (indeed, must) be expressed, but flagged as such and balanced by both sides of the argument, without any judgement being inferred in the text. Edits are often added which contravene this policy, but they are equally quickly toned down by others - in every area.

If in doubt, why not post something on the relevant talk page first? There are dozens of other users of every political persuasion who will be more than happy to discuss what's best and the agreed edit can then be transferred to the main article.

Anyway - thanks for the e-mail. I hope you don't mind if I put this exchange on my talk page! And I would be interested to hear your further thoughts, and read your future contributions. Best wishes, Wombat 16:47, 23 October 2005 (UTC)


 * Mortypsmith: Thank you, good points well made. However I remain convinced that the DiE site should be available as a link from the Commission article. Of course it should also be available from the Euroscepticism article, but generally there is little point in preaching to the choir - the important thing is that people searching for information about the Commission should be able to find not just the Commission's rosy view of itself, but also the concerns others have about it.


 * I would also stress that the "neutral point of view" is of course a hugely subjective notion in itself, as indeed is the question of when something is a viewpoint and when a simple fact. We all think that someone describes a situation neutrally when they describe in the way we would ourselves. With this in mind, consider the fact that the Commission voted itself a budget of 9 million euros for pro-Constitution propaganda in 2005 alone. This of course is just part of its pro-federalist "hearts and minds" campaign which, as I said in my original post, includes classroom materials targeted at children who are likely to absorb what they being told uncritically.


 * This being the case, it's not hard to see how the pro-Commission and pro-federalist point of view could come to be seen as "neutral", since it's likely to be what most people believe, and anyone who opposes it seen as a crank. Surely the very point of something as democratic as Wikipedia is to counteract the huge advantages that institutions like the Commission have in pushing their own agenda, and present the truth without fear or favour.


 * Anyway, I disgress. I will take your advice and re-add my edits with links to Hannan, and establish a "criticism" section of links on the Commission page. Brgrds, Mortypsmith

Me: No worries. Having looked around the DiE site a bit more, I now agree with you that a link from the Commission page is appropriate. While I don't agree with many of the statements on that site, it is all valid criticism, often heard, and a genuinely NPOV encyclopedic article would be incomplete without it.

More philosophically... yes, I agree that the boundary between fact and opinion is indeed fuzzy. But in terms of Wikipedia at least, there is a settled decision on these matters. Something is regarded as a point of view, rather than a fact, whenever it is disputed by others. This is a very wide definition - perhaps, in my opinion, too wide - but nonetheless, it has followed from a great deal of discussion among Wikipedians and there it is. So a statement about (say) the Commission is only regarded as a fact in Wikipedia terms if all sides would agree on it. For instance, eurosceptics and pro-Europeans would generally agree that there are 25 Commissioners, they have the right of initiative but not of disposition, their headquarters are in Brussels and so on. But the statement that the EU is undemocratic, for instance, is disputed by at least some people, as is the statement that it contributes to the prosperity of the continent - so these are points of view, and must be flagged as such in Wikipedia.

You'll find that even in those subjects where there is a broad majority in favour of one particular view (such as that humans evolved from apes, or that aliens have never visited Earth), Wikipedia still strives to get both sides of the argument heard. So the question of whether the other side of the argument is perceived as being put across by "cranks" is neither here nor there; all that's required is that there IS another side of the argument.

Thanks for the constructive discussion! Wombat 16:47, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

Page name for temperature articles
To avoid flip-flopping between 'degree Fahrenheit' and 'Fahrenheit' or 'degree Celsius' and 'Celsius', I propose that we have a discussion on which we want. I see you have contributed on units of measurement, please express your opinion at Talk:Units of measurement. Thanks. bobblewik 23:09, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Almeda University
Thanks again for finding that. Would you mind e-mailing me the word document itself? Just send it to william (at symbol) scissor (dot) com. I'd like to look at the metadata and the other stuff that Word hides away. Thanks! William Pietri 18:09, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Good job
Excellent work on rooting out the paid POV editing. I especially like the part in the letter about the writer they wanted needing multiple IPs (expecting the writer to be blocked or halted by the 3RR ruled). Kevin_b_er 07:24, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Papier-mâché Tiara
You managed to make the corrections before I got a chance! I really liked how you fixed the sentence that had the present-tense reference to Pope Gregory XIII's tiara so, good job & thanks for catching the errors. SailorAlphaCentauri 16:39, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Project European Union
Hello, you are member of the project European Union. I try to create a new project page for the project. You can see it at here Because this should be the project page for all it´s members, please tell me, what you think about it. Please leave your comments on the talkpage of the project.--Thw1309 11:05, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

Eric Maschwitz
I've been looking at the above article and see that you started the ball rolling. It's all VG but can you pse indicate where you got the material in the first place? If it came from one source we could add a section for Notes and Sources. I have added a couple of citations and have access to the entry in the Oxford DOB and also the obituary in the Times. However, it's hard to patch in in-line citations without altering the existing text and I don't want to do that because it's fine. Mikeo1938 (talk) 06:34, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

interview request
Hello, My name is Natalia Ioana Olaru and I am a final year master student in the Corporate Communication programme at the Aarhus School of Business, Aarhus University, Denmark. I am currently working on my final paper on the topic of user motivation to create content on collaborative media websites, the focus being Wikipedia. As a sample I chose the English and Danish portals. I would like to invite you for an online interview on the topic of what motivates you, to participate in editing and creating articles for this platform. I plan on doing the actual interviews in the period between 1st and the 15th of May via Skype, MSN or Yahoo Messenger. I am, however, open to other channels of communication too. Please let me know if you would like to participate in this interview and the preferred channel.

Thank you, Natalia Olaru Email: natalia.ioana.olaru@gmail.com MulgaEscu (talk) 14:18, 11 April 2011 (UTC)

Happy Birthday (2012)
'''Wishing Randywombat a very happy birthday on behalf of the Birthday Committee! Armbrust, B.Ed. Let's talk about my edits? 20:21, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

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Invitation to review Eat Just page
I work for Eat Just, Inc., a sustainable food company. In compliance with WP:COI, I proposed a draft re-write of the page here that trims promotion, updates the page, etc.

I saw that you participated in the Sustainable food system page and thought I'd see if you were interested in chipping in on Eat Just page. Since I work for the company itself, I am required to rely on more impartial editors to approve any large changes.

Thank you in advance if you do take the time to participate. Anoyes202 (talk) 20:33, 27 October 2020 (UTC)

Sorry I only just saw this message! I don’t have much expertise in sustainable food but I welcome your improvements to the Eat Just page. Randywombat (talk) 17:20, 9 November 2020 (UTC)

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