User talk:Rspeer/Archive 6

Survey Invitation
Hi there, I am a research student from the National University of Singapore and I wish to invite you to do an online survey about Wikipedia. To compensate you for your time, I am offering a reward of USD$10, either to you or as a donation to the Wikimedia Foundation. For more information, please go to the research home page. Thank you. --WikiInquirer 03:31, 4 March 2007 (UTC)talk to me

Just FYI
... what I found on AIV: User talk:Rspeer drinks the haterade (now indefblocked). Sandstein 21:42, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

Saskatchewan
Sorry, I know it's a drag, but could you have another look at the edit warring (see WP:ANI - ). The and  feud is still going on, worsening even, despite the many warnings and respective blocks. I think may not be an independent contributor: very similar editing habits to 70.73.4.197, such as unexplained reverts and "revert vandal", mostly applied to 70.64.4.74 edits. Tearlach 01:35, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
 * FYI, 70.73.4.197 is at it again; see his recent edits to Brad Wall and Saskatchewan Liberal Party. --Hiddekel 18:48, 23 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Oh man. I have trouble keeping track of which 70.* is which. But I'll watch their talk pages and block them if it's necessary again.  r speer  / ɹəəds ɹ  21:07, 26 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Sorry, but they're at it yet again - this time it's vs . Are there any long-term options to stop this? It's clearly the same user(s) turning up under various IP sockpuppets, and I think this year-long edit warring is a form of two-handed trolling rather than any genuine attempt to improve Saskatchewan articles. Tearlach 03:50, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

Main page error
IMO you are online. Please see error (not exactly an error though). Regards.--Dwaipayan (talk) 16:06, 20 March 2007 (UTC)


 * It looks like this has already been fixed the easier way (by making the DYK link point to the current article title, Ashoka the Great). I don't see a reason to rush this move through - just get consensus for it on the talk page.  r speer  / ɹəəds ɹ  18:20, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

The Game
I wanted to solicit an opinion of an admin, and given that you were involved in the article until it's demise, thought you might be a good choice. Do you feel as if The Game (game, meme, memory game, or whatever it's parenthetical title would be), in the state that it was most frequently in (that is, a short article almost entirely based from the newspaper article) would meet Attribution ("This page in a nutshell: All material in Wikipedia must be attributable to a reliable, published source.") and Notability ("A topic is generally notable if it has been the subject of coverage that is independent of the subject, reliable, and attributable.") with both those quotes taken directly from the first two paragraphs of their respective pages? Or is there a more serious problem with the newspaper article? (note: I prefer to do conversation on one talk page so the conversation thread is easy to follow, if you don't mind) Darquis 01:44, 1 April 2007 (UTC)


 * The rule of thumb for inclusion right now is "multiple published sources", so the single newspaper article wouldn't be enough. Although I think that Wikipedia would benefit from having an article on The Game, I respect the community's decision to delete it according to the inclusion criteria.  r speer  / ɹəəds ɹ  08:11, 1 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Alright, I was afraid that was the case. It seems like a lot of folks have given up on it being in anyway, judging by the last AFD.  Thanks! Darquis 09:12, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

Thank you
Just wanted to commend you for an excellent, excellent post on RfA talk. I'm amazed to see some editors defending the project count rationale after you explained its drawbacks so clearly. Dekimasu よ! 06:15, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Re:Shotaro "Macky" Makisumi
Ooops. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. ... disco spinster   talk  11:53, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

TeckWiz's RFA
Hey Rspeer. Thanks for supporting my unsuccessful RFA this week under my old name, TeckWiz. I'm now known simply as User:R. I hope to keep helping and improving Wikipedia alongside you. -- TeckWiz is now R Parlate Contribs@(Let's go Yankees!) 15:11, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Protest
For the record I openly protest against your actions for claiming I am abusing Wiki as doing childish, lame games like cloning or acting like someone and being disrespectful to legendary developers who shaped the IT industry as we know. There is no chance any professional developer would play cloning or self promotion games on an online service.

I would revoke my account as a protest but it seems Wiki doesn't allow it. Ilgaz 14:49, 24 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Well, it's established that the "legendary developer" is User:Mewse, whose contributions you seem to admire a lot even though he is "playing self-promotion games". Also, you are allowed to leave anytime you want to.  r speer  / ɹəəds ɹ  20:22, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

Graphic Designer's Barnstar

 * Thanks! I appreciate the support for the image. I'd like to clarify one thing, though -- it's not meant to solely illustrate Condorcet voting. The same image is used in many different voting system articles.  r speer  / ɹəəds ɹ  22:56, 9 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Good point. I saw it on all of the other voting article pages as well and it was the comparison in particular that was so helpful. I haven't given out a barnstar before, which may go some way to explaining the confusing mess this one became. I have now reflected my intention in awarding the thing by editing the text once again. Of course I am completely biased towards Condorcet, which is the other motive. Although it is hard to conceive an instance of, if the the image had shown another voting system to be superior to Condorcet, no barnstar would have been awarded ;-) . -- Grumpyyoungman01 07:24, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

Favorite betrayal criterion
Please support this nomination for deletion. Yellowbeard 15:22, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

Anonymous user 64.229.92.18
As an Administrator can you tell me if this anonymous user ever signed up under a real User Name or is this the only contribution this person ever did as that pertaining to Street Light Interference? Apparently they are not interested in participating further in this article, let alone anything of Wikipedia as they show no other contributions.--Doug talk 13:02, 11 May 2007 (UTC)


 * No, administrators can't look up the IP addresses of usernames. For the same reason, I have no idea why you seem to post as both Doug Coldwell and Doug Cauldwell -- could you please explain that?  r speer  / ɹəəds ɹ  19:28, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, had a "senior moment". Can you (or I) just delete this account of Doug Cauldwell, then I won't have these "moments" again. Thanks. --Doug talk 21:30, 11 May 2007 (UTC)
 * There's no such thing as deleting accounts, either -- where would the contributions go? Just don't log in as Cauldwell. Change the password to something random if you feel like you have to stop yourself.  r speer  / ɹəəds ɹ  22:31, 11 May 2007 (UTC)  Great idea! Thanks, will do that.--Doug talk 22:40, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Hey there
I was the editor who made a request on WP:THIRD, as it seemed the discussion wasn't progressing. However, a while later the other editor in the dispute explained that his objections weren't to the content being removed. After a lot of hullabaloo he explained that he was objecting to why it wasn't removed from the other articles as well. Unfortunately on the bollywood biopages, theres a lot of stuff that shouldn't be there, but since its been there for so long, editors have come to believe thats how it should be.

In this case, once I removed the content being debated about from the other pages, the dispute was resolved. Honestly, there are so many pages under Wikiproject Bollywood that I see this happening again sometime in the future, but its nice to know the community is there to help us out with a Third opinion in future.

I just realised, I don't know whether or not I'm supposed to reveal that I was the person who made the request, since on the page we're told to sign only with date, not our sigs. However, in the page history, the editor's name can still be found, so I guess the question is moot anyway.

Anyhow, just wanted to say thank you for dropping by on the page.

Regards, xC | ☎  04:00, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Looking for an outside opinion
Could you give an outside opinion on the following edits?   The criteria being used to determine what is "on topic" seems self contradictory and I think its part of an ongoing campaign by a small group of editors to push their POV, but I could use an outside opinion and I've checked out your edits - you seem pretty even handed about adding content on Wikipedia.-75.179.159.240 12:55, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

rfa nominations
Can non-admins vote in requests for adminship? I was just wondering, as I can't see any documentation on it. I like your sig, by the way! themcman1 Talk 15:02, 3 June 2007 (UTC)
 * forget that, i wasn't looking hard enough! themcman1  Talk 15:03, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

Signature
FYI, your talk page link in your signature is showing up as "ɹəədsɹ" for me (which may or may not display that the inverted-r's (presumably) are showing up as non-character boxes. Internet Explorer 6, which is still fairly common, on a default font set, if that helps. 64.126.24.12 14:34, 8 June 2007 (UTC)


 * I think that has to do with the fonts that come with Windows, which are kind of lacking in their Unicode support. Any computer with the right fonts to view IPA pronunciation guides will be able to display my signature.  r speer  / ɹəəds ɹ  00:45, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

Your criticisms
I posted a reply to your criticism of my voting on the RfA page. You seem to have taken my argument out of context, left out a key part of the argument, then used that to critcize my vote. My vote was based on a two part argument: lack of experience and poor demonstration of knowledge of policy. I did not go into enough detail, perhaps, but consider the latter failing the more important. Granted, edit counts are not perfect, but they can be viewed (with caution) as a measure of experience. However, a big part of my oppose vote was based on my impression that this user does not have a firm understanding of policy. The issues you raised in your vote only highlight this impression. Cheers. &mdash; Gaff ταλκ 16:13, 8 June 2007 (UTC)
 * The guideline for edit counts was once that you should stop taking them seriously after about 500 or so edits. In particular, official Wikipedia discussions that are restricted to experienced users have never distinguished edit counts above 500. If you think you can tell anything about an editor by whether they have 7,000 edits or 1,500, you're casting an unfounded vote. The way you expressed your vote implies that you think that the editor does not have a firm understanding of policy because of their edit count, so that's why I'm opposed to it.  r speer  / ɹəəds ɹ  18:46, 8 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Perhaps I should have been more precise in my verbiage. Language can at times lead to misunderstandings, such as here.  I have recently offered support to candidates with fewer edits than this user.  In fact, I typically take edit counts with a grain of salt, having seen users with far more edits than this who clearly are not and may never be somebody I would support as an admin.  I did not want to make a huge stink about the AfD debacle several other users have brought up on the RfA, but that was a big facotr in my decision.  That occured only a couple months ago and seemed to show a lack of understanding of even what a reliable source is: sourcing sombody's blog is really not that reliable.  &mdash; Gaff  ταλκ 20:00, 8 June 2007 (UTC)
 * My vote has been withdrawn. Thanks for the hounding. &mdash; Gaff  ταλκ 20:19, 8 June 2007 (UTC)
 * It sounds like you had valid reasons behind your oppose vote (I know I had reasons for mine, after all), and all you needed to do was express your reasons more clearly. Sorry that you became one of my first "targets" when I started taking a hard stance against editcountitis on RfA, and I'm glad you took it well in the end.  r speer  / ɹəəds ɹ  00:41, 9 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Actually, I agree very much with your basic premise, as I understand it: that edit counts are really not very useful in evaluating whether or not a user would make a good admin. Given the amount of vandalism that we see daily, its pretty clear that the more "good" users able to block the "bad" the better.  Still, I would like to think that administrators understand wikipedia inside and out.  In some cases, I have voted support for users who are primarily focused on vandalism, even if they were not heavily involved in other admin tasks, because I felt that they would be reliable in applying blocks where necessary. But whatever, Wikipedia is really not that important, as they say.  &mdash; Gaff  ταλκ 06:02, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

A token of appreciation
And I like the way you express your opinions on RfAs (although I do not always agree with them); they really show that you took some time to judge a person and did not just look at some numbers. Cheers. - Two  Oars  19:45, 8 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Indeed - I am glad more people are seeing sense and realising numbers mean so little.  Majorly  (talk) 19:58, 8 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Oh and btw, I love your signature :)  Majorly  (talk) 20:22, 8 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Thank you both. I'm glad my votes are appreciated -- I think if more people start making votes like this, RfA will become a more reasonable place.  r speer  / ɹəəds ɹ  00:44, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

Requests for adminship/TomasBat
Regarding your comments in the oppose section of this RfA; not to be too picky but I thought you were being unfair to TomasBat regarding the User:AlexHillan block. User:AlexHillan hasn't left WP and is actively editing. And the other editor (whose comments you quoted), was not really harassing AlexHillan; they were only trying encourage him, though in a sort of misguided way (as you can see in from this exchange). Neither was TomasBat. I saw his comments there as being very friendly. (I saw this whole exchange much before this RfA started). Just pointing this out because your oppose makes it out like TomasBat was instrumental in AlexHillan leaving WP. - Two  Oars  20:23, 8 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks for pointing that out. I guess the drawback of looking at a pseudo-random sample of a user's contributions is that I see things out of context.  r speer  / ɹəəds ɹ  20:44, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

My RFA
Thanks for your input at my recent rfa. I want you to know I'm not homophobic in anyway. Sexual preference makes no difference on Wikipedia; the only thing that matters to me is that the user contributes in a constructive manner. Again, thanks for your input at my recent unsuccessful RFA. -- Wikihermit  (Talk • HermesBot) 04:32, 10 June 2007 (UTC)
 * I was wondering if you planned to revisit Requests for adminship/Fvasconcellos ? Regards, Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 15:20, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

My RfA :)
Thank you for your comment. I'd also like you to know that I found your reason for voting Neutral relevant and fair. Best wishes, Fvasconcellos (t·c) 18:45, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

William Cheung page
Hi, sorry for bothering you. I posted a request for Administrator intervention and page protection for the William Cheung page, and was wondering if you could take a look at things. I take full responsibility for any violations on my part in trying to maintain the NPOV of the article. --Marty Goldberg 06:22, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

"Notability is not a reason for deletion"?!
Hello - While I appreciate your taking the news music package article to AFD, I was totally confused by the reason you gave for removing my prod on the Edward Carrington Thayer article. Since when is notability (or, more precisely, the lack of it) NOT a reason for deletion? #14 at Deletion_policy is "Subject fails to meet the relevant notability guideline (WP:BIO, WP:MUSIC, WP:CORP and so forth)." WP:BIO clearly says that articles that can't be improved to meet the policy [because their subjects are inherently non-notable] should be considered for deletion. If you disagree about whether he is notable, that's fine, but disagreeing on whether notability is a criteria seems bizarre. Most of the articles at AFD are deleted because of non-notability. Propaniac 14:36, 12 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Notability goes in and out of style, it seems. Last I knew, notability was just a proxy for "verifiability by reliable sources", and for that reason "just not notable" is listed as a reason to avoid. The problem with most non-notable things -- and the reason notability is a useful argument -- is that you won't typically find reliable sources about non-notable things. This article had a few sources, so I thought it was hardly a slam-dunk deletion, and felt it may even be promoting systemic bias toward the present to delete a minor 19th-century politician. You are welcome to disagree -- it should probably go to AfD.  r speer  / ɹəəds ɹ  17:28, 12 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Which is why my prod stated "no evidence (and barely an assertion) of notability." You know, evidence, like reliable sources? The sources given are some woman's memoir (a book and author with no worthwhile Google hits) and a newspaper column that mentioned the guy had made a lot of money and gave a lot to charity in his will, neither of which confers notability on their face. Like I said, if you think it's iffy, that's one thing, but I hope you don't go around rescuing every half-decent article about a non-notable subject because you can't be bothered to check what the policies are. Propaniac 18:49, 12 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Okay, thanks for checking out the reliability of the sources; based on that, the article should probably be deleted. There's no need to make this personal, though. If making one questionable decision in clearing out half a day's backlog of PRODs gets me flamed like this, it's a good reminder of why I don't close AfDs.  r speer  / ɹəəds ɹ  19:31, 12 June 2007 (UTC)


 * I've deleted the article as if I hadn't challenged the PROD. Hopefully this puts things right.  r speer  / ɹəəds ɹ  19:36, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
 * I did get more vitriolic than I should have; I apologize. I was irritated that an administrator removed a prod so close to the expiration date, for a reason that I knew was directly opposite to a policy I know fairly well, and that my understanding of the policies was being questioned. I didn't want to have to take the article to AFD, where it could possibly have found a reprieve as a dull, mediocre article that couldn't reach a consensus for deletion, when there were no actual objections to the prod. I would have been less annoyed if the article had been more obviously heinous. Propaniac 13:27, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

Thank You
It looks like my Request for Admin has closed successfully at (58/8/2). I am very grateful for your support. I think your pointing out of my interactions over at Talk:Sports club is one of the key reasons why I was given the mop. I consider it my duty to try to live up to the trust that you and others have shown in me. SirFozzie 17:56, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Requests for adminship/Max Naylor 2
Minor issue: The RfA analysis tool can't parse your comment, because it can't attribute your (indented) signature to your comment and interprets it as an unsigned !vote. It's a common issue with bulleted comments which necessarily include line breaks.

You could reformat it like this, but the bullet formatting works only with line breaks:


 * 1) Support based on contributions. Checking over Max Naylor's contributions, he's made extensive edits in his area of expertise (Iceland), and his work there involves communicating well with other users, organizing a WikiProject and a newsletter, contributing images (including high-quality SVGs), working with templates, and so on. My only criticism is that he should use edit summaries more often, which would make it easier to tell what he's working on. Now, some other reasons to support: *No neediness for tools. (What a great phrase!) *Three years of experience. Incidentally, in those three years he's accumulated a perfectly reasonable edit count of 2000+, which of course isn't influencing my vote, but makes one doubt the sanity of those who are opposing based on edit count. *10 opposers, so far, have had the chance to give legitimate reasons why Max Naylor would be untrustworthy and come up with jack all.  r speer  / ɹəəds ɹ  22:41, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

Best regards, —AldeBaer 17:44, 16 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks for pointing this out, but I don't particularly care if the bot knows how to count my vote. It's a bureaucrat who'll be closing it, and presumably they will count it (and hopefully they're doing more than just counting anyway).  r speer  / ɹəəds ɹ  08:52, 17 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Agreed, nevermind. —AldeBaer 00:54, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

Smile


has smiled at you! Smiles promote WikiLove and hopefully this one has made your day better. Spread the WikiLove by smiling at someone else, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past or a good friend. Happy editing! Smile at others by adding {{subst:Smile}} to their talk page with a friendly message.
 * BTW, you have a cool sig. Cheers!--†Sir James Paul† 05:45, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

Thank you X 100
{| style=" background:white; padding:3px; font-family:arial" align=center | T hank you very much for supporting my RfA, which closed successfully yesterday... W00t! I hope to be a great admin (and editor) and I'm sure you can tell that my use of a large, boldfaced, capital "T" and a big checkmark image in this generic "thank you" template that I swiped from some other user's Talk Page that I totally mean business! If you need anything in the future or if you see that I've done something incorrectly, please come to my Talk Page and let me know. So now I've got a bunch of reading to do.... see you around! - eo 13:27, 22 June 2007 (UTC)

G11: FocusFixer?
Hi,

I added a short page about FocusFixer. This was not an advert. As a scientist working in the field since 1978 I thought I was adding something positive - and would probably have added more to the deconvolution article as (it needs it). I added the FocusFixer page as it is an example of a use of deconvolution used in digital image processing. It was short and to the point. It would form an interesting record of how such abstract techniques as deconvolution are now becoming mainstream and available to the general public. Having shown how deconvolution is now available I was also going to show how super-resolution is now also available to the ordinary user of digital cameras. It makes sense to link these to the company responsible for putting these techniques into products. There are many other similar examples on Wikipedia.

I hope you will reconsider.

Thanks

TimAth


 * An unreferenced article promoting a commercial Photoshop plugin made me (and Naconkantari, too) conclude that its purpose was to sell the plugin. If this plugin actually merits a Wikipedia article, feel free to put back a version with references. And sorry for the delayed response.  r speer  / ɹəəds ɹ  17:19, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

AvoDerm
Article rewritten removing any points which may promote it as an advertisement or SPAM. This is a good faith attempt to create this article with no POV. I don't work for the company and have no affiliation to the company nor does my dog eat the products from this company. I just didn't know what points in the original article tipped it into the SPAM category. Thanks. --Chuck Noles1984 16:41, 27 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Your rewrite looks good. I agreed to the speedy deletion of the article because it really read like corporate spam to me -- sorry that I misread your intent.  r speer  / ɹəəds ɹ  17:15, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Stephan Schulz
I've replied to your comments here. Also, I didn't know WP:BEANS was a valid reason to blank an RfA talk page. Happy editing! -- Boricuaeddie hábleme 13:58, 16 July 2007 (UTC)


 * I've never seen it done before, but I assume there's a reason Mathbot isn't posting these statistics anymore. Putting edit counts on the talk page seems to encourage voting based on edit counts, something that's quite discouraged.  r speer  / ɹəəds ɹ  16:14, 16 July 2007 (UTC)
 * I agree. -- Boricuaeddie hábleme 17:01, 16 July 2007 (UTC)
 * I don't think anybody is going to be voting solely on the basis of total numbers. In particular, I find the list of "most-edited pages" in each namespace very helpful, because it enables me to look at the edit history of those and get a reliable answer to the immortal question "what exactly do you do around here?" —freak(talk) 22:39, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

4x4 square templates nominated for deletion
Hello Rspeer. I've nominated most-perfect magic square templates on Meta for deletion. (I've posted this message here since you don't seem to be regularly active on Meta.) You participated in an earlier discussion in 2005 that was never closed; if you'd like to comment again, please see m:Meta:Requests for deletion. — {admin} Pathoschild 02:49:09, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

Mark Hucko
Hi,

I saw that you made an edit to Mark Hucko with the summary:
 * Redoing Amire80's edit after the restore, with the summary: "deleted Multi-Level Universe - self-published"

And i don't see my own edit there.

What happened there? Did it happen because of a failure in Wikipedia's database? If yes - where are such things announced and documented?

Or was it some controversy about the edit itself? I am cleaning up the weirdest parts of articles related to that guy (mostly Slovio) and some people may not like it. Thanks, Amir E. Aharoni 07:33, 26 July 2007 (UTC)


 * I'm helping with the cleanup too. The editor before you had made an extremely libelous edit. By the Biographies of Living People policy, the right thing for me to do there is to delete the edit from the history.
 * Unfortunately, since you didn't spot the vandalism, that meant that the libel stayed in for your edit. If I deleted the vandal's edit, then the situation would be even worse, because it would look like you wrote it! So instead, I deleted both edits and redid your edit, or what your edit would have been on an unvandalized page.
 * Incidentally, I have no idea who Mark Hucko is (aside from what the article tells me). I came across this page on "random article", I think. But there clearly is something weird going on with articles related to him, and you're doing the right thing to clean up these articles.  r speer  / ɹəəds ɹ  07:53, 26 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the reply.
 * It is indeed weird that Mark Hucko AFD was closed as "no consensus" and Slovio AFD was closed as "keep", even though both had strong arguments that supported deletion.
 * I am deleting the most obvious nonsense from the articles. Even after that i shall probably propose it for deletion again. Only hardcore conlang enthusiasts may consider this subject notable. --Amir E. Aharoni 08:08, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads up!
Oh snap! I saw a period placement that I would've put a red line through on a student paper a little while back and got hypersensitive to it -- the fact that it seemed so pervasive should have been a good clue for me that it's the prevailing style on Wikipedia rather than an actual problem, huh? :) Duly noted and enlightened. Cheers! Soundoftoday 01:36, 30 July 2007 (UTC)