User talk:SGBailey/2006

Template:List of people-Top
This change completely changes the appearance of all the LoPbN pages and the usability of the inter-page indexes on them. The box code was writ several years ago by someone who seemed to know what he was doing, but i have no idea of how to get the border back on the boxes - nor of why what you asserted in yr summary might be true and why it was never a problem until now. Can you assist restoring bordering similar to what was there before? --Jerzy•t 03:12, 22 January 2006 (UTC) Thanks, and i guess a fair answer is "nothing wrong", especially since i threw out the box markup completely for a year or so when it wasn't playing nicely with the template system. But for me the border of the box, which i see in monobook & i think saw when i was a Classic-skin holdout, makes a huge visual difference, which i find asthetically and functionally valuable. But you are right that the tag has to go, and i don't think it is in any sense your responsibility to sort out what the tag was doing besides this indeed unacceptable hiding "side effect". (I've tracked down the editor who introduced that markup to LoPbN, and seemed to me -- perhaps just in light of my complete ignorance -- a wizard of box markup, and left them a question.) I appreciate your attention to the serious problem that (per VP/Pol) i now am aware of, and the valuable details in yr reply. (Despite having felt obligated to see what i edit in the default skin, i keep forgetting that there are multiple versions of the look and feel. While that's secondary to the basic thrust of my LoPbN work, i think i'm going to start doing a one-day-per-skin tour of the look-and-feels at the start of each quarter.) Bottom line, i am a degreed & formerly professional programmer, and if i'm not quickly handed a markup that provides the formatting effects of the tag w/o the hiding one, i'll pull up my socks and become competant in MediaWiki box markup. Thanks again, especially for tossing a flag on this insidious problem. --Jerzy•t 16:05, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Current events
What happened in your edit to Current events today? All todays' stories and one of yesterdays' were deleted together with all the interwiki links and some templates. I assume a cock-up rather than malice, and have reverted the page. -- Arwel (talk) 12:57, 8 February 2006 (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 22:07, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia survey
Hi. I'm doing a survey of Wikipedia editors as part of a class research project. It's quick, anonymous, and the data will be made available to the Wikipedia community later this month. Would you like to take part? More info here. Thanks! Nonplus 01:25, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

Please, I am still working on John Batiste!
He is one of the Generals, who served in Iraq, who is now calling on Bush to fire Rumsfeld.

He didn't accept a promotion to Lieutenant General, and resigned from the Army, rather than continue to serve under Rumsfeld.

Don't the guideline suggest that wikipedians refrain from nominating articles for deletion, shortly after they have been created, because the creator might still be working on them? -- Geo Swan 08:26, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

practicality
Sorry, I question the wisdom of abandoning policies and procedures in the interest of practicality.

This is the first time I have encountered the argument that practicality trumps following policy and procedure, over an article, but I have encountered this a number of times over images.

There are wikipedia contributors who patrol the wikipedia for images with the wrong kinds of liscences, or no liscences at all. That is a worthwhile activity. But they aren't following procedure. In one instance an image that I considered important, that had stirred some controversy, got deleted. The person who uploaded it was a new user. They were subjected to some rather unpleasant bullying, and they left the wikipedia. I had seen that image on a television documentary a week before it was uploaded. Eventually it got a screenshot tag. Some months later one of these patrollers decided that the screenshot tag was bogus, and replaced it with a tag that marked the image for deletion in 7 days. They left a note on the talk page of the uploader, the newbie, who had not made an edit since getting raked over the coals months earlier. But they did not follow procedure and put an {unverifiedimage} tag in the caption field(s) of every instance where the image was used.

I contacted the administrator who actually removed the image. They agreed that it sounded like a legitimate image. Apparently there is a different tag {screenshot-tv} for television images. They suggested I just upload it again -- ignoring that I wasn't the original uploader, and I wouldn't have a copy on my local hard drive to upload.

There are wikipedians who knowingly violate procedure, put text that is a copyright violation, or put up images, with incorrect liscenses, based on some kind of rationalization. They shouldn't do that.

But what we were all taught when we were children is correct. Two wrongs don't make a right.

If we want those rogue users to comply, and follow procedure, we set a bad example if we don't follow procedure ourselves. When those who enforce the rules break the rules it just makes the rule breakers (1) feel justified in breaking the rules, (2) try to find clever ways to break the rules.

Therefore, I urge you, in the strongest possible terms, to reconsider placing practicality over policy. -- Geo Swan 09:43, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Bangalore edit
I'm not sure what you were trying to do here, but you ended up deleting a whole section. I reverted your change. --Doradus 22:20, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Oh, and sorry for calling you a vandal in the edit summary. Looking at your user page, you seem to be a decent fellow after all. :-) --Doradus 22:21, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Stub
Hello! I noticed you created the stub on Oak apple. I just wanted to let you know that the use of stub is no longer recommended. Stub types contains a list of more specific stubs. See also WikiProject Stub sorting. Best wishes --MarkBuckles 21:06, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

Too Many Cities
I agree that there were too many cities in the time zone list for the current events box, but perhaps some can be reduced instead of eliminating all of them. Although I don't really need it, others when adding an event to the current events page may use the list to help them determine which time / date the even occured in locally. Perhaps to help restrict the number of cities, we could use primarily global cities. If we were to use the alpha and beta world cities, you'd get London, New York, Paris, Tokyo, Chicago, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Milan, Singapore, San Francisco, Sydney, Toronto, Zürich, Brussels, Madrid, Mexico City, São Paulo, Moscow, Seoul, Taipei. Removing San Francisco would probably be in order since it's in the same time zone as Los Angeles. Replacing Zürich, Brussels, and Milan with Rome would also be a good idea (all five cities are in the same time). Adding Istanbul, Cairo, Dubai, Tehran, or Baghdad (or two of the preceding) may also be a good idea to include a Middle Eastern city. So my suggested list would be: London, New York, Paris, Tokyo, Chicago, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Singapore, Sydney, Toronto, Rome, Madrid, Mexico City, São Paulo, Moscow, Seoul, Taipei, Istanbul, and Dubai. That's twenty cities instead of the original thirty-three. joturn e r 15:23, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

Ackermann Function
The two values in the table I changed were 2+(n+3)-3 as the result for A(1,n) and 2*(n+3)-3 as the result of A(2,n). They simplify to n+2 and 2n+3 respectively. I merely simplified the results. While there may be a pattern for (n+3) in results for the Ackermann function, the article does not state that and I believe it's better to just leave the simplified results as you can change n+1 to (n+3)-2 and you can make any expression with n involve n+3 if you wanted to. SandBoxer 16:17, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

Re: Tense
I have made a response to your question on Village pump (assistance). -- Centrx 03:12, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

The following is copied and pasted from WP:VP.

Tense
I looked at style, but it didn't appear to say. When writing about something whattense should one use? Especially for dead people and for live people? -- SGBailey 21:56, 30 May 2006 (UTC)


 * The past tense should be used when referring to past events. When referring to future events, the future tense should be used.  When referring to the present, you probably want to use the present tense.  So "Bob is a famous rock-collector from Arkansas . . ." if he's still alive, otherwise "Bob was . . .".  Of course, your sentence structure may require a slightly nonintuitive tense, depending on the rules of grammar: for instance, you'd say "Bobland is the name of an ancient amusement park uncovered in the ruins of Pompeii", even though it doesn't exist anymore—Bobland is still the name of the amusement park, just the amusement park is destroyed. Did you have any specific examples in mind? —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 07:44, 31 May 2006 (UTC)


 * William Timym is dead and it reads "He is this & that" which seems wrongs. Also the various current events pages don't seem to have a concessus on tense - especially when they get archived and are old events. -- SGBailey 13:11, 31 May 2006 (UTC)


 * At risk of stating the obvious (oh, and hi, Steve, btw!) - if you find a page where the tense is wrong, for example William Timym as you've just cited - correct it! That's what Wikipedia's for! I agree with Simetrical's assessment of how tenses should be being used, and do try to correct mistakes when I come across them. As far as the current events pages go it's probably inevitable that they'd be in a state of flux; hopefully as they stabilise people will notice and correct grammatical inconsistencies. --JennyRad 16:17, 31 May 2006 (UTC)


 * I will edit such artciles when I understand the requirements. Thus dead Mr Timym gets to become "He did this and that, He was this and that." I still wish to understand what tense Current events and archived current events are meant to be written in. (oh, and hi, Jenny - Barmouth?) -- SGBailey 22:28, 31 May 2006 (UTC)


 * The current events page here and similar things like timelines always use present tense, specifying the date and then saying what happened on that date as though the date were in the present. Common practice in English. -- Centrx 03:04, 7 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Does that apply to old events? EG do/should archived current events remain in the present tense - EG January 2005. If that is present tense then what about ancient events (eg 1066)? -- SGBailey 09:53, 7 June 2006 (UTC)


 * This applies to any event organized in a timeline-like format (there may be some linguistic term for this, I don't know it). So, for example,
 * 1066 — William the Conqueror invades England.
 * However, if this is organized in prose, we have,
 * On that fateful day in 1066, William the Conqueror invaded England.
 * The same applies for current events and year/month pages, where each event is organized under a header for that day, as is seen in January 2005. Even if this weren't standard and reasonable English practice, it would be a waste of time to change the tenses in current events pages every time a day passes. This is similar to the tense one might assume when telling a story, "So, there I am, and he looks at me and says...". -- Centrx 18:54, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

Pastatuates
...I'm afraid I don't understand the question; let's begin with what a pastatuate is. >_< Cernen Xanthine Katrena 09:41, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

WikiProject Contract bridge
Hi. You might be interested in participating in new WikiProject Contract bridge. Regards, Duja 10:17, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

RE: Only Fools on Horses
I did it because I don't think the judges and trainers are notable enough to have their own articles, so I thought it unlikely that articles would be created... Trampik e y (talk to me)(contribs) 17:57, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

Image:Old uk stop sign.png listed for deletion
An image or media file that you uploaded or altered, Image:Old uk stop sign.png, has been listed at. Please look there to see why this is (you may have to search for the title of the image to find its entry), if you are interested in it not being deleted. Thank you. Wwagner 23:06, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Tony Blair
Thanks for boldening the entries in the infobox, i edited it a few weeks but couldn't get that last bit. Tom 16:51, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Control Charts: Nelson rules
I have posted a question on Talk:Nelson_rules that I hoped you might clear up. SparkyMarky 23:17, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

Edit box wrapping
I'm guessing it might be a problem with your browser and how it handles word wrapping. What browser are you using and are there any particular pages that the horizontal scrolling comes up on? Tra (Talk) 10:49, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I think it's a problem with the browser. I've checked and if you use FireFox, the horizontal scrollbar doesn't appear. Tra (Talk) 22:16, 24 December 2006 (UTC)