User talk:Tarquin/Archive 1

Talk Jan 2002 - Nov 2002

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I'll continue the discourse you started on my talk page here, if you don't mind. The Wasp Factory article was something I put off doing at the time I did the framework for the Banks article. Primarily, we hadn't come up with the Wikipedia contains spoilers concept at the time and the last thing in the world I wanted to do was blow the plot away for anyone. Well, we had a big debate last autumn about Twelve Monkeys and determined that the best way to deal with it was to put the WCS notice at the top of any page which we think might spoil it for anyone.

Anyway, it's nice to see another fan of Banks here on Wikipedia. sjc

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Hello there, welcome to the 'pedia! Sorry nobody welcomed you earlier -- shame on us. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you need any questions answered about the project then check out Help or drop me a line. BTW, I like what yor have done to the place. Cheers! --maveric149


 * Hullo. :-) You've already welcomed me, though -- see the bottom of user:Tarquin -- Tarquin.


 * Opps! --maveric149, Saturday, June 15, 2002

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user:Ant Well, I think we're getting there with I(M)B. We seem to have had the same urge to combine the articles at the same time... odd. I'll leave it to you for the moment. /@ 21 June 2002


 * un-subpaging the Banksie novels has been on my unwritten list of Things To Do for a while, seeing it bumped on RC spurred me into action :) -- Tarquin, Friday, June 21, 2002

Cool! I just saw your addition of Periodic table/Wide Table. As a geek I love this version of the table -- too bad it is too wide to have as the main table (all those damn Windows users that keep their displays at the default 800 by 600 res screw everything up). PS, please don't read the text in parenthesis if you are a Windows user with a screen resolution of 800 by 600. ;) --maveric149


 * Thanks :) I'm 1152x900 myself, but I keep a narrow browser window (the ten words per line rule). My chem lab at school had this full-width version of the table on the wall; I've always found it clearer than having the Lanthanides & co as footnotes -- it's worth widening the browser window for :). Plus it exposes a regularity in the way the periods widen. I remember the transition groups were numbered in an extension to the Roman numeral system; I can't rememebr the details though. I *think* it was (after the normal I, II): IIIb, IVb.... VIIb, VIIIb, Ib, IIb, then resuming III, IV, etc. I'll seee if I can dig it up -- Tarquin

Tarquin, I didn't understand your comment concering A Tale of Two Cities. What did you shunt? -- Zoe


 * Someone had added a paragraph on the novel to the page about one of the films. I added a link to the novel to the film page, and integrated the material on the book to the page on the book. It sounds more complicated than it was ;-) -- Tarquin, Saturday, July 13, 2002


 * Gotcha. Thanks. -- Zoe

Bonjour Tarquin,

Tes remarques sur le logo sont très justes, mais le fait est qu'il est probablement mieux de ne pas en parler. Tu as pu le voir, le silence assourdissant indique des "plaies encore vives". Le logo etait sans doute un détail; son look importait peu en fait. Rinaldum etait tres heureux je crois, de nous avoir concocté un joli logo avant son départ en stage (jusqu'à la fin de l'été), et franchement déçu d'avoir le sentiment d'un controle de en.wiki. Il a voulu nous faire une surprise, et on a pas été très cool (dont moi, je le regrette), car évidemment, personne n'avait été consulté, on est tous tombé des nues, et à l'apparition du logo, et aux menaces proférées. En interne, on a surtout reagi à la non-consultation de la communauté. Donc, ca a été un peu chaud, et certains ont été blessé. Dc, on en parle plus et c'est mieux comme ca. Oui ? J'aimerais bcp plus qu'on passe enfin a la version upgradée, sinon l'écart va de plus en plus se creuser entre les wiki. Ca serait dommage. --anthere


 * Compris. :-) On est quand meme plusieurs a croiser entre en: et fr:, mais ici aussi je souffre un peu du culture shock face aux Americains. Differences d'habitudes, differences de facons de s'exprimer. Efface mes remarques si tu trouves que j'ai ete trop direct. -- Tarquin 07:38 Jul 26, 2002 (PDT)


 * mais non, tu n'as pas été trop direct, ne t'inquiete pas. C'était juste pour t'expliquer que 1. il y avait grande chance que tu n'ais pas de réponse à ta question (parfois le silence est d'or) et que 2. le forking n'était à mon sens pas une question d'actualité. Voila. Et puis non, je n'efface pas les commentaires de toutes facons, même pas les miens quand je les regrette :-)


 * ps : euh, je n'ai pas répondu à ta question sur les 6 premiers arts, mais j'ai "déliré" sur la philosophie de l'Art  à la place . bonne journée -- anthère

Just a quickie, Tarquin and not a matter of life + death; why do you change html blocks to old-style wiki? We'd be better served by using HTML format medium to long term in my view. user:sjc


 * I think ' tags are preferable to < b > and < i >: they are easier on the eye in raw form. A property required of Wiki pages is that it must be readable in both raw & rendered forms. http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?RawHtmlWiki


 * OK, I will probably continue with them, though, mainly because I parse my code through an HTML editor. user:sjc

Hello, I posted a question at wikipedia talk:editing policy about whether a section on quotes vs. italics should be added. I haven't acted on it otherwise yet. Thanks for adding it to meta. :-) --KQ

Regarding naming on the meta pages and the meta trees. If we are to favour the English form of names it should be French departments and not departements. It is not being used as a proper noun.


 * The French form "département" is used on Wikipedia pages. Also, while it flouts the rules it's a natural form of disambiguation. -- Tarquin

I get the feeling you're following me ... Heh. Seriously, thanks for going round helping my newbie articles to fit in better, I get the idea that the first line should be a brief summary now. And reading your chat page has sent me off to the Banksie page, where I may have to add a few things ... -- Bth


 * Believe me, it wasn't intentional, it just happened that the titles which caught my eye on Recent Changes were yours.  Another voice on Banksie  would be great (I still disagree with sjc's interpretation of the Culture novels... be interesting to have a few more opinions) -- Tarquin 13:25 Aug 7, 2002 (PDT)

The Note article is much better now. I'm logging off for the day, so consider this a virtual handshake for a job well done!JFQ


 * I've just had another hack at it. We're getting there! :-) -- Tarquin

Hi Tarquin,

Thank you for your tireless work. Please be advised that it is not necessary (indeed, wrong) to remove accents from capital letters in French.


 * [L]es majuscules prennent les accents, le tr&eacute;ma et la c&eacute;dille lorsque les minuscules &eacute;quivalentes en comportent. (Capital letters take accents, diaeresis, and cedillas when the equivalent lowercase letters take them.)
 * - Guilloton and Cajolet-Lagani&egrave;re (Direction des services linguistiques de l'Office de la langue fran&ccedil;aise), Le Fran&ccedil;ais au bureau (Ste-Foy, Quebec: Publications du Qu&eacute;bec, 1996), p. 119

The only case in which you omit the accent from a capital letter is when it is part of an acronym (ALENA, not AL&Eacute;NA) (op.cit., 167). - montr&eacute;alais


 * As far as I know they're optional. I don't have any French style manuals, but I'm going by my 1993 copy of Quid, which consistently omits, and my paperback copies of A la Recherche, which omit more often than not -- tarq

As far as I can tell, they were optional, when it was difficult to put them (e.g. chiseled inscriptions, typewriters). Now that we have access to the Magic of Technology, however, we're supposed to put them. - montr&eacute;alais


 * Further confusion: my copy of Livres Disponibles 1995 has "&Eacute;ditions du Cercle de la Librairie" on the cover, but no accents on the initial "A"s of Proust's novels, and the names of authors are in full caps, with accents. It seems no-one can make their mind up!
 * I've seen somewhere that caps should take an accent where they affect pronunciation (Editions / &Eacute;ditions), but not where they don't ("A la recherche").
 * The Magic of Technology makes serifs obsolete, yet we find that they make reading easier on the eye. This could of course be a Francais / Quebecois difference. (as an aside, when I was in Montreal, it took me several days to understand anything I heard. very bewildering: my mind kept saying "this is french. We know french, remember?") -- t

Had the same experience in reverse in France. :)

BTW, how are serifs obsolete, if they still make reading easier on the eye? (If anything, eliminating accents makes it more difficult to read - even if it's totally clear from context, there's a little jump when you expect the A in A la r&eacute;cherche [sic] to be a verb, not a preposition.)

One interesting thing - I work for the Soci&eacute;t&eacute; de transport de Montr&eacute;al, so one of my references is the fact that the nameplates in all the metro stations have got accents, despite being in all caps, with one exception - it's Berri-UQAM, not Berri-UQ&Agrave;M, because it's an acronym. The Universit&eacute; du Qu&eacute;bec &agrave; Montr&eacute;al (UQAM) has recently started using the grave accent on the A, to graphically balance out the tail of the Q in their logo, even though it's technically wrong. Oh well, I suppose if they can put up with the F&eacute;d&eacute;ration des profession&egrave;les [sic] du Qu&eacute;bec... - m


 * Serifs (wiki link to check the article exists once I save this ;) are in a way technically obsolete because they were originally used to strengthen the extremities of metallic type, to make the metal less brittle and increase its lifespan. My dream job when I was a kid would have been designing metro maps. It probably still is... -- t

-- Sir Tarquin, Please forgive me, for I cannot locate a direct e-mail link to ask you a question... It was posed in a color basic color theory class: Q: Why do humans with blue eyes find bright sun more "painful" than their brown-eyed conterparts? deb dkrolls@earthlink.net


 * probably something to do with the pigment in brown eyes, but it's a wild guess. (I'm a bit bemused by your question... have I given the impression that I'm knowledgeable in this field?) -- t

--- Tarquin, I have a new idea for page titles over at Talk:Orders of magnitude that you might be interested in. --mav

tarquin, I've kept meaning to mention this, and I've kept forgetting - I've got to thank you for writing that La Vie mode d'emploi article. I'd known of Perec for ages and had kept thinking I'd read something by him one day, but I never had until I saw that article. Sounded like a really interesting book, so I rushed out and bought it, and I'm really loving it. Seems to me that anybody who enjoys working on wikis ought to enjoy it, actually. Anyway, thanks, and keep up the good work and all that --Camembert


 * thanks. I hope you enjoy it. One thing I forgot to mention in the article is that the page numbers are important: pages such as 111, 222, 333 etc have important things on them (plot points, etc. I think 111 has a family tree). Apparently palindromic page names are marked similarly too, but I've not checked this. -- Tarquin

Hey--could you give me an explanation of how to ban an IP in UseModWiki? I notice you're an admin at http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/ and they're having persistent problems on the French wikipedia (I remembered the admin password from way back but don't know how to block the perp). Thanks, --KQ 13:21 Aug 30, 2002 (PDT)


 * Do you have the admin bar patch installed? That has a link to the special page. Otherwise, you need the right URL command. the usemod site has a list of system commands. -- Tarquin
 * I don't think they do (I'm not seeing it). I'll look for the usemod site.  --KQ
 * http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?System
 * I found it too, but now it seems that the vandals are blocked already? I emailed anthere asking for clarification; I don't watch the French wikipedia b/c I don't speak French.  :-/  Thanks though.  --KQ

merci tarquin. User:anthere

Tarquin, I left you a note here -- ant

Yeah, thanks for pointing out, but I realized the flaw in my user greeting on my own eventually :) -- Michael

--- Hello. I'm glad you didn't mind me fiddling with Jane Austen - who was looking a bit sick compared with some quite minor authors I could name. I understood why you got confused about her engagement, because there are lots of false trails in her life story. Glad you didn't take offence, as some people would have (no names). Deb

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"Wikipedia:Village pump; 23:47 . . Tarquin (Is there a way to rename images? )"

Presumably the kludge (if necessary) would be to re-save the image under the new name and alter the page to refer to the new name. (Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. :-) )

OK, so now I'm being petty, but those references to "Gillinham (Kent)" on your user page - aren't they meant to be "Gillingham (Kent)"? --Camembert


 * er. oops. yes. That whole city naming kaboodle is all resolved now anyway. I really need to give my page a big, big, big spring clean. -- Tarquin


 * These user pages are a right pain, I must say. I think they should all be added to Votes for deletion - really, what are they for? They're very non-NPOV, none of them would be in a "proper" encyclopaedia, and most of them are very dodgy on the grammer / spelling / punctuation / whatever front. By the way, how is the place-name issue dealt with these days? Naming conventions (city names) seems to suggest it hasn't been dealt with at all. --Camembert

Thanks, Tarquin. I'm still a bit shy about doing certain things. What is the Wiki etiquette about merging pages? Does one consult the author(s) first? User:Renata
 * No problem. I remember feeling the same too when I started here. Articles don't have an "author", so (IMO) the etiquette is this:
 * if they're close duplicates, like the two Gerard Depardieu articles, go ahead and merge. (check naming conventions to see which page should be the "real" one)
 * I often find two or more articles which are on close topics, both short, and which could be merged into something meatier -- in that case, I usually raise the idea on the Talk page, leave it for a week or so & see what other people think
 * I've found this page: Duplicate articles -- I've put a few links to it for other people to find. -- Tarquin

Hi, Tarquin. Thanks for your welcome. I really enjoy this place and just regret, that I haven't found it earlier. -- Cordyph

- About raw URLs...so I though, but find a page with hidden links and press "Printable Version" --AN


 * Ah. didn't know about that. thanks. :-) -- Tarquin

tARQUIN THOSE uNDERGROUND PAGES REALLY NEED to be like the central line style. I have set up this page to talk about it: London Underground Station List/template


 * yup, line order is better than alphabetical. I'm concertrating on writing text descriptions & histories, to make the pages more than bare lists. -- Tarquin 20:51 Sep 27, 2002 (UTC)

Could you tkae the liberty of putting ntoes on the pages teelling people they shoudl follow the orginal format. I am doing alot of redirects at the moment. - fonzy.

For you, and me:

Swift's self-chosen epitaph was: "Where fierce indignation can no longer tear his heart." (Ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit.) Ortolan88

Tarquin, I'm not saying that you're wrong, but your tactics are ineffective. If you'll stop trying to get the last word with 128, you'll find that the problem will disappear. "What you pay attention to, grows." I invite you to join me in helping to channel 128's energy into other directions. Please look at homosexuality and gun politics, for example. --Ed Poor


 * Don't forget burning, kyoto protocol, osmosistwo, richard paradox, antiwikipedian, and slavery.


 * Fair enough. I never said you were malicious, mystery guest, just annoying. What was the deal with osmosistwo, anyway? why did that page mean so much to you? -- Tarquin


 * Yeah, take a look at the 167-word article on burning. Contributers don't have to log in. It just makes it easier to straighten out misunderstandings when they pick a nickname, so they can have a user talk page like this. --Ed Poor


 * (just in case Ed sees this) He's gone now anyway. For the record, I was nice to this person. When they kept coming back and editing the "OsmosisTwo" article with rubbish, I moved in to the Talk page & politely asked them to come and debate the issue there: why did they so deperately want to save this page which as far as anyone else could see was a title made in error? I explained that the text of the page would not be deleted, but merged into Osmosis. All to no avail: they didn't seem to understand me, or refused to. So, yes, I tried nice. It didn't work. LDC banned them, they came back with another IP, and started on this campaign to have a page on the made-up subject "Antiwikipedic" -- re-creating the page each time an admin deleted it. By the end of it all, I was deriving perverse pleasure from hitting the delete button each time they came back to make the page yet again. For the record, I try and be welcoming to newcomers, and I always assume harmless mistakes or accidents before malice. But I have my limits. If someone like "OsmosisTwoPerson" wants to turn themselves into free entertainment, fine.

its case sensitive?

just before u edited that i backed it all up but like somebody deleted all of it! that is rather frustrating :<


 * Which page? Alvin Toffler? your material is still there. If you wrote new stuff, your browser may still have it. When you get an Edit Conflict, scroll down: your submitted text is there. it's up to you to merge the two. Edit Conflicts are a pain, but they're a consequence of working together. Yes, names are case-sensitive. there's a page on naming conventions somewhere that explains it -- Tarquin 12:36 Oct 2, 2002 (UTC)

Hi Tarquin. Driverless metro trains in Paris: I'm curious - do they carry a crew member who rides in with the passengers, like on the Docklands Light Railway. Or are they totally unmanned? Btw hope you don't mind me adding a reference to the DLR on the underground page. Maybe it's patriotism, but I want to point out that true driverless trains have been going for longer than in Paris, albeit not underground ones. (The DLR is run on a system from a French company anyway I believe (Alcatel)). -- AdamW 18:37 UTC 02OCT02


 * I don't mind at all. The DLR counts as Light Rail, but the borders between light rail / tram / metro are based on very technical points, AFAIK. Line 14 has staff members who sometimes ride, but most trains run with only passsengers. the DLR has a crew member on every train AFAIK; they were called 'train captain' when the network was opened -- Tarquin


 * Very interesting. I've never heard of anything like that outside an airport. Might prevent tube strikes if we had that in London ;). The DLR still carries a crew member in every train, but they are now called something stupid - passenger service agent, I think. -- AdamW


 * ...hence the claim that it's the "world's first". I think they did indeed put a specifier on the claim, to cover airport-type things, including the VAL at Orly, something along the lines of "world's first full-scale driverless metro". -- Tarquin


 * I'm actually rather surprised that the unions didn't manage to prevent it happening on "safety grounds". --AdamW

Hi Tarquin

If you could find time to drop by on Talk:Non-sexist language, I'd be pleased to have your feeling or any opinion or any suggestion. I already stated we have problems with neutrality sometimes on the fr.wiki. Especially when confronted with official conventions (especially french conventions, which is a double problem). I think this issue of feminisation versus masculinisation of language is important, and is typically an example of how conventions might hurt neutrality. There are no very strong negative sign of bias on this subject on the french wiki right now, but I think this decision is very important and I would like it to be a sort of an example of how we can differ with conventions to go toward more neutrality. Example rather than rules. Thanks

user:anthere

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I wonder if you have been keeping an eye on the Aria Giovanni talk webpage. The situation there is out of control.

Matters have deteriorated to a highly abusive level over a website link. Of special concern is the general conduct and attitude of someone called NetEsq, who claims in his details to be a lawyer.

He has repeatedly abused anyone who opposed the idea of the website link with such tactics as net misettiquete ( eg the use of the word 'you' in capitals and bold to emphasise shouting), a poor grasp of history, the unrepentant use of such termsas Nazi, out of context quotes and attempted alienation ("only YOU opppose it").

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of his beliefs, it is very advisable to bring this most unruly and arrogant person into line.

Given that your name is on the list of persons who can ban users, I thought it advisable to bring this to your attention, before it leads to persons leaving the wikipedia - something likely to stroke Netesq's already aggressive ego.


 * Hi. Thanks for letting me know. It looks like Mav has stepped in and is clearing everything up. (I'd better put a mention of my time zone somewhere, as it was 4 hours before I got this note.) -- Tarquin 09:12 Oct 11, 2002 (UTC)

Tarquin, you mentioned somewhere that you play the piano rather well. Do you have any recordings? --Robert Merkel 22:46 Oct 15, 2002 (UTC)


 * I'm good (if I say so myself), but I'm not a professional pianist (to the great disappointment of several teachers...) I found many years ago that I don't get along well with microphones. -- Tarquin 22:52 Oct 15, 2002 (UTC)


 * I play the piano too! :) I am currently in piano lessons. Also, I am composing a song for my upcoming CTF map in Unreal Tournament called CTF-Afterlife. It will be called Out of The Oblivion ;) . -- ZxAnPhOrIaN 23:23 Oct 15, 2002 (UTC)

Re serialism versus twelve tone technique: they are different but closely related things, and could have separate articles (the Grove dictionary, for instance, has lengthy and difficult-to-understand articles for each), but as I said at Talk:Tone row, I think it's best that they all live at serialism, at least for now. So yes, I think redirects from twelve tone technique to serialism are right. I'll fiddle with the serialism article a bit to make it clear that the two are not exact synonyms. --Camembert

Me again, asking for a favour this time: could you have a look at what I wrote at Pythagorean tuning and see if it makes sense to you. It's difficult to know how much of the basics to explain - I'd like it to be accessable to all-comers, but at the same time, I don't want to have to explain what a "note" is, and why Eb is considered to be the same as D#. Thanks. --Camembert

keep up the good work! A question on capitalization, It seems that things like Arctic Circle, Equator, Northern Temperate Zone, etc. should be capitalized-do u agree? Lir 17:32 Nov 1, 2002 (UTC)


 * "Arctic circle", small "c" would be more in line with naming conventions here, and in fact I think it's usually written in lower case anyway. -- t


 * Actually, the University of Chicago Press Manual of Style says parts of the earth are capitalized, naming Arctic Circle as one such. Ortolan88


 * Fowler's Modern English Usage suggests capitals for "recognized geographical names", which I think includes Arctic Circle. It gives the river Thames and northern England as examples of general descriptions that do not need to be fully capitalized.  It all hinges on whether you consider an expression to be "recognized" or not. --Heron

Arctic circle /IS/ more in line with naming conventions here, but I think very little of the naming conventions... Lir 22:15 Nov 1, 2002 (UTC)

Well I reverted astronomy but it sure looks messy to me. Lir 17:13 Nov 4, 2002 (UTC)

Why shouldn't we start using the actual native names for places? Many "official" sources have started doing this. We should do this as well. Lir 17:24 Nov 4, 2002 (UTC)

Generally I'd agree with you that the novel shold go before the film in an article with both--but what would you do for e.g. The Wizard of Oz (a novel which is almost universally considered inferior to its film version)? --KQ


 * There are indeed special cases. That particular one is nicely resilved in that the novel & film don't have the same name :-) The Wizard of Oz, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. -- Tarquin
 * Works for me. :-)  --KQ