User talk:Tim Starling/Archive 1

Hello there Tim, welcome to the 'pedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you ever need editing help visit How does one edit a page and experiment at Sandbox. 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

Better still, why don't you put the public holiday list in? And yes, I was using Google just a minute ago on Peter II.

I was going to consult a calender that I had elsewhere on that topic.

-- Arno

not a big deal but something like

it meane

is probably not vandalism so much as noobism Vera Cruz 01:38 Dec 10, 2002 (UTC)

Hi Tim, thanks for the welcome. The Oz culture section is indeed horrid! Over the next day or two, I'll see what I can do - with the top-level entry at least; I'm not sure if I have sufficent hard knowledge in this area (not my specialty) to do a full article well, but I'll see if thinking about it for the summary inspires me. Tannin

Well ... no changes to the main Oz page, but an unpolished and unplanned Culture of Australia article is posted. I'm not sure if you will like it though. Hell - I'm not sure if I like it yet. It's nothing like any of the other "culture of" articles I looked at, so I guess that makes it a step in the right direction! Tannin

You've been doing some nice work on the solid state physics pages. Cool.

A suggestion: I find the various articles on electrical conduction (such as conduction band, band gap, and valence band) quite fragmented, even though they are individually well-written. IMO, the fact that the material is split into little articles makes it difficult to understand the actual phenomenon of conduction. Maybe it would be better to consolidate them into a big article on electrical conduction (to which electric current can redirect.)

Cheers. -- CYD

Thanks for writing the article. -- CYD

Thank you for editing my anonymous contribution on standard enthalpy change of formation Jcwf2

Can you please explain the change from "makes" to "made" in the SPICE article? Makes is present tense, and I think it is more appropriate, since the licensing issue still exists, it has never gone away. --User:Dgrant


 * Good point, sorry. -- Tim


 * cool thanks. I would have put this on the discuss page...but I'm not sure if discuss pages are automatically added to the watch list of watched articles?   -- dave


 * Discuss pages are automatically added, but I didn't have SPICE on my watch list anyway. -- Tim

Hello Tim!

Thank you very much for your contribution in defending freedom of speach for me. Your arguments were quite reasonable and if i were allowed i would put it similarily as you did.

I guess that you gave up to the prevailing group of hostile ignorants, but i advise you to stay with your opinions about me and about letting publish information about my philosophy in Wikipedia.

I appreciate your intellect and the quality of your sound judgment, good soul. My appresiation goes also to Andrew, another one in Wikipedia who was able to think reasonable and without prejudice.

The whole situation resembles the "Catch 22" story by J.Heller. "Why nobody read about you? Because i do not publish. Why do not you publish? Because nobody has read about me yet..."

Humanity needs much more humans as you and much less of those who delete important information without trying to understand it.

With kind regards,

Albert Jacher, the Speaker of God

I don't see anything wrong with Fremantle. The description in your bug report is consistent with the old (redirected) page being stuck in your browser's cache; reload it. (IE? Press control or it doesn't work. Complain to Microsoft, please.) --Brion 16:24 Mar 15, 2003 (UTC)

- TV Guide isn't an ad for a website, it's a stub about a periodical. One of the top periodicals in the nation, in fact.--The Cunctator


 * Really? Which nation? -- Tim

Yeah, sorry, I've been meaning to reply. There is this whole PhD guilt thing which makes my patterns of wikipedia use irregular :).

I notice you're working with the MARC group (are you doing theory, or implementation?). I've been known socialise with physics postgrads on occasion, so maybe I'll run into you down at the postgrad bar some time in the not too distant future... -- Pde

Thanks for the heads-up, Tim. -- Tannin

Hi Tim, can you please revert your mods to the Brisbane pages. Thanks Gaz 12:51 Mar 27, 2003 (UTC)

Hm, maybe you could undelete secondSuperpower and rename it to something with the space it needs. q.v. http://www.google.com/search?q=%22second+superpower%22&btnG=Google+Search&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 Koyaanis Qatsi 04:12 Apr 14, 2003 (UTC)


 * I never saw the article, and assumed (incorrectly) that it had no content. Instead, it had almost no content.  "second superpower" on its own passes the Google test, with relevant results, but the article as it was sounds only marginally better than worthless.  What it refers to is the notion that the blogosphere represents an emergent democracy that, by passing along memes, can influence the media and change policy.  I'm not sure I believe it--it sounds hippy, flower powery, unduly optimistic--but then, I'm a cynic so that's the lens I'm seeing it through (and, anyway, my opinion shouldn't affect whether we have an article on anything here).  Anyway, that's the term as I understand it.  Best.  Koyaanis Qatsi 04:28 Apr 14, 2003 (UTC)


 * I agreed with your judgement, actually, but I'll stub it out some more. I don't know about technocracy--I used to be on a list with someone who was forever going on about technocracy and I have a distinctly Pavlovian response any time I hear the damn word.  Koyaanis Qatsi

Tim, is a problem with JJ's image downloads? I've seen two that I have severe doubts about for personal reasons. He downloaded an image of Irish President Mary McAleese which appears to come from her official website; it is an official portrait of her. I was on to her office about two months ago looking for permission to use their images and they explicitly refused. I cannot find another place where he could have got the image from and if it came from the official website, either they totally changed their mind or it is a breach of copyright download. I left a note on her talk page asking for information tonight. Secondly he downloaded an image of Queen Elizabeth (and I think he may have been the person who downloaded the image of the Duke of Edinburgh). Again I had been on to Buckingham Palace for images and they don't supply images. They did however give a list of official photographers and agencies that do. Those that I checked do not supply copyright-free images, certainly not for wiki. So I am puzzled as to where JJ got this one (possibly two) portraits from. From what I know of them, I think they may be the official jubilee pictures and they definitely are not copyright-free. In fact they are most definitely copyright. I love seeing images on wiki and was initially glad JJ had got them but the more I think about it he gives no clue whatsoever of source or even a statement that they are copyright-free or claim fair use. Whatever about using old images or images of organisations that have an attitude of never enforcing copyright until the image is abused, to use images from the President of Ireland's office when they expressly said 'no', or from a professional agency that deals with official portraits of the British royals is dangerous in the extreme. Is there a wider problem with JJ's images? STÓD/ÉÍRE 04:35 Apr 14, 2003 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the deletions of those images :) Martin

Tim, when you get a spare moment, would you move Geelong, Australia for me? Thanks. Tannin




 * Indeed. Careless of me. That actually came up as the consequence of one of those long chains of things that sidetrack you completely away from your intended task for the evening. I was planning to do an entry on the Australian wren family, Maluridae. In doing that, I stumbled across Australian magpie which linked to the Collingwood Magpies - a crazy thing to call the football club, it's neither the nicname nor the proper name. That led, in turn, to the "Carlton Blues", the "Richmond Tigers" and other silliness. (Robert did a lot of work on the AFL pages, but it's easy to see he's from a rugby state!) Two hours worth of search and replace later, when I was up to the Geelong Cats and remaming them to Geelong Football Club, I came across the Geelong, Australia one, which prompted me to message you, and then say "oh, this is silly, I might as well do it myself". On the football clubs, by the way, I've used their official names, and if we ever come across a conflict with (for e.g.) another Essendon Football Club which is (say) a suburb of London (or somewhere), it can easily become Essendon Football Club (AFL). Tannin

Think about it - using a talk page is "taking it outside". By cutting that, you have actually increased the odds that it will have to reach the vandalism report stage even if there really is a sound explanation - because you just cut down on the communication that could have headed it off. PML.


 * I only moved your talk to the bottom of the page where it should have been in the first place, I didn't delete it altogether. The summary is a description of what people have been arguing about, not an excuse to put your own arguments at the top of the page. The "taking it outside" edit summary was perhaps misjudged -- I originally attempted to move only your first comment with the summary "get off your soap box ;)", but I got an edit conflict with the other entry. -- Tim

You mean we haven't taken over the world already? Why wasn't I told?

I thought subpages were frowned upon. What's with the Bash Street Kids moves? Personally, I think they should be redirected to Bash Street Kids anyway. Mintguy


 * Yep. See Do not use subpages...


 * I've already left a gentle (no, really!) suggestion on the user's former IP address page suggesting he consult the Manual of style, but it doesn't seem to have done much good. And now he's gone and made links of every single minor character's name on Bash Street Kids... this does not bode well, methinks. -- John Owens 14:47 Apr 24, 2003 (UTC)
 * P.S. If you need help taking over the world, I'm an Evil Genius looking for work.


 * Well, if you checked up on my being an American, I'm guessing that you've noticed I don't have any aversion to speaking non-American (nor British, etc., however you prefer to look at it) languages. As for the CIA, would working for them count for or against me in the evil department? -- John Owens

Re: "...refers to..." - There have been wikipedians griping about this for ages, and it gets used all over the place. Believe it or not, there is even an article about it under (can you guess) refers to. -º¡º

Please discuss, either here or on my talk page, what it is you find so offensive about my work on Wikipedia. Otherwise, please quit following me around and making attacks on me all over the place. -- Zoe


 * I can't speak for Tim, but I personally find you a little over-eager to list stuff on votes for deletion. For example, Izzat Ibrahim ad-Douri was created at 07:39 Apr 26, 2003. You listed it on VfD at 07:44 Apr 26, 2003. This implies an elapsed time of around five minutes. You might have waited 24 hours to see if Egil was going to make the articles into valid stubs, rather than listing them straight away.


 * I certainly agree that those articles, as they were at the moment of creation, could have been happilly deleted. Indeed, I'd like to praise your judgement in the matter - taking what seems to me to have been the correct decision, despite the lack of precedents. So there was nothing fundamentally wrong with your assessment of the articles.


 * That said, I feel that your handling of the situation was suboptimal. This could have been cleared up by a friendly note on user talk:Egil, without any need to use votes for deletion. Better yet, you could have stubbed the articles yourself - it's always better to show people what they're doing wrong rather than (as I'm hypocritically doing here) telling them.


 * I had no idea who most of those people were. -- Zoe


 * In other words, while I appreciate the hard work you're doing for Wikipedia, I personally feel that a softer approach would sometimes pay dividends. You may wish to consider trying to smooth things over with Egil who, from his note to votes for deletion, seems to have taken offence. Martin 01:34 Apr 27, 2003 (UTC)


 * I was beinning to wonder from the very beginning if Egil might not really be DW, even before this contretemps came about. Yes, I listed every one of those articles on the to be deleted page as they were being created, because he was overzealously creating pages with zero content.  I am not ashamed of what I did and I would do it again just as I did.  -- Zoe


 * Well, you know my feelings on the matter - we shall have to agree to disagree. Martin 02:20 Apr 27, 2003 (UTC)

I also find Zoe to be over-eager to censor and delete things. Shino Baku


 * And you, of course, would know, since you've been banned in many incarnations because of your failure to be collegial. -- Zoe

Reply to this at User talk:Zoe/archive 10. -- Tim

Hi Tim,

I'm sending you this message because I don't know how else to go about this, and you left a message on my talk page a while ago. I can't use the search feature for article titles. Even when I only use one word for a search term, even when that term refers to a known word in the article title, no title search ever turns up results. You know who I can contact about this and what I can do about it?

Thanks,

Susurrus


 * There's been some discussion of this at the Village pump, and it was then moved to Wikipedia talk:Searching. To sum up, it was deliberately turned off to try to speed up the server performance, but nobody bothered to put a sign on there saying it wouldn't work. :-\ -- John Owens 09:24 Apr 28, 2003 (UTC)


 * Yeah, Brion said as much when I posted this to wikitech-l. -- Tim

Hi Tim,

Thought I'd let an administrator know that some user called Talh has already vandalised two articles--one on Douglas Adams and one on David Eddings--and an administrator should ban or block this person.

Regards,

Susurrus

"Fleming was born in England, was educated in England, worked in England and died in England. Why not call him English?"

Two answers: none of that rules out him being Scottish anyway (the facts you cite are valid parts of the English approach to these things, in law and custom, but the Celtic peoples do it differently); and, I was choosing a careful accurate term, British, rather than either Scottish or English, precisely in order to bypass these issues. Without something separate to justify it, using either the "English" approach or the "Scottish" one would be a concealed circular argument. For what it's worth, being born in London of Scottish and Irish ancestry and sent to an English Public School in due course, I have never thought of myself as English but rather British. Oh, and apparently Ian Fleming's mother occasionally reminded him he was Scottish (despite a similar English connection), or so I read recently in a published excerpt of a biography (sorry, no references to hand). PML.


 * Fleming's own works provide support for your view, PML. Most of his fictional heros are Scottish or have Scottish blood. Bond in particular is very English and very proud of his Scottish heritage. Tannin


 * But Fleming deplored Sean Connery as a choice of actor; he thought him not enough of a gentleman, as indicated by his noticeable though watered down variant of a Scottish accent (shared by my uncle, who unlike my late father was not caught young). The Scottish upper classes almost invariably have British Public School accents - it is that sort of thing that is the "Englishness" that you discern. Also: the title of Buchanan's historically famous work on Scots Law, Lex Regni apud Scotos, translates as "the Law of the Kingdom among the Scots", and similarly the Romans wrote of fearing "a tumult (insurgent uprising - the drums, the drums!) among the Gauls", apud Gallos. PML.


 * (Excuse me Tim. I thought this was Talk:Ian Fleming or somewhere. I forgot I was on someones's user page. Brainfade. Tannin)

"While I've got your attention, why don't you get a user account? This IP business makes you hard to contact with a talk page, but gives you much worse privacy than if you are logged on, PML of the Red Cross Blood Society, 159 Clarence St. Sydney. Hey, I know Clarence St., I used to catch a bus from there! Anyway, if you're logged on, ordinary users like myself wouldn't be able to see your IP address, and developers are very hesitant to give them out on request."

I'm not there. I'm somewhere in Australia, which I've already mentioned. And I keep jumping, depending where I'm posting from rather than from any perverse motive (home, work, my going on platonic girlfriend's place, or an internet cafe, in order of likelihood). While I could theoretically set up regular business, that would conflict with ARCBS requirements on subscriptions etc. unless I went through a huge compliance process. This scanning internet resources is part of my brief, but "anonymously" is the only practical way to do it given the perverseness of bureaucracy. PML.

Hi Tim, I had already entered Young and Innocent on the Votes for deletion page when I got your e-mail. So we'll see what happens. Making such a fuss about a non-existing page is something I have difficulty understanding, but if this is the rule -- okay. Nice to communicate with someone who actually comes from where people (well, some people) always think I live. --KF 14:07 May 1, 2003 (UTC)


 * It's important to discuss deletions that aren't perfectly clear because only
 * administrators can see what it was about after it happened.


 * More at Votes for deletion. -- Toby 07:55 May 2, 2003 (UTC)

Out of curiosity, why are you removing all those ISO posts? Kingturtle 06:21 May 6, 2003 (UTC)


 * Because they're ugly. They make me want to throw up. Save them for some obscure list where I don't have to look at them.-- Tim Starling 06:24 May 6, 2003 (UTC)


 * And the NSW in New South Wales (NSW) is nice? Are You the master of the world that we have to care whether YOU find them ugly? Maybe we can put them to another place. Table is not very usefull.


 * Yes, NSW is nice. No, I'm not the master of the world, I'm the master of my edit button. My sense of style is just as important as anyone else's, but I intend to boldly revert ugly additions, especially ones made to Australia-related pages. And please log on to protect your anonymity, Deutsche Telekom user. -- Tim


 * I agree. Please do not delete them. Just find a better place for them. Kingturtle 06:32 May 6, 2003 (UTC)


 * I didn't delete them. They're still on the web if you want to find them. We can find a better place for them, but not in the intro paragraph of an article like New South Wales or, even worse, Hidalgo. -- Tim Starling 06:37 May 6, 2003 (UTC)


 * The stubs definitely have to go. Kingturtle 06:39 May 6, 2003 (UTC)
 * I agree. But that the Australian codes are now on a page that is called list of capitals of subnational entities, is not a good solution. I don't know where to put lists, but nevertheles if a page for a entity exist, it should contain the ISO 3166-2 code, like it is on country pages with the TLDs/ISO 3166-1 codes.

I'm listing the stubs on VFD. It will take a few more minutes to find them all... -- Tim Starling 06:51 May 6, 2003 (UTC)
 * it were only mexican. i would like to help, i found: Mexican Federal District, Durango_State,Sinaloa, Nuevo Leon,Mexico_State,Hidalgo,Tamaulipas


 * Thanks, but I already found them. See Votes for deletion. Let's continue this discussion on Talk:ISO 3166-2.

Good work on the ISO nonsense, Tim. Tannin

Hi. Is there a convention on capitalising "he" etc when it's about God? -- Evercat 13:07 May 6, 2003 (UTC)


 * Yes. What, you thought it was an accident, did you? -- Tim


 * I mean a convention on Wikipedia. I thought I'd read somewhere that it was considered POV, but maybe I misremembered. -- Evercat 13:16 May 6, 2003 (UTC)


 * That's what I was hoping you would tell me. I don't think there is such a convention. I did a quick search, and I didn't find anything related. I've never heard of it being offensive or POV or anything else, but then, what would I know? I don't even understand what's offensive about AD. But I don't think we should break with (external) convention without a good reason. -- Tim Starling 13:30 May 6, 2003 (UTC)

Let's continue this on Talk:Omnipotence rather than copying and pasting constantly. -- Tim

Grr, you really had me going at Talk:Orders of magnitude. If I had high blood pressure, I'd have surely had an aneurysm on the spot while reading that first paragraph. ;) -- John Owens 07:44 May 8, 2003 (UTC) (speaking of which, do we need Orders of magnitude (pressure), too? ;)

By the way, did you mean to delete the last two items at Votes for deletion? You summarized as just formatting, so I'm thinking browser error? Or did you feel they needed removal and forget to add it? -- John Owens 05:51 May 9, 2003 (UTC)


 * Yes, it was a browser error. I see Zoe's comments that I deleted have already been restored in another place. I'd better explain myself before she starts claiming harassment again. -- Tim Starling 04:20 May 10, 2003 (UTC)

Tim, I'm no maths guru, but I confess to some suspicion of User:Stupidmoron's contributions so soon after the other nonsense, now deleted. Mind running an eye over them? Tannin 13:42 20 May 2003 (UTC)


 * Sure. In progress. -- Tim Starling 23:35 20 May 2003 (UTC)


 * They look alright at first glance except that s/he doesn't know how to spell "ensemble". -- Tim Starling 23:41 20 May 2003 (UTC)