User talk:Tarquin/Archive 4

I begin to be tired of de-disambiguating French cities articles. I saw your comment to Black Widow - thanks, and I posted one too. I am afraid of starting an edit war with this contributor. olivier 16:24 Mar 15, 2003 (UTC)

RE: FRENCH CITIES - I am putting in the commune names in all the Departements. Like American cities, they should be designated with ", Departement". One of the reasons is to TEACH through an encyclopedia. If one searches Toulon for example, it implants in the brain its department name. Also, here is no point to a list of communes by name only because out of the thousands there are duplications within France, Belgian etc. USER:Black Widow

I do not see why they "should" be designated this way. If one searches for "Toulon", one will have the relevant information by clicking on the article link. Following your argument, why not call the article "Toulon port city of the Var in France where the French navy fleet destroyed its own fleet during WWII so that the Germans do not capture it" ? There are thousand of articles in the Wikipedia covering distinct topics with the same name. There is not always a disambiguation page for these, especially when there is little content for each topic. olivier 16:40 Mar 15, 2003 (UTC)

To Tarquin: You said:

"if you do move pages, use the "move page" command, not a copy & paste - I don't know how to do this and DW is dead so he can't help me.
and don't create mis-spelt page names please - I didn't do it intentionally. Why would you accuse me of doinfg that. However, seeing as you think I'm a vandal, I sincerely apologize and will do my best never to mis-spell words, foreign ones in particular.

Also, User:Olivier's insistence on changing all the American, Canadian, etc. city articles to delete the State and Province etc, is an awful lot of work. Why would we not leave them as they are, and use the same format for France? Plus, a little research shows there already was a debate on including the state or province as part of the city name and it was agreed that Omaha, Nebraska was how it should be done. And, I do honestly think that putting the state/province/department does teach. Thanks. User:Black Widow

I NEVER expressed any opinion on the specific topic of the naming of American and Canadian city articles. Besides, the general question of the city naming has obviously not yet been resolved as I can read in Wikipedia:Naming conventions (city names) and Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (city names). Key sentences being "Convention: In general, there are no special naming conventions for cities, unless multiple cities with the same name exist." and "Cities in the United States and Canada, however, will be disambiguated with a format of City, State or City, Province". As far as I have seen during my extensive browsing of Wikipedia, most cities in other countries, which have an article in Wikipedia, do not have their name disambiguated. olivier 17:56 Mar 15, 2003 (UTC)

Black Widow, as has been said MANY times in MANY places, the names of articles do not contain information, they are just names. If there is no other thing of the same name, no need for extra information. Olivier's argument about Toulon is exactly the point. And anyway, parrot-fashion learning is st00pid. -- Tarquin 18:03 Mar 15, 2003 (UTC) PS what is your connection with user DW?

Y0u're right. G0d, h0w c0uld I be s0 st00pid as t0 be c0nsistent and treat every0ne equal. Please accept my ap0l0gies and may 0ur L0rd Jesus Christ reach int0 y0ur heart and bless y0u in his precious name every day f0r sh0wing me the light. Please c0ntinue t0 m0nit0r my w0rk because I'm just t00 st00pid t0 be aware 0f all wisd0m like y0u. Peace and happiness. 0h sh00t! N0 0ffense, s0 Praise be Allah 0r wh0ever y0ur G0d may be. I'm s0 s0rry, I did n0t kn0w Wikipedia was n0t an 0pen site and that I am 0bliged t0 d0 things y0ur way 0nly 0n Wikipedia ?) User:Black Wid0w

Okay okay, I take it back.... sorry. (one of my personal pet hates, shouldn't have mentioned it :( ). But still, there is no need for dept names in those article names. -- Tarquin 18:32 Mar 15, 2003 (UTC)

Many thanks for the apology. Courtesy is appreciated. Would you kindly reinstate the Departement names to the communes. Thank you. User talk:Black Widow

I don't think that they belong there. They are simply not needed. If a towm name is unique, it doesn't need disambiguation. Horse for courses, and all that -- the US uses the "town, state" technique; in France they have added suffixes which distinguishg a town uniquely. -- Tarquin 21:06 Mar 15, 2003 (UTC)

I can finally post a reply (after several attempts)! My comments were intended to be tongue-in-cheek; sorry if they offended. There had been a mix of spellings on the meter page, and I DID note the British spelling in parentheses. Now, after all that, I must point out that if we use the French spelling "metre", shouldn't we use the French pronunciation, which IS "metre", rather than the British pronunciation, which is "meter"?

--jaknouse

Hi, Tarquin! Thanks for the redirect for the Prix Goncourt. I started the article because I want to start adding the awards to the year in literature pages--no need to be anglocentric. On the other hand, it would be good to give the titles of the books in English when possible. Do you happen to know any of them? Do you happen to know where I could find them? Thanks. Danny

Who me? I didn't make the redirect. To be honest, I don't been know how many of those have been translated into English. Proust is a particular nightmare... I've done a search for Proust on amazon -- the volumes different names in different editions in English. -- Tarquin 17:31 Mar 16, 2003 (UTC)

Tarquin, You deleted the article "List of songs which do not appear on a Wikipedia list" without the customary notice or discussion on its talk page because (a) it's a pointless list b) it's daft c) its weird meta-content d) it has self-links.

Well, "it might appear so" to (a); "yes" to (b); "if you say so" to (c); "it wasn't supposed to and it didn't when I originally wrote it" to (d). I would have explained why it was created, if someone had asked on the talk page but since they didn't, I'll do it here.

The real point of it and the reason that I created it was that it's just as silly as the other silly lists of songs which have been added lately. If it deserves to be deleted so do they. If they do not deserve to be deleted neither does it. Personally I would delete the lot and I look forward to the fireworks when you do it. You've got my support for that but you're a braver man than I if you try.

If you feel that the others should not be deleted, just this one, I'd like to know what your reasoning is. I can only see (a) and (b) as good reasons for deletion. I can't comment on (c) because I was asleep or at work when you deleted it and thus I don't know its final form but the original wasn't particularly weird and it could have been reverted to that. Likewise (d) is not a reason for deleting articles: we fix that by removing the self links. So that just leaves (a) and (b) which apply to all the "list of songs that..." articles and yet you didn't delete them. ??? -- Derek Ross 01:21 Mar 18, 2003 (UTC)

I'd like to delete all the pointless "lists of songs with property foo" pages. :-) Yours is not the first attempt at satire on this issue -- the problem is, that the people who revel in these list pages aren't getting the point. :-( -- Tarquin 10:54 Mar 18, 2003 (UTC)

Sorry to belabor a point, but I see the "Communes of France" is a total mess. You changed a few I posted and deleted the departement name from each locale but did not take the time to re-do ALL the others. Without wishing to appear abrupt of difficult, it does seem that when someone comes along and does this they only create a mess that devalues Wikipedia and discourages users. It is one thing to edit an aricle, it is quite another to track articles and impose your view as to how they should be formatted. Would it not have been better, more polite, and just plain civilized to have allowed discussion on this before imposing your views? I am going to change things back. It is wrong to not create ALL places the same as America. In England, WITHOUT EXCEPTION, people refer to the county. In France and elsewhere. Plus, it avoids having links that are not related pop up all over the place. In future, I suggest you show good manners, and, if you wish to impose your views, that is your right on an Open Content Website. However, have the respect for the goals here. To change all Communes listed (or other similar situations) rather than changing one or two and leaving a partial mess that confuses others who actually take the time to create articles of value. I would have done all the French communes, representing many, many hours of work. But, when you arbitrarily do what you did, I have to ask: "Why bother?". Think about it. Thank you for your consideration. User:Black Widow

Regretfully, I do not accept treating one country different than others, and an encyclopedia in fact exists only to teach. Why would you be against me doing that, when I am the one who did 90% of the work on all lists of French Communes and you screwed up a few? You haven't given a legitimate reason and to some it might seem that you base your statements solely on a desire to do things "your way". Give Wikipedia users substantive reasons for discriminating against France, England or other countriues outside the USA? (Note, I did the Entire list of all Canadian communities.) And, if you can "fix" things so easy, why did you just delete one or two and leave a mess? That kind of participation in Wikipedia is certainly not helpful, it is only destructive. Some might call that hypocrisy. Too, another very important reason is to avoid what already is a major problem on Wikipedia -- linking to wrong articles. (Quite honestly, I find it incredible that I have to explain this.) Once you create an article, it pops up in 1 to 100+ other places. I note that very very few at Wikipedia (and I came across it again today several times) both to do a search and correct links. I do every time an any article I post. Note the job done to distort my claim on Neufchateau. Once you have the article, it creates a massive amount of work to fix ALL the links. But, list the place with its name and county/departement etc, you reduce false links by 99%. False links DRIVE away newcomers to Wikipedia who dismiss the site as worthless. )Particulary when it is so slow.) And, the Mafia are people who force their will on others for their own personal gain. 97% of the late DW's articles were never logged in as he didn't need anything other than the satisfaction of helping make Wikipedia a valid, just, non-discriminatory encyclopedia. I shall change things back so that Wikipedia treats ALL people equally unless you can tell everyone why it should not. Thank you, and God Bless. User:Black Widow

Tarquin is not making this stuff up. Read the disambiguation guidelines at Wikipedia:Disambiguation. -mav

I don't see a problem with Neufchâteau: until we have more than a pargraph to say on both these places, they can share a page. (BTW you're not in the edit history for either that page or the non-accented version, so I don't know what you mean about "distort my claim"). So here we go again:

article titles are meant to identify an article, not hold information
most US towns are treated as if "Town, state" is the actual name of the town.
this is not the case elsewhere -- so by your own principles, it would be unfair to apply this to other countries.
ease of linking is paramount. We can't expect people to have to look up which county Doncaster is in, or which dept Orsay is in, just so they can make a link
differnet countries have solved the disambiguation problem in different ways. In the US, the state name is given. In France, names are given a suffix. There are two places called Fontenay in the Paris region, in different departments. Nobody uses the department names to distinguish between them: their full names are Fontenay-aux-Roses and Fontenay-sous-bois.

Case closed. Now please leave me alone. I find your claims of DW's death by Wikipedia sickening. -- Tarquin 10:27 Mar 19, 2003 (UTC)

Hi Quercus. What's the traditional method of making hedges? called (where they half-cut branches and bend them over), and do we have an article on it? -- Tarquin 19:08 Mar 14, 2003 (UTC)

Hi Tarquin- sorry for delay in replying to this, AFAIK it's simply called Hedge laying, I looked in my books to see if there is a more technical term but this seems to be it, itf there isn't an article I'll try & start one... Cheers quercus robur 15:58 Mar 20, 2003 (UTC)

point taken about picture names, I had the same comment from mav. I'll try to remember!jimfbleak 10:33 Mar 24, 2003 (UTC)

Hi Tarquin

Would you please give your opinion at the bottom of this page ? http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discussion_Wikip%E9dia:Pages_%E0_supprimer

User:anthere

What are pages like User:Wanli2/Seven for? -- Tarquin 23:59 Mar 26, 2003 (UTC)

They are quotes drawn from some articles. make the most of them. Wanli2 08:21 Mar 31, 2003 (UTC)

Hi Tarquin ! As I see you've edited GNU FDL and Sonic Boom what is your advice on video formats. Ericd 22:13 Apr 10, 2003 (UTC)

I'm not sure. best ask the mailing list. -- Tarquin 22:15 Apr 10, 2003 (UTC)

: Ok I will do it.

Ironclad evidence already exists proving that Dietary=Susan on the [WikiEN-l] talk-archives. (See http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-April/002479.html)

This user must be banned immediately. Otherwise, there’s a risk that highly qualified users such as JTD, a professional historian, could be chased away from Wikipeida.

172

You have introduced a gross mathematical error into the "orthonormal basis" article. It is impossible to speak of an orthonormal basis on a vector space unless the vector space has an inner product. Michael Hardy 18:29 Apr 14, 2003 (UTC)

And another error: You say it is a basis, so that it spans the space. This opens a can of worms: An orthonormal basis is not in general a basis, i.e., it is not usually possible to write every member of the space as a linear combination of FINITELY many members of the orthonormal basis. Of course it is possible in the finite-dimensional case, but that is not the usual case. Usually one is thinking about Fourier series or the like, in which { e^{π inx} : n ∈ Z } is an orthonormal basis of the space of square-integrable functions. Not every square-integrable function can be written as a linear combination of finitely many members of this orthonormal basis; most of them require an infinitely long Fourier series. That is why the word "dense" was used in the article before you edited it! Michael Hardy 18:39 Apr 14, 2003 (UTC)

And yet another error: You wrote "more generally" when referring to something that was exactly the opposite of "more general". Vector spaces are more general than inner product spaces and Hilbert spaces; inner product spaces and Hilbert spaces are not more general than vector space. Michael Hardy 18:43 Apr 14, 2003 (UTC)

eek... sorry, Michael. Please correct it. But please also write some sort of introduction which is accessible to the lay-reader. This isn't so hard a concept, after all: it crops up in undergraduate maths and maybe earlier, yet I doubt an undergraduate would understand any of the article as I found it. -- Tarquin 19:10 Apr 14, 2003 (UTC)

Re: Image:Btwashington.jpg - I goofed. There was a photo there that was a bit too large so I copied it then downsized it. Don't know how but instead it got huge. So I reinstalled the original but User:Zoe thought it was my photo so she deleted it. I put a new one there today. User:Black Widow

Hey Tarquin, I liked what you did on Murphy's law, The phrase "Western culture" may be a bit confusing because this is more of a practical law (In engineering, which is practiced all over the world) than a cultral phenomena. I thought about removing that but I'll leave it as it is, I want to see what other readers will do with it.. "The wiki law" ;) Rotem Dan 17:39 Apr 15, 2003 (UTC)

Re: Btwashington.jpg -- I was the one who originally uploaded the image. A couple of days later it's gone, and people are screaming about the quality of it and the size of it and the legality of it--you'd think self-styled experts on copyright law would know the 1922 rule--and for all I know they don't like my hairstyle either. I understand policing images is a thankless job, but I think it's fair to ask that the censors do as much research as I did finding the #%^@$ thing. Dave Farquhar 22:42 Apr 16, 2003 (UTC)

Dear Tarquin: Hi1 Part of the reason I had been changing names of city pages, ex Caracas to include their country's name is that I thought that's how it's done at wikipedia. Also, think about it: I dont expect everyone who comes into our site from , say Ivory Coast or Indonesia to know where exactly Caracas is when reading an article with that city on it.

In the case of Bogota and Mexico City, it's justified that we nam it Bogota, Colombia and Mexico City, Mexico, jus like Rome, Cairo, London and Paris would be justified: There is a Bogota, New Jersey and a Mexico City in Alabama or Mississippi I believe.

Thanks as always and God bless you! I want you to know that of all the people who have spoken about the subject I appreciate you the most because you are a respectful writer who exposes his point of views without offending.

Sincerely yours, Antonio Lets Drive Like a Bullet Baby!!! Martin

I'm feeling left out :( User:JohnOwens gets to be the top of the list of bigots? no fair! he's only been around a few months! to be blunt, he's a n00b! I've been around for way longer than he has. *sulks* ;-) ROTFL -- Tarquin 11:52 Apr 17, 2003 (UTC)

Well, to be fair, I've been around since at least October 8, 2002 (plus maybe a week or so of anon contribution before then), so more than seven months, which, while I would hardly call it "a long time" or even "a while", I would call more than "a few months". ;) -- John Owens, still #1 in Olga's book!

to be honest, I didn't realise you'd been here this long already. about half the time I've been here... ;-) -- Tarquin 20:37 Apr 17, 2003 (UTC)

So. Would you mind passing along the secret? I've been trying to install that pesky TCP/IP stack and the SMTP interface on my trusty old mechanical typewriter for ages, and I just can't seem to get the darn thing working right. :) Tannin

the secret is the gerbil-powered treadmill ;-) -- Tarquin 12:37 Apr 28, 2003 (UTC)

My irony detector just went off. Aren't you the TarQuin who on MeatballWiki compared the "UseRealNames" policy to having a rod up one's collective arse? Ahh well, I trust the matter is now resolved to your satisfaction - I presume you'll be making the same request of user:Jtdirl next? MyRedDice (signature changed for your convenience)

TraxPlayer: Why not use ("fancy") markup in the article about Magic Squares for the squares. It does make them easy to read. eg. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_hundred_and_eleven

but hideously ugly to edit! Remeber the KISS principle! :-) -- Tarquin 06:57 May 3, 2003 (UTC)

Excellent work on pixel. My god, I actually understood it, which for a technologically illiterate amadán like me is quite an achievement. Well done. wikilove. ÉÍREman 20:37 May 6, 2003 (UTC)

Just so you don't think I was being too snide about the lines & corners, I was going to put a "thanks" for that picture anyway, even before I noticed that very slight flaw. Good work. -- John Owens 21:48 May 6, 2003 (UTC)

Not at all :-) Though now I wonder if putting in the right-hand lines makes the image too "busy". -- Tarquin

Yeah, I was kind of envisioning just two connecting lines for the left-hand corners, for much the same reason. Did you make a sample like that for comparison? -- John Owens

Done. Check the different versions of the image to compare. -- Tarquin

I think it's a keeper. :) -- John Owens

Thanks for the help on the French side. I did understand what you said - I just didn't understand what the function was for, until I saw the practical example. (How I could have been so slow to catch on, I don't know.) Deb 20:26 May 7, 2003 (UTC)

T, I honestly am not trying to irritate you -- it is just that I really do think that every Catholic understands that in the natural world, virgins cannot give birth to a child. I think that understanding is implicit in the claim of the "virgin birth" -- it is a profoundly unnatural event. Slrubenstein

Yes, I know you're not :-) But if it's not natural -- how can it be claimed to have happened? It's at times like this I wonder if NPOV is possible. -- t

What can I say? Some people believe in miracles. That's why I am satisfied that as long as the article makes it clear that this is what some people believe, it is NPOV. Slrubenstein

thanks! Slrubenstein