User talk:Snoyes: Difference between revisions

Talk policy:

I will not respond to posts which are not signed with either: a username, pseudonym, or IP address. Unsigned posts will be deleted.

Old talk by topic:

• User_talk:Snoyes/picture resizing
• User_talk:Snoyes/backing up news stories and deleting signed messages

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Hello there, welcome to the 'pedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you need pointers on how we title pages visit Wikipedia:Naming conventions or how to format them visit our manual of style. If you have any other questions about the project then check out Wikipedia:Help or add a question to the Village pump. Cheers! --maveric149

Thank you very much! I'd be interested to hear how Wikipedia sustains itself financially. (I don't see a "donate" button/banner anywhere). And no, I'm not offended by a "RTFM" reply - just tell me which manual ;-). snoyes 06:49 Feb 14, 2003 (UTC)

You're Welcome! Right now all the bills are paid for by Jimbo Wales who owns the server and an ISP/search engine at http://bomis.com . But Jimbo is setting-up a non-profit to manage Wikipedia and states that he will give the non-profit the server plus bandwidth. --mav

That is very generous of Jimbo (even if he does stuff like give away his ferrari;-)). Anyway, I'll be happy to donate as soon as the facilities are up! snoyes 06:58 Feb 14, 2003 (UTC)

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Welcome! And thanks for correcting the mispeeling of "iss" in deprogramming. --Uncle Ed

Thank you very much! And my pleasure. Here's to the productive & fun collaboration among all wikipedians - cling. snoyes 22:54 Feb 14, 2003 (UTC)

Hi Snoyes, I don't think changing the word 'with' to 'on' on the [UN . . . Iraq] page solves the problem. on and with are both used, the former by anti-war people, the latter by pro-war people. So we have just moved one POV and replaced it for another. I've another suggestion: instead call it ' The UN Security Council and the proposed Iraq war'. That way you avoid any hint of bias, by all words that could be seen as in any way expressing a POV and instead calling it a term that all sides would be able to use: the Proposed Iraq War. What do you think? JTD 00:32 Feb 22, 2003 (UTC)

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Hi Snoyes - I'm afraid my only secrets with regard to disambiguation are months of practice combined with lots and lots of coffee! Heavy metal was a relatively fast one to do, because almost all the links were about heavy metal music, so I could just copy that to the clipboard, do all the links for there in one pass, and then go back and do the couple that were about heavy metals separately. Also, most of the articles were quite short, so I didn't have to search for the link to be disambigged. I'm usually slower than that, honest! --Camembert

Don't believe him, he has signed a pact with the Devil! :) Nevilley 22:09 Feb 23, 2003 (UTC)

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That wasn't vandalism and I still disagree re: Wikipedia:Volunteer Fire Department.

Sorry, I wasn't trying to insinuate that with "rv", just stating the fact that I had reverted it. Well we can have a chat about it. My point is that the whole article is in humour, and can remain so because it is meant exclusively for those wikipedia users who are 'in the know' (ie. those that would sign up) and therefore likely to understand (and not be 'offended') by the humour. --snoyes 03:30 Mar 1, 2003 (UTC)

I think there's a terminological problem with "rv"! Some use it as "Reverting Vandalism" and others as "ReVert". Most confusing! :) Nevilley 11:33 Mar 1, 2003 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing that out, Nevilley. I hadn't thought of rv as possibly short for "Reverting Vandalism". --snoyes 15:02 Mar 1, 2003 (UTC)

You'all look like you got things well in hand. Thanks.. -&#35918&#30505

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Hi snoyes. In the interest of avoiding a repeat of our misunderstanding of yesterday, I'm coming here to your talk page to raise this issue before making any edits to the article in question.

I see you have edited Current events so that it contains the following:

• The Japanese government has expressed support Saturday for a revised draft resolution submitted jointly by the United States, Britain and Spain to the United Nations Security Council that sets March 17 as the deadline for Iraq. Japanese media opinion polls taken last week indicate that 84% of Japanese people oppose an Iraq war. [3]

My opinion (as I have expressed in Talk:Current events) is that linking these two factoids is not NPOV, and that the statement (as currently parsed) is no better than:

• The United States government continues to prepare for a War in Iraq. Sean Penn is 100% opposed to such a war. [3]

So, with all due respect, why have you reverted my change without consideration of the views expressed in the Talk:Current events? I wasn't attempting to censor or change any piece of factual news, only to remove a POV linkage between two separate pieces of news.

Hi. I did actually consider your poste in Talk:Current events. That is why I did not put back "despite". Firstly, can we agree that a simple poll is not enough for a news story? Secondly, your claim, as I interpret it, is that by "linking" these two facts (decision and majority opinion) one is expressing a point of view. I don't think that this is the case. Here is how I support my opinion: A search on google news with the keyword 'Japan' turns up 3 news articles explicitly about Japans decision [1], [2], [3] . Of these 3, two have in their _titles_ "... despite anti-war public" and "Japan ignores anti-war public...". In the other there is the sentence: "Media opinion polls indicate that the majority of Japanese people are opposed to a war against Iraq, but ...". Remember, these news reports are not editorials, and therefore are supposed to be neutral. If we take the standard of the largest news operations of the world (reuters), then we could safely have a "despite" in there. However, this is obviously not exacting enough for you, so we'll leave it at having it be the same news story. --snoyes 00:38 Mar 9, 2003 (UTC)

Hi snoyes. In the interest of avoiding a repeat of our misunderstanding of yesterday, I'm coming here to your talk page to raise this issue before making any edits to the article in question.

I see you have edited Current events so that it contains the following:

• The Japanese government has expressed support Saturday for a revised draft resolution submitted jointly by the United States, Britain and Spain to the United Nations Security Council that sets March 17 as the deadline for Iraq. Japanese media opinion polls taken last week indicate that 84% of Japanese people oppose an Iraq war. [3]

My opinion (as I have expressed in Talk:Current events) is that linking these two factoids is not NPOV, and that the statement (as currently parsed) is no better than:

• The United States government continues to prepare for a War in Iraq. Sean Penn is 100% opposed to such a war. [3]

So, with all due respect, why have you reverted my change without consideration of the views expressed in the Talk:Current events? I wasn't attempting to censor or change any piece of factual news, only to remove a POV linkage between two separate pieces of news.

Hi. I did actually consider your poste in Talk:Current events. That is why I did not put back "despite". Firstly, can we agree that a simple poll is not enough for a news story? Secondly, your claim, as I interpret it, is that by "linking" these two facts (decision and majority opinion) one is expressing a point of view. I don't think that this is the case. Here is how I support my opinion: A search on google news with the keyword 'Japan' turns up 3 news articles explicitly about Japans decision [4], [5], [6] . Of these 3, two have in their _titles_ "... despite anti-war public" and "Japan ignores anti-war public...". In the other there is the sentence: "Media opinion polls indicate that the majority of Japanese people are opposed to a war against Iraq, but ...". Remember, these news reports are not editorials, and therefore are supposed to be neutral. If we take the standard of the largest news operations of the world (reuters), then we could safely have a "despite" in there. However, this is obviously not exacting enough for you, so we'll leave it at having it be the same news story. --snoyes 00:38 Mar 9, 2003 (UTC)

Hi Snoyes, thank you for the response. We are in agreement that a simple poll is not enough for a news story. In fact, I had thought that all along and my initial impulse was to drop all reference to the poll in the headline and make it read like this:

• The Japanese government has expressed support Saturday for a revised draft resolution submitted jointly by the United States, Britain and Spain to the United Nations Security Council that sets March 17 as the deadline for Iraq.

I resisted that desire since I wanted to avoid a repeat of yesterday, and I saw that you had felt that the poll aspect was worthy of headline mention. Hence, I broke it into two headlines. You are correct that my claim is that linking the decision and the opinion is expressing a POV. I recognize that you have found several news articles that link these two facts, but I reject that this is any indication of the neutrality in general, or that Reuters can be considered a neutral source in particular. As a counterexample we have the articles at [7] and

[8], which didn't consider public opinion to be inextricably linked to the government decision.

In a way, this it the exact same philosophy that divided us yesterday on the Nikkei average. As I recall, you wanted the headline to read "Nikkei benchmark hit 20-year low record as investers fear potential Iraq war in the near weeks." while I wanted it to read "*Nikkei 225 hit 20-year record low." I'm opposed to connecting two facts together when said connection is inherently POV. The final version we "compromised" on was "The Nikkei benchmark hit a 20-year low record as war in Iraq appears closer, alleged stock manipulation by Nikko Salomon Smith Barney came to light, North Korea is preparing to test fire a mid-range missile, and a new political scandal in the party of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi came to light." which I found slightly better for NPOV, but still silly.

So, snoyes, I think this is what is boils down to. My defense of disconnecting factoids like this it that it is inherently POV to connect them, particularly when there is a word like "despite" connecting them. Your defense of connecting them, as I understand it, is that since a major news feeds connects them it must be ok. I believe we are both going to work towards making Current events postings better (and more NPOV), and we are going to do so in different ways, and we are going to keep bumping heads. I will offer to avoid removing any factual content that is posted if you will agree to respect my attempts to NPOV entries. (anon)

"Tokyo has been hesitant up until now to support a U-S-led war in Iraq, with polls showing about 80 percent of Japan's public is against a military strike." (from your first link). I am not saying that reuters is completely neutral, nobody is. you are being non-neutral simply by reporting some stories and not others. The question is to what exacting standard you want to hold yourself. Take the example of the state sanctioned murder (also called "death penalty"). I am opposed to it, because in my interpretation of the declaration of human rights one has the right not to be killed. If there were news tomorrow that the US were forbidding the death penalty I would believe that it would still be neutral to have in the headline that a large number of people are in support of a death penalty. I would also agree that you could say "despite" and still be neutral. I think that you are wrong in your interpretation that public opinion is simply another fact - it is not - it has much more influence than that, and therefore connecting public opinion with anything is not biased. By the way - I never was against your changes in the stock market news piece, but I guess that got lost in the shouting match we had. But it shows also that you do not abide by your exacting standards of neutrality. In the end, you made the story "neutral" not by taking away a connection to a fact (that many or some investors blamed the impending attack on Iraq for the stock market situation), but rather by adding another connected fact (Salomon Smith whatever thingy). By the way, I still think that your resolution was neutral - but you shouldn't by your standards believe that. --snoyes 06:03 Mar 9, 2003 (UTC)

Well, while I was bending over backwards to write the polite response to you above, you add this little gem to your talk page. You have just basically said that you will not discuss edit conflicts with anonymous users, despite any attempts they may make to be reasonable with you. Fine, suit yourself, but your policy of non-discussion is only going to make things worse, not better. (anon)

I have not said that I will not discuss edit conflicts with anonymous users. For all I care you can sign your posts with "(anon)" - just sign them. It makes it increadibly hard to see where your posts end if you don't sign them, there is also the possibility that there are more than one anon user discussing things here. BTW, you are more anonymous if you actually sign in, you don't have to give any email address or anything - just username and password. I can for example determine exactly what educational institution you are from by your IP. It is also frankly common courtesy to sign your speech. --snoyes 05:39 Mar 9, 2003 (UTC)

There is more than one form of anonymity, and the kind I desire could not be served if I used logged in accounts consistently. Since it means so much to you though, I have made an account for the sole purpose of signing this response. -Snoyés 06:00 Mar 9, 2003 (UTC)

I tend to arbitrarily add signatures to anonymous posts, which seems reasonable to me. But then I've always been in favour of sign your posts on talk pages... ;-) Martin

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Talk policy:

I will not respond to posts which are not signed with either: a username, pseudonym, or IP address. Unsigned posts will be deleted.