Older talk is in User talk:Stan Shebs/archive 1.

It is not a matter of "challenging the line between fact and fantasy" as this would be to assert some sort of legitimacy to such a putative line. Rather I am suggesting that such a line is a product of a point of view in motion and that different people see it in different ways. You say things should refer to sources, yet this is not very often done - as you admit. Also when dealing with places like Limehouse which I transverse regularly, I do feel very vexed that blatant nonsense is put up on the page. But I see that rather than moan, it is important to realise that the automated placing of even limited and often wrong information about places in London neverthless serves as a starting point. I find your suggestion that I should exclude myself from this project because I do not have a naive realist viewpoint hardly helpful. Harry Potter

I am glad that you have responded with more candour and are prepared to be more open with your prejudices and personal slurs. Of course I do accept that other people, as myself, do make distinctions between fact and fantasy, but I also appreciate that they do so in different ways and that none of us can ever be sure that the distinction we have made is correct. Indeed this is reflected in how science developed in the twentieth century abandonning the naive realism of people like Kelvin moving towards principals of falsifiability. Nowadays scientist do not claim to grasp reality, but to produce an operational system which can effectively be instrumentalised so as to be useful. Of course, this shifts problems along to the issue for whom and what purpose are these techniques useful. As regard my remarks about Limehouse, my relationship to the place and other features mentioned in the topography is that I walk, drive, cycle and ride the train around those places on a daily basis. Indeed I had just recently been to a cartography conference where the mapmakers insisted on getting of at the Limehouse station even though Westferry was the nearest. I have never considered the Limehouse station to be in Limehouse, I think its in Ratcliffe, but I realise that this is not a question of objective fact but how I and other people who have lived in the area for a long time use language, compared to other people newer to the area who accept the names given to stations by bureaucrats unquestioningly. However when myself and my companion greeted their arrival at the pub with our half-full pints of beer, the reality of the situation became what we like to call "blatant" Any process of distinguishing between fact and fantasy must start at the pre-verbal. When our friends arrived, we were already refreshed, while they were still in need of a god drink after a long walk on a hot day. This variation of visceral subjectivities underlined our friends admission that we were right. HAving made such a distinction, we can then place the preverbal closer to facticity and language closer to fantasy. Already in language we face different ways of understanding reality. This is why, for instance that inuit languages have many different words to describe white, a feature absent in most European languages. Having grasped the cultural specificity between languages, we also have to recognise that within languages there are also substantial variations. The question whether or not the differences within languages varies more than that between languages is hard to answer, because there is such a difference between a gliobal languages like Arabic, Spanish or English and Aymara. When we consider English (which would be wise considering that wikipedia is an English language project]], it is clear that we are dealing with something which such a broad range of people use, with such vast cultural diversity, that any conception as it being homogenous is unlikely to be rooted in fact. Nevertheless, just as the language has spread through the anglo-american imperialist process, it should come as no surprise that there are those who consider such an ironing out of language into a perfectly smooth surface not only possible, or desirable but that they actually consider it an acheived fact. The promotion of such a fantasy is very much to do with notions of hegemony, and whilst I deplore much of Toni Negri's book on Empire at least he sets out to grasp the issues. (For myself I find his scant references to Dante's Monarchia which had such a marked effect on the intellectuals and explorers of sixteenth century England as they prepared to initiate thier imperialist adventures. Dante's influence on John Dee is quite clear and the centrality of this hermetic magician to the iperialist project ia apparent to any person who gains the slightest familiarity with the topic. That the early explorers should mingle their alchemic exploits with their exploring, and bring back strange black rock with the expectation that they could make cheap gold should not raise eyebrows. Likewise that a sailor should encounter a sea monster in uncharted waters is not such an unlikely event (as compared to encountering a sea monster in a docteor's waiting room, for example). I have no doubt that a dedicate group of zealots committed to some sort of cultural hegemony could reagularly treacherise pages, removing anyrthing they considered ideologically unsound, and indeed they might use language similar to your own, in the pretense that they were defending the wikipedia community as a whole, with various rhetocical formulations rooted in that rarest of commodities, common sense. Resistance is futile you suggest, however I suspect you will find that our resistance is fertile, and I doubt that your threat to stir up a vigilante mob to exterminate the contributions of those who you regard as being unworthy of participation is morer rooted in fact than in fantasy. You may spend your time searching the world for islands of deception, but perhaps if you were more aware of your own fallibility in make a real distinction between fact and fantasy - a fallability which makes you as human as the rest of us - you might find your personal interactions less fraught. Harry Potter

Have you always read all the warnings? Seems like you did!

God bless you!

Antonio Not Perfect so What?? Martin

Stan: Its dumb of you to judge anyone for an error. You can ask anyone overhere and they will tell you Im one of the most well-liked citizens here.

Like Mav always says, the most important thing is to have fun here. Remember that.

Antonio Mars and Venus together Martin

Hi Stan, about the List of Republican Roman Consuls -- Most of the names above 145 BC came from an anonymous contributor who added them to the consul page -- look back in the history of that page to see if you can find M. Fulvius Flaccus. The rest come from a URL that fonzy gave me, & may be more authorative. (I'll admit that I haven't done much fact-checking on that list; it's a pain just formatting it, & trying to identify all of the names in it.)

As for your comment, ``I'm half-inclined to make links out of all the consul names, can use to ensure that everything links consistently." One of the points I would make to anyone who wants to work on that list is that every consul was in his day one of the leading men of Rome; in the ideal Wikipedia, there ought to be an article on each one. However, the historical record is not in an ideal shape, & so many of the names in the millenium of that office will remain just that -- names. Feel free to link these names to as many articles as you can manage. -- llywrch 05:38 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Just passing through on an obsessive quest to remove links to disambiguation pages ;) Regards -- sannse

I had written a lemma on the Brown thrasher for nl.wiki and wanted to link it here but found it empty. I saw your name linked to the mimid page. I have a question. There were two links (both) empty. One brown thrasher the other Brown Thrasher. which one is correct? Jcwf at nl.wikipedia

Use Brown Thrasher please. brown thrasher looks like a bit of Michael vandalism, should be a redir to the capitalized version. Stan 03:36 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Stan, I just looked at your latest changes to the consul list. While I am happy at your choice of authorities (I have a copy of OCD near me & use it often when I make changes to Wikipedia), I hope that you are following up on all of your new links & fixing them whenever necessary. For example, Gaius Caesar is listed as consul at AD 1, & you converted that to a link; however, the link then takes one to Caligula, who was not born until AD 12!

Now you know the reason I have been slow at proof-reading & linking this long list of names. (But I hope this does not discurage you from this work -- it is much needed, & I believe will prove to make Wikipedia a far more useful reference.)

PS -- With my addition, you now have 30K of words in this Talk: page. Not only is it time to archive, but I'm envious of you as I have been on Wikipedia longer, & accumulated fewer comments. :-) -- llywrch 02:16 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Stan, no problem about the consul list. Now you know why my name is the most common one associated with it: it's a tedious job maintaining it, & you're about the only other person who's taken more than a passing interest in it! Hope I don't scare you away from further contributions. --llywrch 16:12 10 Jun 2003 (UTC)

And about "Galus Sulpicius" -- I don't have any printed references that mention him (the original source for the consul list suggests he may be mentioned in Livy's History in either book 19 or 20), but I know Galus makes little sense as a praenomen. (IIRC, Gallus is Latin for chicken.) I'd say you are right about "Galus Sulpicius" being a typo for "C. Sulpicius Galus", but don't be afriad to wait until you can verify this. -- llywrch 17:21 11 Jun 2003 (UTC)

May I ask why you removed my comments about the firing of the Director of the FBI in the comments about Vince Foster's death? It certainly seems pertinent to me. One of the great advantages of Wikipedia is that we have the opportunity to correlate facts that you wouldn't find correlated in other sources. Is there some guideline that you can direct me to that led you to make that edit? In the future, if you find it necessary to remove facts from pages, could you at least make a new "Speculation about the death of Vince Foster" page, and move the information there? Bobby Martin 10:33 am central, June 10, 2003

Hi Stan, u are on to something with the funding suggestion: I have been promised £200 from the Arts Council of England (not Britain). But not for a wikipedia project, unfortunately. It's for a project at the Cartography Conference. So if u want to get involved in a discussion on mapping London on wikipedia, then come along to the Limehouse Town Hall on Sunday for the closing of the Cartography Conference, and i'll be more than happy to give you a cut! User:Qqq

Hey Stan, you're not going to like this but I have found a big problem with zillions of wikipedia pages. Those dealing with fictional characters! As fictional characters are fantasy, why are they allowed on wikipdedia. When I looked at Stan it says "The first three verses are delivered by Stan, with the third actually being spoken in the car itself as he is about to drive off a bridge." I am sure if this were true then Eminiem would have been arrested for making a snuff record. So Stan is not a fictional character, but a real person "in the car itself". I think I better warn Tuf-Kat that you are on the warpath .Harry Potter 22:18 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

You'ld also better check Talk:Reconstruction if you are going to rid wikipedia of factoids Harry Potter 22:36 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)

In regards to those Middle-earth pages, some anonymous contributor creates them in spurts. I wikify most of them, but have no knowledge of the subjects. I'll look for existing articles in the future, but normally I can barely keep up with his/her additions. -- Notheruser 23:21 17 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Heh. Avathar :) -- Notheruser 23:32 17 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Hi there! Hey Stan, did you not know that many people do not see meaning as existing in atomised units of words, burt rather are familair with as semantic field whereby new words are continually brought into new relationships with each others. Why not checkout [[John Dee}} he first put the words British and {{empire]] together. When faced with a term like neo-cartesian fundamentalism most english speakers can comprehend the prefix neo, the term cartesian (even if this requires some knowledge of philosophy and science which you suspect you have) and the more popular term fundamentalism. I know this requires mental effort for which you will receive no financial rewards and indeed may lead to a change in attitudes which can be experieneced as tension with the dominant view of social reality in the society you live, but fortunately or unfortunately, this is simply a consequence for all those who seek some sort of Neutral point of view.Harry Potter 22:54 29 Jun 2003 (UTC)

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Stan, I have been adding a few articles on military history over the past few days (and I was quite pleased to have two articles of mine linked to from the front page for a day or so). A couple of those articles were ship histories, of which I will have to do more at some point. I have also added quite a few articles that are orders of battle, or contain that sort of information. That means that I think it would be a good idea to define naming conventions for military formation articles more clearly. There is already a wikiproject on the subject, but it doesn't define naming conventions for articles very well.

There seem to be quite a few articles on American formations with the suffix US to distinguish them from the equivalent formations of other countries. You adopted that convention when listing American divisions here. I have adopted that when naming things in my order of battle articles covering US formations, for example, those on the Korean War. I have also done some listings of British formations in World War II, and in those, I have adopted the convention of the suffix British for ground forces units. However, in some of my other articles, I have linked to RAF Squadrons, and for those, I have adopted a naming convention like RAF No.1 Squadron, using the suffix of the service to distinguish the squadrons. That avoids confusion with services like the RAAF, RCAF and RNZAF which have similar squadron naming conventions. Moving on to the Fleet Air Arm, I have been using the convention No. 800 NAS in links. That might be advisable to change, since there are other countries that have Fleet Air Arms with similar conventions.

What do you think? David Newton 11:54 7 Jul 2003 (UTC)