User talk:MichaelTinkler

I gotta question for you, boss. What's the right bibliographical format? You tell me, and I'll adhere to it (if it's simple enough).

(diff) Wikipedia:Unsuccessful searches (2002-03); 08:53 (1 change) . . . Ed Poor M [Unsuccessful search for bibliographical format]

Personally I don't care whether one uses a 'known' system or not. The secret is that the information should include title, author (if necessary - or co-authors if the list is on the primary author's entry), publisher, and date of publication (preferably of the first edition). The title of a book traditionally goes in italic, an article inside quotation marks (with the periodical title in italic). One should try to minimize the use of italic, in other words. The most characteristic error is to not mark titles at all (no emphasis, no quotation marks). The second most characteristic is to use quotation marks for all titles or italics for all titles. Yes, these are all empty conventions - but the fact that they ARE conventions means that at least some readers expect them and learn information from them. MichaelTinkler

I'm not Larry, but my humble opinion about the question you asked him. I would call the page "Fundation of Rome". It will appear anyway if someone makes a search for Rome, or foundation. AstroNomer

It's been ages. Welcome back! I hope you are able to contribute more. --mav

Thanks, Mav. Yep, I've been doing other things. That damn User:JHK tempted me back with tales of weird goings-on in the Gothic architecture zone. MichaelTinkler

And speaking of which: My unabridged dictionary defines "cathedral" as the seat of a bishop or, more loosely, "any large imposing church," and I consider St. Denis large and imposing. Which "Bourges" did you mean? The one whose floor-plan is at http://www.pitt.edu/~medart/menufrance/boumain.html is cruciform. -- isis 29 Aug 2002

Isis - in common usage, yes, 'cathedral' means 'any large church'. However, there's no reason to do more than nod (as the entry does) to 'common usage'. I think this is important because St-Denis was not 'any' large church - it was an exceptionally significant Abbey, and to lump it in with cathedrals is inaccurate and confusing - it shoul be linked to monastery, where it would do some good AND be quite interesting. The floorplan they're showing doesn't show transepts, but these weird little porches (a later addition). If you look at the full screen version you can see that they're separated from the aisles by deeply splayed doorways - transepts are continuous space rather than compartmentalized (though that's a simplification) Paris, by the way, was initially horseshoe shaped like Bourges. I don't think it got any transepts at all until the 1270s.

MichaelTinkler

Perfect ! -- Now explain it in the article just that clearly, so it will educate readers instead of scaring them off. I have a master's degree in civil engineering and couldn't wade thru that Cathedral article, but what you said to me makes me not only understand but also appreciate the distinctions you made. -- isis

Article Licensing

Hi, I've started a drive to get users to multi-license all of their contributions that they've made to either (1) all U.S. state, county, and city articles or (2) all articles, using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-by-sa) v1.0 and v2.0 Licenses or into the public domain if they prefer. The CC-by-sa license is a true free documentation license that is similar to Wikipedia's license, the GFDL, but it allows other projects, such as WikiTravel, to use our articles. Since you are among the top 1000 Wikipedians by edits, I was wondering if you would be willing to multi-license all of your contributions or at minimum those on the geographic articles. Over 90% of people asked have agreed. For More Information:

Multi-Licensing FAQ - Lots of questions answered
Multi-Licensing Guide
Free the Rambot Articles Project

To allow us to track those users who muli-license their contributions, many users copy and paste the "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" template into their user page, but there are other options at Template messages/User namespace. The following examples could also copied and pasted into your user page:

Option 1

I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:

OR

Option 2

I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions to any [[U.S. state]], county, or city article as described below:

Or if you wanted to place your work into the public domain, you could replace "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" with "{{MultiLicensePD}}". If you only prefer using the GFDL, I would like to know that too. Please let me know what you think at my talk page. It's important to know either way so no one keeps asking. -- Ram-Man (comment| talk)