User talk:Richard New Forest

Welcome

Welcome!

Hello, Richard New Forest, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question and then place {{helpme}} before the question on your talk page. Again, welcome!

I can see you've been a registered user for a while, but I thought that the welcome message might still be useful. Thanks for the style corrections on Gharial. Enuja 20:40, 10 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

References in Pollarding

Dieter -

You just tried to do something to the references section I'd added to Pollarding, then undid it again. I'm new to making references work, so I'm not at all sure I'd done it right -- but what were you trying to do, and what didn't work? Richard New Forest 11:24, 21 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Richard, I was trying to bring your "References" item "Oxford English Dictionary Compact Edition 1971...", up to the first line of the page when you click the ref no. (No 1 in this case) thinking your (although quite correct) way wasn't working, but my shorter method didn't work any better either. The References section is still at the bottom of the page when you click it. I apologise as have already done in the summary. Normally, when you click the link number the reference appears as first line right at the top, so anybody trying to identify what is being linked can see it straight away. See section "Origin and usage of term" in "Pollarding" article.

I am transferring this conversation to your own user talk:page. Dieter Simon 22:32, 21 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Dieter – I think I've found what's happening. It's because the text with the reference link is very near the foot of the page, and there is hardly any page below the references section. If the view is already as low as it can go when you click on the ref link, it can move no lower, so your click seems to have been ignored. However, if the refs are off the foot of the screen, the view does move, and if the window is small enough (only a few lines deep), the refs will land at the top as you'd expected – so I think all is as it should be.

Incidentally, why did you move this conversation to my user page? Should I have put it here in the first place – and if so, how would you have seen it? Richard New Forest 22:25, 22 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Finching

Hi Richard, do you agree that your "finching" article should be merged with "cattle"? Tractorboy60 14:02, 29 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Tractorboy — see my comment on Cattle talk page about this. I think there needs to be either a section on coat colours and patterns on the Cattle page, or a separate coat colours page, into either of which Finching (and a similar one I did for Colour-sided) could go. My reason for making pages on their own was so links could point to them – but links could instead point to a place on a more general page (though not quite sure how to do that...).--Richard New Forest 17:47, 29 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Richard, my name is Tom. Tractorboy60 22:09, 29 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Collie

Thanks for your work on the collie article; I've given up several times over the last couple of years on what exactly to say there. Note that quotation marks don't belong around the breed names even if they don't reflect the actual probable origins of the breeds. Those are the official breed names and there are no quotes in the official breed names. So you can take 'em out again or I will. :-) Elf | Talk 01:47, 4 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

P.S. I have a tremendous amount of history with dog-related articles in wikipedia, although I try very hard these days to stay away, or I get sucked in like I did today when I just came here to look up one little thing... So if you have any general questions or want to draw my attention to something in particular, you can leave a note on my talk page and I'll see it eventually, but who knows when. OR you can go to my user page and click E-mail this user in the left-side toolbox if you want a faster response.

Also, I'm a Border Collie owner, too. :-) Elf | Talk 02:23, 4 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Elf –

I'm not sure it's important to have the types with their exact breed names here – this is a list with comments and interpretation, not a simple list, where I agree that quotes would not be right. My feeling is that without the quotes it would be easy to miss the anomalies, and think for example that there were five Australian types listed (which of course there are, including the German one...). The quotes gently draw attention to this, without the need for overt comment. Take them out though if you feel strongly about it.

Nice dog. Am I right that he's called Sweep...? Two of my dogs (Welsh Sheepdogs) are in the list too, though I left the third out as his name is not a traditional one (Tig – Kelpie cross). I'll put a pic of one of my others on the Welsh Sheepdog page when I get around to it.--Richard New Forest 10:15, 4 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I think the place to address anomalies is in the text and that putting quotes around the breed names is misleading, implying that those are perhaps not the breed names. Nope, my dog's not Sweep--but a bit of browsing among herding dogs indicates that it's a more common name than we see in agility dogs. Probably for "sweeping" around herds or "sweeping" them in. There's a very cool online database of working border collie info (ISDS) that has stuff like this in it: http://home-l2.tiscali.nl/~palado/bcdb/dognames.htm -- maybe we should use that, pick the top 20 names or something, and then we can cite that as a reference. (That was one of the sources I used to be sure that my dog's name--Boost--was not commonly used. ;-) There are SO many BCs working in agility and competitive herding around here & I wanted to be unique.) Looking forward to seeing more Welsh Sheepdog photos. Elf | Talk 16:21, 4 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

OK, I'm happy with no quotes – those ought not to be the proper names, but I suppose they're now stuck... Good idea about the database for names – however, they are the commonest names, not necessarily the traditional ones, and so some very traditional ones get pushed rather low (Rex, Flash, Tip, Judy). How could you not have Flash? (Also, Sam is at 21, and we can't leave him out...). Useful database though.

Lots of Welsh Sheepdog photos at http://www.welsh-sheepdogs.co.uk/ (select Gallery) --Richard New Forest 16:57, 4 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]