User talk:Ortolan88
Hello there, welcome to the 'pedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you need any questions answered about the project then check out Wikipedia:Help or drop me a line. BTW, The Grand Old Opry is great a stub entry - I went ahead and "wikified" it so that it looks and works like other wikipedia articles. You might want to take a look at it. Cheers! --maveric149
Hi Ortolan88,
I've knot been ignoring you. Just a little slow to find my way around. I found maveric149 and your tips helpful and just getting up to speed now.
I've responded to some of your questions knot,bowline. Your comments have been on the mark and appreciated. Please continue. I am going to focus on building the basic articles. After that I'll fine tune each article incorporating your comments and all round get more conversant.
Later I'll add pictures for each method of tying knots. Big job!
Satsun, Friday, June 21, 2002
Howdy! You wanted some pointers, so here they are: Generally it is a bad idea to start a message in a talk page by bolding a word like "attitude" or saying things such as "I'm not looking for a fight." -- even when prompted by another user's rude remarks (I didn't see anything really rude on the talk page BTW). These types of statements immediately gets the other person on the defensive and may skew the way they read what you say -- sometimes assuming you are saying something you don't intend. Just try to sound nice and constructive -- even when being nice is not called for. That way the person you are talking with shouldn't have reason to become overly defensive and might even agree with your constructive criticism. Facts and logic become irrelevant when feelings get involved. --maveric149, Sunday, June 23, 2002
Ortolan, WRT your problems with the database responsiveness, Lee Daniel Crocker has been working on another major revision to the wikipedia software which should hopefully improve responsiveness a lot. IIRC, one of the big slowdowns is when the search engines come and crawl the 'pedia. --Robert Merkel
I just saw your comment at Famous military writers about "one-liners". Previously I tended to limit the scope of that term to stand-up comedy, but your usage is so appropriate. I share your apparent belief that long lists of names don't inspire anything other than deletion. This is especially so when the name is wikied to a non-existent article. Placing a name or other list element in a time, place and activity context makes it a lot more meaningful. Perhaps we have the seed of another wikipedia rule proposal here. Eclecticology, Saturday, June 29, 2002 When I read "one-liners" it reminded me of Henny Youngman (1906-1998) - "King of the one-liners". What you say suggests that we may need a disambiguation page for one-liners. I've been filling in some of the key data when I can. Still, no one knows better why an item is being put on a list than the person who puts it there. Fame is just another subjective concept; we can only hope that the really famous will shine through. -Ec
Anyway, http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=bah shows that you're right. I'd misremembered the severity of "bah" (probably due to the cartoonish treatment Ebenezer Scrooge gets?) I'm usually not so scornful. Cheers, Koyaanis Qatsi
Here is a good site for online conversions you might find useful. http://www.onlineconversion.com/ Cheers! --maveric149, Wednesday, July 10, 2002
WRT movie entries: Years are insufficient to disambiguate movies since different movies with the same title sometimes come out in the same year--sometimes on different subjects, sometimes not. Directors are insufficient to disambiguate titles because directors sometimes direct remakes of their own movies. More reasons to cover all works with the same title and same source material "under one roof," as it were. So far I haven't felt strongly enough about it to make it an issue, though I've felt for awhile that the disambiguation efforts on wikipedia in general have exceeded the useful and are now approaching the ridiculous. Koyaanis Qatsi, Thursday, July 11, 2002
I haven't written the spiderworts article yet. And I took the picture before I knew they were most known as weeds, so I should reshoot the picture to show the rest of the plant. Currently all it shows is the flowers.
So far as the disambiguation goes--I prefer to wait until there's enough to make a solid article for the disambiguated sense too, but others don't, so o-bla-di o-bla-da. I don't give it much thought, though I generally dislike stubs. But I'm guilty of starting a number of stubs myself, so I'll just put the stone back down. :-)
Here are your spiderworts. Article to come (and it'll probably be another stub....) File:Spiderworts.jpg Cheers, Koyaanis Qatsi]
Sorry about the Zoe incident -- your words were a bit harsh in the light that Zoe seems to be very sensitive about of late. I just don't want to take the chance of losing Zoe before she gets accustomed to the type of peer review process here. --maveric149
Opps! Thanks for fixing my typo. --maveric149
About voting pages, in response to your comment on my talk page: There is a specific bug in the automatic voting mechanism (which I have yet to report), in that automatic votes always get a carriage return at the end of the line but assume that the page that the vote is being added to also has a carriage return at the end of the last line. If somebody (like yourself) edits the page manually, then this may not be true. So in order to keep the software from screwing up, you need to make sure that there is a carriage return at the end of the last line on the vote page after you edit it. (It's possible that your browser will interfere with this.) You won't see a problem in the preview, or even in the page as it is displayed when your edit is over; the problem won't show up until the next automatic vote, which will then be tacked on to the end of the last line in the page, rather than put on a new line where it should be. This is not too serious, but it makes things hard to read. Anyway, this is an obscure, unreported bug that will probably be moot with the new version of the software anyway. — Toby Bartels, Sunday, July 14, 2002
well I put a stub up for spiderworts. Could you add anything to it? All I know is what I saw of them and the brief bits I was told by the person who identified the plant from the photo. Thanks, Koyaanis Qatsi
Ortolan, I completely agree with your talk at the list of operas. Lists are nice, but without annotation, they usually provide little information. Many lists can be either transformed into text, or in the case of the "List of" pages, a line or two with some info makes the lists much more informative. Jheijmans 09:33 Jul 23, 2002 (PDT)
Hey there, smarty-pants! And welcome to Wikipedia!! I liked your thoughtful comments on white trash. It seems to be a semi-serious term of contempt for whites whom the speaker/writer deems beneath him because they're stupider, dirtier or more unfortunate. As a term, white trash enjoys a more comfortable currency because it's still politically correct to twith whites in the US, so all sorts of gag posters and books can mock rednecks and hillbillies. Perhaps some people miss being able to make fun of blacks (as in Jack Benny and Rochester). The challenge for Wikipedians is to write an article about the phenomena, describing how and why the word is used, in a way that everyone will say: "Yup, this article is accurate." Now, put away your shotgun, clean up that front yard and get to work (grin). Ed Poor
You can probably find all the one liners in the history of the article. Copy and paste. BTW, I for one think they are great. Danny
Damn -- It looks like several users missed the vandalism in List of novelists and continued to make valid edits that page after the vandalism occurred. There is no magical way to correct this and will have to resolved the old fashioned way. Until somebody edits the article again, here is the link to the major deletion [1]. --mav
I repaired it; I'm very handy with text editors. At any rate, I agree that an unannotated list is worthless; every entry should have a short gloss that serves to identify it better than a mere name. This list is also getting long enough that it shoulud be broken into smaller pieces, and many of the names need to be fixed to conform to our conventions. --~~
Hello, I found the Huck Finn quotation and have put it up at talk:Huckleberry_Finn. Cheers, --KQ
RE lists: Please don't be discouraged from adding useful one liners to list entries just because some lone crank is on a naked list crusade. In retrospect I should have blocked 209's IP for a day or two after you made me aware of the obvious and unexplained vandalism by this person. But alas, I am a pushover when it comes to blocking IPs (even temporarily) -- esp. for users who have contributed good content in the past (as 209 has done). I'm sorry if my inability to do the right thing has discouraged you in any way. We all need to play nice and to enforce that sometimes somebody has to be the cop -- which isn't popular and why I hesitate sometimes (BTW, I still am the number one blocker of IPs, but that is only because I review hundreds of edits a day to monitor against blatant vandals -- not to be confused with newbies experimenting). --mav
- It's always tricky dealing with vandals: too much attention encourages them, but allowing the damage can also encourage them (see Broken Windows). --Ed Poor
Thanks for the compliment on the spiderwort pic. That was at an organic blueberry farm in town; I was waiting to shoot a work party that eventually materialized three people. Hence a lot of walking around checking things out.
I think it's a great idea to add info to the history of plants--I read once that the Iris was used in ancient Egyptian art; in this case the Iris in the picture they provided would have been several thousand years old. For a minute I was completely stunned trying to imagine it--too bad I can't remember the source. --KQ
Thanks for italicizing all those films at List of films preserved in the United States National Film Registry--I forgot to do that after linking all of them (and I've been working off that list for two days, continuing to forget). --KQ
That's a great quote you found for the Alfred Hitchcock page. --KQ 20:11 Aug 3, 2002 (PDT)
Hello, could you visit http://meta.wikipedia.com/wiki.phtml?title=Meta-Tree+-+Works+of+Art and see if anything's been left out (besides the ships, which I forgot) in terms of italics/quotation marks? Thanks, --KQ
- do you mean that the Chicago Manual of Style says that TV series should not be italicized? What do they suggest?
...
- I just dug out my MLA (3rd edition, 1988) and they suggest in section 2.5.2 that TV series be italicized or underlined. They also suggest paintings, sculptures, and planes be italicized, which I had forgotten completely if I ever knew it to begin with. --KQ 09:33 Aug 6, 2002 (PDT)
I'll defer to you on the Leadbelly/Robert Johnson bit. I was the one who added the bits on music to begin with, and only recently decided that Leadbelly was "more obscure"--a conclusion I based on nothing more than my own experience and those of people around me. And, just for the record, I very much like Leadbelly and don't much care for Robert Johnson. :-) "Goodnight, Irene" is of course a classic, but "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" is equally good, and I have some peculiar fondness for "Alabama Bound" and "Pick a Bale of Cotton." --KQ 14:57 Aug 7, 2002 (PDT)
Hi! I believe you wrote the following to me:
Welcome! Usually with a misspelling, particularly a common one, the practice is to simply redirect the page to the correct spelling. The theory is that someone might make the same mistake in an article and this will put them in the right place. I will do this with Psylocibin. The redirect is performed by replacing the text of the article with #REDIRECT followed by a reference to the correct article enclosed in double brackets.
Please undo your redirection of Psylocibin. This is the name of a historically important music band, and will undoubtedly have its own page eventually. Right now it should be a stub. But note that Psylocibin the band has nothing directly to do with the drug Psylocybin. In other words, this is not a misspelling. David 08:14 Aug 19, 2002 (PDT)