User talk:Finlay McWalter/archive1

Hello Finlay, welcome to Wikipedia. I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian.

Here are some useful links in case you haven't already found them;

If you have any questions, see the help pages or add a question to the village pump. Angela 22:57, Sep 14, 2003 (UTC)

Hi there. Be bold! - work on the article Area 51 directly. (and while you're at it -- please give SI units too!) -- Tarquin 23:27, 14 Sep 2003 (UTC)

As I'm doing a wholesale rewrite, I'll wait until the change is a net positive gain before bulldozing what's there already Finlay McWalter 23:46, 14 Sep 2003 (UTC)

'tis done Finlay McWalter 11:34, 15 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Good work on noticing all those dodgy votes at VfD. The user in question has vandalised Karada's user page as well so definitely needs to be watched. By the way, sysops do not have access to IP addresses. Only developers do, and even then I'm not sure it applies to all developers or just some. Angela 23:06, 30 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Re: Shorts -> Short. I'm not sure what the actual name was at the time, but I know that all recent news calls it "Bombardier-Shorts". It appears that the name was "Short Brother" but their airplanes were always referred to as being built by "Shorts". I think it's time I did an article on them, maybe that is a good way to clear it up. User:Maury Markowitz

BTW, I'm currently in the process of cutting HMS Enterprise into separate articles, one per ship, as per usual practice, so you might as well hold off on the tweaks. Stan 19:19, 19 Oct 2003 (UTC)

All done! As you can see, I avoid permanent stubs by leaving the 1-2 sentence ship descriptions in the generic article, since there is a vanishingly small chance that any article writer will ever want to link to one of them directly. The longer articles will eventually be linked when somebody adds OBs for battles and such. Stan 21:21, 19 Oct 2003 (UTC)

re Greg Bear: No, that wasn't me. On the history page, you can see that an IP (62.60.???.???) edited just before and after me. I wouldn't log out, start a page, log in, edit, log out again, and edit some more in a short time ;-) --Magnus Manske 08:47, 24 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Finlay...oh, did I make your day? What context are you taking my contribution on Talk:Duchy? Kenneth Alansson

Re your comments on the village pump, there's free ROT-13 implementations all over the web. See for example http://as.alliancestudio.com/tk/rot13.html -- Pakaran 01:44, 26 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Thank you for your comments on my article about Midoru. This was my first attempt at writing one, so I must admit that it does need some work. I hope I have not embarrassed myself by not being familiar with the accepted scholarly style. (Thanks also for correcting the picture placement – I could not figure out how to do so, well, I was just excited to get something up). I will try to update the article to a more acceptable format as soon as possible. Any further suggestions or corrections would be most appreciated. I would like to present good works. Again, I am learning and hope to improve. There are many things I would like to write about. Infortis

I have rewritten the Midoru article from a less subjective point of view, as you suggested. Any comments would be most appreciated.--Infortis 15:36, 2 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Your improved version is excellent. I've made some further edits, just to tidy things up a teensy bit more. -- Finlay McWalter 16:58, 2 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Thank for the edits and suggestions. I will post an inquiry to the forum you mentioned regarding the image. However, since this person seemed to have wanted to achieve anonymity, for whatever reason, I may honor his intent and not put the photo back up, no matter the ruling (If someone contacts me with a legitimate interest I will probably send a copy). Now, I may be letting my imagination run away with me, but I almost wonder whether the e-mail I received which subtly suggested I should not post the photo may in fact have come from someone representing Midoru. While I do not really believe this, because the photo was only up for one day, but the address was from a UK domain and when I tried to reply it came back with an invalid type error. It is probably just some Wikipedian playing a joke and messing with my head. Question: When you register as a user here is your private e-mail address available to others on the site? Infortis 15:23, 3 Nov 2003 (UTC)

I tried the "email this user" on your userpage, and it says "no send address", which means you haven't set an email address in your preferences screen. So no-one got it via wikipedia. Anyway, wikipedians very rarely use email, particularly for stuff like this - the talk page (or your user talk page) is the appropriate venue, and any wikipedian experienced enough to care about copyright or privacy would have posted there. It's curious that someone found the article so quickly - neither google nor yahoo has crawled the new page yet, so it doesn't come up in a search result. -- Finlay McWalter 16:12, 3 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Hmmm, that is a bit odd. I used to have a program that made mirrors of sites. You could enter search preferences and it would continuously troll looking for sites or mentions of whatever you were interested in. However, it could only find what was indexed on major search engines. As I consider how someone may have obtained my e-mail address I wonder if it could be due to some posts I made while not logged on. I noticed that the IP address was displayed and someone told me that this could therefore be traced. Anyway, I don't really care, just curious. --Infortis 14:53, 4 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Re Finlay's comment to me about my "ECR" commenting-outing.

If you intend to purge the wikipedia of all content you consider to be inappropriate for reason of geekiness, please report your intention on Wikipedia:Village pump first.

I love geeks, I really do. But as much as this is the encyclopedia that Slashdot built, an encyclopedia is fundamentally general interest. The Jargon file element adds a bizarroverse second dimension to ECR where it doesn't really belong. In the grand scheme of things, it's a road. It's the king's road. It's a Spanish relic and it's a Silicon Valley landmark. If you re-read the jargon file text dump for ECR, I sincerely hope you'll see, as I did that's it's (mostly) irrelevant gobbledygok that confuses the issue. It has its place, but, but...Think of the children! 8th graders who come here to do research, and their parents, and every other layperson is going to read that and go: huh?

Simplify. Economize. Edit. :)

If someone reverts, sobeit. It's a wiki, that's how it goes, but editorial judgment is not inherently foolish, and that jargon file stuff is a.) kooky, b.)Not Really The Point.

Finlay - thank you for your welcome. You are right, I did make an effort to follow guidelines with the markup of my first page (not that it was very difficult !) and I am glad to know it is appreciated.

I spend a large slice of my working life writing and reviewing software documentation, so I know how important it is to try to achieve a consistent style and format. I am impressed by the help pages that I have found here, which give clear and helpful guidance without straying over the line into long lists of arbitrary rules. Gandalf61 09:12, Nov 8, 2003 (UTC)

Re: Borders Strike -- objection to latest refactoring

I'm quite new to Wikipedia. While I was frustrated with the refactoring of my first entry, ealier this afternoon - I was impressed with its speed - and, later, validity. I took some time to understand my mistake and re-posted in a way that I thought conformed to Wiki norms. Your latest objection/reason for refactoring, however, leaves me bewildered -- Borders is a huge multi-national company - Ann Arbor is it's headquarters and the store in question is its flagship store - and, while I won't go into it ('cause I couldn't find an article that expressed it just right and haven't had time to write it up, yet) - a strike by service industry workers for a living wage has much broader implications to historcial shifts in the U.S. economy and labor movement. But this is all a digression, I suspect - I won't convince you here -- Please just refer me to whatever editorial principles you were using to decide that the scope of the story I posted did not match with the content desired on wikipedia's "current events". -- Tallison

look at all the other things on the page - major world events that affect thosands or millions of people. While the company is large, the strike is not. A strike at all the Borders _might_ compare with a terrorist bombing, a national election, or an international sports game. You have to understand that wikipedia is here to report things as they are, not to be used to generate publicity for things. This story hasn't made it to the front pages of any major news website that I can find. If the strike spreads, then it might become noteworthy (as, for example, that coca-cola boycott is). -- Finlay McWalter 00:17, 10 Nov 2003 (UTC)

OK. Point taken. While I do think the significance of this event may well be worth "having noted" - my reasons for thinking this are blurred with my advocacy of it. I very much appreciate your taking the time to explain (and the Wiki's facilitation of this communication - Wow!). Tallison