User talk:Rossami

Hi, welcome. I like your Comparative military ranks article. I wanted to add the US Air Force enlisted ranks, but the table is too daunting for me. :) RickK

Please don't add intra-paragraph linebreaks to articles! I can appreciate the desire to get line-by-line diffs, but the linebreaks cause squirrelly formatting and editing problems; most editors will whack them on sight, so they're not likely to survive, and you're just making extra work all around. Diff listings highlight added and deleted chars in red, which is we look for instead of added/subtracted lines. Stan 02:24 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Thanks for your feedback. I'll admit that I have not often run to formatting problems from the intra-paragraph line breaks (except where using any of the indenting features - I try not to accidentally insert linebreaks there). And, while you're right that the diff feature highlights changes in red, I have two dislikes with the current system that the intra-paragraph breaks seem to minimize. 1) After making a minor edit (like a spelling or punctuation fix) in the middle of a really large article with long paragraphs, an intra-paragraph break can reduce the lag time a lot. (I routinely work on dial-up so response and download time is important to me.) 2) Intra-paragraph breaks make it easier to see what happened after moving whole sentences and paragraphs around to improve the readability and flow of an article. The existing system will highlight entire paragraphs in red after that kind of change - not very helpful. I will try to be even more sensitive to whether it's created a format problem, but I'm reluctant to give up what seems to be a useful tool. Rossami 15:18 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)

You do indeed advance good arguments for the change. My reaction is that we generally deprecate long paragraphs and long articles, although not everybody is in agreement on that, and if your paragraphs are shorter, there is less need to do intra-paragraph sentence rearrangement. But the most important reasons not to start unilaterally adding the linebreaks is that no one else on Wikipedia is doing it, there are 140,000+ articles written the other way, and there a thousand editors who will remove linebreaks without hardly thinking about it. So you'll only accomplish this change if you can get other editors to go the same way. A good place to start the discussion is at the Wikipedia:Village pump. The hazard of course is that you'll find lots of people vehemently opposed, but don't be discouraged by that, often people are initially resistant to changes in the status quo. Stan 15:54 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Why are you moving disambiguation pages to xxx (Disambiguation)? I see no advantage to it at all, while it causes the links to those pages to be hidden to Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links and, when it gets online again, Special:Maintenance. Andre Engels 15:57, 16 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Trying to make the fact that it is a disambiguation page even more obvious to 1) readers, 2) editors and authors who are creating the link. But if it causes the query that populates "Disambiguation pages with links" to miss the entries, that defeats the purpose. Looks like I have some reverting to do. Rossami

Thanks for fixing those english links in my articles. From here on in, I should do them correctly by following your example. Bmills 09:24, 18 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Brunswick

I'm not sure Brunswick, Germany should be at Braunschweig if Brunswick is the more common name in English. I think you need to get more agreement on this before moving the pages around. Delirium is saying on VfD that Brunswick is the more common name and at Talk:Brunswick, Sandman says the same thing. Angela 03:19, 30 Nov 2003 (UTC)

I agree. Wikipedia policy is not to have the english version of a name but the most common version used in english. That clearly is Brunswick, not Braunschweig, so Brunswick is where the page belongs on the english wikipedia. German wikipedia, would needless to say be different. Sorry. FearÉIREANN 03:33, 30 Nov 2003 (UTC)

I've moved the VfD talk to Talk:Brunswick. I think it would best to leave it, maybe a week, to get agreement before spening time fixing the links etc. The last thing you want is a page-move-war which has already happened with places like Poznan etc. Angela 03:59, 30 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Thanks for your comment. I have to admit I have never ever heard it outside Germany, or among users of American English, called anything but Brunswick. There is a tendency in some aspects of American English to nativise names, eg, Turino, Milano, Roma, etc. But from my experience it is almost unheard of in all other forms of English (British English, Hiberno-English, Indian English, etc.). To be honest, to me Braunschweig could be anywhere in the planet (OK, anywhere in Germany!). Using Braunschweig seems as alien as using Baile Atha Cliath for Dublin or Ceananas for Kells, their official language names. As the page is currently at Brunswick I changed the reference on Brunswick (disambiguation) to reflect that. That should only be changed if there is clear agreement to move the page. I hope you don't mind. :-) FearÉIREANN 05:41, 30 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Re: 'American'-> US which you've done on four pages I've worked on:

It's hard to conceive of any circumstances under which "American writer" or "American filmmaker" or any such construction could be "ambiguous"; i.e., not mean an inhabitant of the United States of America. I'm Canadian, and I think so! American is just the adjective referring to people from the USA in that context. It is 100% pure English phrasing, and 'US writer' or 'US filmaker' sounds weak by contrast.

Were it possible to confuse this with another meaning of 'American' (an inhabitant of South America, a native American Indian) it would NOT be in THIS context where it's clearly referring to the country of origin in the same sense as 'Canadian writer', 'British filmmaker', etc.

Encyclopedias use "American xxx", including the Britannica (http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=84515&tocid=0&query=kate%20chopin&ct= -- "American novelist and short story writer"); Encyclodepia.com: (http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/c/chopin-k1.asp -- "American author..."); The Columbia encyclopedia (http://www.bartleby.com/65/ch/Chopin-K.html -- "American author"), etc. etc.

So I'm reverting those pages. Thanks!

ZviGilbert 22:46, 3 Dec 2003 (UTC)