User talk:Pedant17

Hello, Pedant17. Welcome to Wikipedia.

A few tips for you to start going. (I'll send more if I see that I can help you :-)

Just edit stuff off the cuff for a while. We like that!
When you have time, check out Wikipedia:Welcome, newcomers + the links in there.
You can sign your stuff on talk pages with ~~~~ It will convert to your username + the time. "anon" is fine too.
If puzzled, put a question on Wikipedia:Village pump, or feel free to ask me on my talk page if it's a very general question.
Most of all, have fun but take our work seriously!

-- Cimon Avaro on a pogo-stick 01:37 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Nice prose

I'm envious of your language skills, as demonstrated for instance in your edits on nation.

I hope you don't mind my small changes, of which the most notable might be the removal of the link to institution. I like links, but only when they are relevant to the article they appear in. :-) I hope I haven't worsened the language again - at least not too much.
--Ruhrjung 17:25, 29 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Yeah, institution needs some work .... Pedant17 12:59, 2 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Regarding your edit on Secretary of State for War, you changed the wording from "... was replaced by that of the ..." to "... when the cabinet title became ...". The newly created Secretary of State for Defence replaced the three cabinet positions of First Lord of the Admiralty, Secretary of State for Air and Secretary of State for War, and so the former wording was correct. The office of the Secretary of State for War's was downgraded to become the office of the Minister of Defence for the Army. I have change the text to reflect this. Mintguy 12:57, 6 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Nice edit

I liked your recent edit on right wing politics. Cheers Jack 00:24, 28 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Hi Pedant, reg. your edits in Jakarta Tomcat I notice you've changed a lot of passive voice to active voice. Are you a technical writer by any chance ? You have any views on what voice an encyclopedia should ideally use ? Any reference articles, website links are welcome. Jay 05:37, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Hi Pedant, thanks for copyediting the French law on... article. I cringed when I saw some of the spelling errors (mine) that you picked up. I really must remember to spell check. Thanks again. :) fabiform | talk 13:38, 8 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Hi Pedant, can you answer the questions directed at you in talk:Landmark Education. Jay 06:04, 14 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Corsets

Dear Pedant17,

I'm surprised that you restored the bit about corsets that I excised, especially as I put a LONG discussion of the reason for the edit in the clothing:talk section. Have you read my comments?

Zora 09:36, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Clothing taboos

I'm upset that you've restored, in its entirety, the section on clothing taboos. It's too long and detailed and unbalances the article. I may be wrong, but I have the feeling that you have some emotional investment in such transgressions. It's ... um ... squicky in an article supposed to be neutral in tone.

When I have time to write the section on clothing maintenance, I think most of the topics you mention could be covered in one paragraph, in a more distanced way.

I will refrain from cutting out your additions until I write the new section. Which won't be till after Saturday, when I take the OS section of my A+ test.

BTW, while some of the edits you made to my prose were good -- made it crisper -- some I thought made it worse. But I'm going to stay away from them until we hash out the matter of the "clothing taboos".

Zora 05:55, 2 Jul 2004 (UTC)

OK, I did the revisions. I wrote the section on clothing maintenance (and then enormously expanded the article on laundry) and then I added a para to the top where I talk about counter-culture clothing and link to beatnicks, hippies, punks, etc.

Then I deleted the clothing taboo section.

I hope you'll feel that your concerns are addressed by the changes.

Zora 08:25, 7 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Voting of Corporations?

Hi Pedant17.

You added a remark on Corporation implying to me that Corporations can vote in some jurisdictions. I've asked for examples on the discussion page Talk:Corporation and out of curiosity would be really interested to know where this is true. Maybe you had somthing particular in mind and could contribute it? Thanks -- S.K. 14:00, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Rugby Football

"And compare the name of Ellis Park in Johannesburg: one of the sacred sites of rugby union." – Snigger, So no POV in that statment then! I suppose it could be argued that as it is at around 3000m above sea level, it is closer to heaven than any other first class rugby pitch. Philip Baird Shearer 06:39, 26 Aug 2004 (UTC)

The Welsh sing "Bread of heaven" not "close to heaven". If you want the home of the gods you have to go to HQ ;-)

I have written an additional piece on Professional sports#The English class system of the 1800s and professional players, which tries to explain the class attitudes of Victorian gentlemen and how that contributed to the split in Rugby. I am not happy with some of the wording and would appreciate it if you would edit for me. Philip Baird Shearer 22:35, 27 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for a job well done. Philip Baird Shearer

The business and economics forum

Anouncing the introduction of The Business and Economics Forum. It is a "place" where those of us with an interest in the business and economics section of Wikipedia can "meet" and discuss issues. Please drop by: the more contributors, the greater its usefulness. If you know of other Wikipedians who might be interested, please send this to them.

mydogategodshat 19:12, 26 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Sociology of clothing

Just to notify you that someone had added to that article that you created. [[User:Poccil|Peter O. (Talk)]] 05:14, Oct 15, 2004 (UTC)

(No Relation, Again)

Salutations, Pedant17!
I've seen you around and just wanted to drop a line to say hello because of our similar handles--I did the same with User:Pedant earlier, thus the "again" in the header. If I can be of help with your articles--see my user page and User:PedanticallySpeaking/Articles for what I'm working on--do let me know. Ave atque vale! PedanticallySpeaking 17:03, Oct 28, 2004 (UTC)

Full stops (star (disambiguation))

Hi, I would have expected a pedant to add punctuation marks. Removing full stops from sentences seems rather strange to me. Could you explain? All the best, <KF> 11:04, Nov 27, 2004 (UTC)

I wasn't quite sure whether I had missed out on some general rule for disambiguation pages. If that's not the case, it's completely up to you to leave the page as it is or re-add the full stops. Have a nice day, <KF> 12:03, Nov 27, 2004 (UTC)

RFA candidate

Salve, Pedant17!
I nominated myself for adminship at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/PedanticallySpeaking2 and would appreciate your vote as you cast one in my earlier nomination. Ave! PedanticallySpeaking 19:49, Dec 9, 2004 (UTC)

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)

Copyright Clearing

Hello. You edited the zsync article a bit. I am the author of that article and I have previously published it on my site Wikinerds.org (not related to Wikipedia/Wikimedia). Your copyedits, if they are copyrightable, are now released under the GFDL since you edit on Wikipedia. It may happen that someday I may want to use your copyedits under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license on my site. You will get proper attribution as "Pedant17" or with your full legal name, if you prefer. Here and here you can check the original article. If you agree with the CC-licensing of your copyedits, if they are copyrightable, please contact me using my talk page. Thank you. NSK 09:06, 13 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Hi again. I saw your note in your user page; I respect your decision and I will not ask you again about any licensing issues. However, your use of the word "commercialisation" makes me to believe that you have partial understanding of copyright issues and the GFDL and CC licenses and perhaps you misunderstood their contents. I am not a lawyer and I give no legal advice, but I have read the GFDL and CC licenses and I happen to be able to understand some limited areas of the copyright, trade mark and patent law. Please note, also, that I have met RMS in a speech and that I like what he does very much (my computer has an FSF sticker on it, I got it from Stallman himself, I have placed a GNU icon on my site and I have signed against software patents in Europe), but I also like Creative Commons and Professor Lessig. Both GFDL and CC-By-SA-2 allow commercialisation. I can get any GFDL material and sell it without giving any royalties to its original author, and the same can be done with CC material. The differences between GFDL and CC are mainly cultural (ideological) and legal. The main legal differences are that in GFDL you must redistribute the whole text of the license, but in CC you just can place a reference to the CC website and license name. In GFDL there are very effective protections regarding the file format of the source. In GFDL, also, there is a requirement to keep a changelog. The reasons I don't use GFDL in some of my texts is the requirements of the license text redistribution and the maintainance of the changelog. CC is more light-weight, but I would prefer to use GFDL for a book, while I find CC very useful for small articles and wikis. What is important to understand is that commercialisation is allowed with both licenses. Also note that there is a CC license which disallows commercial uses, it is called CC-By-SA-NC-2. NSK 04:11, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Just noticed this in passing "I remain (as yet) unconvinced of the merit of opening any loopholes to the potential commercialisation of my contributions. Accordingly, I submit them under the GNU Free Documentation License only.". You should be aware that, as NSK points out above, the GFDL already permits others to commercialise your contributions, although the nature of the license is such that the motivation to do so is greatly reduced (that is, it's difficult to sell something when you can get it for free). The Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license is essentially the same deal, but it's a much clearer license. — Matt Crypto 13:37, 24 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Edict of Nantes

I noticed that you changed all those waffles and passive tenses to good lean and strong active constructions, and I just want you to know that such labors do not go unnoticed and unappreciated! Thanks! --Wetman 07:07, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Francisca

I'm not quite sure what the point of your edits were. You changed a correctly capitalised link to an incorrectly capitalised one, you changed the standard abbreviation "c." to the non-standard full form "circa", you said that the axe has a distinctive shape without saying what it was, and you changed a perfectly clear sentence to another perfectly clear sentence, differing only in inessential matters of style. Why? Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 10:11, 7 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The link didn't show up with a capital in the sentence, as it was piped "reenactor" — thus changing the capital made no difference to the text.

True. Sometimes I edit for the LOOK in trhe source text as well, where an upper-case letter can jar.

But when that means a caprialisation pipe, you're sacrificing efficiency for a minor (and subjective) improvement of what readers won't see. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 22:54, 28 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Your argument concerning "circa" would make more sense if you'd changed it to "about" — but in any case, "c." (or sometime "ca") is used thoughout Wikipedia, and this is the first time I've seen "circa" used (though doubtless there are other places). Moreover, as I said, the abbreviation is standard; changing it is rather like changing "etc." to "et cætera" or "e.g." to "exempli gratia".

I take your pioint on the expansion of "etc." But I persist in disliking abbreviations in general, and ambiguous abbreviations (especially c. but also ca.) in particular. Circa appears as an English word (albeit semi-acclimatised) in the OED, and appears to me much more helpful to those readers of Wikipedia who do not have habitual familiarity with standard historiography.

Many people know what "c." means, because it's the standard term, but would be confused by "circa", which isn't. And anyone who didn't know what "c." means would surely not know what "circa" means. I can't see any ambiguity, incidentally. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 22:54, 28 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The illustration and the text seemed to me amply to convey the right impression of the axe, so gesturing vaguely at a distinctive shape still seems unnecessary at best.

OK.

I can only say that I registered no difference in clarity between the the versions.

Thanks.

Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 09:16, 9 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Pedant17 22:48, 28 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

potato fruits

Just to say cheers for cleaning up the stuf I wrote on potato fruits much clearer and wikidified.Andham2000 15:43, 7 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Your copyediting skill is great

I'm most impressed with the cleanup you did at Ghost (software). I have removed the word alleged in the first para, as Ghost really was called "General Hardware-Oriented Software Transfer", and bore this title in versions up until the Symantec acquisition. There is no doubt that the full name was designed to provide a catchy acronym, but I can't be sure whether the name Ghost ever existed before the full name did.-gadfium 01:47, 12 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Nice edit

Good work on Myxozoa. The article is in much better shape than it was before you found it. The Myxobolus cerebralis-related articles are sort of my babies, and I'm always delighted to see them improved. You may want to put in more precise edit summaries, though--"copyedits" sounds like you just changed a few words.

Thanks, Dave (talk) 12:39, Jun 20, 2005 (UTC)

--== Pedant 17 is doing some ridiculous (and in addition wrong) pseudopedantry ==--

Pedant 17 seems to think that the merit of prose is inversely related to the number of uses of existential words: "is", "are" "was" "there are" "there is", etc. So when he-or-she undertakes a massive edit, he-or-she tries to strip out the "there are"'s, "is"'s, etc. and substitutes "elegant variation" by coming up with lots of diverse verbs and artificial locutions. Typical would be: ORIGINAL TEXT BY SOMEONE WHO KNOWS THE SUBJECT: "There is a bell tower on the village square." PEDANT 17 EDITS IT STYLISTICALLY TO: "Astride the village square looms a bell tower." Not only is the latter not "better" stylistically, it is also likely to be wrong unless Pedant 17 knows specifically how the tower relates to the square. (This example is imaginary, but fairly represents thousand of Pedant 17's edits.) Pedant 17 is sacrificing factual accuracy for a bogus notion of good English style (one properly lambasted in Elements of Style under "elegant variation").

Arrrgh.