Talk:Alameda County Fairgrounds

low level edit war

please note 1) the analog equivalent for 'acre' is not square km, that's why hectare is the default setting when using the 'convert' template. 2) the article is not really a stub as defined by wp:stub. 3) there is no consensus for splaying out reference template and other changes made previously referenced as 'questionable'. either way, it's probably better to work it out here on the talk page rather than continue edit warring. cheers! --emerson7 21:40, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

The hectare question has been enlightening to me; probably due to being raised in one of the only two countries left in the world to use quaint measurements such as "feet", "inches", and "smoots", I haven't encountered "hectare" very often. Even on pages such as this one, square meters or square kilometers seemed to be more commonly used. This page refers to the "are" as a "common unit not officially sanctioned".

But I'm willing to defer to the default setting on {{convert}}; that seems like a reasonable way to go.

Stub -- no problem.

"Splay" -- really, this is the annoying one. We all have our pet peeves; you'll have to forgive me for digging in, but seriously; the "splay" makes the underlying source material orders of magnitude easier to deal with.

I'll also point out that in situations like this when there is no consensus (such as reference style, or "meters" vs. "metres"), Wikipedia etiquette is to leave things the way they exist in the article.

(As a side note, etiquette is also usually to take it to the talk page after first revert. When I reverted your edit, I explained why -- there were multiple issues with your edit, which I mentioned in the summary. You then reverted my revert with no explanation or other comment, so I went to a more fine-grained revert.)

You'll note that, for example, there is wide consensus that infoboxes are "splayed," and as a result, they are much easier to maintain.

When references are collapsed in mid-body, this makes them -- at least for me -- much harder to pick out of the surrounding prose, and much harder to sort out the various fields within the reference.

Separating text from references makes them easier to identify and edit; and, having each field on a separate line makes each field easy to pick out and update when needed.

Why would you re-collapse something that another editor has gone to the trouble of formatting for ease of maintenance? (Which you have now done to me three times here, overriding two explicit protests.)

I won't go to the trouble of reformatting them, because it's kind of a PITA to do, which is why I protested twice, but I'll ask you to consider in the future when you encounter formatted/"splayed" references: why the previous editor did this, whether there's any benefit to undoing it, and what the detriment to undoing it might actually be.

All that being said ... thanks for bringing it to the talk page; I learned something, and that's always good. Please don't take my carping on the "splay" issue as me being overly contentious; just trying to do what's right for the project. (Oh, and by the way -- thanks for fixing the dead links!) Regards, NapoliRoma (talk) 13:28, 25 August 2011 (UTC)