User:Valfontis/Archive 14

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Sausage festival

Article has a few tidbits. Aboutmovies (talk) 06:09, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

I'm a Newbie: need help on correcting references for Fort Rock, Oregon

Val,

The old Fort Rock Museum website www.fortrockmuseum.com is no longer correct. Yet it is still listed in the References section for Fort Rock, Oregon. It now leads to a Japanese porn site.

The correct web address for the museum is www.fortrockoregon.com

Can you make this change? I am new to Wikipedia and don't understand how to do it myself.

Thanks! Roguefly (talk) 03:19, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

Done Valfontis (talk) 13:55, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

You're Invited! Come Celebrate Wikipedia's 10th Anniversary!

<font=3> You're invited to help celebrate Wikipedia's 10th anniversary! Visit this link for details. An informal celebration will take place at the AboutUs office located at 107 SE Washington Street, Suite 520 in Portland on Saturday, January 15, 2011. An Open Space Technology meeting is scheduled from 5pm to 7pm, with a party to follow. Admission is free!

--Another Believer _(Talk) 17:00, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

A little something for my page stalkers: Awesome visualization of deletion discussions!

http://notabilia.net/ Valfontis (talk) 22:46, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

I'd say it's a pretty accurate representation! :-) Jsayre64 (talk) 03:50, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

What an impressive method for visualization. I don't think I've ever encountered anything like that. I'm wondering about additional applications where that technique might clarify or provide new vision for. Thanks for sharing. —EncMstr (talk) 05:16, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

Put a lot of work into my edits, please respect

Greetings, I put a fair amount of time and thought into my recent edits on Willamette River. Would like to have a discussion before you undo them wholesale. Much of what you put back was poor grammar and sense. I have lots of experience improving writing without betraying technical issues, as well as familiarity with the subject. My goal here is to help improve it to competitive, encyclopedic standards. Thank you for your many hours of service here -- far greater than mine. But, let's discuss, please. Here.it.comes.again (talk) 09:54, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

Hi there. I am a former professional copy editor and one of the top 400 editors on Wikipedia. It is highly unlikely that I would revert to incorrect grammar or disrespect another editor's work (although perhaps you should reread the fine print under the edit box that says "If you do not want your writing to be edited, used, and redistributed at will, then do not submit it here.") I think you must have experienced an edit conflict. That is, I made an edit at the same time you had the edit box open, and when you tried to save, it erased your edits. Because as you can see, my only edit on Willamette River today was this one, and it changed nothing but adding a link. Could you explain why you are assuming bad faith? Two notes: It looks like you forgot to sign in for some of your edits, and you don't need to sign your edit summaries with 4 tildes--the edit history automatically records who edited an article and when it was edited. You can see the page history of the Willamette River article here. Cheers, Valfontis (talk) 10:42, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

Hi, you are entirely right, and I am so sorry. I think I was having a flashback to years of editing civil engineers who liked to insist that their grammar and sense problems protected vital technical distinctions.

Since we've crossed paths, I want to ask a great favor. I would edit a great deal more if I was getting feedback from someone with greater knowledge and experience. It can be wild and wooly out there, and the guidelines, which I would certainly benefit from studying better, can only get you so far. Would you look at my edits sometimes and give me feedback? Would you mentor this heathen a little? Here.it.comes.again (talk) 19:26, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

Re: flashback--Oh dear. I'm sorry to hear that. I understand. :) Re: mentoring--I'm flattered but I'm just not that good at mentoring. From what I saw of your grammar edits, you're definitely in the 99th percentile. Hopefully some of my talk page stalkers can suggest some places to go for feedback. I believe the adoption process is somewhat dead in the water, and in any case, I get the sense that that program is for people who need a lot more help than you do. My one suggestion would be to find an active WikiProject in one of your favorite subject areas and work with them. (Some WikiProjects are dead in the water as well.) I don't know what I'd do without my WikiProject Oregon folks. Valfontis (talk) 14:07, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. Appreciate the info. Project idea is a good one. Here.it.comes.again (talk) 02:12, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

While you're at it...

You might take a look at the Flickr stream of "http://www.flickr.com/photos/deadmantalking/". He is documenting NW cemeteries. It is likely that he has photos of gravestones of multiple Oregon notables and location shots of pioneer cemeteries all over the state. He has things copyrighted, but would likely give over any that you asked for to Wikimedia. Here.it.comes.again (talk) 19:48, 17 January 2011 (UTC)

What a fantastic collection! I'll keep it in mind. Especially for what we like to call the "old dead guys" of Oregon history. Valfontis (talk) 14:14, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

Thomas J. Howell (botanist)

Please be more civil in your edit summaries. Thank you. Nadiatalent (talk) 17:10, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

Sorry. Extreme lapse of judgement. And PMS. But it does make one cranky to write a fully sourced and halfway decent article for which the only attention one gets is over one's poor disambiguation skills. So to have one more edit regarding disambiguation be incorrect, well, Grr. But we all make mistakes. Again sorry. (But please do check to see where your links are going!) Valfontis (talk) 13:52, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

Oregon communities

Thanks for all your work on creating articles on unincorporated communities in Oregon. One request: could you please add the appropriate county navigational template to new community articles, and add the communities to the template? I've done this for most of your recent articles, I think, so you don't need to worry about those. Thanks, and keep up the good work! TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 05:40, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

No, because I disagree with a certain editor over the way the 'plates "should" be laid out and rather than raise my blood pressure I decided I wouldn't get involved with the things anymore. Sorry. But thanks for noticing and doing the honors! Valfontis (talk) 13:46, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

Survey Questions

Hi Val, I am a PhD student from the Carnegie Mellon University. I am interested in the Wikipedia community, especially the behavior of anti-vandalism and the mechanism of collaboration of the week. I noticed that you have participated in WikiProject Oregon’s collaborations before. Could you please take several minutes to answer the following questions if possible? Thanks for your help!

Q1. On average how often do you revert vandalism? A. More than 10 times a week B. 5-10 times a week C. 1-5 times a week D. less than once a week (please skip Q2& Q3 if you choose this)

Q2. Do you use any tools for anti-vandalism? How did you learn to use those tools?

Q3. How do you revert vandals but not good-faith editors ? How did you learn to identify those two kinds of editors?

Q4. How much do you learn from participating in WikiProject Oregon Collaboration of the Week? A. A lot B. A little bit C. Not at all (please skip Q5 if you choose this)

Q5. What did you learn from participating in WikiProject Oregon Collaboration of the Week? Please provide examples if possible.

Q6. Do you have any negative experience of WikiProject Oregon Collaboration of the Week?

You could leave your answers either in your or my talk page if possible. Thanks for your time! We have the same goal to make Wikipedia a better place.

Cheers --Haiyizhu (talk) 21:22, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

Invitation

Hey, how are you? Today there was a front page New York Times story about the lack of female editors in the project, so we decided to create a new mailing list which should be a better place to discuss this issue and attracting new editors in general. It would be awesome if you could join us! Steven Walling at work 03:19, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Columbia Gorge casino

Hi Valfontis-- Because you participated in Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Columbia Gorge casino, you may want to see this discussion on the article's talk page. Jsayre64 (talk) 02:43, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

Just popping in to say hello and ask a few questions. :)

Hey there. Just did a few edits and wound up thinking about you, like I always do when I edit. I have yet to make my talk page look like anything, and all it is right now is a message from you telling me that I ought to sort it out that you posted there more than a year ago now, and well, I was just wondering if perhaps you could spare a bit of time to help me set it up so it looks like the kind of page a credible person might have? That's pretty much it. Hope you're doing well, miss you. Love you. --Ainekatt (talk) 04:09, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

Replied on cheeky upstart's talk page. Valfontis (talk) 15:36, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

Note from KatKalls

Hello Val, thank you for the welcome and the links... the style manual is most welcome! I kind of jumped in with writing an article before anything else so I will go back through Mary Jane Haake and see what I missed - I noticed someone else had asked you for a review of their work, and if it isn't too presumptuous I would certainly appreciate any pointers. Also, the Oregon project caught my eye so I will go through my photos and see if anything might be appropriate or helpful. KatKalls (talk) 04:37, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

My advice to the above person still stands! I'm not very good at offering pointers and bad at following through on promises I make around here. That said, I just made one little tweak to the article just now, but this is a great first article for a newbie. Most are not so well-sourced or written. There are a few more tweaks that need to be made to make this comply with the MOS, such as the capitalization in the headers and the citation formatting, but one of the project members rated this a "C", which is great for a first article, I think. Most of my articles are only stubs, and I've been around a while. I was interested to learn about Mary Jane Haake, I hadn't heard about her before. Makes me want to get more tattoos... Gotta run, Valfontis (talk) 15:47, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

Oregon county categories

I will be working on organizing the listings in each county of Oregon by several categories, including populated places, buildings and structures, visitor attractions and protected areas. This is to help find these items within the state. I have already done so for many states including California, Arizona and others. I do not believe it is over-categorization. With so many diverse articles in each county, it was difficult to figure out what things were. I hope other people find it helpful. Jllm06 (talk) 13:17, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

I honestly don't understand the projectwide tendency to split things into ever-smaller categories (and don't really care at the moment to take the time to learn about any rationales about it), many of which are probably going to contain only one thing forever, but I'll leave initiating deletions and renames to the experts. That said, I went ahead and added all the new categories to WikiProject Oregon. Cheers, Valfontis (talk) 15:35, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

Jllm06, while I appreciate your enthusiasm, but yes, much of your sub-categorization is WP:OVERCAT, specifically WP:SMALLCAT. For instance I don't know about you, but three articles and unlikely to grow. And making your own "large overall accepted sub-categorization scheme" doesn't really cut it. The large scheme is meant where say you have 50 countries, and for 45 of those you have robust categories, so adding 5 more makes sense. My personal, general rule of thumb is this for starting a new category: At least 5 current articles to fill it up with, and the potential for at least 10 articles (the main exceptions I make are if I personally am committing to writing the articles to get to the 5 threshold within about a month). So, say "Cities in Washington County" would be fine, but not so much Mahuler County. Which is why I did not start the "High schools in XXXX County" for all the counties, as not all have enough to justify their existence by my measure. But that's my opinion. Aboutmovies (talk) 06:34, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Talkback

Hello, Valfontis. You have new messages at Talk:Blue River Reservoir.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

--Jsayre64 (talk) 02:31, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Les Balsiger

Thanks for pointing that out to me. I took a look in the history, and saw the disambiguation page had been previously put up for AFD and kept at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Les Balsiger (disambiguation). Even though not many people participated in that discussion, it's enough to persuade me it shouldn't be deleted or redirected without going through another AFD. I've reverted my edit [1], and I'll leave that page as it is for now .Robofish (talk) 15:38, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

I took the last admin action here, but I can not find a good solution, and have therefore taken this to the BLP Noticeboard., in the hope that the community can resolve this. DGG ( talk ) 19:54, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks very much for the follow up. Hopefully you will get some responses. I see, via a template edit, that Boleyn would like to revisit this as well, so I hope she chimes in. Valfontis (talk) 02:25, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Ref work

Hi Val-- Regarding your recent ref work, I'm just recommending that you install the ref formatting tool to your account, as I did here. Then, in one click, you can get the citation bot to fix citations to the article you're viewing. It will probably make tasks like this easier. Jsayre64 (talk) 03:41, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

I'll check it out, thanks! I get so used to doing things the old-fashioned way. Valfontis (talk) 20:54, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Frank W. Lewis

Thanks for creating Frank W. Lewis and for letting me know. There are three articles now on people named Frank Lewis (two born in 1912!), so I created a disambiguation page and linked them all both ways. Ma^t_chups 20:49, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Excellent, I was too lazy to do that! Valfontis (talk) 20:52, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

email fail

Mail to you (at some three-letter domain) is bouncing. tedder (talk) 16:08, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Yup. Servers are down. ETA unknown. Sucks. Time to switch over to gmail. I'll send ya the address I'm using today. (Don't usually use/check my gmail accounts because I can't get T-Bird to deal with them). Valfontis (talk) 20:06, 2 March 2011 (UTC)