User talk:Charles01/Archive 21

Half baked

Hi Charles01. An editor is going through changing 1½-litres to this: 1+1⁄2-Litres.

I think this is very ugly because a. there is the great gap between 1 and the fraction which gives an instant of puzzlement and b. the fraction itself is too big causing horizontal blank spaces between lines.

But the proselytizer believes the change is a help to people with reading difficulties.

Do you think 1. I should go waste my time in better ways or 2. should I work for a better solution or reversion to the previous arrangement? Yes/No please. Ta Eddaido (talk) 23:27, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

Praga?

:I agree with you. I do not think, in the great order of things, that it is the most important issue in the world. And it is possible that if my screen were differently configured it MIGHT look less silly than "1+1⁄2-Litres". Don't know.

This is part of a bigger issue. The wiki-community is disproportionately dominated by computer people. They spend their working lives as "IT Managers" (or whatever the current euphemism is) trying to make the companies for which they work think and operate more like computers and adjust their thinking processes accordingly. I spent much of my working life trying to make IT Managers think and operate more like members of the human race. Looking back at the progress made - above all Micro-Soft's mega-clunky adoption of Apple Mac windows operating interface - I think the human race army is in some ways winning. Or at least is not losing. But the battle will never be over and the IT Managers will not give up. Have you noticed how whenever you use a dash in the text someone diligently comes along and replaces it with something bizarrely odd involving (from memory so could be wrong) the letters "NSP"?

Praga

I think your "Fraction IT Manager" is using some kind of a "template", and these tend to be designed by (otherwise sane and decent. usually) members of the human race whose first language is computer rather than English. It is possible that it would be possible for the "Fraction IT Manager" to design a "template" that does not install that silly gap and that furthermore manages to make the ½ turn up in font the same size as the rest of the text. But English is not his first language so he does not see the point.

Maybe the first thing would be to ask a template guru about designing a template to do the job properly. (No, I am not a template guru.) That way your "Fraction IT Manager" and those of us who start with some version English as a language can both all be satisfied.

For me, there are better ways to use my time and possibly also yours. However, were you to launch a discussion on the project automobile talk page, it might lead somewhere useful. If you do so, you should on no account adopt my carping tone as herein. That's not the wiki way. Also it seems to annoy people including potential allies. Avoid sentences with more than one clause - or two at a maximum. And avoid big words. In short, if you want to win even a small battle, you have to do it in terms that lots of people will follow, understand, and instinctively sympathize with. I am not good at any of this, so why I'm preaching it to you I have no idea.

Anyhow, my eldest son is back from uni for the weekend so now I have to take him to the station. Happy Saturday and regards Charles01 (talk) 09:11, 21 January 2012 (UTC).

Thank you for all that, steadied me up a bit but may have only delayed my reaction, will see. Took mine to the airport on Wednesday after 6 weeks here but its 20 years since it was for that same destination. Please would you tell me what kind of car this is so I can put it into a category but in any case have a good Sunday. Regards, Eddaido (talk) 04:38, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

I have barely heard of Praga. My car enthusiasm is more all embracing than my car knowledge which tends to become progressively thinner the further back before about 1950 you go. But yes, the car in the picture you have found must be a Praga. Confidence >99%, once I've enlarged the image a little. It's identically fronted to other Pragas depicted in Wikipedia (eg Praga Alfa which was apparently manufactured from the late 1920s right up to 1942) except for the bends at the end of the headlight bar, which hardly add up to a total identity switch.

Happy day and beyond. Charles01 (talk) 08:50, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

Thanks again. Praga sorted. Never crossed my mind it would be more than a model name and have a WP article! Eddaido (talk) 11:38, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

Barnstar

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Auto Union 1968

Hi Charles, My knowledge about cars is almost none. I got the date from the Dutch registration. I leave it up to you to change whatever you think fit. Regards, Alf — Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.122.139.150 (talk) 17:29, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

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Yes. I wasn't sure whether the name Opel Olympia was intended as a celebration of the 1936 (Summer) Olympic Games in Berlin or the 1936 (Winter) Olympics in Garmisch-Partekirchen (a double barrelled small town formed from two hitherto separate but adjacent villages pushed together by government decree as part of the Olympic Games process). Or both. Whoever applied the disambiguation evidently knows the answer which is good. Or he/she guessed which isn't! Anyhow, I do not think this is desperately important. Regards Charles01 (talk) 21:52, 15 February 2012 (UTC)

Olympian cousins

from 1937

to late 1951

Hi #1, I find there are no articles about Vauxhalls 12 and 14 which seems a pity. I'd also like to take this chance of pointing out that the new monocoque-style hull introduced with the Ten of 1937 survived with re-bent grille and mudguards and bigger boot to 1951 as the Velox and Wyvern. Here to compare and contrast:

I'll admit it might in fact be a 14 size version on the V & W - back doors - but they had 6-light bodies. I didn't ever run a rule over them though. Tapes were for dressmaking.

Note the quality of the lower image.

Best, Eddaido (talk) 02:21, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

I agree with you. Wiki-entries for those 1940s Vauxhalls have been informally on my "to do" list for years. One of these days I guess I'll pick up an old copy of Motor or something that will give me enough to make a start. Unless someone else gets in first. I started on the Opels from the 50s because little by little over the past couple of decades, the equivalent German language entries have turned into nice informative coherent articles. I also have the odd German language source here at home that I can dig out. I suspect that my ability to write English AND to understand (more or less) German language sources is a relatively unusual combination among those able and willing to contribute usefully to articles on cars in english-wiki, though. Which is one reason (for me) to do the Opels before the Vauxhalls.

I don't really know enough about the Vauxhall 12/14 to compare and contrast them with the postwar all-new Wyvern. Contemporary reports from the early 50s stressed the newness of the Wyvern but then you would, wouldn't you? I agree the family look from the 30s is unmistakable, and I suppose when they took the Churchill tanks out of the Luton plant and went back to cars, they probably found a lot of the tooling etc had made it safely through the war. More to the point, a lot of the people in their late 30s/early to mid 40s coming back to the Luton plant from the army would have been the same people who were closely involved with prewar production. And in the late 1930s they certainly stressed the extent to which the new monocoque Vauxhalls, in respect of which they had tooled up to produce massive volumes, were the way for the future.

It MIGHT be possible to set up a decent entry on the Vauxhall 12 using stuff on the web. Maybe someone has uploaded images of some old brochures or magazine articles? My problem with web based sources is that you never know which bits are to be believed: an irony, I appreciate, for someone who contributes to Wikipedia. However, just because something is wiki-source referenced to the limit, that doesn't always stop it from being ... um .... questionable. When you click on web based source notes they very often take you to broken links. Still, it's hard (and surely not usually remotely worth the hassle) to fudge a web-image of a simple image of something printed fifty years ago.

Good times Charles01 (talk) 08:57, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Celica image

Charles01: You have posted a picture of my Toyota Celica Liftback on Wikipedia website. I have no objection to picture of car being used as taken in a public place, but please remove/blur the registration number from picture to preserve my privacy. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.204.109.187 (talk) 13:06, 29 February 2012 (UTC)

Dear Sir or (though it seems less likely - or is that a sexist assumption creeping in?) Madam

Thanks for your note. Thanks for exhibiting your car. And I hope you weren't too disconcerted to find a picture of it on wikipedia. I think it's quite a good picture, especially given that I think it was taken between rain showers, but then I guess I'm biased.

Please take a look to see if you like what I've done. You may need to refresh your screen ("F5") to see the way the page in question is shown on wikipedia now (rather than the way your computer may have stored it on a previous visit). I am about 95% confident of having correctly identified the picture that concerns you, but if I'm wrong about that, please provide more info for me to identify the picture in question. Probably it will be one of the two pictures that I've just copied to the right of this message. And thank you.

Success Charles01 (talk) 13:40, 29 February 2012 (UTC)

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