User talk:Fawcett5/Archive2

Aboriginal Canada 2

Hi Fawcett5! Thanks for your reply, I have a few suggestions on how to proceed. With regards to your question about the naming distinctions being used in practice, the answer is yes. For example, the Assembly of First Nations only represents the First Nations, and only the chiefs of First Nations may vote in their elections. A related interesting article I'm working on for that is Assembly of First Nations leadership conventions. The equivalent organizations for the Métis and the Inuit in Canada are the Métis National Council and the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami. Also that government site I mentioned references the constitution of Canada, saying: "The Canadian Constitution (the Constitution Act, 1982) recognizes three groups of Aboriginal peoples — Indians, Métis and Inuit." So I feel that this is enough credibility to keep such distinctions on Wikipedia.

About the subcategories in Category:Canadian First Nations, I wanted to add something to what I've already said. By using the word "in" and geopolitical terms, we really put weight on the current existence of aboriginal people in Canada, instead of treating them as historical entities. In an era of land claims being newly resolved I think this is really important.

As for Category:Métis history in Category:Canadian history, I have a possible solution. Instead of having the question of which, if any ethnicities to include in the Canadian history category, why don't we remove them all (Canadian First Nations, Métis, Jewish Canadian), and instead make Category:Ethnic groups of Canada part of Category:Canadian history? This is what is currently done in Category:Canadian people. In addition I'm open to the renaming of all Métis categories to Métis Canadian or Canadian Métis or whichever. Or instead keep the Métis category as is, but create Métis Canadian subcategories and move everything as is down a level. Though I don't like excessive subcategories like this either, but I want to provide options.

About your question, are you sure that the correct term for an English/Scottish-Indian person is not Métis? I'm unfortunately not aware of any other term used to describe that kind of mixed ethnicity. Talk to you later, Kurieeto 17:16, Mar 31, 2005 (UTC)

Kurieeto, you are technically correct about the Métis designation, in the broadest sense of the meaning of Métis, but when you read old accounts, people are mostly careful to make the distinction, since there significant cultural and political differences from the Francophone Métis. For instance in the North-West Rebellion, the English/Scottish mixed-race people did not generally support Louis Riel.Fawcett5 19:42, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Featured article size

Liked your comment at Wikipedia talk:What is a featured article#Size. I think you're right. Hydriotaphia 00:06, Apr 1, 2005 (UTC)

I responded on EMD FP7

I responded on EMD FP7 with my guesses as to why the model. I need to look through my books in the hope of finding a real cite, though. —Morven 22:42, Apr 4, 2005 (UTC)

Botanist categories

Thank you for your comment - the wind may blow for or against, but I think that the new categories I am attempting to implement work better than the previous controversial "by nationality" arrangement - it manages to preserve a single category where all the botanists used by the WP:TOL people will hang out (using Category:botanists made it too tempting a target for people who wanted to "tidy it up" by moving articles away from where it was useful to the TOL people), which hopefully keeps TOLers happy (the List of botanists by author abbreviation I am working on concurrently also should help), it lets the nationality-categorisors do their thing too (which makes sense to some extent - if there is a Georgian botanist, it ought to be possible to find him or her from Category:Georgian people) and the other suggestions are more "bigger picture" - if there is a category for New Zealand plants, having a subcategory of that for "botanists active in New Zealand" seems to make sense; similarly if we have category:fungi, why not let readers browse from that category to see which scientists have studied fungi? The biggest single "why not" is that some individuals (especially "generalists") will get category-swamped, but for now I think waiting to see would be better. It isn't an unstructured categorisation - there is rhyme and reason to it (isn't it more important that a botanist studied Japanese flora, or worked mainly on algae, than that the botanist was American?) and they do a lot of tying together things that ought to be linked. Your point is certainly taken however. At any rate, if you do revert, some TOLers would clearly like to make sure that the author abbreviation appears in the article. Not many of the articles did actually have them in before, so if all I have done does get reverted, then I hope people will remember to keep that information in once I've put it in? (Also if you do revert, and you do leave that information in without using the template, could you please manually add the article to Category:Botanists with author abbreviations? It makes sense to keep all those botanists in one place, which is what caused the whole problem in the first place). --VivaEmilyDavies 04:40, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Sorry! Just noticed that I reverted your changes on Joseph Banks

Ooops - my apologies, this was by no means a deliberate move on my part and I have no intention of starting any form of edit war. I didn't realise I was reverting your changes, I just assumed that it was a botanist I had missed out. As for Benjamin Smith, I hope you don't mind me, for the time being at least, taking the following action: reinstating a mention of his abbreviation (this is important to the botanists here, apparently), reinstalling him to the category for biologists with abbreviations (if you leave him anywhere else, he is likely to get moved again) and also sorting him by nationality (you ought to be aware that categorisation of botanists by nationality survived a CFD vote so it must be treated as an accepted categorisation scheme for the time being - what sparked off some a problem is that the TOLers wanted a unified botanist category, and therefore one emptied all the "by nationality" categories despite the CFD vote in their favour, which upset people who liked subcategorising things. The template was meant to be something of a compromise in that it's meant to prevent people from accidentally changing the situation again - nevertheless it isn't strictly necessary). VivaEmilyDavies 05:01, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Also a quickie about subst: I will revert all the template's uses to subst once it is clear that the template has reached final form. However, the suggested text and links will be subject to criticism too, I'm sure, so it must be treated as volatile. Therefore I think it is safer to avoid subst for the time being, as this will avoid the possible problem of archaic forms of the template hanging about. VivaEmilyDavies 05:09, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I think too many people are under the impression that ambiguity is bad. The great thing about categorisation is multiple listings - one of my favourites being Nikola Tesla, who is listed as Croatian (place of birth and self-declared homeland), Serbian (ethnicity) and American (destination of emigration, main place of work, citizenship) - and not, incidentally, Austria-Hungary, which is strictu sensu his country of birth. Actually I'd be marginally in favour of including that as well, especially given his Austrian education. If all people with multiple national affiliations are multiply listed then actually that makes them easier to find (your point is: which one should a browsing readers look under? My point is: allocate to whatever categories a browser is likely to try!) than if only certain types of affiliation are treated as relevant. I think categories should be "inclusively ambiguous", making browsing easy but meaning that there may be more to the categorisation (e.g. Tesla as a Croatian) than meets the eye - but then again, there's a whole article to clear up any such ambiguity! :)

There is indeed a problem with generalists in botany who lie in up to five different fields of research! However, a lot were specialists, and when you look at their pages it seems to make more sense. Actually I think looking at the page itself is possibly the wrong way to do it, I am a great believer in thinking of the way the page stands to all other pages. In that respect, 3 lines of ugliness at the bottom of an article isn't necessarily an absolute evil - it is pretty neat to be able to jump from a category for a type of plant to the botanists who studied that type, or a category for the flora of a country or region to the category of botanists who studied them. To be fair, I wouldn't mind seeing the "field of research" categorisation disappearing (I'm trialling them as an experiment really, but I wouldn't call them "ridiculous"; it does give more detail to a lot of articles though - I hope people extract and insert the information I have put in if/when that happens. Even if they do it does bar the current link from the plant category to the appropriate botanists category, but at least there would be a link the other way), however I do think that the "location of research" is very good (in many respects it is more important that X studied Japanese flora than that X was Dutch, for example) and should definitely be kept. Because people do move around in their studies, I've tried to keep the "locations" largely as "big" as possible, though an exception for conentrated research centres makes sense.

I tend to agree that there is an overdose of subcategorisation going on in general, with a common complaint being that it actually breaks useful groups up, often into fairly arbitrary units. I think one way around this is creating more relevant alternative subcategorisations and doing multiple subcategorisation - perhaps splitting people categories by era as well as nationality, so contemporary but foreign sportspeople, scientists and politicians would lie in the same category rather than being fractured apart. Actually that is one of the reasons I was trialling the "by field of research" and "by location of research". The big problem is that, unlike with something like era, people can belong to a lot of both. With well-chosen eras, people would be unlikely to exist than more than two. The future is definitely interesting! :) VivaEmilyDavies 14:18, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Category:Canadian First Nations people

Hello again, I just noticed you reverted my change of moving Category:Canadian First Nations people out of Category:Canadian people. I did this because I felt Canadian First Nations people should be given no different treatment than people of any other Canadian ethnic group. Category:Canadian First Nations people can be accessed through Category:Ethnic groups of Canada, which itself is in Category:Canadian people. Historical figures in Category:Canadian First Nations people are now a minority so the category is not notable in that manner either. Please let me know what you think of my justifications. Kurieeto 23:13, Apr 6, 2005 (UTC)

DCB template

I like the new template. I will use it. By the way, I cleaned up the name, since it is Dictionary of Canadian Biography. -- JamesTeterenko 03:40, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I guess there is a good reason not to use the "subst:".  :) --JamesTeterenko 04:35, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

please fix the confusion

Hello

In random page viewing I ran into the entry on Peter Mitchell and put a notation in the "discussion" page, viz:

This sentence: "Peter Mitchell was a strong supporter of Canadian confederation attending the Quebec Conference in 1864." has no clear meaning. If Peter Mitchell attended that conference, it should read "Peter Mitchell was a strong supporter of Canadian confederation, while attending the Quebec Conference in 1864." If the whole confederation attended it should read "Peter Mitchell was a strong supporter of Canadian confederation's attending the Quebec Conference in 1864." (The gerund takes the possessive). See [1]http://archives.heritage.com/mg/20030320/G10EMAX.htm

---

Well, there's been a lot of editing, but no one fixed these items - hope you will care to.

Pdn 05:12, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Pdn, I'm not sure why you're asking me to fix it, I've only ever made one edit to the article, and it had nothing to do with that passage. But in any case, I've taken care of it. Next time Be Bold, make the correction yourself. Fawcett5 13:41, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Fawcett, many thanks. I did not have the facts with which to correct the ambiguous material. Sorry I just picked you as the latest editor of the item - if you had omitted the fixing of it, I would have gone back to the next previous, or maybe someone who edited it twice.

Pdn 04:11, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Modest professors

I stumbled across your comment "Hundreds of us here, including myself, are university professors with books and publications to our credit - doesn't make us particularly notable though" on VfD. Best laugh I've had in a while... maybe I should go back to college and enroll where you teach, or at least ship you a boatload of self-important professors that I've run across. In my experience, a professor on wikipedia would have a user name like DrKnowsAllPhD. Feco 07:26, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Explorers

I knew I'd come into trouble with it eventually. I'll remove all the changes within the next hour myself. My philosophy was always "I'd rather see a clean redirect than something broken but redirected". What can I do? I'll remove these all, but please advise me further. Thank you. Bobo192|Edits

I picked Explorers from the bottom of the Redirect pages. This is a page to which I didn't see edits being made in the future to turn the article with the Named link rather than/as well as the piped link. But I guess it doesn't matter that this is not the case.

I don't know what the solution is.. for example, why a redirect should or shouldn't be made in any particular case. Please advise me and set me to a useful task. Bobo192|Edits

So, once more, just to summarize, because I'm stupid and slow:

Task 1 - re-edit all articles to read [[exploration|explorer]] rather than [[list of explorers|explorer]].

Task 2 - thrash out an article something along the lines of History of exploration

How does this sound? Bobo192|Edits

Again, another plansheet:

1) Redirects from all occurrences of explorer to exploration

2) Work on article Exploration

Is this okay? Bobo192|Edits

Please don't take this as a slight, but I had to edit your response to line it up slightly better. I don't feel my user count has anything to do with my seniority in Wikipedia: yes, I have been around for about seven months, but I've mainly been doing junk ever since and apart from always doing the wrong thing have never gotten much notoriety around the place. I have no regrets.. *grins*

Anyway, I will certainly do those things in time (hopefully before tomorrow afternoon). I am going to do most of these as soon as possible, working from recent changes from the last 500 or so of my contributions. Thank you. I'm glad coming to agreement on this wasn't as painful as I had envisaged. As ever. Bobo192|Edits 18:58, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Re: Proposed mod to Template:Infobox SGRailroad

Well, if there's a way to do it as an optional param, then yeah, I don't see why not. The logo on some pages, like Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, looks quite large, while on others, like Dakota, Minnesota and Eastern Railroad, it looks just fine. slambo 13:23, Apr 11, 2005 (UTC)

Canadian Pacific Railway to be on the front page on April 23

I just noticed that Canadian Pacific Railway is currently scheduled ([1]) to appear on the front page as the featured article of the day on April 23. Well done!. slambo 16:11, Apr 13, 2005 (UTC)

UIUC Engineering

Thanks for the copyedits and the tag for fair use! I wasn't sure what to use, because I think it falls under a similar category as the US-GOVT ones. All the logos technically are owned by the Illinois state government, as all the labs as state government institutions (except for the as yet unposted NCSA and CSAR, which are federal govt labs) Agriculture 14:20, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Louis Riel FAC

Hello Fawcett5

I applaud you for the work you have done with this article. I think it's more than ready for FAC status, and will move to renominate it. Denni☯ 00:57, 2005 Apr 16 (UTC)

Allan Cunningham Photo

Re: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Allancunningham.jpg

Added copyright info. Note also I added the same info for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Patricklogan.jpg

It is a scan/photograph of a public domain painting. Sourced from http://thecouriermail.com.au/extras/oq/book2main.html. To the best of my knowledge, this image is not copyrighted.

I'm fairly certain Australia has followed the US Bridgeman vs Corel ruling on scans/photos of public domain art. Peter1968 08:28, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Rail stubs

If you're wondering about those stubs, I created them when I was starting out here; I went to the library and got information from state law books. Unfortunately I never finished, so there are a lot of halfway done articles. --SPUI (talk) 03:46, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

SPUI, there's nothing inherently wrong with the articles, I figured that's what you were doing. I basically just slapped the stub and cleanup on them to help get them more eyeballs... By the way, see the comments I made on User:JYolkowski's page following up yours. Cheers, Fawcett5 03:49, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Category:Australia geography stubs

Hi - recently you edited many Australian towns placing them in a stub category. I have started a discussion on Australian Geography stubs at the Australian Wikipedians' noticeboard. Particularly on the question as to when an article is no longer a stub. As you categorised the articles on Batemans Bay, New South Wales and Braidwood, I would be interested in your views as to what information should be included so that they are no longer appropriately classified as Australian geography stubs?. The latter article does not mention population but the former article does. Regards --AYArktos 03:17, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

J. M. S. Careless

Careless's remark about Louis Riel is from his text, Canada: A Story of Challenge, published back in 1952. Good luck with the article. John FitzGerald 10:58, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Riel/Budd

I'm glad to see your article about the Budd railcar, too. Used to ride the London-Toronto express occasionally back in the 60s. A great commuter service which of course was cancelled long ago. You've really transformed the Riel article. I would like to see a discussion in the article about how justified one is in calling the Red River Rebellion a rebellion, but that's just a bee I have in my bonnet. The article is now a model of what I think Wikipedia historical articles should be like. John FitzGerald 14:38, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Red River Rebellion

Thanks for your note about the RR Rebellion. Couldn't agree more. Glad to know we're on the same page. I look forward to your work on the article. John FitzGerald 16:16, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Thanks

Hey, Fawce -- thanks for the nudge about voting. I was avoiding it because I have contributed to the article, but reconsideration led me to believe I hadn't made that material a contribution. John FitzGerald 19:55, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Vandalism

Thanks for the revert on my userpage, Fawcett. Seems there are those who have difficulty accepting viewpoints which diverge from their own. I would do the same for you. Denni☯ 00:50, 2005 Apr 19 (UTC)

Louis Riel

Hi Fawcett5, just wanted to say very well done for your work on Louis Riel, looks like he's well on his way to featured status. I'm sorry I didn't get around to commenting on the article while it was up for peer review, especially after all your help with Lord Dufferin, but biography is really not my forté, and by the time I read it fully I really couldn't have suggested any improvements. It's a great article! Worldtraveller 12:16, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Canada East and Canada West

Got your comment. While Canada East and Canada West may be unofficial names for different regions of the Province of Canada, did they not have Lieutenant Governors? Lieutenant Governor of Ontario and Lieutenant Governor of Quebec seem to imply that in saying: "After Richard Downes Jackson, the Lieutenant Governors were also simultaneously Governors General." They don't say that the post was abolished. --timc | Talk 13:07, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Districts

Checking all your links has become very tiresome. Many of the district pages you created have the same name as federal electoral districts. Please check and disambiguate appropriately. The big list is here: [2] -- Earl Andrew - talk 06:37, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I noticed the link doesnt work. Just click on ridings and then search. And the problem exists now, because of all the links that lead to provincial articles when they should be linking to federal articles. -- Earl Andrew - talk 17:30, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Please do not create federal district articles that use the word "federal" as a disambiguation. -- Earl Andrew - talk 20:28, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I apologize if I have been bossy, but you must understand that as one of the main contributors of electoral district articles I have set someone of a standard for naming articles. If you don't agree with these standards, I would be happy to listen to your suggestions. It is true, that over time, electoral districts have been re-incarnated on the federal level. When this happens, we just note that in the article. We do not create multiple articles. My reasoning behind not using the word "federal" is because we should have a standard at keeping all the federal electoral district names as simple as possible, and when we come across a provincial district with the same name, we put provincial in it, and keep the federal district as is. It's just less confusing that way. -- Earl Andrew - talk 20:40, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I see your point. If you can get a bot to do it, I don't see the problem. It's could that we worked this out. -- Earl Andrew - talk 21:02, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Yet another bot request

This request has been completed. About 80+ articles were updated. You can see the bot's (CanisRufus) list of contributions for the article names. The bot had problems with article names containing diacritical marks so was not able to check/update them. RedWolf 08:03, Apr 23, 2005 (UTC)

"Bare Stubs"

Shouldn't the "bare stubs" that you have created be reclassified as substubs? тəzєті

Electoral Districts

I notice a lot of the districts use the — character. Is this character a valid character for article titles? It's ascii character 0151, which isn't typable on the keyboard, and doesn't display properly on all browsers. See Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dashes). I replaced a single article before realizing that it was only one in a much greater set of articles where this is done. — Stoph 02:45, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)