User talk:MarkSweep/archive5

AI Arbitration case

The Arbitration case against AI has closed. Given that you brought it, I thought you might be interested. The results include AI being banned until the legal dispute is resolved.

Yours,

James F. (talk) 01:03, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

Uh oh

Hey MarkSweep, User:Viriditas has called me a troll [1]. Could you have a look? Thanks. Wyss 12:56, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

Oops, didn't see this in time. Looks like you guys got it sorted out now. Cheers, --MarkSweep✍ 05:37, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Review

Hello Mark I'd like to know if you would be interested to take a look at my proposal to rewrite the mainland China article, at my sandbox, which was written based on user:Alassius' proposal and the discussion at talk:mainland China. Thanks. :-) — Instantnood 18:20, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Vandalims

I would like to report, that User:Instantnood has taken to vandalism to archieve his aims. In Hong Kong national football team, he tried to speed delete it dispite the fact that it fails to meet any criteria for speedy deletion, and has taken to constantly reverting that notice after my removal of it.--Huaiwei 11:39, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Restoration request

User:SchmuckyTheCat and user:Huaiwei has attempted to move the article on Hong Kong's football team from the title Hong Kong national football team to Hong Kong Representative Team, saying that the team is not a national team [2], with the word "national" defined in their way(s). User:Huaiwei first moved the article to Hong Kong Representative Team, and then moved it again to Hong Kong representative football team (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) [3]. It made the original title Hong Kong national football team (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) a double redirect, and he fixed the double redirect [4], thus creating edit history. Since the original title is no longer a pure redirect with no other edit history, it is impossible to restore the content under the original title. I demanded for formal procedure, that is, to request the move at WP:RM. To do this, I tagged the original title as speedy (with {{deletebecause}}), so that article can be restored under the original title. Huaiwei objected this [5], and labelled me as vandalism [6] [7] [8]. Would you mind look into what had happened, and help restore the content under the original title, so that the move can be discussed through formal procedures? Thank you. — Instantnood 13:04, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

User:Instantnood incorrectly said my renaming of the article was due to me saying it is "not a national team". My effort was based on the fact that the Hong Kong Football Association refers to it as such [9]. The usage by HKFA as the official body overseeing the team should take precedence over all other uses. Taking a redirect for speedy delete means it must fulfill the relevant criteria for speedy deletion. Failing to do so contravenes wikipolicy, and his insistance on restoring the request even after repeated warnings amounts to vandalism.--Huaiwei 13:13, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

I understand this is not the place for me to have a dialogue with Huaiwei. But since he has raised some evidence to back himself, instead of providing a full picture, I have to provide some additional information for your decision.

The Hong Kong Football Association also calls other national teams "representative teams", for instance, Japan [10], since the teams are representing their countries. It is a conventions here that the HKFA calls its team "Olympics representative team", "Asian Cup representative team", "World Cup representative team", etc., as the members of the team for each event is selected every time. The Olympics representative team and Asian Cup representative team are not compose of the same players.

Other evidence I have mentioned in the speedy deletion request [11] was that China Daily [12], InvestHK [13], BBC Sport [14], HKFA [15] and Man Utd [16] are all calling it "Hong Kong national team".

Since the move is debatable, I would like to request you to restore it as it was, so as to allow a formal move request be filed, and the move be discussed. Thanks. — Instantnood 13:33, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

I provide whatever information I happen to be aware of. Is the team mentioned in[17] Japan's national team? The JFA refers to its teams specifically as national teams [18]. The HKFA does not, and probably for good reason.--Huaiwei 13:49, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

I'm the one that first moved it to Hong Kong Representative Team, not Huaiwei. In fact, I moved three teams, HK, Macau, and Guam. I first researched the teams associations to see if they had a preferred name. HKFA does have a preferred name, either Hong Kong Representative Team or sometimes Team Hong Kong. I did this because a year or so ago, it appears that some football fans took some initiative (and good on them for it) and made template titled and formed articles for every team in FIFA. Unfortunately, they named every team "national" if it didn't already have an article. In any case, I moved HK to it's associations preferred name, and Macau and Guam to "regional".

I tell you this so that you don't think I made a bunch of unresearched and reflexive moves. In Macau's case, I also removed POV statements to the effect of "they suck". When 'nood instinctively reverted, he didn't bother to fix statements such as these either. He is so busy restoring and focusing on maintaining "national" that he's also removing constructive edits.

There certainly aren't any "squatters rights" to keep an obviously incorrect name. Let 'nood put it on wp:rm for discussion if he wants them moved back. SchmuckyTheCat 15:14, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

I've fixed the double redirect and would advise you to discuss any further moves on the talk page of the new article and to leave a note on WP:RM. For better or for worse, Wikipedia encourages you to be bold. In this case, if someone moves an article and the move was not done in bad faith, I see no reason to undo it. You're more than welcome to discuss whether the article should be moved back to its former title. The redirects should stay, because they are currently in use and they also help readers locate the article. Regardless of my opinion on their current usefulness, I don't see how the redirects would qualify as speedy deletion candidates. On a general note, I don't think there is any point in labeling each other's edits as "vandalism" etc.: it's clear that there is an underlying substantive debate and disagreement, which you're encouraged to resolve by discussion. Real vandalism, to me, is mostly of the "Bozo wuz here LOL!!11111" kind. The edits you call "vandalism" are just indications that the disagreement is not being resolved by debate. If you cannot decide amongst yourselves, then start an RfC and ask for more input on this issue. For what it's worth, I personally don't have strong feelings about either title, they both seem basically Ok to me. Cheers, --MarkSweep✍ 18:04, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Thanks so much Mark. In fact in the past I have been using {{deletebecause}} when the destination is occupied in a move (for instance: Mister Softee and KCR Light Rail), either because of cut-and-paste moves, or duplicate articles at destinations. It has been alright and that's basically what I was doing for these articles on football teams: to restore the articles back to the original titles, and to move forward to initiate a move request discussion. You're most welcome to take part in future discussions on the move requests. Thanks again for your kind attention, Mark. — Instantnood 18:25, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Vandal watch

Mark, would you please put your extra pair of eyes on Schnorrer. Feel free to block on sight the user accounts that blank the dab notice at the top of the page. SchmuckyTheCat 22:34, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

I've added it to my watchlist. The article is currently protected, and I'll watch out for further activity once it gets unlocked. The dab notice is very useful indeed, because people who don't know about umlauts or can't easily enter them in the search box will end up at this article. I can also see why someone may have a problem with the presence of the dab notice, but its overall usefulness far outweighs any perceived smear due to its presence. The silly vandalism and sockpuppetry clearly have to stop too. --MarkSweep✍ 00:47, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Thanks -- Endowment

Thanks for your edits to the endowment page. --zephern

Curps-like accounts....

....have all already been username blocked by a bot written by Curps. Just to save you some time! -Splash^talk 03:03, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

Underlining section headings

I'm just a Wilkipedian newbie, so go easy... P=)
Is it a firm Wilkipedian style no-no to underline the section headings, or does it depend on the page? I just think it looks neater with the underlines.
Also, I notice most headings are "== Title ==", but some are "==Title==": Shouldn't they all be "== Title =="? ~Kaimbridge~ 00:15, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

Whoops, I didn't see your message to me! ~Kaimbridge~ 00:20, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

Signature glyph

Please could you put {{unicode}} around the very pretty glyph in your signature? I can't see it otherwise, and I suspect nor can a whole load of others. (FYI that's a very cheap template, but maybe you might like to copy in the raw code?) HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 09:31, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

How about this: longer signature, but only ASCII characters? --MarkSweep (call me collect) 16:41, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

More legible but nowhere near so pretty (can you tell I preferred the old one? :-). Cheers. —Phil | Talk 16:08, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

210.8.54.34

I blocked the IP right before you cleared WP:AIV, but now I think I may have been misreading timestamps earlier on the warnings. I don't see much evidence of good-faith contributions, and think the IP has been generously warned already, but should I unblock? Sorry, I'm a little new at this. — MC MasterChef :: Leave a tip — 05:10, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

I'm a bit torn: on the one hand, the IP has few, if any, good contributions; on the other hand, we don't want to punish good behavior (like desisting when warned). Let's leave it blocked for a while, I might unblock later. --MarkSweep (call me collect) 05:13, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

Ok, sorry for the over-enthusiasm on my part. Part of the problem was my local time offset (I'm contributing from Japan); I've reset my preferences to accord with the server time, for simplicity's sake, in the future. I set the block for a week based on Essay's last block, and the fact that all the diffs I sampled appeared to be vandalism. If you want to let them off after 24 hours or so, I'll defer to you, though I expect it will only serve as a temporary reprieve. Thanks, — MC MasterChef :: Leave a tip — 05:19, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

The Second Law Vandal

Hi MarkSweep - some anon user is using multiple IP's to insert the same nonsense into the second law of thermodynamics article. This person does not respond to repeated requests to discuss the situation, and reverts every time someone fixes the problem. List of IP's from which this vandalism originates:

• User:66.92.162.185 00:56 21 November 2005
• User:128.164.129.1 00:56 21 November 2005
• User:161.253.152.34 03:36, 21 November 2005
• User:66.92.162.133 10:07, 21 November 2005

I have put Verror3 warnings on these IP's. Your help, as in the past, would be greatly appreciated. PAR 14:27, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Rome

Infobox is a great addition.

Some other things are a real mess - leading to either inconsistent information across the episodes, OR you're planning on ripping out information and comments in other episode pages.

See discussion for "How Titus Pullo Brought Down the Republic"

More Rome

I added an "abstract" to The Stolen Eagle of my own devising, just as a place holder for now - it's pretty rough - but it's 3am for me.

You've got a good eye for making screen captures for the episodes, btw.

Stability (probability)

Hi MarkSweep - I emptied that article User:PAR/Work7 because it was just a work page I used to develop the Stability (probability) article. Since I didn't know of any article that developed the idea of a location-scale family, I developed it in this article, but it was a step towards the main idea of the article, which was to discuss the stability of such a family. Maybe the development of the location-scale concept could be extracted from the article and put into the location-scale article, leaving a smaller section in the stability article? PAR 02:08, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

Query on how to block

Hi, I just caught IP 213.249.155.237 vandalising at Comic book and Mary Shelley. He seems a persistent vandal User talk:213.249.155.237, can he be blocked without warning? If so, do I just got to Block user and enter the IP address and give a 24 hr block? Apologies, but I've not been an admin long and I just want to double check, and I noticed your name at Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism with a recent time stamp. Steve block talk 12:24, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

Cheers for that, I blocked the user for 3 hours. Steve block talk 12:40, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

Time to press on

Since the ArbCom case that I was involved has eventually been closed [19], I believe it's time to go forward on how the entire issue can be resolved. What do you think? Would centralised discussion be a good way? — Instantnood 18:50, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

I would take it easy for now. Centralized discussion is only a good idea if there is a small set of simple questions that can be presented to, and adequately judged by, the larger community. I don't think we're at that stage yet. --MarkSweep (call me collect) 16:01, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Clean-up of Bayes' Theorem talk

I'm a little confused as to how you selected the "snide comments" to delete on the Talk:Bayes' theorem page. I recognise my comments were somewhat below the level of civility that I usually try to display, but they were not uncalled for. They were provoked by comments from Wile E. Heresiarch, such as these:

"I don't understand what's going on here, but I'll tell you what to do anyway" is a weak position to argue from, but you don't let that slow you down. I'm accustomed to arguing with people who know what they're talking about; I really don't know how to deal with you.

If you can't follow an argument of this kind, I have to wonder why you're editing this page. If you don't comprehend the different levels of exposition, you can't make a reasoned choice between them.

Those are clear attacks in my book. Yet you left them untouched in your clean-up efforts, when you went after the sarcastic replies Heresiarch earned for himself because of these. I would very much like to know how you drew the line between acceptable and unacceptable in this case. --Ritchy 19:11, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

It's a matter of opinion, obviously. Some postings were more insulting than others. In this case, Wile said directly what he thought without the dripping sarcasm seen in other posts. I find that much less objectionable than some of the replies he got (not "earned"). --MarkSweep (call me collect) 16:01, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Left you some messages

In case you're too busy editing to notice, I left you some messages in IRC. Mindspillage (spill yours?) 03:19, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

de-spam

Erm I guess even though you are probably 'pedantically' correct the links to product pages on some tea shops (reasonably) in the references on Lapsang souchong and lots of other pages are there because they seem to have come from good sources and not as spam. It is increddibly hard to find any other references and in some cases very difficult. Some shops cite that their information comes from certain experts they list. I dont really know how to resolve this, but pedantically going around and removing all the references to any tea shop is certainly not a good idea. Usually really real link spam on tea pages is easy to notice as people add stuff to references or external links without adding any content to the page... --Iateasquirrel 12:06, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

It all started with me reverting what I thought were clear cases of link spam by Robi osahan (talk · contribs) and 216.99.210.13 (talk · contribs) (who are arguably the same person). In the end I also removed other links that pointed to commercial sites. Please restore if I went overboard. I personally think that websites with little substance beyond advertising blurb should not be linked from "External links". --MarkSweep (call me collect) 16:01, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

FakeName

I am going to unblock FakeName. As he is not an administrator he cannot edit Alan Dershowitz anyway, but can communicate if he wishes on his talk page. A simple assertion that an article is defamatory is not a legal threat but information which is useful to us. Fred Bauder 17:15, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

No need. Jimbo already unblocked him. --MarkSweep (call me collect) 17:18, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Image:2005-0208dwarf-full.jpg

Please remember to notify the uploader when tagging images with "no license". Thue | talk 19:14, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

Bot disambiguation of "continuous"

Cheers.--Commander Keane 19:31, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

Republic of China

I don't think your unexplained rv is good wiki practice at all. Please participate in the discussion and look at the actual changes (I am not merely reverting except for the last, where Jiang is). I am making substantive changes, while you are doing exactly what the spirit of forbidding 3 reverts is meant to prevent.Moveapage 19:41, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

User:LettuceSalad

Hi. If you are going to block User:LettuceSalad, you should notify the user. The talk page still says they won't be blocked until further vandalism. - Tεxτurε 19:07, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

Dude, give a guy a minute to write something coherent when there isn't a convenient template for this situation. ;-) Consider it done. Cheers, --MarkSweep (call me collect) 19:11, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

Coherent? Dang, I've never tried that! Um... how does it work? Oh! I know: {{coherent template}}- Tεxτurε 19:14, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

Sleeper accounts

1. User:Cool_Cat_is_a_faggot needs blocking.
2. User:Cool_Cat_is_a_fat_fat needs blocking.

Thas all I got for now. --Cool Cat^Talk|@ 20:19, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

Sorry I got confused between accounts these two need a blocking. --Cool Cat^Talk|@ 20:26, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

I deleted those pages, since the accounts don't exist. --MarkSweep (call me collect) 20:41, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

They do EXIST, it is called a "sleeper" please BLOCK them. Thanks. --Cool Cat^Talk|@ 16:10, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

My mistake I did not notice the "." on the real impostoration accounts (User:Cool_Cat_is_a_faggot., User:Cool_Cat_is_a_fat_fat.) sorry for waisting your time. :) --Cool Cat^Talk|@ 16:34, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

No problem, I've blocked them just now. A good way to make sure you got the account name right is to go to the user page and check if there is a "User contributions" link in the toolbox. Cheers, --MarkSweep (call me collect) 16:42, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

JIT compilation

You wrote: compilation to native code irrelevant (besides, modern JVMs are often faster than native compilers). Please explain how the time taken by JIT is "irrelevant". It's not free, and it has to be done every time a class is loaded for the first time in a given JVM. – Smyth\^talk 18:37, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

You have to look at the diff. Here's what it used to say:

A number of language features unavoidably harm performance and memory usage, even if native compilation is used:

I changed this to:

A number of language features unavoidably harm performance:

I never said that the time taken by a compiler (be it JIT or offline) is irrelevant. The point of the paragraph was to say that the Java language has certain features or makes certain guarantees that could be seen to impose a performance penalty. The qualification "even if native compilation is used" is a strawman: the discussion is about language features, so they apply to all compilation and runtime models. In addition, offline native compilation typically results in much worse performance than online compilation in the JVM. So not only is the "even if" qualification irrelevant to the discussion of array bounds checking etc., it is also misleading because it falsely suggests that offline compilation is somehow less affected. The fact is that several things have to happen at runtime (array bounds checking, byte code verification and run-time type checking for dynamic loading), and this will be true no matter what the underlying compilation or execution model is. --MarkSweep (call me collect) 20:39, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

Alright, but how can you say that "offline native compilation typically results in much worse performance than online compilation in the JVM"? – Smyth\^talk 11:17, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

Try it yourself. Take your favorite Java benchmark, compile it using GCJ or some other native compiler and compare that with running the bytecode on the 1.6 server VM (or even 1.5). Even if compiler technology improves, there's still a problem: separate offline compilation makes it hard to perform certain optimizations, like for example devirtualization. A JIT compiler has an inherent advantage there. --MarkSweep (call me collect) 22:26, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks. – Smyth\^talk 13:18, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

Cultures of the World

Would you consider contributing? Or how about voting for it as collaboration of the week for this new but important article.--Culturesoftheworld 19:31, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

Hi Mark, please help

I would like to request your help with serious NPOV and verifiability problems on the Arabic numerals page. I have mentioned it, yet again, here Wikipedia:Wikiquette_alerts#December_17. Please help me recruit as many neutral and well-intending editors to the page to counter the strong and manifest bias. Regards, and thanks. csssclll (14:43, 17 December 2005 (UTC))

Transportation in Taiwan deserves a separate article

see Talk:Transportation in the Republic of China. Please do not revert it without an explanation.

Re: ROC vs. Taiwan

I agree that we should have some naming convention notice for taiwan-related articles. This is already done for all Korea related articles. Unfortunatly, I'm out of town for the next week or so (on borrowed internet here) so my time online is severely limited. If you can, get started. or i'll look into it later. a good number of 163.28.64.50's do seem troubling. --Jiang 03:48, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

Re: Transport articles

I'm most happy to help, but I'm afraid I cannot manage to follow all these closely. :-| — Instantnood 20:52, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

Hello Mark. You may be interested to take a look at the CfD nomination of category:newspapers of the Republic of China. — Instantnood 18:30, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

Should the matter be brought to the administrators' notice board? The community doesn't seem to be bothered with the NPOV policies. — Instantnood 17:03, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

Newspapers used instead of blogs

I would like your feedback on the use of newspapers as a source instead of blogs. In the case of the Robert Clark Young article, I have found newspaper sources that cover much of the same material as the blogs that have been used in the article. When I replaced the blog sources with the newspaper sources, Alabamaboy reverted every single one of my edits. Also, very strangely, he accused me on the discussion page of being Mr. Young himself!

This is the Wikipedia Guideline I am trying to follow with my edits:

"Publications with teams of fact-checkers, reporters, editors, lawyers, and managers — like the New York Times or The Times of London — are likely to be reliable, and are regarded as reputable sources for the purposes of Wikipedia. At the other end of the reliability scale lie personal websites, weblogs (blogs), bulletin boards, and Usenet posts, which are not acceptable as sources."

Thus, I have replaced the blog sources with newspaper sources. Again, let me stress that this has not led to much change in the text of the article itself--what I'm trying to do here is change the nature of the sources so that they themselves comply with Wikipedia Guidelines.

Could Alabamaboy and I get some feedback on this? I wonder if you could go over to the Robert Clark Young history and compare both versions of the sourcing--the one using newspapers, and the one using blogs. Thank you. Berenise 01:39, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

First off, I apologize for Berenise's comment being spammed upon so many user's talk pages. However, since Berenise already placed it here I wanted you to be aware that there are three reasons the article was reverted: 1) Berenise made the changes despite a lack of consensus and my objections on the Talk:Robert Clark Young. In short, the online references are refered to in the newspaper and print articles, making the online sources primary sources. The article also has many print sources which complement and add to the online sources. 2) The edits made the article less NPOV b/c they removed opposing viewpoints. While these references may be online, they are from credible named sources who are considered experts in their respected areas. 3) There is a strong possibility that Berenise is Robert Clark Young. Young previously edited the article about himself and most of Berenise's edits since coming to Wikipedia have been to the Young article. I'm trying to clear this up with Berenise; once she proves she is not Young I'd love to get opinions from other editors about this situation. For full details, see Talk:Robert Clark Young.--Alabamaboy 01:49, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

Re: Category:Ancient peoples of China

Thanks for the answer Mark. :-D — Instantnood 22:25, 10 January 2006 (UTC)