User talk:Mav/archive 1

user:maveric149 Talk archive 1: Monday, January 28, 2002 - Monday, May 27, 2002

I generally respond to inquiries placed on this page by placing my comments on the talk page belonging to the submitter. Therefore many of the comments that follow appear to have gone unanswered - this is not the case. (Well, at least not necessarily the case.)

Other messages are in talk archive 2, talk archive 3 and User talk:maveric149

Thanks for your welcome! I can't wait to get more into this. Your topics interest me a lot. Hell, I guess pretty much anything here interests me a lot. Thanks! NathanBeach

I did happen to see the taxol article and thought it well done. Thanks for your welcome. I am extremely new to the project, still trying to understand how to create links within articles (but I will attempt one by mimicking examples). I also appreciated your Occam's Razor article. You have a tremendous range of interests. Robert Dolan

Hi. I don't really see the tags as that big a problem, it just seemed more elegant to use the more common convention. For example, if the article was to be written to latex or some other format, using standard headings etc... would enable a conversion program to format them properly. Also, how headings are displayed in the browser could be changed through the use of some kind of style-mode if Magnus decided to implement it - these might not be picked up if using manual formatting. Again, its not really that important so I am not going to change it. Incidently, your user-page seems to be a 'Most Popular' article. Congrats :-) User:sodium

Thanks for taking the time to welcome newcomers like me.. I appreciate it! -- saracarl

Thanks for the welcome. Lots of interesting stuff on your page....in fact lots of interesting stuff everywhere here! Graham Chapman

Thanks for the welcome. Help please! I used my email as my log in because on some other sites I belong to that is what is suggested, and I just "did what I'd always done before". I'd like to change it, but the only way I can see to do that is to create another account. Is there a way to edit my username? The help says it can be changed in the preferences page, but that does not seem to be the case. Any suggestions?

Thanks, Perry User:Perry@bebbington.org

Hi, Perry here user:Perry Bebbington, Thanks for the advice and link to the deletions page, I'm just doing it now. I wondered why nothing was coming up against my name. I've put all I know on here and it's anonymous! (only joking). Perry.

Thanks for the welcome. Seems like you have been busy. -- Peter Winnberg

I am attempting to replace copyrighted binaries that were illegaly uploaded onto the wiki server with text files OK this is great. On the wiki server there is a digital book for LOTR, a bunch of banner adds (one of which is from a porn site), some images about NTS (a heavy metal band I think) and various other crap. maveric149

Re: picometer / picometre: it's the classic American/British spelling problem again. I personally feel that picometre is best since, at the end of the day, SI measurements are French - but I'm biased 'cos I'm British. It almost certainly doesn't make a difference either way - and making the redirection one way or the other was the best thing to do. Dragon Dave.

The origin of the measurements are not important. What is important is if there is an official spelling that a majority of nations has agreed upon (and I am speaking of de jur here, not de facto). If there is, then that spelling should be the main article and the alternate spelling should be the redirect. My own felling from the meager research I have conducted, is that metre is a defacto SI spelling and not de jur. Therefore, it doesn't matter what the primary spelling of meter is, so long as a redirect of the alternate spelling is provided. -maveric

I like what you are doing with the Presidential Election articles. Do you have to edit the HTML much before you paste the tables into a wikipedia page? -- maveric149

Thanks, it's a pretty light editing...I plan to do them all, though it may continue to be small batches (as I write this, I realize a really simple script could do most of the work for me)--User:RobLa

Thanks for the welcome. I'm glad you liked the couple of pieces that I wrote or fixed up. I hope to do quite a few more in the next while and to fixing up the lists, which don't seem to have much order to them. Hope it helps. Looking forward to hearing any comments you might have. ---User:Danny

It appears that the nested table bug has been fixed; check out the test table at the bottom of my home article and see if you like this version of the isotope section. The HTML is nice and clean, I didn't have to use the colspan="3" thing on the two-column section. Bryan Derksen

Maveric, we've had no response from the powers that be (ie the Wikipedia software developers, or anyone from Bomis), about the uploads issue. I suggest one of us takes it up on the ML in the hope that somebody who can do something will pay attention. --Robert Merkel

Robert, the new version of the software restricts uploads to logged in users and provides links to the files on log:Uploads for quick checking. Do you think more is needed? AxelBoldt~

Probably enough for now. --Robert Merkel

Hi Maveric -- I already have a bit of an article on halophytes and intend (someday...) to start one on xerophytes. Many of these plants have C4 (or is it C3 -- can't recall off the top of my head just now which is the "conventional" pathway) metabolism -- so feel free to link and/or amend! -- Marj Tiefert

Thanks, I'll keep that in mind. --maveric

Maveric, WRT content like the "Protoss" article, wouldn't most of the problem disappear if the article was titled "Protoss (StarCraft)" and its first sentence was "A fictional race that appear in the video game StarCraft"? --Robert Merkel

Interesting solution - since I made the mess I will clean it up. --maveric

Maveric, you may find interesting that what you have introduced back to Cyprus is i guess more or less the same as in Cyprus/History szopen

Yo Maveric, I just did an article on xeriscaping, but probably won't do one on xeriphytes (since I can't think of anything interesting beyond just the basic definition). So do whatever you want about it when you get to your C4/C3/CAM plant metabolism pages! -- Marj Tiefert

Great little article you have there! I'll see about creating those other articles you mentioned during the weekend. --maveric149

Yep, using the "v" word was a mistake; I overreacted to an easily missed change on a page that says they're quickly fixed. Mea culpa. --Carey Evans

Did you discuss the moving of the Wikipedia article? I think we probably need to set upa better policy for deciding whther to do major redirects, because they often have unintended consequences. Not that this was necessarily the wrong decision, but sometimes a rename (a sysop function) might be better suited. --The Cunctator

If you check Talk:Wikipedia you will see that I posed the question and was encouraged to move the article from the wikipedia namespace. In the history of wikipedia:Wikipedia you will see that user:-- April had moved it previously while searching for and moving a great many wikipedia specific pages to the wikipedia namespace (doing a good little deed, I might add). --April was logged in and actively contributing when I moved the wikipedia article back to the regular namespace - there was no objection. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia article not a wikipedia-specific page. The change was obvious and self evident. At this point, we have no actively contributing sysops that would perform an actual rename in the system. Please tell me of any broken links and I will fix them. Please also refer all policy discusion to the meta --This is something which we may want to discuss in preparation for wikipedia becoming a non-profit (in which case we may actually have volunteer sysops that actively contribute in that capacity). --maveric

Plenty of welcomes! Good work! :-) --Anders Törlind

Thanx - I fell behind with my greetings, so I just did a bunch at once. --maveric

Hi Maveric, I see a lot files with the history "conversion script ...". I assume that the data was obtained from somewhere else and automatically inserted into wikipedia, but from where? Nupedia? Thanks sfmontyo

Hey Maveric. Thanks for the catch on "Wikipettiquette" - doh! My spelling is, ah, not the best... especially when I'm typing in anger, as 'twere. Much appreciated. -- April

Maveric, I am interested to see that you have added a whole lot of pages for the various Kings of parts of Britain. Will you be adding pages for the Queens of parts of Britain as well ? Also, you need to add Kings of Northumbria and Mercia and Pictavia and ...

Well to cut a long story short, that's why we have a page called British Monarchs. It covers Kings, Queens and oddities like Oliver Cromwell, without having to have a gender-specific page for every small part of Britain which used to have an independent ruler. I'm not quite sure of the benefit in adding all these 'Kings of ...' pages. -- user:Derek Ross

test --maveric149, Tuesday, April 2, 2002

Maveric, did you miss what I wrote on Global Warming's talk page? I pasted a verbatim quote from the NOAA page (Aug 1998). If there is more recent information, please provide the source.

I won't engage in an edit war with you, but I do wonder why you reverted something without providing a source.

Ed Poor

Okay, I think I found the problem.

I was correctly cited outdated data. The old NASA webpage at [1], dated August 1998, said, "Corrected trend of -0.01 degrees per decade", which is basically zero.

I found a more recent NASA webpage at [2], dated March 2002, saying "+0.04", which is "near zero".

I will update the source in the global warming article, so when a user clicks on the external reference they will get the March 2002 webpage.

Ed Poor

Hey Maveric! Thanks for moving the asteroids - I found that too daunting a task after only a couple of planets. ;) Want me to follow behind you and pick up the various names for disambiguation pages, as Vesta? -- April

I'll help out too, I've been putting this off until Wikipedia's link database was updated and now it has been. :) Any ideas on how to coordinate and avoid conflicts, or should we just dig in? Bryan Derksen

Go right ahead and have fun with the disambiguation process. :) -maveric

Hi maveric, Thanks for the welcome! From looking at your page it looks like you're the Big Kahuna around here?! lol Or just very knowledgable and with plenty of free time for writing... Ooops... I saved that and forgot that I've got to append my name to it manually! It's not like an email or newsgroup where it's done automatically. Karen Johnson

Woh. .. i ended up here as i started to wonder what are all thesse user talk greetings in the new users ... :-O u didnt welcome me when i was new... well i'm not jealous (ehehe) ... how many clicks do u get a day? :) Zisa

oh btw... yea, Gianfranco welcomed me but ... well, by asking whether i wanted to do some (more) mafia articles :-O anyway, i'm still jealous for your clicks... i have to find sth that everyone looks fos in the dictionary and doesn't exist yet..!! MAybe some sex related... well ... ;-) Zisa

Maybe you can help me? I'm getting very frustrated by things that don't work today and I don't know if it's because I'm doing it wrong or not... I tried to search for 'May 23' to see if anyone else had done a birthdate fill-in, but I got a Boolean error because 'May' is less than four letters long!' So I thought I'd report it on the bug reports page, only when I loaded the screen and hit 'edit' it loaded the appropriate window - but then it wouldn't let me add any new text to the page! It it locked? Or at maximum length? Maybe somebody who knows what they're doing needs to make a 'Bug Reports Page 2'... or maybe I've just totally screwed up because I'm an ignorant newbie! Also, when I typed 'help' into the search box to see if there was another help page to give me a clue, I got no results... I find it hard to believe that no articles anywhere in the entire Wikipedia use the world 'help' in them! I'm bewildered... KJ

Hi maveric - thought I'd say Hi :) I'm an old-timer (if that means anything at a 16 month old project) but I thought I'd give you a belated welcome and congrat on your nice work. I see we have some common interests - for example you've targeted Sharia as an area for work - I wrote the original article. Things can always be improved, and I'm keen to see what your deft hand will achieve. I can't afford to be around as much as I used to be, but it's nice to see that the the "Militia" still has some upstanding members (does the Militia still exist?) It's also good to see that people are still ranting about NPOV and condemning all "miscreants" (ie - anyone who disagrees with you). This means that nothing as really changed... :) Warm regards - Manning Bartlett

Thanx for the warm words. Yes the militia still does exist - there are about a dozen or two of us who are very serious about improving the project and who contribute alot of material, organization, NPOVing etc daily. True vandals seem to be relatively rare since 20 of us were given sysop status. This has improved things a great deal. Of course, I too miss the direction that Larry gave to the project - he had a way of quickly settling arguments and putting fear in the hearts of wikipedians who got out of line without causing undue resentment. I hope to see you around more often. --maveric

Excellent! I was actually the 2nd member of the Militia - hence the Major General title :) I'll be around for the next 10 days, then I will disappear for 2 months (I'm working on a major project in India) and then I should be back for the rest of the year. A LOT has changed since January when I left for India... all for the better frankly. Ignore anyone who moans about "the Old Days" - the only good thing about the past was that we were a much smaller group, and hence there was an level of intimacy between participants that was always doomed as the project expanded. It is steaming ahead beautifully. Even in India I read Wikipedia-L, so I'll be in touch. Great to meet you - User:MMGB

How many of the 20 given sysop status are still around? Does the Militia still exist? I'm trying to get someone who's been around a long while to check out the governance material at meta and perhaps contribute a "status quo" report. Also, if the Militia has any objection to setting up a sort of non-coercive democratic means of making major policy decisions, by outlining best cases, worst cases, visions, etc., and generally agreeing on a direction for the project based on constraints. Since I laid out that structure I don't think I should be as active doing so for a while - and perhaps only named users should write status quo reports.

Also, if there is a need to revive any "Militia" or re-allocate sysop status, ideally that would be to people whose goals and views are somewhat compatible with those expressed in the best cases and visions shared by the rest of us. A "good old days" can always be restored - just needs a process. -24

Reply to 24: All 20 sysops are still around. The term "Militia" is not a real "official" wikipedia body or anything - all it essentially is, is a list of users that agreed to do certain things for the project. There are many users that either don't know about the list or who don't care to sign it, that I informally think of as part of the Militia because they uphold its tenents. As for the meta.... I really don't know how that darn thing works - it mostly is just a place where irrevelent/editorial stuff from wikipedia ends up (and then really dies, since nobody really contributes much to the meta -- except for maybe you, or user:mirwin). All policy discussion goes on in the mailing list - however, since you insist on not creating a user page, I suspect you don't want to reveal your email address. In case you are interested, you can find mailing list info at Wikipedia-L. Any other way of policy discussion is really on hold until Jimbo gets around to setting up wikipedia as a nonprofit that is separete from his company Bomis. As it is, Jimbo is the only one who grants sysop status. He is rather libral in granting this, his only qulification is that a user is not a vadal or an antagonist. However, since you are not a user and at the very least a large thorn in the side for many of us, I don't think he will grant this privilage to you. To be fair, your contribs seem to becoming more NPOV (that is neutral point of view, and not natural point of view) - and even are a bit interesting. --maveric

Hello, maveric. I just noticed your request on my User page to move the Talk from my old page to its new home -- thanks for mentioning it, I'd forgotten about that part.

So everything is over where it should be now. Do what you like to the original Paul Drye and associated subpages. -- Paul Drye

Will do. Looks like I will be redirecting your old userpage to your new one and deleting you old talk and fixing the link on your page. -maveric

Maveric, thank you for your NPOV edits to global warming. I'm glad you found a replacement for the awkward phrase "catastrophe proponents", which as I think Vicki pointed out, sounds like people who hope a catastrophe occurs. Regarding the mismatch between 1995 IPCC report and a 2001 NASA (or NOAA) report, you are of course exactly right. (Unfortunately, I'm not keen on reading long reports; I prefer to let someone else digest them for me; that's what an encyclopedia is all about for me: a digest of useful knowledge.) You or Joao or I should take the time to examine the latest IPCC report. Ed Poor

Ahem...and what, exactly, did you find objectionable to the Cathedral of St. Hedwig (Berlin) page? I did it that way because Hedwig is (Helga says) the patron saint of Silesia (plus Jadwiga is also a Hedwig), and I thought there might be more than one so-named cathedral...or did I not redirect the article? ;-)HK

Check the history of St. Hedwigs Kathedrale -- 66.47.62.xxx (Helga maybee?) created that page and 10 minutes later I moved all that text to the English spelling at St. Hedwig's Cathedral (yep, you forgot to redirect, so we both were cleaning up Helga's mess at the same time). Didn't know that Cathedral of St. Hedwig (Berlin) existed. BTW Google seems to like the page name I created than the one you did. --maveric

A query - I just logged into the wikipedia for my daily play and at the top of the deletions list it says you removed the page for Agoraphobia? I've just been trying to get my friends from my agoraphobia support group to help me WRITE that page... so would you mind telling me why you deleted it? I haven't actually seen what if any content was on it, but it was at the very top of my to-do list. KJ

The page had no content other than "Describe the new page here." There was also no content in the history of the page. This page was created by a visitor to the site probably as either an experiment or a mistake. The software in its current form treats wiki links to such pages as if they are actual articles. For example, a person visiting the phobia article would see a what looks link a valid link to "Agoraphobia" and click on it -- only to be created with "Describe the new page here." That is why the page was deleted. PS, you could have searched Google before implying that I did something wrong (Google's cache is always at least a couple of weeks old). --maveric

oh no... I wasn't trying to imply anything maveric! I just noticed that particular page had been deleted and I wondered whether one of my friends had come in and left content that you considered inappropriate for the site, eg. a group member suggested linking the wikipedia page back to the group's homepage... the blank page was probably made by my friend Red, because she came to look at it the other day. That's all... plus I thought the delete policy was NOT to delete anything that might become a valid article in the future. (shrugs) It's still on my to-do list but goodness knows when I'll get to it - my to-do list is much too long and I keep finding new things to add to it :) KJ

Sorry for my above reaction... The particular policy you refer to needs to be updated per recent mailing list discussions on the topic. Nobody has yet gotten around to doing this yet though. Apparently the real policy has always been that if a page is completely blank and the sysop reviewing it doesn't have the time or knowledge to create a decent stub, then the best thing to do is just delete it so that articles that link to it do not display the link as if there were an article behind it. Then having the link appear as an edit link also notifies those qualified that an article on the subject hasn't been written yet (maybee encouraging them to write one). What really needs to be done, is to not have blank pages or pages that only have "Describe the new page here" show up as actual articles (several dozen of these are created mostly by accident or newbie experimentation daily -- potentially reducing confidence of visitors that wiki links lead to real articles). --maveric

On another note, I've been hitting the random button this morning, and I came across a few old user pages in the mainspace. I was going to make a redirect for one of them but when I did I discovered that the user already had a different page under the user: heirarchy... so I just left it because I didn't know how to handle it. What should be done with the old user pages? KJ

This is what I would do: Just drop them a note on their user page telling them that they still have a user page in the article namespace that really should be redirected to their user page so that it doesn't show up as a regular encyclopedia article. Then watch the page where you placed the note for about a week, then perform the redirect if you don't get a response. --maveric

Hi maveric! I just wanted to say thanks for the wellcome message. user:Eanorel

Hi maveric, sorry for not reacting before but I had the Login problem many had. I logged in and as soon as I went to another page only my IP number came up. That way I couldn't check my own user page which I check through my Watchlist. Thanks for offering help. I probably will need it in the near future as I will want to add some things to the article on [Neem] I wrote. Good work and all the best. Andrew

Hi maveric, I am back again and already may need your help. I would like google to find the article on Neem in Wikipedia. As you can see on my own User page user:Vanderesch somebody suggested a way, but after 3 weeks Google still doesn't come up with a hit on the Neem article. Do you know a solution that might work??

Googles webcrawler Googlebot periodically downloads the all wikipedia pages. It does take a few more weeks to a couple of months for Googlebot to get back around to wikipedia since it is constantly downloading and indexing at least some part of the net. Just give it some time and Google will display Neem. Cheers! --maveric

Maveric149 -- interesting link you added to the macroevolution article (I had time only to skim it). Is this article using the term to refer to more global trends in evolution (a la work by George Gaylord Simplson)? I ask because I made the most recent changes to the macro/microevolution articles, characterizing the distinction as being important only to creationists or ID folk. Am I wrong? perhaps Darwinianists use the distinction too, although in a very different way from creationists? If you know more about this, perhaps you could add more substance to the two articles? My only concern would be to distinguish how and to what ends creationists and non-creationists use the terms differently. SR

It is a totally valid concept in biology -- in fact my General Biology textbook devotes no less than 60 pages on the topic which includes an entire chpater. Macroevolution is also a recurrent theme throughout the book and a very important concept for modern biology. What it is, is the study of the evoloution of taxonomic groups higher than the species level. This include genera, families, orders, subkingdoms and even kingdoms. What is really studied is how the different morphologies (body shapes and types), physiologogies (internal functioning of organisms), and lifestyles (how long they live, method of reproduction and what they eat) of different groups of organisms are related and how and when they diverged from each other. Of course, much of this has to be inferred from the fossil record but since most groups of organisms have at least one relatively closely related living member, it is possible to have a very good idea about these things. I was not aware the Christian Scientists also used the term.... Oh well. --maveric

I thought as much. You should know, however, that creationists (I don't think you mean Christian Scientists,although that is grammatically correct I think it means something else) also use the terms but do use them differently. The way they use them -- and this is how the twoa rticles on macro/micro-evolution originally read -- is that micro-evolution explains how natural selection can lead to modifications over time among members of a species, whereas macroevolution is thr process by which new species evolve (which they do not explain through natural selection). I tried to modify the articles in such a way as to communicate this distinction that they were making, but in a more NPOV way. It is important to include what you just said in the article, I think, while calling attention to the very different way creationists use the term. Thanks, SR

The smallest unit that evolution works on is the reproductively isolated population. Evolution does not work on individuals. --maveric

Hi Maveric, that huge space was strange. Thanks for taking care of it. H. Jonat

NP. BTW it looks like your browser introduced alot of space after your above comment. That might be the origin of the problem. --maveric

Hi Maveric, I see you've been busy re-verting my Olympic articles from "Games of the" to their original values. A few remarks:

there's some more of these around, you may want to correct that (that's why I did it)
I've had a short discussion about this problem about this with user:RjLesch at my page (jheijmans) which you may want to read as well, and we've agreed upon it as a "standard" (see WikiProject Sports Olympics. You will see my reason was that this is the only name about which there's no confusion; you've already noticed the 2002 Winter Olympic/Olympic Winter feature, this can get even worse. So one may want to set up redirects for all of those? My main "problem" (it's not really one) with this is simply that this is an encyclopedia, so I think it should have the right names for everything (or at least mention it), and especially in a case as this, where there's no uniform alternative name for it.

Sorry for the latness of my response -- I actually prepared a rather long response for you that had numerous Google links and arguments for certain nomenclature -- unfortunetley Konqueror crashed (guess it didn't like having 53 browser windows open with SETI@home and Folding@home consuming 100% of the CPU.... I'm rambling). The jist of what I said before was that we were in fact both wrong -- The most common terminology used for any year's Olympics is "XXXX Olympics" as the uber title and "XXXX {season} Olympics" for the particular games. Since I have helped make some of the mess I will be more than happy to help with the heavy lifting involved with renaming these articles (I will do at least the ones I touched). BTW, you are very correct -- the official title of the particular Olympics should always be in the definition paragraph for each of these pages (Although the pages themselves should be named according to wikipedia naming conventions -- therefore the most common, least suprising to the average user name should be choosen when naming the article -- see my lengthy statements on talk:Linda Lovelace about a very similar issue). --maveric

Having read your talk about Lovelace (where Van Leeuwenhoek's first name should actually be given as Antonie in Dutch...), I do agree we should use the most common name, since this will make linking easier, though the redirects could do the work there, if we set them up correctly. This works fine; typing USA ends up at the United States of America (you know, the country bordering with Russia :-) ); actually there's 263 links to United States of America, 134 to USA, 120 to U.S. and 1295 (!) to United States. So should the United States of America page be located at United States, which is by far the most used name, also in normal speech (in whatever language, actually, the 'of America' is usually dropped)? However, the most important to me is that: a) a consistent form and b) the official name is at least mentioned c) all other forms are directed to the article. However, c) may be problematic too; where to redirect the '1984 Olympics' to (probably set up a page to distinguish between L.A. and Sarajevo)? I suppose we could agree on the XXXX {Season} Olympics as the most common form, since this also has a fixed word order (rather than the versions with the word Games included). jheijmans

Funny you should mention the United States of America article -- I was just thinking the same thing the other day (this should be discussed at talk:United States of America). It appears that the Olympics articles are already divided up into summer and winter events, so we really don't need to worry about the XXXX Olympics nomenclature except when referring to both collectively within the text of an article. --maveric

Hi mav - want to discuss pages about species with you. Just got finished with a first cut of Sequoia sempervirens and Sequoiadendron giganteum with pics and am working on Doulas-fir stuff using USFS public domain stuff. I just saw your comments to rgamble about common names for species articles and I like it and will convert these to that. Is this approach documented anywhere similar to the wikipedia:naming conventions article -- it would be a help and I think you could explain it better. ClaudeMuncey, Saturday, April 27, 2002

Well in wikipedia naming conventions there are the rules to "Use common names of persons", "Use simple titles", and "Use English words" -- which taken together seems to point toward using the common, most simple English titles for things. Unfortunately, there is no explicit, written naming convention for species names yet -- this is something I've been wanting to get around to, but I haven't yet decided what to say exactly. I left a scetch of a possible idea on Talk:Magnoliophyta that proposed having lay descriptions with the common name and scientific descriptions with the scientific named articles and then cross link the two. However, this might be an unnecessary duplication of effort...

As a biologoist I am very tempted sometimes to give the scientific name for everything -- so that all of those articles are systematic and "correclty" named. However, how often is somebody going to naturaly create a direct link to a difficult to remember and spell scientific name? What I try to keep in mind when naming an article is how likely it will be for someone to easily and naturally link to that article directly within an edit window of another article. With this in mind, user:rgamble and I decided to go with using the common name whenever one existed and to redirect the scientific name to that article and then explain within the article the difference in useage (if any) of the scientific name and the common name (not all animals commonly called "Jellyfish" are members of class Scyphozoa, for example). Also see my lengthy comment on Talk:Linda Lovelace about a similar topic.

We all should continue this discussion to work out the details and possibly create a WikiProject for Biology based upon what we come up with. For now we can simply try to use our best judgement when naming articles and take them on a case by case basis. BTW renaming and reversing the redirects for the sequoia articles would be a very good idea -- as soon as Googlebot indexes the new names you will probably get more traffic to the articles than if you simply had the common name as the redirect. It is my understanding that Google's criteria on page ranking includes the number of pages directly linked to it -- both internal and external -- and whether or not the searched for term is the name of the page, in the first line of the page, is a bold-faced keyword or is part of the URL of the page (yes to all of these with an article with a fair amount of content and is directly linked by many other articles will improve the rank of the page). Since there will not be many direct links to the scientific names and since Googlebot is going to see that the common name has virtually no content, Google's page rank for the current articles will be much lower than the ranking after the article/redirect order is reversed. --maveric

Sounds right to me -- I have already taken care of the sequoia articles and am working on moving the Douglas-fir ones now.

I think the idea of a WikiProject to provide some overarching structure for biological articles is a good one. It parallels my current musings on such a WikiProject to somehow get our collective arms around the whole "national park" issue. There are thousands of entities "like" national parks around the world, both on and off the UN list, that cover natural, historical, and cultural preserves of some sort. They are controlled by national governments, state/provincial governments, local governments, and quasi-governmental private agencies (think National Trust and English Heritage in England). And the structures differ widely from place to place and many countries (such as the US) are a mixture. But it seems to be an important idea that has gained momentum through the 20th century. The only title for a catch-all article that I could figure out to try to anchor the whole mess was "Heritage Preservation" -- but that has the real problem of being in some ways a neologism, and therefore properly suspect in Wikipedia. Something similar as a WikiProject might be better. ClaudeMuncey

I may have missed something, but could you tell me why you deleted the article "The German Ideology?" I discovered the stub, and spent some time working on it, and have recently discoverred you deleted it. At the very least I wish I had been able to save the work I put into it, for other use. slrubenstein

Hum... I appears that I in fact deleted the thing three times that day. Looking at the date and the fact that I hit the darn delete button three times I think the the wiki server was agonizibly slow that day. I may have been reviewing that article after the content was removed by somebody else and had been in the process of deleting a couple of other pages at the same time and had inadvertenly hit delete on that article. If that is the case, then I am very sorry for making this mistake and destroying your work. I never delete a page that has useful content and have in the last week taken up the practice of turning mistakingly created pages and newbie edit experiments into stubs myself (instead of just deleting blank pages whenever they are created). When did you work on the page? - It doesn't appear to be cached on Google, I wonder if it was included in the latest tarball of the site. I'll check around. --maveric

I have had similar problems with the slow server -- I assumed there was some technical glitch but am reassured to know that you didn't object to what I wrote (I mean, object to it so much that you would delete it, rather than correct it)! Iam pretty sure I worked on it the same day that you deleted it. If you can figure out a way to recover it I would appreciate it, but don't spend more than an hour! If we conclude that there would be a use to such a pager, I can just take an hour and try to reconstruct what I wrote, it wouldn't take me more than an hour so .. let meknow, SR

Hi Maveric, I just need a link i don't want to find by myself. Is there some discusion page (or pages) where a consensus was reached about taking the Star wars subpages (or Star Wars/ pages, subpages don't officially exist) into pages of their own? Or is just something you decided? Just wondering. AstroNomer

Visit the talk for the main Star Wars page. I posted the question and didn't get a response. So I edited boldly. --maveric

Hi Maveric - concerning kinases, not all kinases are protein kinases. The kinase page will have to be un-redirected eventually and probably turned into a disambiguation page. And how come the editing box on your talk page is wider than my computer screen??? :-) -- Marj Tiefert, Friday, May 3, 2002

True. I will see about fixing that. However one could speak about kinases in general so the page should be about that with a list of kinases at the end. I have no idea why the edit box is larger than your screen size -- been having similar issues. --maveric

Your edit box is so wide because you have an extremely long URL on your page, and the browser doesn't dare to insert a line break. It's the Agoraphobia google search URL. AxelBoldt

Thanks Axel! --mav

Maveric, I've tried to answer your question about the year pages several times on different days, but between Wikipedia problems and Mozilla bugs, I've been thwarted each time. My hopes are high this time, though. My short answer is, I don't know of any script that has been used to create the year pages. There should be one, but I do know that the template has changed at least three different times. :) user:Christian has been adding a lot recently, but I think he's been doing it manually. --Stephen Gilbert

Thanks for the info. --maveric

Hi Maveric --

Just saw your note on my Talk page -- I haven't been around much, since teaching three sections of two totally new courses is kicking my butt. Agreed on Helga -- but there really is no stopping her. unfortunately, being a bloody-minded cow is not really enough of an excuse to block her, and she will never: 1)write anything unbiased, nor; 2)stop claiming she's the victim and the rest of us are spreading propaganda. Moreover, even mentioning annexations of parts of other countries (like... I dunno... the Sudetenland?) doesn't phase her. Keep fighting the good fight! HK, Monday, May 20, 2002

Thanks for the comment. Your views about why it was a good thing are close to what I had in mind. (BTW your talk page is starting to react very slowly. ;-)). I considered the Linda Lovelace issue as I was working, but decided that there was a much broader issue at stake. This name changing practice is quite common among Hollywood stars. Who would ever think of looking for an article on Marion Morrison? --Eclecticology, Tuesday, May 21, 2002

Hi Maveric

Thanks for your message on my talk page. You removed an exclamation point from my text? How bad ;-) This is what Wiki is about, right? BTW: I am not at all a newcomer, I just have been active mainly last year when Wikipedia run under the UseMod script... And after the switch I did not like the new software very much, but since then it improved considerably :-)

Cheers, David Andel

maveric my understanding of npov means that u got to show unbiased data ok i agree. so instead of deleting the page why dont we put downt things like arab view vs israeli view. and the palestinians be defined as palestinian freedom fighters/terrorists and leave it up to the reader to decide. after all objectivity is hard so let the reader be objective if we cant

ABC Research Centers is not a topic recognized by anybody. You can't be objective about something that dosen't exist and we are not in the business of entertaining every single crackpot idea just becuase somebody has the idea. End of discussion. --maveric

Hi Mav -- two things -- First, you never answered me about why you even see a "Film" vs. "Movie" problem -- IT really is an issue of cultural norms, I think, and there are plenty of ways to deal with the subject (like, the person who writes the article chooses, but we can always add a page with the alternate word with a "see x"). JHK

Already answered (I think) on wikipedia talk:disambiguation --maveric

Seattle question and response moved to talk:Seattle --maveric

Hello, I noticed you protected Reciprocal System of Theory. I don't think disagreements about what an article should contain are usually cause to protect a page--else we'd lock Noam Chomsky, abortion, homosexuality ... probably everything anyone can have a strong opinion on. I would simply unprotect it if I knew how. Cheers, Koyaanis Qatsi

Hello, I did read the talk on the page, but I was taking literally that rule about never usuing sysop powers in a disagreement over content. Anyway, I see Brion brought it up on the list, so we'll see what consensus emerges. I'll leave the pages as it is. Best, Koyaanis Qatsi

Just to let you know what's up with all the content-deleting I'm doing, I've been wading my way through the stub articles list and weeding those with nothing salvageable (IMO). All those completely blank articles I've left in my wake aren't going to be left in place for long; I plan to make a second pass tomorrow and delete them, thus changing all the links that might exist to them into edit links. It's a lot less work than voting them all onto the deletion page. :) Anyway, that's my plan. Hope it doesn't seem too brutal. Bryan Derksen, Monday, May 27, 2002

Talk continued at user talk:maveric149/archive 2

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