Neuromath

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome! --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 13:25, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

AfD Process

Re your recent edit summaries to edits on AfD's. Please note that the AfD process is not a voting process, it is a discussion. A deletion debate is not a popular vote, but strictly a way of obtaining editors' views as to whether an article meets policy guidelines or not. Please see WP:DEL for more information about this process. Thanks, --Strothra 03:22, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

I'm aware of the fact that according to Wikipedia policy, decisions on AfD's are not supposed to be made by sheer numerical counting of votes; I did not intend my colloquial use of the term "vote" in my edit summaries to imply otherwise. I've also spent quite a bit of time contributing to the debates or discussions in question.

If you find it difficult to understand why I would spend so much effort opposing what you may regard as a straightforward housekeeping operation, please try (as I have done) to put yourself in the position of a game-show fan. I don't really care that much about game shows, and I had never even heard of the game show Greed until I stumbled across the article on Melissa Skirboll on User:Red Director/Pages I have created; but as a Tolkien fan, I know that I would be horrified if anyone tried to take out an AfD on, for example, Thuringwethil, and I regard it as completely irrelevant that Tolkien's legendarium (which has been famous for decades) is documented in print rather than in web pages. I think issues of reliability are only relevant where facts about the subject matter are likely to be disputed, and on any topic where "fans" exist, the fans' judgment is a better indicator of significance than the judgment of the general public. If there's topic a topic where you're a fan, try to imagine it an article about it on the receiving end of an AfD. —Neuromath 06:26, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

A further note: in following up on our discussions, I just read Wikipedia:Fancruft, as well as its current MfD, and it's becoming clear to me that this whole debate is not a new one, nor one on which consensus exists. That being so, the operative principle should be the one stated in WP:BOLD: "Be bold in contributions, but not in destructions" (emphasis in the original). I would urge you to withdraw your recent AfD's until such time as a consensus on so-called fancruft exists (which is not likely to be any time soon). Incidentally, my vote (shorthand for "position stated with supporting arguments") on the fancruft essay MfD was Strong keep; I have no wish to silence the opposition. —Neuromath 09:01, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

Orange banner

Well, I guess you are now here, because of that ugly orange banner ;-). I meant the 'you have new messages' banner. Gets produced when your talk-page has changed, and gets reset when you have visited your talkpage. By the way, I am not an administrator, just a persistent editor. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 10:12, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

Text editor

Something odd is going on with the comments you've been adding to discussion pages lately. I haven't figured out the pattern yet but many of the spaces between your words are being replaced with non-breaking spaces (which show up in the edit view as &><nowiki>nbsp;</nowiki>). For those of us who like to follow discussions using the difference views, it makes the text very hard to read. See, for example, the green text here.

May I ask what browser you are using when writing your comments? Or are you drafting your comment in some other editor then importing it to Wikipedia? Rossami (talk) 00:39, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Those non-breaking spaces aren't automatic conversions by a text editor; they're typed in by hand. I use non-breaking spaces very frequently in any text formatter where they're available, since I find it makes the final text (not the source text!) easier to read. (I find it particularly distracting when the first or the last word of a sentence is "widowed" on a line by itself, or when a line break appears in the middle of a link; I often use non-breaking spaces to prevent those things from happening.) It hadn't occurred to me that anyone would routinely use source-text diffs as their main way of reading discussions, although it does make sense now that you mention it. I'll avoid use of non-breaking spaces on talk pages in the future; it will actually make it easier for me to enter text as well. I suppose I can add this to my list of Newbie mistakes! —Neuromath 04:39, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

On second thought, I've also gone back and replaced all the non-breaking spaces in my comments on the WP:BIO talk page with regular spaces. I assume this will not be taken to be a violation of the rule against editing one's own remarks on talk pages, since it does not change the final text, except for line breaks—and does not change the source text either, except in making it much easier to read. —Neuromath 06:25, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. The other problem we have with non-breaking spaces generally is that they don't do much good for orphans unless you know what screen width the reader will be using. Since we work on so many different browsers and screen sizes, it doesn't make much sense to attempt to manually orphan control. That said, I think the MediaWiki software has a rudimentary orphan control built in. I don't know much about it or how it works, though. If you feel strongly that it's important for readers, you might want to suggest it over on the Village Pump as a feature improvement. Thanks again. Rossami (talk) 22:06, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

I've now removed non-breaking spaces from the three game-show AfD's and from the rest of this talk page; that should make their source text easier to read.

Actually non-breaking spaces can be effective in the final text if you use enough of them wherever you think a line break might look bad, instead of trying to guess where line breaks will appear—although not much can be done about the source text problem in HTML. I got into the habit of using them in LaTeX, which is non-WYSIWYG like HTML, and where the non-breaking space symbol is a simple tilde ("~")—literal tildes must be quoted. Those tildes are much easier to type than the HTML entity for non-breaking spaces, and also interfere much less severely with direct reading of the source text. I wish Unicode had a non-breaking space! For a while I tried using {{nowrap}}, but it has bugs; it causes horizontal scrolling, instead of wrapping as a whole to the next line, as text containing HTML-entity nonbreaking spaces does. —Neuromath 04:56, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Editorial boards

(This is a reply by Edison to my inquiry at User talk:Edison#What is an "independent editorial board"?.) —Neuromath 00:31, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean by showing that some phrases I might have used are redlinked. I do not recall saying they were official guidelines per se. In several deletion debates, people discounted articles about college groups (choral groups in particular) in their college paper, assuming that a college paper uncritically promotes anything on campus. I raised this question somewhere, on the talk page of WP:RS or at the Village Pump (I post so many things it is hard to backtrack and find a given item) as to whether a college paper could count as one independent source toward showing that something at a college is notable. The discussion page at WP:RS does have a comment by someone that the campus papers at Yale and Harvard are probably as good in this respect as most small town papers. There are colleges where the paper is doubtless firmly under the control of the administrators, and speaks only what the college president wants said. At high schools and lower schools, I think such administration control is a given. At other colleges, the paper is an independent corporation, with a self selected editorial board and a policy of independence from the university administration, with many thousands of print circulation, and even more downloads. It might have won journalism arwards. Such things can weigh toward counting it as reliable and independent. I have seen very harsh criticism of plays, concerts, administration actions, professors, and sports teams by college papers. A nonindependent source would be a newsletter published by the campus group itself. For churches, a similar comparison would be that a newsletter published by a church cannot demonstrate notability of the church, but an article in the denomination's magazine might show notability, because it has a degree of independence and an editorial board. By contrast, I have seen papers which said exactly what some cigar chomping mogul and political extremist wanted them to say. The Chicago Tribune doubtless would be considered a reliable and independent souurce, but ever since the days of Colonel McCormick they have periodically put out some extreme political crap, as has the Washington Times (not the Washington Post). Small town papers are usually counted as reliable independent sources, but can be very prone to boosterism, where they praise to the hills anything local. The key thing is that a given person does not get to put whatever he wants into a good newspaper (unless he owns it!). The editorial board has the job of fact checking stories and upholding journalistic standards for accuracy and fairness. In a blog, on the otherhand, literally anything can be said with no one to prevent inaccuracy or bias. For other databases, even such well known ones as IMDB, apparently anyone can register and then add or modify content. I suppose the check is that other members can correct inaccuracies. I have not seen any good analysis of this. There is a similar adult film database, the presence of a performer in which is often cited as proof of their notability, and I have wondered if it is really proof of anything. An online database of computer/video games could be like a blog, or it could have identified editors who how vouch for the accuracy and independence of reviews, and the accuracy of sales and download numbers, or whatever indices might serve to establish notability for a game.I feel that a computer games or gaming group's own website is not a great source to show notability on the basis of how many members or downloads they claim, because an unscrupulous one just might exaggerate to retain their Wikipedia article as a marketing link.Edison 23:48, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

I looked at Game Show NewsNet, and the stories on their front page have links to take you to the newspaper from which they got the story, so I would cite the proginal paper in every case rather than Game Show NewsNet. If it is their commentary (from the operators of Game Show NewsNet) then I would look at their credibility. If they are identified by name that is good. If they are a high Alexa rating site that is good. If they get quoted by newspapers, mabazines or other reliable sources, that is good. Some such sites are less creedible fansites, some are more credible. Regards

Edison 23:58, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your detailed reply. I have to agree that "I have not seen any good analysis of this"; your reply is a step in the right direction. Thanks also for drawing my attention to the presence of citation links on the Game Show NewsNet front page.

On my remarks about redlinks: I was simply noting that I couldn't find any information on these topics in the places where I would naturally look first. I didn't mean to imply that you had cited the redlinks as references, nor that Wikipedia:Reliable sources had.

The masthead of Game Show NewsNet identifies some regular contributors by name, but it wasn't clear to me whether or not they were exercising any kind of oversight over the other contributors' entries, and their entries there are written in a style that could perhaps be described as "breezy". —Neuromath 00:31, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

But it appears that the front page links to reliable sources, so you could just cite them. Edison 04:10, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

I could, if I were editing an article on a topic covered on their front page; but I was trying to find information on Melissa Skirboll specifically, and the page on her I found is not current, and doesn't appear to have any references of its own. After you pointed out that their front page does have references, I had been hoping they might have another story on her with references. But I wasn't able to find any search function on their site, and their 3-month archive doesn't go back far enough to help. I couldn't even find that same page (found originally through Google) again directly from their front page. It would have simplified matters if I could establish that Game Show NewsNet itself had some reasonable form of editorial oversight (and it conceivably might), but they aren't exactly making it easy for me to establish that, nor to find references on Skirboll external to their site. I'm assuming that if I could find enough published information on Skirboll, I could write an article on her myself and apply for a history-only undelete of the previous article. (The other two articles, Daniel Avila and Curtis Warren, survived AfD; I really appreciate your analysis and work on them.) I remain convinced that secondary sources on Skirboll that would meet WP:RS standards are very likely to exist, even if it's difficult for me to find them.

Incidentally, I do place considerable importance on using the most reliable secondary sources available to support an article's claims, as the history of the page Chartreux will indicate; I added all of that page's current references to print publications. I wouldn't like anyone to get an impression that I don't care about good scholarship, although some might, after reading my defense of three (let's face it) scruffy game-show articles. Opposition to deletionism is a separate matter. I would frankly have preferred to let others more interested in game shows polish those articles until they shone, while I worked on things I know, and care, more about; but I really don't think forestalling that possibility by deleting such articles is the best way to improve Wikipedia. —Neuromath 07:00, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of Leah Hunt-Hendrix

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A tag has been placed on Leah Hunt-Hendrix requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section A7 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the article appears to be about a person or group of people, but it does not indicate how or why the subject is important or significant: that is, why an article about that subject should be included in an encyclopedia. Under the criteria for speedy deletion, such articles may be deleted at any time. Please see the guidelines for what is generally accepted as notable.

If you think that the page was nominated in error, contest the nomination by clicking on the button labelled "Click here to contest this speedy deletion" in the speedy deletion tag. Doing so will take you to the talk page where you can explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. You can also visit the page's talk page directly to give your reasons, but be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be removed without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but do not hesitate to add information that is consistent with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. If the page is deleted, you can contact one of these administrators to request that the administrator userfy the page or email a copy to you. Yunshui 雲‍水 22:50, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

Err, sorry, just ignore that ↑. Bad Twinkle! Bad! Yunshui 雲‍水 22:55, 22 March 2012 (UTC)