User talk:Pgan002/Archive/2006

Edit to Sudan

Thanks for your contributions, but this is one of the least minor edits I've seen in a bit. Please make less liberal use of the "minor edit" checkbox. Also, inserting "invisible" text into the article is not very productive in encouraging new contributions; a more effective approach may be to make a list of important to-dos in the talk. Thanks, BanyanTree 23:32, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads up. Do you mean I mande too many (albeit small) changes, or some of the changes are big? Which ones? I think they are all small rearrangement of text, sentence simplifications or wikifications, which qualify as minor edits according to"How to edit a page". Pgan00200:25, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

The first explanation.  :) There are so many tweaks that it actually takes a while to go through all your rewordings to make sure that something does not now imply something that it didn't in the previous version. (I'm sure you're being careful about that, but some editors like me are a bit paranoid unless they scan every edit.) Leaving off the minor check and writing "extensive copyedit and rewording for clarity", or something similar, as an edit summary would be much appreciated when doing a bunch of minor edits at once. You must be the master of the preview; I always find myself going back and catching things I had originally missed. Cheers, BanyanTree 00:43, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

OK. It might help others if the consideration of quantity of small changes is mentioned at"How to edit a page". Ideally, I would make checking easier. Would it help to, say, edit and save each paragaph separately, or something like that?Pgan002 01:06, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

Wow, you appear to have a sudden traffic jam on your user talk after several months of solitude. I'm not at all saying that you should break up your editing, and doing so would just require editors to do a group diff to see the combined effect of all the separate edits. But please consider whether the combined effect of your edit would require more than a few moments for another editor to check. If there is doubt, don't mark it as minor. Nobody will bother you for marking multiple phrase changes as a regular edit, while several will find a thorough copyedit throughout a large article marked minor to be misleading. Users with hundreds of watched pages rely heavily upon the "m" and edit summaries to keep track of the edit churn. - BanyanTree 02:28, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

Path

Noticed your recent edit to Path. Piping and excess wikilinks do not go in disambiguation pages, see Wikipedia:Manual of Style (disambiguation pages). Also, always use an edit suumary, it's important and much appreciated. I have revert your edit to Path.--Commander Keane 02:10, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know -- I would not have read the Disambiguation Page Style Manual on my own. I do not remember such guidelines when I joined a long time ago. I do not understand why the Style says wikilinks should not be used; if the reader does not know some term in the disambiguation, he must then look it up by typing. Pgan002 05:38, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

The dab style guide started in July last year. The reason to not use excess wikilinks is that it distracts the reader from finding the article they were looking for. For example in Path, without excess wikilinks there are 9 options for the reader. With excess wikilinks there could be 25 options - which is harder to navigate through.--Commander Keane 00:43, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Minor edits

You've been occasionally marking edits minor that aren't. See Wikipedia:Minor edit. Note "A major edit is basically something that makes the entry worth relooking at for somebody who wants to watch the article rather closely, so any "real" change, even if it is a single word, is a major edit." To take two examples: you made two minor edits to Wikipedia:Manual of Style recently. One, about serial commas, was probably safe to mark minor, since it was a copyedit without any substantive change (but I know some would disagree, since copyedits can often subtly change meaning—which is more important on a policy page like this). The other, you added information (about "alternate" as a verb). That was not a minor edit. --TreyHarris 08:37, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

Oh dear, I seem to be messing up pretty badly lately! I apologize; I think it's because I'm making bolder edits. I agree the latter was not minor, and I thought I had gone back and re-edited it trivially, just to mark it as "non-monor"; but now I read at Wikipedia:Minor edit that such trivial edits are auto-discarded. I appreciate your feedback, because I have long had doubts about what is a minor edit and how to summarize edits. I honestly think I'm learning. -Pgan002 00:08, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

India copyedit

Hi. I appreciate your copyediting of the article on India. Thanks. -- Sundar ^{\talk \contribs} 08:30, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! -Pgan002

India Map

On the India talk page you said you wanted a specific map,i have made my own,and put it up there (Image:India ter1.jpg).If you do not like it,please tell me,ill glady remove it myself or atleast inform me and delete it.I know it doesnt look too good,but it did take some of my time.Plus i uploaded another image by mistake,how do i delete it??Prateek01 15:32, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

I like it, good work! I would still recommend some improvements, most of which require the unlabeled map:

1. Leave a space after every stop (period, ".") and comma (","). The space looks better and words can break on different lines.
2. Make the text background transparent rather than white.
3. Shade all disputed areas with a hashed pattern, either in addition to or instead of the solid color.
4. Label the state names inside the state borders, when they fit, rather than by numbers. I think it is even better if a name is broken on two lines to fit in, for example "Karna-taka".
5. If possible, replace all numbers with lines from a state to its name when it does not fit inside the state borders, as you did with "administered by ..., claimed by ...". This makes it easier to see which name corresponds to any state.
6. Label the "admnistered by, ..." as "admin. by ..., claimed by ...". The first word is abbreviated, and everything but names is lower case -- there is no reason to capitalize.
7. Make the font size the same for "admin..." as with state names.

-Pgan002 04:06, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

Rhodesia copyedit

Thanks for your good work on this. I had flagged it and you saved me a lot of trouble. I changed 'program' to 'programme' as I think the Commonwealth spelling is more appropriate here.

Guinnog 23:47, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

Of course, I meant Zimbabwe here. Sorry, I was looking at both tonight. Guinnog 23:51, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the thanks :-) -Pgan002 03:52, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Adsorption

Very nice corrections to adsorption, are you also a chemist?? Knights who say ni

Thanks. Nah, I'm a computer scientist but I like to read well-written articles. -Pgan002

The Isotherms section probably can be improved. What is the first isotherm called? Do the isotherms have more descriptive names than the names of their discoverors? There is a trend in science to prefer such names, and I think it's a good trend. -Pgan002 18:52, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

Please use the preview feature

I would like to thank you for your contributions to Wikipedia. However, it is recommended that you use thepreview button before you save; this helps you find any errors you have made, and prevents clogging up recent changes and the page history. Thanks again. - Tangotango 08:21, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, I will be more careful. Certainly errors should be corrected before a save. But what may sometimes look like errors is that I try to break up large edits into pieces which can be rolled back more independently. So which edits did you have in mind more specifically? -Pgan002 08:32, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

I was referring to your edits to DNA, but I can see why some edits would be more useful split up than together. That's certainly something I didn't think about :) Cheers, Tangotango 08:38, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

Barnstar

		The Worker's Barnstar
		You have done some great work keeping some science articles clean, and wiki-tastic (triangle of U, polyploidy, etc)! Thanks from everyone! Adenosine | Talk 09:16, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the reconition! I had never heard of barnstars. My next goal should be an Editor's Barnstar ;-)

Vandalism on Microsoft

I had to revert your edit on Microsoft. Some people before you did some massive amounts of vandalism and there was no good way to fix what they did without undoing what you did. ---J.S ^(T/C) 08:59, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Fair enough, your call. I noticed the vandalism, but the versions where it was introduced seemed so many that I thought it would be simpler to improve the current article than to revert. You must be better acquainted with the article history. I probably will not edit it again anyway, unless I return to read it for information. -Pgan002 05:47, 4 December 2006 (UTC)