Talk:Christmas Bullet

Regarding that revert: of course it is more "accurate", but one can in fact overdo accuracy at the expense of readability, and I strongly feel that this is the case here. Can we expect anyone to read up two different facts in four consecutive pages of a book? I think we can. Doing it otherwise leaves a reader of average intelligence with a feeling of "how illiterate do they think I am"? -- Theoprakt (talk) 21:02, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

Any change to Bzuk's reference formatting preferences in aircraft related articles is likely to be seen as vandalism and reverted as such, no matter what other editors think, or what gnome-work they had already contributed to sorting out formatting according to WP practice. The only solution seems to be to leave aircraft articles to their cabal. 8-(

Personally I'd use separate cites when there are two one-page refs in a book, but merge cites to separate pages of one short reference within a book. If someone does go to the effort of finding an article, then it's not much to ask for them to read all of the half-dozen pages. Andy Dingley (talk) 10:35, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

In response to the above comment as to consolidating references: I do agree in many cases, that simplifying citations is required, but in this case, I considered the article was not necessarily an easy one to source and that there were many conflicting pieces of information that needed to be sorted out. That's the real reason for the change back to the earlier set of reference notes as awhile back in Wiki, there was a tendency to simply cite entire books or chapters of books as reference sources but more and more, you will see individual pages used as exact notations for bibliographical sourcing. My change back to an earlier format has nothing, repeat nothing, to do with a "rollback" or "vandalism rollback" as was indicated in the proceeding comment. FWiW Bzuk (talk) 11:25, 20 December 2009 (UTC).

You have undone an awful lot of my edits (including content edits) to aircraft-related articles, where I've also formatted references using the WP standard templates. When challenged on this, you claim that it's because the WP {{cite}} templates are "wrong" in how they format refs.

In the last couple of days I've also had other editors (well-known on aircraft articles) undo changes that merged the cites & refs for an article that had only a handful of refs, one of which was (as here) three separate cites to three consecutive pages of a three-page article. Also another undo where they are insisting on keeping a reference to the wrong engine (and there's no shortage of refs to the right engine variant, I've just added them). Andy Dingley (talk) 12:11, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

Rewriting citation or bibliographical notations is not undoing the original work. The citation template is useful to a point, but when there are "garbage in, garbage out" errors, it is often easier to rewrite in text form rather than trying to manipulate the template. FWiW, these talk pages should be discussing the advancement of the article. Bzuk (talk) 13:42, 21 December 2009 (UTC).

And I see that you've just done it again, on the Westland Wyvern article. 8-( Please, stop treating my contributions as if they're vandalism that you have to edit away on sight. Andy Dingley (talk) 14:13, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

Incidentally, please take a look at DBPedia some time, for yet another of the reasons why a ref through a formatting template is better than plaintext. Andy Dingley (talk) 14:13, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

The name of the Christmas Bullet

Is there any verifiable or definitive source that identifies the exact name of the aircraft? FWiW Bzuk (talk) 13:46, 21 December 2009 (UTC).

Figures

Hello everybody... sorry, I think there's a problem in the "Specifications" section: it is stated that the length of the Bullet was 26 ft (6.40 m), but 26 ft is not 6.40 m. I wondered which of the two figures is correct. 26 ft would be 7.92 m, while 6.40 m would be 21 ft. I added a "clarification needed" template in the article. Thanks for any help, --MLWatts (talk) 08:30, 4 September 2011 (UTC)

All right, I found the first-hand source here and I made the correction. --MLWatts (talk) 12:44, 4 September 2011 (UTC)

Confirming the Red Bird

"After a second aircraft was supposedly built, called the Red Bird, later modified into the Red Bird II"

http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/history/q0038.shtml treats it as confirmed (as opposed to his 1908 flight). http://www.virginiamemory.com/blogs/out_of_the_box/2011/12/21/mr-christmas-and-his-flights-of-fancy-2/ says there's no evidence of the plane.

I would have thought it would be easy to check the patent records at least to see if he actually patented it, even if that doesn't confirm whether he actually built the thing? AkaSylvia (talk) 09:59, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

an Valspar ad?

Under operational history: "Despite the crash, Christmas placed an Valspar ad in Flying Magazine". should it be "a Valspar ad"? and/or what does a varnish company have to do with this?71.208.46.9 (talk) 04:25, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

William W. Christmas

Was he ever charged with fraud, and/or contributing to the death of two pilots? Look at that photo and you can see that over 50 mph would be ridiculous. How could he convince a pilot to try it out?71.208.46.9 (talk) 04:38, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

My thought too. Relatives of at least the second dead pilot should have filed for wrongful death, claiming that Christmas was a grifting fraud who knew his plane was not airworthy. Flight Risk (talk) 04:15, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

Cantilever wings?

Can these clearly non-rigid wings really be considered cantilever? — Red XIV ^(talk) 21:05, 20 April 2023 (UTC)