User talk:Afil/Archive 1

License tagging for Image:Altman-akhmatova.jpg

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Please see the Image talk. Thanks for the negotiating a great deal on the image (ordinary the image would go as PD-USSR which existence is very contraversial) but are you sure Mr. George Mitrevski is the heir of Nathan Altman? abakharev 01:11, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

The picture is posted on the internet http://www.auburn.edu/academic/liberal_arts/foreign/russian/art/altman-akhmatova.html

Under the picture it clearly indicates who the copyright owner of the picture is. I contacted him and he agreed. I don't see how else I could verify it. This is an university sight. I do not think that a university professor of a well known university would play games on a legal matter. The entire correspondence is posted at the image site, as a justification.

Afil 03:55, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

You might want to take a look at Wikipedia:Successful requests for permission. - Jmabel | Talk 05:54, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

American Comparative Literature Association

Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia! We welcome and appreciate your contributions, such as American Comparative Literature Association, but we regretfully cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from either web sites or printed material. This article appears to be a direct copy from http://www.utexas.edu/cola/progs/complit/printable.php?subsection=ACLA&content=index, and therefore a copyright violation. The copyrighted text has been or will soon be deleted.

If you believe that the article is not a copyright violation, or if you have permission from the copyright holder to release the content freely under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), you can comment to that effect on Talk:American Comparative Literature Association. Then you should do one of the following:

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It is also important that the text be modified to have an encyclopedic tone and that it follows Wikipedia article layout. For more information, see Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Thank you, and please feel welcome to continue contributing to Wikipedia. Happy editing! -- ReyBrujo 00:08, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Re: American Comparative Literature Association

No problem at all. Although copying a paragraph may or may not be copyright, pure original content is better. In fact, I will recreate it just because it was not a promotion of any kind but instead a good faithed attempt of including new information in Wikipedia. -- ReyBrujo 01:49, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Welcome

Really good work. - Jmabel | Talk 05:53, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Fair use problem with Image:Albert Wass Statue.jpg

I notice you uploaded the image Image:Albert Wass Statue.jpg with the {{Newspapercover}} fair use image tag. However, it appears that this tag is totally unrelated to the content of the image, and as a result it may qualify for speedy deletion. Image:Albert Wass Statue.jpg has been tagged for deletion, and may have been deleted by the time you see this message.

If you can find a valid tag that expresses why Image:Albert Wass Statue.jpg can be used under the fair use guidelines, please replace the {{Newspapercover}} tag that you have placed on it with that tag. If no such tag exists, please add the {{Non-free fair use in|article name that the image is used in}} tag, along with a brief explanation of why this constitutes fair use of the image. If the image has been deleted, you can reupload it but please ensure you place the correct tag on it. However, you must not remove the speedy deletion notice. Thank you, and please feel free to continue contributing to Wikipedia. feydey 04:51, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Quilt picture

Looks like it's up to me. Image:Quilt.jpg. --Liface 18:42, 25 December 2006 (UTC)

Systematization

Please see my comment at Talk:Urban_planning_in_communist_countries#Strenuous_objection. And I have to say, an accusation of incompetence on my part is one hell of a first word back from a person with whom my only prior interaction has been to praise your work. - Jmabel | Talk 20:08, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

I have responded on my user talk page. You accused me of incompetence. I can't force you to apologize, but I am certainly not going to back down just because you are so sure of yourself in a matter where I have presented extensive evidence and your only evidence is the absence of a word from an unnamed dictionary. - Jmabel | Talk

Bucharest '56

Thank you for writing the original article - it is indeed a story that should be told. I've actually been planning to write about the Timişoara and Cluj protests for a long time now, but I never seem to get around to it. Your article thus fit very much within my own sphere of interest. The copyright business is fine - I just wasn't sure (you almost have to be a trademark lawyer to know some of these details). By the way, is there any reason you changed the image of Miss Filotti? I thought she looked better in the first one. Anyway, I look forward to your corrections. Biruitorul 20:44, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

There is some material on the Internet about Timişoara / Cluj, but if you have additional material, by all means please send it my way. I'll try to finesse the copyright information to include what you've told me. Good point about Mrs. Filotti - it was not a happy time for her.

You may have noticed that Anonimu has been attacking the content; let's work to fix that. A good article on Labiş, for instance, has just come out: [1]. Of course no one said "we murdered him" (or else it's still in the archives), but it's pretty clear what happened, so we should mention that. Also, in the other places where he put {{cn}} tags, if you do have citations, it would be great if you could put some in. I'll also try to bring back the stuff about Iliescu, since the connection is important and shows that his 1990 actions didn't come out of nowhere - in 1990 he was a fairly unreformed Communist who understood too well what students might do to his position.

On the Hawaii matter: I do see how that might raise questions, especially because Hawaii isn't very Hawaiian today (only a few thousand pure Hawaiian natives remain, most don't speak Hawaiian, and the monarchy is extinct - no descendants remain). Still, I rather like the situation that existed between 1875 and 1893: Hawaii was formally independent, but because it could export sugar to the US with no tariff, it was essentially an economic colony of the US (and under its military protection), sending it thousands of tonnes of sugar per annum but only a couple hundred to the rest of the world. If it did receive independence, then a new monarch would have to be found, and he'd have to be accepted by most people, both of which are somewhat dubious propositions. So you might say that in theory I like the idea of a restored sovereign monarchy there, but putting that into practice wouldn't really be possible. Biruitorul 01:29, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Actually ... check your Wikimail. Biruitorul 03:25, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Dâmbovinic

Thanks for suggesting this redirect be deleted. However, if you could make this mistake, it's likely someone else will, so unless there is something else named Dâmbovinic which could result in confusion, it's probably best to let the redirect stay. Thanks again! Johnleemk | Talk 15:41, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

Crişul Negru

Why have you moved the article to Crişul Negru River? Other river articles use the simpler form, not Danube River, Someş River - by the way take look at Crişul Repede and Crişul Alb. The word "river" is only needed in cases like Mureş when a county with the same name also exists. Zello 14:25, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

Moldovan request

I believe the people you want to talk to about who should consider this request are the special projects committee's languages subcommittee. I'm not particularly involved in the process, I just happened to write that story, and that was two years ago now. I do know that a Moldovan Wikipedia has been the subject of a lot of mailing list controversy, with enough people twisting and misrepresenting facts to make it difficult to know what the real situation is, so you'll have a challenge demonstrating that this is legitimately a linguistic issue and not a nationalist-political one. I wish you well, but I'm not in a position to try sorting out the merits of the arguments or otherwise provide assistance. --Michael Snow 16:55, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

Little context in Categorie: Rivers in the Ialomiţa subbasin

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Commercial use of Image:Bahlui River at podul Ros.jpg

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List of rivers of Romania

Hi Afil; I see you're working on List of rivers of Romania and subpages, but I'm sorry to say that you made a fairly big mess.

• For some reason, you created all the alphabetic lists in a wrong namespace, like Wikipedia:Rivers_of_Romania/Alphabetic_list_-_A—you placed them in Wikipedia: namespace, which is reserved for pages about wikipedia. They should be in article namespace (i.e. no prefix at all). They should be named like (List of rivers of Romania (A), rather than having a slash (/) in the title.
• I dislike the way you organized the list; List of rivers of Romania is basically a disambiguation page, which forces first user to choose between alphabetic and by-length list, and alphabetic further forces him to select one of letters. Wouldn't it be better to consolidate everything into just one or two pages? See how it's done in List of cities in Germany, which, I gather, is a list of similar size, and it's just 75 kB, i.e. doesn't take years to load; I think it's much better navigable.
• I see you started the individual articles, starting with letter "A". While there's no hard and fast rule how river articles should be named (Wikipedia:Naming conventions (landforms) has never gained an official status), a general rule is that articles shouldn't be disambiguated (by "River" suffix) unless their name collides with something else (or "River" is an integral part of the name). Thus, Arieş River should better be named Arieş. That in itself is not a big deal, and if you prefer consistency, I won't insist on that kind of naming.

First, I'd like to merge all the Wikipedia:Rivers_of_Romania/Alphabetic_list_-_A-Z articles in one list, like German cities one, and preserve the edit history. You can take it on from here. (Please reply here). Duja► 08:14, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

---

I was bold, and merged all letter articles into List of rivers of Romania (alphabetic). I also translated most of it into English, where it was feasible. I think I made a few errors, especially on letter R (there are some rivers which should have Râul in the title) It's currently 208 kB long; it could be split into 2-4 sub-lists, but I think it's manageable now. I also merged the List of Longest Rivers of Romania into List of rivers of Romania; in summary, there are only 2 lists now. Please take it on from here. Duja► 11:16, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for sorting out the river list. I was working on translating the information but there was still work to do.

As far as the names of the rivers are concerned, they follow the recommendations of the Wikipedia rivers project. I had some doubts about where the name river should be included and where not, as in the example you quoted. However, many rivers have names which coincide with localities, mountains or other features where the name river is warranted. If River is added only to those, it leads to an non-homogeneous result. How could you know beforehand, that Abrud should be Abrud River because there is a Village Abrud, but Arieş should not. Besides, when somebody discovers this ambiguity, all links have to be changed. Therefore, as a general rule I prefered to have the rivers with the River added (except where the name River is included in the foreign language name) and to have redirects. In this case however you search you find it.

I have another problem where I would like your input. It is the name of international rivers. I have suggested in the discussion of the Wikipedia River project, that we adopt the rule of naming the article after the name in the country with the longest reach, if there is no usual English name for it. This would mean that the Danube remains Danube, but the Tisa river is Tisza as the longest reach is in Hungary. However it would mean that the Brzava should be Bârzava. Anyway, a rule should be set to avoid conflicts. Maybe you can post your input on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Rivers so that a consensus can be reached.

Thanks again Afil 14:52, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

I didn't immediately realize how huge that list was; after I've done the job, I concluded that it's indeed simpler to simply have "River" by default, and I retained all links in the list with "River" disambiguator. So, I withdraw that suggestion :-).

As for international rivers, I agree with your proposal, and I think a similar rule was enshrined somewhere (I can't find it right now). I also don't have a problem with the move to Bârzava; to avoid any "nationalism" allegations, it should probably be moved through WP:RM rather than unilaterally. That being said, the "length rule" should not be followed blindly—there are probably some cases where the river is longer in country A, but more important or renowned part (for some reason) is in country B (I don't recall any at the moment, but I guess there are such cases). Common sense should prevail, in any case. I see some discussion at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Rivers/Naming, but it's ages old -- seems that it just died on its own. What we have now is basically a go-as-you-please. Hopefully no one would move-war about rivers. (With the notable exception of Shatt al-Arab [4] :-) ).Duja► 15:14, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

List of rivers of Europe

I'm not so happy about your edits to the List of rivers of Europe. It is intended to be a list where rivers are listed orographically, which means that the tributaries are ordered by their confluences, not by country. See the old version [5], where Vedea, Yantra and Osam are listed between Argeş and Olt, because they flow into the Danube between the mouths of the Argeş and Olt. That the former three come from the Bulgarian right bank, and the latter two from the Romanian left bank is less relevant for this list. Please restore these edits. Markussep ^Talk 19:12, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

(your answer on my talk page) I agree that the corrections made are not final and I intended to continue correcting. However, I have my doubts that the old list is as good as you claim. I am not discussing the order in which the tributaries enter the river. But the general title indicates In Romania. The Iskar is not in Romania, neither is the Yantra and so on. Agreed that the mouth is in Romania (actuallz also in the Ukraine) but the tributaries are in various countries. Indicating the country only according to the mouth of the river is confusing.

I also have serious reservations about indicating the order of the rivers from downstream to upstream. In most countries the presentation is done in the direction of the flow of the water, not otherwise.

But I have no objection to reverting to the former version for the time being, until these matters are sorted out.Afil 19:41, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

The whole idea of this list is to show the geography of the rivers, a structured way to show tributaries and sub-tributaries. That is a lot more convenient going upstream than going downstream, see also the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Rivers#Order of presenting tributaries. The subheadings like "in Romania" are not perfect, but they're meant to create some structure in the respective coast lines (in this case that of the Black Sea). If you have a better suggestion... BTW I have to agree with User:Zello that your moves of all Romanian rivers to "X River" format were not necessary/desirable. Markussep ^Talk 15:13, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

Rivers of South Africa

Hi there. I see you're compiling lists of rivers by country. If you get a chance, please take a look at List_of_rivers_of_South_Africa: South African rivers are very poorly represented in Wikipedia, and could use all the help they can get. Have fun editing. -Kieran 01:17, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

Hi. Thanks for the very enthusiastic response. I have to admit that I have been contributing to South African rivers somewhat haphazardly until now. It's been something of a side project. However, I'm quite happy to work more systematically.

1. We do have a Department of Water Affairs and Forestry.
2. The following two NGOs have some additional information: [6], [7].
3. I've also found this map on the department web site, including detailed GIS information on the rivers. (This will require the use of some GIS software, however - something I could probably learn, but don't have the time to.)
4. The current distribution and quality of South African river articles is very poor. Probably a good beginning would be to take the government-defined drainage regions, and to get an article on the main river in each region created and filled in with some basic information, at least. The GIS data for each could be used to generate pretty maps by someone competent in GIS.
5. This file contains "lists of reaches connecting each source stream to the mouth, with river run in km" for all the rivers in the country. It's a whole bunch of CSV files. I'm not sure that I wholly understand them, but I imagine they'll make more sense to you.

Well, I hope this is helpful. Good luck with the Romania project in the meantime. -Kieran 23:59, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

OK, I've sent an email to the DWAF, asking them how we could relate the map information to the names of rivers. If they don't reply, I'll try a few other email addresses. I'm afraid I'm on holiday until Monday, so not very well connected until then, but will try and follow this up soon. -Kieran 19:25, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

Misplaced tags

For God's sake, Afil, the Wikiproject tags and evaluation such as {{River}} should go to articles' talk pages, not to the articles themselves. You've just screwed ~200 articles. You might be interested in downloading AutoWiki Browser, which automates such tedious tasks; you have to apply for download though, see that page.

Your hard work on river articles is must appreciated, but please familiarize yourself with existing practices. I understand that WP:MOS and WP:NC are huge reading, and it's easy to get lost, but please in the future, just check how some things are done on similar articles. Otherwise, your hard work is spoiled because other editors have to go after you and do the cleanup, spending more time than you would if you had done it right from the start. Duja► 10:36, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

Sorry if I sounded too harsh. I understand that you're new, and this site is difficult to learn; I'm probably speaking from the perspective who is (too) long here. Actually, most people don't start like you—they usually fix or add a couple of things here and there, then gradually widen their scope; you jumped straight onto a huge topic. Which is a Good Thing, but it also means that any strategic errors you make would be more difficult to fix :-). Still, if you have browsed around, you would have notice that pretty much every article talk page has similar Wikiproject tags. Duja► 15:01, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

Romanian rivers

HI I've noticed you;ve done some good prolific work on Romanian rivers but I must admit I don;t really see th point of the Danube template -its too generic for smaller rivers -I'd suggest create several templates for Romanian rivers maybe even a Rivers of Romania template or by county etc ♦ Sir Blofeld ♦ ^{"Expecting you" Contribs} 13:23, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

For instance what does the Arşiţa River of Romania got to do with german geography? You see my point? ♦ Sir Blofeld ♦ ^{"Expecting you" Contribs} 13:25, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

I can't think of a way unfortuntately. . I'm trying to think of a way we can devise some useful templates. To make a template with all the rivers in Romania would be out of this world -ridiculous of course - it would be like a template of all the basketball players in the NBA. Also the problem with county templates is that rivers flow through different counties and will become confusing. If it is too difficult to create templates related to the river systems in question its probably best not to have a template just a see also List of Romanian rivers ♦ Sir Blofeld ♦ ^{"Expecting you" Contribs} 17:12, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

I wouldn't waste any time at all removing the template from past articles. If editors come across it and think it unsuitable then I'm sure they'll be removed eventually . Can you think of a way to construct sensible localized templates for Romanian rivers -there must be different catchments and river basins which have a controllable number of rivers in ♦ Sir Blofeld ♦ ^{"Expecting you" Contribs} 17:14, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

Off hand see how many of the small rivers are organized by many of the localized basins in the United States. River of Pennsylvania I think has it organized into creeks within a catchment area. I beleive there should be "official catchment areas" in Romania -but there should be some overlap with tributaries but I think this should be controllable. If there are other notable geographical features in a given area such as lakes, waterfalls etc - you may want to think about incorporating them. Many places I have seen a template n Hydrology of ... county etc . Does this help? If so good luck -I would follow the basin boundaries - the "official classification" as much as you can so the templates remain controllable and not containing the several thousand rivers!! Try not to split classified areas if possible but only if the template is ridiculously huge. Bu the end of it I'd hope we would be able to connect every rover of Romania together resulting in superb coverage!!! ♦ Sir Blofeld ♦ ^{"Expecting you" Contribs} 17:45, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

I'd be good for wikipedia to hire some Romanian photographers to photograph them all!!! ♦ Sir Blofeld ♦ ^{"Expecting you" Contribs} 17:49, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

One last thing - if there are official classifications of catchment area sin Hungary you may find it useful to create a page Catchment areas of Romania or something and list them and their territories if possible. ♦ Sir Blofeld ♦ ^{"Expecting you" Contribs} 17:51, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

Rivers of Romania

There is a message regarding Romanian rivers at Wikipedia talk:Romanian Wikipedians' notice board#Infoboxes for rivers. You know the subject better and maybe you could try to answer. R O ^{A M A T A A} | msg  07:38, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Re: A common technique to split long alphabetic lists is to break it into N smaller subsets, where N is not necessarily equal to the number of letters. For example, List of rivers of Romania (A-M) and List of rivers of Romania (N-Z) would provide some 100 kB articles each, which is manageable; breaking into 4 chunks would be also OK. You don't need administrator help for that: move the original article, and cut & paste the contents into new page -- just indicate something like "split from List of rivers of Romania (alphabetic)" in the edit summary.Duja► 06:59, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Sorting Romania-stubs: not just "acceptable", but required

Your reverts have been extremely unhelpful, please consider reverting those. I (and my bot) have made no edits in this area in between your first message and now: what does it serve to leave increasingly aggressive messages in multiple locations, on the same topic? You may think that Romania is a "small country", but Category:Romania stubs is an undesirably large stub category, which you're now "unsorting" to, worsening the situation. Splitting by subdivision may not be "inspired": it's in fact the completely standard thing to do: see any other country-geo-stub subtype. Furthermore, far from acting "unilaterally", this was well-flagged at WP:WSS/P. If you have some other scheme for splitting the Romanian geography stubs, please suggest it there (though be aware that landform-specific stub types have attracted considerable opposition in the past). Alai 23:53, 4 August 2007 (UTC)

You seem to be confused as to what I'm "claiming". I said nothing about Wikiproject Rivers; I said that the stub-sorting wikiproject has consistently supported sorting geography stubs by country, and by subdivision thereof. I didn't split any of these by country: that's was the pre-existing state when I found them, and the state you have reverted many of them to. Alai 00:16, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

"Confusing" would be putting it mildly. Category:Romania geography stubs is oversized; this is due, one-for-one, to usages of {{Romania-geo-stub}}. When a stub type (i.e. both template and category) get oversized, then (hopefully) someone makes a proposal at WP:WSS/P for splitting them further, and this then gets implemented. In every case for the country-geo-stubs, this has been done by subdivision, and this what was done for {{Romania-geo-stub}}. If you think that the river article shouldn't even be using this in the first place, then get a consensus to do something else with them. Don't just revert standard practice sorting steps, especially if you're then going to complain about the scheme as-reverted to. Alai 00:44, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

Good to hear we're reducing the confusion somewhat. I've no particularly strong preference on how to split up the rivers, but currently the rivers are simply tagged with -geo- templates, and splitting "geography" articles is currently done by country and subdivision, that being the scheme that generally makes the most sense for "human geography". In any case, we'd want to follow some "permcat" scheme or other, for the sake of consistency. "Too much" is obviously a somewhat fuzzy concept, but currently anything over 800 stubs is listed on the "to be split" list (which is at WP:WSS/T). (Some would say that over 400 or over 600 is time to be starting to think about re-sorting, though.) There's no-one "in charge" of stub types per se; as I mentioned, practice is to list proposals at WP:WSS/P, and try to determine a consensus. Prior discussion, or else links to the WSS proposal, at related Wikiprojects (like "rivers" and "Romania") might also be a good idea (if I'd realized this would affect so many "river" articles, or that there'd be anything controversial about it, I'd have mentioned it at those, too). Alai 01:35, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

Afil, it is standard stub sorting practice to sort geographical stubs by location rather than landform. the reasons for this are simple: firstly, it is far more likely that an editor will know about a particular area rather than a particular type of geographic feature worldwide (an editor in Romania interested primarily in rivers is thus more likely to know about small towns in Romania than about small rivers in Nicaragua). For members of a specific WikiProject relating to a subject such as rivers, there are other tools available to sort articles, such as that project's {{river}}. Second, there are an infinite number of different types of landform, some of which are so rare that there can be no hope of ever assigning an accurate stub type to them. By using national and subnational boundaries to divide geographical stubs it is possible to accurately place all geo-stub articles in an effective subdivision where they can be found by editors. This is extremely important, given that there are well over 100,000 geography stubs. The large number of stubs is evident in the large numbers of stubs for many countries, which is why they are further subdivided by official region - again, a more practical solution than subdividing by type of feature and for exactly the same reason. You may consider that Romania is a "small country", but consider that Luxembourg has over 400 geography stubs. Given the relative sizes of the two countries, how many do you suppose Romania has? The answer, in simple terms, is "too many to have in one undifferentiated category". It is for that reason that WP:WSS is using exactly the same system as it uses for every other country with too many stubs for one geo-stub category - splitting by subregion. You have mentioned elsewhere that Category:Rivers of Romania is not split by counties, and therefore the stub articles on them should not be either - please do not confuse the standard practice of permanent categorisation with that of stub categorisation. The two systems work in parallel, but - since they serve different purposes (one for readers, one for editors) - there is no guarantee that they should automatically be identical. Category:Rivers of Romania is a subcategory of Category:Geography of Romania, a level at which the stubcat and permcat hierarchy is identical. The different needs of readers and editors makes it more logical, natural, and effective to split stubs by subregion from that point on. To remove river articles from their correct stub categories, as you have been doing, severely affects botht eh stub-sorting wikiproject and also the ability of editors to find those articles and therefore help Wikipedia. You are reducing the likelihood of editors being able to find these articles to expand them. By doing that, you are harming Wikipedia. Please do not continue disrupting the stub sorting process by removing stubs from the stub categories to which they have been correctly assigned. Grutness...wha? 01:20, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

A reply to your points

Hi Afil - You raise some intereting points that desrve a full reply. Your origianl comments are in italics:

I want to make it clear first of all on why I was vocal. After working for over one month on the project and posting several hundred articles if not more, I finally find out that there have been changes made without the courtesy of being informed about the changes.

It is not standard practice to inform earlier editors of an article when an amendment to the article is made. This is the case across the whole of Wikipedia, and not just true of stub sorting. If the editor of an article wishes to see further changes to an article, it is very easy for him or her to put that article on his/her watchlist. If a particular change is made across several watchlist articles, it should become obvious what the editor could do in future to improve what is done to the articles he/she is interested in. In the case of replacing stub templates with more finely-grained ones, this is something that happens all the time on Wikipedia (I personally chnange over several dozen per day, and often hundreds). If every previous editor of an article was informed it would take forever. In cases where it is clear that one editor has done a batch of articles, all with the same problem, then a stub sorter will often make a comment to that editor - but when a bot is used, it isn't always obvious who has done the previous editing.

I would like to raise a question. The issue is that rivers have a certain length and have a tendency of flowing from one administrative unit to another. Therefore, they will be included in more categories as the split into administrative units goes further. Your comments don't say if it is acceptable to have seven or ten stub categories for the same article because the river crosses seven or ten administrative units.

The standard maximum number of stub templates on an article is about three or four. If a river crosses into more than three or four subdivisions of a country, then certainly it makes sense to use the country's geo-stub rather than subdivisional ones. the same is true if a river crosses into more than three or four countries - then the continental level geo-stub is used. But many rivers only pass through two or three subnational regions. In those cases, it is better to more accurately pinpoint the river using subnational geo-stubs.

I still don't know how many articles are acceptable for a stub category. I understand your preference for splitting stubs by subdivisions even if I don't totally agree. But even in accepting this principle, we can reach an excessive number of articles in one stub category. In this case should we not further subdivide the units to keep the number manageable? Therefore even if we accept the principle of administrative units it would be better to design the system and to select the units so as to maintain an acceptable number of articles in each stub category.

the Stub-sorting WikiProject regards 60 to 800 stubs as being the optimal size for a stub category. Any more than that, and an editor may feel swamped by the number of articles to choose from. Any fewer than that, and it is likely that an editor wil have to search several categories before finding articles that he/she can expand. These limits are also useful from the point of view of sorting stubs, as they allow fairly finely-tuned subject areas without a proliferation of thousands of nearly empty categories. As to further splitting, that's exactly what WP:WSS tries to do. There are usually several levels of subnational region, so splitting by the top one allows for further splitting later. Ths has happened with US geo-stubs, for instance, which are all split by state, with some states further split by county.

What I still don't understand, is why we must have a single stub category. Why could we not have a stub category which subdivides the articles by subunits (as you prefer) and another stub category which uses another criterion? The articles categories are not limited, the same article can be part of several categories. Why can we not have the same principle for stubs? Your comment that stub categories are meant for editors is only part of the explanation. There are several editors and their needs might not coincide; some could prefer one type of classification and others another one. Editors are generally concerned by several fields of activity. In the case we are discussing, rivers are no doubs a geographical feature. However, there are other professions, such engineers or environmentalist, which look at rivers from a different point of view. If we have more than one type of stub classification we could satisfy the needs of various categories of editors.

As I said above, there is a limit to the number of stub templates that can be placed on an article. As it is, there are often complaints from editors that an article looks ugly even if it has three or four templates. Because permanent categories are not added by template, articles can be in alarge number of them without causing any fuss. With stub categories, however, there is a limit imposed by the templating process (which is a necessity for the purposes of stub sorting, labelling the article and further later splitting of stub categories if needed). For that reason, the most obviously useful stub categories are used. Though you are right that environmentalists or engineers might wish to expand articles on rivers, they too would no doubt also be looking at other related geographical features as well - canals, lakes and estuaries, for example. If there are a significant body of editors working on articles, then they also have recourse to forming a WikiProject and using a talk page banner template, as I mentioned earlier.

The last issue I would like to raise is that we should be exchanging the information such as this more frequently. Wikipedia is a worldwide project covering over 100 languages. The project of Romanian rivers was initiated in the Ro:wiki where I am an administrator. The English version is intended to be an improved version of the Romanian one. How can we get a common approach is instead of informing each other about our views, some of us are bullied by others. The issue of the entire dispute is the lack of communication. I am sure that if we talk, we can also understand each other. If we don't, we might never guess what the other person wants.

Fair comments. Unfortunately, with the size of Wikipedia, it is often difficult for one group of editors to know what another group is doing. We don't want to be "bullies", but we also have a project that covers a very large scope and is a very difficult one to keep organised (there are nearly half a million stub articles!) for that reason we do try to maintai as much control over the stubbing process as we can - not so as to usurp the "free-for-all" aims of Wikipedia, but more to keep the stubbing process as streamlined as possible so that it is useful for editors in general. There will be cases where an editor doesn't agree with the way stubs are organised, but hopefully you can understand what we are trying to do and why we do it the way we do.

Grutness...wha? 02:37, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

Moving articles

Please use the move tab if you wish to move an article. Is that what you were trying to do at Bughea River? Respond here and I'll fix it up for you. --- RockMFR 01:59, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

Damn!!!!!!!! that bot is annoying!!! It has bothered me too!!!! I think its about time you thought about those templates we discussed before ♦ Sir Blofeld ♦ ^{"Expecting you?" Contribs} 18:26, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

I think its fine to categorize all rivers in Romania as Category:Romanian river and whatever county it is in add the ...County also. I wouldn't be so concerned about stub templating what is important is connecting all the rivers in a given basin with a navigation template to enhance understanding of it. I would like to think also these stubs can be expanded into articles with nice images!! ♦ Sir Blofeld ♦ ^{"Expecting you?" Contribs} 19:19, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

Categories for rivers

I moved some articles about rivers, from Cluj County category to Geography of Cluj County and you undone it. I think the county category is having to many articles. Do you think it should remain there? --R O ^{A M A T A A} | msg  21:18, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

Is it now OK if I move the rivers to the category Category:Rivers of Cluj County? R O ^{A M A T A A} | msg  07:23, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Stub tags on Romanian rivers

So, what conclusion did you come to about splitting up the numerous rivers in Category:Romania geography stubs? That category is oversized again, so action of some sort is certainly required. Alai 04:13, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

As far as I'm concerned, the 800 article limit should be treated pretty strictly, if not to say it being rather on the high side. (Ideally we'd keep stub categories to one or two listings pages, but I don't see that happening for quite some time.) Are you saying there's going to be more than 800 articles per county? (More than 800 rivers, or more than 800 total?) At any rate, can I take it you have no objection to them being sorted by county, for the time being? Alai 03:06, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

OK, thanks, that'll suffice for now: we can burn the rest of our bridges as we come to them. Or something like that. If we get to the point where the geo-stubs for the smallest sensible administrative unit are themselves oversized, perhaps the by-landform-opposers will have to do a rethink. Alai 01:35, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

The duplication of {{Cluj-geo-stub}} and {{ClujCounty-geo-stub}} seems inadvertent; I'd be inclined to redirect the former to the latter, though perhaps re-using the image in the "County" template. I think the remaining county-level templates would be all speediable; they should be upmerged, though (either to the parent or to regional categories), if they're not going to have 60 articles in each at present. I'll make a start on doing that tomorrow. Alai 01:28, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Capitalization

You have created large numbers of pages with proper names having the wrong capitalization. Things like "river is a tributary of [[Uz River|Uz river]]" should be "river is a [[tributary]] of [[Uz River]]". Uz river is simply not correct so there is no reason to go to extra effort to type it in. It should, in fact, be avoided. Rmhermen 13:17, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

sppedy deletion request

A tag has been placed on Dumicuş River, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done for the following reason:

article to small...to little information

Under the criteria for speedy deletion, articles that do not meet very basic Wikipedia criteria may be deleted at any time. Please see the guidelines for what is generally accepted as an appropriate article, and if you can indicate why the subject of this article is appropriate, you may contest the tagging. To do this, add {{hangon}} on the top of the page and leave a note on the article's talk page explaining your position. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the article that would confirm its subject's notability under the guidelines.

For guidelines on specific types of articles, you may want to check out our criteria for biographies, for web sites, for bands, or for companies. Feel free to leave a note on my talk page if you have any questions about this. Aflumpire 22:14, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Vandalism Warning

Hi there. You may not know this but you are not permitted to move or delete speedy deletion requests by yourself.

I am not putting in an official warning but please follow the correct procedure by using the hangon tag or negotiating with the person who put up the tag.

I will not put it up again but please follow the correct procedure in the future.

Aflumpire 22:24, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

No, I said nothing about what you were talking about, but your article MET CRITERIA FOR SPEEDY DELETION. You vandaliside by REMOVING the speedy deletion tag that I placed on the article. I have every right to do so. Next time, you must follow correct Wikipedia procedure for contesting a speedy deletion tag. I did not place in an official warning, this is a friendly warning.

Thankyou and I hope that you now understand. And a warning. Any more rants on my page will be classed as vandalism. Please do not rant on my user page. Aflumpire 01:14, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

although in general one should not remove speedy tags from one's own articles, I think that in the case of tags places on such articles as rivers, towns, and cities, that their removal could be seen as justified, since there is unmistakable WP policy that these are always notable. However, to avoid complaints, it is better to let an admin like me do it. If any accidentally get deleted, let me know. DGG (talk) 01:17, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

speedy declined by reviewing admin.

By repeated decisions at AfD, all rivers and similar places are notable, including cities towns and villages. Established WP policy for years, still consistently supported without exception. See WP:COMMON. If anyone would like to change the policy, feel free to try, but my advice is that success is extremely unlikely. I urge the WikiProject to endorse it. Feel free to remove andy speedy and prod tags placed on such articles. (except if they should happen to be copyright violations) As the reviewing admin, I've decline the speedies i saw--if any others need to be undeleted, please let me know. DGG (talk) 01:13, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

I agree with DGG that they should not be deleted. Of course, it would be better if each article had a little more information. Rmhermen 01:42, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Broken redirect

You recently created the page Angela da Foligno, whose contents are "#REDIRECT Angela da Foligno". (You'd be surprised how often this happens.) I haven't been able to figure out what article you meant to link to, so please correct the link yourself if possible. --Russ (talk) 19:10, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

• Never mind, I figured it out and corrected the redirect. Sorry to bother you. Russ (talk) 19:11, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

SOrry But..

If you dont add souces i will be forced to put them all up for speedy deletion. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Gaogier (talk • contribs) 22:00, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Do you think these articles will ever all be developed? Did you think about creating templates for the river basins like I said? ♦ Sir Blofeld ♦ ^"Talk"? 21:54, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

This Balinţi River article is a bit confusing. What is it called? Why is the name different in the box? ♦ Sir Blofeld ♦ ^"Talk"?

The thing is there are now a massive number of articles on the rivers and every time you pick one at random they are the one line stubs on the tributaries when people are looking for a half decent article. Wouldn't it more beneficial to have articles on the river basins and have a list of rivers and maps of them in rather than creating a seperate page for each stream? ♦ Sir Blofeld ♦ ^"Talk"? 22:00, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

I'm pleased with the progess and your dedication to this. If enough information could be found I think they could all develop eventually but realistically I don't know if they will ever all devlop. I would suggest writing some of the statistics into the articles a bit more to fill them out a bit on each one rather a one liner ♦ Sir Blofeld ♦ ^"Talk"? 22:04, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

E.g why not create an article on Jiu sub basin and have table of all the rivers in Category:Rivers of the Jiu subbasin with column headers like length, discharge and tributaries. One article could convey the same information that over a hundred do. ♦ Sir Blofeld ♦ ^"Talk"? 22:11, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

I appreciate your efforts - I hope you can begin expanding them and find info like you say. Setting out the rivers in Romania is an incredible task and your doing very well. I'm sure certain rivers can be expanded into full articles given time. it is though slightly concerning the level of stubs on the rivers compared to fuller articles. ♦ Sir Blofeld ♦ ^"Talk"? 22:15, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

Thats a very interesting story I'd never have imagined. Hope you can add the info then to help these people. Regards. Maps don't necessarily have to be copywrighted. Many editors have created their own maps and geographical diagrams based on existing ones ♦ Sir Blofeld ♦ ^"Talk"? 22:39, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

Who said anything about it being a game or you being a kid? I hope the WikiProject Rivers members are helping you ♦ Sir Blofeld ♦ ^"Talk"? 22:45, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps you could create some written articles related to river management in various parts of the world then? ♦ Sir Blofeld ♦ ^"Talk"? 22:51, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

Your rivers

I appreciate your effort in creating articles about rivers, but please cite your sources and add more content before saving your articles.

Thanks. Hostile Amish (talk) 01:28, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

A shiny barnstar

		The Original Barnstar
		Awarded to Afil for their brilliant hard work creating and dealing with articles relating to rivers. Keep up the great work! Pumpmeup 01:51, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

RFC Help

There's an example of a completed RFC template on my user page.

You can also look on the RFCbot user page.

The template ExampleRFC can be used with a single parameter for a page name to place a message on a user talk page relating to a broken RFC template on another page. For example:

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will insert the following, which includes a link to the rfc instructions:

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Re: Mediation and arbitration in foreign language Wikipedias

Well, the English Wikipedia Mediation Committee doesn't deal with policy issues such as copyright etc., but rather specific disputes about specific articles. On foreign Wikipedias, the process would probably be different to Wikipedia, but in response to "how can the mediation or arbitration process be initiated" the best place would be to ask an administrator on that language-chapter for assistance in starting dispute resolution. Cheers, Daniel 09:05, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Zăpodia River (Neagra Şarului)

This is an automated message from CorenSearchBot. I have performed a web search with the contents of Zăpodia River (Neagra Şarului), and it appears to be very similar to another wikipedia page: Zăpodia River (Secu). It is possible that you have accidentally duplicated contents, or made an error while creating the page— you might want to look at the pages and see if that is the case.

This message was placed automatically, and it is possible that the bot is confused and found similarity where none actually exists. If that is the case, you can remove the tag from the article and it would be appreciated if you could drop a note on the maintainer's talk page. CorenSearchBot (talk) 21:52, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Bahna River (Dunăre) River

Could you please change the name of the article to contain the word "river" only once or add some explanation what the title means. TIA Pavel Vozenilek (talk) 23:14, 24 December 2007 (UTC)