User talk:Andy Dingley/Archive 2009 February

JavaServer Faces

I provided the Wikipedia policy. WP:ELNO # 10 and # 11 apply here. Whether or not it's useful is not a Wikipedia policy.E_dog95' ^{Hi '} 02:28, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

Not everything is a "blog", just because it's hosted through Wordpress and the like. Now purging EL's to "web log" and "web-hosted diary" sites is fine (maybe not in some high-profile bios of bloggers notable for their blogs), but this is technical content relevant to a technical article. It's also useful technical content that's relevant to the article and not covered by the article itself - one of the main use cases for WP:EL. Wikipedia doesn't really recognise how the tech world works sometimes: the fact that people wo work in the tech field use that field as their publishing medium. Journalists write in newspapers, academics publish in peered journals, geeks do it online. Andy Dingley (talk) 08:59, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

OK, I see that you're now stripping most of the other ELs from the article and putting it down under a comment of reverting my edits, so it's not obvious what you're up to. Please don't use the words "good faith" around such an action, it confuses people. 8-( Andy Dingley (talk) 09:04, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

Let's take this to Talk:JavaServer Faces, so that those involved with the article can see it. Andy Dingley (talk) 09:07, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

re: this edit

That's some impressive use of parser functions, looks complicated.. may I ask what it was intended to do? I'm interested in learning more on how to use parser functions. OlEnglish (talk) 18:31, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Pah! That's just me faffing about pointlessly and wasn't any attempt to use parser functions at all 8-) It's just {{subst:otheruses}}

I wanted to add an {{otheruses}} hatnote to "Book It!" about the other Book It!, which would of course need some extra explanation about two unrelated pages with exactly the same name - {{otheruses}} doesn't support this with the standard params. As one of these might get deleted soon, I didn't fancy a full disambig page. My idea was to subst in the boilerplate from the hatnote template, then tweak it a little manually. As the contents are this vast splurge of complexity, then I abandoned it and just typed it from scratch (probably getting the formatting wrong, but...).

As to wiki parser functions, buy my new book 8-) (just don't hold your breath...)

I don't do that much with Wikimedia: most of the wiki work I do is commercial intranet stuff. A lot of this is semi-workflow based on very heavy use of categorization, lots and lots of the DPL extension (dynamic page list) which uses the cats and then parser functions. I don't know of good references to hand - just the obvious sites, a lot of searching and a big bookmarks page on my home wiki. It's worth browsing through the extensions too, there's a lot of useful stuff in there. Andy Dingley (talk) 20:05, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Ah I see, hehe, thanks. :) -- OlEnglish (talk) 21:22, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Bristol's "floating harbour"

you wrote: I think there's also some justification to capitalising it when the phrase is treated as a proper noun referring to this one specific example, such as "the Floating Harbour", but when it's merely an adjectival phrase like this you were correct to lowercase it.

And I agree; the text said "a Floating Harbour", not "the"—as you noted—thus making it not a proper noun, either. Isn't it wonderful when Wikipedians agree? --Piledhigheranddeeper (talk) 00:33, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Aww, can't we have a huge edit war? 8-(

Four stroke engine

The template was added because some of the content of the article refers to the four-stroke cycle, some to the Otto-cycle and the distinction between thermodynamic cycles in scientific theory in general and engines is not clear. To be honest, taking issue with the title is a little unfair as the issue is more with how grossly misleading the article content is, but I felt such a box would be a good indicator to readers that the content might not be 100% representative of the big black header at the top of the page. I haven't put the template back, nor will I, but I would appreciate it if you would consider doing so. Anyway, I hope to attempt to dive into the article and see if I can rectify some of it's errors soon, so I suppose it's not crucial.

On that note, I haven't taken the time to have a look at your past contribution but is this a subject you know a lot about? Would you have any interest in helping with a bit of a clean-up? _ɹəəpıɔnı 00:32, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

I have (several) theories about Wikipedia.

One is that some articles are beyond hope and it's a mistake to put effort into them. Some of these are obscure topics with one editor's WP:OWN issues, others are broader where there's a political problem (anything involving Ireland). If it's showing this behaviour, then just walk away and enjoy the rest of your life in peace.

Others fall under a second theory: that Wikipedia works best for narrow-scope articles and fails for broad scope. We can do the history of the Chevy small-block OK (objective, adequately referenced, but not over obvious) but we fail badly when it comes to a broad article like steam locomotive, boiler or four-stroke engine. When a topic is this broad, every idiot has access to some knowledge and a feeble reference to support it (the Readers Digest Big Book of Motorcars). We produce bad articles with no structure to them and a mess of trivial factoids bolted on one-by-one with no overall strategy. These factoids aren't wrong, so it's impossible to clean them up and the page has been gang-edited by so many people that every line will have some staunch defender somewhere who resists any improvement to it.

Fortunately we don't need these articles anyway. There are real references out there that cover the big topics perfectly well, so I don't mind too much when Wikipedia fails to.

What I won't do though is waste my own time on articles in this group. Mostly these days I just create articles, rather than adding to existing ones. I'll add coverage for something quite obscure that's not already mentioned. I'm not going to waste time claiming that Donald Campbell set a land speed record when another editor decides that he didn't.

"is this a subject you know a lot about?" Why would that matter? Knowledge of a subject isn't respected on Wikipedia - just look at the way we keep lynching Peter Damian.

Andy Dingley (talk) 11:11, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Aktion T4 and euthanasia

May be you are interested in the recent "discussion" about modifications on the section Aktion T4 and euthanasia recently made in that section of the that article —Preceding unsigned comment added by 190.25.66.51 (talk) 22:20, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Yes, thanks for the notification. That's a terrible piece of WP:POV editing - fortunately TeaDrinker caught it and reverted it. I'll have to make sure to watch out that it doesn't get re-added again. Andy Dingley (talk) 22:26, 26 February 2009 (UTC)