User talk:Andy Dingley/Archive 2009 January

Semantic Web

Based on the idea that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and not a directory, and if there is value in the external link that you just restored, I suggest that the original editor or you distill the value from Bergman's list and add it to the body of the Semantic Web article. I think the list is a hodgepodge, but you may prove me wrong. Cheers. -- Iterator12n ^Talk 17:58, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

We can't reproduce the list, as that would be a {{copyvio}} according to database right. Besides which, why should we? It's a big list, so search facilities are more useful than a simple static. There's also the issue of a tool list being fundamentally different in scope from an encyclopedic article. A "list of all tools" should also list the poor-quality tools just to note their lack of interest, but that wouldn't deserve WP:N to justify their inclusion in another "list of notable SemWeb topics" or similar encyc. article. This is also a potentially dynamic list, and we hope that the author intends to maintain it. If you want to, go ahead and delete the link - but please do so after taking a look at it first, this one is more than the usual shoot-on-sight spamlink and deserves more study. Andy Dingley (talk) 10:39, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the response. Here is my train of thinking. 1. Obviously, the Bergman list represents knowledge. 2. I would agree that the list represents ‘’useful’’ knowledge, even if the list’s selection appears incomplete. (I didn’t find a description of how the list was generated but I wouldn’t be surprised if a semantic search engine assisted in the generation. As you may know, the tools in this field aren’t that terrific yet.) 3. However, the usefulness appears limited to developers of semantic webs and parts thereof. As such, a catalog of components that can be used in building or extending a semantic web is, in my opinion, not useful in the edification of Wikipedia’s general reader who is trying to learn about “semantic web.” 4. Also, per WP:NOT Wikipedia is not a manual – in this case not a manual/catalog (or a pointer to same) for builders of semantic webs. 5. Recently, I found a bit of a parallel in the guidelines for Wikipedia articles about pharmaceuticals: dosage is an obvious piece of useful knowledge when it comes to pharmaceuticals, however, the guidelines advise against including dosage information in Wikipedia drug articles. 6. The dosage guideline has a qualifier, “except when [the information is] notable or necessary for the discussion in the article.” So, forget about usefulness, is there something notable about the list? I think there is – the notability is in the large number, 700! and not in the specifics of the list's contents. 7. In short, I’m adding the following sentence to the article’s project section:

”It is also remarkable that in this early stage of the development of semantic web technology, it is already possible to compile a list of hundreds of components that in one way or another can be used in building or extending semantic webs.”

8. At the same time, I remove the external link. The fewer external links the better. Cheers, Iterator12n ^Talk 04:55, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

V tail

Im afraid your removal of my 'dubious' tag is based on incomplete logic. We should discuss it on the article's talk page, but in essence the problem is that if you removed a conventional tail with 3 equal sized surfaces and replaced it by a V tail and kept all the rest of the design the same you'd have to make the two V tail surfaces significantly larger than the original ones. If you optimise the angle of the V, it works out to 50% larger, in fact. MadScot (talk) 00:19, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

Rockall - Your Reverts

The section is about Ireland in relation to Rockall. Surely to say that Ireland is closer to Rockall than Great Britain is, has much relevance. I cannot see what POV has to do with a geographical fact, since you mention it! PurpleA (talk) 20:10, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Your position has everything to recommend it, except geography.

Your reverts

Hi, why I should read conventions? and why you are reverting those --Typ932 ^T·C 11:38, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

Because they are getting >this< close to being flagged as vandalism instead. I suggest taking a look at LightBot's talk page too. Just because someone has let you loose with an editing 'bot is no reason to convert everything that looks like a number, especially when half of them are inappropriate for such conversions. There's a "200 mph" barrier which was seen as a target in period, however arbitrary, but no-one ever ran a newspaper headline "Segrave breaks the 320 km/h barrier". The 350hp, 1,000hp & 2,000hp Sunbeam engines never produced anything like that output, but it made a nice round number for the posters. Converting this to a metric figure with 3-digit accuracy is ridiculous and incorrect as a number. Anyone who wants to read the "glitz" of the period should read "300", anyone who wants the detail needs a better starting figure to begin with. Even the speed records of fractional mph themselves aren't reliable enough to do this with - we don't have cited figures for them that agree with each other, so we shouldn't pretend, or pretend to the readers that these ultra-precise conversions are equally accurate. Andy Dingley (talk) 11:46, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

And I now see that you're starting an edit war over this and reverting all my fixes. That's not an action in Good Faith. Andy Dingley (talk) 11:48, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

Heh, if those hps mphs arent accuracy you should tell the reader what they represents, are they what standards, if there reads 200 mph barrier no one with using si-system could not understand it, there could read aswell like 60000 kjkhsd no one really understands it. Where you see 3 digit accuracy? I suggest you think/write to talk page before reverting anything --Typ932 ^T·C 11:57, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

Andy, I see from User:Typ932 that he's working in English as a second language. How's your Finnish? Please give him a break. The point is that we have many readers who don't know what a yard is. That's why WP:MOSNUM recommends that we convert. Think of it as easing the job of all the translators that will propagate the article to other language WP's. It might even be him.LeadSongDog (talk) 15:29, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

What relevance does my (surprisingly it's non-zero) Finnish have? Take a look at Bean Cars today (Ah, I see you already have done). "The address Bean Road has long existed for a residential street within 200 yards of the Dudley factory." Now "200 yards" here means nothing more than a bit of decorative flannel for "near", yet LightBot converted this to "200 yards (180 m)" first, then (LightMouse) "200 yards (200 m)". Both of these are _worse_ as encyclopedia content that "200 yards", even if you're unsure what a yard is. If you're reading in English, it's reasonable to assume you have knowledge of domain and vague magnitude: a "yard" is a distance, not a weight, and "200 yards" is about a city block (with all the variation that itself implies). We don't _need_ more precision than this. If any of these quantities are a round number, chances are that they're inapproriate for conversion - their roundness is more important than their precision, whether in bushels or cubic metres. Look at the Sunbeam 1000HP - the power there was more like 900 hp (670 kW) rather than 1,000 hp (750 kW), so it's simply wrong to cite the 750kW figure.

If you could write an encyclopedia with a script, there wouldn't be much to it! Some rational selection as to which are good changes and which aren't is important. Andy Dingley (talk) 16:06, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

Orphaned non-free media (File:Hans Villiez von Stuck.jpg)

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"Thornycroft Bison" rewite.

I just wanted to thank you for doing a good job expanding and rewriting my initial stub page for the Bison. Hohum (talk) 18:32, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

Thankyou, it's nice to know someone reads them! I'm thinking about doing something on the Thornycroft Hathi when I have time and can find free diagrams to use. An early 4x4 gun tractor, with a very complicated 4WD system. Andy Dingley (talk) 01:18, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

Who needs time when there's insomnia? Andy Dingley (talk) 02:34, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

About the Antar pics

I am glad that i could be of any service. Thank YOU for writing the nice article of the truck in Wiki. I used a lot of your info in my dutch page. It is an great truck but a b**** to drive. Regards Hans —Preceding unsigned comment added by Macfip (talk • contribs) 00:13, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. I've also been working on tank transporter today (still needs work) and discovered this site http://tanktransporter.co.uk/ which has lots of photos by British RASC drivers, many of them with Antar Mk3s. Andy Dingley (talk) 01:18, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

204, 205, Culverin

Good spot! 12 piston perhaps?! Thanks for wading in, I was aware of a potential problem but as you stated the captions are clear enough. Cheers Nimbus (Cumulus nimbus floats by) 01:35, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

You're welcome. We pick up trollage on the most trivial little digits or unreferenced factoid, but still let the most obvious inconsistencies fly straight through. I'm just starting an overdue job on Preselector gearbox - which is currently almost entirely wrong, saved only by not saying much in the first place. Andy Dingley (talk) 01:38, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

Concorde airframe efficiency

The thing is Concorde had an L/D ratio of about 7 (less than half a Boeing 747), but flew slightly more than twice as fast. The engine fuel consumption was about 50% higher.

If you plug that into the Breguet range equation range (aircraft) then you find that Concorde was inherently pretty thirsty.

In fact it's worse than that per seat, because the vehicle needed extra strength/weight due to its thin wings and higher pressure differential due to the high altitude.

Of course in many ways this doesn't matter, since Concorde made a tidy packet because people paid through the nose to get there and back quickly.

FWIW I originally wrote that particular sentence anyway, so it's kinda unclear that I changed it. ;-)- (User) Wolfkeeper (Talk) 17:10, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

Of course - but to talk about Concorde in this way now is blatant POV for "Crappy British aircraft was inefficient, that's why it was abandoned" when the point about Concorde is that's it's even _capable_ of M2, so efficiency comparisons like this are an irrelevance, even if qualified. As a direct comparison to something relevant we'd have to compare Concorde's subsonic performance to a Tu144 or a US SST flying subsonic, at which point Concorde is quite superior, owing to the lessons of ogee deltas over triangular deltas that were learned in the Vulcan B2 program. Andy Dingley (talk) 17:17, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

Um... I'm British, and love Concorde. ;-) But Concorde was not energetically efficient compared to subsonic aircraft when in subsonic either. The L/D was up to about 11. Boeing 747 is about 18, and the 747's engines were more efficient as well, at these speeds. I don't actually have the numbers for the TU-144, so I'm not sure about that. And I can't comment on the non existent US SST either ;-) - (User) Wolfkeeper (Talk) 18:00, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

SE7

I wondered the same thing. It appears that they have stopped right now so it should be OK. CambridgeBayWeather Have a gorilla 12:57, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

Quarter sawn

I have reverted your undoing of another editor's edit (although at the time I didn't know I was) because redlinks in a "See also" section is nonsense (as is a circular link - the redirect is up for discussion as WP:RfD). You cite in your edit comment that redlinks are allowed per WP:MOS. This is true - in the text of the article itself - but links in a "See also" section must be to active Wikipedia articles, categories, templates, etc., with actual information, and redlinks do not provide those... and certainly not circular redirects. Of course, should those titles get (at least stub) articles, I cannot see why they could not be added then... but not before. 147.70.242.54 (talk) 17:41, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

As you obviously haven't followed the suggestion to read WP:MOS, here's the direct link as to why those redlinks ought to be in place. Andy Dingley (talk) 18:32, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

Daf H drive train

Hi Andy, i saw that you put a reaction to my drawing of the Daf drivetrain. Sorry for my late reply but i've got another life apart from Wiki also. *grin* I always thought that the H principe was an invention of Huub van Doorne (founder of DAF) but apperantly it is not. I know for sure that van Doorne built conversion kits for the dutch army to convert Ford 4x2 trucks to 4x4. That was before WW2. That was also the time he developed the H drive.It's nice to see that lots of people are interested in those different and special constructions allthough they are nice but mostly not practical. They H drive f.i. was, on paper very nice but in practice to complicated and needed a lot of maintenance with all those universal joints and the worm cases needed special oil because of the bronze gearing. I took the liberty of putting a pic of a diamond T M20 on the tanktransporter site. Regards HansMacfip (talk) 15:18, 27 January 2009 (UTC) nb. Sorry for my poor english. H. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Macfip (talk • contribs) 09:43, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

Note on grammar (Samuel Pepys)

Either form is correct (Pepys' or Pepys's) - I had the idea that the rule was absolute, and that adding an apostrophe and 's' was the technically correct way. I would not have changed it otherwise. Yohan euan o4 (talk) 21:50, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

I think we have to agree to differ on this - it doesn't even seem to be a trans-Atlantic variation. Infuriatingly both Fowler and Partridge are silent on the subject. Oddly though, there does seem to be empirical support for Samuel Pepys in particular taking the "'s" form, even when cited in modern works. I suspect an affectation of literary aspiration (and Max Hastings (Grauniad, September 2008) I mean you)! Andy Dingley (talk) 00:40, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

The Cartel (record distributor)

Hi Andy Dingley: I responded on my "my talk" page, but not sure if I was supposed to do that here or there, so I decided to also put it here...--Ludasaphire (talk) 13:28, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

WTF? Why was that deleted? Would you happen to have a wl to the deletion debate?

Thanks Andy Dingley (talk) 11:09, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

Hi Andy Dingley! Don't mean to be too excited, but I'm very new to this, and you're the first real person with whom I'm commenting. Let me see if I can help...

It looks like The Cartel (record distributor) was proposed for deletion by User:Aitias late last year. Then, since there was no objection for over five days, User:Aitias went ahead and deleted the page. Therefore, there was no debate. I have no idea why it was deleted but given what I'm learning, my guess is that there was no references given or something like that. In any event, it's very easy for you to start the discussion process. You might start by looking at a general note that User:Aitias left here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Aitias/deleted. As you can see, just like me -- albeit on a much more modest scale since I was just cleaning up some internal links to deleted pages -- User:Aitias was just serving the Wikipedia community by cleaning up some pages that might have needed some work. Since nobody was watching them to either explain why they shouldn't be deleted or clean them up (adding References, or what not) he went ahead and deleted them.

Good luck! And let me know if you do start the deletion debate. I'd be happy to read both sides and chime in.--Ludasaphire (talk) 13:22, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, I'd seen your talk page note but hadn't had a chance to respond yet. Not having seen the article it's hard to say (that's one of the most annoying things about deletion) but we'll see where we get to - I've requested an undelete. Andy Dingley (talk) 15:13, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

Heya - This seems like a stub that you wnat to take somewhere, however right now there doesn't seem to be much grounds for this beeing a seperate article from the the KLF, so I've voted delete on it[1]. However if you wnat to make a case for it - or better expand the article with some non KLF content (preferably with references) I'll gladdly take a look at it. Artw (talk) 20:48, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

This really ought to exist, as something of note to the music business (stuff the talent!), and it's a long way from the KLF. However I've just seen the article and there's not a lot to it as it is! No idea if I'll find time to do anything with it before it gets zapped again. Andy Dingley (talk) 20:52, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

Possibly you could copy it to a user area and work on it there? Let me know if you need help with that. Artw (talk) 21:46, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

Hey Andy Dingley...just letting you know I voted to "Keep" your revised the Cartel (record distributor) article and commented back to you at user talk:Ludasaphire.--Ludasaphire (talk) 13:47, 29 January 2009 (UTC)