User talk:Ardonik/Fall and Winter 2004

2004: Summer. Fall and Winter.
2005: Spring. Current.

The autumnal equinox is upon us. A new season, a new beginning, a fresh talk page.

Image courtesy of John Powers

If there are any old conversations that you'd like to resurrect, feel free to copy them in here (so I can see the "you have new messages" notice) or reply directly inside the archive page. All the archives are on my watchlist. --Ardonik.talk()^* 05:51, Sep 21, 2004 (UTC)

Wikiclique

(Regarding an irate comment I made in response to reading the word "wikiclique" on the Village Pump)

I didn't mention you as one of the Wikiclique, though you seem sensitive on the subject. The word Wikiclique is an accurate description of some Wikipedians behavior. That can't really be denied.--Xed 02:27, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Rather, the word "wikiclique" is a schoolyard insult that can only serve to infuriate the very people with whom you are trying to reach consensus. The issue you're raising on the Village Pump is important, but I feel that your vituperance is diminishing it and alienating others. If you expect civility, you must be civil yourself. --Ardonik.talk()^* 02:33, Sep 22, 2004 (UTC)

Clearly--Xed 03:32, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

beta Systemic Bias section

(Regarding gathering support for removing the systemic bias from the Wikipedia)

Hi, if you wish to help contribute to a beta version of a Wikipedia page section designed to counter-act Wikipedia's systematic bias, please sign the bottom of this section on the Village pump - Wikipedia:Village_pump#Systemic_bias_in_Wikipedia. If not, no worries.--Xed 03:32, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I can't sign yet; I need to know more. All I gleaned from your conversation is that you feel an emphasis on things less important than the Congo Civil War and the Holocaust constituted a bias. What other articles do you feel betray this bias? What, to you, is the set of articles that, when expanded, will counteract aforesaid bias?
Alternately, if you don't have a clear idea of what precisely is causing the bias, then why raise such a ruckus about fixing it? None of us know or can predict what makes you feel that the Wikipedia is biased, and we all have different ideas about what articles need emphasis. You'll need to help us out and flesh out your idea more.
I think the present method (i.e., let people work as they will) is the best solution for the moment. Eventually, every important topic will get covered, even if the fanboys get to write their novels and video games into the Wikipedia first. --Ardonik.talk()^* 03:47, Sep 22, 2004 (UTC)

Your characterisation of my argument doesn't match with what I think. I mention the demographic make-up of Wikipedia, and how this influences the character of Wikipedia. Rather than gleaning, read the arguments carefully. I am not suggesting changing the current methods of editing Wikipedia. My idea is merely a small addendum to the many ways articles are brought to peoples attentions. --Xed 04:10, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Merging Afghanistan

(Regarding my request to merge List of leaders of Afghanistan with Heads of Government of Afghanistan)

Hi Ardonik -

Thanks for your message.

I didn't want to duel-post a template - and I hope it wasn't too much of a surprise!

As you will see - there has been a lot of discussion/contention about lists of rulers etc. and what suits one person is an anathema to another. So it was ironic that another variation has been thrown into the equation.

I would like to arrive at a uniform format for all these lists - and I think that it is achievable - but may not be to everyone's taste.

This is how I see it:-

Head of State is the 'modern' generic label for a 'ruler' of an independent state.

There are some regions which are not independent states (those located in African countries, for instance) which it would be right to use the term 'rulers' for the leader.

Head of Government is a generic for the primary official in the government of an independent or non-sovereign state.

For clarity I like to try to avoid 'concurrency' on a single page - unless it is unavoidable, the page should comprise a single chronologically consecutive list and the phrase to present should only appear once on the page.

Some lists are quite long already, and I am aware that to combine lists would put some people's backs up.

But then again, to combine some and not others would be inconsistent and would vary how people approach each list.

Anyway, as I say this is only how I see it. The concensus should prevail - and if hundreds of people disagree with me (rather than the odd one or two) then sobeit.

I am always open to working in collaboration in the project.

Hope my reasoning makes some modicum of sense.

Thanks again for your message. Speak soon. --JohnArmagh 06:25, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Although it doesn't sound as formal, perhaps "List of leaders of X" could serve the combined role of "List of X-ish heads of state" and "List of X-ish heads of government." After all, the world leader is timeless, while the word state meant nothing before the advent of the modern nation-state. (Just a proposal. I'm not sure of precedent or what the current convention is leaning towards right now.) --Ardonik.talk()^* 06:43, Sep 22, 2004 (UTC)

I'm just concerned that that might sound ambiguous - and someone is bound to jump up and down about a perceived ambiguity! --JohnArmagh 06:50, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

You have a good point. I meant "leader-as-in-an-executive-office-holder-or-similar-position," not "leader-as-in-role-model." For me, "Leader of Afghanistan" pretty clearly refers to the person calling the shots, and not, say, other members of the interim government or to anyone in any leadership role over there. But I acknowledge the ambiguity.
I think we're stuck. English doesn't have a single clear, unambiguous phrase for the person in charge — it depends on when and where they're in charge. If I had to choose between "heads of state" and "heads of government", I would choose the latter over the former every time, even if that meant listing leaders who, in their days, were not heading what we would now call a government. --Ardonik.talk()^* 07:03, Sep 22, 2004 (UTC)

Logos

(Regarding the copyright status and appropriate tag for Media:Wikimedia.png and related images)

It's GFDL but it's also a trademark, so can't be used in the same way as most other GFDL images. The same is true of all our logos other than the MediaWiki one which I think is PD. I was going to point you to m:Logos but I just realized that page is missing all the copyright information as well. I'll try to get it clarified. Angela . 01:08, Sep 23, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks. I've replied on your talk page. --Ardonik.talk()^* 01:14, Sep 23, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks

Thanks for the birthday greetings (though it's still not till tomorrow here). Surely that should be at Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by birthday? :) Rick K 01:20, Sep 23, 2004 (UTC)

Page created. Feel free to humiliate others by tricking them into revealing their birthdays and then listing them therein. --Ardonik.talk()^* 03:00, Sep 23, 2004 (UTC)

Link Spamming

Ardonik - I got your message about link spamming (131.191.72.23), and I'm a bit taken aback. You've mistaken my information site for a personal blog site, and removed all of the relevant external links I added. I really am glad that people like you are watching out for the quality of information here, I just think that you were a bit zealous on my part. I admit that I write my own content, and I'm trying to share it with others; but I contest that the links I added were relevant :

On the State Songs page, after the listing for "You are my sunshine", I added a link to my performance of the song (available for free). Perhaps it would be more appropriate to upload the song ? Create a page just about the song ? I'm not sure, but I imagined that readers might want to hear the song.
On the Weblog page, I added a listing of sites where a person could get a blog for free. I'll admit that my site has free blogs, and was on the list, but is the information not useful ?
And then the Origami page, which I added a link to the book I've been writing with detailed origami instructions. Why would you delete that, when there are four other sites in the list that I tacked mine on the end of ?

I spend a decent amount of time making sure that if I add anything to Wikipedia, it is useful. Honestly, I am motivated to integrate my website into the internet, but I try very hard to make sure that it is relevant and informative. I hope that you will not indescriminetly remove the additions I made today, both to the Origami page and the Tamatebako page that I added. Once again, I have spent considerable time and research into the additions I have made, and it is dissappointing to have somebody call it "spam".

Thank you for your efforts to keep wikipedia useful, and I hope that we can play nicely.

-Chris

Thank you for explaining the situation to me. I see so many anonymous linkspammers on Wikis that I tend to get sort of zealous (rather, extraordinarily zealous) about removing any and all unexplained external links. It was a misunderstanding on my part, and I apologize for it. Feel free to add your links back in.

I've leave a message on your IP's talk page. (While you're here, though, why not get a username? You seem like an honest sort of guy.) --Ardonik.talk()^* 15:43, Sep 23, 2004 (UTC)

Reply from 152.163.100.7

Hi, You have left a message at this IP (which I guess is mine) saying that I have been vandalizing pages. I have only made one edit to the wikipedia (reverting vandalism) so this could not be me. whoever you intended the message for did not get it.

I am unformiliar with talk pages use so please for give me if I am editing in the wrong place.

User:Ifoolyou

Did you actually try logging in with the password given on bugmenot? ;) --Node 19:13, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Happy Birthday!

Happy birthday, Ardonik! Whosyourjudas (talk) 01:04, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Russian

You have an extra letter in the cyrillic on your user page: in 'yasik', the 'a' is redundant since the first symbol, backwards R thing, is 'ya'.

By the way, I came here since you have been adding TeX, and, while it's not something that needs to be a big deal, the math people are generally much happier for the moment for it only to be in displayed formulae. Inline, it renders oddly (and I guess how oddly depends on browser). Charles Matthews 08:24, 4 Nov 2004 (UTC)

How embarassing! Thank you very much. I'm not happy with the decision to prefer HTML to inline TeX, but having made my case and failed, there's no point in pressing the issue any further for the moment. --Ardonik.talk()^* 09:03, Nov 4, 2004 (UTC)

images

hey there thanks for the heads up on the images thing there, i really do appreciate it. basically what i'm really looking for is an image to add to my lesch-nyhan syndrome article (not finished btw). my goal is to work it into a feature article (my first). i think an actual picture of a patient may be a little gruesome, and so anything really pertaining to the disease, or even chromosomes or something like that would be great. maybe you could lend me a hand? --Larsie 16:24, 4 Nov 2004 (UTC)

you see i do all my contributions on wikipedia from work and we have restrictions on the net in short i only have acces to our intranet and .org sites. so those external links do not help much --Larsie 16:27, 4 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The exciting world of image tagging

Greetings! A while age you signed up to help tag images, so I thought I'd let you know what's been going on lately in the image-tagging world.

First off, things are moving slow, but at least they're moving in the right direction. (What I mean is, more images are tagged every month than the number of newly uploaded images without tags, so the net number of untagged images keep decreasing.) But judging from the progress on the lists at User:Yann/Untagged Images, most of the time it's just me tagging images. And it sure gets lonely out on the tagging prairie.

Second, I have basically rewritten the User:Yann/Untagged Images page. Hopefully that will make it easier for people to help, and will attract new recruits. What do you think of the new text and layout?

And third, there have been a bunch of new tags added in the last month. Check out Wikipedia:Image copyright tags for the new tags and new organization, mostly done by Zondor.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me. Happy holidays! – Quadell ^{(talk) (help)}[[]] 17:37, Dec 8, 2004 (UTC)

Article Licensing

Hi, I've started a drive to get users to multi-license all of their contributions that they've made to either (1) all U.S. state, county, and city articles or (2) all articles, using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-by-sa) v1.0 and v2.0 Licenses or into the public domain if they prefer. The CC-by-sa license is a true free documentation license that is similar to Wikipedia's license, the GFDL, but it allows other projects, such as WikiTravel, to use our articles. Since you are among the top 1000 Wikipedians by edits, I was wondering if you would be willing to multi-license all of your contributions or at minimum those on the geographic articles. Over 90% of people asked have agreed. For More Information:

Multi-Licensing FAQ - Lots of questions answered
Multi-Licensing Guide
Free the Rambot Articles Project

To allow us to track those users who muli-license their contributions, many users copy and paste the "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" template into their user page, but there are other options at Template messages/User namespace. The following examples could also copied and pasted into your user page:

Option 1

I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:

OR

Option 2

I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions to any [[U.S. state]], county, or city article as described below:

Or if you wanted to place your work into the public domain, you could replace "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" with "{{MultiLicensePD}}". If you only prefer using the GFDL, I would like to know that too. Please let me know what you think at my talk page. It's important to know either way so no one keeps asking. -- Ram-Man (comment| talk)