User talk:Calair/Archive 1

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Rasputin on Glucose

I'm the dude who snarkishly retitled the passage about Rasputin having been saved from KCN poisoning by his large consumption of glucose as Anecdotal Agents. I came to that article after watching the movie Downfall. I added what information I could find about the use of glucose as a KCN treatment and left it there in caustic apposition as a sociology experiment. That was my first time into the pool and I wondered where it might head from there.

Very cool to see that someone who cares about accuracy in matters quipish came along and tried to sort the story out. I couldn't agree with you more about eradication of these tenuosities.

Anti-Australian sentiment

Palestine in 1918 was the site of the Australian defeat of/victory over Turkey, not Gallipoli in 1915. (See First Australian Imperial Force.) But it looks like the page may be going anyway. Grant65 (Talk) 10:37, Sep 13, 2004 (UTC)

I really *shouldn't* have forgotten that - one of my relatives, who only died a few years ago, was part of the AIF in Palestine. If the page does survive, I'll look at putting that bit back in.--Calair 12:40, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Compulsory voting

Thanks for your comments on this subject, which I get very tired of arguing about with people. Adam 06:53, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Olbers' paradox

Thank you Calair for a fascinating and enlightening answer. Dainamo 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Chick tracts

I acknowledge that what I'd added (not the IP address, my edits after that revert) wasn't quite NPOV'd, but I acknowledged it as such in the edit. I was presenting these facts to be NPOV'd by someone else, basically, since I'm not levelheaded enough about the guy to present a truly neutral view. Mo0 05:09, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Regarding POV links - Thanks muchly for letting me know about that, I'll make sure to remember not to do that again. :) [[User:Mo0|Mo0[talk]]] 00:21, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Shakesperean tragedy

Don't cut and paste material when you move an article, use the Move link. Cutting and pasting loses the history. I'll fix it for you. Rick K 00:09, Nov 1, 2004 (UTC)

Ugh. I can spell, I just can't type. Make sure there are no double redirects anywhere. Rick K 00:30, Nov 1, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for your vigilant debunking

I always believed that claim about glass being a viscous liquid. I'm guilty like most people of believing false ideas without checking them up. Is pretty hard to check up on all of one's beliefs because information is so easy to absorb. Another good feature of Wikipedia is its self-correcting (viscous?) nature -- as opposed to all the frozen media out there. WpZurp 15:17, 18 Nov 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 2000 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)

Edit summary

Hello. Please provide an edit summary. Thanks and happy edits. Hyacinth 02:14, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

referendum articles

if you feel that any of my changes to your spelling in the referendum articles is wrong. feel free to revert. Xtra 01:51, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Review request

Hi :) If you have a few minutes it be great if you could have a look at West Papua and the re-name proposal at the bottom of its discussion page. Any input, edits, or opinions be great. I've always tried to ensure there was an abundance of supporting evidence before adding content, and avoid emotive wording; I welcome different opinions, just wish they would explain what it is they disagree with. All Best :)Daeron 17:01, 22 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Polyamory

Hi! I just noticed your edit and disagreed, but I didn't want to rudely revert it in case I'm wrong about this point of contention. I don't think "denomination" is the right word to use there. As far as I know, "denomination" is a term that only applies to the subclasses of Protestant Christianity. There are no denominations of Catholicism, Taoism, Buddhism, Paganism, Wicca, etc, and none of those are denominations themselves. So, I think "religion" is the correct term. — Saxifrage | ☎ 01:28, Jan 24, 2005 (UTC)

Ah! Yes, I can see how "religion" would be an inadequate word to precisely capture that nuance. I hadn't considered that distinction. I still don't think it's quite the right word because it's ambiguous in its use, but I think there just might not be a better one. Thanks for the response. — Saxifrage | ☎ 05:31, Jan 24, 2005 (UTC)

Talk:Polygamy

thanks for the message on my talk page - my response is here as well as on my talk page.

You wrote: Researcher99, if you could put together a 200-words (or so) paragraph about how polyandrous "couples" meet, and cite this web page as one source - ITYM 'polygamous' or 'polygynous' here? R99's argument for citing that page is that it shows the existence of single women looking to join male/female marriages; polyandry means one woman married to multiple men. --Calair 00:37, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for your comment. I do understand the difference, and I'd normally agree, however, I expanded the "requirements" for his finding of multiple sites, as I don't think there are any out there like this that help multiples meet for marriage - wheter polygamous, polygynous or polyandrous. There just isn't the information out there to justify the content. I'd find nothing wrong with adding in women finding multiple men, if it supports this point within the polygamy article. Frankly, I'd find it rather interesting, as long as the difference is clear to the reader. Thanks for the clarification. -Visorstuff 20:57, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I'll also leave a clarification to my note at Talk:Polygamy. -Visorstuff 21:00, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)

'Self-deprecation'

...is not a spelling mistake. As per usage note here, 'deprecate' "is now used, almost to the exclusion of depreciate, in the sense "to belittle or mildly disparage"" (which was the intended sense here). Google shows that "self-deprecation" is six times more common than "self-depreciation". --Calair 23:16, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Duh, you are right. I was using WordNet and a few other old dictionaries and none of them had "self-deprecation". Thanks, I will revert these changes. Sam Hocevar 23:44, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Referendums

You are right that I should not have altered the title of the paper. Otherwise, there are three points to make. 1. In Australia referendum has only one meaning - a vote to change the Constitution. 2. The Australian Government uses referendums as the plural of referendum. 3. As a matter of principle, English plurals should be used in preference to Latin etc ones. Adam 00:38, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Chick Publications

As I suspected, 1001 is reverting the edits that you made (twice so far), with no discussion on the Talk page, just edit summaries that describe your work as vandalism. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 11:54, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Wal-Mart criticism split

I'm attempting to establish an solid consensus on whether or not to split Wal-Mart and Criticism of into separate articles. See the vote at Talk:Wal-Mart. Feco 20:56, 9 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the heads-up :-)--Calair 23:55, 9 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hiya

Should have known you'd be a Wikipedian too. --John R. Barberio ^{talk, contribs} 12:27, 14 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Good rewrite

I liked your edit of Polyamory. It elegantly addresses the reason for my last edit there. Common Man 09:06, 9 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Capitalization in links

Note that the capitalisation in telco is not displayed; if you want to alter it, I'm not going to stop you

*lol*

I know; I'd just added that one by hand while making sure that I didn't obliterate your edits while reverting mine. —Wiki Wikardo

William Schnoebelen

I feel bad about deleting the category you added, since it's one I happen to agree with, but I don't think it can be considered 'uncontroversial'. Sorry :-( --Calair 11:45, 22 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think it's one of the less controversial interpretations of his actions. See talk page for his article. Harvestdancer 02:47, 25 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Least controversial interpretation? Quite possibly. But interpretation is not Wikipedia's function; see Wikipedia:No_original_research for some related discussion. We can report on extant interpretations (citing sources), and indeed the article already does, but it's not our place to endorse one interpretation over another except maybe when the matter has already been settled, not just on the balance of probabilities - which is what 'least controversial' means - but beyond reasonable doubt.

By way of parallel, most of the world thinks O.J. Simpson killed Nicole and Ron. It's the least controversial of the competing theories, and the civil trial found against him on the balance of probability. But 'least controversial' is not the same as 'uncontroversial', and so he is not listed in [[Category:Murderers]]. --Calair 06:50, 25 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

LOL you forgot the No Wiki and accidentally added both of us to a category. Harvestdancer 05:49, 30 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

And what a category, too :-) --Calair 12:08, 30 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Goannas

Arguably, they're also found on a number of Indonesian and PNG Islands, too. Lokicarbis 07:20, 25 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

WP:AIAV

Please be sure to properly warn vandals before adding them to the WP:AIAV page. Warnings older than 24 hours are generally not received by the user, especially if it is not a static IP. Thanks. --tomf688^{talk} 23:09, 6 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Dickens/Lovecraft

"The Pickwick Horror" "Shadow Over Pickwick" "Beyond The Veil Of East End" "Great Old Expectations"

I agree - faboo crossover potential ;) Longshot14 00:30, 25 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Superheavy elements

Hi, and thanks for the discussion on Unsepthexium and superheavies in general. I responded in more length on my talk page, but the short answer is, yes, you can treat me as supporting "blank and replace with a redirect". Looking at the articles more, I agree that there's nothing that needs to be merged. Barno 19:07, 28 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Re: When we two parted

I was, in fact, referring to WP:CSD#A5. Upon closer inspection of the actual policy, I would suggest that it ought to be broadened to more closely reflect common sense, at least in obvious cases such as this (merely the text a poem for crying out loud). I mean unless it can be converted into a decent article about the poem, or merged to (perhaps) an article about an anthology of work by the same poet (but only if the poems are old and in the public domain), yes, it should probably be transwiki'd and speedy deleted, and by no means kept as a poor excuse for an encyclopedia article. — Mar. 30, '06 [01:05] <freakofnur_xture |talk>

On with the "shew"

You got me; an honest mistake. Also, I have been with the Wikipedia for thirty months, and you have the unusual distinction of being the first person ever to chastize me for using the minor edit tag. I believe there was a longish period in my editing history when I didn't use it al ALL. -Litefantastic 23:20, 3 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Me

Yes I am quite abrasive at times , however, I do try to edit in good faith. I have always believed that it is not someone's politics that matter, but their ability to accept someone else's beliefes even though they disagree with them and be able to get on with one another. Xtra 12:22, 10 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

userpage

You're welcome! I have no idea what's up with that particular vandal. Happy editing, Antandrus (talk) 04:47, 11 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Welcome. Snottygobble 06:12, 11 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

No personal Attacks

Please do not make personal attacks like those in here Please see Wikipedia's no personal attacks policy: There is no excuse for personal attacks on other contributors. Do not make them. Comment on content, not on the contributor; personal attacks damage the community and deter users. Note that you may be blocked for disruption. Please stay cool and keep this in mind while editing. Thanks.

A warning that ~~does not refer to any individual incident and~~ is not signed? Warnings should only be given by good faith editors. Xtra 09:04, 11 April 2006 (UTC) A good faith editor will admit when they have made an error in good faith. Xtra 09:15, 11 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Doesn't refer to an incident? You mean the link up the top that directs a person to the article and section where the attack was made? Guess that wasn't specific enough by your "standards." I'll ignore your second personal attack. We all know how you feel about my kind, so it's expected, ...any reasonable person wouildn't call biased edits "good faith." PSYCH 09:09, 11 April 2006 (UTC).[reply]

If Calair wishes to remove the unwarranted warning from a non-genuine editor, I have no objection to mycomments on it also being removed. Xtra 09:26, 11 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'm going to leave it up for now. He made a complaint about this over at Wikipedia:Wikiquette_alerts#10_April_2006, and if any poor soul who read that has wandered over trying to figure out what's going on, I imagine the existing reversions & deletions would make things confusing enough without me adding to them. I think the record (including a long string of deleted defamatory edits by somebody with rather familiar activity patterns) will bear me out. --Calair 12:13, 11 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Alan Jones

I guess my own theory is that he may be trying to be dismissive of those kind of comments. Let it go through to the keeper.

"Good on you" might mean something like "thank you for your time", and if so, saying it pretty much after one or two sentences, it'd be cutting them off somewhat quickly.

I'm not really trying to come to a conclusion as to what he did say, but to prevent people jumping to conclusions about it. I'm not a viewer, odds are you aren't either, so even if original research were allowed, we wouldn't be the best qualified people to do so. Andjam 12:46, 11 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Wouldn't him wearing a clown suit be less notable? Andjam 06:27, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It's/Its

Ugh! I can't remember making a mistake like the one I did on the best film page. Thank you for the correction. Double ugh! :) --Happylobster 13:39, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Blood donation

Thanks for being watchful :) Kind regards - Introvert ~? 04:32, 25 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

couple of questions

Your user page struck me. A couple of questions – of the theoretical kind so no rush. First on your critique of the "point-counterpoint style". It's an interesting point, but I'd always just assumed that this is the way it must be. What other approaches do you have in mind? And secondly, your list of things you try to rid Wikipedia of scared me a bit because I'm sure I use almost all of them except false precision. Since I saw you via the George Pell article, would you use a different section title for "Controversies"? If so, what? Cheers! — Донама 06:39, 5 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Calair, first, nice work cleaning up the George Pell "Islam comments" section. It's obvious you put a lot of effort into representing the facts in an exceptionally clear manner without resorting to directly quoting Pell -- and that is more difficult than it seems at first. And second, on your approach to creating articles, it really made me think. So thanks for that. I mean, I do see pitfalls with trying to explain Joe Bloggs' loyalty with both positive and negative examples. Even though I really like this approach I just sense that people would find it too unencyclopaedic because you are introducing your own interpretation -- which kinda sucks. Seems to me that even though Wikipedia IS an experiment in democracy, it is still considered to be a strictly published-facts-based experiment (at least according to WP policies) whereas the approach you describe is somehow too advanced -- it's almost a spiritual approach, if that's the right word. Anyway, I keep it in mind for future article development :) Cheers — Донама 03:22, 8 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I understand why the no-interpretation rule is important, and the Joe Bloggs example does run afoul of that. The Mary Smith bit might be a better one, if the explanation could be backed up by her correspondence or something of that sort.

I don't think it's possible to write all articles this way, and it might not even be desirable - convoluted theories patched between known facts are often just as bad as no theories at all. What I'm really driving at is that a good article shouldn't be just a thinly-veiled debate, because that leads to the neglect of information that doesn't support either side of the debate.

Now I think about it, George Pell's recent speech might be a useful example. Suppose the speech was considered significant enough to merit an article in itself, written by two camps of people: Pell supporters doing their utmost to defend him (within the bounds of Wikipedia convention), and opponents doing their utmost to denigrate him.

The article would probably end up as a combination of two descriptions, along these lines: "Pell described Islam as an intolerant and violent religion" and "Pell presented both positive and negative descriptions of Islam". Both of those have some truth in them, and can be supported by facts in the form of quotes, but neither really tells the full story.

I could add a third, intermediate reading: Pell's speech presents both positives and negatives, but is subtly weighted towards the negatives. That, also, can be supported with facts - for instance, his positive examples are generally qualified ("optimists say that...") while his negatives and given simply as statements of fact. I haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure the raw word-count is also weighted towards the negatives.

But even with that added interpretation, something important is missing. In wrangling over whether Pell was saying "Islam bad" or "Islam OK" or somewhere in between, all three camps have unwittingly limited the analysis to one dimension. It's certainly an important dimension, perhaps the most important of the speech, but concentrating on that dimension to the exclusion of all others means missing a lot of what the speech was about.

For instance, although he starts with the question of whether Islam can peacefully coexist with Western democracy, the last third of his speech is about the how. He blames secularism for some of the problems Western societies have experienced with Islam, and declares that a religious understanding is necessary to tackle the problem - "In the present challenge it is religious people who are better equipped, at least initially, to understand the situation with Islam. Radicalism, whether of religious or non-religious inspiration, has always had a way of filling emptiness. But if we are going to help the moderate forces within Islam defeat the extreme variants it has thrown up, we need to take seriously the personal consequences of religious faith. We also need to understand the secular sources of emptiness and despair and how to meet them, so that people will choose life over death."

This also explains what a one-paragraph aside about global warming is doing in the middle of a speech about Islam - he sees secularism as an important weakness in how we deal with Islam, and environmentalism makes a convenient illustration of secularism's weaknesses (in his eyes). Without understanding that Pell's speech is targeting secularism as much as Islam, that wouldn't make any sense.

In the 'controversies' section of an article about Pell, this doesn't matter quite so much; a lot of the controversy was over specific elements of his speeches, rather than the speeches as a whole, so we can get away with analysing them piecemeal. But if we were trying to offer a good analysis of his speech, it would be a serious deficiency to present it merely as somewhere along the axis of "Islam good --- Islam OK --- Islam bad", and the pro/anti method of writing tends to encourage that.

Whew, that was a long and rambling answer, but I hope it makes some sort of sense. I'd better go do some work now :-) --Calair 01:11, 9 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I see your general point here. There's a voice telling me though that we're not meant to be providing analysis of anything in Wikipedia -- simply summarising published facts. Of course, in reality Wikipedia is full of Wikipedian's personal analyses (otherwise known as opinions :)). Anyway it was from this perspective that I tried to add information to the George Pell article but kind of failed because in trying to summarise it I seem to have dumbed it down or misrepresented it. — Донама 07:00, 10 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry about George Pell

I didn't actually notice that you'd only just added the tag. I'd read the media reports earlier that day so the controvery was fresh in my mind. --Gene_poole 04:58, 8 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Re: "It should be noted"

In fact, I am using a semi-bot called Auto-Wiki Browser to search for the problem phrase and then find-and-replace it; I still have to approve every edit, but it's a quite powerful tool. (ESkog)^(Talk) 04:32, 22 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]