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Archive 1Archive 2Archive 3

IPA

  • I have exactly the same problem as you had, showing IPA [1]. But, I'm using Firefox 3.6 in Windows 7 :( Please, tell me how did you fix the problem? May I copy your monobook.CSS page? I can't, i get a message telling me that this page isn't authorized. If you fixed the problem by other means, please let me know. --Mahmudmasri (talk) 01:53, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Boy, this is a blast from the past. I don't honestly remember for sure how it got fixed. But it's fairly clear that it's a font problem, not really a CSS issue. I did play around a bit with the monobook CSS in conjunction with another problem, but ended up yanking that and now use just the vanilla monobook default.

The key, I think, is making a font with full IPA support (like Gentium) the default font in your browser. That way, no matter what font is called for by the active stylesheet, your default font can supply the requisite character if necessary. At any rate, I haven't noticed any problems since making Gentium my default font. (See Wikipedia:IPA#Rendering issues for some font suggestions.)

Hope that helps, and good luck! -- Elphion (talk) 03:08, 13 February 2010 (UTC)

Council of Elrond

Hi! Okay, so I'm also noticing on several pages that they sometimes try to link back to the Council of Elrond, but there appears to be no page for the Council of Elrond so those links simply go back to the Fellowship of the Ring novel page, and in that page there is no specific section for the Council of Elrond, the events at the council are briefly described but it's not even referred to as a council. So. Should I remove any links to "Council of Elrond"? Thanks in advance for the advice! Evening Scribe (talk) 20:24, 10 July 2010 (UTC)

Not a clear-cut call, I'm afraid. One could expend the effort to delete all the links, but (a) there are a lot of them, (b) as long as the redirect page for Council of Elrond is still there, links to it will continue to be added, and (c) it's just slightly discourteous to the user to remove links to information. In this case, I think the best approach is to leave the redirect page in place, but to redirect it more specifically to The Fellowship of the Ring#Book II: The Fellowship of the Ring, and to edit that section slightly so the phrase "Council of Elrond" does appear, maybe even in bold. -- Elphion (talk) 20:54, 10 July 2010 (UTC)
Oh goodness, you're quite right. I didn't even NOTICE the redirect page, I thought it was direct linkage. It's a pretty problem. That paragraph is quite REALLY well written, and I'd hate to break it up, personally. Evening Scribe (talk) 21:05, 10 July 2010 (UTC)
I've made a small change to the target paragraph and sent the redirect directly to that section. -- Elphion (talk) 06:49, 13 July 2010 (UTC)
That looks great! I'm sorry if I made you do the heavy lifting; I was too intimidated and failed to be bold. ;) I'm just glad my edits seem to be HELPING and not hurting the project. :) Evening Scribe (talk) 09:08, 13 July 2010 (UTC)
The lifting wasn't very heavy! And opportunities to eradicate gratuitous passive voice always give me strength ... :-)   -- Elphion (talk) 09:16, 13 July 2010 (UTC)
Yes! I've been noticing, enviously, your edits now and how wonderful you are with turn of phrase! Are you a writer/editor offline as well? Evening Scribe (talk) 19:45, 13 July 2010 (UTC)
I write (and edit) a lot, yes. I wouldn't call myself a writer yet. -- Elphion (talk) 20:02, 13 July 2010 (UTC)

Zs

I hate Z's but thanks for the heads up :-) Carl Sixsmith (talk) 18:09, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

Assistance.

Hi, if you get 5 minutes can you have a look at the Arwen and Galadriel article, I'm disputing various categories and titles they've been given, and could do with someone I trust on middle-earth related articles to either set me straight or back me up. Cheers Carl Sixsmith (talk) 07:17, 13 July 2010 (UTC)

The avalanche begins! -- Elphion (talk) 20:04, 13 July 2010 (UTC)
Cheers mate, as ever I stand indebted to your intricate knowledge in all things Tolkien :-D Carl Sixsmith (talk) 07:12, 14 July 2010 (UTC)

LOTR: "Biography" vs. "Fictional Biography"?

Hi! Okay, so new question: I was studying the Wikipedia style manual section about "in Universe" style and it listed categories such as "Biography" or "History" in articles about FICTIONAL people/places as too "Universe." On the various fictional LOTR biographies I've seen "Biography," "History," and "Fictional History" and mostly "History" or "Fictional History" for places, etc. All of these section headers be standardized to "Fictional Biography" and "Fictional History"? Should I just go ahead and do it, or is there a Middle Earth Portal page I need to ask this question and bring it to a vote? Are page vandals annoying? What's the Meaning of Life? Oops... Evening Scribe (talk) 16:14, 14 July 2010 (UTC)

I think the easy question here is "What's the Meaning of Life?" ...
The Tolkien project (like most projects covering large fictional territory, like the Narnia series) tends to take some guidelines with a grain of salt. Yes, ideally we should be discussing these as soulless English dissertations (POV showing through :-), but for the most part that's not what authors or users are interested in. Peppering a straight-forward synopsis or character biography with "fictional" and the like is fussy and pointless: it's obviously fictional and saying "fictional" doesn't make the article any less in-universe -- the discussion itself would have to be changed. So by and large we don't bother with the pepper pot, unless we're trying to promote an article to featured status. It's something to do, but low on the priority list. Accuracy, references, and NPOV are much higher. Also, be careful editing existing headings, since they may be in use as link anchors. (Check "what links here?") -- Elphion (talk) 18:00, 14 July 2010 (UTC)

middle-earth places

Discussion going on here re: Arnor and all those images and stuff. Carl Sixsmith (talk) 18:10, 20 July 2010 (UTC)

Labyrinth

I added some comments for the "lady of the labyrinth",to show that there is a continuity of her cult in classical Greece.In the Arcadian cults the godess of mysteries was Despoina,or Despoine (miss).In the Eleusinian mysteries,a similar title is given to Persephone.It must be noticed that the priests at Delphi were called Labryades (men of the double ax).94.65.254.167 (talk) 07:15, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

Help: Moria

Hello, something is bugging me about Moria, and you might be able to help.

The inscription on the doors reads 'Ennyn Durin aran Moria. Pedo mellon a mino'. Now why would they refer to it as 'Moria' when it didn't get called that until later 3rd age? Am I wrong in assuming Moria was a later name or is it an authorial mistake? Carl Sixsmith (talk) 11:23, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

It's probably Tolkien's error. He says (App F, I think?) that "Moria" was a late Sindarin coinage, "in the later days when it fell into evil" (approximate quote from memory) -- and we assume that he's talking about the appearance of the Balrog ca TA 1980, on which reading the name could hardly have been used on the doors in Moria's early days of glory. But there's enough vagueness in the history of the word that the apparent inconsistency could have been patched up with more invention. I saw once a really silly fannish solution: that the inscription itself magically morphed over time when the new name came into vogue. My bet is that Tolkien would have found a way to endow the name with enough age that it could appear on the original doors. -- Elphion (talk) 12:45, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

Arango, may be

[2] ? José Fontaine (talk) 21:18, 23 August 2010 (UTC)

Oh, yes, that's better. Last time I checked, the cheapest copy was ~$60. -- Elphion (talk) 23:56, 23 August 2010 (UTC)

Flag of Bhutan

Hi im from WikiProject Bhutan and i was looking to see if there are still any active people working with the Flag of Bhutan article. I checked the talk page and you seemed like you where actively participating in the article. Spongie555 (talk) 04:44, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Still interested, but there's a dearth of source material to work from. Not sure how much more can be said definitively without additional clarification about the early versions of the flag. -- Elphion (talk) 14:30, 5 September 2010 (UTC)
I think that Nvvchar and Dr. Blofeld could help you alittle on the article. They work alot with Bhutan related articles and have gotten a couple to GA. They can probably find sources for you. Spongie555 (talk) 23:18, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

Flag of Bhutan

Can you perform a copy edit to this article? User:Zscout370 (Return Fire) 07:27, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Oops, I did not see the above topics. Anyways, I was asked by User:Spongie555 to help with his article when it comes to the content. Flags are my specialty and if you count my userpage, I have 6 FA's and 3 GA's about flags. I can lend a hand, but I have to admit the first glances at the article, there was a lot of things I have to change. User:Zscout370 (Return Fire) 07:31, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
Yes, I've been watching your progress, and what you have looks OK. I have little to add. Orange Tuesday and I went through long discussions of earlier versions of the flag and concluded that absent more documentation almost nothing authoritative could be illustrated for the flag between 1949 and 1970; and I've seen no further documentation for that period. Elphion (talk) 20:21, 27 September 2010 (UTC)
It just happens I was at a 2009 conference about flags in Yokohama, Japan, where a paper on the Bhutan flag was given. I will see what I can pull from that paper but a lot of it already comes from the CBS paper. User:Zscout370 (Return Fire) 01:24, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Caldwell

Hi there. I noted you are adding the Caldwell stars to dab pages. I'm going to fix the ones already done, but just for future reference I wanted to point out that according to MOS:DAB there should only be one blue link per line. Best regards, and happy editing. --Muhandes (talk) 19:27, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, on both counts. -- Elphion (talk) 19:42, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

UTF-8

Both FF and FE were fairly specifically excluded from UTF8, so the byte sequences FF+FE and FE+FF could never appear in any UTF8 file (even one with misplaced start and continuation bytes). AnonMoos (talk) 18:16, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

You're right that I could have phrased it a little bit better, though... AnonMoos (talk) 18:19, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but if hypothetical sequences longer than six bytes are mentioned, then it should also be mentioned why they were excluded from the original design of UTF-8 -- since they would involve FE and FF bytes which might be dangerous if sequences became disarranged. You might think this is a remote contingency, but the designers of UTF-8 thought it was important enough to arrange UTF-8 so that 2 of the 4 bytes which should never occur in texts according to the original UTF-8 specification (C0, C1, FE, FF) were FE and FF...

Furthermore, speculations about sequences longer than eight bytes must removed from that section, since they would violate the design principle that one must be able to know exactly how many bytes are in a sequence based on the value of the start byte alone... AnonMoos (talk) 15:16, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

I think these are both spurious issues. First, Thompson was originally concerned only with the 31-bit space, so naturally didn't worry about extensions beyond it. FE and FF not appearing was not the reason he stopped there. That they don't appear in Thompson's scheme allowed the standards committee to note that FE and FF don't occur in their restriction of it -- but is there any evidence whatsoever that they would not have adopted Thompson's scheme if they did occur? They didn't "design" UTF-8 so that FE and FF wouldn't occur. I've never seen that random BOMs in the text cause problems: the decoders throw in the "illegal character" code and move on. And no well-designed decoder I've ever seen is fooled for long by a spurious BOM/Anti-BOM at the beginning of text -- heuristic tests are invariably applied, and are even recommended by the standards. You'd be nuts not to, what with rampant coding stupidity and transmission problems.
Second, whether the extension scheme breaks Thompson's principle that the number of bytes is coded in the first byte depends entirely on how you phrase it. The extension scheme still follows Thompson's lead and marks all continuation bytes with "10", and naturally an extension beyond 8 bytes will have to use more than one byte to encode the byte count. But it still encodes the number of bytes at the beginning of the sequence, in a manner that is easy to decode -- and that's the real thrust of Thompson's innovation: self-documenting layout.
-- Elphion (talk) 17:20, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
PS -- I'd prefer that this discussion move to talk: UTF-8, but since you raised the two issues privately above, I've answered here too. -- Elphion (talk) 17:55, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
By the way, my comment of "15:16, 8 December 2010" above was in reply to your edit of "20:55, 7 December 2010" on article UTF-8 itself, and not to anything else in any location. AnonMoos (talk) 19:04, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

The Chronicles of Narnia and Catholics

Must learn to read. I kept reading that it was Lewis. My mistake. --Walter Görlitz (talk) 02:56, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

I realized that's what was going on -- but only *after* I'd saved the edit. Otherwise I would have said something in the edit summary. -- Elphion (talk) 05:21, 19 December 2010 (UTC)
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