User talk:Gamma Metroid

Welcome

Hello, Gamma Metroid, and welcome to Wikipedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages you might find helpful:

Introduction
The five pillars of Wikipedia
How to edit a page
How to write a great article
Simplified Manual of Style
Your first article
Also feel free to make test edits in the sandbox.

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, please see our help pages, and if you can't find what you are looking for there, please feel free to leave me a message or place {{Help me}} on this page and someone will drop by to help.We're so glad you're here! DocTree (ʞlɐʇ·ʇuoɔ) Join WER 18:58, 28 February 2014 (UTC) DocTree (ʞlɐʇ·ʇuoɔ) Join WER 18:58, 28 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Gamma Metroid, you are invited to the Teahouse

Hi Gamma Metroid! Thanks for contributing to Wikipedia.
Be our guest at the Teahouse! The Teahouse is a friendly space where new editors can ask questions about contributing to Wikipedia and get help from peers and experienced editors. I hope to see you there! Writ Keeper (I'm a Teahouse host)

Visit the Teahouse

This message was delivered automatically by your robot friend, HostBot (talk) 20:42, 4 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Cavvies, etc.

I removed the ref on Cavvies because that is not generally referenced, despite its not being listed on corpreps.com. Chris Maher will add it to corpsreps.com when he gets around to it, but that site is only an avocation. Most of his ongoing additions and corrections are from my editing the show summaries here and then sending him my changes. Right now, I have several hundred changes that I am holding until he finishes the last batch.

As for the text width problem, I wasn't aware there was one until you brought it up. I have been setting it up for Chrome, forgetting that it might be different for other browsers. I was trying to keep from breaking entries within or between composition and composer. I'll see what I can do about correcting this by comparing Chrome, Explorer, and Firefox...

GWFrog (talk) 04:14, 18 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Corps reps

Many corps used to list historical programs and corps history on their website, but most have dropped much of this for one reason or another, so that is not really a valid reference point. I often find the same problem with colleges and universities; history is often too often neglected and/or overlooked.

Corpsreps.com is a fairly reliable reference for the show summaries, and in some cases, for some corps history. It is better than any other source, and any other source probably quotes directly from corpsreps.com. However, corpsreps.com mainly relies on the corps to supply the information they have on their site.

Unfortunately, the corps are often quite unreliable sources for what music they perform... Sometimes they think the title is one thing, when it is really something quite different. Even more often, they list the composer as an artist or group that performed the tune, but who had absolutely nothing to do with writing it... These are the errors that I catch and report to Chris Maher for correction. He is relying on me, not on Wikipedia to correct the errors that have unwittingly been given to him. Thus, corpsreps.com is the actual reference, and that ref cite might contain errors, just as any other ref cite might be somewhat incorrect (as is all too often the case). And, as Chris makes corrections based on my research, corpsreps.com becomes a better and better reference source... (The hundreds of corrections I am holding before sending to Chris did not come from Wikipedia, but from pages that he has on corpsreps.com that show song titles for which he is lacking composers...)

On those corps where I have already made corrections to the show summaries, I have listed a second ref cite--- allmusic.com... This used to be an outstanding reference for recordings, artists, and the composers of the musical pieces. This site is less than it used to be before the digital age, but it still comes in quite handy on tracing the elusive composer of pieces with no attribution or one where the attribution seems questionable. (allmusic.com is where I found most of those corrections I am holding before sending...)

I also cross-check the composers with their Wikipedia article, if they have one. This sometimes helps to verify the attribution, but it also assures that I am linking to the correct Wiki-page for the composer and not to someone else of the same or similar name John Barry versus Jon Barry. It also occasionally shows that I need to look further to find the actual composer of a piece, because it refers to that piece as being an arrangement of a composition someone else wrote.

All in all, it takes a good bit of work to correct the show summaries, which are usually things that someone else originally posted, including the errors on corpsreps.com and the ones the editors added as they wrote the sections... If it didn't take so long to do each one, I would have long since done all of them... (Cavvies is one I have not yet gotten around to redoing... probably after I finish with Troopers...)

GWFrog (talk) 23:51, 18 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

linking

Generally, the composer is more important than the song, even though the composer's songs are what is being performed by the corps. Also, the composer is more likely to have an article than the song, even though there are lots of songs with articles of their own. The biggest reason is the same one that only one link is used per composer--- avoiding overlinking, even though this is a kinda nebulous subject; see: Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Linking... GWFrog (talk) 05:52, 19 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Show summary

I have been converting the show summaries to the format that I use for a while now. I don't know who originated that box format, but it was on several corps' pages that way, or in a very similar form. The problem you had with spacing was the first complaint I have seen, and I am now cross-referencing Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox to try for optimum non-breaking, but have only done a couple, including The Academy (which I reverted to the previous format).

There was once a Wikipedia:WikiProject Drum Corps where a number of people were trying to get the drum corps stuff done accurately and in a uniform manner, but some people kept trying to do things the way that they wanted it done without consulting with the others, so most of the members fell by the wayside, and WikiProject Drum Corps is now defunct. There are some corps where one or two people try to keep those corps pages up-to-date, but, for the last year or so, I have been doing the bulk of the work on DCI corps, which often consists of reverting crap that some yahoos throw at the corps while trying to keep doing the rewriting, correcting, and updating on the existing corps pages and adding new pages when I can. GWFrog (talk) 04:54, 26 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

...

On your sandbox, I changed the format I've been using to how it was recently redone.

I did a background highlight on all of the champions having show summaries, with Color #DAA520 for World Class/Division I/ old Open CLass, #FCC200 for Open Class/Division II/ Class A, and #FFDF00 for Division III/Class A60 (originally, I used tones similar to the corps's colors, but changed to standard colors for all corps).

I have tried to cut the lines of musical selections to a short enough length to avoid the breaks without going to one line per selection; seems like it should work regardless of screen resolution.

Whoever designed this format I've been using seemingly was trying to keep things simple, unlike some of those that have since been converted, which were complex almost to the point of being ridiculous. Your new template is both more complex and seems to be tending toward too much information. Wikipedia offers several ways of doing this type of thing, and they range from fairly basic to overly complex; when trying to make it as accessible as possible to the most people (which is what Wikipedia is supposed to be), it seems to me that the simplest way is always the best way to go. While I applaud your effort, I prefer the older format. GWFrog (talk) 04:11, 27 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

DC Show Summary

So what was wrong with the old Show Summary that you had to make a new one? At first look, your set-up is harder to understand and work with than the old one is. The collapsed format also makes it look like there's nothing there---I tagged your Spartans article as a stub before realizing the summary was there. Fredref123 (talk) 12:57, 9 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Show Summary Template

After giving a good bit of thought to your new Show Summary template, I told myself, "Yeah, I can work with that," even though I thought the hide/show option was really a bad idea. Then I started to convert a completed summary to your format...

Sorry, but yours is so much more complex than the old one that I had to change my mind. Yours has some good aspects to it, but the simple, older one that someone came up with several years ago is so much easier to work with that I cannot see the use of changing just for the sake of changing. It comes down to, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." The minor problem of composition/composers wrapping in some viewing formats does not really mean it's "broke" and is insufficient reason to throw out a format that already does the job well and much more easily... GWFrog (talk) 01:03, 12 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Not only does the show/hide option make the summary easy to miss, it also makes it look like the article has little or no content... IMO, the only time to use a show/hide option on an article's features is when the article has a very large amount of content. In the case of drum corps, the show summary is sometimes the bulk of the article. GWFrog (talk) 23:32, 13 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Nomination of Spartans Drum and Bugle Corps for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Spartans Drum and Bugle Corps is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Spartans Drum and Bugle Corps until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. Ad Orientem (talk) 21:44, 7 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Hlist nowrap functionality no longer working correctly?

Hello, I was reading the Template:Hlist talk page and I noticed your question about wrapping behavior. Were you able to get any kind of satisfactory answer on how to get list delimiters to wrap correctly? I haven't been keeping up with wikipedia much over the past few years but one of the areas that I used to edit a lot were navboxes at the bottom of pages. One of my pet peeves was using {{·}} and {{·w}} to ensure that lists would wrap correctly. This mechanic has changed greatly so I figured I'd ask you if you knew of a good resource that could point me in the right direction to get this behavior working correctly on some of the navboxes that I used to edit before I make any major changes. For example none of the bullets in {{apple}} wrap correctly anymore. This old diff is when the code was changed to use the hlist class and subsequently removed the nowrap functionality that used to be the standard way to do these things. Thanks for your help in pointing me in the right direction. Happy editing! ~ Paul^T+/_C 20:00, 17 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

No, I don't believe I did. I think I found out that the best option was to just use {{nowrap}} on each list item... which I didn't think was a very good solution, and I ended up letting the lists wrap wherever they naturally would. Apparently the reason the nowrap functionality of hlist was removed was because applying it automatically to the list items would cause problems in Internet Explorer. I do think that hlist is a simpler and more effective way to create lists like that, except for the problem with line wrapping. Gamma Metroid (talk) 01:25, 18 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the follow up. I agree that it is much more readable this way and I'd rather not introduce less readable cruft just to correct a small error that probably only bothers me and a small handful of other people. Having said that, it is a little ridiculous that IE is the reason why this functionality was changed. Do we know if it is due to a modern version of IE or an older one? ~ Paul^T+/_C 16:03, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I have no idea. Basically all the information I found is in the H:TABLE page, and I didn't find anything on why that change was made, either on the page itself or the talk page. I remember I also looked around on the metawiki or wikimedia or somewhere, but I still wasn't able to find anything. And as much as Internet Explorer lacks functionality, I do think it's important to keep things as compatible as possible, and a lot of people do still use IE. Gamma Metroid (talk) 17:48, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Nomination for deletion of Template:Drum corps show summary

Template:Drum corps show summary has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. Izno (talk) 19:41, 2 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]