User talk:Jdowland/archived-2005-11-01

These are archives of User_Talk:Jdowland. This stuff was archived on 21:23, 1 November 2005 (UTC).[reply]

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Happy editing!

Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 16:36, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Hi, Jon :) - Fredrik | talk 01:16, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

My welcome

Automated? Every part of me was in the original specs, I'll have you know (though a few bits have dropped off along the way). Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 23:09, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Bash.org flame

Would it be: this one?

<Jon^D> I had to cat 8-9 seperate quote files, compare each line in each of them to make sure there weren't any duplicates then sort
<Jon^D> I wrote a nasty perl script to get it donw
<Jon^D> and it didn't work very well
<skank> cat quote*.txt |sort |uniq

or this one ? (there are a few possible others here as well.)

<Jon^D> if I was gay and in ireland I'd score with gav
<Jon^D> he's my hero
<Jon^D> he'd probably have to be gay too mind
<arioch> those repressed homosexual tendencies are coming to the surface now
<Jon^D> I wish I was gay

Heh- I'd be embarassed wi' those sorta quotes, too. --maru 01:18, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Yup - those and many more. I'd be just as embarrassed with your favoured articles though. :P --Jon Dowland 11:15, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I'm not embarassed at all- my 1600-odd edits addup to quite a variety/lot of good work; I have been focussed on Star Wars lately, but that's largely due to so many of the articles being so crappy. I would be embarassed if my 100-odd edits were so trivial, though. --maru 17:15, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The discussion has spiralled down to the depths of the average bash.org quote. Care to re-rail the discussion, or shall we continue avoiding the subject? --Jon Dowland 17:28, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Sez the fellow who first brought up embarassing personal quotes, and started the avoiding with a few attacks... You could 're-rail' this discussion by simply, y'know, actually offering some reasons for deleting this article besides "Oh, popular websites are un-encyclopedic!" --maru 20:00, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I offered plenty of reasons in the post which this troll-fest has spun out from, but you chose to dig out quotes from bash.org rather than tackle them. I apologise for sinking to the same level with my quip about your star wars edits. --Jon Dowland 21:03, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Apology accepted. Now, on to the actual discussion. You mentioned your arguments so I'll summarize them here, since it is not on the original page anymore:

maybe every blogger with some modicum of notoriety should write an in-depth encyclopedia article about their pages too?
- As I said, an invalid comparison, since Bash is not a blog, rather, it is more of a community (to use your word) whose raison d'etre is maintaining and expanding a quotes database, which has become a central storehouse of Internet/geek humour (definitively so, in the case of IRC humor), somewhere up there with the Jargon dictionary or Slashdot, in their respective fields.

"carping"? Seems the talk page is the most relevant place to bring this up... I didn't realise this has been discussed before. I compare bash.org with a random blog because I think both are equally inappropriate topics for articles.
- I said carping since you didn't say anything someone hadn't beat you to in previous discussions or the VfD. The second point is more fundamental and philosophical- a deletionist vs. inclusionist sort of thing; I won't argue about that, since I am not really up to speed in that particular longrunning meta-debate, but I will mention that I think that is a narrow, constricted, un-encyclopedic view and position.

What I meant (generalising away from blogs) is, should popular site X have an article about it, where the article has little to do with any topic, other than the site specifically?
- Popularity is not something which merits writing about? It seems popular things are precisely what encyclopedias should be covering- popular things are by definition things that many people are interested in; Julius Ceasar is popular, and merits an article- Paris Hilton is popular too, and while of little intrinsic merit (from my own POV anyways...) still clearly meriting an article, and so on and so forth. We do not write about, and indeed shun as un-encylcopedic, things which no-one is interested in, but are nevertheless factual. People are interested in Bash.org- just look at how many people discuss it, visit it, edit its article; just like we are doing.

I'm just still not convinced, personally, that this article really has anything of value in it. It's certainly well written, and has a reasonable density of wiki-links, but would someone outside the clique really care about with which software the site was built, the various moderator politics and april fools jokes?
- I don't need to point out the POV there; the clique, as you put it, is still a valid audience. If simply appealing to a clique is a Bad Thing, then most articles would have to go kaput, since most articles are about things only a small group would care about (such as Kim Stanley Robinson, or minor Star Wars characters, or ancient Syracusan battles, or obscure programming languages...), very few articles are universally interesting.

At present, I'd think it had enough interesting material to be a paragraph in a page about internet culture, case study about community-driven software politics, or something similar.
- And where would the case study derive its data from, if not a non-deleted, comprehensive, encyclopedia-style article... like Wikipedia's? Better too much details than too little- too much can be filtered out, but no filter will pull missing data out of nothingness. --maru 04:02, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

This is a much better reply :)

I think we fall into the two opposing camps wrt wikipedia philosophy, which is where this difference of opinion stems from. Firstly, it would appear that I am a deletionist - although new enough to wikipedia that this may change. Secondly, I am still of the opinion that something needs to be more than just popular to merit an article, although I take the point that popular subjects result in better articles. The question of exactly what criteria a subject needs to pass in order to merit an article, in my book, is not something I can answer until I've had more experience: I'm still 'feeling in the dark' there.

In terms of popularity, maybe bash.org is more widespread, especially on IRC, than I was aware. I haven't spent much time in popular public channels (or at least ones without a specific topic of conversation which more-or-less excludes quoting) in the last few years, and it certainly seems to have grown since I was last exposed to it (which feels like ages ago - I am suprised to learn it's only been around since 2002). --Jon Dowland 18:30, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I certainly hope you change your mind about Deletionism- Wikipedia becomes more valuable the more it has, and information once deleted is darn hard to retrieve. And I'd have to agree with you on how fast Bash grew- it really is fairly surprising that in so short a time it could be so central for Internet-humor quotes, one would expect it to take several many years to earn such centrality. Perhaps that should be mentioned in the article? :) --maru 21:47, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps so, yes - if you were going to adjust time/date stuff, I'd mention when it was formed in the intro paragraph, too. --Jon Dowland 17:17, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

It turns out this discussion actually helped me, Dowland. See: Talk:List of Star Wars references. --Maru 17:57, 11 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Anon blocking

Hi Jon - I've finally got around to reading my talk page and answering your message. Sorry for the delay. Adhib 10:15, 15 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

My todo page

Thanks for letting me. I've wondered how people would find it. Regards, Ground Zero 18:03, 15 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Language Tags

Thanks for the language tag tips. I have implemented them now. --Westendgirl 20:13, 12 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]