User talk:Monedula/Archive001

Welcome

How to edit a page, How to write a great article, Naming conventions, Manual of Style, policies, recent changes, help pages, village pump, my talk page, Wikipedian, assigning those to your username. You can sign your name using three tildes, like this: fabiform | talk. If you use four, you can add a datestamp too. Again, welcome! :) fabiform | talk 14:53, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC) — made shorter Monedula 16:47, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Russian History Harmonization

Names

Hi, I see you are busy with Russian geography! Please take a look at Naming conventions, not to say about other guides the guy above recommended. In particular, it is cusomary to name, say Kostroma River and Kostroma, Russia (in the cases when a disambiguation is required). If you feel that the name of the river is not widely known, while the city is popular, you may leave simply Kostroma.

By the way, I hope you are checking for other spellings may have already present in Wikipedia, like, Pereslavl-Zalesskiy/Pereslavl-Zalesski, or Cherepovets/Cherepovec. I usually perform search for all variants (you wouldn't believe how these English may twist simple Russian words :-) and create links, if missing. Linking data is just as important as creating articles. Good luck! Mikkalai 08:04, 11 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Russian names

Would you add the Russian names to Vladimir-Suzdal' and Vladimir Igorevich Arnol'd, please? -- Kaihsu 23:22, 2004 Feb 17 (UTC)

Done! — Monedula 16:45, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Removing "redundant" names

Redundant names serve two purposes: (1) they "trap" references from other wikipedai pages (2) they serve as keywords for google search.

Therefore a proper way to remove redundant references is following:

click at "redundant" link
replace it by a redirect
click "what links" to this redundant link (e.g., Altai Region: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Whatlinkshere&target=Altai_Region )and replace by links to "real pages".
Edit the link to make as a simple, unlinked synonym.

Mikkalai 21:24, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Russian persons

When adding or editing an article about a Russian, please make sure he is in List of famous Russians. Mikkalai 21:50, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Russian accents

I don't agree with putting accents on Russian names. First of all, Russian doesn't use accent marks. Second, the people most likely to need accents can't read Cyrillic in the first place. (It also seems rather overkill to accent single syllable words.) --Jose Ramos 05:38, 19 Feb 2004 (UTC)

— You are wrong. Russian does use accent marks whenever it is necessary to disambiguate meaning or when introducing a little-known word. In Russian encyclopedias and dictionaries head words are always provided with accents. Also in beginner's reader books for foreigners studying Russian all texts throughout have accents. Moreover, even Russian people sometimes do not know the place of accent. So putting accents on all Russian names seems indispensable. (Accenting one-syllable words is overkill, of course, but I like it better.) Monedula 11:40, 19 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Óf cóurse, Énglish díctionaries álso pút áccent márks ón wórds, but we don't normally use accent marks.

I think there's a big difference between dictionaries and language books for beginners on the one hand, and an enclyclopedia, on the other. --Jose Ramos

— The Rabinovich issue clearly shows that you are wrong. If we don't put accent there, how will people know the correct pronunciation? Putting accents on all Russian words simply gives you more information at no cost, so it makes Wikipedia only better. — Monedula 12:40, 19 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Providing accents on Russian word entries is useful to some of us. I am not a native Russian speaker and mostly encounter Russian in written form, so it's nice to have some indication of stress. However, the accent you added in the entry vareniki seems to be over the "n," giving "варе́ник[и]." Surely this should be "вар́еник[и]" - at least, that's how it looks in my dictionary. In other entries where you have added in Russian accents, I also see the accent marks over consonants. Is this some strange rendering issue, or a convention I'm not familiar with? In all of the Russian textbooks for English speakers that I have seen, and in English-Russian dictionaries, I have always seen the accent drawn over the stressed vowel, and in no case over a consonant. Reuben

Sorry, after a little bit of further education I see that it is a rendering problem after all. It's my own browser's fault - the accents look fine with Konqueror. Reuben 06:58, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)
- It is possible that the wrong rendering is connected with the Verdana font. — Monedula 09:54, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Patriotism

Hi Monedula-- An awesome quote. I'd never thought of patriotism as slavery before but I can see Tolstoy's point.

Quick query: is "slaverish" a typo or some word I've never seen before?

--Opus33 20:26, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Hi. Tolstoy's social and political views were quite radical. Presently, many people read Tolstoy's fiction, but few are aware of his propagandist pamphlets. Tolstoy viewed all governments as evil, and preached a sort of christian-pacifist anarchism.

As to "slaverish", it should be changed to "slavish".

— Monedula 21:52, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Russian accents

Someone claimed here in wikipedia that putting accents makes words unsearchable by Google and started replacing them by bold letters. Please stop putting accents until the issue is clarified. Mikkalai 22:41, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

— Russian accents (done with the U+0301 character) are in strict compliance with the Unicode standard. The support for this will grow in the near future. (Probably we should suggest to the Google people that they ajust their routines for searching Russian text — i.e. before string comparison, the U+0301 character must be removed.) And imitating accents with bold letters is a BAD THING, because it is non-standard and ad hoc. — Monedula 23:04, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

You need to tell this to User:Cantus, who is busy reverting you, see, e.g., his changes in Boris Yeltsin and many others: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=Cantus , as well as you must speak about this at the Wikipedia:Village pump.

By the way, since you didn't react to his efforts earlier, I suspect that you don't "watch" the pages you edited. You may want to set the flag "Add pages you edit to your watchlist" at the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences page. Mikkalai 23:34, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Monedula, which transliteration system are you using? You seem to be using some sort of custom phonetic transcription system. Let's try to stick to a standard. I'm using the Library of Congress (ALA-LC:1997) transliteration scheme, which is a standard in the US. I'm also adding the ISO 9:1995 transliteration, which is an International Standard, in parenthesis for all names. Why do you keep deleting these? And while I don't agree with using accents in cyrillic text (I prefer bold letters, can be searched in Google), if you are going to use accents in cyrillic text, please don't make all the word bold or italic, because if you do, the accent will be shown separately from the letter in most (if not all) Mac browsers. By the way, are you Russian? -- Cantus

— The transliterations you mentioned are not intended to be English names. They are only useful where Cyrillic letters are not available. Since we can insert the Cyrillic spelling directly, the transliterations are not necessary at all — we need only an appropriate English name which will allow English-speaking people to understand what the page is about.

As to the accents: the only correct method for accentuating Russian text is using the U+0301 character ("combining acute accent"). This is envisaged by the Unicode standard. If Google search engines or Mac browsers have any trouble with this, it is a problem for programmers who work for Google or for Apple — not in the least for Wikipedians. For instance, there are browsers that cannot display Russian text at all — so what?

And by the way, I am Russian. — Monedula 15:33, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

To this I will only add that what is actually needed is not an "exact" transliteration, but most commonly used ways of spelling of a Russian word in English, to assist searches. The "exact" transliteration like ISO is useless, if it is not used in real life. Mikkalai 19:17, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Sorry about the before/after mix-up. I'm using Mozilla 1.6 final on Win XP Pro, using normal Microsoft fonts like Verdana, but I can assure you that on my system, the accents appear on top of the letter after the U+0301, instead of before, like you say it should be. For example, on my browser, in the first word of the next section's title (Сою́з), the accent is over the з instead of the ю. I don't know what the problem is, but I'm assuming that it's on my end. Sorry again. Gus 18:40, 2004 May 22 (UTC)

It seems that the problem is exactly with the Verdana font (see the article). Try to use Tahoma or Arial instead. — Monedula 19:52, 22 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Usually, I use Georgia as my default font, but Verdana is the font specified in the Cologne Blue theme. I guess I'll switch to the standard theme then :-) Gus 20:49, 2004 May 22 (UTC)

Meet me at the Wikipedia:Village pump#Transliterations from Russian. Mikkalai

Сою́з Сове́тских Социалисти́ческих Респу́блик

I've replied to Mikkalai's post above. I've posted a proposal there and created a place for discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(places)#Transliteration_of_Russian_place_names. as a place to discuss all this. -- BCorr ¤ Брайен 03:19, 28 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Periodic table

I want to congratulate you on all the work you did on Chinese element names! You did a wonderful job, and I am impressed by how quickly you did it. I also wanted to let you know that I've moved the page to periodic table (Chinese), so that it is consistent with such articles as periodic table (standard), periodic table (big), periodic table (electron configurations), Periodic table (metals and non-metals), etc. --Lowellian 23:53, Mar 23, 2004 (UTC) (Responses should be directed to my Talk page.)

Ångström

Kudos!
--Ruhrjung 00:56, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Alexander Beliaev

Spaseba for providing the Russian on Beliaev! --DavidA 00:13, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Yaroslavl Oblast

Thanks for the minor corrections to my corrections - typographics has never been my strong side :)

I do, however, have some questions regarding the changes:

Italics and accents. I do somewhat agree that Cyrillic (in italics or not) is not easy to read for someone who does not know the language all that well. However, when looking over previous discussions, I could not figure out whether italics was accepted or not. At this point of time quite a few articles have italics/accents, but then again — quite a few do not. I myself was italicizing Cyrillics (when it follows the transliterated version in parentheses) and did not use accents. Any pointers as to what the policy is? Is there a policy? I personally prefer italics, which helps the text stand out, and consider unreadability claims as a form bragging (after all, it's just a couple of words, not the whole text).
Accents. I would use accents if such policy exists, however, it is often impossible to say what syllable is stressed in the names of the districts (especially considering that sources omit the letter ё in most cases, replacing it with е). This adds to the inconsistency of the articles, however minor.
Administrative Division. When adding a list of districts, I rename the lists of cities and towns as Major cities and towns. This is a convention I've been using across the oblasts/krais/etc articles. Do you have any special reasons or objections if I restore the heading?
Font lang=ru. I am curious about this as I have not seen this in any other article before. Isn't it redundant as everything is in Unicode anyway?
Townlet. This is unrelated to the recent revisions — I am just curious where this term came from. Dictionaries define this more as a diminutive of town, and it sounds a bit silly for a formal definition of p.g.t. I don't really care, but wouldn't settlement be better suited?

I understand that you are from Yaroslavl area yourself, and must be personally attached to this article :) (I know I am to the articles on my region). I am just working on articles' consistency, and it is little things like this that make wikipedia a psychodelic mosaic at times. Any input or suggestions will be much appreciated. --Ezhiki 18:58, May 12, 2004 (UTC)

Italics. In English, there is a tradition to italicize words from other languages when they use Latin script. Here we have a different script, so perhaps we can do without italics to improve readability?
Accents. It is necessary to indicate accents and ё exactly because they are inpredictible. It is easy to derive unaccented version from the accented one, but not the other way round.
Administrative division. It is wrong to write "major cities and towns" — simply because all cities and towns have been listed — there are no others.
font lang=ru. It serves only to indicate to the browser that the text is Russian (and not Ukrainian or Serbian). It would be better to write <span lang="ru">, but unfortunately Wikipedia doesn't allow to use <span> (currently there is a discussion about it — see Wikipedia:Span_tag_poll).
Townlet. I have invented it as an equivalent of p.g.t.. Maybe indeed settlement would be better — but it is too vague. Basically p.g.t. is a small town that is not officially a town (but neither a village). — Monedula 19:44, 12 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Italics. Maybe we can. Maybe, when I have a little more time, I will actually go through the articles and remove italics myself... *sigh* But then, maybe common sense will prevail, and I will spend my time on something more useful. Anyway, from now on I will not be using italics in texts I personally create, and I will be removing it when editing an article.
Accents. Agreed. How do you do them, by the way (I know I've seen the instructions somewhere, but I'm too lazy to search for them)?
font lang=ru. What is the final purpose of it? My guess is that this would allow search engines to determine the language a text is in. Is that right?
Townlet. Any objections against making an article for settlement, making p.g.t. into a redirect, starting using settlement instead of townlet in new edits, and adding a definition of settlement for посёлок городского типа to the Proposed Naming Convention for Russian subdivisions table located here? A city would be used for город (large), a town would be used for город (smaller), a settlement would be used for посёлок/посёлок городского типа, and a village would be used for деревня. With proper linkage and descriptions this should do the job just fine.

--Ezhiki 20:03, May 12, 2004 (UTC)

Accents. To add an accent to Russian text, you should insert "combining acute accent" (U+0301) after the stressed vowel (in HTML it is ́ or ́).
font lang=ru. There are many reasons to language tagging. Of course, it has something to do with search engines. It will also help spellcheckers. It will help hyphenation. It will help automatic translation. But the most important thing is that text display often depends on the language, even if the character codes are the same (e.g. there are some differences in letter forms between Russian and Serbian).
Townlet. The picture is in fact much more complicated. Посёлок is not the same thing as п.г.т.. Посёлок can be a п.г.т., or it can be a village, or it can be a part of a town or of a city.
Village is not always деревня — it can be село́ (and sometimes посёлок). Село is a village with a church building, and деревня is a village without such (this distinction, however, is not strict).

Accents. Thanks for the tip. Are people still complaining a lot about the accents, or has it been settled? I understand their concern about making text unfindable in the search engines, but I'm with you on the statement that people should move the technology, not the other way around.
Townlet/Village. Nothing is ever simple, huh? And let's not forget aul, khutor and the likes... I guess I'll take a timeout for a weekend to think about this problem. Maybe Russian administative division is worth a dedicated WikiProject after all - without guidelines and standards the articles will become a total mess of transcriptions, bad transliterations and sloppy translations when it comes to geographic and administrative names.

--Ezhiki 22:35, May 12, 2004 (UTC)

Yer, Hard sign

Hi, I cut some text from Cyrillic alphabet to make the article. You may wish to upgrade it. For some reason, Yer doesn't show any backlinks, although it referred from several articles. Mikkalai 19:39, 18 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Wingdings 2 & Wingdings 3

I noticed you had done character lists for the Webdings & Wingdings fonts. Would you be able to provide ones for Wingdings 2 & 3? I have linked to Wingdings 2 from the no symbol article.

"Westernization" of Russia

Thank you for showing me your source, though I don't completely agree with the source. By the way, in the article you showed me, where "Westernized nobility and lower classes" is mentioned, what is the significance of adding "Westernized" in the section?--Marcus2

"Westernization of nobility" was started by Peter the Great. It included wearing European-style dress, cutting beards, smoking tobacco, drinking coffee, learning European languages, reading European books, going to European universities for education etc.

I heard that Peter's father Aleksey I made some western reforms before him, anyway. And I don't think Peter forced the nobles to smoke tobacco and drink coffee. And in his case, when you say he introduced European-style dress, isn't that basically clothing? --Marcus2

Yes, Peter did force the nobles to smoke tobacco and to drink cofee. He issued orders to that effect. (And what's the difference between dress and clothing?) — Monedula 11:15, 21 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Bashkortostan

Hi, Monedula! Since you list Unicode among your interest, could you, please, take a look at the Bashkortostan/Temp page? I am having trouble figuring out how to capitalize the letters (in bold here) in "БАШҡОРТОСТАН РЕСПУБЛИКАһЫ" — the name of the republic in Bashkir on top of the info box on the right side. It would, of course, help if I knew the Bashkir language, but unfortunately I don't. Your help will be much appreciated!--Ëzhiki 18:19, Jul 12, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks!--Ëzhiki 14:22, Jul 15, 2004 (UTC)

Ukrainian language

Hey, Monedula!

Would you please stop your post-imperial propaganda in the articles related to Ukraine. If you can documentally prove that Ukrainian was "being used" in USSR in the fields you specify - so do it on the page, cite. And even if you do - your anyway would be lying or misinformed because Sovdepia was purely Byzantine system of lying, hiding and falsing. I was born in 1977 and never seen such usage. AlexPU 15:19, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)

So your parents have never watched the Ukrainian TV ("the republican program")? And have never bought any Ukrainian-language books? — Monedula 05:35, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I'm not Monedula, but I don't understand what you are talking about. Which fields do you mean? Dr Bug (Volodymyr V. Medeiko) 20:44, 28 Jul 2004 (UTC)

To Monedula. My parents even had a Czech books and a Latin vocabulary. Bui it noway means that these languages were "used" in Ukraine like you edited (consistently deleting previous more neutral points). Anyway, how dare you (living in Yaroslavl) to be an undisputable expert regarding Ukraine? To delete and write just "it is ridiculous"? Am I disputing the items of local revolutionary events in your city? Or Siberian history? Again, you're a shameless nationalistic vandal.

To DrBug. To find out what I'm talking about, see this guy's editing manner in Ukrainian language (he deletes the same unbiased points by different authors without any explanation, just adding something like "this is ridiculous"). Particularly answering your question, this "Wikipedian" doesn't accept consistent remarks on that page stating that Ukrainian was not used in all, or in many spheres of social life (see the editing history for Ukrainian language) And please note: we're not talking about deletion of my particular contributions. I'm just fighting for neutrality. He`s just a vandal. AlexPU 12:12, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)

To AlexPu: Please list the spheres where Ukrainian language was used, and where it was not used (in the Ukrainian SSR). Perhaps it will give us something to discuss. — Monedula 13:54, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Dear Slavic "brother", let's not discuss Ukrainian history here. What I'm talking about here, is your editing manner. Since the article's problem is so disputed, how about writing little more than "it's ridiculous"? Do you want "something to discuss"? So revert any of your changes to that page, then go to the Talk and write, criticize, formulate your opinion. Specify just where and when do you think Ukrainian was used, and describe the dynamics of that. Write about regional differences etc. Than wait for Wikipedians to reply and discuss. Don't be monistic. Act like civilized intellectual (not like RTR propagandist). AlexPU 11:37, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Please read Wikipedia:Patent nonsense first. Some of your writings fall exactly into that category. — Monedula 16:12, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Redirects

Hello. There is no need to make those redirects for When, Maybe, Whence, etc. Wikipedia is not a dictionary. We have Wiktionary for that. Please stop. Thanks. Danny 14:41, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Those redirects serve exactly that purpose: they prevent creation of unnecessary articles. In addition, they facilitate finding information for those who do not know English well. In any case, redirects are not Encyclopedia articles, so there is no limitations on them. — Monedula 14:48, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)

The thing is that there are no pages that actually link words like but, then, whence, etc., so there is no reason for the redirects. Danny 14:54, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I have to agree with Danny. The only other use of redirects is to catch alternative searches - but these words don't work on a search anyway. -- sannse (talk) 14:56, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Still if the user enters such words in the search box, then he/she will be prompted to create such articles, and it is quite undesirable. I think that Wikipedia must return something reasonable whenever the user enters something reasonable. In any case, do those redirects disturb anyone? — Monedula 15:01, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Izvinite, pozhaluysta!

Dear Monedula, please refrain from comments such as the one I've cited below. This is considered a personal attack and is against Wikipedia policy -- see Wikipedia:No personal attacks.

if you cannot use search engines, then you must be really ignorant... — Monedula 06:24, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC))

Bol'shoye spasibo, BCorr|Брайен 13:04, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Can you help me revert other vandalisms easily?

I notice you rv'd Roman Forum; the same anon has been doing the same stuff to lots of other pages this morning, and I'm going to go fix them: is there some easy way of reverting, or do I have to copy and paste and adjust?? Thanks for any help. — Bill 11:52, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)

While you are on a page that needs reverting, go to Page history and then click the date of a correct version; when the old version of the page is dispayed, click Edit this page; when the edit dialog appears, click Save page without changing anything — the old version then becomes the current one. — Monedula 12:00, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)

И я тоже благодарю тебя. I just knew there had to be a simpler way of doing things. — Bill 12:55, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Road signs

Very useful picture but I think you've forgotten to tell us which country that set of road signs applies to. Please put the info in the pic caption. Thanks. - Adrian Pingstone 21:09, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Join RWNB!

Hello!

I see from your contributions that you are interested in Russian topics. Perhaps you would like to join the new Russian wikipedians' notice board? It is a discussion forum for wikipedians interested in all things Russian. Also, each week we pick an unfinished stub article to improve through collaboration.

Russian Collaboration of the Week

Every week, a lacking Russian topic is picked to be the Russian Collaboration of the Week.
The current RCOTW is Vostochny.

Notice boards and Collaborations-Of-The-Week have become increasingly popular on wikipedia reciently, with Irish, British, US and many more. There is also a score board for competing collaborations! See FAC.

Isn't it about time we got articles on Russia up to standard?

Hope to see you on RWNB!

Seabhcán 12:24, 25 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 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)

Chess image

Greetings. I've been image tagging, and I came across Image:Chess symbols.PNG. Some fonts are copyrighted, so I'm not sure whether the image is free or not. Can you tell me what 2 fonts were used, and whether they are copyrighted or not? Thanks, – Quadell ^{(talk) (help)} 19:09, Jan 3, 2005 (UTC)

I suppose that font licence allows the rightful user to create any text or pictures with the font. Otherwise, what use the font would be? — Monedula 20:18, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I really wish things worked that way. But fonts can be trademarked, copyrighted, patented, or all three. It's always illegal to give away a font without the copyright owner's permission. According to the SIL (a recognized authority on the matter), "If a designer were to copy [patented fonts], even by redrawing them from scratch using pencil and paper, he would be in serious legal trouble." This is one reason all screenshots are considered fair use: even if the OS is open source and the application is opensource, one of the fonts might be copyrighted. It sucks, but it's true. – Quadell ^{(talk) (help)} 18:55, Jan 4, 2005 (UTC)

Is there a chance of using some free fonts? Arial Unicode MS makes a reference to "Free Software Foundation" fonts, but provides no links. Do those contain chess images like these? grendel|khan 01:14, 2005 Jan 5 (UTC)

Creating a picture is not the same thing as copying the font. If I cannot create a picture using a given font, then what I have bought it for? — Monedula 03:38, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Legally, you haven't bought a font; you've purchased the right to use that font on a single machine. So putting a picture of a patented font (and maybe a copyrighted font - I can't get a straight answer on that one) on the Internet is, unfortunately, illegal. It's a horrible copyright system we have in the U.S., and it's worse in other countries. (In the UK, you can't even reproduce any font's letter, even as a free-hand drawing, if it is recognizable. In the US, that only applies to patented fonts, but in the UK, it applies to all copyrighted fonts.) Anyway, I think the system should be changed, but there it is. – Quadell ^{(talk) (help)} 21:53, Jan 5, 2005 (UTC)

Then, what can I do with a font? Any use of a font means creating copies of character images, isn't it? That's what a font is for. So something must be wrong in your reasoning. — Monedula 22:02, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

You are right in a sense that any use of a font means creating copies of character images; however, a font's license allows you to do that only on your machine and your machine alone (unless, of course, a license specifically states otherwise). When, for example, you create a document in Word, you have a right to view the characters you type in a font you had bought. When you distribute the document, only the character codes and a pointer to the font are included, not the font itself. It is assumed that whoever else receives your document will have a font installed on his/her machine that would allow for viewing the document. Same thing goes for the webpages—you are undoubtedly aware that HTML code does not include actual fonts; at the very best it contains recommendations as to which font the browser on the receiving side must use.

When a picture is created with a font, that's a whole different can of worms. The situation is exactly as bad as Quadell described.—Ëzhiki (erinaceus europeaus) 14:54, Jan 6, 2005 (UTC)

Update!

Okay, I've done a lot more sleuthing on this topic, and found out some surprizing things.

Fonts are not the same as typefaces. Typefaces are the actual shapes of letters. Fonts are tiny software programs that render typefaces on a computer.
Fonts are copyrightable as software. You can't copy a font to a second computer, and you can't put up a font on the web for downloading.
Typefaces, however, are not copyrightable in the U.S.
The following are examples of works not subject to copyright and applications for registration of such works cannot be entertained: . . . typeface
- 37 CFR 202.1(e), US Code of Federal Regulations, 1976.

The Committee has considered, but chosen to defer, the possibility of protecting the design of typefaces. A 'typeface' can be defined as a set of letters, numbers, or other symbolic characters, whose forms are related by repeating design elements consistently applied in a notational system and are intended to be embodied in articles whose intrinsic utilitarian function is for use in composing text or other cognizable combinations of characters. The Committee does not regard the design of typeface, as thus defined, to be a copyrightable 'pictorial, graphic, or sculptural work' within the meaning of this bill"
- H. R. Rep. No. 94-1476, 94th Congress, 2d Session at 55 (1976)
A photo of a font, a gif of a font, and a printout that uses a font are all treated the same way. All are reproductions of the typeface, not the actual font. All are legal.
Companies that sell fonts (e.g. Adobe) seem to purposefully obscure the difference between fonts and typefaces.
In all of Europe and most of Asia, typefaces are copyrightable. All the above only applies to the U.S. But the Wikipedia servers are in the U.S., and only have to follow U.S. law.

All this leads me to conclude that Image:Chess symbols.PNG should be tagged as {{PD-ineligible}}, and I'll do so. Cheers, – Quadell ^{(talk) (help)} 20:23, Jan 6, 2005 (UTC)

Template:Kings and Dukes of Poland

Please help us to get things under control in False Dmitriy I, Vasili IV of Russia, and Michael I of Russia. Polish nationalists repeatedly include Wladislaus IV of Poland in the list of Russian tsars and delete Nicholas I (who was crowned as king of Poland in Warsaw) from the list of Polish rulers. Thanks. Ghirlandajo 09:25, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Latin

Yesterday I was cleaning after an anonymous who was inserting garbage. So, I removed that person's contributions to latin until somebody who really knew the topic could confirm those insertions were really correct. By the way, are you sure those are correct, or they just "seem so"? Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov 18:49, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Yes, they are correct. See [1], for instance (at the very end of that page). — Monedula 19:53, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Great! Oleg Alexandrov 21:28, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)

image copyrights

Thanks for uploading Image:Roadsign-priority.png and Image:Roadsign-warning.png. I notice they currently don't have an image copyright tag. Could you add one to let us know its copyright status? (You can use {{gfdl}} if you release it under the GFDL, or {{fairuse}} if you claim fair use, etc.) If you don't know what any of this means, just let me know where you got the images and I'll tag them for you. Thanks so much, Duk 00:35, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

They have been scanned from Russian traffic rules book. Since the sign shapes and colors are prescribed officially, it seems that they are not copyrightable. — Monedula 08:19, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

template:lang

Can you tell me its purpose? Better, can you write about it in its talk page? Mikkalai 07:12, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Template:Chset-tableformat

Your Template:Chset-tableformat is cool. I only doubt, whether monospace is a good choice. For some scripts I don't have monospace fonts, the proportional ones are much easier to find nowadays. --Pjacobi 12:43, 2005 Jan 28 (UTC)

In fact, the monospace font gets used only in the numbers of rows and columns, and in the small Unicode hex numbers below characters, because there is another template, Template:Chset-cell that puts the main characters in serif. See an example at CP437. — Monedula 13:03, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Ah, very good. And it even works in 800x600 without horitontal scrolling. Th downside is now, the large number of tables which should be changed. --Pjacobi 13:42, 2005 Jan 28 (UTC)

Splitting Obsolete Tatar weights and measures is nonsense

Discuss this at Talk:Obsolete Russian weights and measures. This is trivia; they are obsolete. Having English, Russian, and Tatar language on the same page is helpful. Gene Nygaard 14:28, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Cyrillic accent marks

Well, Russian is my second or third language, not my first like yours, but I must admit that accent marks in Cyrillic do grate on me. I'm not about to get into an edit war with you about it (i.e. on Tolstoy), and though I agree with you that the marks are "educational," I don't think it is necessarily Wikipedia's function to serve as a primer for beginning students of foreign languages. I don't expect, nor have I ever seen, orthographic aids in other non-Latin script in Wikipedia (such as names written in the original Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic, etc.), so I don't see why Russian 101-style accent marks must be provided for Russian names, especially as they are not used outside of the very specific area of language instruction.

You also mention that such accent marks are found in all Russian encyclopedias; however, I should point out that this is not a Russian encyclopedia!

So while I'm not going to go around reversing your edits, I will continue to excise Russian accent marks whenever I happen to encounter them, and I just wanted to let you know my reasoning behind this. Cheers, dablaze 13:22, Mar 22, 2005 (UTC)

You are wrong in assuming that accents are for "beginning students". Even native speakers of Russian do not always know the correct accentuation. And most English-language encyclopedias do not include Russian spellings at all, so why do we include them in Wikipedia? At least accents take no additional space. — Monedula 06:50, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Yes accents on the cyrillic names are very helpful. I just filled a bug about the search problem: Mediawiki: Bug 1836: strip Combining diacritical mark when searching

Monedula, please comment.--Hhielscher 20:09, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Gerade habe ich gesehen, dass du (Monedula) auch Deutsch sprichst. Auf de:Wikipedia_Diskussion:Namenskonventionen/Kyrillisch#Betonung_von_kyrillischen_Namen werden gerade Akzente im Kyrillischen diskutiert, mit im Moment eher negativem Resultat.--Hhielscher 13:37, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

As I see, many objections center on purely technical problems, such as incorrect display in some browsers, or problems with search engines. I think that such approach is quite wrong. Computer implementations must follow human needs, and not the other way round. — Monedula 06:30, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Многие путают ударения и диакритические знаки над буквами (думают, что в русском алфавите есть отдельные буквы с чёрточками), например встретив в Википедии русское имя с ударениями говорят, что в их источнике буквы без чёрточек. Я думаю лучше не ставить ударения в английской Википедии — это избыточная информация. --ajvol 19:22, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I do not agree that marking the stress of a word is needless information. IMHO the only question to be asked is on how to insert that kind of information best. Accents on the cyrillic have the disadvantage that it is exclusive to people that know hot to read cyrillic. But all other ways to mark the stress have the problem that they are even less common.--Hhielscher 19:51, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The zero bug

Someone looked into the bug you found about html zero characters, and it turns out its caused by a bug in php's "tidy" library (http://pecl.php.net/bugs/bug.php?id=4202). I guess it will be fixed when the PHP people fix it. -- John Fader (talk | contribs) 14:45, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

VfD

Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion/Occupied_territories_of_Baltic_States Mikkalai 22:08, 16 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

hi~~ can you tell me the local name of USSR

hi, my russian friend. i am from china. i want to know the local names of the USSR. can you tell me?

i only know the local name as follow:

russian: Союз Советских Социалистических Республик,

ukrainian: Союз Радянських Соціалістичних Республік,

belrussian: Саюза Савецкіх Сацыялістычных Рэспублік,

Lietuvių: Tarybinių Socialistinių Respublikų Sąjunga

Latviešu: Padomju Sociālistisko Republiku Savienība

Eesti: Nõukogude Sotsialistlike Vabariikide Liit

but i want to know other local names. can you help me?? thank you very much! --icywind 02:45, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)

See http://www.geonames.de/couru.html (closer to the end of that page). — Monedula 05:35, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)

lots of edits, not an admin

Hi - I made a list of users who've been around long enough to have made lots of edits but aren't admins. If you're at all interested in becoming an admin, can you please add an '*' immediately before your name in this list? I've suggested folks nominating someone might want to puruse this list, although there is certainly no guarantee anyone will ever look at it. Thanks. -- Rick Block (talk) 13:41, Jun 20, 2005 (UTC)

Quot linguas calles, tot homines valles!

Ако разумеш шта овде пише, додај и српски међу језике које говориш ;)

Really impressive collection of language babels, it's amazing! Howewer it is strange that Serbian isn't among listed languages, especially since it is very similar to Russian and Bulgarian for example :) -- Obradović Goran (ta^lk 23:54, 9 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Image:Webdings.png

Image deletion warning

The image Image:Webdings.png has been listed at Wikipedia:Possibly unfree images. If the image's copyright status cannot be verified, it may be deleted. If you have any information on the source or licensing of this image, please go to its page to provide the necessary information.

Craigy (talk) 15:23, July 13, 2005 (UTC)

lang and lang-* templates

Hi,

Just left something on Template talk:Lang for you that I probably should've put here.

— J’raxis (T) 18:26:35, 2005-08-03 (UTC)