User talk:Mzajac/2005

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2005 archive of User talk:Mzajac

Mysterious deletions

Michael, would you as a Web expert take a look at the history of police (as well as at my contributions history)? A guy says I've ocasionally deleted the whole article. How could it happen? Earlier I've been accused in deleting the whole page after minor editing only a section of it. Was it my mistake, or should I suspect viruses, intentional interference, hackers using my log etc? Best wishes, AlexPU

Hey Alex. What changes were you trying to make in that second edit to police? Can you point out which other items in your history are suspect? (WP is quite slow right now.) There's probably a simpler explanation (browser bug, network problems?), but I can't think of any obvious cause right now.

When you edit a section, I think it actually updates the text of the whole page anyway. A couple of times I've accidentally reverted my own edits by editing different sections of one page simultaneously, in two different browser windows. I'm guessing this is similar weirdness that you're experiencing.

—Michael Z. 16:16, 2005 Jan 7 (UTC)

Hey Michael. On the police page, I first added internal links to MVS and militsiya, than replaced MVS with MVS (Ukraine). In both cases, I've been opening for edit the "Europe" section only. As for elder item, I can't freaking recall the page, but it was some talk regarding Russia-Ukrainian relations cause I remember the ill-famous DrBug gloatingly accusing me of vandalism. And what I clearly recollect, the circumstances were just the same: I edit the section of talkpage, then the guy comes out crying "you deleted the whole", I'm naturally denying, then DrBug links me to the history of that page. I've tried to find that contribution of mine, but ceased attempts soon. When WP is slow for you - it is expensive for me cause I'm using time-counting Dial-Up connection now : (((.

BTW, my new guess that it was my slow connection that caused the deletion. I mean I was using 4 windows simultaneously (including WP editing processes for 2 different pages) in order to save connection time. Could it be the reason? But! I thought both WP engine and browsing software are full of gizmos protecting from such effects?

Another guess that it was caused by my browser's poor compatibility with WP. You now, I did switched to Opera 7.53. I'm hoping to find a time for describing the bugs (and advantages) that I experience with it. I think Wikipedia needs a special talk/help page dealing with different browsers usage for editing. Or do we have it already? I think it would be interesting for your Web-creating practice. Pryvit, AlexPU

I use multiple windows and tabs for browsing and editing WP all the time. Just don't edit parts of the same page in two windows. You're protected against conflicts with other users, but not from yourself. Even when editing two different sections, the whole page is updated so your second save will wipe out the changes of your first.

That doesn't explain blanking a page, though. Maybe if a very long save is cancelled, or times out, then the page can register as updated before any data is sent. Police is a long page; maybe the slow connection comes into play too.

You might be able to save connect time by loading up lots of pages, clicking "edit" on some, then disconnecting before reading and editing. It should be no problem to connect again, then click "save" on pages you've edited. You would like a browser with tabs (dunno if Opera has tabs, but Firefox does).

Have a look at Wikipedia:Browser notes. I don't see anything resembling your problem there, though. Good luck, Michael Z.

BTW, I save articles to my HDD and then edit them in MS WOrd. It takes a lot of freaking time for Wikifying, but saves Dial_up money.AlexPU

Cyrillic vs. IPA; font-serving; Cyrillic fonts.

If the latin-based Slavic languages display fine without IPA, then you're absolutely right.

The problem is cyrillic, since there is very poor support for the pre-reform orthographies of Russian, Bulgarian, and (I'm a little nervous to say this) Ukrainian and Rusyn.

Basically, the yat, fita, izhitsa, and yuses are hard to find. Arial Unicode MS is awful in inclined pseudo-italic, I agree.

I wonder if a font-serving template {{CyrFont}} can be concocted, perhaps in two versions, for semi-uncials and civil-script. There are some not-too-bad fonts available for non-commercial use, or indeed entirely in the public domain, that include the entire set, diactitics and all. I did not design them, but for my private use I have tuned their Unicode mappings and have even played with the OpenType composition tables. Of course, the Mac uses a slightly different format for pre-composition.

Typographically the non-commercial Irmologion font set (the site keeps moving, but it's available through google) gives really excellent semi-uncials (perfect for OCS, CS, and OESl languages). Perhaps they could be contacted for Wikipedia use.

With respect to the civil-script cyrillic, there are public-domain versions of New Standard, Academy, and Elizabeth typefaces at [1] which possess the yat, fita, and izhitsa. They are print rather than display fonts, but a bit of hackery will give the necessary screen smoothing, I think. Unfortunately, there is no public-domain version of Literaturnaya, which was the standard cyrillic typeface for most of the twentieth century in the USSR and Bulgaria.

I possess the skills to attempt to construct such a template, that would work multi-browser, but I am leery of uploading fonts until both the licensing and technical issues are resolved. Unfortunately, my computer is not really powerful enough to run the MediaWiki software chain.

What do you think? A. Shetsen 19:25, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Good ideas. In my opinion, the simpler solution is usually the best, especially in computing. I'd rather start with an open source font and enlist necessary help to convert it to a good Unicode font, than mess around with licensing issues. On the other hand, it can't hurt to ask if someone would release their font under GFDL.

There are some lovely non-unicode Slavistics fonts, and I've always wanted to mess around and modernize them. Sounds like you're way ahead of me, but I'm willing to learn and contribute. TTF and opentype fonts do seem to work well on Mac OS X, although I don't know anything about composition tables. The odd exception is Kirillica Nova Unicode, whose font name shows up in Chinese, but it still works. Thanks for the font link—Drevnerusskij looks like the most complete version I've seen of the old Cyrillic font that I've seen floating around, although the encoding is weird.

Template:IPA is really only needed for MSIE/Windows. Maybe the solution for Wikipedia is to add some styles in the MSIE/Windows-only style sheets (Wikipedia already has towe browser-specific style sheets, for MSIE5+ and 6), and make template:IPA and template:Cyrillic simply provide selectors. This would also let technically proficient readers use them in their own user style sheets.

 <span class="IPA"></span>

   <span class="Cyrillic"></span>  

Mozilla/Win and Safari/Mac automatically substitute a different font if a character is missing. On my Mac, I've found that template:IPA makes IPA look a bit different, although all the characters still display. On the Mac, bold and italic don't get auto-generated (I guess the emphasis is on high-quality display).

Bringing italics and partial Cyrillic fonts into the mix can make things worse. On my Mac, in template:IPA, the first three fonts are skipped because one isn't installed and the others don't have italics. Gentium italic is used next, but it only has Russian characters. The rest fall back to the last resort Lucida Grande roman, I think, and I end up with a mix of italic-serif and roman-sans.

Here's a screenshot of part of Old East Slavic language in Safari. I've specified Arial (not Arial Unicode MS) as the default font in my monobook.css, because it renders nice Cyrillic italics. Characters not present in that font are displayed in a fall-back font, usually Lucida Grande. But Template:IPA overrides all that.

File:Font-mix.png

I found the Irmologion UCS fonts. Very nice. Do you have any idea how they're licensed? —Michael Z. 23:34, 2005 Jan 12 (UTC)

Russian (spelling) article

Please see Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)#Russian_.28usage.29_page Jayjg | (Talk) 20:59, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

country infoboxes

Hi, and thanks for your support. I fear that minds are already made up about the endgame of a brutal edit war. I view infoboxes as companion pieces to articles – an ad-bar for a right margin with relevant content. Since they don't change often (and shouldn't) they would be best moved out of the article proper. That they are right up front means that everyone has to scroll around them — hopefully without damaging them — each and every edit. On some pages, they begin on the very first line, which, from a layout point of view, socks them into the top-right corner; to good effect. But from a source point of view there they are, right in the way. The transclude mechanism reduces the in-article clutter to a single line.

There is another move afoot to move the infobox down after the opening paragraph, which I suspect is driven more by a desire to present at least some recognizable article text to a neophyte editor before they have to face an infobox. I wouldn't mind seeing most tables and other gritty stuff moved into subpages.

Anyway, thanks for your vote of support. — Davenbelle 08:35, Jan 14, 2005 (UTC)

Template:IPA

I was glad to have you introduce me to the template. I was excited to use it, and spent quite a bit of time adding it to one page in particular. Your recent changes have caused it to cease functioning on my computer entirely, though. I’ll give you some time to figure out how to accomplish your recent goal while still preserving its earlier usefulness; but if you cannot, we should revert your last two changes to your version before January 14. You know far more than I on this subject, so I will look forward to seeing the product of your efforts.
— Ford 22:02, 2005 Jan 14 (UTC)

- - - - -

It looks fine today. I noticed that you had fixed it, as I supposed you would. I appreciate your efforts (and even your failed experiments) on this matter, because I believe they improve the encyclopedia for its users. Carry on.
— Ford 20:17, 2005 Jan 15 (UTC)

But IE6 does inherit...

Sorry. The second spec of the same css attribute (font-family) seems to override the first on IE6/XP. I've got a custom font set for my #content in my monobook.css file, and after you made the change, IPA now displays in it as well. A. Shetsen 22:08, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

• PS. the only thing that appears to work on IE6/XP is to put the inherit at the end on the one fontlist, which I've done at Template:IPA (not IPA fonts). Does it work on a Mac? A. Shetsen 22:25, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Sorry, I should have done a better job testing that. No, just "inherit" doesn't work. Oh well. —Michael Z. 23:33, 2005 Jan 14 (UTC)

History of the Russian language

Hey Zajac,

  Check out the distinguishing beteween Ukr. and Russ. history of languages!

. Many Russian historians of the East Slavic region equate Russia with an earlier political state called Rus' (Русь). Other scholars consider Russia to have developed later from Slavic settlements amidst the Finno-Ugric areas of the northeastern hinterlands of Rus'. Ghirlandajo 22:53, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

This statement on the lamentable state of scholarship of the history of Russia and the Russian language is true. However this blatantly false equation of Russia with Rus' is a late invention. It became current in the politically Mongolian and ethnically heavily Finno-Ugric and linguistically heavily Old Slavonic newly-formed nation called "Moscow" only in the 15th century, to justify the claims of its rulers to the aristocratic title to "all of Rus'", which was, at the time, a wish, not a reality! Genyo 01:13, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Retrieved from "Talk:History of the Russian language"

This page was last modified 01:13, 16 Jan 2005. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (see Copyrights for details).

Re: Monobook.css validation

Hi Michael, nothing of what I've changed in Monobook.css could be affecting form fields, unless there's a really weird bug in Safari (it's a usability experiment, slightly fading out inactive tabs).

I'll take a look into it, it could be recent changes to Monobook's primary CSS file is causing the problem. Hopefully it can be fixed soon, sorry for the problem in the meantime. Thanks, Tom- 20:30, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)

[replied at User talk:Tom-#Monobook.css validation]

Apparently fixed now, seems Safari has a nasty and very weird bug with opacity. I'll send a bug report to Apple. Tom- 23:31, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Ukraine's law enforcement and military

Michael, take a look at Talk:Politics of Ukraine as well as at my edits to your HUR and SZR. Pryvit, AlexPU

Photos of revolution

Michael, I recall you once asked me if I was keeping my camera with me during the revolution. Actually, I don't have any - only considering what to buy and how to learn shooting as professional as it possible. But I just came across a photo gallery that may be interesting for you http://rupor.info/gallery.php . You may also look for pictures at http://maidan.org.ua Pryviyt, AlexPU

United States move

When you voted to support, you may not have realized that it is also being proposed to move United States (disambiguation) → United States. That is, the page United States would become a disambiguation page.

Can you please clarify at Wikipedia:Requested_moves#United_States_.26rarr.3B_United_States_of_America_.26_United_States_.28disambiguation.29_.26rarr.3B_United_States whether you are voting in favor of only one or both of the proposals? -- Curps 23:38, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Economist definition on Canada

I don't have the context. But before my edit, it ran like this.

One definition of a Canadian, offered by the Economist in 1993,
was "an American with healthcare and no guns",
though in actuality, an estimated 3,100,000 Canadians own some nine million firearms.

which is even worse, as it did not describe how can canadian had "no gun". I think it is a metaphor here.

Dawson City image

Thanks for cleaning up Image:Dawson2.jpg. It looks much better! You're a dab hand with an image editor. - Montréalais 07:54, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Hey, thanks! I only wish I had a higher-res original to work with. —Michael Z. 2005-01-27 08:19 Z

Early Cyrillic alphabet

I've finally got around to replying to your work at Talk:Early Cyrillic alphabet again. You might wanna jump straight to the diff in order to work out what's going on.

In an unrelated note, being nosy at your sandbox made me think of my sandbox (at User:OwenBlacker/Cyrillic), which was mainly an attempt to come up with a policy that would stop people italicising Cyrillic characters and confusing readers who know Cyrillic a-little-but-not-all-that-much). Please feel free to comment on there (or whatever).

And two other things:

1. Happy New Year!
2. Поздравление на избрании Ющченко ! :o)

— OwenBlacker 14:52, Feb 1, 2005 (UTC)

Заємно!

Your comments and changes look good. I'm trying to go on the Wikipedia wagon for a day and get some work done. Go ahead and move the table to the article.

One nitpicky thing: I wouldn't put the Unicode values (e.g., U+1FFD) in <code> tags; they are documentary only, and wouldn't be used in computer code this way (as e.g., HTML entities would: А).

—Michael Z. 2005-02-1 16:52 Z

Good luck on the wagon; I know the feeling. I put the Unicode values in code tags, just because I prefer the way they look like that, but I don't feel strongly about it, so I'm just gonna take the table as-is from the Talk: page and copy it over (and will do the same when we're done with punctuation). I'm gonna move the table over now, anyways. — OwenBlacker 00:44, Feb 3, 2005 (UTC)

PS: Cool signature substitution; I might nick it later… ;o)

Hm, must get to work....

Well, I don't feel that strongly about the <code> tags either, but how about using <tt> instead? It looks the same on WP, but doesn't carry the same semantic meaning: U+1FFD. Yeah, I'm an HTML geek.

You're welcome to the sig code. talk pages would be a bit less cluttered with little poodle poops instead of those big coprolites squeezed out after every sig. —Michael Z. 2005-02-3 01:12 Z

Custom timestamp in your signature

You're the first person I've noticed with a custom timestamp. How do you do that? —Mar·ka·ci 21:52, 2005 Feb 2 (UTC)

The short answer is: paste in the text instead of using ~~~~. Here's what I paste in (on a single line, broken here for readability):

  ''&mdash;[[User:Mzajac |Michael]] [[User talk:Mzajac |Z.]]&nbsp;<small>
  {{subst:CURRENTYEAR}}-{{subst:CURRENTMONTH}}-{{subst:CURRENTDAY}}&nbsp;
  {{subst:CURRENTTIME}}&nbsp;Z</small>''

You can read about the variables like {{CURRENTTIME}} at meta:Variable. Subst: simply substitutes the value of the variable immediately—so you get the current time entered as text, instead of it remaining a variable that will always show the current time.

Unfortunately you can't put it into a template, because then {{CURRENTTIME}} would be updated every time someone edits an article, and {{subst:CURRENTTIME}} would be converted to the time you create the template. I found this out the hard way—there may still be one or two of my sigs around, that claim to be written very recently, indeed....

For convenience, I've added a user javascript which puts this into a text field on the page, underneath Wikipedia's edit field. I can select the text to copy and paste from there. see User:Mzajac/monobook.js for this and some other code. —Michael Z. 2005-02-2 23:05 Z

Thank you very much for the info. ^_^ I was thinking that it's also possible to change your signature in the prefs to include the timestamp. You'd only need ~~~ to sign. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the subst:VARs to work. :| [rant]Also, the day needs the leading zero when it's only one digit to conform to ISO 8601.[/rant] —Mar·ka·ci:2005-02-3 05:05 Z

Eureka! I thought I'd let you know what I discovered. :) You know that button (second-last) in the toolbar for signatures? Maybe you don't see/use it (since you can turn the toolbar off), but I've figured out a way to make that button insert your signature, custom timestamp and all. This way the signature button is actually useful! You can further play around with it to suit your needs. See my /monobook.js (I'm testing out using a template in userspace). I think this would work for you (line breaks included for readability):

 document.getElementById("toolbar").innerHTML=
 document.getElementById("toolbar").innerHTML.replace("--~~"
 + "~~","\\'\\'—[[User:Mzajac |Michael]] [[User talk:Mzajac |Z.]] <small>
 {{subst:CURRENTYEAR}}-{{subst:CURRENTMONTH}}-{{subst:CURRENTDAY}} 
 {{subst:CURRENTTIME}} Z</small>\\'\\'");

The escaped backslashes are there because when they are rendered in the page, they escape the apostrophes that italicize your signature. Enjoy. :> —Markaci 2005-03-13 T 22:41 Z

Cool! And very simple, too. The buttons just show text in the field in my browser (Safari), but that will be convenient. I'll try it out. —Michael Z. 2005-03-14 00:28 Z

How do I use this monobook.js script? Would I have to put it somewhere so that Firefox can find it? -- BBlackmoor ^(talk) 14:52, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

I haven't used this particular script, so no guarantees. But if the default monobook skin is selected in your preferences, you can set up custom scripts for your own account at User:Bblackmoor/monobook.js, and a style sheet at User:Bblackmoor/monobook.css. After making changes, refresh a page to get them to start working. —Michael Z. 2005-10-23 14:57 Z

Excellent. Thanks for the help.[2] -- BBlackmoor ^(talk), 2005-10-24 T 21:06:26 Z

New image for Template:Ling-stub

As the creator of the new Ling-stub template, I just wanted to say thanks for creating the new image. It looks a lot better than the original, which I created. That was my first attempt at creating an icon image, and it shows :-) Szyslak 21:29, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)

My pleasure. I thought yours was just fine, but the PNG format works better for solid-colour images than JPEG. Cheers, Michael Z.

Template:Latin alphabet

Good fix for the font family! I now see my preferred fonts again. How did you find out about the trick to make it apply only to MSIE? Jordi·✆ 07:44, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Woah, you spotted that quickly. It's something I figured out for Template:IPA. I found the technique described here. I'm guessing you use Mozilla.

The font-family: inherit; declaration resets the font to whatever your browser was going to use. The strategically-placed empty comment (/**/) hides that declaration from MSIE 6/Win. Every other browser can pick the right font on its own.

I suspect that this may break the font display in MSIE 5.0 or 5.5, but I'm too lazy to test it, and no one has complained yet. —Michael Z. 2005-02-7 08:01 Z

I actually use Opera Beta (Opera 8). I didn't know about this CSS bug (MSIE apparently doesn't know how to handle empty comments), looks like it can come in very handy. FWIW, MSIE 5.5 displays fine: I can't check 5.0 (don't have a machine with it). Thanks again! Jordi·✆ 08:24, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Cool, I haven't met any Opera users before, although I did licence a copy for a museum kiosk project. The comment and whitespace have to be exactly as entered for this one to work. That site has a whole catalogue of css hacks and a compatibility table. I'd rather not use this kind of hack on WP where anyone can edit it, but so far so good. I'm trying to lobby a developer to add this stuff to the MSIE-specific style sheet, but no luck yet. —Michael Z. 2005-02-7 14:42 Z

First Nations Naming

see Talk:Nisichawayasihk_Cree_Nation for the answers to the questions you had, from my perspective. We need to bring this into a larger discussion circle. It's 1:40am, and I'm teaching in the morning. Cheers! Weaponofmassinstruction 07:39, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Prime Ministers of Ukraine

Thank you for reformating the table. It is more readable now. ISO-dating is a bit unusual, but convenience may be sacrificed for the sake of compactness. A few people were concerned that some PMs are listed twice. Currently, it's the case for Yanukovych and Azarov. Maybe, it's still better to keep them twice. Also, let me suggest a way to improve readability even more. How about alternating white and very light grey backgrounds in rows? Sashazlv 05:15, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for noticing! I guess most people have date preferences that will reformat those dates, anyway. I've grown accustomed to using ISO dates myself, and they do work well in tables. Regarding duplications, think of it as a list of prime ministerial tenures, rather than people who have been prime minister.

I had a heck of a time getting the table rules working similarly in different browsers. MSIE/Win doesn't seem to like drawing borders on individual table rows, Safari doesn't support the rules attribute. I finally got it to look close, but not quite the same in those browsers and Firefox.

White/grey backgrounds might be better. Have a look at Romanization of Ukrainian#Table of romanization systems for an example. —Michael Z. 2005-02-10 14:29 Z

Yuliya

That’ll work. Actually, my original was “whose deputy as prime minister she was”, which is what I meant to restore. I did not catch the change in time to revert it, and the new language was just too conversational for an encyclopedia. Your version will do until someone comes along and changes the whole thing again.
— Ford 01:49, 2005 Feb 12 (UTC)

USSR military equipment

Since you seem to be interested in military equipment and I'm guessing you're from the Ukraine where a lot of the Soviet stuff was designed/built (not to mention being a part of the USSR) perhaps you'd like to help me improve the articles on surface-to-air missiles of the USSR and Russia. A few already existed when I arrived here a few months ago (I think SA-1, SA-2, SA-7, SA-14 and Igla). Most of them are OK. I added all the rest up to SA-19. I'm quite happy with some but overall, many still need fleshing out and they all need to become more consistent in terms of layout, information, etc. Well, I'll probably eventually manage it myself so don't worry too much, but the task of creating so many missing small articles, linking everything properly, etc. is daunting. Thanks. Nvinen 13:14, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Easy does it. I'm no specialist in the AA missiles, but add those to my watch list and contribute however I can. Good work.

I'm interested in articles concerning Ukraine, but I've never been there yet. Cheers, Michael Z.

Khotyn uprising (1919)

I think you should be interested to take a look at the Khotyn article, which is repeatedly flooded by Romanian nationalism. If you have any facts on the Khotyn uprising, please help to make the article better. Ghirlandajo 06:55, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Vote on Talk:Gdansk/Vote

Hi. Since you have edited on Wikipedia:WikiProject Cities/Names issues, I would invite you to vote on Talk:Gdansk/Vote to settle the multi-year dozens-of-pages dispute about the naming of Gdansk/Danzig and other locations. The vote has two parts, one with questions when to use Gdansk/Danzig, and a second part affecting articles related to locations with Polish/German history in general. An enforcement is also voted on. The vote has a total of 10 questions to vote on, and ends in two weeks on Friday, March 4 0:00. Thank you -- Chris 73 Talk 07:13, Feb 18, 2005 (UTC)

Kill the Britannica!

Michael, would you please somehow retire Kremenchug as obsolete? (I added the useful part of it to Kremenchuk) I'm afraid redirects are above my knowledge yet. AlexPU

Done. Making redirects is simple: just delete all the text and put a link in the form #REDIRECT [[Target article]] in its place. Michael Z.

Thanks for help. I thought there were some server problems particularly with redirects when I was trying to redirect Obolon. Pryvit, AlexPU

We need statistics

Michael, please take a look at the statistics issue at Talk:Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine. Your opinion as a Web-designer could benefit the subject a lot. Feel free to move the discussion anywhere useful. Best wishes, AlexPU

P.S. Thanks for support on Category:Kyiv city.

Kamyaniets Podilskiy

Hi Michael. Would you please take a look at Kamyaniets Podilskiy and make a decision on its name spelling (and the page name)?. I think it should be a transliteration of Ukrainian (not Polish or Russian) name. But I'm not sure on:

• dash between two words (what are the English Wiki rules on it?)
• transliteration of Ukrainian apostrophe

Pryvit, AlexPU

Yushchenko Photos

Hi, I put new official photos to Viktor Yushchenko article (I marked them as PD since they were explicitly made available for download by his site). It seems that now the article is overloaded with photos. However, I wouldn't risk throwing any of them out.

Could you, please, have a look at the current article layout, especially, how the photos in the Inaguration section are organized?

Best regards, Sashazlv 06:59, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)

You know, it doesn't look overloaded to me. I would consider dropping the first one, since it looks like a montage made for marketing purposes (pre-orange revolution photo of Yushchenko superimposed over the crowd), and not a documentary photo. Many world leaders' articles have their state official portrait as the leading photo, but I couldn't find one on the official government site. The Our Ukraine portrait is nice, but looks a little dated. —Michael Z. 2005-03-4 15:44 Z

Off-line Wikiediting

Hi Michael. I need your professional Web-designing/PC gizmo advice. As I told you, I edit Wiki pages off-line as a whole using text editor (because changing particular paragraphs on-line is too Dial-Up-time-consuming). For that editing, I import HTM pages in my MS Word (no matter how: by clipboard or through opening). By doing that, I lose even those Wikilinks which I don't intend to change. So I'm forced to restore all the links manually, and this is freaking exhausting!!! I especially hate the Ukrainian language, necessary on the top of every bloody page.

So do I have any chance to automate the process? MS Word macro's? Replacement lists? And what about that "Wiki software" mentioned on some pages? Could it help? Thanks in advance. Pryvit, AlexPU

Click "edit this page" while you are still online, and copy the wiki-text into MS Word. I know it can be time-consuming to wait for the wiki's response sometimes, but that way you won't lose any links (including piped links), formatting, table code, manually-entered HTML code, HTML entities, etc.

I think the wiki software that's referred to is the actual Wikimedia server. Some people run their own WP-like projects, or run copies of the server to test and develop new features of the software.

One could make a macro or program to convert the body of a page to wikitext, but I don't know of any such software. Still, it wouldn't be 100% reliable. —Michael Z. 2005-03-9 15:50 Z

Ukrain city maps

Hi Michael, I invite you to find out the best basic ukrain map to show the position of cities. We discuss here --ST ○ 16:50, 2005 Mar 9 (UTC)

Kiev talk page too long

Michael, the Talk:Kiev page became too long (over 100kb) and most of it is discussion on Kiev vs Kyiv topic. Since the issue seems settled, can this be archived to make the page smaller and more convenient to use on still ongoing disputes? I am writing you simply because I don't know how to do it. If you can easily do it and have time to do it, I suggest to create an archive devoted to Kiev vs Kyiv dispute with a link at Talk:Kiev page and move most of the stuff there. I don't think anyone would object to this change. TIA. Irpen 20:37, Mar 15, 2005 (UTC)

Will do. —Michael Z. 2005-03-15 22:19 Z

A note on the Dnieper article

I am writing you here, rather than farther overload the talk:Dnieper page by our discussion. You may notice, I added a European Geography stub note to the article because Dnieper needs much more to be said. Maybe you are aware of a better stub category. I found it difficult to navigate Wikipedia in search of a best stub category. As to the name dispute, I agree with you that this is a minor issue. My preference of the word "river" next to the Dnieper is a weak one and based on my impression of what is used in English media which may be erroneous. Wikipeadia needs a cleanup of the names that are by far more obviously incorrect an deliberately introduced by ideologues of all colors against the accepted naming rules. Cheers, Irpen 22:54, Mar 17, 2005 (UTC)

Russian Soviet on WW2 tanks/equipment

Please be very careful in changing this from russian to soviet !
The germans used always "russisch" (russian) for captured russian/soviet equipment hence the (r) designation. From today's point of view soviet may be correct but from historical point of view it's wrong. --Denniss 08:55, 2005 Mar 19 (UTC)

Thanks for the note; I suspected that may be the case. I was careful to be specific and consistent on my recent spree of correcting, and avoided changing historic citations where Russian might have been used in this sense. Sorry if I made any mistakes on this account. Always feel free to correct my mistakes when you see them. Cheers. —Michael Z. 2005-03-20 00:13 Z

closed cities

Articles used in the "Did you know sections are required to be non-stubby. Could you please expand this article so I can feature it? Mgm|^(talk) 09:14, Mar 21, 2005 (UTC)

I'm tapped on the subject, but I've left a request on the Russian wikipedians' notice board. Stay tuned... —Michael Z. 2005-03-21 15:48 Z

Spelling info in articles

I've read your comments about spelling information in articles. I think they would be useful for copy-editors. See my user page and my comment on the MoS talk page. SpNeo 03:15, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[replied at User talk:SpNeo —MZ]

Tank, Tank R and D etc

I agree that there should be linkages from the tank article to articles on automatic defence systems, with a short phrase to establish the context of the link. And I also agree that there is a lot of work to be done on tank related articles. In fact I am sometimes depressed at the amount still to be done for the tank history article or articles, since I sometimes have the impression the best solution would be to divide it in three articles: 1-Before WWII, 2-WWII, 3- After WWII. The section I removed completely from the main tank article dealt only with power plants and made no reference to any other article in Wikipedia, or any book or web page. It offered no explanation, no facts, just suppositions that fuel cells and electric drives might be the way to go in the future. Why not suppose nuclear propelled tanks might be the way to go then? I know that given a few days in a public library I could actually find some 1950s and 1960s articles suggesting this. But would this be useful to understanding the modern tank? I do not see how. On the other hand I did move to a newly created Wikipedia article (the link is in the "see also" section at the bottom) a rather good, well structured section on current tank armour R and D because it seemed to me that it had the potential to become a good encyclopedic article, standing by itself once sections on non-armour R and D have been added, and at the same time this move helps reduce the size of a tank article focused on present day tanks instead of past or future ones. Ah, yes my studies of the T-10 (and other soviet machines)is a bit too old (around 20 years ago) for me to make good contributions to its article. My memory fails me. --AlainV 07:51, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Signature

I like the date format of your signature e.g. 2005-03-26 22:47 Z - how do you achieve this. Saw this no where else. thx and best regards Tobias Conradi 22:35, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

See heading #15 on this page: User talk:Mzajac#Custom_timestamp_in_your_signature. Only problem is that the first nine days of the month are displayed with only one digit; but I've chosen to live with it. —Michael Z. 2005-03-28 07:22 Z

Hi Michael, time to say thank you for your signature-explanation. With the redirect thing I meant if one visits Regions of France and actually gets the content from Région in France later if one see the link Région in France this will not be marked as read, because the browser never has requested this page. Tobias Conradi 06:06, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)

withdrew move request for Regions of France (how I call it) ;-) this is not an Aprils joke Tobias Conradi 08:23, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)

DYK

Woohoo! —Michael Z. 2005-03-29 06:11 Z

Comprise and compose

I should read closely. My apologies.

No need to apologize. It's an easy mistake to make, or perhaps not even strictly a mistake any more, because people are always saying that something "is comprised of blah...". —Michael Z. 2005-03-29 22:30 Z

I only thought that "to comprise" in the active form...but no, of course no. "Is comprised of" is just the inversion of "to comprise". Unless, of course, you count "comprised" for an adjective instead of for a participle...--141.150.75.12 02:18, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Correct:

• A tree comprises roots, a trunk, and branches, and
• roots, a trunk, and branches compose a tree. Therefore also:
• a tree is composed of roots, a trunk, and branches.

Incorrect, but you hear it all the time:

• A tree is comprised of roots, a trunk, and branches.

—Michael Z. 2005-03-30 04:23 Z

superscripts

Hi - Thanks for the response on superscripts at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical). Have you seen my comment on your response? I don't mean to be a pest about it, but I'm pretty sure Meta:Help:Special characters#Unsafe characters is correct about superscript 2 and superscript 3 not being safe, and I'm pretty sure the issue is Mac-Roman (used on pre-OS X Macs, which I think are quite common in many US schools). I don't have extremely ready access to a pre-OS X Mac, so I haven't seen the problem with my own eyes. Are you absolutely sure it isn't a problem? Thanks. -- Rick Block 15:15, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Should we try moving some UA city articles?

Hi Michael. Since no one expressed any objection either at Talk:Dnipropetrovsk page (after I moved the article) nor at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ukrainian subdivisions, shouldn't we request these page to be moved as we discussed? The suggestion was to move these two articles first :

• Kharkov -> Kharkiv
• Luhans'k -> Luhansk

Regards, Irpen 14:45, Apr 6, 2005 (UTC)

Sounds good; I'll reply to your last at at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ukrainian subdivisions. Will you file them at proposed moves, or shall I? —Michael Z. 2005-04-6 18:38 Z

I just filed them and hope I did everything right. Left a template at Kharkov and Luhans'k talk pages and a note at Wikipedia:Requested moves. Irpen 20:35, Apr 6, 2005 (UTC)

I think we should follow up on this trend and request a move from Ivano-Frankivs'k to Ivano-Frankivsk to reverse the current redirect. Same with Dniprodzerzhyns'k. If you agree, you can just go ahead and post a request or I can do it. Or we could just move it by cut and paste. Talk pages of these articles are empty anyway. Since both transliterations are unquestionably Ukrainian, there should not be any sensitive controversies like Donets'k/Donetsk and Kharkiv/Kharkov. Cheers, Irpen 21:12, Apr 11, 2005 (UTC)

I'll get this one. [Our campaign of conquest continues; mua ha ha!] —Michael Z. 2005-04-11 21:16 Z

Oblasts of Ukraine

Hi, Michael! I was wondering if there is any specific reason why Ukrainian oblasts should be placed under the article titles matching their romanized Ukrainian names. Is there an important issue I am not seeing that would prevent moving them from current names (such as Kharkivs'ka oblast') to cleaner names (such as Kharkiv oblast)? (Incidentally, this particular article uses the name that does not match the title.) The adjective forms (Kharkivs'ka, L'vivs'ka, etc.) can always be mentioned in the article, but the actual article title would be much more reader-friendly. This is how the article on Russian oblasts are done, anyway, and it seems to work very well. Thanks.—Ëzhiki (erinaceus europeaus) 18:49, Apr 13, 2005 (UTC)

Hey, thanks for noticing. Irpen' and I are just looking at some of these naming issues, starting with a few cities. We thought we'd introduce the changes gradually, and see if there is resistance. Kharkov → Kharkiv just passed the censors, so we're off to a good start. Main discussion has been at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ukrainian subdivisions. —Michael Z. 2005-04-14 03:18 Z

I guess I don't quite understand what you mean by "resistance" (you don't mean Ukrainian nationalists who would resist this change because Russian subdivisions use it?→just kidding :)), but I see that you are way ahead of me on the Ukrainian subdivisions Wikiproject talk page.—Ëzhiki (erinaceus europeaus) 15:55, Apr 14, 2005 (UTC)

Style manual

Re: your edit today of Wikipedia:Manual of Style where you say It doesn't say anything about only proper nouns...

Yes it does. It uses the phrase "title terms," which IMHO is too easy to overlook (I missed it, on first reading, and so did you, apparently), so I said "proper nouns". The idea, I believe, is to dissuade people from throwing in native spellings in parentheses for every Romanized or Anglicized loan word. Please consider reverting or rephrasing your edit. Thanks! — mjb 16:03, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

No, I did not overlook that it says "English title terms with foreign origin can encode the native spelling and put it in parentheses.". Interpreting this as meaning "native spellings in non-Latin scripts may be included in parentheses, but only for proper nouns." is quite a stretch.

• Title terms doesn't mean proper nouns (e.g., the titles of the articles horse or umbrella).
• It doesn't say that anything else should not be italicized or put in parentheses, as your interpretation implies. X can be Y does not mean Y, but only for X.
• It's obviously a writing style suggestion, not a rule of English orthography nor Wikipedia policy.

—Michael Z. 2005-04-14 16:13 Z

Point taken re: proper nouns not necessarily being the same as titles, although I wouldn't say it's "quite" a stretch. However, while your deductions about X and Y are accurate (to the extent that the guideline is not merely a suggestion), I don't agree with your implicit conclusion that the guideline has no intent to curb excessive use of native spellings.

There was a great debate about this topic last year, when an overzealous high school student began peppering numerous Japan and Japanese-language related articles with multiple kanji and kana spellings in parentheses. He did this for practically every non-English term, which irritated a lot of people because it was distracting, seemed to serve no purpose, and made the articles a pain to read. IIRC, at the time, the people who were attempting to give the guy the smackdown had no relevant guidelines to point him to, so much 'discussion' ensued and specific guidelines for Japan-related articles precipitated in order to prevent such things from happening in the future. It seems reasonable to assume that the guidelines I attempted to paraphrase derive from this debate.

Anyway, my point is, the way you have left things, it now implies that it is always OK to use native spellings in parentheses for any foreign word, willy-nilly. I am pretty certain that's not ideal. — mjb 19:13, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Your version adds a proscription against showing native spelling for non-proper nouns. You say that you are restating another convention, but you are actually making new policy. —Michael Z. 2005-04-14 19:26 Z

Signatures

How do you get a signature like yours without typing in ''~~~ <small>~~~~~</small>'' each time? Brianjd | Why restrict HTML? | 05:24, 2005 Apr 17 (UTC)

See #Custom timestamp in your signature, above. I paste or drag the whole thing into the edit field. —Michael Z. 2005-04-17 07:19 Z

Ukrainian language zealously attacked by vandals

Hi Michael, I just noticed you made some edits to Ukrainian language page. If you look at its history and talk pages, you will see that it's being attacked with zeal from several IP addresses located in Ukraine by someone, who seems to have an oversimplified understanding of what means to be a "patriot". I tried to respond at the talk page and asked those individuals to stop but they seem unconvinced and persisted with blanking the section they didn't like as well as posted a rude remark at my talk page. I am in kind of doubt on what to do. This clearly qualifies as vandalism, if you ask me, but since their purpose is to push their POV rather than vandalism per se, I am not sure this is considered vandalism by WP policy. Also, I am not sure whether the IP address can be reported to "Vandalism in progress". Several of the addresses seem to be dial-up IPs. Of course it would not hurt to improve the article further but it does not seem too bad as of now and I am not sure it would have helped. What are your thoughts? Cheers, Irpen 17:00, May 10, 2005 (UTC)

I've been following this (twice I've had edit conflicts because you just beat me to un-blanking the section). I think it's best to give him/her the benefit of the doubt, and consider this to be an inexperienced Wikipedian rather than a vandal out to make Wikipedia worse. Patience usually seems to be the way to deal with a situation like this, although there have definitely been other times when I didn't have nearly enough of it. I'll leave a note on their last user page, and see if I can encourage more constructive behaviour. —Michael Z. 2005-05-10 17:13 Z

Yes, you are right, I think, that it is better to wait more. Maybe we'll end up getting another contributor. I just lost my temper a bit, probably, because the anon was rather rude and ignored my polite attempts to talk. While I was busy unblanking the section several times, I had actually a chance to read the article in full. I think it is still rather raw, but it shows that there is much work already in it. I might start making changes to it more actively. As always, I won't mind changes and copyedits over my edits, of course. I had much work to do lately, so I didn't do much of what I was planning. Cheers, Irpen 03:37, May 11, 2005 (UTC)

Zaporizhzhia

Michael, I moved the Z. articles around a little bit because the city is what the user is most likely looking for when entering the term in the search box. Right now Zaporizhzhya will bring the city article (former [[Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine]], instead of disambig article, and the disambig article that was sitting at [[Zaporizhzhia]] is moved to Zaporizhzhia (disambiguation). This seem non-controversial enough so that I just did it without proposing it first. I hope no one will mind that.

On the other note, isn't it time by now to move the UA oblasts articles in accordance with Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Ukrainian_subdivisions#Proposed_renaming. There were no responses, so I would say let's just go ahead and propose the moves. If anyone has objections, the listing at proposed move page will bring the issue to prominence. Irpen 21:56, May 11, 2005 (UTC)

The Zaporizhzhia move sounds good to me. Whenever it seems sensible, just be bold. If someone unexpectedly disagrees, then at least the discussion will begin with your point-of-view as the starting point. (I suppose you've already learned that, in dealings with me :-). )

Regarding oblasti, since there hasn't been any response, let's just move all the articles we can, then propose moves for any that are stalled for technical reasons. I have no idea how many will work. First I'll post a note at the proposed renaming discussion, so we can agree on the four unsettled oblasti.

By the way, I haven't snubbed you about the Ukrainian article you referred me to. It's just that it's a bit of work for me to read so much modern Ukrainian all at once, so I haven't got around to it yet (my Ukrainian vocabulary is strongest at the dinner table). Cheers. —Michael Z. 2005-05-11 22:47 Z

Чернобыль/Чорнобиль

Hi Michael, in the deWP we splitted the article about the Chernobyl accident and satteled the article about the city to the ukrainian Chornobyl de:Tschornobyl instead of the rushian Chernobyl. The accident kept the russian name. - Just to inform you about our ideas. So long --ST ○ 23:08, 2005 May 15 (UTC)

Thank you Sven. But I think this was discussed on the Chornobyl page, and the consensus was to go with the popularly-known name. I don't feel the fighting spirit right now, but maybe sooner or later... —Michael Z. 2005-05-16 20:54 Z

;-) --ST ○ 19:02, 2005 May 18 (UTC)

Novorossiya and other terms for historic areas

Maybe we should mention also this term along with Bukovyna/Bukovina among historical areas (see my note at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ukrainian subdivisions)? "Novorossiya" is less used since after the 1917 revolution, but sometimes I saw it even in modern days. On another point re your copyedit, I thought that while one should just say Ukraine or Russia without "the", using of "the" is appropriate when saying "in the southern Ukraine" or "in the southern Russia". I am not a native speaker, so I just would like to know for the future usage. Cheers, Irpen 18:06, May 16, 2005 (UTC)

More terms for historic areas came to me as I thought more about it: Polissya and Podillya. I think Polissya is north-central Ukraine, perhaps Zhytomyr Oblast and part of Kiev and Chenihiv oblasti. Can't seem to remember where exactly in the Western Ukraine Podillya is. The piece of poetry from high school time "Kraso Ukrayiny - Podillya" (or was it Podollya?) comes to mind, but I am not even sure now who is the author. Maybe Lesya Ukrainka. These are the memories from long time ago :). Irpen 18:30, May 16, 2005 (UTC)

Yup, that was her and she said Podollya and not Podillya. Surprisingly, I remembered this through all this years. "КРАСО УКРАЇНИ, ПОДОЛЛЯ!" at Moshkow library. Cheers, Irpen 06:51, May 17, 2005 (UTC)

It looks like Regions of Ukraine could use a bit of a make-over. I'm glad we never got around to deleting that article.

Regarding the article "the", it seems to me that it should be used when the subject is another noun, as in "the southern part of Ukraine", "the south of Russia", or "the Ukrainian south", but not when the subject is the proper name, as in "in southern-most Ukraine". I've also seen a case where the proper name is used as an adjective, or part of an adjectival phrase, so the article is applied to a different noun: "A previously-scheduled EU-Russia summit in The Hague is overshadowed by the Ukraine presidential election crisis." —Michael Z. 2005-05-16 21:00 Z

Little Russia article

Hi Michael, for obvious reasons I just changed the Little Russia article from being a "#redirect [[Ukraine]]" to an article about the term. It needs expansion and may need a copyedit. Besides, I thought you might want to wikilink to it the 1911 EB material from your user page (of course as long as you want to keep this material there). I wikilinked other WP articles but, obviously, I won't edit your own user page, so I thought, I let you know here. Cheers, Irpen 19:50, May 22, 2005 (UTC)

Thanks. I will link that, although it's time for me to put something else on my user page. Regards. —Michael Z. 2005-05-22 22:56 Z

Ukrainian portal for WP

Hi Michael, I helped Zscout370 a little bit with maintenance of the Russian Wikiportal he recently created. Browsing around I saw once more how little Ukraine is covered in WP compared to other countries and histories. Of course Russia is much bigger and much more in the news but still, the coverage of Ukrainian topics in WP needs to be expanded dramatically. Based on RU portal I created a draft version of Ukrainian portal at my user space. Please check it out at User:Irpen/uawp. Please do whatever you like with sections, layout, content, etc. In a couple of days I would like to have it exposed to the community, by moving it to Wikipedia:Wikiportal/Ukraine and placing it into a couple major UA articles, like Ukraine, Ukrainian language, etc, similarly to what was done with Russia article. Hopefully, it will bring more exposure and editors to Ukrainian topics. In the meanwhile, please play with it in your free time.

On another note, I had some discussions with other editors where an extra opinion might help. The first one on talk:Lviv page about the necessity of "Famous Leopolitans" section, the second one at Talk:Sikorsky_Aircraft_Corporation about whether it is correct to call Sikorsky "Ukrainian born". (I was amused to be accused of "Russian Imperialism" for the latter one, and it is even more amazingly by Mikkalai, whom I respect a lot. Perhaps he was annoyed by another disagreement we had recently). Anyway, if you have an opinion on these two issues and feel like expressing it at these talk pages, please do so. Of course you don't have to, if you are not sure about those issues or don't want to interfere. I am much more interested to bring life to Ukrainian portal. Also, I placed a link there to a warning for editors to be a little timid while still being bold in view of recent cases of, probably good willing, bud a little short-tempered novice editors who roamed in Ukrainian language, Ukraine and Kiev articles with changes of terminology that stirred up the hornet's nest. So I would be grateful for your contribution to the portal, if you have time. Thanks! Irpen 20:48, May 27, 2005 (UTC)

Wow, nice work! I'll get in there, but possibly not until Monday. I spent far too much of the day rehabilitating Regions of Ukraine, which probably direly needs your attention—please have a look. —Michael Z. 2005-05-27 22:31 Z

Portal

I think we really need to fix the portal skeleton. Have you ever used it on a new portal page? What happened to the old one that was used for United States portal and European Union portal? Why does this look different? - 68.23.96.151 21:39, 29 May 2005 (UTC)

I just worked on my first portal a couple of days ago (it's the proposed Ukrainian portal, currently at User:Irpen/uawp), so I don't know much about the skeleton. I un-fixed the vertical size of the boxes in the current one. Also made a couple of other changes for the Ukraine version, based on the code in the Quebec portal:

• put the edit links into the box headers
• made the box headers <h2> HTML elements, instead of just generic <DIV>s.

It seems okay to me. I could add these changes into the skeleton, if you think that would be an improvement. The only drawback is that the edit links are hard to read if the box headers have a dark background. Cheers. —Michael Z. 2005-05-30 14:39 Z

Michael, I just noticed that there are two mirrors of the portal draft: User:Mzajac/WPUK and User:Irpen/uawp. For some reason, they lay out at my destop differently. The one in my user space has "edit" buttons inside windows messed up. Also, I recently updated one of the portal subpages, and the update made it to mirrors not simultaneously, but with at least several minutes difference. I am not complaining, I just want to let you know about this. maybe you will find this info useful. I don't have experience with web-design. So I figured I tell an expert. Cheers, -Irpen 01:41, Jun 9, 2005 (UTC)

The copy in my user space was just a temporary copy while I was making major changes to the template, the main one in your space has changed since then.

Thanks for the report about the messed up edit links; I'm guessing you're using Internet Explorer on Windows. I'll have to do a bit more testing and tweak the style sheet. Perhaps it's not 100% ready to go into the public space yet.

I think the changes showing up at different times must be database lag. I don't know the details, but it may have something to do with page caching, or different Wikipedia servers updating their copies of the database at different times. I've experienced delays like that of up to a minute, or so. —Michael Z. 2005-06-9 14:56 Z

Treaty of Hadiach

Tnx for the translation, I compiled an article at Treaty of Hadiach, perhaps you could go over it, fix some red links and such. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 11:58, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Great work! I did a quick copy edit, but it didn't need very much, and looks like very good coverage of this event to me. I suggest you submit it as a suggested article to Wikipedia:Did you know (at Template talk:Did you know). Getting listed on the home page is a good way to attract more editors. —Michael Z. 2005-06-6 16:15 Z

White Russia

With all due respect, I think your latest rewrite of White Russia made it more confusing than it already was, admittedly. The main point there is that "Rus'" != "Russia". The point must be made clear. In your wording it a sort of gets lots. I think that paragraph really needs some work. --rydel 00:26, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

It needs more of a rewrite than an edit. I think I understand the gist, so I'll give it another shot today. —Michael Z. 2005-06-8 15:26 Z

WP:Point and 3 RR rule

Hi Michael, Do you know whether 3 RR applies for reverting the editor whose action exactly fall into WP:Point. Please look at User_talk:Space_Cadet#Kiev, User_talk:Nohat#Kiev and recent edits to talk:Kiev page to see what I mean. Regards, -Irpen 04:32, Jun 10, 2005 (UTC)

Well, the only exception to the 3rr rule seems to be vandalism. Under the principle of giving the benefit of the doubt, I'd say we have to assume that Space Cadet really thinks he's improving the article (but of course, it's your call). Looks like you have several other Wikipedians who agree with you (me included), so it shouldn't be too much of a problem. —Michael Z. 2005-06-10 13:41 Z

Again on K..v article :)

Michael, I just noticed you copyedit Piotrus' intro to the article. I have recently commented on it and proposed some minor changes. Could you please look at Talk:Kiev#Historical_Summary_in_the_lead and comment if you'd like? Thanks! -Irpen 21:36, Jun 13, 2005 (UTC)

Gogol

Michael, there was an interesting discussion recently at talk:Nikolai Gogol. Please look at it as well as at the Gogol's article recent history. I would be interested in your opinion. Thanks! -Irpen 00:20, Jun 15, 2005 (UTC)

More on Portal

Please take a look at Wikipedia:Wikiportal/Ukraine/Ukraine-related Wikipedia notice board. I will write to Zscout370 to reuqest help with scrambled edit buttons at the portal. Once it's done, let's go live. Regards, --Irpen 03:57, Jun 17, 2005 (UTC)

the Ukraine

I noticed you deleted the article "the" form the phrase "in the Ukraine" on the Bela Kun page. Why? "In the Ukraine" is standard English (at least British English) usage. Like "in the Netherlands", "in the UK" etc. A Google search gives you 350.000 instances of "in the Ukraine" vs 1.390.000 of "in Ukraine". So it is about 1 to 4, which means that these two formulations are in free variation, although the one without "the" is more frequent. Cf. "in Spain" (7.270.000) vs "in the Spain" (15.000, and mostly in constructions like in the Spain not under Franco domination): "in the Spain" is clearly a grammatical error. What I want to say is that "in the Ukraine" (and "the Ukraine" - 796.000 hits) is perfectly correct, so there is no need to change it. I know some people feel "Ukraine" is somehow more elegant the "the Ukraine" but I cannot see why. I mean, if "the UK" is OK for the Brits, the Dutch are fine with "the Netherlands", what's wrong with "the Ukraine" for Ukrainians? To me, it even sounds more elegant.

This question has come up before. The short answer is that although you often still hear "the Ukraine," and occasionally see it in print, it is incorrect usage today, and is contrary to English-language publishers' style guides. There's a more detailed explanation in my talk archive (User_talk:Mzajac/2004#Ukraine/The Ukraine), and at Talk:Ukraine#The Ukraine. It is also mentioned in the article at Ukraine#Name. —Michael Z. 2005-06-17 14:45 Z

All right, the style guides sort of convinced me. But off the record, I think it is a huge misunderstanding that the "the" is somehow belittling or has anything to do with the statehood or non-statehood of Ukraine. I mean, if you consider German, where countries normally do not take an article, you have some exceptions, like "die Schweiz"=Switzerland. And the Swiss are completely happy with it, and don't feel belittled. So to me, this "the-deletion" seems to be an example of mistaken political correctness, but since it has gained ground already, there is really no use fighting it in Wikipedia.

Just another small remark about the Bela Kun article: in 1919, Ukraine did not have stathood (internationally recognized), so maybe "the Ukraine" would be more appropriate in this historical context.--Tamas 07:33, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I don't think that the use of an article is necessarily a belittling practice. There's nothing wrong with the Netherlands or the United Kingdom, although I believe there's an etymological history which puts the articles in those names. In the case of Ukraine, though, it's simply incorrect today, and there is a political history which determines the character of this usage. The Ukraine comes from the same context as Little Russia, the impression that the land is simply a territory of "one, indivisible Russia", and having no national identity of its own. Neither Ukrainian nor Russian have a definite article "the", so in English translation this is a self-consciously applied device, rather than an artifact of the name's etymology.

Regarding the use of the Ukraine when speaking about a particular period, it's not that the name of the land underwent a name change from the Ukraine to Ukraine, either during independence of the Ukrainian National Republic, the establishment of the Ukrainian SSR, or at Ukrainian independence in 1991. It has been Ukrayina (Україна) throughout this time. Our language for referring to the land of Ukraine, in any period or under any government, is what has changed. Using the Ukraine when referring to it in an older period of history would be a bit like writing about Chaucer in ye Middel Englishe. —Michael Z. 2005-06-20 16:47 Z

OK, I see your point, but how can you prove that the English added the "the" in order to express that the territory in question is part of "one, indivisible Russia" as you put it? Maybe they added it for some other reason. Language can be so illogical at times. And actually, I can tell you, before reading your arguments I never felt "the Ukraine" to be a belittling form. And I guess most native speakers do not feel so either. But anyway, the bottom line is you have some valid arguments on your side, and if you feel "Ukraine" is more justified than so be it.--Tamas 07:35, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Well, I can't prove it, and I can't think of any historians that have written about it, and I so I'm not writing my explanation into any WP articles as encyclopedic truth. I am merely speculating that Imperial Russian representatives and translators would naturally refer to the territory of Little Russia or "the Ukraine" this way when dealing with the West, not as active propaganda, but merely as a result of their world view. On my user page you can read my rambling essay about the 1911 Britannica's picture of Ukraine, which would probably have adopted their nomenclature from some travelogues concerning "Russia" and some translations of Russian academic publications. Again, I don't think the English who adopted the terminology in the 18th or 19th century meant to belittle the Ukrainians in the least, but we have a very different historical perspective.

Of course these are all my explanations of the view of this terminology. As you pointed out before, one merely has to accept that modern style guides exclusively use "Ukraine" and not "the Ukraine". —Michael Z. 2005-06-21 18:48 Z

Actually, it would be a very interesting philological exercise to trace the history of this "the". Maybe the OED already has something about it. I may check it out, just for fun:) --Tamas 12:07, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Missed your last message because it was ganged with some other edits on my watchlist, Tamas. I'd be very interested to read something about that too. Let me know if you find anything. Regards. —Michael Z. 2005-07-4 21:48 Z

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) 17:36, Jun 21, 2005 (UTC)

Thank you. It would certainly come in handy. —Michael Z. 2005-06-21 19:25 Z

I'll be damned. This is one of those "I thought he already was an admin" classic cases. I will gladly nominate you if you have no objections, because you certainly deserve it.—Ëzhiki (erinaceus amurensis) 13:29, Jun 24, 2005 (UTC)

Actually, this was exactly what I was going to do :)! However, since Ezhiki is already taking initiative upon himself, I would gladly support and add my comments. Michael, I am sure the nomination will sail smoothly. Cheers, -Irpen 15:07, Jun 24, 2005 (UTC)

OK, the nomination is in. Michael, you have to officially accept it. Irpen, if you want to edit my nomination text to indicate that it is a joint nomination, go right ahead.—Ëzhiki (erinaceus amurensis) 15:36, Jun 24, 2005 (UTC)

You are both too kind. Thanks for the nomination. I'll review the rules and file my acceptance shortly. Irpen, you probably deserve adminship more than I do; during all my goading, you've never once lost your cool. Cheers. —Michael Z. 2005-06-24 17:06 Z

I just edited and co-signed Michael's nomination. This would sail through in no time, I am sure. As for my adminship, I would be flattered, but maybe it should wait a little. Take a look at talk:Transnistria and you will see what I am talking about (if you have enough patience to read all of it). Nominating me now might unload another bunch of bullshit against me from those childish folks but at even more public forum than that talk page. I spent too much time trying to respond to their silly attacks at talk:Transnistria and my own talk page. I temporary withdrew from that article, so tired I was of this. So, let's wait until some other time. Cheers, -Irpen 17:28, Jun 24, 2005 (UTC)

Half the battle is knowing when to cut your losses and retreat. Keep up the good work, and you'll be an admin soon enough. —Michael Z. 2005-06-24 17:31 Z

I was going to nominate Irpen myself, only later when he hits the "magic" 2000 edits. I myself don't give a crap about edit counts when a person is trustworthy and committed, but a lot of people who consider fitness of admin candidates tend to factor in edit counts quite often, often assigning them too much value. It would be a shame for his nomination to fail just because of "will support when 2000 edits" votes. Just thought you might want to know that :) As for Transnistira, it will haunt Irpen until the end of time; he should not worry what others will think of him as long as he behaves professionally and does what he thinks is right for Wikipedia (so far he's been doing a great job we all should be envious of).—Ëzhiki (erinaceus amurensis) 18:08, Jun 24, 2005 (UTC)

1939 massacre

Hi. Thanks for working on the blind musicians article. I just wanted to check to see where you got the 1933 date for the Stalin massacre. The book I have by Natalie Kononenko lists 1939 as the date in several places; and from the way it's integrated into her discussion, I don't think it's a typo. Since hers seems to be the authoritative text, I kind of doubt that she would have gotten such an important point wrong, though anything's possible, I guess.... Anyway, it would be easier to evaluate if we knew the source for your info. Thanks again! NoahB 17:27, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Looks like I'm mistaken. All I can find at the moment is in Subtelny's Ukraine: A History, p. 419. He's writing about the 1932-33 repressions, including "Several hundred kobzari (wandering bards) were invited to a congress, arrested, and reportedly shot." But I see that the section deals with some events from 1931 right through '39. —Michael Z. 2005-06-22 19:38 Z

russian vs ukrainian cossacks

in refenrece to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Cossack#Ukrainian_Cossacks_vs_Russian_Cossacks.3F

anyone except for jews can be a cossack. i have a chilean friend who works as a journalist in russia. after a long day and night of drinking with the cossacks, while on assignment, they declared him a cossack --GregLoutsenko 12:08, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Ukrainian Oblast's Infobox

Michael, could you take a look at Talk:Zhytomyr_Oblast#Ukrainian Oblast's Infobox. I know it's not nice to shift the work to others :). Anyway, you don't have to do anything of course. But please take a look and respond there if you can. Cheers, -Irpen 03:13, Jun 27, 2005 (UTC)

I promise, that's the last request from me (for the week :) )

Please look at User_talk:Irpen/uawp#Time to go live? Time to go live? Time to go live? --Irpen July 1, 2005 05:37 (UTC)

Congratulations!

Congratulations! It's my pleasure to let you know that, consensus being reached, you are now an administrator. You should read the relevant policies and other pages linked to from the administrators' reading list before carrying out tasks like deletion, protection, banning users, and editing protected pages such as the Main Page. Most of what you do is easily reversible by other sysops, apart from page history merges and image deletion, so please be especially careful with those. You might find the new administrators' how-to guide helpful. Cheers! -- Cecropia | explains it all ® 2 July 2005 22:22 (UTC)

Please accept my congratulations as well! I am very happy for you. And man, total support, no one against or neutral? I am all envious! Keep up the great work and have fun with the reading list Cecropia recommended :).—Ëzhiki (erinaceus amurensis) July 3, 2005 04:11 (UTC)

congrats from me as well! Tobias Conradi (Talk) 3 July 2005 20:46 (UTC)

Hi Michael, the smoothness of the vote was exactly what I expected. You deserved it well! Best luck with your new powers as well as with editing and everything else! Cheers, --Irpen July 4, 2005 21:05 (UTC)

Thank you all. Cheers. —Michael Z. 2005-07-4 18:45 Z

Congrats! Halibutt July 5, 2005 05:58 (UTC)

Congratulations from me too. :-) —Markaci 2005-07-17 T 00:18:03 Z

Army of Poland

And again we have a lengthy voting on name issues - this time at Talk:Wojsko Polskie. Please join. Halibutt July 5, 2005 05:57 (UTC)

Template:Merge

Please revert your change.

First of all, that template page is protected.

Second, using the ":" (colon) to indent is a misuse. ":" should only be used when paired with ";" to create definition lists, not used just to indent. In HTML, ":" converts to <dd>, and ";" converts to <dt>.

Thirdly, that template page is protected. -- Netoholic @ 5 July 2005 18:06 (UTC)

Sorry; I thought the page was protected to prevent multiple reverts over the use of an image. I merely harmonized the code of the three merged templates so that they were consistent with each other. (template:merge, template:mergeto, and template:mergefrom). I thought that my edits were within the guideline.

The colon is used to indent in many templates. I agree that applying a left-margin would be better.

I'll revert the changes. —Michael Z. 2005-07-5 18:09 Z

"class=notice" does not add any indent in my browser (Safari 1.3), under monobook.css. —Michael Z. 2005-07-5 18:13 Z

You'll want to be careful to not edit protected pages for any reason (even one that makes sense, see Wikipedia:Protection policy). As far as the "class=notice" not indenting, it is defined in MediaWiki:Monobook.css (search for .notice). This page says that margin is compatible, so I'm not sure why you're not seeing it. -- Netoholic @ 5 July 2005 18:46 (UTC)

I should have looked more carefully. I appears that class=notice does indent 0.5em, but template:merge uses a colon which indents 1em, I think. —Michael Z. 2005-07-5 19:25 Z

I don't see any reason we couldn't accommodate 1em. Would you change MediaWiki:Monobook.css to make .notice "margin: 1em;" ? -- Netoholic @ 5 July 2005 19:53 (UTC)

Will do, shortly. —Michael Z. 2005-07-5 19:54 Z

Order of Ukraine

I hereby award you the title of the "Hero of Ukraine" with the Order of the State (Орден Держави) for the great labour achievements. --Irpen

Image:Oblasti-test.png

Thank you for uploading Image:Oblasti-test.png. Its copyright status is unclear, so it may have to be deleted. Please leave a note on the image page about the source of the image. See Wikipedia:Image copyright tags, for a list of copyright tags, that you can use. Thank you.

i think there should be more mzajacs

Just wanted to add that I think so, too :)—Ëzhiki (erinaceus amurensis) 02:56, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

Halo

[Moved to Talk:Halo (disambiguation)#Order of precedence. —Michael Z. 2005-07-31 07:06 Z]

Proto-Slavic

I see what you did at Chernoles culture. It's probably pre-Proto-Slavic (Ultimate Late Balto-Slavic, Earliest Proto-Slavic}, but it does get attention. Talk to Wiglaf. You are invited to peek at my re-write/move of the Corded Ware culture (hint, battle-axe people). You need beat the bushes of Slavic wikidom to make this a good article.--FourthAve 09:24, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

Connor's Influence to Duncan

Hi, I like the Connor's tag in Highlander series page. How about put it also to Duncan MacLeod's page? Thanks....HoneyBee 23:01, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

Topics of archived talk

Michael, do you have to manually create a template for topics of archived material to be displayed at the current version? --Irpen 03:00, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

You mean like the box at the top-right of my talk page? Yup, I created that manually, starting with a cut-and-paste of the HTML code from my archive page, and using lots of creative find-and-replace. If you archive your talk, I'd be glad to throw together an index for it. —Michael Z. 2005-08-8 05:12 Z

First of all, I would like to archive the closed and settled issues (like Chersonesos name, "Old Ruthenia" VfD, etc) from both RU- and UA- portal boards. What exactly do you mean by "throwing an index"? --Irpen 05:23, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

I just meant that I'd be glad to make an index for your archived talk page, if you'd like. For standard procedure for archiving talk pages, see Wikipedia:How to archive a talk page (if you haven't read that already). —Michael Z. 2005-08-8 05:47 Z

Please take a look at Wikipedia:Wikiportal/Ukraine/Ukraine-related Wikipedia notice board. I built it using your archive as a template. If this is all correct, I will move to archiving some other things at ru-portal. BTW, do you keep an eye on its boards? Cheers, --Irpen 07:01, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

Looks perfect, and smart to put the archive template as a sub-page of the archive. I've been watching the Russian Wikipedians' notice board, but that seems pretty quiet lately. I'll have a look at the portal. —Michael Z. 2005-08-8 16:22 Z

The old "Russian Wikipedians' notice board" is quiet because all activity is now moved to the Russian portal. It has similar notice board to UA-portal. One for new articles, another for announcements and the portal's own talk to discuss the portal itself. --Irpen 16:56, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

DYK

Did you know? has been updated. A fact from the article T-44, which you recently created, has been featured in that section on the Main Page. If you know of another interesting fact from a recently created article, then please suggest it on the "Did you know?" talk page.

Help needed with obscure tank

Mystery tank

Hi Michael,

Last month in Kiev, I took a photo of a tank identified on the yellow plaque in front of it as a T-42 of 1962 vintage. Only problem is, I can't find any information about it anywhere on the Internet! It's not listed on List of Soviet tanks either. I've uploaded the image - you can see it below. Any ideas? Maybe it's a variant of some other model? -- ChrisO 20:21, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

Nice shot; did you take any more? T-42 could be the designation of some obscure protopype, but this looks like a T-62 to me, and T-42 must be a typo. It's a bit hard to tell, because of where the barrier post is. A T-54 or T-55 has a bigger gap between the first and second road wheels; a T-62 has progressively larger gaps towards the rear between each road wheel, which appears to be the case here (and in the background of your nice PT-76 photo). T-62 also has the fume extractor in the middle of the gun barrel, as this one does. The rounded grab-rails on the turret tend to be on T-62s instead of straight ones, but superficial stuff like that can sometimes be misleading.

T-42 was the designation of a 1930 prototype multi-turreted heavy tank, similar to the T-35 but weighing 100 tons, which was never completed. That doesn't prove that this isn't also a T-42, because the Soviets sometimes reused the designations.

But I think it's safe to label this T-62, and to put this in the article's info-box. —Michael Z. 2005-09-26 21:22 Z

BMP image

Thanks for correcting my terrible mistake of tagging an image on a BMP as a T-90 tank. Cheers --{{IncMan|talk}} 23:01, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Your welcome. We all make mistakes. —Michael Z. 2005-10-1 23:07 Z

IPA template

Thanks for sorting it. :-) Grinner 15:36, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

I'm glad that worked out. The new arrangement is a better one overall, but I hope people aren't going to be too eager to keep changing the font declarations. Cheers. —Michael Z. 2005-10-4 15:43 Z

I now find that in my browser (Internet Explorer 6) the Unicode, IPA and Polytonic templates no longer work (they worked perfectly OK until recently). Is it just me? rossb 17:52, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

It may be that your browser is caching the old monobook.css style sheet. Try clicking refresh or shift-refresh (or is it alt-refresh?) while browsing a Wikipedia page in your browser. Or have a look at the style sheet and check whether the .IPA, .Unicode and .polytonic declarations are at the bottom. Let me know if you don't get it to work. —Michael Z. 2005-10-4 18:07 Z

I did shift-refresh, and it now works fine. Thanks. rossb 09:27, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Cooperative spirit in Ukrainian topics

Hi Michael, could you pleae take a look at the contributions of user:AndriyK. I care less about his accusing in "Ukrainophobia" at my talk page but I am worried about the Ukrainian topics if the conserned members loose colaborative spirit and start cutting pieces out of the article and make changes like Chernigov/CHernyhiv again. I tried to talk to him but got the "-phobia" nonsense in response. Do you feel like getting yourself involved? There are some server problems now and I can't really edit much from my end. There will be too much wasted time if we allow the trend to develop unchecked. Cheers, --Irpen 02:05, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Dear Irpen, I have nothing to do with the message on Ukrainophobia on your talk page. Please do not misinform our colleagues. --AndriyK 16:57, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Dear Michael, thanks for your message. In fact, I just reminded Irpen that s/he (as everybody else) should respect Wikipedia policy. (You can check this. I signed my messages on my and Irpen's talk pages). Is this a reason for a conflict or stress? ;) --AndriyK 17:10, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

I am sorry and I take it back. I now see that the message was indeed left by anon who forged the signature that linked to an ua-wiki page where my work is being discussed by AndriyK with an extreme disrespect and foul language. That ticked me off. There are other accusations spread at several talk pages but, as I said, I care more about the possibility to develop Ukrainian coverage than commenting on such attacks. The rest about the danger to loose the collaborative spirit if this continues applies. I once had to leave one article because of the POV-pushers and the level of personal attacks. I will try my best not to allow my self to loose my temper and leave the Ukrainian topics altogether (hint). I hope this will settle down and we will get another contributor for Ukrainian topics. We need that badly. --Irpen 17:30, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Dear Irpen, I understand, you could accidentally mix my message with Gutsul's one (altough our names do not look similar). But you assert the following "I tried to talk to him but got the "-phobia" nonsense in response". This looks like I accused you in "Ukrainophobia" unswering your messages. Could you provide any evidence for this? Otherwise it looks like you tried to misinformed our colleaugue on purpose.

By the way, you changed the article about Lviv with the comment "restore neutral phrasing". But in fact, one [[3]] that your changes go much beyond the "phrasing". You did this not ones. Does not it look like you tried to misinform the community?

Finally, I appologize for my sharp words on uk-wikipedia. I'll clean my messages up. I am sorry, it happened.--AndriyK 06:30, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Fine, since you intend to be civil, let's move this to article's pages and leave Michael's page alone. As for your accusing me in "misinforming" I am not to worried for now. My reputation at WP is sufficient to withstand this and I am not going to dignify these accusations with an elaborate response. --Irpen 06:54, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

I see, you don't care about "misinforming". It's a pity, because it lies destroy the Cooperative spirit you pretend to be so worried about.

Concerning your reputation at WP, I'd better ask other people than yourself. At least three people (excluding myself) seem to share the opinion about your tendency to use Wikipedia as a propaganda machine.--AndriyK 10:30, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Michael, please try talking to AndriyK youself, if you can. I am loosing patience. This is becoming a nightmare. --Irpen 22:26, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

It is degenerating into the silliest revert wars ever, generously seasoned with personal attacks. I am getting all the heat for taking it upon myself to deal with this user and third/fourth/fifth opinions would help. I tried to postpone asking for eyes at portals because I hoped the user could be dealt with by me alone. I now doubt that. If you have time, please keep an eye on his edits. Maybe I am all wrong and his edits bring light to WP. Nevertheless, more eyes I needed to make sure of it. Cheers, --Irpen 08:33, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

I had to take a wikibreak to relieve this stress. I am glad things are starting to improve, even if a little bit. Thanks for being a voice of reason and, as always, don't hesitate to tell me when you disagree with my opinions. Cheers, --Irpen 18:09, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

Hesitate... me? I've been trying to stay out of the revert wars but occasionally 'share some wisdom'—how long can it last? I must take a break myself, because I've been neglecting other work. —Michael Z. 2005-10-21 19:26 Z

But please keep an eye on these topics when and if you can... --Irpen 19:32, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

We'll see if I can not. —Michael Z. 2005-10-21 19:33 Z

Take a look at this. --Irpen 00:19, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

I'm reading through it now; some thoughtful responses so far. There's an English translation and one comment here. —Michael Z. 2005-10-23 00:55 Z

Just read Ukrainian through the end. You may be surprized. MaidanUA is, BTW, a site that helped a lot in the Orange Revolution and I am still reading it occasionally. But this thread with what AndriyK posted now is just disgusting. --Irpen 01:00, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

AndriyK's slander is disturbing, but I doubt that it will have much effect. Some participants there are accepting his postings in good faith for now. But I've read some thoughtful remarks there, and I hope most who come to Wikipedia will see it for what it is. If nothing else, we will merely have a few new contributors.

I do know how stressful it can be to be bad-mouthed this way. Hang in there. At least now you've got some company in the roll of villains, but I'm jealous because I don't rate. —Michael Z. 2005-10-23 15:32 Z

Russian architecture

Please take a look at Talk:Russian_architecture#POV.3F. Please feel free to comment. While the issue seems trivial to me, maybe it's just me... --Irpen 23:41, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

The article is great indeed. And Kievan Rus' part clearly belongs there, doesn't it? The question is what do we do. Vote? We can't have a lunatic tag spoiling the article for nonsense reasons. --Irpen 02:05, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

Exactly. To me, a passing mention of Ukrainian and Belarusian heritage in this section should be enough to satisfy a reasonable East Slav—a short sentence defining what Rus’ is without distracting from the subject. When Ukrainian architecture is written, we can figure out how to cross-referenc or tactfully borrow material from this article. —Michael Z. 2005-11-2 02:13 Z

Ok, I will ask Ghirlandajo about passing mention. However, whether this is done soon or not, the tag has to go now, IMO. I will see to it but please feel free to voice your opinion too. There is no problem, I think, to just paste a ready section to a UA-architecture article. All we need is someone to write the rest. Not me for sure, :(. Cheers, --Irpen 02:19, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

Page moves

Michael, the fellow also moved several articles and it will now take a time-consuming WP:RM listing. Just wanted to let you know in case you missed. Log includes:

• Igor Svyatoslavich moved to Igor Svyatoslavych
• Vsevolod Svyatoslavich moved to Vsevolod Svyatoslavych
• Mikhail of Chernigov moved to Mikhail of Chernihiv (why not Mykhaylo of Chernihiv, I wonder)
• Oleg of Chernigov moved to Oleg of Chernihiv

On the other hand very sensible ideed:

• Mongol invasion of Russia moved to Mongol invasion of Rus

--Irpen 19:45, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

I think an arbitration is in order with preliminary injunction to prohibit moves by this user issued upon case acceptance. He should be allowed to propose moves at talk, of course, but not move single-handily, even if the page is available. These pages should be moved in one block. My god! That's so exhausting! I so much wanted to do something with St. Volodymyr's cathedral, because it is a very worthy topic. And with so much more! Cheers, --Irpen 19:59, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

Continues:

08:09, October 28, 2005 user:AndriyK Russian architecture moved to Architecture of Rus (The article concerns not only Russian architecter but rather the architecture of (Kievan) Rus)

Architecture already taken care of. Sorry to have bothered you, but his recent edits are instructive. --Irpen 15:55, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

See also contributions, Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#User:AndriyK and Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#Large-scale_edit_war. --Irpen 12:05, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

Template lang-uk

re ua-> uk conversion, please take a look at template_talk:lang-uk. Let's give this a little time to find what others think. --Irpen 15:52, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

I just discovered that template:Lang-ua was a redirect to template:Lang-uk. Lang-uk is used in over a hundred articles, but Lang-ua in only about a dozen, which I've already converted [4]. The redirect will continue to work, so there shouldn't be any problems, but now all the examples use the correct form. —Michael Z. 2005-10-6 15:58 Z

User Categorisation

You were listed on the Wikipedia:Wikipedians/Ontario page as living in or being associated with Manitoba. As part of the Wikipedia:User categorisation project, these lists are being replaced with user categories. If you would like to add yourself to the category that is replacing the page, please visit Category:Wikipedians in Manitoba for instructions.--Rmky87 22:52, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

Flying tank pic

You're welcome (for finding a pic); flying tanks rule. As I mentioned in the picture comments, that pic is sprinkled around WW2 websites but I haven't seen it in a source book that I would expect to have done due diligence to make sure it's not a hoax ... so I'm just hoping it's not a hoax. I have no particular reason to think it's a hoax.

I'm also hoping the picture is indeed free to use; I don't think it will be controversial. Tempshill 18:42, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

Flying tank tag

And thanks for the flying tank PD-USSR tag. Tempshill 15:44, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

More Soviet armour pics

On ISU-152, 2S1 and ZSU-23-4 Shilka - I think that concludes the series I took in Kiev in August... -- ChrisO 22:29, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

Nice! Thanks for giving all these great pics to Wikipedia. Why not put a complete list or a Wikipedia:gallery on your home page? I'd love to just be able to browse through them. —Michael Z. 2005-10-17 22:34 Z

I went and did it myself. ChrisO's photos:

• 
  2S1 Gvozdika
• 
  BA-20
• 
  BMD-1
• BMP-2
  BMP-2
• 
  ISU-152
• 
  Katyusha
• 
  Katyusha
• 
  Katyusha launch rails
• 
  PT-76
• 
  RT-21M Pioner (SS-20)
• 
  SU-100
• 
  T-10
• 
  T-27
• 
  T-38
• 
  T-42
• 
  ZSU-23-4

Thanks very much. It looks much better like that. :D -- ChrisO 16:17, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

==Template:Arab subdivision==

..is nominated for deletion. I thought of making series for different languages, like we have Template:Subnational entity. The are lots of these native terms around. Maybe they can also be grouped, e.g. the slavic terms may have something in common. Arab probably will stay a small template for a long time. thanks for your comment on Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion#Template:Arab_subdivision. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 05:45, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

Signature date and time format

(1) Would it work to put your code of heading 15 in the Preferences nickname field, and then use three tildes for that signature? Or would this require saving each edit twice? (2) Does your answer to question 1 change if the variable {{subst:CURRENTDAY}} is replaced with the template {{subst:CURRENTDAY2}} in that nickname field? (3) How do you get the time in your signatures to omit the seconds, displaying only hh:mm? By the way, I would appreciate if the answers could assume javascript is turned off. Thanks. --Simian, 2005-10-18, 16:29 Z

1&2) Don't know; but let me know how it goes if you try.

3) Sorry, there doesn't seem to be a way at meta:Help:Variable. I would really like to know how to show the day padded with zeros, so that e.g., the third of the month renders as "03".

When experimenting with this, be careful not to leave a template or variable right in a talk page, because then the content would get recalculated and updated by the server each time someone loads the page. Cheers. —Michael Z. 2005-10-18 16:54 Z

(1) I think item 1 works only if you either (a) save the page twice, or (b) preview the page then copy and paste the displayed string. However, method (b) replaces the &nbsp entities with hexadecimal html entities (I think), which I don't really like. Another method is to simply copy and paste the code manually yourself from a plain text file on your own computer. Of course, all of these methods will still have the wrong number of digits for days of month less than 10.

(2) Item 2 doesn't seem to work, because {{CURRENTDAY2}} contains a template, which doesn't get substituted and continues to update at each page save (and maybe at each load). If you can figure out (any time in the future) how we can use {{subst:CURRENTDAY2}} for this application, please post here. This template always gives the two-digit day of month. But it's currently a template, not a variable. However, notice bugzilla 2522. You can vote for it there if you want it implemented. (3) Regarding item 3, also notice bugzilla 3453. You can vote for it there if you want it implemented. Thanks. --Simian, 2005-10-18, 17:45 Z

I'm still at a loss for how you and Markaci get the seconds omitted using your heading 15 code. It's not explained under heading 15. --Simian, 2005-10-18, 22:26:06 Z

But typing {{CURRENTTIME}} just shows hours and minutes. I haven't seen any circumstances under which it shows seconds. I must be missing something... —Michael Z. 2005-10-18 22:33 Z

Interesting. In your Preferences, under "Date format," which of the five radio buttons is selected? First, second, third, fourth, or fifth? Or is none selected? Mine had the fifth button selected, ISO format, and {{CURRENTTIME}} showed seconds. Now I selected the first option, "No preference," and {{CURRENTTIME}} quit outputting seconds. And, they've been told before, ISO 8601 format doesn't mean they should suddenly start listing seconds. The options should be consistent on that menu, none with seconds; but they're shown inconsistently on that menu. We shouldn't have to give up ISO 8601 dates in articles, all history listings, etc., just because of this bug. --Simian, 2005-10-18, 23:46 Z

"No preference" was selected. Weird design. —Michael Z. 2005-10-19 04:04 Z

Re: Deliverance-wreath's block

Fair point. I've unblocked and reblocked for 48 hours to give him time to re-think things and decide whether or not he can contribute to Wikipedia in a useful manner. Rob Church ^{Talk | FAHD} 14:20, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

Cheers. Sometimes these guys can become productive, although I'm not holding out much hope here. —Michael Z. 2005-10-19 14:40 Z

Military vehicle stubs...

Well, you're right, B&W outline drawings are graphically better for stub icons. But on the other hand, what could be more "iconic" than a T-34? As compared to a T-70? :) Alai 03:45, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

I do agree, and you're welcome to restore the picture. I thought the T-70 was graphically effective, and instantly recognizable as a tank (if not recognizable as a T-70, to most folks). Cheers. —Michael Z. 2005-10-21 12:25 Z

Your image request

I was bored last night so I decided to fill your request on Wikipedia:Requested_pictures#Military.

I made two version - before I wondered if you had any feedback / changes you would like before I replace the existing images.

I did the images in Visio - so they are easy enough to change.

Let me know Megapixie 02:48, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

[Replied at User talk:Megapixie#Hull-down diagram —MZ]

With grey T-72 and text mods

Thanks for adusting the template

Thanks for getting rid of that pesky space in template:Cyrillic alphabet navbox. I couldn't figure out why all the articles suddenly had an extra line space at the top. Cheers. —Michael Z. 2005-10-26 04:58 Z

• You're welcome. -- WB 05:05, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

Removal of link in AT-3

I don't see why you need to remove clarifying links in that page. See CCC. I think that can help to put the link in some context. --Rogerd 18:02, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

[reply at User talk:Rogerd#Removal of link in AT-3 —MZ]

I can certainly see your point, and won't revert your change, even though I think it is a little nit-picky. I do, however, agree with you that disambiguation pages should be concise and without a lot of extra verbiage. As far as the AT-3 (jet trainer) article is concerned, I intend on writing that article as soon as I can get some solid infomation on the aircraft. It is a little difficult to get info on a Taiwanese training aircraft, but I like challenges. Thanks for responding, and thanks for cleaning up so many bad disambiguation pages. --Rogerd 01:05, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

It's not just a little nit-picky! Good luck with the AT-3 article. Cheers. —Michael Z. 2005-10-27 01:24 Z

History of UA template

Michael, could you please take a look at Template:History of Ukraine? What do you say? Please modify or suggest whatever you have to add. Thanks, --Irpen 19:10, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

Russian architecture

Dear Michael, thank you for your efforts concerning resolving the dispute about Russian architecture.

The issue has not be solved yet. It would be incorect to consider churches in Kiev and Chernihiv as "Russian" architecture.--AndriyK 19:40, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

[Replied at Talk:Russian architecture#Modifying text according to the title —MZ]

Orange revolution

Michael, I remember well how painstakingly we were building a balanced article researching and adjusting every phrase. Therefore, it especially pains me to see it's being added to the butchers' list. Please keep an eye on it. This is one of few rather detailed articles we have. With Ukrainian language largely killed, we have now less article with FAC potential. I think OR is one of them. Cheers, --Irpen 03:04, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

Michael, I worked a little more on the O.R on Sunday. Could you take a look, if you have time, whether it is ready for a peer review. I would love to have this featured.

On the side note, please check Wikipedia:Naming conventions/Geographic names and its talk. Right now a final verion is almost agreed by several interested editors. If approved, it would allow to keep vandals at bay with lesser effort. And yet on another side note, you reverted Chernihiv exactly 3 secs before I was about to. Have a great Monday (if it is possible). --Irpen 16:44, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

Just forgot to mention re O.R. In the recent time two pieces from there were attacked. One was the SBU-KGB lineage which, I think, is well defined and I returned it. The other, is the perception of Yushchenko's "oath" that he took in the midst of events, the oath that helped to put pressure on "vlada" but had no legal bearing. I remember vividly that many people who supported and even participated in the protests against election fraud (they may have not been necessarily fervently pro-Yushchenko, but they definitely stood up to overturn the vote rigging), many of these people had mixed feelings about this "oath", while his strong supporters of course didn't mind. Also, the public figures from his camp obviously would not have expressed any ambivalence to the press, at least at that time, because that would signify the crack in the team. Nevertheless, from the articles published by pro-liberal observers and from the content of forums, such as Maidan.org.ua or Ukrayins'ka pravda, one could see that the perception of this step was mixed. Do you think the sentence should be rephrased? Because Andrew Alexander just removed it as he usually does. Would appreciate your opinion. --Irpen 20:11, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

T-34

Michael, I looked at the T-34 and made some small changes up to "Combat effectivenss]] chapter already. The article is great, and will be FA, I am sure. I checked ru-wiki and it also says that it was a first diesel engine tank. I have no idea, but I thought I let you know. --Irpen 08:37, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

Thank you. I thought I was done, but now I'm thinking of expanding the intro into more of a summary of the whole article, since parts of it go into so much detail. I also want to add a paragraph or two of background, to show how the design of this tank was (r)evolutionary and how it came about against political pressure and circumstances. You don't think the production history section is too long?

I think its fine. I would keep it. Production history of T-34 is unnecessary as a separate article. --Irpen

The use of diesel fuel was important. But I read a Soviet tanker's account where he describes how the crew of a lend-lease gasoline-powered Sherman would hide under the hull of their tank when it was disabled (although they were called "Tommy-cookers" by the Germans). T-34 crews would run for it, because even a minor diesel fire would cook-off all the main gun ammunition. I'll read around a bit, and double-check that it was actually the first, and add this. —Michael Z. 2005-11-8 18:02 Z

Also, I added "best tank of the war" to the lead and google search confirms that. I may be wrong, of course. Also, I am not clear about the figure caption with sprung bed frames. How the frames helped is not evident to me. But this is the great article already. --Irpen

Have I anderstood you correctly? Do you mean that diesel is more inflammable then gasoline?

In fact, just in opposite. When I was in the army, one officer told us a story: the whole crew of gasoline-powered armor transporter ("bronetransporter") died because one idiot had been smoking there. It never happend to diesel-powered machines.--AndriyK 18:22, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

Yup, just gas fumes are explosive while diesel is hard to get burning even with direct flame—big safety issue when you're shut up in something that's designed to be shot at.

The RPG screens are supposed to detonate shaped-charge (HEAT) rounds too far away from the armour for their focussed explosive force to penetrate; I'll try to make it easier to figure out in the article. —Michael Z. 2005-11-8 20:58 Z

I did a bit of reading. Morozov's Model V-2 diesel engine was first fitted into the very last BT tank model, the BT-8 produced from 1938. It also went into the T-34, KV-1 and 2, IS-2 and 3 and all the large self-propelled antitank and assault guns of WWII. The engines in the T-10, T-44, T-54, and T-55 (in production until 1981!) were versions of the same, so similar that in the 1960s T-54 engines were retrofitted into second-line T-34 tanks. It must have been a pretty solid design to be manufactured for over forty years. —Michael Z. 2005-11-9 08:17 Z

liberal vs strict interpretation of 3RR

Hi, in case you missed, I would like to draw your attention to the recent discussions at User_talk:AndriyK#User_blocked followed up at User_talk:Robchurch#3RR. The latter link is an interesting policy debate. I thought you might be interested. --Irpen 18:54, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

Grand Prix

What does adding "__NOTOC__" to Grand Prix do exactly? {{TOCright}} is putting the contents on the right, "__NOTOC__" seems redundent to me.--Commander Keane 06:14, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

Ah, that's why it didn't seem to work. I thought it was a glitch. the __NOTOC__ directive prevents a table of contents from being shown, which seemed like unnecessary clutter on such a short page. —Michael Z. 2005-11-4 06:16 Z

Historic maps of Ukraine

Hi Michael, thanks for the hint. That is a very interesting source of maps. I didn't know about two more oblasts of ukraine yet. When I look at the oblast articles I'm a bit sorry, that the enWP obviously don't like to store images at commons, so other languages could use it more easy. commons:ukraine --ST ○ 17:27, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

Are you thinking of the little oblast maps with highways, etc? They are public domain, so I'd be glad to move them to commons; let me know. We could ask User:ChrisO to provide the source files, so you could make multilingual versions. I've looked at the original UN pdf maps, and some of them have all the themes separated out into layers, so they shouldn't be too hard to work from, either. —Michael Z. 2005-11-9 18:03 Z

Yes, like Image:Lviv oblast detail map.png. We could store this images as SVG (best option: vector graphic shapes) so everybody can use them directly in all wikimedia projects or make his own language version without problems (see also: meta:SVG image support). --ST ○ 18:48, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

Cool; does the SVG rendering to PNG work automatically, or is this still the plan?

I'll post a note on User talk:ChrisO. —Michael Z. 2005-11-9 19:07 Z

Sample: --ST ○ 19:22, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

Cooool! —Michael Z. 2005-11-9 19:28 Z

ChrisO doesn't have source files to offer. It sounds like the individual maps are derived directly from this PDF. According to the licence posted with them, it appears that derived maps are public domain; I would interpret that to mean that if you clipped a region or changed some colours, then you're free to post it at the Commons. I have got to get myself a copy of Illustrator, so I can join in the fun. Cheers, M. —Michael Z. 2005-11-9 20:37 Z

Subdivisions of Kyiv

Hi Michael. Here is the article of a man who haven't been writing in English for a few months. Would you please making it a little bit normal? And of course sharing your thoughts on how to use it best? Details on the respective talk page. Thanks, AlexPU

I'll read it over and see what I can add. I think you may want to merge it into this initial article: Raions of Kiev. —Michael Z. 2005-11-11 21:12 Z

moved the rest to Talk:Subdivisions_of_Kiev. --Irpen 21:30, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

Michif

Michael, take a pill and try to relax. The comment was not even directed at you - given the constant vandalism the article has been getting, I assumed that the term was added added by one of the many previous anon vandals, and that it had simply been overlooked in earlier corrections. My previous ignorance of the term comes into play...the fact that it looked like "mischief" and was not wikilinked led me to believe that its addition was just a kid playing around. So apologies... you will notice that I wrote the bulk of the text now present at Red River Rebellion, so I thought I knew the subject area reasonably well....but you learn something every day I guess. Fawcett5 19:48, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for apologizing; I appreciate that it was a misunderstanding. I'm sorry to have reacted so extremely; I'm oversensitive because I'm involved in editing dozens of articles that have non-stop edit wars and reams of unproductive discussion. Please try to keep your edit summaries informative, not accusative; I understand the temptation. Cheers. —Michael Z. 2005-11-13 21:36 Z

Ukrainian language

Michael, thanks for your attemts to appeace the short-tempered folks. Although I grew rather a thick skin in the time I've been around here, a word of support helps.

What do you think about spinning of the history of UA L into a separate article? On one hand, we have it much more complete than the rest and, if in the separate article, it would be easier to bring it to a WP:FAC. Also, the word or two about suppression that some are just so eager to have in the lead would at least make sense there. OTOH, if we do that there will be little left in the UA L article and someone will have to write a short history summary for the UA L article to replace a detailed history, and I am afraid that would have to be one of us. Please, see also my note at Talk:Ukrainian_language#The_opening_paragraph.3F.3F. Cheers, --Irpen 23:08, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

I've been keeping an eye on that. I'd be glad to write the summary of UA lang. history for the main article. Actually, with the history removed, it could still be a nice concise article.

I could also add a bit of linguistic information based on the articles in my Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopedia, but there's really a huge amount of very specialized writing to be done there. I was planning to do some more work on the history of orthography at Ukrainian alphabet before starting to chip at that iceberg. Come to think of it, the UA lang. article could also use a little bit more summary on the Ukrainian alphabet too. —Michael Z. 2005-11-14 04:28 Z

Also, user:Iopq mentioned in a discussion I had with him at his talk that he was considering writing a Ukrainian phonology article. As for the history part, spinning it off might really be a good idea. Then we could restore large pieces butchered from there by I don't want to call names who as "too much politics". History has illustrations, details and potential to become a FA on its own. This is definitely one of the topics I intend to be firm with the POV pushers/butchers because so many people invested so much effort into it and the article is featurable. I care less about Polkovnyk, an interesting but rather obscure topic, and being called ignorant about it by the same characters. --Irpen 06:08, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Here is another example of what kind of temper these guys posses. This is another fellow (Andrew Alexander). Previous messages too. I think there will be more... Sad :( --Irpen 08:50, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

Hello Michael, if you have a spare minute, please take a look at (this) talk about Kyiv Metro stations (bottom of the talk, table). We need your expetise. Thank you, --Bryndza 17:31, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

Meat Shield redirect?

Hi. I wanted to ask you why you created a redirect from Meat shield to Tank (role-playing game terminology)? Considering that Meat Shield has a full history and Tank was created that day by an anon (as a cut and paste of the Meat Shield article...I would have preferred a move to preserve the article history.

Can you take care of that as an admin? I certainly don't object to Meat Shield being moved to the new name. Thanks! :) --Syrthiss 13:04, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Sorry that I didn't realize what had gone on before I got there. I merely moved Tank to a correctly capitalized name (without the capital R in role-playing), and updated the redirect which was already in place.

Cut-’n’-paste moves are bad. I'll have a look, and see if I can set it straight. —Michael Z. 2005-11-14 15:28 Z

Done. A cut-paste move is simply undone by reverting, since this preserves the page history. The important part is to explain to the offending user how a move should be done—make them feel welcome and prevent misunderstandings. Cheers. —Michael Z. 2005-11-14 15:40 Z

Thanks. Yes, I know I could have reverted it. ;) What I had been suggesting was since Tank (role-playing game terminology) did seem a better name, that we do a rename/move of Meat shield to that (which requires an admin since the target page exists, correct?). Heh in any case, tis fixed as it sits now and I'll go write a nice note on their page.--Syrthiss 15:52, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

ah you already handled that too.  :) --Syrthiss 15:54, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Nope, it's still at Meat shield. I'll let you handle the move. If it can't be done without an admin, post a request at WP:RM.

But I suggest a simpler name if possible; maybe Tank (games), or Tank (role-playing games)? Be consistent with other article names if possible. Cheers. —Michael Z. 2005-11-14 15:59 Z

WPSU

Hi, thanks for joining WPSU and thanks for your input :) - FrancisTyers 22:24, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Need your help (as always)

Hi Michael. Here are two brief questions for you as a Wikiexpert:

• how the F. exactly should I eliminate the double redirects after creating or moving the page? Couldn't find the understandable explanation. So please drop a link or something
• don't you think we urgently need few more stub templates for the Category:Ukraine-related stubs (with more than 140 articles inside and counting)? I become scared every time I get in there :)
• how can I have a "noie" notice in the middle of my page too? Should I just copy the code from yours and change the digits? Do you mind that? BTW, it was a brilliant idea to stress the fact that we don't use Billy's explorer. If you know some Wiki campaign on this issue - please drop a link!

Pryvit, AlexPU 20:40, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

1. In the "what links here" listing, click every disambiguation page that links to another disambiguation page (I cmd-click to open each in a new tab in my non-Billy™ browser). Then edit each one, and change the link target to go to the new real page. Very low tech; the server should be programmed to skip all the redirects automatically.
2. Honestly, I never browse the stub categories. With 140 articles though, it sounds like a good idea, but don't spread it too thinly. On the other hand, they still fit on one page, and it is nice to see them all at once.
3. There's an official way to do it described at Wikipedia:Babel, but I don't like the extra box around the boxes. You're welcome to copy my code (below). There's also a zillion other languages, and see also User:NSR/userboxes (although I would avoid using an image until the servers catch up to the load).

Cheers. —Michael Z. 2005-11-15 20:55 Z

<div style="float:right; margin:.25em 0 .5em 1em; width:245px; text-align:right;">
{{User en}}
{{User uk-2}}
{{User fr-1}}
{{User noie}}
<small style="margin-right:3px;">see [[Wikipedia:Babel]]</small>
</div>

Done. Thanks! AlexPU 21:22, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Re:Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship/Halibutt

Thanks for your vote of support for Halibutt. Could you perhaps address the statement by Ghirlandajo, who is accusing Halibutt of strong pro-Polish and anti-Russian bias? It would certainly add a more legitimacy to Halibutt's position if Ghirlandajo would be moderated by somebody who is not Polish (like me or Halibutt). --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 22:03, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

Thanks a lot. Perhaps it would clear the things up a bit if I noted on the RfA that my nationality is not necessarily Polish. In reality, just like Rick Blaine from Casablanca I'm a drunkard. However, I'm not sure if such a statement would suffice for those who believe I'm anti-(put your favourite here). Halibutt 05:51, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

Thanks. WikiThanks.

I would like to express my thanks to all the people who took part in my (failed) RfA voting. I was both surprised and delighted about the amount of support votes and all the kind words! I was also surprised by the amount of people who stated clearly that they do care, be it by voting in for or against my candidacy. That's what Wiki community is about and I'm really pleased to see that it works.
As my RfA voting failed with 71% support, I don't plan to reapply for adminship any more. However, I hope I might still be of some help to the community. Cheers! Halibutt 05:10, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

ISO 8601 date in signature?

Hello, Michael; noticed your signature at MediaWiki talk:Common.css. I have tried all manner of curious template and variable incantations to get an 8601-like timestamp in my signature, to no avail. What's the trick? The thing that has stumped me is that I can't seem to use subst in my signature, which I would think would be required. I hadn't thought to use Javascript until just now, but maybe that would work... —HorsePunchKid→龜 19:55, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

See User talk:Mzajac/2005#Custom timestamp in your signature for details. I don't have it in my Wikipedia signature preference, but drag-’n’-drop or paste it in; my user monobook.js adds a convenient text field to the page for this. Minor problem: Wikipedia macros don't pad the date with a zero, so the first nine days of the month only have one digit. —Michael Z. 2005-11-18 20:53 Z

Thanks for the info! For what it's worth, there's a {{CURRENTDAY2}} that's zero-padded (see meta:Help:Variables#Varying with time). (I see now that this does not subst properly.) I was playing around with my monobook.js, and ended up doing something probably similar to what you're doing, only with pretty much just plain Javascript. The net effect is a tab along the top of the page that will insert a signature. I'm trying to hack it up so that Alt+S will insert it, but I cannot figure out how to disable the accesskey on the "Save page" button. :( —HorsePunchKid→龜 2005-10-19 03:26:09Z

If you have something working that fills both digits, would you mind to post a step-by-step instruction somewhere for us non-tech-savvy people? – Wikipeditor 04:24, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

I don't know of anything, but I suppose a Javascript could generate a two-digit date. —Michael Z. 2005-11-20 17:03 Z

FYI. I'm now using a signature very similar to yours and I have written a user script to automatically replace ~~~~ with the signature: User:Quarl/advanced_sig.js. Thanks for the inspiration. —Quarl ^(talk) 2006-01-05 05:48Z

Thanks a lot for sharing. I'll have a look; it sounds like it would be much more convenient than the way I do it now. —Michael Z. 2006-01-5 18:31 Z

You know Ukrainian well, right

Check out this Russian to Ukrainian translator [5]. It does good job in the reverse direction for me. I presume since we have somewhat similar grammar with Ukrainians, so translation may be more reliable than say Russian to English. It is opensource and the English<->something translation pairs are virtually absent at his stage. –Gnomz⁰⁰⁷(?) 22:01, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Cool. It even translates Sovnarkom SSSR to Radnarkom SRSR. Thanks very much. —Michael Z. 2005-11-21 22:07 Z

Well, kudos to those Ukrainian programmers –Gnomz⁰⁰⁷(?) 22:19, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Polish invasion of Russia

[moving to Talk:Polish invasion of Russia#Ad Ghirlandajo, —MZ]

RfAr

An arbitration request against User:AndriyK has been filed. If you intend to participate/co-sign, please add your name to the "Involved parties" section and write a statement.—Ëzhiki (erinaceus amurensis) 18:02, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

ArbCom accepted

This is the generic message left at several editors' talk pages in relation to the ArbCom case Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration#Community_vs._User:AndriyK. Since the fourth ArbCom member has recently voted to accept the case, the case is now considered accepted by the ArbCom as per Arbitration Policy. Please make sure your statement for the ArbCom is on the page if you are willing to write one (OTOH, being named as a party does not require you to make a statement, it just gives you a right to write one) and please make sure your statement is proofread if you wrote it earlier. Please, also, make sure your statement is in the appropriate place of the ArbCom page and not interjecting with others' statements. You are welcome to read up on the Wikipedia:Arbitration_policy and the associate pages.

--Irpen 04:00, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

Disambiguating abbreviations

You contributed to the TFD discussion for {{2LCdisambig}}. I am following this with further discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (disambiguation pages)#Abbreviations. Susvolans ⇔ 18:52, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

returning to damaged articles

Michael, I see you returned to editing Ukrainization. Do you think we should give it a major overhaul first after it was messed up so completely? I raised issues at talk a while ago. I just never got to this article yet and have postponed doing it until the mess of AndriyK and co is being dealt with. Same applies to Ukrainian language with a wealth of info deleted from there. I say, we either restore it, or return to our idea to spin off its history into a separate article. In the latter case, I will have little say in what remains in the language article, since I know little about the linguistics. I temporary undid your recent addition to the UA L article because I had first to undo the contribution of this anon. I already restored yours afterwards, but I just thought I explain why it was done. Regards, --Irpen 20:31, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

Don't worry about the change; that was obvious. I was just trying to follow some of the recent changes to Ukraine, Holodomor, etc., and while looking for a quotation noticed that Ukrainization was missing that bit of material which was covered in Ukrainian language, so ya roztlumachyv a couple of paragraphs. I would still like to keep polishing those articles and spin off History of the Ukrainian language, but I can't dedicate huge amounts of time. I also have had Orange Revolution open in a browser window for many days now, because I still owe you a look at that article. —Michael Z. 2005-11-24 20:43 Z

Take your time! Also, should it rather be History of Ukrainian rather than History of Ukrainian language. As for the anons messing up the UA/RU topics, I get really upset when the fellow does both. It really, puts us, Ukrainians, in bad light. Before this anon, there was another one whose contribution to the RU article was a disgusting one, and his other contributions showed from which POV he was editing. Such characters, despite being on the fringe in UA, are disproportionately vocal and active. Andrew Alexander and AndriyK are the best manifestation of that. --Irpen 20:52, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

Most of these guys' Wikipedia career is only about three hours long before they lose interest; only the very best manifestations hang on for weeks & weeks. Regarding the article title, they all sound fine to me. I'll have a look and see what other languages' history articles are called. —Michael Z. 2005-11-24 21:05 Z

See Special:Search/Language history. There aren't many specific language history articles, but they all seem to be titled in the form History of the Ukrainian language. They also tend to be more pure linguistic history: the languages' development, changes in phonology, etc. What we have for Ukrainian language history is going to be a rather unique article (FA!). It could use a bit more about literature (which I know very little about) and pure linguistics (on which I'm no expert, but I think I can contribute). —Michael Z. 2005-11-24 21:35 Z

Siverian Principality

Please let me finish the article. Only then one can judge whether there are reasons to merge it with another one. Unfortunatelly, because teh arbitration procedure against myself you and your frends have requested, I cannot promice I can finish the article soon. If you need ideas what you can do during this time, I'd suggest you to merge Kalinigrad Oblast with Prussia, or Golden Horge with Russia, or doing other equelly usefull things up to your choice.--AndriyK 09:28, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

I merely removed the inuse notice which appeared to have been on that article for three weeks, and replaced it with a merge notice because I didn't see anything going on. Normally, an inuse notice shouldn't remain on the article for more than an hour or so while you are working. I won't do any merging, but you might want to explain the situation on the talk page. —Michael Z. 2005-11-25 15:40 Z

I am waiting until this naming mess is resolved somehow: either by adoping a policy/guideline, or by arbitrage decision, or ... I do not know how. Otherwise you-know-who will come and start renaming, merging, redirectiong etc. You may consider this as a very naive method to "protect" the article. But I do not have anything better.--AndriyK 00:27, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

Belarussian History

Have a look at this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Belarus#Russian_occupation, and tell me do you see this as History of Belarus or more like the history of Poland and the Polish Partitions, lets modify it I have an excellent source on 19th century history in Belarus, it is slightly religiously orientiated but good nevertheless. http://www.pravoslavie.ru/arhiv/050513111111 Kuban kazak 23:27, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

I'm sorry I haven't even looked at this yet. I'll do so tonight when I'm at my own computer. —Michael Z. 2005-12-2 17:43 Z

Arbitration accepted

Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/AndriyK has been accepted. Please place evidence on Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/AndriyK/Evidence. Proposals and comments may be placed on Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/AndriyK/Proposed decision. Fred Bauder 02:26, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

Template talk:Fact

the square brackets look very unprofessional. maybe it's just because I've spent too much time on wikipedia. maybe they should be replaced with parentheses or glowing silver pentagrams, I dunno, but the squarebrackets look ... amateurish. Tomer^TALK 07:28, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

[Responded at template talk:Fact —MZ]

[Responded at Template talk:Fact :-p -t]

Russian architecture

Michael, your changes work fine for me. --Ghirlandajo 10:51, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

dab style

Excellent explanation of the purpose of dab pages! Tedernst | Talk 18:18, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks; it took a while for me to figure all that out myself, so I'm always trying to spread the good word. Cheers. —Michael Z. 2005-12-2 19:25 Z

AM

I won't get into a pointless edit war, but I'd like to point out two things:

1. Isn't it ironic you felt compelled to remove « encyclopedic material » from an encyclopaedia?
2. How is the user going to tell which of the three main country code systems uses AM for Armenia (turns out it's all three in this case) if we snip that out and leave "country code" link-less?

Making Wikipedia concise is a worthwhile aim, but there is such a thing as being too concise. If I want concise, I'll use the Wiktionary. I want an encyclopedia to throw "useless" tit-bits at me, so I come out of the experience enriched, and go to bed less ignorant than when I got up in the morning.

Urhixidur 04:43, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

But,

1. A disambiguation page is not an encyclopedia article—there's no irony in following the spirit and word of the convention. According to WP:DAB: "a disambiguation page contains no article content, ..." and and MOS:DP: "Disambiguation pages ... are (like redirects) non-article pages in the article namespace."
2. The user doesn't have to know which country code system uses AM for Armenia! If the context of the link which brought the user to the disambiguation page indicates that the target was Armenia, then he can click on Armenia. If it indicates another link on the page, then he can click the other link. I can think of no scenario where the user clicked on a link to AM, where "AM" was meant to be a link to "ISO 3166". MOS:DAB: "Don't wikilink any other words," and "Only include references to related subject articles if the term in question actually is described on that page"—ISO 3166 does not describe Armenia.

A disambiguation page is not an article. It stands between the user and an article. It is an interface for when a link fails to link to its intended destination—in an ideal Wikipedia there would be zero links to disambiguation pages. It's like a very slooow redirect. Its job is not to give any information, just to let the reader find the right link, without offering any distractions to the process.

If someone linked AM and meant Armenia, then:

1. The link should be changed to [[Armenia |AM]].
2. If it's important to know that AM was the ISO code for Armenia, then that information should go in the encyclopedia article about Armenia.

The useless tit-bits belong in articles. According to the convention and the MOS, they clearly do not belong in the disambiguation pages. —Michael Z. 2005-12-3 06:13 Z

Your input would be useful at Talk:AM where the wikilinks and other non-MoS:DP content is being added back by User:Tobias Conradi. Thanks/wangi 18:02, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

transcription, transliteration, and brackets

Re: Your Podolia edits.

"Brackets denote IPA phonetic transcription" True but they also denote parentheses within parentheses which was the case there. Without parenthesizing, the Cyrillic and Latin forms are implied equal. While this is obviously not the case with Ukrainian or Russian, it would apply to other languages with multiple scripts such as such as "Serbo-Croatian," Hausa, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Tatar, etc, so there is potential for confusion. Do you have antoher possible suggestion?

"Standard Ukrainian transliteration for WP" "For geographic names in Ukraine, the Ukrainian National system is used." (Wikipedia:Naming_conventions#Ukrainian_names) In this case, the entry, Podolia, has an English exonym in which case the rule doesn't apply (see Kiev). The rendering of the Ukrainian form here was using the International Scholarly system, a reasonably decent way to romanize. The Ukrainian National system follows neither Ukrainian orthography or phonology and is inadequate as a transcription and a transliteration system. The lack of palatals and the conflation of І, Ї, and Й are just some of its problems.

LuiKhuntek 09:34, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

In the nomenclature section, commas, semicolons and position are used to represent the relationship between the Cyrillic and Latin transcription. Perhaps this isn't ideal, but it's the way it is already done in probably hundreds of articles on English Wikipedia. Personally, I think that a more disciplined transcription system should be chosen, the same one for Ukrainian, Russian, and other languages, and in most cases a Latin transcription alone should be sufficient to represent the word.

I don't know how WP does it for multiple-script languages, but I think it makes sense to standardize on one, at least in cases when the other(s) can be reliably reconstructed from one. No need to include redundant information.

Regarding transcription system, I removed the Scholarly notation, because we currently only use that in linguistics articles; it is never used in the lead nomenclature section for a person or place. Although the National system is used for article titles and text in modern place names, the nomenclature system uses a better-representative but informal system, including doubled consonants, apostrophes for ь and usually e.g., "ia" for non-syllabic я, and "ya" where it forms syllables.

I'm actually planning to start a separate page and start a discussion about Cyrillic transcription in Wikipedia shortly, because the current conventional practice is unsatisfactory. When I get things going, I'll post a note at the Russian and Ukrainian portals, and other relevant places. —Michael Z. 2005-12-3 16:28 Z

Looking forward to the Cyrillic discussion. Any standard is better than none. I don't agree that "a Latin transcription alone should be sufficient to represent the word" as long as there is ambiguity in the transcription system. I still get confused with the Russian "ь" in certain situations. East Asian languages have much more standardized systems on Wikipedia. It's the Arabic and Cyrillic ones that suffer from the most dissonance.

The beauty of Wikipedia compared to other on- or offline sources is the wealth of native language geographical information. Of course the problem with multiple languages and scripts is that it clutters the intro too much (e.g., Qinghai_Lake). I'm guilty of that at Podolia -- it probably needs a separate names paragraph like the one I made at Ulaanbaatar and your move was wise. I'm making one for Budjak now too. LuiKhuntek 20:48, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

On languages with multiple scripts: Concerning Korean, even if it were possible to guess Hangeul spelling from the transcription, it is still a good idea always to include a word's hangeul next to the transcription if only to prove that it has indeed been correctly transcribed; so many mistakes are made that it would be unwise to solely rely on transcription. For Ukrainian, however, the situation might somewhat differ. – Wikipeditor 23:26, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

RfC

Hi. In regards to your comment here, it seems like you have left a very reasonable "Outside View" on the Talk page. Do you have any objection to to it being moved to the main RfC page so that other editors can, if they agree with it, endorse your view as part of the community's response? Thanks. Jkelly 17:57, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

I don't mind—I almost did, but the description implied that I had to summarize the outsider view, rather than being able to just contribute an isolated comment. —Michael Z. 2005-12-3 17:59 Z

Ussr/German cooperation

Military-technical cooperation of the USSR and Weimar' Germany began in 1923 after the treaty in Rapallo. Both countries were dissatisfied with restrictions of the Versailles treaty. The coperation has stopped in 1933 because the Weimar' Germany has turned to nazi Germany. Ben-Velvel 16:52, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

Yes. That's why I changed "Till 1939" to "In 1939"; the previous version implied that the USSR and Germany had been enemies throughout the inter-war period. Germany helped establish modern tank factories in the USSR, and the Soviets provided a tank school where the Germans and Soviets could conduct secret joint trials and develop tactics for the Blitzkrieg. —Michael Z. 2005-12-5 16:57 Z

"From 1933 to 1939" is OK? Ben-Velvel 17:03, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

Hm, I just found the article Soviet-German cooperation which seems to contradict that view. Perhaps it's best to keep it simple and add a link. —Michael Z. 2005-12-5 17:10 Z

I have not found any distinct facts in this article confirming military cooperation of the USSR and Nazi Germany during 1933-1939. Ben-Velvel 23:30, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

The following is quoted from Soviet-German cooperation. —Michael Z. 2005-12-5 23:39 Z

This was the start of military cooperation between the two countries, which ended with the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22 1941

[...]

While Britain blockaded Germany at sea to prevent her importing war materials from overseas, all the supplies which the Reich needed for the war were sent direct from Russia by rail. Stalin promised that what Russia could not supply from her own resources, she would buy up on the world's markets and pass on to Germany. Three-eighths of the oil used by Germany in 1940 came from Russia, including high-octane spirit for the Luftwaffe to fight the Battle of Britain.

From the start of the war until Germany invaded Russia less than two years later, Stalin had supplied Hitler with 1,5 million tons of oil, the same quantity of grain, and many thousands of tons of rubber, timber, phosphates (for making explosives), iron and many valuable metal ores, particularly chromium, manganese and platinum.

We do not discuss Soviet-German cooperation in 1939-1941 after signing the Pact. We speak about the period 1933-1939 before signing the Pact!!! Ben-Velvel 23:59, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

Okay, I see. I was not getting that there was a specific thaw in relations during 1933–39, sorry. This calls for an addition to the Soviet-German cooperation article, which currently implies coöperation right through 1920–41. Also, the wording in Russia#Russia as part of Soviet Union should be altered a bit, to account for the change after the beginning of industrialization. —Michael Z. 2005-12-6 00:09 Z

Toque

Thanks for fixing the spelling of toque in the Canadian English article! I had wanted to fix it, but figured I should let a Canadian do it as perhaps I might not be aware of a Canadian spelling of the term. :) Regarding the usage of "skull cap", I agree that a toque isn't close to the scalp like that -- I used that term because when searching for knitting patterns for such a hat, I keep finding some called "skull caps" for some reason. To me, a "skull cap" is more of a yarmulke or beanie, but clearly some people call a knitted watch cap a skull cap. So I figured I would include it. I'm just as happy that you deleted it, since the usage would not be in my idiolect. Cheers, ManekiNeko | Talk 07:12, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Wikitable contrast

If you are still interested in the issue of wikitable contrast, you may be interested that I made another comment at: MediaWiki_talk:Common.css#Increase_wikitable_contrast_2 Bobblewik 09:36, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for adding your comment there. In have now raised the issue of text contrast more widely at: WikiProject_Usability. Bobblewik 11:28, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

March of the Soviet tankmen

No its not Soviet tankmen song - volk sond March of the Soviet tankmen the oficial song I dont understend what you

and it would be better to put that into a small stub article with a bit of info about the march, and link to the article from the "See also" section of the tank articles.

Compositor Pokrass brothers text Laskin ???

I've gone ahead and created the stub article: March of the Soviet Tankmen. Now the information is in one place, and can be expanded.

Is this the official march of the Soviet Army, or Soviet Armoured Troops? —Michael Z. 2005-12-6 17:34 Z

Operation Wisla

Michael, could you translate from UA into EN a short passage I added in the end of Talk:Operation_Wisła#Modern_legacy (not the Russian passage in the beginning, but the Ukrainian one in the end as our Polish colleagues usually know Russian better than Ukrainian). I think you would do the translation better and faster than myself and also more grammatically.

On the other topic, I read your outside view at Ghirlandajo's RfC. I think you are a little too harsh. My first encounter experiences with him, as you know, were similar to yours, and I agree that he may indeed be short-tempered. However, most importantly, he is able to compromise, unlike his opponents in this RfC that do have patience for endless arguing but would never give an inch content-wise. This is what ultimately caused this RfC, IMO. --Irpen 01:53, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

Well, I thought I gave a fair description of my own experience. The first impression sticks pretty hard and I've mostly avoided him or watched the action from ringside. It's only very recently that I've had the opportunity to collaborate with him a little bit, and seen what significant work he can do. —Michael Z. 2005-12-7 06:26 Z

Ukrayina

Hi, Michael! For no particular reason, I noticed today that the infobox in the Ukraine article gives readers the English name ("Ukraine") and what I suppose is a Romanized Ukrainian version ("Ukrayina"). According to the Romanization of Ukrainian guidelines (or, more specifically, their "national" portion, which is what I believe is in use in Wikipedia), it should be "Ukraina". Am I missing something, or are both variants acceptable? Just curious...—Ëzhiki (erinaceus amurensis) 04:13, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Well, it's like this... (I really have been planning to write up a more detailed summary of the current usage; and see also Wikipedia:Requests for comment/History and geography; and see below for how I'd like to change things)

For general Ukrainian article titles, we use the standard sort of transliteration, similar to the method in "Transliteration of Russian into English". Then to make clear the Cyrillic name, next to it we use a more detailed transliteration; including doubled consonants and apostrophes, ia and ya to differentiate palatalizing я versus syllabic я (similarly є, ї, ю); we should use one of the standards, but we don't.

For places that have strongly-established conventional place names, we use those for article titles (Ukraine, Kiev, Odessa, Dnieper). For all other political entities, we use the official simplified geographic naming convention for the title (that would be Ukraina)—but for more traditional regions whose names are not in official government documents, like Podillia and Zakarpattia, we still use the conventional transliteration, which seems closer to intuitively phonetic for anglophones—and so we do this for Ukrayina. (FYI: we also use the scholarly system for linguistics topics, which is as it should be)

I know it's a complex justification. I've been meaning to start a Cyrillic transliteration MOS page, so we can coördinate all the different languages. In my opinion, for Russian transliterations we should abandon that original research article, and use a conventional transliteration for most article titles and proper names in text, but one of the standardized systems for transliterations wherever Russian words are shown in an article's nomenclature line or in the text. Then Ukrainian and possibly Belarusian and Bulgarian could use a compatible system, so that all Cyrillic is transliterated using similar assumptions. —Michael Z. 2005-12-8 07:37 Z

[See also Wikipedia:Naming conventions#Ukrainian names, Wikipedia:Naming conventions#Russian names.]

Well, it's about time. I'm going to start a skeleton Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Cyrillic). Once I have all of the current usage documented, I'll post notes at the relevant portals and language articles. Then we can start some discussion about reforming the conventions—if there's no interest, then at least I've documented current usage so it can become the convention. —Michael Z. 2005-12-8 07:50 Z

Well, it's a bit more information than I was hoping to hear, but OK :) For what it's worth, I think that current Russian transliteration system used in Wikipedia is doing its job quite well (also, you might have missed the fact that unmodified BGN/PCGN is generally used to transliterate stuff like anthem lyrics and such). What is wrong, however, is the way it's documented. The Transliteration of Russian into English indeed smells like original research, is not very properly titled, and does not cover a whole lot of material. To make matters worse, it is referenced by an official Wikipedia policy. The very least that needs to be done is for that article to be moved to the Wikipedia namespace, if it is to be used for policy, and to rename and heavily copyedit the main namespace article to bring it up to snuff. Also, the policy is lacking any guidelines about conventional/non-conventional names and other less apparent issues.

Anyway, I'll save my arguments for later, when the discussion is open. I am sure there will be plenty of discussion by that time. Take care, —Ëzhiki (erinaceus amurensis) 14:46, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks, I'm sure there'll be lots to say. The Russian system is fine for names, since it's really the intersection of several "conventional" systems in use. But it falls down flat where transliteration is actually needed to represent words, so it's always necessary to add the Cyrillic too, just to show what the "transliteration" represents. I have no idea how to point these defects out without the risk of offending someone. Cheers. —Michael Z. 2005-12-8 15:00 Z

I'm sorry, Michael, you confused me somewhat. I am not entirely sure what you mean by "offending". Offending whom? Are there any particular words that are offensive when transliterated one way but are not when transliterated differently (apart from "Kiev"/"Kyiv", of course)? Are you referring only to Russian transliteration, or transliteration of Cyrillics as a whole? And, just to make sure we are thinking about the same thing—what kind of words you have in mind, which need transliteration but are not names (and can you give an example or two)? Pardon me for the barrage of questions, but I'm a bit slow this morning.—Ëzhiki (erinaceus amurensis) 15:26, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

I just mean I don't want to upset the creators who worked hard on "Transliteration of Russian into English", if I propose such a major change to the status of the article.

I'll look for some more specific, instructive examples, but essentially in every page's first line where both Cyrillic and transliteration appear, it could be sufficient to simply show the transliteration if it were rendered using one of the disciplined standards, and omit the Cyrillic altogether. A real transliteration method is able to convey the spelling, not just the general pronunciation of a word. In many articles the lead sentence has three times more nomenclature than meat. —Michael Z. 2005-12-8 15:42 Z

Well, don't you worry about offending the creators of Transliteration of Russian into English, because it was me who created this article/transliteration table in the first place (the intro was added later by other editors). I am a tough nut to offend :) Basically, what happened was that at that time we desperately needed any Russian translit guidelines (it was an aweful mess), and this article worked well enough. I was not as experienced in Wikipedia matters back then, and the thought that the article on transliteration should be separate from the Wikipedia transliteration guidelines only occured to me much later, after the article was already mostly accepted as a Wikipedia standard for transliterating Russian. I'd be more than happy to work with you on improving the situation—there is definitely much to be improved.—Ëzhiki (erinaceus amurensis) 16:51, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Example: in Polesie there is a very long nomenclature line which includes "Belarusian: Палесьсе, Paleśsie; Ukrainian: Полісся, Polissia; Russian: Полесье, Pelesye';"—the Cyrillic would be redundant if we knew it was represented unambiguously by the Latin transliteration. The sentence which follows implies that Cyrillic is not required when transliteration conveys the spelling: "An inhabitant is called Palašuk in Belarusian, Polishchuk in the local Ukrainian dialect, Poleszuk in Polish, Poleshchuk in Russian."

Also, I'd like to treat names differently from words; the difference is easiest to see in anglicized names, like Volyn Oblast/Volyns’ka oblast’. —Michael Z. 2005-12-8 15:59 Z

I don't necessarily agree that Cyrillics is redundant once a good, unambiguous transliteration system is in place. It is quite possible that a reader might want to know how the name of the place/thing/concept is written in Cyrillics. Good transliteration will give such a reader an idea, but if s/he does not know Cyrillic letters, s/he will not be able to convert the term back, even if transliteration is perfectly unambiguous. There are probably cases when original Cyrillics is redundant, but it's definitely not going to be the case every time.

Another thing is that "transliteration" is basically a system of presenting of a script that's foreign to a reader in a way the reader can understand (which pretty much boils down to replacing letters of the original alphabet with the letters of the alphabet native to the reader; in this case Latin). The problem is, however, that it's impossible to establish a one-to-one conversion between Cyrillic and Latin alphabets without use of diacritics and/or other supplementary means. When the result is saturated with auxiliarily symbols, it becomes just as foreign to the reader as the original script. How many English readers know exactly what "ž" or "ş" stand for?—Ëzhiki (erinaceus amurensis) 16:51, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Regarding redundancy of Cyrillics, I agree. There are particular cases where Cyrillics can be especially relevant, like why the Soviets called the M4 Sherman tank "Em Cha". But there are also many places where words or names are referred to in the body of an article, and Cyrillic orthography is irrelevant and could be redundant.

Agreement about transliteration systems too, so this requires careful consideration. But, for example, the Oxford atlases have found BGN/PCGN translation to work perfectly well on their maps, so it can be done successfully. And readers who are particularly interested in Slavic topics or the details of orthography can learn about transliteration, so they'll know why KhPZ has a mix of upper and lower case, or why Rus’ often has an apostrophe. If we can use a unified transliteration system, it can only help these readers. —Michael Z. 2005-12-8 22:10 Z

re: RfC - Russian architecture

Sure. So how is it going to go with that? Am I right in inferring that its kind of AndriyK vs. everybody else? Is hegoing to see the light, do you think? Herostratus 07:14, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

AndriyK and Andrew Alexander; IlyaK posted the POV notice the first time, but has refused to rejoin the discussion since then. See the light, I doubt it. I'm hoping we can boil down the argument to the essential points, and edit the article to the best possible acceptable compromise position. I was thinking creating a separate "Architecture of Kievan Rus" article may be a last resort, but even so, the topic can't be removed from "Russian architecture", so that wouldn't really help (AndriyK actually did copy the section to a new article, and lost interest in it).

After the RfC runs out of steam, I guess we take it to the next step. I don't see moderation as being any more helpful after the amount of discussion that's taken place. AndriyK's involved in a lot of other disputes which are holding up Ukraine-related articles, and that has gone to arbitration, currently in progress (Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/AndriyK/Evidence). I believe I'll write up this dispute in the arbitration evidence. —Michael Z. 2005-12-11 16:36 Z

Blond

While I don't really care about you changing my edits to the article as it's all a matter of opinion. I would prefer your edit summary to be a little more straightforward. Saying something like "rv badly done edit" would be better than "rv uncited figures". I didn't add any figures to the article so how could you have reverted them. Thanks. CambridgeBayWeather (Talk) 17:35, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

So sorry, I don't know what happened there. I clicked in the history to revert the previous user's addition of demographic figures (he has been adding bogus statistics to various articles). I've restored your edit now. —Michael Z. 2005-12-11 17:38 Z

Thanks. I have also had run-ins with that user on several articles besides blonds. At least you didn't do my trick. An anon editor had made several edits in a row, all valid. I hit the rollback button by mistake! My other trick is to copy the article into the text editor then back into the article without checking to see if it's changed since. CambridgeBayWeather (Talk) 17:44, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

I've always found that If I paste it back into the same open edit window, Wikipedia will return an "edit conflict" if someone has edited the article in the mean time. This is the first time I've screwed up a history revert; I think I must have merely clicked the wrong item. Apologies again. —Michael Z. 2005-12-11 17:46 Z

Back to naming conventions

Michael, the new EE naming conventions work is evolving very slowly but I have a q. re old guidelines in connection with the ongoing move vote at talk:Kiev Oblast. We need clarification, I think. First of all we have the page: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English). Then we also have Wikipedia:Naming_conventions#Ukrainian_names chapter that is unchanged since long time ago when you wrote it and these two pages are not interlinked. Add editors' POV to the breadth of possible interpretation and you get the battle at talk:Kiev Oblast.

First of all, I think we should get some order with all those pages (existing and under construction) so that they are at least mentioning each other even if they can't be made consistent all at once.

Secondly, a q. for you since you wrote both Wikipedia:Naming_conventions#Ukrainian_names and [[Wikipedia:Naming_conventions#Russian_names and both remain unchanged ever since. In "Russian names" you wrote "Many Russian names have a conventional English spelling." In "Ukrainian names" you just wrote how to transliterate. We need clarity in all this, I think. I know full clarity and full consistensy is impossible at WP, but perhaps we should try to put some order in this. I never changed anything in policy pages, so could you help me with these? Thanks! --Irpen 04:26, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

I must have been asleep because I haven't even noticed the vote. And did I really put the Russian naming convention on that page? Please see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Cyrillic) for my latest input on transliteration. I'll look over the vote at Kiev Oblast and respond ASAP. —Michael Z. 2005-12-14 06:50 Z

I think you did write both RU and UA chapters. It was almost a year ago [6]. In any case, we need to work these issues out to minimize the ambiguity and unclarity that some try to use to advance their POV. I think I will have a little more time soon to help, once the ArbCom is behind. Cheers, --Irpen 07:09, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

Cyrillic naming conventions

Michael, do you by any chance now how the Wikipedia:Naming conventions#Ukrainian names and Wikipedia:Naming conventions#Russian names came to be? I am really surprised that no one caught a reference to the main namespace for the Russian naming conventions when the policy was being discussed (it was discussed, wasn't it?). I must have missed that event completely. Was anyone from the Slavic community involved at that time?—Ëzhiki (erinaceus amurensis) 18:41, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

I wrote both of those notes, purely to document the practices that I observed in use on Wikipedia at the time, and hoping that they could become the basis for further reform. "Transliteration of Russian into English" was being very actively developed at the time, and I didn't want to butt in and suggest abandoning or reversing all the hard work—I also improved the introduction there, but it really needs a major overhaul as you propose. Recently, I felt confident enough to start the Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Cyrillic) effort, prompted by a few instances where the existing practices have been a major discussion point or a real problem, and encouraged by some of your comments. —Michael Z. 2005-12-14 18:54 Z

Thanks for your comment, Michael. You may add one to the list of the "few instances", by the way—this just came up again yesterday :) Which, of course, only confirms one more time that current conventions are indeed problematic. I'll be participating as time permits, and by no means expect it to be a quick process. The split I made (see above) was just to better document existing status quo; it certainly was not an attempt to solidify it and/or give it more weight and substance (in case you were wondering).—Ëzhiki (erinaceus amurensis) 19:05, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

I'm with you. This is definitely going in the right direction. —Michael Z. 2005-12-14 19:08 Z

And we need to be sure that there is some clarity that Naming convention (cyrillic) addresses only a part of the more general naming conventions as applied to the names in the countries that use cyrillic alphabet. The transliteation rules are very important but the choice of the names that we transliterate and whether we use "oblast" or "region" and such similar issues won't be resolved by the "cyrillic" part of the NC. The current debate at Talk:Kiev Oblast#Comments is caused, IMO, largely by bad faith, but the lack of clarity in the naming conventions and their consistensy just adds the heat. We very much need to address that asap. --Irpen 02:14, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Survey on Russian architecture

Dear Michael, I would propose slightly change the question of the survey to make it more clear:

Who is in favour of including all of the architecture of Kievan Rus (including buildings located in Ukraine and Belarus) in the article "Russian architecture"?

It's clear enough that you voted. —Michael Z. 2005-12-15 00:40 Z

Hyphens and en dashes

Hi! Can you please come and check out User:Chocolateboy's comments on the current hyphens vs. en dashes guideline on Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)? I have not been here long enough to understand the issue, and a solution must be found quickly. He says that this manual and Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dashes) are inconsistent with the rest of Wikipedia, or something like that; I need to look up past discussions to figure out what's going on. A revert war depends on your assistance! lol, well there are less dramatic ways of putting it. Thanks. Neonumbers 23:14, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

I left a brief comment, and I'll keep an eye on the page. I hope this is mostly a non-issue, thanks to Unicode. [sigh] I guess we have to work out the manual wording. —Michael Z. 2005-12-15 01:43 Z

Soviet WWII armour units

Hello, found out about you at the Wikiproject SU. Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Fourth_Mechanized_Corps this is my main reason for contacting you as I'd like to hear your opinion on whether or not it would be feasible to create something larger out of it (a list of all units or battle participants etc). Scoo 09:47, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

teenager newbie

Michael, could you please keep an eye on the Paeris (talk · contribs · checkuser · block user · block log · edit count). He left two hate messages at my talk and some inflammatory edit summaries. He seems rather young and trigger-happy. If he keeps his style, he needs blocked. I tried my best to talk reason at his talk and I hope blocking him would not be necessary. Just check him up from time to time. Thanks, --Irpen 23:30, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

I've left a message on his page. The usual dispute resolution, yadda, yadda, and if you continue to be troubled, let me know. —Michael Z. 2005-12-19 23:53 Z

I don't think it would be necessary. He uploaded a porn image with "I am a fed employee" "tag". This generated enough attention to this user and he will be watched from now on by even more people than needed anyway. So, never mind. --Irpen 05:06, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Vandalism

Hi, your user page was recently vandalized and I reverted the edits. The vandal, Vipsta has been warned several times within the past few days, and deserves to be blocked. CanDo 02:01, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the clean up. —Michael Z. 2005-12-20 04:52 Z

Romanization of Russian

Hi, Michael! I added a table to the ALA-LC section of this article, but I am having problems with a ligature sign (used for TS, IA, IU and such). From what I found, it seems they are Unicode codes U+0360 and U+0361, but neither of them shows up in my browser, so I cannot check for myself. Would you know how the ligature is coded? Also, could you check the hard/soft sign primes for correctness? They do not show up in my browser as well. Any help will be much appreciated, if you have time. Thanks!—Ëzhiki (erinaceus amurensis) 18:29, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

These are combining double diacritics

• U+0360 ( ͠ ) combining double tilde
• U+0361 ( ͡ ) combining double inverted breve

To display over a pair of letters, one of these characters should be inserted between them.

Using these is complicated by the fact that the relatively common font Arial Unicode MS renders them incorrectly (see discussion in IPA talk archives). Arial Unicode MS draws them one character too far to the left, so they will combine the two letters before. Courier New, Lucida Grande, Code2000 and Gentium fonts include these characters and work correctly.

Do the ts, iu, ia under ALA-LC display correctly in your browser at Romanization_of_Ukrainian#Table_of_romanization_systems? MSIE/Windows has some problems with Unicode characters; and template:IPA may be required to make them work (not sure). You may want to try Firefox. I use Safari on a Mac.

I'll add the diacritics to your ALA-LC table. —Michael Z. 2005-12-20 19:02 Z

Thanks, Michael, this was educational.

Romanization_of_Ukrainian#Table_of_romanization_systems also does not show up correctly in my browser. I only wish I could switch to something else. I'm using Opera at home, and I never had a problem with it displaying symbols incorrectly (or not displaying them at all). At work, however, I am stuck with IE with no other options.

Anyway, thanks again for your help, I much appreciate it.—Ëzhiki (erinaceus amurensis) 19:11, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Any time. These tie characters seem to be supported properly by the tahoma font that came installed on my Win XP test system. Maybe we can get these to work right after all. —Michael Z. 2005-12-20 19:25 Z

Thanks again, I'll try Tahoma now.

Also, just wanted to note that i-macron is used by the LOC to transliterate Russian "i" (which was rendered obsolete by the 1918 reform), not "и". I made a correction.—Ëzhiki (erinaceus amurensis) 19:27, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Did a quick test. These tie characters seem to be supported properly by the Tahoma font that came installed on my Win XP test system, but not by Microsoft's version of Tahoma for Macintosh. Can you see this: t͡s, i͡u, i͡a? Maybe we can get these to work right after all, but it won't be as simple as just specifying the font. Oh, Microsoft. —Michael Z. 2005-12-20 19:32 Z

Yeah, those I can see, although by now I am now completely lost as to what I should use to have it fixed :)—Ëzhiki (erinaceus amurensis) 19:39, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Cool; so it's doable. Can you see any of the following? If not, then we'll have to figure out which fonts work, and create a new template, and update the style sheet common.css. —Michael Z. 2005-12-20 19:45 Z

• in {{IPA}}: t͡s, i͡u, i͡a
• in {{Unicode}}: t͡s, i͡u, i͡a
• in {{Polytonic}}: t͡s, i͡u, i͡a

I can see the first two ligatures all right, but they are shifted to the left (so it's diacritics, then letters). The third one does not show any diacritics at all. I am currently using Tahoma (and omfg, it's ugly!).—Ëzhiki (erinaceus amurensis) 19:53, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Too bad these templates don't work. They use the offending Arial Unicode in their list of fonts. I'll see if I can get something together in the next day or two. Better Tahoma on a couple of letters than the whole browser window. —Michael Z. 2005-12-20 19:57 Z

All right, I've just looked at Romanization of Russian through my new Tahoma glasses, and no, it's not better. Not only the font is ugly, but the ligatures seem to span three letters instead of two (e.g., in "TSimliansk", the ligature starts over "T" and ends over "i"). Prime and double prime still do not show up, and I lost the "ǐ", which is also an empty square now. I guess I'll have to live with IE. Arial at least does not hurt my eyes, unlike Tahoma. But for those symbols that only work in Tahoma altering the template a bit may indeed be the only solution.—Ëzhiki (erinaceus amurensis) 20:00, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Halo Disambuguation

Hi I saw that you changed halo disambuguation. Before you changed it, the article was acurate. Because the megastructure, books, flim, and video games are in the universe. You changed it to look like the flim and the books were in the video games. This is not ture. I fixed it so it's acuate again. Thanks. Tobyk777 00:42, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Well, in the real world, the games and film follow after the video games, and I wanted to simplify the disambiguation page by removing a line which doesn't disambiguate the term halo. That's being nitpicky anyway; I've gone back and de-linked "Bungie Studios", which isn't a disambiguation link. —Michael Z. 2005-12-21 01:16 Z

TLA

Hi! There seems to be a standard way to introduce TLA's:

XXX is a three-letter abbreviation with multiple meanings, as described below:

Point is, you've been changing these to XXX-can-mean's while another editor is changing them to is-a-TLA's. The irony is that since you're not working on the same pages simultaniously you probably both don't know that a very slow revert war is budding.

Maybe it's time for a MoS comment about TLA-dabs, and then adhere to that. Shinobu 17:17, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Sorry about that. In some other discussion there seemed to be a consensus to reduce the number of disambiguation templates, and deëmphasize the differentiation between words, TLAs, 2LAs, abbrevs. and acronyms.

TLA's are often also TLWs (three-letter words), so the description is spurious. Regardless of that, classifying something as a TLA and adding a link doesn't help disambiguation in the least, and simply waters down the page. I find disambiguation pages seem most effective when the interface is minimized to the extreme. [rant mode off]

Anyway, I agree that we should polish the MoS guidelines a bit. —Michael Z. 2005-12-21 18:07 Z

User:70.81.117.175

User:70.81.117.175, who you've blocked previously for changing stats erroneously is back at it[7]. -- Mwanner | Talk 16:31, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing this out. Please add any other examples of clear vandalism to my list on the user's talk page. —Michael Z. 2005-12-22 16:40 Z

T-34

Hey man, I added some suggestions to the peer-review for T-34, let me know if you want any more feedback. Merry Christmas! PS. I noticed you speak Ukrainian, could you take a look at this and let me know if there is a Ukrainian translation? Thanks! :) - FrancisTyers 04:20, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

[responded at user talk:FrancisTyers#T-34 —MZ]

RFC on User:Antidote

Hello, this user is suspected of being responsible for mass voting on Catholic, Jewish and Slavic articles and numerous other disruptions including arbitrarily changing population numbers and removing people from lists dating back to March, see Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Antidote. I would appreciate if you could endorse the request for comment at Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Antidote#Other_users_who_endorse_this_summary.--Pecher 19:42, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

Liberals for Forests requested move

Hi! There has been some events since the initial WP:RM request...

could you please give your opinion at Talk:Liberals_for_Forests?

Thanks!

WhiteNight T | @ | C 01:45, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

Cut and paste moves

Please explain who your edit summary - "when you learn not to use cut-and-paste page moves? And not to use the edit summary for putting people down?" - was addressed to? Such allegations are quite serious, and could lead to blocking action, so please be doubly sure of what you're saying, and that you're not simply over-reacting a little. --Ghirla | talk 16:54, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

That was in response to your previous edit, changing a page with a half-dozen authors in its history to a redirect, and with the edit summary "when you learn to use redirects?". It's not totally clear what happened there, but it sure looked like you were completing a cut-and-paste page move and using the edit summary to put another editor in his place. If that was not the case, I am sorry for jumping to conclusions, and in any case I apologize for being snide in my edit summary instead of just asking about it in the talk page. Peace, Ghirla. —Michael Z. 2005-12-30 21:58 Z