NOTE: The following is out of date as of the move to wikipedia:Software Phase III. The counter for all pages was reset and user pages no longer included in the list.
User:Sodium has informed me that my user page is (for some reason that completely escapes me) one of the most popular.
Yeah, just for chuckles on February 8th, I checked the most popular page and saw that my little ol' neck of the woods is right next to: Vulva (since I am gay, this seems funny as hell to me), Wikipedians (makes sense -- I am logged in contributing here and there about 10 hours a day now), Pornography (damn! How'd you guys find out? ;), September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/City of New York casualties (heavy; kinda bums me out...), Beryllium (also makes sense -- I've been working a great deal on this article), user:Maveric149 (:thats me:), Mercury/wiki.phtml (don't have any idea what this is for...), Fire ant (a cool article mostly written and maintained by User:SteveSmith), Lupercalia (luper-what? Sounds like something I should have learned geting my BS in BS), Playboy (Well, at least I am more popular than Playboy. tee-he!) and finally, Music (a subject I am very fond of; especially musicals -- no just kidding).
Since this page is one of the most un-imaginative ones I maintain, the fact that it is one of the most popular is rather embarrassing. It's kinda like having a really messy living room and keeping the curtains open at night. Unfortunately, I can't just pull the curtains here -- I'll have to put some effort into tidying things up around here. Until then, pardon the mess....
Thanks Chuck. Hopefully when the bug is fixed I will get fewer visitors -- and therefore have less pressure to clean-up my page. --maveric
I generally respond to inquiries placed on this page by placing my comments on the talk page belonging to the submitter. Therefore many of the comments that follow appear to have gone unanswered - this is not the case. (Well, at least not necessarily the case.)
Just popping by to say thanks for the name switch on Musee d'Orsay. -- Tarquin
Hi Maverick, thanks for the feedback on Ulysses. The reason I have the chapter links point to their own pages rather than the existing topics is that, for example the Hades chapter of Ulysses has no literal relationship with Hades. I'm not sure if I'm writing a separate page for each chapter, or whether I should write one long page. I guess I'll know once I've written it!
You might want to include the euro symbol in your cheat characters. --Daniel C. Boyer
Thanks for the welcome, Maveric149. I hope I'll get used to Wikipedia real soon. As a newcomer I'm bound to make mistakes, so please tell me when you discover something I should or shouldn't have done. Thanks! Guy
Thanks for creating the new article Quantum Leap. It's probably a good idea to make sure the names of different articles differ in more than just capitalization. If there's already an article on the phrase Quantum leap, then a new article on the T.V. show should probably be called something like Quantum Leap (tv series) rather than just Quantum Leap. This is the way some other TV articles have been named, and it's less likely to confuse people.--LC
Can you erase my password? I deleted my cookies and none of the dozen variations I've tried work. -- Ark
Wow, fancy meeting you here. It was nifty getting a greeting on my talk page...and then to see your name in the diffs for Nirvana, well, I just had to stop by and give you a big shout-out. Looks like you're doing a nifty job here on the 'pedia. --charleschuck
Maveric149 -- I appreciate your recent comment on the talk page for Early Infanticidal Childrearing. If it is within your power to restore more of the deleted talk section, I would appreciate it -- I am specifically concerned with an exchange between Ark and myself involving an excerpt from a book by Suggs. The reason this is useful, I think, is that it provides a concrete example of a text that Ark refers to as proof for his position; by quoting the excerpt, readers can decide for themselves... slrubenstein
Maveric149 -- I went over the reinsertion you did and realized it was from the older "Neolithic Childrearing" page. But the EIC page actually had a couple of feet worth of talk (talk since the page was renamed or moved) as of yesterday that someone -- I assume, but perhaps wrongly, Ark -- somehow deleted. If you can figure out what happened and track it down I would be grateful; it was I admit at times excessive, but I also think it was revealing and informative and ultimately useful.
For various reasons, this issue is very important to me both morally and intellectually. Frankly, I am getting tired of constantly reworking a clearly controversial peice to have a modicum of NPOV. I assume this is the sort of thing the Wikipedia Militia was formed for, and do appreciate you and your comrades attention, slrubenstein
Mav, does Doug (of Reciprocal Theory fame) have a user page? Or does he know how to use Meta? I'd like to work with him on npov-ifying RS of T, but I'm mentally handicapped -- oops, er, I mean I don't know enough physics to understand what the heck he's talking about. I just want to see an NPOV treatment of RS of T.
It should be clear to traditional physics lovers (1) that scientists dismiss it outright, and (2) why scientists object to it. But I'd like it to also show a bit about why RS of T advocates are so fond of it.
Is there any way to do this? Or should I just admit to Doug that it can't be done, and withdraw? Ed Poor, Thursday, June 6, 2002
Mav, You'll excuse me for picking you, but I've been away from the Wikipedia for a while, and yours was the first name I recalled. Last time I was here the Stats page said we were over 33,000 non-sub-pages, but now the figure has dropped to around 28,000. What happened? Cheers, user:Verloren Update: Thanks for the answer!
Can you tell SolKarma to lay off? He's created about a dozen different pages, each containing maybe one or two sentences and links to every other page, instead of a single article about hard drives.--Ark
Thanks for the welcome on my userpage. How was your field trip? a small question, is there anyway a user can tell how many readers have read a page? special:PopularPages only shows the top 50. Would it be possible to put the number of reader in the History? Cheers. user:Ktsquare
Thanx for the answer. I'll make the sugguestion myself so more wikipedians will know about me.--Ktsquare
(in the former Wikipedia commentary/Wikipedia camaraderie you wrote:) Content moved to meta at Wikipedia camaraderie. Can somebody who knows how to delete / pages delete this page and also tell me how to delete them?
Concerning the new title of Table of Chinese Sovereigns, when will the bugs of the move feature be worked out as history from the previous page will be preserved? --user:Ktsquare
Yeh man, I didn't even know how to use the "move" command or where to find it. Where can I find it (I'll use it after the software's updated)? I want to help move the rest of the country subpages, since it's something I set into motion (before we all knew better). Cheers, Koyaanis Qatsi, Sunday, June 16, 2002
Hi, Maveric. As you already noticed I tried to work on some kind of standard for the country entries (similar to your work on the beryllium). Once a "fixed" format has been agreed upon (which is not yet the case of course), would it be possible to make it a "policy" or something like it? It will give the Wikipedia a more authorative look if articles on similar topics have the same information build-up, and this can be achieved for the country and elements pages, since there are only so many of them, and all the pages already exist, in one form or another. Other candidates for such establishing an editing policy are plenty: the planets, US states (or maybe sub-divisions of countries in general).
The country pages should contain most of the relevant information in short form, which is mostly available from the World Factbook data. We can structure this information. For all the details, there's still more than enough work on all the subpages - which reminds me; the /Transnational issues pages don't appear to be very useful in common, and if they are, they'd be better of at the main country page or in history.
Any ideas on this? Greets, jheijmans
Thanks for the note, which I just found! You may have answered my first question.
1. Where do I ask for help? Is there a general location, or do I ask an individual, like you?
2. Sometimes I have a great deal of trouble connecting. Actually wiki doesn't respond. Is this usual? When's the best time to work here?
Thanks for the nice words about the articles I've submitted. Actually my keyboard has chronic diarrhea and I just add the periods. Sometimes I do what seems correct and hope somebody else'll do the nitty gritty. I won't tell you how long it took to learn about the pipe = | . I use HTML when the wiki shortcuts don't seem to work for me.
A question : why fertilisation instead of fertilization ? Where is it written that american language is the one that goes over the british one ? Please, do not change the fertilization I used (I redirect it to fertilizer to avoid ambiguity) until you gave me a proper answer (another page of recommandations ?) :-)
user:anthere
RE: your knot greeting me to 'pedia
Thanks for your offer of Q&A. Picking up a little Wiki editing here and there. I am interested in your opinions: am I adhering to the page naming and capitalization conventions, should link entries for 'knot' be 'knot|knots' (with the double brackets of course), any other editing tips I could start using that would assist?
Just figured out #REDIRECT and how to embed my handle Satsun this evening. That gives you an idea of the low voltage I'm at presently.
Would I be wise to back up each page. Are content attacks common? (not talking about real input of course)
I consider a goal of 300+ articles (with pics) on knots for a start reasonably ambitious so I want to prevent any easily avoided oversights.
Satsun 18 JUNE 2002
If someone saw a violation or vandalism on a page, where is the link for putting an IP under close inspection ? as seen here: History of Indochina Thanx. --- Ktsquare
Maybe an addition for the elements template: a short history of its discovery, its uses and maybe an etymology of its name. There's some stuff on this at Discovery of the chemical elements that you might use for this. -- jheijmans
Another remark on Calcium: in the template discussion on Periodic table/Temp, it is said not to include isotopes with a half-life of less than a week (have no idea why, though). At the Calcium table, there's one of 4 days. jheijmans
Again on the elements template: why is the density given at 293 K, and not 298 K (which would be ST)? jheijmans
Hey, maveric149, I've been meaning to post a "Thanks!" for nominating my English grammar rewrite to the votes for article of the day queue. I'm flattered by the compliment! Pgdudda
Dear maveric149, you may delete this as soon as you read it, but I seem to have inadvertently caused some kind of problem in the Cajun entry by trying to help the author make it better. See the Cajun/Talk page for evidence. I guess I'm better at entries than Talk, but I feel really bad about this.Ortolan88
Hi maveric,
what's the status on the (city, state/country) debate? It seems that some have figured out that all cities should be moved to articles name thus. Is there a page with a debate on this going on - if so, I'd like to donate my two cents as well... regards, jheijmans
Hi maveric, thanks for the redirects of Scheele. H. Jonat
Mav, I just happened to come across that. No problem. To the spelling of names. Carl, Casimir or other names with C or CH was the earlier spelling in the German language. These names are now spelled with a "K".
sample, place names: Coeln=Koeln (Cologne), Crossen=Krossen, Culm=Kulm, Chemnitz Churfuerst= Kurfuerst or Chur (city in Switzerland) Celtic in German spelled Keltisch. The C or Ch's were and are pronounced just like a K.
Spelling the name Carl , with a C is now the American (English) way. H. Jonat
Mav, please help me out. I have managed to write from an acceptably NPOV on homosexuality, despite being 100% against it. I contributed to articles on sexual orientation and another (whose name temporarily eludes me) on the state of research into a possible genetic bases for homosexuality. Even though you are (as you say) gay, you have not objected to these of my contributions.
On the other hand, when I have written on global warming, you and especially AxelBoldt object frequently. You have called my mention of troposphere temperature measurements (from weather balloons and satellites), which contradict the IPCC model predictions, "harping". But I am operating on the assumption that if a theory X predicts phenomena B and C -- but only phenomenon B apparently occurs while C does not occur at all -- then there is a serious problem with the theory.
There are also problems with the placement and reading of thermometers in weather stations, especially those in inhabited areas. And also the selective use of data.
The worst problem is the apparent abuse of the peer review process by the IPCC. I have read reports by prominent scientists and researchers that after the technical portion of the 1995 IPCC report was peer reviewed, it was changed to make it conform to the Summary for Policymakers which the national representatives voted for. This in itself would seem to indicate that the Summary is nothing other than a political consensus. Moreover, a survey of the scientists who contributed to the technical part of the report showed that 60% disagreed with the Summary for Policymakers.
Crucial sentences deleted from the peer-revieved technical portion of the report directly contradict the "balance of evidence suggests a discernible human effect" pronouncement of the Policymakers Summary. A lead writer said that such changes were made to make the technical part conform to the Policymakers Summary. Shouldn't it be the other way around?
I care about the environment as much as any man. If there is scientific evidence for warming, or for a warming trend, or for harmful anthropogenic warming, I certainly would support its being in the Wikipedia.
But if there is faulty or suppressed data, or if predictions fail to conform to later observations, shouldn't these facts also be in the Wikipedia?
Larry's not here any more, so I'm asking you to clarify Wikipedia policy. I may be a gadfly and a whistle-blower, but I'm not a troublemaker. I will follow whatever guidelines your website requires: just clarify them for me, will you?
Ed Poor, Wednesday, June 26, 2002
--mav
Maveric, should there be redirects to the elements articles with their common abbreviations? Don't know if it'll be of any use, plus that many (especially the single-letter ones) may conflict with the letters. Just a thought. jheijmans, Thursday, June 27, 2002
Just in case you didn't notice (I'm sure you did :), I made a very minor tweak to the element format; I replaced the font-and-boldface headers with wiki-coded "===" headers. The result looks exactly the same, but is more semantically meaningful and looks "cleaner" for future editors to work with. Bryan Derksen
Hi Maverick,
At the very bottom of the knot page I give an ISBN for a book. It has picked up a strange link to an external web page some how. Please visit knot. I'm curious how is this happening since the text has no such link. Any insights are appreciated. I've copied it here for your convenience.
All The Knots You Need Lee,R.S. Algrove Publishing I've only been t ISBN 0-921335-47-4
Thanks, Satsun
What time zone are you in? I'm in EST (& suffer from chronic insomnia). Cheers, Koyaanis Qatsi
Eh, I'm going to call it a night soon too. Have fun in Oakland. I've only been to Palm Desert, Palm Springs, Hollywood, and central L.A., and found each of them repugnant in their own special way. SanFran seems like it might be cool though. What's in Oakland? Koyaanis Qatsi
Hi Mav. I found your message regarding naming conventions for pre-Roman rulers. I then looked at the naming convention pages, but couldn't find any reference to the limitation that you mention. I guess I just missed something! Your point about why the Xxx of Yyy format is not required for the pre-Romans is well taken. Nevertheless, there are times when our post-Roman conventions might even be helpful for pre-Roman times. I didn't start my changes with Cleopatra but with an article on Ptolemy III Euergeter I which I redirected to remove the cognomen. I then proceede through everything I could fint in the Ptolomaic philadelphiocracy. (I mostly avoided the other dynasties.) For now I would tend to consider that applying that naming convention to pre-Romans is an option to be considered on a case by case basis where change still implies responsibility for broken links. Eclecticology, Sunday, July 7, 2002
Thanks, Mav. It was getting kinda tedious already to keep removing that. Danny
I'm at a loss. I honestly don't know how to progress with my film entries, and don't even know if I should continue, because I honestly don't understand what I've done that's wrong. Can you PLEASE enlighten me? -- Zoe
Mav - thanks for the assist on ObjectPAL, I'm brand new to Wiki, and love the idea. Obviously, it'll be a little while before I actually know what I'm doing. Was the external link to Corel.com a bad idea? (I saw that you edited it out). Thanks again for the nice welcome to a total newbie! - Gjalexei
p.s. I can see how cool an open-source encyclopedia can be. In my short time here, it's totally addicting!!!!
7.11.02 1610 - Mav: This open source encyclopedia is an awesome living example of the viral growth of living information. Thanks again for being gentle with a newbie... btw, at times the server seems to be v-e-r-y slow in serving pages. Are there plans to upgrade the host? --Gjalexei
I'm not overly critical, all I said was that having two articles called "Tale of Two Cities" had confused me, which it had, and that I thought one would be better, which I do. I thought the talk pages were the place to discuss things with authors. Other people have been landing all over that contributor and changing her contributions right out from under her without so much as a by-your-leave. I didn't do that. I raised what I still think is a reasonable point. I certainly didn't expect to hear from you before the contributor had a chance to reply. She didn't seem that upset.
I commend to your attention the following from philosopher Sidney Hook: "Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments." And why not do it on my talk page, not hers? It would be impolite for me to make any answer to your remarks there. Ortolan88, Saturday, July 13, 2002
I put the table in the Salmonella page before I realized that we were using different colours for different kingdoms. I have no problem with the concept. Be that as it may, the gray that you suggest for Monera ended up being a dark blue. Eclecticology, Sunday, July 14, 2002
Thanks for rearranging the Sainfoin page - it looks great. I'll use that as a template for my future submissions. Ramin Nakisa.
I've been learning to use the classification boxes and the results have been interesting. Being outside the box is sometimes the best influence for thinking outside the box. Of course, I tried to push the system a bit. I chose to workn on a small order Callitrichales with its two families of one genus each. I tried to include all the common names and synonyms that I could find for the species with the result that the table spread across the entire page in the Callitrichaceae article. (I didn't even try to reconcile the different combinations of hyphens, spaces and nothings that I saw in "water-star-wort")
One thing that I questioned as I played in my user sandbox to make the template work foir me was turning all the classification names into wikis. These terms will repeat on every page. If somone wants an overview of what these terms mean it should be sufficient to clisk on Scientific classification. Furthermore, since these terms all require disambiguators, it becomes just one more problem in trying to keep things simple.
Please look at what I've done and comment accordingly. Eclecticology, Sunday, July 14, 2002
I have absolutely no idea which of the common names for water starworts is most widely used. My impression is that different names are used in different places, or (based on my reading of the Latin) the different names at one time applied to the different synonyms. At one time they may have been considered as separate species.
Callitrichaceae is a family not a class. There does seem to be some uncertainties over wher you show a one genus family. I chose to put it into a family page, because it's more important to have article for all familie rather than all genera.
The problem with the piping approach is that hides the common names from the list. In the approach that you suggest, where common-name problems are resolved at the species page that could work quite well. Realistically, we may wait a long time before those species articles are written, and it will take a lot more manpower than the four of us that have been active in this thread recently could ever provide - even if we all abandon our many other topics of interest. After consideration, this is why I didn't bother to treat the species as links at all.
I have no problem with the "C. (species)" format, but earlier today when I put the table in the Salmonella table usinf "S. (species" somebody saw fit to expand them. I can live with either approach.
I'll wait until the "real template" is functioning, before I say anything more about the classification links. I'll give them a chance to work. Thanks Eclecticology, Monday, July 15, 2002
New standards digest in place for your vote! JHK
Thanks for the welcome, mav! You commented on my title for the Department of Energy entry and I have a question. The entry has that name because I created it from the "Most Wanted" page and that was the way it was beign referred to. What is the best way to deal with that? I imagine I can RTFM for how to make redirections or what-have-you, but I don't know what the unofficially appropriate way of dealing with the situation is. Marknau
I found garbage on Bennelong and erased it. Then I checked and found that it's a place in Australia and added that. But in the meantime, the Epopt had deleted the page. Had he been a bit later, he would have deleted the stub. -PierreAbbat
Mav, you might want to cut back on the page renaming for a bit, there's a new and even funner bug that munges the edit histories! --Brion VIBBER
Hi Mav, sorry to bother you, but please take a look at the new Copernicus piece by Helga. If this is her original work, I am the long-lost heir to the Prussian throne. (Oh, and thanks for the help with the bald eagle the other night. Thought I would take a shot at the taxonomy tables. Maybe we could use a template for things like that.) Danny
Mav, someone (not logged in) put this in a recent summary:
I have been carefully "prettifying" external links by making the URL's invisible whenever I edit something. I do think visible URLs are ugly and also that a paperback version of the wikipedia is a chimera. As for the printable version, I can see the point, but wiki is a web creation. Print is an add-on. Comment? Ortolan88 18:56 Jul 22, 2002 (PDT)
If the software could make little anonymous links like [1], that would be cool. It would be cooler if, lacking any other identifying string, it popped out to the URL and picked up the page title (but let's don't slow things down right now). If anyone has a reason to display the URL, maybe they should note it in the talk page. I'd be interested in hearing the reason. Ortolan88 07:16 Jul 23, 2002 (PDT)
Hi maveric, saw you moved the article Van to Van, Turkey. Is that to make ready for disambiguation with the vehicle, or has putting regions in this format also become Wikipedia policy (like with cities)? Regards, Jheijmans
Mav -- when did we move from naming conventions -- which have always been strongly suggested but unenforceable (except by peer pressure and the fact that some people are willing to do cleanup work) GUIDELINES to a "this is how we do things here so you have to do it that way, too" POLICY? I think that, if you read through all the early stuff put out by Jimbo and Larry, as well as really old-timers like LDC, Magnus, and Malcolm, the consenses was that the only really hard and fast rules were NPOV and respect for other wikipedians. Granted, it's hard to give a lot of respect to some of the more crackpot types, but that's usually because they refuse to follow NPOV or even listen to, if not participate in, discussions on generally accepted conventions and standards. Some of these seem to have been pretty much unilateral on your part, for example, and actually go against earlier agreements that this was an English-language, not an American-language, wikipedia -- like the movie title thing. Film and Movie are used interchangeably in the US, but not necessarily in other English-speaking countries, yet you've been pretty heavy-handed in telling people not to use "Film". I know it could lead to aesthetically annoying inconsistency, and even duplication of pages, but that's easily remidied with redirects, etc.
anyway, you can give this whatever value you think it's worth, but I'm of the opinion that we should concentrate on good content, rather than focusing on rules for rules' sake (except NPOV, of course)-- especially when most rules are really only guidelines. This doesn't mean not calling people on crap contributions (Lord knows I have no problem with that), but there's a great danger in allowing a set of artificial constructs to box in the contributions of others. Take Care JHK
From the top of Recent Changes: "Wikipedia policy (especially naming conventions, neutral point of view),..". Furthermore I wasn't the one who developed the movie naming convention and do not go seeking about for articles to enforce this convention on -- I merely change the ones I happen to see. Besides, the word "film" has more than one valid meaning in English whereas "movie" only has one (and with the advent of digital movies the word ?film? may become an anachronism). Therefore "movie" is a superior disambiguator. But this is not something I feel strongly about (If I did then all the (film) articles would have been changed over by me some time ago -- as were most of the Improperly Capitalized Page Titles) and I am willing to discuss changing to the more international ?film? ? but this should be discussed on the mailing list, not here. Consistency is more important than a particular usage is and conventions are needed so that article naming and linking can be consistent and predictable without the need for redirects as a general rule. Otherwise there will be either broken links or worse duplicated articles. When the project first started-out naming conflicts were rare and naming conventions were in flux and were not particularly important. But as the project grows consistent naming of articles that they are naturally disambiguated will increasingly be important to avoid conflicts. --mav
Vicki and Mav, don't fight! I disambiguated van. Like it? --Ed
I made van point to [[van (vehicle}]] and Van (Turkey). Hope this helps. Ed Poor
Maveric, the first external link in your dipluran article (and maybe several other classification articles?) isn't working, it says something about being restricted. Jheijmans 00:42 Jul 24, 2002 (PDT)
Could be, though this http://www.ncbi.nih.gov/Taxonomy/taxonomyhome.html/ link appears to be working (at least I get a page), so maybe the link simply changed? Jheijmans
Maveric, I just put up a proposal at Talk:China, and I guess you have something to say about it - at least I'd like you to :-) In case you miss it because of the messy Recent Changes, I remind you here. Regards, Jheijmans 07:14 Jul 24, 2002 (PDT)