User talk:Kwantus

Hi everyone,

The human behind this Wikipedia userid passed away suddenly on July 22nd, 2005. I am not sure what, if anything, is usually done in these situations, but I felt his passing worth noting here. --RobHutten 19:57, 26 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

For more information on his passing, see Wikipedia:Deceased Wikipedians. --Alabamaboy 15:49, 27 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hello there Kwantus welcome to Wikipedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you ever need editing help visit Wikipedia:How does one edit a page or how to format them visit our manual of style. Experiment at Wikipedia:Sandbox. If you need pointers on how we title pages visit Wikipedia:Naming conventions. If you have any other questions about the project then check out Wikipedia:Help or add a question to the Village pump or my User Talk Page. --Lypheklub 16:31, 27 Aug 2003 (UTC)


Hello Kwantus :) Did you know instead of using <var>n</var>, you can just as easily (and less typing), use ''n''? (Not apostrophes, two single ' s) It'll render just the same! Also, you don't need to line-break sentences when you write a wiki-article.

Nice work on Moser polygon notation :) Dysprosia 01:17, 29 Aug 2003 (UTC)

In reply to: (Dys, y'missed one; tho it's horrid practice to use emphasis for variables) -- It may be, but it's much harder to edit. It's Wikipedia standard practice anyway. If I'm not mistaken, they have same effect (I'm going to go try find out anyway :) Dysprosia 01:31, 29 Aug 2003 (UTC)

spiff. Wikipedia shoulda consulted the W³C first…dare i say something about XML woulda made lotta sense?

Hello, and welcome! I just wanted to thank you for helping out with AIDS reappraisal. That article is going to be a real monster to clean up; more level-headed editors are needed, regardless of their perspective on the issue. Also, I have to say I agree with you on the structure-versus-style markup - I use var for variables too, but it does get ugly to edit. Hopefully we'll have nice wiki-markup for those someday. I'm honestly very impressed with Wikipedia's general adherence to web standards practices - it's not perfect, but it's miles better than what you see almost everywhere else on the web. If you are interested in helping Wikipedia get a little closer to W3C-standards compliance, check out some of the related pages such as Wikipedia:How to use tables and Wikipedia:Alternate text for images. There is also a meta-page at m:Wikipedia accessibility for coming up with some good rules for accessible design, which unfortunately has languished as of late. Anyway, good to have you aboard! -- Wapcaplet 04:35, 2 Sep 2003 (UTC)

One that kinda bugs me is that WP eats <q> so i have to use &lsquo &rsquo &ldquo &rdquo ... but I'll admit M$IE ignores <q> and my own Konqi handles it all wrong. -- Kwantus

Ah, yes. I, too, long for the day when modern browsers are capable of fully implementing standards that are four (or more) years old. As for implementing additional HTML tags, I am fairly sure that is something that must be explicitly defined in the PHP code that manages Wikipedia; I don't imagine it would be too hard to implement them. Anything would be better than the informal standard we have now of using the colon ":" at the beginning of quotes, causing them to be formatted as definition data (without a definition term). A similar problem afflicts the usage of ":" to do indenting on talk pages and anywhere else, but there doesn't seem to be a good solution to it. We really could use a good Wiki-markup character for "quotation" though. I don't know what it could be. Maybe beginning a line with a hyphen? That doesn't seem to be used for anything else, aside from creating horizontal rules. Dunno. At any rate, I'd suggest avoiding using entity names (lsquo, rsquo, etc.) for quotation marks - they could easily confuse novice (or even experienced) editors, and many browsers seem to have difficulties with rendering them.

MSIE ignores a lot of things, in my experience. :-) I haven't tried Konqi (though I've used Konqueror, which isn't bad). You've probably heard it before, but Mozilla is really the only browser worth having (IMHO). -- Wapcaplet 05:43, 6 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Konqi=Konqueror AFAIK. My actual favourite browser was Opera, I even paid for it. Having eschewed Winduhs, I've not used it for years =\--k

Opera is excellent too. I also paid for it, way back in version 3.21 or so, but lately it seems that it is getting bigger and clunkier; perhaps it's just not optimized so well for Linux (which is all I use these days), since it seems to take a while to load and run. It's not as streamlined as it once was :-) But you gotta give them credit, they really came out of nowhere and made a great browser. Unrelated, perhaps, but did you ever hear about the Opera Bork Edition? That was one of the most ingenious things I've ever seen! -- Wapcaplet 17:28, 7 Sep 2003 (UTC)

I dun think I had. Hehee =) And then people think you're nutty when you talk about deliberate sabotage by M$ (see also DR-DOS). "That nice Bill Gates wouldn't do that."
WHy don't I use Mozilla? dunno. Not native-built for NetBSD? it tries to be everything? not integrated w/ KDE? bad memories of markup wars? not liking to use the same thing as everyone else and thus being subject to the same dangers? memory of the security hole in the JPEG code? stuff like that...-k

Re: John J. McCloy. Any chance you can write complete sentences and correctly wikify what you include in the article? This article is currently really worthless. RickK 07:48, 6 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Simple answer, no. I research, not write. Don't like it, then fix it, erase it, or ban me, or any subset thereof...

Worthless? Not if, for example, someone were to visit the page hoping to find out information about John McCloy. Matthew Woodcraft
A problem I have in writing articles about people that connect to so much, like Hanfstaengl and McCloy, is what to put in their article and what to leave to other articles. So, McCloy release Thyssen and Krupp. Do i explin the significance of that in McCloy, or leave it to Thyssen and Krupp? Do I slap people over the face with the history -- leaving some looking for a minnow in a lake -- or put in only stuff that really belongs to THAT person? --k

For what it's worth, I don't think it's a big deal to have unfinished work lying around; incomplete sentences and undone wikification can always be fixed later, and it gives those who are new to Wikipedia some easy things they can tackle before working on writing new material. I am not one of those who believes that the article should be spit-shined before hitting "save page"; I think those who do believe such things are in the minority. So carry on; don't mind the detractors. IMHO, Wikipedia needs more researchers and fewer copy-editors. -- Wapcaplet 17:45, 7 Sep 2003 (UTC)

I don't think you need to work on articles at your userpage until they're "ready to publish". I think there's nothing unpublishable about any of your articles here. There are many worse articles already on Wikipedia. It also encourages involvement of others if you publish them on the main Wikipedia. I just posted your article. There is no urgent need to use complete sentences and such. You don't need to stay on math. LDan 18:42, 7 Sep 2003 (UTC)

umm... ya. But opposed to a set of facts which is in some sense complete at any stage, it can take quite awhile to sort out a piece of maths, and I don't think it's that's useful to put up something that's in NO sense finished. I'd've liked to have had at a nongibberish Alexander polynomial done before moving the page. I'm less likely to be falling over parallel edits... =p --k

Could you please write in sentences. This is an english language encyclopædia and its basic requirement is that its content be written in sentence format. Don't worry if you aren't sure of wikification rules or whatever. Others can do that. But some attempt at sentence structure is an elementary requirement. Others can clean it up if necessary but it is unfair to leave it exclusively to others to turn an article into a usable format, and it would be unfair to you if some people, finding lots of articles that weren't in some recognisable form, decided that they were then worthless and simply deleted them. Wiki is a team effort. Telling people 'I research, not write' is disrespectful to others and undermines your own credibility and the credibility of your contributions. lol FearÉIREANN 22:41, 7 Sep 2003 (UTC)

(The truth undermines credibility? Some people write better than study, and vice versa...) *sigh* I probably would have eventually made sentences, once i got key facts i felt substntiated collected ... but the whole thing blew up before i got to that stage. S'why i'm going to draft stuff in my own space from here on. --k (ugh. reminds me SO of usenet 20 years ago. "haha you mispelled a word! what a looser" =p)

You should take your request to Wikipedia:Votes for Deletion. I'd rather not be responsible for deleting you. RickK 20:57, 22 Sep 2003 (UTC)

even this has to be an aggravation. fine. i'm just outta here. 'bye.

Kwantus, please do me a favor and tell me what you're trying to do with the fluorine article. Are you trying to alert readers to the dangers of fluoridation, or what?

Try to keep in mind that Wikipedia is not a forum for advocacy. Those of us who ARE advocates must especially keep this in mind, as we help to create articles which REPORT on controversies. See the section "writing for the enemy" in our NPOV article. --Uncle Ed 21:48, 25 Sep 2003 (UTC)

I've explained this in a nutshell enough times already.

But I'll make a deal with ya. I'll summarise it again for ya, if you can make me understand why fluoride is added to water in the name of good health for the poor but vitamin C is not added to water in the name of good health for the poor...or any reason, anywhere, that I know of.

Fluoride is added to water that does not contain it naturally because it does not occur in food in sufficient quantity to provide good health, even if a well-balanced diet is consumed. It is the only nutrient essential in human nutrition for which this is the case, though iodide is close for people who don't eat fish.
Flaw: Fluorine is not an essential element (nor fluorides essential nutrients), for any biological process. It's a poison to most.
Vitamin C is not added to water because it is present in sufficient quantities in vegetables and citrus fruit that people who eat reasonably balanced meals get plenty of it.
Flaw: The poor can't afford good-quality, Vitamin-C rich food. It's because their food's poor that they're s'posed to need flourine, remember?

Hello. Your editing of Chebyshev polynomials prompts these two tips. ... Michael Hardy 22:47, 3 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Ya, forgot the backsolidii. I often do =\ shan't happen again, since the less absurd I get the more abuse I suffer. The stomping of honest additions to Runge-Kutta methods and Taylor series by pointyhaired Tolkienheads whose numeracy is strained by football scores and listing of the royalty of Nincompoopia is the final very very last straw. I don't stomp his cr@p, yet I get the vandal labelling. WP's aiming for a comic book, not an encyclopedia, and I'm wasting no more effort on it. And I mean it this time. You won, RickK. 142.177.19.200 17:44, 5 Jan 2004 (UTC) (can hear the cheers all the way out in Nova Scotia)

I've listed your page American Idle on Wikipedia:Votes for Deletion. This topic does not merit a page of its own. It should be incorporated into American Idol, pop culture, or some article of that nature. -Smack 03:27, 19 Jan 2004 (UTC)