User talk:Ellmist

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Mav (talk | contribs) at 23:35, 21 September 2002. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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Welcome to Wikipedia
Hello there, welcome to the 'pedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you need any questions answered about the project then check out Wikipedia:Help or drop me a line. Cheers! --maveric149

Wikify Text from Encyclopedia Britannica
Whoa! Slow down there partner! You should at least wikify 1911 text before importing it and place a simple disclaimer at the bottom of these articles. Please see Backwardation for an example. Thanx! --maveric149

Gotcha. I'm sure you are right. I'll do that. --Ellmist

Only Major Works on Year in Review
Ellmist, whilst Heinlein was undoubtedly a fine writer, is his work so significant that every book he wrote deserves mention on the individual year pages? Where brevity and selectivity is important (as it is in the year in review pages), we have to be very careful what we add. --Robert Merkel

Yeah, I agree with Robert Merkel. I could do the same thing with a few of my favourite writers and this could snowball completely out of control. My suggestion is that you only annotate the significant ones "that everybody knows" e.g Stranger in A Strange Land. sjc

All right. Makes sense to me. Only fairly popular books should be listed on the date pages. -- Ellmist

What criteria determines a popular book? Estimated number of readers, links on the 'pedia, awards, results on Google? -- Ellmist

Good question, and something I don't think we have a good answer to right now. I've just sent a mail to the wikipedia-l mailing list asking a more general question of how we decide what's significant enough to list on "year in review" pages. Hopefully we'll get some debate (everyone should contribute if they have an opinion on the matter) and maybe some kind of consensus will be put together. Hopefully somebody will come up with some guidelines, which might get posted at meta.wikipedia.com until they get solidified enough to be transferred to the main site as "official" Wikipedia policy (or as official as anything ever gets around here). --Robert Merkel

Well, I don't think there is any question that books that have won an award like a hugo, or was on the best seller list in the same year it was published or was the basis for a movie that grossed over a 100 million bucks shouldn't be on such year in review lists. It is the cult classics that have a small, yet fiercly loyal following and some other books that venture into the gray area. --maveric149

Thanks. That also reminds me that I need to sign up for Wikipedia-L so I won't make mistakes like this again. I'm glad I have people like you all to watch out for me. -- Ellmist

's cool. There's a learning curve with everything, and particularly writing for Wikipedia. Still learning, myself. Loads of stuff I did with English town names for example, we have merrily had to disambiguate, ditto English Kings, my formal training being that you didn't disambiguate in the case of an English monarch, but did in an overseas monarch. Fine in a national context but not so context apparent in an international encyclopaedia. sjc

More Detail on Book Pages
If you're going to create separate pages for Heinlein works, please write enough to tell the user something. That "The Lone Watch" is an sf short story is too minimal to be useful. A brief plot summary, maybe even some analysis. Vicki Rosenzweig, Saturday, June 29, 2002

Sidebar Date Link
Just so you know, the day link on the sidebar is not going to be a continued feature with the impending software upgrade (being replaced by a more sane link to current events) and all the day pages created will be merged into current events and deleted. --maveric149

Thanks. That saved me some of trouble. --Ellmist

Unsuccessful Searches
Hi! I note you're creating a whole lot of redirects from misspelled unsuccessful searches to the correctly-spelled article. I'd suggest sticking to only the more "common" misspellings; "Wormholes" is good, but unusual ones like "Other linguadges" are unlikely to be repeated all that often and probably aren't worth the bother. It's a nice gesture, though, so don't take this as a complaint! :) Bryan Derksen

Bypassing Disambiguation Pages
Just so you know, whoever makes a disambiguation page is responsible for fixing misdirected links that result. Please do so. --maveric149

Sure thing. I fixed all the ones I could, but a few were lists without any context. I assume that they should point to the disambiguation page? --Ellmist

The Simpsons Reorganization
Ellmist, thanks for taking over the heavy lifting on the reorganization of The Simpsons. And may I suggest that you check the little box marked "This is a minor edit", so as not to distract our good friend Danny? That would make him a little less grumpy :-) --Ed Poor

Thank you, Ellmist, for both your zeal to systematize and link articles relationg to The Simpsons, as well as your willingness to cooperate with curmudgeons like me and Lee. With the energy of newcomers like you and wisdom of old-timers like Lee, we can make a wonderful resource for the whole world to share. --Ed Poor

Eventually, I might possibly understand the Wikipedia. Thanks for your understanding. --Ellmist Friday, July 26th, 2002

Country Subpages
Ellmist, I see you're changing over the <country>/subpage Factbook pages to a Subpage of <country> format. Great work, this will save anyone making new templates the trouble. However, could you perhaps change the /Government subpages over to Politics of <country>, instead of Government of <country>, as per the WikiProject Countries template? -Scipius

Someone else just pointed that out to me. Thanks for the tip before I had too much to redo. --Ellmist Sunday, August 4th, 2002

Table for my reference:

  • Government > Politics of
  • People > Demography of
  • Communications > Communication in
  • Transportation > Transportation in
  • Transnational issues > Foreign relations of

Anything else is ______ of.

I think it should be "Communications in" Danny

Okay, I'll go back and change them. --Ellmist Sunday, August 4th, 2002

I've changed some of them, but, on second thought, shouldn't this fall under the avoid plurals naming convention? --Ellmist Tuesday, August 6th, 2002

Obfuscate Email Address
Ellmist, you may want to delete your e-mail addresses (or write them as mail dot me at this dot domain), to prevent (large) amounts of spam mail. Jeronimo

Fixed. --Ellmist Sunday, August 4th, 2002

Redirecting Redirects
Hi Ellmist, I saw you moved "Countries of the world" to "List of countries". While I applaud the move (better title), you should notice that there were several pages redirecting to "Countries of the world". Double redirecting does not work, so all these redirect are all broken. So next time you move an article, please check whether there are any redirects to the moved page. Thanks! Jeronimo 09:13 Aug 9, 2002 (PDT)

I understand the potential for loops, but this is still an issue that people shouldn't have to waste their time on things like this. Is a fix being considered? In the meantime, I am bypassing the redirects. --Ellmist Friday, August 9th, 2002

Another thought, if the software is going to keep this limitation, what do you think of having it automatically list everything that needs to be changed? --Ellmist Friday, August 9th, 2002

Thanks! Yes, the feature would indeed be useful. Maybe you can propose it as a feature request - hit Bug Reports on your left and then Feature Requests to add one. Jeronimo

Hi, Ellmist, I just came here to thank you for moving Wikipedia Announcements to Wikipedia:Announcements and to remind you to re-direct the redirects. I see that you're already talking about it. Yes, this would be a good feature to have for the move function. — Toby 21:57 Aug 9, 2002 (PDT)

Poker Page Renaming
Thanks for doing some of the cleanup of the old poker pages on Wikipedia. They were written a long time ago on the old Phase I software, so they have a lot cruft remaining from that.

I just wanted you to know, though, that I plan a major overhaul of those pages very soon with drawings and some new text, so you don't have to go out of your way to fix every link and typo. In fact, it's no exaggeration to say that I wrote the Phase III software for Wikipedia mainly because I wasn't happy at how the poker pages came out and I wanted better software to support redoing them. --LDC

Okay. I'll leave the rest to you. --Ellmist Saturday, August 24th, 2002

Subpages for Alphabetical Lists
I can see moving the "Colleges and Universities" pages to titles with "List of..." since that's a useful convention here, but what's wrong with the "/A" instead of the awkward "starting with A"? We generally de-slash things like "Simpsons/Homer" because that title represents two separate subjects and enforces a hierarchy between them that the author might not want. But breaking up what is logically a single page with a single topic into pieces for purely size reasons seems like a natural thing to use a simple "/A" for. See, for example, List of rare diseases, which I think is a good set of pages. --LDC

I suppose my aversion to subpages has gone too far. Should I continue with the format I have so far (List of colleges and universities starting with *), revert back to the way it was before (Universities and colleges/*), or subpages of the new title (List of universities and colleges/*)? --Ellmist Saturday, August 24th, 2002

I probably would have put them at the same place. I'm all about removing all non-META subpages from the 'pedia, though I've yet to get them all (I work on it occasionally). --KQ

Move Feature
Thanks for moving Famous military writers to List of famous military writers. However, there is an easier and better way to do it: Look on side panel or the bottom of the page for a link called "Move this page". This is the administrative move feature which is being made available to all logged-in users on an experimental basis (which to my shock doesn't seem to have been abused much by the very green or ill of heart). Simply follow the instructions. Moving pages this way is better becuase it moves the history of the page as well -- otherwise the edits to that page are hidden at the history of the old page title. Be careful to follow wikipedia:naming conventions though. --mav

Well, it's back. It seems to me that it disappears occasionally. I'll do that from now on. --Ellmist Saturday, August 31st, 2002

It should be there whenever you are logged-in. If it isn't, then that's probably a bug. --mav

Larger Image Links
Neat trick: [[media:Tomatoes.jpg|larger image]] -> larger image This is the best way to link to larger images. (See tomato). -- mav

Disambiguating Glenn County
There is no need to disambiguate Glenn County because there is only one. The article should probably be deleted completely, since it's an orphan. Eclecticology 17:56 Sep 4, 2002 (PDT)

I happened to see this remark, and have changed the page into a redirect.Andre Engels 12:22 Sep 11, 2002 (UTC)

Ellmist, great job on uploading and linking all those public domain images. However I don't see much point in linking the description page of a larger version of the same image when the images are from the same source. It just makes more sense for me to have a media link to the larger version instead on the description page. Not a big deal either way. But wording like "larger cow" is ambiguous and should be changed to "larger image". Taken literally, "larger cow" means a picture of a cow which is larger in real life. --mav

Are you asking me to change all the image links I have done so far or just do that from now on? --Ellmist Saturday, September 21st, 2002

Just from now on. --mav
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