Talk:Adolfo Farsari

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Contents 1 Serving Italy 2 Fukiage 3 Banta 4 Remaining very minor oddities 5 Footnote formatting 6 Gallery formatting

[edit] Serving Italy

A quick look in the not-so-reliable resource Wikipedia tells me that Farsari, born in Vicenza, was serving in the Italian armed forces while Vicenza was still Austrian. I wonder where in what-is-now-Italy he was at the time. -- Hoary 11:05, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

How could we locate him in the midst of this mess? Pinkville 13:03, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

Actually, here! Pinkville 13:05, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

Yes, exactly: and it shows that Vicenza was Austrian. My guess is that the Austrian army would have had few speakers of [any dialect of] Italian, and that somebody living in Vicenza could hardly have served in the Italian military. Had Farsari perhaps moved to somewhere within what was then Italy? -- Hoary 14:05, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

Or did he serve in a Lombard military unit within the Austrian forces? Apparently, Lombardy had relative autonomy compared to other provinces of the Empire. &P^TM In fact, it's Farsari's early years (in Italy and then the US) that are most intriguing... I'd love to know more... and it's reasonable to think that there's more information in both Italy (civil and other records) and the US (Civil War archives/buffs). Pinkville 18:00, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Fukiage

I would love to find and use a Farsari image of Fukiage (the Imperial Gardens (Tokyo), but though I searched far and wide, I could only find images attributed to Kusakabe or Tamamura - though these are undoubtedly actually Farsari images! If anyone can find a Fukiage photo identified as by Farsari, please add it to the article - or selected photos list. Pinkville 18:18, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Banta

Some notes cite "Banta". Did Banta perhaps write an accidentally unmentioned paper within "Banta and Taylor", or what else might this mean? -- MrNigglingPedant 03:54, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing this one out! The citations should indeed be "Banta and Taylor", to which I'll now transform them. Pinkville 02:21, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

However, Banta and Taylor are described as "eds"; their book is referenced by the bibliography entries for Handy, Iwasaki, and Robinson. So again, did Banta and Taylor write an accidentally unmentioned paper within "Banta and Taylor"? If this is just the introduction, then "Banta and Taylor, introduction, 12" or some similar solution. MrNigglingPedant 05:00, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

Success! I was having trouble sorting this one out, but I finally found the bibliographic citation for the (accidentally unmentioned) article by Banta included in the book she co-edited! Citations have been corrected and the reference added. Pinkville 18:48, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Remaining very minor oddities

I've gone through the article a couple of times; there was little to change, and while an article on some old geezer who took snaps of old buildings and stuff and wymmyn with their clothes on can hardly compete with Really Important Stuff like Final Fantasy or Dragonquest, I sense that this article is now within reach of the big FA.

Some nits:

• AF's work, we're told in the introductory paragraph, "had a major influence on the development of photography in Japan". Unless I've sleepily misunderstood something, we have to go quite some way through the article before we reach an explanation of what this influence was. Worse, before we reach this point we get the impression that (notable though it may be), it was genre-bound, even derivative. I think a little addition in the intro about what this influence was (exacting technical standards, I believe) would help: the reader would then expect to wait to reach a discussion of this.
• "Imperial Gardens (also known as Fukiage)": I deleted the parenthesis, as I thought this explanation should go in the linked article. But I have a queasy feeling that it was here for a particular reason.
• Watanabe is described as the "former chief operator". That makes him sound a bit like somebody in railways or the mafia. Could it be made a bit more precise?
• Half a ryou (pardon lack of diacritic) is described as "roughly equivalent to a month's pay for an artisan". I was about to substitute "about" for the first three words but then wondered whether bartering might have been a major factor or if there were some other reason for the fastidious wording.
• The article is scrupulously footnoted. The notes in turn point to scrupulously formed references. All of this must have been very tedious to do, but it's most commendable and I wish more articles were done in the same way. That said, it's surprising that the great majority of the notes that refer to print publications have page numbers and the references have page numbers. Why the page numbers in the latter? If the latter do need page numbers, there are odd discrepancies; I haven't gone through this rigorously, but I see that notes point to "Sharf, 10"; "Dobson, 34-35"; "Clark, 96" -- each of which is outside the page numbers given in the corresponding item in the list of references.

Well done so far; don't give up now! -- Hoary 01:49, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

First, thanks for the numerous edits/corrections - I can't find fault with any of your changes. To the five points you raise:

• I'll make an addition to the intro as you rightly suggest. - Done, with a thievery of your 3-word phrase.
• The Fukiage issue is increasingly perplexing to me. I can find several images attributed to Kusakabe or Tamamura that were probably acutally by Farsari (given the probable date of exposure) and I can find earlier photos of the gardens by other photographers - before Farsari's studio had exclusive access, but I can't find any image of the Gardens identified as by Farsari (on the Net, anyway). I used the roumaji "Fukiage" because the majority of these images were so inscribed (and otherwise only rarely inscribed "Imperial Gardens"), but since I'm not using an image of the Gardens I don't suppose it's necessary to include the transliteration. I see that Fukiage is indicated on this map!
• Watanabe might, I guess, be described as "a manager", but maybe "former chief operator" was meant to indicate "chief photographer"? Impossible to say. I took "former chief operator" verbatim from the source, not knowing what else to do with it. Maybe this could be changed to "senior employee" or somethin'. - Done, using an "employee" formulation...
• Fastidious quoting. "About a month's pay" is perfectly good, better, even. -Done like dinner.
• This should be the last time we run into this pagination issue together. Farsari is the last of "my CCA articles", i.e. those that were inspired by my work (in a very different form) for the CCA's catalogue and that I rewrote for Wikipedia while retaining some of the (quirky) CCA pagination standards (created for use in an arcane and ancient MINISIS database). Though the blood rushes to my eyes whenever I look at the page numbers in these notes and bibliographic sources, I'll make an effort to see through the red to rationalise them! - Done.

Thanks for the encouragement! I have half a mind to emulate Frasier Crane's example in an episode of Cheers! in which he "reads" A Tale of Two Cities to his bar friends, but in a version he has heavily embellished to maintain their interest. Thus we'd find: understanding the danger to his life if his identity were discoved, Fasari created a costume to conceal his true self, adopted the nom-de-guerre, A-shashin, and began a personal war against his enemies... evil and corruption.... Pinkville 03:22, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Footnote formatting

The footnotes, previously just in irritatingly small lettering, are now (when viewed via a Gecko-based browser) in irritatingly small lettering that's prettily in two columns. As each line can be scanned with fewer saccades, the doublecolumnization is to the good (+); as doublecolumnization means one may have to scroll up in order to read the entirety of a single note, it brings an extra irritation (−).

So much for the columns. Now the lettering size.

"Wikipedia is not paper" is a mantra often chanted in support of the silliest causes. But these don't detract from the fact that yes, it's not paper. It's not toilet paper either, and extra megabytes cost server space -- but decreasing the size of footnotes brings no real saving whatever.

When the standard CSS was rewritten to automate this reduction in lettering size, I vigorously opposed the end as well as the means and won some support. I'll reiterate my objections here:

1. Source footnotes are not merely a meaningless formality; they are (or an alternative is) essential.
2. Substantive footnotes (as in this article) are also interesting.
3. Ergo, footnotes should be easy to read.
4. Reducing the size of screen lettering in footnotes is likely to reduce their readability by a more than negligible degree for a more than negligible percentage of viewers. It doesn't help legibility for anyone at all.
5. Reducing the size of lettering in footnotes may be a vaguely reassuring web reminder of hard-copy conventions (where it commendably saves trees); on the web, it results in no saving whatever.
6. Ergo, footnotes should be in the default text size.

An additional benefit of rendering them in the default text size is that there'll be no need for columns and the irritating backscroll that's likely to be necessary to read one of the notes in its entirety. -- Hoary 08:27, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

I entirely agree. Pinkville 04:20, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

Then render them in default text size. I think it's largely an aesthetic issue. I'll make the change so we can see how it looks in one column in the default size. Shimeru 18:25, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Yup, looks better. Thanks. Pinkville 21:30, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

I prefer it now too, and my thanks to Shimeru for reacting so graciously to my rant above. (I've a queasy feeling that in his place I'd have thought "If you're going to pontificate about it like that, the hell with you, I'm going to dig my heels in.") -- Hoary 06:25, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Hmmm... I hadn't noticed this discussion and went ahead in reinserting the 2-column format. I'll change it back again though to be honest I think it looks silly (on my nice little Firefox) as half of the space is now taken by the list of references and one has to scroll through them. Also, for all that's worth, the two-column/ridiculously small format is the de facto standard for recent FAs. I think it's nice to have some uniformity. But hey, it's only detail... Pascal.Tesson 07:43, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Noticed this discussion while I was here responding to Hoary; I generally like uniformity, but it sounds like Hoary understands some of my frustration about Wiki text sizes that are hard on older eyes - for example, the new reduced TOCs on some of the University articles (University of Oklahoma) are very hard on my eyes. Maybe we need a minimum text size standard to preserve readability for other than the 20-something crowd? UofO is at FAC right now, and the author mentioned it came from other University articles, so it's catching on. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:35, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Gallery formatting

Originally posted on the FAC page:

The gallery takes the form of an HTML table of class "gallery". As an HTML table, it has a fixed division into rows each having a certain number of cells: no fiddling with monobook.css will change this.

Use of an HTML table for a purpose such as this is a bad idea. But there was a demand for a gallery, and thanks to the way MediaWiki is written, a gallery necessarily brings you an HTML table.

It needn't do so. This page explains a table-free alternative: the result looks pretty much like a WP gallery (if you care to color it that way) but it snakes: reduce the width of your browser window and the rightmost cell plops down to become the leftmost of the following row. (Thus it works just like text. You can see a simple example here.)

(SandyGeorgia, I'm assuming that your browser window is very narrow. If my assumption is mistaken, please correct me.) -- Hoary 08:02, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Hi, Hoary - goodness, I didn't remember my Object on the article, and I'm sorry I didn't get back to strike if concerns were met. I view four different monitors - the only small screen is my laptop. I've had problems with wrap on image galleries and math formulas on all four. Maybe it's my screen resolution settings? I don't think it's only a problem with my settings, though, because on some of the math articles, the printable versions also wrap and text is chopped. Congratulations on the FA, and if I ever leave a resolved Object again on you, pls do ping me. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:28, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Sandy, any congratulations should go to Pinkville, not me. It's very much his article, as the page history will show you. And yours was just a "comment", not an "object".

Screen size shouldn't be an issue; browser window size might be. Your browser window might be almost as large as your screen but it might be much smaller. If you're interested I'm interested: Try maximizing your browser window on any of your computers (laptop included) and then see if the gallery still requires horizontal scrolling or is otherwise screwy. If so, what's your screen resolution and what browser are you using? -- Hoary 13:45, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

um, warning, I don't speak computer very well. Right now (so I'll remember), I'm on the kitchen computer, IE7, screen resolution 800 x 600. Gallery scrolls off slightly. By scroll off, I mean it's larger than the text size window. What do you want me to change? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:43, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Ps - curious - do the long formulas in Monty Hall problem work for you? What happens if you print the article from the printable version? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:44, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Friends don't let friends drive Micro$oftware. No, really, MSIE7 is the new MSIE, isn't it? I heard that the new MSIE is buggy. Why not use Firefox or some other good alternative? I've just tried Monty Hall problem with Firefox on 800x600 which I crushed to a width of 500 or so: everything was fine, everything was within the browser window [laterally], no horizontal scrolling was necessary. -- Hoary 14:51, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

So, I'm finally gonna have to bite the bullet and change browsers. I so hate having to deal with dealing with the machine that I depend on. Monty Hall is fine on my screen until I open my Favorites column on the vertical left of my screen - then it scrolls off. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:57, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

And Sandy, why stop there? It's 30 Jan 2007; as good a day as any other to move to an operating system where malware won't thrive: something like this. The price can't be beat! -- Hoary 15:28, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

<grrrrrr ... > It's a good thing I only commented on the problem, and didn't make it an Object :-) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:33, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

No matter: all your base is belong to us. -- Hoary 16:00, 31 January 2007 (UTC)