User talk:Willscrlt/Edits

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Archive This page is an archive of past discussions involving Willscrlt (Talk·Cntrb). Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on Will's current talk page.

Contents


November 2006

List of people by name: Tur

Thanks for your carefully thot thru and carefully stated questions re List of people by name: Tur. Please forgive my being terse: you deserve a quick response, and it's hard for me to be anything but terse without using more time than i have right now, and probably using up more of your time than is reasonable.

  1. What i call the "low-resolution terminology" is aimed at fulfilling the navigational role of LoPbN. Ideally, each entry would have
    1. The lk
    2. The inverted name, to aid the eye in seeing whether the entry it's on is before or after the one sought
    3. Something, as short as possible, that the searcher is likely to know about their guy that is not true of any other entry with the same name or a name close enough to be mistaken for their guy -- but only if there is at least one name confusable with the person sought.
    Users who look at LoPbN to find out how to spell someone's name, or what made them famous, are misguided: they should go on to the bio article. (And it might be good for someone good at saying that in an encyclopedic fashion to do so on the root page of the tree, and maybe even link to that section in a note on every page.) Putting in an entry information that is not crucial to navigation is clutter that impedes navigation to adjacent bios (and maybe even the one sought), and encourages misconceptions about what the list is useful for.
    Practically that minimal scheme is unworkable, for at least two reasons: adding in additional distinctions as new entries that are confusable appear is a finicky and large maintenance task that IMO would always be seriously behind, and the variability of detail among entries would encourage the hypothesis that what makes a good entry is best left to the editor who adds it to decide -- i.e., encourage many editors to decide it by whim.
    AFAI can see, the optimum practical scheme is to put a very small amount of information down that is nevertheless redundant for 90% of entries and sufficient for 95 to 99%, namely
    • vital stats
    • nationality
    • occupation (or other role where inapplicable) in which notability accrued.
    I try to deal with the remaining 1 to 5% in a clearly divergent format: "American politician" usually suffices (for everyone from mayors to heads of state), but where it doesn't i will suffix, e.g. " -- Florida" or " -- Congress", intentionally using the double hyphen that doesn't otherwise appear in entries, so it stands out as an exception. My hope is that the reader & potential editor takes away the impression that v.s., nat, occ'n is as much as they should worry about grasping, and not worry about why 1 to 5% violate that. My key concern is that they not be faced with a chaotic-looking population of entries where three adjacent entries seldom conform to the same format.
  2. Yes, you pretty well got it. The point i think you missed is that a J - Jo range is something i strictly avoid, to the extent of creating pages like List of people by name: name Ca to isolate even a single entry. A J - Jo range is not so bad, except that if that is acceptable why not a Turney - Turnq range or a How to Hug [chuckle] one, or whatever it takes to make all the sections about 25 entries? Because for pages of about 25x25 600 names, finding your way thru such a ToC would be distracting and annoying compared to clean steps thru a hierarchy that basically reflects one additional letter per level.
  3. My practices are IMO most vulnerable to criticism in cases like Welsh. I think i may have settled on nationality, in the sense that (in the cases moderns) corresponds to passport, in response to the guidelines on lead sentence of bios -- WP:MOSBIO? In any case, the key again is navigation, and while 191 nationalities are too many (how many people can keep Dominica separate from the Dominican Republic, or the two Congos, Guinea and the Guianas), sticking to them avoids users saying "no, that Catalan musician can't be the right Casals, i know he's Spanish, etc. "Welsh" is a finer distinction than "Scottish", and "Cornish" still finer, and the tribal or linguistic ethnicities of many countries (ironically, both the states of India and North American Indian tribes come to mind) are far too many for users to keep of, or more to the point, to be useful for navigation. I waver on this; some days i'd put "British Welsh" and some days just "British"; i'm not sure whether i stick to "American Puerto Rican" because of Puerto Ricans who wouldn't stand for just "American" or because some of our readers may think there is such a thing as Puerto Rican passports. In any case, the bottom line logically should be that an ethnicity alone is likely to be confusing and a passport nationality is more likely to be recognized and useful.

As to the writer or whatever Jack Turner, you sound better informed than i, and i'll be glad to try to remember to leave it as you settle on. The "klunky" term was no doubt an issue for me: too many words for something involving so little specialization that any actor or journalist would probably stand in quite effectively. But there are seldom perfect LoPbN occupation terms.
(Terse? Well, it might be worse if i hadn't tried.)
--Jerzy•t 05:41, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the great explanation. I take it that these are largely your own views and opinions, but I think they are very good rules of thumb. Any new entries I add, I will attempt to follow your lead. The "passport" method of choosing a country does make a lot of sense. (Assuming, of course, that you know that a person from Wales would have a British passport.) I am still a little unclear about when you divide a large group into smaller sections. I think I will leave that alone for now, and let you make those decisions until I become more experienced. --Willscrlt 09:35, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
_ _ Thanks for asking.
_ _ My logic is that only editors need to know that (so they can put the passport nationality into the entry), and that readers are more likely to know he's British w/o knowing he's Welsh than to be in the reverse state of partial ignorance: if you know he's Welsh and see "British" on LoPbN, no matter what you know abt passports, you're likely to realize that all Welsh are also British, and say "that could very well be him"; if you know he's British and LoPbN says "Welsh", you may have heard of other British people, but never even heard the word "Welsh" except as a verb or having something to do with beer and melted cheese, and go away thinking we probably don't have an article on him (or think we haven't gotten to adding him to LoPbN, which sadly is likely: i think we're at 5-20% completion. (And while i add entries, my principal contribution is encouraging consistency by making consistency as visible as possible, and keeping the entries accessible in spite of the unabated growth, by subdividing sections and pages, and working toward making it more feasible for others than myself to participate in the maintenance of structure rather than just content.)
_ _ If you're interested enough, look at the ToC on the same page every time you see a really small section: it's usually bcz it doesn't have next to it any sections that it can comfortably merge with. And also look at {{List of people by name exhaustive page-index (sectioned)}}, which is essentially a ToC w/ a lk to each page in the tree; unlike pages, which often have potential ranges that lack a corresponding section, there is a page for every name except very short uncommon names that don't have a "Name Xxx" link. But i gotta run.
--Jerzy•t 01:39, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

December 2006

thanks

thanks for niticing that typo, i go fix that now -- BrianEd 04:57, December 17, 2006

Um. Sure. Which typo? Also, please remember to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~) to help people know who and when made the comments. Thanks. --Willscrlt 01:19, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

B-52 (cocktail) rewrite

Your rewrite of B-52 (cocktail) is very well done. I didn't think the original page could be saved (and it was deleted several times, I think), but you created a good article. Quale 19:03, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. Coming from you (re: our previous discussions on Backdraft (drink)), that means a lot. This is why I said that I just need some time to do the research necessary to improve the articles. It might seem that I have slowed down a bit here, but I have been doing a lot of work over at Commons, WikiBooks, and within the WikiProject Cocktails to help create an infrastructure that works well. It should make it much easier to move things around wherever they need to go, expand or compile the information together, and so on. It just takes time, and now, it seems that people are holding back a bit on the AFDs and prods, which is really helping me to get some real work done on the Project. And that is something I really appreciate. :-) I also appreciate the thanks, because this has mostly been a pretty thankless job. I'm just happy to be improving Wikipedia and making a little corner of cyberspace a better place. --Willscrlt 01:46, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
Just wanted to finally reply to a message you left on my talk page to let you know that I'm not an admin. My visits to Wikipedia have been kind of spotty as of late, so I'm not as prompt replying to notes left on my talk page as I should be. Good luck with your ongoing work on the cocktail/mixed drink articles. Quale 09:56, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

Re: Alexander (cocktail) Prod

I've responded to your comments at my user talk page. Could you let me know which articles you're planning on dealing with, so I can get rid of the Wikibooks cleanup tag? Thanks, and happy new year to you too. theProject 18:15, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

January 2007

"an" herb

I noticed you disagreed with my changing "an herb" to "a herb". That's fine, it's not completely clear what's correct, it depends on the pronunciation. But it's not "proper English" to use "an" before h. Some americans say "erb", in which case it's fine to write "an herb", but if you pronounce the h, it should be "a herb". Admittedly, it's partly a US vs. Brittish english thing.

A source on this would be http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutgrammar/hotel?view=uk

AskOxford is a part of the Oxford Univerity, so they would have some knowledge of the matter, even if there could be a discussion.

MacLaurin 14:04, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

[EDIT: ooops, forgot to mention: It's about a change you made in the Vermouth entry]

Red Ferrari

Sorry. I was planning on writing something about it, but i don't really have much to write and I don't feel like being rushed to do so. I did not know if i should contribute but i figured if someone wanted to nitpick, they could. a bad contrib is better than no contribs, remove it if you wish. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Thuglas (talk • contribs) January 24, 2007

My suggestion would be to simply change the link into a bold heading, follow it with a hyphen or dash ("-") and then list the most essential ingredients and simplest of preparation steps in the list itself. Later on, after you have the time to develop and source the real encyclopedic article, you can replace that basic information with a link to the newly created article. This provides useful information right now, and makes it easy to add in more information in the future. Just the name of a drink does not really provide any information. When you do created the Red Ferrari article it would be a good idea to add a disambiguation link at the top to the Ferrari automobile. --Willscrlt (Talk·Cntrb) 00:21, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

Alright I'll do that, but I'm not too sure what a bold heading is.... The 'red ferrari' is not a very widely spread drink, but I have seen people order it in 3 different provinces cross-canada. I do have numerous books and such on mixed drinks so I think I could help out a bit. Perhaps this would be a way to keep myself away from politically heated articles where i can loose my temper. 'cheers' thuglastalk|edits 01:16, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks

Yeah its really good, try it. I'm going to start editing more but i need a little break to catch up in school work. thuglastalk|edits 18:16, 28 January 2007 (UTC)


February 2007