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User talk:Bryan Derksen/Archive 8

Washington Metro
I wasn't gonna. But if you wanna, go for it. ;) Just wasn't sure if there was a proper way.  Figured the list was sufficient, but I suppose the ideal solution is that every single article on Wiki is categorized. :) --Golbez 05:34, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * Heh. Hit one Washington Metro article while random-paging, and had a few spare minutes so I dove in. There doesn't seem to be much of a standard right now, so I figure one will develop out of the chaos of editing if enough people categorize stuff. :) If nothing else, putting all those articles in a category gives a convenient "handle" for recategorizing them later. Bryan 06:50, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * Right now the overwhelming listing of Metro stop articles hides the more important Metro line articles. I think all the stop articles should be put in Category:Washington Metro stops, leaving the line articles in the base Washington Metro category—that's how I've handled it with Category:New York City Subway and intended to do it with this too.  I don't know if this is a particular interest of yours, but another project that needs to be undertaken is renaming many of those stops with "(Washington Metro)" at the end that have the same names as independent DC places (i.e., Judiciary Square, King Street).  Even if King Street, for example, doesn't rate its own article (I'm thinking about it), it should at least be made clear that "King Street" isn't simply a Metro stop and has no independent meaning.  I was planning to eventually get around to that myself.  Postdlf 07:48, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * Sounds good to me. This isn't really an area of interest of mine, though, so I'll just do the recategorization and leave it to those who know more about Washington geography to do the moving and renaming stuff. Bryan 07:53, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * How on earth do you do that so quickly? ;) --Golbez 08:08, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * Mozilla's tabbed browsing function. I start by middle-clicking my way down the list of stations, opening each one in a new tab. Then I cycle through the tabs, clicking "edit this page" on each one. Then I go back to the first tab again, by which time all the articles are now open in editing windows. Highlight the old category, paste, click save (actually ctrl-v, tab, ctrl-v, tab, space, enter - pastes the new category into the article and edit summary, marks the edit as "minor", then triggers the save button. This set of keypresses has become so habitual it takes maybe a second or so :), and then move on to the next tab while the edit uploads. When Wikipedia's slow there can be dozens of articles in the process of saving in the background at once. :) Bryan 08:13, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * That's just sick. ;) --Golbez 08:24, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * I choose to take that as a compliment. :) Bryan 08:37, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * Thanks so much for taking care of that so quickly! Postdlf 12:09, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC)

renaming List of Lunar mountains -> List of mountains on the Moon
Hi,

Can you use your sysop powers to do this rename?

It's needed for consistency with all the other "List of FEATURE-TYPEs on PLANET/SATELLITE/ASTEROID" pages that I'm classifying in Category:Surface feature nomenclature of solar system bodies, and it's needed to make the category alphabetical sorting come out right under "M".

-- Curps 20:36, 13 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * Done. Would you like me to nominate you for adminship, BTW? I've seen quite a number of your edits since I hang out at a lot of astronomy-related articles, and I don't think I'd be risking my reputation by doing so. :) Bryan 00:34, 14 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * Thanks, but perhaps not yet. At some point I might go for adminship. -- Curps 02:32, 14 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * I have another category task for you now too, based on this—Category:Mountains on the Moon! Postdlf 20:51, 13 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * Hi Postdlf. What's your task?  You didn't make it clear.  It is something that requires an admin to do?

 * I think he's referring to my near-bot-like ability to categorize vast numbers of articles rapidly. :) Bryan 00:34, 14 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * One thing that would need to be done is split off all the articles like Carpathian mountains and so forth which also exist on Earth into their own Carpathian mountains (Moon) article and then classify them under Category:Mountains on the Moon. -- Curps 21:46, 13 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * I'll get on that a bit later this evening, and categorize everything as I go. Bryan 00:34, 14 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Renaming by admin
One more rename needing admin intervention: Aristarchus (crater) -> Aristarchus crater, for consistency

Bulk categorization
I undid much of your categorization spree from a few days back, sorry. I note that some of it has been discussed on talk:Australia. Categorization is another good page for finding general consensus on how article categorization is done on Wikipedia.

On another note, perhaps Category:Cratons would be useful to create as a subcategory of continents if you plan to add articles on those as well? Bryan 15:32, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * I suppose that my love for palæocontinents blinded me to the concerns of others. The Australians seem to think about their land more as a country than a continent.  I shall only categorize when I add new continents such as I did yesterday, when I added Laurentia.  I shall lurk in Categorization and maybe contribute a bit there after a while.  I had no idea that some people find categorization such a sensitive subject.

 * ¡Thanks!

 * Ŭalabio 00:38, 2004 Jul 21 (UTC)

 * No problem. It's not so much a question of "sensitivity" in my case, as it was that most of the categorizations you added didn't really seem to apply; you'd categorized North America under "Geological timescale", for example, and I can't see any way in which North America is a geological time period. It was also put in Category:Earthquakes, and North America definitely isn't an earthquake. :) Bryan 00:44, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * "It's not so much a question of "sensitivity" in my case, as it was that most of the categorizations you added didn't really seem to apply; you'd categorized North America under "Geological timescale", for example"

 * ¡Oh! ¡I misunderstood!:

 * I noticed that "Geological Timescale" links to all of the geological timeunits. I figured that this would be a useful resource.  So categories are of the subject  --  not for the subject.

 * ¡Thanks!

 * Ŭalabio 01:15, 2004 Jul 21 (UTC)

Celestial body atmospheres
I've slightly altered your article on Celestial body atmospheres and added a section "Theoretical ideas on the atmospheres of interstellar exoplanets"though I'm not quite sure it belongs with the article it's attached to or should be moved to a new one.... (I'm also 128.151.43.132). --Deglr6328 01:38, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * Looks like a neat addition! You're right, though, I'm not sure that it fits so well in this particular article. It might fit on extrasolar planet, but the definition currently over there would exclude them because interstellar exoplanets don't orbit stars. Hm... perhaps you could move this to its own article, interstellar planet? It seems like a sufficiently distinct class of object to warrant it, IMO. Bryan 03:11, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * Neat, the "interstellar planet" article already exists but is less detailed than the stuff you wrote. I'd forgotten and didn't check before saving my comment above. :) Bryan 03:15, 21 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Fictional deities
Hello Bryan Derksen,

You recently removed categories of some D&D deities to Category:Fictional deities, when they had other Categories in either Gods or Goddesses.

This is fair enough, but at the same time some deities with specific genders remain in the main Deities page. Should I deal with the obvious ones? Or... It is my opinion, that despite deities often being termed as he or she, these aren't actually accurate - deities are deities, and can masquerade as either sex. So should there even BE subcategories for gods and goddesses?

Thanks for your time. Erolos 17:02, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * Personally, I wouldn't have created those subcategories myself given the choice; that's why I didn't do any work to sort the other dieties, I just did the ones I'd come across while reading through all the Forgotten Realms-related articles. But I also don't strongly oppose the subcategories, so I don't plan to campaign for their destruction. :) Anyway, IMO for some gods and goddesses the gender is a pretty well defined part of their description, much like their portfolios and other such details, and those are probably okay to move into the gendered subcategories. Others don't have gender so strongly defined (often the "monsterous" deities like Cthulhu, for example) or are otherwise ambiguous, and those should stay in the root fictional deities category. Ideally, IMO each deity will only be in one of the three categories. The guidelines at Categorization seem to support this, suggesting that redundancy and over-generalization leads to needless clutter.

 * Anyway, those are my thoughts on the matter. I was just cruising through those articles on one of my random walks through Wikipedia, so if you find some edit of mine that you really want to revert I probably won't even notice let alone object. :) Bryan 05:56, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * I see your a Fictional deity now Bryan? Moving up in the world... ;) Sam [Spade] 06:07, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * Whoops, fixing Erolos' link. Not that I don't mind the promotion. :) Bryan 06:17, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * Thanks for your thoughts. I'll leave it as is then, as the FR deities DO tend to have specific genders, apart from the specifically androgynous Corellon. But I'm still of the opinion that deities shouldn't be classed by sex at all. -Erolos 22:05, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)

S/2000 J 11
A few idiots used this page as a chatroom. Looks like it's back to normal, but maybe the history should be cleared of everything since my own last edit. Are admins empowered to do that? -- Curps 00:48, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * I'm afraid not, I can only delete the article entirely (and its edit history could still be restored in that case, too). It looks like pretty ordinary vandalism, the same sort of thing that's sprinkled harmlessly throughout the edit histories of many other Wikipedia articles, so it probably won't hurt to just leave it in there for future historians to write papers about. :) I'll watchlist the article to make sure it doesn't get vandalized again without being noticed. Bryan 01:32, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)

OK, I overreacted a bit. It's already on my watchlist, which is how I noticed it, a few hours after the fact. -- Curps 02:15, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * If the vandalism is still going on tomorrow, I'll try protecting it for a few days; these anonymous users seem to be fixated on that particular article for some strange reason, perhaps they'll just go away if they can't play. Bryan 05:05, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Monopoly (game)
As you may have noticed, the Monopoly (game) article is currently up for featured article status. Currently the only objection remaining is that the boards are too big for small screens. Personally I don't see this as much of a problem and it may not be a valid objection. However, since you appear to have generated the original board tables, do you have a problem if they are replaced with the equivalent tables polluted with tags as shown here. Of course this doesn't actually reduce the size of the boards all that much, but can get the total page width down to ~820px. -- Solipsist 15:19, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * I've edited the first table in your sandbox version to use CSS styling instead of "small" tags, what do you think? I generally prefer CSS where possible, and in this case it allows the font size for the entire board to be modified again in the future quickly and easily. BTW, thanks for the tweak to the image on my main page - thumnailing used to work nicely for an older version of that picture, and since I rarely visit my own home article I never got around to fixing the code for the new version. :) Bryan 16:39, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)

 * Even better. In fact with the CSS approach I don't even mind that the boards are smaller since it doesn't impeed future editing. The only problem now, is that I might have to conceed that user mav was right to insist on reducing the board size ;-) -- Solipsist 17:33, 31 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Sysop Accountability Policy
Thanks for the CowboyNeal explanation. It appeared to be random vandalism/someone having fun on a policy page. I'm still not sure why something like that would be on the policy page and not on the talk page. An attempt to further the VfD vote? - Tεx  τ  urε  18:13, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

 * Or just a general response to the atmosphere of "this is a wacky/dumb poll". I must admit to contributing to that myself somewhat, since it is a wacky/dumb poll IMO. :) Bryan 18:46, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

 * True - Tεx  τ  urε  20:09, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Hawstom
Thank you for reverting the unexplained blanking that was done on my account. Tom 18:52, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

 * No problem. Bryan 18:55, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Education in Hawaii
Woohoo!! Someone actually found time to remove all those redundant categorizations of Hawaii educational institutions!! I've been meaning to do it for a long time but got a little too lazy. Repetitive deletions make me dizzy. Hehe. Great job!! --Gerald Farinas 15:08, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)

 * Heh, thanks. I've developed a system for repetative operations like this using Mozilla's tabbed browser window interface, once I'm in the groove it goes quite quickly. :) Bryan 15:11, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Arts categories
Hi,

I noticed that you have recently been active in categorising in the visual arts. Can I also encourage you to join the categorisation discussion at Category talk:Art -- Solipsist 21:08, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)

 * Oh, I wasn't really being "active in the arts." What I do on some days when I'm bored is click "random page" until I hit an article that needs some easy-to-do work - in this case, presumably one that lacked a category. If I did a whole lot of categorization in one particular field, that probably means I hit a jackpot - a juicy "list of" article that hadn't been made into an analogous category yet. I don't remember offhand which one that might have been, though. What did I do? Bryan 23:29, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)

 * Ahh, I though I had spotted someone with a penchant for adding Canadian painters, so it would have been good to get a Canadian/US perspective. But if it was just random (useful) editing, don't worry if you don't feel you can contribute. -- Solipsist 23:38, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)

 * Oh, I can contribute. Just point me at a large mass of articles in need of having category tags added to them and I'll churn through them with bot-like monomania. However, I don't really know much about art itself, so I don't think I'll be able to contribute much to conversations about the subject. :) Bryan 23:44, 6 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Linking Syntax
I am the fool who thought placing a category in a page only provided a link to the page of the category. I thought that Category:Geological Time Scale would be useful for Pangæa and ended up listing Pangæa in Geological Time Scale. I found out how categories truly worked the hard way.

Well now, the way categories work now is cool; the category-pages just write themselves. Still it would be nice to link to a related category without being listed in it. Maybe, the next version of the software could recognize two linking syntaxes for categories such as:

 * [ [ Category:X ] ]
 * { { Category:X } }

One would generate a simple link like between Pangæa and Category:Geological Time Scale; while, the other would categorize Pangæa into Category:Continent.

 * ¿Would this be a good idea?
 * ¿Would this be possible?

¡Thanks!

Ŭalabio 23:54, 2004 Aug 6 (UTC)

 * Actually, there's already a syntax for it. Put a colon at the front of the link, like so: Category:Geology becomes Category:Geology. You can also do this with images (eg, Image:Smiley.png) and templates (eg, Template:disambig), and possibly other things that I can't think of offhand. Category links like this would probably be best suited for the "see also" section, but I'm not sure whether there are any standard practices being developed about linking category pages in this way. I guess you could try doing a couple and see if anyone comments on it. :) Bryan 01:20, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)

 * Oh, BTW, sorry I didn't mention this earlier; I didn't realize at the time that this is what you were trying to do. I would have said if I'd thought of it. Bryan 01:33, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)

 * Now that I know this, I shall use it sparingly and cautiously. I am certain that neither of us want a repeat of what happened last time I rushed in where angels fear to tread.

 * Ŭalabio 02:07, 2004 Aug 7 (UTC)

 * Be bold. It wasn't all that big a cleanup, in the grand scheme of things. :) Bryan 04:54, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)

 * I shall be bold, in a cautious sort of way. ;-)

 * Ŭalabio 05:07, 2004 Aug 7 (UTC)

Malicious Deletion Attempt
Hello. Sorry for the imposition, but I thought you might be interested to note that an article you supported in the past on vfd has been listed again under malicious circumstances - the 3rd such attempt in 7 months. Please feel free to review the discussion and cast your vote as you feel appropriate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion/Atlantium --Gene_poole 10:36, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)

"Ban em as I see em"
 I see em. --TIB (talk) 00:16, Aug 24, 2004 (UTC)
 * 1) (cur) (last)  17:36, Aug 23, 2004 Grunt m (rv vandalism)
 * 2) (cur) (last) 17:33, Aug 23, 2004 209.173.230.77 (added drama)

Special:Ipblocklist: 10:57, 23 Aug 2004, Guanaco blocked 209.173.230.77 (expires 10:57, 30 Aug 2004) (contribs) (unblock) (returning There vandal)

Guanaco stomped him the moment he popped his head up. He's been making fewer and fewer attempts at vandalism lately, I suspect the futility of his activity is starting to dawn on him. :) Bryan 00:21, 24 Aug 2004 (UTC)
 * Picking up. --TIB (talk) 20:20, Aug 27, 2004 (UTC)

Dubious tag on Senate_Internal_Security_Subcommittee
You've placed a tag on the page, but didn't really discuss it with the parties involved in that Talk page. Maybe you should check the accuracy of the statement involved yourself. [[User:Poccil|Peter O. (Talk)]] 01:14, Aug 25, 2004 (UTC)

 * There is only one comment on the talk: page, and it would seem to be in fundamental agreement with my dubiousness. Here's one of the best links I found on the first page of Google results: . It indicates that the SISS was involved in investigations, and that one of the more bucolic provisions of the McCarran Act was to authorize the establishment of concentration camps. That's hardly comparable to being able to "kill anyone they wanted from a safe distance with complete freedom." I didn't see anything at all about assassin commandos, which I would expect to be fairly prominently mentioned under the circumstances. Bryan 06:15, 25 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Capitalization of God
Thanks for the note. I know that at one point you all had come to a silly consensus, where "deity" was used instead of the word "god"/"God" (a consensus I was happy with). But from what I could tell in the history, this consensus was overturned by Sam Spade acting on his own. Sam Spade frequently does this sort of thing on pages that bare a philosophy he doesn't like. He even started a VfD for the libertarian socialism page with the excuse that he didn't understand it, and, that, he thought we were playing an elaborate trick on him. The only reason I ever registered a user name was so that I could vote keep on that VfD. On the death metal page he wrote an absurd statement that I think most DM fans would find offensive, but I let it stand because I'm tired of dealing with him. There just comes a point when I feel like people need to stand up to him. If I'm wrong on this, feel free to change the capitalization back to avoid conflict; I won't get into a battle over this if you do so, but if Sam Spade does so, I think I probably will. millerc 03:06, 29 Aug 2004 (UTC)

 * Heh. Yeah, I've had a bit of a history with Sam too; he's the only user I've ever got into a long-running fight with. Hopefully it won't start all over again, it's been six whole months since the issue was "settled" and I'd feel somewhat frustrated to be back at square one again. But I also am hopeful that at this point we're just jiggling around a bit near a relatively well-accepted compromise position and it won't blow up like it did before. Bryan 03:19, 29 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Finding the content of some long-deleted pages
I was looking through my watchlist and discovered a couple of pages that had been deleted, and that furthermore were so deleted that I didn't even get a "view or restore deleted edits" link. They're administrative pages and probably don't need to be restored, but I would like to get ahold of the text that was in some of them since it may be relevant at some point in the future. Does anyone have suggestions on how I might go about finding this? Bryan 19:45, 28 Aug 2004 (UTC)

 * Talk to one of the programmers, they have access to the logs. RickK 23:19, Aug 28, 2004 (UTC)

 * Hi Bryan. I've moved your question here since it was time to clean the Village pump. Brion Vibber might be the best person to ask for this since he has backups of the now deleted archive tables. Angela. 14:49, Sep 1, 2004 (UTC)

 * Thanks. It's not terifficially important, so I'll get to asking him about it "eventually". :) Bryan 15:39, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)

American nuclear tests?
Do we need a Category:American nuclear explosive tests when we already have a Category:Nuclear tests? I don't think we have enough articles on nuclear test series to warrant breaking it down on a country-by-country basis? --Fastfission 21:33, 4 Sep 2004 (UTC)

 * Yeah, I just this very moment noticed that that category already existed. However, Category:American nuclear explosive tests can be further sub-categorized under American history, American military, etc. so I think it isn't such a bad idea. Other countries don't have as many articles for nuclear testing, so breaking them down by country wouldn't be necessary; they can just go right under cat:nuclear tests. Bryan 21:36, 4 Sep 2004 (UTC)
 * It doesn't matter much to me, I was just wondering if you had seen the other category or not. --Fastfission 04:53, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)

 * I hadn't until I ran into an article already categorized in it, about halfway through my run. Bryan 04:57, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Wickes class destroyers
Please see my note at Category talk:World War II American destroyers. Jinian 15:22, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Image:Metis2.gif
--Diberri | Talk 22:16, Sep 7, 2004 (UTC)

Neptune
Hi Bryan, sorry about Neptune (planet)! Looks like we had the same idea at the same time, and then tried to fix it at the same time. Hopefully now it is all sorted. -- Chuq 05:13, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)

 * Heh. Such things happen from time to time. I've VfDed the April 11, 2009 page, though I think I could probably have just deleted it myself without much controversy. Bryan 05:18, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Pics ot the Moon
See : "These images can be reproduced if credit is given to the Nordic Optical Telescope and observers listed below." I have uploaded some, but I'm unfamiliar with some of them. Like, is Rima Hyginus = Hyginus? —Joseph | Talk 05:06, Sep 14, 2004 (UTC)

 * I suspect so, a rima is a fissure (Planetary_nomenclature) so "cleft" would seem a reasonable synonym. Any others you need to find articles for? Bryan 05:22, 14 Sep 2004 (UTC)

 * Central Bay
 * Gassendi (links to Pierre Gassendi)
 * Godin and Agrippa (disambig with no info about the Moon)
 * Kepler (links to Johannes Kepler)
 * Known Sea
 * Rima Ariadaeus
 * Seething Bay

??

—Joseph | Talk 05:56, Sep 14, 2004 (UTC)

Leotard
I have now replaced the image on Leotard with a picture of M. Leotard wearing his original garment. -- The Anome 08:38, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Bot
Bryan, thanks for the janitorial services, keep up the good work! However, could you teach your bot (it is a bot, is it?) to mark its changes as minor? If it's the category it fixes and nothing more actually, then I see no point in overcrowding the watchlists. Also, what is the point in removing the categories from a template into the articles themselves? The effect is the same with the exception that it's easier to add just a template message than template and the same set of categories to all project pages. [[User:Halibutt|Halibutt]] 04:17, Sep 17, 2004 (UTC)

 * Heh. Not a bot, I've been doing categories manually. With Mozilla's tabbed windows it's easy to develop a rapid patter for doing simple cut-and-paste changes like bulk categorizing. I've actually been of two minds on whether categorization is minor or not, but since you ask I'll try to lean more on the side of marking them minor. As for the template category issue, I feel it is inappropriate to put categories in "navbar" templates because the two features serve distinct functions. Many of the articles that wind up with templates do not properly belong to the categories that are included with them. For example, although I didn't take the time to clean it up myself this time around, most of the articles with Template:Polish Secret State probably should not be located directly in Category:World War II; it's excessive and overly redundant clutter. They should be in sub-categories. Bryan 05:58, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)

 * Thanks for the quick answer. As to the categories - IMO if you find the categories wrong - feel free to correct them. However, I still do not understand the reasons behind removing the categories from a template into the articles themselves. The navboxes are not only a nice and clean way to let the users navigate between sub-pages of the same project, but they also serve as templates that ease the work of a wikipedian who writes the articles. That's why I decided that it would be easier for me to add the categories to the Template - it's much easier to write than to write     . It saves both time and effort. [[User:Halibutt|Halibutt]] 06:15, Sep 17, 2004 (UTC)

Larry Niven
Hey, I didn't know about the warlock's disc thing. I guess you're right about it referencing the disc instead of ringworld, I was sort of pulling that out of my ass if you didn't notice ;-). Good catch. --Ignignot 20:51, Sep 24, 2004 (UTC)

 * No problem. I hadn't heard of the Magic card before, so this is one of those serendipitous comings-together of facts to form an articular whole that's greater than the sum of individual editors' knowledgeses. Or something. :) Bryan 23:23, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Template:Quebec
Thanks for your help and support. --Valmi 08:59, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Catherine Palace images
Greetings:

I'm still learning about images - I noticed that your positioning in individual thumbnails is now "none", but preceded by **div class="floatright"**

Could you please inform me more about this technique? How does this differ in effect from positioning each image "right"? I note that those editors with tiny monitors (800 px) object to the larger images - my theory is that a reasonably sized image may obviate the necessity of a click-through to what is in some cases an over-large image (see Three Gorges Dam and click on one of the first few images - I have not yet produced an intermediate as is needed in this case, not my contributed image), so I tend to prefer a 300 pixel minimum. I have also had a carefully constructed gallery destroyed by an editor - it appears that the editor did not like the detachment of image from text, as the gallery followed the text. This destruction resulted in some of the ugliest image layout I have yet seen on WP. I restored it by putting the gallery before the text and then referencing the specific image within the nested sub-article with a postage stamp sized image - see seismic retrofit. At least that has (thankfully) been left undisturbed for a while. Where a large number of images are to be shown I have been putting these in floating galleries (see Shanghai as an example) specifically so that they may be of reasonable size, and where the image is central to the theme of the article, to make it large and prevent text wrapping with appropriate coding. See Sundial Bridge for a large article preface picture with a trailing gallery. That article would definitely loose its impact with a smaller image as the image is a representation of the visual impact of the object. I do think that 250 pix is too small for my preferences in the particular case of Catherine Palace, but that a gallery is not yet appropriate for that article, and a large image would be inappropriate as the article is about the palace - not its visual importance as with the bridge article. What we really need is a variable image width by user screen width - at least it would be nice to set this up as a user preference. I think that there methods to get the user's width - at least the window size, but the Wiki engine would have to have some extensions to process this correctly.

By the way, what size monitor do you use and why did you feel that the images were out of control (a bit)?

Please respond here - I will watch your page.

Best wishes, -- Leonard G. 00:47, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)

 * Heh, many comments in one. I'll try to answer them all.
 * Firstly, the div. I use the "classic" skin rather than the "monobook" skin, and although I didn't know it at the time the "monobook" skin apparently automatically stacks floating images in a column down the side of the page. In "classic" it doesn't; try switching your preference over to "classic" skin temporarily and have a look at the version before my edit: . All the images are in a row at the top instead of a column down the side, which squeezes the text into a tiny little column on the left. By turning off the built-in layout code (using the "none" keyword) I forced the images to form a column, and by wrapping the whole group in a div I was able to tell the whole group of images to float to the right. Here's a quick demo, using a div with a visible border (and note that I'm still in "classic" skin):

without div (the "before" version):

In classic skin, this results in a row of images beside each other.

without div and with "none" keyword, putting images in a column in Classic skin:

with div floating the column to the right:

 * I have since learned that Monobook handles image layout better than Classic does, however, so I've mostly stopped doing that (but I haven't worried about going back and removing it from articles I've done that in, since it looks the same in Monobook either way). At some point I'm going to file a bug report and see if I can get Classic fixed to work like Monobook does.

 * As for resizing them down from 350 to 250 pixels, that was just due to my own personal preference for what a "good sized" thumbnail was. I agree that it'd be nice to have an adaptive thumbnail setting, once upon a time I used to just use the "thumbnail" keyword without specifying a size in the hopes that that would be implemented soon. Personally, I think Wikipedia articles should be primarily focused on the text and use images only to accentuate the text rather than as the main centerpiece of the article. Generally speaking I would only leave images larger than around 300 pixels if it was a map or diagram that would become illegible at smaller sizes. In my opinion a thumbnail should be large enough to let the reader know what's in the image so that he can decide if he wants to click and see the full-sized version and not much larger than that. However, I don't feel strongly enough about this that I'd argue if you made those images 350 pixels again. :) Bryan 01:20, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)

 * Thank you very much for your prompt and very informative response. I agree that many find 350 pixels too wide, but I feel that the 250 pixel WP "standard" is too small - I have been recently been setting to 300 pixels in the hope that this will stick, but it still gets downsized in some articles - which I why I have taken to galleries and (only in a few and especially appropriate cases), wide images isolated from the text (not only the Sundial Bridge but also a bridge panorama in the Wuhan section of the article. This latter example simply would not work well in a more restricted format. I admit to pushing the envelope further down in the article with the concert group panorama, especially since it is not isolated.

 * I will follow your model for right hand images in my new work and will try to go through my older articles as time permits. -- Leonard G. 02:34, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)

 * Unfortunately, I believe the Sundial Bridge article is a perfect illustration of what I said about how images should serve the text of the article rather than the other way around; that first 700 pixel image completely dominates the article, with the descriptive text about the bridge tucked away at the bottom where I have to scroll down to see it. Furthermore, at 700 pixels the image is too wide for people browsing on 640×480 or smaller screens (don't laugh, I bet Wikipedia's going to be a popular item for small handheld computers once a properly downloadable version is available :) and even an 800 pixel wide screen is a bit too small when you allow space for the sidebar, scrollbar, etc. And the image size is 93.5 kilobytes, which is a bit hefty for dialup users especially when combined with the four other thumbnails below. I'm going to shrink it down into a "conventional" right-floating thumbnail, I hope you won't mind too much. Bryan 02:52, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)

title: User talk:Bryan Derksen/Archive 8


text:
User talk:Bryan Derksen/Archive 9

Catherine Palace images
Greetings:

I'm still learning about images - I noticed that your positioning in individual thumbnails is now "none", but preceded by **div class="floatright"**

Could you please inform me more about this technique? How does this differ in effect from positioning each image "right"? I note that those editors with tiny monitors (800 px) object to the larger images - my theory is that a reasonably sized image may obviate the necessity of a click-through to what is in some cases an over-large image (see Three Gorges Dam and click on one of the first few images - I have not yet produced an intermediate as is needed in this case, not my contributed image), so I tend to prefer a 300 pixel minimum. I have also had a carefully constructed gallery destroyed by an editor - it appears that the editor did not like the detachment of image from text, as the gallery followed the text. This destruction resulted in some of the ugliest image layout I have yet seen on WP. I restored it by putting the gallery before the text and then referencing the specific image within the nested sub-article with a postage stamp sized image - see seismic retrofit. At least that has (thankfully) been left undisturbed for a while. Where a large number of images are to be shown I have been putting these in floating galleries (see Shanghai as an example) specifically so that they may be of reasonable size, and where the image is central to the theme of the article, to make it large and prevent text wrapping with appropriate coding. See Sundial Bridge for a large article preface picture with a trailing gallery. That article would definitely loose its impact with a smaller image as the image is a representation of the visual impact of the object. I do think that 250 pix is too small for my preferences in the particular case of Catherine Palace, but that a gallery is not yet appropriate for that article, and a large image would be inappropriate as the article is about the palace - not its visual importance as with the bridge article. What we really need is a variable image width by user screen width - at least it would be nice to set this up as a user preference. I think that there methods to get the user's width - at least the window size, but the Wiki engine would have to have some extensions to process this correctly.

By the way, what size monitor do you use and why did you feel that the images were out of control (a bit)?

Please respond here - I will watch your page.

Best wishes, -- Leonard G. 00:47, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)

 * Heh, many comments in one. I'll try to answer them all.
 * Firstly, the div. I use the "classic" skin rather than the "monobook" skin, and although I didn't know it at the time the "monobook" skin apparently automatically stacks floating images in a column down the side of the page. In "classic" it doesn't; try switching your preference over to "classic" skin temporarily and have a look at the version before my edit: . All the images are in a row at the top instead of a column down the side, which squeezes the text into a tiny little column on the left. By turning off the built-in layout code (using the "none" keyword) I forced the images to form a column, and by wrapping the whole group in a div I was able to tell the whole group of images to float to the right. Here's a quick demo, using a div with a visible border (and note that I'm still in "classic" skin):

without div (the "before" version):

In classic skin, this results in a row of images beside each other.

without div and with "none" keyword, putting images in a column in Classic skin:

with div floating the column to the right:

 * I have since learned that Monobook handles image layout better than Classic does, however, so I've mostly stopped doing that (but I haven't worried about going back and removing it from articles I've done that in, since it looks the same in Monobook either way). At some point I'm going to file a bug report and see if I can get Classic fixed to work like Monobook does.

 * As for resizing them down from 350 to 250 pixels, that was just due to my own personal preference for what a "good sized" thumbnail was. I agree that it'd be nice to have an adaptive thumbnail setting, once upon a time I used to just use the "thumbnail" keyword without specifying a size in the hopes that that would be implemented soon. Personally, I think Wikipedia articles should be primarily focused on the text and use images only to accentuate the text rather than as the main centerpiece of the article. Generally speaking I would only leave images larger than around 300 pixels if it was a map or diagram that would become illegible at smaller sizes. In my opinion a thumbnail should be large enough to let the reader know what's in the image so that he can decide if he wants to click and see the full-sized version and not much larger than that. However, I don't feel strongly enough about this that I'd argue if you made those images 350 pixels again. :) Bryan 01:20, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)

 * Thank you very much for your prompt and very informative response. I agree that many find 350 pixels too wide, but I feel that the 250 pixel WP "standard" is too small - I have been recently been setting to 300 pixels in the hope that this will stick, but it still gets downsized in some articles - which I why I have taken to galleries and (only in a few and especially appropriate cases), wide images isolated from the text (not only the Sundial Bridge but also a bridge panorama in the Wuhan section of the article. This latter example simply would not work well in a more restricted format. I admit to pushing the envelope further down in the article with the concert group panorama, especially since it is not isolated.

 * I will follow your model for right hand images in my new work and will try to go through my older articles as time permits. -- Leonard G. 02:34, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)

 * Unfortunately, I believe the Sundial Bridge article is a perfect illustration of what I said about how images should serve the text of the article rather than the other way around; that first 700 pixel image completely dominates the article, with the descriptive text about the bridge tucked away at the bottom where I have to scroll down to see it. Furthermore, at 700 pixels the image is too wide for people browsing on 640×480 or smaller screens (don't laugh, I bet Wikipedia's going to be a popular item for small handheld computers once a properly downloadable version is available :) and even an 800 pixel wide screen is a bit too small when you allow space for the sidebar, scrollbar, etc. And the image size is 93.5 kilobytes, which is a bit hefty for dialup users especially when combined with the four other thumbnails below. I'm going to shrink it down into a "conventional" right-floating thumbnail, I hope you won't mind too much. Bryan 02:52, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)

 * OK, I moved the main pix to the gallery - since it follows all text, this should answer your download objections. Note that some nontrivial computations are involved to get the images to flow without hangups (see my User Talk:Leonard G.. As the max size is now 505 wide [Sat AM - reduced to 404, other from 200 to 160, still looks good], this should be fine for small (800 pix) screens — I do not believe the WP should be crippled by considerations for handhelds and cellphones - this should be a max image width option set as a user preference. This is a multimedia environment, after all. Now if 505 [now 404] is too wide for 800 pix screens, all images in the gallery must be reduced in width proportionally to maintain image layout flow under various widths - but I do not expect that these should fit on a 256 wide (or whatever cellphones are) screen, It is bad enough that people are driving, walking and eating while talking on these infernal distractors, I don't want them watching too! (Help! I'm turning into my grandfather!)

 * By the way, I followed your instructions on four images in the seismic retrofit portion of San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, but as the first image was (appropriately) wider than the following, the images were left justified within the box. I set up two separate image flows to accommodate this problem. So this should work with various skins? - Leonard.

 * I did check the classic skin. Fortunately, monoblock works the same as classic when left aligned, the images stack in a wrapping row (otherwise my several floating galleries would not work). It appears that the problem is actually non-stacking to the right in monoblock, not a defect in classic. It would be nice to have more image control. Could you tell me how to get a centered image? That would be nice for certain isolated bridge images, e.g. first bridge at Wuhan and others that are by nature wide and short and cannot have text at the sides anyway ("center" does not work). -- Leonard G. 16:04, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)

 * There used to be a "center" tag that you could use in place of "left" or "right" in the wiki image markup, but unfortunately that got disabled at some point for reasons I'm not aware of. A lot of people do centering by setting the image's float tag to "none" and using a tag pair, and although I don't like using deprecated HTML like that I don't know of a better way offhand. I never use it myself because I never center images, I always float them right.

 * Very nice! - (I pushed this to 550 pixels. What do you think is "too wide" in the context of a centered, text free image? I intend to use use this on a few important bridge images, including some not yet uploaded. These have 5 to 1 or better horizontal to vertical aspect ratio and would look very nice as centered, isolated images. If too narrow for a wide screen they might look strange, so I want to go for the max (excluding PDAs), which I think would be somewhere around 600 pixels. I will still force text isolation "br style=clear:both] as done above, even though a test (without colons) of the example above showed it to not put text into the margins - that may be skin specific.

 * The current Sundial Bridge images are 404/160/160/160/160. If you think this is still to wide the next appropriate size would be 303/120/120/120/120 - feel free to experiment. Note that the main bridge image at this size in isolation I would consider too small, but in the context of the numerous trailing narrow images it may look fine, as the context of the gallery allows the dramatic sweep of the initial image to be seen clearly. -- Leonard G. 21:30, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)

URGENT! Which browser do you use? I was at my son's house today and he uses IE on the Mac, was showing him some pages - YECHH!. This does not work - all pictures are on left, no text until after bottom most image. I am removing the div stuff and returning to old form. Center is OK because at worst on IE the pix is left, rather than centered (I always kill boardering text for these anyway). Leonard G. 03:53, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

 * I use Mozilla 1.8a. Internet Explorer is notoriously poor at supporting some parts of web standards such as CSS, which is what the "style" attribute is using to do its thing. Bryan 03:57, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

 * So exotic layout things should be tested in IE, right? Since "center" ... "/center" works, I tried it with "right", but this was worse as the coding was displayed on the page. Since the only problem is with one seldom used WP skin (the default setup is other than that), and there are millions (or as Carl Sagon would say ....) of IE users, we should not use the method suggested above. (I use Safari on Mac.) Leonard G. 04:15, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

 * I've already mentioned that I've stopped using divs like that in most cases. However, I don't feel any particular need to bend over backwards for IE when it's IE's own fault for not understanding perfectly valid HTML markup. Bryan 04:24, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

 * I'll bet that they do understand it, they choose to not implement things properly - remember their (supposed) mantra - Embrace (the standards)- Extend (to be noncompliant)-Dominate (the market) &mspace; or something like that.

 * Probably. Embrace and extend. :)

So, why _is_ the hubble-barn commented out?
On the page, List_of_strange_units_of_measurement in the history, you mention that you found out why the section on the hubble-barn is commented out, but you don't explain what it was. What was it? I want to add it to the commented out section so people like you and me don't keep being confused. JesseW 07:33, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC) I found out it was done by User:Palapala so I asked on eir user page. JesseW 07:41, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)

 * Oo, hard to remember. I think it was because I noticed the edit summary of the edit where it was originally commented out:

(cur) (last) 02:22, 5 Mar 2004 Palapala (last entry awaiting confirmation)

 * But I'm not absolutely certain. I note that barn (unit) has an article that matches this description of it, but I don't think I was able to dig up anything confirming the length of a Hubble. Bryan 07:44, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)

NAMBLA
As I saw that you edited Roman Catholic Church sex abuse scandal I would like to invite you to help with conflicts in the article about the "North American Man/Boy love organization" as well. Get-back-world-respect 20:24, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

 * All I did was categorize it, and I'm already involved in another conflict about an article on a subject I'm not familiar with (PNAC) so I think I'll beg off of this one, sorry. :) Bryan 23:29, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Reminder
Please remember to list pages that you protect on Protected page (see the protection policy). Thanks. Angela. 00:29, Oct 20, 2004 (UTC)

 * Oops. I had assumed Category:Protected obsoleted that without checking. (I don't do this sort of thing very often :) Bryan 01:36, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

 * I had hoped it would, but unfortunately there wasn't consensus on that. Angela. 05:35, Oct 21, 2004 (UTC)

Deletionist campaign
Hi there. As someone who has displayed a fairly rational and objective attitude towards micronation articles in the past I thought you might be interested to note that the rabid deletionist lobby is on the march against them again.

The latest target is New Utopia, which although a poorly written article in its current form concerns a subject that is eminently encyclopaedic, being the latest in a long line of libertarian "new country projects" (and therefore representative of a notable social/historic phenomenon), being the subject of dozens of international press and TV stories, as well as the subject of a widely-known US Securities & Investment Commission investigation for fraud.

You might want to take a look at the VfD and respond accordingly.

For future reference you might also want to note the articles in the Micronations Category, in order to keep an eye on its contents; I’ve been adding a number of well-researched, illustrated, fully referenced articles to this category in recent months, but there are moves afoot thanks to a highly suspect ongoing arbitration of process to have me banned completely from writing anything at all about micronations on the basis that as the founder of one, anything I write is somehow self-promotional and/or controversial. --Gene_poole 22:36, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Invite
Hi

I'm posting this to invite you to participate in WP:LCOTW, a project you may be interested in. Please consider nominating and/or voting for a suitable article there. Filiocht 12:27, Nov 8, 2004 (UTC)

category:fictional places
Hi - A while ago, you changed category:fictional places to redirect to category:fictional locations (actually was a redirect, but you added the leading ":" before "category"). I suspect you already know, but category redirects effectively don't work (articles added to the redirected category don't show up in the "redirected to" category, etc.). I'll put category:fictional places in WP:CFD. -- Rick Block 02:12, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

 * Yeah, I recall that for a while I was using the redirect syntax with categories simply as a shorthand to let other human editors know "this stuff should be over there instead." Thanks for cleaning up after me. :) Bryan 02:48, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Misclassification

 * "… When you created the Commencement class category for them and moved them all over into it en masse, this distinction was lost and I'm going back through all the Commencement class ship articles to restore the WWII categories. …"
 * O, the embarrassment! Seriously, I'm sorry, I thought I was helping.
 * —wwoods 08:58, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

 * S'okay, it was only a dozen or so articles so it didn't take much effort. I just wanted to make sure you didn't do the same thing later with a category containing hundreds of ships, that would take rather a lot more effort. :) Bryan 16:11, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Bureaucratship
Hello Bryan - I just wanted to let you know that I'm running for bureaucratship, and I would like to ask for your vote, be it good or bad. I'm sending this message to a few users I respect who have interacted with me recently. Thanks, Andre ( talk )A| 00:33, Nov 16, 2004 (UTC)

Reversion, please...
Someone has vandalized the entry for composer Johann Nepomuk Huber (found via the Random Page function). Could you be so good as to set it back? Thanks. DS 19:40, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Category:Political parties by name
I have listed Category:Political parties by name on CfD, your input would be appreciated. - SimonP 22:34, Nov 22, 2004 (UTC)

 * Thanks, I've cast my vote and given my reasoning. Hope I don't get kicked out of the Derksen Conspiracy, I didn't notice Gangulf's real name until after I cast my vote. :) Bryan 00:57, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Re: 1993 or 3991
From Timeline of fictional future events, you changed it to a distant future event with the claim that:

"actually, it's not 3991 or 1993 but some extremely far distant period in the future when the universe has begun collapsing towards a Big Crunch.)"

changing the content to:

"The Red Dwarf crew travels into the far distant future to a point after the Universe has begun collapsing towards a Big Crunch, causing time to run backwards until it is the equivalent of 1993 on Earth again (or 3991, as the locals write it). They spend three weeks there."

On what do you base this explanation? Yes, I understand reversing entropy and whatnot, but your explanation is the result of bringing in outside knowledge, and not necessarily the actual explanation. Unless the writers actually state that your explanation is the correct one, you can't claim it to be the correct one.

In any case, moving in reverse isn't going to make us write "3991" instead of "1993" (the numbers were all facing in the right direction). Time would move in reverse, but our actions wouldn't be mirrored like that. The use of "3991" is what is called "funny". Since that Earth was obviously meant to be some weird version of 1993 where time goes in reverse, we should ignore the "3991" as just being a joke, and put under 1993 that they traveled to a parallel universe or something where time was going backwards to their own. As for the "3991", you could add a comment in, something like "even the date was humorously written backwards as 3991."

--Brian0918 03:53, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

 * I realize that it's not realistic, but that's what the explanation was in the episode itself. Here's a link to a transcript of the episode: http://www.darkdreamstealer.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/backwardsscript.html

 * The relevant exposition is this, from right after the Starbug crashes:

HOLLY: (vo) It's perfectly consistent with current theory. Everything starts with a Big Bang, right? And the universe starts expanding. Eventually, when it's expanded as far as it can, there's a big crunch, right? And everything starts contracting. Perfectly possible that time starts running in the opposite direction, as well.

 * So there you go, it's not a parallel universe, it's the distant future of our own universe. Bryan 04:52, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

 * Thanks for clearing all that up. --Brian0918 17:58, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Article Licensing
Hi, I've started the Free the Rambot Articles Project which has the goals of getting users to multi-license all of their contributions that they've made to... using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-by-sa) version 1.0 and 2.0 Licenses or into the public domain if they prefer. The CC-by-sa license is a true free documentation license that is similar to the GFDL (which every contribution made to Wikipedia is licensed under), but it allows other projects, such as WikiTravel, to use our articles (See the Multi-licensing Guide for more information). Since you are among the top 10 Wikipedians by edits, I was wondering if you would be willing to multi-license all of your contributions or at minimum those on the geographic articles. So far over 90% of people who have responded have done this.
 * 1) ...all U.S. state, county, and city articles...
 * 2) ...all articles...

 * Nutshell: Wikipedia articles can be shared with any other GFDL project but open/free projects using the incompatible Creative Commons Licenses (e.g. WikiTravel) can't use our stuff and we can't use theirs. It is important to us that other free projects can use our stuff.  So we use their licenses too.

To allow us to track those users who muli-license their contributions, many users copy and paste the   template (or    for public domain) into their user page, but there are other templates for other options at Template messages/User namespace. The following examples could also copied and pasted into your user page:

 * Option 1
 * I agree to multi-license all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:

OR
 * Option 2
 * I agree to multi-license all my contributions to any U.S. state, county, or city article as described below:

Or if you wanted to place your work into the public domain, you could replace   with   . If you only prefer using the GFDL, I would like to know that too. Please let me know at my talk page what you think. It's important to know, even if you choose to do anything so I don't keep asking. -- Ram-Man 16:30, Dec 2, 2004 (UTC)

Category : Memory
Sorry for my mess, I didn't notice. --Jondel 08:51, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)

 * S'okay. It's a big user page and that's the only error that was on it that affected other pages; it wasn't so bad. :) Bryan 16:22, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Category:Medicine
Hi Bryan. Please avoid Category:Medicine whenever possible; you put it on hepatosplenomegaly, which is a medical sign and qualifies for Category:Sign (medicine). The former is getting unbelievably huge, and I don't even know where to start... JFW | T@lk  09:55, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)

 * Yeah, I figured it probably belonged in a subcategory of medicine, but I was just cruising by on the random-page express so I tossed it into the root category for someone more knowledgeable to deal with. I occasionally go on category-cleaning sprees so I figure others must do that from time to time too, in which case putting this in Medicine would be useful. Bryan 18:21, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Sure, that's how I caught it :-). A function that Mediawiki could seriously do with is the rapid migrating of all articles in a category to another, without having to edit every single one individually... JFW | T@lk  16:19, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Weaubleau-Osceola structure formatting
Thanks for showing some interest in the Weaubleau-Osceola structure article I wrote. Unfortunately, the formatting change you made to the images doesn't work well under Firefox or Mozilla browsers. And although it works with I.E., it that's not the effect I was after. Since the caption relates both of the images to each other I put it between them without it being attached in a box as a caption to either. Of course, when submitting the article to Wikipedia I agreed to allow "merciless" editing by others, so it's not "my" article any more. Before putting it back the way it was, I'm interested in knowing why you weren't satisfied with the way I had originally put the pictures and caption into a table. --Kbh3rd 15:57, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * Hm. My main concern is that using tables for attaching captions to images isn't "meaningful", in that the software can't automatically understand that the caption text refers to the image and deal with it accordingly. Things like accessibility (alt tags), automatic removal or resizing of images, that kind of thing. So, when I see an image that has a caption attached to it via table, it's kind of reflex to just merge the two together in proper wiki formatting. A caption that refers to two different images is a bit awkward in that regard, though. How about I try splitting it between the two images, and see if that works better? Also, I'm curious in what way what I did "doesn't work" on IE and Mozilla. It looks fine to me in Firefox, and I was doing the same sort of thing routinely back when I was using Mozilla without trouble. Bryan 05:12, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * BTW, if it turns out that you can't abide by my changes, it's not like I'm going to fight tooth and nail to preserve them. Go ahead and revert, just make sure to preserve the category update I made at the same time. :) Bryan 05:17, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * I was working from strictly a visual perspective and hadn't thought of the uses of the caption as a form of meta-data attached to the image. It would be possible to not use "thumb" but still have a caption on the image that would show up on mouse-overs and be available for other computer-mediated uses, while maintaining the original visual layout.  But what you've done works pretty well, too, and passes the "keep it simple" test.  Maybe I'll play with it some more, or maybe I'll leave it be.  Thanks for your contribution.

 * The problem I saw with both Mozilla & FireFox is shown in this screenshot. Odd that you report not seeing a problem in FireFox.  Perhaps it's manifestation depends on window size affecting the layout of the elements.  This screenshot is from Mozilla 1.7b on Linux, but I saw the same thing with FireFox 1.0 on Windows. --Kbh3rd 17:05, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * Ah, I see. I use the "Classic" skin which doesn't have underlines under the headers, so I wouldn't see that problem on my browser one way or the other. One sec, I'll switch to monobook and check the old version... yup, there it goes; I get the same thing when I view in Monobook. Could it be that the PNG has a transparent background? Checking... yup, so it does. I suspect that if the background of the PNG was white this little bug would never have been noticed. :) Now that the thumbnail keyword is being used there's a box around the image that seems to be preventing the header underline from spilling over into it any more, but if you like I could switch the image over to a non-transparent white background as well. That would also prevent problems if for some bizzare reason someone decided to read Wikipedia with a black page background. :) I'm going to see if I can find a place to post a bug report about this, it seems likely nobody's ever noticed this happen before since it's a pretty unusual circumstance. Bryan 01:39, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Category: Islands of New Zealand
Hi Brian - I've moved the category "Islands of New Zealand" back where it belongs (under "New Zealand geography", but NOT under "Locations in New Zealand"). Please read the reasons at the discussion page for the category, or the detailed discussion of why it is categorised as it is at WikiProject New Zealand places and/or New Zealand Wikipedians' notice board 06:11, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Waste Management
Thanks for letting me know. Pedant 23:46, 2004 Dec 4 (UTC)

Kovoor Article
I did remove a lot in terms of word count. But did you actually read both versions or just eyeball it? If the latter, please look again. The original was very poorly written, long-winded, and include a lot extraneous detail, such as practically the full text of the "challenge", which I shortened to a sentence. The details of the challenge were not especially interesting, unless you were planning to copy it for your own challenge. If you read it and still think there is something important lost, as I said on the discussion page, I will work it back in. I spent quite a lot of time working on those edits, with the aim of improving the article, and I would be saddened to simply have it lost, just because I made the article shorter. Surely these matters are not decided only by word count. --BM 01:03, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * I did read it, and while I agree that the current version is a bit wordy I still think that your version cuts out far too much. Better to be a bit wordy than to willfully omit relevant information, IMO. Bryan 01:07, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * As I said, I'm willing to work back in information that others think relevant, if I removed something that others think is relevant. Tell me what it is the relevant informat that I dropped..   This blanket reversion stuff is pretty discouraging.   How do any of these articles ever advance except around the edges if every change of more than a sentence or two is immediately suspect and reverted all the time?   It is very frustrating.  For example, rather than revert me, why not simply edit back in the paragraphs where you think I overdid it?  I am sure you didn't intend to be rude, but someone could easily take it that way. --BM 01:28, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * By the way, what is your interest in the Kovoor article? I didn't notice in you in the history.   Are you following me around or something?

 * Only a little. I had moral relativism watchlisted, saw you remove a link that seemed relevant without explanation, and clicked "user contributions" to see whether you were a vandal. I don't think you are, but that happened to be the one other example I found in my cursory search of an edit I disagreed with. As for why I didn't just edit back the bits I thought were over-trimmed, well, that would have ended up pretty much exactly like a revert anyway. Bryan 06:01, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * Well, you might want to check out Universism which is probably going to be deleted. That link was added by someone promoting his article on the religion he invented last year called Universism.   I left a lot of the links he created because the VfD process isn't finished yet, but I did remove links where I thought the links were gratuitous.   It's true that Universism argues as the editor stated, but it is not distinctive in that regard.    I left the sentence describing the argument, but made it a passive mode sentence.

 * I restored the link before I looked at the Universism page, since the section had "Universism" right in the title I figured it was pretty important to actually link there so people could find out what it meant. If Universism is ultimately deleted as an irrelevant fringe organization, then I'd have no problem with removing reference to it from moral relativism altogether. The current vote tally shows an even split on whether to keep or delete, though, which suggests to me that deletion is unlikely - Deletion policy suggests that consensus to delete is usually considered to be around a 2/3 majority. All of which is irrelevant to our debate over the contents of the Kovoor article, of course; I was just explaining why it is that I happened to see what was going on over there and weigh in on the matter. Bryan 00:55, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * Well, its long so probably you didn't read much of it.  All but about 5 or 6 of the "Keep" votes are people who appeared for the first time after the vote started, and have no edits other than on that page.   Either sockpuppets or universists organized to vote.    Normally such votes aren't counted.   So, despite the appearances, the Delete side is actually overwhelmingly winning at the moment. --BM 03:12, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * That'll be up to whichever admin eventually gets around to reviewing the vote. Bryan 04:00, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * Wow. I finally tried reading some of that VfD discussion, what a mess over there. I don't envy that admin trying to sort it out. Fortunately for me, I still have no opinion on the deleteworthiness of Universism myself and so won't be wading in. :) Bryan 01:57, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)

The Humungous Image Tagging Project
Hi. You've helped with the WikiProject Wiki Syntax, so I thought it worth alerting you to the latest and greatest of Wikipedia fixing project, User:Yann/Untagged Images, which is seeking to put copyright tags on all of the untagged images. There are probably, oh, thirty thousand or so to do (he said, reaching into the air for a large figure). But hey: they're images ... you'll get to see lots of random pretty pictures. That must be better than looking for at at and the the, non? You know you'll love it. best wishes --Tagishsimon (talk)

Decategorization
No, I don't mind. As you can see I am working on making standard Elections in pages. They were just for a test in this sandbox. Gangulf 06:58, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Image copyright
Hi! Thanks for uploading Image:Outphase.png. I notice it currently doesn't have an image copyright tag. Could you add one to let us know its copyright status? (You can use if you release it under the GFDL, or  if you claim fair use, etc.) If you don't know what any of this means, just let me know where you got the images and I'll tag them for you. Thanks so much, Edwinstearns 21:31, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * I don't know what the copyright is, I got it from http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Outphase.png which lists the uploader as "Automated conversion". I'll add a link in the article page. Bryan 00:54, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)

RFC pages on VfD
Should RFC pages be placed on VfD to be deleted? I'm considering removing Requests for comment/Slrubenstein, Requests for comment/Jwrosenzweig and Requests for comment/John Kenney from WP:VFD. Each of them was listed by CheeseDreams. Your comments on whether I should do this would be appreciated. - Ta bu shi da yu 03:26, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Unverified images
Hi! Thanks for uploading the following images:

 * Image:Inv2.png
 * Image:Inv3.png
 * Image:Inv4.png
 * Image:Inphase.png

I notice it currently doesn't have an image copyright tag. Could you add one to let us know its copyright status? (You can use if you release it under the GNU Free Documentation License,  if you claim fair use, etc.) If you don't know what any of this means, just let me know at my talk page where you got the images and I'll tag them for you. Thanks so much. [[User:Poccil|Peter O. (Talk, automation script)]] 07:30, Dec 10, 2004 (UTC)

P.S. You can help tag other images at User:Yann/Untagged_Images. Thanks again.

 * Those were all moved over from meta, and there was no licence or uploader identification over there. I've added links ot the original sources now but other than that can't help. Bryan 07:46, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Also:
 * Image:Concurrent exchange.png RedWolf 00:02, Dec 24, 2004 (UTC)

 * Made that one myself, I'll go PD it. Bryan 07:24, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * Image:Cys-stick.png RedWolf 18:24, Dec 25, 2004 (UTC)

 * That used to be part of Image:Amino acids 2.png, which is GFDLed. Bryan 19:24, 25 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * Image:Quadwave.png RedWolf 02:56, Dec 31, 2004 (UTC)

 * Same as the various inv*.png images, that's from meta and has no licence information over there. Bryan 04:14, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * Image:Phospholipid structure.png From nupedia RedWolf 05:33, Dec 31, 2004 (UTC)

 * It's from Nupedia. Nupedia was released under the GFDL. Bryan 05:41, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Strong Atheism
Bryan, that last removal was a glitch which I didn't intend. Not quite sure what happened. I was editing a section, and the article ended up consisting of just that section. I was in the process of fixing the problem, when you did. By the way, your "fix" lost many of my other edits, which are generally in the vein of fleshing out the existing arguments. --BM 02:17, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * Ah, by all means revert me then. You did 19 edits in a row without any edit summary for any of them, so I didn't bother trying to figure out what was done in each; I just did a diff of the first version and the last one. This is another good reason why you should be putting some sort of descriptive comment in the edit summary field. Bryan 02:21, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Smart quotes
Heya, thanks for cleaning up the smart quotes mess my browser so wonderfully highlighted. I try to keep an eye out for smart-quotes when I edit, but occassionally I miss a few. --fvw* 06:19, 2004 Dec 13 (UTC)

Energy Development and Hubbert's Peak Theory
There is a little storm brewing at Hubbert peak concerning, well, many things. But currently concerning how to organize information concerning future development of energy schemes (phrased as "Oil Alternatives" or "Future energy development" depending on whom you ask). As you might guess, Hubbert Peak is an article that might be expected to draw a lot of public interest and heat; Energy development is not. We could use your input regarding how to proceed. Visit Talk:Hubbert Peak to contribute. Thanks for your consideration. Tom - Talk 21:06, Dec 15, 2004 (UTC)

 * Taking a quick look through the edit history, the only thing I think I've done on that article is adding category:petroleum. I don't know anything else about the subject so I suspect I won't be able to help resolve the issue, sorry. Bryan 00:43, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death
Aloha. I noticed that you added/modified the image tag on the Doctor Who page, so I figured you might be the right person to ask a particular question, as I've been unable to find the answer to this question in the guideline or policy pages. What are the rules regarding screenshots of tv and film? I would like to be able to add them to a dozen or so pages but I haven't been able to confirm the acceptability of such edits. Any help you can offer is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance. --Viriditas | Talk 04:17, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * It's my understanding that the use of screenshots to illustrate things being discussed in articles about them, when there's no other way to illustrate those things, is a classic example of exactly the reason why the "fair use" exemption to copyright is there in the first place. As long as the screenshots are labelled with an appropriate fair use template (like the Fatal Death one) there should be no problem. I don't know what the official Wikipedia policy is offhand but I'd be surprised if it said otherwise. Bryan 04:30, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your reply. As an example, look at the Gun Kata section from the movie Equilibrium.  Since it is difficult for most people to conceptualize what this is, I would like to upload a screenshot from the film.  Would this be an instance of fair use? --Viriditas  | Talk 04:54, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * I think so, but that's just my own personal opinion on the matter. If you're really concerned I'd suggest asking at the Village Pump, probably Village pump (policy). Or if you only plan to do a dozen or so images, you could just upload them and see if anyone complains. :) Bryan 05:21, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * You can also check out fair use for an overview. Bryan 05:29, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * Thanks. I'm familiar with the page, but not with the specifics of the images themselves.  I have identified four frames from Equilibrium that I would like to place in one image: two on top and two on bottom.  I will construct a small image, upload it, and then ask for your opinion. --Viriditas  | Talk 09:23, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)
 * Ok, here it is. --Viriditas | Talk 11:47, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * I'd recommend making the image out of full-sized screen captures, rather than uploading a smaller version. Someday Wikipedia may get printed and at that time we'll want every image to be as high a resolution as possible, until then the thumbnail feature will resize the image the same whether the source upload is big or small. Other than that quibble, though, looks fine to me. Bryan 15:54, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)
 * Ok, I've uploaded a better image on the Equilibrium page. Let me know what you think.  Can you help me delete the old images?  I've moved the image to a different name because I ran into trouble trying to save and replace (it wouldn't let me for some reason, cache problem?)  Thanks for your help in advance. --Viriditas  | Talk 23:54, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Deleted - you can also use Images for deletion to call for image deletions, if you don't want to have to hunt up admins to ask directly. If you think you're having cache problems, the way to solve it on most browsers that I'm aware of is to hold down the shift key while clicking on the reload button - for Mozilla-derived browsers and IE, at least, that causes the browser to ignore all cached files and go right back to the source. I had to do that myself when I first viewed the updated image at the old location, the size of the image had been updated in the HTML image display code but the old file was still being used, resulting in a hugely pixellated image. Bryan 00:26, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Oh, I just noticed; there's a subcategory of fair use images specifically for screenshots. Use instead of  to label screenshots with. Bryan 02:41, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the tips. --Viriditas | Talk 05:38, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Sun article
This article currently looks horrible on my browser for some reason. There's this huge blank space in the middle going all down to the bottom of the box on the right....Is it just me? When I added the spectum it filled the big empty spot and made everything look ok...--Deglr6328 06:10, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * I'm not seeing it. I use Firefox 1.0 and the Classic skin at 1024x768 resolution. I'll try out the Monobook skin in a moment, which I assume is what you're using? Bryan 06:13, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)
 * Looks fine for me in Monobook, too. What browser, resolution, and skin are you using? Bryan 06:22, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * IE 6 @ 1280X960 --Deglr6328 06:37, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * Unfortunately quite far outside my experience, then; I'm not sure what could be causing it. It's possible that IE isn't handling certain CSS elements the same way Firefox is, but I can't really offer any suggestions on how to fix things. Perhaps try different Wikipedia skins and see if any look better? Bryan 06:41, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Speed categorization
My watchlist shows you managed to categorize four articles in under a minute! That's amazing. I work with categories a lot, and never get anywhere near that fast. Do you mind me asking what your process is? I dread categorization projects because they take so long. Any tips that you can offer? -Willmcw 06:51, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * Heh. Once upon a time I had someone make suggestions for the categorization bot they thought I was running, I'm glad I've still got it. :) The most important tool I've got in bulk categorization is the tabbed pane feature of my web browser, Firefox. Any tabbed browser should suffice, though. First, I open all of the pages that I'm going to be categorizing in separate tabs; I've configured Firefox to open links in new tabs in the background when I middle-click on them, so I just go down through the list of links middle-clicking each one (in my most recent spree I was working off of the stuff already in Category:High schools). If Wikipedia is being particularly sluggish, I'll then go through all the open tabs and click the "edit page" link on each of them before getting started on any actual editing; I'll sometimes have several dozen pages all loading in parallel in the background. Then, once everything's open and ready, I'll put the category tag I expect I'll be using most frequently into my clipboard.

 * Scroll to bottom of article, control-V paste, hit tab to jump focus to the edit summary, control-V paste, hit tab to jump focus to the minor edit checkbox and hit space (optional, but categorization generally is a minor edit IMO), hit enter, then move on to the next tab while the edit saves in the background. In really simple situations I can do the whole sequence of actions in about three seconds. In this case I was going slower, since I needed to actually think about what sort of category tags to put in (I was also categorizing schools into the education-by-state categories, for example).

 * Then, once I've finished working on the batch of pages I'd opened, I wait until they all finish saving their changes and then close them all. And I'm ready to open up the next twenty or thirty pages to work on. :) Bryan 07:37, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * Awesome! Thanks for taking the time to spell it out. (Gee, you coulda been doing thirty edits in that time). I'm copying the info for future use. And thanks for your work on Wiki. Cheers, -Willmcw 08:15, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Succession boxes
Hello there. By convention, we don't group a peerage succession (e.g. Earl of Balfour) with offices. I've made the necessary change at Arthur Balfour. Just so you know. Mackensen (talk) 03:00, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * Okie-dokie. It's my first time using these things, I'll keep it in mind for the future. Bryan 03:02, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * No worries, and I'm glad to see someone else doing the grunt work. Happy editing. Mackensen (talk) 03:12, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * Hopefully any messes I've made will be easy to clean up now that the data's been put into templates like these. It looks like a very tidy system. Bryan 03:36, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * After over a year of trial and error...mainly error it seems like. Ah well, nothing like free time I don't have. Incidentally, I think I've straightened out the Lord Warden bit. Whomever went and did them all in the first place really didn't know what they were doing, and we're always tripping over them and fixing them. Mackensen (talk) 05:48, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * Thanks. BTW, did I guess right on the pluralization of Lord Warden when I created the category for them? I have the sneaking suspicion that I should have called it Lord Wardens instead of Lords Warden. :) Bryan 05:52, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * I have no idea ;). Go ask Lord Emsworth. He knows all. Mackensen (talk) 05:55, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * Hmm, it seems Emsworth is taking a vacation. From a cursory Google search, I'd think it's "Lords Warden", but Emsworth, John Kenney, etc. are far more knowledgeable on the topic than I am :) ugen64 20:05, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)

 * I'd say "Lord Wardens", since they are primarily Wardens rather than Lords. It's similar to Lord Chancellors, Lord Great Chamberlains, etc. (Have a look at Category:Great Officers of State.) Proteus (Talk) 15:03, 1 Jan 2005 (UTC)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: User talk:Bryan Derksen/Archive 9


text:
North Island College

North Island College (NIC) North Island College (NIC), is a community college located primarily on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada.

title: North Island College