User talk:Derek Ross/2002

2001 talk archive

Many thanks for the kind compliment re Budapest, Derek - I wouldn't have worried if I'd known you were starting an article. Have you any plans to tackle Belgrade? (I imagine we're both working through the "most wanted" list", and I'm putting off "Cotton" and "Wheat") One query, though: I incorporated your AD 198 for Aquincum, but another source indicates 106 or earlier. Any preference? Cheers, User:David Parker

No real plans to do Belgrade. The only reason that I did a stub for Budapest was because I'd visited on business last week and I had my guide book handy to pull a few facts from. It was a nice city to visit. The Roman remains at Aquincum are well worth seeing and the city as a whole has some great buildings going back to the Turkish occupation and before. As for Most Wanted, I only plan to do stuff that catches my eye. Re the 198 date, that's what the guidebook said for the date when Aquincum became an official Roman colony. The same guidebook says that the Celts founded the settlement soemtime in the 1st century BC and that Aquincum is from the Celtic for Many Waters referring to the local springs and spas. So your source for 106 may well be better since I'm pretty sure that the ancients Celts didn't write my guidebook and it didn't say where it got the info from! -- Derek

Per your comment about the kings pages in relation to the British Monarchs article: All I was doing was providing redirects to the British Monarchs article. The reason why, was to fix several broken links I have created over the months. It would also be odd to have a direct link to "British Monarchs" within a king or queen article - that term just doesn't flow like, king of England, for example ("king of England" is a redirect to "British Monarchs"). I didn't make any queeny broken links, so I didn't bother with that (there weren't that many anyway...). And while we are on the subject, the term "British Monarchs" sounds and looks like a proper name of a sports team. I would suggest changing that to British monarchs or beter yet the singular (and therefore easier to link to in an article) of British monarch to avoid confusion - I will fix the redirects I created to match the new article name if it is changed. -maveric149

Hello, Derek

Yes, there is something funny going on with Mary Stuart, isn't there? But I think it's part of the general wikipedia problems, and nothing personal!

Nice to see Scotland getting a bit of expert attention, anyway - from you, that is. user: Deb

Hi Derek. Thanks for the changes you made regarding the Gregorian calendar (October 5 - October 14). You made me look into the subject and I learned something. That's a good thing about Wikipedia. Thanks! -- G_from_B

Thanks Derek for your comments on the city naming debate. I'd like to raise a few responses here instead of on the subject page to keep the debate from spinning out of control in yet another direction. With your having raised the issue of multiple Newburghs we may need to review just what we mean by "where required". It is also important to remember that outside of the United Kingdom the knowledge of UK counties is somewhat wanting. Some even draw the conclusion that Scotland is a part of England.
In the simplest situation of only two cities to be disambiguated,
1. There is one city outside the UK and one in the UK.
2. There are two cities in different nations of the UK.
3. There are two cities in the same nation of the UK. My proposal was designed for situation 1, and yours for situation 3.

In disambiguating Aberdeen, South Dakota and Aberdeen, Scotland is it necessary to show the Scotish County?

In situation 2 would it be sufficiant to put [City A, Scotland] and [City A, England]?

In your example would there be any benefit to using the format [Newburgh, Fife, Scotland]?

Could you please answer on my talk page. Eclecticology 02:40 Aug 14, 2002 (PDT)

I appreciate your reply. The debate has gone a long way from the time when the Yanks believed that duplicate country names could happen in no universal country but their own. What you say about people who found communities not feeling the restraint of Bureaucracies on Geographical Names is true everywhere in the world. Our two positions aren't that far apart. I admit that limiting the examples to cities that only occur twice appears simplistic, but it is an essential stepping stone to solving more complicated situations. I also accept that the bulk of the labour fro disambiguating British place names will fall on British shoulders.

I think that most disambiguations will develop by degrees. It may very well start as Newport, Rhode Island and Newport, Wales, and the person who started that may not even imagine that there are several other Newports in the UK. The next person may realize that there is "one" in England and proceed to Newport, England. He may know about Newport-on-Tay in Scotland, but think of that as a completely different name. It may not be until yet another Wikipedian comes along that Newport, Wales becomes Newport, Gwent and Newport, Dyfed.

Your example of Kincardine was an interesting one. I also found a Kincardine Parish in Perthshire, that few people might be presumed to know about. Of the two Scottish sites that you mention my old Times Atlas of the World shows the one in Fife as "Kincardine on Forth", and the one in Aberdeenshire as "Kincardine O'Neill" in Grampian. Even though I agree with your proposal for listing these two, how would I know whether to use Kincardine, Aberdeenshire or Kincardine, Grampian?

In an attempt to reconcile our approaches I would propose amending my proposal at the beginning to read "Where required, and you know of no other place in that nation of the UK with the same name, ... " What I had in mind when I first wrote this version was the question of the usage "Scotland" as opposed to "United Kingdom".

PS. I love the humour of Ivor Cutler.

Welcome to Wikipedia! --Ed Poor

What?? I'm sure that I've been contributing for longer than you have, since last summer at least. It's a bit late for Welcomes.

LOL, a bit belated, eh? -- a newbie

Hey Derek, welcome to Wikipedia! ;-)--branko

Derek, there is a vote on the city naming issue at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (city names). Since you participated in the debate, you may want to let your vote be counted as well. Jeronimo

Thanks, Jeronimo. I know about the voting and I've added mine to the issues I care about. However I don't care about some of the issues because they seem pretty trivial to me, so there's no point in my voting on them. I'll just go along with what other people decide. -- Derek Ross

I'm curious; what is the problem with "momentarily"? I've *never* heard anybody use it to mean anything other than "in a moment" or "for a moment" personally... Khendon

That's a big enough problem for me in a moment is time sequence; for a moment is duration: that's quite ambiguous for me. At the least it interrupts my reading flow. However people also think it means at that moment or temporarily. It's best just to avoid using it. -- Derek

Check the definition on dictionary.com Khendon... there does seem to be a usage problem identified with the word. Greg Godwin

Hmm - even so, the meaning "for a moment" is unquestionably valid - so why the change in Sleep apnea from (for example) "stops breathing momentarily during sleep" to the clumsier "stops breathing for a moment during sleep". And there's certainly no question of ambiguity; what would the potential misparse be? -- Khendon

Even though a sentence is grammatically and even semantically valid, it may still not flow well. Sentences using momentarily often fall into that category. If you don't like for a moment change it to something else -- but not momentarily, please. -- Derek

Whats the deal? Why were my posts removed? What does "reverting product placement" mean? You say it was copyrighted material, but I just got done writing these additions (for Daniel Amos, the Swirling Eddies, Terry Scott Taylor and Lost Dogs) 30 minutes ago. You *won't* find them *anywhere* else, because I wrote them. 100 percent my own words. Stop screwing with my additions. Please. There are other musical artists listed, why can't my favorites be listed too? I was working on additions for other musical artists - should I just abandon my efforts because my favorite styles of music are not welcome here? - jazz77

Just being careful. I haven't a clue what style of music the bands are, so it's a bit difficult to decide whether I like it or not. My reason for doing what I did was that anonymous IP users who contribute gushing text on bands -- copyright or not -- look like they're part of a record company publicity machine rather than people who want to contribute unbiassed material to an encyclopedia. You've taken a step forward by registering a nickname. If you just make the text a bit less sycophantic, a bit more NPOV, there will be no problem from me or anyone else. -- Derek Ross

Derek, I believe the last versions were not copyrighted. Some were missing a bit of NPOV, and I had never heard of the people, but it doesn't make it "product placement" I think.--AN

Fair enough, AstroNomer. Maybe I'm just too suspicious, it read too much like advertising bumf to me. -- Derek Ross

I understand that I suppose. However, I posted information on a dozen artists and bands yesterday (which I now know had some possibly copyrighted content problems). Just going through my favorites. Perhaps I have been "gushing" a bit too much on certain artists, but that was not my intention. I was just trying to give as much information as possible (well known artists that worked on some of the records, songs that had some degree of success, etc) as well as a "feel" for each artist's sound. I'll try to tone it down in the future. - User:Jazz77

Okay, in that case I apologise for being a bit quick off the mark -- Derek Ross

I get the feeling that I can't spell "successful" -- User:GWO

Could be! <grin> I wouldn't worry though, there's a lot of it about. -- Derek Ross

where is the page with the character map of different text symbols? Lir 22:04 Oct 18, 2002 (UTC)

I could be wrong but I think that this is on Wikipedia:Special characters

Derek,

I changed your Supreme Court reference in BBC to the United States Postal Service, it seems more of a valid comparison, to me. If you disagree, go ahead and change it. -- Zoe

yah Lir 23:02 Oct 18, 2002 (UTC)

The sure sign of Armageddon: a generation that knows nothing of the Twinkie -- Someone else

Naah, it's just that Scotland is still in the pre-Twinkie stage of civilisation -- Derek

Derek, thanks for telling me about the colon (:) character for commenting out false positives on the spellcheck list. I put back most of the words I took out. I'm keeping out contractions: they don't cause trouble and shouldn't be on the list. Don't you agree? --Ed Poor

Seems reasonable to me, Ed.

Thanks for fixing the spelling error in "propaganda". I can't believe I did that. -- GABaker

Hey, we all do it from time to time. Sometimes the hand is quicker than the eye. When I do it, I like to think of it as a typo rather than a spelling error. -- Derek

I've noted your change of "practice" to "practise" in the divination article. Although I, in Canada, would use the same spelling as you. Some of our American friends view "practice" in such circumstances to be correct. Eclecticology 13:45 Oct 28, 2002 (UTC)

Authoritative source: http://www.bartleby.com/61/85/P0498500.html

Thanks for pointing that out, Ec. I assumed that they always spelt it using the -s- form, like license. If they always spell it practice, then it's not a mispelling, just a US variation, so I'll stop changing it. -- Derek

Hey, when was it agreed that British English spellings were wrong and American English ones correct? I've noticed that your sterling efforts to reduce 'mispeelings' have branched out into removing u's from humour, even when talking about British subjects. [62.253.64.7] (15.43 GMT, 29 Oct)

Hmmm, looks like I was being over-zealous with humourous. Okay, since I'm British myself, I'll leave it alone. There are plenty others. -- Derek

Hey Derek-- how did you make that .ogg? It crashed ogg123 for me... DanKeshet

Sorry about that, Dan. The process was:

Isis uploads a wav file (mono, 11kHz,
I use Advanced WMA workshop to convert it to a WMA file.
I use the same utility to convert the WMA to an OGG file.
I don't check it because the PC I'm using doesn't have a sound card.
I upload it to Wikipedia
I check the Wiki link on another PC with a soundcard.
WinAmp3 doesn't crash but I don't hear anything either.
I revert the Wiki page.

I'll have to try again. -- Derek

I uploaded a version I made with oggenc, on quality level 0. (I had to resave the WAV file from Sound Recorder as regular PCM to get it to read in.) It's about half the size of the WAV (~125k instead of ~250); I can get it down ~85k-ish but the quality gets pretty bad at that point. --Brion 00:17 Oct 30, 2002 (UTC)

Thanks, Brion.

Derek: I've set up links on the project page to the 'clans' page Wikipedia:WikiProject Clans of Scotland/Clans of Scotland and the 'tartan' page Wikipedia:WikiProject Clans of Scotland/Tartan, with some suggestions on the 'clans' page for subjects it should include. My editor has just dropped my work for this month on me earlier than I expected and with less time than I need to do it, so I'm not going to be able to do anything on Wikipedia for about two weeks (maybe more). So would you please touch base with User:Ram-Man and User:fonzy and you all go ahead with those pages and the 'clan ross' sample page? Or, if nobody wants to do anything in the meantime, just let it sit, and I'll be back to it when I can. Thanks. -- isis 17:22 Nov 3, 2002 (UTC)

Okay, Isis

Thanks for the catch on Great Western. I changed your redirect to a disambiguation because Great Western had two inward links, neither of which was about the railway. I also merged that stuff into Isambard Kingdom Brunel, though it needed a bit of rewriting. --rbrwr

And a nice rewrite you did too! I had to catch the train home from work. That's why I didn't straighten things out properly myself. -- Derek

Re the Python_vs_java_typing_example. how did you come by this? did you find it useful? user_talk:Hfastedge

I was just searching for spelling mistakes and fixing them. I'm sure that it would be useful if I was working with either language but I'm afraid that I'm just another VB hacker so it's not directly relevant to my day job. If it's of any significance, I prefer Python to Java. -- Derek

Just to give thanks for your copyediting of the article Slovene language. I'll look your corrections carefully to learn something more about English language. I have checked them briefly and I do believe they do not change the meaning of the text. If I would find any other imperfections I will let you know. Best regards. --XJamRastafire 10:34 Nov 25, 2002 (UTC)

You're welcome. It's a nice, informative article on a subject which I find interesting but know little or nothing about. Therefore I tried hard not to change your content, while rephrasing the text to look grammatically more as a native English speaker would expect it to be. I'm glad that you don't mind. -- Derek Ross 23:06 Nov 25, 2002 (UTC)

Hi Derek: How are you? Thanks for merging both Joseph Bonnano articles. However, I have to say it probably needs to be merged into the Joseph Bonnano headline, not Joseph Bonanno, because I checked the aol for websites and most of them have him as Joseph Bonnano. Other than that, I want to congratulate you on a excellent job done on the merger. You were able to keep the most important facts signaled by both pages, and you kept the report enjoyable

Thank you and God bless you.

sincerely yours AntonioMartin

Antonio, thanks for the praise. However you deserve it more than I do. Your article was excellent. I wanted to merge the articles because yours had great content, very detailed, but the other still had a couple of facts which were worth keeping.

There are a lot of references on the Web to Bonanno and to Bonnano on different sites. Some sites even manage to use both spellings, as the Wikipedia used to do. The reason that I chose to go with Bonanno, is that the name means Goodyear, in English, if spelled Bonanno but doesn't have an obvious meaning when spelled Bonnano. That is what convinced me that Bonnano is a widely used mispelling. If it turns out that I'm wrong, it can always be changed back and I will happily undertake the work involved.

Cheers, Derek

Howdy. I was delighted to read your article on "dramaturge"--- this is what I do as a profession, and I have never seen a more accurate description. I wonder if you could tell me from where you gathered that information. ? BarkingDoc

Thanks for the praise, BD. Unfortunately I cannot accept it as I have done little more than spelling corrections to that page. The praise should really go to User:Stefan Brun, who originally contributed it. Unfortunately he no longer seems to contribute to the Wikipedia, so you may not get an answer to your question. In any case I am glad that you liked the article. Please feel free to add to it. -- Derek