User talk:BlankVerse

I followed the red "My talk" link here. I guess that I should write something so it is no longer a red link. BlankVerse 20:59, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

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Happy editing! -gadfium 21:03, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Book of Kells

Hi, thanks for the hint. I started using Firefox recently, but have not explored that aspect of the browser. I shall. I've seen the older facsimile of Kells, but it was in the Rare Book Room at Univ. of Oklahoma library, so I wasn't allowed to really look at it long. One of my Art History profs had a copy of a page from the new facsimile that the publisher had sent out, trying to tempt Universities into buying the facsimile. Very cool. Sadly, OU didn't want to come up with the $18,000 purchase price. Dsmdgold 14:49, Jan 28, 2005 (UTC)

Kryon VfD

Thanks for the compliment about my rant ... I think. Cheers, --BM 18:35, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Yes, it comes down to how many editors there are on an article, and who they are. If there are enough reasonable editors with an article on their watchlist, the POV warriors can generally be kept at bay, and the result will be reasonable and NPOV. There are plenty of examples of this, to be fair. But for many of the more obscure articles, there might be only one or two "reasonable" people who have noticed the problem article. Arrayed against them will be many more people who are determined to have the article reflect their zany point of view. And the latter are generally much more motivated. This is why there are so many mechanisms (the 'pastel-colored template boxes') to call attention to problem articles. It is to increase the number of reasonable editors fighting back on a problem article. Unfortunately, as Wikipedia grows larger and more popular, the ratio of good to bad editors seems to be dropping, and the pastel-colored boxes don't work as well as they used to. Indeed, sometimes the pastel boxes just tell the trolls where they should invest their efforts. Moreover, as you point out with Charles Darwin, only one extremely motivated person, perhaps with the support of a few trolls or a few misguided but well-meaning people with idiosyncratic interpretations of Wikipedia policies, can stand off the entire Wikipedia for a long time. --BM 16:00, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Marietta, Georgia

Thanks very much for the pointer. My plan was to let 66.20.28.21 hang himself on the medical torture and Phil Gingrey pages, since there is already an arbitration ruling against him and yet he keeps going back there. If he abandons that and focuses on other pages, including Marietta, I'll go through the bureaucracy again if it is necessary. (He pushes his agenda on a fairly wide variety of pages, and it's conceivable he could keep creating sock puppets and editing different groups of pages, making him very hard to catch.) Ultimately I would like to see him permanently banned on sight—I don't really care how it is achieved. --dreish~talk 18:53, 2005 Feb 6 (UTC)

Lucas David

Thank you very much for looking into that dispute, and for the detailed comments! I summarized some text from related german wiki articles on Talk:Lucas David, and also gave it a try on the main page: Lucas David was born 1503 in Olsztyn (Allenstein), in the Bishopric of Warmia (Ermland) of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth Please have a look. Thanks -- Chris 73 Talk 00:26, Feb 7, 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the response to the request for comment on Lucas David. I found only one reference (so far), in German from 1875. The link is on the article and talk page now. It lists him as prussian historian, and indicates that he was hired to write a history to counteract the bias of the polish histories related to prussia (where have I heard that one before ... ;) However, I will keep on looking for more references. -- Chris 73 Talk 09:46, Feb 7, 2005 (UTC)

Also worked my way through http://scholar.google.com/, Amazon full text search, MSN search & MSN Encyclopedia and encyclopedia britannica. I also found the link to his volumes of Prussian History you mentioned, but unfortunately i am not nearby. -- Chris 73 Talk 10:13, Feb 7, 2005 (UTC)

Thank you!

Just a quick "thank you" for voting me for admin. Now all I've got to do is find out how to use these worrying new powers... Grutness|^hello? 06:19, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Meta-templates considered harmful

Quite frankly I am a little confused. From your comments at Wikipedia talk:Meta-templates considered harmful#Scope creep it looks like you are endorsing User:Netoholic's overwrought and distorted description of the stub creation process. So instead of getting a substantive response to my comments, Netoholic just adds a "me, too" post, and then accuses me of trollingand deception as well. BlankVerse ∅ 20:27, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Granted that Netoholic's comments were slightly out of line, I was merely pointing out the facts, and correcting some of your statements. I do believe that Meta-templates are harmful, and it would be best to include the subst: in all the stub sorting templates. -- AllyUnion (talk) 22:19, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Personal attacks

Thank you. These are not the first attacks by ExplorerCDT. Ashley Pomeroy said she/he's a long term pest. Take a good look of WP:RFC/ExplorerCDT 2 and his talk page if you're interested. :-D — Instantnood 06:13 Feb 23 2005 (UTC)

Re: re:USer:ExplorerCDT

I will do so if things go on in that way. It seems he's a little bit better since Hadal mentioned about it at his discussion page. — Instantnood 07:30 Feb 23 2005 (UTC)

Please fix your signature

Every time you post on a talk page, you've been turning all of the text below green. Please also check your contributions and fix this on pages that you have already accidentally 'colorized'. Thanks.--Pharos 07:59, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

ROC and Taiwan

Hello BlankVerse. The vote and discussion at Wikipedia:Requested moves#Economy of Taiwan → Economy of the Republic of China is getting messy. Do you think there's anything that we could do? — Instantnood 12:47 Feb 28 2005 (UTC)

Thank you. The situation has become pretty unsatisfactory and it revealed a big problem, or more concisely a loophole, of Wikipedia: the most heard versions rule whenever it comes to consensus building. Founders of the Wikipedia might be ambitious enough that such a collaboration would create a best encyclopedia ever, and the present situation at WP:RM is perhaps the answer. :-D — Instantnood 08:19 Mar 1 2005 (UTC)

Comments about Category:Gay Travel Destinations on my talk page

Thanks for the good comments and suggestions. I have since then created the article gay tourism and linked the list of gay villages, as well as the list of gay resorts to that article. While I see gay travel destinations very clearly as encompassing both the villages and resorts, I see it a bit more broad: essentially, the city is the destination while the village-within-the-city is one of the attractions. And yes, I realize, it could easily be argued that some who travel to these destinations never get out of the village. Why, heck, some who travel to a destination never get out of their hotel!

Anyhow, I had no-o-o-o-o idea I had stepped into a hornet's nest with creating this category. In the meantime I think that the article with referenced lists, and eventually an annotated list of gay travel destinations, will do the trick. And as for why these American and Canadian destinations were listed in the category? I had used as a starting point the list of US and Canadian cities listed on the Columbia Fun Maps site, thõse gay tourism specialists who publish specialty maps of gay travel destination. If there is a market to sustain their publishing efforts I think its fair to surmise there is probably also enought of a gay presence (tourist and otherwise) to make this list.

By the by, if you want to make your comments publically heard on the official discussion page please do so.

And as for country dancing and tap dancing, and why not clogging— well, yes, I did try clogging for about six months (and loved it). Unfortunately my knees ain't what they used to be anymore, so I have settled in my older age into something as comfortable as square dancing, gay square dancing when possible. (Sure wish someone knowledgeable would write that darn article about clogging already. I've been red linking it for ages!) Sfdan 09:15, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Iff

Oops - okay, I'd assumed it was a typo. Despite having studied logic in Introductory Philosophy at university, I've never come across iff before. Sorry about that! Grutness|^hello? 09:47, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

RfC

Hello there. I am recently being listed on RfC. Feel free to comment as you wish to. I regard it as a way out and to have the matter settled. Thanks. — Instantnood 12:48 Mar 1 2005 (UTC)

The sharing at RfC seems to be over. I have made a response there. Please take a look. I do hope that with everyone's effort Wikipedia will soon be the best encyclopedia ever. :-D — Instantnood 21:24 Mar 5 2005 (UTC)

Who wrote that, you asked on my talk page...

This guy did, in the work Tsurezuregusa, a collection of essays. KittySaturn 07:20, 2005 Mar 6 (UTC)

Translation is my own :P The "boring" part is actually a question: "Is the truth boring?" KittySaturn 07:56, 2005 Mar 7 (UTC)

I look to [1] usually for my Tsurezuregusa text, which also provides a (somewhat free-style and modernised) translation into modern Japanese. As for creating an article there, since I know less than what the Japanese Wikipedia article says about it, I will admit now that even if I do create that article, it'd probably be no more than a translation of the Japanese version! :-P -- KittySaturn 12:06, 2005 Mar 10 (UTC)

"Mainland China" in titles

Hello. I have proposed at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Chinese) to change the title of some articles and categories. Would you be interested to join the discussion and say something? — Instantnood 20:41, Mar 11, 2005 (UTC)

Long Beach, California

This is in response to your message left on my talk page regarding the photo I added to the Long Beach page.

I took that shot on the 405 northbound south of, if I am recalling my street smarts correctly, Baldwin Hills, which can be seen in the distance. I honestly can't remember what offramp this was around, but I believe it may have been around the Crenshaw offramp. --Lan56 08:15, Mar 13, 2005 (UTC)

You are quite intelligent in that area. I wasn't very familiar with the south bay area, so thank you for clearing that up. I will move it to Carson page instead. Thank you again. --Lan56 20:27, Mar 13, 2005 (UTC)

I didn't add it to Carson either, and removed it from Long Beach article, so it isn't anywhere right now. I do agree that it isn't the most interesting photo, but I guess I thought since I had it I might as well make use of it. Either way, it is not in use. --Lan56 04:24, Mar 15, 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the reqimage

I had a hard time finding the reqimage marker before. If you can update the image templates page with your marker, that's how I was looking for templates before. All Templates I'd also suggest a redirect from the old one to the new one so people don't make my "mistake" again.

Cwolfsheep 17:59, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Civility

I'd like to ask you to stop being so hostile towards me. Please remove or rephrase your comment on Wikipedia:Templates for deletion#Template:CompactTOC5, because it is unnecessarily aggressive and insulting. I have never spoken to anyone in such a way, and don't deserve it, no matter what your feelings toward me are. -- Netoholic @ 18:26, 2005 Mar 21 (UTC)

Done. -- Netoholic @ 16:45, 2005 Mar 22 (UTC)

Your vote is needed!

Hello BlankVerse. Despite the ongoing discussion at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Chinese) over the use of the terms "mainland China" and "People's Republic of China", SchmuckyTheCat and Huaiwei have listed category:Cities in mainland China, category:Companies of mainland China and category:Laws of mainland China onto Wikipedia:Categories for deletion.

Your vote is now essential and vital for the survival of these categories, and to avoid attempts to bar the Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Chinese) from truly enforced. — Instantnood 20:45, Mar 24, 2005 (UTC)

Update: there's also a poll at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Chinese). — Instantnood 01:02, Mar 25, 2005 (UTC)

Arbitration

Hello BlankVerse. I've got listed onto requests for arbitration by SchmuckyTheCat. Could you have a look? Thanks. — Instantnood 04:32, Mar 29, 2005 (UTC)

New Admininstrator Thank You's

Hi BlankVerse,

I would like to thank you for your vote of support and confidence for my adminship, it has been much appreciated. If you need anything in future that requires my attention, please do not hesitate to contact me. :)

- Cheers, Mailer Diablo 18:29, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Let me add my thanks for your support in my nomination as well. I look forward to helping out. - BanyanTree 04:12, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Haiku

Ok. Thanks, I stand corrected. My Concise Oxford Dictionary is over 5 years old. Andycjp

Please come and vote!

Following the long discussion at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Chinese) regarding proper titling of ROC-/Taiwan-related topics, polls for each single case has now been started here. Please come and join the discussion, and cast your vote. Thanks. — Instantnood 06:16, Apr 6, 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Categories for deletion/Restructuring

Please revisit this and vote on #2C and #6 (variations on earlier proposals). Yours, Radiant_* 15:31, Apr 14, 2005 (UTC)

Unexpected

I'm sorry to see you still feel you and I haven't worked things out. To be honest, we did start to work on some solutions, just before the Wikipedia talk:Avoid using meta-templates was bombarded :/ . Youshould have let me know these things were still pressing, and I would have addressed them. I find it surprising that you tend to think that I have done something wrong in my dealings with Xiong. That whole subject needs to be better covered, and held separate from my Arbitration, I think. I've actually just started authoring an RFC on him (Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Xiong). It's not open at the moment, but your input is welcome.

When I've made those new policy proposals, or suggested any changes, it is becuase I've seen others voice the same concern. To blame me for the failure of WP:RFDA when many others also supported, isn't fair. I invited input on it widely, and tried to address concerns on the talk page.

Regarding Wikipedia:Meta-templates considered harmful, it was not a "weapon", but an attempt to put all of this technical explanation in one place which can be useful to everyone. Let me add something to your "timeline"... just before Itai created Template:Sisterproject on 27 Jan 2005, he first attempted to make a related change to all of the sister project templates (open this, and look just before that date and time). I wasn't stalking him by posting that template up for deletion 50 minutes after creation... it was because his insertion of it showed up in my watchlist when those templates were edited by him to insert it.

I'm sorry you choose to interpret my actions from such a negative perspective. I'm also sorry it seems too late to salvage things between us. -- Netoholic @ 07:51, 2005 Apr 19 (UTC)

Regarding the "Scope creep" section, when I made that edit, I thought I was incorporating much of the feedback, while preserving what I feel was good advice. It was a good faith edit to address concerns. I think we're both guilty of not reacting well to each other. Like I said, before the disruption that occured on that page, I had honestly tried to make strides. When the guideline discussion started, I didn't ignore your comments, I simply didn't act on all. I did take your suggestion as to the name of the page. Regarding subst:, I have always thought of it a great way to avoid the meta-template problems (check out this early comment I made about it). I didn't like your take on it, but I did like the later one that was inserted by someone else.

I don't need an outside person to look at things. I respect and understand your words, but from my perspective I think there are some things people miss (or choose not to see, in some cases). -- Netoholic @ 07:53, 2005 Apr 20 (UTC)

Bravo! Bravo!

Here for you is WikiThanks for stepping up to the plate in the RfA against you-know-who. I really appreciate your comments -- all of them. — Xiong熊talk 03:07, 2005 Apr 20 (UTC)