User talk:Jeffq/2005

Appreciate the editing

Thanks for cleaning up Grosse Pointe Blank(1997). This is the first page I've done any major work on; knew the conversation looked wrong but wasn't sure how to correct it. Also had no idea how to eliminate stub message (I have a parrot-like ability to remember movie lines, but extremely limited computer skills... as you'll have gathered from the way I went about current message). User:RPickman

No problem. Most people have the advantage of seeing other dialog samples and their Wiki markup while editing a quote article. You did rather well considering you didn't have that info available. You might check out Wikiquote:How to edit a page for many helpful tips about editing. Also, the easiest way to sign your comments on Talk pages is to end them with "-- ~~~~" (without the quotes). The hyphens are just a convenient way to mark a signature, and the four tildes cause the editor to insert your user name (with a link to your user page) and the timestamp of your comment when you save the page. (By the way, as far as I know, the habit of copying Talk page dialog between myself and others (like I've done here), with the Talk page owner's text in italics, is my own convention. Most people just carry on conversations by posting their comments on the other's page, so you have to go back and forth between the pages to follow the conversation. I just think my way is easier for each person to follow. ☺) — Jeff Q 01:36, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I've actually looked over the how-to-edit material, though I could clearly stand to go over a lot of it in more detail. "Grosse Pointe" is one of my favorite flicks; when I started work on the stub it consisted of 2 quotes (one of them a misquote). I probably should have looked over some complete pages before I set to work, but I decided to get some of the material in place first and get the formatting straight later... which you took care of... which gives me a sample to work from. Should come in handy for my next pet project, a "True Grit" page.

I appreciate the additional tips (by the way, your talk-page method is indeed clearer). I may pester you from time to time for tech tips; I hope you won't be shy about telling me to bugger off (in less, or more, blunt language, depending on your inclination & degree of irritation) when/if it gets to be a pain.

Irrelevant tangent: your stuff on "Zorro the Gay Blade" really takes me back!My brother and I can still rattle off entire scenes from memory.

--RPickman 14:32, 11 Jan 2005 (UTC)RPickman

Caught the supersize margins while previewing message to check for typos (though I didn't know what caused it). Decided to leave it alone, as it went so nicely with my "ignorant newbie" theme. Will try to avoid same blunder in future (most likely so I can try out some new blunders). --RPickman 03:17, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Trying to move a page

I'm about finished with True Grit page; all it needs is a plot summary and director/writer acknowledgements. Page only exists in "List of Films" section. I'd like for it to be accessible in Western films but haven't been able to work out how to make this happen. Any pointers you could pass on would be greatly appreciated (if I'm just overlooking something in the how-to-edit stuff, please disregard this request). --RPickman 00:06, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Actually, it's not a question of moving the page. It's a Category designation. Anything with a category tag on the page automatically gets added into the appropriate Category listing. (I don't know if Wikiquote says much about categories. They're relatively new in Wikidom. I've basically learned what I know by looking at pages with category tags embedded in them.) All you need to do is add the following line to the page:

[[Category:Western films]]

You can put in anywhere in the page, but traditionally it's placed at the bottom. If you want to refer by link to the category on a page, you add a colon in front of the word "Category". The end result looks like this: Category:Western films. Finally, if you want to make the listing on the Category page look different from the article name (like changing The Sixth Sense to show up as "Sixth Sense, The" on Category:Films), format the tag like this:

[[Category:Films|Sixth Sense, The]]

Hope this helps. — Jeff Q 01:40, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Yup, it helps. Pretty thoroughly, as a matter of fact. Thanks yet again. --65.26.233.252 03:08, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Reduced activity

I'll probably be doing only minor corrections and edits for the foreseeable future, until the severe response problems with the Wikipedia and Wikiquote servers is fixed. — Jeff Q 14:38, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I'm pretty much back now, although I'm only contributing sporadically, more due to time issues than Wiki issues. — Jeff Q 03:12, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Another rookie question

At the risk of coming off as technologically retarded... how do I make a vertical line on-screen? (e.g. your Sixth Sense, The note above). I don't see it on my keyboard, and haven't been able to figure another way of doing it. --RPickman 06:27, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)

If you're talking about the pipe character ("|", ASCII 124 or 0x7C), it's usually represented on keyboards as a broken vertical line, like a colon that uses vertical segments instead of dots. (A Unicode picture version of this is "╎", or U+254E (if your browser supports this), but don't use that code, use U+007C.) Most English keyboards have it on the backslash ("\") key, and create it using SHIFT-backslash. It's usually just above the ENTER or RETURN key on US PC and Mac keyboards, although some have it just to the left of ENTER instead. UK keyboards apparently place it to the left of the "Z" key. Some keyboards have it in other places (e.g., French keyboards have it on the "6" key, but I don't know what kind of control keys one uses to get the symbol). If your keyboard doesn't have this character, you should still be able to create it by engaging your NUM LOCK and holding the ALT key down while you press "124" (the general means to reproduce any extended ASCII (0-255) code). Hope this helps. — Jeff Q (talk) 08:59, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, the pipe character is what I was after. Can't decide if I'm too literal-minded RE:keys or just stupid (don't answer that, please). Thanks again. --RPickman 19:51, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)

And another

I'm trying to start a page for the novel "The Princess Bride". There's already a page for the movie; pages started in "Literary Works" automatically link to the movie page. Any ideas for getting around this? All I've been able to come up with is tacking "novel" on to the title, which will look lousy. --RPickman 03:18, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)

NEVER MIND! Got a chance to look over the movie page; I'd forgotten that the author of the book also wrote the screenplay. Most of the good quotes made it into the movie, so a separate page for the book is not really necessary. Sorry. --RPickman 13:18, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Darn. I was writing a lengthy response to a number of issues I thought were raised by your question, but most are irrelevant to your immediate needs, which you happily resolved yourself. ☺ Actually, I wrote all this Monday morning (EST), but I've spent several hours waiting to find that special moment when the overburdened Wiki system would allow me to post this comment.

I do want to clarify something, if I correctly interpreted your concern about links for pages "started" in a list article. If you meant that you cannot create the title The Princess Bride on the List of literary works page without it becoming a link to the current The Princess Bride article, that is because there is nothing special about creating a link on any page anywhere in Wikiquote. The link [[The Princess Bride]] will always refer to the same page, no matter where it's created. (In fact, it's handy to take advantage of this by making links out of article references in Talk pages like this, like I'm doing here, so people reading these discussions can click on the link to see what's being discussed. Most Wikians don't seem to consider that many people not originally involved in their discussions read these pages much later. I always try to write for a general audience.) Pages like List of literary works, List of films, and Television shows are merely lists of article titles to make it easier to find subject articles. They don't confer any special characteristics on their titles. In fact, if you wanted to be whimsical, you could add Albert Finney to the Television shows article. (Of course, someone would eventually delete it again.)

The only thing that confers any special attributes to an article is the Category system, which is very new and not too well understood yet (even by the creators!). Ideally, when people create an article, they should add Category links to the bottom of the page. In the case of The Princess Bride, if you add a novel section, you should add [[Category:Fantasy books|Princess Bride, The]] to the page bottom, in addition to the Comedy films and Fantasy films categories already there. (The "Princess Bride, The" part allows this article to be sorted appropriately on the category page; otherwise, it would be placed under "T" for "The" because of the article title.) Existing categories are listed at Special:Categories, which you can also get to by clicking on the Categories link on any page that has a category. New ones are automatically created whenever someone adds a [[Category:WHATEVER]] tag to an article. You can see how silly this can get by looking over the existing Category list, which is why I usually try to find an appropriate existing one (or ones).

If you had felt you needed to create an article with a title like The Princess Bride (novel), don't worry about it looking tacky. It's perfectly acceptable and is in common use here. Readers, of course, wouldn't think to add the parenthetical part when looking for quotes from the novel, but we get around that by one of two methods:

Create a disambiguation (dab) page The Princess Bride that provides links to The Princess Bride (novel) and The Princess Bride (film), usually with some perfunctory comments about each. (In this case, you could have Moved the current page to the (film) page, then created the dab page.)
Add an introductory line to each of The Princess Bride and The Princess Bride (novel) pages, along these lines:

These are quotes from the 1987 film The Princess Bride. For quotes from the William Goldman novel, see The Princess Bride (novel).

… and …

These are quotes from the William Goldman novel The Princess Bride. For quotes from the 1987 film, see The Princess Bride.

Both of these methods are in use in Wikiquote. — Jeff Q (talk) 17:39, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)

WOW. You are a very thorough man; would be humbled, if my limited knowledge hadn't kept me humble to start with. Armed with your tips, I may go ahead with a page for the novel after all. Once again, I appreciate your help. --RPickman 13:49, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Caching problem

The caching problem you mentioned is something I have encountered occasionally as well. I don't know what the problem is, but it is frustrating. Another troublesome "feature" of the existing software is that sometimes a recent version of a page will show up when one is not logged in, rather than the latest revision, and this seems related to the source rather than any cache files on the computer being used; I've noticed it on new computers that have never been to Wikiquote at all yet. ~ Kalki

Interested in becoming a Sysop?

Any interest in being a sysop? Mainly because I have something of an aversion to the term, I have thus far put off asking to become a "bureaucrat" here (a sysop able to make other users into sysops) but if you are interested in becoming a one, I will ask about it, and hopefully something can occur in the next week or so. Thus far there really hasn't been much of a formal procedure here as there has been at the much busier Wikipedia. You certainly have made important contributions here, and you and a few others who have become active more recently seem to be good candidates. Things have been getting a bit more active, and I have sometimes been too busy lately to check in as frequently as I'd normally like. Weak wi-fi connections while away from home have also occasionally prevented me from responding promptly to some of the vandalism that has occurred. As a sysop you would be able to block vandals, edit protected pages, protect, unprotect or delete pages, and reverting the most recent changes by someone usually becomes a little simpler and easier thing to do. ~ Kalki 20:16, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I have nominated you for adminship at Wikiquote:Requests for adminship, and myself as a "Bureaucrat", so that more sysops can be created here, without needing to contact a developer. Voting options must remain open for a week before any action can be taken on either request. ~ Kalki 21:14, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for your vote. I've been in something of a rush lately, and it will be good to have other sysops around who I can trust to handle some of the vandalism that occurs. ~ Kalki 23:33, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Broaden your suspicions

I commend your prudence, RPickman, but don't sell yourself short. I've been Wiki-ing for nearly two years, and there are still plenty of things I don't know. Based on your hard work, your conscientiousness, and your fearlessness about asking questions, I'm sure you would absorb the necessary details quickly and rise to the challenge of adminship quite well. I suspect your main obstacle will be your own assessment of your readiness. — Jeff Q (talk) 23:53, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I appreciate your confidence. You might be right - but I really don't think so. Thing is, my ignorance extends beyond Wiki into the broader field of computers in general. Took a brief look at the sysop functions mentioned by Kalki, above; I have only the vaguest notion what half of them mean, and no clue how any of them would actually be done. Can't see the point in having additional abitities that I don't know how to use. (Believe it or not, at one time I was nearly cutting-edge; if FORTRAN makes a comeback, I'll be set.) Again, thanks - but I'll stick with being an ordinary contributor. --RPickman 19:52, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps the biggest problem you'll have is distinguishing between computer stuff and Wiki stuff. FYI, the "Wi-Fi" (Wireless Fidelity) reference is the only general computer term Kalki uses, and it's irrelevant to Wiki work (unless you're on the road). I don't know how to "block vandals, edit protected pages, protect, unprotect or delete pages" yet, myself. And anyone can revert a change quickly and fairly easily; Kalki's statement merely hints at a special feature for sysops that makes it even quicker and easier — presumably, since I don't know what it looks like, either. These are all things you get information on if you become an admin. (At least, I hope, otherwise I won't be a very useful admin. ☺) I'm fully prepared to look for and then ask about any of these things, if I get the admin nod, but that's nothing more than you've been doing already. Anyway, I'm not trying to sell you on the idea; it's just a learning curve we all need to travel. — Jeff Q (talk) 02:42, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Bet you're right RE: my biggest problem; it's hard to tell which category terminology I don't "get" belongs in. With this additional info, my admin nomination no longer seems as completely ludicrous as it did at first (coming as it did a few weeks after you had to tell me where one of the keys is). And for your sake, I, too, hope you'll get information on sysop functions. Good luck. --RPickman 03:13, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Sorry for interruption. As for MediaWiki sysop interface, it is quite easy as same as ordinary editor's one. You will get some new bottons (like [rollback] or [protect]) and that's all. If you would like to glance them, please see w:fr:Wikipédia:Administrateur/Tableau de bord de l'administrateur, one of four admin tutorial pages on French Wikipedia with full of snapshots of admin interface. (would you think it would be useful when it is tranlated into English? ) Cheers, --Aphaia 06:12, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the information, Aphaia — even en français! (It'll be fun using my rusty French to read it.) I wasn't particularly concerned just yet about sysop functions, as I felt it would be jumping the gun unless and until I'd been approved as an admin. Are you saying that there is no English equivalent for that useful page? If not, I could probably translate it for en:Wikipedia, if it's not already in progress. Meanwhile, I came across Wikipedia:Administrators' reading list, so I suspect I'll be able to figure out the basics fairly quickly. — Jeff Q (talk) 07:56, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Film shortcut

Use the red link created in the preview to open a second browser window to create the article. (If you want to know how to do this, let me know what Web browser you use.)

Appreciate the tip. My browser is Internet Explorer (within Windows '95, if that makes a difference). Please fill me in on how to do this when you have time. I usually start an article working from memory, then go back later and add more material (and make corrections where my memory was fuzzy) after watching the movie again. I've been starting in films/requested because I didn't want to clutter up "list of films" with empty or barely-started pages; the problem you mentioned didn't occur to me. Thanks. --RPickman 23:11, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Jeffq - the right-click method works; used it to start a page for Dogma. Only did format & cast; didn't want to put too much work into it until I was sure I'd be able to save (not doubting your instructions here, but my ability to execute them correctly). Worked like a charm. Can see this being very useful. Thanks again. --RPickman 02:20, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Dogma, etc.

Had a feeling I wasn't the only one who thought this flick needed a page; suspect this one won't be a solo project for long. Another (semi-)technical problem: the movie Leon was released in most (all?) US markets as The Professional. It's in Foreign Films as "Leon"; I'd like to have it listed in Action Films (or just Films) under the American title. My attempts have resulted in film appearing as "Leon" listed under the letter P. Any idea what I'm doing wrong? --RPickman 02:54, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

It looks to me like you added a properly formatted film link for The Professional to the P section. There's nothing wrong about that. When you find out that there's a different preferred name, you can just edit List of films to remove the less-desirable title and add the preferred one, if it's not already there. It's not uncommon for people to add two different titles for the same film or TV show. When I see that that has happened, I typically remove the secondary one and put that title in parentheses on the line with the preferred title link. I've just done it for this movie, as an example. — Jeff Q (talk) 03:11, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Thanks

Thank you for your vote and again for your request for sysopship. The reason I accepted was that I had been aware English Wikiquote would need more sysop; users/admin ratio here had been too high when I checked the statistics. It would be a great pleasure if I could make a crew including you, a very energetic editor ;-) --Aphaia 10:33, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Azerbaijani proverbs & sysop status

The credit you posted in the talk page Talk:Azerbaijani proverbs#Credits should be more than sufficient. It probably was a good idea to add that, and not rely upon the credits that were on the original redirect page. I simply hadn't thought of it. Thanks. I am hoping to hear from Angela soon as to our status as admins, but I know that she is usually very busy with many Wikimedia projects. I would like to see you and the others nominated become sysops as soon as officially possible. You have all done excellent work here. ~ Kalki 23:58, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Deletion

First I hope you know that just because a page is listed for deletion or speedy deletion doesn't prevent others from "rescuing" the page. Hopefully they indicate that they have done this so it isn't mistakenly overlooked. I sometimes do this work on Wikipedia although most speedy deletion pages there are either newbie tests that should have been done in the sandbox or simple vandalism. I would always recommend deleting something like You Kicked My Dog because it has no content. Deletion doesn't mean that such a page should never exist, only that the current content is useless, unsalvagable or harmful. Creating a new page for a title is no more difficult than replacing useless content in an article so no harm is done by deleting. The slightly harder case is one where, for instance, only biographical information is added. If the page is recent perhaps the contributor got sidetracked and will return. Doesn't hurt to ask them. If it is "ancient" I usually check to see if the Wikipedia article has any useful quotes. But our non-quote content in articles is small and I would usually say that it is easier to delete it now and recreate it from scratch when the quotes show up. It is possible to recover article that have been deleted -for a while. Eventually they actually disappear. And images are gone immediately on deletion -although image description pages have to be deleted separately and I think can be recover like articles. Rmhermen 22:29, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Totally agreed. In my opinion it is better to delete it and wait a person who will create it again than to have a bunch of pages without quotes (and need to clean up). --Aphaia 06:04, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Reference desk

Thank you for your reconstruction! --Aphaia 06:04, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Léon/The Professional

Oops. I see Rmhermen better understood your problem. (Apparently my brain was in snooze mode when I read your rather straightforward explanation.) To quote Emily Litella (Gilda Radner) from Saturday Night Live… "Never mind." — Jeff Q (talk) 04:46, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Let's see... roughly 2 million queries (not counting ones from people besides me), one minor error? I think we can let you slide. --RPickman 18:46, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Sysop

Congratulations! I am now a bureaucrat, and you are now a sysop. With all the work you and the other nominees have been doing in the last week, I am certainly now no longer the most active sysop here! I will probably be very busy for at least the next few days, and then hopefully will have more time to spend here. Now to get around to the others... I just want to make sure that a week has officially passed since their nomination before I make them sysops too! ~ Kalki 18:35, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Congratulations for your promotion! I'm happy to see your several amazing works and proposals. And again thank you for your voting. --Aphaia 00:50, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Deletion policy

Hi, Jeff Q. Thank you for your nice draft of Deletion policy! It is more than enough as tentative policy. By the way, I believe you can simply delete categories which you replaced their tag from {{delete}} to {{db|reason}}, though I'm very impressed by your prudence. --Aphaia 10:48, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Redirects

I'm trying to set up a link from Wikipedia's page on the film Zulu to the Wikiquote page I made for it. Problem is, 'Pedia lists it as Zulu (film), so link goes to nonexistent page. How do I go about redirecting to the actual 'Quote page (just Zulu)?

Also - congratulations on making sysop. --RPickman 00:37, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I assume you're trying to use the {{wikiquote}} template that requires the articles to have the same title. If you want to use the template, you should edit the page Zulu (film) here on Wikiquote and add the line:

#REDIRECT [[Zulu]]

You can also use the direct link [[q:Zulu|]] in the Wikipedia article (which will display just "Zulu" in the link), if you don't feel the need to use the template. One hopes the MediaWiki crew will eventually make it possible to override the {{PAGENAME}} parameter in these templates so we can link to mismatched names between projects. — Jeff Q (talk) 00:54, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Just wanted to say thanks for your help (again), especially since a quick glance around the project shows me how busy you & other admins have been. --RPickman 18:26, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

List of films

I was wondering if you would mind if I change the two-article structure of List of films and List of films/requested to a single list like Television shows, where the requested titles are in a separate section at the bottom. I seem to be doing most of the transfers between the two lists, and I've found that the other method is more convenient, without sacrificing the clarity of a live-article section. — Jeff Q

Jeff, what a coincidence that today is my first log-in after a solid break only to find a message from today -- as to your specific inquiry, making dual style film lists into one I have no objections; first I must apologize for leaving you with the burden of updating the list, but if you find the other method (TV list) more user friendly than by all means please incorporate it into the film list.

On a side note, I am excited on the vast growth wikiquote is experiencing... the quality (as in expanding the stubs) will eventually follow. ~ RoboAction 08:15, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

P.S. for the user above who was asking about the 'redirect' check out Predator and notice how the tag:

{{wikipediapar|Predator (movie)}} is used, and vice-versa:

{{wikiquotepar|Q TITLE}} placed on wikipedia

No problem about the "burden". One thing I really like about wikis is that you come and go as you can and wish to. There are no mandatory schedules, there's always other people to take up the slack, and things will get done sooner or later. ☺ And thanks for the tip on wikiquotepar! — Jeff Q (talk) 08:20, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

IP look-ups

I posted an response to your query on my talk page but will post here as well; there are useful addresses in it that you might want to add to your bookmarks.

205.188.116.195 is an address used by AOL and thus one that is shared by many people, so the variety of edits isn't suprising. 69.170.114.159, and 70.32.148.108 both belong to Adelphia cable of Pennsylvania, and they might also be shared addresses, but used by a relatively small group of people.

I usually use the search tools available at American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) or Reséaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC) to find out the owners of IPs I'm curious about. Other major Internet Organizations (most of which I've not looked into) can be found at this page

Thanks for erasing the SPAM last night by the way. Previously I would set long 30 day blocks on some of the worst Spam senders, with messages to addressed them, but these Spammers know that they are nuisances, and know that they can simply evade most blocks so I seldom bother with addressing messages to the spammers anymore: I just block them. I have not yet been irritated enough to report any of the jerks directly to the IP Service Providers that they work through, though I have been tempted at times, and even then actually catching them could be an elusive task. ~ Kalki 14:29, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Buffy nomenclature

For once, I don't have a technical question. Have been making occasional additions to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer page. Most recent was from episode "Who Are You?" where Faith has switched bodies with Buffy; makes things tricky when one of them talks from the other's body (doesn't seem to have come up before). I went with "Buffy-in-Faith" for character. Give me a holler if you have a better idea. By the way (sort of): 1) Outstanding job on guidelines for Buffy page 2) Thanks for passing on the "par" tip. --RPickman 04:14, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the Buffy contribution. You may have noticed I rudely tweaked your wording ☺ to match my own record of that passage. I do this regularly with Buffy because of my obsessive need to quote exactly, and that's one of the tons of quotes I've recorded in my own Buffy quote system. (I don't add everything I've got because the page would several megabytes long, but when someone adds one, I tweak it when necessary. It also prevents the list from becoming my personal "favorite Buffy quotes" page, as there are many passages that folks add that I wouldn't.)

As for the body-switching situation, I had the same problem with my quote database, and I used the system I implemented for MST3K: when person A is speaking as if they're person B, I write A [as B]; e.g., Servo [as Dracula]. But that's much harder to figure for one person in another's body, without giving instructions to the reader. Does Buffy [as Faith] mean Buffy's soul in Faith's body, or Buffy's body with Faith's soul? Frankly, I find your method much clearer in this circumstance. — Jeff Q (talk) 09:21, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

P.S. Thanks for the note on the guidelines. I'm actually not so happy about them, because they're so long and involved. I hate tons of instructions that might discourage people from contributing. But I thought it would help people understand the style I'd defined, so they would be less likely to complain about it. (It'd be so much easier if the Wiki community came up with some decent quote markup and stopped screwing around with skin styles that make existing markup look so different for different people, but that's another long diatribe.) Of course, people often just try to imitate other quotes' format, and some won't bother even with examples and instructions, but everybody has their own way to learn, and I figured the instructions would help those who like to RTFM ☺ before doing something. — Jeff Q (talk) 09:29, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

It would only be rude to tweak my wording if tweaked version was inaccurate. In this case, I bow to your superior obsessive attention to detail (am not mocking you — I have similar hangups with a couple of the film pages I started). This wasn't my first addition to Buffy, by the way. Also did a lot of the recently-added Anya/Xander material (the Anya character was a personal favorite). Your guidelines are long and involved, but also clear, specific and easy to follow. (they must be — I used 'em wiithout needing to ask you how!) --RPickman 02:14, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Wikivacation

I am on Wikibreak until 13 April. In addition to regular sysop chores, I'm been trying to make it easier to get things done and clearer what needs to be done, and I'm afraid that I'm just pissing people off. I know they're doing it to me, however unintentionally. I think everyone would appreciate a break from my "help", and I need the time to cool down. — Jeff Q (talk) 07:19, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)

It's now April 13, at least where I am, so let me welcome you back. As a new user, I appreciated your comments (re: the Veronica Mars deletion): you alerted us to how to sign votes and took care of the beuracracy of the VfD MosheZadka 14:02, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

As anyone who has visited Wikiquote for any length of time in recent months knows, Jeff Q is one of the most active and involved contributors here. I do believe he has probably volunteered for a bit more than any one person can be expected to handle very easily, and he certainly deserves whatever vacations he takes. This is just a note of appreciation and thanks for many jobs well done. ~ Kalki 17:04, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the nice words, folks. Kalki's right in that I sometimes get wrapped up in too many things at once. I was losing my cool in arguments with people who just happened to have different strongly held opinions than mine. This is bad for any wikian, but especially dangerous for a sysop. When I found myself rewriting my comments four times to tone done my own rhetoric, I realized I need to put everything aside for a bit. I'm gradually coming back and trying to remember to add some content alongside the admin work, which I hope will help me readjust my attitude. ☺ — Jeff Q (talk) 19:13, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Welcome back Jeff Q, hoping you enjoyed your vacation ;-) And I appreciate your decision to take a break for cooling down. Such self-reflection deserves apprause. I am happy to be with you again . --Aphaia 03:49, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Protection before deletion?

Hello Jeff, just a quick unimportant question: why do you consistently protect a page before deleting it, for example Yasunari Kawabata today? I understand the need to protect the pages that cannot be deleted because of the block-compression bug, but I don't see any need to protect it for few seconds before deletion. Such protection does not even protect against re-creation, as far as I know. Is there some subtlety I'm missing? jni 07:58, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I'll give you first a simple and then a thoughtful answer. The simple reason is that I do it because that's what I read in Wikipedia:Deletion process, which offered no explanation of why this is done. (It rather illogically put this instruction under Block revision deletion errors, as if sysops knew beforehand which deletions were going to fail. If we're supposed to, I haven't seen an explanation of how.) But as I started doing deletions, I believe I saw some likely reasons. One could protect the page after a deletion failed, but it's quite easy to forget a step that only occurs occasionally, whereas it's easy to remember a step that always occurs. (I've spent decades of my life observing the use of and contributing to the creation of process automation, and I've found that this is a common issue in any well-defined but manual process.) Second, I don't know all the details of how wiki software operates (as if anybody could, even the developers), but any complex process that involves resource locks is rife with potential for unexpected failures and bugs. Protecting the page may just be an extra measure of problem prevention. Since the protection step only takes a few seconds, I highly recommend training oneself to follow it in all cases. I haven't bothered to bring it up with the other sysops, though, because we all have enough on our plates, and I think that I've been making too many suggestions already, which is especially nervy as I'm the most junior wikian in the crew. ☺ — Jeff Q (talk) 08:43, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Hi, Jeff Q, I agree with Jni and "protection before deletion" is unnecessary. I think it is unrecommendable too. Once a protected article was deleted, the newly created article under the same name wouldn't be protected. So the protection log becomes easily very confused; there could be "protected" pages but really unprotected. To know which pages are really protected, such situation is not welcomed, I am afraid. --Aphaia 09:02, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Aphaia, the protection log cannot be used to determine what pages are currently protected, because, as you point out, any pages that are deleted don't register this fact in the log. Wikipedia:Deletion policy says right up front that you are supposed to protect a page that hasn't been deleted because of block-compression errors. When those pages get deleted, they can be recreated, so unless the developers (or whoever does the BCE cleanup) unprotect each page before deleting it, the log will always be somewhat out-of-sync. I was under the impression that the protection log, like all other logs, is primarily a record of who did what to whom and when, to allow others to review problems with the process or with the participants. It is a record of past actions, not a state machine. The only reliable way for a non-developer to know if a page is protected, I suspect, is to bring up the page and see if your navigation tabs show "protect" or "unprotect".

Also, you yourself suggested a reason to follow the process I describe, when you mentioned in WQ:DP#Deletion pending how people might forget to tag failed deletes with a pending-deletion tag/category link. As I explained in my 01:58, 16 April posting in that section, my process allows us to use the same process for every delete and be finished with the last step every time, whether the delete succeeds or fails. There's no more work to do, so we can't forget to do it. And there's no change in procedure, so we can't do the wrong thing for one deletion by accident when plowing through a long list of deletions. It actually prevents mistakes.

In my further discussions on this topic on Jni's talk page, I got the impression that Jni neither approved nor disapproved of this practice. He seemed to think it might be unnecessary and slightly wasteful. But I've made a case that it helps prevent problems without taking any significant time or resources, and that the log issue is irrelevant because the log already can't be relied upon to provide current page status. I may still be in the minority on this useful process, but I hope that everyone will consider the advantages. — Jeff Q (talk) 09:55, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)

TV quote guidelines

I saw your guidelines on the Buffy quotage page, and I wondered why not create a consistent format for all TV shows somewhere accessible? When the people created the Veronica Mars page, I know I at least mostly copied the style from Angel and Firefly, which probably copied it from Buffy due to the similarity of the fanbase. It would be nice if some central place documented a central style for wikiquote/TV stuff. [Especially for the benefit of scripts which use wikiquote to seed fortune-like databases!] MosheZadka 13:04, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

nm, found relevant discussion MosheZadka 13:06, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Block compress errors

I really dont think that these can be deleted at all at the present time, and the record of the log at wikipedia goes back to February. I think our current system is sufficient, and whenever the issues are resolved we should be able to make the deletions ourselves. ~ Kalki 00:20, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Thanks

I appreciate you on your comment on Talk:Reirom. Personal attack is reluctant even from trolls, but your support encourages me enough stand against their rant. Besides that, I would like you know my talk is not "correction-free" and though I'm trying to avoid communication confusions from my English writings, it is no t my mother tongue anyway, and any suggestions for improvement are always welcome ;-) --Aphaia 01:33, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

(slight subject change here, but header still applies)

Nice job on cleaning up The Wizard of Oz!

Thanks! Wiz was my biggest cleanup to date. The material was all there, it just needed to be moved around and/or organized... still took me most of an afternoon to finish, though. And I still feel a little bad about dumping original contributor's Lollipop Guild & Lullaby League sections (but only a little — they work a lot better on film than when read). --RPickman 04:23, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

P.S. Would you mind if I lifted your Buffy instructions for the Angel page? I had everything there reformatted Buffy-style as of last week, but having directions might save some editing later on (might not, too — but it's worth a try).

Not at all; help yourself. They really belong to the community, anyway. It may fuel my already excessive ego, but I try to remind myself that it's an accident of circumstance that they still resemble what I originally wrote. I myself have lifted plenty of practices from other wikis and wikians. — Jeff Q (talk) 08:17, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Protection from move

Just now, I protected your user page and your talk. PusAss vandal, or assumingly WoW moved mine nad Jni's pages. I think the sysops' pages will be most frequently targetted and the effect and confusion from their move on a bad faith is worst to the community, when an editor ask a sysop a help. If you think my protection is inappropriate, please unprotect your pages. I think the pages of other three most active Wikiquoters would be better to protect from move, too, specially if they request. --Aphaia 08:43, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Pirates

Could you please move Pirates Of The Caribbean to Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl? - 69.212.73.178 02:07, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The full article should be under the full title, especially since the 2006 film will have a similarly long title (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest). That was the state it was in when I started looking to move around titles. Therefore, I've changed both shorter versions (with and without complete capitalization) to redirects to the full title. When the new movie comes out, Pirates of the Caribbean should probably become a disambiguation (dab) page, and Pirates Of The Caribbean a redirect to the dab page.

I've checked all three article names, and they are all working. If your browser still shows problems, try reloading the page a few times until the article shows up. (If you don't how to reload, let me know what browser and version you're using.) — Jeff Q (talk) 03:08, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Signature problems

I've very sorry about the problems with my sig. Apperantly I didn't have the "raw signatures" box checked off, which was causing the problem. It should be solved now. -- LGagnon 04:06, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

::I've since learned that it probably wasn't your fault. BugZilla bug 1905 seems to have messed up wiki markup like yours. It's apparently been fixed now. Sorry to trouble you. — Jeff Q (talk) 07:20, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

RfA thanks

Thank you for supporting my RfA and before that patiently helping me to become familiar with this wiki and its community. I very much appreciate your confidence in me and it's an honour to join the sysop team we have here. I'll try not to cause a mess with my new superpowers! Please let me know if you see something I should (or shouldn't) be doing as an admin. Regards, jni 06:20, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Amin Maalouf

You added something to my talk page about this. I was only trying to fix and synchronize things with wikipedia, I failed and wasn't sure how to do a VfD here, sorry for the inconvenience. -- 128.175.66.14 05:11, 28 Apr 2005

My main concern was to get any useful quotes from Amin Maalouf before the article was deleted for lack of content. If you don't have any yet and would just like to get it deleted for now, I'd be happy to do that. (It can always be recreated later when quotes are available.) If I don't hear from you before 30 April, I'll assume that deletion is acceptable. In the future, if you want to request deletion, you can post it at Wikiquote:Votes for deletion, which has some instructions. You can also ask an administrator like myself and we can take care of it. — Jeff Q (talk) 10:14, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Issues with guidelines

Latest comment: 19 years ago5 comments2 people in discussion

As requested, I've removed your signature from the instructions for the Angel page. Left it in at first to avoid looking like I was trying to snake credit for concepts you created & tested, and I cut & pasted. As to your second concern [I notice that, as you've created them, the copy-and-paste character references require a person to edit the instruction page in order to do the copy, rather than simply select the text from an ordinary page display. I suggest that this makes it somewhat harder for editors (especially newer ones) to make use of this shortcut, which will probably result in fewer people taking advantage of it. My rationale was this: anyone who is comfortable doing an edit to get the shortcut doesn't need it, because they can do the same thing on the main article page, where those shortcuts already exist in the quotes. The nowiki-wrapped text is more for folks who are just getting started.] Lord knows I'm sympathetic to new folks (and/or slow learners), and would like to help, but (and I'm sure this will amaze you)... I'm not sure I understand the problem, or what needs to be done differently. Would appreciate a dumbed-down explanation when time allows. Also: noticed you've cleaned up my Buffy entries from Dawn's diary. They're a lot clearer now; my versions were so garbled ("malformatted", as you aptly put it) that I was considering deleting them. Nice work! --RPickman 03:15, 1 May 2005 (UTC)Reply

Sorry about the confusion. Apparently I had been looking at a version of Talk:Angel earlier than 13:39, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC), because I see that at that time, you had converted the character links to nowiki-formatted text, which is what I was suggesting. (If you look at an earlier version, my text might make a bit more sense.) Either I had a old cached version of the page when I looked at it, or I took several hours to getting around to posting, during which you'd made my point moot. My apologies for the resulting unfathomable suggestion. And as far as Dawn's diary entries in "Real Me" go, your stuff was hardly "malformatted". (I use that more to mean stuff that isn't indented or character-bolded.) We just had a slight difference of opinion on how to present it, and since I'm obnoxious about the Buffy page, I revised it to keep with my strict opinions. Someday someone (or someones) will probably become more obnoxious than me about it, and I'll probably concede to their greater diligence. Such is the way of community editing. ☺ — Jeff Q (talk) 07:32, 1 May 2005 (UTC)Reply

On further review — unfathomable suggestion is most likely due to the fact that I missed part of the message when you first posted it, corrected problem in the interim, then read message and got baffled trying to find it. Sorry about that. On the "Real Me" quotes, first entry was OK, but second one (arrival of Xander and Anya) was unclear enough to bother me (really did consider deleting it). Perhaps "malformatted" was overly harsh; I got a kick out of the term and was looking for an excuse to use it somewhere. Oh, and I wouldn't describe your Buffy-page behavior as obnoxious. You've put a lot of time and effort into it, and there's nothing wrong with keeping it up to your standards. --RPickman 17:10, 1 May 2005 (UTC)Reply

I remember agonizing over that passage, because it was hard to come up with a decent way to list the dialog without the context and formatting getting in the way. (My version still is rather awkward, but I think it's the best compromise between following the general guidelines and maintaining accuracy. And I really wanted to keep that quote!) Part of the problem is voiceovers. It's annoying to have to put "[voiceover]" in front of each quoted line. You can perhaps skip it when a whole passage is voiceover (as I do in my Buffy quote project during Dawn's initial recitation), but when the voicing-over character intersperses non-voiced-over dialog, it's mandatory to make the passage clear. Check out Dead Like Me, in which a major portion of every show is George's voicing-over, to see how confusing it can get. (It's one of the reasons I haven't bothered to add any more quotes to that article.) — Jeff Q (talk) 04:16, 2 May 2005 (UTC)Reply

I see what you mean about Dead Like Me. Reading the text makes my head hurt a bit; trying to format it would probably make my head explode. Had similar problem (similar to Buffy issues, that is — not to having my head explode) with another bit from Dawn's diary (interested in witchcraft, she once told her mom she wished Willow and Tara would teach her some of what they were doing; mom got quiet and sent her to her room; Dawn guesses witchcraft isn't okay with "her generation"). Here, the entire quote was voiceover, but I couldn't see a way to introduce it for those with limited Buffy-familiarity in under a paragraph... which would spoil the joke. --RPickman 06:04, 2 May 2005 (UTC)Reply

P.S. - Thought I'd covered this elsewhere, but can see I didn't. I never had a problem with your signature on the Angel guidelines. As a matter of fact, I was hesitant to put mine in, especially after "contact me with any questions" part. Besides a different character list, it was all your material in the first place, and I always felt uncomfortable passing it off as mine. -Pickman again

John-1107

Latest comment: 19 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

The quotes at my page are my quotes about my friends from school. They're not unfamous people. I know them very well and they knew i'm famous. Besides, i show these quotes to my friends at school. What's wrong with that?--John V 23:14, 3 May 2005 (UTC)Reply

Perhaps we have a misunderstanding here. The fact that anyone can edit nearly anything on a wiki project does not mean that any content is acceptable by that project. Every wiki project has a purpose and a set of guidelines for content. It is incumbent upon the participants to follow those guidelines in order to promote the purpose of the project. Wikiquote's purpose is to collect quotes from people and works that are notable in a worldwide context.

"Famous" and "notable" are relative terms, and are only shorthand for the more specific concept of notability in a worldwide audience. I have some measure of fame myself within my industry, which extends well beyond the limits of nearly any high school, but I do not qualify for the adjective "famous" in a worldwide compendium of quotations (as impressed as I might be by my own profundity). Wikiquote is such a compendium and exists to collect quotations from people who are much more notable than you or I (or your friends), people who have published books, given well-publicized speeches, performed nationally or internationally-known works, etc. The word "famous" is usually used for these purposes, not the one you espouse, so it's a bit disingenuous to claim fame for you and your friends. If you appear on a CSI episode, in the latest Star Wars, publish a best-selling novel or a critically-acclaimed thesis, or appear as a primary subject in a high school course on literature or science, you may very well be famous enough for inclusion in Wikiquote's articles. If you are wildly beloved by your entire high school and hometown, but are virtually unknown outside of it, you are certainly not famous enough. There are exceedingly few people who contribute to any wiki projects that are famous enough to merit their own articles. (Even the people who have founded various WikiMedia projects have had to face notability challenges from the communities they founded. These are very high standards.)

However, for the benefit of Wikiquote users, we follow Wikipedia's (and other WikiMedia projects') policy of allowing personal information on User pages, which are not treated as authoritative works, or even required to be the least bit factual. They are still subject to approval or deletion by community will, but this is rarely exercised in most wikis and (as far as I know) has never been an issue on Wikiquote. But Wikiquote is not a repository for personal information, a personal website, or a blog. There are many such services available, often for free, that provide these capabilities; Wikiquote is not one of them.

I hope that you will consider adding to the existing quotations by notable people, especially if you have been inspired or amused by people or works you've studied in your school courses, or even in books, movies, and TV shows you've enjoyed. But if you continue to attempt to post your own or your friends' quotes in the main articlespace without any evidence of notability, and against repeated admonitions to discontinue this practice, you will be blocked. I don't like being this blunt, but you seem to be more insistent than most in trying to get into the articlespace based on your own unsupported idea of "fame". Most of the people who have been this persistent have been obvious vandals, and we block them rigorously without debate. I'm hoping that, in your case, we simply have a misunderstanding of the purpose of Wikiquote, and that you can become a valuable participant in the community. Thank you for your attention. — Jeff Q (talk) 02:04, 4 May 2005 (UTC)Reply

Nomination

Latest comment: 19 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Good day Jeff; its been too long, and thus is what I like to address. A while back you and Aphaia nominated me for your adminship, while I appreciate your consideration, as I have noted on Aphaia's page I will have to decline your offer. I feel I have not had enough presence and my lack of contributions are a damper; but I am planning on expanding my additions. Nevertheless, as I have told Aphaia, I am glad to see wikiquote what it is today -- a vast progress has been undertaken and your actions have been a key. Thank you for your diligent effort. And do keep me updated on recent developments and concerns... ~ RoboAction 20:13, 11 May 2005 (UTC)Reply

Cleanup tips

Latest comment: 19 years ago2 comments1 person in discussion

I've seen a lot of your cleanup work on the film articles on my Recent Changes (RC) patrols (which is how we watch for vandalism, in case you didn't know that), which is why it may seem like I'm following you around. It's not intentional. ? I hope you don't mind my making a few observations.

Trimmed your message down to bare minimum, as I think I've eaten up more than enough space on your talk page. Hope you don't mind. I knew you weren't following me around — and if I was offended by observations (or tips for correcting my blunders), I'd spend much of my life in a snit. As to the specific blunders you mentioned: in my defense, I believe they were all done on the same evening (not sure about 1999), and adjusting to new work hours is leaving me very short on sleep... not that this improves the situation for you or anyone else that must correct my mistakes. Will attempt to use your pointers and/or preview thoroughly before saving. Will also try to remember to italicize titles to help keep those medication bills affordable. Final note: this is probably funnier at my end... but is there not a potentially-amusing degree of irony in my hope that you'd have less stress to deal with while piling up editorial issues for you? Sorry about that... --RPickman 21:54, 16 May 2005 (UTC) P.S. My attempt to "branch out" may be a bit premature.Reply

PPS (will try to be brief) Was actually being fed by sponging off my long-suffering spouse, and there's definitely something to be said for letting others handle uncouth matters like earning a living while you loaf and/or pursue your hobbies... but yeah, being a cog is a good thing if your working life has been spent doing grunt-work. On your stress: wasn't trying to claim responsibility for all of it; I just find it funny when my intentions differ so dramatically from the results of my actions. Cheers. --RPickman 23:19, 17 May 2005 (UTC)Reply

Quotation marks

Latest comment: 19 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

I intend to keep on using proper punctuation. Apostrophes and quotation marks are entirely different things. 121a0012 13:42, May 17, 2005 (UTC)

If you are the person who, through a IP user account, has made a number of contributions to various style articles on Wikipedia, then you know that the question of what characters to use for punctuation is much more complex than the simple idea of what a character is used for in any given language or dialect at any given moment in history. I will not repeat the arguments for and against current Wikiquote practice here.

Typographic issues for any MediaWiki project are decided by consensus, and policy is described in the relevant project's Manual of Style. This house style, a concept with which you may be familiar, is standard practice not just in the MediaWiki world, but in the overall publishing industry. Each publisher has its own guidelines on how to represent punctuation, from strict observance of an original source, to a standardized form determined by the editors of the publication, most of which differ on a number of points. (See the guides from Chicago University Press, NY Times, AP, Oxford University, Cambridge University, as well as broader references like Strunk & White, not to mention the undocumented practices of music and cinematic publishing houses, for many examples of different practices.)

If you wish to change existing policy, you should bring up the issue at Wikiquote talk:Manual of style. Otherwise, you will likely have such contrarian practices in your contributions changed from time to time, and you will cause headaches for the very small number of people who are trying to bring pages into conformance with official policy.

Wikiquote is still too small to enforce its style guidelines, so a conscientious objector can pretty much do as they wish. But we are trying to clean up such irregular practices to make WQ look more professional. You can be a valuable contributor to this effort by participating in Wikiquote maintenance discussions. — Jeff Q (talk) 14:14, 17 May 2005 (UTC)Reply

Template:Otherwiki

Latest comment: 19 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

hello jeff. can you please replace this image with this from the commons? all other versions of this file should be deleted User:Schaengel89 84.175.218.11 20:30, 23 May 2005 (UTC)Reply

Hello...

Hi Jeffq, I'm quite new to the Wikiquote/Wiki idea, and so I guess I may have been a little misguided in my post, for I am Eric Fulton. After reading the rules (I admit, silly to read the rules after I post) it would lead some to think it was a "Vanity" page. Well, the reason that I posted my quotes (yes, they are mine) is because my friends said that I should. I am in Varsity Legislative Debate at my school (as you probably found if you googled my name) and a bit of a philosopher. I constantly come up with good quotes (I think:D) and think they would be useful and/or fun to read to people who come across wikiquote. If I am out of line posting new ones as they arise, or even quotes that I have come up with in the first place, then feel free to delete them, and I am sorry.

Sincerely, Eric Fulton

Standard summary field when fixing spam vandals?

Hey, Jeffq. That was cool how we both went after that spam vandal (and pretty funny that you just blocked yourself). But, I have a question. Is there a shortcut to automatically format the summary field like (Reverted edit of Bjgyg, changed back to last version by 4.242.192.117) or do you type it out manually? --Slac 05:05, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, not one of my better sysop moments. ☺ Sysops get a "block" link in "Recent changes" that creates that edit summary message. We don't do anything but fill in the block period and reason; the entire message is autogenerated. (I think my accidental self-blocking happened because that link apparently blocks the last person to edit the page, and I clicked it after I'd reverted the vandalism. I remember seeing my own ID in the user field, though, so it's still my own foolishness.) I don't know another way to generate the "reverted edit" message, other than manually. (Keep up the spam reversions, though, and contribute to other maintenance activity, and you may find yourself nominated for sysophood. That's one way. ☺) — Jeff Q (talk) 05:18, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Uncle Nagy's House

Latest comment: 19 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion

Jeff, I'm sorry that you consider my show un-notable. You should watch it some time, there are far more inane quotes in it than just the one. Regardless, I put up the page so my friends could add their favorite quotes from the show; but if that's against your policy, please do remove it. Also, the Alayna page was a joke, so you should probably remove that too. Thanks. --Ken Mickles 23:01, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Hell, if they don't allow quotes from your sitcom, may they burn in some religious hell. Freaking idiots, that wikipedia police sucks ass I kid you not. 195.64.95.116 01:34, 15 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

It's a comfort to know that the creative individuals behind many works of art are more polite, thoughtful, considerate, and downright intelligent than many of their fans. Ken Mickles, creator of Uncle Nagy's House, kindly and humorously responded to my concern about his show's notability, which did not meet the current rough standards we're using here at Wikiquote (but which may in the future, either through its own increasing notability, through gradual changes in the community's acceptance of web-based shows, or through a general change in the entertainment field that leads to greater visibility of such art in mainstream culture). On the other hand, this anonymous fan not only so lacks vocabulary and education that they could not come up with anything but obscenities and vague religious condemnations, but was oblivious to which website they're posting to. It's quite sad, really. I certainly hope UNH is, overall, gaining a much more civilized audience than this fool demonstrates. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 03:07, 15 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Do you really expect me to read all this crap? Get a life. 195.64.95.116 16:02, 15 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

No, 195, the above is for the benefit of literate people. I don't expect you to be able to read at all. And unlike you, apparently, I already have a life, where I contribute useful information to worthy projects, not just stare at videos and complain. It is always easier to destroy than to build. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 19:35, 15 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Consensus on VfD

Jeff, I would like you to know I have no objection to close the vote (I just found your closing message after I submit my comment & vote a bit late). And at that moment unless the vote is extended, it gives no effect to decision if it should be deleted. My concern is your VFDA comment. You suggested two third as a measurement of consensus making, and it surprised me a bit. I guessed roughly 75% (a bit higher than your criteria). Perhaps if we support "if it doubts worthy to keep, so delete it" policy, 66% would be okay. (And I know even a sysop who deletes articles even 51% support ... so 66% is not too less for me too). But perhaps we are better to make consensus among the team about our judgement criteria? Even though it isn't wise to write down the number itself on our policy page. --Aphaia 08:12, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

We don't have any policy on consensus here, so I was borrowing what I thought I recalled from Wikipedia:Consensus. I see that it now suggests (as a guideline, not a requirement) 70% rather than 2/3. They're almost the same, but the difference is critical here because Wikiquote VfDs often have only 3 votes, which would then require unanimity for deletion. However, I feel that, young and understaffed as Wikiquote is, we can rely heavily on the "judgment" clause of the deletion policy; i.e., allow and even expect sysops to make judgment calls. That's the main reason I put so much detail into my "vote close" summaries — I want the community to see exactly how I judged the vote.

I agree that we shouldn't have any exact number written in policy. Even Wikipedia doesn't do this, and they can count on much greater participation in votes. However, it's my belief, based on general MediaWiki admin policies, that we must consider sysop judgment to be limited to closing votes. Even though recent Wikiquote policy changes have been largely based on sysop-only discussions, they've always been open to everyone. We sysops must not assume that we make the policy. The entire community must always be given the opportunity to participate on these issues, including defining consensus if they desire. (But I won't bring it up if you don't. ☺) — Jeff Q (talk) 09:49, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Brian Kubats

I hope I didn't cause you too much grief about the "Brian Kubatz" list-name restoration. I have an annoying habit of reversing even other sysops on occasion out of a possibly overdeveloped need to act within policy. ☺ Jeff Q (talk) 01:21, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Not grief, but some confusion. When I added a previous article to the VfD, I mentioned a need to remove the quotes from "QOTD suggestions", and you said you'd do it right there and restore later, so I wanted to save people work by removing this one from the list, rather than add to the sysop workload. MosheZadka 03:10, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Touché! I could say that removing individual quotes is different from removing index links to an entire article, but that would be a post-hoc rationalization of my inconsistency. The fact is that there is no real policy for either, other than general removal of redirects (not necessarily related material) from the linked articles of whatever kind, and that policy only exists on Wikipedia currently and could use some Wikiquote-specific amendment for our own copy. My apologies for the confusion. — Jeff Q (talk) 05:02, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Thanks

I appreciate you sticking up for me. MosheZadka 07:50, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

reversion

Is there any reason you don't use "rollback" function which is available from diff or history? Just curious. --Aphaia 22:30, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I usually do use rollback for reversion, but I get flustered sometimes during these AP/PS vandalisms, and when I'm flustered, I make mistakes. When I'm trying to untangle mass-vandalism, I usually bring up a separate window for each page that had been vandalized. If it's simple vandalism, I can use rollback without problems. But when it's complicated like this recent one, where there were several stages (User:BeanGlue's direct contributions, uploaded images, and pages linked to those images in a way I couldn't trace through page history), I find it extremely easy to get confused. I've already had one experience where AP started a second wave of vandalism while I was still fixing page-moves from the first one. I'm much less confident that rollback will do the right thing if I'm looking at a page history that may be out-of-date because someone has changed the page while I've been reviewing the damage. But I know if I pick the last good version, then edit & save it, it'll be fine. — Jeff Q (talk) 07:02, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Create a new topic

RPickman, might I recommend using the "Create a new topic" link at the top of Village pump instead of editing the previous section and manually adding a new header?

You certainly might. The issues you mentioned (surprise!) never occurred to me. Will try to remember to use your method in future. --RPickman 20:51, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Re: Adding a VfD entry

No problem. I'm not a complete greenhorn anymore, but I still have thing to learn. Thanks for your polite and adroit carriage of your duty. -- Benn M 19:33, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

On a different note tied to the VfD thang -- thanks for the help on the strike-through. -- Benn M 23:56, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)

TV updates

Thanks a bunch for "promoting" shows in the Television shows list that have had articles created for them! And thanks, too, for creating many of them and building up others with some infrastructure and formatting. Could I ask one other small favor? When you create the Wikipedia link with the title, could you surround it with bold/italic markup (5 apostrophes on each side) to indicate article title (bold) and film/TV series title typography (italics)? There are plenty of enhancements that we all eventually add to these stub articles, of course, but I ask that one over others because it's easy to add it to the process of WP-linking the title itself. — Jeff Q (talk) 2 July 2005 08:50 (UTC)

You're welcome, and thanks for pointing out my mistakes, as usual :) ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 2 July 2005 09:05 (UTC)

Abortion

I don't feel as though the rules are being followed on the abortion page. I think I have been frozen out of this page without any real basis. And Aphaia has made a baseless allegation of a rule violation that she refuses to either back up or withdraw. Finally, there is no atempt at compromise or true consensus (=something everyone can accept). In fact, "working toward consensus" seems on this page to consist of posting comments that nothing needs to change and that I am somehow disruptive (even though I made edits after seeking input and not recieving any). No has made any attempt at working toward consensus or compromise. I made every attempt to follow the rules and ettiquette, and even repaired any changes that breached the ettiquette once informed of the faux pas. However, there is truly no effort to make the page relevant or useful. Right now people show up to the abortion quote page and find quotes from minor figures from American pop culture as some of the first entries on one of the major cultural/philosophical/legal issues of the day. I don't see how this is "useful", and there has not been any argument that it truly is a useful orgnization. I think what we have is a "Status quo" mindset by people who want the page to conform to their paradigm. In any event, there is no explanation as to why the page is still forzen or why I am locked out of it (not sure which is actually the current page status). 214.13.4.151 2 July 2005 11:31 (UTC)

214, don't look to me for sympathy. Do you expect us to believe statements like "frozen out of this page without any real basis", "baseless allegation", and "not been any argument that it truly is a useful orgnization" [sic] when such things have been repeatedly explained? As one becomes more experienced with wikis, one learns a number of rules of thumb when dealing with others, in order to make the wiki experience a relatively smooth one; e.g., Wikiquette, 3RR policy, the value of assuming a registered identity, and the signs that someone is attempting true compromise. When editors fail to learn or make use of those rules of thumb, they tend to be regarded as uncooperative. The more they persist, the less seriously they are taken.

You are not the only one in this debate who has revealed a strong point of view. From my limited perspective, MosheZadka is primarily interested in maintaining the old organization, Aphaia is mostly concerned about how this affects policy and wasteful database loading from frequent change, Kalki seems most anxious to avoid one-sided revisions while maintaining the logical organization of the two well-known sides of the debate, Eustace Tilley finds the existing dichotomy inappropriate, and I am mostly concerned about avoiding time-wasting arguments on unresolvable issues and insisting on Wikiquette. None of us has necessarily been at the top of our form in this debate, but I make no apologies for any lack of perfection we may have exhibited, and I don't need to, because these editors have proven their value to the Wikiquote project by long, consistent, thoughtful work on a wide variety of articles and issues. You are being largely dismissed because you are an unregistered Johnny one-note who refuses to cooperate, contorts the concept of compromise so that it always comes out promoting your obvious POV, and does his best to distort the debate to impune respected editors. Long experience with wikis has taught seniors editors that such a person cannot be expected to become a useful member of the community. It's junior editors like myself who are foolish enough to keep trying to talk sense into such people. I hereby give up on trying to get you to cooperate. — Jeff Q (talk) 2 July 2005 22:36 (UTC)

Hi, Jeff. You may find this illuminating as to the frequent use of the biblical quote in the pro-life fanatic-christian debate. This is just a note -- I am no more interested in continuing endless discussions than you, but you seemed interested. ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 3 July 2005 07:55 (UTC)

Sysop

MosheZadka, as I threatened earlier, I'd like to nominate you for Wikiquote sysop, if you're interested. It may seem like bad timing, right in the middle of this Abortion fiasco, but that just reminded me that we're shorthanded and that I was just waiting for you to acquire some more WQ experience. You been editing here not quite three months, but you've made over 1300 edits, worked on a growing variety of articles, added quite a few yourself, participated in some ugly anti-vandalism efforts, and been a regular VfD contributor (all of which I wrote down here so it's handy for my nomination, should you choose to accept ☺). Let me know, at your leisure, what you think. — Jeff Q (talk) 4 July 2005 16:21 (UTC)

I am very flattered, and happy to accept the nomination. ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 4 July 2005 17:45 (UTC)

Got you message; I too am fatigue

Thx 4 the feedback, Jeff; I'm overworked and underpaid here too, but I hope to address all the concerns. I am not so sure that 214 put in a quote in the wrong spot. Also, I suspect that this editor is a military person who doesn't want to get in trouble with superiors and edits anonymously for this reason. (214's IP is a Dept of Defense IP address, which leads me to believe this may be the case.) Well, I hope to see what I can do, but don't expect miracles: I don't get paid enough, and don't expect Jimbo to START me on a parole now, lol (not that I'd have time anyways).--GordonWattsDotCom 4 July 2005 22:16 (UTC)

I think you're right about who 214 is, but the rationale doesn't make sense. If he would have registered as a user, we wouldn't know he's operating from within DoD. He's much more likely to get into trouble with his superiors by remaining an anonymous user, as I'm sure they know who's using which IP address. In fact, his best tactic now would be to register and then continue his one-issue crusade, which is something I've been anticipating. I'm not sure what will happen then, because Wikiquote doesn't have any formal mediation process, as I believe you've found to be useful on Wikipedia concerning your own troubles with Terri Schiavo articles. As for being overworked and underpaid, I can assure you that the problem is much greater for the folks who have made thousands of edits over several years on a wide variety of articles and have stepped up to the typically thankless job of sysophood. It's why I've avoided such responsibility on WP. Oh, well. — Jeff Q (talk) 5 July 2005 00:05 (UTC)

I spotted the material that occationally got lost, like I think the formatting asterisks when you editied and a whole paragraph the Aphaia accidentally deleted. I was able to grab them from history anbd replace and then hot with spell check and keep a saved copy on my computer while I'm working. Thanks for the concern though. This is going to be a "long hot summer," and we don't need to go outside to see fireforks: There are HERE! Gotta go; talk later.--GordonWattsDotCom 5 July 2005 01:20 (UTC)

Invitation to help identify problems, suggest solutions, debate, & vote!

I was going to invite others to look at my analysis anyways, but Aphaia has suggested this:

"I would like you to consider if it is a good idea to invite other editors to read through over 100K talk. In my opinion, it is a sort of burden and shut out most of editors. And I suspect who is now interested in this issue. --Aphaia 5 July 2005 05:10 (UTC)" [1], and I shall do as asked.

You are invited by me, Jeff, to look at my analysis at: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Abortion#Analysis_and_proposed_solutions and see if all the problems are identified, and if not, add one or two. Also, please notice that you can post your proposed solutions below. Afterwards, we can briefly discuss and then vote on different ideas. Don't worry: I addressed all concerns, but if you don't believe me, check it out. Sorry for the length, but many people had many problems.

In conclusion, I have done all the research: Read my analysis, debate it, vote on it, and accept the vote -even if it goes against you; All will be well. Take my word for it. Have a nice day.--GordonWattsDotCom 5 July 2005 05:52 (UTC)

GG collisions

Latest comment: 19 years ago2 comments1 person in discussion

My sources are mostly a) tv.com for episode summaries b) my memory and c) WP for episode referneces. I'll leave a note here when I'm done exhausting my memory and checking it what sources I have. ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 12:15, 12 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

I'm done for now. ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 12:59, 12 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

I'm busy now with World War III at the Schiavo page, but wanted to drop a note

Latest comment: 19 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Jeff,

I'm busy now with World War III at the Schiavo page, but wanted to drop a note...

Most of the fixing on the abortion quotes page is done, but Aphaia has a few concerns with the extra links. (I sourced a few extra links in case one was a bad web pages, etc.) I understand her aesthetic (appearance) concerns, but I wanted to get other opinions.

so, in short, I think things are well, and just need "tweaking," but I wanted to let you know I was finished with all my quote additions and the agreed upon structure change; Sorry I can't talk, but I have other problems that need my attention;

I personally favor locking ALL highly-trafficked or controversial WikiQuotes & WIKIpedia pages and screening editors, making them post their real name, etc., like we would do with "real" writers/editor; --and of course, paying the help would probably "help" quality improve, but you can't have it all -viva la volunteerism (read: free labor, lol)

I trust the "Great Wiki Spirits" to make any minor adjustments to my work that are needed. Thank you for your help. Take care,--GordonWattsDotCom 19:30, 12 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Jeffq, please take a look at the abortion discussion. Well-documented quotes made by partial-birth abortionists known to be made as part of an ardent defense of the practice of partial-birth abortion most logically belong in the pro-abortion section of the page. Such comments are not neutral. I invite you to examine the quotes and explain how the quotes are anything but a defense of the practice. If context is the issus, we can add more of the quote to ensure no one is mislead. The speakers were, at the time they spoke, very much speaking precisely to defend partial-birth abortion. That some people consider the remarks to support an anti-abortion position or are somehow neutral is interesting, but it does not negate the specific context and reason the comments were made and that they were made to promote abortion. 214.13.4.151 08:47, 15 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Re: congratulations

Latest comment: 19 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Congratulations on achieving sysophood! I probably don't have to tell you how happy I am that you've joined the official ranks after all the work you've been doing here. (But I guess I just did, anyway. ?) And I like your use of a single tilde as a signature separator. It's more distinctive that the traditional hyphen or the double-dash, and it's easier to type than my — or the "—" Unicode character. Thanks for the idea! ~ Jeff Q (talk) 04:01, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the congratulations, and thanks for the compliments on my sig. I've tested a few versions before I settled on this one :) ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 04:11, 14 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

IRC

Latest comment: 19 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Hi, Jeff. I saw you asking around a while ago about IRC. #wikiquote is up and running, and in the expected time for a Japanese and an Israeli, Aphaia and I (respectively) are there. Please feel free to drop by any time! Thanks ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 06:09, 15 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

SD

Latest comment: 19 years ago6 comments2 people in discussion

Hi, Jeff. Since this is the first time I've sent things to speedy delete (as opposed to deleting after a VfD), I wondered if you could look over the logs and tell me if I did everything alright. Thanks ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 12:53, 17 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

I assume you're talking about Talk:Frenetic Five/Alternative. (It's always a good idea and often essential to specify and provide a link to the article at issue. In this case, I hoped I figured it out correctly with a little research, but the less research you require for a favor, the more likely it'll get done. ☺ And I can't emphasize enough the utility of providing links to anything that a reader might reasonably click on for more information in any discussion, like the "speedy delete" link I added to your query above.) Anyway, addition to the category looks great, but I don't quite see how it meets any of the 10 guidelines for speedy deletion candidates. The closest I could come up with are the following:

2. Test pages (eg "Can I really create a page here?").

This is meant for trivial test pages, primarily from newbies who don't know about using the Sandbox, not for proposed page changes and/or their discussions.

9. Deleting an image which is an exact copy of something else, redundant, and unused.

This is not an image. Duplicate or unused articles or other pages should go through VfD. In fact, images have been VfD'd here also, as we know.

10. Users requesting the deletion of their own personal subpages.

This is not a personal subpage. This rule exists because users are considered to have complete authority over their user namespace (subject only to community rules and review). Test pages for articles are considered community property, so their deletion should go through VfD. (That's why I sometimes create experimental pages under my user namespace.)

I also looked at the page and was somewhat confused by its purpose and effect. As of this moment, Frenetic Five does not follow the format shown in Talk:Frenetic Five/Alternative, so the db reason "main page already has that format" doesn't seem to be correct. Also, if you're going to use a subpage to present a recommended set of changes, it shouldn't be a Talk page. Talk pages are supposed to be for discussion about articles or related pages. Proposed changes for "Frenetic Five" would more appropriately go in a page titled "Frenetic Five/Alternative", so that its Talk page could be used to discuss issues about the alternative. (See Wikiquote:Proposed Votes for deletion and its Talk page for an example of how this works.)

I recommend delisting "Talk:Frenetic Five/Alternative" from SD, reviewing its status, and then VfD'ing it if desired. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 13:28, 17 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Sorry, I meant I deleted them on sight, not applying to {{delete}} template. Perhaps it was a mistake? :( ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 13:26, 17 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

(These pages: Talk:Martin Luther King Talk:Musicologist Dimitris Varos) ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 13:28, 17 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Oh! (You see what I mean about specifying. ☺) I agree with your SDing of the two talk-page spams, although I would probably have blocked the IP for 24-48 hours first for the spamming. (Did 64.124.222.176 do any more spamming that has been deleted?) You were exactly correct to SD "Dimitris Varos"; I suspect we may eventually have to block the IP and/or create a blank article to prevent repeated attempts. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 13:38, 17 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Yes, indeed I saw what you mean :) I did not block that IP because I am still somewhat afraid of using that feature, and I was too nervous about making mistakes. I did check for more spamming, and did not see any. Thanks a lot for your help! ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 14:29, 17 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Tru Calling

Latest comment: 19 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Hi, Jeff. I wondered why you changed the Eliza Dushku red-link to point to wikipedia? Is there a guideline on not redlinking actors or something? The reason I am asking is that I did this on purpose and noticed it was a redlink, and I thought it might be nice if we ever have a Dushku quote page. Thanks ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 06:18, 18 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Check out the template for films (which is essentially being used for TV shows as well). You'll notice that actors, writers, directors, etc., all have WP links instead of WQ links. For now, the vast majority of people in films and TV shows have no quote articles. (Many of them don't even have WP articles, but that's the place for editors to create the logical encylopedia articles.) Using WQ links instead of WP links in articles is one of the main reasons we keep getting useless encyclopedia stubs on people; editors see red links and decide to create a blurb about the person. That latter problem is hardly confined to TV and film articles, either — many such red links from theme articles get inappropriately turned blue, even though the editors have at least one quote to add to the new person article. (That's the problem — people still think more of encyc rather than quote for links, even here.)

As far as I know, we have no real guideline on when to change WP links to WQ links, other than the obvious — when someone creates a quote article for the person. Anyone familiar enough with WQ to know that's what we want hopefully knows to change such links, if they know about them. The real problem is that there's no convenient mechanism (like "What links here") to find such WP links even after the article is created. (A "Search" should do it, but that's not as easy, and one can miss spelling differences in the names.) The whole issue is just one more frontier for expanding Wikiquote. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 08:05, 18 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Derek Devenpeck

Latest comment: 19 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Hi, Jeff. I am probably misunderstanding something -- should the dead discussion remain in WQ:VFD forever? Probably not. If so, does your "no archive" comment means the discussion should just be deleted? Thanks ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 10:54, 20 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Sorry about the lack of clarity. Speedy-delete entries that appear on VFD apparently just get deleted, although we've left the 2 or 3 we've had for a few days, with a message like "as this was speedy-deleted, I will remove this entry after a few days for review" (from one of my prior deletions) to let people know their imminent fate. I know it feels a little funny, but I guess the idea is that they shouldn't have been there in the first place. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 11:11, 20 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Buffy goofs

Latest comment: 19 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

Thanks for the contributions to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Might I suggest a few formatting tips? … ~ Jeff Q (talk) 23:58, 20 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

I did look over the discussion page and used it for reference. Thought I did it right, but obviously it wasn't enough. I'll go back through and make the changes you described, if someone else doesn't beat me to it. Sorry. Thought I was doing it right. =( ZachsMind 00:17, 21 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Hey, don't worry about mistakes for several reasons: they're easily corrected, Buffy formatting can be complicated, and, as I mentioned, some of it is undocumented, so it takes a while to pick up on it all. Usually I don't trouble relatively new editors, but I could see you were in the process of adding substantial text, so I thought it'd be a good idea to let you know right away. Don't let it discourage you from adding more material. In fact, any comments on the information as presented are welcome. (Some explanation of why it's so complicated can be found at User:Jeffq/Experiments/Firefly format, Wikiquote talk:Templates#Films & TV Shows, Talk:Television shows/Dialog formatting#General comments, and elsewhere.) ~ Jeff Q (talk) 01:09, 21 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Veronica Mars

Latest comment: 19 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion

Hi, Jeff. I have edited Veronica Mars to link to a format page which has characters and links to Firefly (TV series)/Format, as well as reformatting the article correctly. I would appreciate it if you would take a look, as the second show to use those guidelines. Thanks ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 11:49, 21 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Looks great! I fixed a few remaining stage-direction format differences to use the ''[text]'' format. Only difference I see now is that VM still has what I would call context lines (complete sentences separate from dialog lines) embedded as stage directions, but there's no clear division between the two. (That's another reason I specify whole sentences for context lines. If it's a complete sentence, I think it shouldn't be embedded because it distracts too much from the quote itself. But that's just my opinion.) It's pretty obvious from your Veronica Mars/Format just how your two-part link scheme could work as a general system, with most of the stuff in Firefly (TV series)/Format going into a page hanging off Wikiquote:Templates or equivalent. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 13:22, 21 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

I'm not entirely sure what qualifies as "stage directions" and what qualifies as "context" -- there are several examples on the verge (like "clasping his hands and looking at the heavens", or "holding the camera"). Thanks for your format fixes! ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 13:34, 21 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

I call a "context line" something that provides a necessary setting or description of action without which some of the dialog makes little sense. (Example: "Wash is playing with plastic dinosaurs.") I call "stage directions" the quick notes embedded in the dialog lines themselves, which are meant to give a necessary hint of how the dialog is meant to be interpreted, when the words alone are ambiguous. (Example: "Mal: Right. [sad look] We win.".)

When one is transcribing dialog, one has a tendency to include many stage directions and contextual data that have no direct impact on the quoted dialog, even though they may be a major part of the interest in a scene. The thing to remember always is that Wikiquote is a text-based quote database. We can't adequately describe visual or aural events, so if the quote is mostly interesting because of these auxiliary elements, then perhaps it shouldn't be listed here. In the case of something like "clasping his hands and looking at the heavens", I would ask myself if someone who isn't watching the scene needs to know all that information, and if it can't at least be trimmed to a word or two. Ultimately, there are no hard and fast rules, so we can only use our best judgment, and it will likely vary between individuals. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 15:30, 21 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

VfD goofs

Latest comment: 19 years ago5 comments2 people in discussion

Could you please sign when you close a VfD? Since VfD closure is a potential point of controversy, it's important to make clear who does the closure. (Of course, it's in the history, but signing is the standard mechanism to provide transparency in decision-making.) Thanks. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 06:58, 23 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Oh, I just remembered — page histories aren't obvious, either, because the archiving of a VfD entry into WQ:VFDA may be done by someone else, leaving no trace of the vote closer in VFDA. This is an issue whenever votes are closed by one sysop but moved by a different editor (as I'm about to do for some current VfD entries). I'm afraid your commendable conscientiousness in processing VfDs is beginning to bite you. <wry grin> This is a major reason why I'm trying to discourage spreading our sysop work across too many issues. There just aren't enough of us to handle all the problems; we need to make sure that the basic ones are consistently addressed. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 07:08, 23 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Oh, and as long as I'm already being an irritant ☺, could you consider using a closure time that allows "rounding up" a bunch of entries? Since votes don't have to be exactly 2 weeks long, setting an advance "rendezvous" (like 23:00 when you start hunting for deletion candidates around 12:00) allows vote closers to set a reminder for that rendezvous time, rather than periodically check throughout the day to do the next closure. It's hardly crucial, because a vote closer could always set their own rendezvous at the end of a spate of votes, but this would reduce the window for post-closure voting while making block closures easier. Just a thought. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 08:09, 23 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

As the newest admin here, I appreciate the feedback! Sorry for all the goofs :( I'll try and do better. I have added language to that effect to the documentation. ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 09:00, 23 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Wikiquote VfD is unfortunately a rather complicated process, and you're coming in after several months of process discussions. If you haven't already, check out some of the old discussions at WQt:VFD and WQt:VFDA; you'll find that most acknowledge the current system is not viable for the long term. At some point, we'll have to make more changes to reduce the load on the sysops, but we also don't want to increase it on editors. Thanks for updating the instructions! ~ Jeff Q (talk) 09:09, 23 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal

Latest comment: 19 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

On your recent inquiry as to why I moved the link on Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal: I merely thought that on individual author's pages having links to individual works near the top is more convenient for people seeking particular quotes from a particular work. On theme pages I could agree that a "See also" section of related themes or subjects might be better at the bottom, but on an author's page, if a major work is not going to have the major portion of its quotes on that page I think it should be indicated as soon as possible to anyone who might be seeking quotes from that work. ~ Kalki 06:50, 25 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Million Dollar Baby vote

Latest comment: 19 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Hi, Jeff! I was wondering if you would not mind changing your vote on Million Dollar Baby. Many quotes from it, as you know, have been added. I know your original vote was conditional, but it is probably best if you change it just to avoid sysops looking like they play favorites. Thanks ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 05:22, 27 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Actually, I didn't notice that quotes had been added. I realize now that UDScott had mentioned adding dialog to it in a separate conversation, but hadn't recalled that it was on VfD for lacking quotes. I'm afraid I don't always connect all these separate activities in my head, especially when I've been distracted by major issues elsewhere. Thanks for calling this to my attention. I have changed my vote as promised. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 05:32, 27 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Message Rec'd - thx 4 feedback

Latest comment: 19 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

I got your message in my talk. You were worried about being annoying, but maybe I was the one who was annoying -accidentally. I didn't mean to complain, but you know, I'm human. I'm in between jobs, and trying to prepare for a proper job search, and maybe that is stressing me out a little.

"...there are many projects in the world that can reward a person for their work by financial compensation..." Thank you for your suggestions to look at other opportunities to make my talents be profitable for me.

Yes, I did grumble and complain a little, but since I have decided to spend less time in volunteer projects (such as Wiki or my other endeavors), I wanted to leave you all with something that I thought might help you avoid loss of important article materials -and I wanted to encourage you all to set up structures to help avoid constant wasting your time in "policing the pages." (Others shared my concern about the open nature of a wiki.)

However, on the plus side, being open and volunteer allows (1) much influx of new ideas and (2) in an economical way for the wiki web servers.

Well, I didn't mean to grumble or complain, but I thank you for not being offended too much, and thank you for pointing out where my social skills may sometimes fall short or be capable of improving.

My lasting contribution would, I hope, to help my neighbors get along with one another, and, in that light, I am glad for the benevolence that you showed the stressed out newcomer, "214." Whether you block her IP or not, I hope you, in your own way, pray that she is able to address or deal with whatever is stressing her to have overreacted. Well, if I don't see you all in a while, thank you to all of you all for being good neighbors. PS: I highlighted a little bit of the text, because I saw the neat blue color from some active links immediately above. Have a nice day.--GordonWattsDotCom 03:43, 28 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

User picture

Latest comment: 19 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

I have recently updated my own picture, just to be cool like everyone :) However, seeing Aphaia's note on VfD, I went ahead and uploaded my picture to commons. Since we are thinking of disallowing pictures here, I hope you will not think it is too rude of me suggest that perhaps uploading your "Jeff as dimension" picture (under the GFDL anyway) to commons and using it from there. I am reviewing the list of pictures now trying to figure out if there's anything we are going to need. Thanks ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 08:42, 29 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Not rude at all. I've been thinking about that myself. My concern at the moment is that Commons' stated goals can be interpreted to imply a disinterest in user photos (personal collections), which motivated my question in WQ:VFD#Clarence McCoy. But I haven't taken the next logical step and asked about it at Commons:Village pump. I'd prefer to wait until we get an official position from them before we start encouraging people to move any images outside the main articlespace. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 10:31, 29 July 2005 (UTC)Reply

Re: Congratulations

Latest comment: 19 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

I noticed your tally in your recent Buffy edit. I'm envious; I've racked up only about 2200 myself in 15 months. Might I ask how you calculated this? I haven't seen a Wikiquote equivalent of Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by number of edits, and I don't believe that separates main from auxiliary namespace edits anyway. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 13:13, 2 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the congratulations. I've used Kate's tool, pointed to by User:Davidcannon ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 13:21, 2 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Re: "Kill them all; for God knoweth them that are His"

Latest comment: 19 years ago7 comments2 people in discussion

A belated thanks to you for adding this oh-so-appropriate quote in the recent VfD for transwikied speeches. (As you probably noticed, I took your advice.) I had run into a spoof of this quote in MST3K, from The Phantom Creeps, chapter 1:

[The opening credits, after showing the main characters in action, merely list the lesser players.]

Crow [as Bela Lugosi]: I forget who did what here. I say, "Shoot the picture! Let God sort it out."

I'd thought about adding this line and including a note about the original quote to show the cultural reference, but my own research had tracked it to an unsourced assertion[2] that it was a U.S. Marine/Green Beret saying that was based on a monk recording "Neca eos omnes. Deus suos agnoset" during the Béziers massacre around 1210. This appears to be the same event, but with some varying details, like your citation of Arnaud-Amaury, Abbot of Citeaux, 1209 (the guy who apparently said, presumably in French, what the monk recorded in Latin). Do you have a source for that? (I read Albigensian Crusade and saw the reference to Caesar of Heisterbach; is this from his Dialogus magnus visionum ac miraculorum? If so, where did the French version come from?) I'd like to nail this down, to the extent possible. Thanks. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 15:39, 2 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

My own research led me to think that a good place to look for the source might be The Perfect Heresy by Stephen Shea. Sadly, the only copy of that book down here is down south, so it might be a while before I get my hands on it. ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 16:07, 2 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the title. My local library system has a copy, so I've slapped a hold on it and will take a look in a few days. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 16:24, 2 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Hi, Jeff. A friend of mine researched the issue. Here are his results:

The quote is attributed to Arnold Amalric, Abbot of Citeaux and papal legate (representative) with the crusading army at the massacre in Beziers on 22 July 1209. Earliest source reporting the quote is "Dialogue concerning miracles" of Caesar of Heisterbach, a Cistercian monk in the diocese of Cologne, written about 40 years after the event. (Caesarii Heisterbacensis Monachi ... Dialogus Miraculorum, ed. J. Strange [Cologne, Bonn and Brussels 1851] volume 1 page 302):

"Knowing from their confessions that the Catolics were mingled together with heretics they asked the Abbot 'What shall we do, lord? We cannot tell the good men from the bad.' It is said that the Abbot, fearing - as did the others - that some might pretend to be Catholics through fear of dying but would return to their error after the crusaders had gone, replied: 'Kill them. The Lord knows who are his own.' [Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.] Thus it was that an innumerable host of people were killed in this city."

Hope it's helpful, ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 13:38, 3 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Thanks once more! I appreciate the effort you and your friend have put into sourcing this quote. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 16:50, 3 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

I finally got my hands on the O'Shea book and looked up the specific text to confirm the source, then added it to Latin proverbs. (I couldn't find any info on Dialogus Miraculorum, and I don't feel comfortable adding sources I can't personally verify. But that's just my hangup, I suppose.) In case you didn't notice (ha!), I also added quotes to Veronica Mars and MST3K that allude to this famous quote. I'm not usually big on links within dialog, but I thought this one was intriguing enough (and its origin sufficiently obscure) to include links from these two shows directly to the "original" Latin (using a SPAN id tag). ~ Jeff Q (talk) 16:11, 19 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Wow, this quote gets around! I was reviewing the Firefly episode "Bushwhacked" to flesh out its Wikipedia article when I came across yet another apparent version of this, from Alliance Commander Harken. I've added that quote and yet another link to the original in Latin proverbs. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 19:07, 26 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Starting new page vote

Latest comment: 19 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion

Hi, Jeff. Thanks for your encouragement — and your admonishments! I've added notices to the places you recommended, and if you think of any others please either let me know or add notices there. I have extended the vote by a week, to raise the probability that everyone has enough time to evaluate the issues and to voice their opinion. As you know, I am quite new here, and I certainly do not want to overstep my boundaries. ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 19:54, 3 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

I worry that you take my advice a little too much to heart sometimes. I'm afraid that my habit of being pedantic comes off as delivering sermons from the mount. The only boundaries you have are the ones that bind us all at Wikiquote, and, as you know, many of those are rather flexible. Believe me, I'm just as likely to be preachy to Aphaia and the other sysops who have much more sysop (and often wiki) experience than I, and they remind me often enough of errors, questionable interpretations, and practical problems with my ideas (usually less ponderously and more diplomatically!). It's all part of this cooperative community. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 21:55, 3 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Don't worry too much. Usually, when I take it "to heard", it because it resonates with a fear I've been having anyway, with more or less awareness. In fact, before you sent me the message, I was going to thank you for commenting on Help talk:Starting a new page because I was starting to feel like a one-man show, and I don't want it...so keep delivering sermons — I'll manage to ignore the ones I thoroughly disagree with :) ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 03:22, 4 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Of course, you are a one-man show. That's the problem with many of the issues that we face on Wikiquote — they're often dealt with by a single person who steps up to the plate. You're doing exactly what I and others have done in the past: work out a way to solve a problem and present it as a fait-mostly-accompli. Then you wait for some input and hope you've provided enough framework (without going too far off in a novel direction) to allow folks to tweak it and then approve.

I'm hoping to help out a bit by going over the WP and meta versions of "Help:Starting a new page" to provide the starting point I suggested, but I see that it's already more complicated than it used to be. Apparently meta now has a template (in the general sense) for the entire page, including several templates (in the wiki sense) that I've never seen before, which is supposed to be copied verbatim without editing, using only some project-specific parameters. (That's fine if you think that meta and WP have the ideal page; I rarely do, because I think they both have a tendency to drop into wiki developer-speak, which is rather pointless in a page for newcomers.) I also noticed it uses the input box right up front, which certainly supports your approach! Anyway, I'll try to come up with something in the next couple of days. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 04:28, 4 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Question for you regarding titles of pages

Latest comment: 19 years ago6 comments3 people in discussion

Jeff,

A question: is there an easy way to rename a page? An example is the recent edits I did on teh page called 'Evans' which is a candidate for deletion. I would like to change the title to the full name of the person (Bergen Evans), but didn't want to merely cut and paste onto a new page, losing the connection to the ongoing vote. Maybe I'm just overlooking something obvious here? Thanks UDScott 13:23, 4 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Nothing is obvious until one learns it. ☺ Each wiki page has a "Move" tab at the top (or link at the left, if you're using other page-format "skins") that is essentially a rename function. Any registered user (like yourself) can Move a page, unless one already exists with that name. If the page to be moved has a Talk (discussion) page, it is usually moved as well.

Your question raised another one that I don't have an answer to at the moment: should some move/rename an article while it's being voted on for deletion? This also just came up with The Other Eden, which should be titled This Other Eden. I suggest you hold off for the moment while I look up relevant policy info and perhaps ask the other sysops. Thanks. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 13:33, 4 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Hmm, can I do it using the list of people? If I change it there, will the connection I mentioned still exist? UDScott 13:25, 4 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

When you move an article, a redirect is automatically created, so that any links to the old page, when clicked on in other pages, will jump to the new title. (There are limitations and complications to this; see w:Help:Renaming (moving) a page for more information.) On the other hand, changing the link in other pages without changing the original article title will only make it a "red link"; i.e., a link to a non-existent article. Fortunately, once you move the article, such red links will automatically become valid. When moving an article, you should always check the "What links here" link on the left of the page to see what links should be changed to point directly to the new title. (Many people forget to do this, however, because the redirect usually makes the old links work.) ~ Jeff Q (talk) 13:43, 4 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

In en.wikipedia, articles to be VfDed should not be moved or merged. See w:Template:vfd ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 15:47, 4 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Thanks, MosheZadka! That's exactly the sort of thing I was worried about. Sounds like we should wait until vote closure before acting. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 15:58, 4 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Reply and MST3K thanks

Latest comment: 19 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Thanks for replying and giving me a tip on my page. Wikiquote is probably one of my top three visited websites ever (every day I come here). And since you are the main maker of the Mystery_Science_Theater_3000 page, let me say how deeply thankful I am to you. I got hooked on MST3K a long while back. Unfortunately I picked a worse time, right at the zenith of its removal from the Sci-Fi Channel. I first read that page of MST3K quotes and was utterly racked in tears of pained laughter.

May I ask if you know of any free ways to get MST3K stuff? I found a few free clips but no proper downloads barring torrents that always fail me or are too slow for my limited daily net time. And please, no DAPcentral, I got pissed off with their stupid instructions to get their stuff. Any info is greatly appreciated on Mystery_Science_Theater_3000, thank you.User:FinalGamer (talk) 12:37, 5 August 2005 (GMT)

I'm not big on obtaining creative works for free unless their creators specifically allow or encourage it. Best Brains Inc., the people behind MST3K, had a policy of encouraging tape swapping among fans in the early years of the show (noted by the admonition at the end of each shows credits: "Keep circulating the tapes"). BBI discontinued its encouragement quite a while ago (perhaps as MST3K climbed into Hollywood radar). I believe tape swapping is still discussed at Old Timer Billy Slater's Tape Tradin' Post, but I've not looked in on that for years. You might give that a try. (I looked at DAPcentral myself a while back, and couldn't figure out how to use it, so I gave up.) Of course, the stuff that's been released on Rhino DVDs is verboten for swapping, so the pool of "free" material continually shrinks. (Personally, I'm glad; I figure the more I spend on DVD episodes, the more funding and notice BBI will get for any future enterprises, including the unspoken possibility of revisting the SOL sometime down the road.) ~ Jeff Q (talk) 15:42, 5 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Film quote source

Latest comment: 19 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Jeff -- I'm sure it got lost in the onslaught of changes that are always appearing, but I left a comment and question for you in the Superman II talk page. Basically, I'm wondering if there is a better source for accurate quotes from films (besides the flawed IMDB). I've found film scripts occasionally that help,but was wondering if you had any alternate sources. Thanks. UDScott 18:00, 9 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Sorry about not responding to your Talk:Superman II posting earlier, but I was preoccupied with meatspace matters and then Wikiquote VfD stuff. (If you're used to MosheZadka's lightning-quick replies, he's an unusually energetic editor. Wiki interaction can easily take days, since no one knows when anyone is "listening".)

I hope you don't feel put out by my revisions. Your formatting work was a useful, necessary, and often-overlooked step in creating a robust and accurate article for Wikiquote. It just happened that I've had Superman II on my worklist for several months, and it finally came up in my Netflix queue. When I found you'd created the article and populated it with WQ-formatted quotes, you saved me considerable effort! All I had to do was review the DVD to sort and correct the existing quotes (as well as add a few bits).

As quote sources go, IMDb is perhaps the best of a bad lot, for two reasons: it does have a professional screening committee, however understaffed they may be, and it is arguably the most respected source of film and TV information on the 'Net. Your use of IMDb as a starting point is exactly what others (myself included) have done to add to Wikiquote's database. It provides the raw material that we can then fashion into a properly formatted, organized, and verified Wikiquote article, saving us considerable typing. This is legal because one cannot copyright facts; insofar as the quotes are accurate, they aren't owned by IMDb or any quote website. And I seriously doubt a respected organization like IMDb would ever try to make a copyvio case based on how error-riddled their data is! Even so, correcting quotes prevents even this potential problem. (Standard IANAL disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, so take this info with a grain of salt.)

The web is literally littered with wildly inaccurate quote databases. One way I've used to locate accurate sites is to take an original work and do an exact Google search for a phrase likely to be misquoted. For instance, I just tried searching for Lex Luthor's "oh my fullness as I explained to you before" (including the quotes to make it an exact search; case and punctuation are ignored) to look for a good S2 transcript — many quote databases will miss stuff like "oh my fullness" — and found a Superman II shooting script. Even though these sites themselves probably violate copyright laws, we can use the material from them, which is presumed to be factual, as a basis for creating a quote article. (A note about shooting scripts, though: they're rarely definitive, as actors and directors often change things during shooting. On the other hand, besides serving as a starting point, they can often provide clues to unintelligible dialog.) The basic requirement for this quote-location scheme is a definitive excerpt of the original, best provided by a DVD or uncut telecast recording. And as long as you have that, you might as well do a verification and perhaps a chronological-sort pass. (The former is made much easier if you do the latter, too, or even first; that's one of the great advantages of chrono-sorted quote articles.) If folks don't want to do all this work, what they do contribute will eventually be edited by others; that's the beauty of wiki. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 19:21, 9 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Buffy quotes

Latest comment: 19 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion

Jeff -- After completing the addition of quotes to the Season 5:Triangle episode, I wanted to ask a general question (a little late since I already expanded the quotes, but here goes). How much is too much (when it comes to TV shows in particular)? With a show like Buffy, there's so much strong dialogue that I was loathe to eliminate much. But did I add too much? Where should I have stopped? UDScott 18:24, 10 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

You ask many a good question, UDScott. After quickly looking over your additions, I would have to say that it looks like too much to me (not to mention that "Triangle" looked a bit long even before your edits). But there are no hard and fast rules. The problem with TV shows is that they have a huge amount of material to cover. Buffy has about 103 hours of dialog, whereas a typical film has only 2, give or take. In general, it's wise to consider adding only your favorite quotes from any episode, especially since every other editor can be expected to do at least the same. (I have perhaps 4 times the amount of material currently in Buffy recorded for a quote project of my own, but I resist the urge to add too much more of my own favorites.) There are also practical reasons — even with only highlights, Buffy is already the longest Wikiquote article (and has been for the past year or so).

A few specific guidelines:

Try not to add more than 2-4 quotes yourself, as MosheZadka mentioned.
Try to avoid adding dialog whose humor or pithiness won't be clear to someone who has not watched the show. Such material is better suited for fan sites.
Any time you find yourself transcribing an entire scene, consider trimming it down to the best few lines.
A context longer than a single line suggests that too much non-quote material is needed to make the quote interesting.
It's better to remove a single non-pithy quote line than add a paragraph to demonstrate why it's interesting.
Always remember that others may have different opinions on what should or shouldn't be included, so leave "room" for their ideas.
Wikiquote will never be the definitive Buffy quote site, or the definitive site for quotes on any single subject, any more than Bartlett's Familiar Quotations could possibly be the definitive book for Shakespeare quotations. Single-subject sites will always have more material. All we should hope for is to provide accurate highlights of the show.

Also, I'm afraid I must counter MosheZadka on the subject of avoiding copyright suits. We follow MediaWiki fair-use policy because it is policy, not just when we think we can't get away with breaking it, as other clearly copyright-violating sites have done thus far.

Finally, at some point, we should probably consider trimming what is already in Buffy. I and other editors have tended to avoid deleting quotes, so as not to put too much of a personal spin on the article, but there are probably many quotes that break the content-based guidelines above and practically beg to be trimmed or deleted. Frankly, I'm a bit surprised we Buffy contributors haven't gotten complaints yet from the rest of the community about this article. We must not let our love of the show outweight our responsibilities to the WQ community. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 23:29, 10 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Two points:

1. My point about avoiding law suits is not against MediaWiki fair-use policy. "Fair-use" is a vague legal term, and can only be tested in court. That the various media companies did go after transcript sites and didn't go after the quotes sites, which hints at the allowable length.

2. After looking again at Triangle, yes, it could use serious trimming.

~ MosheZadka (Talk) 06:37, 11 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Which "media companies"? Which "transcript sites"? I doubt that more than a tiny fraction of either have been in court. It's all about visibility, because it's simply not cost-effective for copyright owners to pursue every violator on the web, even when they provide full transcripts. I always worry about adding links to my transcript sources just because MediaWiki projects might give them undesirable visibility. (Of course, one could argue the ethics of using material from a copyvio'ing source, but I stand on the principle that facts cannot be copyrighted — and hope I'm right.) ~ Jeff Q (talk) 06:43, 11 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Vote reminder

Latest comment: 19 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Hi, Jeff. I wanted to note that you did not vote in the "death to quotemarks" vote. If it's not merely a case of forgetfulness, I'm sorry for bothering you -- I do not mean to pressure you to vote if you do not want to. Thanks ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 12:13, 15 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Your comments on WQ:VFDA

Latest comment: 19 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

You said Untangling these transwikied articles is complicated. Virtually nobody is logging outgoing transwiki action as required. I have just verified and deleted every Wikisource-incoming article that was properly logged there and added logs entries for them here. Any blue links above have not been completely or properly transwikied yet, so please don't speedy-delete them.

I wish to verify I understood you correctly: in order to speedy delete them, all I need to do is:

Make sure they moved to wikisource
Add them to Wikiquote:Transwiki log

Right?

Specifically, I am referring to Franklin Roosevelt's First Inaugural Address and The Four Freedoms Speech. Thanks ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 12:55, 17 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

The other element is making sure that the edit history of the Wikiquote article (up to the point of transwiki) has been copied to the talk page of the Wikisource article, preserving credit for user contributions (a requirement of GFDL). It looks like Kalki did these two, so that was probably done correctly. Two other considerations that I like to do to make it easier for folks trying to find the results:

Verify wikisource:Transwiki has a record of the incoming transfer, which should include the final destination article title and link. This gets complicated, because the originator of the transwiki (the person who copied the text to the new project) isn't obligated to place the article in its final position, only in the Transwiki: namespace, but many people ignore this and copy right to the new project's article space. That can make the new project's transwiki log confusing. Worse yet, someone at Wikisource decided they didn't need all those records, and rather than archive them, simply deleted them. I don't recall that they've responded to my complaint. Transwiki is complicated enough that many feel justified in ignoring the formal practices, regardless of license issues. (One of my if-I-install-a-test-wiki projects is to implement an automated transwiki process that I've already sketched out.)
An easier optional task (which directly benefits WQ readers) is to ensure that the final title and link are recorded in our Transwiki (the canonical name for the transwiki log, which is redirected to wherever each project wants to place it). That way, WQ readers don't have to rely on the vagaries of other project's practices to find the article they seek. Of course, since we are supposed to log the initial transfer, and that transfer is often shortcutted to go right to the final destination title, this is often already done. But it's nice to check.

File this away in your Too Much Information file if desired. ☺ ~ Jeff Q (talk) 17:01, 17 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

OK, I've followed the procedure to remove these last two. Thanks for the help! ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 03:00, 18 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Reply to Trick Daddy question

Latest comment: 19 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Originally posted at User talk:152.130.8.67:

Someone using this IP address added a line from Trick Daddy Dollars to the new Lyrics article. I've moved it from the "Sourced" section to a new "Attributed" section, following Wikiquote guidelines, because there is no specific work cited (i.e., song title, preferably with the album first featuring it, if available). Not being familiar with this artist's works, I did some hunting through Trick Daddy and Trick Daddy Dollars lyrics, as well as Googling for the lyrics themselves, but could find no such line. Could the contributor add this information so we can consider it sourced? Thank you for your help. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 20:03, 18 August 2005 (UTC)

I've sourced it already — see lyrics ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 20:14, 18 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the quick correction! ~ Jeff Q (talk) 22:43, 21 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Re: Aggressive discussion moving

Latest comment: 19 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

In my obviously subjective opinion, I think you might be getting a bit aggressive about moving discussions from WQ:VP. That Che Guevara statement was only incidentally connected to QotD, and was more a complaint about a perceived bias in Wikiquote. Most VP discussions should be archived on a periodic basis in the VP archive, not moved to specific topics, because people won't remember them from those topics that they may never have participated in. The main reason to move discussions is when they get long and complicated, and are therefore better served by a topical audience at the appropriate article. In summary, I think it would be better to archive older VP discussions that to move them to topical pages just because they're inactive. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 19:01, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

Hi, Jeff. I'm afraid as I understand it, your complaint is inaccurate -- I moved discussions off of Talk:Main Page into topical pages. That being the case, it might still be justified, I just want some clarification. Do you think I should have left the discussions on the T:MP page, or that I should have moved them into WQ:VP? The reason to move things off the main page discussion is that hardly nobody looks at it, and it gets waaaaaay too long. It is a better alternative, I believe, to archiving it on T:MP/Old, as that way it would be even less reachable. Thanks for your feedback, in any case, and thanks in advance for any clarification — and sorry if I seem like I'm nitpicking, but I am really unsure what your suggested strategy is. ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 22:27, 21 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Geez, I'm getting sloppy! Your comment is hardly a nitpick. I hadn't even contemplated the nature of current Main Page discussions (as opposed to WQ:VP), so my complaint was extremely confusing. I'm still unhappy with the tendency of some folks to move discussions from general to specific talk pages, unless the individual discussions get too long (i.e., have a depth more appropriate for the specific topic's talk page). I believe that short questions should be answered where they arise, with links provided where needed, and that when a talk page gets too long, it should be archived rather than trimmed. (I've had this conversation with Aphaia in the past; I don't think we ever settled it even between ourselves.) It's a standard wiki practice to find old conversations from a talk page in an archived subpage off that talk page, and the links from the original discussion to more appropriate forums for extended discussions provide an easy backtrack through "What links here", even after the original is archived. That makes it reachable both by the original asker (who may only know about their original-page posting, both by memory and Watchlist) and by anyone starting from the logical topic.

But I obviously wasn't paying enough attention to what I was doing. (At least your action had logic!) I'm sorry about the confusion. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 23:09, 21 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Lyrics

Latest comment: 19 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion

I wanted to direct you to my remarks at Talk:Lyrics#Wikipedia links. Thanks ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 05:06, 26 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for catching my egregious error. I've simply got to pay more attention to some of my edits! ~ Jeff Q (talk) 06:00, 26 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

No problems :) I only followed the link since I wondered what this guy's beef is with Paul Simon. You can imagine my surprise when I found out he died before the latter was born... ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 07:21, 26 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Actually, Forster's song is hilarious. I'm a major Paul Simon fan, but I still found Forster's blending of many Simon music and lyrical styles an amusingly appropriate spoof. In fact, I think the better you know Simon's works, the funnier it is, just like with classical music and P.D.Q. Bach, big band and Spike Jones, and pop music and Weird Al Yankovic. I saw him in concert with Christine Lavin, a big folk name in the Northeast US, and I nearly died laughing over "Fusion". I also found the title song of his album, Entering Marion, a play on odd town names in New England, quite funny. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 07:50, 26 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Re: Tagging "verified" section articles

Latest comment: 19 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Thank you for adding to the collection of articles that need to have "verified" replaced with "sourced" and "attributed" sections. You might want to double-check the pages you find, though. You tagged Scott Ritter, but it had never had any section, let alone a "verified" one. It does have the word "verified" in it, but within a quote. (You don't have to worry about that one, though — I've fixed it up.) ~ Jeff Q (talk) 20:15, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the note! I've gone over everything in the category, and double-checked. I found only one other mistake (Twelve-tone technique, which I fixed). Of course, I still may have missed something, but now at least I've double (though not triple) checked :) ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 21:58, 30 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Re: Duplicate stub messages

Latest comment: 19 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

I commend your speed and energy, Moshe, but I think that sometimes you work too fast to notice what you're doing. ;-) I happened to notice that you'd added a second stub tag to Stephen R. Covey, so I deleted it. Just now, I ran across Abraham Maslow, to which you also added a duplicate stub tag (which I also deleted). Could you please check first to see if the stuff you're adding isn't already there? Thanks. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 20:19, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for noticing. Going over my work, I noticed Robert Redford had the same problem, which I fixed. The next batch I plan to do, I will use computerized assistance (a script flagging problematic articles), which will hopefully cut down on mistakes. Thanks ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 22:31, 31 August 2005 (UTC)Reply

Re: Template:Vfud

Latest comment: 19 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

I agree a Votes-for-undeletion process is useful. I disagree it could be served by such a template: where would you put it? I mean, the article is deleted, so you can't put it there. This is why the template that Ryan added on WP was deleted there as well. ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 05:54, 4 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

D'oh! I got caught with my brain turned off again. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 06:58, 4 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

It's not like I have a better brain, I just read up on Ryan's activities in WP and saw this rationale there. Memory can often serve in lieu of thinking :) ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 07:01, 4 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

RfA

Latest comment: 19 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

Jeff, Please support my request for adminship on en.Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship/GordonWattsDotCom

Thx.--GordonWattsDotCom 15:03, 13 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

Got your messaage on my qikiquote user "Talk" page; I understand your concerns, but Uncle Ed said that hwe would support me if I changed my username to drop the "DotCom" in 'pedia -and I did:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship/GordonWatts

I expect him and Ann (another editor) to vote for me (another 2 votes for 4 or 5 FOR) -I may get a turnaround. You are still welcome to come and vote for me -it;s only wikipedia after all -what harm can come from it + The new arguments I make on the RfA page above show how any simply editor is suppored to have accedd to Admin rights if he's at least normal (I think I am at least normal, lol) -come and at least see the updated happeneings -I don't know what will happen, but I would not request RfA if I thought it were harmful -- time-consuming (as I'm lamented) yes, but a good investment --in the future I may need an admin tool to help out or something -kind of like a spare tire --get it NOW while the gettin's good (If I can -I might not be able to). Come and see -and look around and vote your conscience. Thx, Jeff.--GordonWattsDotCom 04:11, 14 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

Sorry, Gordon, but I'm not quite following what you wrote above. I guess you must have been in a hurry when writing it. From what I can glean, the updated situation doesn't really affect my concern — that you are too focused on an extremely narrow area. I also have concerns about your real-world involvement with and advocacy on the topics you're editing. These are not absolute reasons to prevent someone from supporting an RfA, but they are my "conscience", so I choose not to support your request at this time. Good luck with your efforts. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 05:42, 14 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

Buffy stuff

Latest comment: 18 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

I actually started off intending to ask for tech advice, but I think I may have worked out the answer myself (I believe this would be the second time that's ever happened). Since I'm on your talk page anyway, I wanted to thank you for adding the "heartbreaking final version" of Anya's wedding vows to the "Hell's Bells" page. I left them out to avoid turning this episode into an all-Anya (or all-Pickman) section, but your addition makes the material feel more complete somehow. I also wanted to ask if there's a preferred name for the group of "supervillains" (Warren, Jonathan, Andrew) featured in Season Six; I've seen them referred to as the Trio, the Evil Trio, the nerds, the geeks, etc. and am not quite sure what to call them. --RPickman 05:12, 15 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

I'm not aware of an "official" name. (I prefer Xander's "Legion of Dim" myself.) I suggest using whatever term suits you when you write the context lines, as long as it's clear who you're referring to. I think we can be a bit creative in the context lines, as long as we don't get too fannish about it (and keep it brief, of course). I recommend not using it to indicate speakers — i.e., if they say something in unison — but rather to show each in a comma-separated list. I've always felt that as long as the exact speakers are listed in the actual dialog, one can take some liberties in how one describes a group in the context lines (e.g., "Scoobies", "gang", "Slayerettes" for Buffy's group). So far, no one seems to have a problem with that. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 18:16, 15 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

Hi Jeff. I know you've been very patient with my Wiki transgressions. It's jut that I can't find my head from my tail through the docs, and I read more docs/books/instructions offline more thoroughly than most people. I'll try to learn, though. xiner 16:01, 17 February 2006 (UTC)Reply

Condensed TOC for TV shows

Latest comment: 19 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Jeff, I wasn't sure if you ever got consensus on this, but I wanted to say that I really like your condensed TOC for Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and Blackadder I believe). As I was working on Alias, the TOC was getting a bit cumbersome and I adapted your format (through the first three seasons -- I've still got work to do). I plan to use it for the other series I am working on as well. It takes a little time to set it up, but I think it looks much better than the standard. Are there any plans to adopt this format as the norm for TV series? Thanks. UDScott 19:30, 22 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

Egads, no! I admit I'm rather proud of these custom TOCs (my Mystery Science Theater 3000 one is the most sophisticated — for good and ill — and my Firefly one is my favorite, just ahead of Blackadder). But they add a considerable chunk of data to articles likely to be rather long already. And even though they're designed not to need editing, they're not as wiki-friendly as the automatic TOCs. They also prevent editors from noticing errors in headings, whereas you can easily spot such a problem with the auto TOCs. But they definitely provide a more compact and robust TOC for lengthy and/or complex articles. I see it as one of the necessary (or at least extremely useful) evils for overcoming a deficiency in MediaWiki markup and formatting. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 20:47, 22 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

Re: Tweaked VFD notice

Latest comment: 19 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Moshe, I've corrected your VFD notice on Talk:Giosuè Carducci to make clear that the article under vote was Hymn to Satan. I noticed this problem before whenever we closed kept-but-moved articles, and when I was doing the bulk of VfD closures, I just copied and edited the Template:vfd-kept text to say the right thing. But I was too lazy to create another template for this case, and now that you're doing most of the closures, I'm afraid I've been caught out in my laziness.

I was going to create a Template:vfd-moved just now, but I realized that I can't avoid a problem I neatly skirted with vfd-kept. In the latter, the only parameter is the name of the VfD entry, not the article name. This is a problem whenever we have VfD entries that aren't exactly the same as the article name, like for multiple articles and extremely long titles. As long as the page is merely kept, the only parameter necessary is the VFDA heading. When moving, however, the message I created for T:GC requires 3 parameters: the original article, the final article (which is the current PAGENAME without the "Talk:"), and the VFDA entry. I think it'll take a little experimenting to see how best to do this. Sorry for the inconvenience. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 04:15, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the note, and fixing up after me. I've edited the documentation to better reflect those practices. ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 05:04, 26 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

Computers cleanup

Latest comment: 19 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Hi Jeff, would you take a look over my ideas for cleaning up the Computers article please? Talk:Computers Thanks. — Richiesmit 21:33, 26 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

Minor formatting question

Latest comment: 19 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Jeff - I've noticed on a lot of pages (and I'm as guilty of this as others) that the divider line between lines of dialogue can often be shown as ...width=50% as opposed to ...width="50%" Does this matter? When I type either one, they appear to generate the same result, but I noticed on your recent work on Gilmore Girls that you had added in the quotation marks. I'm always eager to do things the right way, so I was curious if this was something I should be concerned about (and should I go back to pages I have edited and add in the quotation marks)? Just wondering. UDScott 13:26, 28 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

It's not really an issue — yet. Regular HTML allows many shortcuts, like attributes without quotes, but XHTML (the new web standard) tightens syntax to make pages easier to process for more sophisticated XML-based applications. MediaWiki isn't demanding compliance yet, but there are moves to make it XHTML-clean. I only tend to make these changes when I'm doing some other kind of major work, like cleaning up an entire page. Truth be told, there are enough other concerns about formatting (not to mention my general dislike of HTML issues, despite my support for the half-width tag) that I haven't brought this up anywhere. I just update the pages and formatting guidelines whenever I think about it. I wouldn't worry too much about it. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 17:01, 28 September 2005 (UTC)Reply

baen cd rom

Latest comment: 19 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

here is text from an email from baen

Dear ****,

Here's the thing. While I thiunk this guy is discourteous in the extrreme, we did say anyone could distribut files from aBaen CD in any way they chose, as long as they make no money from it, and made no changes to the files. If onyone does that (removes author's name or copyright noctice, say) we'd have to sic a lawyer on them. Otherwise, I guess we must grin and bear the loss of some of the CD's promotional value. (Promotional value is indeed part of our Evil Plan.)

As long as there are people like you out there, people who understand that it is socially brutish to puunish people for doing the right thing, I guess we'll be ok.

Best wishes, jim baen

(spelling mistakes are his) Guit4r9uy

I'm afraid I have a hard time believing a professional publisher would respond with such a poorly written email, but I could be wrong. Since you apparently told Jim Baen something which caused him to think of me as "discourteous in the extrreme" and "socially brutish", I thought I'd better make sure that Mr. Baen hear from the brutish horse's mouth, as it were, and ensure that he had links to an uneditable copy of the exact dialog that apparently motivated this personal communication. I've sent you a copy (via your email address registered with Wikiquote, if you have one) of my own correspondence with Mr. Baen, asking for clarification on this matter. (If you don't get the email, you can send me an email through the "E-mail this user" link so I can forward you a copy.) I will also let you know if I hear anything from him.

I think it's great that the Baen Free Library exists to promote distribution of its products. Besides my own fannish enjoyment, it makes it much easier to grab quotes for Wikiquote. But it doesn't free Wikiquote editors from the responsibility of ensuring that any links we add go to responsible sites. As I already said at Talk:David Weber, I was concerned that your new link was potentially copyvio and asked for justification, you provided it and restored a link (or variation thereof), and I thought the matter was settled. I'm rather disappointed you seem to feel a need to muster external support for your anger toward me. As Rodney King famously said, "Can't we all just get along?" ~ Jeff Q (talk) 09:04, 10 October 2005 (UTC)Reply

Zalman Stern

Latest comment: 19 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Hi, Jeff. You were the closing admin for the Zalman Stern VfD. It was a long time ago, at least as far as a newbie like me is concerned, and standards might've been different back then. The decision was to "delete the article and move two quotes to Computers. I have engaged in a campaign to move suspected quotes to the talk page, pending discussion of the notability of the source, as a basic cleanup operation, and I'm not sure what to do about the aforementioned individual. Your opinion would be appreciated! ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 11:12, 10 October 2005 (UTC)Reply

Sorry I didn't respond to your query about Zalman Stern quotes last month. As you've no doubt noticed, I've been practically absent on WQ for a while, and I'm not sure when I'll be participating regularly again. (I'm trying to work on my backlog, but it's proceeding at a snail's pace.)

Anyway, Stern is one of those semi-notable people that makes for hard judgment calls. He is published, but only in a few comp-sci journals, and I don't think they're the source of his quotes. The quotes themselves, I believe, are unsourced and possibly unsourceable. I'm afraid I contributed to the Computers mess by moving the quotes there, although I think Stern is far more qualified for a presence in "Attributed" than most of the other quotes there. Were I working actively on "Computers", I'd be inclined to leave him there for others to source him, but I wouldn't object to his removal, either. Moving suspect quotes to the Talk page sounds like a good idea in general, although it may need to be used selectively for "Computers", given the quantity of suspect quotes. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 09:12, 7 November 2005 (UTC)Reply

re baen

dude the only part relevant to you was the fact that the cdroms can be copied and reproduced. the part about links being removed was about some of the sites with the cd-rom. Just wanted to give you some more clarification. guit4r9uy.

MST3K Quotes

Sorry, I thought that someone would mind but I decided to test the ground. I'll get to it right away. Thank you for letting me know.
I took some quotes out, does it look better? I'm trying to think which are funny without needing the episode itself to see, like the other quotes. Let me know on my Talk page if it's better. If not, I can work more off it. Thanks JeffQ. FinalGamer (talk) 09:20, 14 October 2005 (GMT)

A note of appreciation

Latest comment: 19 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Just a note of appreciation here. Your comments on the Wikiquote:Requests for adminship page indicate an entirely unwarranted dissatisfaction with your level of involvement here.
Though we of course require some minimum levels of activity and proven inclination to responsible editing to grant adminship, I really don't think anyone should be held to a minimal level of activity to maintain it. Your contributions to the project have certainly been, and continue to be, anything but minimal. We all have interests and activities and problems to deal with outside of anything that occurs here, which should be mostly a pleasurable place to be — despite the occasional jerks who delude themselves that it's a mark of impressive and admirable talent to disrupt the responsible efforts of others, or who seek to sneak in their damnable spam.
Though there is still much to be done, I think we are doing very good in maintaining and developing this project, despite there being so few of us regularly involved. ~ Kalki 07:51, 3 November 2005 (UTC)Reply

A man is not idle, because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labour and there is an invisible labour. ~ Victor Hugo

Pictures on commons

Latest comment: 18 years ago5 comments3 people in discussion

Hi, Jeff. Thanks a lot for all the archive work on VfD! If you remember, a while ago I asked you why your user picture is not on Commons, and you said you were not sure if it's within their mandate. I've now asked on their village pump, and I hope I will have an answer for you soon. I hope that this will enable us to get rid, among other things, of Category:GFDL images (and all its baggage, like the template), as well as serve as a useful step in removing all other images. Thanks ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 15:41, 4 November 2005 (UTC)Reply

Personally I convince it is within their missions (if you would like to put your photo on "each your user page", it would be better to centralize it rather than spreading on all wikis, for instance), and I know many Wikipedians who uploaded their photos on Commons, but it is surely better to ask their opinions and it's so kind of MosheZ to ask them about it. An admin on Commons (you know perhaps him) gave an instruction to ask Commons:Commons:Criteria for inclusion ; and I found nothing against personal images per se on this criteria. --Aphaia 21:19, 5 November 2005 (UTC)Reply

Hello again. After a discussion on the commons' VP, there was agreement re the guidelines, and I added them to Criteria for inclusion. I hope this clears any confusion, and I am going to start discussion in Template talk:welcome regarding a suggestion to upload userpics to commons. ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 06:51, 7 November 2005 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the work, Moshe. At this point, the only reason my picture isn't on Commons is because I'm so inactive. Moving it is on my list of things to do. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 06:55, 7 November 2005 (UTC)Reply

By the way, earlier this week, I finally got around to moving my pic to Commons and deleting the copy here. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 17:01, 3 March 2006 (UTC)Reply

Summary template

Latest comment: 19 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Hi, Jeff. I've cut'n'pasted a wonderfully worded note you left on a user's talk page encouraging them to use talk summaries into a template. Thanks for your attention to phrasing and effort in making yourself understood -- now we can all appear to be as thoughtful and eloquent as you :) ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 20:27, 10 November 2005 (UTC)Reply

Flatterer! ☺ Thanks for the kind note, which I hope will encourage me to keep striving for clarity and working on my tone (which I'm afraid gets a bit testy sometimes of late). ~ Jeff Q (talk) 02:59, 11 November 2005 (UTC)Reply

Admin shortcuts

Latest comment: 19 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Hi, Jeff. I saw your recent comment to UDScott, and it reminded me of a project I keep putting off: stealing your admin shortcuts page, putting them somewhere in WQ: namespace (so it will be ok for everyone to edit) and calling them something more..."neutral" (maybe "Useful shortcuts"), since nearly all of them are helpful to a user which is involved in the community and the process here without being an admin (currently there are very few of those since we recruit heavily, but a man can dream). ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 05:28, 15 November 2005 (UTC)Reply

Sounds like a good idea. After UDScott's question, perhaps we could even add a usage subpage (à la Firefly (TV series)/Format) that would describe what each does and how to use it. (Or maybe even add a <span title> tag to include hover text so the information pops up, like in the MST3K TOC!) ~ Jeff Q (talk) 05:37, 15 November 2005 (UTC)Reply

Re: Lexx cleanup tag

Latest comment: 19 years ago6 comments2 people in discussion

I'm not clear on why you added the cleanup tag to Lexx. The article is certainly in need of quotes from other characters, and could use some dialog, which is why I added the stub tag, but these are not formatting issues. Could you post a note on its talk page to explain? Thanks. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 04:41, 16 November 2005 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for your question! I added a note to the talk page. Please remove the cleanup tag if you disagree with my reasoning there. ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 04:50, 16 November 2005 (UTC)Reply

I don't know if you noticed, but I actually put some work into something like that: Wikiquote:Guide to layout/Draft. Any thoughts and comments you have on this guide would be useful. Once I move it out of draft, I intend to link all cleanup templates to this guide (possibly to sections, I'm not sure) -- the guide was originally written because many people asked me "why did you add cleanup tag?". Thanks for your help and care ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 08:10, 16 November 2005 (UTC)Reply

I admit I'm behind on studying and commenting on all the new activity that folks (mainly you!) have been working on. The draft WQ:GtL looks like a succinct summary of the main points of the different formats, which is an excellent idea. However, I believe it's generally good wiki practice to post a specific reason for adding a cleanup tag, especially if it's not obvious. (But what is "obvious", you ask? Good question.) I've certainly been known to tag some articles without explanation, though I try to do that only when the format or content is so bad that even a wiki novice could understand the concern (if not necessarily the solution). On the other hand, I understand how much time a large-scale cleanup-tagging effort takes, and just getting the tags on the articles raises their visibility for attention. I'm just a bit concerned about pointing folks to a concentrated summary without specific citations of problems. I guess it's just my ongoing concern about the tension between encouraging new users and requiring reasonable formatting, which for Wikiquote can be quite cumbersome. (Even an old hand like myself was initially confused about which ones of the several dozen TV-show structure elements was not being followed in a TV stub.) Oh, well. Don't stop your tremendous efforts on my account! ~ Jeff Q (talk) 08:36, 16 November 2005 (UTC)Reply

You're probably right that cleanup tags should have reasons. I will try to be more careful about writing summary of issues in the future, at any rate. Thanks ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 08:49, 16 November 2005 (UTC)Reply

I've copied the discussion to Wikiquote talk:Marking problematic pages, because it seemed to be relevant to documenting our guidelines. Thanks ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 05:35, 24 November 2005 (UTC)Reply

Re: For us the living

Latest comment: 19 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

What an interesting coincidence it was to find Lincoln's quote posted as QotD as I was reading Robert Heinlein's recently published first work, For Us, the Living. Thanks for nominating this! ~ Jeff Q (talk) 09:40, 19 November 2005 (UTC)Reply

Thanks! Even I like to take a rest, now and again, from my cynicism and nominate an actually inspiring quotation :) I haven't read Henlein in a while. If when you finish it, you think it's good, please let me know. ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 09:47, 19 November 2005 (UTC)Reply

I'm not too keen on it as a novel, as it's even more dialectical and expository than than the preachiest of his works. But as Spider Robinson points out in the forward, it reads more like an outline of Heinlein's ideas for his future works than a polished novel. I think the way to read it is as an interesting view into Heinlein's imagination than as the usual roller-coaster ride through quirkiness that his real novels are. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 10:07, 19 November 2005 (UTC)Reply

Bill Maher iPod quote

Latest comment: 19 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

I was 212.30.222.56 at the time, I've sourced the quote at iPod [3] and Bill Maher [4]. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 22:52, 19 November 2005 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the update. Unfortunately, I couldn't verify the episode info you provided (unless it was in the AVI and I missed it somehow). However, Google now has Maher's site's transcription, so I added that link, the date (which is critical for chrono order), and Real Time's episode number (63), as well as reformatting your info in our "series.episode" format (6.08). I also added the preceding text that provides the context for the punchline, because it's a bit more accurate than saying "iPod" (it's the Nano version). Thanks for calling this to my attention. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 06:11, 20 November 2005 (UTC)Reply

Template:Wikimedia

Latest comment: 19 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion

Hi, Jeff. I saw your closure of the T:W vote, which was probably justified. I think I will nominate again for VfD in two months, if it is completely unused by then. Please let me know if you think this is wrong. Thanks ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 09:14, 21 November 2005 (UTC)Reply

On the contrary, I find myself wishing I'd been able to delete the darned template just to get it out of the way. I didn't really examine your "rant" closely before the vote expired because (A) I didn't feel like learning all the implications of wiki portals, especially when the editor didn't comment, and (B) I've been distracted by so much outside WQ. I don't recall offhand if we even have a guideline on renomination, but I have no objection to 2 months on this issue (unless I'm forgetting some policy issue). ~ Jeff Q (talk) 09:31, 21 November 2005 (UTC)Reply

Off the Net notice

Latest comment: 18 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion

My trusty laptop has finally bit the dust, so I'm off the Net until further notice. I may drop in here and there, but I don't expect to be back up full-time for 2-7 days. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 17:24, 29 November 2005 (UTC)Reply

Hi! I'm happy to see you at least dropping in here and there. ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 04:53, 4 December 2005 (UTC)Reply

I'm still not back up completely, and won't be for probably another week at least. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 20:24, 17 December 2005 (UTC)Reply

I'm finally back on the Net full-time again (more or less). I have a month or so of backlog to catch up on, though, so please be patient with me. Thanks. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 04:01, 29 December 2005 (UTC)Reply

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