User talk:Jeffq/2007a

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Yo

Thanks for the welcoming message :) --Heptor 22:38, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

transwiki snafu

The following post from w:User:Jeffq was copied by User:Jeffq from w:User talk:Savidan#Wikiquote transwiki nightmare, with links refomatted for use on Wikiquote:

Savidan, could you explain how a Wikipedian entrusted with sysop privileges could perform literally hundreds of transfers of material from Wikipedia to Wikiquote without any attempt to follow the transwiki process required to provide editors with proper credit under GFDL? We now have a massive amount of quote data at Wikiquote that give no indication that possibly thousands of edits from many different editors went into this material. Instead, the only person credited with these edits is you. Worse yet, they weren't even properly integrated into Wikiquote, but slapped into episode articles that encourage the kind of copyright violations that got French Wikiquote shut down for a year.

I'm sorry if I sound angry, but I am. You have left us with a maintenance nightmare that it will take the already horribly overworked sysops of en:Wikiquote months to untangle. I would really like to know how you might help us fix this mess. Please discuss this in detail on the appropriate Wikiquote pages: my WQ user page, your user page, and/or WQ:VFD#Free Willzyx, where we're just starting to call attention to the problem. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 01:27, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Sorry about that. I did most of those many months ago and was not familiar with the correct process. GFDL-wise, on Wikipedia, content placed in the wrong article is frequently moved to the correct article by a different user simply using copy and pasting; my impression was that as long as the edit summary noted the original location it still preserved authorship information consistent with the GFDL. For example, many off-site mirrors of Wikipedia do not include the page history, but merely state that the information was from Wikipedia (i.e. where the authorship info can be found).

I am not familiar with Wikiquote at all, and don't understand what needs to be done to fix the GFDL problems you allege. If you explain what needs to be done to fix this to me, I'll try to fix it. If this is really an issue that exposes Wikiquote to legal issues, why not just delete all the episode articles since they don't fit the TV show format anyway.

Also, back in March someone told me that it was a problem that the articles were for individual episodes, but did not mention the attribution problem that you talk about. Are you sure about it? Savidan 02:03, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

The lack of edit history information is not unique to transwiki or to Wikiquote. From Wikipedia:Merging and moving pages:

Do not move or rename a page by copying/pasting its content, because doing so destroys the edit history. (The GFDL requires acknowledgement of all contributors, and editors continue to hold copyright on their contributions unless they specifically give up this right. Hence it is required that edit histories be preserved for all major contributions until the normal copyright expires.)

The policies for merging articles on Wikipedia exist to avoid the loss of contributor information when copy-and-paste is done. Edit histories are an important part of Wikimedia editing and GFDL. That is why meta:Help:Transwiki was developed, as there is no history-preserving mechanism to move material from one project to another. Like any other practice in the Wild-West environment of wikidom, sloppy handling of mergers is not uncommon, but it can be argued that it's not as big a problem for intra-project merged articles that remain as redirects, because the history still exists. But anything that deletes these histories (as mergers sometimes do, and transwikis usually do) violates the GFDL. I am not a lawyer, but it's my understanding that, as the originating work for the material, as long as Wikimedia projects preserve the edit histories, subsequent users of this material can keep within GFDL terms by pointing back to the specific page from which the material was derived, making a simple two-link journey to find the contributors. We do our jobs within Wikimedia by ensuring that those histories are attached to the place where the material exists, either by "history" or "discussion" links.

In general, the idea with transwikis is to avoid the almost-certain problems with inter-project synchronization by copying and pasting the edit history of the transwikied article into the talk page of the new project page, which is supposed to be titled Transwiki:{{{ORIGINAL TITLE}}}. (Note that this is a special namespace that all Wikimedia projects have for this very purpose.) This temporary name allows the new project's community to decide whether the transferred material should be (A) moved to an appropriate page, based on its policies; (B) merged with an existing article; or (C) deleted. This is basic transwiki practice. Anyone who doesn't know this should not be doing transwikis. Many experienced transwikians will take shortcuts, but this should never be done unless the editor is familiar with the policies and practices of both projects, and knows how to do this correctly.

In this particular situation, South Park episode WP articles still retain the edit histories, so it is at least possible to recover this information. But we have only half a dozen regular editors for nearly 9,000 articles, and we have a severe backlog in nearly every aspect of project maintenance. You have presented us with yet another huge task. I haven't had time to review the entire scope of the problem, but my initial idea is that we will, at the very least, need to go through all of your "transwikied" articles, find the corresponding WP article, copy its entire edit history up to the point of the pasting (because actually finding the quote edits would be unreasonably difficult), format them for talk-page posting, and then post them… somewhere. I don't yet know if it would be advisable to add them to the now-redirected ep articles or post them en masse to the South Park season articles. And there are also the film articles, and any other material you transferred.

The copyright legal problem is a serious one, and one which many Wikipedians fail to realize. (This is one of the reasons I encourage new editors coming from Wikipedia to read about Wikiquote policies and practices, and one of two reasons I started a total-welcome campaign last year to ensure that every new registered user receives a welcome message with Wikiquote info links.) At Wikipedia, it is necessary to compose your own words in writing about a topic. Copyright violations can be summarily excised, and editors told to rewrite the material. But Wikiquote must include exact copies of quotes — its raison d'être — so our articles must be very selective in the amount of quoting we do, lest we violate the vague requirements to avoid "substantial" copying of material. By recommending against articles that are likely to violate copyrights if they have more than a small handful of quotes — like TV-episode articles — we try to avoid legal exposure. (See Wikiquote:Copyrights and its talk page for some discussion on the general issue in the context of quotation compliation.)

I'm sorry if I'm being harsh, but I can't adequately express my frustration. I take licensing and copyvio issues very seriously, and I am very concerned about Wikiquote's ability to handle even its basic maintenance tasks. Your work has hit all of my sore spots in one breathtaking mass action. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 03:55, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

If you are correct then that policy should be amended to make clear that it applies to moving only small amounts of content between articles —i.e. a sentence, a paragraph, a section—which are not situations of moves or mergers in that both of the original article titles continue to exist. Such situations are clearly not included in that policy. Wikipedia:Summary style explicitly says that an appropriate edit summary is sufficient for such cases.

It's still not clear to me what exactly you want me to do at this point (if these histories need pasting). I'll make a point of doing such transwikifications correctly in the future. You're definitely on to something with this welcome campaign. I wish now that someone had caught me earlier, before I'd caused so much damage. Savidan 04:45, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Re: The Design of Everyday Things

Thanks for the recommendation - I'll definitely check it out. :) Koweja 14:48, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Images about friendship and love

Dear Jeffq:

The images are available for wikiquote and commons, there are no problems with the copy right. About the Copy right: alinettelapremiere@yahoo.fr —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Cme (talk • contribs) 17:11, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Copied from User talk:Cme by User:Jeffq at 00:24, 10 January 2007 (UTC):

I've removed the images you added to these two pages. Most importantly, the images lack sufficient information about their copyright status. I notice that on Jeffq's talk page, you say that there are "no problems" with them, but that isn't sufficient for the Wikimedia Commons nor for Wikiquote. In order for it to truly be okay, the images need to either be public domain (whether by being sufficiently old, which these are not, or by the creator explicitly releasing them to the public domain, with proof of identity) or specifically licensed to allow their use. Neither of the images, at present, meet these conditions, and unless evidence of their public-domain or licensed status is shown within the next week or so, the images will be removed from the Commons.

Secondly, I don't think that the images worked particularly well here. The "Friendship" image seemed like it might just have needed to be resized, but the "Love" image needed some serious cropping (and resizing) to make it not only smaller, but more clear what it was about. —LrdChaos (talk) 18:51, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Cme, based on your original post above about images in the Friendship and Love articles, I assume that you are claiming to be the artist, Aline Mattei. We have no way of knowing whether you are or not, as there is no easy way to tie a Wikimedia username to a real-life person. The way we ensure that Wikimedia projects (like Wikiquote and Commons) have the legal right to use images contributed to them is to demand an explicit statement from the uploader that the image is properly licensed. That statement must appear on the upload page for the image, not here. If it does not, the image is tagged with a no-copyright message, and it may be deleted by anyone if no such licensing assertion is posted within 7 days. This information is clearly shown on the image pages, together with a link to Commons:Copyright tags that provides quick templates to make this license statement easy. I recommend you review these and select one that matches the situation for each image. Let me know if you have any questions. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 00:42, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

Reply

You are "losing your patience" with what, exactly? What I have I done more than once? I complained on the talk page, which is what talk pages are for — discussing the content of the page. I didn't spam or destroy the article in any way at all since his revisions. I'm simply annoyed that he removed a valid web link to a valid site for no reason. There are several fan websites of various artists and comedians [1], some of which may or may not be affiliated directly or indirectly with the individual who is being represented. Don't you think that if there were truly copyright issues with a website such as those, that the artist and or the artist's parties would have had the link shut down? For you and LrdChaos to assume a relationship with an artist does not exist, or that it is unwanted, and for that matter for you to assume who owns a website, is ridiculous. I think that relevant links should remain on a page — if the artist/individual complains about a website, they'll complain directly to that site. I highly doubt WikiQuote gets in trouble in that situation. /Timneu22 11:35, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Timneu22, you are merely restating the same tired arguments that YouTube copyright violators assert when claiming that material uploaded to that site must be fine because it's not immediately removed. I seriously doubt you have any awareness of what it takes for a copyright holder to get material removed, or how websites phrase their removal process in ways that prevent anyone from using it without investing signficant effort to document the copyright situation, despite U.S. clearly assigning automatic copyrights to original material. They do this simply to protect themselves, because they are well aware that most ordinary folks could not care less about copyrights and will casually assert that they are "legally" allowed to upload anything, including entire TV shows. (I use this example because I was involved in getting one such incident scrubbed from Wikipedia and Google Video, and the rights-holder was quite displeased to find these dishonest claims being made.)

You may have noticed that YouTube ran into serious legal trouble because a Japanese consortium noticed that over 50,000 videos of material that it held rights to were illegally uploaded. The problem is that, when one has a single target that presents 50,000 violations, it may be worth the cost of pursuing court cases, but when a rights-holder has millions of individuals propagating illegal material across thousands of small websites, there's no cost-effective way to stem this tide of naive law-breaking. No one is going to sue you or me for our actions, but Wikimedia is far too large and visible a target. It is largely up to conscientious editors to ensure wiki projects comply with laws.

LrdChaos removed the website link because it violates Wikimedia policy. He has even cited the policy to you. As far as site ownership, we cannot of course know who owns it, but since it's registered to [name deleted — JJQ] and is edited by someone who has made it clear they transferred material from our Mitch Hedberg article, and a user called "Timneu22" is fighting the removal of material from this article and has announced the website, it's not much of a stretch to deduce that you are the owner. I notice that you didn't actually say you weren't, only that we are "assuming" you are. But don't waste your time arguing about it, because it doesn't matter who owns that website. If it violates the copyright law you are so anxious to ignore, we are obligated to remove links to it.

I have already told you that Wikiquote has had copyright problems and has suffered project closure because of them, but like so many other points, you simply refuse to acknowledge this. There is no point for further argument here. Your website (whether you own it or not) is operational, so your stated desire to have a website that collects all of Hedberg's material has been accomplished. Talk pages are indeed the place to discuss content, but senior editors with far more experience and concern for Wikiquote have made it clear with many references how your and others' attempts to violate project policies endangers the project, and you have offered nothing but unsupported assertions and personal opinions to make your points. Please stop wasting our time on this fruitless argument. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 20:07, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Couldn't one can argue that you're wasting your time being such a hard-core wikipedian? Seriously though, why does the MitchHedbergFans website link get to stay? It has similar material. This is my source of your "power hunger." If you can explain this policy, then I'll accept it. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Timneu22 (talk • contribs) 00:26, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for calling attention to the other links. I have removed all but the official website and a disinterested link (IMDb), in order to avoid questions of favoritism. As for the rest, anything that prevents the Foundation from summarily deleting articles, as has already happened at en:Wikiquote, or avoids having the Foundation named in a copyvio suit, is not wasting my time. Further discussion with someone who refuses to acknowledge ideas not compatible with his own point of view, even when they are Wikimedia policy, is not. You have been answered, despite your claims; further talk is pointless. You can make further posts here if you wish, but I will not respond unless you raise a new point. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 01:33, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

My whole point was that he removed one fan website link and not the other. This does make sense that there's some "power" involved. If they are both gone, that's fine. Now, one last question... LrdChaos states: Since it seems that the entire point of the site is to provide all of the quotes that were formerly here (which are almost certainly a copyright violation), it should not be added as a link until that site has taken steps to stop infringing on the copyright. —LrdChaos (talk) 14:16, 11 January 2007 (UTC) My question: How can it be determined tha "steps have been taken" to stop infringing on the copyright? Thank you /Timneu22 02:14, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

I think he is saying that the only way to permit the link here is for Mitch-Jokes.com ("MJ", for short) to demonstrate its own effort to avoid copyvio. Since it appears to exist specifically to collect all Hedberg jokes, I don't see this happening.

I would add one note of appreciation: since the site explicitly gathered its information from our article, it's quite right to specifically provide a link back to the WQ article, even if the quotes are no longer there. It may seem counterintuitive that a link from WQ to MJ is not permitted but a link from MJ to WQ is required. However, this arises legally from the fact that the presentation copyright of the collected material on Wikiquote is held by Wikimedia Foundation and all the contributors to the article, as licensed under GFDL. This means that anyone using this material as a basis for their own work can, as far as Wikiquote is concerned, do anything they want to with it so long as a link back to the GFDL-licensed page is provided, which MJ has done. In the other direction, we demonstrate to potential suing parties that we do work to avoid copyvio by removing likely copyvio material and refusing to link to sites that appear to be copyright violators, even if they are based on material they collected from us. (We cannot and do not control what others do with our material; that's part of the nature of an open-source license like GFDL.)

Please note, however, that complying with Wikiquote's GFDL license requirements for the presentation copyright (i.e., the specific set of quotes built up by our editors) does not relieve MJ and its editors from the need either to license the original material from its copyright holders or keep its excerpts to "fair use" standards, neither of which MJ appears to be doing. But that's MJ's problem, not Wikiquote's. Our means of dealing with the issue have been discussed and implemented already, per our policy.

In conclusion, I am not a lawyer, and cannot give you official legal advice for the editors of MJ, but I can warn you from my experience at Wikiquote that this new website may be legally vulnerable to copyvio claims from the estate of Mitch Hedberg, or whomever Hedberg passed his intellectual property (IP) rights to. You might want to run it by an IP lawyer to be safe. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 03:36, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

thanks

thanks for welcoming me. Nice shirt! KaElin

More about copyright

I'm not sure that I understand the rules/regulations of WikiQuote as easily as I understand how to edit WikiPedia. A page like this one has a bunch of famous quotes by an individual. Why can these be posted freely, whereas we decided that other pages have copyright violations? Really, did Mitch copyright every joke? Can't it be argued that those words were just spoken, like John F. Kennedy spoke words? I guess I don't understand the difference between the individuals. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Timneu22 (talk • contribs) 11:08, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

John F. Kennedy is a public figure who made many of these quotes while holding political office. In the U.S., at least, speeches by public figures seem to be considered public domain. I say "seem" because I don't actually know the specific legal details, but it's also unlikely that someone courting voter favor will engage in copyright lawsuits over their speeches, which may be why it doesn't come up much. (Technically, I think a clause about public interest may be involved in pushing speeches by politicians into the public domain. But remember that I am not a lawyer.) However, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous "I Have a Dream" speech is apparently still under copyright, so one can't be too sure.

I would say that the main difference between the Kennedy and Hedberg situations here is the amount of material. None of the quotes we have from Kennedy are long enough, or a substantial enough portion of a work, to violate clause #3 of the fair-use guidelines (see Wikiquote:Copyrights). Collecting all of Hedberg's jokes, or even most of them from any one work, is very much in violation of this clause.

As far as what Hedberg copyrighted, you are still missing the point. Every original work created in the United States is automatically copyrighted by its creator. There are no forms to fill out or registration to perform. Comedians are automatically granted copyrights for their material when they create it. In some cases, works don't even need to be published for the copyright to apply.

I know you are coming at this from the point of view that fans ought to be able to collect and share Hedberg material, especially if they are not trying to "profit" from it, just enjoy it. Nobody would bother to sue anyone for creating their own compliation of someone's material and passing it between friends. The problem is that the Internet, especially through the mechanism of websites, has become as powerful as (and potentially far more powerful than) traditional publication systems, making it possible to destroy any effective use and control of creative material by its creator. If all of Steven Wright's jokes are placed on a website, what does that do to Wright's ability to earn a living? Mitch Hedberg may be gone, but his intellectual property rights went to someone, just as someone inherted his money and tangible possessions. We materially intefere with their ability to benefit from Hedberg's hard work by making it freely available without permission on the Web. That's why we have copyright law, why it restricts us to very limited sampling, and why we fail to observe the law only at our own peril. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 12:08, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Copyright really is confusing. I'm about to release a new solo piano CD, and no one can be sure about "do I need to copyright" the songs or not. Some say No, the songs are my original material (similar to your bolded statement above, where I am the creator). Some say I need to copyright each song, and some say that only the album itself needs to be copyrighted. I still haven't found a good answer that I trust. This stuff shouldn't be this hard to understand! /Timneu22 11:28, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

thanks for welcome without template :)

Just a little hint: What about add {{#if:{{{1|}}}|~ [[User:{{{1}}}|{{{1}}}]]}} to the end of Template:Welcome and u would be able to use {{welcome|Jeffq}}. Previous usage of template won't be affected. --Kandy Talbot 22:50, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the tip about parameterizing the {{welcome}} template. I'll keep it in mind as I ponder some changes to it, if someone doesn't beat me to it. (If you decide you'd like to change it yourself, please note it on the talk page or add a no-include doc section to help folks realize it's been improved.) ~ Jeff Q (talk) 12:13, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

The Children of Men

This article is about a book, but is inappropriately formatted as a film.

This might have been more obvious had you used {{lit-cleanup}} instead of {{cleanup}}. I don't mean to rag on you (and UDScott), but having just gone through more than 200 articles to clean up the mess that was Category:Wikiquote cleanup (and is now Category:Uncategorized article cleanup), it's rather disheartening to see another editor start to fill it up again with material that clearly belongs in another place (particularly when it's the editor who originally created {{lit-cleanup}} in the first place). 121a0012 04:03, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Sorry about that, 121a0012. I should have remembered, or at least looked up, which one that was. I guess my thought processes are so befuddled at the moment that the confusion between film and book formatting for that article was all it took for me to "punt" with the unnecessarily broad tag. I rarely use {{lit-cleanup}}, so it didn't immediately come to mind. As far as having created it, I did so as part of my own minor expansion of genre tags back in September 2006, but you might be surprised how many of my 22000+ edits I completely forget about, nearly one-tenth of which I made in that month alone. ☺ Anyway, mea culpa. I'll try to be more careful and precise. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 09:29, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

New topic edit summary

Tyrenius, I noticed that when you post a new topic, your edit summary includes H2 heading markup (e.g., == Vfd ==), which would seem to require some extra effort. At first I thought it might be a mistake, but then I realized that, since using the "create new topic" tab only shows the title, without an internal link (which we only get when section editing), this notation actually helps set off new-topic creations from ordinary edits. Is this a common practice that I'm unaware of? ~ Jeff Q (talk) 09:22, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

Ha! No, it's not a new practice, though I've noticed it occurring in wikipedia, probably by accident, and, as you say, it makes it clear that it's a new topic, so I often do it, but partly from convenience. I don't use the start new topic tab. I usually open up the last topic on the page and write under that. Because several occasions I've tried to save a post and lost the lot, I tend to copy the new post on my clipboard, then click paste in the summary box straight away. When you do this, the summary box only registers the heading and does not, for some reason, show the text following it, so you end up with a summary of the topic heading and markup, which, as you've pointed out, gives useful information anyway.... Tyrenius 11:56, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

thank you

thank you 4 ur massage :-)

WrestlingManiac 22:39, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

Ted Ginn, Jr. VfD

Thank you for your vote on the VfD. I am new to Wikiquote, with experience on Wikipedia, so I am trying to contribute in a helpful way. Rkevins82 17:29, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

Jim Traficant

The "Beam me up!" WAV used to be on his House website. You can find it on archive.org. 1ne 07:14, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

Personally, I don't doubt that there is a WAV file of Traficant making this statement. But that's not the issue. Quoted text must have a verifiable provenance, not some undocumented sound clip that must be interpreted as coming from Traficant. (Who should we trust to confirm this is Traficant? As an experienced Wikipedian, you should already know that personal testimony is irrelevant, and neither amateur websites nor archives of material are compelling sources.)

Because I remember seeing Traficant's "catchphrase" in print way back when, I am sure reliable sources are available for this quote. We just have to put in a little elbow grease to find and cite them. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 15:43, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

Huh?

What? Um.. I'm not the sockpuppet of anyone Jeff. Your right that I'm Adi, It's just, I'm not trying to vandalize or troll. I'm just trying to get a usertname unblocked. Please Jeff, I'm not a vandal. 'Taker 22:21, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

I'm not interested in playing these tedious games. I actually have a life. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 23:21, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

VFD question

Jeff, I was about to close the vote on The Secret Show, but the results are evenly split between Keep and Delete. Not a big deal, so I was going to preserve it and post a note on the Talk page, but I realized there's a hole in our recent process of me closing and you archiving votes (since I'm not up on the archiving process). If the vote is inconclusive or is a Keep, I'm supposed to post a link to the archived discussion on the talk page, along with the message that it was preserved after a vote. But, since I'm not sure how to archive just yet, I can't do this. Sorry for being so long-winded, but I guess in the end, I'm asking if you can close out this particular vote (and hopefully we'll have updated instructions soon, or at the very least no more Keeps or inconclusive votes). Thanks! ~ UDScott 17:30, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Yes, it is a bit uncomfortable establishing a link to a yet-uncreated archive page. LrdChaos's VfD process revision may resolve this, because if we start nominations with the subpage, it'll already be there when the discussion is closed. Even now, though, you can still post the {{vfd-kept}} message, because the archive page title follows a strict form. Just remember that the single parameter of the kept template is the title of the discussion without wiki markup; i.e., exactly how it's displayed in the VfD table of contents or the discussion heading. (For example, if we were to keep either of Hercules 64 or Pro Wrestling from the current WQ:VFD#Hercules 64 and Pro Wrestling, the template to post on the appropriate talk pages would be:

{{vfd-kept|Hercules 64 and Pro Wrestling}}

which will include a link to Wikiquote:Votes for deletion archive/Hercules 64 and Pro Wrestling in the text of the post. When the discussion is archived, it'll fix the red link.

But don't worry about it. If you'd rather skip over some votes, someone else will close them. Just do what you feel up to doing. Thanks again. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 19:06, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

User:Fabartus & interwiki link templates

It doesn't look like this was cross-posted to your talk page, so you may have missed it. User:Fabartus (the creator of the 2-3 dozen interwiki templates we VFD'd a few months back) has written something on their talk page about it, and has also been starting to recreate some of the templates. I'm still not sure what the point of them is, and I'm tempted to speedy delete them as recreations of previously-deleted content, but I'd like to get a second opinion in case I'm just being dense. —LrdChaos (talk) 16:09, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm way too overcommitted to dig into this mess again right now. But just reading over Fabartus's recent reponse to your question and skimming through a few links, it sounds like Frank still hasn't learned to be aware of what programming stuff looks like to non-programmers. See his POV in w:Wikipedia:Templates for deletion/Log/2007 January 15#Template:Interwikitmp-grp, specifically where he says, "My programming days were in assembler and C, so forgive me if I see the characterization of Complcated [sic] code as a bit of hyperbole". He still seem not to comprehend that even basic template use is a bit of a trial for Wikimedia's primary audience, folks for whom bullets, colon indents, bracket links, and apostrophe-based highlighting are a lot of work.

Another example of how bad he is at communicating his ideas is how he "demonstrates" one of his templates in that talk page response, in the section beginning with "Aside: Demo of interwikitmp-grp in tagging mode...". He slaps the template into the text and assumes that the reader will realize what the associated text is referring to, even though the effect of the template is displayed well below the "example" section. (The right way to show an example of something so non-trivial, as many of us have done here in explaining some of our more complex formatting, is to show the wiki code first, then show the effect, and make damn sure the effect is properly positioned to make sense to the reader.) Frank just doesn't care to ensure readers are following what he says. His work demands they rise to his level of expertise. As another experienced wiki editor, I find this an unforgiveable sin against our main audience. (And the fact that these templates are used inside other templates is no excuse. In fact, such complexity puts an even greater responsibility on the maintainers to clarify it, as even template experts can easily make mistakes.)

Finally, he seems just as sloppy and rushed as ever, as shown by his incorrect claim to have cross-posted his response to me. This is exactly what we saw from him the last time. These failures are a little too "outside the box" to trust him with this work. He strikes me as someone with a lot of ideas but not enough time to implement any of them well.

I'd prefer not to dismiss his revised work without a more in-depth look, but if I see any of his templates appear in any talk pages or articles without a compelling need, without a properly formatted usage explanation for ordinary mortals, or incorrectly used (as I've caught him doing repeatedly with one of his own templates), I'll SD them myself on your cited basis. I'll also support anyone else SD'ing them until Frank demonstrates that he's addressing these concerns. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 17:22, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks

cheers Jeffq (-: --McNoddy 10:47, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Hello, thanks for the welcome!

Hi, and thank you for the message you left me, and for helping me find out how to link to Wikipedia pages. Are we allowed to do up our User Pages as we wish or should they contain quotes only?Gavin Scott 21:27, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Users have considerable leeway in what they put on their user pages. Mostly, we need to avoid using Wikiquote as a personal website (like for weblogs, commercial advertising, invading others' privacy — stuff like that). Wikiquote:User page has more to say on this. It's also not a bad idea to read Wikiquote:What Wikiquote is not. Some of it applies mainly to articles, but there are points that apply to all Wikiquote pages. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 22:40, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Nick DeCamp Debate

Hello. Recently I Googled upon the Delete the Nick DeCamp quotes debate at:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wikiquote:Votes_for_deletion_archive/Nick_DeCamp

which you and your colleagues presided over last November. Even though the matter seems to be settled, I thought I could offer some insights regarding the referenced author, since I am, in fact, he. My name is Nicholas DeCamp, but only my wife calls me Nicholas and only when she is angry, which is often. I did write for The Centre for the Easily Amused, which was administered by Cathie Walker. Ms. Walker now runs http://www.sillybuddies.com. The former site was financed by uproar.com, until they decided to focus on online games and do away with boring written content. I was actually paid to write, which seems silly now in the age of myspace.com when any semi-literate pubescent with two brain cells to rub together has an online platform to rant from. Nonetheless, it was a rewarding experience, and I can assure you all the aphorisms were indeed created by me. Amazingly, the page I originally created for my work is still up at Geocities: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Oracle/2609/deep.htm I have no idea how to edit it or get it down, so there it stays until the year 3056.

Also, I was in fact heavily influenced by Jack Handey of Saturday Night Live fame as well as Dave Barry.

My email is rif00222@ride.ri.net, in case you need to see some ID or do a blood test. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 68.9.252.58 (talk • contribs) 04:53, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Editing new VfD page

When I went to vote on the Wikiquote:Votes for deletion/Charles Miller, Jr. page, the Show Preview for my vote appeared as an edit of the Template:Vfd-new2 page. Being the techno-ignoramus that I am, I wanted to ask first if there is something here that I'm missing. It surprised me to see, instead of the words of your nomination and the vote closing time, nothing but the format of the Template:VfD-new2 page. (I canceled my edit, of course, since it wasn't what I had intended.) - InvisibleSun 02:10, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Sorry about that. I forgot to "subst:" the template. I've fixed it now. Wikipedia uses something to blast a large, bright red warning message to call attention to this failure. I'll see if I can port that to our new templates. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 02:16, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

{{#if:{{{SUBST|}}}|THIS TEMPLATE MUST BE SUBST'D|{{{SUBST}}} template content }} is one way. The user has to define SUBST=subst:, though. // FrankB 08:17, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, but this can be done without user definitions, as Wikipedia's AfD templates demonstrate. 99% of wiki users won't go through such trouble, or understand why it's desirable. The proper way to solve a problem is to do it so it works for everyone, not just technically savvy people. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 14:13, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

What are you talking about user definitions? This is the kind of coding (Probably an earlier version of what you're looking for) that would work. Here Template:I2A) W:template:afd, W:template:afd2 + W:template:afd/doc Template:I2B) W:template:cfd, W:template:cfd2 + W:template:cfd/doc Template:I2C) W:template:mfd + W:template:rfd (These have no /doc pages--only 'Techies' and admins generally even know about them. Template:I2D) W:template:tfd, W:template:tfd2 + W:template:tfd/doc. (And don't try to teach your grandpa how to spit!)

<!--BEGIN CFD TEMPLATE-->
<!-- Please do not remove or change this [[Template:Cfd]] message until the survey and discussion at [[WP:CfD]] is closed -->
{{#ifeq:{{NAMESPACE}}|{{<includeonly>subst:</includeonly>NAMESPACE}}| |{{error:not substituted|cfd}}<div style="display:none;">}}<div class="boilerplate metadata" id="cfd" style="margin: 0 5%; padding: 0 7px 7px 7px; background: #FFFCE6; border: 1px solid #aaa; text-align: left; font-size:95%;">
'''This category is being considered for deletion in accordance with Wikipedia's [[Wikipedia:Category deletion policy|Categories for Discussion policies]][[Template:Cfd|.]]''' {{#if:{{{1|}}}|This nomination is part of a discussion of several related categories.}} This does '''''not''''' mean that any of the '''articles''' in the category will be deleted. They may, however, be recategorized.<br/>
Please share your thoughts on the matter at '''[[Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/{{<includeonly>subst:</includeonly>CURRENTYEAR}} {{<includeonly>subst:</includeonly>CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{<includeonly>subst:</includeonly>CURRENTDAY}}#Category:{{#if:{{{1|}}}|{{{1}}}|{{PAGENAME}}}}|this category's entry]]''' on the [[Wikipedia:Categories for discussion|Categories for Discussion]] page.
Please do not empty the category or remove this notice while the discussion is in progress.<br/>
''[{{fullurl:Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/{{CURRENTYEAR}} {{CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{CURRENTDAY}}|action=edit&section=2}} add entry]  '''{{subst:cfd2|{{PAGENAME}}{{#if:{{{1|}}}|{{!}}{{{1}}}}}|text=Your reason(s) for the proposed deletion. ~~~~}}'''''
</div>
<includeonly>
[[Category:Categories for deletion|{{PAGENAME}}]]
</includeonly>
[[Category:CfD {{<includeonly>subst:</includeonly>CURRENTYEAR}}-{{<includeonly>subst:</includeonly>CURRENTMONTH}}]]
<!-- End of CfD message, feel free to edit beyond this point -->
<!--END CFD TEMPLATE-->
<noinclude>{{protected template}}
{{/doc}}
<!-- Add cats and interwikis to the /doc subpage, not here! -->
</noinclude>

Note the {{/doc}}s! Foolish youth. Advisory, THAT may need to be {{{{PAGENAME}}/doc}} HERE. BTW- My billing rate is $250/hr and you and LrdChaos, owe me about $500 apiece from that premature Vfd. And you better figure out what fool is blocking I, i0, i2, i5, and indent and all the others without due process. If indent or space is misbehaving, then your Mediawiki:Common.css needs an update. That would evince as a square placeholder on older IE6 browsers and some setups on X-windows from Unix. The slightly different code at commons:template:indent can then be used instead--which needs the m:template:template:unicode to force proper behavior.

BUT you will need at least equivalents of what you are supporting deletion for or different boilerplate for the /docs. Just so happens I was tasked to update most of these the other day here! So DOOO tell me, where is the F***ing haste, and better, the need for such. // FrankB 16:19, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

What am I talking about "user definitions"? Let me quote you: "The user has to define SUBST=subst:, though." It is not my job to decipher your statements. It is your job to make your point clearly and concisely, which the above post once again demonstrates you cannot seem to understand. Are you not even able to write simple posts without interspersed non-functioning templates? (I'm sure you know it's possible to cite them without expanding them.) Do you even preview anything you compose to see how your correspondent is going to see it? I find your lack of communication skills breathtakingly inappropriate for wiki work. Clearly you are more comfortable buried in a computer room away from the people who are supposed to be using your tools. If you want to talk developer-ese, join the developer discussion forums. If you want to make a case for the community to use your work, then speak English and make your points without embedded non-functional wiki markup. If you won't do this, you have no business complaining about communities that won't put up with this.

A) Sorry on the youth crack, but you all have drawn a little pique--I really didn't need this pressure NOW.

B)I put the non-functioning templates in as a small goad. Turns out my premise may have been wrong, inasmuch as I couldn't access a deletion record. My belief was that like {{interwikitmp-grp}} someone had disabled {{indent}}... When preparing to leave, I noticed neither {{i}} or that wasn't listed in that second batch TfD (Vfd). I'm not too tolerant of fools, or people that circumvent their own customs and rules, and that being disabled really ticks me off. I'll probably post your VPP (or whatever--Scriptorium???) here tomarrow. That sort of behavior is over the top. The upshot, seeing I2, I5, and I0 all BLUE, was to cobble together a quick W2, I, and import indent... It really IS a useful bugger, since it holds paragraphs, fonts, AND numbering. So things can be judged on a basis of working too. Heck, that's a wikisource template-- we just improved it a bit. I also referred to those a lot in my comments.

B) I'm not a big fan of parameter arguments in templates either, but they can and do have tasking one can't do easily with a command using place ordering. I try to minimize such myself, but OTOH, most page tagging templates in wikipedia from citebooks to novels, authors, citys, states, ad infinitum use them extensively, not the ordered arg1, arg2, etc. we old command line guys used to live with. The lay people there have little trouble with such, if the directions are layed out in the pre/pre blocks so they're clear. Which goes to good documentation, which is REALLY where I came in... It's been a lifelong bug of mine, even if you write it first, and I second. Sometimes, I do it your way, then program to that. In fact it's exactly how the next iteration of IWTG is being built... the documentation is driving the coding (if I ever get back to it). But one method is not always the right mode.

C) As someone who spends at least 30% of my time on the commons, I'm well aware of the staffing problem and work loads. This concept is really to lighten that, and moreover, by providing constant reminders that you folks are out here in the hinterlands, I hope the exposure will attract people to lend their aid here. A related 'quasi-project', tying commons categories to wikipedia's really generated this one's concept, and you can see my commons talk pages, that I made that same point six months ago to one of their bigshots, Duesentrieb, if you know him.

D) This project is derivative of that whole philosphy, give people information, and common tools, expose the other sisters, and attract talent. Empower that non-technical talent with a common 'goto' place for information, by which I mean a skeleton of templates which tie together in categories of the same names and relationship, and are common to the sisters--which provides a highway of links to traverse to your Category:wikiquote templates, and thence from there, I would hope a structure of links to your admin, projects, and category systems and schemes... so that's all in my thinking. For me, finding my way into a place in the category system was the most difficult challange studying each sister. The inconsistancies can get you, so assumptions tend to bite one.

Css --below Agree you shouldn't need to... that was a 'if there is a problem with' statement -- but you might ask that updates on Meta/Commons/Wikipedia are mirrored here when made as SOP.

You seem unaware, as with so many other things, that en:Wikiquote, like most projects, doesn't have anyone actively editing CSS files. It's not that we don't have folks who can do it; it's that we have about 500% more work than we can handle, so we absolutely must focus on the basics, and remove any attempts to complicate the basic work. This is why you're getting resistance from us. We don't have time to untangle your mess, let alone integrate it, and unlike you, we have a responsibility to the community to ensure the basic needs are met.

As for "foolish youth", unless your "30+ years of programming" are a second career, you and I are of a similar age and technical background. However, having worked directly for decades with non-techie customers on projects, where we actually had to create software tools that didn't require them to configure environments or decipher DOS or Unix documentation (let alone listen to annoyed programmers spouting jargon), I have little patience with that subset of computerdom whose inhabitants treat English as their second language (after FORTRAN, Pascal, assembly, C, LISP, C++, Perl, Java, XHTML, CSS — pick your poison from among some of my lingua operari — or even MediaWiki). Unlike you, apparently, I required myself to write the documentation before presenting the work, and never considered my work done until the project not only did what it was supposed to do, but also could be operated by the people who it was created for, per their own evaluations. I used to like to say that my life goal was to put myself out of a job by making computers easy enough to use for meaningful work that no one would need me when I was finished. It's folks like you who guarantee me lifetime employment, if only to translate for what they obviously consider the great unwashed population of computer dunces.

What you consistently ignore in the above is the unknowns... which the fall foray pretty much settled, but there are now the refinements to that-- mainly minor, but real 'political' matters--{R from ... ) templates are one. To be used without change, either some stuff has to be duplicated on all sisters, or suffered as redlinks. If your Vfd doesn't want to track redirects, that's small potatoes. But knowing something is a name case redirect is a good thing. Frankly, one less site is a blessing to me. Less work... but I imagined the hue and cry that would be made if I would have let ANY sister off the system. More to the point, I'm well aware of the staffing issue, and I see this as a means of improving that by more efficient tools in your Vfd (la, lc, cat, lt/lts, etc.) There is no good reason to type out things long hand or navigate twice or three times when one forward, then a backspace gets you back on task, especially when time and man-power is precious. But maybe we just see so much more day in day out, that we're used to being able to see right from the section now, the history, the links, the talk link. I can at least understand and sympathize with YOUR concerns, but Wikiquote's culture won't even tolerate redirects...

As things stand, I'm no longer trying to deal with them, as taken together with their phobia about first letter capitalizations, there is just too many issues which would require special coding just for them. Never mind that some things like SP were name case alternatives just to miss some of their many short short template names. To accede to those two criteria is to imperil everything else, and if you guys are sated with your small set of tools, Wikispecies and Wikiversity are thirsty-looking for solutions. To my surprise, so was Wikinews in some ways.

I'm not going to hold 'ill considered' against you below. It's anything but that, but we can agree to disagree for now. You have to give me that this version certainly has less pages and looks better than the one in the fall. I'm not going to dignify one tag and two supporting documentation templates as a software system either... that's ill-put. The rest are tools independent of those. It's a big macro, at best a small sub-routine, and if you are that experienced with software, how can you call something ala assembler with only if-then-else's, no jumps, and no exernal calls anything else? Think about it.

Category:interwiki utility templates. Ha! Silly me... you've deleted or diabled interwikitmp-grp, so nothing is tagging those. If it's been deleted, I wonder why I see no deletion log link? No matter, you've all broken your own guidelines in the very fact it's missing now. This is clearly NOT the same template as last falls. Be well Jeff. Hope you'll forgive me for holding your phobia about a tagging and linking system as non-understandable. I'll reserve the contempt for the SOB that deleted these without due process. Regards. // FrankB 09:49, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

As a sysop, I have (and must have) a hell of a lot more respect for the intelligent non-programmers who make up the bulk of our community, and it's because of them that I hold ill-considered software innovations in contempt. Wikis are a phenomenal contribution to enabling serious collaboration among non-geeks. Inventing complex text-display and linking template mechanisms to "fix" the admitted deficiencies of MediaWiki is not necessarily an improvement. As I've said ad infinitum already, if you get a complete system working and documented, and show that it's in use on Wikipedia by the kind of editors we have here (not just programmers and super-wikians), we might consider importing your work. But every snarling invective you post makes this less likely by trying the patience of people who have more important responsibilities to the project than dealing with one over-enthusiastic programmer. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 17:32, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

Re:Thanks for the welcomes

Thank you for joining the Welcoming Committee, not just literally but also effectively as you've been doing for the past few weeks. Since we're welcoming all new registered users and catching new anonymous users as we can, I really appreciate the assistance! ~ Jeff Q (talk) 03:04, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

No problem, I'm on the Welcoming Committee and the English Wikipedia and frequently welcome users on Meta as well, so I'm used to it. :) If you need anything, please post a message on my talk page (even if it is something boring like welcoming the new users from the New user log). :) Cbrown1023 talk 03:12, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Although, I probably won't be doing that unless you say so (because normally, I don't do that, because some people may never edit, I find it better to go through Recent Changes). If you do think it is better to do that, just tell me. :) Cbrown1023 talk 03:12, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

I started the campaign to welcome all newly registered users in March 2006 (and retroactively added everyone who registered since February 2006) because I saw it as a fairly simple way to ensure that everyone who used a username while editing would get one in-your-face "new messages" notice that revealed a set of useful links that they would (hopefully) read, and would at least be able to be tersely directed to if they made edits that showed a lack of awareness of Wikiquote's practices. It seemed to be a cheap investment for a potentially large gain. I believe it has paid off, as we've had plenty of registered users who manage to assimilate these practices or show other signs of having looked at them, while so many anons still routinely fail to follow even the most basic, general wiki guidelines. But I can't know this for sure, of course.

LrdChaos and I seem to be the two main editors who do this Special:NewusersSpecial:Log/newusers-based welcoming, although others seem to pitch in from time to time. (Aphaia and others follow your Special:Recentchanges-based welcoming.) I'd love to have more people covering all new users; not only do we get as many as 50 new users a day sometimes, but also, I'm not especially happy that my huge edit count is perhaps 40% due to these welcome messages. (Some day I hope to run a bot to do this, as long as the message includes a clear pointer to specific users ready and willing to help newbies.) But every contribution through whatever means helps the cause. I also appreciate your efforts to welcome anon users, since they have been clearly "under-welcomed" by this strategy. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 14:18, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

One of the main reasons that I welcome IP users is because they don't have an account yet. I feel that one of the main things we should do is get new users and then make sure the new users feel welcome. I noticed (on RC Patrol) that most of our users are IPs, I think we should try greatly to change that and have more people get accounts. I'm planning on importing the w:Wikipedia:Why create an account? page so that the anons can see the benefits. Cbrown1023 talk 00:12, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

cross-post from Wikiquote_talk:Welcoming Committee

I spent a couple hours today on AWB, searching through the new users log and welcoming users that hadn't been welcomed yet. As of right now (03:21, 7 February 2007 (UTC)), all of the users have been welcomed (over 5000). I only welcomed about 20 during that AWB run tonight, so that means that you guys did a real lot. Looks like all we have to worry about is the future users. :) Cbrown1023 talk 03:21, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

MediaWiki talk:Bad image list

Please see my post to MediaWiki talk:Bad image list. Cbrown1023 talk 03:41, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

If you want to be helpful

Oh great tribal leader <g>... Then help me figure out why my email isn't getting this generated email with it's coding to unlock the email facility here. Haven't had this issue on any of the other sisters. I'm suspecting an email filter on my mail client may be trapping it, and re-filing it, but need to know what the email title line might look like to see if I can check for that possible problem. That is however unlikely... no filter I have would be marking something as 'read', and the message isn't showing up anywhere by that test. Can't CC-by email with this blocked either. Please inform me by direct email, or my WP talk when you have some kind of response. I've emailed Brion Vibber on this, but don't know whether this is part of his duties. Thanks. // FrankB 17:26, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

As a tribal leader ("great" is probably pushing it too far), I believe I can help you here. Based on a test I just completed of one of my auxiliary accounts, your should receive the following:

TO: [your email address]
SUBJECT: Wikiquote e-mail address confirmation

Someone, probably you from IP address [your IP address], has registered an
account "Fabartus" with this e-mail address on Wikiquote.

To confirm that this account really does belong to you and activate
e-mail features on Wikiquote, open this link in your browser:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Special:Confirmemail/[32 hex digits]

If this is *not* you, don't follow the link. This confirmation code
will expire at [hh:mm, d mmmm yyyy].

(Apparently, the developers forgot to include a "(UTC)" to make clear that this is the timezone meant.) Let me know if you need more information. (I am also posting this to your WP email address, as requested.) ~ Jeffq QotD 05:45, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Not sure how that 'UTC' was supposed to be affecting things, but you got the scoop as it happened (if not check your email! <g>). [When I'm this heavily into the wiki's, I keep my system on UTC anyway, so I don't have to add/subtract time to figure out what's going on and when. I'm used to Zulu time anyway... 30 years in the Navy will do that to you. (added: FrankB 08:18, 11 February 2007 (UTC))

Thanks a second time. BTW- no hard feelings, however things turn out. I begrudge the lost time some, as I have not reached back into open edits before Alaia's heads up yet and it's now 3:15 am once again <head shaking>, but that's wiki's for you. Some other matters came up complicating time spent. Sometimes you have to scratch people's backs, even when it diverts you from your tasking. See ya! // FrankB 08:15, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

BTW-Notice how nicely spaced those I2 para's are above. There be methods to me madness! <g> (jes rubbing it in!) // FrankB 08:20, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Template:Welcome

It seems Aphaia accidentally messed up the template slightly when adding the interlanguage links. Could you please remove the two extra lines before </nowiki></nowiki>. The noinclude tag should be touching the template text. Thanks. (If you want to see what I am talking about, put {{subst:welcome}} ~~~~ and see what happens.) Cbrown1023 talk 03:04, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Done. Thanks for the heads-up. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 03:07, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Meta

Just so you know, I believe it be an annoyance as well, and do not like having to edit people's comments. However, it is a necessity and it greatly reduces spam on all Wikimedia Foundation Projects. I'm sorry, it may have seemed like we all ganged up on you. Have a good day, Cbrown1023 talk 00:56, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Hey, no problem. I wasn't exactly the soul of diplomacy at m:Talk:Spam blacklist#en:Wikiquote problems, and although every one disagreed with me, they all did so without rancor. I always try to remember that, for all the impossibility of trying to keep tracking of all the juggling balls here, on Wikipedia, and elsewhere, my challenges are nothing compared to what the developers must deal with, supporting not only all the Wikimedia sites but also everyone who uses MediaWiki for their personal projects. As for the solution, I'm thinking I'll just rip the "http://" and apologize in the edit summaries. I feel like I should insert editorial notes, too, but I think that would be more intrusive than the link-less sitenames. Or maybe I'll just nowiki the protocol prefixes, which ought to thwart the filter's interception without thwarting either its intent or our need. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 01:16, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

newbie questions

Hi Jeff. I noticed you added a {{no-intro}} tag at Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. I took part of the intro from Wikipedia and put it in. Is this acceptable? Also, does Wikiquote have "featured article" content like Wikipedia has? I'd like to look at a page great page as an example (rather than trying to read through the style guidelines). Thank you! --Fang Aili 15:57, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Excerpting the WP intro is exactly what we tend to do, so you're right on track there. As far as "featured articles", we don't really have that system here. We feature "new pages" (specifically articles), which a sysop (usually Kalki) selects at random and/or to give them visibility for editing, so they may be great or terrible. I personally don't think we have the community participation to instigate a "featured article" system, or even maintain an informal list (since we don't have the editorship to watch over FA'd articles to ensure they don't degenerate over time).

On top of all this, we don't really have much in the way of standards for electronic-game articles yet. I'm afraid that the current set doesn't inspire much interest among the regular editors to invest the time to create standards, especially since it's hard to apply Wikimedia-standard guidelines to these. Two examples of EG-specific challenges:

• How can we adequately cite a specific source, like the equivalent of a page number in a book, for a game quote? Sourcing is vital to achieve the project's goal of verifiable material.

• Most EG editors treat Wikiquote as a place to post everything that a game contains, which is not only a blatant copyright violation, but a fundamental misunderstanding of what Wikiquote is — a compendium of quotes selected for being especially pithy (i.e., short and memorable). Long tracts of dialog, quotes that merely reveal plot points, and other miscellania are not what we want here. Quotes should be the kind of thing one cites to another when remarking on a situation that reminds one of the quote — like someone saying "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child" (William Shakespeare, King Lear, act I, scene 4) when observing a child's hissy fit.

Perhaps this gives a flavor for the kinds of problems we're having with this genre at the moment. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 15:56, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the response! You and User:Cbrown1023 seem to disagree about intros: he thought that I would have to copy the edit history and such before adding content from Wikipedia.[2] This seems overly complicated and unnecessary (despite being involved at several wikimedia projects I have yet to grasp all the details of GFDL); is it really necessary? It might even be impossible considering the very lengthy edit histories that some articles have.

About video game articles in general, I just happened upon Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories by using the random page link. I don't have any specific interest in video game quotes.

I get the feeling that the community here is quite small. (Only, what, 15 admins?) Is this a correct assumption?

Thank you, Fang Aili 18:18, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

I've answered these to some extent on his talk page. However, feel free to put in your comments, of course. :) Cbrown1023 talk 18:34, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

As suggested, I've posted further discussion at User talk:Fang Aili#newbie questions. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 19:58, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Template:vb when closing VFDs

Jeff, it looks like you missed adding {{vb}} at the bottom of the discussions for the two VFDs you closed ("LOVE QUOTES" and "Author"). It's probably just a minor slip (since the vt/vb templates are your creation), but I figured I'd mention it in case you'd just forgotten. —LrdChaos (talk) 15:23, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the notice! I'm afraid I'm still getting used to the new system. Under the old system, I'd been using an input box to create archives that automatically adds the VFDA wrappers, but this isn't adaptable to the new way. Only today did I start closing votes with the {{vt}} banner added at the same time as the closure notice, so I really appreciate your catching my omission before bad habits started. After doing a few more of these, I hope to write up a "best pratices" summary of how to efficiently handle closure under the new system. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 15:30, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

I think it's fairly easy to get the hang of, but then, I've been doing all my closures by hand, so typing out the vt/vb templates is part of what I'm used to (I think that, with time, it would become a "second nature" thing, just like changing the "closes" line to "closed"). On that note, though, as someone other than me who's closed and archived a VFD with the new system, do you have any thoughts about it (how it's better/worse or could be better)? —LrdChaos (talk) 16:16, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Split up the Bible?

I am proposing to split up the Bible article, maybe with a separate article for each major book, so we could end up with 30 or so. Maybe I should just be bold and do it, but I thought I ought to sound out people first.--Cato 20:18, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

I apologize for being slow to respond. I'm not sure what to do about The Bible. It presents a unique challenge in that many different versions are extremely popular, and none of it was originally English. Furthermore, like with William Shakespeare, there are many who would love to include long passages, many of which have been memorized by millions. One could create an entire wiki just for Bible quotes.

Because of this, I've been reluctant to engage in any recommendations of how to attack this problem. It seems likely that we would need to split up the books at some point, but I don't know if we've reached that point, nor am I inclined to study the article to see where we should go with it. I'm sorry that I'm not of any help, but we all must be selective about what we work on here, and I've counted on the likelihood that many others would be more interested in this one than I am. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 01:41, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Hello!

Hello, great Jeffq! I'm new here and before I just "jump into things" I wanted to ask a few questions. I'm asking you because I was told you are a great leader here at Wikiquote. Here's the Q's dog:

1.) Are there any special rules or traditions I should know of?

2.) Is there a type of hierarchy here I should know of?

3.) Any ideas of where I should start?

4.) Anyone I should stay away from or be aware of? (Trouble makers, notorious vandals etc.?)

Thanks for your help,

5 outta 7 23:36, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

---

I notice that your cross-posted the same set of basic questions to three sysops, suggesting an attempt to identify a non-existent power hierarchy and draw sysops into unflattering comments about other editors. You did so after Cbrown1023 posted a welcome message that contained answers to the non-inflammatory questions. Cbrown1023 pointed this out to you:

The Welcome message I put on your user page before this post should be of some help.

Your response was not only to take offense:

I asked you four questions, responses would be appricated.

but also to accuse Cbrown1023 of rudeness:

Why are you being so rude?

and of misbehavior on Wikinews, which was executed by a vandal. A truly new user may well have made these posts, but they are far more fitting the pattern of trolling behavior associated with a pattern vandal who uses multiple accounts across projects to stir up trouble.

Because of this, I am posting a warning to you. New users should read the information in the welcome message, do their best to learn before they post, and ask politely before they accuse. Further escalation along the lines of the pattern vandal may be treated quickly with a temporary block. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 02:02, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Re:Troll warning

Jeff, you were right in all of what you said. I would just like to point out a few minute details so you are more "in the loop". 5 outta 7 was referring to a user vandalising his talk page when he stated that I was being rude, but it turned out that it was a user whose username was purposely almost identical to mine (i.e. an imposter). (You can see the bottom of my talk page for more information.) The same thing happened to me at Wikinews, I think the users are the same person. Here, I blocked the user in question indefinitely and enabled an autoblock. In case you are not aware, an autoblock is a, normally 24 hour, block on an IP address that was used by a blocked user or that the blocked user tried to use. My reasoning behind this was to see if the imposter (who caused havoc at Wikinews and was an imposter/troll here) was in fact 5 outta 7. A possible confirmation of this is that 5 outta 7 has not edited since my enabling the autoblock. This should be a simple way to solve this without checkuser. Cbrown1023 talk 03:35, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Oh, and I was not meaning any bad faith by this, I just wanted to make sure you informed of this incident in its interity. I also appreciate greatly you sticking up for me and what is right. :) Thanks (and thanks for your support in my RfA). :) Cbrown1023 talk 03:37, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the details. It's good to have the absence after the autoblock to suggest our suspicions are accurate. You might want to read my detailed description of the last attack we had along these lines, to see why it was reasonable for Wikiquote sysops (yourself now included — congrats!) to deduce bad faith from this user, even without that evidence or a checkuser. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 06:53, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, but I'm not trolling??? I apologize If my questions casued an inconvience. Alos, I've been mad aware theat my userpage was defaced by an imperosnator of Cbrown 1023, and I'm sorry that I mistankly accused hime of being rude. 5 outta 7 22:14, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

The Bible

Yes, I quite agree, big problem. We could quote the original, but it is the English wiki! I'm inclined to give preference to the King James version, being the best known, unless another version is strikingly different or there are important theological variants (does a virgin have a child, or is it a young woman?) I'll just go ahead (as my time permits) and do what seems sensible unless someone else objects.--Cato 19:39, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Hello folks. KJV is literally important,　I think, but a bit hard for the modern readers? Also it is based on textum receptum, so not on a good critical text as other modern versions. I prefer to use mainly RSV, if possible.　(I have a version RSV and USB3[based NA26] combined at hand, while I forget where I put it on my bookshelf, so I hope I could help editing from the side of proper citing...) --Aphaia 04:21, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Why Do You Torture Me So?

You accuse me of being a...troll! How so, may I ask? What did I do deserving of this shameful title? From my edit history, It has been proved that I am not the one who tried to mimick you name, as I edited within 24 hours of his block. So I ask...Why Do You Torture Me So? 5 outta 7 21:03, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

In any arms race, a key factor in the opposition's ability to adapt to one's strategy is the revelation of that strategy. I have no interest in explaining to you why it's so easy to identify your patterns so that you can avoid them. The complete lack of useful contributions to Wikiquote while pestering multiple users is sufficient justification to block you for trolling. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 22:02, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

In all seriousness, I'm not. I edited withing 24 hours to prove Iam not the impostor so why do you accuse me of being him? 5 outta 7 22:03, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

I have replied to this on my talk page. 5 outta 7, does this mean that you agree to a m:checkuser? Cbrown1023 talk 22:51, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

We don't do checkusers here yet, as far as I've ever noticed. (I don't think we have two network-savvy editors who are willing to volunteer for this extra responsibility.) If Meta is doing this for us at our request, I've not been directly involved with any such incidents. (The ones I've seen discussed here have typically concerned cross-project vandals.) I'm not sure I see a need for this, but if there is community concern that we are not doing due diligence, I might support a checkuser. Frankly, this seems more like a garden-variety troll to me, and I'm not especially interested in giving him the satisfaction of wasting our time on him. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 22:57, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

It would hvae been a simple m:steward task, but it is not needed, I was just showing him that we have futher ways to prove that it was or wasn't him. He was also active as an IP today, but was blocked by Kalki for "repeat vandal" (it was also block evasion by 5 outta 7). Cbrown1023 talk 23:00, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

As for checkusers of our own, we cannot meet the criteria "at least 25 supports from the community", I'm afraid. We need to ask a steward help on meta until we reach the size required for having checkusers locally. --Aphaia 02:15, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

I disagree, it is possible. We have around 15 administrator's who are active or near active and many other editor's who are still active. The policy in question also states you should state this information in many places, such as the village pump, the Administartor's noticeboard, your user page, ect. It is very possible, although not necessary at this time. I am just afraid that that may change in the near future. Cbrown1023 talk 02:40, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

5 0utta 7 - Is this considered trolling?

This was posted in my Talk page. And after looking at 5 outta 7's History it seems he is posting this question on many pages:

I need you help...can you? 5 outta 7 21:03, 25 February 2007    (UTC)

 Depends what it involves! Mr Goodbyte 21:08, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

  God I thank you! Please email me at kovalcj@yahoo.com so I can ask you without
  letting everyone on Wikiquote see, thanks so much. 
  5 outta 7  21:10, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

   Well, I'd rather not e-mail someone who I've met on the 'net, sorry 
   Mr Goodbyte 21:17, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

    Well my lord, in that case I will ask you right here, is that okay? 
    I THANK YOU YOU SO MUCH! 5 outta 7 21:18, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

 Fine Mr Goodbyte 21:21, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

  I'm having a problem with my computer keyboard. It is working
  sporadically. I think it migh be becasue my cat was dumping on it.
  Is this possible? If so, how do you think I should go about cleaning it?
  THANKS SO MUCH! 5 outta 7 21:23, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Mr Goodbyte 21:59, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

5 outta 7 then replied to this article using your Username:

Nope...dosen'tlook like it to me ---Jeffq

Thank you, Mr Goodbyte. I had already noticed that and was in the process of blocking this user for impersonating a sysop, as well as previously-warned about trolling behavior, while you were posting the above. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 22:19, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Time for you to hear the truth.

You've heard the names...Wazzawazza...MyName...Nookdog...etc...etc. You've seen the damage now you'll hear the truth. This is us: The project became a reality about nine months ago, a secret underground group called Raptarsnook wanted to create a big stir in the Wiki vandal world, and hell they did. SO far, we have created some of the most complexly mentally confusing vandal schemes in the history of all Wikis. You cant forget the time you and Dragonfire got into a fight for no other reason than the chaos out group created. I got news: It aint ending anytime soon...infact soon. The problems are only going to escalate, and automated system (version 2) mind you has been tested on various less known Wikis and has had amazing success. Soon it will be unleashed on Wikiquote. Imagine the glory, hundreds of edits per minute...and then you block it..well..thats not a problem as the system "knows" to change IP addresses when an admin gets in the way. See you in a few Jeffq...and...good luck. Who we are. 22:57, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Something funny going on

Someone has added to the Administrators' Noticeboard (Incidents) on Wikipedia a post you made back in October, about a spate of vandalism we had then. Fys. &#147;Ta fys aym&#148;. 00:41, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know. I see that Cbrown1023 let WP know about this. I've explicitly struck the signature, noted the anon's correct sig/timestamp, and added a specific list of the problems 24.115.238.8 (talk · contributions) caused there as well. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 12:05, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Comment on Wikinews

Did you post this? Please respond here. I've added an interwiki link to confirm my identity --Deprifry 00:42, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

No, I did not post that. It appears to be a copy of one of my m:Vandalism reports edits [3], but I haven't checked it thoroughly. This person (24.115.238.8 (talk · contributions) on Wikinews) is engaged in another series of attacks on Wikiquote, and is just trying to stir up trouble. I have reverted the addition with my long-established Wikinews username and noted what happened in the edit summary. Thanks for calling my attention to this. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 00:59, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Thank you. I've blocked the user in question. --Deprifry 01:04, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Page deleted, no track, no notice

Hi Jeff, I was wondering if you can help me out on this one, a page that I created from the last international speech of Jaswant Singh Khalra has been deleted from wikiquote. I dont know why as there is no notice, and no track. Can you help me figure out why??

Thanks A. S. Aulakh 20:32, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

That article was discussed at Wikiquote:Votes for deletion/Jaswant Singh Khalra. If you're used to checking the Wikiquote:Votes for deletion history for section edits with the article title as a "track", please note that we're currently testing (and likely to permanently switch to) a more Wikipedia-like use of WQ:VFD subpages for active discussions. This means that the traces of an article's deletion discussion look a little different (i.e., something like "+Article Name" when started, and something like "closed Article Name" when finished). All the intervening posts are in the history of the discussion subpage. In most cases, you will find a deletion discussion about "Article X" at "Wikiquote:Votes for deletion/Article X".

If you wish to recover the text so you can more easily create a new article that addresses the problems cited in the discussion, let me know. We'll have to be careful about doing this openly to avoid having the article summarily deleted as a recreation of a VfD'd article. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 20:46, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

About an old Austro-Hungarian Popper quote about LOVE being deleted

Hello Jeff, I am wondering if you can provide some help on the use of Wikipedia and Wikiquote. I teach and research in the field of Foresight and my studients are becoming more keen in the use of Wikipedia to keep an account of courses, research project and publications. But on the Wikiquote area I have added an old quote from my Austro-Hungarian (Popper) family quote "A beautiful future begins, once you have found true love". Could you please explain why does it disapear? Many thanks in advance! --Rafael popper 01:50, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

If you haven't already done so, you might want to read the following pages on using Wikipedia within schoools and universities:

• Wikipedia:School and university projects
• Wikipedia:Schools' FAQ

One key feature that both Wikipedia and Wikiquote share is setting a notability threshhold for articles, so that the subjects and contents have some importance outside very local groups like individual cities, schools, and families. We also insist on having reliable sources for the content, which basically means information (quotes in Wikiquote's case) that have been published by third parties or other well-established sources. This means that family quotes, personal quotes, classroom quotes, quotes from self-published books, etc., are not the domain of Wikiquote.

I deleted the "Rafael Popper" quote because it didn't appear to be well-known or from a well-known person (no offense intended). We also routinely delete quotes without specific sources (e.g., publications with dates and pages, or their equivalent in other media). We need these so our readers and editors can verify the accuracy of the quotes (or other information). This is how Wikimedia achieves accuracy without formal editorial oversight — through millions of volunteer fact-checkers.

Of course, we have quite a bit of material that isn't properly sourced. This is an especially bad problem for theme articles, like Love. A growing number of editors (myself included) are beginning to take a stand on these articles by removing any new quotes that aren't properly sourced or from identified, notable people, and periodically sweeping them to remove older ones.

Please understand that this is not a judgment of whether any particular excluded quotes are uninteresting. It's just that our threshhold for inclusion is that the quotes can be found in well-established sources. You are welcome to add quotes that do not meet our notability or sourcing guidelines on your user page, as well as other material as described at Wikiquote:User page, as a way to identify yourself and your interests.

Let me know if you have any other questions. By the way, I am not familiar with the "field of Foresight". Can you explain what this is? ~ Jeff Q (talk) 02:22, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

I am new user in Wikipedia too

A short article I posted to provide real and virtual students with some references to ongoing projects, publications and course in the field of Foresight has been apparantly considered for deletion (see message below). Could you please elaborate a bit more on the reasons? --Rafael popper 02:10, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

This article is being considered for deletion in accordance with Wikipedia's deletion policy. You may share your thoughts on the matter at this article's entry on the Articles for deletion page. Please improve the article if possible, but the article must not be blanked, and this notice must not be removed, until the discussion is closed. For more information, particularly on merging or moving the article during the discussion, read the guide to deletion.

Discussion moved to w:User talk:Rafael popper#I am new user in Wikipedia too. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 03:07, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Deletion of "The Hours"

You wrote:

Could you explain why you deleted The Hours after moving it The Hours (film) to match the WP article? Normally, one would expect the redirect to be left in place until someone wished to turn it into either a quote article about the book or a disambiguation page (like w:The Hours). In this case, it also looks peculiar because this article is currently featured on Main Page. Thanks for any info. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 04:44, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

You're probably right Jeff that I should have created a disambig page for this, rather than just delete it. I was in the midst of recategorizing the Literary Works into more specific categories and I guess I just didn't want someone who was searching for the book to think that the only page available for 'The Hours' was for the film. I erred on the side of caution that a user might not know how to change the redirect page to a new page for the book, if that was what they wanted to do. I will create the disambig page and in the future, either do this or leave the redirect page. Sorry about that. ~ UDScott 15:51, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

A little help...

Jeff, could you possibly chime in on a conversation I am having with a user regarding copyright issues? I think you could probably explain a little better than I can. It is at User talk:Zarbon. Thanks. ~ UDScott 17:28, 1 March 2007 (UTC)‎

Bots

I noticed your thread on Aphaia's talk page. Sysops should always block first and ask questions later, no offense to Essjay, but he was over-reacting just a wee-bit (although you should never put an autoblock on a bot account or block anonymous users only, because they could be hosted by the toolserv, and that could cause collateral damge (not so much for this wiki, with very few bots)). Bots should be programmed to stop when their owner gets a new messge or when they get a new message. Aphaia may have fogotten that we had a local b'crat because Kalki should certainly do the flagging. We may want to "approve" our bots on the Village Pump or Administrators' noticeboard, but they definitely need approval. Cbrown1023 talk 17:39, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Yes as you guessed, I simply forgot now bureaucrats could give the flag. As for approval, I have no problem to use Wikiquote:Bots for the entire discussion and not find to move to other pages. --Aphaia 13:27, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm with Aphaia on using on WQ:BOT for approvals, for two reasons:

• We have a relatively unsophisticated community and bots are a complex subject, so we can expect little general interest in them.
• Those who are interested in them, including admins, can and should know to watch WQ:BOT.

I do see a potential need for splitting the current page into two — one for policy, one for requests — if the policy page gets some enhancements I'm planning to recommend to make it easier for our less bot-experienced community to understand the basics of bot approvals and monitoring. But that's another topic.

As for the now-retired Essjay's reaction, he did make the point that my use of the bot emergency shutoff button probably was done poorly. (I'm not sure if it actually caused toolserver problems or that he was just warning me it might, but I was ignorant of this possibility.) I am trying to create a version of {{Emergency-bot-shutoff}} that automatically turns off IP autoblock, as I can't see why it should be enabled as a default for a bot that includes the button. Reasoning, as I understand it currently:

• One uses the shutoff button when bad things must be stopped quickly, so one is likely to overlook turning off the default IP autoblock.
• Bots are either operated either from a user's computer (IP) or from the toolserver. Pressing the button without unchecking the autoblock does one of two things:
  • For bots running on the user's IP, it unnecessarily blocks the user, too.
  • For bots running on the toolserver, it disastrously blocks many bots and other critical functions.
• The only good reason to IP-autoblock a bot is if it's done by a vandal, but no vandal should be able to get approved to operate a bot. If one somehow slips by, further edits from the vandal on the same IP will show up as other vandalism that we'll block (with the IP autoblock) in our normal anti-vandalism patrolling.

(This is my theory, but please remember I'm fairly ignorant about bot technical details. Feel free to correct any misapprehensions.) Anyway, my experiments at Template:X0 so far have not worked. I'm open to suggestions. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 14:35, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

A note about the vandal thing, bots can still be run when they aren't approved, they are just breaking policy and aren't flagged. So, it is possible for a vandal-bot. Cbrown1023 talk 21:19, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Username

Is there a way to change my username. I am currently Thorneenterprises but should be ThorneEnterprises. It's just a minor difference and if it is too difficult or causes problems, don't worry about it.

Thanks, Thorne Enterprises 18:15, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Hello guys, personally I think both your username, the current one and the requested one are not acceptable. There is a for-profit organization named so[4], unless you are the person who can speak of its behalf and it is a sort of group account behind which it is clear who edits, it should be discouraged. Otherwise it could be a trademark violation. I recommend you to think up the other kind of username. --Aphaia 20:02, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

It's not clear to me what position Wikiquote should take on usernames that happened to be for-profit company names. There are many "pro" and "con" arguments, mainly over trademark infringement, at w:Wikipedia talk:Username policy#Issue with trademark policy, but as far as I can see, no solid legal advice or direction from the Wikimedia Foundation. We have nothing about this in our Wikiquote:Username policy. I'm also not sure if a username can be said to be "promoting" a company of the same name, unless it is used to edit articles related to that company (which is already against our loose, informal conflict-of-interest policy, based on w:WP:COI) or to spam articles with information (which is against our informal spam policy, based on w:WP:SPAM). HOWEVER, it seems unwise to use a company name as a username anyway. If you are an employee of the firm, the company might object to your assumption of this identity, especially if you find yourself no longer working for them down the road. Even if you own the company, you might sell the company (and the name) to someone in the future. And I'm sure there are many "Thorne Enterprises" in the world, so other companies may object as well. Best to choose a more personal identity.

But getting back to your original question, Thorne, you can request username changes from any Wikiquote bureaucrat. Since we have only one ☺, I place you into the helpful virtual hands of our esteemed colleague Kalki. You can request a change on his talk page. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 21:14, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

I had not considered that. Thanks for your help. --Thorne Enterprises 22:37, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Television quotation marks

The television page is a theme page. Theme pages have a different layout from other Wikiquote people pages. Please feel free to read for yourself. You may also want to create an Archive for your User talk page. Sweet Pinkette 06:47, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

Wikiquote:Guide_to_layout#Theme_pages Sweet Pinkette 06:53, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

Ah, that's where that came from! I'm afraid you've run afoul of one of many problems we have at Wikiquote due to a shortage of regular editors. Despite the fact that Wikiquote:Guide to layout, clearly marked as an unfinished draft, is included in our standard {{welcome}} message, it isn't as current or well-maintained as Wikiquote:Templates and its subpages, which have been the de facto formatting guidelines for all genre pages for nearly two years. The discrepancies between the Guide and actual practice are obviously a serious oversight. Thank you for calling attention to this.

Please review Wikiquote:Templates and Wikiquote:Templates/Themes for the most current formatting guidelines. Meanwhile, I will see what we can do about bringing the two sets of guidelines into sync. I apologize for the confusion. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 14:14, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

By the way, I do have a set of user-talk archives, with an "ARCHIVE INDEX" at the top of my user talk page, providing direct links to every discussion since I first came here in 2004. I frequently use it to consult old discussions. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 14:14, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

Hey there. Thanks for your timely response. Early this morning I did in fact come across a page that contained a similar template, but I thought it was no longer in effect since the Template page that is currently in its editing stages was newer, ostensibly. Although I do like the former template better I can see how the latter is more consistent with Wikiquote guidelines and pages. Thanks for setting me straight. By the by, I have a question about some quotes in bold text featured in some Wikiquote pages. Is there are any particular reason for that? And is that standard practice? It isn't very pleasing to the eye and I've seen a few pages like this (see Marilyn Monroe), but I didn't want to act on them because I felt I should make sure first. Thanks a billion, have a great week! ☺ ~Sweet Pinkette, 16:03, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

Bolding selected quotes based on users' preferences has been around since the early days of Wikiquote. I'm not particularly happy about it myself, but it's fairly popular and not likely to change in the foreseeable future. The most recent substantive discussion on this issue that I recall can be found at Wikiquote:Village pump archive 9#MoS/NPOV: quotes in bold?. One problem this creates is that some editors believe our style is to bold all quotes, but not bold source and context information. Any time you see that, you are invited to be bold yourself and "reset" the formatting so that no quotes are bolded. It's too easy to get carried away with this POV (IMHO) styling. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 04:32, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

I personally feel it's a bad idea, especially since, as Wikiquote grows, there will probably be more problems arising from the neutrality of certain quotes. I mean a dilemma with neutrality has already risen on the Television page and it only has one bolded quote. I can't imagine why it's allowed, especially since the templates already call for organization, alphabetization, chronologication (haha, that's probably not a word but you know what I mean). The whole thing seems a little folly to me. I guess we'll see what happens in the future. Anyway, thanks for everything. I'll stop bugging you now. ^__^ ~Sweet Pinkette, 2:58, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

Template question

Jeff, something came to mind when you recently created a couple of templates. For those of us who are not quite so sure how to use templates, can we make it a suggestion (if not a rule) that any template show an example of the markup that would be added to a page? You did this on the Template:Unsorted, but I don't always see this in many templates that are created here. This can leave some with the task of trying to figure out how to use it. Thanks. ~ UDScott 15:52, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

The main reason {{unsorted}} has an example, I'm afraid, is that I copied it from a Wikipedia template that had an example I could easily adapt. ☺

I totally agree that we need clear examples for templates, especially since our editors are less likely to be wiki-savvy than WP's. Given our recent experiences with Fabartus's messy template work, a rule would be useful. I'm tempted to encourage folks to nominate undocumented templates for deletion just to push this, except we probably have so many right now that it'd cause us serious problems. So far, adding examples to existing templates is still one of my hundred-or-so long-delayed to-dos, which I'm hoping to tackle if we ever get enough folks doing basic maintenance.

One thing I would like to push is the use of inline documentation instead of those klutzy "/doc" pages some WP templates are now using. Although I can see an argument for the latter, the former is much simpler for the vast majority of active templates here, I think. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 16:08, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

Sure, destroy my articles, why don't you.

Those articles collectively took me six hours to write and you want to reduce them?! It's not like I wrote out the script. Dev920 23:51, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

Also, wtf with the unsorted dialogue template? You want something other than chronological order in a film? Dev920 23:55, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

First of all, Dev920, please identify what articles you are talking about in your posts. I make upwards of 100 edits on some days, and I don't always check to see who worked on what articles, as what I care most about is the content, not the author. In any case, it's good practice to link to what you're discussing if it's not on the article's talk page.

Second of all, there is no such thing as "my article" or "your article" here. Wikiquote articles are a collaborative effort. While many start with the considerable work of a single individual, no one "owns" them.

Third, I hope you realize that it is not my intention to "destroy" anything here. If you don't, you should review my other 25000+ edits here to see that I don't generally destroy articles. I would ask you to approach concerns about others' edits by assuming good faith, just as I assume (correctly, I believe) that your work here has been (and I'm sure will continue to be) very much in good faith. If you were being sarcastic, please consider that plain text is a poor delivery mechanism for friendly sarcasm. Nothing in your post suggested to me that you were being wry, just feeling angry.

Now on to the business at hand. Based on your mentioned of the {{unsorted}} tag I just created, I see you're probably talking about Latter Days and Proof (2005 film). They came to my attention when you added them to Wikiquote:Good entries, because I feel this will be construed by Wikiquotians as a list of articles that meet all the various policies and guidelines we expect of the best articles at Wikiquote. Because of this, I believe it's important to ensure they do in fact accomplish this, much as offering a Wikipedia article for Good or Featured status would encourge folks to bring it up to the highest standards there.

The main concern I had for these two articles was that the dialog segments were mixed into the character quotes. We have no format recommendations for this, and frankly, I think this is going in exactly the wrong direction. Character quotes are a commonplace thing in film articles, but as I'm sure you've noticed, what is commonplace is often sub-standard here at Wikiquote. The problem with character quotes is the same as identifying a literature quote simply by citing a book — it makes it effectively impossible to verify without spending several hours reading the whole work (or watching the whole film in this case).

The advantage of dialog sections is that chronological order, enhanced by terse scene-describing context lines, provide the next-best thing to timecodes, especially in the age of DVDs where people can skip through a film at high speed to spot the described scene. Because of this, we should always put dialog in the "Dialogue" section. If I had my way, we wouldn't even have character-quote sections because they're so ineffective for sourcing. (Or at the very least, the very few quotes from character sections would be repeated with proper sourcing context in the "Dialogue" section.)

With all this to consider, I moved the dialog segments to "Dialogue", but since there is (again) no sourcing info for them, and I didn't have the relevant DVDs to review, I placed the {{unsorted}} tag there to call attention to the fact that they were probably no longer in chrono order. It was, and still is, my hope that editors more familiar with the subject can fold these into proper order. (I and others do this all the time with TV-show articles like Mystery Science Theater 3000, which are far more challenging because they often have 100 times the source material to review.)

I apologize if I offended you, and I didn't mean to make light of the work you've put into these articles. But I hope we are all working toward the same goal — making each article the best it can be. This must be doubly so for articles we expect to present as "good entries". ~ Jeff Q (talk) 00:47, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

I apologise for coming on too strong, but that template which indicates you intend to cut down my article (which I use as a term for convenience, not ownership) is frustrating considering the amount I spent constructing it. I laid it out according to the template that existed when I first wrote them - I thought it was strange but who am I to argue? I will go put the bits you changed into order. Dev920 08:12, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

Hangon, why have you moved those individual quotes as well? That's clearly still Wikiquote policy to judge from the preloaded template:

== Other ==
* '''Character4''': (...quote...)

* '''Character5''': (...quote...)

Should they have been moved? Dev920 08:18, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

I apologize (my turn again!) for the delay in responding on this. There are some discrepancies between the policy-by-template and practices that I still need to review to better respond to this. The short answer is, yeah, you were following the template both for "Other" and even with embedded dialog in the character sections. This is going to take even more work than just synchronizing the templates and Wikiquote:Guide to layout. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 09:23, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Jeff, what's happening with these? I'm reluctant to edit any more articles until I know the proper way forward. Dev920

I'm sorry, Dev920. I'm just not keeping up with everything that's going on. I have no moral authority to push any variations from the existing templates, regardless of the rationale, unless I'm willing and able to put a lot more time into them than I have right now. All I can do is ask that you consider how to provide readers with a fighting chance to identify where in the film each quote is. Otherwise, I need to get out of your way so you can contribute more material! ☺ If you'd like, you might take a look at The Man with Two Brains, which I think still follows chrono order, includes a scene context line for (nearly) every quote, and even includes some not-quite-standard poetry quoting from the film. The policy fixes and synchronization will just have to wait for more attention from more editors. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 09:25, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Well, I can sure put in context lines, but I'm more concerned over this copyright tag at the top. What's wrong with the amount of quotes? They are all relevant. Dev920 16:06, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Relevance has nothing to do with keeping within "fair use" guidelines. However, because I am not prepared to deal with this specific issue right (I don't recall that we have any specific recommendations for film articles), I have removed the {{checkcopyright}} tags I added to Latter Days and Proof (2005 film). This should not be interpreted in any way as acceptance by Wikiquote or Wikimedia Foundation. But I'll have to leave such analysis and review to others for now. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 17:50, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Ok. I'll continue my work here then. If they do get choopped I can submit them to IMDB instead. Dev920 00:09, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Question

Jeff, I want to be sure that I did not overstep my bounds as a sysop in my recent exchange with User:EHStories. This user seems to be blanking pages so that he/she may recreate them in a style different than out templates. I warned time and again, and tried to help by creating a sub-page to the User page for this user to work on their pet project. But with no return dialogue, the changes kept coming from this user. This was followed by an attack on my userpage. I've blocked EHStories for a couple of weeks, but I'm not sure that this user can be classified as a vandal as we usually see them. I'm just not sure where to go with this one once the block expires. Any advice? (I also posted this on Kalki's talk page for another opinion) ~ UDScott 17:23, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

I think you displayed patience with a stubborn and uncommunicative new editor. Cbrown1023 provided them with useful welcome links 3 weeks ago, so they had ample time to learn Wikiquote basics and ask questions. They also could have asked questions after any of your posts, but instead ignored them and even vandalized your page for all your trouble. I've posted on their user talk page a warning about a permanent block should they choose to return with the same disregard for cooperation, communication, and courtesy. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 23:52, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Depreciation of lynx

It has been mentioned at VP. Cbrown1023 talk 21:01, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

I will be restarting the bot then. Cbrown1023 talk 21:17, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

No, this hasn't been "mentioned", let alone discussed, at VP. What was said was an innocuous statement that "The sidebar has been updated to included wikquote links." What's a "sidebar"? What specific "wikiquote links" are being discussed? "Lynx" isn't even mentioned!

Wikiquote is not Wikipedia, with thousands of experienced wiki editors involved in architectural discussions. Nearly everyone participating here knows just enough to use the "edit" tab to make changes to articles, and if we're lucky, they follow the formatting they can observe in the articles they're editing. Announcements or discussions with the community must include context appropriate for the general community if they're going to be mean anything. You might look at some of my VP posts responding to non-sysop questions to see how I fill in the contextual gaps that we wiki-savvy editors tend to assume (incorrectly) that everyone understands (like expanding acronyms like "VP" at least once in any conversation and making sure there's always a link to whatever's being discussed, instead of expecting any interested party to already know all the relevant pages and discussions).

I have posted what I believe is a more useful announcement of the situation. It may very well generate nothing but yawns, but it fulfills our responsibility to keep the entire community informed.

I had no real problems with the bot. I only stopped it after reading your acceptance of unprejudicial blocks and noticing that you were still making BrownBot changes after I posted some comments, including on your talk page. (That's one thing I find annoying about separate accounts for bot or other special activity. I can't wait until they get a cross-account message notification system working.) Despite my concern about the lack of community involvement, I am quite happy that you tackled this issue energetically. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 21:34, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

Whats Up?

So, hi, hows the weather doing in your neck o' the woods? Tapernoc 19:40, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

Welcoming users

When welcoming new users, do I need to check that new users aren't vandals, or should I just welcome everyone without an offensive username? Dev920 06:12, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

That's your option. It's not such a bad thing to be friendly even in the face of vandalism or other rudeness. I usually just look up the new users and post a welcome to everyone who hasn't received a welcome message (even the ones who have posted something to their talk pages already, and the ones who have received non-welcoming communications from other users). After I do this, I use the convenient "User contributions" link to see what they've been up to. In rare cases, I've replaced my welcome with a block notice. But usually I like starting on a good foot, even if I have to immediately follow up with a "I'm sorry to see that..." post. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 06:21, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

Good, I shall be kind and loving to all then. :) Dev920 06:24, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

Quote 'It doesn't do anything...'

Check this out: http://s98.photobucket.com/albums/l269/hosmackah/beauty/ My email, in case you're interested, is gjallarhorn@juno.com

GGW

May I create a page on with pictures of the girls? 68.96.23.7 21:09, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

I am guessing that GGW means Girls Gone Wild (it was just that I saw the commercials on MTV, I swear!), in which the answer would be no. There are also not pages just for pictures alone. Those pictures are also copyrighted, making them not-usable on Wikimedia. Cbrown1023 talk 21:25, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Quote from a not-so-very-famous person

I have added a quote (sourced) to the "Environmentalism" article from a certain Todd Murphy, a friend of Bill McKibben (who is famous as an environmental author). My rationale is that it is so very quotable, and thus a valuable addition to the article.Writtenright 03:09, 29 March 2007 (UTC)Writtenright

I reverted it since 1) there is no such phrase on the page which was claimed as the source 2) a "March 27, 2007" dated quote can hardly claim "very quotable" in my opinion. --Aphaia 09:37, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

I don't understand your statement, Aphaia. I had earlier checked (and just re-checked) the cited source, and it clearly contains the following text:

My friend Todd Murphy, who started the Farmers Diner in Barre, Vt., printed up stickers that said, "Think globally. Act Neighborly."

This is a quote from Bill McKibben, the interviewee of the article, which is dated "March 23, 2007" (not "March 27, 2007" as you state). I hadn't yet responded to Writtenright because I wasn't sure what to say. I was thinking that it would be a useful compromise between the need for notability and inclusion of the source to quote the entire sentence as I show it above. This makes it a proper quote (as opposed to a second-hand report of a bumper sticker), but also allows us to use it as a starting source (probably not the original source) for the expression "think globally, act neighborly", a variation on the better-known "think globally, act locally". I also have some concern about quoting a mere bumper-sticker variation that has less pith than the original because it loses the parallel contrast aspect ("locally" is the opposite of "globally", but "neighborly" is… what?). I might not have said anything before, but I did want to try to sort out some apparent confusion. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 11:34, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Dear JeffQ: What's brilliant about the quote is the double entendre upon the original catchphrase, "Think globally. Act locally." It has to do with two related yet distinct meanings of the verb "to act". In the original, "act" means to influence; in the parody, "act" means to behave in a certain way. Murphy's (and McKibbon's) point is that our "acting locally" must be a human-centered affair, and not simply one directed at the non-human environment around us: we "act locally" by "acting neighborly".

What makes the quote additionally worthy of inclusion is that the original which it gently parodies has become rather shop-worn and thus cliched. It has thus become both ripe for parody and deserving of parody. As to the provenance of the quote, if McKibben, who is a well-known environmental writer and Writer-in-Residence at Middlebury College in Vermont, "heard" it first from Murphy (from a lowly bumper sticker! Quel scandale!), then Murphy, if not the originator, may be as close as we can now determine to the ultimate source. Let another editor correct my ignorance in some future addition to Wikiquote: that's what's so beautiful about Wikipedia and her electronic children. I remain, sir, your excellency's humblest, most obediant servant, Writtenright 22:50, 4 April 2007 (UTC)Writtenright

Thanks

I appreciate your vote and your greeting!--Poetlister 22:27, 30 March 2007 (UTC)