> It's definitely '''not''' easy to find articles without Wikipedia's search
> facility I just typed in "[[continental breakfast]]", not knowing that such
> an article does not exist (yet) and was referred to [[Departments of the
> Continental Army]]
Try using google. It's fast; it doesn't cause Wikipedia to slow down; it gives vastly
better content summaries; and it's much better at evaluating the relative importance
of pages. For example, if I do a google search for "continental breakfast", I get two
hits, in under a second: [[breakfast]], and [[Full English breakfast]]. Parfait!
How easy is that?
(don't tell me, you're on some browser where the google taskbar doesn't play, or
something - in which case, sorry...)
-Martin "MyRedDice" Harper
Tarquin saith:
>Everyone tries to invent their own phonetic system when they're in their
>teens. I did.
>But reinventing the wheel is generally a bad idea.
>if every dictionary & encyclopedia has its own system, then it is not
>transferable, and the reader has to relearn for each book they open.
>Let's stick to something that is universal: IPA / SAMPA.
I've seen IPA/SAMPA used in Wikipedia articles and didn't like it. The
former uses too many non-ASCII characters to make it easy enough to use
and the latter uses weird ASCII signs that make the word @n"rid@bl
[unreadable] and l33t-like for those who don't know the system.
The system used in practically every school dictionary I've seen
(except for Merriam-Webster's) is simple: prime mark after accented
syllable (doubled for two accents in one word), flipped e for
schwa, breve (curve) for short vowels, macron (line) for long vowels,
diaresis or circumflex for vowels of far and fur, line across th for
voiced and no line for unvoiced. This last one is the only thing not
representable in Unicode; everything else is sĭm'pəl ēnəf' for us to use.
(If those words came out garbled, either your mail client or mine doesn't
support Unicode. That was 73 12D 6D 27 70 259 6C 20 113 6E 259 66 27 hex.)
Even better is the limited letters-only system used in textbooks that aren't
dictionaries: complex words are repeated in identical-sounding imitations
(I-mi-TAY-shuns). If this latter system is formalized (FAR-muh-liyzd) it
may be simpler than SAMPA for those who don't have the time to learn it.
Geoffrey Thomas / jěf'rē t�'məs / JEF-ree TAH-muhs
geoffreyerffoeg(a)yahoo.com
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The battle on [[New Imperialism]] is reaching absurd levels. First we had
Pizza Puzzle /insisting/ that his rival version to the main article should
be advertised on it. Whatever about advertising a new draft being prepared
that was scheduled to replace the main article, to have the official article
and PP's personal alternative rewrite seemed absurd. Encyclopædias do not
normally put in two rival versions of an article. I protected the page to
stop the constant attempts of PP to insert it until people had a chance to
discuss whether this was a good idea. (PP refused to wait until it was
discussed and insisted that he be allowed to have his way). We had a vote
and a narrow majority agreed to put in the link /for one week/.
The page has since been redesigned and reduced in size, negating one of PP's
main complaints about the live page. But now it turns out that we have not
just one but TWO temps being placed on the main page.
This temp madness is becoming a joke. It is barely encyclopædic to put two
rival drafts on the one page. But now THREE??? We have the main one and two
temps. This is plain silly. We have agreed to PP's temp1 being there for one
week but now introducing Temp 2 is madness. I have removed the Temp 2 link
and will be placing a link to it, alongside Temp 1, on then talk page, where
Temp 1 was only supposed to be linked to in the first place.
JT
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It's definitely '''not''' easy to find articles without Wikipedia's search
facility. I just typed in "[[continental breakfast]]", not knowing that such
an article does not exist (yet) and was referred to [[Departments of the
Continental Army]] (!). This is going to drive away both casual users and
regular contributors. If you type in "[[continental breakfast]]" you should
at least get one of the "breakfast" articles rather than a "continental"
one.
KF
JT writes:
> We /really/ need to lay down the rules here and tell him in no
> uncertain terms that running multiple identities on wiki is as
> unacceptable now as it was months ago when we faced his previous
> games with names.
Ugh. I suppose I now have to come out of the closet and say that I
myself have a separate account that I occasionally use when I'm
involved in too many arguments with my main account, and want to be
able to ignore them all for a while...
I have never used it for any dubious activities like vote rigging or
anything. In fact, that account has never once been used for
discussion of any page, and with I think 1 exception, has never been
used for editing a page that I edited with my main account.
If there's a real objection to this then I'll stop (and make public
that account name, if you like).
How this all relates to Pizza Puzzle - it's not so much having an
alias that's dubious (I think), but rather using it for dodgy
purposes like escaping a ban, vote rigging, creating false concensus
in a debate, etc... this sort of behaviour is, I agree, a problem.
Evercat
--
Allan Crossman
a.crossman(a)blueyonder.co.uk
http://dogma.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk
A few messages back (on WikiEN-l) I sent some accented
characters that are found in Unicode/UTF-n but not in Latin-1
using Yahoo! Mail. These apparently appeared on Timwi's client
as HTML entities, but on my client they displayed properly.
Is this just a bug with Y!Mail?
Most other special characters cannot be easily displayed
in my browser. I get the digested form, and some messages
use different character sets than others - and Mozilla
autoguesses the character set as a third, in most cases.
In one digest with links to the Hindi Wikipedia and a UTF-8
apostrophe, the default character set was Chinese Simplified.
Is there something the software can do about this? We can't
assume everyone'll send in UTF-8 (which would have been nice),
and for those like me who receive digests, it's impossible to
get the browser to display two character sets on the same
page. Could the digesting software automatically convert all
e-mails to the same character set, preferably UTF-8?
--[[User:Geoffrey|]] Thomas
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>From: Fred Bauder (I'm pretty sure 172 has got to be up to SOMETHING).
>
Yes, writing an academic standard article.
JT
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KF wrote:
> Whenever I try to access Wikipedia, this is what
> I get. No one has reacted to the same message
> which I posted for the first time 24 hours ago,
> which I find rather strange. A number of minor
> disputes still seem to be going on, and people
> do react to them. But how do you work if you
> can't read, let alone edit Wikipedia articles?
> Or is it just me who can't get in?
I'm having the same problem, periodically, but I
didn't respond earlier because there's nothing I can
do about it. I understand your frustration, but I
think that most of the developers aren't around right
now, and do all they can when they are. Within a few
years we'll probably need as many machines as slashdot
has--which will cost quite a lot--but until then, all
we can do is wait for the code to be optimized, which
takes time. Until then, given that everyone is a
volunteer--including the coders--I'd recommend
patience. :-)
kq
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