At 10:02 PM 9/12/02 +0200, someone calling himself Jaap van Ganswijk wrote: Netiquette doesn't demand real names, in part because it's very hard to tell which names are real. At one point over on Usenet, someone angrily demanded that another poster use his "real name". The person of whom the demand was made was, in fact, using his full legal name. Conversely, I have no way of knowing, online, whether you're really named Jaap van Ganswijk. -- Vicki Rosenzweig vr(a)redbird.org http://www.redbird.org

At 11:48 PM 9/12/02 +0200, someone who has yet to contribute to Wikipedia wrote: Since it appears that either you are using a handle for the Wikipedia--in which case you have no credibility in this discussion--or have never bothered to sign in, I don't think it matters. I have an encyclopedia to write and edit. -- Vicki Rosenzweig vr(a)redbird.org http://www.redbird.org

--- Jim McKeeth <jim(a)mckeeth.org> wrote: The technical term is "trolling". ;-) Stephen Gilbert __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! News - Today's headlines http://news.yahoo.com

Jaap van Ganswijk wrote: Our KQ has already proved himself. Too bad he's already go the name though, the Hopi language term might have suited Jaap better.

Jason Khendon Williams wrote: Don't worry about it Jason... there IS no issue! I agree with you too - if you do a google search for 'Karen Johnson' you'll come up with a million hits, almost none of which are actually ME. A search for Kajikit however, will give you a lot more info than my full name. In fact, you'll find out a heck of a lot more about me than I realised! I just did a search for Kajikit and at the top of the list is my website Kajikit's Corner, followed by my Yahoo profile, a couple of bulletinboards I'm registered on, my writing in other people's websites and a bunch of my usenet posts! I didn't know that so many people had websites that tracked newsgroups... you can find out everything except my mother's maiden name with these hits, so I hope nobody decides to use it against me! Searching for Karen Johnson, on the other hand, brings up a good million hits but the only ones that are me are #11, #50, #52 and #89. The other million are just there to confuse the issue :) I choose to use my full name on the wikipedia because I feel it is a project that I am proud of, and I WANT to be associated with it in public. In general internet use, the use of a full name is extremely unusual, so I use my normal web ID, which is the one in my sig. They're both me... -- Karen AKA Kajikit And on the seventh day, God said 'What my world needs is a creature that will truly appreciate it in all its facets' - and so He made the kitten. Come and visit my part of the web: Kajikit's Corner: http://Kajikit.netfirms.com/ Aussie Support Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AussieSupport Allergyfree Eating Recipe Swap: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Allergyfree_Eating Ample Aussies Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ampleaussies/ Love and huggles to all!

could someone with more tact and diplomacy than me point out nicely to user Tucci528 that in many of his recent articles he has spelt "received" as "recieved"? I hesitated to do this myself yesterday when I corrected some of them -- if I mention it to him he'll probably think I'm biting his head off. It looks like he may become a regular, I don't want to scare him away! (I hope he's not on the list yet!) thanks tarquin

Ray Saintonge wrote: I've been pondering. There are some typos and common spelling mistakes which are no-brainers to catch and fix, but require a lot of grunt work. Would it be possible, or desirable, to have a system which does a search for one particular error at a time, eg "recieve", and corrects all the pages it finds in batches, of say 20, to avoid loading the server? Obviously, this will deal with only a fraction of the overall typo checking, since many things depend on context (eg "its" / "it's"). Would this be best implemented as a system tool, or as a seperate script (like the Eason's Bible Dictionary import)? -- tarquin

On 13 Sep 2002, Ray Saintonge wrote: [[List of battles 1401-1800]] before British spell-checker: "1775 Battle of Lexington and Concord? Apr. 19 Patriots lose 8 and with guerrilla action kill British" [[List of battles 1401-1800]] after British spell-checker: "1775 Battle of Lexington and Concord? Apr. 19 Rebels lose 8 and with guerrilla action kill British" ;)

At 01:54 PM 9/14/02 +0100, you wrote: Once you've written on a few controversial articles like [[Scotland]] or [[History of England]] or, God help us, [[Law]] your watchlist will be a full plate without adding in hundreds of routine pages. Fred

That already happens: see the "this user's contributions" link, Fred Bauder wrote:

Of the 5 nobel prize pages, 3 start from the present day, 2 go forward from 1901. I found a page on filmographies etc which suggest that lists start from the most recent item: http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia_talk:Filmographies_an… A comment on the talk page Wikipedia talk:Filmographies and Discographies raises the fact that this order may have been influenced by the IMDB's filmographies. IMO lists of prize awards or works are in a sense timelines, and as such should go forwards. what are your opinions?

Ray Saintonge wrote: It's the same as listings of an author or artist's works (eg.paintings, books). A few weeks ago somebody went to the trouble of making a listing of books by Dianna Wynne Jones - in alphabetical order, which meant that somebody else had to go through and painstakingly re-order it to be chronological. I would like to be bold here and to suggest that ALL lists involving dates in any way should be chronological. -- Karen AKA Kajikit And on the seventh day, God said 'What my world needs is a creature that will truly appreciate it in all its facets' - and so He made the kitten. Come and visit my part of the web: Kajikit's Corner: http://Kajikit.netfirms.com/ Aussie Support Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AussieSupport Allergyfree Eating Recipe Swap: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Allergyfree_Eating Ample Aussies Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ampleaussies/ Love and huggles to all!

--- "Michael R. Irwin" <mri_icboise(a)surfbest.net> wrote: A search would work even better. A search would work here too. Maintaining multiple manual indexes of the same material is next to impossible. I've tried. An advanced search function (which Lee mentioned as one of his priorities) would allieviate the need for such lists. Stephen Gilbert __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! News - Today's headlines http://news.yahoo.com

Yes, we seem to be timing out, and as I use 3 different browsers on 2 different computers to access wikipedia I notice odd differences in how each of them handles it. Practically it means having to log in over and over despite having checked the little box, keep me logged in on this computer. As I have noted before eBay sometimes exhibits exactly the same bug so Lee is in some good company. I am disorganized enough that off the top of may head I couldn't say exactly what happens with each browser on each computer, but the timing out affects them all. Fred

Bryan Derksen wrote: I generaly have used an automatic login. I haven't had the problem since Lee has made his adjustment yesterday. I also double-checked to make sure that I was remembering the log-in across sessions. Hopefully the problem is gone forever. Ec

Hopefully Someone reported the same problem one hour ago on the German Wikipedia: http://de.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Beobachtete_Fehler Kurt

This has been hanging around for some time, with most people in favour, and only 1 1/2 objections. In answer to Toby, I think we should choose a standard because consistency of presentation is important in a body of work such as an enclyclopedia. (The information itself is more important, of course.) If I found in a paper encyclopedia that the list of Nobel Laureates went one way, but Pulitzer Prizes went the other, I would be pretty unimpressed. In asnwer to LDC, chronological lists are a form of potted history. The Nobel lists give a quick overview of developments in a field such as Physics; sports records such as the 100m show how human sporting achievement has progressed over the last century. Likewise, lists of novels or films show the development of the artist in question. I think the difference with film biog sites that give lists starting from today is that these sites seek to give a "current snapshot" -- the star as they are *today*. An encyclopedia, though, seeks to show the complete history of that person, how they develop to become who they are at the time of writing. Anyway, we have bigger fish to fry on this list, so since this had only minor objections, I think we can say it's Manual of Style policy (allowing for exceptions, of course), and move on. I'll work on the Nobel lists at some point -- one of them (physics I think) is *really* nicely laid-out, with details of *what* the prize was awarded for, as well as the recipient. I'd like to make the others look the same. Toby Bartels wrote:

Bryan Derksen wrote: Now *this* is a feature that I could definitely use! 7 days sounds right for me, please. While we're on the subject, I'd dearly like a secondary watchlist that listed all the pages that I'm watching, in alphabetical order, with no further information about them (no database lookup necessary). An analogy: [[Watchlist]] : [[Recentchanges]] :: my request : [[Allpages]]. For extra gratitude from me, include nonexistent but watched pages (which breaks the analogy somewhat). -- Toby

I don't think this would work - I think there will be thousands, if not tens of thousands of words that are used exactly once. The great majority of these will not be mis-spellings, but (parts of) proper names and geographical names that happen to occur exactly once, words from other languages and reasonable neologisms. As a test, here is the result from 20 pages got with 'Random page', looking at the count of those words I think might be unique: Aratrum aujtovguon - Greek word used for lack of English equivalent phktovn - idem Mounce - name, although not proper or geographical Subtractive synthesis synthisizers - indeed a misspelling (*) highpass - jargon word Shocking Blue no unique words Conjugate base no unique words Cenozoic Caenozoic - given as an alternative spelling of the subject Aldo Moro Moro's - genitive form of a proper name (**) Freedom of speech no unique words Film genres no unique words Alexandre Fleming actibacterial - actual typo (*) Hydrogen cyanide no unique words ISDN no unique words 20-GATE no unique words Unspun unspun - name of a group (**) unspinning - logical neologism (**) Apu Nahasapeempatilon octuplet - logical neologism or normal word punchcard - might actually be considered a misspelling (*) Lua programming language no unique words Eros no unique words Scud Makeyev - name of an institute UDMH - jargon term (abbreviation) RFNA - jargon term (abbrevation) Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay Herczag - proper name Siliphant - proper name Hauben - proper name Peploe - proper name Zaillian - proper name Gaghan - proper name Elie Ducommun no unique words Masamune Shirow Deunan - proper name (fictional character) (*): As I happened upon this misspelling, I corrected it, so you'll have to go to the previous version of the page to see it. (**): Occurs several times, but just on one page. Total: 16 proper singles, 3 misspellings, 3 cases (the ones with **) not counted. On the other hand, I came across the following mis-spellings which DID occur more than once (also corrected): missles (5 times) If my attempt above is any guideline, the actual ratio will be more like 1:5 or 1:6. Andre Engels

Andre Engels wrote: I agree with Andre. I suspect that the distribution of mis-spellings and typos would be Zipfian, as would the finding and corrections for such words. "Antibacterial" occurs 4 times in Wikipedia. No amount of direct searching would have found "actibacterial" One feature that would help for finding some common errors would be a search feature that allows optional searching for parts of words. Thus far we have spoken of "recieve" and "recieved", but being able to search the part word "reciev" would also catch "recieves", "reciever", "recievers", "recieving" and maybe other less common words with this root. Perhaps the article should be redirected to "Alexander Fleming" ;-) . Octuplet is a perfectly normal word. "Punchcard" is an acceptable (and IMHO preferable) variant of "punch card". It appears that way in the Oxford Dictionary. If I were to use the term in an article and someone else "corrected" it to two words, I would change it right back. Who will ever have the enthusiasm to check the spelling of Apu's surname? Eclecticology

At 20:40 13.09.2002, tarquin argued thusly: I hope he will become a regular - the sheer amount of knowledge he has on different characters of [[Greek mythology]] amazes me. His/her user page seems empty though, are there any replies on the user talk page? regards, [[WojPob]]

--- Jason Khendon Williams <jason(a)jasonandali.org.uk> wrote: There is absolutely no problem with using pseudonyms on Wikipedia. Many good contributors choose to use them for a number of reasons, and you should feel free to do so as well. Stephen Gilbert __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! News - Today's headlines http://news.yahoo.com