Hi Anthere -- I think you misunderstood me -- What I was saying was that, between you and the other person, you were the only one willing to let the page be frozen. ALso when I said someone had been in nasty edit wars before, I was not talking about you -- I was talking about the other person. Every time he gets into an edit war, he starts calling the other people names and asks for the sysops to ban his opponent. As I said, I don't care about what's in the article, but I want it to be a good article. Don't let it get you down. We all know that you are a great contributor and a good person!
Your e-mail's are not currently flagged at all. In any case, I thought you said they were being sent twice b/c of your work e-mail account? I guess I was wrong. Oh well, I will just go through them by hand, since you can't do anything about it, and delete the extras. No biggie, just thought you were being careless, didn't know it was out of your control. MB 16:42 2 Jul 2003 (UTC)
(Note: I have started to organize comments by section in preparation for the new "Edit this section" feature that is currently tested on test.wiki. This will make it easier to edit individual discussion threads once this feature goes live.)
I completely understand your frustration with the article count vote result. After all, the solution was more important to the int'l Wikipedias than it is to the English one. However, please recognize that this is not a problem related to voting at all, but to implementing community decisions in general, no matter how these decisions are reached. With most decisions (move page X, ban person Y) that is not a problem, because they are trivial. But updating the different wikis has become a non-trivial process. This is mainly because a) there is only one person who actively does it (Brion), and he occasionally takes breaks; b) new features are committed to our CVS server all the time, and these are often not fully tested. We are now in a situation similar to the Debian project, where the migration of a feature to the live wiki is prevented by the addition of another feature. This would not have been a problem if all wikis had been migrated at the same time, but right now, the CVS (developer) version has lots of untested stuff.
Even then, it is still possible to update a wiki by looking at its individual state and moving only the changes of the code that you want. However, this is a tricky process, and it can break things. Understandably, when Brion has an important (to him) feature or important (to him) bugfix that he wants to go live immediately, he may only do so on the English Wikipedia because of the complexities involved. Updating the int'l Wikipedias becomes harder and harder as their codebase gets older.
So how do we solve this? The simple solution is to give more people shell access to the server. This is also a dangerous one, because they can really screw things up -- prevent one or all wikis from running entirely, with nobody available to fix their mistakes which they themselves may not understand. Few people are as smart as Brion. On the other hand, if you know a highly technical person on the French wiki who you think can pull this off, please ask them to apply for such access.
The other solution is more complex and involves some scripting and some general effort on the part of the developers; the latter refers to our current practice of having no stable version of the software. That is bad, because it causes the above problems of code separation when updating, so we should maintain separate branches of the software (stable, unstable) and make sure that all wikis always run the latest stable version of the code, with bugfixes always committed to stable as soon as possible. CVS allows this, but many of our developers are not used to this working model yet.
Right now, the best thing you can do is ask Brion (again) to commit that specific patch to the French wiki -- he is the one who wrote it, so he should know where to put it and if it will conflict with other things. It usually takes some poking, but he always reads his messages, and will eventually do it (unless Lee does, but Lee seems to have been abducted by space aliens). You can also nominate me for shell access, in which case you have one more person to poke about these things, although I can't make a strong commitment in terms of time spent for free working on Wikipedia.
I think these issues should not be raised as a general decision making related problem, but as individual problems, because as I noted above, with those decisions that can be easily implemented this is not an issue.
As for explaining things, I understand, and apologize if I have been unduly dismissive in the past. Unfortunately, often explanations can get very complex, depending on who you talk to or what the subject is, and people become lazy and just say "We've already been through this". In that case, the proper form should always be, "We've already been through this, look here." But this is difficult with the mailing lists, which are not searchable and not easily linkable. Even on talk pages it can be a problem with archives scattered around, not summarized, or entire discussions being removed. These are technical problems which I would like to be solved by making discussions on wiki easier and possibly eventually phasing out the mailing lists.
If the discussion style with headlines becomes common practice, this at least would help in having first-glance summaries, which in turn would be automatically turned into a table of contents on long pages. We could also formulate a policy on the archiving process, namely that comments should be archived in different categories (e.g. /Comments on table layout (archive), /Comments on quotations (archive) etc.). Finally, the history search feature that I have suggested should help in locating previous comments.
You see there are many issues which we need to address -- Wikipedia has just been around for 2 1/2 years, and it's remarkable that there is any semblance of an ordered process at all, but lots of things are still shaky and can get annoying. Please remember that if people on the French wiki, or elsewhere, ever start talking about forking. -- Eloquence 17:53 2 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Hi Ant, I was just wondering why you did not put anything at all on your "Homepage". Sometimes it is nice to know who you are talking to, but the first line I saw on your page was the "ban"-line... I look forward to learn something about you, your articles and comments gave me a good impression. Greetings from Munich, Fantasy 12:56 3 Jul 2003 (UTC)
PS: I think, if you sign with three "~" instead of "Ant" it is easyer to understand who wrote the comment.
I think that this is the markup you should be using you might find the <strike> tag more appropriate.
Martin
There is some strange error on the test wiki with one of the changes Magnus is making for the category system development. I've just put in a workaround so it doesn't kill the entire site. -- Brion 18:55 4 Jul 2003 (UTC)~
I have undone your move of [Vichy France] to [Vichy, France]. The article is about the French WW II state not the town of the same name and so should not have a comma in the title. TwoOneTwo 20:39 4 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Hi Anthere, on the page Talk:Main Page/Layout design a vote for the new Homepage-layout is going on. I was just wondering, if you don't want to add your preference. See you, Fantasy ;-)
Please try section editing now. The problem was caused by a section entered in HTML (i.e. <H2>..</H2>). This creates problems because the section can then no longer be found in the wiki-source text, where the program expects it to be found in the form "== ... ==". I will probably disable HTML sections entirely, because they're an annoyance anyway. -- Eloquence 16:03 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)
an article about BAV1, a bacterium that can decompose vinyl chloride, which otherwise lasts for hundreds of years in the soil. You might know where to stick the relevant info. :-) Koyaanis Qatsi 16:04 9 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Anthere, speciation is a technical scientific topic in evolutionary biology; it requires a link to our article on biological evolution. Why did you remove the link to evolution, and replace it to a duplicate article (Theory of evolution]]) that is missing most of the science and details, and replaces science with religion and mysticism and Gaia theory? This makes no sense. When people want to learn about a very technical genetics and evolution topic such as speciation, we can assume that they do not want to study the mystical views of a Jesuit Christian priest from a century ago! Removing the science link and replacing it with the one you made is not justifiable. Please stop pushing your political and religious views into science articles. RK 23:01 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Okay, Talk:Gaia theory (science) should now contain the older edits in its history out of Talk:Gaia Theory (homeorhic). -- Brion 01:27 13 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Hi Ant! Sorry if I was a bit sharp about this
Wikicide trouble. I'm afraid GrahamN has become a bit of a pain in the backside over issues to do with deletions and so everyone tends to see red when he gets involved in more sysop-bashing. What he did to Zoe was what RK tried to do to you. As you know, a lot of crap gets put onto wiki and if everything went onto the VfD page it would be clogged up and unusable. People have to make judgments on what is dumpable and what is debatable. Mistakes can and do happen. But GrahamN doesn't say "I think a mistake was made here" he jumps up every time and screams "abuse, abuse, cabals, plots, this person should be sacked etc etc". It is frustrating and after what people saw him doing to Zoe, who was already under siege from DW, Michael and Adam Rickleff before he jumped in and demanded she be stripped of her powers for supposedly abusing her powers (when she did nothing to warrant such abuse), which proved the last straw and drove her away, he is regarded as a prat by most people. Just occasions there are people who stretch the concept of wikilove beyond breaking point. Adam, DW, Michael and GrahamN are four who have done that for many people, hence the row. Take care and wikilove,
FearÉIREANN 02:15 15 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Thanks Anthere for the message. I appreciate your comments and have a great respect for you and your work. One of the problems with wiki's success is that like any organisation, the bigger it gets the more complex it gets to try to keep it together. All organisations find that the bigger they get, the more they need rules to hold everything together. For example when I came on the issue of how royalty was named on wiki was a complete mess that made the pages unusable and left people unclear as to how to write up the pages. A group of us worked out a detailed set of guidelines which we then applied to the massive number of royal pages. The result is that the royal naming pages and pages to do with people with honorifixs are some of the best and most accurate now on wiki. Providing that order actually has made things easier for each user because there is a clear formula to follow. So all the pages now work as pieces of a jigsaw that fit together as a unit, whereas before we had multiple jigsaws which confused user and external reader alike. So rules in some instances make things easier for everyone, rather than more difficult and confusing.
Regarding deletions, sysops do make mistake. I know I have made some mistakes, and undeleted somethings I myself deleted. I can understand people's concern that sysops might abuse their power by deleting stuff because of their own POV. In the 10 months I have been here, I have however only seen one sysop do that (and there are more than 100 sysops!). Rules are important but they do need to be flexible sometimes. The rules on deletion are a classic example of this. They do allow deletions of pages without they having to be put on the VfD page. And they do allow the deletion of some pages on the VfD page if they are items with don't have to be there and belong to the delete-on-sight category. GrahamN's insistence that this isn't so is simply his unique and inaccurate understanding of the rules. But he does his case no credit by turning each and every 'case' he throws up into a 'corrupt cabal' abusive rant.
The restraint you showed in dealing with RK was most impressive. Sometimes I wish I could be as restrained! It is a pity that with hundreds of people working here on building an impressive body of work, a small number seem to go out of their way to turn wiki into an unpleasurable experience, with their vandalism (in the case of DW, Michael and Adam - though Adam as Pizza Puzzle does appear to be acting with astonishing tact, given his past behaviour as Lir/Susan Mason/Dietary Fiber, etc. If Adam after months of outrageous behaviour can reform and become a good member of the wiki family, there is hope for everyone!) and their abuse, in the case of GrahamN towards sysops, and RK's insistence that a POV stance in favour of Israel is NPOV and any attempt to be NPOV is pro-arab and anti-Israel or anti-semite. But I guess we all must hang in there and just keep doing our best. Anyway, thanks for the message and keep up the good work. RK may think you are biased but anyone who reads the pages you have worked on show that the only bias coming onto those pages is his. wikilove, FearÉIREANN 21:01 15 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I wrote a reply on Wikipedia talk:Wikicide. -- Eloquence 22:50 15 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Talk:Gaia theory (mystical, social and environmental)
Théorie de Talk:Gaia (mystique, social et ambiant) ? !
Im désolé, Anthere -- je pense que ce titre est un peu fou, si pas simplement trop long sur des syllabes. Il n'est rien personnel -- car tu sais. Juste qu'il doit y avoir une certaine un peu chose de NPOV continuant -- ceci essaye d'empaqueter un groupe entier de substance dans une -- comme si ces différentes choses ont été scientifiquement reliées -- son un titre faible.
Avec sinceritie,
I was happy to trouble myself with Systrans-lating that French :) Merci. what do you mean "before I leave" -- is this one of those disheartened closings-of-shop weve seen before after someone talented in vileness imposes themselves upon someone a normal level of tact and civility? That would be unfortunate -- Respect and civility are supposed to win, y'know. :) - 豎眩sv
well, frankly -- everyone here needs to take a break once in a while. I just try to encourage people to see that the vacation issue is quite normal, and almost always unrelated to any conflicts that are occuring. The conflicts are NOT a *cause, necessarily, of a "vacation" -- rather are a *symptom of a need to break away and detach -- we dont own a damn thing here, even if we put our hearts into it -- any old newbie or crackpot or knowitall academic has a right to make changes, to whatever is on here. All of it will rub us the wrong way sometimes -- but the good *should make up for the bad. :) If you feel there are some issues needing resolving -- make sure that theres at least one person around who at least understands your point of view, and will take an interest in representing that view when your away.
- is it the custom now to not leave signatures? :)
Hi Anthere, I've put forward some other ideas about how to make the VFD page more user-friendly and more decisive. They are on the Wikipedia talk:Votes for deletion. I'd welcome your observations. lol FearÉIREANN 00:37 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Salut, je n'ai pas compris ce que tu voulais. -- Youssefsan 13:23 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Hi Anthere, I am sorry, the images you uploaded Image:Crataegus oxyacantha L(s).jpg and Image:Crataegus oxyacantha L.jpg definitely are Rosa canina. Best wishes -- Franz Xaver 13:05 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Another correction: This "myosotis" in User:Anthere/PictFlower2 is some Veronica species. -- Franz Xaver 14:28 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Well hello. Interesting time I had visiting my sister, but I'm glad to be back at home. How have you been? Koyaanis Qatsi
In Spanish it's got a similar name: girasol, from girar, to turn, and sol, which I'm sure you recognize. On an unrelated note, I find it odd that our parasol is, in Spanish, paraguas. :-) Anyway, that's a nice picture, thanks. I like the one of the bee especially, but they're all good. Koyaanis Qatsi 23:43 22 Jul 2003 (UTC)
With regard to Catholicism, putting two versions on the page makes it 48K long, and it will be truncated if certain people edit it. Similarly the talk page is approaching 30K and will need to be archived or you will disenfranchise those with browsers that can't edit more then 32K. I think the usual thing is to revert to a version before the edit war started. Two copies of the article in one long page that only some people can edit is not a good solution. -- Someone else 12:03 23 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Thanks for the isolated sunflower. Now I'll see if I can do something useful with it -- got to get the atrophied visual regions of my brain working .. --
Eloquence 17:05 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Hi Ant, I answered on my talk page, Fantasy ;-)
I just wanted to inform you that there is an actual vote going on at VfD regarding Daniel C. Boyer. MB 19:47, Jul 30, 2003 (UTC)
http://www.nature.com/nsu/030804/030804-2.html Koyaanis Qatsi 19:40, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Hi Ant, is everythink allright? Are you on holiday? Hope to see/read you again soon... (some kind of miss you ;-) Fantasy 20:06, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Apparently light pollution can interfere with the natural cycles of ecosystems. (I had some notion of this myself, being a mammal who formerly worked at night in overlit environs--no amount of daytime sleep would compensate). Anyway, this article brings into the discussion bits about urban development, circadian rhythms, and unsuspected lynchpins of various ecosystems.
http://www.discover.com/July_03/featlights.html Koyaanis Qatsi 00:50, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
When RK comes back I want to nominate him for sysop (again) I dont ask for much, but I ask that you support his nomination. Sincerely- 戴眩sv 23:09, Aug 16, 2003 (UTC)
Hi Anthere, I've been away from wikipedia lately, doing research for a book and arranging some music. Not much else going on here--isn't that enough? ;-)
Anthere, I'm sure I don't know why glow worms glow. (bonus points for a response in iambic pentameter). :-) Koyaanis Qatsi 07:32, 18 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Yeah, Michael was on last night, and he has a history of moving my user pages, so I did a premature protect. Concerning Daniel C. Boyer. It seems that more people favored deletion, second was people requesting a major rewrite. Then there were a couple people who just didn't want it deleted. In any case, it is still there. The discusion, and vote results are archived well by Kat on the talk page. マイカル 13:52, Aug 18, 2003 (UTC)
Hi Ant! Just one tiny thing wrong with your sql: the " should be -- two single quotes (') instead of one double-quote ("). It looks the same in most fonts, which is annoying. :) -- Brion 00:36, 19 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Hi Anthere, Sorry to disappoint you--I never expected it to make much of a difference whether I'm contributing to wikipedia--but wikipedia is satisfying me less and less so I'm searching out other things to do with my time. I don't think I was especially useful here--I wrote a few articles and contributed a few pictures, sure, but much of what I did was routine work that anyone or even a bot could have done. I don't think I've had much positive effect on the formation of wikipedia or its culture, though I wish I had; and now it seems bent on certain directions that I think are foolish at best and severely damaging at worst. At any rate, onward. I'll send you some music if you like; that's what I'm doing with most of my spare time now. I'll check wikipedia periodically, but with considerably less emotional involvement. Best of luck, and you have my email address. :-) Koyaanis Qatsi 21:58, 19 Aug 2003 (UTC) ... Have Toby, Eclecticology, and The Cunctator all left? They were good contributors.
Hi, I noticed you have contributed to the Simple English Wikipedia in the past. I am trying to revive it a bit as it hasn't been edited very much lately, so this is just a reminder that it's still there and you are very welcome to come and help! Yours views on what to call the "village pump" are also requested. See [1]. Thanks. Angela 11:57, 20 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Hi Anthere, sorry for intervening in your translation page. I just saw, that someone not logged int changed the french tranlation page, so I thouhgt, better take care, that we don't get two translations... And today with this slow servers working is really frustrating... Fantasy 13:01, 20 Aug 2003 (UTC)
File:Grillon1.jpg |
(because I am on a diet, and suffering)
...I just can say: Wow! Good night :-) Fantasy 22:42, 20 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Good morning (or afternoon ;-) Do you have the images also in a bigger size? Fantasy 12:38, 21 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Quelques reponses sur ma page de discussion... et alors, je dois dormir, il presque fait matin. :) -- Brion 11:57, 21 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Thanks for helping me understand, what the Mailing list are for ;-) Fantasy 07:53, 22 Aug 2003 (UTC)
I left you a note on my talk page. By the way, I'm jealous of the ham in the photo above. Good acorn-fed, aged Iberian ham is among my very favorite culinary treats, and it is just about impossible to get here. Kat
Merci pour ta remarque à propos de P. J'espère que la situation va se calmer... Même si çà risque de prendre du temps. --FvdP 02:00, 23 Aug 2003 (UTC)
I like your photos, especially the ones of the flowers, insects, and Algeria. But my favorite is the one of the trees with the barbed wire--il est tres magnifique! -- Jose Ramos 17:31, 27 Aug 2003 (UTC)