Teaforthetillerman

Ruse

Hi, and a warm welcome to Wikipedia! Please sign your comments with four tildes, like this: ~~~~. (I had to look through my user talk page history to tell that you were the person asking me a question.)

As for that question, unfortunately, Ruse does end rather abruptly; though the ending does resolve what happens to the Enigmatic Prism, it still feels very abrupt and cut-off, and there are a lot of unanswered questions left at the end. It's a great series, though, and I nevertheless still highly recommend it. —Lowellian (reply) 09:04, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

NOM

I'm afraid you have caught me at a bad time for giving careful consideration to anything, as I am both ill (getting better) and on deadline. will try to take a look when i can. ---Nat Gertler (talk) 20:51, 29 November 2009 (UTC) I'm feeling better - still hectic, but I'll see if I can give you some feedback on your points. I'm not going to wade back into the NOM article discussion tonight, both due to the hecticness and due to my being a little burned out on Wikipedia, after having seen a negative, unfair, and inaccurate campaign take out an editor. I will caution you that some of the research you're doing would not be usable in the article, due to the WP:NOR policy. I.E., if the reporter emailed you her reasons and NOM emailed you their stance, neither material could be included in the article. (I also strongly suspect that NOM doesn't want to make a statement one way or the other; if they publicly announce that they're not a Christian organization, that will cost them some Christian financial support, but if they announce that they are, that will have them taken as less of a common interest group and more as a religious mouthpiece, hurting their influence.) In general, it's best to due at least one round of concerns about a person's behavior on a person's talk page before doing it in a more generally-read forum; it makes it look like you are concerned about addressing the problem rather than sniping back. Lecturing someone to Assume Good Faith about yourself almost never works; if you already think you caught someone with their hand i the cookie jar, hearing them say 'for all you know, I might have been putting cookies into the jar!" isn't going to convince. Were someone else to say that, that might have some effect... but at best, an AGF lecture will have effect sometime down the road, rather than on the current conversation. (The AGF guidelines actually say Making accusations of bad faith can be inflammatory and hence these accusations may not be helpful in a dispute. Sometimes, the guidelines are wise.) One other minor note: When adding a new talk section to someone's talk page, it's best to do it at the bottom of the page, as that's where experienced editors will look for it. That keeps the page flowing in relative sequence. Some user's editors have an "add new section" link that automatically places the new section at the end. - Nat Gertler (talk) 04:33, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it. I have tried to be careful not to accuse OL of bad faith. (My understanding is that to point out a BF accusation is not to accuse someone of BF; one can make a BF accusation in GF, and this is what I assume OL did.) I will try to stick to people's talk pages for suggestions of courtesy, if such a situation arises against; hopefully it won't. Also thanks for the talk page pointer. Teaforthetillerman (talk) 17:01, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

By the way, I just noticed the supportive note you placed on another editor's talk page. Thanks for the support, and in general, for trying to keep an air of civility going. --Nat Gertler (talk) 21:19, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

Dead links

Among wikpedias seventy-gajillion policies, there are ones on what to do with a dead link. I understand your desire to clean-up that link on NOM, and have instead replaced it with a link to the same AP article form a different source. - Nat Gertler (talk) 16:22, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads up, sorry about that. Teaforthetillerman (talk) 20:46, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

formatting

There were three issues with the reference formatting in that section:

1. Spacing: There should be no space before the opening REF tag. Keeps the footnote superscript right up next to whatever precedes it, and no space between one footnote and the next.
2. Placement: When you inserted that new sentence, you placed it before the Advocate ref. Obviously, the material in that sentence is not from The Advocate. Best to keep the reference with the text it supports.
3. Bracketing: the URL in the NOM reference had an opening square bracket, but no closing square bracket. The correct choice is no brackets - if all you have is a URL and you bracket it, it just shows up as a number on the reference list. Squsre brackets within a ref are handy when you have a title -- i.e REF BRACKET http://blog.aaugh.com The AAUGH Blog BRACKET /REF - so that title shows up as the reference. (The effect of the single brackets are different within the line of text than within ref tags.)

All of the refs should be better, with titles and such rather than just URLs, but we're all lazy in that.

Hope that helps. - Nat Gertler (talk) 21:39, 10 December 2009 (UTC)