Parsiferon

Please post any questions or comments for User Parsiferon at the very bottom of this page. Extra-urgent items may alternately be posted at the very top. Any text added in the middle of the page may not be seen for a _long_ time.

Special Editing Tricks

Quick & Easy Web Citations:

See "Solid Boxes...", below, for an example

Line Breaks

See "Solid Boxes...", below, for an example

Separating lines:

Preceding-text

---

Separating horizontal lines around this text. Untested whether the blnak lines have any effect.

---

Post-text

Dotted boxes without line breaks, using the "pre"formatted Courier font

Preceding-text

Dotted box around this is caused by the preceding space!  Untested whether the blnak lines have any effect.

Mid-text.

 Two prefix & suffix spaces yields wider gaps.  
   Nesting doesn't seem possible.

Mid-text.

   Four preceding spaces just does a further indentation.

Post-text.

Solid Boxes / Inset Quotations / Quick & Easy Web Citations / Line Breaks

Syntax: ((Quotation|text[|attributionweb|url=the-url|title=The-Title|year=the-year\\</ref>]))

where (( text )) = text enclosed by 2 pairs of braces, // text \\ = text enclosed by 2 pairs of angle brackets

The solid lines on the box are not any thicker if you bracket the whole quotation (including braces) or just the inner text inside double single-quotes: you just get boldface text. Maybe there's a way to create a custom "Box-o-Pedia" box using the actual box syntax (which differs from quotation syntax).

I have not tried nesting quotations.

Example: Preceding-text-example: In 1798, Thomas Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population, describing his theory of quantitative development of human populations:

Quotation-text-example: I think I may fairly make two postulata. First, That food is necessary to the existence of man. Secondly, That the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state. These two laws, ever since we have had any knowledge of mankind, appear to have been fixed laws of our nature, and, as we have not hitherto seen any alteration in them, we have no right to conclude that they will ever cease to be what they now are, without an immediate act of power in that Being who first arranged the system of the universe, and for the advantage of his creatures, still executes, according to fixed laws, all its various operations.
...
Assuming then my postulata as granted, I say, that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio.

— Malthus 1798, Chapter 1, online

Post-text-example: A series that is increasing in geometric progression is defined by the fact that the ratio of any two successive members of the sequence is a constant.

Multiple columns

An example "See also" section

• Albert Bartlett
• Beyond the Limits by Donella Meadows
• Cannibals and Kings by Marvin Harris
• Carrying capacity
• Charles Galton Darwin
• Club of Rome
• Demographic transition
• Dismal Science
• Famine
• Future energy development
• Malthusian growth model
• Malthusianism

• Medieval demography
• Neanderthals, Bandits and Farmers by Colin Tudge
• Olduvai theory
• Over-consumption
• Overpopulation
• Peak oil
• Population growth
• Survivalism
• Sustainability
• Tragedy of the Commons
• The Ultimate Resource, a work by Julian Simon challenging the perceived dangers of overpopulation
• World population

Automated additions to this page

AfD nomination of The Energy Machine of Joseph Newman

An article that you have been involved in editing, The Energy Machine of Joseph Newman, has been listed for deletion. If you are interested in the deletion discussion, please participate by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/The Energy Machine of Joseph Newman. Thank you. --BJBot (talk) 21:08, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

User pages of interest

Take a look at Brat32's userpage as of 00:36, 17 August 2006 (UTC).

Text in flux / Postponed

What we REALLY need: Collapsible Lists!

Certain lists are quite appropriate. We need a feature to support them more naturally.

Collapsible lists are the answer: they would remain inside the relevant articles where most appropriate, yet they would initially be out of view to avoid cluttering the default view. Clicking a line such as "[Show] Listing of imminent Wikipedia features" would then expand the list in place underneath. It could be just as easily hidden by clicking "[Hide] Listing of imminent Wikipedia features" or just by reloading the page.

@@@@@@@@@ Who can implement a great COLLAPsible solution like this? There is already a "[Hide]/[Show]" capability for Tables of Contents (such as at the top of this Talk page). This feature would be very similar except that lists handled by it would be hidden by default. By extending the software so it can handle lists similarly, we can resolve many of the List-Or-No-List battles across the WikiRealm. @@@@@@@@@@

(Editorial: Many lists are not appropriate, such as those which grow unreasonably long, which lack any natural ordering (such as alphabetic or chronological), or which do not naturally fit the parent article. However, the lists in plenty of tagged articles are really not inherently "unencyclopedic" -- and the definition of that word is surely subject to change with the advent of electronic encyclopedias such as Wikipedia! Requiring articles to look just like (and no better than) the obsolete in-print Brittanica does not make us "encyclopedic".) Parsiferon 17:35, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

If you think about it, collapsible lists are the best way to resolve clutter while keeping short lists attached to the most appropriate sections of the articles they belong to. Otherwise we wind up with the usual mess: text-only articles linked to long list-only "articles", with no practical way to keep their sections and subheadings in synch and linked with each other. (Then the lists are deleted. Then they get recreated. Then they are moved again...) Parsiferon 17:36, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

Orion 14: Missing or not?

We have a separate page on it, but it was not in the listing. Which was wrong? I have "fixed" the list temporarily.

Edit conflict on 2000s page

Determining a name for the decade has been problematic, especially in the United States. The term "Noughties" has been suggested by the BBC, and in most English-speaking countries, "Noughties" and "Noughts" have come to be the most widely recognized and accepted terms. In North America, this term has not become popular. Perhaps, as Douglas Coupland told the BBC, "[Noughties] won't work because in America the word 'nought' is never used for zero, never ever."[1] But with the slight change of a vowel, "Naughties" is an irreverant variant that has some appeal in the United States, where the word's connotations are mostly humorous rather than offensive.

FOUND YOUR ARGUMENT THAT COLLAPSIBLE LISTS ARE NEEDED

Completely agree. Has any progress been made towards such a tool for metawiki that you know of?

ArbCom elections are now open!

Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:56, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

"Quantum suicide and immortality/Archive 1" listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect Quantum suicide and immortality/Archive 1 and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 December 30 § Quantum suicide and immortality/Archive 1 until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. Regards, SONIC⁶⁷⁸ 06:26, 30 December 2022 (UTC)