User talk:Pmanderson/Archive 2

Archive 1

Welcome to the Wikipedia

I noticed you were new, and wanted to share some links I thought useful:

• Wikipedia:Tutorial
• Wikipedia:Help desk
• M:Foundation issues
• Wikipedia:Policy Library

[to which I add Septentrionalis]

• Wikipedia:Utilities
• Wikipedia:Cite your sources
• Wikipedia:Verifiability
• Wikipedia:Wikiquette
• Wikipedia:Civility
• Wikipedia:Conflict resolution
• Wikipedia:Brilliant prose
• Wikipedia:Neutral point of view:Articles without bias describe debates fairly rather than advocating any side of the debate.
• Wikipedia:Pages needing attention
• Wikipedia:Peer review
• Wikipedia:Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense
• Wikipedia:Village pump
• Wikipedia:Boilerplate text
• Wikipedia:IRC channel
• Wikipedia:Mailing lists
• Wikipedia:Current polls
• Wikipedia:Votes for Deletion
• WP:NOT#Wikipedia_is_not_a_soapbox
• kate's tool

For more information click here. You can sign your name by typing 4 tildes, like this: ~~~~.

(Sam Spade | talk | contributions) 14:22, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)

See also Template:Welcome

Please feel free to restart any interrupted conversations.

U.S. Congress debate

Thank you for your comment. I apologize if I was oversensitive. I hope we can do some positive work on the Congress article in the future. — Mateo SA | talk 04:32, September 7, 2005 (UTC)

Income tax

Sure, it would be helpful to have another watcher there. If you want, you could also add Brushaber v. Union Pacific Railroad, Direct tax, and Indirect tax (more favorite tax protester targets) to your watchlist. Thanks. — Mateo SA | talk 22:47, September 8, 2005 (UTC)

Template:Disambig-cleanup TfD

I saw your listing in TfD here. Templates for deletion gets rather clogged up. Next time, could you contact the original author or a related group before nominating it for deltion, so we can have the discussion elsewhere. Cheers, Commander Keane 13:38, September 7, 2005 (UTC).

Closer of asteroid cat

User_talk:Kbdank71#Please_reconsider

uniformity

The wiki solution to the problem would be for anyone who was editing a sentence anyway to change the style if he objected to it, and otherwise to leave it alone.

We may disagree totally on Hellots but at least the above is something we tottaly agree on. (I await your reply to your latest edit on Slavery in antiquity with interest. Dejvid 18:23, 9 September 2005 (UTC)

Clinton Street Station (Trenton)

Thanks for moving the stuff over to the talk page, i knew i forgot to do soemthing. --Boothy443 | comhrÚ 04:53, 10 September 2005 (UTC)

Request for arbitration, rktect

For your information, I have submitted a request for arbitration: User:rktect -- Egil 08:43, 14 September 2005 (UTC)

Science pearls

Hi,

Please notice the above project. As a mathematician, you might be especially interested in List of publications in mathematics

I’ll appreciate any help. Thank, APH 10:06, 18 September 2005 (UTC)

Rhodus, roses, Hegel and Berlin

Thanks for the "hic rhodus" quote -- the little journey to the Hegel/Marx/Isaiah Berlin universe was a pleasant diversion. --jpgordon∇∆∇∆ 04:57, 19 September 2005 (UTC)

• ...I have no idea. Seems to me he's sufficiently disruptive that an otherwise uninvolved administrator (i.e., not me, Jayjg, or Slimvirgin) should just block him every time he's obnoxious, which is always. Problem is, his obnoxiousness is of the hardest form to demonstrate to a third party; most of his individual utterances are perfectly tolerable; it's only when you follow them for a while is the disruptive nature of his blathering made clear. --jpgordon∇∆∇∆ 05:10, 19 September 2005 (UTC)
  • I know what you mean about Terrorism; someone asked me to get involved, and I did, and that was my first experience of ZS, and I wish I'd never gone within a mile of that talk page so I'd be blissfully ignorant of this blight on Wikipedia. --jpgordon∇∆∇∆ 05:38, 19 September 2005 (UTC)
    • Maybe if you concentrated on making articles better and reaching consensus instead of blindly supporting the requests of your friends, things like this wouldn't happen. It's just a thought. --Zephram Stark 15:37, 19 September 2005 (UTC)

SOME article titles should be plural

The page you cited on preferring singular article titles says:

In general only create page titles that are in the singular, unless that noun is always in a plural form in English (such as scissors or trousers).

"Always" is much too strong. The article titled The Beatles obviously should NOT be singular, but this word is sometimes singular: Ringo Starr is a "former Beatle", not just a "former member of the Beatles". Joint Chiefs of Staff is another obvious exception. Legendre polynomials, Hermite polynomials, etc., are exceptions because, although one may speak of, for example, the 6th Hermite polynomial, using the singular, the whole sequence of Hermite polynomials is what the article is about, and it would seems strange to regard the fact that a polynomial is one of the Hermite polynomials as of interest in isolation from knowledge of the sequence as a whole.

The word "always" is used too promiscuously here. Someone once wrote on this page that the bolded title word in an article should not be italicized unless it's a word that's ALWAYS italicized. Of course, it should have said unless there's some specific other reason to italicize, i.e. don't italicize MERELY because it's the bolded title phrase. What it should have said is what it did say last time I looked (months ago).

I just moved Bell number back to the plural Bell numbers; my reasons are similar to those that apply to Hermite polynomials. I would do the same thing with Bernoulli numbers and Fibonacci numbers. Michael Hardy 18:22, 21 September 2005 (UTC)

Ultramarine

The idea that you are a Marxist is so clearly abusurd that I will most certainly give evidence. I presume that my comment will carry more weight if confine myself to the question of whether you are a marxist and ignore the wider dispute. At the moment I intend to write my comment before going to the dispute page to avoid what I say being colored by that. Expect the comment within a day. No rereading your bit on my page it is clear I must read what Ulramarine says I think about you.Dejvid 10:08, 22 September 2005 (UTC)

Berenice II of Cyrene

I made this redirect because this name was on the list at Wikipedia:List of encyclopedia topics/Biographies B2 (see the old revision [1]). It is used, but not much: 22 google hits, most of them not on wikipedia. I don't care about what happens to the redirect, though. Eugene van der Pijll 12:32, 22 September 2005 (UTC)

Aetius

Do you have an (informed) opinion on whether this should be written Aëtius -- with a diaeresis? If so, please contribute to Talk:Aetius. --Macrakis 18:55, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

Stark

Thanks for letting me know — I'll keep an eye on it, and add my little voice if it seems likely to help. --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 22:11, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

New CfD for La-N

Flex restarted the CfD for La-N, despite it being resolved less than one month ago, and has gone around to people's talk pages informing them. Just fyi.--Prosfilaes 23:22, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

Eigenvalues

Dear Pmanderson, You have contributed greatly to the article Eigenvalues etc... during the last days. Do you think the article is ripe for peer-review/feature article candidate? If so do you think you could help me making the changes the peers will ask for? Vb 09:57, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

I haven't change my opinion with respect to your edits to Eigenvalue etc... They have all been sound and useful. I was just thinking the remark about other examples of eigenvectors of rotations was not adding much content. Someone interested in the article will find in the body a discussion of the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the 2D 90-degree rotation. Moreover in the example to the definition it is writtern that the eigenvalue 1 is the only one of the spectrum which is not complex. So I think the question you addressed is already well discussed in the article. Vb 09:51, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

Template:PAphoto

On the TfD listing for this template, you voted to "wait". I just wanted to let you know that all of the images tagged with this template have been deleted, so you may want to reconsider your vote. Thanks, JYolkowski // talk 00:09, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Page move

Hello. Given your past interest in a similar page move, could you take a look at Talk:Höðr and comment on moving that Norse deity to a name more familiar to English readers? Jonathunder 02:58, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Eminescu

I know I'm such a terrible procrastinator, but please have a little more patience with me (say, 48 hours) and I'll edit it 'comme il faut'. I have a few busy weeks with my students (and also some papers I'm working on), but the subject is dear to me and I wouldn't want to see it made up of some of my casual comments. No, căminar has nothing to do with kamerer. It comes from camină (of Slav origin, I think), which was a tax imposed on the trade of (distilled) spirits. Therefore, the căminar was a special kind of customs officer and one of the lowest aristocratic ranks. Quatrocentu 06:12, 8 October 2005 (UTC) Talk

Eminescu strikes back

You convinced me, I stayed up late and edited. It's not finished, but it's more like it. Quatrocentu 08:22, 8 October 2005 (UTC) Talk

Chimera

Is there some reason you keep undoing fixes to capitalization, format, and so forth in this article? This is twice now you have completely undone all of my edits without so much as an edit comment explaining why. This latest time you put in an edit comment about some minor change you did but then went ahead and revert also. If you think it needs to be changed back, explain why since you know it's in dispute, although I think you'd be hard pressed to explain why random words are capitalized for now reason and why you unitalicize titles and so forth. DreamGuy 05:58, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

Thank you for beginning to discuss the matter. You have been pointlessly removing items from this article. I did not insert them (I might not have bothered to add some of them if I'd known about them); but there is no justification for their summary and undiscussed removal. Septentrionalis 19:07, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

What the hell? No, you have been pointlessly erasing solid edits that fixed capitalization and formatting problems and removed a couple of highly trivial mentions and reorganized the rest into an order more representative of their relative importance. I as discussing the edits in my edit comments, you were blindly reverting to the error-filled version without any comments and then with deceptive edit comments. As such, I will once again fix the article. DreamGuy 21:59, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

Scanian

You have supported a move of the article Skånska over at Talk:Skånska#Requested move that is not compatible with the concept of NPOV and general guidelines over at Wikipedia:WikiProject Languages. I would appreciate if you'd read the objection I've posted and reconsider your vote.

Peter ^Isotalo 11:08, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

I have altered single "first past the post" vote to approval voting so that we can try to reach a consensus. Please check that your vote still reflects your position as I may have misunderstood your voting intentions. Philip Baird Shearer 21:41, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

A heads up [2]

Revert DOM page

Thanks for catching the vandalism on the DOM page. Just a heads up, you are probably going to get a message from the guy who did the revert. He has made all kinds of wild accusations on the talk page trying to make you believe everything from me approving his version that he is pushing(which is not true), then he stated I approve the current version (again not true), to his claim that he has 7 people that are supporting his version (not true). Davidpdx 03:30, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

Removing two examples

Hi, I don't understand why you removed two examples here. I'm pretty sure that the English-Hungarian pair was correct and justified there, but I may be wrong. Please tell me your reasons. -- Adam78 00:09, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

I see. Well, Hungarian ház is related to Finnish kota, in accordance with regular sound changes (e.g. h vs. k, t vs. z), see Sound correspondances. That is, it's not a loan word from German or any other Indoeuropean language, rather, it's a Finno-ugric and Uralic word, which just happens to be similar to German Haus and English house and could be safely included among the examples if proper reference is given.

By the way, what is the most common place for references like the above? After the link as a comment, among the References or the External links section, on the talk page, or elsewhere?

Adam78 07:43, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

Inalienable

I have reported Zephram Stark's violation of the 3RR on Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/3RR. Your comments are welcome there. Maybe somebody will ban him for a while, at least. --JW1805 03:44, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

Ha, ha. Very funny. You know there is blatant original research on that page. Are you so corrupt that you would rather have a bad article as long as you can railroad me? --Zephram Stark 03:45, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

Rfd for DOM Pages

I appreciate your watching the pages that have been vandalized by the person pushing DOM. Right now I'm in the process of trying to delete some of the articles that he has added that push the DOM idea. Here are the links to the pages

• Category:Ecclesiastical_government
• Solkope
• David Even Pedley

If you would vote to delete on Ecclesiastical Government and Solkope and vote to delete or delete and merge on David Even Pedley, I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks Davidpdx 13:34, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

Demetrius - sacker or besieger?

I changed sacker to besieger (on the Ptolemy I Soter page) as that is how the word is normally translated. Feel free to change it back - I don't claim to be able to read Greek. However perhaps if you are convinced that besieger is wrong you should change this on the Demetrius page also. Dejvid 12:21, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

Greek language

I welcome your edits here, though in some ways you've gone a bit too far. Many of the sound changes between Classical and Modern had begun by the Christian Era, and were complete well before 1000 AD. This needs to be explicitly acknowledged. I think it's important, too, to distinguish between structural changes such as the merger of the various vowels and diphthongs and the loss of the length distinction, and more superficial phonetic changes such as the pronunciation of gamma, phi, etc. which do not entail a realignment of the system. --Macrakis 23:05, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

The current text is nonsense, but I am tired of dealing with people who have never studied linguistics repeating nonsense they learned in school.... And then trotting out ridiculous convoluted theories to justify it. Detailed commentary:

Koine had seven vowels, two of which η and ω were long, two ε and ο were short and three α, ι, υ were either long or short.

First problem: some of these distinctions were probably gone in Koine.
Let's assume we're really talking about classical.
This confuses letters with sounds. There were five vowels, each of which can be long or short. Some of them have special letters to notate the long version.

This distinction is still present in modern Greek.

Rubbish. There is no length distinction in modern Greek.

Alongside the individual vowels there were six special vowel-vowel combinations given the name of diphthongs αι, αυ, ει, ευ, οι and ου.

Again, confusion of sounds and writing system. "Diphthong" obviously refers to having two sounds, not two letters. But traditional modern Greek grammar still calls "ει" etc. "diphthongs", where they are really "digraphs".

Most noticeably, the vowels i, ē, y, and diphthongs ei, oi (ι, η, υ, ει, οι) have all become i in modern Greek but subtle differences in their pronunciation can still be heard

Nonsense. There is no difference in pronunciation in Modern Greek among the various spellings of /i/. This is not a Katharevousa/Dhimotiki issue.

Got to go. Thanks for working on this! --Macrakis 23:46, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

Re: Arbitration proceedure

Ultramarine has been adding talking points to Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Ultramarine/Workshop, unsigned, in the same style as the Arbiter's proposed resolution. This is not the proceedure suggested (at least as I read it) by the heading of the page. Please fix this, or explain. Septentrionalis 22:52, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

The Arbitration Committee considers it acceptable for parties or other interested persons to add proposals to the Workshop page. The Committee is capable of evaluating the merits of such proposals. Kelly Martin (talk) 03:17, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

Panini (grammarian)

I noticed that you moved the article on Panini from Pāṇini to Pāņini. The latter spelling is wrong, as the first n in his name is transliterated using n with an underdot, not n with a cedilla. I have since moved the article

Arun 05:35, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

Liberal Arts, Inc.

OK, I wrote up some stuff based on Charles A. Nelson's Radical Visions. Basically, there are four explanations presented now.

--The official view: an oddly phrased statement about the endowment being insufficient for a building fund.

--Samuel Sass's view: that wasn't the real reason, but he doesn't know (or won't tell) the real reason.

--The Springfield Republican's view: Mellon was annoyed by the political activities of "an associate" of Barr's.

--Charles A. Nelson's view: Mellon gave 'em an inch and they tried to take a mile. More specifically, his intention was to endow a fund for the continuing operations of the St. John's program, or a similar program elsewhere if it appeared that St. John's would never be safe from the Navy, and Barr and Buchanan thought that he would agree, or had agreed, to fund a much more ambitious effort to build a new campus. Dpbsmith (talk) 01:15, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

Your comment on WP:RFPP

In regards to [3], my point is this: A content dispute is not vandalism. See Wikipedia:Vandalism#What_vandalism_is_not. Mischaracterization of others' edit as vandalism is a serious breach of civility. It goes without saying that "It would be uncivil to speculate whether he is a liar or a lunatic" was uncalled for. Don't do it again. You hurt your own case, and invite conflict. Dmcdevit·t 07:19, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

Okay, lets talk about the changes. See my comment at Talk:Chimera#Page_protected. It's addressed to you (since, DreamGuy made the first change, and you reverted it). I'd like to know which parts of teh edit you find acceptable, and where we can compromise. Dmcdevit·t 03:25, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

Reversals

The vote was to keep the title of the article. Rodric the First 07:59, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

Income tax

Hello again. Could you help me again on income tax? A tax protester nut has been inserting false information into the article and I have been reverting it. Now an admin has claimed I am violating the 3RR because this is a "content dispute". Could you use your 3 reverts on income tax to remove the B.S.? Thanks. — Mateo SA | talk 18:55, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

• Just out of curiosity, since your comments on Talk:Income tax seem to support the type of paragraph that DES added to the article, why did you revert his changes rather than editing them? -- DS1953 ^talk 23:31, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

Proposal up for a vote

A new proposal on representation of Norse mythology names is now up for a vote. I'm letting you know because you commented on that page :) - Haukur Þorgeirsson 00:51, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

FYI, the vote is about whether English language encyclopedia artticle names should be forced to use 13th century Icelandic versions of the name.... completely insane. Looking at your vote on a previous article name discussion, you'll probably want to show up to vote against this one, which goes against your votes elsewhere and would effect tons of articles. DreamGuy 02:36, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

Page move

Completely without announcement, an article was moved from its common English name Nidhogg to the old Norse version Níðhöggr, even though a proposal to move mythology articles to non-English spellings failed to gain consensus. You have expressed interest in simular page moves in the past. Please take a minute to look at this one. CDThieme 18:53, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

Important AfD

Hello again. Recently I've been having difficulties in getting a sufficient amount of feedback from the top caliber editors of the history and politics articles-- needed in order to establish a consensus in the vote at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of modern day dictators. It'll be much appreciated if you can take a look. Regards. 172 22:21, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

GMU Alumni

I think you may be one. If so, feel free to add to your user page: Category:Wikipedians by alma mater: George Mason University Hiberniantears 16:53, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

Final decision

The arbitration committee has reached a final decision in the Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Ultramarine case. Raul654 17:59, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

Talk:R. J. Rummel

I would appreciate it if you would look at Talk:R._J._Rummel#No_wars_between_democracies --Philip Baird Shearer 00:34, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

Naming Conventions

Thank you for tewlling me about the vote on Naming Conventions. I see that I missed the vote (I hurt my hand in November); but I acknowledge your sportsmanship in informing me. This is especially kind of you since I continue to disagree with the convention proposed: Most Norse names have English forms, and we should use them unless a clear convention has developed to the contrary, which is very rarely the case. Septentrionalis 21:33, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

No problem and I'm glad your hand is back online! See you around :) - Haukur 21:56, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Yom Kippur

Hi there, regarding this article, you voted against because of an attempt to impose the Arabic usage. I just wanted to confirm that you know the suggested title is not the Arabic term, "Ramadan War". That, I would consider, is POV. The suggested title is 1973 Arab-Israeli War which is, IMHO, a NPOV title and already commonly used in other encyclopedias (see my vote). Maybe you could clarify the note under you vote. Thanks for your input. Spaceriqui 01:30, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

Current issues

Paul, Happy New Year -- sorry you hurt your hand. Glad you've recovered.... On Ancient Greek phonology, we finally assembled a crew of competent and determined editors who refuted Thrax's stuff quite decisively. At which point, Thrax went from being simply difficult, repetitive, and uncooperative to being actively scornful of orderly editing, using every possible strategem to get his way. This eventually made it abundantly obvious to outside administrators that he was grossly abusing the system, and he has been blocked. There have been threats of a permanent block, but no action, despite his multiple sockpuppets etc. Anyway, that storm is over for now. The good news out of this tiring episode is that there is now a group of good editors who work well together in at least this area. Personally, I am not ready to wade into contentious waters for now, and am in fact trying to reduce my hours on WP in general. --Macrakis 00:30, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Norm Coleman

Hi, I am sending this message to serious contributors who may be interested in articles related to U.S. politics. I believe I am receiving an unreasonable response-- and at times insulting and rude-- from the editors of Norm Coleman article, who refuse to remove a section that may offer some interesting trivia for Wikipeidia users, but is irrelevant to people interested in reading an encyclopedia article on a member of U.S. Senate. If you have time, please take a look at the article. Regards. 172 | Talk 03:18, 21 June 2006 (UTC)