User talk:Before My Ken

SuggestBot postings

Archive page 1: 2005 - 2007

Archive page 2: Jan-Mar 2008

Archive page 3: April 2008

Archive page 4: May-Jun 2008

Archive page 5: July 2008

Ida Lupino

That sounds good. I've got a couple of books where her career progression is briefly discussed, so that may also be useful too. I'll keep my eyes open for any changes to the article. Thanks for letting me know. Cheers. Rossrs (talk) 04:23, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Orphaned non-free media (Image:Imitation of Life poster.jpg)

Thanks for uploading Image:Imitation of Life poster.jpg. The media description page currently specifies that it is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under a claim of fair use. However, it is currently orphaned, meaning that it is not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the media was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that media for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (see our policy for non-free media).

If you have uploaded other unlicensed media, please check whether they're used in any articles or not. You can find a list of 'image' pages you have edited by clicking on the "my contributions" link (it is located at the very top of any Wikipedia page when you are logged in), and then selecting "Image" from the dropdown box. Note that all non-free media not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. BJBot (talk) 05:29, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Fixed Ed Fitzgerald (unfutz) ^{(talk / cont)} 05:34, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Please see WP:Don't restore removed comments

Please see WP:Don't restore removed comments —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.49.4.199 (talk) 14:49, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

That's an essay, not policy, and, in any case, it doesn't apply to IP editors, only those with accounts. The talk page connected with the IP address does not belong to you, and leaving comments visible is necessary to see the history of warnings that have been posted there. Ed Fitzgerald (unfutz) ^{(talk / cont)} 14:56, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Actually, it does apply to IP editors, and while WP:DRC is an essay, it exists because it clarifies exiting policy at WP:USER, as well as clarifies that there is not a policy against removing warnings, despite frequent attempts by members of the community to achieve one (see WP:PEREN). Since other relevant policies say that users can remove content from their user talk pages, and since no policy exists to exempt warnings, it is a valid (and nearly universal) interpretation to assume that warnings may be removed as well. WP:DRC merely clarifies this.

Note that unblock requests, sockpuppet notices, etc., should not be removed, but any other warning is fair game. You can still see the warning in the history anyway. --Jaysweet (talk) 13:55, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the correction, which I actually became aware of after this exchange.

Incidentally, policy is wrong in this regard: allowing IP editors to edit their talk pages is deterimental to Wikipedia -- but, then again, IP editors should probably not be allowed to edit in the first place, it would cut down on a large percentage of the vandalism.

Thanks again. Ed Fitzgerald (unfutz) ^{(talk / cont)} 14:08, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

Good work with the Sturges and Berkeley articles

Noticed these new articles, and it's nice to see them freshly turned out as Starts rather than Stubs. Just a brief note - the IMDb is not considered a reliable source on WP, so I would caution against using it for citations, since they will all require replacement in order to move up the assessment scale. Otherwise, steady on! :) Girolamo Savonarola (talk) 20:35, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Thanks much. Ed Fitzgerald (unfutz) ^{(talk / cont)} 22:49, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

auto-lemon

Hi, I noticed your posting at Lightmouse's talk page. Please note that autoformatting is no longer encouraged. See MOSNUM. In reality, no one cares which order day and month are in, and the differences between the spelling varieties we manage on an article-consistent basis are less trivial. TONY (talk) 04:15, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

You've missed the point, I think. Ed Fitzgerald (unfutz) ^{(talk / cont)} 05:02, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

My RFA Thanks

Thank you for your vote at my RFA, which has now closed as a success. Regarding your comment about my talk space edits and lack of mainspace edits: My coach (Balloonman) was always on at me to do more mainspace edits, as other editors do like to see work on the main project rather than just in the background. And yes, I should have listened to him. I suspect the reason I have such high talk space edits is because I always warn vandals (registered and anon), and with the high amount of vandal fighting I do, it is kind of inevitable my talk space edit count will get very high.

Anyway, I thank you for your participation in my RFA, and please be reassured that I have taken your comments to heart. StephenBuxton (talk) 17:30, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

Putting the tags in a bottom "tags" section

Hi there. I noticed you have been going around in a lot of articles and moving the various tags from the top of the article down to a subsection entitled "tags" at the bottom. I appreciate you are being bold, but I think you are going to get widespread opposition to this and I would discourage you from unilaterally doing this to articles without consensus. Long-standing community consensus has held that while the tags at the top of articles may be "distracting," they are an important disclaimer, particularly when they warn about poor references, etc., and so should be highly visible. Also, your practice of adding a "tags" section clutters the table of contents, which IMO is even more distracting than the tags at the top of article.

I would strongly urge you to stop doing this right away. I intend to revert you in places where you do this, and I am sure many other editors would as well. If you feel strongly about this, you could consider bringing it up at The Village Pump. Thanks, and happy wiki-ing! --Jaysweet (talk) 13:52, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice. Ed Fitzgerald (unfutz) ^{(talk / cont)} 13:53, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

Spacing?

Hi. What's the point of the spacing you're adding? —Wknight94 (talk) 16:14, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

The point is that without it, the lede is so close to the ToC (or the external links to the nav boxes or stubs) that it is annoying and unpleasant to look at. It makes the article look sloppy, and more difficult to read.

My overriding concern is with the casual user who pops into Wikipedia looking for some information. When they get here, they should find good, accurate information that is well presented. Anything which gets in the way of this is detrimental to the project. Ed Fitzgerald (unfutz) ^{(talk / cont)} 16:22, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

Have you considered trying to get a community consensus in one of the forums for that, such as the WP:Village Pump? That way it could be built in. -Colfer2 (talk) 16:32, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

What Colfer2 said. Otherwise, you'd have to add this spacing to every single article in the system, no? If it's unpleasant for you specifically, you could probably engineer a personal monobook.css to fix it. Otherwise, I've never heard of anyone else making that complaint. —Wknight94 (talk) 16:43, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

(e/c)

FWIW, I think I agree with Ed that it looks a little nicer with some extra whitespace above the TOC. However, I am skeptical about the method of just adding a carriage return to random articles you encounter... There is no consensus for this, and as Colfer2 says, if there were consensus, it would be better to have it built-in. ---Jaysweet (talk) 16:44, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

I haven't looked but a CSS change could probably do it if things are designed well enough here. —Wknight94 (talk) 16:55, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, add some margin-top to table#toc in the system-wide CSS file and add some margin to {{S-start}}. Easy-peasy. But you should get some consensus first. —Wknight94 (talk) 17:00, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

FYI, I've brought this issue up at WP:VPR#Table of contents margin and MediaWiki talk:Common.css#Table of contents margin. At worst, you could add "#toc { margin-top: 10px; }" to User:Ed Fitzgerald/monobook.css - like I did. That would preferable to forcing blank lines and comments into numerous articles. —Wknight94 (talk) 22:42, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Quite honestly, the difference is hardly perceptive and certainly not worth going around and reverting it when someone removes it. The only reason I noticed it at all on Claudette Colbert was because one of the insertions was incorrectly formatted and showed up on the page ( <!-spacing, please do not remvoe--> ). I do agree that there is no consensus for this, and if it is determined to be an issue, there needs to be a better fix than this. Multiply reverting the removal of it by others seems to me to be disruptive. Wildhartlivie (talk) 00:28, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

(outdent) My thanks to everyone for the really helpful comments and information here. I've avoided answering immediately because, frankly, I didn't exactly know what to say -- I have mixed feelings.

First, I'm thrilled to hear that it would be easy to globally change the look of Wikipedia to prevent the bottom of the lede from infringing on the ToC (I assume the same thing could be done for the last section of the article -- usually the external links -- from getting too close to the navboxes or secession boxes or stubs that fall beneath them), but at the same time, it's been my experience that trying to get that kind of global change instituted is very difficult. I've never participated at the Village Pump, but my experiences elsewhere in discussions of that sort have been... disheartening? disappointing? dispiriting? depressing? Whatever the right word is, it wasn't pleasant, and it's not something that I would willingly do again.

Which is why I've been acting locally instead of globally, which, after all, is another perfectly legitimate way to go about things, Wikipedia being the open platform that it is. As a local editor, I don't carry the weight of responsibility for all 250 million (or whatever) articles in the project, only those which I've edited (and not even all of those) -- which is precisely the situation with the vast majority of editing here. Correcting the spelling of "traveling", for instance, doesn't impose upon me the burden of correcting the mispelling everywhere on the project, it's perfectly legitimate to make the change only on the page you're working on, or on every page you work on, or wherever you come across it. I don't see adjusting the spacing to be cleaner and more presentable to be any less of a legitimate local edit than correcting a mispelling, or moving the placement of an image, or any other edit which improves the encyclopedia.

As for that change itself, I'm well aware that some people don't see that it makes much difference. All I can say is that on my system (and every other system I've used) under the browser I usually use (Internet Explorer), it makes a tremendous difference. I have looked at many pages under Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari (running under Windows Vista), and if I were running those browsers as my default, instead of IE, I would never have been prompted to make the change, but I do not find that the additional blank line is a problem in any way, it looks fine to me. So, on other browsers, the default spacing looks fine as it is, but on IE, the lede gets too close to the ToC, and on all browsers, the result with the additional spacing is an improvement.

And it's never been a matter of what it looks like for my viewing purposes. I've been aware for a while that there was a fix to my CSS file that could fix the problem for me, but my overriding concern is, and has been almost from the very beginning of my time working on the project, not what I see, or what other registered users see, but what casual users of the encyclopedia see. Those people who want to look something up and have heard about Wikipedia, or gotten a link to it from Google, and just pop over to get what they need. Those people are the audience we need to be sucking in, if we are to become what I believe Wikipedia can be, the default primary source of information on the Web. Folks like that see things strictly with default settings, and what they see is going to be a large part of how they feel about the project -- along with the quality of the information, of course. That's why I say Good Information, Well Presented. So far, I think most of the emphasis here has been on making the information good: accurate, reliable, verifiable, but the presentation of that information: layout, the way images are used, and so on, has been given short shrift. It's not enough, for instance, to say that registered users can adjust the size of the thumbnails they see, so images shouldn't be hard-coded with sizes, because when that casual user comes over he's going to see a lot of text with postage-stamp sized mini-images that can barely be seen, and don't convey much in the way of non-textual information, the way a good image, well-placed and correctly sized can. That's hardly good presentation, and we need to address that. What I've been doing with adding spacing on a (relatively speaking) vanishingly small number of articles, is an attempt to make the articles I work on look as good as I can make them, so that the information in them is presented well.

Let me say, finally (at long length), that should a global change be made, I will gladly go through and find each and every instance of spacing I've inserted and remove it, I feel that responsibility, but, given my previous experiences, I am loathe to make the kind of global argument that it's been suggested that I make. I've been there, and I've done that, and I've learned my lesson from it -- which is "stay far away from here." What I want to do is edit articles, and make them better, and thereby make the encyclopedia better.

Again, I really do appreciate the comments here, and the time you've taken to read this. Ed Fitzgerald (unfutz) ^{(talk / cont)} 03:55, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

I am in the software business so I am always trying to think globally. My problem with your approach is that, if a global CSS change is made, then all of your "local" changes will have double-spacing and will look silly. While you can say that you'll go back and fix them if that situation arises, we don't know when a global change would be done or if any of us will be available to find them all easily (it wouldn't show in a Google search to my knowledge). My compromise would be for you to create a template or templates with your spacing. Then, in your local changes, you can use the template. If a global change is made, someone can quickly go to your spacing template and blank it out (or remove them all), thereby fixing all of the double-spacing in one shot. I don't know what others would think of this, but I think it's about the best you can do. —Wknight94 (talk) 04:17, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Since I invariably use the same phrasing and formulation, I think you're somewhat overstating the difficulty of undoing these edits, either by hand or through automated or semi-automated means, whether or not the undo occurs within our time on Wikipwdia.

As for a template -- don't think I haven't given thought to using one -- it would certainly be easier. Unfortunately, and this is something I've experienced first hand, it also makes it easier for the spacing changes to be undone before they have a fair chance to be accepted, or even fairly evaluated. Here again, one bitten, twice shy. I may not be the most perceptive person in the world, but I do try to take to heart the practical lessons I've been taught here by hard experience. Ed Fitzgerald (unfutz) ^{(talk / cont)} 15:49, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

Bibliography

The reason for the bibliography as the last entry (sans index) in a researched work is that it provides the reader with a "point of reference" as to where the information is derived. Why is it last? is due to end/footnotes and appendices being considered part of the text and the index considered as part of the organization of the work. Essays and articles at tertiary level must include references to all material used as sources for the content of the work. The normal convention is to link a reference in the text of an essay to a list of works cited at the end of the essay and subsequently provide all the references sources that were consulted. FWiW Bzuk (talk) 02:55, 17 July 2008 (UTC).

Thanks, that makes perfect sense. Ed Fitzgerald (unfutz) ^{(talk / cont)} 15:42, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

The Paradine Case

Hi Ed. You are known for your dislike of the consensus process, and prefering a more individualistic approach. And I do respect that. However, I feel you also need to recognise the consensus method on Wikipedia, as the project is based on that. You are working against consensus on The Paradine Case. Your revert of The Paradine Case puts the article into a format that you like as an individual, however, in cases where there is dispute between individuals on how to present an article we have discussions, and form a consensus. We then record the consensus in essays and guidelines. You are fully aware of this. If you wish to present an article against consensus, that is fine until someone puts the article into the consensual format. At that point you need to back away gently and go work elsewhere. Wikipedia is a big place and has many articles. However, if you do wish people to consider and take your ideas seriously, please do enter into a discussion on the talkpages of the relevant guidelines, essays, WikiProjects. Continuing to work against consensus, without entering into a discusion in the appropriate places, could be seen as disruptive. You are making work for yourself and others, and you are essentially putting your ego above the needs of Wikipedia as a whole. Regards SilkTork *^YES! 13:30, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

RE:WP:ANI

I have done nothing wrong,I'm just doing what WP:NC says. XxJoshuaxX (talk) 15:48, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

No, as has been explained to you a number of times. Ed Fitzgerald (unfutz) ^{(talk / cont)} 15:50, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

But "over" is a prepsotion! XxJoshuaxX (talk) 15:52, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

Quality not quantity

Hello. There is a very clear and fair policy, and we must not care about how many images do we have. The question is (In my option), how much we trust in these images.--OsamaK 08:10, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

Please do not undo my edits with unknown reason, before ending of discussion. This is so unfair, Everyone knows that sources are requested for all images!--OsamaK 11:11, 22 July 2008 (UTC)