User:Dr. Blofeld/ArchiveJuly2009

Iran geo stubs

Hi again,

I'm looking into creating some Iran stubs as you suggested. I created a preliminary infobox at User:Passportguy/Sandbox, please take a look at it and suggest an additional info that could be added.
A couple of things seem to be difficult to obtain :

• Population data
• Arabic script spelling of names, especially for the smaller villages. Unfortunately I don't read Arabic, so I'd need a site where they are listed with their latin counterparts.
• The Iranian county to which the villages belong - the site you gave ([1]) has them listed by provinces which is also useful to add but countries would be even better.

Btw : Is there an easier way to add the geo coordinates in decimal degrees as this is how they are quoted on above page ?

Passportguy (talk) 18:32, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

I have now finished Ardabil provice. There are just a few minor points which still need to be addressed :

• 1) A map shows a "Givi county" but does not show the Kowsar county as per out template. Does this mean that Givi = Kowsar ??
• 2) We have an article called Khalkhal County, but the corresponding town has apparently been renamed Herowabad. Or is it the other way around ?
• 3) Valandaran is - according to the geo co-ordinates given, which do check out when double checked on other sites - clearly outside of Ardabil district. Yet multiple sites have it listed as within. An exclave perhaps ? Passportguy (talk) 18:08, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

Passportguy (talk) 18:08, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

Sri Lankan parliamentarians?

I found a directory. I'll do that Iran tagging tonight - I thought it best to give Passportguy a chance to do all the stubbing before I get in there and start creating talk pages. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 14:36, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Just open the biographies; his reveals that his name is "Abdul Rahim Mohideen Abdul Cader". It's alphabetized in the index as "Abdul Cader, A. R. M." - that's how I'd presume it would be filed. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 15:01, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Ah, sorry. I'd go with whatever they have there - tradition indicates that initials are acceptable, sometimes (like with S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike). Perhaps a rule of thumb - three or fewer names we spell out, more than that we use initials like in the profile? --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 15:07, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

If you are doing something related to Sri Lanka, how can a Sri Lankan say "I can't help". I'm on it. Er... I'm taking a lil break though, to study for the exam on 5th. From Monday I'll be running in full throttle again. Is it fine with you pal? I checked the external page. The MPs names are given in their most known names. So I think the same naming scheme is alright in here. Cheers!--Chanaka L (talk) 03:33, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Awesome. Not sure what kind of time I'll have today, but I'll take a crack at it when I get the chance. Haven't forgotten Iran, either - sorry, it's been a hectic week. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 13:20, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Thanks pal, did some minor edits on articles. I'll see the rest of them too.--Chanaka L (talk) 13:33, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Excellent - I'll see what I can do later. Enjoy the tennis! Cool-ish day here, but it's supposed to warm up for the Fourth. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 14:39, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

It's about 70-ish here, if memory serves - supposed to warm up to 90 or so by the weekend, though. So long as I'm inside, with the air conditioning running, I'm fine. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 15:21, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Responded. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 17:34, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Awesome. Although yesterday's count I did shows me closing in on 20,000...so it's a bit out of date. :-) --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 19:57, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Not bad...want to work on making it 1 in 25 by the end of the year? :-) --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 20:23, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Well, I'm going to be doing my part; I'm going to try and get my total up to 20,000 by the end of the month. Should be doable, if I remember my numbers correctly. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 21:01, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

It keeps the newpage patrollers from going mad, as well. Speaking of which...I might put myself down for it, too - where does one go for that sort of thing? --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 21:32, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

So where did you ask about it, then? INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 21:38, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

OK, will do. Oh...and it's 14,835 new articles by latest count - bumping that up to 20,000 by month's end is a tall order, but I'll see what I can do. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 21:42, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Right - perhaps this afternoon, when I catch a lull in the proceedings... --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 13:16, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

Indeed - it looks quite nice. Glad to see it coming along. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 17:59, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

Re: Talk page tags

Sure. I wasn't assessing the articles, but I guess anyone could tell they were stubs. Will do in the future. Cheers, ErikTheBikeMan (talk) 20:28, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Phthisiatry

Not a term in common use, seems restricted to Eastern European and Russian science. However, there is no article currently on Tuberculosis research so this is all we've got. Tim Vickers (talk) 16:23, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Not too hot today, I'm not sure if we can say in the main TB article that it is "currently known as" phthisiatry, I'll reword that a bit. Tim Vickers (talk) 16:43, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Comment on my talkpage. Tim Vickers (talk) 21:11, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Mistake

It says this on your userpage: "According to this Baldy is "Number 1" contributor to english wikipedia". You're actually number 2. Hahaha! Auric Goldfinger, (I don't expect you to talk, I expect you to die) 19:23, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Mmmoowwaaa Goldfinger you fat b*****d. Just kidding. I don't refer to edit count my Gold-enrusted portly friend, I refer to article count. Kotbot is a bot so isn't counted, besides which it has only just "stolen my crown". I rarely look at my user page but the last time I looked Kot wasn't there. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 19:48, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Kotbot can be destroyed, the solution is obvious. Tim Vickers (talk) 21:13, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Geography Barnstar

		The Geography Barnstar
		To my friend, Dr. Blofeld, for today's Brazilian river articles! Rosiestep (talk) 21:31, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Thankyou Rosie!! May our coverage of Brazil blossom as much as the Brazilian jungle! Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 21:32, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Image

Yeah, that image was one of the ones that came in a batch from one of my image contacts who keeps me updated when she takes new images. I always enjoy watching the actress in my favorite television action film True Lies (since it's always on television several times a month it seems!). Thanks for supporting the FAC, I was surprised by the number of reviewers (I think there was maybe eight supports). Now I get to play the waiting game and hope that it gets on the main page in April. --Happy editing! Nehrams2020 (talk • contrib) 23:19, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Well, I've recently uploaded a few images this past week including: File:GaryColeJan09.jpg, File:SirMixaLotDec06.jpg, File:CameronDiazJune09.jpg‎, File:KatieHolmesTomCruiseJune09.jpg. This week I also had two different Flickr users reply to messages I sent back in February! I also contacted an author of one of the journal articles about the Oklahoma City bombing, and she said she is going to get me an image I can use for the article as well. --Happy editing! Nehrams2020 (talk • contrib) 23:30, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

German maps

Gee, you're impatient! Many municipalities already have maps showing their location within their district and state. The advantage of those maps is that they also show the area of the municipality. It could be a good idea (I've seen something similar at French wikipedia), but I don't have the time to work on it. Markussep ^Talk 11:44, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

Re: Template talk:Infobox German location

It would be fairly easy to set this up, and I'd be happy to do the coding if that's what you guys decide on; but, personally, I don't really have a strong opinion on which map would be more useful for the reader. Kirill ^[talk] [pf] 13:55, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

Yep, having two maps should work fine. I'll set up a sandbox version for you to look at in the next day or two. Kirill ^[talk] [pf] 14:07, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

I've changed around the order of the fields on {{Infobox City Spain}}. The width is most probably going to be controlled by the size of the embedded images; do you have any examples of the template being too wide even if the images would allow it to be smaller? Kirill ^[talk] [pf] 02:53, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

Indeed it is; I've just been rather busy with a few other matters, and haven't had time to attend to the infobox. I'll make the needed changes as soon as I can. Kirill ^[talk] [pf] 02:27, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Re: Antun Vrančić

I could, of course... However, the Croatian Wikipedia article is unreferenced, so my translation would actually leave us with two unreferenced articles. (This is my gripe with the Croatian Wikipedia in general, and the reason why I only go there looking for ideas and pointers, not for actual content.) Still: the Vrančić article is not really substantial, so what the heck. I'm putting it on my todo list, could do it in a couple of days or perhaps a week. GregorB (talk) 19:36, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

New Iran stubs

I've prepared Template:West_Azarbaijan_Province. It still needs a bit of work with spellings which I'll do later on today if I can find time. However the task seems daunting, since there are close to 1000 villages in this province alone. I believe Iran as a whole has close to 70,000, which seems almost impossible to add by hand.
Btw : What happend to the planned bot that was going to add stubs for all towns ? Is that project still on or was it shelved for some reason ? Passportguy (talk) 20:46, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

I agree on the navbox being too big. Ideally these should be sorted into new county tenplates for all provinces, which would provide for much smaller ones. But I don't have a list of villages by county, so i can't do this myself - at least until I find such lists. Passportguy (talk) 22:07, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

Can you use |pushpin_label_position =right for West Azarbaijan anyway

I'm not quite sure what that means. What exactly do you want me to do ?

Btw : I am adding the geo coordinates for the provice in decimal citation, as the traditioanl coordiantes given seem to be rough approximations only. Passportguy (talk) 20:21, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

Is this better : Agheshlu ?

Btw : can you look into Agdash The coordinates put it in East Azarbajian, and I can't seem to find the correct data. Passportguy (talk) 20:30, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

Aghmiun is another one. I hope that there aren't too many of these, otherwise the tageo list will be essentially unusable. Passportguy (talk) 20:32, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

I've checked a few more and the West Azarbaijan data does not seem to be reliable, as all figures are rounded. The same is seems to be true for Maplandia (e.g. [2] or [3]). The general problem with maplandia is that it is very difficult to browse, requiring multiple clicks for every new village. I guess for the moment I'll just stop creating stubs then and go back to doing other things. If you find a good list (preferably one listing them by county), just drop by a line. Passportguy (talk) 20:47, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

Greetings o hairy one

Long time no pester - Depan bisa belakang bisa a stub of yours from 2 years ago has been prodded - I have no idea of the size of yours (watchlist that is) you might have let it drop off (oh dear Im getting off this one now) - cheers and trust the sense of tumour is as ever ready to fire SatuSuro 12:47, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

Not sure why you are telling me. What do you expect me to do with it? Am I expected to have an Encyclopedia of Indonesian cinema handy? If you want to delete it take it to AFD. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 13:54, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

I didnt do the prod - I thought I found you as the first ed (unless I had read the edit history wrong) and no I dont want to delete it, and no I dont have an encyc of Indonesian film to hand either, and hope I find you in better humour sometime - I am more likely to try to find a ref or two to send the prod away - if possible - cheers SatuSuro 13:03, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

LOL it is exactly that. The "Encyclopedia of Indonesian Cinema was humour my friend. I am feel in great humour, as they say "great humour=no tumour". As you referred my sensr of tumour I thought I'd play the wounded bald guy. I honestly don't mind what you do with it, I thought sometime it would be expanded. All I know is that at least two editors on the article seme familiar with the film see this. Perhaps we could ask them to find a link. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 13:07, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

One reason why I would have never followed my father into veterinary science - dealing with bloody tumours :( SatuSuro 13:17, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

You have enemies? garn a man with your edit count and stature? your imposing user page and even more so talk page? narh gerrofit (I'll be wandering through your country of abode in september - promise I wont try tracking you down and insisting on giving you a beer or three :) SatuSuro 13:31, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

OOps it will be north wales that I venture into for a day or two at most to meet a rellie never met SatuSuro 13:34, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

Turkey

Oops - I'm running AWB at the moment; give me about fifteen minutes and I'll take care of it. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 19:07, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

Actually, looks like you caught it. Anything else you'd like me to AWB? --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 19:21, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

OK - I'll get to it in a bit, then; just give me a list of links to work with. At the moment I'm cleaning up some after the Disaster Wikiproject, which seems to have requested an "aviation-accident-stub" tag and then not used it hardly at all. I may have a new category to request; it looks like it. I think I want to go through the earthquake stubs, too, and remove the "disaster-stub" from any that have it. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 19:35, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

It's next on my plate, then. Oh - there are also a lot of New Caledonian politicians over on the French wiki; I'll work on translating some more in the next few days. With luck we can get a stub category launched this week. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 19:54, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

Done. Anything else? --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 20:54, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

I'll see what I can do today. I went ahead and used AWB to stub a bunch of Brazilian rivers yesterday; I'm going to finish up the rest tonight. It'll save you a lot of work on that front... --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 13:21, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

Well, I blasted through the 80,000 edit count this weekend. :-) Speaking of which - I need to transfer my talkpage contents to an archive, so I'm going to do that right now. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 13:26, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

Will do. Sorry - busy day today here; I'll try and get some more stuff done once I'm home. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 15:41, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

Good to hear - I've seen a couple of opera-related stubs I created expanded to good length recently. It's quite heartening, really. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 15:46, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

We'll see - possibly this afternoon I can do some things. I finished up the Brazilian rivers yesterday...I've still got the talk pages to do, but that may have to wait a tad. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 13:20, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

Awesome, thanks. I'll put it on the pile with the others. :-) Now, let's see what we can do about those castles... --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 13:34, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

Yes...I'd say that's a fairly accurate assessment. I could give you a detailed breakdown of why it is, but that would take all day. :-) I think a large part of it has to do with the fact that castles are viewed somewhat romantically in our culture, and people associate them with the nobility and the monarchy, two things which we've traditionally done without in this country. They're unfamiliar - don't forget that the kind of people who first emigrated to the colonies weren't much for building castles or palaces, so the few that do exist are modern creations. Don't forget, there's only one real royal palace on American soil. So yes...I'd say you're right about that. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 14:04, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

Most of the Indian ruins that I know about are out west, or towards the Midwest (ever hear of the Mound Builder culture? Very interesting.) There's not a whole lot on the east coast other than archaeological sites, due mainly I suspect to the ferocity of the wars the colonists engaged in with the Indians, and the fact that most native villages were made of wood and plant matter, not of mud or stone. We do have the Newport Tower, which is kind of odd, and rather interesting. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 14:24, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, pretty much. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 14:42, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

I did, yes. I'll do some redlinking tonight, and some more stubbing; I should be able to finish the new Brazilian articles and do some more US rivers (I did Virginia last night). --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 00:11, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

Czech municipalities

Hey buddy! I am a bit busy these days, however I support your initiative and wanna say, just let me know if you would want to ask about something, need some clarification etc. Read also this, please: Wikipedia:WikiProject Czech Republic/Guidelines/Geographical names. - Darwinek (talk) 19:16, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

Barnstar

		The WikiChevrons
		For writing articles about castles instead of replacing Michael Jacksons' page with "HE WAZZ A PEDO!!!!!!1111!!!!" I dream of horses (talk) 13:49, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

Hi!

I just dropped around to your page tonight to see how you have been doing since you returned to the Wikipedia and to say "hi" and that I hope things are happier. BTW congrats on the new barnstar! Cheers, John Hill (talk) 16:57, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

Copyright & fair-use rationale of SVGified logo

You are invited to participate in an interesting discussion at Wikipedia talk:Image use policy#File:Man Utd FC .svg. Your comments & suggestions are very much appreciated Arteyu ? _{Blame it on me !} 08:35, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

Rivers

Sorry - was so busy stub-creating last night that I didn't get around to redlinking things. However, I managed to finish up Bahia, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Panama, Guatemala, and Mexico (!) off of the lists that currently exist. I just did St. Vincent and the Grenadines as a morning exercise; otherwise I'm going to be hellishly busy today, so any further stubbing will have to wait (though I might tackle a small country or two, like Jamaica, over lunch). Speaking of which...I can stub things out of an Iran provincial template with AWB, as long as you don't mind a very rudimentary beginning. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 13:28, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

Yeah - I'm going to try and mop up some of the others I missed this evening; I'm running an article count now to see where I stand. :-) By the way, I owe you a barnstar; when I have a moment to think I'll dig it up. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 14:08, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

I'll probably restrict myself to low-key edits for most of the day; the sorts of things that don't require a lot of thought. What can I say? I'm a good multi-tasker... --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 14:17, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

Nope - I'm a northpaw, as it were. My mother isn't though - perhaps I've picked some of it up from her. She was actually forced to use her right hand for things in school, so she's somewhat ambidextrous now. She writes with her right hand, though. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 15:21, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

I've inherited my musical talent from my father; he's a fine amateur tenor, and I've got the same voice. My mother, bless her, can't sing a note - but she understands music well, better than I think she realizes. I can't draw to save my life, which is why I became an art history major instead. My "genius" (hah) lies in pontificating about art more than in creating it. Both of my parents write well academically, which is where I suppose I picked it up. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 15:33, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

Oh, I'd be a decent lyric tenor with some good training, but I've never been interested enough to follow up on it. And I'll wager you that most decent art historians are failed artists of one sort or another. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 16:31, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

Sure thing - I'll get to that one tonight. Busy night again last night; I stubbed Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas, Haiti, Barbados, Antigua/Barbuda, Minnesota, and Jamaica. Looks like I might actually meet my page-creation goal for the month. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 13:41, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Ain't that the truth - pity there's been no attempt to get the geobot off the ground again. That and a species bot would really alleviate a lot of the work that needs doing. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 13:55, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Tremendous bias, indeed - there's so much that needs to be done to bring aspects of this project up to snuff. To be honest, I'm disappointed; I had hoped we'd be over 3 million articles by now. As it stands, I hope we pass that benchmark by the end of the month. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 14:39, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I've noticed that - and while I'm not entirely displeased with the new content (any new content is good), I'm a little bothered by the direction things seem to be taking. I mean, there's a lot of other stuff that ought to be covered, too, and I feel like some of it is being overlooked. Look at the lists of rivers of Africa, for instance; it's laughable how much is missing from those. Ah, well - between you and me, we ought to put things a damn sight closer to 3 million this month. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 15:23, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Oh, Lord - periodically I go over to the Wikiproject and weep; the amount of missing content is mind-blowing. Anyhow, I've got more rivers to stub tonight, and I want to get cracking on adding a few more New Caledonian politicians; with luck, I can have a stub category ready for the end of the month. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 15:36, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

If you could find a way to do that, it would be AMAZING help. Anyhow, I should probably get to work on other things; we'll see what I can come up with later. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 15:45, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps that's a goal you can look at once the 3 million article mark has been reached? That's how I like to think, at least; reach one goal before starting on another. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 15:52, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

OK - it'll have to be tomorrow, most likely, as I'll be out this evening. I tried to do more last night, but AWB was slow and uncooperative; hopefully it will be better tonight. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 15:39, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Excellent - looks quite nice. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 19:43, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Well, I may be able to help some this afternoon - I'm not sure. Looks like the workload's winding down a bit for the week. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 19:59, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Well, it'll be inelegant, but if you want I can AWB those as well, while I'm doing rivers and lakes and things. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 20:40, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Very. Maybe this weekend I'll work up some kind of bot proposal and see if we can get somewhere with it again. Meantime, yes, I create things in AWB the way you do manually; I use the {{subst:PAGENAME}} tag and all. It just speeds the process up some. (Well...it should, at least...last night was an anomaly.) --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 20:46, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Sure - give me a little bit and I'll get to it. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 19:59, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

Almost done

I just finished Tomorrow Never Dies and currently have The World is Not Enough on the way in the mail. I've already seen the films past Enough so I'm finally on my last film. Octopussy's last half was quite entertaining, although the Bond as a clown didn't work too well. I didn't care for A View to a Kill too much. I actually liked License to Kill quite a bit especially for the final chase scene. I enjoyed watching the progression of Desmond Llewelyn through all the films, and its a shame that they didn't work Q into Craig's films. --Happy editing! Nehrams2020 (talk • contrib) 18:00, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

Del Toro had quite the gruesome death. I liked how Bond was just hanging off the edge about to fall into the grinder, and when his female partner arrives, she just stares at him for a few seconds instead of immediately helping him. I thought Dalton did alright as Bond, but he wasn't one of my favorites. It took me a few minutes to figure out what film I had seen him recently in, and then remembered he had played the villain in Hot Fuzz. --Happy editing! Nehrams2020 (talk • contrib) 23:11, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

I'm now finished! I still may watch the Casino Royale spoof, since it's available on Hulu. I wasn't very impressed with the plot/characters in The World is Not Enough, so it's definitely not one of my favorites. Throughout the entire series, I'd say best Bond goes to Connery, Brosnan, Moore, Craig, Dalton, and Lazenby. By the way, I reviewed Dr. No (film) for GA Sweeps and placed it on hold. There are a few issues that need to be addressed, so if you have the time, please help further improve the article. Now that I've seen all of the films, I'll probably review the rest of the James Bond GAs for Sweeps. --Happy editing! Nehrams2020 (talk • contrib) 00:32, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Iranian towns

I never said I didn't think they were non-notable as a whole! If something has a decent-ish article on fa.wiki we should probably have it here. I just didn't think that being on that tageo list was necessarily indicative of notability - it seemed like many villages probably were the size of tiny neighborhoods, and those are probably best consolidated into lists one administrative level up. If you look on google earth and it looks substantial I think that is a good enough indication of notability for now IMO. Calliopejen1 (talk) 12:04, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Re: Substituting surname

I believe there was an extension installed recently which allows something like this; let me look into it and get back to you. Kirill ^[talk] [pf] 11:48, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

The way to do this would be to use mw:Extension:StringFunctions (particularly #explode), but I don't think they're enabled on Wikipedia. You might want to ask the developers if they're accessible. Kirill ^[talk] [pf] 01:59, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Locator maps

Yup, these are the ones I myself asked User:Obersachse to transfer to en a couple days ago. I have already integrated them with the city infobox and they show up nicely—see, for example, Novosibirsk. At any rate, thanks for the note; much appreciated!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 11:55, July 10, 2009 (UTC)

I don't really like the white margins this produced, but I don't care all that much about them either. The infobox is due to re-design anyway :)—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 14:03, July 10, 2009 (UTC)

Well, I've been thinking about the re-design for about a year now. The way I work, it could be another year or so until the re-designed template actually materializes :)

Making the new template more condensed is definitely one of the ideas (I'm thinking of cutting the whole Events section out and replacing it with a two-liner for previous names—that's the information the section mostly contains anyway—and the rest is too much detail and belongs in the article). Moving stuff to the side, not so much. The template needs to be consistent with the rest of the Russia-related templates, so the color/tiles aren't going away. Besides, with the Events section gone, the length of the template isn't going to be much different from a similar template not using tiles/color. All in all, however, if you have any additional ideas, I'm listening.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 17:29, July 10, 2009 (UTC)

Steven Seagal

Good call. - CobaltBlueTony™ _talk 17:11, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Belgian infobox

Hi, I see the automatic map of Belgium has been removed in July last year. I don't know why, I don't see any discussion about it on the talk page. I could work on it, but that will be after my summer holidays, that start tomorrow. I'll be digiless in Macedonia and Albania for a month. Markussep ^Talk 17:48, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Eh?

I like white dogs better than white cats :) And also because I don't know of a way to do the surname thing and don't like admitting I am not all-knowing. MBisanz ^talk 20:20, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for File:ShannonReed.jpg

Thanks for uploading or contributing to File:ShannonReed.jpg. I notice the file page specifies that the file is being used under fair use but there is not a suitable explanation or rationale as to why each specific use in Wikipedia constitutes fair use. Please go to the file description page and edit it to include a fair use rationale.

If you have uploaded other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified the fair use rationale on those pages too. You can find a list of 'file' 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 "File" from the dropdown box. Note that any non-free media lacking such an explanation will be deleted one week after they have been uploaded, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you. Jack Merridew 06:10, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

List of lakes in Nova Scotia

Hello! I've done the first batch of articles with geodata given in the List of lakes in Nova Scotia. Some of the entries linked to disambig pages, and one linked to an article about a person, so they were skipped: see my talk page for a list. If you can tell me when all the lake articles have been created, and the disambig links fixed, I'll run a second batch to finish the job. In the meanwhile, I'll take a look at the other lists you mentioned. -- The Anome (talk) 09:21, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

Bavaria location map

Hello Dr. Blofeld, I've got a question which you may or may not know the answer too. I've tried to use the File:Bavaria location map.svg, but had no luck. The File:Deutschland.svg but it does not seem to recognise that the Bavaria map exists. I saw your name associated with the map so I thought you might know. If not, no big deal, but if you could point me in the right direction I would be grateful. Thanks, EA210269 (talk) 09:31, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

What you are planning to do, I assume, is to replace the Germany map with a more local one, like the Bavarian one? If so, I think its a good idea. Do you know why it doesn't recognise the Bavaria map when I try to use it in my Sandbox? EA210269 (talk) 09:51, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

Many thanks. I added the category to my Usefull links list. I left my opinion on the talk page, too. I think, this map(File:Bavaria location map G.svg) is quite good for the purpose you have in mind. It serves both purposes without having to have two maps. EA210269 (talk) 10:00, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

Byzantine barnstar

Thank you very much Doctor! It is truly an honour to receive recognition by an editor with your level of contribution to WP. :) BTW, there is an ongoing Peer Review on the civil war article, if you are interested. Best regards, Constantine ✍ 12:05, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

AWB

Is done. Tonight I begin the remainder of Nova Scotian lakes and maybe some Australian rivers. I'm holding off on finishing New Zealand for the moment until I hear back from the WikiProject. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 21:34, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

In which case I can't use AWB - so it'll have to wait until I have a good chunk of time to devote to it. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 00:38, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

OK, I'll give that a shot sometime. Today I want to finish up those New Zealand rivers, and then we'll see what else I've got to do. Rivers of Guam, for starters, I should think. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 16:53, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

You bet I'm looking for more to do - let me just have myself some dinner, first, and I'll go ahead and work them up for you. Any other districts you're working on? --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 21:36, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Moldova localities

1. Right now my priority is speed. That means quite bare-bones stubs. They will be filled in later, I promise.

2. I respectfully disagree with you on the need for the second category. The village is implicitly coterminous with the commune; there is really no reason to place a commune in a specific district category and in the one right above it. - Biruitorul ^Talk 21:59, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

Commune lists are planned for inclusion on each district page, as are templates. They're coming, I promise. And yes, the main category might be due for a renaming: that's also an idea worth considering. So we're really not very far apart on this one. - Biruitorul ^Talk 22:12, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

No, it's not. As you can see here, I'm moving along nicely. Glad to have you on board. - Biruitorul ^Talk 22:16, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

about basmenj

ok dear friend I'll try to translate articles about Basmenj from its persian page, but you probably should make another page for this town before coz the right spell is Basmenj not Basmnj. Regards, —Preceding unsigned comment added by Pournick (talk • contribs) 01:12, 12 July 2009 (UTC) =

Chaning realities of Sri Lankan politics

Hi, came across Dimuthu Bandara Abayakoon, great job you've done of Sri Lankan MPs. However, please note that UPFA is not a party, but an electoral alliance. Its probably best to identity the actual party identity of the MPs also, for example for categorization. Notably the second largest party in UPFA in 2004, JVP, broke with UPFA after the elections, and thus their politicians can't be categorized as UPFA politicians. --Soman (talk) 09:30, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

If you continue blue-linking them, you could write. 'Was elected as a UPFA candidate in the 2004 elections' or something, leaving out the exact party identity. --Soman (talk) 09:39, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Reversing last names

I don't think that's doable using template code. I could do it in an excel spreadsheet - that you could you "text to columns" to separate first and last name using a space delimiter. Then you could manipulate the first and last names as needed. I really really really think you need to learn a bit of excel! It would make your stub creation even faster, by a large margin... Calliopejen1 (talk) 23:02, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

NZ river stubs

Hi Dr. B - I've replied over at User talk: Grutness. Grutness...wha? 23:07, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Translation issues

Seriously, many of them have little to translate. I'm just asking that you evaluate them individually before slapping a tag on them. When the czech article has like two unreferenced sentences it makes it harder to find the gems of articles that are high priority translations. Like I said, the French category has this problem. If we had an army of czech translators this wouldn't be an issue but we simply don't. In fact I can't remember the last time I saw an expand czech tag that got someone to produce a translation. My point is that when only a few czech articles realistically will get translated in the near future, we should make sure it is easy for translators to find high-quality ones. Calliopejen1 (talk) 11:54, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Should I set up a topic=village or something category for {{Expand Czech}}? Calliopejen1 (talk) 11:57, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Now I have seen your next revision, I did not mean to come across as patronizing but just to leave you a quick note expressing my concerns. If all you want is data transferred maybe this isn't really the best tag because that doesn't require translation skills. Thoughts on that? Maybe there's no better tag for that though. Calliopejen1 (talk) 11:59, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Well I don't think they should be started without tags I just think you should look and see whether it really needs a tag (as in, not just a few lines of content). Maybe this is not feasible on fast-creation sprees. I'm mulling over whether I can think of an easier way to transfer data. Maybe just some sort of excel magic to automatically translate the infobox? Give me a few minutes. My trial office expired so now I either have to find my old office disk or learn to navigate the openoffice excel... BTW have you thought more about the German politician thing, with possibilities for excel? Can you make a sample article and show me the list of names you want this based on? I could probably make you a fast method to create them, along with the defaultsort. Calliopejen1 (talk) 12:15, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Well at least for now I could create what you need in excel, and you could just copy-paste out of it. Hopefully you can copy-paste?? Calliopejen1 (talk) 12:24, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Oh no, have you been creating the czech articles without interwiki links? Chlístov (Benešov District) and I've seen several more. Calliopejen1 (talk) 12:25, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

I was trying to be light-hearted there in volunteering my help, clearly it didn't work. Calliopejen1 (talk) 12:28, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Are you interested in trying to automatically translate the czech municipality infoboxes? If I knew what each of the fields meant I could work up something so you (or me or someone else) pastes in what's from cs.wiki and it spits out an english-language infobox. Calliopejen1 (talk) 12:31, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

I'll have a look at that later. If we're translating a few fields, we really should translate all the useful ones... Obviously it's no more work for the computer and fairly trivial to set up in the beginning. The biggest problem probably is that the coordinates are not in a good format, with degree/minute/second but not in separate fields. This may be outside the capability of excel to handle. (Not sure how I'd recognize and convert them.) Have you contacted User:Quadell (he's behind User:Polbot) about helping with a defined set of places? I think the problem with the grand geobot idea was it was just too huge-sounding. But if you had a defined set like czech municipalities only I think it would probably not cause problems. In the past Polbot has done some great conversion of federal judge biographies into usable wikipedia format (see code) and I think his skills could be easily applied here, to do machine translation of the infobox and just paste in a certain article text. Calliopejen1 (talk) 12:49, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Thanks

If I keep it up, I should be within 1,000 of my goal by the time I go to bed tonight. Got any other templates you'd like AWB'd? --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 14:03, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Right - tonight I should be able to do at least one or two templates, depending on how well the program chooses to cooperate. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 14:10, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Oh, I haven't - there are a couple of countries whose river lists need wikifying, and I'll get around to that soon enough. The politicians might not be such good candidates for AWB, but I'll have a look-see and think of something. Mind giving me the link to the list again? --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 14:14, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

You and those lists...I swear. There ought to be a barnstar for those. Which reminds me...I've been meaning to give you this for about a week:

		WikiProject Architecture Award
		For excellence in the creation of a whole bunch of stubs for Latvian (and other European) castles and manors and whatnot, I award Dr. Blofeld this architectural barnstar. You know the drill by now, I'm sure... --User:AlbertHerring Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla! 14:34, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

You're most welcome. And I quite agree - I like a good list. Ah, well; I have some things I need to take care of now, but hopefully I can do some stubbing around lunch or a little after. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 14:40, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, that's the sort of thing I like to see around here. Anyhow, I'm going to be out of here in a few minutes; I'll try to get some more stubbing done tonight. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 21:19, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Responded. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 16:18, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

I hadn't. Got your e-mail, by the way; when I have a moment I'll respond. Crazy afternoon. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 20:22, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

Newsletter

Sure thing, I'll make sure it's mentioned. --Happy editing! Nehrams2020 (talk • contrib) 02:34, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

Tamil Cinema

Thanks for the Barnstar Blofeld.! Vprajkumar (talk) 17:21, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

Re:List of Bengali films

Hi,Thanks for commenting. I must complete all year of List of Bengali films. Actually I am so busy of my native language Wikipedia (Bengali Wikipedia) and I am admin there. Only I worked out about Bengali film and there list.( sometimes one or two several user help me to do this). So please give me time for that job.- Jayanta Nath ^{(Talk|Contrb)} 18:55, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

Book

Do you think I ever doubted that you are a wonderful human being or a great editor? I know that you really noticed how much I was fascinated by this book (which was introduced to me by you). By the way, I often get to read it online. And I thank you for this nice gesture of goodwill. And I also told you I was going to give you a barnstar a few days back. I have nothing against you, Blof. I'm just at such a stage in my life when everything seems difficult to deal with; I'm sensitive and this is for several reasons. Wikipedia is a place that I visit to distract myself and have some fun, because I like editing and chatting with different people, but somehow we got into such intense fights and unpleasant conversations that I took the decision to stop it definitively. I do miss our previous conversations, discussing films, cultures, or just spending time on nothing particular except laughing. I think this time will come, but for the next few days I need a break. Shahid • ^Talk2me 19:04, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

Peace

You can always retired to the gentle world of WP:VIET YellowMonkey (cricket calendar poll!) paid editing=POV 02:28, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

Well in most of the districts of Vietnam the area/popn stats had not been added yet, but they are all reporduced here, taken from the VN census [4]. A few months ago you got Albert to add in the ref before you added the numbers, which has been done to some of them. I don't know where you got the list of communes from when you said that the VN gov website wasn't wroking (because you created some of them), but all the communes can be found by going into rhe respective province and choosing the commune option in the pull down menu. However, you have to click on "chi tiet" next to all of them and get the pop/area bits one by one. I don't know what Fritzpoll is up to he said he would see if he could get his bot to parse through all of them so that the data is gathered automatcially rather than each commune has to be clicked on to get the stats. YellowMonkey (cricket calendar poll!) paid editing=POV 04:25, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Hi

Thanks for the kind-of barnstar! :) Re the Czech villages I made a topic=village parameter for {{Expand Czech}} so I think that is probably the best route for now. The category page is still a redlink so if you actually use the tag you should create it. Autotranslating the infoboxes will take more time than I can invest now, bc I should be getting hardcore about bar studying. BTW good news for developing world photos! I'll be in India for seven weeks this summer/fall and just bought a new camera! Also going home to Alaska for a while so I may get some photos there too. :) Calliopejen1 (talk) 12:37, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

I'm in Alaska Aug 5-18, then India Aug 19-Oct 5. Very exciting! Calliopejen1 (talk) 12:59, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

Wow, that sounds like an expensive trip!! My flight cost so much I figured I should stay in one place for a while. :) I do think I'll be going north to Leh, esp bc it will still be monsoony and I'm trying to avoid the worst weather. Not sure re Srinagar, probably depends on the security situation. Lucknow I haven't thought about at all. Someone I've been talking to on couchsurfing volunteered an itinerary for me. He says:

arrive in Delhi on 19th. till 21st tell us stories about alaska and then move to ladhak .. stay there till sept first week .. do some trekking there i will give u the places to go there. come back to delhi go to agra> orcha> khajuraho ( it can be done in a four days) then go to varanasi > boudh gaya go to rajasthan > goa> kerela> and bit of kerela and then come to mumbai n fly out in october.

We'll see how much I pack in! Your videos are great - I'll have to hunt for more. My little camera[5] I just bought has HD video so hopefully I can take some fun clips myself. Calliopejen1 (talk) 14:01, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

BTW don't you hate the image server problems we've been having lately? Articles on India aren't nearly as fun when the photos don't thumbnail. :(

Haha yeah folks in Alaska are like that. My boyfriend (from Spain) visited recently, and it's always interesting to hear his impressions of different parts of the US from an outsider's perspective. Going out to bars in Boston, he always is mocking (and I am mocking too) the ridiculous people who throw tons of money around but clearly don't really have much money or any class, that in Boston it's always about trying to be the important, rich one. In Alaska, his impression of guys in bars is that it's a big contest for who can be the man, with all the scruffy half-grown beards and muscles and baseball caps etc etc. :) Calliopejen1 (talk) 14:15, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

I've made it so topic=village and topic=muni both categorize as Municipality. That's what you're making right? Calliopejen1 (talk) 16:09, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

Article expansion

I agree - that's the sort of thing I like to see. A couple of my recent efforts have been well-expanded, too; there were two or three stubs on zarzuela librettists I wrote which have since been expanded quite a bit. Anyhow, don't know how active I'll be today; I've got a lot of stuff to get through before lunch. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 13:25, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

No, actually, I never did - but I'd be happy to, once I've finished with the moths. Just give me a list to work off of. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 13:25, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Right...I'll do some of it tonight or tomorrow, then. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 15:56, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

I think I passed my 20,000 last night...thing is, the article-counting program I use keeps running down before it gets to that point, so I can't be certain. Ah, well...perhaps I'll do some more German politicians this afternoon.

By the way, speaking of expanded articles...check out Luca Zingaretti, which I started as a stub some months back. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 16:02, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps. I know we're not supposed to have edit-count-itis, but I have a feeling that a lot of the best work on here comes back, in some way, to one-upmanship... :-) --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 16:08, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Yeah - there's a lot of improvement they could stand. I might stick my nose in later tonight and do something, once I've taken care of a few other things. (I've got a little list, after all...) --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 20:36, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

I see you working on those politicians - if you'd like a hand with AWB, I can probably provide. I don't know what else I'll be able to do today, because I have some long-needed chores to attend to. But I can probably multitask. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 18:26, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

Cloud Gate FA

Thanks. I don't know if you know this, but it is part of a WP:GT (Wikipedia:Featured topics/Millennium Park) that we are attempting to bring to WP:FT, I think the best candidates for promotion right now are Crown Fountain currently at WP:PR, Jay Pritzker Pavilion, McDonald's Cycle Center, and Millennium Park. With current standards, we need three more FAs, but the way that they keep raising the standards, we will probably need four in the near future. Any comments on the Wikipedia:Peer review/Crown Fountain/archive2 would be helpful.

We are not trying to get them all to WP:FA right now. The currrent WP:WIAFT standards call for 1/3 of the articles to be featured. I anticipate that maybe by the end of the year those standards will go up to 40%. There are 14 articles and it is likely that Pavilion projects will be added to the topic within 90 days of the completion of the projects (around August 1). Thus, we have an eye toward six as the magic number.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 14:13, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

2 more DYKs

Buddy, I am so grateful to you and Albert that you completed the Sri Lankan parliamentarian list. By the way I noted that you are just 2 short of getting 50 DYKs. I was wandering why don't you knock down two articles quickly. Hope you write something about Wales this time around. Cheers!--Chanaka L (talk) 09:47, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

LOL

LOL... I couldn't agree more!!! I am a BIG fan of Mike Myers and his Austin Powers series. I thoroughly enjoyed the first two movies; both of them are true classics. However, I was a little disappointed with the third one... but nonetheless, I enjoyed watching it. IMO, it would be great if they made the series continue... but there is nothing to continue it with. Dr. Evil and Mini Me have already turned into good guys (Austin finding out that Dr. Evil is his long lost brother... LOL) and the only bad guy left is Dr. Evil's son. It would be best if they didn't continue the series anymore :D Continuing the series further would just ruin the charm of the first three movies. Wouldn't you agree?? -- Bollywood Dreamz ^talk 15:35, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

Municipalities

Hi, got your message on my return. Well, my bot is going to be busy for a month or two making corrections to the Polish village articles. But I don't mind helping out with the Czech ones, especially if I don't have to run the bot from my own computer. Can you let me know exactly what needs doing?--Kotniski (talk) 10:27, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

WP:IPA help?

Hello and my greetings. Hi, Dr. Blofeld. My name is World Cinema Writer (call me WCW). I see you are a famous WP:WIKIPEDIAN. I would like to ask a little help from you. It's about WP:IPA in English. You see, I'm trying to bring up an article to WP:FA. I'm keeping it in my sub page. It's User:World Cinema Writer/TM. I wrote the name of the film in IPA also. Just, could you help me check whether the IPA I made was correct or not. Thank you, World Cinema Writer (talk • contributions) 12:45, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for the praise, Doctor. If you feel free, you could help me with the article. World Cinema Writer (talk • contributions) 12:53, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

Expand Dutch

What categories do you want? The basic ones that French german etc have? If you're planning to do a huge spree all from one category I could set something up specific to that too. Calliopejen1 (talk) 16:37, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

I've made expand dutch like expand french - if you want to see the possible ctegories check out the code[6]. I didn't create the category pages yet. If you want more categories, you can just add a line in the "switch" section. I know what you mean about the chain effect - when I finish translating an article I look to see which redlinks in the article exist in the source wiki, and it's normally several! So I create stubs for those and tag them for expansion again... Calliopejen1 (talk) 17:11, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

German politicians

Hi Blofeld, could you please consider putting the living people category on these? Also, it would be better to begin them with "Joe Bloggs is a German politian" rather than just "Joe Bloggs, German politian", don't you think? Regards, Majorly talk 18:55, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

See User talk:Rjwilmsi. It will be sorted. I have tried generating them at slower pace but the sheer amount needing doing and mixed bag of living and deceased politicians makes generating them this way the most efficient possible. Ideally every articles would be generated with trtanslated content first time but unfortunately nobody has investe din a translation bot yet. If I say somebody "is" a politician and died 60 years ago it will not be correct. It will cause serious problems with my PC going back and forth to another site several times a minute. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 18:59, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

OK - I'll get started on that now. I'll take the liberty of replacing each "Politiker" in an article title with "politician". --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 19:48, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

I did a handful, but I find that these are actually better done by hand, so I think I'll leave you to that for now. Perhaps I'll go back to those Czech villages instead. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 21:05, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

That's about the rate I'm getting, too - I actually was able to do a few more by hand more quickly. OK...there are some moths and flies that need stubbing... --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 21:09, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

Hmm, at least you're not making my spelling error on them all! Majorly talk 21:11, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

Sure - that'll be Monday, most likely, as I'm going to be out for much of the day tomorrow (which is an opportunity for photography, naturally...) Had you been a tad patient, I would have done them once I'd finished my moths. :-) --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 21:12, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

Yeah - I find that for biographical stubs, manual stubbing is better than AWB for a number of reasons; as it happens, your edit rate on those was better than mine. I'm doing a few fly genuses now...as for the Czech villages, you know I'm just tweaking your nose a bit...right? Wouldn't want you to go all "takeover the world" on me. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 21:35, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

The flies will be done soon, and then I want to take a walk, but I think I can manage some of that tonight. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 22:45, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

Indeed - I see you've been busy. Me, I did some more flies and moths, and I did the talkpages for most all of the New Zealand rivers I started. Anyhow, I'll be out for much of the afternoon, but I may be able to do some German politicians before then; we'll see how the day shapes up. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 16:05, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

OK - I did about a hundred more German politicians. Now I'm out for the afternoon - if you want some Czech things AWBed, let me know and I'll try to do it this evening. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 18:02, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

Well, here's the thing - I had noticed that you're at least sorting them by the first letters of their last names. Which is fine. However, AWB sorts the entries on the list alphabetically...by first name, not last. As I want to do it the way you've been doing, I think it's easier to just manually go down the list and fill them in like that. Anyhow, as you can tell, I'm back in, so perhaps I'll be able to do some more in a little bit. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 01:08, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

I have the same comment Majorly did above. I think having a complete sentence is better. Creating a stub with a sentence fragment seems very poor form to me. If that means it has to be done a little slower, then go a little slower, please. LadyofShalott 02:12, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

And my response is still the same as above, I don't know what else I can say. As I said my computer is not passing back and forth to foreign wikis very quickly at the moment and I am having trouble doing so. I can say ... is a German politician but half of them are deceased so is likely to be misleading as it is "was" a politician. If people care that much about them that they are concerned with the structure they'll not only correct it but translate the information we should have on these bios. I guess to say is is better than a broken sentence so I'll do that then. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 09:15, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

OK, I'll try and help with some more politicians today; don't know how much I'll be able to do, though. Think we can get them finished today? --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 13:52, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

Another one to consider might be New Caledonian politicians. There's a good number of those in the French Wiki, and I think we should have enough to open up a stub category. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 14:31, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

EEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee...well, maybe a little... --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 14:34, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

I'll try and get to them by the end of the day today.

I've been thinking, and provided you're willing to accept a very rudimentary solution, I think I can find a way to AWB the socialist politicans for you. I'd use the PAGENAME template; I'd also tag each as {{DEFAULTSORT:}} without anything further, and I'd slap the {{inuse}} tag at the top. That should buy enough time for them to be sorted properly. What say you? If you like that, I can get started on them tonight. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 18:00, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

Right...that'll be my task for the evening, then. And probably the next few, given the size of the list. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 18:28, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

OK, sure. I don't know about Wikifying the lists, but I should be able to work off of the text lists to begin with. Let me do one and show you what it's going to look like. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 21:06, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

Klaus Zwickel. How's that? --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 21:09, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

Dutch novel

Hello, Dr. Blofeld. You have new messages at Drmies's talk page.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Chiaravalle

Sure! Thansk for compliments... can you help to correct my English (I am Italian mothertongue?). Ciao and good work!! --'''Attilios''' (talk) 11:52, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

Czech municipalities

Hey. Too much manual work for everybody. :) A bot would do that job perfectly. User:Kotniski operating User:Kotbot done a great similar job with Polish villages. - Darwinek (talk) 15:45, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I've been out of WP for a week and in that time tremendous amount of work has been made. Try to contact Kotniski. Adding coordinates and other numerical data should be very easy, since all Czech municipalities have standardized infoboxes on Czech WP. - Darwinek (talk) 15:56, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

Try to ask him again, point to standardized Czech WP infoboxes which should allow easy transfer of data by his bot ... then I can drop in and support the idea. - Darwinek (talk) 16:07, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of Dieter Fischer (politician)

A tag has been placed on Dieter Fischer (politician) requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section A1 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because it is a very short article providing little or no context to the reader. Please see Wikipedia:Stub for our minimum information standards for short articles. Also please note that articles must be on notable subjects and should provide references to reliable sources that verify their content.

If you think that this notice was placed here in error, you may contest the deletion by adding {{hangon}} to the top of the page that has been nominated for deletion (just below the existing speedy deletion or "db" tag), coupled with adding a note on the talk page explaining your position, but be aware that once tagged for speedy deletion, if the page meets the criterion it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the page that would render it more in conformance with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Lastly, please note that if the page does get deleted, you can contact one of these admins to request that they userfy the page or have a copy emailed to you. HereFord 22:05, 19 July 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by article count

Nice work on starting this list, Dr B! Lugnuts (talk) 11:11, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

Again, nice work on starting those articles. For info - there's a query on the article count talk page about the code to generating the list, if you've not already seen it. Lugnuts (talk) 18:04, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

German politicians

Like the system I worked out? Extremely busy day today here...I don't know when I'll be able to do much of anything. Well...until I get home, at least. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 13:46, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

Oh, I don't mind doing them all at once - in fact, I rather enjoy it. As to AWB speed, 15 a minute is an ideal, but it doesn't always happen; sometimes the program slows down for reasons I don't quite understand. I'd have used the stub tag you mentioned, only I didn't realize we had it. Anyhow, we'll see...but for the moment I have a bunch of things to take care of.

Oh! Almost forgot - I passed 90,000 yesterday. :-) --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 13:56, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

Well, I thought it best to have that tag on the articles in case anyone had any questions. If you don't mind, given the volume I've been doing, I'd like to leave it there...at worst it gets removed by the bot after a week, but it leaves the articles unmolested for the nonce. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 14:12, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

You have...more time on your hands than I, I suspect. I've had a pretty productive morning myself; with luck the afternoon will be as productive. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 16:55, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

Not bad...with work maybe you'll even make it to 10 someday. :-) --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 17:00, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

Mr.AshJam may need to be looked at

FYI. User:MrAshJam has also put speedy deletes on Lukas Hoffmann and Michel Duboille articles I have created. The source that I have is legitiamte. He has tried to speedy delete several other articles as well. He could be a vandal, IMO. Chris (talk) 14:30, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

That is good. Can you take the CSDs off of the two articles mentioned above. I would greatly appreciate it. Chris (talk) 14:36, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

He is now in WP:ANI. I put him in a few minutes ago. Chris (talk) 14:46, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

In reply to your edit summary, I apologise for the bot, but please note that per policy, creators shouldn't removed CSD tags themselves, even if they ere wrong. You seem to get a lot of these incorrect CSDs (which is understandably since you create a lot of pages). And it's probably very frustrating to have them nominated for deletion, but remember, the admins aren't going to delete obviously incorrectly tagged pages. Cheers :) - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 16:11, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

On behalf of bot operators

Meh, they're bots, they can't think for themselves. And yes, technically, you did actually remove a speedy tag from an article you created, which is against policy (or perhaps guideline, haven't checked). I sympathise. - Jarry1250 ^{[ humorous – discuss ]} 16:13, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

LOL I just noticed!! Not the bots fault after all. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 16:16, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

Aye, content building bots would be good, but also very difficult to code ;), I guess it's what AWB is for. As for creators not being allowed to remove CSD tags, I believe it applies to all users, per WP:CSD, which states "The creator of a page may not remove a Speedy Delete tag from it. Only an editor who is not the creator of a page may do so". Anyway, do keep up your content building :) - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 16:19, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

New stubs

To get around the problem mentioned above of creating articles about people who aren't politicians, maybe you should auto-skip any article that doesn't include the german word for politician (Politiker?). You can do this in AWB easily. Calliopejen1 (talk) 17:34, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

That would be the majority. Most of the articles are politicians or at leats were involved in politics. Either way all of the biographies need translating. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 17:36, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

See you - I'll have some more politicians done for you by then. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 18:56, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

Oh, I meant Politiker anywhere in the article (not just the title). AWB can filter on that. That way you'd avoid the random sociologists in the category. Even if there aren't many of them it's worth avoiding the creation of incorrect articles. Calliopejen1 (talk) 19:58, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

Sounds good...if this nice weather holds up I'll have a nice walk after dinner. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 20:59, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

It's the same with Virginia, I find - I created most of the stubs in the Madison County, Virginia template. Considering places like Criglersville and Banco are on the official state map, it shouldn't have taken as long as it did. I find it really depends where you go, though; New York has a fairly active WikiProject working for it, while Virginia has far less of one. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 13:38, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

Yeah - it's pretty hit-and-miss. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 13:55, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

I'd be surprised if you can't just dispatch them in one big list article, honestly; I don't know that they're different enough for separate articles. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 16:45, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

Responded. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 16:53, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

Excellent - hopefully I can make plenty more headway tonight. We'll see how it works out... --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 21:26, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

Well, for any and all of them, I'm willing to help out by using AWB. As long as the current system holds, that is...I have to admit, I didn't expect to have done as many as I did over the past couple of nights. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 21:47, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps for those I'll just make it "so and so was a member of the Nazi Party", then. That should cover all bases. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 21:56, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

E-mailed. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 13:45, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Battles

What exactly you want I translate? My next task should be siege of Crema, an epic battle led by Frederick Barbarossa against Crema, which I'd take something from also for the siege machine I think. Ciao and let me know. --'''Attilios''' (talk) 15:55, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

German polictians

Dr. Blofeld, can you read German? You are starting german stubs about politicians who never were politicians, see Christian v. Ditfurth. He simply was member Social Democratic Party for two years. --Textkorrektur (talk) 08:53, 23 July 2009 (UTC)< Sorry you didn't start this article, but: --Textkorrektur (talk) 09:31, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

This is not correct either. Tissy Bruns is a well known journalist. Simply mentioning her because of a (former) membership of a party gives a completely wrong impression. --Textkorrektur (talk) 09:04, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Günter Amendt is another example. He ist a social scientist and author. Membership of political party is only a small aspect of his life. --Textkorrektur (talk) 09:28, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Well change them and expand them then!! I know this but the fact is the article is now started and when expanded it will become more informative. Yes I can read a bit of German and if I checked each one on German wikipedia I could instantly adjsust them but I have so many to start this would slow down the task considerably. The fact is they were all members of the party. German wikipedia is at fault for putting all of the politicians in the same category as members. I am merely starting articles from categories on German wikipedia. As for Tissy Bruns, I never said the person was a politician, I said they were a Communist Party member which is true. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 09:44, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Please stop that nonsense. Eva Gottschaldt is a historian. Reducing her to a member of a party is, sorry, silly. I must admit in de this would not be possible, such stubs were deleted within a few seconds. And reducing Tissy Bruns to a member of a party is not less untrue. --Textkorrektur (talk) 09:50, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Albert Herring, can you read German? I wonder how you got the idea that Christian v. Ditfurth might be a german politician. He never was. --Textkorrektur (talk) 09:33, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Um maybe because his article says Von 1973 bis 1983 war er Mitglied der DKP For a whole ten years of his life he was a member of the Communist Party. Hardly no worthy of mentioning.... Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 09:53, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

What you are failing to understand Textkorre is that I am merely blue linking these articles from German wikipedia. They all notable biographies and are all party members whether you deny it or not. If the person is a writer or actor or whatever and is only affiliated with the party then this will be written out in due course. If you went back onto German wikipedia and sorted out your category mess mixing politicians with affilliates then it wouldn't be a problem. When I say so and so was a member of the party this is true. It might not be the first notable thing to write about a writer but it is a start. What don't you understand? Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 09:57, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Here is a random article I selected. Guess what. They are a politician and a member of that party. I'll admit there are several articles about writers which have got mixed in which the politicians bag but only because German wikipedia lists members with politicians and awkardly lists them under German politicians by party. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 10:06, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

There is no "List of Social Democratic Party of Germany politicians" in the German Wikipedia at all. There is only the "Kategorie:SPD-Mitglied" - something very different from "politician". That`s why many of the persons mentioned were or are 'no politicians. Or is in English/England every member of a party a politician??? Reichensee (talk) 12:49, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Do you not think then it is a good idea to split politicians from members? Ask me why then the parent category is "German politicians" on German wikipedia? Wouldn't it be better to categorize them as German politicians of a party and then seperate them from the party members? WOuldn't that be easier for German wikipedians who only want to read about politicians and not writers who may have a loose affiliation? Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 12:52, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

I think both categories are justified but should be seperated carefully. In many cases it is useful to know, how someone is "linked" to a political party (e.g. high-ranking civil servants like Jörg Asmussen), wathever profession he has. In "my" German Wikipedia there is the "Kategorie:Parteimitglied (Deutschland)" with the sub-category of SPD-members with more then 5000 persons. The "Kategorie:Politiker (Deutschland)" contains only 221 persons and has no link to the party member lists. Until now, this category isn't very helpful, as important persons as Helmut Kohl or Gerhard Schröder aren't listed there.

I can't find any "Kategorie:Deutsche Politiker" (but there are catogories "politicians of the xx. century"). As I'm not very familiar with categories, can you help me how you have got the information that there is a "parent category" of "Deutsche Politiker"? I only know how to find sub-categories of categories, but don`t know how to find parent-categories. I beg your pardon for my simple English. Reichensee (talk) 19:24, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Try seeing Category:German politicians by party. Right. Now the German version is? Not politicians? No politicians in those categories? Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 19:27, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

As i understand the german category system, the politicans are sorted by funktion, as chancellor, or member of a parliament. there is no general category german politican. Politiker (Deutschland) is just for people who cannot sorted to sub category of funktion. the category parteimitglied is a subcat of politiker (deutschland) since feb 2009, i think this is a mistake, i will correct it. Also have a look at category tree [7] --80.133.137.76 (talk) 11:18, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

Stubs & Wikipedia

Hi,

In case you are wondering why I'm not creating any stubs anymore : I am seriously considering leaving Wikipedia. This has nothing to do with the geo stubs per se, but after almost two years on here I have to say that this has not turned out the way I invisaged it to be. I orginally came here to work on my speciality, which are immigration/passport related legal issues, but I have found that beyond POV pushing, vandalism and the occational well intended but ill-informed edit there is almost no collaborative editing going on. That goes for many other pages as well, where constant edit wars and POV makes collaborative editing impossible and many editors seem more interested in their own personal agenda and ego than in any collaborative effort to improve the pages.
In a way I think Wikipedia's greatest asset is also its greatest handicap : The fact that anyone can edit everything. Because of the fact that Wikipedia accepts edits by non-experts it is largely edited by people who - albeit well-meaning - take information from secondary sources like other encylopedias and newspaper articles with very little understanding of the subject matter. Unfortuantely in the process a lot gets misinterprested and as a result misrepresented on here.
As a result I find myself in a bit of a watchdog position when it comes to passport pages, constantly reverting and correcting mistakes others have made. If it were just that it wouldn't be so bad, but if you add the constant POV attempts - yes, strangely enough you can even push POV in passport pages - and outright vandalism I have come to the conculsion that I best take my efforts elsewhere.
I think Wikipedia has reached it's prime. It now covers almost everything and it is absolutely great as a quick reference to get an overview of a subject matter. However it will never become a truely reliable source of information as there are just too many mistakes in it and the articles simply cannot be checked fast enough by experts to keep them factually acurate after vandalism and good faith but factually wrong edits. Passportguy (talk) 13:21, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Re: Jovan Hadži

Hey! I'm currently on vacation. I'll try to expand it when I get back (although it's not my field of knowledge). Best, Viator slovenicus (talk) 15:59, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Beyond Germany

Depending on how things shape up tonight, I might be able to finish off the German politicians. You mentioned some other lists - do you have them set up anywhere, even in userspace? If so, I can begin working on them once I'm done with the Germans. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 18:43, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Spain and Slovakia look viable at the moment, given what's on the other wikis. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 18:48, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Well, I'll do what I can tonight. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 18:54, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

OK - just as long as I keep myself busy. :-) --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 19:38, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure - remember I've been averaging a little over 1,000 a night. If that holds, I should be able to finish the Social Democrats tonight. Maybe even some of the others, because their lists are so short. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 19:41, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Right - I'll bear it in mind. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 19:43, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

It has - think we can make it by the end of the month? --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 19:46, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

We'll see - at worst it'll be August. Anyhow, I've got to take care of some more stuff before I go home for the day. With luck perhaps I'll be able to stub a couple more things. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 19:52, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

No promises, but I'll try. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 20:26, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Or rather, I won't. I'm holding off for the moment. I have a lot of talk pages, and a handful of fly stubs, to create, so I'm going to work on those until this runs its course. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 20:52, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Concerning this, Blofeld, since I'm unsure you noticed, I left a comment at the bottom of User talk:Jennavecia#My apologies which you might want to comment on.
Amalthea 14:52, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

Wikiproject for generation of content

I think the project would benefit more from a Wikiproject dedicated to expanding the thousands of sub-stubs you have created. The project does not need anymore one-sentence articles. That's generally not what people are looking for when they search for any topic. Lara 20:34, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

The idea Jenna would be that the project would have the ability to create better and fully articles more quickly with a reference or two so your concerns would be met. Do you honestly think that neither Albert or I would like to see every article fully translated upon creation? We'd at least like a project and bot to create missing articles and at least have a little content and references.Seriously, I don't know when people are going to wake up that we need to be transferring article enmasse from other wikis. The content exists it just needs putting in english. We need to build up teams of translators who work together at systematically transferring referenced information from other wikis. Having the odd person translate one or two articles every month is really not good enough given the scale of this project. I'd like to make a new project proposal and I'd like to see some support for generating content in a way that causes no objections and can be done much more efficently than is done at present. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 20:53, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Fantastic, but just as we don't need the incessant creation of sub-stubs that no one has any intention of expanding. The expectation that someone else will expand it doesn't always work, particularly with BLPs. People don't want to click on a WP article and find a sentence. If other sites have more detailed information, surely that's the page they'd rather hit. Rather than adding to the pile of articles to be expanded, we need to be expanding, improving and referencing the articles we have. Creating a project to transfer fully translated articles would be awesome. But until that happens, what we don't need to be doing is what was just done here. There is a very small sub-set of editors working on BLP issues. It's an extremely boring job and not a lot of people are willing to help out with it. Adding to the load is helping nothing, rather it is further discouragement for the few people struggling to improve the BLP problem. Organize what you need to and then create the articles, otherwise you're creating messes. Lara 21:06, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Well I'll speak for Albert in that we both think the starting process is far from ideal but we really do need these articles put into english however much of a mess it creates. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 21:25, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Not all at once. Quality > quantity. Lara 23:29, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

I agree. Necessity is subjective. As an accountant, I expect clients to provide me with files that are relevant and useful. However, lawyers seem to favor dropping boxes of related documents in my office. The latter can be a headache for everyone. The former puts the burden on me to parse out necessary information, but the box-drop seems to say, "Everything you need is here, you just have to find it." Law _{type! snype?} 05:16, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

At the suggestion of JulianColton and some others in the AN/I thread, I have nominated the articles for deletion. The discussion is here. I realize the creation was in good faith, but I think it's best to get a bot written as you've suggested above, and start that way. Regards, Lara 06:52, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

I want to say again, that I think these articles were created in good faith, and I believe a project dedicated to transwiking articles carefully would be very beneficial. I want to apologize to you if I worded anything in such a way as to seem as though I don't value either you or Albert as editors. That was certainly not my intention. I appreciate that you've endorsed the mass-deletion, and I really hope that the attention drawn to the AN/I thread and the AFD results in noticeable attention on your project proposal. Lara 16:26, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

DYK for Louis Ferron

On July 24, 2009, Did you know? was updated with a fact from the article Louis Ferron, which you created or substantially expanded. You are welcome to check how many hits your article got while on the front page (here's how) and add it to DYKSTATS if it got over 5,000. If you know of another interesting fact from a recently created article, then please suggest it on the Did you know? talk page.

Royalbroil 06:07, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

Stay calm even if the others don't

I have not looked at the attacks on you in detail, but you can tell yourself that they just mean that others are taking you and the stubs seriously as something that can reasonably be argued. A spammer creating 3000 pure nonsense articles doesn't get such a reaction. I guess the problem is: People feel very strongly that it's a bad idea, they expect long discussions, and they are not keen on having to make up their minds why exactly it's a bad idea. You can decide that none of us can have thought it through and that you did and therefore you are right and should try to sway the opinion. Or you can decide that there is probably some wisdom in the crowd, collectively and/or individually. In the latter case I would expect any attacks to stop. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they have stopped already, once it looked like a snowball decision. (Not that I would argue for applying the snowball clause, of course.) Hans Adler 11:42, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

Thankyou Hans for clarifying that. I do have feelings like any human and sometimes people don't realise how hurtful they can be in discussions and causing outrage towards a good faith action. If you read my recent comments at the bottom of the deletion page you'll see why I see subjects as set and to work towards and believe even if somewhat too optimistically that we can achieve anything on here. I want to see this encyclopedia develop and ultimately I would like to see a decent article for each of these politicians. Rather we disagreed in the way it was done. A lot of people prefer to build us brick by brick, I often try to build us house by house if you see what I mean. We all share the same goals on wikipedia I am certain but I really wish people would tone down the drama. The articles can easily be deleted no problems if it is causing a major or potentially serious problem. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 11:50, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

Yeah there is a lot of drama. I wish I had bot-coding skills so I could help out, but I don't... Probably would have to get decent at Perl. I've always wanted to learn a useful programming language (the only thing I've ever done is Visual Basic for Applications) but that obviously would have to be a long-term goal! Maybe next time to avoid the BLP hysteria you could limit your stubbing to articles with the little cross. BTW I disagree that referencing to german wikipedia is sufficient (or really counts as a reference) - the templates are for attribution (required by licensing), not for referencing. (That is, it's to attribute the source of sentences rather than the source of facts if that makes sense - and what is needed for verifiability is the source of facts.) I'm not sure about the best strategy to encourage translation. All the previous translation collaborations have fizzled out. :( Calliopejen1 (talk) 13:34, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

A small correction: when I say "sufficient" i mean sufficient to count as a reference (not sufficient to merit creation). Personally I have no problems with unsourced articles, just unsourceable articles. Calliopejen1 (talk) 13:38, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

BTW on a happier note I got my new camera in the mail! It's so tiny and beautiful. :) I'm not going to be getting any featured pictures from it (sensor tiny and not so great - decent amt of noise, fringing, etc) but I still like it! My new project is to take photos of National Register of Historic Places listings in my neighborhood. I'll have to take a couple on my walk to the coffee shop today. There are a ridiculous number in Cambridge and Somerville, near where I live. Calliopejen1 (talk) 13:43, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

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Russian infoboxes

Hey, Blo! Sorry for the delay with the answer, but apart from being busy I also needed some time to think this through. I'll try addressing your suggestions point-by-point, so it's easier to keep track of them. Feel free to comment on each one separately as well.

1. Infobox colors. I am actually of two minds about this. The blue color for the federal subject (FS) boxes was chosen, if I remember correctly, to match the blue of the Russian flag; the colors for the city/district boxes were pretty much arbitrary, but matching the color saturation level of the FS box (the light green is also the same one the Russian Wikipedia uses for the city boxes). In the hindsight, that was probably not the best selection—the color looks fine on the flag, but when used in an infobox it makes it pretty gaudy. So, you softening the colors is something I have no problems with. What I am concerned about is that now all the boxes (FS/city/district) use the same (ugly!) purple color. I hope your love to this color doesn't go as far as to insist on keeping it :), but I am actually more worried that using the same color on the boxes does away with the color coding. What I mean is that an average wiki reader would have no idea what the difference between an FS and, say, a district in Russia is; color coding the infoboxes makes it immediately obvious that the article about, say, Kaliningrad Oblast and Giaginsky District are actually about two very different concepts. I would strongly advocate for using different colors for different concepts; as for what colors to use, that, of course, is open to discussion (preferably not between you and me, but on WT:RUSSIA, in case anybody else gives a damn).
2. Sections. I disagree that sections in the boxes are not useful. Sections allow grouping related bits of information in a clean and logical manner. Only when we have too many sections does that become a problem. Your removal of the "Area" section, for example, is something that makes perfect sense (I recall making it a separate section because I was planning to add more parameters to it, but in the end all that was left was just the area itself); on the other hand, merging the "Administrative" and "Municipal structure" sections on the district box would be something that actually makes the information much more confusing. With the flag and coat of arms, I was trying to fit links to the heraldry and flag articles along with the links to the articles about the CoA and flag of the entity itself—I agree that the section approach wasn't the best in this case. Not sure how to do it better, though, so if you have ideas, please don't hesitate to share.
3. Charter and representative body. Charter and legislation of a FS/district/city are actually very important concepts in Russia. I realize that the links to those are presently mostly all red, but that's only because just like with many other important Russia-related things there are not enough (interested) people to work on those. When interested people show up, we get articles like State Council of the Chuvash Republic, which is short but still very worthy of being linked to. Having entity's charter and representative body listed is just as important as listing the president/chairperson/head/mayor/etc.
4. Timezone. The idea of adding a timezone parameter was shot before more than once. With the federal subjects, all articles already have a time zone section; as for the districts/inhabited localities, their time zone would always match the time zone of the federal subject they are located in. The only localities that would benefit from this parameter are those in the Sakha Republic (which spans three time zones) and in Sakhalin Oblast (which spans two). If you want to re-open this can of worms, feel free to post an inquiry on WT:RUSSIA. Myself, I don't believe this parameter is needed and feel that the way it is going to be filled out is by people doing a random google search and inserting the first piece of data they can find. Unlike with the rest of the parameters, there is no one good authoritative source which gives up-to-date information on the Russian time zones.
5. N/As in fields. When I was designing these boxes, I deliberately did not make the sections auto-hideable. If one is to approach filling out these infoboxes diligently, the data for every single parameter can be found without much difficulty. If one adds an infobox which mostly shows N/A's, it means that the person added it just for the heck of it and it is unlikely that s/he took time to make sure that the few parameters which had been added are actually correct. You yourself the other day had to go through a bunch of boxes which were basically copy-pasted across a number of articles—someone did not even bother to check that the names were changed from one article to another! How good do you think is the rest of the information in these boxes? On the other hand, the N/A's had been implemented before the auto-map feature was enabled; today, even if all one can add is a name the resulting infobox would probably still be useful because of the automap it would show. I'll keep that in mind during future design efforts.
6. FS locators vs. {Location map Russia}. The problem with {{Location map Russia}} is that when it is stuffed into a cramped infobox, it's very hard to understand what's going on in it. This is especially true for small republics like Adygea, Chechnya, etc. I know what you mean about the FS locators being somewhat confusing (although I don't quite get the part about some maps being tilted 90°—would you have an example handy?), but I still believe they are an improvement over the locator map for the whole of Russia. If you manage to get a better locator map of Russia which wouldn't have these deficiencies, I'll be all for using it, of course.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 16:16, July 24, 2009 (UTC)

Hey, I do get annoyed real easy, but I don't ever recall "exploding" :) Especially not on you!

As for these darn infoboxes, I want to improve them just as much as you do; I just prefer thoroughly planning the process first and implementing the changes later—apparently, in those regards I am a unique individual, as everyone wants to have everything changed right away. Oh well, such is life.

Anyway, whenever you are through with the Poppe conundrum, you are welcome back to my talk page; we'll discuss the infoboxes then. In the meanwhile, I'll try to go back to the drawing board and hopefully will have something for you when you return (unless I get distracted in the process, which happens more than I like to admit!). Best of luck,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 16:37, July 24, 2009 (UTC)

Oh, I do want that very much, but it wouldn't be, erm, what's your British concept for that, ahh, polite! :)

Seriously, though, if you want to comment on the points I laid out above, that'd probably get the ball rolling. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 16:51, July 24, 2009 (UTC)

1. Gween is good :)
2. As for the charters, here's a stub-creation idea for you! This task lends itself easily to automation (the basic information that needs to be added is the title, adoption date, effective date, list of amendments, table of contents, and a link to the Charter's full text, which also serves as a self-reference), although I could imagine for you the difficulty would be the fact that everything is in Russian.
3. Adding the country field, that, I think, is just silly. Every single city article would say that this is a "city in Russia" right in the lead (and if in some it doesn't say that, it should be added); mentions of "Russia" would further be scattered throughout the article, the infobox would have a map of Russia prominently on top—why the heck do we need another line to state the obvious? You yourself find it funny that the London article explicitly clarifies that that's the city in the UK. Why add something that is so clearly redundant? Not to mention that for Russia the traditional break-down by "country-province-district-county" levels cannot be done cleanly. Once you drill to the federal subject level, where you go next depends on whether you are interested in the federal subject's administrative or municipal divisions. Neryungri, for example, is administratively a town of the republican significance (i.e., it has the same status as the uluses), but municipally it is only an urban settlement, albeit one that's the administrative center of the municipal district which the territory within the administrative borders of the city of Neryungri comprises. Good luck programming around that. With sections, at least, both aspects of the city can be presented separately. When you "simplify" the box by mingling both sections in one data flow, you are not simplifying life for those for whom it matters the most—our readers. Remember some time ago I was explaining why Russian cities should not use the generic {Settlement} infobox? This is one of the very good reasons why—things for Russia are just too different to neatly fit under one-size-fits-all approach. If we care about our readers at all, we should recognize when making exceptions is warranted and justified. I am sorry if this may sound offensive, but sometimes it seems to me that you believe I just want to control my own version of the infobox for no particular reason at all, apart from satisfying my control-freak personality. I assure you that is not the case.
4. As for the box for the urban-settlements, previous consensus on WP:RUSSIA was not to create one until most of the articles about the urban-type settlements grow to at least Start level. An article with an infobox which is five times longer than the text hardly entices anyone to believe that the information in the box is well-researched and accurate, wouldn't you agree? At any rate, we shouldn't be bothering with creating an urban-type settlement infobox until we have a stable infobox for the cities, or we risk to simply create a maintenance nightmare for the WikiProject with the membership base that is hardly active as is. If I learned anything in real life, it's that the surest way to kill any project is by assigning too much work to extremely limited resources—people will get overworked and quit, deadlines will get missed, and in the end nothing (except harm) will be done. WikiProjects are no different—you keep dumping dull maintenance work on them, they die.
5. It is important to remember than having an infobox is not the final goal, it's a means to an end. "An end", in our case, is creating a thorough, usable, and well-referenced article. Once the content hits critical mass, it makes sense to summarize it, and that's where adding an infobox becomes most useful. In a two-page article, it helps to have something to quickly glance through to get the most important facts and to find out what the most important links are. In a two-line article, an infobox does not help anything except creating an impression of sloppiness and lack of professionalism.
6. On the maps issue (them being green), I concur; they do look better that way (not to mention they now match the green scheme of the infoboxes nicely!). And, of course, thanks for all your work with the pictures—much appreciated!
7. On an unrelated note, can you take a look at this list and let me know what you think? This is supposed to be the pilot version of how the set indices on the Russian inhabited localities will look like—I've implemented (in one form or another) all of the ideas I had, and am now looking for more input by uninvolved parties. These, by the way, when done, can double as sources for article-creation bot runs.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 18:17, July 24, 2009 (UTC)

Could you, please, clarify what you mean by "hard to follow"? As for the table layout, I didn't go that route that because for a list that size the page would take forever to load (try looking at or editing this more than once to see what I mean), but for smaller lists it would definitely be an option to consider. Thanks for the suggestion.

As for the Stub→Start development, one doesn't really need an infobox to do that, what is needed first and foremost is content. Besides, coat, flag, and even a locator map can be all added separately without overwhelming a stub as much as a full-blown infobox (even with hideable parameters) would. Sorry, not buying this one still.

On mentioning "Russia", I kind of like the blue bar on the infoboxes on the US cities (e.g., Kansas City, Missouri), which says "— city —". I think for Russian cities adding a similar bar which would say "— a city in Russia —" would be a neat way to address the problem you mentioned above. What's your opinion?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 18:42, July 24, 2009 (UTC)

I think you maybe misunderstood me (or maybe I you)? If we have "a city in Russia" at the top (something you said you had been thinking about yourself), what's the point of having "Country: Russia" listed again further down the box? And as I previously explained, we cannot do the province/district/municipality tree in the template, because, first, we'll need to have two such trees (administrative and municipal separately), and second, oftentimes those trees are not going to match one another (see the Neryungri example above). Which again brings me back to the fact that (these two, at least) should be handled via separate sections. You gotta make peace with the fact that the template isn't going to look exactly like the "standard" templates used elsewhere :) This is one case where it is important that it doesn't.

As for Omsk, I am not happy with it at all. Everything is now in one heap, it's too darn messy! Placing area/population/postal code/telephone code/etc. in one flow is not really a problem (everyone intuitively knows what those are), but when it comes to highly country-specific information (administrative status, local government, municipal aspects) such mingling is simply inexcusable. These two sections are the very least that need to be restored in order for the box to make at least some semblance of sense. Try removing all subheaders from the article itself, so everything seamlessly flows into everything else—you'll see right away why this doesn't work.

I am not trying to say that the version before your edits was ideal; it was not. I am still planning to completely re-design this infobox (this one still has technical glitches, has no parameters for such important thing as references, and includes such unnecessary stuff as "events", which really should belong in the text) and, as per this discussion of (h)ours, I will try keeping the number of specialized sections to a minimum (i.e, there'll be no sections such as "area" or, god forbid, "other information I didn't know where else to stuff in"). I can't do away with vital grouping such as admin/mun separation, though; I hope you understand it's not my pigheadedness, but actually a valid concern. And of course, I'll give you a holler when the template is ready for prime-time, because if I don't, it wouldn't be, what's that word again, ah!, polite :) And I am a polite person, even though it's not always obvious :)—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 19:36, July 24, 2009 (UTC)

talkback

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Keep on plugging

I was sorry to see the way your stubs were shot down. I agree that Wikipedia has too many articles on kid stuff. Keep on keeping on, don't let them get to you. Blast Ulna (talk) 19:49, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

German politician stubs

I see that the mass created stubs have been (or are being) deleted. If you are interested in pursuing the recreation with more content via a bot idea let me know. It might be difficult to get community consensus for the project, but I would be willing to try. --ThaddeusB (talk) 20:27, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

I agree with everything you have said on my talk page and would be happy to comment on any proposal to improve our integration of content from other language Wikipedias. Please inform me when said proposal is ready so that I dont' miss it.

I also agree that a bot to make lists of missing articles is a good first step. There would certainly be no controversy in doing that. The community is indeed hesitant to allow bots to create new content and for good reason - such projects have occasionally created complete disasters when a bot was poorly done. That said, such projects can and do get approval from time to time. Fortunately the people who do the actual approving of bots are more understanding than the community as a whole.

A bot can, in theory, do anything a human can do quicker and more accurately. The key is in the programming. As a trusted bot operator, I would hope that I have sufficient technical skill to persuade enough people to trust me to get it right. (I am also a skilled debater, so that also helps.)

Anyway, drop me a line when you are ready to proceed and I will be happy to help. --ThaddeusB (talk) 20:26, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

Municipalities of Mexico

I finally saw the note you left on my talk page asking for help with the articles you are starting. It seems that you are separating municipality and seat. Whether or not to do this has been debated a bit on WP Mexico with no real consensus so far. While it might seem obvious, there are problems. First of all, many, if not most, municipalites have the name of their seat. And many of the info sources on them in Spanish do not make a clear distinction between the town and the municipality. Second, even when the town officially goes by a different name (like Xico/Valle de Chalco Solidaridad) no one uses the official name of the town for the town but rather the municipality name. Municipalities in Baja Californa are large and divided into districts, but jsut about every little town in Oaxaca is a municipality. Last but not least, in more than a few cases, when the seat is a city,it is co extensive with the municipality. We will probably wind up with separate articles for both entities but we need naming guidelines. Thelmadatter (talk) 23:00, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

OK I just saw a couple articles that seemed to indicate a trend to separating the two. No problem. Ill work on whatever towns/municipalities I can. Just put one up about the Grutas de Cacahuamilpa National Park in Guerrero. Do you think 130 pictures of not even half of the formations that are in that cave system is too many to put up on Wikimedia? :D Next article is on Chalma, Malinalco, Mexico State. Not a municipality (its in Malinalco) but a very important pilgrimage site. Have pics up in Wikimedia. Thelmadatter (talk) 20:01, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

transwiki

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Polish politicians

Hi, I want to help you with those lists of Polish politicans. Thank you very much for start those articles! Very good work! Ps: Sorry about my English. DK4]]$4 ^(Contribs) 11:22, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I can do it. DK4]]$4 ^(Contribs) 11:35, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

CDP articles

Don't have time at the moment to help out bc of bar studying. Glad to see a few have been translated by others. In your next big article batches (not BLPs obviously!!) you should only do half of the alphabet. That way a year down the road we can have some hard data for the number started by others from redlinks vs. the number expanded once the stub already exists. Calliopejen1 (talk) 19:01, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

Gavin.collins

I appreciate your speaking to Gavin.Collins about his unwarranted call for a block of AlbertHerring. Unfortunately, I do not think it will change Gavin’s views at all. Gavin is very firm in his opinions and interpretations of policies, and does not change them no matter how many people show him he is wrong. Gavin is still firmly convinced his actions were right and the correct interpretation of policy. [8]

This is nothing new as Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Gavin.collins, Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Gavin.collins 2, Wikipedia:Requests for mediation/Kender and the associated links clearly show. Edward321 (talk) 22:05, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

Well I can see that he is not a level headed individual otherwise he wouldn't have said what he did. I certainly don't and I doubt Albert really takes him seriously, for an apparent professional he sure gives off a sign that he is incapable of human interaction. I can see he has a history. I think it may have completely shocked ALbert at first but i just think he needs a good amount of time away from wiki to let it blow over and allow him to retain his dignity. He loathes drama as much as anybosyon here, even more so maybe so being involved in something like that and being unable to aboid prying and condemning eyes took its toll I think. Thanks anyway. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 22:12, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

transwiki stub debate

I totally support your views that we need a concerted effort to transwiki articles across the different language wikis. While this effort may be met with resistance today, I believe it'll gain momentum. So stay the path... I think it's the right direction. Just my 2 cents. --Rosiestep (talk) 01:49, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

I agree. Please keep up the good work. Stubs are great - they regularly encourage others to add to them. And I do believe we need more transwiki translations and sharing of information - I have been trying to a similar thing recently with figures from the Venezuelan independence struggle. Please hang in there - we need you. Cheers, John Hill (talk) 02:14, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

Thankyou both for your kind words. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 09:12, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

I would also like to express my support and apologize for the part of the community that seems to have lost any sense of the purpose of Wikipedia. --Apoc2400 (talk) 11:29, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. Don't worry they will all be restarted given time but it will take considerably longer than it should have. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 11:47, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

Just a few years ago you and AlbertHerring would have been thanked for your work. And people wonder why Wikipedia is stagnating... --Apoc2400 (talk) 11:54, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

Re: Hungarian-opera-stub

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...Just in case you're not still watching the page. Best, Voceditenore (talk) 17:44, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

"you can be quite rude at times"?

I saw this in your edits comments to my tallk page. What are you talking about? -- llywrch (talk) 21:11, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

I'm sure it wasn't intentional but I read somewhere that you said something like: Nah nuke the lot of them, I create much better stubs than that. I'm not interested. I found that a little dismissive. I generally create a lot of good stubs, there was just banks of articles to be translated from German wikipedia so we didn't think starting them like that would cause a problem. I would have appreciated a reply from you personally. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 21:32, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

Well, I did say something like "nuke the lot of them" -- however it was out of dissatisfaction at this whole affair. Yes, I thought these stubs were on the skimpy side (I think biographical articles should have born/died dates), but instead of deleting them they should be brought up to a satisfactory length. And just because a stub is only a couple of sentences -- or less -- doesn't mean it is too short; IIRC, when BLP articles are stubified, they are reduced to a single sentence consisting of the person's name, date of birth, & the reason for their notability (e.g. programmer, politician, convicted serial killer). When I did that people said that wasn't good enough. Add to this Ottava Rima's involvement ... I'll stop at that point before I am honored with another thread in WP:AN/I. But trying to explain what I wanted to do was not a discussion between peers, it felt like I was trying to argue my way out of a parking ticket before a judge -- which is how an increasing number of interactions on Wikipedia feel. Man, if this is what you encounter trying to create articles, I'm amazed you don't lose your temper more often. (PS -- I am sorry if I did offend you; it was not my intent. I didn't respond to either of your messages because of the demands of my personal life -- my daughter demands my attention, my wife & I selling our house & buying another -- makes the time I can spend on Wikipedia limited, which means a lot of discussion threads I get involved in I end up needing to drop out of due to lack of time.) -- llywrch (talk) 05:01, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

I understand totally. Yes it does get pretty annoying at times, not you obviously, I don't find you rude at all it was more confusion over the mixed reaction I saw from you, I can see now why you gave up on them, not just to avoid more wiki drama but because the workload was too great. German politicians are not exactly top on my list of interests either but I believe as an encyclopedia we should be covering them. I know you feel the same way as I do that's why I had anticipated an earlier response. Yes I that is exactly how I feel, its kind of like being gunned down by a firing squad whenever you try to express a point to explain why you are the wrong one and the community are always right. It would have required a tremendous amount of work to sort them all out but the fact that many had already begun translation by various people and the relatively low threat from vandalism in the short term period I thought it would have been better to work through them than take the easy way out and delete articles which will be restarted soon enough anyway. If the view that " it is a bad stub it should be started properly" was the unviersal view on here we'd lose 85% of our articles because "they need to be started more adequately". Maybe I misjudged that content on German wikipedia and linked templates were enough to verify that these people are actually politicians and members of parties, I somehow doubt it. When people talk about the starting of new articles where the information is directly there for the taking as "errors" that makes me pretty annoyed. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 09:03, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

DYK for The Asylum Seeker

On July 27, 2009, Did you know? was updated with a fact from the article The Asylum Seeker, which you created or substantially expanded. You are welcome to check how many hits your article got while on the front page (here's how) and add it to DYKSTATS if it got over 5,000. If you know of another interesting fact from a recently created article, then please suggest it on the Did you know? talk page.

BorgQueen (talk) 00:08, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

German BIO mass delete

Hi Doc. I figure there's a good chance you're not familiar with me, as I don't recall us ever interacting directly. Anyway, I do some BLP stuff, and worked on the whole "mass delete" thing a couple days ago. One thing I did do, was try to track what could be salvaged. Some stuff got deleted anyway (no refs I guess), but I did gather a list at: User:Ched Davis/Julian-list. If you'd like I could move it over to your userspace, or it's fine where it is too ... whichever you prefer. If there are any of the ones that got deleted anyway, and you'd like to work on them in your userspace - let me know on my talk page, and I'd be more than happy to restore them there for you. I don't speak German, so I probably can't help much with the individual articles, but I thought you might appreciate the effort in trying to track what we were able to salvage. Maybe you could even pass on a few words of encouragement to the guy who did the bot import - I thought he got some pretty unfair nastiness thrown his way over that. Hope he does return. Anyway, just wanted to let you know - All my best. — Ched :  ?  04:41, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Respect

I see that you are taking the unkind, "derogatory" comments of others to mean that people are getting their way unfairly. I hope that my little comment was not considered derogatory. I think the reason people argued so vehemently was because they respect you as a content provider. They were afraid your status here on Wikipedia would lead to a different result than if you were a ordinary editor. I've been thinking about what you were trying to accomplish, and mulling over a proposal for an article creation drive with you. I'll explain further if you are interested. Abductive (talk) 09:49, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

I know, I didn't mean you. It is comments I regularly get by people like David Fuchs that I am "intellectually lazy" and resemble "betacommandbot" (the nuisance that spammed eveybody's talk pages with deletion warnings remember?) and that Blofeld is this terrible nuisance by people such as him and references ongoing to past events or articles that may not have worked out so well. It is unfair I think, so at least a new user name and a more attention to creating referenced stubs is the way to go I think. Besides which the user name reflects more my interests. Note that I am not renaming myself "German politician" because that subject is really not of prime interest to me. As an encyclopedia though I think we should have full articles (rather than sub stubs) on these people. Oh, I'm still planning on making a proposal, my goals haven't change, I just want to try to change the overal perception shared by some people to my current name that's all, I certainly think a lot of people have got the totally wrong idea about me. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 09:54, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

"Intellectually lazy"? That reminds of a quote: "All he did to get that fruit was shake a tree." "Yeah, but did you see the size of the tree?" Abductive (talk) 10:22, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

My idea is simple enough. If you look at http://wikistics.falsikon.de/latest/wikipedia/de, you'll see the 1000 most popular articles on the German Wikipedia last month. Most of them are the remarkably similar to the ones on the the English Wikipedia, but some aren't. At number 121 is an article Sturm der Liebe that has no English equivalent, but gets 3320 page views a day from the Germans. If we could build a list of such articles from the other Wikipedias, and create them in the English Wikipedia, nobody could say that the are obscure or unlikely to be improved, right? Abductive (talk) 10:22, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Nobody can please all of the people. Abductive (talk) 10:22, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

I agree!! What I hope the new project will do is draw up full banks of missing articles from other wikis and store all of them in our workspace. Then a bot can be assigned to start articles if they have a common source and can be started adequately. A lot of cock ups have occurred with automation on wiki. I believe Thaddeus is intelligent and cautious enough though to know what he is doing. What we need is to support each other I think and give it more of a focus that it has at present. One of our core goals is "the sum of all knowledge", I believe we can't gnore other wikipedias and their growth, but we just need to find a way to make their work added to our english wikipedia with sourcing. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 10:25, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

If this list could show page view statistics or how often the article is linked to in other articles, it could provide a basis for choosing which articles to tackle first. Abductive (talk) 10:32, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

That would be good, the thing is though I'm not sure a bot would be able to start different often unrelated articles in a most visited list like that. I think a bot would have to work through categories of related articles. The bot though could certainly draw up a top 1000 list for eahc language wikipedia and for us to try to ensure we have articles on everyone of them first. That would be a good idea, definately. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 10:39, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Let me know when you guys need some help. Abductive (talk) 10:45, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

I found these well-developed, popular German articles with no English version: Triftbrücke Triftbrücke and Concordiasee Concordiasee. One is a spidery bridge and one some sort of unity-lake. Abductive (talk) 11:30, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Yep, and you are likely to find at least a million similar quality articles from German, Dutch, French and some of the other wikipedias. It is like a gold mine of encyclopedic content missing which is why we should definately have a large scale project devoted to transferring it. Search through city categories on German wikipedia for example and you'll see the huge amount missing. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 11:33, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

impressive scale

Even in a gold mine one should ta the richest veins first. That is the jist of my idea; use some sort of trick to find the articles with the most views, or the most interconnections, or the most citations, and create those ones first. Abductive (talk) 11:47, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

By the way, this Concordiasee seems to have risen up and killed people last week. Abductive (talk) 11:47, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

No I love pictures! I was just admiring the beauty of the aptly named Lake Baldegg. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 11:51, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Cool. I got to sign off now, talk to you later. Abductive (talk) 11:54, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Czech places

I've started generating articles for the municipalities (most of those on the first row of Template:Jeseník District, except those that already existed). Once I can get it working fully automatically I'll do more. Am I right that you've finished all the regions before Olomouc? --Kotniski (talk) 11:07, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Help !

Hi !
Ambition always seems to be ending in faliure !
When I go after a better template , I find out that the new complex one does not works : [9] can you please help me in that ? Thank you --Alborz Fallah (talk) 14:16, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

It does not expands , and it's navigation section (V.D.E) does not works in pages .--Alborz Fallah (talk) 14:23, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

As an example try this : [10]--Alborz Fallah (talk) 14:24, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

OK, Thanks ! Better to keep it simple ! --Alborz Fallah (talk) 14:36, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

As you wish . And thank you again for your interest in an Iranian topic .--Alborz Fallah (talk) 14:42, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Tatar State Orchestra

What are you looking to reference? The only sentence in the article is already supported by the external links.

A quick search also produces this review on the Tatarstan's Ministry of Culture website; more is available, but I guess it depends which way you want the article to develop.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 15:15, July 27, 2009 (UTC)

The MinCult review would be a great start then. I guess you are probably planning to feed it to a machine translator, but let me know if you see any passages that need to be clarified. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 15:19, July 27, 2009 (UTC)

Not sure where the "society" part came from in the link description; rest assured, the website is about the same entity (although, unlike the MinCult review, it is an unofficial website, so use caution).

As for the infobox, I haven't had a chance to look at it yet (I've just returned from my weekly weekend wikibreak), but I'm planning to look at it after I catch up with my watchlist monitoring.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 15:30, July 27, 2009 (UTC)

For what it's worth

I misread your link "Mali expansion links" above as "Mail expansion links" & thinking this was some kind of special email method to reach you clicked on it. Instead, I suspect I discovered another governmental organization which has been co-opted into SPECTRE: who would suspect that the Mali "Commission of Food safety" was in truth yet another front through which your operatives can do your bidding throughout the world. Truly brilliant -- & evil! -- llywrch (talk) 16:00, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Or the Evil Doctor has tired of materialism & decided to find the monastery of Blue moon & seek enlightenment there? Or perhaps to enjoy reliving the career of Aurel Stein & discover another lost civilization? (But then what will his minions in Mali do?) -- llywrch (talk) 16:25, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

About bilateral relations: I know well about that mess. Sadly, many involved know little about the foreign relations of the countries involved. (The foreign relations of Ethiopia & Sweden being one such topic; I only wish I had the time to write a proper article detailing its fascinating & extensive history.) -- llywrch (talk) 16:28, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

And bringing down the Wikimedia servers would be a crowning, most evil act! ;-) llywrch (talk) 16:33, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Publicizing your proposal

I wonder if you might want to publicize your proposal more widely - maybe at the Village Pump (Proposals)? LadyofShalott 17:12, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Mmm, I dunno, it could backfire.. There are a lot of people at ANI and village pump who'll gladly do anything they can to oppose me. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 17:14, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Oh. :( LadyofShalott 17:26, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

I had brought it to the attention of a number of people anyway, I anticipate a lot of people will see in on their friends talk pages etc. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 17:28, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Everything has changed, except your name

By asking to be called Himalayan Explorer, you have already left behind the impermanent reputation of Dr. Blofeld and started your route to enlightenment. For your request to be declined because you've made 263,063 edits is a triumph, not that it matters. You have overcome the final barrier preventing Dr. Blofeld's transformation into a compassionate avatar of spiritual peace. Though praise and priority are hollow vessels, let me be the first to congratulate you anyway. - Pointillist (talk) 18:58, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Me too, anyway I always thought the Himalayas made for the ideal hideout for a super villain - where else do you have that much space to hollow out without having to pump any spilt blood back up to sea level? ϢereSpielChequers 19:05, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

LOL indeed. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 19:32, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Nah, you should investigate the Zen path of enlightenment: "What is the sound of a Martini that is neither shaken nor stirred?" -- llywrch (talk) 20:12, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

I wish I'd thought of that one. - Pointillist (talk) 20:35, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Here you go!

Constitution of Ethiopia Calliopejen1 (talk) 20:46, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Another one: 1987 Constitution of Ethiopia. Calliopejen1 (talk) 21:07, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Kyrgyzstan Picture requests

I'm in Kyrgyzstan for another couple weeks. Go ahead and give me your picture requests, and I'll see what I can do. Btw, I've been doing stuff more for WPCA. —Firespeaker (talk) 21:29, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

At the moment I'm just in Bishkek, but I'll be in other places in Chüy oblast too before I leave. I have a ton of pictures of villages and roads in every oblast of the country that I haven't sorted well yet. I've uploaded a few of these at various points when I've noticed an article that needs a picture and I happen to have one, but I haven't gone about it in a direct way. If only I had more time [for wikipedia]... Is there a list somewhere of Kyrgyzstan-related articles needing pictures? —Firespeaker (talk) 10:11, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)

I hope I did not upset you when I redid the episode list wikistyle as I know you must have put a lot of effort into it but I kept your links although I had to adjust a couple to get to the episode page. I am a fan of R&H and you have done a great job. You should do the TV IV[11] pages (for R&H would be nearly 40 pages). I did it to try and simplfy the main page as there is a lot of duplication. Also answering a question on the talk page about the DVD means the overview needs rewriting. I shall not do it. Except for the first episode there is no story arc, the episodes can be in any order.REVUpminster (talk) 22:33, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Just repaired four links. They worked yesterday. They all work nowREVUpminster (talk) 23:26, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Yeah similarly i didn't want to remove your work because you did a great job adding director and writer to the tables. Yes I love Randall and Hopkirk, quintessential 60s British TV. Someday maybe we'll have articles on the Avengers episodes too! If you can help improve any of the episodes for Randall go ahead, I couldn't find many reliable sources. A lot of them aren't complete. I did mean to continue with my analysis of the series but it is really original research although it would seme to give an informative analysis of the series and the concepts. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 10:04, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

Original research is the one bugbear of wikipedia especially when dealing with film and telvision, I got into trouble over Zorro's Horse!!!, when the only source is youtube. The TV IV does not have those problems. In fact the way you laid out the episode pages is very similar to how they do it. It is a wiki site so has almost identical formatting rules. I have added the writers and directors to R&H there. Here on wikipedia I am working on the episode list for Department S another of my favourites.REVUpminster (talk) 21:43, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

Yep that was great too. The Saint was good too as was The Man from UNCLE. Z Cars was good too, love cult 60s TV. I also liked The New Avengers in 70s, a lot of people thought it was crap but Joanna Lumley was and always will be incredibly sexy to me! Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 21:59, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

Right

That's that taken care of, then. Back to business. --User:AlbertHerring ^{Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla!} 02:49, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

The first order of which is the new username, of course. --User:Ser Amantio di Nicolao ^{Che dicono a Signa?}_{'Lo dicono a Signa.} 04:46, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

Ooh, I like it. What do you think of mine? --User:Ser Amantio di Nicolao ^{Che dicono a Signa?}_{Lo dicono a Signa.} 14:26, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

I like too.--Chanaka L (talk) 14:30, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

Dr. B's new layout hasn't quite captured the serene majesty of the Himalayas though, has it? - Pointillist (talk) 14:33, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

Unfortunately not yet.... Still aevil.... Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 14:35, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

In Monobook it shows fine. --User:Ser Amantio di Nicolao ^{Che dicono a Signa?}_{Lo dicono a Signa.} 14:43, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

Well, it's there - you just have to mouse over to find it. --User:Ser Amantio di Nicolao ^{Che dicono a Signa?}_{Lo dicono a Signa.} 15:21, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

I haz volcanoz, two

Mount Agung (L), Mount Batur (R)

I live on the far-side slope of the one what did the big boom some years ago; do see the description on commons. That caldera's about 15km across and the little nipple inside is what's pictured on the article. Cheers, Jack Merridew

fyi, mostly I'm trying to get things looking right at various screen resolutions. Cheers, Jack Merridew 03:09, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Ethiopian notables

I probably have information on them. I'll have to look before I pack those books away. -- llywrch (talk) 16:57, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

I'll have to amend that: I do have more information on them. I happen to own Keller's Revolutionary Ethiopia. (Unfortunately I probably won't be buying a copy of Andargachew Tiruneh's monograph, despite it appearing to be the best book on the subject: the lowest price I can find for it online is $140.--, a bit out of my price range. :-() -- llywrch (talk) 17:33, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I know about Google books. That's how I got ahold of my copies of Nathaniel Pearce's diary of his time in Ethiopia (several years around 1810) & Hormuzd Rassam's Narrative of the British Mission to Theodore, King of Abyssinia. My principal drawback with this wealth of information is that I find myself unable to properly digest it & the material never ends up in the articles where it could do the most good. -- llywrch (talk) 17:45, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

Any more stubs?

Considering you didn't mention your own stub creations on German politicians when the other nearly 3k were up for AFD, and another 500 were just found, I was wondering if we've missed any more. Do you know? Lara 17:46, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

HALP

Please help. Brain fried. Please look at Jasen Walker: notable? Thanks! - CobaltBlueTony™ _talk 18:25, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

Seemingly, just lacks a serious amount of references though and needs a cleanup. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 18:28, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

Transwiki

No offense taken, I agree that more women should be on the site. BTW it's very hard not to stick everything Gavin Collins is saying in a collapse box and be done with it. Calliopejen1 (talk) 18:52, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

What she said. LadyofShalott 19:53, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

It's an interesting question. I'm not sure why there is not a more even division of the sexes here. I certainly enjoy working on this site, even with its frustrations. LadyofShalott 19:55, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

Well I'm very glad you are both here! Her Pegship and Rosie too! Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 20:54, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

What have we always said? "If you build it, they will come"? Anyhow, I've got a lot to do today, so I probably won't be around until later. --User:Ser Amantio di Nicolao ^{Che dicono a Signa?}_{Lo dicono a Signa.} 13:37, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

I think there may be more of us around than most people know. The more genderless nicks though tend to make it harder to guess if their users be male or female. ;) -Yupik (talk) 22:43, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

On a roll

Did you see? You created an article on Concordiasee, and User:Mazbln, a native speaker of German, comes along a few hours later and improves the article. He wouldn't have created the article on his own because, as he says on his userpage, he is unsure of his English. I take this as evidence that starting with popular topics will attract exactly the kind of editors the new project needs. Abductive (talk) 08:20, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

• Let's see what happens now that a German bot has added the interwiki link to your article. I'm tempted to test out my theory by creating another popular-in-Germany article here. Abductive (talk) 08:32, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
  • People are most comfortable editing stuff they know. Abductive (talk) 08:48, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
    • I made Hero Corp from the French Wikipedia. It's a scifi comedy featuring an supervillian in a mountaintop castle. Abductive (talk) 11:27, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Awesome! See if you can add an imdb link at the bottom though. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 11:29, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

• Nothing on imdb. Abductive (talk) 11:38, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
  • I always double-check for sources before creating an article. I gave Gavin.collins the example because I want him to review it. Abductive (talk) 11:59, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
    • Gavin found out that Premiere and "the producers" of Hero Corp are "owned" by a larger company. I'm going to put that information in the article. Abductive (talk) 19:08, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
      • A French WP user came over and corrected my Hero Corp article; it is his/her only edit in our Wikipedia. Abductive (talk) 12:26, 1 August 2009 (UTC)
• I am unsure what these pages are supposedly to look like and how I can help at the moment. I envisioned a table of members of a category with redlinks in the English Wikipedia, and links to articles in the other Wikipedia(s), along with some information like number of citations in the article to be transwikied. Since I'm super busy IRL, I'm going to have to let you and ThaddeusB hash that out. Abductive (talk) 12:39, 1 August 2009 (UTC)
  • I have no abilities in the bots or table layout/nested lists departments. Also, my real life is a pressure cooker right now, so I'm going to be scarce for a while. I might check in once every 24 hours to put out fires. Abductive (talk) 12:49, 1 August 2009 (UTC)
    • The only reason I didn't sign the list is that I have plans to make a custom signature and have its first use be signing onto the project, but I don't have time right now. Abductive (talk) 13:24, 1 August 2009 (UTC
• Made another article, Jakob von Washington, which was suddenly very popular on the German Wikipedia. Let's see if it attracts any attention. Abductive (reasoning) 12:58, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
  • I was just thinking that; a DYK. Sources are difficult to find, though. Abductive (reasoning) 13:04, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
  • Is there a proper way to get the image of Jakob von Washington from the German Wikipedia if it isn't in the Commons? Abductive (reasoning) 13:20, 2 August 2009 (UTC)
    • Thanks for the daguerreotype. Abductive (reasoning) 13:59, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

WikiProject TRANSWIKI

Hi again! Yes, I like the idea of WikiProject TRANSWIKI very much. I think another way of expanding the project and making it of real educative value would be to get schools, colleges, etc. involved too. I used to get so bored having to translate passages from Caesar and the like that had been translated and re-translated over and over again by many generations of school kids. It really turned me off both Latin and French. What I would have loved was a project working with others to translate something that had not already been done to death - something NEW and EXCITING! My proposal would be to try to get teachers to assign a translation project to create new (or better) pages for Wikipedia. A group or a class taking French could, for instance, translate some article from the French Wikipedia. To make it even more interesting and educative - it could be to translate something of historical, geographical, cultural, or some other interest - so it would be even more than just learning how to translate (and to use computers to edit something like the Wikipedia). Maybe they could get extra credits if they could get an article to good article stage??? Anyway, this is just an idea of mine - I am not sure how to get anyone or any group inspired enough to try it. Whadaya think? Cheers, John Hill (talk) 10:57, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Re: Besos Brujos

Hello, Dr. Blofeld. You have new messages at Erik's talk page.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Polish politicians

Hi, I finished correcting the lists of Polish politicians, I also fixed titles (from Polish to English). Do you plan to do some of these articles about Polish politicians? DK4]]$4 ^(Contribs) 16:07, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Thanks! Nice work. They will all be started in due course, however at present I have a tremendous amount of cleanup/error fixing to do so it might be delayed a while... Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 16:09, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Thank you very much for your invitation! I also joined the WP:Transwiki/German. DK4]]$4 ^(Contribs) 17:15, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

AWB

I'll try tonight - have a model for me to look at? I also need to finish talkpages for Brazilian rivers. And there are several new lists of them to start, too...those are safe enough to begin using AWB, so I'll do that. --Ser Amantio di Nicolao^{Che dicono a Signa?}_{Lo dicono a Signa.} 19:25, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

OK, I'll give it a shot...we'll see how it goes. --Ser Amantio di Nicolao^{Che dicono a Signa?}_{Lo dicono a Signa.} 19:31, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

It isn't that - it's just that what you ask is a little complicated to do with AWB. I'll try, but I don't know if it will work. --Ser Amantio di Nicolao^{Che dicono a Signa?}_{Lo dicono a Signa.} 19:38, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

No, that doesn't matter - I'm not concerned about it. It's a minor edit; I can't see why anyone ought to object to it. --Ser Amantio di Nicolao^{Che dicono a Signa?}_{Lo dicono a Signa.} 19:46, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

That I definitely agree with. Ah, well...back to work for a while. --Ser Amantio di Nicolao^{Che dicono a Signa?}_{Lo dicono a Signa.} 19:53, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

I didn't want to say anything...but yes. I don't pay him any mind right now. --Ser Amantio di Nicolao^{Che dicono a Signa?}_{Lo dicono a Signa.} 19:55, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Would you believe it had never even occurred to me to ask? Shows you how much attention I pay... --Ser Amantio di Nicolao^{Che dicono a Signa?}_{Lo dicono a Signa.} 20:05, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Film cats

The lists should remain at the top - that's standard category organization, IIRC. As for the linked redirects...to be honest, I'm loathe to be responsible for the cleanup of a mess I specifically warned against at the time. Sorry. In any case, I'm in the middle of a protracted and belated task force tagging run right now anyway, so I can't really commit myself at the moment. Best of luck, though. Girolamo Savonarola (talk) 20:26, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

File copyright problem with File:ZackMorris.jpg

File Copyright problem

Thank you for uploading File:ZackMorris.jpg. However, it currently is missing information on its copyright status. Wikipedia takes copyright very seriously. It may be deleted soon, unless we can determine the license and the source of the file. If you know this information, then you can add a copyright tag to the image description page.

If you have uploaded other files, consider checking that you have specified their license and tagged them, too. You can find a list of files you have uploaded by following this link.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them at the media copyright questions page. Thanks again for your cooperation. Chris G Bot (talk) 00:24, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

File copyright problem with File:Ioan_Alexandru.jpg

File Copyright problem

Thank you for uploading File:Ioan_Alexandru.jpg. However, it currently is missing information on its copyright status. Wikipedia takes copyright very seriously. It may be deleted soon, unless we can determine the license and the source of the file. If you know this information, then you can add a copyright tag to the image description page.

If you have uploaded other files, consider checking that you have specified their license and tagged them, too. You can find a list of files you have uploaded by following this link.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them at the media copyright questions page. Thanks again for your cooperation. Chris G Bot (talk) 00:24, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Yangon

I reverted your deletion about Yangonites carrying stashes of cash. Well, stashes of cash doesn't mean buying power. In Yangon's (and Burma's) case, it simply means high inflation, not wealth. And people don't have access to credit or debit cards, so yes, even regular people have to carry lots of cash. Very annoying problem. If you ever visited Burma, you'd know.Hybernator (talk) 02:43, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

I can see now what you are trying to say but it was really written badly and misleadingly. "Stacks of cash" used in an encyclopedia looks very amateurish and it wa smisleading as if you were trying to claim everybody was reall rich and floating in money. Say something like, "Due to the problems of high inflation and the fact that many of the population do not have access to credit or debit cards, it is common to see citizens carrying a considerable amount of cash." A lot of that section reads as original research. You need to reference such claims. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 08:20, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Chopin

Thank you so very much for the link to the video with the exquisite Chopin piece! You are the only person who has every sent me Chopin! What a nice thing to do! If you ever go to Paris, look up the tiny Hotel Chopin - a very special experience if you love Chopin - and very reasonably priced when we were there some years ago. Thanks again - I hadn't got around to playing the video when you first sent me the link, but this afternoon was perfect - it really was soothing and a delight. Cheers, John Hill (talk) 05:35, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

re: Argentine films

No problem! I've discovered some amazing films from Hungary, Poland, Japan, etc, by working on the Cannes festivals, so it's been really worth while.

In light of the recent headache about German politican stubs, here's a joke that needs to read in a deadpan-German style, that I thought you'd appreicate:

Why are there no asprin in the jungle?

Hehe. Lugnuts (talk) 06:52, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

LOL yes Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 08:31, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Not seen that film - the whole horror genre does nothing for me, TBH! I'll look at that category thing later. Lugnuts (talk) 08:06, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

Started work on the categories, including adding a neat little template (check out the 2008 cat). I'll do 3 or 4 years' worth each day, and they'll soon be done. Lugnuts (talk) 17:09, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

List of German Christian Democratic Union politicians

Hello Dr. Blofeld!

I will look at some of the politicians from your list. But not all of them are "important" - and this is not "my party". But I will take a look and if I'm able to help, I will do this ...

Greetings from old Germany in old Europe --Togodumnus (talk) 20:31, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

DO you think, my contributions for 'Peter Deeg' are enough??? And I am German, so I make mistakes in my English. But I think there are enough helpful people hanging around in en.wikipedia!?!? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Togodumnus (talk • contribs) 20:37, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Brazil stubs

Sure - I didn't realize that there were stub tags for them all already.

Didn't mean to disappear today, but the firewall wouldn't let me edit anything for most of the day. Lord knows why... --Ser Amantio di Nicolao^{Che dicono a Signa?}_{Lo dicono a Signa.} 21:12, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

I can try, but I'll be out tonight, and likely tomorrow night as well. If it can wait until Saturday I'll try it then. --Ser Amantio di Nicolao^{Che dicono a Signa?}_{Lo dicono a Signa.} 21:19, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Well, I can see what I can do tonight, but I doubt I'll have time for that much. --Ser Amantio di Nicolao^{Che dicono a Signa?}_{Lo dicono a Signa.} 21:28, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

The 50 DYK Medal

		The 50 DYK Medal
		I, hereby award Doctorate in Evil Medicine, A.K.A Dr. Blofeld the 50 DYK Medal in recognition for your hard work, particularly on geography of all around the world. Keep up the good work and it wouldn't be too long til you're eligible for entry into getting the 100 DYK medal!

Caspian blue 21:38, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Well done buddy! Your Deforestation series is extraordinary. I consider Deforestation in Sri Lanka is the crown jewel of Wildlife of Sri Lanka series. Keep up the good work buddy!--Chanaka L (talk) 03:56, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

Films list

I looked through the list, and I actually don't own very many of them. But I have seen all of them except for seven or eight of them. Those would definitely be quite the additions to my collection at some point though! --Happy editing! Nehrams2020 (talk • contrib) 23:41, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Cloud Gate FA thanks

Cloud Gate has achieved WP:FA status and you have been an active editor of the article. Thank you for your involvement.

This user helped promote Cloud Gate to featured article status.

--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 03:28, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

Congratulations, Blofeld!--Caspian blue 03:32, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

Pham Van Son

You inadvertently put the ARVN general under this guy! YellowMonkey (cricket photo poll!) paid editing=POV 08:06, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

Your comment

Hi, I've asked for clarification of your comment at the FAC on the Senate article page, hope you will oblige.--Wehwalt (talk) 14:13, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

I'm still here

Just finished my bar exam yesterday (phew!) and am in Massachusetts till the 5th, then in Alaska till the 18th. I can help out. What needs doing? Calliopejen1 (talk) 14:15, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

I like the idea of reinvigorating WP:ECHO. Do you want to ask on their talk page? They don't like me because I removed a lot of their worthless banners. :) Calliopejen1 (talk) 14:18, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, nearly deserted. When I proposed removing their tags, it was at least a week before anyone noticed. I suppose it might be best to avoid any confrontation. I think maybe it would be best to make a wikiproject translation, with a bot/stub-building taskforce. Then the expansion and stubbing could be under the same umbrella. I think that makes more sense than grouping this with content we're moving to Wookiepedia etc at WP:TRANSWIKi. Calliopejen1 (talk) 14:23, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

Upcoming work

FAC pipeline: Crown Fountain recent WP:PR, McDonald's Cycle Center @PR, Trump International Hotel and Tower (Chicago) @PR and whenever Dabomb87 gets around to tweaking Rob Pelinka it will get worked into the rotation.

GAC pipeline: Burnham Plan.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 14:34, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

AWB

Er...I did a hundred more rivers the other night, actually...--Ser Amantio di Nicolao^{Che dicono a Signa?}_{Lo dicono a Signa.} 19:41, 31 July 2009 (UTC)