User talk:DanDanner

Bedbug

Regarding this [1] edit of yours: they are called bedbugs, not "nestbugs", and the term usually refers to a single species that lives preferentially, if not exclusively, on human blood. "Warm-blooded animals including humans" makes it sound as if human blood is an incidental diet for the most notable species. It's far from being incidental. If your point is to put humans on a level with other species, a la Deep Ecology, well, that's rather WP:POV, I'm afraid. I wasn't happy with the wording as it stood, but I don't think your change really improves matters. Yakushima (talk) 14:19, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

Hi, I like your re-write. It adds information that I did not know when I made my edit, and it explains why my edit was, unintentionally, misleading. Also, I did not use the term "nestbugs". Respectfully, DanDanner

Very sorry, I was unclear -- when I said "they are not called nestbugs", it was alluding to the fact that, in common use, bedbugs are seen as attracted to (human) beds, not (animal) nests. I didn't mean that I thought you'd written "nestbugs" yourself. I get too clever sometimes. I'm glad you spurred me to make those changes, though. In fact, I help run a small inn that has had bedbug problems (hence my obsessive interest in this topic), and it took Wikipedia pointing out to me that bedbugs can drink non-human blood to make me realize that if we didn't also solve the problem of mice infiltrating our place, we might be on a treadmill with the bedbugs as well. No matter how far we drove them back, we might only be driving them toward another food source (mice), giving them a chance to come back stronger and bite us and our guests again. I think the lead now invites people to that valuable inference more quickly. So, your wording change was all to the good.

As long as I'm here: I'm also sorry for the slightly frosty tone of my first comment above. If it's any excuse, this article has been useful but also very frustrating for me, because of both persistent vandalism and many well-intentioned changes made by people who don't understand Wikipedia editing policies. It puts my guard up far too high sometimes. If you have any other ideas for improvements to this article, you should feel free, of course, to make them. If I have problems with your changes, I'll bring my objections here, or I'll leave notice here that I've brought them up on the Talk page. Yakushima (talk) 11:10, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

Hi Yakushima, thank you for your reply. I can imagine your frustration with trying to maintain this page. I'm a computer programmer, and I contribute to Wikipedia only very occassionally, and my contributions are almost always minor edits, so I would not be surprised if I accidentally break the Wikipedia editing policies. I'm well-intentioned, but I might still break things, so I can certainly see how that would be frustrating. And I can certainly understand how vandalism could be frustrating.

Thank you for your contributions to Wikipedia, and the best of luck with your Inn. Regards, DanDanner 16:14, 5 July 2010 (UTC)