User talk:Skinsmoke/Archive 2006

Welcome!

Hello, Skinsmoke/Archive 2006, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Where to ask a question, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome!  Dr Debug (Talk) 01:28, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

Bredbury

I've added some links to railway stations. The Bredbury page has had more than its fair share of graffiti artists recently. I hope you can keep up! Chevin 18:43, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply. If I make make a hint, if you click on "Show preview" after you've made a change, you can view and test the page. You can do this as often as you like until you are satisfied, then click on "Save page" to add it to the server. That way you don't get a long list of amended versions in the history. Did you notice the tick box "Watch this page" which means every time you look at your watchlist it wil show up if any one else has made any changes. Best wishes. Chevin 09:32, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your message. What I do if I'm making big changes to a page is to open the editing page than copy and paste the text in the window over into Wordpad. (Doing it this way copies the link brackets as well)Then I can amend it off line and at my leisure, with the changes in red. Then I can open up the editing page in Wikipedia again and copy over the red bits. This takes the urgency out of the situation, so long as one notes whether other people have made changes in the meantime so as not to overwrite them. Chevin 09:28, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

Character Encoding

My firefox (in WindowsXP) is set to UTF-8 and I don't think I have installed any extra font's or anything. Maybe someone else on the help desk will have further insights into the problem. --Martyman-(talk) 01:34, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Answer copied from the Help desk:

I would say the problem is indeed the font. Or rather, the fact that MSIE is the only common browser which is unable to select characters from fonts other than the default one. Compare the following: Č and Č. If the second one shows but the first one doesn't, it means the article is missing the ugly hack used to force MSIE to behave like a modern browser would (probably because the original editor of the article used a better browser). If that's the case, you can fix it yourself (using {{unicode}}, {{IPA}}, or {{polytonic}} in the correct places), or ask for it to be fixed by someone else. --cesarb 03:30, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

I'm copying it here before the question is archived there. --cesarb 03:33, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

Cesar, Many thanks for your response on the problems of Czech (and other characters). It's the first reply that makes sense! I will try what you've suggested, though the problem must be huge. I have discovered a work round that helps me (but nobody else), which is to paste the appropriate words into a Microsoft Word document, where they show up correctly. Skinsmoke 01:41, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

Another workaround would be to use Firefox. Just like with Microsoft Word, they should show up correctly; the problem is with MSIE only (and perhaps with Netscape 4, but nobody uses Netscape 4 anymore). In fact, most modern browsers should work fine. I hope future versions of MSIE are better. --cesarb 03:31, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

No luck with your suggested workround. However, I'm puzzled why the problem should be confined to Wikipedia. Practically all other websites display correctly. Is the problem not a lot simpler than everyone is assuming? Wikipedia uses Sans Seriff, which in MSIE is not Unicode enabled (unlike, for instance, Arial, which is). Skinsmoke 00:09, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

Even if the font used does not support the requested character, the browser should be able to look for the character in other fonts. MSIE cannot do that; it needs to be told explicitly to change to another font. The problem does not happen in other sites because they use mostly characters from a single language, and select a font which is known to have alls these characters. And "sans-serif" is in fact the browser's default sans-serif font; you could try changing that default from Arial to Arial Unicode MS. --cesarb 00:16, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

Tuvalu and other places in Oceania

I see you have a considerable interest in Tuvalu, and maybe in other states in the region. Would you be interested in helping out at Portal:Oceania, in particular adding to the "Oceania news". Ideally, any item added should also be included in a relevant article in greater detail, and that article bolded in the news item, but it's acceptable to add news items without an updated article. Also, any feedback on the portal is welcomed on its talk page.-gadfium 08:10, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

Thank you!

Your recent articles (example: Yawan District) are great! -ENIAC (Talk) (Current Projects) 12:58, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

Ishtarlay District

Thanks for the article, but was the district really created in the year 200? I suspect that's a slight typo! Tonywalton  | Talk 10:03, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

No problem. I happened to be on NP patrrol and noticed some short articles - often a sign of test pages or nonsense (but not in your case). I'd have guessed at 2004 or 2005, given the dates on your other articles, but I'm no expert!. Regards, Tonywalton  | Talk 10:46, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

Mazari Sharif?

I changed the Ziarat article back to the old form because I thought you were committing vandalism. After looking at your contribs, I see that you're systematically changing it across WP. You're probably right that the Afghan government decided to change the name, but ... I don't KNOW that, and neither do most of the people with Afghan-related articles on their watchlists. It would help if you put a note in the discussion pages with a reference, and added "See talk" to your edit summary, so that other editors know that there's a valid reason for the change. Those of us who've been fighting vandalism for years are suspicious of unexplained changes. Zora 15:02, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

I see you changed the spelling of Mazari Sharif in many of the articles about Guantanamo detainees.

Sorry, I think that is a mistake.

1. We shouldn't be correcting spelling and grammar mistakes in quoted material.
2. I transcribed those allegations myself. The American intelligence analysts who compiled those allegations never mastered Afghan place-names. The spelling of those Afghan place-names is wildly inconsistent between detainees CSRT and ARB documents. Place-names are even spelled inconsistently within single documents.

IMO it is important to preserve rogue spellings in quotes from the documents American intelligence analysts produced from the Guantanamo interrogations.

Other contributors who use robot-mediated editing tools have corrected other spelling and grammar errors in the quoted material I transcribed from the documents the American intelligence analysts composed. They told me I should have marked each error in the original with a {{sic}}. Well, I am not going to go back and add a {{sic}} to each one I already put in. That would be as much work as the original transcription. But I have started using {{sic}}.

Would you please stop using your robot-mediated correction on articles about Guantanamo detainess? Thanks. If you disagree with me, let's discuss it.

I have no problem using the new official Afghan transliteration outside of quoted material. But I think all the instances where you changed other transliterations to Mazari Sharif should be changed back, with a {{sic}} added after each one.

American intelligence analysts spelled Jama'at Tablighi wildly inconsistently, and just about every other Afghan, Pakistani or Arabic charity, or political group, or militant group.

American intelligence analysts showed terrible confusion over the spelling of Afghan and Arabic names. A serious concern when so many of the detainees are held because their names matches those on a list captured from al Qaeda suspects offices or the hard drives in their computers.

Cheers! -- Geo Swan 16:15, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

Woops. You ignored the {{sic}} here and here. Other users of robot-mediated editing told me if I wanted to make sure the questionable spelling in the original material was preserved from robot correction I had to follow each instance with a {{sic}}. Well, I did that, but you corrected them anyway. Please don't do that.

Cheers! -- Geo Swan 16:45, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

Ah. I see you got my note. At the risk of seeming hard to please I think leaving Mazar-E-Sharif, or adding a {{sic}} after the questionable spelling, is more useful than using a piped wikilink as you did [ http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Abdul_Rahman_Mohamed_Saleh_Naser&diff=prev&oldid=80846107 here].

• If you leave the questionable spelling, and use a redirection, you can count the number of instances of the different spellings. In retrospect I wish I had done this with every instance of questionable spelling, rather than using piped wikilinks.
• Linking using the original questionable spelling, and using redirection, is safer. I know it is unlikely, in this particular instance. But when we second guess the correct spelling, we open up the possibility that we will be fooled by a surface similarity, and conflate two articles that should be distinct. If we leave the original spelling, and use redirection, if we learn that there should be two articles, after all, it will require changing only one file -- the one that was originally a redirection. This is much easier to fix than a series of piped wikilinks. IMO at least. Does that make sense to you?

Cheers! -- Geo Swan 18:42, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

I found some autoblocks under Maximilianb, but at this point they all appear to be disabled. Go ahead and try editing -- the sandbox is handy -- and see if that works for you. Luna Santin 02:40, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

Districts of Afghanistan

Thanks for the multiple articles on Districts of Afghanistan. It's been a sort of pet project of mine for a while to get articles for all of them, though there's a long, long way to go. You might want to have a look at Talk:Districts of Afghanistan, and feel free to add your own comments. Indidentally, I've replied to your message on my talk page. --OpenToppedBus - Talk to the driver 14:59, 14 December 2006 (UTC)