User talk:Dpbsmith/Archive06

List of agnostics

I've pruned List of agnostics significantly, retaining only verified agnostics. Could I persuade you to change your vote from "delete" to "keep"?

Democratic Ideals

If it matters, I've worked on the article a bit and added citations. You may wish to take a look at it again. =) Xaa 17:20, 6 August 2005 (UTC)

Cardioretinometry

I wonder if you would take a look at this article. There was a vfd on an article with the same name, but this isn't a cut & paste of the deleted one. I can't tell if this one is re-worded nonsense or potentially good stuff. Joyous (talk) 01:30, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

• Yeesh. I don't have time to research this properly now. Some quick Googling suggests that CardioRetinometry (yes, the Google results have the capital R) is some kind of vitamin-C-related quackery. I think it's garbage, but I can't be sure yet. Dpbsmith (talk) 01:38, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
• On comparing the new article with the deleted one, I conclude that it's a rewritten article presenting essentially the same material and speediable as re-creation of material prevously voted for deletion. It should be noted that the references do NOT refer to "CardioRetinometry" and the article acknowledges that it is original research: "CardioRetinometry is therefore proposed to the scientific community for further evaluation as a surrogate predictor of cardiovascular disease." I'm speedy-deleting it. Dpbsmith (talk) 01:44, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for your assistance! Joyous (talk) 01:50, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

Also, for the record: PubMed search (National Library of Medicine) on "cardioretinometry" yielded:

The following term was not found and ignored: cardioretinometry. No items found.

ProQuest search on "ProQuest Research Library" and "Medical Science: AMA Titles: Abstracts & Indexing" which includes "Archives of Opthalmology" yields: "Searching for cardioretinometry did not find any documents." Compare: "714 documents found for: photodynamic therapy." Dpbsmith (talk) 02:13, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

Race to the bottom

About Stephan Kinsella, I said: Keep. We have articles on equally undistinguished people who are Wikipedians. Grace Note 01:22, 29 July 2005 (UTC) and you said: That's irrelevant. We are considering this article. If the existence of inappropriate articles in Wikipedia was considered to justify the addition of more inappropriate articles, we'd have a rapid "race to the bottom." Dpbsmith (talk) 17:42, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

The point I was making was not that other articles are inappropriate so we should keep this one but that the bar is (thankfully) rather low. Personally, I feel the bias against biographical articles is unfortunate. It's a pity it has been written into policy. I don't think well-written short articles about people do any harm. My view is, and always has been, that crap articles are a bad thing but good ones, even about the "non-notable", do no harm. Sorry it's taken a while to get to your comment. Grace Note 04:57, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

"Crap articles are a bad thing but..."

"My view is, and always has been, that crap articles are a bad thing but good ones, even about the "non-notable", do no harm."

I pretty much mostly agree with you. It is what I personally think about articles about high schools, street intersections, "fancruft," etc. As long as a reasonable amount of work went into the article, as long as it is reasonably thorough, and not just written off the top of the head with unattributed "facts" that someone is pretty sure he read somewhere.

Well, if you allowed that the article in question could be short, if there's not much to be said about the subject, I'd agree entirely.

Someone wisely pointed out a long time ago that bad articles that nobody reads do no harm, and bad articles that many people read are likely to be improved.

That's more or less my approach. Bad, short articles that readers stumble on are also likely to be edited. They can be editor lures! It's how I started.

(But, again, where I part company with the inclusionists is I believe that bad articles should be deleted if there is no credible prospect that someone is going to improve them. I don't approve of leaving them to fester on the assumption that they will magically improve themselves.

Perhaps you could improve them instead of deleting them ;-)

Similarly, I think it is irresponsible to create a substub if one has no serious intention of coming back to do more work on it. The responsible thing is to put in an article request instead).

A substub yes, I agree. A well-written stub is a jewel though.

I part company a little bit in the case of articles that are promotional. The fact that anybody can insert material into Wikipedia makes it a tempting target of abuse for people trying to publicize things.

Yes, I agree with that. I'd be in favour of stronger approaches to advertising. Perhaps not deletion, but a page for alerts at least, and a coordinated effort to "de-ad" articles that are nothing but.

The go-getter boys quickly insert material about themselves, their health theories, their businesses, their soon-to-be-produced movies, etc. anywhere on the Net that permits it. A Wikipedia article is great way to boost a Google rank, and it often comes up in mirrors as "Encyclopedia article about..."

Yes, that's true, but we have policies to protect against these things. Okay, they don't always work but they exist. I don't think there's anything wrong in itself with writing about your own company (or yourself) but the content ought to meet the standards we set for any article. So if you write ad copy, you must expect to be heavily and summarily edited. If you resist it, then I think there should be scope for action.

I think that it does damage Wikipedia if we do not have a firm community consensus that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and that articles in it must be "encyclopedic," even if it is very, very hard to establish just where the borders lie.

I think you have to accept that views of what is "encyclopaedic" are going to vary a great deal. Some see Wikipedia as nothing more than a bigger Britannica. Others see it as something much grander. I'm in the latter camp. Working for Britannica doesn't enthuse me. Jimbo's vision does.

I also have a strong feeling that all articles must be written at least partially with the intention of serving some putative readership, not just satisfying the self-actualization needs of the contributor.

Yes, absolutely. I take the readers first view too. I also get very annoyed when people put less effort into an article than they do into their homework! But that's why we're here: to fix that and to make up for others' slackness. Okay, it's sometimes painful (and it's work that is not given much credit -- elsewhere today I read a snippy comment that I make "minor edits", when largely what I do is fix crap articles).

So, there's no bright line. Very obviously an article about Stephan Kinsella does not damage Wikipedia.

So long as Kinsella himself stays within the bounds of our policies. Frankly, I'd like to see the line drawn on the grounds of quality and informativeness, rather than notability. Write an article about your dad if you like, but you can only include what is notable about him. If he is a policeman, you could say that: "Joe Smith is a policeman in Chickpea, Illinois". End of article. I can't see that that harms. What harms is to continue to give details of his career, a list of arrests and so on.

However, allowing pitbull-tenacious self-promoters to use WIkipedia as a publicity medium does damage Wikipedia. I don't know if you were involved in the the Shawn Mikula business, but it was fairly ugly. This was a grad student at Johns Hopkins with no obvious notability who was just plain insisting on using Wikipedia for his vanity page, repeatedly re-creating it over and over, etc.

I think those cases would be a lot easier to approach though if you did not say "you must be notable" but said instead "you must only write what is notable about you", be it ever so little. Make the policy "no shit" rather than "be notable".

So, I'm fairly mellow about good articles on most topics, but I tend to be somewhat more picky about categories of articles that are intrinsically likely to be abused by self-promoters. That would include biographies. Dpbsmith (talk) 22:22, 13 August 2005 (UTC)

You know, we agree at least 95% on this subject and yet we draw such different conclusions! Still, it's a pleasure to chat about it without the usual heat of VfD. Grace Note 00:25, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

Beefstew

Would it be possible for me to borrow your beefstew list. With credit given of course to you. I'm very impressed by it. Gateman1997 21:03, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

Time Magazine covers

I'd appreciate any help you can give me with two items, both related.

• In the Categories: Fair use TIME magazine covers I seem to have inadvertently created a non-cover picture. I was in the Waldo Peirce article, trying to insert a Time cover that he painted of Hemingway in 1937 and was fiddling around with a Time cover from the Jimmie Foxx article, trying to duplicate its settings but with the Hemingway specifications instead. Imagine my astonishment to discover that I had inadvertently copied and sent (I guess) the Waldo Peirce article photograph into the list of Time covers. I dunno how I could have possibly done this, since I was still in the "edit this page" mode at the time and never saved that particular edit at all. Anyway, it's there, if you go to the Time cover category. I've been trying like crazy to delete it from the real covers but can't find any means of doing so. Could you zoom in and make it disappear? Sorry for the inconvenience, and I'm still baffled as to how I got it there....

• I can't seem to find any way of bringing in the Time cover that I want. The Jimmy Foxx image "edit this page" says:

{TIME} (there's actually a second pair of { } there, but that's to make a template....

SOURCE: http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,1101290729,00.html

which made me think that I could copy the similar source for the Waldo Peirce cover into the Upload file source field:

http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,1101371018,00.html

but this doesn't seem to work at all. Somehow the guy who put in the Jimmy Foxx cover managed to turn it into a Wikipedia jpg image. Is there any Help info somewhere that could give me a clue as to how to do the same?

Thanks for your help! (And are you sure in the O'Hara article, in the first paragraph, that the final sentence shouldn't have something that I think was originally there, more or less like "...particularly among the well-to-do, which was a major theme in his works.") Hayford Peirce 21:45, 13 August 2005 (UTC)

John O'Hara redux

Thanks for the time you took on the Time cover baloney. As you say, the Waldo photo is now missing. But it was sure there for a couple of hours, just before I wrote you. Verra strange, but, as you say, I *have* seen Wiki do strange stuff with images before. I forgot to wait a while and let things cool off. Next time I'll give it a day or so before panicking, hehe...

As for the O'Hara sentence, it now reads, in its entirety: "He was a keen observer of social status and class differences, particularly among the well-to-do." Someone has taken out the "and wrote about".... A year ago it read: "He also a keen eye for, and wrote about, social status and class differences, particularly among the well-to-do." I *think* that I wrote that myself, and that you then polished it up a little bit. But in any case, I think the "and wrote about", should go back in.... Hayford Peirce 22:13, 13 August 2005 (UTC)

Oh, I see. Yeah, I was the one who took it out. Here's what was in my mind. First, I thought the wording of the sentence was awkward. Second, I was sort of at a loss for a concise way to characterize the social classes he wrote about.

I don't like "well-to-do." Which, at least in the U. S., is nothing more than a euphemism for "rich."

For one thing, what's-her-name—Gloria Wandrous?—in BUtterfield 8 was certainly not well-to-do herself. Neither was the writer who is the protagonist of The Instrument. And where would you put Julian English? Part of "the local 400," maybe, but not way up in their ranks. Works for a living, rather than living off "the interest on the interest." And is experiencing financial insecurity.

His novels generally involve people interacting with people who went to an Ivy League or equivalent school, live on the good street in town, and are among the social elite—but we're talking about the social elite of Gibbsville. Biggish frogs, but not the biggest, in medium-sized, if not small ponds. People who drive Buicks, not Cadillacs. (Dated, dated... oh, well...) In fact part of the dynamic usually involves the social insecurity of these people who know they are outranked by others.

So I guess here's what I'd say. I'd prefer it if you didn't just put the sentence back the way it was. See if you can find some succinct way to add a sentence characterizing the social strata he wrote about. Dpbsmith (talk) 22:39, 13 August 2005 (UTC)

P. S. Whatever you do I won't revert. Dpbsmith (talk) 22:40, 13 August 2005 (UTC)

No, no, you misinterpret me. (And I do appreciate all your analysis of what, and whom, O'Hara was writing about. He obviously did write about more than just the "well-to-do" -- that was sloppiness on my part.) What I was concerned about was the "writing about them" being missing from the sentence. Lemme see if I can find some graceful way of getting it back it.... Hayford Peirce 22:49, 13 August 2005 (UTC)

I've redone the first paragraph but am the first to admit that my stuff could using some polishing of its own. But I'm pretty convinced that all the stuff about Coal Region etc. should be banished.... Hayford Peirce 23:12, 13 August 2005 (UTC)

How about "O'Hara was a keen observer of social status and class differences, and wrote frequently about the socially ambitious?" or "O'Hara was a keen observer of social status and class differences, and wrote frequently about social climbers?" Being ambitious or being a "social climber" means striving to attain a higher status, etc. It might appropriate to mention somewhere that he grew up in the coal region, but it certainly doesn't need to go in the first paragraph, since he wasn't part of the mining community like, say, Homer Hickam. His coal region origins weren't exactly part of his persona. Dpbsmith (talk) 00:09, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

We seem to have been telepathically linked about "socially ambitious". I thought about using "social climbers" but wasn't certain if that was too colloquial or not. It's probably better than what I've written. Why don't you fiddle with it when you have a moment. And I agree that the coal region should be mentioned, but not in the first sentence. It seems fine now.... Hayford Peirce 00:49, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

Dpbsmith Coal Region should be mentioned in John O'Hara After all it is his heritage, as is mine too, and glad I was. Thanks so much. Opinion? Scotty

Catholic plot for world domination

I understand & sympathise completely with everything that you say. But I didn't tag it as a copyvio. User:Johann Wolfgang did: . I just moved the thing around. Given the standard treatment of copyvios (where all text is removed), I just assumed that the text remaining there was left in error so I took it out. I'll admit that I didn't feel up to reading the source of the material in question. Slac speak up! 13:54, 18 August 2005 (UTC)

Which was stupid, of course. I got carried away but I thought it was funny *sheepish* Slac speak up! 22:53, 18 August 2005 (UTC)

Barbara Nitke VFD

Many thanks for the kind words on the Barbara Nitke VFD vote page. Writers of "fringe" articles appreciate all the support we can get. --Outlander 13:30, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

It's Dartmouth time of year, again

• Thayer Dining Hall (VFD discussion)

Ahem. ☺ Uncle G 13:08:24, 2005-08-24 (UTC)

University FA

The other day I thunk up a new idea for waging the endless war against academic boosterism. What if we picked a school which is currently hardly covered at all and pushed its article to FA status? See, a while back I noticed that Calvin and Hobbes was suffering extreme factoid bloat (and was poorly referenced besides), so I nominated it for FA removal. Several people managed to get together and save its FA status, and at the moment it's actually a stronger article than when it was first promoted, particularly where references are concerned. FA votes, for either promotion or demotion, seem to attract more critical thinking than the various other kinds of discussion. I believe it would be convenient to have a "gold standard" against which one could compare other articles, or even the same article at a later date. If the Harvard article were filling up with excess laudatory quotes, or if Dartmouth was bursting with trivia, etc., etc., we could direct attention to the Featured University Article and say, "Here is how rankings were handled in this case."

The school would have to be chosen carefully. I'd suggest finding a college or university with some amount of history, a verifiable reputation for quality in some field, and a tangible media presence — say, one which has appeared in a couple movies. Looking at US schools, Wellesley College springs to mind. Just compare its article with Massachusetts Institute of Technology and taste the good ol' systemic bias! A reader browsing the FA list who sees MIT placed there would likely say, "Of course. Just nerds patting each other on the back." Likewise for Caltech. I think we could dodge this accusation with Wellesley. Plus, I know people who went there, and in these days of pervasive digital cameras I bet I could score a few GFDL photos.

Anville 15:27, 24 August 2005 (UTC)

Technology Review

Hi. Unfortunately I had to put a POV tag on your Technology Review entry. Re-read the entry and I think you'll find that the whole thing sounds like an attack on the magazine now, which I hope was not your intent. -- BrassRat 09:47, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

Thanks

Thanks so much for taking the time to explain the whole linkspam issue and how to handle it. Jeremy J. Shapiro 00:23, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

Incompatible votes in guide

Based on the talk page, I think you wrote this:

• "Delete all article content and edit history and then re-create as a redirect to Example"

An exception to this is the case of an article where, apart from the AFD nomination, the entire article history consists of a single edit by a single user. In this case, the GFDL requirements are easily satisfied by a simple attribution on the target article's Talk page and "merge and delete" is a reasonable disposition.

It has been suggested that merge and delete is possible with proper attribution by moving the AFDed page to a subpage of the talk page of the article it's merged with and linking it from the talk page. This would preserve history and not leave behind a possibly meaningless (or worse) redirect.

I would like to point out the fact there's discussion of merge and delete under Delete and redirect. Could you also explain to me why Delete and redirect would be incompatible if no content of the original article is retained? - Mgm|^(talk) 11:36, September 6, 2005 (UTC)

Well, I find the page confusing, so I'll just explain what I put there and why. I personally believe that in many cases "merge and delete" is appropriate, because I am a "mergist Wikipedian." That is, I detest the creation of substub articles, apparently for the joy of creating them, for material that, it seems to me, would be much more appropriate in the context of a larger article. And in most of the cases I am interested in, the material is essentially the work of a single contributor, apart from minor typo-fixing and insertion of AfD tags.

I am talking about the sort of article like "List of mayors of Newcastle" or wherever it was. It's just a compact list, the article on Newcastle is short and has plenty of room for it, and there's absolutely no point to having it as a separate article because someone who wants to find the mayors of Newcastle is much more likely to try typing in "Newcastle" than "List of mayors of Newcastle."

A while ago, I rather suddenly noticed that whenever I proposed a "merge and delete," someone would instantly snap back "Invalid vote! Violates GFDL." At that time I engaged in a number of discussions with oldtimers trying to figure out what this was all about, and was told that the requirements of the GFDL are by no means clear, the Wiki history mechanism is by no means the only way to satisfy them, and it was always possible to perform a valid merge-and-delete by merging histories, a laborious operation that any sysop can perform.

My belief is that this "incompatible vote" stuff was either being promulgated by people who enjoy waving rules around—like the people who used to say "I had to do this unreasonable thing because the article was 33K long;" or it was, forgive me, simply an inclusionist ploy.

So, I added language to the section to clarify that a) a merge and delete is always a possible, valid option, but it is frowned upon because sysops don't want to perform the work involved; b) in the (frequent!) special case where the material to be merged-and-deleted is essentially one contributor's work, it is easy to satisfy the GFDL with a note on the Talk page and a little common sense.

With regard to your specific comments: a) I don't see where the reference to "delete and redirect" says anything about merging; b) I'm not a GFDL maven but I don't see a thing wrong with "delete and redirect" in the case where no old content was used.

Of course, I don't understand why it would ever be important to get the old cruft out of the History, except in very special cases. Dpbsmith (talk) 14:51, 6 September 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/JDizzle Comics

Hello, you voted on this VfD which I had accidentlally pasted Gillian Slovo instead of JDizzle Comics. I cleared all votes in order to remove any bias because of my stupidity so please vote again knowing that it is about JDizzle Comics. Sorry and thanks. gren グレン 21:29, 6 September 2005 (UTC)

The scope of VfU

Considering the Harry Potter trolling VfU discussion and several recent ones, it's time we revived the discussion on Wikipedia talk:Votes for undeletion#The scope of VfU and dealt with the question directly. Whilst you weren't involved in the original discussion, your remarks on this VfU suggested you might nevertheless want to chip in, so I thought I'd let you know. -Splash 21:51, 13 September 2005 (UTC)

vfd

i was ironically amused by your comment on the presidential rape vfd. i actually created the article for pretty much the opposite reason you suggest. the clinton article was being completely dominated by scandal trivia, so i began spinning them off to subarticles. i decided to create a unified presidential rape article to provide a little context. but, of course, the clinton part of that article got swamped with a play-by-play, which i've now mostly removed. at any rate, my purpose in creating it was to prevent endless battles and scandal-mongering on the main clinton page. if deleted, i fear that will be the result again. Derex 00:59, 15 September 2005 (UTC)

Ah. Well, it seems I was wrong. I hate it when that happens. Cheers! Dpbsmith (talk) 01:44, 15 September 2005 (UTC)

Re: Picture of Easter Eggs that you contributed

Hi. I nominated

as a featured picture. There's some comments made about the nomination that I wondered if you could respond to at Wikipedia:Featured_picture_candidates/Eggs. Thanks for the picture. --bodnotbod 21:33, 15 September 2005 (UTC)

Visicalc

The page creates a false impression by omitting Visicalc which was the first spreadsheet and which prompted IBM to enter the desktop computer field which lead to the IBM PC and to Microsoft.

That section of the article is not describing the general software milieu. It is not a history of IBM PC software. It is attempting to explain, very specifically, the reasons why PCs that were merely MS-DOS compatible, rather than IBM hardware-compatible, failed. They failed because virtually all of the commercially important software wrote directly to the IBM hardware, rather than being "well-behaved" and writing only to the MS-DOS API. Lotus 1-2-3 is mentioned because Lotus 1-2-3 vs. Context MBA is an almost perfect illustration of why software developers did this.

I fully recognize that Visicalc on the Apple ][ was the breakthrough that made the PC possible. Dpbsmith (talk) 23:51, 15 September 2005 (UTC)

Localizing

Dear dpbs, there's some talk of having Wikimania in Boston next year. Please comment on that page if it strikes your fancy.

Also, there's a meetup two Mondays from now in Cambridge; Jimbo is likely to be around. Would you be able to join us then?

Finally, a few locals are thinking of forming an Ignobels "delegation" for October 4. I'm not quite sure what our theme would be, perhaps something inspired by WP:LAME... +sj + 10:31, 16 September 2005 (UTC)

Mirthless in Beantown? +sj + 03:07, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

Level two fun alert

This is your last warning. The next time you engage in mirthful behavior you will be spanked with Texture's shoe.

Please check your images

I noticed that you have some images in the category Category:Images with unknown source. Due to the vast number of images in this category (12000+), and the fact that, lacking a source, they present considerable copyright uncertanty, Jimbo has stated, and added to the Criteria for Speedy Deletion, "Images in category "Images with unknown source" or "Images with unknown copyright status" which have been in the category for more than 7 days, regardless of when uploaded." This means the images can, and will, be deleted with no notice. To see a list of all the images you've uploaded(at least, under this username), review the upload log. You might also find User:Pearle/by-author-Category:Images_with_unknown_source.txt to be useful(search for your username). If neither of those work, you can find a list of all the images you uploaded(mixed in with all the images you edited) by viewing your contributions by namespace. If you have any questions, please let me know. JesseW, the juggling janitor 22:08, 20 September 2005 (UTC)

vfu relisting for Fuck the south

Don't distress :) - looks like you got it correct last time :). Ryan Norton ^{T | @ | C} 21:42, 24 September 2005 (UTC)

mmmmm.....

mmmmm..... Nedick's and Absolut! A nice break from Grape Nehi and Veuve Clicquot..... - Nunh-huh 02:36, 25 September 2005 (UTC)

Truly, "nausea in a glass." But when, how about... Moxie and Campari? Two taste sensations in one! Or is it three in one, counting Campari's fruit taste and bile aftertaste as two? Dpbsmith (talk) 02:39, 25 September 2005 (UTC)

For a truly bilious delight, you'll be wanting some of this "liver-ripple ice-cream".... - Nunh-huh 03:16, 25 September 2005 (UTC)

Master Meme

Heh, you are reminding me why I never took another logic class after the first one I had as a freshman all those years ago.--Isotope23 23:59, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

Great Year

Just FYI I decided to use AltaVista's search engine and I found a reference to a January 28, 2004 airdate on PBS for The Great Year, according to KOCE-TV in Huntington Beach Cheers! 23skidoo 17:46, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

I'll be interested to hear what KOCE has to say. One other potential source (depending where you are) might be the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. This film (and the subject matter) is something that might be right up their alley. They probably have the DVD for sale in their gift shop! 23skidoo 23:06, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

Googolduplex

You removed the link to googolduplex which I added to names of large numbers, saying that the former article contains no extra information. That's fine with me, but I think that in that case, googolduplex should be a redirect. Would you agree with that? More importantly, I'm wondering whether the name googolduplex is used at all. Google returns some hits, but it seems many are just copied from eachother. From the talk page, you seem to have some experience with this question, so I'd like to have your opinion. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 12:29, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

This is a difficult area involving opinion. People enjoy the intellectual challenge of inventing names for large numbers and extending naming schemes. Many of these are essentially neologisms and vanity. Sometimes they appear in print, when an author is exploring the world of numbers and may say "these names could be extended" or [random person] "has proposed these additional names." I don't know where "googolduplex" came from. An a9 search on "books" (a useful resource!) turns up nothing. People enjoy proving that they know something that other people don't know, and constantly try to create articles on nonstandard extensions of numbering schemes. My personal opinion is that names of large numbers fall into three categories: "real" names that at least appear in standard dictionaries; names for large numbers that have been proposed by notable writers or mathematicians; and vanity/neologism/cruft.

It would help enormously if people would cite sources for these number names, but they rarely do.

I think you're right that Googolduplex should be a redirect to Names of large numbers. That's likely to be easier and less contentious than proposing it for deletion. Personally I do not believe googolduplex is "real," but am willing to be proved otherwise.

The key point here is that all names of numbers larger than a decillion or so are not "real" because they do not need to have names; they do not refer to anything in the physical universe, and when they are used they are always referred to by numerically ("ten to the fiftieth"). Dpbsmith (talk) 13:14, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for your answer and for creating the redirects. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 13:53, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

Visual Basic wikibook

I see you have contributed to the Visual Basic article on Wikipedia. Any chance you would like to join in editing the wikibook: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Programming:Visual_Basic_Classic? --Kjwhitefoot 08:11, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

• I'll take a peek, but I haven't used VB actively in years. (I do quite a bit with REALbasic, however). Dpbsmith (talk) 10:02, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Did not!

N'unh unh! It did not have my foreknowledge or approval -- just my mild bemusement after the fact. It should not be there. I don't want to have to see my own mug anywhere, and I only put it up, with gun, at the request of others. Once there, on my own little page, it was a way for me to change the facial expression to reflect my mood (see the Geogre-1.png, then -2, -3, etc.). The shotgun alone, with perhaps a clay pidgeon, might be a good talisman for VfD, but not me. I shall now bravely run away some more. Geogre 21:51, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

To make that a little clearer: The photo of me is on my user page. I never put it anywhere else and don't support its use anywhere else. At the same time, it's public domain. I find it amusing, like anyone would, that it became the mascot of AfD, but I didn't have anything to do with it. Geogre 09:45, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Schools

Hi, Just to comment on your comment: Wikipedia:Schools is not policy. It is not even a guideline. There is no policy that everything that "verifiably exists" is suitable for Wikipedia; on the contrary, WP:NOT notes explicitly "Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of items of information. That something is 100% true does not mean it is suitable for inclusion in an encyclopedia." There is no consensus about schools. Comments in this AfD should comment directly on this particular article and should give specific reasons why this particular article should or should not be deleted.

• That's all perfectly correct and perhaps I should explain the reasoning behind my Keep vote as you posted much the same response to a similar vote I made earlier on another school. Personally I'd delete a lot of these schools, however my reading of Wikipedia:Schools is that there is no concensus and will not be in the short-term. We can only agree to differ, recognise that schools aren't going to get deleted, and move on to using our limited time on work that will be fruitful like spam, nonsense ... So I normally abstain now but, if I do vote, it's on the lines of Wikipedia:Schools - verifiability and not notability is the only currently-workable school criterion. Dlyons493 Talk 04:57, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

I take your point. However, I feel that the school-inclusionists are all but dishonest. If Wikipedia:Schools is going to be cited at all, it should be mentioned in passing that it is not policy. School inclusionists are constantly referring to non-existent "consensuses." And I do not agree that "schools aren't going to get deleted." That's another shibboleth. A year or so ago there was a spate of high-school VfDs and that statement was made, and I spent a little over a month tracking every school article that was created to see what its disposition was. It turned out that, contrary to some assertions, nobody was systematically nominating articles on high schools; the good articles were rarely nominated. And it turned out that, contrary to some assertions, quite a few of them were being voted for deletion and deleted. Mostly ones that deserved it.

So I really wish, if you're going to cite Wikipedia:Schools, that you'd find some brief way to phrase it that explains your reasoning and captures the notion that it is at best a de facto guideline accepted by some Wikipedians.

Can do - I presumed, perhaps naively, that people were either familiar with what it said or would read it and discover that it said there wasn't consensus. Dlyons493 Talk 16:46, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Everyone is probably guilty of this from time to time--but many people give me the impression that they have made a snap judgement about their vote and then parrot anything plausible that anyone voting previously has said. If someone they know has voted, they may just "support" that person without even reading the article.

This is particularly problematical with regard to policy, for a number of reasons. First, there's a bandwagon effect. If someone says "There is consensus that all roads are notable" others will repeat it and even believe it without ever checking to see whether it's really policy. Second, policy pages are subject to change, and there are frequent errors in which experienced, well-meaning Wikipedians will verbally cite what used to be policy.

Third, there are various good-faith exaggerations and elisions. At one point some school-inclusionist was citing what he said was "consensus" on some point. It turned out, when someone finally tracked it down, that it was a consensus that had been reached on a Talk page for one article—a decision on which schools to include in one particular list of schools. He was correct that such a consensus had been reached, but incorrect in his impression that it was a wideranging consensus on schools in general. Warning language for such situations is a vague phrase like "But we decided long ago that..."

I don't mind differences of opinion about schools. And I don't mind differences of opinion about the interpretation of a policy in borderline cases. I really do mind misstatements, even if innocent, about policy and what consensuses have been formed.

I really wish people would simply vote on each school, giving a specific reason for their vote on that specific school, and then move on, without impugning the integrity of the nominator or other voters. And I really wish people would just say "this is my opinion" instead of misrepresenting it as some objective and generally agreed-on principle.

So, if you'll indulge me and find some short formula like "Per Wikipedia:schools, which, though not policy, I believe to be the only workable guideline" or something along those lines, it will make me happier.

Cheers, Dpbsmith (talk) 17:55, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

I read many school AfDs for every one in which I comment. I agree with you that schools are not being deleted currently. I don't like it because I believe that this is not a result of either consensus or good judgement, but a demonstration of the success of systematic bloc voting. It's not the most terrible thing that could happen to Wikipedia, but it's not good. On the other hand, a year or so ago you had people voting "keep" on schools who never apparently put in any work on editing them, and you now do have a cadre of people who do an adequate job of bringing them up to some minimum level of quality. Dpbsmith (talk) 09:51, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

AfD

I thought he should have been reverted, but when I saw the lengthy response you made, I didn't want to waste all your work. He explicitly deleted the instructions not to do what he did. I'm not sure what to do now. Jayjg ^(talk) 20:25, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Sunny Jim

I just thumbed through your contest entries until I came across Sunny Jim. While he's mentioned in the deletion debate on Force (cereal), it's own nomination never seems to have been finished which would disqualify it from the contest. Can you provide me with a link to the debate, speedy, or copyvio entry? - Mgm|^(talk) 21:57, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Revision3 Studios second nomination

Oh cracker most wise,
Am I totally off the beam here? I looked over the previous nom, no real evidence on encyclopedic worth as far as I could see. But I keep seeing these "it's really notable, we swear" opinions. What gives?
brenneman^(t)(c) 13:02, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Cinerama

I noticed that you contributed to the cinerama article. I looked it up because I have a new DLP TV that has a Cinerama feature, however, it does not use film. Would this feature be an imitation of cinerama? I have a 16:9 55 inch TV that slightly distorts a 4:3 image to make it fit full screen.

whicky1978 03:34, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

• What make and model of TV is it? I'd like to look at the manufacturer's website and see exactly how they describe that feature. It cannot be a good imitation of Cinerama, because standard HDTV is generally regarded as having less detail and resolution than a standard 35 mm film frame, whereas Cinerama had about three times the detail and resolution of a 35 mm film frame. Dpbsmith (talk) 15:29, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

My TV is an RCA Scenium . Cinerama has for this TV has to do with the ratio of the screen and not the quality of the picture. --whicky1978 01:47, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

Wow. I downloaded the manual and I have to say I'm baffled. They claim that it processes a 4:3 image so that it fills the screen with "very little distortion." I don't see how this is possible. I'm assuming it is some nonlinear kind of stretch, but if you have one you can tell me more. I'm guessing that it gives the picture a very distorted appearance gives the illusion that the screen is curved... and looks vaguely like the way Cinerama looked if you were sitting in a bad seat. But you tell me. What does the feature actually do when you turn it on... compared to the "stretch" feature? In particular, what happens to an object that is supposed to be rectangular, like a window or a picture on a wall? Dpbsmith (talk) 15:11, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

It definately distorts the picture (its noticible). The RCA Scenium also has a stretch feature. I think it might trim from the top and bottom and stretch it out. I suppose I could take photos, but the it might be a good idea to email RCA and ask them out it works--whicky1978 02:02, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

It stretches the sides more than the middle. The thought is (I guess) that it looks less distorted because people on TV are usually in the middle of the screen instead of one side or the other.--whicky1978 04:55, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Got it. That might be a good feature but calling it "Cinerama" doesn't make any particular sense. Is it only a horizontal stretch, as I expect? If it also stretches the picture vertically at the sides, so that a circular object in the center of the screen gets both taller and wider as it moves toward the sides, while still remaining circular, that might make a little more sense because that means the picture is being stretched into a sort of bowtie shape which is vaguely reminiscent of the logos some of the widescreen processes used. See http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/lobby.htm for examples. Actually that would look more like Superscope than Cinerama.

I think on your TV "Cinerama" just means "very good dramatic wide-screen process with a curved-screen look to it."

Oddly, the "anamorphic" widescreen processes--CinemaScope--had exactly the opposite kind of distortion. Closeup objects in the center of the screen were stretched. This was known as "anamorphic mumps". Dpbsmith (talk) 12:43, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

I've summarized this in the article under a new section, Cinerama" video stretching mode. Dpbsmith (talk) 22:36, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

As I understand it from the manual, it is only a horziontal stretch, but the sides of the picture are stretched disproportionally more than than middle. I'm thinking th screen is divided into thirds, and the left and right thirds are stretched more so than the middle thirds.--whicky1978 02:14, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

Re: enrollment management

I read the New Yorker article whose link you posted to my talk page. Actually, it was just about the first thing I read when I switched on my laptop, after a lazy Saturday morning (I'm on French time these days). Disturbing stuff to see first thing after breakfast. . . .

Two of my best friends in high school were "second-tier" academics. They were both terribly smart, but they just couldn't make themselves care about the full range of classwork one had to do in order to "excel". (Our high school had enough pretentions that, if you were one of the smart cookies and took all the AP classes, you got yourself into a pretty serious and high-pressure environment. Most of the "gamesmanship" which The Hidden Curriculum portrays at MIT showed up at Virgil I. Grissom High, too — and oddly enough, it's the only school in town which doesn't draw students from a low-income housing project.) In one case, my friend just wanted to program computers and read his way through the last century of science fiction. The other was just an inimitable underachiever: he became so good at forging signatures and getting his absences excused that he could pile up twenty or thirty "holidays" each semester. He also rode on a Jeep's spare tire when we went to a scholars' bowl competition one day.

The first guy went to Mississippi State and the second to Arizona State. Either one would have done fine at MIT, had they compromised with the Institute's "hidden curriculum". The trick would've been making it through the admissions process. The former didn't try at all, and the latter, well, he showed up at his interview in a baseball cap, a pair of torn jeans stained with Alabama red clay and a T-shirt advertising the lighthouses of the East Coast.

It's nice to know that the admissions process I survived is a legacy of rampant anti-Semitism. The flip-side is that most of the interesting people I met started off completely befuddled on how they got in. My roommate for two years insisted, half jokingly, that he only got past the Admissions Office because they had to fill their quota of guys from Texas.

The Atlantic Monthly article doesn't work without a subscription, by the bye.

Anville 10:34, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

advice on bad faith afd

Hi there. I notice the Jessamyn West article is up for AfD again. While I'm not concerned about that, I am concerned that the nomination came from someone who is closely associated with someone [a non-Wikipedian] whose own article came up for AfD a few days back. I voted not to keep that article, and all of the sudden the AfD for my own article came up. I don't know if there is any purpose in indicating that I think it's a bad faith nomination on the AfD page but it concerns me. Jessamyn 16:35, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

a heads-up on the List of Guantanamo Bay detainees

Greetings,

Since you voted to keep the article List of Guantanamo Bay detainees I thought I would give you a "heads-up". A copyright violation was filed against the article, on October 11th. It was filed by someone who had voted to delete the article on October 5th.

I believe that the copyright violation is entirely bogus. I believe it is bogus because, as explained in Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service, lists of facts, like lists of names, cannot be copyright. This Feist v. Rural case went all the way to the US Supreme Court, which made the possibly counter-intuitive ruling that the amount of effort someone put in to compiling a list plays no role in determining whether that list is eligible for copyright protection.

Even if alphabetic lists of names could be copyright, I believe the wikipedia list would not be violating copyright since the list was compiled from various sources.

Yes, I have considered that this user invoked a bogus copyright violation to achieve a result that failed in the {AfD}. Yes, I asked them to terminate the copyright violation process, in light of Feist v Rural. They declined. The backlog in the administrators dealing with copyright violations seems to be on the order of a month long.

Anyhow, I wanted the people who had shown interest in the article to not freak out, or feel betrayed, by seeing the copyright violation tag. -- Geo Swan 11:35, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

Disney and Art

Seen it in many places, found one quote by Disney in Bob Thomas' biography: "What young artists need is a school where they can learn a variety of skills, a place where there is cross-pollination". --Janke | Talk 18:07, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

Good. Put it in. Dpbsmith (talk) 18:14, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

Done. I also added a bit more about the strike. See the wikilink to Herb Sorrell, for instance. The whole article is still pretty POV, being mainly sourced from Schickel, who has/had a notoriously negative view about Disney... --Janke | Talk 18:38, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

Original research and lists

As you have brought up the subject of original research and lists, please swing by Longest streets in London and its talk page. It appears to me to be a project to find out what the longest street in London is by collaboratively measuring all of them. Uncle G 00:58, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

O. Henry

I love the quote on the AfD page. Excellent! —Gaff ^ταλκ 04:10, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

"this is how the college selection procedure would go..."

That's fricken hilarious. I recall during my college application process, my parents wanted me to apply to Brown since it was the only Ivy they thought would accept me. I wanted to study aerospace engineering for god's sake! ✈ James C. 06:38, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

(User page, click click) Do your parents now understand that you went to just about the top school there is? In that field? Even if I always thought it had something to do with researching unsolved problems in embryology...

TRUE STORY: I was working in a computer support unit at a research institute, and my boss, with whom I got along quite well, was talking about his concerns about his son, who was fifteen and needed to start thinking about college. His son, he said, just didn't have any sense of direction. He wasted his spare time carving little things out of wood.

Me: Carving?

Him: Yes, little mannequins and figurines. He sells them at craft fairs.

Me: He's actually doing work that is good enough to sell?

Him: Yeah. He talks about going to some funny school I've never heard of, in Rhode Island. The, uh, what is it, Design College of Rhode Island?

Me: Could that be, uh, the Rhode Island School of Design? Rizzdee?

Him: Yeah. Ever heard of it?

Liberal Arts, Inc.

Fantastic work on the Liberal Arts, Inc. article! The St. John's library has every book ever written on the college, or by a tutor/dean/president, etc., so if you need anything looked up just ask. --zenohockey 05:21, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

Well, to my way of thinking there is still quite a bit of mystery about the demise of the project. Assuming Nelson's account is correct, I still get the impression that Barr and Buchanan were more soured on St. John's than the Navy threat could account for. I mean, the whole story from beginning to end was, the beginning, that Paul Mellon offered a $4.5 million endowment to St. John's or a reasonable facsimile thereof, and the end, that the money wasn't used for anything and reverted to Mellon's foundation. And when one account suggests that the finance weren't the real reason, while another account suggests politics was, I have to think there's something more to the story than even Nelson is telling.

I also get the impression that Weigle comes of as a hero; Barr and Buchanan were the innovators but it sounds as if Weigle was responsible for St. John's with the new program becoming a stable institution. Dpbsmith (talk) 11:10, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

= AfD by CarDepot

"CarDepot" is suspected of being a sockpuppet with a number of identities, including "Science3456". All of the articles he just AfD'd are articles that he created in another persona. At best, he is just wasting our time, at worst he may be using the AfD process to drag out the existence of articles like Linen closet Coat closet Towel closet Walk-in closet and so on. -O^O

• Of course. (Yes, I looked at a few of the article histories). But what do you suggest be done? I had thought about moving the AfD discussions to the Talk pages of the respective articles (most of which do not have Talk pages) and then deleting them from the AfD page itself... Dpbsmith (talk)

Bret Harte Middle School

Thank you for updating Schoolwatch during my absence. Things have been quite busy lately. Bahn Mi 21:08, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

Initialism, eh?

TFHMEMVT (Thanks For Helping Me Enhance My Vocabulary Today). Cheers. PJM 22:29, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

Prestige

While I get your point, there is, to my mind, something quantifiably different about Harvard (Or, for that matter, Duke) and the University of Montana. Prestige seems to me the best way to describe this. Phil Sandifer 02:59, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

Well, yeah. Speaking off the record: what Harvard has social prestige. In fact this is one of the things people tap-dance around, because we want to pretend that the U.S. is a classless society, though somehow in the last analysis our Presidents tend to come from Harvard and Yale. (And Williams.)

But I don't know how to put "prestige" in an article from a neutral point of view. And it spreads like... shall I say... poison ivy. Once it appears in one school articles, it immediately appears in the articles for rival schools.

OK, I'll try to keep my hands off Southern Ivies for a while. Try. Dpbsmith (talk) 03:11, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

"Harvard of the South!"

The paragraph explaining how much better the public ivies are than the actual Ivy League is both an example of the cultural inferiority complex at work and an example of what wiki does to everything. When the Web started out, several hundreds of people simultaneously got the idea that it would be just so cool to have a corporate-authored novel or story. "One person will write the first sentence, and then someone else will write the second sentence. It'll be neat." It wasn't. What it was was a sort of MadLibs of the lame and cantankerous. The smallest semantic level of discourse, it appears, is not the sentence. It is the utterance. Wikipedia is sometimes like those corporate novels. Each person adds a sentence (always at the bottom), and the result is contradiction, illogic, and so many micro-digressions that there is no thesis. Of course what actually happens most of the time is that a single author writes a whole article or a whole subsection, folks tweak a word here or there, and then someone does a rewrite to make a whole article work. The "why the public ivies are better" paragraph looks like one where the wiki-way has been involved. Tin cans are lumped in with glass jars, and everyone wants to insert a fact about the alma mater.

What has bothered me since my days at Emory is this obsession with "Harvard of the South" or "Southern Ivy" or what have you. First, in such discourse "ivy" doesn't mean the Ivy League. It means "elite, difficult, and snobbish," alternately. The fact that some of the so-called ivies have work loads that are harder for undergraduates than the real Ivy League schools only proves the fact that the term "Ivy" doesn't mean "Ivy League." (Dartmouth is neither as exclusive nor as difficult, for example, as many of the faux ivies around the nation, and the same is true of Brown.) As such, the term, and the football league, exist not as anything definable, but only as a cultural token, a token of Northeastern 1) plutocracy (of the 19th c., of course), 2) cultural authority, 3) superiority in education. To have that function, the rest of the nation has to be sold a bill of goods about its own poverty, barbarism, and ignorance. And then, of course, there is the small matter of aspiring to be a "Harvard of the South" prevents your becoming the Tulane of New Orleans or the Vanderbilt of Nashville or Emory of Atlanta.

The article in question is inoffensive, but it's also unnecessary. I've always said that this is a dictionary lemma, not an encyclopedia article. Geogre 09:28, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

Nicely said... I like "inoffensive but unnecessary." That is the area in which there is so much contention...

I think your description of the article evolution process is good, too. Pure-Wiki advocates portray the article evolution process as if it were a process of slow, continuous, improvement. In reality, it's cyclical. Someone does a major rewrite. Then you get an accretion process in which the added material is a mixture of relevant and irrelevant material, poorly written and badly organized. During this period the article is arguably being incrementally improved—in a way. Then you get another major rewrite, usually by a whole 'nother "author."

One of the frustrations is those "major rewrites," particularly to anyone who personally put a lot of work into an earlier rewrite. Frequently they are not improvements on the previous stable state. Often, in the interest of smoothing out rough edges and giving it an encyclopedic tone, they end up bland and glossy. It is common for the rewrites to be done by someone who has boosterish or fanlike motivation and for critical material to be removed altogether (as opposed to being toned down, put into proportion, or balanced). For example, the MIT article, which once had a very unnecessarily long section on suicides—nearly ten paragraphs, if I remember, giving all sorts of evidence and statistical analysis bearing on the question of whether MIT has more suicides than other college—now does not mention suicide at all, even though a high suicide rate has been either a) a fact, b) folklore for half a century and deserves at least passing mention in anything that isn't intended to be an admissions-department brochure.

The "plutocracy" was fading, but very clearly elements of that tradition were still present within, uh, living memory. When I was at MIT, there was still such a thing as a "Harvard accent;" not everyone at Harvard had it, but it was not rare; I assume it was prep schools that taught it. I am not sure to what extent antisemitism existed at Harvard by, say, the 1960s, but it clearly existed as late as the 1940s (and is portrayed very nicely in a very evocative novel by Myron S. Kaufman entitled "Remember Me to God"). In the 1980s, I believe it was, admissions-department memos surface that made reference to "lineage" as an element factoring into admissions decisions. Dpbsmith (talk) 13:41, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

This is somewhat tangential, but you can find a real-for-life example of the phrase "MIT of the South" cited in Works which reference MIT's lead paragraph (assuming you haven't looked there already). I also fully concur with your (and Geogre's) description of the way wiki text evolves, having myself seen that process work out several times. (Calvin and Hobbes, cyberpunk, Schrödinger's cat in fiction — I've seen one "cycle" happen in each of them.) Anville 21:47, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, right. And Boston College is Oxford in America.

Now find me a reference to a "Sweet Briar of the North" and I'll be impressed. Dpbsmith (talk) 21:54, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

"In addition, we can't add a category for every industry GE is involved with."

See Talk:General Electric. —Joseph/N328KF (Talk) 18:40, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of victims of the American Civil War

Could you please revisit the discussion, read my comments there and consider changing your vote?

I think two reasons used to delete this are faulty:

1. This list includes information which would be lost if categorized. Categories cannot list the date and manner of death in a organized manner as lists do. Categorizing would lose the info.
2. Wikipedia is not a memorial doesn't apply as that rule is for people who do not deserve an article. These people played major roles in the American Civil War and therefore do not fall under the memorial clause of WP:NOT. They already have articles, and lists listing closely related people should not be deleted because they happen to be dead.

Thanks for your attention. - Mgm|^(talk) 10:09, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

US or U.S.

Use one of "US" or "U.S.". You could ask a similar question about the UK or GB:) jguk 19:51, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Disney strike

Good edit! I was actually contemplating doing just that, linking to Schweizer, but thought it would clutter the article. But this is good, and NPOV. Thanks! (PS: did you do the original deletion, but logged-out? Not that it's any of my business to know - but it's hard to discuss with an IP, so that's why I put the comment in the edit field... ;-) --Janke | Talk 21:36, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

• No, not me. Dpbsmith (talk) 22:56, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Extreme card manipulation

This may get few hits on Google and may possibly be invented, but card manipulation (not Extreme) is not only used by magicians but also used as a show of of dexterity, so in that regard the article is right and Card magic needs serious expansion. Would you consider a merge? - Mgm|^(talk) 09:06, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

Not quite sure what it is you think I should do.

• I don't think an entry on Extreme card manipulation should exist even as a redirect unless it can be shown to be a real phrase.
• The last time I looked, the article on Extreme card manipulation had no content that I see as worth merging. I just looked again and I still don't see anything. It says nothing about card manipulation as such; it says only that it's an art form and promotes some dubiously notable practitioners. So I don't see what should be merged.

I certainly would support expanding Card magic to include material on flourishes, if it doesn't already. Actually, I see that the two illustrations in that article both should flourishes. So I'd say there isn't any editorial policy on that page that would exclude card manipulations that are done for their own sake (as opposed to being part of the misdirection used in a trick). I'm not at all knowledgeable about magic but my understanding is that good magic is an performance art that of which stagecraft and choreography are properly an integral part, and that all magicians include presentation elements that are there for their own sake, not simply to advance the deception of the audience. In that respect, I think Extreme card manipulation is actually... dare I say... misleading.

I'd certainly support expanding Card magic which is quite short and has plenty of room for expansion. Actually, not being an expert, I only know one card magician by name, one who is associated with both illusion and dramatic flourishes, and that is Cardini, who, amazingly, is not mentioned in the article. I'll add his name now.

But if you expect me to vote to keep Extreme card manipulation as an article title, I'll need more convincing. Dpbsmith (talk) 13:09, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

The Washington Monthly rises again

Resistance is futile. You will be rated.

Why does everyone want to cite random magazines to prove how great their old FP was, instead of writing anything about its history? Sigh. Anville 00:00, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

Cinerama post

I have posted a reply to cinerama above--whicky1978 01:49, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

Often-viewed

Unfortunately, Wikipedia doesn't have such lists. I've been using the list of most-linked articles. It's the next best alternative. While it's not always true that the most-linked article is also the most-viewed, in any case all articles should be referenced. This just serves as a place to start. — BRIAN0918 • 2005-12-1 14:53

Dartmouth

Please read Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Molecular economics and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Arthur W. Baron. Uncle G 07:12, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

Floaters pic

Hey, I saw your picture of floaters and...uh...they don't really look anything like that. Or at least the ones I get. It's more of a "Multiply" or "Color Burn" effect if you understand what I mean by that. It's definitely NOT a grey patch when looking at the sky, though. I don't get most of those shapes, either, usually circles. Sorta looks like the shape of a blood cell, or a coccus under a microscope. However, I can understand if shapes may vary. ~ Oni Lukos 15:32, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

• Floaters come in various kinds with varying appearance. I tried to include some of the ones that look "like the shape of a blood cell, or a coccus under a microscope." They're in the upper part of the picture. I found it very challenging rendering their appearance and I guess I didn't succeed. The bigger one near the bottom resembles ones I saw after a posterior vitreous detachment, a common occurrence in older people; I never saw one like that when I was younger. (And, yes, I had an ophthalmologist check it out immediately...). It had a decidedly "three-dimensional" appearance to it, with one end in focus and the other out of focus, rather like focussing on a transparent, deep object through a compound microscope. Dpbsmith (talk) 17:38, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

Yes, those are somewhat what they look like, but the main problem remains: the coloring is not grey, rather it's a darkening of what's already there. I could get a better description if I could see some, but it's cloudy right now so I can't stare up at the sky which usually allows me to see them. ~ Oni Lukos _ct 21:55, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

Harvard rhino

Thank you for the kind words - I think the rhino is very "Harvard". Greatly enjoyed reading your pages, glad that you weighed in on Wang Labs, LINC, Thayer Hall, and most especially Currier and Ives etc. Cheers - Daderot

Help me with Cornell

So, I've been trying to de-puff college and university boosterism, but just can't do my own alma mater as well as I'd like to be able to. I keep catching myself justifying things that I'd consider puffery on other pages. I was wondering if you could take a glance at Cornell and make the page more NPOV. Cheers, JDoorjam 14:18, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

I'll take a look at it in the next day or so. I may not be neutral as one of my grandfathers graduated from Cornell in mechanical engineering. He loved the place and the very idea of one of his descendants going to MIT instead probably has him rolling over in his grave. Dpbsmith (talk) 14:52, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Wikicruft problem (re Siegenthaler defamation scandal)

I completely agree with you that the WP community needs to address this! I think far more than this particular policy change will be required, however. But at least the board seems to be thinking about this stuff.---CH (another Cornell alum, incidentally) 02:03, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

I can't believe... well, actually I can believe... the amount of bitching this is evoking from the "wiki" crowd (as opposed to the "-pedia" crowd). I'm not a Cornell alum, I'm a Son of MIT. Dpbsmith (talk) 02:08, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Babson College

I deleted a whole bunch of stuff from Babson College and reorganized what was left. It is not a pinnacle of encyclopaedic excellence, but it might now be adequately NPOV. The bad news is that Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering seems to have been written by the same people. How they can say so much about a school which isn't even accredited yet boggles the mind. (expletive deleted) Anville 18:33, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

• Thanks. I frankly wasn't sure where to begin. So I went off and added a paragraph about the Babson Boulder Trail to Roger Babson while I was thinking about what to do. I don't have the stomach to tackle Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering today, but I'll take a look at it eventually. Dpbsmith (talk) 18:45, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

I chopped a few passages which read like Admissions Office extracts, and moved some material into the lead. It still needs a great deal of work, but I'm cautiously optimistic about it. Anville 18:57, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

By the way, I just discovered (while trying to track down information about Roger Babson's founding of the college--the article should at least mention the founder, right? that a lot of what you removed was a cut-and-paste from Babson's website. Dpbsmith (talk) 19:02, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

It's back!

• Nonabyte (AfD discussion)

Do you know where the old deletion discussion is? Uncle G 19:52, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

• No, I never have much luck finding them. I'm speedying it anyway. If challenged I'll try to find it. Dpbsmith (talk) 20:01, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Hobart college and Graviy stone

I don't quite understand a bit of what you added to Gravity Research Foundation, the long quote about the Hobart College monument. What is that quoted from - is it on the monument itself? We need to be clearer on that, I think. - DavidWBrooks 21:04, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

• Better now? The reason I put that in is that while everybody assumes that the monuments were donated by Babson, we don't have a lot on exactly what the deal was. The quote makes it clear that the monument was connected to a substantial donation which had significant strings attached. (In my mind, the quote also suggests that they probably didn't use the money in exactly the way Babson expected them to, Rosenberg Hall being a biology and chemistry facility... although I suppose chemistry might be needed to produce a gravity semi-insulator. In any case, using Babson's money to help build a hall named for someone else seems a little cheesy to me, but what do I know about academic philanthropy?) Dpbsmith (talk) 21:56, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Sockpuppet

It is suspected that this user may be a sock puppet or impersonator of Pinocchio. Please refer to {{{evidence}}} for evidence. See block log

It is suspected that this user may be a sock puppet or impersonator of Jiminy Cricket. Please refer to {{{evidence}}} for evidence. See block log

:P

What tipped you off?

I'm an ethical puppeteer though, my sockpuppets never actually vote. Dpbsmith (talk) 01:10, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

I ran a quick CheckUser on you, and I got the IPs of those accounts. ;) But yeah, I know, I'm not accusing you of sockpuppetry or anything. It was actually quite nice comic relief. Titoxd^{(?!? - did you read this?)} 01:18, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

Is it OK if I remove the tags now? Or would you mind removing them? Being listed in those categories does kinda bother me... Dpbsmith (talk) 01:25, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

I'll do that for you. Titoxd^{(?!? - did you read this?)} 01:43, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

I took out the categories, you're welcome to take out the tags if you wish. I would have them as pseudo-barnstars... :) Titoxd^{(?!? - did you read this?)} 01:44, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

I accept them as tokens of your, um, esteem. Besides I was planning to archive this page soon now anyway. Dpbsmith (talk) 02:15, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

Rhapsody in Blue reation

The reaction to rhapsody in blue made it anything but an instant success, some people walked out half way through the debut performance. The sentence saying it was met with instant success is wrong, i'd like to change it. Briaboru 22:54, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

Well, I don't remember where I got that, but I didn't make it up. Accounts probably vary. I'm sure I've read several places that it was recognized at the time as the high point of the concert. I'll excise the statement that it was an instant success, but let's replace it with actual source quotations showing the range of reaction.

Ethan Mordden in "A Guide to Orchestral Music" says of the Aeolian Hall concert, "Until Gershwin came onstage... the afternoon had not gone well. Now it exploded."

I just checked The New York Times online (courtesy of my public library) and Olin Downes' review, while quite critical yet also appreciative of the Rhapsody itself, says "There was tumultuous applause for Mr. Gershwin's composition" and says nothing about disgruntled listeners leaving. He also says "The audience packed a house that could have been sold out twice." Dpbsmith (talk) 01:44, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Footnotes reminder

A while ago you expressed interest in Wikipedia:Footnotes. As that article was updated through a renaming process, you might not be aware of changes during recent months. I invite you to read the article again in case it is now more useful. (SEWilco 08:49, 15 December 2005 (UTC))

• Thanks! I've been using the simple "hatnotes" like these for a while, but have been finding keeping the sequencing in sync between article and notes to be a challenge. I see new features have been added and I'll try to understand what they can do for me and take advantage of them. Dpbsmith (talk) 13:50, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

3. ^ Zeitschrift für Krankschafft und Geerschifft Apr. 1 2006 p. 22-3