User talk:Gaz~enwiki/Archive-01

Giddy, digger!

Thanks for the note re Sydney Harbour Bridge. Arno

Hey Gaz,

the pictures on dominoes are great. They really improve the article.

Arthur 19:15 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

Nice work with the multiple-place names pages. --mav

Thanks Mav - What do you think of the idea of converting each of the ABC pages into lists? Gaz

ABC? --mav

Each of the A, B, C pages. Go have a look at Multiple-place names (V) Gaz

Do you mean turn Wikipedia:Multiple-place names (A) into a list? It is already a list (granted a compact one). IMO that is the better format. But the wikicode can be in a linear list. --mav

Nah, a "real" list like Wikipedia:Multiple-place names (V) - Gaz

Just a note that the max width images with text flowing around them should be is 250-300 pixels. See Wikipedia:Image use policy for the lowdown. --mav

The bridge images are very nice - but a 300 pixel width is really the max width that any aligned image should be. --mav

The recommendation for 300 pixel max width is predecated on "many readers are using 800x600 displays". I am an IT consultant working every day with clients ranging from home users to large corporations. The recommendation is based on what now days is considered antique equipment which is rarely seen. I do test each page which contains an image at various horizontal resolutons before I commit the change. I make sure they are all readable at 800 pixels, albeit a little squeezed. They all look great at 1024 and above. - Gaz

Over 50% of all net users still view pages at 800 x 600. Wikipedia aims to be accessible to all users - squeezing text for over half of them degrades their reading experience. --mav

Where do you get the 50% figure? - Gaz

It was mentioned on the mailing list. See [1]. MS Windows still has 800 x 600 as the standard screen resolution and all the studies I've seen or heard about indicate that users tend to shy away from playing with default settings. --mav

...and now they are in the minority (and falling fast) http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2003/February/res.php ...but who's counting. As the 300 pixel max is a recommendation, I hope that we can agree to disagree on this. Given enough time (which I believe to be a short time) this point will be moot anyway. - Gaz

47% is still the largest single group. Therefore our pages must be made to look real good at 800 x 600. This is our largest single audience. --mav

(Left a reply for you over on my user talk page. Hephaestos

That works quite well I think. Of course your shots are easier on the psyche than ol' von. :) - Hephaestos

Glad you liked my suggestion for an ancestor chart at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Genealogy and made it even better! It does save a lot of space placing proband at top. Now we are two (three?) who thinks that such a chart is useful. Nex step is to convince the decisions making non genalogist that it would be vise to use a standard! Dan Koehl 10:25 Mar 7, 2003 (UTC)

Gaz said "Hi Tim, can you please revert your mods to the Brisbane pages. Thanks". Why? This was discussed on Talk:Canberra, Australia, User talk:Karen Johnson, the wikien-l mailing list, and indirectly on Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (city names) and Talk:Brisbane. Karen's in favour, Tannin's in favour, Mav's in favour... in fact you could say a consensus has been reached. Except you. Please explain? You can reply here, I'll be watching. -- Tim Starling 13:16 Mar 27, 2003 (UTC)

Gaz, you've lost this one, I'm afraid. Despite being one of the 'winners' in this particular case, and having a view opposed to yours, I am sympathetic. I know only too well the frustration of seeing a convention harden into something that I'm damn sure is 'wrong' - most recently, the current stupid craze for 'slogan' articles of the 'AIDS kills fags dead' variety that add nothing useful to Wikipedia and serve only to promote shallow thinking and petty hatreds. Errr ... well, no use saying any more about that - it's gone too far to stop now. You win some, you lose some. Next time. Tannin

Just because something is popular, doesn't make right or correct. You argue that consensus has been reached, I disagree. I thank Tannin for his sympathy but I still view all pages titled "X (disambiguation)" as redundant abominations. Tim, please revert your changes. Gaz 14:03 Mar 27, 2003 (UTC)

Tim, I have read the recent discussion on city naming within Australia that transpired on wikiEN-l. I do disagree (strongly) with what you are proposing. Earlier discussions on city naming around Aug 2002 (predating both our involvements) were fractured and resolved very little. I do believe that for the USA and Canada the standard of "City, State/Provence" was most widely accepted. I agree with that and believe that it should be done pre-emptively. I am of the opinion that Australia should follow that standard as well, with the addition of redirects in the form "City, Australia" for those places known to the rest of the world (eg capital cities, tourist spots).

I am FIRMLY of the opinion that NONE of the Aussie place names should be used without some form of qualifier, even if that place is virtually (or completely) unique (eg Canberra). This should be done for consistency. Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney and Perth ALL have overseas equivalents and hence really need to have their state name or "Australia" to qualify them. If this means that Canberra is qualified (you believe unnecessilarily) then so be it. This leaves the generic title, eg Brisbane, available to house the disambiguation page, and means that the abomination titled "Brisbane (disambiguation)" goes away FOREVER!!!

More on the concept of "disambiguation". I prefer to think of it as "context resolution". I am currently preparing an idea to solve this problem in software. Trouble is that, even though I have been a programmer for 22 years, and database consultant for 16 years, I don't write PHP. I you like, I would love to bounce these ideas off you. Get back to me. - Gaz 05:29 Mar 29, 2003 (UTC)

It's just a matter of taste; you haven't brought anything new to the debate. Like Tannin said: you win some, you lose some. I went into the debate on wikien-l quite prepared to back off in the face of popular opinion if need be.

As for PHP - you shouldn't find it too hard if you've been a programmer for 22 years. I've only been programming in my spare time for a mere 11 years, and I picked up the basics of Perl pretty quickly. It's such an amusing language -- I love writing "or die" after everything. It doesn't have a "strfry" function like GNU C, though :)

Automatic context resolution is an interesting idea -- as long as you don't have to tell the machine what context you're in. If you did, it would be almost equivalent to what we have now. I guess the idea would be to compare the document containing the links with the documents it could be linking to. You could look for similarity in terms of common non-structural words. Hmmm... I guess you could also record what people click on in the disambiguation page. -- Tim Starling 10:47 Mar 29, 2003 (UTC)

I am not suggesting automatic context resolution, just software assisted. Using Mercury as an example, if I create a page linking to just [[Mercury]], I suggest that the wiki software looks at the content of that page and presents me with the bulleted list converted to radio buttons. I select the context that I desire and the software modifies my original link to point to the more specific location, retaining my original text via a pipe. A special option meaning "no change" could be included as well. This method could mean that most people resolve their own links most of the time. An improvement on the current situation I think. - Gaz 16:20 Mar 29, 2003 (UTC)

Yeah, that would work. If this was implemented, pre-emptive disambiguation would be unnecessary. Canberra could stay as Canberra until another use for "Canberra" comes to light. It could then be moved to Canberra, Australia or whatever, and the software would soon sort out all the old Canberra links with a minimum of fuss. If you can write this in PHP, and convince the (generally conservative) dev. team it's a good idea, it would satisfy both our senses of style. -- Tim Starling 00:22 Mar 30, 2003 (UTC)

Added some dates etc to Jim Soorley's term and Tim Quinn's election. The last effort was rather half-hearted, I admit. Hope this is a little better. Melody 00:00, 5 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Moore help request[edit]

G'day. I backed into filling a hole in Wiki, and created an article for John Moore (Australian MP). Since I'm not really that famliar with Australian terms and government, and you are a regular contributer from down under, I'm asking for you to please take a look at it, and clean up or point out anything that's obviously wrong. Thanks in advance, Lou I 22:45, 7 Feb 2004 (UTC)