User talk:Zoe/archive 1

Hi Zoe,

Most people here are friendly, but be prepared to have your work edited and corrected or improved regularly, even if it is good already. It's the nature of the project. Don't take disagreements too personally, and just walk away from any that get too harsh, even if you are right. It will save you frustration, believe me!

Most of all, have fun! --Dmerrill

Thank you. I'll try not to make too many mistakes. Zoe

Please don't try too hard. It might get in the way of your writing articles. :-) --LMS

Hi Zoe - welcome to the team! I agree with Larry (LMS) - do your best, and don't worry about making mistakes that much. We all learn from each other and we all work together pretty well (most of the time!). The one thing we all have in common is that we all just want to see a great encyclopedia. You'll get to know everyone pretty soon, and judging by whqt I've seen of your work so far, you'll fit it just fine. Why not make yourself a /contributions page? - warm regards - [[ManningBartlett

Hello Zoe, My first introduction to Wikiepedia. I added the title of Koestler's autobiography with the perhaps inappropriate "wonderful" adjective. Your edit is accepted and appreciated, I was a little uncomfortable with the word, even though it's one of my favourite books. Have you read it?

Gabe

Hello there, welcome to the 'pedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you need any questions answered about the project then check out Wikipedia:Help or drop me a line. BTW, I am very impressed with the quality of your editing, fact checking and cross-linking. Great work! Cheers! --maveric149

Zoe, WRT your work on city pages, we have a naming convention for cities as many localities worthy of mention in encyclopedias share names (for instance, Melbourne, Florida and Melbourne, Victoria). An example is Georgetown, which as well as the capital of Guyana is also the name of a major city near Washington D.C. Therefore, the Georgetown page should be shifted to Georgetown, Guyana and a disambiguation page pointing to the various Georgetowns put there in its place.

I understand that, but I was linking from the "national capitals" page, which isn't disambiguated, so I was just creating new pages from there. I guess I need to do REFER or whatever it's called, but I'm not sure how to do that. -- Zoe

Zoe - don't worry, I'll fix the Georgetown thing. Nice work on the capitals you have done. :) Cheers User:MMGB

It's not your fault Zoe -- whoever made the list in the first place was careless about this issue. It's also sometimes difficult to know if a particular city name is shared by several (or more) different cities. What I do when I'm not sure, is look up the city name on Google while excluding the name of the country and see if there are other notable cites also known by the same name. For example. Of course, one would never make a disambiguation page out of truely famous cities such as Paris just because some small city in Texas has the same name (in these cases a link to Paris, Texas at the bottom of Paris is more than enough). BTW, whoever makes a disambigution page is also responsible for fixing any broken links that may result (in other words, any links to Georgetown would have to be fixed to go directly to the right page). Hope this helps! --maveric149

Hey that was ME, ya mongrel :) Actually, when I made the original page (which took forever) the last thing on my mind was disambiguation issues, back in those days we didn't have enough articles to have even contemplated it! Nice to see how times have changed :) - User:MMGB

Hi Zoe, good work on all the capital cities! One request: if you create a new article on a city, also create a redirect for "city, country". This isn't a real Wikipedia naming convention, but some people tend to link that way. Then again, if you don't do it, I will make the redirects... Greetings, jheijmans

One more note - when you have a link to an article as the first word of a sentence, there's no need to make a link like

[[sugar|Sugar]]

In fact, all articles start with a capital letter, so no need to do this. jheijmans

Minor clarification: Articles are displayed with their first letter capitalized but are in fact case-insensitive -- so it doesn't matter if you capitalize the first letter or not when linking. --maveric149

Minor clarification to clarification: Article titles really do all start with a capital letter. But, the first letter of links to articles is case-insensitive, so it doesn't matter if you capitalize the first letter or not when linking. --Brion VIBBER

Hi again Zoe: Well you are certainly making your presence felt - really top-notch work on the world capitals! One question - what's your source for the "Masero" spelling (as opposed to "Maseru")? I've been to Lesotho and I've never seen the "Masero" spelling before - it's always "Maseru". However, in deference to your skill and effort, I didn't want to rush in and change anything. Also, if you are planning on sticking around here (which I certainly hope you do), consider signing up for Wikipedia-L. Warm Regards Manning

Thanks. I think I may have mistyped the REDIRECT. Can somebody correct that for me? I can't delete the page. Sorry. -- Zoe

Don't apologise - I've done a lot worse than that in my time :) You go on with whatever you're doing and I'll do the hack editorial stuff - I'm too jetlagged to do anything else. Cheers User:MMGB

I do appreciate your work here; I don't mean to be rude (though sometimes I am anyway). At first when I started writing for wikipedia, my contributions would get edited severely and I'd take offense. Now I think that's just the natural result of writing for a site with a lot of users, all of whom can edit any article they see that they think needs editing. Having said that, I do still think that plot summaries should go before awards in movie entries, if only because it's been that way in all of the books I have on movies (Ebert, Maltin, Videohound, etc.) Call it a force of habit. I don't think we have a policy for how to write about films, though I'm glad we're getting enough film entries that the issue has come up. :-)

Anyway, I won't insult you by going through and changing them all, though I may change ones I run across in the future (in a few months or a year or a decade ... if they haven't all been expanded greatly by then anyway). Again, thanks for all your work, and I aplogize for being cranky. Best, Koyaanis Qatsi, Tuesday, July 9, 2002

Yes, please don't be discouraged by other people reworking your articles -- it all comes out right in the end. I really appreciate your contributions on the movie articles. -- Anon.\

Zoe, sometimes the greatest contribution is simply to start an article on its way. Someone will see it in Recent Changes, remember that they have something to say about it, then someone else sees it and so on. I would never have thought of doing an article on Trader Horn, but when I saw that you had done one, I remembered that I had seen it on vacation once and was inspired to add to the article. Then I noticed that Duncan Renaldo, who played the Cisco Kid was in it, so there was another link, which might lead someone else to write something about O. Henry who wrote the Cisco Kid. By that time, you may be adding something to someone else's article, and so the great wheel goes on, having been started rolling in this case by you. Ortolan88

Zoe, disambiguation help badly needed! If there is a movie and a novel with the same title (and they are the same story, of course) I think they should be discussed in the same place and at the same time. The Dickens titlesA Tale of Two Cities and A Tale of Two Cities (1935) had me wandering all over the place editing the wrong thing, and as you add more movies based on books you will be creating more confusion. Sometimes the book is obscure and the movie is famous, so the article can be mostly about the movie with just a mention of the book, but with A Tale of Two Cities we have a routine movie, and a pretty old one at that, competing for the article title with a very important novel. The model you used in Les Miserables where everything was discussed in one place, seems to be a good one to follow. Ortolan88, Thursday, July 11, 2002

Oops, there are two Les Miz articles too. Les Miserables covers everything (including 7 or 8 film versions) while your Les Miserables (1935) covers only one movie. This really doesn't work. I'm sorry. Ortolan88, Thursday, July 11, 2002

I don't see anything wrong with having separate articles on the book and films so long as everything is cross-linked. Generally I prefer to start with the most famous work, go into some detail on it and adaptations of it, summarize that info at a non-disambiguated title when a certain length is reached and then have more in-depth discussions on particular adaptations in disambiguated articles. However, I don't fault people for making lists after stubs (like in A Tale of Two Cities) and then make a couple of those items stubs too -- all they are doing is just planning ahead to the way the article will be when it is fully fleshed out. Ortolan, please stop being overly critical of other people's style of contribution -- nothing you mention above is in violation of any policy. Furthermore, the project is only 30% toward its goal of at least 100,000 articles -- everything here is still in alpha development. Please keep that in mind. --maveric149

I think Zoe is doing a great job on these movie articles, and I too was puzzled by the comments about disambiguating these same name movies. Eclecticology

I thought I did a good job of disambiguating. I CREATED the pages for the novels A Tale of Two Cities and Les Miserables,and aded entries for the movies so that we can disambiguate the movies from the books. I hardly think my entries on the books are gold, in fact they're little more than stubs, but I wanted to make separate entries for the movies and the books. the movie pages ARE disambiguated by the dates. And thanks for everybody's encouragement. -- Zoe

Hey Zoe, I just moved Academy Awards/Best Picture to Academy Award for Best Picture. I also changed all the links to the former to point to the latter--so in any future entries you don't have to pipe the link, you can just type it the way you'd expect to. Cheers, Koyaanis Qatsi

Yes, user:Eclecticology and I moved a lot of the Academy Awards pages. I'm also trying to correct all the links so they point to where the articles are now and none are left pointing to the redirects. I'll be working on it more tomorrow (sunday); I've had enough of it today. :-) Koyaanis Qatsi, Saturday, July 13, 2002

If I have the history right, you included the phrase "firestorm of protest" in the Current Events entry for Sahelanthropus tchadensis. Where was this? I saw some suggestions that it might not be a direct human ancestor, but nothing that I'd characterize as a firestorm, in the articles I read--Science, Nature News Update, the BBC, New Scientist, and Newsday. I've been tracking this, and working on the article; I'm leaning towards removing that comment, leaving in that it's unclear whether this is a human ancestor, a chimp ancestor, both, or neither. Vicki Rosenzweig

If I remember correctly, it was in CNN. Another French scientist said it was clearly a female gorilla and nothing to make a big deal over. I can't find the article now, though. Sorry. --Zoe

I hope you don't mind me stepping in, but I think the article you're talking about may be here instead. Cheers, Koyaanis Qatsi

That sounds like a followup to the article I read, but I know I didn't read Yahoo originally. That does sound like the info I was first posting about. -- Zoe

Hi there Zoe - I wondered why you were changing links such as Florence to Florence, Italy. Because Florence already redirects to Florence, Italy, it's fine to leave links like that as they are. The purpose of the disambiguation policy used in these cases is to make it really easy to link, so that people use Florence rather than the longer Florence, Italy and still have it linking to the page they most likely want.

Thanks for all your hard work on the 'pedia on the films and everything else - I'm hoping that you might write some more great articles if you spend less time with the links :-). Enchanter

The reason why I'm doing it is because if you leave it at Florence, it sends you to the disambiguation page, and then you have to click again to get to Florence, Italy. Following the same process as was done for Rome, Italy. I didn't want to do it, but I've seen people complain when you change a page and don't redo all of the pages that link to it. It's the first time I've done this, don't think I'm going to do much more of it. :-) -- Zoe

Now I'm getting confused Zoe - Florence already redirects to Florence, Italy, not [[Florence (disambiguation). That's how it ought to be too, in line with, for example, Paris redirecting to Paris, France, with a comment at the top of Paris, France taking you to the disambiguation page.Enchanter

OK, well, then I'm confused, too. Did somebody change what I did last night? It doesn't really matter, it's all done now. :-) But see the comment at the top of this page about disambiguation of city names -- I'm just doing what I'm told. -- Zoe

Hey Zoe -- Just so you know it really isn't necessary to seek out each instance of something like Florence and make it link directly to Florence, Italy when Florence already redirects there (one or two would have been fine to make sure at least something directly linked to it). Just trying to save you some time -- (of course there is nothing at all wrong with what you did). Power to the wiki! --Maveric149

Oh, thanks, now that it's all done. ;-) -- Zoe

LOL -- BTW thanks for creating the other two elements lists. --Maveric149

Markup or style note: Names of movies, books (including series), record albums, magazines, are italicized. Names of short stories, songs, and magazine articles are enclosed in quotes. Mad Magazine, "99 Luftballoons". Ortolan88

Go for it. -- Zoe

I have been going for it. I was hoping you would too. :=) Ortolan88

Hey, Zoe! I will say the same thing to you that JHK said to me a while ago. "Welcome to Helga's world." :-) Danny

It does seem to be different from ours, doesn't it? :-) -- Zoe

Please do not use the characters ????????????????????????????????. They may look like something meaningful to you, but to the rest of the world they are all the same: wickets, boxes, or slugs. If you must use em dashes, etc., type out the entity reference in HTML; at least then it will look right in Clearlyu, even if it doesn't look right in the normal ISO-8859-1 fonts. -phma

Well, none of those look meaningful to me but the apostrophes. I had copied the Basil items out of a document I've written in Microsoft Word, so I guess the apostrophes don't translate, though like I said, they look fine in my browser. Next time I'll change them. -- Zoe

Thanks for adding the novelis, actor, and director details on The African Queen's page. I frequently forget to check if a work's based on a novel (which should IMO always be mentioned) but in this case I forgot quite a lot more too. Sheepishly, --KQ

Are we using (year film) or (year movie) to disambiguate? Or does it matter? I just wrote an article on Chinatown and backed out of it because I didn't want it on the wrong page. I guess I'll go ahead with it and move it later if need be. --KQ

Not a problem. Just being pedantic. I think I've mentioned that a few times. ;-) Maybe if we just created Chinatown (movie)? Or is there more than one?

Oh, well my question was actually whether to "film" or "movie." I've been adding the year also because we can't check the IMDb for films that haven't come out yet--e.g. Stray Dogs, The Postman, The Man Who Wasn't There, and countless others examples I've seen and forgotten. There are supposedly rules in place to prevent exact duplication of titles among movies with different sources but apparently they don't work. New dupes come out all the time, and shouldn't. Oh well. Do you think it's overkill? --KQ

It's probably overkill if there is no such film now, tho IMDb does it. I was disambiguating by using the year when there was more than one movie with the same title, but I suppose YMMV. -- Zoe

What's YMMV? Mav pointed me to Wikipedia:Naming conventions, which I should have thought to check to begin with. I'll drop the years when I can't find a second exact title match on IMDb (in accordance with the above). Thanks, --KQ

YMMV = Your Mileage May Vary. Meaning, it's your own choice what you want to do. -- Zoe

I am getting more and more p***ed off. See Talk:Mithril. -- Zoe

Hi Zoe,

I hope you decide to shrug off the negative interactions and stick around.

I am preparing a proposal that Wikipedia shift to a text review approach that would leave current material intact as the primary article until a couple of logged in users have reviewed a proposed change version and ok'd it as improved.

Do you think this approach would reduce friction currently resulting from others editing or reviewing your work?

Do you think the exciting immediacy of a Wiki, i.e. seeing editing efforts published immediately to the internet would be diminished?

Other comments or pros and cons as you see them?

Thanks! user:mirwin

I don't know ... I think that delay thing would be really frustrating to a lot of people. Besides, it isn't the fract that people were changing my work -- as I keep saying, I don't care about that, as long as they're accurate. But it was the fact that my work was looked down upon as unworthy of being in the 'pedia. -- Zoe

Ok, I have taken notes. Thanks for responding so quickly! Personally I think all contributions are valuable. I think it is impressive that you have created sufficient depth and breadth with regard to LOTR, or other fantasy subjects, that people feel other subjects are treated too lightly. If you decide to take a break, then thanks for the all work to date and I hope you come back soon. 8) mirwin 01:05 Aug 19, 2002 (PDT)

Thanks! ;-) Danny

I love your work, Zoe. If anybody gives you a hard time, let me know. Now that I'm a sysop, I carry a bit more weight. --Ed Poor

Well, that was weird. I was working, and all of a sudden, my preferences got changed, and I realized that I was no longer logged in. It looks like my cookie got deleted or something. I had to re-log in, and now everything is fine. -- Zoe 15:17 Aug 15, 2002 (PDT)

Mea culpa! As per general agreement on the mailing list that www.wikipedia.org is preferred over www.wikipedia.com, I've set the software to link to itself using the .org address. Cookies aren't smart enough to know that the two domains are the same thing, so you have to log in again now that we're in .org-land. (If there are any other problems, I can change it back in a jiffy.) --Brion 15:21 Aug 15, 2002 (PDT)

No, seems to be okay. I'm glad I found out, I'd hate not to be able to find the 'pedia next time I come here. :-) -- Zoe

Zoe, Thanks for stripping certain stuff from "N.m.". I have my own strategies for this but principally this centres about gratefully welcoming her comments and incrementally removing them a few days later. It was on my to do list for this morning. This strategy usually keeps the frau from the door and preserves the integrity of "N.m." without it turning into edit wars. She only crosses our threshold occasionally so it is a minor inconvenience. Moppping up during the middle of the night is a strategy which I guess works well for you. rgds user:sjc

Hey Zoe, thanks again for all your work on the movies. I really appreciate it. :-) --KQ

You're welcome. It's kind of fun, actually. Something that has really surprised me when researching these early films is how many of them were written by women. I had always thought that movies were a man's field in the early days. -- Zoe

Zoe - not that's its a big deal at all, but the convention on naming movie entries that have multiple movies with the same title is [{name of movie} (YEAR movie)]. So for example Titanic (1997 movie). I do, however, kinda like the way you are titling these entries though -- Scarface (1932) actually has a chance of being directly linked whereas Scarface (1932 movie) has little chance (and this does not present an ambiguity issue so long as nothing of significance named "Scarface" was created in 1932). If you really think your way is best I will support the idea on the mailing list as a change of the convention. Cheers! --mav 15:25 Aug 26, 2002 (PDT)

I don't have any preference one way or the other, but I've been doing it this way for a while now, as I hadn't seen the convention. If you want to go with the changes you've made, we're going to have to go back and change quite a few. -- Zoe

Keep on doing it your way -- I think it is better. I'll take care of the process that is needed to change the convention. --mav

Sorry, it looks like the list doesn't want to change the convention. So please use the (YEAR movie) conention when more than one movie shares the same name. I will take care of moving the (YEAR) format pages later. --mav

OK, no problem. -- Zoe

Hey Zoe, you should relogin under "the indefatigable Zoe". ;-) --KQ

Or "the obsessive Zoe" :-) -- Zoe

Hey, Zoe, why don't you move the chat from your user page to your user talk page? Thanks for the careful editing work. Also, you seem like the sort of person who would keep an interesting personal web page. Do you? --John Knouse

Thanks, no, not really. I've never gotten around to creating one. :-) -- Zoe

I am geting majorly frustrated. I DO NOT mind when people edit my articles. That's what they're for. But when the instructions for uploading images say they should be uploaded as .pngs, and they ALL get changed to .jpgs on somebody's whim, then why should I even bother? -- Zoe

Please read the image policy and upload page again--photographic images should be JPEG. Drawings and other iconic images should be PNG. We've been very consistent about that, and there are good reasons for it. Besides, what's your problem with other people doing all the work for you? --LDC

What do you mean, "all the work"? It would hae been nice if you had at least EXPLAINED why you were converting my pictures. And this is NOT what was said in the Mailing List. -- Zoe

OK, I suppose politeness isn't my strrong suit. By "work" I mean just doing the conversions themselves. I don't know what I might have said on the mailing list that was confusing, but the reason behind to policy is very simple: it produces the smallest file (and therefore quickest download for wiki users with slow modems) with good image quality to use formats designed and and optimized for the kind of image. JPEG's compression was designed and optimized for photographs; PNG's compression was designed and optimized for icons (though it's actually higher quality than JPEG for photographs as well--it just produces huge files for them). --LDC

Yes Zoe, please don't be frustrated. I too am short on politeness and sometimes my intentions are golden but my delivery is terrible. Same for LDC me thinks. It would be a great loss to the project if you left. Please don't. --mav

Zoe: see Talk: Neeltje-Jans

Hi zoe- Marc Bonfils IS his full name!!! I only linked his suranme as I've already put a link to Bonfils somewhere else quercus robur

Please stop putting links on the List of dukes of Norfolk. You are creating errors, because the articles about people with those names are about different people. Don't put a link on this page unless you first create an article for it to go to AND disambiguate with any existing article. Also, please don't link to Norfolk, England, because it's essentially a disambiguation page for all dukes of Norfolk, whether it's Norfolk, England, or not. For that reason, it needs the info about the Bigods to disambiguate them from the real dukes. Thanks. -- isis 2 Sep 2002

Why can't the name be disambiguated on the name page? I didn't link anything to Norfolk, England. -- Zoe

It can -- that's why I said it's okay to put the link in if you take care of disambiguating it first, but look at what you did to John Howard to understand the problem. -- isis 2 Sep 2002

I see nothing wrong with what I did. Add something to the John Howard article indicating there are several people by that name and disambiguated them on that page. -- Zoe

209.226.107.51 doesn't want to sign in and use a real name, so I can't respond to him/her on his/her user page, so I'm forced to do it here. You seem to be spending a lot of your time going through the Wikipedia and trying to make lots of anti-American statements, but your attempt to make the US look bad in East Timor isn't going to fly. -- Zoe

I'm just curious, does that mean the Wikipedia will be censored of all references to even well-documented facts that "make the U.S. look bad"? zadcat 20:24 Sep 2, 2002 (PDT)

Hardly. -- Zoe

209 here. I don't need to attempt to make the US look bad in East Timor. The US did that itself. I gave you a source. I have yet to see you refute that source. Are you saying you will remove things that "make the US look bad", regardless of whether they're completely relevant and true?

I'm not "anti-American", whatever that means. For all you know I *am* American. I have American friends. Many of the writers I greatly respect are American.

Anyway, I guess there's no point to this. You're probably the true believer type who will continue to stick to your story no matter what.

If you want to put in a paragraph that begins, "The United States is accused of ..." I can live with that. -- Zoe

Sorry for butting in, but what's going on? I don't see any problem with adding it, regardless of whom it makes look bad; we're not a PR machine but an encyclopedia and, if I may speak so loftily, we've got a higher obligation than to make people look good. If it's true, it's true and to hell with it. :-)

Having said that, 209 should know we are still an encyclopedia, so the NPOV still applies. I imagine there must be some controversy around the arms sales, which should be characterized and explored if we're going to mention them. Zoe, is lack of that plus the lack of attribution what disturbs you, or is there something else? --KQ

Mainly it was because 209 came in from out of nowhere and started doing nothing but writing anti-American info on several different pages. He/she obviously came in with an agenda. I have to admit I don't know the details of the East Timor situation, but when some stranger with no login starts gong all over the Wikipedia trying to make the United States get bad, I have a problem. -- Zoe

That's reasonable enough; I just saw the conflict on this one page and not on the rest. I don't know details of it either, and if I had noticed the rest I probably would have been suspicious also (like Mav, below). Also like mav, though, I probably would have noted why I reverted any changes on the article's talk page. Best, --KQ

Good point. I did make my objections in the comments, but didn't say anything on the Talk page. -- Zoe

I missed that part, sorry. (had the blinders on, I guess). I'm not trying to stir up trouble, I promise. :-) --KQ

I just want to be on the record that I would have done pretty much what Zoe had done if I was the one who discovered 209's apparently POV additions. Although I would have laid down a quick statement why I did what I did on the appropriate talk page at the first sign of disagreement. But that's just me. --mav

Me again. I wish I could link to the section 655 reports (legally required reports to congress on weapons sales), but I can't find them online. Given that the data from human rights organizations comes from these reports, we'd really have to write "The United States accuses itself of...". Frankly, I'm amazed you dispute this. I haven't heard even staunch defenders of America's Indonesia policy dispute it -- they usually say it was necessary to defend against Communism or something along those lines.

For now I'll put it as "human rights organizations say that" and add a note asking for someone to come up with the 655s, or a report from credible sources derived from the 655s. If they can find that, I think it should say "sold xxx million in arms, according to the American government's own public reports."

That's fine. I can live with that. -- Zoe

Hey Zoe, I'm planning to put maps into all the CA county articles that show their locations within the state. I put a sample in Los Angeles County; I'm hoping for a little feedback before I save and upload 58 of them and discover they're all wrong and/or hideous. :) If you have any thoughts on the matter, please let me know. --Brion

You don't have to shout; I did get new glasses recently and I'm wearing them. :-) Anyway, take a look at Talk:Decatur County, Alabama. --KQ

??? When did I shout? Sorry if you took something I said as shouting, but I'm at a loss as to what that might have been. ??? -- Zoe

In the edit summary. More of a, uh, rapping on the desk, I guess ("that's the CITY of Decatur, Alabama, which is in Morgan County, Alabama"). Don't mind me, I've been up far too long and it's obviously time for me to log off (though I haven't done much here this weekend). You haven't done anything wrong, sorry. Cheers, --KQ 05:52 Sep 15, 2002 (UTC)

I just ran into your entry Julius Caesar (1952 movie). According to IMDb this movie was one year later in 1953. I was tempted to change this as necessary, but since you may have had some reason for your entry I thought it best to get your comments first. Eclecticology 19:32 Sep 18, 2002 (UTC)

Sorry if I made you upset with that whole announcement about the counties wikiproject. I didn't know you were working on counties and such. I've been focusing my work on cities and counties and so forth and I wanted to make sure all of the work was to standard and consistent. I was going to create a WikiProject for cities as well and move the stuff from the U.S. States one regarding cities. Any thoughts or objections?

With regards to the cities, I ran into a new naming problem. I posted an explanation at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Cities. Since you post a lot of cities to the county lists I'd like to get your thoughts on the issue. -- Ram-Man

These are great articles you're adding on the senators. --KQ

Zoe, I downloaded all sorts of data from the U.S. Census Bureau on some demographic and geographic items. Anyway I compiled the county information (for all the counties in the country) and put them in a spreadsheet. I thought maybe you'd like to look at them. I modified Baldwin County, Alabama with the new information. Since you do a lot on counties I thought maybe you'd want the information. I put it on my web site at "http://www.rit.edu/~dlr1225/census-counties.xls" (Excel Spreadsheet) and "http://www.rit.edu/~dlr1225/census-counties.sxc" (Openoffice Spreadsheet). I will be completing a similar list of all the cities, towns, townships, etc. in the U.S. soon. -- Ram-Man

Thanks, Ram-Man, that must have taken forever to download! -- Zoe

It wasn't so hard with a DSL connection. Thank goodness! Anyway, maybe you will want to hold off on it. I have to learn SQL for work, so I am going to put all the data into some mySQL databases and autogenerate the articles. That way all that I will have to do is paste them in (or at least I will post the stuff online so others can access it!) -- Ram-Man

Hi, I'm writing this to you because you have shown a consistent interest in movies. This comes from a brief exchange that I just had with KQ that involved verifying a basic fact about a movie. We all run into these little questions of fact that we would like checked out but we don't know who is the best person to ask. A request on the article's talk page may never be noticed, and "recent changes" has been just too big to be communicative. KQ mentioned the various mailing lists that have been set up for Nupedia; to say that these have been inactive does not do justice to what hasn't been happening there. The specific list at http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/filmtv-l is relevant to our topic. What I'm suggesting is that Wikipedians could take over the list as a vehicle for checking out these little questions. If you are iinterested please go to the site to subscribe. Eclecticology

Great idea, E. I just did that. -- Zoe

I finished putting the data in a SQL database and I generated everything on Autauga County, Alabama under the "Geography" and "Demographics". I can do this for every state, county, and (eventually) city. Can you look over it and see if there are any formatting concerns before I go ahead and generate all the articles? Thanks! -- Ram-Man

What exactly do you want me to look for, just the format or something else? -- ~~

Well formatting is most important, but also if you think some of the content is stupid or any other thoughts you might have.. those are important too. Just take a look and tell me what you think. -- Ram-Man

Thanks for your attention to the Corinth page. I do have some concerns about whether there really is a Corinth in Perry County Illinois. Two Illinois Corinths do appear at http://www.placesnamed.com/c/o/corinth.asp but they both have the same lattitude and longitude. This often happens when a community straddles the county line, but here Perry and Williamson counties do not have a common border! If you can shed any light on this mystery, it would be appreciated. Eclecticology

Well, I don't know from personal experience, but I got the information from http://www.placesnamed.com/c/o/corinth.asp; I don't know where they got their information. -- Zoe

FWIW, the [Perry County website http://www.perrycountyillinois.net/sub69.htm] makes no mention of a Corinth. --Brion 23:53 Sep 26, 2002 (UTC)

Might as well delete the entry, then. {shrug} -- Zoe

I know I said this before, but I think all the work you're doing on the movie entries is awesome. :-) --KQ

Hi Zoe, I see that you are trying to make some sense of User:AntonioMartin's entries...Good luck! I have put a note on his talk page and another in a talk page, but he hasn't even aknowledge them...If you want more challeges, just review his contributions link....--AN

LOL. Thanks, I'll do my best. :-) -- Zoe

Good work!....I'm just dying to see if you feel like tacklin Carlos Monzon...Another contributor called it "an article uncontaminated by a drop of NPOV" :)--AN

Ack! LOL -- Zoe

Hey Zoe, just a reminder that the "move page" button in the sidebar is an easier and less painful way to move/rename a page. --Brion 22:16 Oct 1, 2002 (UTC)

Thanks, Brion. For some reason, that button hasn't been available for me till recently, so I haven't ever used it. :-) -- Zoe

Zoe, may I ask why you are moving Canadian cities around? I thought the idea was that we would leave cities be unless they had to be disambiguated. (I doubt there are other cities named "Quebec City" or "Winnipeg", at least for the present...) Long city names are a hassle to link to, and "Quebec City, Quebec" sounds dorky IMHO. I think they're OK where they are, although redirect pages in the form city, province would be useful. - Montréalais

I'm redirecting because it's inconsistant all over the place. Some times it's with the province, sometimes it isn't. In places like Quebec City, which has a lot of pages linked to it, I only did a redirect, not a move. -- Zoe

Huh? The article is now at Quebec City, Quebec. To my knowledge that's a move.

I don't think it that important that the names were inconsistent before. Sometimes they were City, Province for a reason, such as Sydney, Nova Scotia being so in order not to conflict with Sydney (Australia). But the rest were just Cityname. Do you think this is really necessary? I mean, as long as all the links work. You know what they say about a foolish consistency.

To show that it makes a difference - a lot of articles are well served to link to [[City]], [[Province]], [[Canada]]. It would be very irritating to link to [[City, Province|City]], [[Province]], [[Canada]]. Sure, there are redirects, but it's preferable to avoid a redirect, and it would also be better to leave new city entries as just City when there's low risk of having to disambiguate (Moose Jaw, 100 Mile House, Happy Valley-Goose Bay, and so forth). -- Montréalais

What a shame. We have to do that for all the American cities, and there are certainly more of them than there are Candian cities. This was what was agreed to -- federal states such as the US and Canada would use city, state or city, province. -- Zoe

Can you give me a link to see where this was decided, please? - Montréalais

http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-September/004552.html

Besides, I'm done now. -- Zoe

It would probably be useful for you to have sysop powers. You tend to come across a lot of newly created pages that are pure junk and should be deleted on sight. All you have do to is ask the list. Chow! --mav

EEK! I don't know if I want to be a sysop. "With great power comes great responsibility." Thanks, I'll think it over. :-) -- Zoe

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