User talk:Urhixidur/Archive/2004

Archive of 2004 Talk

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Mars missions and categorization

Hi Urhixidur. Thanks for your categorization effort on Mars. Just two things though: first, can you please add Mars missions to the "Mars missions" category I just created under Mars, to keep down clutter? Second, and more importantly, please put the category link at the bottom. The way you are doing it now, at the top with an extra line after it, is causing extra space to appear at the top of the articles you categorize. Thanks! --Jkeiser 02:13, Jun 24, 2004 (UTC)

Mars missions has already been taken care of, I see (by you or someone else). The formatting I've just finished fixing. It is not the presence of Category at the top that inserts the extra space, but rather the blank line I put in; it has now been removed. Although putting categories and alternate languages at the bottom does have the advantage of not inserting extra blank lines at the top, I feel it is better to put these at the top where they're more likely to be taken care of by editors --in that way, it is a constant reminder that, in addition to the body of an article, one should think about categorising and linking to the other wikipedias.

Urhixidur 12:57, 2004 Jun 24 (UTC)

Yep, I found out you can put it at the top later, and I agree with you, it makes more sense. I will move mine there in the future. I did take care of Category:Mars missions, I was just posting here in case you were still categorizing things :) --Jkeiser 02:47, Jun 25, 2004 (UTC)

English dates

Hi,

For English dates, you should say:

Discovered in 1979
but
Discovered on March 4, 1979

Also months are capitalized in English: "March" instead of "march".

And the month and day should be linked: [[March 4]] instead of just "March 4".

Yeah, you're right. Those last few entries were laziness on my part (I normally stick to the ISO standard of yyyy-mmm-dd). Did I really type "discovered in"? Must have been tired...

Urhixidur 16 jul 2004 à 21:04 (CEST)

You didn't type "discovered in", it was already there, because previously there was just a year, not a complete date.

By the way, Phobos is Mars I and Deimos is Mars II. The numbering doesn't always follow order of discovery (first seven satellites of Saturn and first four satellites of Uranus are numbered by distance, not by order of discovery). Titan is Saturn VI, though first discovered.

-- Curps

Yeah, my bad. I thought for a moment that Phobos and Deimos were discovered after the rule of historical sequence came into effect...But that turns out to be wrong. I have not been able to find the "rule" itself in the IAU web pages, but that's because the IAU puts nothing much on its web site.

Urhixidur 17 jul 2004 à 06:46 (CEST)

Moon axial tilts

Just left a note on Talk:Triton (moon) requesting that the table row for axial tilt be left in place, just blank the data cell if the tilt listed is wrong or put the correct value in if you know it (for synchronous moons it'll always be 0°, right?). Bryan 05:02, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)

subscripting of asteroid number indexes.

I notice you've changed some pages like Asteroid moon to introduce the subscripting. I still think this is problematic. Especially since you are using the "small" tag, which makes the number quite hard to read.

As I mentioned in a previous message, it's not just American astronomy magazines that don't use subscripting, but also German and French ones too. And it's not just popular science magazines, but also scientific journals (some example articles were cited).

I would still say it's best to stick with what seems to be the common de facto practice.

-- Curps 03:48, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)

The small tag does sometimes make the text too small. I'll note, however, that in other articles I was not the culprit --others had used the subscripts. I guess my preferred position would be that the subscripts be used on the object's page when giving its true title (typically in bold at the very beginning of the article); after that, they can be dropped to lighten the text.

Urhixidur 12:04, 2004 Jul 22 (UTC)

Asteroid templates

Great work with the asteroid templates, it's much cleaner than before.

But there are two things:

I notice you're putting all the asteroids into Category:Astronomy as well as Category:Asteroids. This will eventually make the "Astronomy" category very crowded if it's done for every asteroid... Generally, a page is not put into a subcategory and a parent category at the same time.

Is it useful to add provisional designations for asteroids, if the designation was only given many decades or centuries after their discovery?

For recently discovered asteroids it's important, because the provisional designation is found in the astronomical literature at the time of discovery (for instance 4581 Asclepius = 1989 FC). But I don't know where the 1969 provisional designation for Astraea comes from, for instance, and it only seems confusing.

On sub-categorising. I dug around and found out that Astronomy includes Solar System, which includes Minor Planets, which includes Asteroids. So you're right --adding Category:Astronomy is redundant or worse. I'll fix it as I go.

I'll alter the template so it reads "Alternate designations" rather than "Provisional designations". Asteroid 1969 SE was a sighting that was later identified as 5 Astraea. These things happen all the time with asteroids.

Urhixidur 01:48, 2004 Jul 24 (UTC)

Lenka Šarounová, etc.

It's probably not advisable to move Lenka Sarounova to Lenka Šarounová, because the S-with-accent is not a ISO-8859-1 character. Wikipedia doesn't support Unicode in article titles, only ISO-8859-1 (Western European).

See Wikipedia:Naming_conventions#Be_careful_with_special_characters.

It's OK to use these characters within articles, because they can be specified using Unicode. But for titles it's problematic. A future version of the Wikipedia software will allow Unicode characters in titles.

Some versions of the Wikipedia software allow Unicode characters in titles (including, obviously, the non-Western-European-language versions) but apparently the English version of Wikipedia doesn't. I'm not sure why, but perhaps you can ask at the Wikipedia:Village pump and somebody might be able to explain.

-- Curps 02:04, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)

It seems to work just fine under en.wikipedia; it gets translated as Lenka_%8Aarounov%E1. It won't work with some other characters, however, like the C caron. I think it works with S caron because it is in the ANSI set. Redirects exist from the ASCII version of the name, so it should be transparent to any users...Now that I've checked out the reference you supplied, I see you are right; S caron is not ISO-8859-1 and will therefore not work correctly under a non-Windows machine. I'll fix this later tonight.

I appreciate your patience with my newbieness... ;-)

Urhixidur 02:16, 2004 Jul 25 (UTC)

Hi, Welcome! Great to have another astronomy enthusiast. I've posted some comments on VfD concerning your listing on VfD, please take them as intended, I thought afterwards they are a bit terse. If I can help in any way please contact me at my talk page, I'm happy to do VfD etc listings and have sysop powers which is useful sometimes. Andrewa 06:40, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Category:Asteroid spectral types

Categories don't get put on VfD. Instead, they go on Wikipedia:Categories for deletion. To make a category show as a regular link, use a ":" before the work Category. I've deleted the category. - UtherSRG 13:06, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Category links

Also could you not create articles that consist solely of a link to a category: they should contain some text about the subject as well! -- Graham ☺ | Talk 15:11, 26 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Like what? I haven't (willingly, anyway) created "articles that consist solely of a link to a category". I was just trying to move "Category:Asteroid spectral types" to "Category:Asteroid spectral classes".

Urhixidur 22:43, 2004 Jul 26 (UTC)

"Ambiguous billion"

Hi there. I noticed your recent edit to "Bank of America" ... it seems more counter-intuitive to make up a term like "G$" than it does to use the word "billion," which now has the same meaning in all English-speaking countries. -- Sekicho 22:08, Aug 3, 2004 (UTC)

It does not have the same meaning in all English-speaking countries. The switch by the UK government is far from having been swallowed by the population. See the billion and trillion articles if you wish. Using known metric prefixes is definitely the way to go, currency being just one more unit of measurement. Besides, "megabucks", "gigabucks" and the like are already in common usage.

Urhixidur 23:32, 2004 Aug 3 (UTC)

No those really are not in use here in America (except the first as the name of a lottery). Rmhermen 23:43, Aug 9, 2004 (UTC)

Urhixidur: Yet SI prefixes are not in common use in American English for currency, and are at least as confusing to me as "billion" is to you. Also, in American English the dollar sign ("$") always precedes the amount (e.g., "$[number] billion", not [number] $G). I've thus reverted the edit, and have added a fully numeric example ($60,000,000,000) to clarify the usage.

Oops! I did not mean to make the above comment anonymous; I'm afraid I merely forgot to sign it. I wanted to also point out that "G's" are, in addition to their SI use, a slang term for "thousands of dollars", especially in Mafia argot (at least in the common conception of the term). E.g., "He owes me 10 G's, the rat!" means "He owes me $10,000." Additionally, I agree with Rmhermen—"megabucks" and the less common "gigabucks" are slang terms. DocWatson42 11:40, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I think I'd rather use "gigaDollars" than "billion dollars". Even though "billion dollars" is used far more often than "gigaDollars", "billion" can mean 2 very different things, while "gigaDollars" means only one thing. I'd rather have somebody feel a bit confused and uncertain about what I say, than feel that he completely understood what I said when his understanding is a factor of 1000 different than what I meant. --DavidCary 01:01, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Asteroid template

Do you really intend to change the 200-300 articles to your new template? Otherwise I will revert the 6 you changed so far. We really want to have one standard for these articles. Rmhermen 23:43, Aug 9, 2004 (UTC)

It'll take a while but it'll be done. I've automated a large part of the process already (extracting pre-wikified data from AstOrb.dat), so it isn't as painful as it seems at first glance.

Urhixidur 00:27, 2004 Aug 10 (UTC)

Good luck with that. I wish the box was a little smaller. Most of the asteroids barely have a couple sentence long article. Rmhermen 18:56, Aug 10, 2004 (UTC)

Planetary system navigation footers

Hi - couple of cosmetic comments about the planet navigation footers (e.g., Template:Neptune) you've been adding/modifying:

These footers are left-aligned, whereas Template:Solar System that often appears just below them is centre-aligned. This looks a bit ugly.
On some of the pages you've added these footers to recently there seems to be a spurious-looking extra link added just above the footer -- e.g., in Neptune (planet), there was a link to Naiad (moon), which also appears in the footer. I tidied up that one as I happened to notice it but I see it applies to other topics too, so I thought you might want to know.

JTN 18:44, 2004 Aug 10 (UTC)

They're all supposed to be centered; if any aren't tell me and I'll fix them.

None of the footers I've looked at are centred, at least in my browser (an old IE5). I gave up after looking at the outer planets. Also the fonts are slightly different to Template:Solar System; and perhaps a different colour background in the header to that of Template:Solar System might be nice. But this is all cosmetic. JTN 19:30, 2004 Aug 10 (UTC)

The planet link is not spurious; it is meant as the "start of the journey", in the same way that the outermost moon links to "Solar system". I've modified it so it has a label "Visit the moons of ...". If you have a better suggestion, I'm all ears.

Urhixidur 19:20, 2004 Aug 10 (UTC)

Right, like the tours on The Nine Planets. With you now; it looked like a mistake, sorry to have deleted it. (Perhaps it's worth putting in some markup to distinguish it from the rest of the text, e.g., italics?) JTN 19:30, 2004 Aug 10 (UTC)

I toyed with the idea of putting them in a small box, but the planet pages already have two footer boxes, so it seemed like too much. They cannot be integrated into the planet footer box because of the "pipe" problem with templates (e.g. if one parameter were "Naiad", the template breaks at the "|").

Urhixidur 19:35, 2004 Aug 10 (UTC)

It's already taking up vertical space; I don't see that putting it in a box makes much odds.

I'd suggest putting in the name of the current topic to make clear that this puts it in context; e.g. something like

... | Rhea | Titan | Hyperion | ...

instead of just

Rhea || Hyperion

(Are you planning to swap the order of Janus and Epimetheus every four years? :)

JTN 13:39, 2004 Aug 12 (UTC)

What an evil idea! It is already unwieldy enough to include the Trojan moons in the sequence (Telesto, Calypso, Helene; for those I've adopted the ordering convention [1] main moon [2] leading trojan [3] trailing trojan). Plus the JPL orbital elements for the moons of Jupiter give different sequences depending on whether you use distance or period (I'm still not convinced this is due to solar perturbations).

The middle link is a good idea --feel free to jump in and help putting them in: there are "only" 146 such bloody links to change...And another 146 over on fr.wikipedia!

Urhixidur 16:17, 2004 Aug 12 (UTC)

We seem to both be doing Saturn's moons - I've collided with your edits now. I side-stepped the co-orbital problem by making small Trojans branches off the main line and treating Janus/Epimetheus as a special case.

JTN 17:00, 2004 Aug 12 (UTC)

Brilliant solution; I like the style you've hit upon. Now I'm off to lunch; I expect everything done by the time I get back. ;-)

Urhixidur 17:02, 2004 Aug 12 (UTC)

I notice that people are making the same mistake I did, and removing the "moon navigator" footers from planet pages as "broken", despite our changes -- they've been deleted from both Saturn and Neptune recently (although they've left them on moon pages, mutter). Which probably implies that many people still don't understand what we tried to achieve with it.

To be honest, I've cooled on the whole idea, given that if you want to tour the moons you can do so almost as easily via pages like Jupiter's natural satellites with far less maintenance and redundancy required. Having such a labour-intensive process seems rather "unWiki" to me.

(Arguably the moon navigator should follow the style described in Wikipedia:Incumbent series if we keep it at all.)

Perhaps we should take the discussion to Wikipedia:WikiProject Astronomical Objects?

JTN 18:01, 2004 Sep 13 (UTC)

Meter vs. Metre

Please don't go around changing spellings. You will only get people annoyed with you. We have a longstanding policy of retaining the initial author's choice in variant spellings (except in cases where a particular spelling is more appropriate given the subject of the article.) Rmhermen 20:51, Aug 10, 2004 (UTC)

Mylar as a generic name

I notice you've been going through articles that link to mylar and adding an ® to every instance of the name. I don't think this is accurate in most cases, however; when used as a trade name Mylar refers to BOPET polyester film made specifically by DuPont, whereas most of these references seem to mean BOPET polyester film in general (ie, from any manufacturer). Bryan 23:53, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Guess that'll teach me to try to play it safe...

Urhixidur 02:01, 2004 Aug 14 (UTC)

Well, I'm hardly an expert in trademark law; I could be wrong. But the mylar page itself says that "mylar" is often used as a generic name so I figured this distinction might be significant. Bryan 18:59, 14 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Neptune's moons

The nav tables are redundant; the Neptune infobox has that information.

[[User:Neutrality|Neutrality (talk)]] 23:50, 21 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Nope; the infobox is far from complete and shows only the major moons or moon groups. This is particularly evident with the Jupiter and Saturn footers. The infoboxes allow quick jumps; the nav "bar" is for sequential navigation.

Urhixidur 23:55, 2004 Aug 21 (UTC)

Accentuation

I'm obviously appealed to the idea of mass-changing Montreal for Montréal, etc. – as a matter of fact I changed this damn "in French, Montréal" for "officially, Montréal" just a few days ago – but I'm not totally sure about it. (Especially changing direct links for links to redirection articles.) Do you think Montreal, Quebec itself should be moved to Montréal, Quebec? I suppose you had some thoughts about that, so please share them! :-) --Valmi 04:51, 23 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Being an ISO-8859-1 character usable on en.wikipedia, the "é" should be used whenever possible. With the various redirects in place, it seems "Montréal, Québec", being the most correct, should be the page's true entry. It won't move, however. (I tried). Maybe I'll ask an admin to fix it.

Urhixidur 12:01, 2004 Aug 23 (UTC)

Well I'm not 100% sure. Granted, Montréal is the official English name, but this is not widely recognised by usage – OED for instance spells Montreal, just as about all local anglophones do. Other cities that have different names in English and in their local language are listed under their usual English name, like Rome/Roma – although I guess it is true they don't have an official English name as we do...

As of Québec (the province), there again the national government use Québec like the official English name, but the hard fact is, the British North America Acts of 1867 (not surprisingly) spells it Quebec with no "é".

So in my opinion (as of now) the best would be to have Montréal, Quebec and even Québec, Quebec...

--Valmi 19:13, 23 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Asteroid designations

What's with the wacky subscripts on asteroids, like '(12126) 1999 RM11' and 2002 AA29?
—wwoods 07: 43, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I'm not Urhixidur, but... the wacky subscripts are:

1) the official way to write such asteroid names (!)

2) widely ignored and not used by most publications including scientific journals

I would argue that we should follow suit and not use them either, for a number of reasons:

— Some browsers like Mozilla don't handle the underline properly for link text involving subscripts (the underline goes right through the subscript, striking it out).

— Simplicity: adding the subscript means having to create complicated links like [[(12126) 1999 RM11|(12126) 1999 RM<sub>11</sub>]] instead of just slapping [[ and ]] around the already complicated asteroid name. This duplication is error-prone.

— Readability (it's hard to read the small numbers)

— Consistency with the de facto and widespread usage by other publications of not using subscripts.

-- Curps 15:31, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)

We agree on the facts, except that I must point out that Mozilla (which I use) does not strike through the subscript; so this may be an OS problem maybe? We mildly disagree on the reasons pro and con (the link is indeed harder to write; tedious but not error prone [if one uses cut and paste]; but this is transparent for the reader). De facto "standards" I always look at askance, as they tend to propagate errors and bad habits as often as they do good ideas.

How's this for a compromise: We'll restrict the subscripting to 1) the asteroid's table header (template name parameter) and 2) its first mention in its own article (to compensate for the fact that we can't make it appear in the Wiki title). For an example, see 2002 AA29.

Urhixidur 22:17, 2004 Sep 4 (UTC)

Seems reasonable. Eventually they'll get real names anyway.

—wwoods 15:55, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)

table alignment

Is there a better way to get columns of numbers aligned on the decimal point, as on Orbital period? Using &_nbsp;s is kludgy, but it looks right on my browser. Using aligned columns for the parts of the numbers leaves too much space around the decimal point:

432.1 432 . 1

43.21 43 . 21

4.321 4 . 321

—wwoods 17:25, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Frankly, I'd put the request to the programmers. Specifying alignment within Wikitables isn't as painless as it should be right now. Using non-breaking spaces won't work because you have no control over the font used by the user's browser.

Urhixidur 17:54, 2004 Sep 7 (UTC)

There, I've gone and entered a "bug report" (which is actually a feature request). We'll see if it bears fruit.

Urhixidur 18:10, 2004 Sep 7 (UTC)

Mean Radius -> Semimajor Axis

Doradus 13:00, Sep 9, 2004 (UTC) -- Hi there. If you change Mercury (planet)'s "mean radius" to "semimajor axis" (which I agree with) then you probably ought to do all the others too.

I'm not sure I agree with these changes. I think "semimajor axis" seems a bit hard to understand for someone who simply wants to know how far away Mercury is from the Sun. (But "mean radius" is a bit vague, and could potentially mean several different things -- so I like the extra precision of "semimajor axis"). Is there an easier-to-understand way of saying semimajor axis? The semimajor axis of a planet is exactly halfway between apihelion and perihelion, right ? What do you think about something like "Mercury: distance from Sun: 57,909,176 km +- 11,907,903 km" ? That compresses 3 numbers to 2 numbers, without loss of information. --DavidCary 01:01, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)

The main reason to switch to the proper technical term, semi-major axis, is that "mean" or "average" means several things. The time-averaged focus-to-planet distance is slightly larger than the semi-major axis (it is equal to $a(1+e^{2}/2)$ ); the eccentric-anomaly-average is equal to the semi-major axis and the true-anomaly-average yields the semi-minor axis, $a{\sqrt {1-e^{2}}}$ . (See the semi-major axis article for details)

Listing a range of orbital radii as you suggest is problematical with comets which sometimes have parabolic or hyperbolic orbits (the semi-major axis is then infinite or negative, so a span of radii makes no apparent sense).

Yes, the "range" won't work for parabolic or hyperbolic "orbits".

This is an encyclopedia, after all. A chopped-down table (showing orbital radius as a range) may be suitable for simple.wikipedia.org, however...

Still, you have a point that the table is somewhat overwhelming. Maybe a "quick" facts" table, holding just the essentials, should appear at the top. The full table would still appear, but further below. What should those essentials be? How about: semi-major axis, orbital period, number of satellites, diameter, mass and rotation period? All in Earth units, of course.

Urhixidur 02:08, 2004 Sep 10 (UTC)

I'm not suggesting a "chopped-down table". I'm suggesting that it would be better to give the semimajor axis and the range "57,909,176 km +- 11,907,903 km" in a single row, than to spread that information out over 3 rows. Once we have that information, the aphelion and perihelion rows become redundant, right ?

DavidCary 19:56, 14 Sep 2004 (UTC)

The one problem I have with a +- notation is that it forces people to do the addition and subtraction when all they wanted was to look up the perihelion and aphelion...

Urhixidur 02:27, 2004 Sep 15 (UTC)

Hey, since you seem to be well-versed in this area (having uttered the words "eccentric anomaly"), I have recently started re-writing the Astrodynamics page. My brother got married this weekend so I haven't had much time to do anything else to it, but I have put in a derivation of Kepler's formula that I'm fairly proud of, since it's simpler than the ones I have read elsewhere (though it is in dire need of a diagram). Anyway, check it out if you're interested. --Doradus 18:37, Sep 14, 2004 (UTC)

list of asteroids

Thank you for responding to the reversion that occurred after my edit of List of asteroids (1-1000). You may wish to check '603 Timandra 1906 TJ'. When I looked at it, the date said 'February 16, 1906'. It now says 'February 16, 1905'.

Bobblewik (talk) 16:13, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Yikes! Glad you caught that --search-and-replace problem on my part. It has now been fixed.

Somebody ought to write a Wiki or Word macro to do this kind of systematic link-lightening...

Urhixidur 16:30, 2004 Sep 17 (UTC)

Glad to be of help. I was also thinking of looking at a previous list taken from the history of that topbanana report. But I need a break. As you say, correcting excess linking is ideal work for a Wikipedia bot and is tedious for a human. I asked about it Wikipedia:Bot requests. Feel free to make a support my request there. Bobblewik (talk) 16:51, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Could you take another look at [[List of asteroids (1-1000)? I reverted it to restore the correct and necessary date linking and may have erased your last changes to the page. But for some reason, I can't tell. Rmhermen 20:04, 2004 Sep 17 (UTC)

"Correct and necessary"?? You've reverted it completely to the original mess. Why? What's wrong with removing line-by-line duplicates?

Urhixidur 22:38, 2004 Sep 17 (UTC)

Removing the link to the year in the date causes the user date preference to not function, causing the page to display a mix of date format (user preference for fully linked dates, writer preference for unlinked, and partial user preference for partially linked dates). I was unsure whether I reverted your changes to the 1905-1906 asteroids or if they are still correct. Rmhermen 15:56, Sep 18, 2004 (UTC)

I'll buy the dates reason (I had noticed and shrugged it off), but that does not excuse re-inserting the duplicate discoverer links. There is no need to list (for example) J. Palisa as a link on every line of a block of asteroids discovered by him --just the first line of the block.

The 1906 discoveries are correctly dated (you can tell by looking at the provisional designation).

Urhixidur 16:23, 2004 Sep 18 (UTC)

Physical parameters of 2002 AA29

I'm currently writing the article of 2002 AA29 in the german wikipedia. (de:2002 AA29) and I am checking the values given in the english article at the moment; I couldn't find any source for mass and density of 2002 AA29 on the web although I googled quite a lot. In article history I saw, that you added thoese values to the article. Did you compute them with a reasonable assumed value for density and the given diameter? I have also left a small note about that in the discussion page of the article (Talk:2002 AA29). Arnomane (in German wikipedia).

Yes, as the question mark shows, I assumed a default density of 2; this then allows mass, gravity and escape velocity to be computed. You may want to fetch my AstOrb Browser application to see how easy this makes wiki entries. If there is a de.wikipedia template similar to the English (Template:Minor Planet) or the French (fr:Modèle:Planète mineure), I could easily add it to the application. (This response also appears in Talk:2002 AA29)

Urhixidur 23:48, 2004 Sep 19 (UTC)

Possessives ending in s

I've just seen your change to transit of Venus. Sorry, but all singular nouns take apostrophe-ess to denote possessive. Check the apostrophe page. I've put some stuff on talk:transit of Venus which you may find interesting. Also see St James's Park.

best

Robinh 12:42, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Wrong! Well, sort of. I quote from Apostrophe (mark):

« If a name already ends with an s, the extra s is sometimes dropped: Jesus' parables. This is more common in U.S. usage and with classical names (Eros' statue, Herodotus' book). Additionally, many contemporary names that end with -es (a -z sound) will see the extra s dropped by some writers: Charles' car, though most style guides advocate Charles's car. »

So, although writing "Venus's" is not quite a mistake, classicists and purists will prefer to drop the final s. After all, you don't write "babies's teeth", for example, so why would you do so for Venus? We have a choice between writing « the boss' desk » and « the Jones' house » versus « the boss's desk » and « the Joneses's house » (see http://www2.cuw.edu/WritingCenter/grammar.htm for the latter).

Urhixidur 18:49, 2004 Oct 15 (UTC)

Hill sphere

Hi Urhixidur. Thanks for checking my calculation of the Shuttle's Hill sphere radius. I'm afraid I still think it should be 1.2 m though ;-) My reasoning: the linked website wrongly divides 104,000 kg by g to get the mass. But 104,000 kg is already the mass, not the weight! Using m=104,000 kg I then get r=1.2 m. Fwb22 22:11, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)

You're right. Wikipedia gives the shuttle's end-of-mission mass as 104 t, which then does yield 1,2 m radius. I had used the 10,6 t figure. The web site's sentence is a mess.

Urhixidur 01:52, 2004 Oct 30 (UTC)

Neptune moon navigator

Why are you reinstating the moon "navigator", its a duplicate of the footer. ed g2s • talk 15:55, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)

As was explained in the note, it is *only* in the Neptune case that it is a full duplicate. I'm currently fixing the other footers to get around this recurring problem.

Urhixidur 15:57, 2004 Nov 5 (UTC)

It should in be all cases that it lists all the moons. There's no reason why we can't have large footers, like Template:United States. What's the point of forcing someone to "walk" through all the different moons when they can just have one box that lets them choose the one they want. ed g2s • talk 16:51, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)

A footer listing all 63 known moons of Jupiter would be much too heavy on the eye. The advantage of the palettes as they stand right now is that they properly group related small bodies into a single entry. Neptune's moonlets don't readily group, which is why they ended up all listed; Uranus' moonlets, on the other hand, quite naturally group around Puck (13 members) and Sycorax (8 members, with S/2003 U 3 standing apart because it is prograde). These groupings reflect the underlying physics of orbiting small bodies, and in some cases it could be they are the fragments of an original body --exploding the entries in the palettes would dilute this fact, in effect hiding the forest for the trees.

Urhixidur 17:00, 2004 Nov 5 (UTC)

Uranus' moons aren't too many to list in one box. I don't think having a list of 63 is too much of a problem anyway (see Template:UEFA_teams). This is an encyclopedia after all, not a walk-through picture book. ed g2s • talk 17:10, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I'd be willing to accept heavy palettes only if they grouped the objects appropriately. Which is problematic if one is trying to preserve their distance sequence at the same time, as the groups often intertwine (S/2003 U 3 is in the middle of Sycorax' group, for example). Let's see what you can come up with in the sand box first.

Urhixidur 17:14, 2004 Nov 5 (UTC)

You seem to be far more knowledgeable on the subject - so I wouldn't know how best to group them. ed g2s • talk 17:18, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Loren Ball

Loren Ball is a redirect to a page that does not exist. It has been added to Wikipedia:Redirects for Deletion. If you know where to properly direct it, please do so.

CaseInPoint 23:50, Nov 29, 2004 (UTC)

It is correctly directed right now (to Loren C. Ball). It is just a place-holder for a future astronomer article. It can be deleted without any problem, since it'll be recreated when the article gets done. I could not find it on Wikipedia:Redirects for deletion; is this normal?

Urhixidur 12:28, 2004 Nov 30 (UTC)

This appears to be part of a project that is landing a whole bunch of these target-less redirects on WP:RfD. (See below for another.) I don't recall this one showing up - I thought maybe they'd just added an {RfD} tag to the page, and forgot to list it pm WP:RfD (which happens regularly), but not so. No idea what happened; I'm pretty sure this one never showed up on WP:RfD. Noel (talk) 13:37, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

PS: I don't usually check other User_talk: pages (so that I don't have to monitor a whole long list of User_Talk: pages - one for each person with whom I am having a "conversation"), so please leave any messages for me on my talk page (above); if you leave a message for me here I probably will not see it. I know not everyone uses this style (they would rather keep all the text of a thread in one place), but I simply can't monitor all the User_talk: pages I leave messages on. Thanks! Noel (talk) 13:37, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Redirect you created at "A. van Staden"

Hi, you created a redirect from A. van Staden to Andre van Staden, but there is currently no article at Andre van Staden. (It may have been deleted since the redirect was created.) Wikipedia policy is to get rid of redirects to non-existent pages, and someone listed A. van Staden on WP:RfD If you want the redirect to stay, you will need to create something at Andre van Staden (even a stub will do), or else the redirect will go away. If you do create the target, you don't have to do anything on WP:RfD (we'll eventually notice the target is there), but if you do, just delete the entry for A. van Staden. Thanks! Noel (talk) 12:32, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Umm, no, I did not. I was following a "please clean-up" link and did not change anything. Wiki created it on its own.

Urhixidur 12:41, 2004 Dec 1 (UTC)

Happened to see this when I was adding the comment above. I don't know how the page was created, but the history does list you as the creator. If you don't want the page, I'll delete it. Noel (talk) 13:48, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

The Humungous Image Tagging Project

Hi. You've helped with the Wikipedia:WikiProject Wiki Syntax, so I thought it worth alerting you to the latest and greatest of Wikipedia fixing project, User:Yann/Untagged Images, which is seeking to put copyright tags on all of the untagged images. There are probably, oh, thirty thousand or so to do (he said, reaching into the air for a large figure). But hey: they're images ... you'll get to see lots of random pretty pictures. That must be better than looking for at at and the the, non? You know you'll love it. best wishes --Tagishsimon (talk)

Article Licensing

Hi, I've started a drive to get users to multi-license all of their contributions that they've made to either (1) all U.S. state, county, and city articles or (2) all articles, using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-by-sa) v1.0 and v2.0 Licenses or into the public domain if they prefer. The CC-by-sa license is a true free documentation license that is similar to Wikipedia's license, the GFDL, but it allows other projects, such as WikiTravel, to use our articles. Since you are among the top 1000 Wikipedians by edits, I was wondering if you would be willing to multi-license all of your contributions or at minimum those on the geographic articles. Over 90% of people asked have agreed. For More Information:

Multi-Licensing FAQ - Lots of questions answered
Multi-Licensing Guide
Free the Rambot Articles Project

To allow us to track those users who muli-license their contributions, many users copy and paste the "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" template into their user page, but there are other options at Template messages/User namespace. The following examples could also copied and pasted into your user page:

Option 1

I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:

OR

Option 2

I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions to any [[U.S. state]], county, or city article as described below:

Or if you wanted to place your work into the public domain, you could replace "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" with "{{MultiLicensePD}}". If you only prefer using the GFDL, I would like to know that too. Please let me know what you think at my talk page. It's important to know either way so no one keeps asking. – Ram-Man ^{(comment) (talk)}[[]] 13:44, Dec 9, 2004 (UTC)

T. Fujii and K. Watanabe

Sorry for the delay, I finally replied.

If you have any questions about other Japanese astronomers, let me know. I don't actually speak Japanese, so it's possible I got some of them wrong, but in most cases did actually check and confirm.

-- Curps 01:36, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

O. Bancilhon

Good job finding out her first name, all my searches came up empty. I became a little bit obsessed with this.

If you could figure out the famous A. Laurent it would be great. I have seen a photo of the commemorative plaque on Benjamin Valz's house in Nimes... even that just says "A. Laurent".

-- Curps 05:05, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

No kudos for me; Odette's name (along with 15 others) was handed to me by Dr. Schmadel, the semi-official minor planet historian. I did find Andrzej Kwiek on my own, but only because Dr. Schmadel had identified Jerzy Dorbrzycki. As for A. Laurent, I've come up empty too, no doubt up the same blind alleys. If only he had descendants eager to trumpet his fame from a family web page...

Another side effect of this recent sweep: someone had added an (incomplete) C. Torres page identified as Carmen Torres. Double-checking confirmed my original research: wrong person --Carlos Torres is the minor planet discoverer. The page has now been fixed.

Urhixidur 05:10, 2004 Dec 21 (UTC)

The remaining delinquents are:

Banh, S. ((85559) 1998 AC5 from Dominion Astrophysical Observatory (DAO); co-observed 1997 YL11; 1997 XS2; 1997 SZ10 (this one from Mauna Kea with Christian Veillet))
Barr, E. (Could be the Edward Barr involved in 1963 sighting of possible volcanic activity on the Moon; discoveries all at Anderson Mesa: 3445 Pinson (1983 FC); 3743 Pauljaniczek (1983 EW); (4436) 1983 EX; (6286) 1983 EU; (9294) 1983 EV)
Behymer, B. E.
Belyaev, Yu. A.
Berney, K.
Bruton, W. D. (Dan/Danny Bruton: astro@sfasu.edu; brutonwd@titan.sfasu.edu)
Cofre, S.
Courty, F. (Bordeaux, 384 Burdigala (1894 AV); 387 Aquitania (1894 AZ); NASA ADS: 1 hit, 1911)
Cross, K.
Dalsanti, A. (La Silla, 40314 Hainaut, nothing on NASA ADS)
Davis, D.
de Pascual, M.
de Saint-Aignan, C. P.
Di Clemente, A. (Campo Imperatore, (26914) 1996 KC1 with Andrea Boattini; NASA ADS: 9 MPEC, 1 ApJ (Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma))
Dunn, A. (Kitt Peak, (48484) 1992 ET1; NASA ADS: Andrew M. Dunn? 11 misc, 1991-6, Galactic astronomy (U. of Cambridge))
Faul, K. L.
Fisch, G.
Fric, T. F.
Galliani, E.
Gualdoni, C.
Gyllenberg, K. (=? Walter Gyllenberg (5 Apr 1896 - 25 Jul 1952); PAT 33 (1952) 149 N. Ambolt 52.10.01)
Kirsch, K.
Koldewey, E. (Possibly married to Susanne Koldewey (DLR))
Kriete, A. (Bergedorf (Hamburg), (3769) 1967 UV with Lubos Kohoutek; NASA ADS: 1 hit 1978)
Kveton, J. (J. Květoň)
Laurent, A.
Lee, L. (NOT Lee, Laurence Patrick (1913 - 1985))
Leech, J. P.
Lochno, P.
Lohnert, K.
Lokalov, A. (University of Chile Observatory, Cerro El Roble Station; 2975 Spahr (1970 AF1) with H. Potter; NASA ADS: IAUC 2207)
Masotti, G.
Meese, C.
Mendenhall, J. D.
Michaud, J.
Parchomenko, P.
Paroubek, A. (Skalnaté Pleso, 1989 Tatry (1955 FG); NASA ADS: 4 hits 1953-7)
Petit, J. (Universidad de Chile; probably not Jean-Marc Petit)
Plyugin, G. A.
Potter, H. (University of Chile Observatory, Cerro El Roble Station, 2975 Spahr (1970 AF1) with A. Lokalov; =? H. I. Potter (Pulkovo 1958-65; H.I.L. 78-2002); NASA ADS: IAUC 2207 (1970), others)
Rajamohan, R.
Salyards, S. L.
Samuel, A. G. (usuario@casleo.gov.ar; El Leoncito = CASLEO (Complejo Astronómico Leoncito), Provincia de San Juan, Argentina, 1917 Cuyo (1968 AA) [named for Universidad Nacional de Cuyo; Universidad Catolica de Cuyo] with Carlos Ulrrico Cesco; NASA ADS: 2 hits, 1969, 71 (Observatorio Austral Yale-Columbia; Boletin de la Asociacion Argentina de Astronomia))
Solovyov, V. Y. (NASA ADS: 1 hit: Three new variable stars in Cygnus, T. V. Kryachko, V. Ya. Solovyov, Peremennye Zviozdy (Perem. Zvezdy), 23, pp. 429-431 (1996))
Stern, W. A.
Stockmaster, M.
Strommer, G. (maybe Gyula Strommer?)
Suvanto, R.
Taeymans, D.
Tuma, D. (tuma@mbox.troja.mff.cuni.cz)
Wagner, J. (=? Jeffrey Wagner (U. Pittsburgh))
Weber, R.
Wilder, P. D.
Zelinsky, D.
Ziboli, M.

Urhixidur 05:27, 2004 Dec 21 (UTC)

Soloyov is actually Solovyov. But I don't know who this is. -- Curps 05:58, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Zhang Yuzhe

I really highly doubt that "Chia-Hsiang Chang" could be the same person. Do you have more information? -- Curps 05:38, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I draw the conclusion from Dr. Schmadel's statement that C.-H. Chang is « Chang, Chia-hsiang (and Yu-che) ». The dates match, the location makes sense (Nanking), and the resemblance between Yu-che and Yuzhé jumps at you. Of course, we can always be proven wrong later...

Urhixidur 05:54, 2004 Dec 21 (UTC)

Yes, Yuzhe and Yu-che are just two different ways of writing the same thing (the first in pinyin, and the second in an older romanization). But Chia-hsiang and Yu-che are completely different names.

At his death, he was known as Zhang Yuzhe, so it seems really unlikely that he changed his name to "Chia-hsiang" in middle age and later changed it back. I never heard of Chinese people changing their Chinese first name. In any case, Chang (or Zhang) is a very common Chinese surname. Maybe Dr. Schmadel implied that it was a joint discovery, although only C.-H. Chang is credited with it?

I will try to research this. -- Curps 06:03, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Adminship

Hi Urhixidur. I've seen you make a lot of good contributions for quite a while, and I was wondering if you'd like me to nominate you for adminship? --Doradus 12:49, Dec 23, 2004 (UTC)

If you think I'm worthy, go ahead. I do think I've taken the usual newcomer's lumps by now. And I'm a confirmed wikiholic... ;-)

Urhixidur 13:19, 2004 Dec 23 (UTC)

2004 MNthingy

Given your user page, it appears you're more familiar with these things than I am. I defer to your judgement about whether the name is "incorrect" or not. Feel free to remove the wrongtitle tag.

That unicode character is ridiculously small for some reason, so I'd appreciate sticking with the html subscripts. -- Cyrius|✎ 06:31, 25 Dec 2004 (UTC)

The unicode rendering depends on each user's installed fonts, so we have no control over that. We've been using sub tags so far, so it's easier to stick with those. Although the name is sort-of-wrong, I think I'll remove the wrongtitle template; it is meant for those cases where the ISO-8859-1 en.wikipedia limitation gets in the way (in my mind, anyway).

Urhixidur 15:34, 2004 Dec 25 (UTC)

2004 MN4

Hi, I left a question for you at Talk:2004 MN4. Cheers, AxelBoldt 07:38, 26 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Congratulations!

Congratulations! It's my pleasure to let you know that, consensus being reached, you are now an administrator. You should read the relevant policies and other pages linked to from the administrators' reading list before carrying out tasks like deletion, protection, banning users, and editing protected pages such as the Main Page. Most of what you do is easily reversible by other sysops, apart from page history merges and image deletion, so please be especially careful with those. You might find the new administrators' how-to guide helpful. Cheers! -- Cecropia | explains it all ® 04:35, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)