User talk:121a0012

Welcome

Hello, 121a0012, and welcome to the English Wikiquote, a free compendium of quotations written collaboratively by people just like you!

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To ask for advice or assistance feel free to drop by the Village Pump or ask on my talk page. Happy editing! And again, welcome! --Aphaia 07:59, 11 May 2005 (UTC)

Quotation marks

I intend to keep on using proper punctuation. Apostrophes and quotation marks are entirely different things. 121a0012 13:42, May 17, 2005 (UTC)

If you are the person who, through a IP user account, has made a number of contributions to various style articles on Wikipedia, then you know that the question of what characters to use for punctuation is much more complex than the simple idea of what a character is used for in any given language or dialect at any given moment in history. I will not repeat the arguments for and against current Wikiquote practice here.

Typographic issues for any MediaWiki project are decided by consensus, and policy is described in the relevant project's Manual of Style. This house style, a concept with which you may be familiar, is standard practice not just in the MediaWiki world, but in the overall publishing industry. Each publisher has its own guidelines on how to represent punctuation, from strict observance of an original source, to a standardized form determined by the editors of the publication, most of which differ on a number of points. (See the guides from Chicago University Press, NY Times, AP, Oxford University, Cambridge University, as well as broader references like Strunk & White, not to mention the undocumented practices of music and cinematic publishing houses, for many examples of different practices.)

If you wish to change existing policy, you should bring up the issue at Wikiquote talk:Manual of style. Otherwise, you will likely have such contrarian practices in your contributions changed from time to time, and you will cause headaches for the very small number of people who are trying to bring pages into conformance with official policy.

Wikiquote is still too small to enforce its style guidelines, so a conscientious objector can pretty much do as they wish. But we are trying to clean up such irregular practices to make WQ look more professional. You can be a valuable contributor to this effort by participating in Wikiquote maintenance discussions. — Jeff Q (talk) 14:17, 17 May 2005 (UTC)

I see you've taken my advice by bringing up a set of points on this issue at WQt:MoS. Might I suggest that you sign your posting? (You might want to sign each section, as that lengthy argument is likely to generate nested discussions.) One of the problems that keeps the overworked sysops busy is reminding new users to sign their talk page postings so they may be taken seriously. I'm sure it was just an oversight on your part. — Jeff Q (talk) 16:23, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

Thank you

for your setting of QotD votes! --Aphaia 06:06, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the work on the July and August Quote of the Day voting pages. I had intended to create at least one for July at least this weekend, but saw you had already done it. ~ Kalki 27 June 2005 04:25 (UTC)

QotD August 6th

I realized that the entry for the Eisenhower quote was late, and if anyone had objected to its use in the couple of hours before the deadline, I would have deferred on that account, because I do think the TCP quote is a good one; but I thought the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb was clearly a more notable event to commemorate than the birthday of Jon Postel, if a significant enough quote could be found. I didn't think the Dr. Strangelove quote was appropriate. There are many times already I have deferred to the clearly indicated preferences, even though they were not mine; this was a last minute decision, and I agree there is room for debate and further refinement of the selection processes. ~ Kalki 04:33, 6 August 2005 (UTC)

I only had a few very rushed minutes to respond earlier to your comments, and missed some typos that I just fixed. I also have only a few minutes now, and had only a few minutes to make the final QotD selection for today— I simply made a snap judgment upon the matter. I had thought the Postel quote a good one, and still do, and would like to use it sooner than his next birthday, if possible. ~ Kalki 08:00, 6 August 2005 (UTC)

Welcome assistance

Thank you for your participation in welcoming new Wikiquotians! ~ Jeff Q (talk) 05:59, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

Record-setting VfD nominations

Whoa, pardner! I appreciate your enthusiasm for cleaning up articles, but could you give us a bit of a breather on your record-setting set of VfD nominations? I'm very concerned that even the regular reviewers, let alone newer visitors, will have a hard time doing justice to 40 new entries in a single day. You might instead make a list of your finds, and we can sift through with the proposed speedy-deletion changes in mind, possibly to allow us to SD many of them in the near future. Just a suggestion, though. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 05:22, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, it's just an avoidance exercise. I started looking at Special:Shortpages and found it more fun than what I was supposed to be doing this evening. Time for me to go to bed, anyway, so I'll leave you in peace for the overnight hours at least. 121a0012 05:26, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

I'm quite familiar with that tactic myself. I'm currently using it to avoid some annoying paperwork by mass-converting the old VFD archive pages. Anyway, thanks for calling attention to this entire area of needed cleanup. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 05:30, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

By the way, the reason I mentioned the speedy-deletion changes is that the people who have been putting off this critical task, which will allow us to summarily delete much of what must currently go through VfD, are the same ones who spend much of their editing time on VfD. By adding a dozen or more articles a day to VfD, you are all but ensuring that the means to speed up deletions will be pushed farther and farther down the road. I hate to discourage your efforts, but this is kind of a case of bad timing, as I'm really hoping that we can address Wikiquote:Speedy deletions/Draft shortly after I finish the preliminary repair of our deletion archive mechanism. If you are still doing your good work on Wikiquote out of task avoidance, perhaps I can talk you instead into looking over the draft policy and commenting on it at Wikiquote talk:Speedy deletions? ☺ ~ Jeff Q (talk) 01:38, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

I notice that you've added another 9 entries to VFD, which is getting really crowded now. I know that it's very nice to have something as an avoidance exercise (it's why I took up stub-sorting at Wikipedia a while page), but there are nearly 80 active votes on VFD now, which is a bit much. If you're looking for some other repetitive work to do here, you might consider working on stub sorting (talked about at Village pump, at least until the votes from your first round of nominations have closed, just to keep the page to a manageable size. Most of the pages have been around for a while, and another few weeks won't hurt things much. (With the nominations from new pages, on the other hand, quickly starting the VFD process might work to discourage people from creating similar pages in the future.) As with Jeff, I don't want to discourage you or to turn away your enthusiasm, but it's a bit overwhelming at the moment. —LrdChaos 14:17, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

Sysop nomination

With your ever-increasing work on Wikiquote maintenance in addition to your article work, I would like to know if you would be interested in becoming a sysop here. I've found your actions and postings both useful and well thought out (even when I disagree with them). I realize you may still be somewhat "offwiki", but at your convenience, let me know if you'd like to be considered. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 13:05, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

Arrghh! 121a0012, you're gonna kill me with these mass VfD nominations! ☺ Meanwhile, have you had a chance to think about possibly becoming a WQ sysop? ~ Jeff Q (talk) 04:14, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Much appreciated

Thanks for the work you did in helping to revert the latest series of vandalisms. - InvisibleSun 01:48, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

Deletion of The Homework Diary Company Ltd

I noticed that you are supporting the deletion of the above article, and of a few affiliated articles. I have given some information on the deletion page, and, after seeing your user page, thought that you might be interested in a project to try and find sources for these quotes. Please see the deletion page for more information. Also, please read this notice which I placed at the reference desk. -- R160K 19:40, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

Ralph Klein

I'm a bit puzzled as to why you not only restored the copyvio text in this article, but restored a badly-formatted version thereof instead of going back to my last version (before I discovered the copyvio). 121a0012 18:09, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

I was confused about this myself until I analyzed the edit activity involved. To make a long story short, I improperly edited new User:Trapper's version of the article to add a {{people-cleanup}} tag, when I should have noticed that the article had been updated several times since then with your logical changes.

This error has demonstrated a major flaw in my new-user welcome-and-review patrol. When I post welcomes, I often check user contributions to see if I can tweak or comment on edits to help set newbies on the right track early. Until recently, I always seemed to be the only frequent editor editing during the times that I do this work, so the new-user edits have been the latest versions. I've seen changes and avoided this mistake in the past, but clearly my old assumptions and level of attention are no longer adequate.

I apologize for the confusion. I'll try to be more careful in the future. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 21:14, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Danish politicians

I just noticed that you never added {{vfd}} calls to the pages for the other Danish politicians when you added them to the VFD I started on Morten Messerschmidt. 121a0012 05:07, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

Sheesh! Even cutting back on my activity, I'm still messing up basic stuff! I've tagged them all now and extended the vote again so all the articles can get a proper 7-day hearing. Thanks for catching this, 121a0012. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 09:18, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

Esperanza

Join wikiquote:Esperanza and help make wikiquote a better place.

Pedro J. Ramírez

Hi, 121a0012.

The quote is verifiable and notable.

Verifiability:

Please hear [1], first fifth of the radio program: 5´35´´...[]....7´42´´...[]...10´54´´.

Notability

• Pedro J. Ramírez is the CEO and founder of the second spanish newspaper ("El Mundo").

• He is saying that the current spanish government version about what happened in the w:en:2004 Madrid train bombings is impossible. It´s difficult to think about something more "notable"

Please use my TalkPage

Thank you for your attention. Randroide 13:22, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Theme article sourcing

You mentioned in an edit summary to Investment that "Our guidelines for theme pages allow omitting the source if the author's page has it." I am unaware of this guideline. Can you tell me where you found it? I couldn't find it in the WQ:Templates pages. I've posted an argument at Talk:Investment#Theme article sourcing that refutes this idea, and if it is somehow being propagated elsewhere, I'd like to raise this as a problem there. Thanks. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 09:06, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

A-ha! I see now where you got the idea about no source lines for theme pages. Wikiquote:Guide to layout currently recommends the source-less format:

• "This is a quote." ~ Quotee

I see that the current version of this policy was essentially written by MosheZadka in a major update a year ago, and was implemented by lack-of-objection rather than meaningful consensus, largely because it was a necessary and visible policy that had to reflect updated practices. Your sense of its implications seems to be in line with actual practice. I also see that Imjustmatthew attempted to call attention to some of the contradictions at Wikiquote talk:Guide to layout#Conflict in policies Templates and Guide to layout, but received no response from anyone, myself included, I'm sorry to say.

I think time has shown the "quote ~ quotee" format just encourages a lack of sources anywhere, as many editors don't bother to add quotes to a "quotee" article, but just slap stuff they find on the Internet into a theme article. Furthermore, Wikiquotians are quite careless about the punctuation, using tildes, hyphens, double-hyphens, en-dashes, em-dashes (the last two in both HTML entity and UTF-8 character forms), and even no punctuation at all, to separate the quotes from the quotee. The net result is quite sloppy visually as well as informationally.

I would be tempted to start a crusade for switching to a single mandatory-source-line system for all non-dialogue quotes, except that this is just one of many widespread problems that seem to raise their head each week here. I don't see myself working on this particular one unless and until I regain my energy for such challenges. Even if I or someone else does this, I don't know if anyone else will participate. We might end up with another lack-of-objection-based policy. Sometimes it's very hard not to be discouraged by the lack of general Wikiquote community participation. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 04:40, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

fr:Winston Churchill

(No trouble, my english is far from perfect but I live in Toronto, so I'm used to it :)

Thanks a lot for the tip about Hansard. I've just searched the University of Toronto catalogue, and it seems the law library has the volumes I need — so I'll just go there and look it up as soon as possible.

I will of course add the information to the english page. :-) Thanks again for your help, Manuel Menal 05:17, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

ASAP proved to be quite long since it meant an interlibrary loan, but I finally found the needed volumes and added the references to both quotes. I'll try to get some other references. Thanks, Manuel Menal 05:25, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

James Thurber

Hi there. Is there anything I need to do about the copyvio concern I raised, other than sit back and see what happens next? Should I look for an admin to review the article per your tagging? Thanks. Mavarin 09:49, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Philip Larkin

I don't understand why you changed (1) the format and (2) locality of the birth and death dates in the Wikiquote Philip Larkin article. For format, I had "August 9, 1922". You changed this to "1922-08-09". I've seen the date format I used in many places, and I thought it was an acceptable alternative. Is it? If so, why change it?

Also, I had put in Wikipedia links for the year parts of the date, which I thought was pretty standard (see Robert Frost, for example). You removed the Wikipedia part, so now it's just the year. Your comment says "Use internal links for dates", which I took to mean that you wanted the links to go to Wikiquote. But Wikiquote doesn't seem to have links for years. Or, at least, the way you changed it doesn't link to anything. Before, the Month-Day combos were linked to Wikiquote pages, and the Years were linked to Wikipedia pages. Now, the Month-Day combos are linked to the same Wikiquote pages, and the Years are linked to nothing. How is this an improvement? Thanks!

Eric Albert 06:29, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Cleanup tags

I know you tend to be rather zealous in applying various cleanup tags, many of which are clearly appropriate, but I just noticed the {{fix citation}} notice applied to quotes on the page for The Last Unicorn, all of which have citations by chapter. I definitely feel that this is over-zealous, that further precision is not, and should not be required, and that the tag should be removed. ~ Kalki 08:18, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

I do not believe that chapter numbers are adequate for verifiability, but setting that aside, the article also fails to identify the specific edition of the book being quoted. 121a0012 17:30, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

The edition being quoted can be helpful, and sometimes necessary in the case of variants, but I don't see it as absolutely necessary when there are no quotations or variants in dispute. I believe that insisting that people always need to give page citations for specific editions, unless there is actually some clear reason to dispute a quotation, is excessive. It can be good to be thorough, but it can be needlessly inhibitive to many potential editors to insist that they give page and edition citations for everything that they contribute.

Though accuracy and reliable citations should certainly be our goals, and these can be helped by thorough citations, Wikipedia had already become the biggest encyclopedia in history when it began to be dominated by policies that are so anal retentive about insisting on thorough citations for nearly every statement that is made; we are still a relatively small project with much need to grow. Unless there is clear reason to dispute a statement, such as those with a very uncharacteristic or slanderous nature, I believe we should not scare off or alienate too many potential editors with quite so extreme an insistence on meticulous citations for every quote we use, at least until we are likewise the largest and most thorough collection of quotes available, with a far greater number of regular editors, and can afford to be far more involved in the need for parring down excess and eliminating dross than in gathering new material. ~ Kalki 18:19, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

As you both know, I'm pretty anal about sourcing myself. My take is that we need to encourage specificity in sourcing, but not so much that we scare off people who are trying to do it. I definitely prefer pages numbers and editions (with a total page count that allows verifiers with different editions to interpolate), but I'm not inclined to implicitly criticize sources with only chapter information by tagging them with {{fix citation}}.

(By the way, 121a0012, thanks for bringing over fr:WQ material for our use. I'm not sure how much we should drive for this, per Kalki's concerns, but I can easily see us needing their more deliberate efforts soon if we don't get a handle on copyvio issues.)

My current thinking is that it's unreasonable to expect verifiers to read an entire book, but skimming through a chapter is tolerable, at least until we get many more regular contributors so that we can demand more of the community. Of course, this won't stop me from turning chapters into more specific citations if I happen to have a copy of the book available. As far as editions go, I don't think we need specific editions unless we have pages, as (in general) we can expect chapter numbering to stay the same between editions. Similar partial specificity may be appropriate for collections of poems, short stories, etc., where the cited source is "chapter-sized", making it a minor additional hurdle to find the quote. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 03:18, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

The Children of Men

This article is about a book, but is inappropriately formatted as a film.

This might have been more obvious had you used {{lit-cleanup}} instead of {{cleanup}}. I don't mean to rag on you (and UDScott), but having just gone through more than 200 articles to clean up the mess that was Category:Wikiquote cleanup (and is now Category:Uncategorized article cleanup), it's rather disheartening to see another editor start to fill it up again with material that clearly belongs in another place (particularly when it's the editor who originally created {{lit-cleanup}} in the first place). 121a0012 04:03, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Sorry about that, 121a0012. I should have remembered, or at least looked up, which one that was. I guess my thought processes are so befuddled at the moment that the confusion between film and book formatting for that article was all it took for me to "punt" with the unnecessarily broad tag. I rarely use {{lit-cleanup}}, so it didn't immediately come to mind. As far as having created it, I did so as part of my own minor expansion of genre tags back in September 2006, but you might be surprised how many of my 22000+ edits I completely forget about, nearly one-tenth of which I made in that month alone. ☺ Anyway, mea culpa. I'll try to be more careful and precise. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 09:29, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Cleanup

You wrote:

Please do not add {{cleanup}} to new pages when an appropriate category exists (e.g., {{game-cleanup}} for video games). Sorting through the jumble of Category:Uncategorized article cleanup was difficult enough the first time. 121a0012 03:47, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

No problem, I usually do -- I didn't realize there was a template for game cleanup. ~ UDScott 13:42, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for all your contributions

I just wanted to give you kudos for all the hard work you've been doing here lately. (One of these days, I'm going to have to learn about the Barnstar system of Wikipedia, so we can import it and award it to folks like you.) My graphicless Barnstar award is for your considerable, consistent, and conscientious work to improve many aspects of Wikiquote, its articles, and its policies and practices. In fact, I suspect that you are the most prolific editor we currently have that we haven't been able to cajole into becoming an administrator. Keep up the good work! ~ Jeff Q (talk) 10:21, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Cleanup of Robert Fisk

More than a year ago, you tagged the Robert Fisk article as requiring cleanup. The last few days, I tried to put the article in an adequate form. Can the tag now be removed? Greetings, --Meile 17:38, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for your message! I'll try to continue working on the article in the next few days. --Meile 19:44, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

cite web

You mentioned in a recent edit summary, "now I remember why I don't like {{cite web}} all that much". Is that because it uses periods instead of commas? Are there other annoying aspects? I ask because I'm looking into updating and improving our citation templates, and I'll be asking folks for their opinions. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 03:46, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

VfD: Rumor in African American culture

Since you tagged Rumor in African American culture for cleanup, you may be interested in discussing Wikiquote:Votes for deletion/Rumor in African American culture. ~ Ningauble 18:14, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Thank you

Thank you for your comment at Village Pump regarding Kalki's inappropriate image use. I think at this point he's reverted the images all back. I'm not sure what to do at this point in time. If you have any suggestions going forward, it'd be appreciated. -- Cirt (talk) 05:33, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for your honest opinions and I hope that FULL consideration of ALL possible people will be increasingly considered here. I welcome honesty and frankness, even where I must strongly disagree with it and sincerely believe I must present counter arguments with as much vigor as I can muster. I hope that you will appreciate that as a proper quality of a human being. Blessings to you. ~ ♞☮♌Kalki·†·⚓⊙☳☶⚡ 05:44, 1 February 2012 (UTC)