User talk:Jaxl/Archive02

VFDA organization

Thanks for closing that near-record block of six entries!

You may not be aware of this, but we've been placing non-article entries under the heading "Deleted pages", as opposed to the letter sections under "Deleted articles". (I've moved "Category:1964 films" and "Template:Intro" to the appropriate places.) It's one of a number of customs that we developed back when Aphaia and I (and later MosheZadka) took over most of the VFD work from Kalki last year, in an attempt to subdivide and sort the mass of entries.

Obviously, VFDA is much overdue for some significant revision, as the current system is quite slow and unwieldy. I'm hoping to get to it shortly after dealing with the also long-overdue policy revision of Wikiquote:Speedy deletions. I welcome your input and/or assistance on either of these issues. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 02:39, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

Whoops, I hadn't noticed that section before. Thanks for the info. As for speedy deletions, like I said, I'll assist in polling if you need me to. The new draft policy should lessen the amount of articles on VFD since they can just be speedied once the new policy is put into place. After that, we'll deal with VFDA. -- Robert 16:56, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, Robert — I didn't mean to be redundant redundant. I'd just finished a long day of fixing my computer, and had forgotten it was you who started the SD discussion on my talk page. (I also get confused sometimes because I know you better as "Jaxl", but your signatures always use the unfortunately ambiguous "Robert", and it takes lots of my tiny brain cells for me to connect the two sometimes. ☺ Heck, I cringe whenever someome refers to me as "Jeff" (not "Jeff Q" or "jeffq") unless it's in response to one of my signed postings or includes a user link, because I worry that a new user reading the dialog later won't know who "Jeff" is.) I'm hoping to start work again on SD as soon as I resolve my latest Critical Real-World Problem, hopefully in less than 2 weeks. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 18:58, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

It's fine. I'd be happy to change my signature back to "Jaxl" if you so wish ("Robert" is quite ambiguous). A while ago on Wikipedia I started to dislike my username but I didn't want to go through the whole username change process, so I simply decided to start signing with my first name and keep registering the same username on other projects for the sake of simplicity. However, if you feel it is too confusing to both frequent and new editors, I can certainly change it back. -- Robert 19:08, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

Legend of Zelda articles

Hi Jeff, I was wondering if you have an opinion on this topic I posted on the village pump a little while ago. I think the WQ community at large might have missed it because of the more urgent issue of VFDA being broken, but now that we have a new dated system for that in development, do you have any suggestions as to what could be done with these articles? I'm pretty stumped myself, but maybe you could offer some insight. Thanks, -- Robert 14:44, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

Your request threw me for a loop for a moment, because I distinctly remembered writing at least 3 paragraphs on the subject. Then I recalled that, when reviewing what I'd written, I ran into several inconsistencies and even some inadequacies in my understanding of history-merging and GFDL requirements that eventually caused me to scrap the whole thing as being beyond my ability to address at the time. Since this genre is not one of my basic competencies, and I feel the need to do some policy and process reading before returning to this issue, can you ping me again on this in a month or so? I'm beginning to fray over many WQ and WP issues I'm involved in, and don't really feel up to addressing this one right now. Sorry. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 21:33, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

It's fine, thank you. I'll continue to ponder this one and hopefully come up with a good solution. Hopefully the topic will get a response one of these days. -- Robert 02:45, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

It looks like Zelda won't wait — Legend of Zelda: Other: Games (Unidentified) has been nominated for deletion. We could use your perspective there. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 19:43, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Warcraft draft

Jeff, I've created a very trimmed-down version of the article at User:Jaxl/Warcraft, if anyone wants to take a look at it and see if it is an acceptable replacement. However, I'm not sure how to provide acceptable context, since I'm used to listing quotes by character. Would using italicized brackets ( [Context] ) work, or should it be formatted more like this:

• Quote
  • Context

-- Robert 16:35, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

We have two common policy-based contexts: the separate-line prefacing for dialogs, and the second form one you show above. There are many others in use, of course. The in-line preface form you're using in your current draft I find especially obnoxious because it seriously detracts from the quote itself. I'm of the opinion that what matters is the quote, and it should always stand out where it is quoted. That's why I fought for dialog context sentences always to go in a separate line (out of the way of the quoted text), why I urge as little dialog stage directions as possible (none wherever possible), and why I prefer using the usual 2-bullet source lines for context in other quotes, even though they are less satisfactory than putting the context first. Of the last, many professional quote dicts do the same thing. That's also one of two reasons I encourage dialog organization over character organization for articles that include both (the other reason being the use of context for sourcing, to avoid using timecodes instead as a kind of page number). ~ Jeff Q (talk) 19:59, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Okay, I've reformatted the quotes per your suggestion and ordered them chronologically (aside from the unsorted ones). Let me know if you think the draft looks like a good replacement as it is now (I've also mentioned it on the VFD). -- Robert 20:49, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

I think it looks much better, for what that's worth. I'd also suggest adding a release year to each installment, much like we might for book or film series in a combo article. I've made a few changes as well, including:

• Adding a more descriptive intro & changing the WP links to w:Warcraft Universe, since w:Warcraft currently redirects to what looks (to me) like a specific installment.
• Splitting the links into the standard "See also" and "External links".
• Replacing the deprecated {{wikipediapar}} template with the parameter-capable {{wikipedia}}.
• Adding a little non-printing space to make it easier to spot the categories and interwiki links.

Since you seem to know a lot more about Warcraft than I do, feel free to "un-fix" anything I may have messed up, especially the WP links, to achieve my principle of least astonishment intent. In any case, thanks for working on this. I was pretty sure this one would get fixed rather than deleted, so I'm glad to see someone rise to the challenge. (Let's hope other Warcrafters cooperate.) ~ Jeff Q (talk) 01:32, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

Hey

Welcome back! Cbrown1023 talk 00:21, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! Hopefully I'll be sticking around for a bit longer than I have been as of late. -- Jaxl^Talk 00:26, 7 May 2007 (UTC)