User talk:Savidan

Welcome

Hi Savidan. Welcome to English Wikiquote.

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Enjoy! ~ Jeff Q (talk) 19:20, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

Clone High

Just wanted to let you know that I changed this page's formatting back (moving the wp link to the bottom, and wikifying the title), per the established template. ~ UDScott 18:02, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

Re: Post on Talk:Patton (film)

Hi from Wikipedia! I wanted to make sure someone saw what I left... and while RPickman seemed to have written the article, you last worked it.

re: Talk:Patton_(film) My sigs not working over here, but DirectLinktomyTalk that will!

You use different templates here I gather, so wanted to make sure someone saw this. btw, if you have redirect capibility, I suggest Patton (Movie) and/or Patton (movie) be added as redirects for searching.

Best regards, 24.61.229.179 06:07, 21 March 2006 (UTC) aka User:fabartus at Wikipedia

South Park episodes

Is there a reason you've been creating separate pages for some South Park episodes? These should all be consolidated under the main page for the show. I've added merge tags for the episode pages you've added. The main page really needs some work, and the quotes from these episodes really belong on the main page. ~ UDScott 13:50, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

I'm just transwiki-ing them from Wikipedia. You could consolidate them all into one article if you want but it would be extremely long. Probably a single article which had key quotes from each character and an organization of links to each episode (or season) would be better. If they get merged, please make sure the redirects are sharpened so that people clicking on the links from wikipedia get right to the quotes about that episode. Savidan 20:57, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

• • If you take a look at Wikiquote:Templates/TV shows, you'll see that the accepted way to present quotes from a TV show is to have the episode quotes all on one page. Yes, this can get quite large. But that's the way that all other pages for TV shows are. For shows that have many seasons, sometimes a special table of contents is created (see Buffy the Vampire Slayer for an example). Also, when the quotes are gathered onto one page, they are still grouped by episode, rather than by character. ~ UDScott 13:04, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Singular vs. plural titles

I saw your question to LrdChaos about Pick-up lines. Wikiquote does generally follow Wikipedia's lead (although our article titles sometimes vary because WP's are occasionally wrong even by their own standards, and it's frequently easier for us to fix that than it is for them). This is nearly always the case for people and creative works. The one common exception is in themes. Some themes, like Love or Science or Floccinaucinihilipilification, are mass nouns, which have no plural sense. But countable nouns are typically used in their plural form for Wikiquote titles. The general rules is that a Wikiquote article title X should be in the form used in the phrase "quotes about X". This gives use "quotes about war" (mass noun), "quotes about Rounders" (looks plural, but is actually singular — the title of a film), and "quotes about William Shakespeare" (singular for a person), just like their corresponding WP articles. But "quotes about fools" and "quotes about pick-up lines" (both countable nouns) will differ. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 23:59, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation. Savidan 08:15, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Jeff Gannon

You downgraded all the quotes to "attributed". I knew in the back of my head that somebody would do that eventually. I put an external link in the article providing videographic proof that he actually said all of those things. Is that enough? I'm seriously asking. I don't actually know much about wikiquote.

What "attributed" means is that the source of the quote is not known. In fact, there is a movement to replace this designation with "unsourced" on most pages. But what I mean by not having the source known is that for most quotes to qualify as "sourced" you need a definite, verifiable source (e.g. a specific book & chapter, or a date and title of a speech, etc.) In the case of these quotes by Jeff Gannon probably all that is needed is the date that the words were said by Gannon. ~ UDScott 14:22, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

I would have to disagree with UDScott's assessment. A date is not a source, as it provides no direct citation of a quote. While a date may suffice for publications that have editorial boards, Wikimedia projects have no such professional scrutiny of evidence or professional reputation to stake on editorial decisions, so we editors are expected to point to material from sources that do. I've even been trying to encourage editors contributing quotes from famous historical speeches to cite a publication or wiki-reliable website for these speeches, as they are just as vulnerable to the "telephone game" as anything else. If we need them for famous speeches, we certainly need them for modern quotees, and there is no excuse not to cite reliable sources for a reporter from a 21st-century web-based publication. I would expect that Talon News itself could provide these. I note that you are primarily a Wikipedia editor, Savidan, so let me just say that Wikiquote has the same sourcing requirements as WP, however unevenly they are currently applied in any particular article (also much like WP). ~ Jeff Q (talk) 23:13, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Bush bash

I finally found the context! I was right. The liberal interviewer even wrote a piece highlighting this comment in context as evidence of something very positive in then-candidate Bush. Feel free to salvage the quote - but remember to preserve the context if you do add the quote. Mr. Grace

transwiki snafu

The following post from w:User:Jeffq was copied by User:Jeffq from w:User talk:Savidan#Wikiquote transwiki nightmare, with links refomatted for use on Wikiquote:

Savidan, could you explain how a Wikipedian entrusted with sysop privileges could perform literally hundreds of transfers of material from Wikipedia to Wikiquote without any attempt to follow the transwiki process required to provide editors with proper credit under GFDL? We now have a massive amount of quote data at Wikiquote that give no indication that possibly thousands of edits from many different editors went into this material. Instead, the only person credited with these edits is you. Worse yet, they weren't even properly integrated into Wikiquote, but slapped into episode articles that encourage the kind of copyright violations that got French Wikiquote shut down for a year.

I'm sorry if I sound angry, but I am. You have left us with a maintenance nightmare that it will take the already horribly overworked sysops of en:Wikiquote months to untangle. I would really like to know how you might help us fix this mess. Please discuss this in detail on the appropriate Wikiquote pages: my WQ user page, your user page, and/or WQ:VFD#Free Willzyx, where we're just starting to call attention to the problem. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 01:27, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Sorry about that. I did most of those many months ago and was not familiar with the correct process. GFDL-wise, on Wikipedia, content placed in the wrong article is frequently moved to the correct article by a different user simply using copy and pasting; my impression was that as long as the edit summary noted the original location it still preserved authorship information consistent with the GFDL. For example, many off-site mirrors of Wikipedia do not include the page history, but merely state that the information was from Wikipedia (i.e. where the authorship info can be found).

I am not familiar with Wikiquote at all, and don't understand what needs to be done to fix the GFDL problems you allege. If you explain what needs to be done to fix this to me, I'll try to fix it. If this is really an issue that exposes Wikiquote to legal issues, why not just delete all the episode articles since they don't fit the TV show format anyway.

Also, back in March someone told me that it was a problem that the articles were for individual episodes, but did not mention the attribution problem that you talk about. Are you sure about it? Savidan 02:03, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

The lack of edit history information is not unique to transwiki or to Wikiquote. From Wikipedia:Merging and moving pages:

Do not move or rename a page by copying/pasting its content, because doing so destroys the edit history. (The GFDL requires acknowledgement of all contributors, and editors continue to hold copyright on their contributions unless they specifically give up this right. Hence it is required that edit histories be preserved for all major contributions until the normal copyright expires.)

The policies for merging articles on Wikipedia exist to avoid the loss of contributor information when copy-and-paste is done. Edit histories are an important part of Wikimedia editing and GFDL. That is why meta:Help:Transwiki was developed, as there is no history-preserving mechanism to move material from one project to another. Like any other practice in the Wild-West environment of wikidom, sloppy handling of mergers is not uncommon, but it can be argued that it's not as big a problem for intra-project merged articles that remain as redirects, because the history still exists. But anything that deletes these histories (as mergers sometimes do, and transwikis usually do) violates the GFDL. I am not a lawyer, but it's my understanding that, as the originating work for the material, as long as Wikimedia projects preserve the edit histories, subsequent users of this material can keep within GFDL terms by pointing back to the specific page from which the material was derived, making a simple two-link journey to find the contributors. We do our jobs within Wikimedia by ensuring that those histories are attached to the place where the material exists, either by "history" or "discussion" links.

In general, the idea with transwikis is to avoid the almost-certain problems with inter-project synchronization by copying and pasting the edit history of the transwikied article into the talk page of the new project page, which is supposed to be titled Transwiki:{{{ORIGINAL TITLE}}}. (Note that this is a special namespace that all Wikimedia projects have for this very purpose.) This temporary name allows the new project's community to decide whether the transferred material should be (A) moved to an appropriate page, based on its policies; (B) merged with an existing article; or (C) deleted. This is basic transwiki practice. Anyone who doesn't know this should not be doing transwikis. Many experienced transwikians will take shortcuts, but this should never be done unless the editor is familiar with the policies and practices of both projects, and knows how to do this correctly.

In this particular situation, South Park episode WP articles still retain the edit histories, so it is at least possible to recover this information. But we have only half a dozen regular editors for nearly 9,000 articles, and we have a severe backlog in nearly every aspect of project maintenance. You have presented us with yet another huge task. I haven't had time to review the entire scope of the problem, but my initial idea is that we will, at the very least, need to go through all of your "transwikied" articles, find the corresponding WP article, copy its entire edit history up to the point of the pasting (because actually finding the quote edits would be unreasonably difficult), format them for talk-page posting, and then post them… somewhere. I don't yet know if it would be advisable to add them to the now-redirected ep articles or post them en masse to the South Park season articles. And there are also the film articles, and any other material you transferred.

The copyright legal problem is a serious one, and one which many Wikipedians fail to realize. (This is one of the reasons I encourage new editors coming from Wikipedia to read about Wikiquote policies and practices, and one of two reasons I started a total-welcome campaign last year to ensure that every new registered user receives a welcome message with Wikiquote info links.) At Wikipedia, it is necessary to compose your own words in writing about a topic. Copyright violations can be summarily excised, and editors told to rewrite the material. But Wikiquote must include exact copies of quotes — its raison d'être — so our articles must be very selective in the amount of quoting we do, lest we violate the vague requirements to avoid "substantial" copying of material. By recommending against articles that are likely to violate copyrights if they have more than a small handful of quotes — like TV-episode articles — we try to avoid legal exposure. (See Wikiquote:Copyrights and its talk page for some discussion on the general issue in the context of quotation compliation.)

I'm sorry if I'm being harsh, but I can't adequately express my frustration. I take licensing and copyvio issues very seriously, and I am very concerned about Wikiquote's ability to handle even its basic maintenance tasks. Your work has hit all of my sore spots in one breathtaking mass action. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 03:55, 5 January 2007 (UTC)