User talk:Stan Shebs

Older talk is in User talk:Stan Shebs/archive 1, User talk:Stan Shebs/archive 2, User talk:Stan Shebs/archive 3, User talk:Stan Shebs/archive 4, User talk:Stan Shebs/archive 5, User talk:Stan Shebs/archive 6, User talk:Stan Shebs/archive 7.

Naval Whistle Signal

Stan, it occured to me that you might have some info to get me started. I am interested in finding out the meanings of the various whistles that marked events on, for instance, a British naval vessel. My understanding is that there are signals for such as a call to arms, chnage of watch, and perhaps others? I cannot seem to find anything to give me a hook to find something. Any suggestions you might have would be appreciated. RayKiddy 02:14, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Philately

Hello, I'm from the French Wikipedia and has written articles about philatelic topics. Do you know if there is on en:wiki an "opening gate" into wikipedian articles on philately (such as on fr: (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Portail_Philat%C3%A9lie)) ? It will help me see what's new here and how to use it on fr:. Have a nice sunday. Sebjarod 08:52, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Thank for the answer. I will be attentive on the 3 pages you name. Sebjarod 12:51, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Note that someone created this portal Wikipedia:Wikiportal/Philately this morning. Sebjarod 08:17, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Ancient history

Hey. This is User:Lectiodifficilior. I run the site www.isidore-of-seville.com and www.ancientlibrary (http://www.ancientlibrary.com). I saw your edit to Arrian, and your interest in ancient history generally. You look like a Wikipedia dynamo.

Do you have any interest in working on a "Wiki Classical Dictionary"? I'm about to bring such a site live, and am looking for people who might want to be editors. The site would eventually cover anything classical, but would branch out from Alexander and Hellenistic history. The difference between Wikipedia and a Wiki Classical Dictionary would be similar to the difference between the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Oxford Classical Dictionary, eg.,

Emphasis on "norms of good scholarship," going beyond NPOV to citation, "writing to your level," etc.
Authors would have standardized headings for editions, translations and commentaries.
Deeper, focused coverage of the classical world.

What do you think? No commitment necessary. I want to gauge interest and sollicit ideas. Hit my talk page or email editor@isidore-of-seville.com (mailto:editor@isidore-of-seville.com).

Middle Earth

Hi there! Thanks for your contributions to the 'deletion policy/middle earth items' discussion, but I'd have to inform you that the discussion had already drawn to conclusions (WP:FICT) which do seem to correspond mostly to what you suggest. Radiant _* 10:17, Apr 4, 2005 (UTC)

Transwiki Bot

I don't know what the hell is going on, but you need to make your bot pay more attention to talk pages. I objected to a transwiki for letter carrier several months ago, being nice on the talk page and not just summarily reverting everybody in sight, but my reward has been to have another bot attempt to delete it, and only fail because of compression. It really pisses me off that we have irresponsible people running bots to delete stuff, not even taking the trouble to notice if something had been posted on the talk page. I guess the next time I'm just going to revert, since the talk page is apparently no longer used. Stan 17:45, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Stan, the transwikifier is a program I wrote, but it is not an automated bot. I put eyes on each of the pages that were transwikied, and no I didn't look at the talk pages of the 1000 articles or so that I've transwikied. Furthermore, I am not an administrator, so I did not delete the article (I did mark it for deletion, but in retrospect that article deserves to be in Wikipedia). I'll admit that I made a mistake marking the article for deletion. I'll contact the administrator that has protected the page and ask him to unprotect it and remove the pending deletion tag. I'm sorry if this caused your blood pressure to go up. Finally, you need to know that transwikifying an article does not mean that it will be deleted, it only means that it gets an entry in the transwiki namespace at wiktionary. Kevin Rector 23:13, Apr 2, 2005 (UTC)

Stan, Letter carrier has been unprotected and removed from the pending deletions. Kevin Rector 03:23, Apr 3, 2005 (UTC)

Trashed categories

"Are you aware that by changing category "American botanists" to "botanists", you simply destroyed the nationality info that hundreds of editors have been trying to develop and maintain across all of WP, not just the botany section? At the very least you should have added "American people" etc. I didn't notice this before now because the software broke my watchlist until today, now you've created a huge mess to clean up after. Stan 02:47, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)"

I disagree. I merely restored Category:botanists to how it used to be before 19 March, when it was broken up, almost entirely by one person (the anonymous user 82.35.37.118). I did not remove any other nationality categorisation. - MPF 17:39, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)

"Wikipedia:Categories for deletion/botanists by nationality lists a 4-4 vote, which is hardly a consensus to make the changes you did. Some of the categories you emptied have been around for six months at least, such as British botanists, so it wasn't just an anon (who was most likely User:Pcpcpc logged out, as the software is wont to do). Although I understand that you personally think nationality is unimportant, that is just your POV; for a high-school teacher in New Zealand or Brazil looking up homegrown botanists for the class to write about, that is quite relevant, and nearly impossible to find out without the subcategories. In any case, you're setting yourself against the hundreds of editors who have built Category:Nationalities by occupation and Category:People by nationality and their thousands of subcategories. Either botanists are fundamentally different from other kinds of people (which could be argued I suppose :-) ), or all these other editors are mistaken, in which case you should convince them of their wrongness first before unilaterally emptying out the category. But given that Category:American actors alone has some 3,000 names, I don't think you're going to get much of a favorable hearing! If you want to argue that the botanists is still too small to be subdivided, that's plausible, but your argument seems to be that the category shouldn't be subdivided no matter how large it gets. Just as you expect other people to defer to your knowledge in matters arboreal, you should respect those who are more knowledgeable about information organization. Stan 18:29, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)"

Hi Stan - several points; first, neither was there any consensus for Pcpcpc's (if they were his) changes in the first place; I was restoring the original status quo, not making a change. And no request for comment had been made at either WP:TOL talk or from regular botanical contributors, as should have been done, before making that change. Second, botanists are fundamentally different from (almost) all other kinds of people when it comes to nationality; e.g. uniquely only botanists and ornithologists working in Britain and Germany among all people maintained friendly communication and exchange of scientific information throughout the second world war. Third, yes, botanists are too small to subdivide; all but 4 or 5 of the new subcategories created had less than five entries, which is pretty ridiculous; it is not comparable to actors at all. Fourth, and most important of all, is the need to have all the botanists at a single source for reference. There are thousands of plant articles that are being written or having their taxoboxes updated; both involve adding the line {{Taxobox_section_binomial_botany | color = lightgreen| binomial_name = | author = }} ; one takes a species, and looks up the botanical name and author citation to enter there, e.g. {{Taxobox_section_binomial_botany | color = lightgreen| binomial_name = Pinus ayacahuite| author = Ehrenb. ex Schltdl.}}; this gives you two authors to link in, with no information on their nationality. One can then get their full names from the IPNI author query page (http://www.ipni.org/ipni/query_author.html), but that still leaves the article writer with the task of finding the botanist's wiki page - does the botanist Diederich Franz Leonhard von Schlechtendal have a page at all? Is it at Diederich Franz Leonhard von Schlechtendal, or Diederich Franz von Schlechtendal, or Diederich Leonhard von Schlechtendal, or Diederich von Schlechtendal, or Diederich F. L. von Schlechtendal, or Diederich F. von Schlechtendal? The simple way to do this is to look up in Category:botanists. If you have to search through 30-odd subcategories and sub-subcategories - it takes an hour to do something that should take 2 minutes. So you don't, you give up in disgust. Or else start a new duplicate page about the botanist. It is quite clear from both 82.35.37.118's and Pcpcpc's contributions lists, that they've not had any experience at all of writing plant articles, and I think they should listen to those who do. They didn't even ask. - MPF 20:22, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Classsical wikis

Thanks for your reply comment. Actually, I have a text-plus-wiki-commentary engine coming soon. I built it, but now I'm thinking I'll rewrite the PHP to work with Wiki markup, not HTML. Against your advice, I did start my Wiki Classical Dictionary (http://www.ancientlibrary.com/wcd/Main_Page). Not sure if it'll work. Thanks and best Lectiodifficilior 06:30, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Zambia map

Ow ow ow, eh? Yes, the general consensus seems to be that the bright colours are annoying. I think you probably saw the old version of the map. Have a look at the new one and see what you think. Kelisi 23:55, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

USS Constitution photograph

The [1] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:USS_Constitution_1997.jpg) photograph you submitted has, as part of the caption, "Constitution was en route to deliver livestock to Russia during the emergency shortage of November 1987". You can't be serious. Please edit the caption to something realistic? --Gcashman 02:31, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Ah, right you are (prank on image). Sorry, brain dead moment on my part and didn't think to check. --Gcashman 02:53, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Palla/Impala

What is the importance of the redirect of "palla" to impala that you created? I ask because I made an article called pallaventuno, that (after doing a little more research) is probably better titled "palla," Italian for "ball." I would like to usurp the palla article for this purpose. --Eoghanacht 00:13, 2005 Apr 19 (UTC)

(US) vs (U.S.) vs (United States) title disambiguator

Hi, Stan. I remember 2 years ago, you had a strong opinion that the article Sierra Nevada (US) should not be titled Sierra Nevada (U.S.). This issue has come up again. If you'd like to participate in the new discussion, feel free to contribute at Wikipedia Talk:Naming conventions (acronyms)#Rethinking this decision. Thanks! -- hike395 05:45, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Dab style

I've created a draft project at Wikipedia:Disambiguation/Style for comment. I'll announce it on Village Pump, but I'm directly notifying people who have commented lately. —Wahoofive (talk) 17:24, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

Postage stamps and postal history of Afghanistan

an image of one of your stamps is not loading correctly in Postage stamps and postal history of Afghanistan...maybe it is just my machine...i tried to fix it, but couldn't. the image is Image:Stamp Afghan 1892-600px.jpg. Kingturtle 04:47, 8 May 2005 (UTC)

1911 Britannica

Hello, Stan. I have a query about Omaguas. Do you have any current information on them? The article contains statements like "The Omaguas are still numerous and powerful around the head waters of the Japura and Uaups." This may have been true in 1911, but for all the average reader knows they've been entirely wiped out or assimilated since that time. The 1911 EB appears to contain a lot of ethnographic information that is either grossly over-simplified, tinged with racial prejudice of some kind, or just plain wrong (the same goes for plenty of Western literature of that period), so I can't help but question the value of importing a straight copy of an article about a tribal group from it. As far as I can tell they do still exist in some form, but like many such groups there's a dearth of information on them to be found on the Internet. I just wonder if the 1911 EB is the best source to use here in the absence of much else, especially when copied verbatim. Cheers. — Trilobite (Talk) 22:36, 11 May 2005 (UTC)

I don't have any more info on the Omaguas; one would have to visit a well-stocked university library (I'm always surprised at how much more info is still in books instead of on the net). The 1911EB article is certainly borderline, but what tipped it for me is the references to early explorers, which will be valid no matter what is changed or added about the tribe itself. I view 1911EB lifts as staking out ground, so to speak, letting later editors know the topic exists and should be updated, making links from other topics work, etc. I expect that sooner or later we'll ditch all the 1911EB content in favor of modern rewrites of the topics - in the meantime it's better than nothing at all. Stan 05:00, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

Roman Africa

I've posted a request for a page move at North Africa during the Classical Period. User:Adam Bishop said you'd be a good person to talk to. Alan 20:13, 21 May 2005 (UTC)

More on Russian Navy

Hi Stan! I remember you once asked me if I had more info on the history of the Russian Navy. Well, I've just recently wrote an article on Imperial Russian Navy and added some info to the Russian Navy article on its earlier history. Please, let me know what you think. Cheers! KNewman 16:50, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

Cultivar infoboxes

I would be grateful if you could comment on my proposal for cultivar infoboxes. The proposal is outlined at Wikipedia:WikiProject Tree of Life/Cultivar infobox and there's comment at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Tree of Life#Cultivars. Gdr 10:30, 2005 May 31 (UTC)

Italian Provinces

Hi Stan, would you care to pass a comment here [2] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Provinces_of_Italy#Naming_of_Italian_provinces). Regards Giano | talk 13:04, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

USS Missouri

Don't no wheather you care or not, but the USS Missouri (BB-63) is up for featured article status. Thought you might like to know. TomStar81 02:28, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Category:Crusades

Hey Stan, a few months ago we were talking about reorganizing the category - well if you're still interested, I finally made some suggestions on the talk page, I don't know if you've seen it yet. Adam Bishop 06:22, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Royal consorts and monarchs

hi there. i´m trying to get a discussion going to change the rules on naming consorts, monarchs, etc.. it´s a bit of mess at the moment. maybe you wanna join in and give your opinion? feel free [3] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_%28names_and_titles%29#Royal_consorts_and_monarchs) cheers Antares911 23:38, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

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