I was going over the list of bots and noticed that JdforresterBot (talk · contribs) has not edited in a very long time. Is this bot still active and if not, would you object to it being de-flagged? Please post your comments to Wikipedia_talk:Bots/Requests_for_approval#Dead_bots since this is a rather widely-posted message. MBisanz ^talk 06:41, 13 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Have replied there.

James F. (talk) 19:19, 14 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Username rename

http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jdforrester#Username_rename

Please take a look. Thanks. -- Cat ^chi? 13:39, 15 March 2008 (UTC)

Done.

James F. (talk) 14:27, 15 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Nice willow picture

I'm using it on my userpage. I like to cycle my photos around, and my girlfriend saw a weeping willow for the first time recently and I went searching for a nice picture. Good work. Keegan^talk 07:28, 4 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, though I'm sure I could take a better one given a push. Maybe I'll pick a nice day and go walkies with my camera & tripod. :-)

James F. (talk) 12:01, 9 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Category:Wikipedia requested photographs in ...

I saw your name at Wikipedia:Wikipedians/Photographers. I revised the pages at Category:Wikipedia requested photographs in England. Please consider adding your name to the top of the page at Category:Wikipedia requested photographs in London and to any of the other subpages for Category:Wikipedia requested photographs in England. Thanks. GregManninLB (talk) 01:46, 6 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Neat idea - thanks, have done.

James F. (talk) 11:59, 9 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Nice to meet you yesterday

Keep up the good work Bashereyre (talk) 10:18, 14 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! And to you. :-)

James F. (talk) 17:56, 14 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah good to meet you. I mentioned you and your work on my blog actually.

I've taken the plunge and arranged Wikipedia:Meetup/London 9 on the date you suggested. Sunday lunchtime again, May 11th! Not sure if there is enough interest to get something happening monthly. But let's see how it goes. Get yourself signed up on that page!

-- Harry Wood (talk) 15:49, 18 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

See you tomorrow lunchtime! (Wikipedia:Meetup/London 9) -- Harry Wood (talk) 15:32, 10 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Attempt to usurp ArbCom's role in appointing checkusers

A discussion is ongoing at Wikipedia_talk:RFA#BAG_requests_process to have checkusers elected to their positions rather than have them appointed. Apparently, none of the proponents of doing this have notified ArbCom of this effort. I am therefore informing you. Thank you, --Hammersoft (talk) 14:32, 25 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. We're going to have some "fun" with this, I'd imagine.

James F. (talk) 08:44, 26 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Could be made to work, but only people with certain competencies can do checkuser in the first place. So that can be interesting. :-) --Kim Bruning (talk) 18:23, 26 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Questionable redirects of links to Church of St. Margaret, Westminster

I do not understand the reason for these two edits: [1] [2]; the first one was done by you, and the second one by JdforresterBot. Especially in the first case, it is desirable that the article's title is used in the template, so that its name can appear in bold when that article is viewed. In the second case, the result is merely to use a redirect instead of going straight to the article, even though the appearing text is still different. Am I missing anything? Regards, Waltham, The Duke of 15:02, 5 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I moved the article to what it would normally be called (per convention on Wikipedia and actual usage in the "real world", which are not unrelated); I thought it impolite to assume that the author of the text originally, and so chose not to replace "St. Margaret's Church" and "Saint Margaret's Church" with "St. Margaret's, Westminster". The appropriate name depends on context, and as we have to use the best non-contextual name we can with article titles, it is not always the one one would select to mention in-line within an article.

Note that the link is to the article's title; I always try to correct links before, rather than subsequent to, moving a page, so as to remove any possibility of broken redirects (even for just a few minutes) for our readers. Sorry for the confusion that this has evidently caused.

On a more general point, hello; it saddens me that my article editing of late has been so very slight that it has taken us a year to cross paths despite similar editing interests and your prodigious contributions.

James F. (talk) 15:27, 5 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

P.S.: Bah, edit conflict

All right, the page was moved and I did not bypass my cache. My mistake; perhaps I should have been a little slower in my reactions. Still, the move might not have removed all problems. The name does not have a full stop after St, following British conventions. Why is it still in the title? Waltham, The Duke of 15:16, 5 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

No problem, it happens to me frequently, too.

I have checked all links to the page (this is one thing for which the bot is particularly good), and there should be no problems. If you do find some, I would be grateful (and concerned!) to hear.

As to "The name does not have a full stop after St, following British conventions.", I have to say I'm perplexed; do you mean to say that you do not believe that "Saint" should be written as "St." in British English? If so, I'm afraid that you follow a different strand of British English to that practised here in London. If you wish, I can go out and take some photographs of, for example, the sign above St. Margaret's, or for St. James's Park, etc.. It very much is part of British English in my (quite wide-spread) experience of it :-)

James F. (talk) 15:32, 5 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps I have under-estimated the impact of my contributions; I am just a Gnome... I must say that, although your name is not completely unfamiliar to me, I cannot connect it to anything in specific (typical of my memory...), so it must have been some time since the last time I have encountered it.

Now, the article in question is in need of copy-editing (which I intend to do), so it's nice to know the proper name has a full stop, but I recall a previous version not having a full stop in the prose, and I have been, so far, quite confident about abbreviations in British English ending with the word's final letter not using full stops (like Dr for Doctor and Stn for Station). I'll take your word for this case, so you don't need to take any pictures, but from other articles it does seem that St is widely used for other locations with saints in their names.

P.S. I appreciate your cross-posting your reply in my talk page, but you needn't have; I watchlist pages where I leave messages. Waltham, The Duke of 16:34, 5 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Deserving of a barnstar

If I was still the type of person who gave out barnstars, this would deserve some sort of award for good humour. Guettarda (talk) 21:31, 14 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. I suppose it means I'll have to recuse if there's an Arbitration case, though. Oh well.

James F. (talk) 22:22, 14 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Coyote FP

Hi there
I've nominated for delisting here the Coyote featured picture you originally nominated. Perhaps you'd like to participate in the discussion there?
Cheers, Pstuart84 Talk 21:18, 15 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Agr "Driving a stake in descriptive policy"

[3] That's not good. This is a pivotal point in time I think. I hope you can spare a few minutes to take a look. --Kim Bruning (talk) 19:04, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Have done so. You probably won't like my response, however. :-)

James F. (talk) 22:49, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, but you know what I'm talking about at least :-)

The problem with setting things in stone is that they start showing all kinds of odd and unpredictable behavior (chaos theory). The other problem with setting things in stone is that they become unmediatable (is that a word?). Mediation relevance and success-rate drop considerably when hard rules are involved.

The former is a problem because some of the unpredicted effects are bound to be causes of conflict (murphy's law), and the latter is a problem because most of DR (besides) arbcom is structured around mediation or is mediation-like structures. By altering the rules the way you say you are doing, you are increasing the arbcom workload, reducing mediation efficacy, and incidentally also reducing opportunities for information transfer and leadership (aka acculturation) for reasons that don't quite fit in this margin today, but which I'm willing to expand on.

So a couple of weeks ago, a pair of arbcom members walked in and basically said that the entire system is broken. I wonder why? ;-)

--Kim Bruning (talk) 23:55, 19 May 2008 (UTC) That's a key issue, though there are several others ^^;; [reply]

Well, I was commenting on a trend rather than agreeing entirely with it. But yes, there are severe structural issues. :-(

James F. (talk) 13:03, 27 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Reminder Sunday Lunchtime

Just a reminder about Wikipedia:Meetup/London 10 See you Sunday 1p.m.! -- Harry Wood (talk) 00:25, 7 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Absolutely! Might even get there a tad early, just for fun.

James F. (talk) 11:19, 7 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Talk:List of countries by GDP (nominal)#Informal mediation

Hi - you're invited to join in a discussion on the inclusion of the EU in the List of countries by GDP (nominal) article. Regards SilkTork *^YES! 23:13, 14 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the invite, but I'm not sure I have an opinion either way.

James F. (talk) 18:10, 16 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Query

cross-posted

I need help renaming about 200 articles. Doing this by hand would take me all day.

Can your bot rename articles, or be adapted to do so?

If so, please contact me.

Thank you.

The Transhumanist 22:41, 16 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, no problem; what do you want me to do?

James F. (talk) 18:58, 17 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Two things. Maybe they can be done in the same operation, I don't know.

The Wikipdia:WikiProject Lists of basic topics has been renamed to Wikipedia:WikiProject Topical outlines. Unfortunately, "move subpages" only moved 100 of the subpages when the move was done. So 100 of the pages that need to be renamed are subpages of the correctly named WikiProject.

Those need to be renamed from Wikipedia:WikiProject Topical outlines/Draft/List of basic foo topics to Wikipedia:WikiProject Topical outlines/Draft/Topical outline of foo, where foo is the subject the page is about. Some of the new titles will need the foo, where grammar requires it. For example, Topical outline of the Solomon Islands, and Topical outline of the Central African Republic. A few need the plural tense added, resulting in for example Topical outline of black holes.

The rest are subpages of Wikipedia:WikiProject Lists of basic topics/Draft and need to be moved, and renamed as above.

Is this something you can handle?

The Transhumanist 19:57, 17 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Talk:List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)#Conclusion

The Mediation discussion regarding the inclusion of the EU in List of countries by GDP (nominal) has come to a conclusion with the following result:

The EU to remain in List of countries by GDP (nominal).
The EU to be positioned according to GDP rank between World and USA.
No consensus on the EU appearing in all three charts. By convention this means the situation would remain as current - that is the EU remains on all three charts.
Data for the EU on each chart to only be given if sourced, otherwise a dash to replace the data.
Explanation to be placed in the lead section for the appearance of the EU and other non-countries. Possible wording: "Several economies which are not ~~normally~~ considered to be countries are included in the list because they appear in the sources. These economies are not ranked in the charts here, but are listed in sequence by GDP for comparison."
The List retains the current name.
A suggestion by Tomeasy that I feel should be carried out is that the sister articles are given the same treatment as agreed above.

Unless there are significant disagreements within the next 48 hours I will be closing the Mediation. Any questions, please get in touch. Regards SilkTork *^YES! 10:57, 21 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Ground Control to All Arb.s (a friendly request for comment)

I wanted to ask you to please consider posting some of your responses, or feedback to the current arbcom situation - I don't think it's massively hyperbolic to note that this really is in many ways a Wiki Summer of discontent (well actually winter for us southern hemisphere types...).

I believe it's the right thing for you, and all other committee members, to be doing right now - I don't think the community as a whole are getting the benefits of any private discussions, and I believe they, and the individuals named in the various debacles around the place, deserve much, much better.

I entreat you to consider signing up as available to offer thoughts, or answer some short, focused, questions. I would also ask you to consider contacting the Wikipedia Weekly team, or the 'Not The Wikipedia Weekly' team, if you might be available for a short voice conversation.

It's my view that communication really really matters, and I think there's an urgent need for arb.s to step up.

cheers, Privatemusings (talk) 03:58, 2 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Silly two-year-old query

Can you shed any light on the dilemma at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions#Policy.3F? Your name was mentioned in a years-old edit summary, yet for some reason, the page has been marked as policy ever since. Was there an ArbCom case involved? If you don't mind, pls respond over there so we can try to sort this, thanks, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 05:03, 3 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

@@ Line 180: / Line 180: @@
 cheers, [[User:Privatemusings|Privatemusings]] ([[User talk:Privatemusings|talk]]) 03:58, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
+== Silly two-year-old query ==
+Can you shed any light on the dilemma at [[Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions#Policy.3F]]?  Your name was mentioned in a years-old edit summary, yet for some reason, the page has been marked as policy ever since.  Was there an ArbCom case involved?  If you don't mind, pls respond over there so we can try to sort this, thanks, [[User:SandyGeorgia|Sandy<font color="green">Georgia</font>]] ([[User talk:SandyGeorgia|Talk]]) 05:03, 3 July 2008 (UTC)