User talk:Yellowdesk

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thanks for taking up my slack

ah... yes, I see that when I fixed the business of the "manner of dress" I completely forgot to fix it! Eitch 22:09, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

Barnstar

		The Original Barnstar
		Thanks for your hard work on Ted Sannella! Ben Tibbetts 12:54, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

Shire town

Yellowdesk wrote: "No state in the U.S. presently refers to its center of county government as a shire town. All of your changes have been removed."
- - - - - -

I do not know about 49 states, but Massachusetts certainly does. Please see, e.g., the following statutes:
M.G.L.A. c. 211 § 18
M.G.L.A. c. 212 § 14
M.G.L.A. c. 36 § 1
M.G.L.A. c. 213 § 7
M.G.L.A. c. 57 § 4
M.G.L.A. c. 261 § 24
. . . and others. I could find no statutuory reference to the term "county seat." JPSheridan 14:25, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

My intended but forgotten operative words are residents of any state in the US. Yes, that it's true that that's the legal terminology, and I would guess the laws of nearly all of that states east of the Missisppi, and many west would have that terminology, since most of the states copied the structure of eastern codes when setting up their style of government. In common terminology, I have met no one except historians and lawyers that know of the term shire town. I believe you'll find no U.S. gazetteer or atlas printed in the last 15 years that uses that term for US county administrative centers. I would not desire to defend the "shire town" on Wikipedia from other editors. You'll notice that at least two other people changed "shire town" back to "county seat" in Massachusetts counties. I'm not sure if I changed more than one or two, based on my own edit summaries. I think If you were to hope for your view and edits to survive, I would recommend "county seat (shire town)" as the term, and expand on the article about counties, tracing the evolution and use of shire town as the legal title of a locus of the county court sessions for many states in the U.S. Yellowdesk 05:36, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

The correct term in Massachusetts is "shire town", not county seat. The term county seat does not appear anywhere in the Masachusetts General Laws, whereas "shire town" does. JPSheridan / 141.154.239.82

As I indicated above, you'll find that "shire town" is the statutory term in many states, but it is not the customary term by nearly anyone in conversation or writing, nor in currently published general materials referring to the administrative centers of county governments, such as maps, gazeteers, newspapers and the like. Yellowdesk 19:08, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

category link syntax

hope this doesn't sound critical - I just recently learned the thing about categories, and am excited to share. instead of writing out the whole url as a hyperlink you can stick a colon in front of the wp link - "[[:category:categoryname]]" (also, "[[Blabla bla]]" will look like "Blabla bla" and will link to Blabla_bla) - Eitch 16:17, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

Hide/Show

I'm not much of an expert on such things, I just copied the format from another article. Can you see both at 109th United States Congress? If the section is high enough on the article to conflict with the TOC, that could be causing the problem. Sorry I can't help much. NoSeptember 00:34, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Re: Romney Governorship POV tag

Hi Yellowdesk! I received your comment on my talk page. I, myself, am not disputing the neutrality. I was acting in a more administrative role. I should have commented better, but I was actually just adding the tag based upon on your recommendation - Talk:Mitt Romney#POV Tag. These were comments made by User:ZimZalaBim quoted by User:Wizardry Dragon. All I was trying to do was move the tag from the Mitt Romney article to the Governorship of Mitt Romney. I apologize if I did this in error. Chupper 21:06, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

A couple of points (state legislatures)

Hello. First, I'd like your opinion on one idea of mine. That is, I personally find the long list of legislators at the bottom of Massachusetts House of Representatives and Massachusetts Senate to be both distracting and short-sighted - after all, the list is changed after every election and the previous members get lost (given that most will never have articles of their own). (I also think we should only link those with articles because, if you think about it, do we implicitly want to commit ourselves to creating articles on every person who has sat in the Legislature since the 1630s?) I've been looking for models we could follow to address this problem, and I rather like the Georgia example. There's an article on each chamber of the Georgia Legislature, and then we find 148th General Assembly of the State of Georgia, 147th General Assembly of the State of Georgia, etc (well, not that much else - there are just three such articles at present). These articles list both the members and what happened during each session. Anyway, do you think that would be a good example to follow? The current General Court is the 185th, by the way, in case you start making articles right away.

Second, we definitely should have a list of Speakers of the House. I could try and dig out some older ones, but so far I haven't managed to find a complete list (apparently DiMasi is 84th, though I don't know if that's counting from the 1780s or the 1630s). Do you have anything more, by any chance? Here's what I've come up with so far:

• William B. Calhoun 1828-35
• John Davis Long (R) 1876-9
• Christian Herter (R) 1939-43
• Tip O'Neill (D - the first Democrat in this position) 1948-52
• Robert Quinn (D) 1967-9
• David Bartley (D) 1969-1976
• Thomas McGee (D) 1976-1985
• George Keverian (D) 1985-1990
• Charles Flaherty (D) 1990-1996
• Thomas Finneran (D) 1996-2004
• Salvatore DiMasi (D) 2004- .

Biruitorul 05:39, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

Yes a list of senate presidents (and speakers if there is none now) for Massachusetts is desirable.
I think ultimately, in parallel to the various ordinal U.S. Congress pages, it is worthwhile to have similar ordinal state legislature pages. A corollary to your argument about lists, is that the list of legislators on 110th_United_States_Congress should be dropped because it is distracting there, which I think you'd probably agree is not desirable. Consider the state legislature pages transitional to future improvement. Because of article histories, the recent listings for the Massachusetts General Court won't be lost, if the history does not end up in a strange place because of page name changes and splits, so it is recoverable. I am agnostic about whether there should be RED names for all of the legislators without biographies, or simply black-type listings, and I don't think a RED listing needs to imply that an article will ever be written, but rather an invitation to the interested editor to write one. I think it is worth having the detailed listing, and it's a challenging set of information to track down, and hence worth making accessible--over time--in wikipedia. Remember that nearly every famous politician was once a humble town officer, or state legislator, and it is usefull to understand who his/her peers were in legislative chambers. -- Yellowdesk 14:45, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

You may want to check over Massachusetts_Senate_Delegations -- Yellowdesk 15:09, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

We have an incomplete President of the Massachusetts Senate list; I'll try to get the Speaker one going at some point.

Let me clarify my point - I think the lists of legislators should go on each ordinal General Court page, but not on the main pages about the House and the Senate. In other words, for the US Congress, you don't find lists of members at United States Senate and House, but rather at 110th Unites States Congress, 109th, etc. Similarly, for MA, the lists should be on 185th General Court, 184th, etc. I know the pre-2007 (and maybe pre-2005) legislators are in the histories - hopefully they'll be moved out of there and into proper articles. I suppose I'm not vigorously opposed to the red links, except for this reason: black writing looks better. And when we're writing the list of legislators from, say, 1832, it will probably look better to have them all in black and add links if an article emerges, which I'd wager is unlikely for the bulk of them - I think the House, at least, was a citizen legislature at the time, so potential articles might, at best, read like this: "John Smith, a Whig, was a farmer from Watertown who served one term (1832) in the Massachusetts House." Anyway, that's not an immediate worry, because data like that is hard to find.

Interesting Senate delegations page. Of course, the House will be more challenging - 160 members, and 240 until 1978. It is nice to see how seats changed over time, but I do anticipate that eventually, we'll be duplicating that content on the pages of individual sessions of the Legislature. Biruitorul 06:21, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

Your point is well taken. Yes, "Ordinal General Court" pages are desirable. And have "Current General Court" redirect to the presently-in-office-Ordinal General Court page. I would be inclined not to split off the list of legislators, for the near term, until several Ordinal General Court pages/lists exist--how about 10 years of lists? In general, I think it's a good Idea. Let me check the Georgia example again, and possibly give more comments. -- Yellowdesk 13:36, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

Re:{{Infobox Mayor}}

After taking a look at the template, it seems to have relatively low usage (only 54 transclusions), and therefore it may be better to deprecate its use. It would require changing the individual pages to use an alternative (mostly likely {{Infobox Officeholder}} because Infobox Mayor uses non-standard parameters (e.g. date1= instead of term_start=). Any thoughts about phasing out its usage and then making it a redirect to Template:Infobox Officeholder? --MZMcBride 03:24, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

Responding, I have no objection to the idea of moving toward {{Infobox Officeholder}}, but you may consider me a neophyte on templates, and the issues that go with them--and edited my first page with a mayor on it yesterday--which led to my inquiry. I don't at this moment have the time to carry forward a small project like that, but I would be an interested observer. Perhaps a query on that template's talk page, or a couple of sample pages that use the box might generate more knowledgeable response. -- Yellowdesk 04:17, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

Baldwin, Hoar & Sherman family

I have limited energies to devote to Baldwin, Hoar & Sherman family, but it would be nice to figure out how to make it more accessible. For example, I cannot figure out if all of Roger Shermans children are even shown on that page. This, over at Roosevelt_family has some appeal. or Template_talk:Blackfamilytree#Dimensions Even simply numbering the generations, perhaps in addition to

   * the non-character box would be an improvement.

What's your interest lately in the topic? -- Yellowdesk 05:36, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

I would be willing to do what ever is necessary, but I am not real familiar with how the Wiki formatting works. Additionally, I am a descendant of the Simeon Baldwin side of this family. aaron@aaronbaldwin.us AaronB0413 20:08, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Massachusetts

Yellowdesk, I've made a first attempt at narrowing the focus of the Massachusetts article. I've also noticed there are now two articles of famous people from Massachusetts. One is the List I've created moving all the names off the Massachusetts article, the other is a previously named article . They should probably be merged. You can find them at the see also area for [[Category:People from Massachusetts]]. Let me know what you think of my consolidation.Pmeleski 00:15, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

It's a start.

• Yes List of Famous people from Massachusetts should be merged with List of people from Massachusetts. I put in tags to do that.
• I think the various other historical "see also" items should be revived.
• There should be a section on people, so that editors will not be tempted to start new lists again, and cite the List of people from Massachusetts as the main article for that section.
• Probably desirable to create a stand-alone list for the federal parks/heritage/wildlife areas, and cite that list in some section.

-- Yellowdesk 20:22, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Fed supervised areas

Hi there! Thanks for making changes to my edits for Massachusetts. Feel free to change any way you think would make for a better article. Sorry about not describing my edits better. I'll try to be more conscious of doing that. I'm going to try to make some effort in cleaning it up a bit, and adding some here and there using Minnesota and Boston, Massachusetts as a guide. Hope you don't mind. Pmeleski 03:10, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

History

Let me know what you think about the redo of the Massachusetts history section. I hope it works for you! Pmeleski 15:19, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Mitt Romney's early life and education

---

Why the need to remove Mitt's struggle with poverty? Ann spoke about it during a 1994 interview with the Boston Globe. I feel it is an integral part of Mitt's upbringing, and that the American people should know that Mitt has struggled to make ends meet just like the rest of us. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by MB24 (talk • contribs) 23:35, 14 February 2007 (UTC).

For your edit, for which the source is an opinion piece. (Reilly, Adam. Romney’s greatest gaffes — so far: He may be the GOP’s new golden boy, but the country doesn’t know Mitt like we do Boston Pheonix. April 21, 2006). It's humorous, though incorrect and disingenuous, to claim Romney had a "brush with poverty," since he held investments that could be sold and was a member of a family of a former president of an auto company. You can state the facts without the point of view attached. Even better, find the original interview to summarize-- Yellowdesk 02:32, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Groton Long Point

You may be interested in the discussion about the legal status of Groton Long Point at Talk:Groton Long Point, Connecticut. Any additional information you may have would be very helpful. Thanks. --Polaron | Talk 16:49, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

Second Barnstar

		The Editor's Barnstar
		I hereby award you this barnstar for your tireless editing & addition of content to the Mitt Romney presidential campaign, 2008 as well as Governorship of Mitt Romney articles. Thanks for your hard work! Chupper 00:52, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Moving clean up

Sorry for that; it was the first time I'd worked off that page. I'll be more careful. - Denny 21:08, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

Incoherent sentence

About this edit, the sentence is a direct quotation; the source itself is good. Did you mean that the quotation itself--that's literally what the person said--is incoherent, or the way I referred to the quotation? - Denny 01:34, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

The quotation itself (on Registerfly is incoherent, and lacks a subject to relate to the verb "completely. If maintained it needs a [sic], ; even better is a quotation that makes sense in English, or paraphrasing in a non-quotation context. -- Yellowdesk 01:40, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Brief footnotes on current events articles

I see what you mean but honestly, I don't see it as a terrible disaster. For the most part, the cites are repeated within the same paragraph or so. Also, if the first one is in fact deleted, one can always compare the last good version with the current one to see the deleted items. It shows up fairly clearly because you an "a b" without any text with it in the reference section. However, I will follow your advice and add in the full information at every place. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 18:07, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

Ted Sannella Barnstar

You're welcome. Seeing that article reach that degree of completion was very nice for me and my mother; Ted Sannella was my grandfather. Ben Tibbetts 01:43, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

Dismissal of US Attorneys Controversy

I see that you changed the Template to "resigned because of the contoversy". I see pros and cons to this. On the one hand, this makes sense, because it's irrelevant when someone resigns for wholly unrelated reasons (especially as time passes, and someone may resign months, or years, after the fact). But, on the other hand, many resignations may be related, but there's no clear evidence that it is so. For example (on a different subject), Kevin A. Ring (former staffer to John Doolittle, and underling to Jack Abramoff resigned his job the same day that Doolittle's house was raided by the FBI. Was it related? No one can say, because Ring wasn't talking. In this vein, I don't think one can say that Michael A. Battle resigned over the controversy. Not that he didn't, but, other than timing, there isn't much circumstantial evidence for claiming so. (Is this making any sense?)

When I first started that section of the template, I wanted to keep track of who was resigning right away. This makes sense close to the event. But, as time passes, you may be right, that we need to add the qualifier "because of the controversy". So, I think, on the whole, I agree with your re-wording. But, along with your re-wording, I'm not convinced Battle belongs there anymore. -- Sholom 19:47, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

Point taken.

I noticed this when updating Miers, who resigned, but "apparently" did not resign because of this controversy.

I invite you to improve, revert or fix to some better listing. -- Yellowdesk 19:51, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

I changed to "during the controversy." Feel free to revise. -- Yellowdesk 19:56, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

Yellowdesk, I continue to be amazed by your tremendous work on the subject. As for me, I've been feeling overwhelmed by events -- so much changes every single day. E.g., two days ago we learned that perhaps 26 USA's were on "the list." Just this morning, McClatchy writes: "... the top prosecutors in Macon, Ga., and Roanoke, Va., landed on a proposed firing list weeks after the White House and Justice Department traded notes about the potential for voter-fraud cases in central Georgia and Appalachia. They were added to a list just days before last November's midterm election, but ultimately not fired."[1]. In any event, again, kudos to your efforts. -- Sholom 12:35, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

		The Current Events Barnstar
		Hereby awarded to Yellowdesk for his outstanding work on Dismissal of U.S. attorneys controversy, which includes, but not limited to, adding a huge amount of well written, sourced, relevant, informative material, as well as a tremendous effort towards reorginizing it all, breaking off sub-articles, (e.g., Dismissal of U.S. attorneys controversy documents), all while the current event is changing daily. Well done! Sholom 14:20, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

gwb43.com

Thanks for writing me. I'm going away for the weekend, so I can't help right now, but you might want to try http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/mt/mt-search.cgi?search=gwb43&SearchCutoff=90 as a start (and, in turn TPM has links to other places). Good luck! -- Sholom 21:58, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

• Have been making some edits. Feel free to look and let me know what you think. Cheers. Nomen Nescio^{Gnothi seauton} 20:01, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

Malformed AIV report

Thank you for your recent report to Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism, but it was malformed. Please follow the instructions in the edit window comment block. —dgies^t_c 01:17, 27 April 2007 (UTC)

Re: Thanks

Thanks a lot for your kind words. However, what are the edit boxes?

UnitedStatesIndia

Your recent edit to Dismissal of U.S. attorneys controversy/sandbox (diff) was reverted by an automated bot that attempts to recognize and repair vandalism to Wikipedia articles. If the bot reverted a legitimate edit, please accept my humble creator's apologies – if you bring it to the attention of the bot's owner, we may be able to improve its behavior. Click here for frequently asked questions about the bot and this warning. // MartinBot 15:32, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Excellent job

You did a great job on the draft request for peer review. I thought it looked great so feel free to submit it and I will monitor what happens. Remember 13:26, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks

Thanks for the message - i always such at random stuff like that, apologies. some nice little person fixed it for me :) arent i lucky. Thanks so much for the msg :) best wishes. Twenty Years 15:14, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

Your recent edit to Dismissal of U.S. attorneys controversy/sandbox (diff) was reverted by an automated bot that attempts to recognize and repair vandalism to Wikipedia articles. If the bot reverted a legitimate edit, please accept my humble creator's apologies – if you bring it to the attention of the bot's owner, we may be able to improve its behavior. Click here for frequently asked questions about the bot and this warning. // MartinBot 12:18, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Election section for Dismissal of U.S. attorneys controversy

I'd be happy to contribute to this. I'll wait for Bdushaw to get things rolling though, since he seems to have been reseaching it already. Sorry again about charging into the page and making changes & criticisms without taking more time to look through previous discussions - you really have done awesome work on this challenging topic. -Rustavo^{Talk/Contribs} 16:03, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

Wikiproject

Yellowdesk, I proposed this wikiproject awhile ago (Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals#Political Scandals and Controversies) and I thought you might be interested in it. Remember 00:33, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

AdamJWC

Sorry, I just saw that an IP address removed almost an entire page of work and assumed that the rest of that persons edits were vandalism as well. I will have a look at what I have done. AdamJWC 04:14, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

It looks as though several edits were made since I reverted that page, so I will leave it alone. Thanks. AdamJWC 04:16, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

What do you mean by thankless task, what I saw looked like page blanking. AdamJWC 04:23, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

When you see an edit summary like this (Dismissal of U.S. attorneys controversy‎; 13:43 . . (-6,703) . . 24.41.62.243 ) from an unregistered user, you would automatically assume that it was vandalism. AdamJWC 04:34, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

USAs

I am signing off for the day to let things settle down after my violent maneuver (I am all done and we are edited on top of each other at the moment!) - I hope the change is an improvement; the change seemed to me to give a more logical organization. We can put it back as before if you like. I was stunned by the implications of the Taylor appointment...the thought of civil war ran through my mind. At this rate people will be abandoning Washington, D.C. much like they are abandoning Bagdad... Bdushaw

Regarding the coverage of the elections angle in the US attorneys controversy pages, I think it might be a good idea to wait a week or so before making any huge revisons. Todd Graves and Bradley Schlozman are scheduled to testify in front of the Senate judiciary committee on June 5th, which should focus the major media on that exact issue. -Rustavo^{Talk/Contribs} 04:45, 31 May 2007 (UTC)