User talk:Zlerman

/Archive 1 /Archive 2

Request for help

I've been rewriting the Outline article from scratch.

Before I move it to article space, it needs to be finished and completely referenced.

I need your help on it.

The Transhumanist    01:11, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

Paska (bread)

I did some work on this article. It seems similar to challah. I thought it might interest you. Cheers. ChildofMidnight (talk) 18:46, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

I understand

Sorry, I didn't know about this rule. It's just that most of people from Central Asia I've met told me that Russian language was as important to them as their mother tongues. Many of them even only speak Russian. It seems to me that Russian in Central Asia is just like French in West African countries such as Senegal, Ivory Coast or Benin.Mitch1981 (talk) 18:04, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Second language

In many developping countries, the language of the former colonial power often plays a central role. In some cases, people are even more prophicient in this language than in their official language. For instance, many North African speak better French than (litteral) Arabic. I think that the infobox should take that into acount. We could put something like "language used in higher education" or "second mother tongue" or "second language", don't you think so? It would be more precise than "language for interethnic communication".Mitch1981 (talk) 19:02, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Re : Re : Second language

Sometimes, I forget that, after all, Wikipedia is just an encyclopedia and that it can't completely reflect real life. I may be wrong but it seems to me that, in Central Asia, Russian is not used only in business or politics but also in ordinary life by ordinary people. It is the same with French in Senegal or Benin, English in India, Spanish in Equatorial Guinea or Portuguese in Angola. The difference is that, in those countries, these languages do have an official status. For some obscure reasons I don't really get, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan won't give an official status to Russian language. It's very surprising considering that those governments' web sites are in Russian (besides English and the official language of course) but not in Chinese or French for instance.

About the Baltic States I don't know. Russian is the 7th most spoken language in the European Union (partly) because of these countries. Their governements' web sites use Russian too. So, we should not completely discard the possibility of inserting it in their infoboxes. до свиданияMitch1981 (talk) 07:36, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

I met people from Kazakhstan and it was clear to me that Russian was at least as useful to them (and their counterparts) as their "real" mother tongue. Plus, a friend of mine who spent a few months in Kyrghistan assured me that people spoke Russian in everyday life. So, I've probably jumped on false conclusions and considered that the other "Eurasian Muslim" former Soviet Republics were doing the same. But could you tell me more about Tajikistan ? Another friend of mine lived there for a few months and he needed a French-Russian dictionary because Russian was very used there. And what about Azerbaijan ?

Being biligual myself (Swahili dialects and French), I can't understand why these people are rejecting the opportunity of having two mother tongues. I travelled a bit too and I'm more and more convinced that English will never be a genuine "universal lingua franca". For instance, in France, Italy, Brasil or Spain, most of ordinary people are not very prophicient and they probably don't intend to be. On the other hand, languages of former colonial powers are real and useful "second languages" for the third world.

By the way, are you a "Russian Jew" ? I mean ... is Russian a "second mother tongue" to you or did you "just" learn it at school ?Mitch1981 (talk) 09:13, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

As you may have noticed, I'm very interested in foreign languages. Next year, I intend to learn Russian and I was convinced it was a real "super language" just like English, French, Spanish or Arabic. Now, from what you said, I have the impression that it will only survive in its motherland, K&K, Belarus and maybe Ukraine. But why do they hate Russia so much ? Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of Soviet Regime's. It's just that I don't have the impression that USSR treated them so badly. I was even told that most of kyrgyz physicians were trained in Russia. Is their attitude just motivated by national pride ?

But I don't think that Wikipedia is the place for this kind of conversation. Here's my MSN : gaston.michel4@hotmail.fr. Mitch1981 (talk) 10:16, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

Russian Armenia

This person Folatin is removing my External Link, and is saying Im banned when I started editing Wikipedia. Please help he is vandalzing. He is removing a link I am putting is completley with info of Russian Armenia. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.250.8.34 (talk) 20:33, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

You keep inserting a general link on Armenian history, and that is why it is being reverted as spam. What you may need is a specific link on Russian Armenia (if you can find an appropriate one). --Zlerman (talk) 00:55, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Agriculture in Azerbaijan

Hey you may want to expand this. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 21:25, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

Rollback?

Hello. Recently I noticed your anti-vandal work on the Kyrgyz article. The easiest way to clean up vandalism and spam is via the rollback tool. If you are willing to abide by the rollbacker rules (see WP:ROLLBACK), I would be more than happy to grant you access to this function. If, after reading WP:ROLLBACK, you promise to follow the rollback rules to the best of your ability, just drop a quick message on my talk page saying as much and I will update your rights. Thanks again for your help in keeping Wikipedia clear of vandalism! — Kralizec! (talk) 14:18, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Your request for rollback

After reviewing your request for rollback, I have enabled rollback on your account. Keep in mind these things when going to use rollback:

• Getting rollback is no more momentous than installing Twinkle.
• Rollback can be used to revert clear cases of vandalism only, and not good faith edits.
• Rollback may be removed at any time.

If you no longer want rollback, then contact me and I'll remove it. Also, for some information on how to use rollback, you can view this page. I'm sure you'll do great with rollback, just leave me a message if you run into troubles or have any questions about appropriate/inappropriate use of rollback. Happy editing! — Kralizec! (talk) 15:02, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for your hard work helping keep Wikipedia vandalism free! — Kralizec! (talk) 03:16, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

IP edits on Kazakhs

I opened a sockpuppet case here about the IP edits to Kazakhs, which seems to be Kazax1 continuing to edit without logging in. On a completely different note, have you thought about archiving your talk page? Otebig (talk) 16:47, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

IP blocked for making personal attacks, and the article has been semi-protected to prevent him from just changing to another IP address. — Kralizec! (talk) 16:00, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Please give warnings after reverting unhelpful edits

Hello. I see that you are putting the rollback tool to great use! When reverting unhelpful edits (especially vandalism), you should also give the editor a warning (see the complete list at WP:UTM) in order to help educate him or her on their mistake. We typically start with level one warnings, and progress up the scale with escalating levels of warnings issued if or when an editor ignores the warnings and continues their disruptive behaviour. Once an editor has been "sufficiently warned" (typically interpreted as ignoring four levels of escalating warnings that have been issued during the current calendar month), they may be reported to Administrator intervention against vandalism where an admin will review the case and block the editor as necessary in order to prevent additional disruption of the project.

As an example, for your revert of the edits by 78.21.40.7 (talk · contribs) to the Kazakhstan article, I issued the IP a {{uw-unsourced1}} warning to help them understand that we require sources for changes like this (you may view the warning here). If 78.21.40.7 were to ignore the warning and change the article's statistics again, a {{uw-unsourced2}} warning could be issued. If vandals are properly warned after each of their edits are reverted, they can often be stopped (aka blocked) in as few as just five edits.

Please let me know if you have any questions or issues. Thanks, — Kralizec! (talk) 00:20, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Unfortunately with rollback, you have to manually issue warnings. However unlike Huggle or any of the other tools, at least this gives you the opportunity to pick the exact correct warning for the situation. — Kralizec! (talk) 01:08, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Piped links and redirects

Hi

I saw your edits to Tajikistan, which was a bit puzzled by. The original problem which I fixed was that there were piped links where both the link target and the link label were redirect pages (fortunately to the same article!). One of the purposes of redirects is as an alternative to piping, and although the piped link help tells us of 3 drawbacks to using redirects, they seem pretty trivial to me, and not enough to outweigh the convenience of using redirects or to make it worth changing them to piped links. Life's too short! Mhockey (talk) 15:55, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Farkhor Air Base in Tajikistan

I've provided the info you asked for, along with a reliable source for it. Cheers, Askari Mark (Talk) 04:20, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Kurds

This web page does not qualify as a WP:RS. The author, Barbara Robson, is merely a biochemist, not a scholar Islam or Middle East. We can't use her "opinion" as a credible source for a statement of fact. --Kurdo777 (talk) 21:34, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Talk:Northern Cyprus

Hi. Replying to your question — I didn't block anyone. I'm not an admin. I was simply expressing a concern and hoping that an admin can help sort things out. Richwales (talk) 15:10, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Ah. I see why you were confused. I noted that those users (User:Happy19April2009, User:Elderbrother45, and User:Sisamvleda) had been blocked, and I went in after the fact and updated their talk pages. But I wasn't the one who originally identified them as sockpuppets or did the actual blocking. And yes, I'd be fine with asking User:Future Perfect at Sunrise for assistance in sorting this out. Richwales (talk) 15:40, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Outline of knowledge WikiProject update 05/10/2009

Development is moving steadily forward. We haven't created any new outlines lately, but a lot of editing of our existing outlines is taking place. Take a look at Buaidh's contributions.  :)

I'm impressed.

I can safely say we now have another fanatic working on the project.

Importance of watching

A big danger to new pages or pages that have low traffic are prods. These are deletion proposals that don't have to go through AfD. If a prod sits on a page, any page, 5 days without opposition, the page can be deleted without discussion.

Such pages can be undeleted without discussion too, but there's usually a delay, especially if you don't notice the page missing right away. Prods create undesirable gaps in the subject coverage of list sets.

I just caught one the other day, so keep an eye on the outline pages!

Tangent: Indexes

One of the benefits of reverse outlining is the discovery of problems (gaps in coverage, etc.) with the publication being outlined. We've come across several and have been fixing those as we go. Because hypertext tables of contents are only as good as the pages they link to, we've been cleaning up large sections of Wikipedia. This was something I did not foresee when I started this project.

One of the sets of pages we link to on the outlines is the set of indexes, formerly called "List of x topics". Unfortunately, the lists of topics were divided between 2 different sets competing for the same article names, and this impeded development of both sets. One of those sets were indexes, and the rest are outlines (more about these below).

So I set about splitting up the 2 sets, by renaming the indexes to "Index of x articles" or "Index of x-related articles".

All 450 or so of them.

Nobody has complained about the new names, but 2 or 3 people thought I was way too bold to attempt this without a proposal or discussion first. Just 2 or 3 people. That's about as much opposition as you could expect for moving a single page.

Not bad for a move of this volume.

There are many more indexes out there, but our main concern are those which are provided links on the outlines. Many of those are redlinks (gaps in coverage as mentioned above), and so we need a way to track these and direct editor attention to them so that somebody creates them...

So, I've created a page for the set, that parallels the OOK list:

See Portal:Contents/Index.

The complete list of "Index of" articles can be found at User:The Transhumanist/Index, and this list needs to be gone over to make sure each article index listed is included on the portal page above. If you help with this, please put - placed after each entry that you check and place.

Thank you.

To further support the development of index pages, and provide a central place for people to go to find out more about indexes and what needs to be done, I've created the Index WikiProject.

Hidden outlines

There are outline pages hiding all over Wikipedia. They aren't in OOK's formats, but we can fix that.  :)

Converting existing outlines and absorbing them into the OOK is a lot easier than creating outlines from scratch, and it avoids unnecessary duplication of effort. But before we can convert them, we have to find them...

A hunt is underway for non-OOK outlines. So far, User:Gimme danger is in the lead and has found the most. See Wikipedia:WikiProject Outline of knowledge#The hunt for hidden outlines for more information.

Please don't rename any non-standard outlines you come across to OOK's standard naming until after you reformat them. Renaming them only after they are reformatted helps us keep track of which outlines have and have not been converted.

Thank you.

Converting outlines

The way I usually do this is by substituting the relevant outline generator template at the beginning of the outline, which forces the existing outline to the bottom of the page. Then I add an "under construction" tag, and then move all the links from the original outline to the relevant sections in the standard structure. It is important to finish the conversion quickly, so as not to create confusion. Then I scour Wikipedia for missing links (using Google to do a site-specific search of Wikipedia), to make the upgraded outline more comprehensive than the converted outline. Be sure to check all related categories too. Add a lead paragraph, add external links, and voila!

Better than before.

Where we're heading

The next phase in the evolution of this project is to increase participation by expanding the Wikipedia community's awareness of the Outline of knowledge, its purpose, and what needs to be done for any given subject.

This will entail placing banners on the outlines' talk pages, the talk page for the WikiProject associated with the subject of each outline and of each planned outline, and on the talk page of each article corresponding to each outline and to each planned outline.

Then instructions on improving subject access, including the creation and development of an outline for each subject, will be posted on every related WikiProject page. (There's a WikiProject for the subject of most outlines).

We will also be sending notices to every member of every WikiProject associated with the subject of each and every outline and planned outline.

But before this happens, the outline guidelines and the article draft for the topic "Outline" must be completed. Without these, many editors will not know what an outline is, or what to do to build and improve them.

And that's our current bottleneck.

Once those are ready (the guideline and article), we can take this project to the next level.

Keep up the good work

Well, that's all for now.

Until next time,

The Transhumanist    23:46, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

A couple questions for you...

What are the benefits of a tree structure?

The article doesn't say.

I'm interested, because I need to explain the benefits in the guideline on outlines I'm writing. (Outlines are a type of tree structure).

I've also asked the question at various reference desks, and these threads may help to jump start your brain on this question.  :)

• Wikipedia:Reference desk/Science#What are the benefits of a tree structure?
• Wikipedia:Reference desk/Mathematics#What are the benefits to humans of using a tree structure?
• Wikipedia:Reference desk/Humanities#In the humanities, what are the applications and benefits of a tree structure?
• Wikipedia:Reference desk/Language#What are the benefits of using tree structures in linguistic communications?
• Wikipedia:Reference desk/Miscellaneous#With respect to the fields covered by this refdesk, what are the applications and benefits of a tree structure?

What are the benefits of outlines, over and above regular articles?

What benefits have you noticed?

How are Wikipedia's outlines useful to you?

I look forward to your answers on my talk page.

The Transhumanist    04:35, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

WPOOK Update - 05/17/2009 - Blockbusting!

This project needs another shot in the arm.

So here it goes...

Countries WikiProject Collaboration - Contests!

I've contacted all 59 members of the Countries WikiProject to help in designing and conducting contests for the further development of the country outlines.

You are invited too.

Houston, we have a problem

The guidelines and outline article still aren't complete.

Which means you will be needed to help explain to the newcomers mentioned above what outlines are and how to develop them.

Please participate in the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Countries#Hosting country coverage contests.

The Transhumanist    22:23, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

An idea for a contest

To promote work on the country outlines, maybe a contest between country WikiProjects could be run, to see which WikiProject could develop the best country outline.

What do you think?

(I look forward to your reply on my talk page).

The Transhumanist    23:50, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

I Don't understand

Why were the Albania changes deemed not constructive in your subjective opinon? May I ask, are you the gentelman that has been deleting what I added there consecutively in the past few days?

Thank youSile101 (talk) 10:43, 19 May 2009 (UTC)—Preceding unsigned comment added by Sile101 (talk • contribs) 10:11, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

RE: Re:I Don't understand

Well I am sure you can realise your inconsistency in this approach.

A person well known to 1.5billion Muslims, apparently not famous enough, but a person who is on American Idol was deemed ‘famous’ enough for the article.

Furthermore the ethnicity of the three people I placed there have been verified by the sources that they were hyperlinked to, if anyone bothered to look. Their history is well documented, if one done the most prima facie research.

Lastly, I do feel that there was an anti-Islam feel to all my reversions, mother Teresa (whom I very much respect) although Albanian was born in FYROM. If one was going to be pedantic about this, then really she should not have qualified on that page. But the article was about famous Albanians, but evidently they could not be Muslim. However the religious bias is well noted, and has not gone un-noticed.

Thank you E.G Sile101 (talk) 10:43, 19 May 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sile101 (talk • contribs) 10:39, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Has the shit hit the fan? - WPOOK update, 05/25/2009

Maybe...

We've started the next phase

I was experiencing mental block on the article draft for "outline" and on the outline guideline draft. And this was holding the whole project back. Without these (which are intended to explain the type of lists known as outlines in detail), the danger is higher that a controversy could go the wrong way.

I requested help on them, but there was none forthcoming.

So I went ahead and started us on the next phase of operations without those 2 pages...

Our AWB'ers and I have placed about 1600 notices all over Wikipedia. And the plan is to place several thousand more.

This generated only one complaint, but it was a very vocal one, and attracted a few other detractors who seemed unfamiliar with the concept of hierarchical outlines and their benefits. However, just as many or more editors came to the defense of the OOK, and there was no consensus formed. But, dab is still trying to rally opposition to outlines at the Village Pump. See below...

Administrator noticeboard incident and Village Pump policy discussion

It appears that the banner placed on the talk page of the Outline of Switzerland caught the attention of an editor named Dbachmann who posted a rather forceful message on my talk page, another on WT:WPOOK, another at WP:VPP, and still another at WP:AN!

He went well out of his way to use negative hype to cause a stir.

It appears that Mr. Bachmann doesn't understand the nature of hierarchical outlines and their applications. And though he implied that he has never seen an OOK outline before, he was involved with a discussion on these when they were called "lists of basic topics".

His primary argument is that outlines are content forks of articles, and violate WP:CFORK.

But "topic lists", of which outlines are a type, have been around for almost as long as Wikipedia, and fall under the WP:LISTS and WP:STAND guidelines. They aren't intended as forks, as they are lists, bringing the benefits of lists to the corresponding subjects, such as grouping and navigation.

Someone suggested an MfD, but lists are articles, and are within the jurisdiction of AfD. Only the portal page, which merely lists the outline articles, falls within the scope of the MfD department.

The administrator's noticeboard was considered the wrong venue for the discussion, and the discussion was closed.

But Dab's discussion at the Village Pump is still active. Hopefully level heads will prevail there too.

Now what?

Am I disheartened or deterred? Hell no. I say "full steam ahead!"

But we really need to finish the article draft and the guideline. Otherwise there will continue to be confusion.

Over the next week or two, we'll be posting another 1600 or so notices. It's a good thing we didn't send out 10,000 of them all at once.  :)

The Transhumanist    23:17, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

P.S.: Another related thread has popped up at WP:VPR#OoK's expediency. --TT   04:29, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Azerbaijani Propaganda map

They are putting the propaganda map again in the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan page. This was reverted many times, and they continue to put it back. Please help out. Thanks. 63.16.203.197 (talk) 17:48, 25 May 2009 (UTC)