User talk:Amalthea

Not Afraid

Ok so there's this guy called quasi boy who keeps changing the cover of the Not afraid song by Eminem ONLY and ONLY because he wants to increase his edit count . I asked him to give a reason and he wont reply . Nowhere on the internet is the picture available but a guy on my own website got a hold of it from somewhere and this quasi boy is copying the same file and replacing it with my image . Please correct me if I'm missing on a wikipedia policy here and if there's a way to stop Quasi form doing what he is doing . Asid12345678 (talk) 08:38, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

Falling rain

Hi. Many months ago I proposed that Falling rain was blacklisted. It contains false population and altitude data and out of date railway markings etc which lesser informed individuals don't know about. One notable example was a town in Tibet with 35,000 according to official chinese sources. Falling rain claimed 800 odd people in a 7 km radius. Grossly inaccurate. The deletion was endorsed by a number of active geography contrbutors such as myself, Orderinchaos, Darwinek and others. What a waste of my time. Look at this. We now have hundreds of fresh new stubs with false data using this source. Great one. I don't have a problem with the new stubs except for the source and data which is false. Falling rain should be blacklisted asap. Can you or xeno please see this through and perhaps we can organize a bot to remove the link and data from all of the articles it is currently used in. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 14:27, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

That's precisely the reason why mass-creation of articles should go through a BRFA these days :\ (which xeno already brought up on Matt's page, I note). I see that you've already approached the creator of the articles, let's see what he says first. He can surely take care of the issue himself. Amalthea 14:41, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

Twinkle issue

cf Template talk:Db-meta#Nowiki the URL in Db-g12. Rd232 ^talk 14:35, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. Amalthea 19:58, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

Template:GAN

Nice job with the markup simplification! harej 12:14, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Now you've tempted me to clean it up even more. :)
Cheers, Amalthea 12:53, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Alphabetical order

I was wondering if you'd reconsider the change you made putting the block templates in alphabetical order. I've gotten sort of used to seeing some of them in certain place (I imagine others have as well) and while I like the idea of an organized list, it does seem sort of weird to have botusername and socialnetworking above vandalism, jah? ~ Amory (u • t • c)

Sure, it's now back to being as semi-random as ever. :) Nobody has ever complained about it, I just thought it was a good idea when I tried to figure out where to put that new template.
Cheers, Amalthea 20:18, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Thanks! ~ Amory (u • t • c) 16:14, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

Recovery (Eminem album)

your a senior member , so I need help here because you've corrected me before . A fake photoshopped image of Eminem's next album's cover is circulating around . Check the discussion page I've given enough proof that it's not the cover bu this guy keeps changing it saying Rap=Up(which is a blog) is a reliable source . Check the link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Recovery_(Eminem_album)#Album_cover . Please reply it ASAP as the guy keeps changing the cover . Asid12345678 (talk) 20:54, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Hi Asid, I replied there.
Thanks, Amalthea 22:19, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Thank you

WikiThanks

Thanks for getting that to work for me. I really appreciate it!-- Patrick {_oѺ^∞} 00:35, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Sure, you're welcome. Amalthea 21:11, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Hostmask

Glad to see you made a stand there. Pcap ping 12:56, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

I wouldn't call it that, just responded to some misconceptions that were brought up. Amalthea 21:11, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

George Perez

Hi;

I made a new page about George Perez (actor). There is another person (comic artist) on en.wikipedia whose name is also George Perez. Can you help me about this. Or can you rename the other George Perez's name to George Perez (comic artist) or something like this. Can you make an disambiguation page then. Thank you. Metu Impact (talk) 19:35, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Hello, Metu, and welcome to Wikipedia!
Let me say first that I am very impressed with the technical side of your first article, it's not often that I see a new user start an article with infobox, filmography table, and refererences.
However, the content needs some work I'm afraid. Most importantly, the text seems to come from http://www.actnowstudios.com/About_Me_.html and can't just be reused here. You have adapted it a little of course, but it's still so close that it has to be considered a copyright violation. That is, unless you actually own copyright of that text since you are George Perez? It would be possible to reuse the text in that case, but that would require a few additional steps. It would probably be easier to rewrite the text from scratch anyway due to some other issues: The text is not really written from a neutral point of view (small wonder, considering the source), and none of the facts from the article are actually sourced to a reliable source, only to the primary source of the topic's web page.
I see that Vianello has already taken care about the disambiguation and the hatnote, next time please try to only contact one editor, or otherwise centralize your questions.
Kind regards, Amalthea 20:28, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

George Perez is my friend. I'am from America but I live in Turkey. I started a page about George on tr.wikipedia.org and then, I decided to start a page about him on en.wikipedia.org. The article is the English version of Turkish Vikipedia's George Perez page. George let me to use his photos by sending an e-mail to info-tr@wikimedia.org . Can I upload and use that photos on this page? Thanks for your time and consideration. Metu Impact (talk) 20:54, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

I see. Concerning the text, the English article was so close to the text on his website that I can only conclude that the Turkish version was a translation to begin with. Compare

"That same year he also appeared in his first break out role as the lead in Elton John’s music video, A Word in Spanish", [1]

with

"That same year he also appeared in his first break out role as the lead in Elton John’s music video, “A Word in Spanish."", [2]

Since you don't own copyright of the original text, and without the release under a compatible free license by the copyright owner it's imply impossible to keep that text on Wikipedia, I'm afraid, and I had to remove it. Considering the other issues that I mentioned above a rewrite would be good anyway, but I must say that I have problems finding reliable sources to build an article from. In fact, after some searching, I'm not quite sure he passes our inclusion guideline for actors at this point, WP:ENTERTAINER. That's not for me to decide though.
Concerning the images, the best way to display them here is to have someone copy them to Wikimedia commons, the central media repository, since that way the license issues should already be done with, with the prior OTRS approval. I would suggest that you approach someone on tr.wikipedia to do that, it will be easier for you than for me. Process to do this here is detailed at Wikipedia:Moving images to the Commons, maybe you can mention that over there.
I must also urge you to rewrite the text on tr.wikipedia: A direct translation from a copyrighted source may not be used on Wikipedia. The basic rule is that you may take information from copyrighted sources, but not whole sentences, not even if you translate them. Can you do that?
Sorry that this is turning out a bit more difficult than you probably thought. We take copyright very serious on Wikipedia, and it's really in the interest of your friend and all creative professionals that we do.
Kind regards, Amalthea 21:41, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Yes, as you said, it is hard for me to find reliable sources for George. Then I used some information that I know and also from his website actnowstudios. It was really hard for me to do the page that you deleted. I saw that you had deleted everything that I write. I did not copy all the text and paste it. I write the whole text on the noteped then I opened that page. I hardly find the reference links with some other information. There are too many pages on Wikipedia that they have no references. I do not like that kind of pages. I tried to do the best I think. I tried to rewrite many of the texts. There are almost no information about him on Internet that I can rewrite. I live in Turkey and I think, I am forgetting English. Sometimes I do not know what to say and how to rewrite texts. I just want to do a good think. Your behaviour is not good, I think. I do not want to focus on English Wikipedia after your behaviour. Sorry about this. Take care. Metu Impact (talk) 22:15, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Well, as I said, I'm sorry about the result, but there is very little I can do with copyright issues. The one sentence I quoted above was just an example, but it affected pretty much the whole text. Amalthea 22:40, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Template:Multiple issues

Hi, could you perhaps remove {{expand}} from Template:Multiple issues? I think I could do it myself, but don't want to risk breaking anything. :) Garion96 (talk) 11:56, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

Doing that would essentially mass-remove the issue from all articles, without looking at context, which is "probably unwise", as Coren put it in the TFD. I've removed it from the documentation and some WP space pages, that and the removal from Friendly will certainly make it less used in the future. Other than that, usage of expand in Multiple issues should get the same treatment as a straight transclusion of the template. What that is I'm not sure.
It might be useful to categorize articled tagged with it May 2010 or later into a separate category, to control new additions.
Amalthea 12:36, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

Duh. :) Of course. Didn't thought of all the instances already in use. Garion96 (talk) 13:52, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

Smackbot removes them now from stubs, FWIW. Cheers, Amalthea 14:05, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

MOTD deletions

Forward MARCH. Warning, this is not an APRIL fools day joke. Simply south (talk) 11:13, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

Done. Amalthea 17:51, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Whoops, i was not meaning don't do April. And thanks as usual. Simply south (talk) 21:37, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Ah, was a little too cryptic for me. :)
Gone, too. Amalthea 09:59, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

ZE ORANGE BAR COMETH

Thanks for that =) –xeno^talk 13:56, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

• This is on my back burner, so maybe you might like to take a shot at it: Template:Administrators' noticeboard navbox (make it so it doesn't need manually updated: probably doable with ifexist parserFunctions). –xeno^talk 15:00, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
  • Can do. FWIW, individual #ifexists would be too many on ANI, but {{count pages}} can count them quite efficiently. Amalthea 11:39, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Template:Feedbackreply

Thanks for fixing the hastily cobbled together attempt at a template on my part! I based it on Template:Helpdeskreply so maybe you could make the same changes there? I noticed that you don't think it should be subst'd. I only put that in the documentation so that the edit section link works properly when the template appears on the user's talk page - otherwise, if it is transcluded, the edit link edits the template itself. Does your edit fix that problem? If not, do you know how to fix it so that the template can be transcluded? As you can tell I am a template coding neophyte. Thanks again! – ukexpat (talk) 16:30, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Ah, I see. You're right, transcluding sections from templates is not good. How about the version from {{Feedbackreply/sandbox}}: If you transclude it, it displays the headerless box, and if you substitute it, it turns into a header with a transcluded version of the template beneath. Could be a bit confusing, but might also be the best of both worlds. Amalthea 17:47, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Basic question is whether that talkback notice needs a header in the first place, though. {{Talkback}} doesn't have one. Amalthea 17:53, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

George Perez

Belated thanks for bringing to my attention the tr:George Perez article. I deleted the copyvio section and warned the user. --İnfoCan (talk) 22:07, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for looking into it! Cheers, Amalthea 09:57, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

Streamline?

Hey Amalthea, can the code in my signature be tightened up? If so, could you show me? Thanks! Maedin\^talk 12:47, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

Certainly:

• Original, 164 characters:

  Maedin\^talk

• Tightened, still valid markup (albeit <font> is a deprecated tag), 7 characters shorter:

  Maedin\^talk

• Same visual result, markup by itself is not valid XHTML, but is fixed by HTMLTidy (and I for one consider it perfectly valid MediaWiki markup), 37 characters shorter:

  Maedin\^talk

• Slightly changed colors, 46 characters shorter:

  Maedin\^talk

• Let the skin define most of your colors (makes no diff for me in monobook since I've visited both your pages, but for others it may look different), 80 characters shorter:

  Maedin\^talk

Cheers, Amalthea 15:47, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

I chose the one that requires HTMLTidy but "my preferences" won't let me save it because it's "invalid code". Your first suggestion is a winner, then, :) I realised that the colour of "talk" isn't very noticeable without zooming in, btw, so I removed the tags for it altogether. Much slimmer now, thank you! (I wonder why I had mixed <font> with <span style>?!) Maedin\^talk 18:21, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

Right, I knew that once. Cheers, Amalthea 01:09, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

Checkuser question

...Polls are open, how/where do I !vote?! Cheers, TFOWR^{This flag once was red} 10:59, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

Aha! The Man's feeble attempts to deny me my voice have been thwarted! It turns out that !voting is delayed, and that it'll take place at Special:SecurePoll. Apologies for the noise! Cheers, TFOWR^{This flag once was red} 11:42, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

No problem. :) Cheers, Amalthea 01:09, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

Twinkle

I think the template you added on twinklewarn had a little bit of an effect on the vandalism template. Like this. But was working fine beforehand. I'm not sure, just thought I'd ask you since you have a bit more knowledge here. Elockid ^(Talk) 02:17, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

Ditto - switching to any block template forces an indef timer. I've had this happen before, but it went away after a few hours so I assumed it was an issue on my side. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 03:27, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

Fixed, feel free to just revert next time. Cheers, Amalthea 08:05, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

I apparently used you as a guinea pig, Elockid: I just went through the recent changes of the last eight hours to look for other incorrect notifications, but as it turns out only you were using the changed script yet, all other notifications were fine. Good for me, I guess. :) Cheers, and sorry, Amalthea 08:41, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

You do rock, so ever much. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 11:33, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

I feel a bit embarrassed now that there were no other people. But everything's okay. Elockid ^(Talk) 11:54, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

Don't, it was my fault, not yours. Cheers, Amalthea 11:57, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

So not. :) Amalthea 11:57, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

Vector tab

Hi Amalthea, i have been testing the following [3] which did the trick for me. Note that all scripts have this loading issue on Safari/Chrome. Really somewhat of a mess.. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:49, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

Hmm, right, maybe it was just that. Do you know why webkit browsers need to have morebits fully loaded before it may load the other parts? What exactly is breaking there? But that just gave me another idea, I'll try that before I cave and use your time delay for those two browsers. :) Amalthea 16:15, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

Safari and Chrome do async loading of all their javascript, not regarding the order of the definitions that do these DOM inclusions. jQuery uses a similar loading verification technique. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:44, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

So even relying on anything defined in wikibits.js (or the page source, even?) is playing with fire?
Anyway, just delaying import of everything with that same hook seems to work robustly, try User:Amalthea/twinkle.js on an article. The hook looks a bit weird, admittedly, but works very well. :) No worse than repeatedly querying status, I'd say.
Only loads three modules, but they appear to be very reliable. Could you try it out, please? If we see no problem I'd really like to bring it live before the 13th. :) Amalthea 16:58, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

Actually, it the problems seems to have been a different bug.I've thrown out the delayed loading from User:Amalthea/twinkle.js and it still works reliably for me. Can you reproduce any problems? Amalthea 17:26, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

Tested it some more, and it looked good to me, so I've brought it live. Thursday is a holiday here and I'll probably go offline tomorrow evening for around 24 hours, so I wanted to get a full day of testing until then. Cheers, Amalthea 22:24, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

Re: Twinkle, bug 373.

Hi Amalthea. I wonder if you would be kind enough to help me. I know that Twinkle isn't technically or officially supported for Internet Explorer, but it has served me very well up to now. However, it's now not working since the change to the vector skin. I'm wondering if you would be able to help me figure out a workaround to get it back on the go properly please? I've switched back to monobook for the time being at least. Thank you for any help in advance you may be able to provide. Regards, BarkingFish ^{Talk to me} | _{My contributions} 01:28, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

The Vector Skin SUCKS. Curses to whomever made it ;-) — Rlevse • Talk • 01:41, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Don't curse the person who made it, curse the one who approved its use - Jay Walsh from the WMF! BarkingFish ^{Talk to me} | _{My contributions} 03:42, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Well, there are some aspects I prefer, and with some heavy tweaking turning it into a Vectobook mixture I find it usable for me; but by and large I agree, it's not an improvement for experienced editors who know monobook in and out and know what's behind all the links. What I really don't get is why they would throw in a couple of extra changes with the go-live that weren't tested, turned out to be buggy, and would of course have benefited from some honing that other parts got through the beta testing. Hmm. Amalthea 20:40, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

BTW, I've switched back to monobook. The more I improved its usability (for me), the more monobookesque it became anyway, and some features/bugs were just too annoying. :\ Amalthea 22:12, 16 May 2010 (UTC)

Most probably because the import statements were missing from your Vector skin script file, User:BarkingFish/vector.js. I've added them for Twinkle and Friendly now, please bypass your browser cache and try again before you add more scripts from your Monobook.js: Some of them may be incompatible and can affect other scripts. Twinkle and Friendly were tested with Vector and should work as well on IE as they did with Monobook.
Amalthea 20:40, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Typical of developers, rush to market with bugs. — Rlevse • Talk • 02:15, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

Template talk:Talkback

I would like your opinion on a possible change to the template to allow it to remove itself using the "undo" function. Please respond there. PleaseStand ^(talk) 19:55, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Will do as soon as I catch up with my watchlist. Amalthea 20:43, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Palatschinke, Palatschinken, oder Eierkuchen

OTRS quality queue got an email saying the en.wiki article Palatschinke should be "Palatschinken" and that Palatschinken is both singular and plural. On de.wiki both Palatschinke and Palatschinken redirect to Eierkuchen. Should the en.wiki article indeed be Palatschinken? Or something else? I've eaten these, BTW they're quite good, and just called them "thin pancakes" in English. In this context it seems "schinken" does not mean ham??? Pls advise. — Rlevse • Talk • 22:32, 16 May 2010 (UTC)

Hmm. "Palatschinken" is certainly used as a singular form, and I've personally never heard it called "Palatschinke" by anyone. However, the de-facto reference for German orthography, the Duden, lists in its online entry:
Pa|lat|schin|ke, die; -, -n <meist Pl.> [ung. palacsinta < rumän. plăcintă < lat. placenta, →Plazenta] ...
Read: Yes, the singular form is Palatschinke, albeit it's mostly used in plural form. Per WP:PLURAL, the current title Palatschinke is preferrable. The confusion most likely roots in the interesting history of the word, it is apparently just a kind of phono-semantic matching of the Czech word palačinka, and has nothing to do with "Schinken" (ham) at all. If one doesn't know that (and I didn't myself, until just now), "Palatschinke" sounds wrong since "Schinken" is both the singular and plural form of the German word for ham.
I'd say you should just respond with that: Give them the link to the Duden, and point out the unexpected etymology.
Cheers, Amalthea 23:10, 16 May 2010 (UTC)

Cool. But isn't it way past your bedtime? — Rlevse • Talk • 23:20, 16 May 2010 (UTC)

Quite. Luckily I'm on kind of a Flextime. :)
I am still pondering whether the article would be better placed elsewhere. As far as I can tell, Eierkuchen is a far more generic term, with Palatschinken just one variant. Moving it to that generic term would make large parts of the article undue, including the Etymology. I'll bring it up at WT:GER, turns out I know far too little of German cuisine (if you can call it that) outside of my little regional corner.
Amalthea, off to bed :). 23:28, 16 May 2010 (UTC)