User talk:Milkunderwood

Hello, Milkunderwood! Welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions to this free encyclopedia. If you decide that you need help, check out Getting Help below, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking

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January 2010

Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to contribute constructively to the encyclopedia, your addition of one or more external links to the page Under Milk Wood has been reverted.
Your edit here was reverted by an automated bot that attempts to remove links which are discouraged per our external links guideline from Wikipedia. The external link you added or changed is on my list of links to remove and probably shouldn't be included in Wikipedia. I removed the following link(s): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuPO2Kvqlms&NR=1 (matching the regex rule \byoutube\.com). If the external link you inserted or changed was to a media file (e.g. a sound or video file) on an external server, then note that linking to such files may be subject to Wikipedia's copyright policy and therefore probably should not be linked to. Please consider using our upload facility to upload a suitable media file. Video links are also strongly deprecated by our guidelines for external links, partly because they're useless to people with slow internet connections.
If you were trying to insert an external link that does comply with our policies and guidelines, then please accept my creator's apologies and feel free to undo the bot's revert. However, if the link does not comply with our policies and guidelines, but your edit included other, constructive, changes to the article, feel free to make those changes again without re-adding the link. Please read Wikipedia's external links guideline for more information, and consult my list of frequently-reverted sites. For more information about me, see my FAQ page. Thanks! --XLinkBot (talk) 21:43, 14 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Under Milk Wood

Hi, I would have e-mailed you earlier if I knew how. Bought set of 11 CDs as result of your message. Many thanks. Any info etc or mail direct welcome: knapp.tony @ btinternet.com - Regards (28 Feb 2010)

La Traviata list of recordings

Thanks for your notes on that. I think that we were both editing about the same time, as there was an edit conflict. I guess that reliable 3rd party sources are always justification for inclusion.

Yes, I saw the edit conflict warning too.

Although I added the ref to "operadis" and found most of the cat numbers from it, I didn't establish the page nor the contents of the list. These lists have grown over time as different editors have chosen to add additional recordings, so I would say "go ahead and add more if you like".

The format is pretty well set now by the WikiProject Opera goroup's consensus, but feel free to join us and keep contributing to opera articles. All the best, Viva-Verdi (talk) 00:38, 29 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, okay; *you* added the ref to the UK site-- hope you don't mind my moving it up to the top of the page with the "very limited" caution.

PS: Am interested in seeing the UMW article now, since I just to tried to buy a CD on Amazon which, when it arrived, contained only the second half of the play (from page 44 on my 86-page Dent copy from 1958 when I bought it. They got my money back for me.

Glad to be of help with that. Amazingly cheap for 11 great CDs.

Budapest Quartet

Hi Milkunderwood!

Glad you liked the contribution. It's just that someone gave me the book as I do play a bit so it seemed a shame to miss the opportunity. I must admit I did not pay much attention to this question but, yes there is a discography. At the start it says it was prepared by Sony Classical and includes re-issues released since 1970.

There is also an appendix listing guest artists.

Budhen (talk) 19:42, 4 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

OK I'll leave you to do the discography. Personally I spend a lot more time listening to live chamber music than canned. My own collection reflects that: Amadeus (now a bit dated), Lindsay (great for Beethoven), Borodin (great for Russian composers). I have heard but not collected: Endellion, Chiligirian, Takacs Nagy, Carmina... I live close to Manchester, where the Royal Northern College of Music is stuffed with fine student quartets, most of whom will never make it - the economics of chamber music being what they are. I guess that you are American and live far from any big city? Budhen (talk) 09:33, 5 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'll be happy to do the discography when my copy of Brandt arrives--I'm very glad to know there was such a book about the Budapest. I guess I'm not only old-fashioned in my taste in how something ought to sound, but I also like for it to sound "right". For instance I can appreciate the technical sophistication of the Fitzwilliam's set of the Shostakovich quartets, but they play them with an unmistakable "English accent" that sounds more appropriate to Bridge or Chadwick, for instance, whereas the Borodin's set is echt Shostakovich through and through. But still I do enjoy listening to different versions of things--such as the Fitzwilliam Shostakovich--and making comparisons. And of course some people are better at different things. Some musicians I know--I'm not one myself, at all--disparage Barenboim's pianism, but I know of no better solo Mozart than his, even Gieseking's, whereas his Schumann is just plain weird. It's fascinating to compare his Beethoven trios that he did with Zuckerman and Du Pre in 1969, with live performances with the same personnel played the following year, where he sounds angry and depressed. And I have found very little attractive about his conducting of anything at all. (I might say that I have *never* seen what people can find to like about Brendel. His fingers are made of wood, and he has zero sense of musicality. But he has written a couple of interesting books.)

Nobody has ever played Brahms better than Rubinstein at his peak in the 1940s, which also happens to be the time of his best Chopin, much more sympathetic than either his '30s or '50s sets. I have a never-reprinted LP of Walter's 1946 Pastorale Symphony with the Philadelphia Orch that is so much better that his famous 1958 version with the Columbia Sym, which is frequently said to be the definitive version--it is very good indeed, but he had done better. And for all of Karajan's frequently almost Nazi-sounding pompousness, there's no better Sibelius than his, with the possible exception of Koussevitzky's. Also his B Minor Mass is incomparable, but that's also partly due to Christa Ludwig, who sings directly from heaven.

Then there's also the situation of performers changing stylistically as they get older. For instance I love Ashkenazy's early Chopin and Prokofiev, but I have a hard time with anything he did after about 1974. I am in the US as you guessed, and live in a mid-size city that supports a not-bad symphony orchestra, but as you can guess I'm much more addicted to recordings than to live performances. In fact I last went to a concert in the mid-1980s to hear Ashkenazy playing I think a Beethoven concerto, and came away thinking how dreadful it had been. Now if it had been Gilels...

I greatly prefer Serkin's Mozart to anything he did of Beethoven, in general, but his almost entirely out-of-print work with Alexander Schneider conducting tends to have far more magic than the same concertos he did with George Szell. Speaking of magic, try to find his 1964 Brandenburg #5 with Casals at Marlboro, which of course is not even supposed to be played with a piano; I'm completely blown away whenever I hear this recording.

Are you familiar with Kodaly's sonata for unaccompanied cello played by Starker? He made five different recordings, of which I know the 1949, the 1957, and the 1970.

[Edit: I think I'm wrong about five different recordings. I've recently tried to run down the Philips issue, but from what I'm told by the distributor it seems to be the same 1949 as the Period recording. (Actually, what the distributor's supplier in Japan told him was that the Philips seemed to be 1950. I don't have my Period LP readily at hand but I had written down (P)1949 from it. The Period CD reissue doesn't give a date other than its own (P)2007.) And I don't now remember where I got the idea there ever was yet another, supposedly fifth, recording. Milkunderwood (talk) 10:24, 12 April 2010 (UTC)][reply]

I prefer the '70 to the '57, but the 1949 is absolutely stunning. And have you ever heard the Melos Ensemble's pairing of the Mozart and Beethoven piano/winds quintets? Most groups make the Beethoven sound very like the Mozart, but in the Melos recording, they give the Op 16 a wonderfully Beethoven-y sound. (I have to say the version of these I like by far the best is the old Serkin/Philadelphia recording.)

So anyway you can see my preference for recordings, and why.

I have an Endellion of Bartok, only, which I think I prefer to the Emerson's, but I don't know Bartok well enough to really say. I do greatly prefer Solti's Bluebeard's Castle to the Kertesz/Berry/Ludwig, which rather surprised me. But how can you say the Amadeus is "dated"?? Good playing and a sympathetic understanding of the composer's style never go out of date. I like nearly everything I know of theirs--Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Dvorak. The Hollywood Quartet is an interesting example of understanding of style, or not. Their Schubert Quintet (paired with the original sextet version of Verklaerte Nacht) is one the the best recordings ever made of anything at all, but I don't much care all that much for their Beethoven, and their Shostakovich, while not "badly" played, demonstrates that they simply had no idea whatever of what Shostakovich is supposed to sound like.

Talk about being "dated", the Budapest can never go out out of date. They definitely had a more sympathetic understanding of some composers than others, and some of their Beethoven is more satisfying than on other dates. But compare them to the Tokyo Quartet, which was all the rage a decade or so ago--these people do get the notes right, but convey absolutely nothing of Beethoven's sound and sense. From what I've heard, I suspect I might like the Cleveland better than anyone else for Beethoven other than the Budapest. For that matter, speaking of being dated, other than the problem with relatively poor audio, I still like the Busch group a great deal for many various pieces. Milkunderwood (talk) 21:56, 5 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Dear Milkunderwood. You're just way outside my league in study of all these performers! I bow to your great knowledge and sensitivity and simply take note.... Budhen (talk) 16:41, 6 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

F?

I am sorry, but you are quite wrong here. I don't know what Heyse wrote in manuscript (and neither I nor my source says Heyse's comment was in manuscript - it is in fact, if you read the source, in the printed introduction to the translation). In print Heyse used the asterisks and that is the only source I definitiely have. We mustn't second guess our sources - that would be WP:OR (or worse). Check up in in source if you don't believe me - I have cited it in full. Best regards - --Smerus (talk) 13:14, 7 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

History prior to last 500 edits archived?

I'm trying to trace back the article on okay back to its original entry as a WP article, but History will only go back 500 edits to January 2003; are earlier edits archived anywhere?

Other than this being a general question of interest, specifically in this case I'm trying to find the origin of a funky paragraph in the okay article, predating 2003, discussed here: [1].

Thanks very much for any assistance you can give. Milkunderwood (talk) 01:37, 13 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If you click on 'earliest', it shows the earliest edits, going right back to creation in 2003, like this. You could also use Wikiblame to search for text in old versions. Chzz ► 01:56, 13 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

P.S. I know that "Wikiblame" is a bit complex, so I found it for you. here is the diff, when it was added, by Wetman (talk · contribs) on 6 October 2003. Chzz ► 02:04, 13 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Chzz, but that's just the problem--the article way predates that earliest 500th edit displayed in History; I'm trying to find an archive that goes back much earlier than 2003. I haven't checked out Wikiblame yet, but it looks very useful for locating actual text--thx. Milkunderwood (talk) 02:24, 13 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

That specific page was created on 9 January 2003 - this is the very first version. If there was a page before that, then it was under a different title. As I said above, that specific text regarding "Old Kinderhook" was first added to the article in Oct 2003 - prior to that, it was not in the article. If it was copied and pasted from another place, there is no way to tell. Simply, there was no article called "Okay" before Jan 2003. Chzz ► 02:33, 13 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Editing conflict--I was trying to post this:

OOPS--no, I'm wrong (not for the first time here hangs head). That is the beginning.

About Wikiblame, can it Search for specific words added? How? Milkunderwood (talk) 02:40, 13 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, it can search for specific words added, and it can perform a 'binary search' through versions. That's how I found the diff above, when the text was added. You put the text in the 'search' box. The manual is here.

A bit more info: All versions of all pages are kept (unless removed for some legal reason or something). If a page is moved, this is recorded. If the information that you seek is under a different title, it's hard to find it. The only problem might be if someone performed a Copy and paste move, because these cannot be recorded in the history - the system cannot tell where pasted info comes from.

If you do want to poke around an older version, try Nostalgia Wikipedia, a read-only copy of the English Wikipedia from December 20, 2001 - perhaps you could try other titles there - but as you'll see, there was no "okay". Chzz ► 02:43, 13 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Many thanks for the tips. I have WikiBlame running (still diligently searching now) but in the meantime I found the first occurrence myself by successively bracketing dates into smaller intervals, clicking (prev), and simply doing a ^F Find for the text. Milkunderwood (talk) 03:38, 13 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yep; that is what Wikiblame can do too - 'searching in intervals' - that's what I meant by a binary search. I serached for 'kinderhook' over 5000 revisions skipping by 50, and selecting 'binary' instead of 'linear'; that's how I found that the first mention was this one of Oct 2003, as mentioned in the original P.S. Chzz ► 15:44, 13 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks very much for your help. Actually, this is what I was trying to search for. (I wonder if you might have any thoughts on the discussion there, as well.) Milkunderwood (talk) 18:12, 13 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

OK - I had a read and added my 10c-worth. Cheers, Chzz ► 23:27, 13 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Many thanks for your input. I understand that you were not "taking sides", but I think your comment was very helpful. Milkunderwood (talk) 23:53, 13 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

No problem, any time. I won't keep watching this page, so if you do want me for anything else, please drop a note on my own talk to let me know. Cheers, Chzz ► 03:59, 14 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Links to quartets

Hallo, new interesting name! I am sorry I don't have the time to go over the extensive list of the BSQ but you can easily do it yourself. I linked the Brahms quintet because it was a new article today (not mine) that I could help with a few links. I bet all those famous quartets have articles that you can find looking up the composers. Then follow the Brahms example [[name of article|name as you want it]]. I will travel tomorrow. Happy editing. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:27, 13 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

:-) I think I'd rather wait and let you do that--I'm swamped with just entering new unlisted recordings. In fact, that one looks so lonely, I'm tempted to revert it until you can get around to making a project of the whole list. Would you mind? (That is, my primary interest is in the BSQ rather than specific composers and their individual compositions.)Milkunderwood (talk) 19:34, 13 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't mind. My primary interest is specific composers and their compositions, as you can see on my user page, :-) I have a project of the Bach cantatas and their performers and will not get to the string quartets anytime soon. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 19:56, 13 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'll go ahead and revert it for now since it's the only one, and let you paste it back when you're ready to make a project of them. Thanks. Milkunderwood (talk) 20:47, 13 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

BTW, if I had originally set up these listings myself I would have used the standard format of "No. x in x Major/Minor, Op. x, No. x" instead of the pre-existing "no x in x major/minor, op x, no x"; but I didn't feel like changing everything already there. Milkunderwood (talk) 20:53, 13 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I created the article about Brahms' String Quintet No. 1. On the subject of links in discographies, red links to individual compositions aren't a problem in this case, in my opinion. They allow editors to use the what links here tool to find out how much an article is needed. But if you think they look too ugly, that's OK too. Just follow the standard link format like String Quartet No. 2 (Brahms), etc, and you'll have no problems; the links will eventually be filled out. I only create articles to add audio to Wikipedia; I'm not much of an article creator, but more of a WikiGnome. Graham87 05:34, 14 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The following was started before Graham's message:

Thanks for your message about Wolf. I think it's easier to keep the discussion this place, I'm watching for changes. - Yes, I think to link to the unusual, be it a piece or a composer or ..., is a good rule - not a breaking of a rule. Who needs another link to Mozart? If you want to do your readers a favour you might want to send them to List of compositions by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart#String quartets when they click Mozart, quintets similar ... - When I want to say that a singer appeared in an opera, I mention the part, the composer's last name and link to the opera only. Whoever needs the composer will find him in the first line about the opera. - We recently changed the format of the Bach cantatas to one that you can use without modification, example Erschallet, ihr Lieder, erklinget, ihr Saiten! BWV 172 or Erschallet, ihr Lieder, even St John Passion, after a long discussion on a page that you may want to watch (just click watch in the top line): Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Classical music. Musical greetings, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 05:48, 14 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Re Wolf: My point really was that I don't care how many links are set up, as long as I don't have to do them myself; I only think it makes more sense (maybe not?) to wait until a bunch of pages are set up for specific compositions, and then make links for the lot, all at once. But I can see it might be easier to create the links at the same time each page is started. The only reason I put the Italian Serenade link in was because, as I said, it's unusual and it's a nice long discussion rather than a simple stub. I don't see much point in linking all these opuses just to stubs. Milkunderwood (talk) 06:05, 14 April 2010 (UTC) EDIT: Of course your Classical Group may disagree, and that's fine with me; if you'd rather go ahead and undo my revert of your Brahms link I have no problem with that. Milkunderwood (talk) 06:13, 14 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

In the meantime I'm spending hours struggling with this verdammte so-called discography of the BSQ generated by the tom-fool ***s at Sony; I thought the early HMVs were hard, but the Columbias are a disaster. (I have no idea who set them up as separate sections anyway.) Milkunderwood (talk) 06:19, 14 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Gerda, I'm continuing this discussion here, and will note to your talk page.

Going back to your original suggestion of linking to individual compositions, I've all along had in the back of my mind that it may not be a very good idea because multiple links can make a page look very cluttered. Then a couple of days ago I got in trouble on a different page I was editing, because it had too many links, and was led to this at Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Links:

"Make links only where they are relevant to the context: It is not useful and can be very distracting to mark all possible words as hyperlinks. Links should add to the user's experience; they should not detract from it by making the article harder to read. A high density of links can draw attention away from the high-value links that you would like your readers to follow up. Redundant links clutter the page and make future maintenance harder."

I don't disagree with the idea behind your suggestion, but I'm not sure how to reconcile these two conflicting goals. Especially in the BSQ discography, it's already difficult enough to follow because of all the square and round brackets, and abbreviations, catalog numbers, etc. One gets boggle-eyed just looking at it, and I think that loading it up further with links to individual works would just make it that much worse. I'm sure I will already have a problem with multiple linking to composers' and performers' names the next time a bot comes around cleaning up style violations. Milkunderwood (talk) 08:13, 15 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

preview of references (footnotes)

I can't figure out how to preview a reference or footnote.

Specifically, my present problem is in what is currently reference #22 in the article on okay, which displays as:
Online edition of American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, [Houghton Mifflin.]

I need a closing square bracket to follow "Mifflin" that displays in black before the "ref" symbol. I tried adding a space between the two closing brackets, but that didn't help.

I've also encountered problems before in not being able to preview references generally. Milkunderwood (talk) 16:11, 23 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The easiest way to do this is to use some other sort of brackets, e.g. American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, (Houghton Mifflin). The second easiest is to escape the offending character, i.e. American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, [Houghton Mifflin]. The best way is to use a citation template rather than just a url. As for previewing refs, the easy way is to edit and preview the entire article, rather than just that section. The other way is to add {{reflist}} to the bottom of the section before previewing (but remember to remove it before saving!). Algebraist 16:24, 23 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes yes yes!! The escape character did the trick here, and your suggestion of {{reflist}} is just what I've been looking for all the time, but couldn't find anywhere. Thanks very much! Milkunderwood (talk) 16:40, 23 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

okay article

Chzz, in reference to your and my last few posts to my "History prior to last 500 edits archived?" section above, the offending gross misrepresentation language was still there unchanged in the article on okay as of today, so I have now deleted that and rewritten a couple of paragraphs to try to clarify the article. Please let me know if you think it may still need more work. Thanks for your help. (Also see User_talk:JPFay#.22okay.22_article from the same April 13 date.) Milkunderwood (talk) 17:43, 23 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Looks 'OK' :-) Much better. Of course, it can be improved - but that is true of all articles. Nice work; give me a shout if you need anything else, and keep up the bold stuff. Chzz ► 02:46, 24 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Rubinstein project

User:Milkunderwood/sandbox Rubinstein

Rubinstein

Actually, I think RCA ->Bmg ->Sony did a pretty good job with Rubinstein's legacy. I can't think of any other pianist on any label whose gotten the red carpet treatment like this. When they issued the big box in 1999, everything was remastered from the original sources, with the correct takes used, and with the sound restored honestly without being tarted up - and the book that accompanied the box was rich in detail. It was such a lavish effort that it broke the bank and allowed Sony to scoop up BMG. I can tell you that there will be no remastering of the 1999 issues in this new box - but the 3 CDs of new material will get a fresh remastering. I can't go into details now, but I can tell you that the new CDs will have some items that Rubinstein fans have been begging for for decades.THD3 (talk) 13:37, 30 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

YouTube

In your recent reply to Robert Allen, you said you got dinged for using a YouTube link to Richard Burton reading Under Milkwood. Whoever dinged you was right, but gave the wrong reason. Links to YouTube are perfectly alright, as long as they are not potential copyright violations. That means they are self-posted, with the clear intention of making the post public. In the case at hand, the post was a clear violation of copyright, and that's why it got axed.

There is, incidentally, a new feature of YouTube that lets a poster assign a Creative Commons 3.0 Share-alike license, which is just the kind of license Wikipedia likes. I have asked posters on several occasions to change the licenses of their posts so I can use them in Wikipedia. I then strip them of the video, chop the audio up into snippets, and use them as examples in articles. You can see this, for example, at Death and the Maiden Quartet and American String Quartet.

Just so you know.

Regards,

--Ravpapa (talk) 10:02, 14 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the info. I had wondered about this. If you look at the top of my same User talk page under "January 2010", you'll see I got hit by User:XLinkBot (which I didn't know what that was, and tried responding to). In the meantime I've run across several other YouTube links that appear to be similar in nature, but have been left undisturbed. Milkunderwood (talk) 15:15, 14 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hovhaness project

User:Milkunderwood/sandbox Hovhaness

Article Feedback Tool

Thanks for your comments on Wikipedia talk:Article Feedback Tool; I agree completely about the worthlessness of a "star" based rating. As it happens, the Foundation is trying to move away from that and more towards comments. All the changes that they're considering for the next version can be found at WP:AFT5; would you like to give it a read, and post any thoughts or ideas of your own on the talkpage? The focus is on getting the community to help shape the tool :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 21:06, 28 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

We've also started a discussion here on access issues for some of the features - I'd love to hear your thoughts :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:43, 8 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the thoughts, dude :). It's great to see a new editor who "gets" the problems our internal system faces when trying to help new editors along. The next AFT Office Hours session will be held on Thursday at 19:00 UTC in #wikimedia-office, btw. Give me a poke if you can't make it but want me to send you the logs when they're released - we'll be holding sessions timed for East Coast editors and Australasian/Asian editors next week. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 22:50, 8 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

disambiguation pages

forcing

Sorry, it was I that moved the forcing page to add (disambiguation). There's a lot of ins and outs in WP styles and procedures I'm not familiar with. How can you tell the difference between a list that needs it, as opposed to one that doesn't? Milkunderwood (talk) 20:19, 7 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Milkunderwood! Sure, I can show that difference. If the base name has a primary topic (either an article exists at the base name, or an article is the target of a redirect that is at the base name), then the disambiguation page gets the (disambiguation) qualifier. Or, to look at it the other way, the disambiguation only gets the (disambiguation) qualifier if it can't exist otherwise. A base-name disambiguation page can be the target of a redirect with the (disambiguation) qualifier (for WP:INTDABLINK), but the other way - a base name redirect to the (disambiguation) qualifier - results in the page getting listed at WP:MALPLACED. See also WP:PRIMARYTOPIC. Now, all of that makes sense to me, but I've seen it a lot. To recap:

Base name is a disambiguation.
- If Base name (disambiguation) exists, it redirects → base name.
Base name (disambiguation) is a disambiguation, and base name leads to a primary topic article.
Base name (disambiguation) is a disambiguation page, and base name → base name (disambiguation). , as a WP:MALPLACED

Cheers! -- JHunterJ (talk) 20:47, 7 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the walk-through - I think I understand it, but may need to study your explanation some more if I'm ever tempted to move such a page again. I'll just copy this over to my own talkpage for my reference. Milkunderwood (talk) 20:55, 7 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

A barnstar for you!

	The Special Barnstar
	For your insightful and very very needed comments at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Article_Feedback_Tool/Version_5#Info_page_for_users - please accept this small token of my appreciation. Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 22:53, 8 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

+1 from me. I'm just sorry he got here before I did :p. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 22:54, 8 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'm certainly honored, and thank you both for your kind thoughts. Milkunderwood (talk) 23:03, 8 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

User:Milkunderwood/sandbox Hovhaness

((help me)) In my User:Milkunderwood/sandbox Hovhaness I have a complete "List of compositions by Alan Hovhaness", finished through his final Op. 434, as found at the Hovhaness.com website, with a fairly long list of references that have all displayed properly.

I'm now in the process of cross-checking this list of compositions against another online source, called Kunze (both of these sources still display in my sandbox). I have just now written a new reference footnote to Op. 356, and in doing so it has eaten all opuses following 356, and all of my footnotes, displaying a "Cite error" saying that I don't have a ((reflist)) template. But I do have this template, and until now it has been working perfectly well.

I think the problem is that inside my ref to Op. 356 I further referenced to http://www.crystalrecords.com/Hovhaness.html

I can back-button to an earlier version of the page, but when I save that version, I'm only saving the eaten version instead.

No idea how to proceed from here. (In this sandbox there's a lot of discussion and other stuff up above the List of compositions, which is unaffected, and can all be ignored.) Milkunderwood (talk) 22:44, 10 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Also now, looking at History, this is not displaying any of my 5 or 6 most recent saves. Milkunderwood (talk) 22:51, 10 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'm further confused, because I used to have a TOC allowing edits to specific sections, but when I merged a 4th section leaving only 3, the TOC went away; and when I manually put a TOC at the top it just displayed the alphabet. Milkunderwood (talk) 22:57, 10 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

How is it now? You were missing a closing ref tag and adding that in appears to have fixed all the problems. I have beautified the notes section using a columnwidth, and forced a normal TOC. You will get a TOC displaying the alphabet if you use certain other forms of TOC forcing such as {{CompactTOC8}}, but you should never see that if you use __TOC__ as I did, and it's displaying normally for me. How about for you? By the way, if you are still seeing the error, you might be seeing an older, cached version of the page. Try Clearing your computer's cache. See WP:BYPASS. I have already purged the Wikipedia page cache (see WP:PURGE).--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 23:06, 10 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

WOW! Thank you so much! It's great! :-) Milkunderwood (talk) 23:12, 10 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

You're most welcome. By the way, if you ever have a problem and you think I might be able to help, please feel free to contact me directly on my talk page.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 23:13, 10 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Copied from User talk:Fuhghettaboutit:

[Random_Acts_of_Kindness_Barnstar]:
You saved my skin, and many hours of work that I thought were lost forever - Blessings upon you! Milkunderwood (talk) 23:32, 10 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

(My main problem was that although I knew I had made an error, the edit display wouldn't allow me to see the place where the error was, so that I could try to fix it. I still don't know how you managed to get a full display including the error.) Milkunderwood (talk) 23:54, 10 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Aha, let me tell you how. Are you familiar with the find function of your computer? Usually accessed by ctrl+F or you can choose it from a menu if you must. Put that aside for a second. All of your text, once saved, doesn't go away, but it may not display properly in read mode if there is an error in wikimarkup. So no matter what, the error should be fixable in edit mode since that text persists – if you can find it. Experience will also tell you that 9 times out of ten when someone is seeing a large portion of the page swallowed it's a typo in the reference markup, a failure to close a tag, or an unpaired tag (sometimes it's something else, a span class that wasn't closed, a malfunctioning template, etc.) Experience also shows that not always, but often, the error in code is right at the end of where everything gets swallowed (which makes sense; it's at that point that the error is bollixing everything after it). So here, all I did was copy text from the last part of the page that was displaying, then click clicked edit and used the find function to find that text in the middle of everything, and then searched for an error in the markup right there. Of course, it helps if you are quite fluent in the code, so an error stands out for you somewhat like a misspelling does. In this case it really took me about 15 seconds after seeing you post to find the error and fix it (sorry). But if the error had not been right at that point, there are other ways which I won't get into here. And thank for the barnstar:-)--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 00:10, 11 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Well, you deserve another barnstar for that explanation. :-) Good thing it's here on your talkpage where other people in desperate straits might also see it. Milkunderwood (talk) 00:27, 11 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Office Hours again

Hey Milkunderwood; once again, office hours for the article feedback tool! These will be held at 22:00 UTC this evening; logs from the last session can be found here. Hope to see you there :). Do drop me a note if you're not familiar with IRC and would like the cliff's notes, or if you can't attend but would like the logs/have some questions for me to pass on to the devs :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 05:25, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I confess I haven't kept up with the debates on AFT, but it suddenly occurs to me that many articles will have old suggestions or complaints on their talk pages, sometimes fixed with subsequent edits, or sometimes not; and sometimes replied to, but more frequently not. I get a general impression that talkpages for more obscure articles tend to be orphans, with no one really watching out for them, whether an editor who originally left the article in less than desirable shape, or a different editor who came to the article and made his/her own improvements.

So first, with regard to the present 4-question AFT, that history remains despite subsequent improvements to the article. And second, the question arises of how any AFT at all will differ in editors' responsiveness, from the way talkpages are now ignored. Milkunderwood (talk) 03:30, 19 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Those are both good points. The difference is going to be, methinks, that there'll be a central page for all the feedback; hopefully that means that editors-at-large can deal with feedback from unwatched (or underwatched) pages. Things like response rate is one of the things we'll be monitoring. Sorry for taking so long to get back to you; had a heck of a week ;). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:24, 21 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Sequence of listing roles

Hi Viva-Verdi:

I have been trying to puzzle out whether there is any sort of standardized sequence for the listing of roles in operas, either generally, or perhaps with certain composers or types of opera. For instance there seems to be at least a semi-standard of listing the lead soprano first, and then the lead tenor. This is easy enough for something like Madama Butterfly, until you look further, and find that Suzuki sometimes comes before Pinkerton. In this specific case (and in some others I've looked at here) in the listing of Madama Butterfly#Roles, it goes Cio-Cio San, Suzuki, Pinkerton, Sharpless - whereas at Madama Butterfly discography Pinkerton comes before Suzuki. La Boheme#Roles, rather to my surprise, lists Rodolfo first, then Mimi, Marcello, and Musetta, and then La bohème discography has Mimi, Musetta, Rodolfo, Marcello, which would be the usual alternative listing.* :Mefistofele#Recordings gives what I might expect to find, as Mefistofele, Faust, Margherita; but Mefistofele#Roles seems to give a jumbled sequence of Elena, Faust, Margherita, Marta, Mefistofele. I would be inclined to guess that the listing sequence in Roles may reflect either original premiere listings, or those specified in the score, while discographies may follow either a well-considered relative importance, or perhaps (hopefully not) the name recognition of the specific singers in a given recording.

I should explain that I'm not a musician, but am simply working on a project of cataloging a fairly large collection of CDs and LPs, some of which are my own. Right now I'm looking at what I would have tended to call the Callas/ Gedda/ Gavazzeni/ La Scala Il Turco in Italia, but wondered whether to put Rossi-Lemeni (as Selim) in before Gedda. What I find here, in both Roles and Recordings, is instead Geronio (Franco Calabrese) first, then Fiorilla, Selim, Narciso. For the purposes of my own cataloging I'm content to rely on performers' name recognition to a greater extent than I would expect to find here; but I am somewhat puzzled as to whether Wikipedia does in fact try to follow any sort of rule for these listings. Thanks for any suggestions you may have. Milkunderwood (talk) 20:57, 26 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

*But backwards - what I had really expected to find was Mimi/ Musetta/ Rodolfo/ Marcello at Roles, and Mimi/ Rodolfo/ Musetta/ Marcello (or ../ Marcello/ Musetta) at Discography.

Thanks for your note on my user talk page re: this issue. Frankly, I've not given it much thought except in certain cases and where I've been starting from scratch in cresating "recordings" boxes. I've only had occasional involvement in creating "Roles" boxes; however, the order of many of them (for Verdi articles) follows sources such as Budden's volumes.

When starting "Recordings" boxes, I've genrally taken a look at our main reference source, "operadis", which lists casts in what apears to be order of appearance. for example, this is the last recording in the La boheme list:

Conductor Stewart Robertson - 2008(LC)

Orchestra - Orchestra del Festival Puccini

Chorus - Coro del Festival Puccini

Rodolfo - Massimiliano Pisapia

Schaunard - Massimilliano Vallegi

Marcello - Gabriele Viviani

Colline - Andrea Patucelli

Mimi - Norma Fantini

Musetta - Donata D' Annunzio Lombardi

Now, I've just taken a look at some random articles comparing them with operadis:

e.g. Anna Bolena was just edited so I looked at the 1984 Sutherland recording and the order whoch operadis employs is the one which appears here. So, they start with the totle character - and certainly the most well-known singer.

e.g. Verdi's Ernani has the following order for the Roles:

Ernani, the bandit

Don Carlo, later Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor

Don Ruy Gomez de Silva

Elvira, his niece and fiancée

Budden's order is the same

But the "recordings" list runs as Ernani (title character, of course), Elvira, Don Carlo, Silva

and this follows the operadis format:

Ernani - Luciano Pavarotti

Elvira - Joan Sutherland

Carlo - Leo Nucci

Silva - Paata Burchuladze

Taking a non-character name of an opera, and since I have Budden Vol. 1 out, I see for I Lombardi the follwing:

BUDDEN: Arvino, Pagano, Viclinda, Giselda

ROLES BOX: Same

Recordings box: Same - with the addition of Oronte

Operadis: Well he/she has:

Giselda (is she the first to appear: don't remember the opera well enough), Oronte, Pagano, Arvino, Viclinda

So, what is "correct"? And should we be concerned?

There is something to be said for name recognition, of course. And there is logic in following operadis' format for recrdoing boxes, especially if someone wants to link to it to refer the the list.

As far as I know, I do not think that WikiProject Opera has taken a position on this. Viva-Verdi (talk) 00:23, 27 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Well, è strano. In Bohème, the actual order of appearance is Marcello, with "Questo Mar Rosso", then Rodolfo, Colline, Schaunard, Benoit, Mimi; then Alcindoro and Musetta.

Callas/ Di Stefano/ Votto/ La Scala lists Mimi/ Rodolfo/ Marcello/ Schaunard/ Colline/ Musetta/ etc
Carteri/ Tagliavini/ Santini/ Torino lists Rodolfo/ Schaunard/ Marcello/ Colline/ Benoit/ Alcindoro/ Mimi/ Musetta/ etc
de los Angeles/ Björling/ Beecham/ RCA lists Rodolfo/ Mimi/ Marcello/ Schaunard/ Colline/ Benoit/ Alcindoro/ Musetta/ etc
Moffo/ Tucker/ Leinsdorf/ Rome lists Rodolfo/ Mimi/ Marcello/ Musetta/ Colline/ Schaunard/ Benoit/ Alcindoro/ etc
Sayão/ Tucker/ Antonicelli/ Met lists on the back cover Mimi/ Rodolfo/ Benoit/ Musetta/ Marcello/ Schaunard/ Colline/ etc; but in the booklet the names are given in order of appearance.
For each of these 5, Operadis gives Rodolfo/ Schaunard/ Marcello/ Colline/ Mimi/ Musetta/ Benoit/ Alcindoro/ etc; but they are not consistent throughout with other recordings.

In Ernani, the order of appearance is Ernani/ Elvira/ Carlo/ Giovanna/ Silva/ Iago/ Riccardo

L. Price/ Bergonzi/ Schippers/ RCA Italiana lists Ernani/ Elvira/ Carlo/ Silva/ Riccardo/ Iago/ Giovanna;
and here Operadis follows this same cast list.

So much for my theory of lead soprano, lead tenor, baritone or mezzo, and bass, except when either mezzo, baritone or bass has an obvious lead role - for instance, Rigoletto/ Gilda/ Mantua; or Mefistofele. I had been dreading trying to figure out the Ring, but I can see why you've never worried about it. For my cataloging I guess I'll stick with some combination of that theory together with name familiarity, which tends to be more or less what is displayed on the front covers of recordings. I had just been hoping for better guidance here at Wikipedia. Putting all four guys before Mimi, like some of these do, just seems crazy to me unless you're following the actual order of appearance, which they don't. Milkunderwood (talk) 03:48, 27 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

In terms of amount of singing, I would guess Rodolfo/ Mimi/ Marcello/ Musetta/ Schaunard. Milkunderwood (talk) 19:56, 27 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Edmond de Stoutz

Started, feel free to expand. If you want anything else started, let me know!♦ Dr. Blofeld 21:21, 4 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Great, thank you! (I'm not a musician, and don't have access to sources. I had just been looking for information.) Milkunderwood (talk) 21:27, 4 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Nino Rota discography

I have incorporated all of your suggestions into this article. Thanks for helping.--Foobarnix (talk) 22:02, 4 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Milkunderwood -- The articles List of compositions by Nino Rota & List of film scores by Nino Rota were created by Kleinzach in March of 2011. He simply copied them both from the Nino Rota page of the time. You can see all this content in an old copy such as this one from 16 March 2011. Whoever originally created these long lists in the Nino Rota article apparently did not cite any of this list info and neither Kleinzach nor I had anything to do with it.

When I created the Nino Rota discography page, I added quite a bit of new material—and while I was add it—put in citations for everything. Noone has had the time to do this yet for the other two split-off pages. I do not know where that material originally came from. In any case, the four Rota related pages are certainly better than the bloated original single page. As for adding citations to film scores and compositions, let us hope that someone gets around to doing it sometime.--Foobarnix (talk) 09:58, 5 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I've written about this here. I was surprised to see the criticism of my (minimal) copy editing of this material: "Kleinzach should have realized at the time that he was leaving those other articles orphaned without any refs." Are you serious? Do you know what 'orphaning' means? Do you think editors have an obligation to reference every article they touch, like "Oh drat, I've added a comma to 'Gastropds of Western Australia', so now I've got to reference the whole article. Damn, the Dictionary of Australian Gastropods is not on the net! Jeez, I'll have to try and buy a cheap flight to Perth so I can check the 1899 edition. . . ." Seriously? --Klein zach 00:38, 6 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It's also worth noting — in relation to a multi-linked article like List of film scores by Nino Rota — that most of the referencing will implicitly be in the target articles. --Klein zach 04:42, 6 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

{ec) Gee, this is not my day. Everyone here at home is furious with me too. Let me see if I can get some of this untangled. First, I hadn't realized that "orphan" is a Wikipedia term of art with a very specific meaning. I knew it wasn't very descriptive of a separated page where all of its references had been left behind, but it was the best I came up with at the time. Or maybe first, you want an apology, herewith tendered: I sincerely apologize for having offended you. (I'm afraid you'll have to explain the "MUW" part - I don't recognize that initialism.) But I want to assure you that my apology is indeed sincere: you have gone out of your way to be helpful to me ever since I first came to Wikipedia, as well as being friendly to me (which is a different thing); further, I have a great deal of respect for you and the posts you've put up, and the opinions you've expressed. (And also on occasion I've been grateful not to have been the object of your wrath when I've seen it in action.)

Turning then to the situation with Nino Rota: First, here I have to say I never really sat down and analyzed exactly what was going on, or how it happened. I saw that first one and then another of the separated-off lists had no cites at all, and then that Foobarnix's table had gobs of cites. What at that point I hadn't realized was that none of those cites belonged with either of the other two lists - that in fact neither of them had never been cited at all. Okay, in the meantime, I saw that you had "created" those two list pages, so once you told me this wasn't your project at all but had simply been helping Foobarnix break off lists from the original Rota article for his Rota project, I jumped to the conclusion that you might have overlooked the relevant references and left them dangling. Putting myself in the position of breaking off a list from a bio page, I would hope to have also thought about checking refs, to make sure I was bringing everything necessary with me. So still not understanding that those two lists never had any cites to start with, I thought it strange that with your much more extensive experience, you might have left the needed cites behind. The thing is, one sees (or at least I see) a bunch of references at the bottom of a page, and without having checked exactly what each one points to, one assumes that there are not huge sections of the page that were never cited at all. Now if I were breaking up a page, I would, I hope, think to make sure I was carrying all the appropriate references with me - and at that point I would start checking each one. Now suddenly I discover that the lists I'm proposing to break off never had any references at all - so I would stop and say "whoa - what's going on here? We have a big problem."

Trying to put myself in the situation of helping someone else with their project, I would come back to that person and explain the problem to them. I would say, "Look, this is your project, and here is the situation. There's no way now to find where these lists came from, but if you're interested enough, you could try to find references for them. If we still want to go ahead and break out these uncited lists, I'll put banners on them. We also need to make sure we're linking all these different new pages together with "See also"s. Otherwise, if this is more than you feel you want to mess with, maybe we ought to just leave well enough alone." Anyway, this is more or less what I would have done at this point. Maybe that's the wrong attitude to take; it probably is. I don't feel like it's my job to fix everything I see - in general, I just tiptoe quietly away if it's something I don't want to get involved in.

What I was really doing was expressing surprise rather than criticism, in the line you've quoted, because I know you are a careful and conscientious editor. Doubtless I expressed it very poorly. And so I apologize again. I hope this explanation helps. Milkunderwood (talk) 05:25, 6 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

OK. Apology accepted. I think this does illustrate how difficult it can be to disentangle the history of the editing. Regarding List of film scores by Nino Rota, about 80 of the films have their own, at least minimally referenced, articles so there's little danger that it's all inaccurate. List of compositions by Nino Rota needs attention because only two works have articles. It probably needs to be checked against NinoRota.com [2]. --Klein zach 05:52, 6 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you - I try not to get people pissed off, but I seem to have a habit of expressing myself poorly. All of the film scores can probably be verified easily enough at IMDb.com (which should also give him the conductors, so that info can be filled in as well), and which I've already mentioned to Foobarnix. I think that's probably a better idea to go to the source rather than depending on another editor here to have gotten it right. The actual years of composition would be impossible to pin down (unless they're mentioned at Rota's website, which I haven't looked at), but the year of the film's release can be considered the "official" date. I hadn't thought of Rota having his own website - I really do very little web surfing - but if that lists all of his compositions, then it just becomes a chore that can be tackled, as opposed to being a dead end. So another Wikipedia mess that an anonymous editor left here two years ago can now get fixed, if Foobarnix or someone else is up for it. A happy ending for all. Oh, and I finally remembered what brought me to Rota to start with. I was cataloging a CD of Arturo Benedetti Michangeli playing two of Haydn's piano concertos, accompanied by Edmond de Stoutz with the Zurich Chamber Orchestra, and was startled to see that the cadenzas for Hob. XVIII:4 that were used are credited to Nino Rota. I had otherwise just associated him with Fellini's very distinctive sound (and had no idea of all his other movies). Milkunderwood (talk) 06:36, 6 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Talk:Dmitri Shostakovich

Hello. Sorry to pop up here when you're probably busy, but I thought I'd let you know that a) the merger has taken place (thanks for your vote on this); b) you may be interested in the Talk:Dmitri Shostakovich#Time for a Featured Article Review?. All best, Alfietucker (talk) 00:57, 12 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the heads-up. Milkunderwood (talk) 04:49, 12 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Article

Will start shortly. Can you provide me a link to where this editor was complaining? Its probably about my theatre stubs.♦ Dr. Blofeld 11:04, 18 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Well, the idea is that we fully transfer all missing content on German and other wikipedias into English. Ideally it would be done instantly without any translation problems! I don't speak German, only basic so I'm not confident translating German but I can try to decipher using google translate but really needs proof reading by a fluent speaker. I don't think one liners are ideal but the point is that missing notable articles have at least been identified and started and can be expanded I guess and the sheer amount missing... You have great taste in Rubenstein BTW. ♦ Dr. Blofeld 16:14, 18 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

You may wish to expand Alexander Zakin.♦ Dr. Blofeld 17:05, 18 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Started Lydia Mordkovitch. You'll need to fix the links to the composers though... Give me another one in a few days to start I'm training like a madman at the moment on a low calorie diet and doing some other things so I'm not that active on here or can concentrate as much I can usually.♦ Dr. Blofeld 14:22, 19 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Etude/étude

Hi. I've just responded to your October question at User talk:Antandrus @ Chopin preludes. Cheers. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 04:22, 22 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

other editors' contributions

Copied from Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Change "My talk", "My preferences", etc to "Your talk", "Your preferences", etc:

Personally what I keep wishing for is an easy way to access other editors' Contributions and Watchlist. I'm not "spying" on anyone, but if I have a question about a topic and am thinking of posting on an appropriate editor's talkpage, it's very helpful to know where that editor's interests and presumed expertise lie. My experience has usually been that hardly anyone ever looks at the talkpages for articles, and questions or comments posted there can go without any response seemingly forever. It's much more effective to post directly to a specific editor, if only one can figure out an appropriate editor to look to. Milkunderwood (talk) 03:26, 23 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Watchlists are protected by privacy. See Help:Watching pages#Privacy of watchlists. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:13, 23 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks - I suspected that might be the case. However, I've occasionally been able to access another editor's contributions, but can never remember from one time to another how I managed to find them. Milkunderwood (talk) 05:08, 23 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

All contributions are at Special:Contributions/Example. Simply replace Example with the name of the use you want the contribs of. fredgandt 05:35, 23 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Or if you are looking at a "User:" or "User talk:" page, there's a "User contributions" link in the toolbox at the left (at least in the default Vector skin). -- John of Reading (talk) 06:06, 23 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, thanks very much - it's the Toolbox -> User contributions that I've been looking for. If I have a question, I first look for editors who have contributed to either an article or its talkpage, and only then want to see how interested any particular editor seems to be in the topic, so that I'm not bothering people unnecessarily. I hadn't been aware of Fred's suggestion at all, so that's also useful to know. Milkunderwood (talk) 07:43, 23 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, thanks for your note, and do become more than a "user". (Classical) music is an area on WP that is poorly served. It's ironic that dedicaed WPians seem to neglect the areas in which they've spent a lot of time in real life, and I'm to blame their not least. You might like to make contact with User:GFHandel, who'se an old friend on- and off-wiki, but who seems to be not talking to me at the moment. He's got strong views on the kinds of issues you mentioned. Tony (talk) 11:42, 23 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Undoing vandalism

Copied from talkpage:

Hi David--

You helped me post a merge proposal for E1 Music last month. In the meantime the article has now been anonymously vandalized with several sequential changes, only the last of which I've undone. I don't know the procedure for restoring it to its pre-vandal state. Thanks for any help here. Milkunderwood (talk) 21:04, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Done. In future, if you look at the article history and select differences between the last good version and the vandalised version you can then select the "undo" option and that will undo the lot. - David Biddulph (talk) 21:11, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks very much. So what you mean is to go back to the initial vandalism, and that will automatically undo the entire lot, with all the subsequent ones? (Just being careful that there are no intervening legitimate posts of course.) Milkunderwood (talk) 21:23, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

True. For experienced users it is also possible to obtain a "rollback" privilege to allow successive vandalism edits by the same user to be reverted in one click, and there are also various tools (such as Twinkle) to do similar things, but of course any such tools must be used with caution. - David Biddulph (talk) 02:29, 6 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I'm more a visitor than an "editor". I very rarely run into this situation, but I might need to visit with you again some time in the future if I find a sticky one. I knew there a prohibition against undoing multiple edits sequentially, so this tip will be helpful. Thanks again for your help. Milkunderwood (talk) 03:16, 6 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Mondschein

Thank you so much for your detailed wording in the move discussion about that sonata! Obviously you can read my mind and express it better than I could! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:31, 1 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I absolutely agree with everything you have said there. I've since added a bit more to mine. Milkunderwood (talk) 22:45, 1 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Noticed and appreciated. What do you think of reducing the amount of Mondschein in the article itself? So many times it could just say "the sonata", --Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:03, 2 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Oh gee - I haven't even read it! (Don't tell anybody.) Milkunderwood (talk) 07:07, 2 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, and good work on keeping an eye on the various dodgy goings on in the moonlight! And I own up, I haven't actually read the text of the article either. I wonder how many of those arguing the case one way or the other have read it.... --Deskford (talk) 03:21, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

(Post made here by User:JackofOz 09:35, 5 January 2012 (UTC) moved to section Moonlighting, below.)[reply]

More on the moonlight shenanigans

Hi Milkunderwood! Do please be careful with your choice of words in the discussions relating to renaming the Beethoven sonatas. I know you feel strongly about this, and feel that that a certain amount of underhand dealing has occurred, but using words like "illegal" and "vandalism" is likely to inflame the situation. These could be construed as accusations against the editors concerned, which would go against policy. Much better if you can to stay calm and collected, take a deep breath before pressing the "save" button, and maintain that decorum that has been mentioned elsewhere. Best wishes! --Deskford (talk) 21:01, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks - good advice. Milkunderwood (talk) 21:28, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Also, just in case you're not aware (as I wasn't in the past!), it's considered an offence on WP to make more than three reversions on the same day on the same page, even if they regard different edits. I got caught unawares on that one during an ongoing news event. Best, MistyMorn (talk) 22:38, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Moonlighting

Hi - I'd like to see if we can't keep this disagreement civil. It's just a dispute about a few article titles, after all. It happens every day. There's no evil plot. There are just some editors who have different ideas on how to title articles. And there's really no reason why people shouldn't be able to continue to edit the article. If you disagree with the edit, then fine - but there shouldn't be a call for no editing until the title is resolved. Fair enough? Dohn joe (talk) 22:35, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Concerned: how can we suggest in civility that changes at present should be discussed on the talk first, where I suggested a simpler lede/lead (however you want to call it). I am truly amazed that the article isn't even able to get the dedicatee's name right. Ideas welcome, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:43, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

For Giulietta ("Julie") Guicciardi, de.wp: [3] (+[4]). Goodnight, MistyMorn (talk) 23:28, 3 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

New day: I tried to sort facts and myths, what do you think? - See bastardi here, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:44, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ooh - you've been peeking! Naughty! (I knew it as "wear you down", not "grind".) Nothing is private around here. --Or have you? Now I'm confused. Milkunderwood (talk) 08:51, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Facts and myths: The music's critical edition says --you didn't cite this and you WILL get called out on it - try to fix it fast. Milkunderwood (talk) 08:56, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Good advice, sourced now. "not true", "naughty", that's what I get. I wonder if "not true" is as bad as I understand it (not telling the truth), so I chose not to react so far. - "Or have" I what? - I wish he would write the article from scratch. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:06, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

:-) No, "naughty" is when someone peeks at something not addressed to her; when a child sneaks a cookie out of the cookie jar when his mother isn't looking; etc. Nothing at all to do with being untrue. Yes, I wish he would too. I'm not going to. Milkunderwood (talk) 09:15, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

:-) "naughty" is understood now. You didn't say "not true", but could you explain that also, language-wise? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:29, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure which you want explained - let me know. (BTW, when I need correct spelling or a meaning I'm not sure of, I always go to http://www.onelook.com/?d=all_gen and from there I usually go to American Heritage. This and Merriam-Webster are the two authoritative US dictionaries, but AH (now sponsored by Yahoo) is much friendlier.) Milkunderwood (talk) 09:41, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

And your new section is fine - I like it. Jack has just now added to it, from Grove. (Fat lot of good it's going to do, though.) (Is the expression "fat lot of good that'll do you" familiar to you?) Milkunderwood (talk) 09:53, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Start over, thanks! I didn't know the expression but now I do! I am seriously tempted to start an article with the facts name (instead of the redirect) and leave the moonlight where it belongs. I will try your sites, but prefer to discuss the use of phrases with people. So, repeated: If someone tells me what I say is "not true" is it as bad as I understand it, that I am not telling the truth? I chose not to react so far. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 10:18, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Found in the link: "dishonest, fraudulent, illusory", --Gerda Arendt (talk) 10:21, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

No, no, no. Not true is much more likely to mean "you are mistaken" than "you are not telling the truth (you are lying)". Where did you find "fat lot of good"? I didn't find it when I looked. Literally, as slang, it means "[of] great (fat) benefit (lot of good)"; but sarcastically, so that it really means "of no benefit". Milkunderwood (talk) 10:29, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, thanks. I found the meaning of "fat lot of good" not in books or sites, but in your use of it, very clearly so! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 10:39, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

And now I finally understand your original question: "Or have you?" That is, had you really been peeking, or did I just imagine it? And the answer is, yes you had been. Naughty Gerda! :-) Milkunderwood (talk) 10:43, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I worry about your suggestion to create another article - this will just start a merge war, I'm afraid. Let's see where that discussion ends up. Milkunderwood (talk) 10:56, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

(ec) To the above: I have a long watchlist, and of course see what happens for my favourite editors, and use my own talk to present (not hide) topics. I just archived that Lo dicono-bastardi, it was on top until a few days ago, may it rest in peace now. If I don't want peeks I write emails. - To article: I have no time. Did you know we have two articles on Haydn's The Creation, unmerged. The author of the first saw no problem, I asked. (Those could easily be merged.) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:03, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I have to keep my watchlist very short. My brain works at 1 km per hour, and my fingers at 1/10th that speed. I'm a one-finger typist, not to mention that it always keeps hitting the wrong key; also dyslexic; so that I have to proofread everything twice. And that's why I'm always so slow in responding. Did you post a merge proposal for The Creation, or just prefer not to get involved? I haven't looked. Milkunderwood (talk) 11:15, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

So far you responded fast and readable! I created The Creation structure for the fun of having it on the Main page on the day of our performance, as before Messiah structure when the authors of Messiah had no room for the music in their FA. No need for a merge. The Creation jumps from one article to the other, movement by movement, in friendly coexistence, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:38, 4 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Is the POV banner really necessary? There's already a "requested move" banner in place. Appending a POV one too gives the impression that the entire article has NPOV issues. Just my pov, MistyMorn (talk) 01:56, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your input, which I always do respect and value although we don't always see eye-to-eye. I guess my personal feeling is that it doesn't do any harm staying there just until this dispute comes to some sort of resolution. It isn't only the article title at issue, but also what is emphasized, and how stated, in the lede, etc. (In the meantime maybe we can get some of these assorted conflicting facts straightened out while we're at it.) But if there's some broad agreement that I posted it inappropriately, then of course it ought to go away. Milkunderwood (talk) 03:21, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, I was under the impression that your POV issue mainly regarded the title. Best, MistyMorn (talk) 08:50, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It doesn't really matter. The two matters (the issue of what to to call the article; and the content of the article) are quite separate. Which is why I see no problem with ongoing edits to the article while the debate about the title is going on. Unless those edits to the article are made in a deliberately underhanded and back-door (from the perspective of the talk page) attempt to sway the debate about the title one way or another. But I see no evidence of that going on. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 09:35, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for this, Jack. I really don't know, but I do feel the article title and contents are related. I'm not going to say "deliberately underhanded and back-door", but on the other hand I sense that some of the revisions in the lede, made or suggested, are intended as justifications for this odd-man-out title. The way I've been seeing this situation - very possibly mistakenly - is that most (not all, and I gather not including you) of the project members feel that 32 numbered sonatas should be titled consistently, by sonata number, with the parenthetical (Beethoven) disambiguation. On the other hand over the past few months there have been multiple attempts made by a small number of individuals to either retitle all of the sonatas together, or separately, one by one, or as a smaller group. In general, the same editors have made the same or similar arguments, pro and con, in each of these attempts. To a large extent these issues have already been hashed out at length. It becomes, as DavidRF put it, a game of whack-a-mole. Anyway, this is how I see it, whether I'm right or wrong - that finally with Sonata No. 14, popularly known as "Moonlight Sonata", these individuals have finally found their stick, won their case in a fluke when no one was looking or aware that it was happening, and are now defending that victory to the death with arguments that mostly verge on the inane. An good example of inanity is the deceptive (whether or not by deliberate intent) argument from the Oxford Dictionary, where the fact of the entry was cited, but not what that entry actually said. My overall impression is that this is a case of "if at first you don't succeed, try, try again." The idea of renaming pages based on descriptions given on a particular set of CDs just might have been well-intended, if misplaced. CD notes can indeed give valuable information at times. Anyway, this effort having failed - twice in a row, one immediately following the other on that discussion page (first for the whole set, next for one at a time, starting with No. 1), the tactic has switched over to nicknames. In this regard I have to say that I am conflicted, because I am normally the last person in the world to subscribe to any kind of conspiracy theory whatever. It does seem to me though that pushing the same agenda over and over again must somehow be contrary to Wikipedia policy, when decisions have already been made. Coming back to your original question of title vs content, as I said above to MistyMorn, I am under the impression that changes being made to the lede and further content are mostly intended to justify and defend the existing nickname title of the article. I'm also convinced (as opposed to simply having an general impression) that while you and I have occasionally disagreed about one thing or another, your stand has always been well-considered, sincere, and principled. This is why I particularly welcome your input. I'm more than willing to be shown wrong in my impression of what has been going on with these sonatas; but still I have to come back to the fact that previous efforts to rename them have failed; and that the granting of this single victory was improper and ought to be reversed. Milkunderwood (talk) 15:50, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

As to the underlying issues involved, this is where I personally am coming from, to repeat some points I have previously made, but here perhaps better organized:

Searchbox search is every reader's entry into Wikipedia. We should have redirects from nearly every conceivable search term to the likeliest desired article.
Despite the tension between the sometimes conflicting goals of openness and authoritative factual accuracy, Wikipedia does make an effort to be, and to be seen as, a serious encyclopedia where curious readers may find information that will hopefully be reliable.
To this effect, and as an encyclopedia in general, our mission is to be educational, in its broadest sense.
An important function of this educational mission, to the extent that it may be effective, is to perhaps help casual readers broaden their horizons, and pique their curiosity into investigating further.
In any case we should try to avoid confirming misleading or narrow preconceptions.
Concerning "Moonlight Sonata" specifically, I have argued elsewhere that the opening bars of the first movement, or at most the first movement alone, constitute a popular meme associated with this name, with little or no concept of the composition as a whole, or its place in a set of 32 other piano sonatas, or these sonatas in Beethoven's importance as a composer, etc. Now obviously many or most casual readers will have no interest in making any of these connections at all - but some will, and will be encouraged to investigate somewhat further.
It has been argued that the title of an article is per se insignificant, and never noticed - I must disagree. Certainly this will be true of many readers, but I'm convinced there is an important subset of curious readers who will notice that they have been redirected from what turns out to be a nickname - and a poorly conceived nickname at that, if a reader might get that far - to a better (and more formal) article title that, as a title, places the meme "Moonlight Sonata" into a context.

I could go on from here, but this is essentially the underlying basis of my reasoning. Does this help explain my position? Milkunderwood (talk) 16:54, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, Milkunderwood, although it wasn't really necessary. I've been following the debate with very great interest, and am getting close to re-entering it with some thoughts of my own, ones that actually take a position, rather than just continuing to sit on the fence. This debate has raised some really interesting points, not the least of which is that the Naming Conventions for classical music can do with a good review. Another one is that, given the number of editors who must have the Moonlight sonata permanently watchlisted, how come everyone missed the previous page move? Or maybe they didn't miss it at all, but didn't think it was a big deal at the time. But now they do. Whichever the truth is, it's very odd.

I came across Talk:Piano Trio, Op. 97 (Beethoven)#Title last night and was reminded of an attempt of mine to change it to Archduke Trio; an attempt that's currently in abeyance pending consideration of other matters. I'm no longer as entirely convinced of the usefulness of that move as I was; but I still strongly dislike the current title, so I'm conflicted too. But it's good to have these tensions and different points of view. As long as we can all conduct ourselves with dignity and respect and act like decent human beings - which is the real challenge here - bring on disputes by the bucketful, I say. They're what make life interesting. Cheers.-- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 18:42, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I appreciate your thoughts. It was at Op. 97 that I myself got into deep doodoo, if you look back at the history. Milkunderwood (talk) 18:45, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I ought to say that my rationale for "Archduke" was entirely different from yours - mine was just because of the confused numbering of the trios, which is the way it had earlier been identified. But now that the title is by uncontested opus number, I think this is the best solution, and I would have to oppose your suggestion to move it to "Archduke Trio" for exactly the same reason I believe Sonata No. 14 should be reinstated. So here we have, I think, a principled disagreement. Milkunderwood (talk) 18:55, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure how to find the history of changes in article titles when a move occurred, and what the previous title had been. As I recall, when I first came upon that page, it was titled something like "Piano Trio No. [whatever]", but a wrong ordinal number. Milkunderwood (talk) 19:01, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You also say it's odd that "given the number of editors who must have the Moonlight sonata permanently watchlisted, how come everyone missed the previous page move?" I have no idea what other people do with their watchlists - Gerda says, above, that she maintains a fairly long one, while I need to keep mine as short as possible. It would never have occurred to me that I, or anyone else, would have Piano Sonata No. 14 (Beethoven) on permanent watch. Milkunderwood (talk) 19:56, 5 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Oops! See my response on my talk page. Apologies again.--Smerus (talk) 09:10, 6 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your kind remark

I just spotted your kind words and wanted to thank you personally. I appreciated your comment a lot because because I've been finding it hard to balance the wish to contribute something different (and I believe valid) to the discussion with the social need not to harass the group. I hope another time, in a similar situation, I'll be able to present my points more succinctly and maybe less pomposly. Thank you again, MistyMorn (talk) 18:41, 12 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I just want you to know I meant every word of it. And we've certainly had pleasant conversations in the past that were helpful to me when you've offered good advice. Milkunderwood (talk) 19:00, 12 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I think you know I'm only insisting because I genuinely feel that there's an issue that needs addressing. But then again, I'm rather ignorant of the quaint and wonderful ways of Wikipedia. So I fear may just be wasting everybody's time. I hope not. Best, MistyMorn (talk) 19:13, 12 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't felt that you've been wasting people's time at all, but have rather gone to the core of an important issue, however much I disagree with those who keep arguing for nicknames. It's I who has confused the issue by taking a much more radical stance than Kleinzach, who keeps trying to keep the discussion on track with series of like compositions. If you are "rather" ignorant of the quaint and wonderful ways of Wikipedia, I'm very nearly entirely so. As I've said on my userpage, I'm here as a reader rather than as a dedicated editor. And I've been assuming, falsely, that nearly everyone approaches any WP article from its own searchbox, as I do. I hadn't even thought of the much more common practice of coming to a specific article by its title listing at Google.

Still, and regardless of that oversight, I fully agree with the arguments put forth by many editors to keep series titled consistently. I'm convinced Sonata No. 14 was improperly moved in September, and that it needs to be restored to the page title it had borne for many years without creating any problems at all.

When I now type "appassionata" at Google, the very top return is

Piano Sonata No. 23 (Beethoven) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Typing "pathetique", the top return is

Piano Sonata No. 8 (Beethoven) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, with
Symphony No. 6 (Tchaikovsky) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia next, and the third return is
Pathetique - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Pathetique may refer to: Piano Sonata No. 8 (Beethoven), in C minor (Op.13), titled Pathétique by Beethoven; Symphony No. 6 (Tchaikovsky), in B minor (Op.74), ..."

I have to assume that Google was smart enough to do the same thing for "Moonlight Sonata" prior to its September move. I'm glad I looked at these - I ought to post this at that discussion. Milkunderwood (talk) 20:29, 12 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I honestly think that navigation issues and SEO are irrelevant here. The claimed effects aren't really plausible nowadays, and those timelines cleverly provided by Dohn joe just don't seem to provide any indication of a rise which couldn't be attributed to these naming discussions (though I have to admit I don't really understand what the two different lines actually refer to - use of redirects perhaps?).

For the record, I have little sympathy myself with the 'Moonlight' nickname: it's not Debussy! None the less,removing it altogether from the title seems to me a bit pedantic in the context of a general encyclopaedia, when the vast majority of people know the work by that very name. But the skies won't fall. And I agree that it's better to try to achieve genuine consensus on the overall naming conventions. As you know, I have serious reservations about the current situation, which I feel is far from immune to reasoned and reasonable criticism. MistyMorn (talk) 19:47, 14 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sorry if you found my quip about not wanting to be "educated" obscure or even offensive. My point was a serious one: that most readers of Wikipedia, I believe, are here to consult an encyclopaedia rather than be ~~"spoon fed"~~ "nudged" (if I can use that expression) by the editors. Obviously, I wasn't suggesting that Wikipedia doesn't have an educational role. Of course it does! Hope that clarifies a bit. Best, MistyMorn (talk) 14:56, 26 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hi - thanks for your post. Certainly no offense taken, or intended. I hadn't even remembered who had used that specific word, but I did definitely get the impression that your feeling expressed was widely shared by many others. As I said in this present discussion, I'm obviously the outlier in thinking that "common name" ought to be entirely discarded as unworthy of a "serious" encyclopedia. Readers learn something useful and meaningful by being redirected to a more appropriately formal name. Milkunderwood (talk) 21:20, 26 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I think your view may be a majority one in the Classical music project, but a minority one overall. Personally, I don't think expanding people's knowledge is the key to a good title. My 2c MistyMorn (talk) 21:39, 26 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

My point about Wikipedia terminology was merely that certain terms have defined meanings which can be important; for instance, disruption can be a serious allegation. However, I do appreciate your advice and am indeed backing off. This is despite my belief that the consensus was mainly local, the provision was pushed through as a political expedient, and the implications of the guidelines were not appropriately explored in any detail (something I've since been trying to do with the Eine Kleine, RVW and Beethoven examples). I found the process alienating enough to remove my name from the CM project list. But there's nothing personal about that, especially as far as you're concerned. Best, MistyMorn (talk) 12:00, 11 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your note. I guess I've been following too many other discussions, really strenuous ones, where a word like "disruptive" is by far one of the milder ones thrown around - so I appreciate your bringing me back to WP norms of civility. Best, Milkunderwood (talk) 22:23, 11 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, and I understand the difficulty of keeping up with all the wikispeak and other norms. Personally, I'm thinking of posting something on my talk page explaining why I won't generally be accepting invitations to get involved in RfCs and other heated discussions. Just a brief comment and then a retreat maybe. Getting heavily involved is just too much stress for my 2c... Best, MistyMorn (talk) 22:45, 11 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Re San Alberto District, Paraguy,

Yeah, that was redirect misspelling that already existed, so all I did is fix the double redirect. Thanks for the confidence in my positions at WP:AT. --Mike Cline (talk) 01:19, 31 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

By Jove!

I have given further consideration to your revert of my "emigration" vs. "immigration" edit, and, by Jove! I actually take your side against mine own! Writtenright (talk) 23:33, 7 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you! It's nice to have a scholarly gentlemanly exchange of views on Wikipedia under Marquess of Queensbury rules. (A lot better than some of the catfights I've been in...) Writtenright (talk) 19:03, 8 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Aluminium

I was able to duplicate the problem by fiddling around with my settings, but I don't really see any way around leaving it as one paragraph rather than splitting it up, because invariably it will look worse than the current (minor) formatting error to a lot of users if split. Maybe if you combined some of the parenthesized information so there aren't so many of them floating around? There are 3 pairs in that first sentence alone. Clay^Clay _Clay 02:18, 15 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The line ends at "is a" after all the parentheses are closed for me, so making a newline before the parenthesis there cuts off a good 1/4 of the line or so. I wouldn't know where to start looking for something like you're describing as a fix; who thought up inline images, anyways? I am no content editor on aluminium either, but maybe if no obvious solution pans out a post can be made to the talk page of the article or the template being used. Clay^Clay _Clay 02:58, 15 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Evolution as fact and theory

Hi again, Thompsma-- I see you've been doing a lot of excellent work on this article. I'm still very concerned about the Evolution as theory and fact in the literature section and its two subsections, where (without having the references) I'm convinced that virtually all of these apparently conflicting statements are addressing semantics of terminology rather than truly substantive issues, and thus give the reader a very misleading impression. There is much dissent and argumentation concerning specific theories of the mechanics of evolution, and this is the real issue, but it seems to me this is lost in the way the quotations are presented. As I've said before, at least Dawkins if not also others appear to be trying to simply purge the word "theory" because of the abuse and misapprehension of its colloquial meaning as opposed to its scientific use as term of art. Some others may be objecting on the ground that evolution stands as a collection of overlapping or competing "theories" rather than a unified and coherent theory in a sense that they prefer. I guess my basic problem is that the quotations in the "fact not theory" section appear to be taken out of context. As it stands, much of this in the literature section seems to reinforce and give distorted ammunition to the "just a theory" crowd by emphasizing an apparent but false basic disagreement on substantive issues as to the status of the viability of the entire concept of evolution. Milkunderwood (talk) 18:58, 20 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Milkunderwood - thanks for your message in my talk page. I completely agree with the concerns you outline. I've worked hard in the discussion page to bring up those very points. I disagree with the way that editors have created this kind of protection shield around evolutionary theory so that we must state that it is both fact and theory. I'm actually in communication with quite a few evolutionary biologists directly and working on this problem. Dr. Fitzhugh[5] and I, for example, have been exchanging e-mails and discussing the nature of evolutionary theory. I don't agree with Dawkin's (as you've framed it) with discarding (or downplaying) the concept of theory in reference to evolution; that might work in public lectures, but not in the actual published works on the nature of science and its practice. I don't like the way all the quotes are lined up in that article, it should rather include a synthesized work not a bulleted list of quotes and I've stated this in the discussion pages. The nature and philosophy of the science in reference to theory is far more complex than the average person appreciates, yet it is also quite elegant and simple at the same time. There is no singular definition of theory nor understanding of what science is and that is precisely the way it should be. Science has at the heart of it the perpetual aim of moving away from theoretical monism toward theoretical pluralism. It is precisely the open inquiry of a competing dialectic that keeps facts attuned to theory, driving the precision of linguistic foibles closer to a natural truth. Science does not have everything figured out, despite the certainty that non-scientists see in it. Even the scientists themselves publish a certain amount of error and that is how it evolves. Look, for example, at the mistakes that Barnosky and Kraatz made in reference to turning evolutionary theory into a fact[6] - that is a critical philosophical error that got published in Bioscience; actually, I've read quite a bit of work by the Barnosky group and they've been sloppy in a few other places, despite contributing valuable scientific information on the topic of phylogeography. You will note in the recent discussion that I have recently stated: "we have to decide what this article is about. Is it a counter-point to creationists objections, or is it an encyclopedic resource on the scientific philosophy and scientific practice of evolution as fact and theory? The two approaches make a difference on how the topic is addressed." Currently, the article is presented as a counter-point to creationists objections, although I'm attempting to transform it into an article on the scientific philosophy. There is a critical error at the onset where the article changes from the title "Evolution as fact and theory" to the first sentence where it says "Evolution is both fact and theory" is a statement that appears..." - that is in fact false. I've changed it several times, but others keep changing it back. That statement does not appear very often in the literature and those most qualified to speak on the matter have illustrated using logic that it is a false claim. The article needs to be re-dressed as an encyclopaedic reference to evolution as fact and theory - describing how inferences are made in the science and why scientists can make the claim that "natural selection or ‘descent with modification’ has withstood repeated attempts of refutation by way of testing."[7] Anyway, I'm working on the problem slowly and gradually. The main problem is that there are some problem makers that step into that article accusing people like me of being creationist POV pushers, which is ironic and an an extraordinary claim when I have contributed so much to the actual content of that article.Thompsma (talk) 19:33, 20 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Your last sentence there is ironic indeed. I think you're doing a hell of a good job. But I don't entirely understand your objection

""Evolution is both fact and theory" is a statement that appears..." - that is in fact false."

Would you mind explaining this? I can see on one level that it's a fair statement, but on another level that it is not. I have no problem in the abstract with something being both fact and theory at the same time. By the way, you seemed to disagree earlier with Pine's formulation of law as a term of art - possibly some other definitions that he uses as well - and I've been curious about your objections, if there are any. Thanks.

Sometimes I wish I were a teacher, with the ability to start off kids in their earliest grades, introducing them to the basic concepts of scientific reasoning, and gradually building on this in each successive grade, introducing terminology and its ranges of meanings, through high school, where I could at last devote the full first class of each semester to "teaching the controversy" and disposing of it as nonsense. There's so much free-floating BS about this, which they will obviously have had long exposure to, that I strongly think it is best to confront it head-on. Here at this grade level the kids should be able to separate their beliefs ingrained from childhood from a formal study of the scientific method and its critiques, with the admonition of "don't believe everything you believe" as a better formulation of "don't believe everything you think." Gould's point of non-overlapping magisteria is not without its critics, but it would be handy for 9th grade biology. I can visualize myself saying "you don't have to believe everything you're going to learn in this course, but you do have to understand it." Then probably university would be a more appropriate level for in-depth criticism of the philosophy of science. Anyway, over the years I become more convinced this is the only way of purging confusion and prejudice, by starting very young with these general concepts.

Milkunderwood (talk) 21:05, 20 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Milkunderwood - I have never taken the time to learn about the talk pages. Do you get notified if I respond on my own page? Anyway, the best source explaining this issue is Fitzhugh[8] who states: "The greater certainty one holds for a hypothesis or theory subsequent to testing is nothing more than an indication of the ever-increasing understanding afforded by that hypothesis or theory of the facts we perceive or anticipate perceiving. Referring to hypotheses and theories as ‘facts’ is contrary to the explanatory nature of those concepts, and is a corruption of the intent to accurately represent the nature of acquiring understanding in the realm of science." He is not the only evolutionary biologist who has makes this claim. Fitzhugh's expertise and speciality is on the philosophy of sciences as it relates to evolution and the same goes for Walter Bock[9] who concurs with this line of reasoning: "A single evolutionary theory as considered by Darwin does not exist, but several evolutionary theories occur with clear distinctions made between nomological and historical evolutionary theories, the latter being separated into a general and numerous special theories....If understood correctly, both nomological and historical evolution stand on their own as strongly corroborated scientiﬁc theories. Neither have to be further embellished as a fact or as true."[10] He even makes it more explicit: "If understood correctly, both forms of evolutionary theories stand on their own as corroborated scientiﬁc theories and should not be labeled as facts." Once you understand what theory is, it is truly an absurd notion to claim theory to be a fact as well. Evolutionary theory actually refers to many theories, whereas you might be able to interpret it as a fact if it is refers to the subject that hypotheses are trying to explain. If you study DNA, the facts are the DNA sequences themselves. If I build a phylogenetic tree out of those DNA sequences, does it now become a fact that they evolved according to the phylogeny inferred? No. The phylogeny itself is an explanatory hypothesis of the facts as they relate to each other. "Conﬁrming evidence cannot change the status of a hypothesis to a fact...To say ‘evolution is a fact’ is just an inexact reference to what is thought to have existed, which are organisms and the events in which they were involved. While evolution is not a fact, it is also not a single theory, but a set of theories applied to a variety of causal questions."

On the point of Pine's formulation of law - I have no objections, I just found the other reference easier to understand and think it states almost the same thing. The nomological-deductive versus historical narrative, however, is an important point on this issue. The concept of a "law" is meaningless in context of the historical narrative of evolutionary theory. "Historical-narrative explanations are almost always avoided by philosophers of science because they, quite correctly, wish to use law-like statements in their explanations and do not accept ‘‘historical laws’’ in the erroneous belief that historical explanations require historical laws." Hope this helps! I didn't really explain this myself, but I can do no better than Bock and Fitzhugh.Thompsma (talk) 23:22, 20 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy[11]] may be helpful in this regard. On facts:

It is a fact life evolves
That life evolves is a fact
That 2 + 2 = 4 is a fact.

This first two sentences are of the contingent sort, the last sentence is another kind of fact. In this first sense, the contingent nature of facts, evolution is a fact. However, what meaning does this really state? The key is in the term "evolve", which is why these kinds of statements, while they appear to help us to understand the claims, are really not helpful in explaining anything of importance. If life evolves, then this means that there is "decent with modification", but who is evolving? Life is evolving. Hence, the fact refers to many different kinds of creatures where we find facts. So are facts nested sets, such that "It is a fact that birds have wings, that birds have wings is a fact" and "It is a fact that birds evolve, that birds evolve is a fact"? In this way, fact is an inexact reference to the nesting of the systems involved. Wings are objects than can be observed (the worlds data independent of theory), but when we talk about bird evolution we are really referring to the hypotheses that explain the facts (wings, feathers, DNA, Archaeopteryx, etc..). In referring to the explanatory hypotheses as a fact, we are doing a disservice to the facts and hypotheses, because hypotheses can never achieve absolute certainty and neither can facts, but why add duplicity to a hypotheses by stating it a fact as well? Facts are supposed to exist regardless of our perception of them, they just are and as such they lack the theory-laden components that we are trying to test in the first place. We're not in the practice of testing the facts, they are already accepted as clearly as a bird has a wing. Who in their right mind would set out to test that kind of hypothesis? Referring to theories or hypotheses as facts kills the entire purpose and philosophy of science as a perpetual machine of inquiry. Hence, evolution is not a fact - but a collection of many facts that are explained by the theories and hypotheses within.Thompsma (talk) 00:14, 21 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Okay. I need to back off, because this is way too hard. I first came to that article, as I said, by stumbling across a reference to it, and it's a subject I've always been interested in, but have no expertise in whatever. Today I've finally done, to a small extent, what I ought to have done to start with - to look back at some of the article's history. Have you ever looked at Filll's original page from December 2006? I thought it was pretty intriguing, in what he was trying to accomplish, and what he included. I haven't tried to follow the history, just seeing that a large number of people have worked on it, that it has provoked a lot of arguments, and has several times been put up for deletion. My impression is that discounting the expected objections from people who reject the concept of evolution, most of the argument is from people committed to the science, to proper use of scientific terminology, and to the philosophy of science, and seems to be largely made in good faith.

Your latest posts here and at the article's talkpage have finally clarified for me - at least to my own understanding - what the current discussion is about. First let me say that I have great admiration for the obvious depth of your scholarship, and for your writing skill.

Each of us has our own worldview, the way we organize our knowledge and beliefs, etc. Pine's definitions and explanations sound natural to me because these adhere closely to the way I've been taught to think in scientific terms since I was in about the 6th grade. I know that many people have never had the benefit of this kind of education, and perhaps especially cohorts coming through school today are left to muddle through the cultural noise of scientific ignorance, religious fanatics, and inadequate textbooks and curricula that present "science" as discontinuous factoids giving no coherent underpinning of what science is or how it works. These are the people I fear for.

I need to make a distinction here between what I'm calling a "worldview", a point of view, a way of organizing our knowledge and beliefs, as opposed to Wikipedia's injunctions concerning NPOV and NOR. I have mine, you have yours; everyone has their own. What I had not understood until reading your new posts is that apparently you approach the subject of evolution not "as fact and theory" nor "as fact not theory", but "as not fact but theories" in the plural. That's fine with me. I understand the logic of rejecting "fact" as an appropriate term for ... may we call it the "phenomenon" of evolution? It seems to me the important thing is to have a mutual understanding of each other's preferred terminology; otherwise we're just talking past each other. Personally I would be inclined to think of "theories" in the plural more as hypotheses, subsumed under an overarching "theory", but this is not a point to quibble over. Then we come to the question of what is meant by "evolution" in this context, as either a "fact" or a "theory". We can postulate that life, or living things, do evolve, because we see it happening - in fruit flies, or bacteria, or any such life form that generates on a fast time scale compared to our own; or we infer that it has occurred in the past by finding the remains of ancient life forms, etc, etc. So we can agree that the "phenomenon" - if you will accept these words - of evolution is "observed" and thus "demonstrated". We will leave aside the question of whether this constitutes a "fact". But by "evolution" do we mean simply the observed phenomenon, or do we gather up into that term a proposed mechanism by which the phenomenon might occur? Here again our communication will break down unless we can agree on what I mean when I say "evolution" as opposed to what you mean when you say the word.

Here I'm going to break off this thought and go back to the confused - even benighted - cohort of young people who will eventually be in charge of running this planet when you and I are gone. Some few of them may come here to Wikipedia for enlightenment on the topic of evolution. And let's assume that some few of those few may find their way to this particular article (which is not really a very obvious destination). Let's pretend, you and I, that we are members of this cohort - young, callow, confused, undereducated. Now hold that thought for a moment, and zip back to Filll's original page from December 2006. How does it address the questions in your mind? (Please note that I am not holding out that page as being a "good" Wikipedia article, in any sense. This is merely a thought experiment.) And now zip back to the present article, still pretending, and let your eye just skim quickly through, as innocent of terminology and concepts as you are able to maintain the pretense. Now let your eye come halfway down the page to Evolution as theory and fact in the literature, and let it linger there a moment, scanning through the names of people you've never heard of. Even without deliberately reading any of the quotations, it's apparent that there is vociferous disagreement going on here. Is evolution a fact? Is it a theory? Is it such horsehockey that nobody knows what it is?

Okay, so much for that strawman "experiment". Now let's be intelligent and fairly decently educated people, but with a spotty background in what science is and how it works. Let's actually read through the article, and understand what it is saying. Again we come to these disputes about fact and theory. The question I have to ask myself is, to what extent are these disagreements substantive, as opposed to being based on different definitions of the terms used? There's not really any way to tell, is there?

Now stepping out of character and being myself, I still come up against the same question. Further, you have argued, I think, that evolution is neither "fact" nor "theory", in your understanding of these terms as based on Bock and on Fitzhugh. I'm not sure where you've tried to edit the article to reflect these, but I believe you've said your edits have been reverted? Now the question becomes, is your stance, and Bock's and Fitzhugh's, the correct one? Is it true? Is it more true than the various positions taken by Simpson, Muller, Miller, Mayr, Gould, Lenski, Gregory, Lewontin, Futuyma, Dawkins, or Campbell? As I read the article now, you have treated this in a fair and evenhanded manner, listing Fitzhugh in this last group even though his specific terminology is at odds with them. Since I didn't review the history back very far from its present state (my computer is very slow in refreshing pages) I don't know whether you've tried to present that view higher up in the article's discussion as well; but if you have, I would have to disagree with you. If Fitzhugh is a poor fit in the section where his quote is now located, it would be better to add a third subsection to accommodate it. Very frankly, as I see it you have put yourself out on a shaky POV limb with your "nope" post on the talkpage. I'm afraid the consequence may be that other editors may take you less seriously - assuming this has not been the underlying issue all along.

Anyway, this is as much as I have gathered from what I've seen in the article and its talkpage. My own major concern with the article is the question of disagreement on the basis of substance as opposed to semantics, but I don't see any easy way to delineate that with the brief quotes out of their full context. (And if you can't follow my train of thought in this rambling mess, you're not alone; in my experience no one else can, either.) Best, Milkunderwood (talk) 14:25, 21 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The last "Nope" headline was to call attention to the literature that runs contrary to the claim made in that article. The key concern is the lead sentence that states: "Evolution is both fact and theory" when the title of the page says "Evolution as fact and theory". The two sentences mean different things, the later is consistent with the literature at large, whereas the former is inconsistent with some of the literature. I have never stated that I completely agree with Fitzhugh and Bock, but I respect and recognize their work for what it is. What I have tried to relay to you and other through these discussions is my understanding of their work in this area. I am not completely convinced with Fitzhugh's suggestion that evolution is not a fact and side more with Gould on the rules of inference on history that helped Darwin establish evolution as a fact, but I have done my very best to represent Fitzhugh's published views on the matter. In understanding Fitzhugh's position on the matter, I can come to understand my own perspectives and I am still trying to formulate a counter argument to Fithugh's statement that evolution is not a fact. I can agree with Fitzhugh that evolution is a collection of facts, but is it a singular fact? I think it is, but to be claimed as such it needs to be defined in a manner that is consistent with the philosophy of fact in science. Colloquially, it is absolutely a fact that life has and will continue to evolve. However, wikipedia is not about getting my perspectives onto the pages, it is about trying to represent the published information in a representative manner. Fitzhugh and Bock have published some very complex philosophy on the subject matter.

I suspect that if Gould were still around that he would be impressed by the work by Fitzhugh, because he has done a very thorough job digging into the history of the science not only through evolution, but science in general. I also have copies of manuscripts that Fitzhugh has sent me ahead of publication, which has given me some insight into the work that is to come. Bock and Fitzhugh are experts in the field and have published contrary evidence to what is stated in the page. This is the problem with stating that evolution is both fact and theory as though science can make grand claims that are static through time. The very nature of science thrives off the reigning ideas that are knocked off their perch. I am a huge fan of Stephen J. Gould's work as well, so I have not discounted his publication on Evolution as both fact and theory, but Bock and Fitzhugh have brought new information to light that was missed in much of the evolutionary debate. I suspect that they are creating a paradigm shift in evolutionary theory through their revelation on abductive inference and the nature of test. For example, look at Franciso Ayala's publication on "Darwin and the Scientific Method"[12] - Ayala is a highly reputable evolutionary biologists and I have greatly enjoyed following his research over the years. Yet in that publication he states: "There are 2 basic components in the process by which scientific knowledge advances. The first component consists of the formulation of a conjecture or hypothesis about the natural world. The second component consists of testing the hypothesis by ascertaining whether deductions derived from the hypothesis are indeed the case in the real world. This procedural practice has become known as the hypothetico–deductive method, often characterized as “the” scientific method." Unfortunately, that is the line you will hear from most practising evolutionary biologists and it is what I have learned over the years as well. It is also unfortunate that it is an incorrect characterization of the scientific method as many notable scholars beyond Fitzhugh and Bock have noted and this goes deep into the history of science; Rieppel[13], for example, is another author that is working in this direction. Fitzhugh has brought a fresh perspective on the species problem that hasn't been seen since Ghiselin wrote "A radical solution to the species problem", which is an amazing accomplishment given the number of papers on species concepts[14][15]. He has brought a fresh and revolutionary perspective into phylogenetics and the nature of phylogenetic inference clarifying that what cladists (like myself) have been calling a hypothetico-deductive test is actual a case of abduction[16]. This flips the whole paradigm around. In doing this he has brought clarity to the topic of the scientific philosophy of evolutionary biology.

My key concern with the article is that I see prejudice. I believe that people are stating that evolution is a fact because they want to believe it so as a counter claim to creationists. In contrast I want to claim that evolution is a fact if it is indeed consistent with the wider scientific understanding of what a fact is. That evolution has factually occurred is not a problem for me, but to frame the science in its proper context is what ensures its success and helps others to question and sharpen their own perspective on the matter. The article should not be a prejudiced counter attack to creationists, but an honest disclosure of the dialectic discourse on the nature of evolution as fact and theory - what are the scientists saying. They are not all saying that it is a fact and indeed one of the most qualified researchers in this particular area states exactly this. Many of the other evolutionary biologists have focused on evolution, the actual philosophy of science less so. Fitzhugh has brought the two together like no other.Thompsma (talk) 18:11, 21 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Precious

	elucidating
	Thank you for light much better than moonlight on Beethoven's Sonata quasi una fantasia (to be on the Main page on 8 March), also your help to understanding (English and people), --Gerda Arendt (talk) 17:34, 24 February 2012 (UTC)[reply] Vielen Dank, Gerda! :-) Milkunderwood (talk) 21:55, 24 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Erection

Just letting you know that Pass a Method added back the crap to this article. He's one of the worst editors on Wikipedia (just check his talk page), so I can't say I'm surprised there. 49.212.13.55 (talk) 05:42, 27 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Yes, I've seen it. Milkunderwood (talk) 05:46, 27 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Please be more accurate in you assertions

Two of your recent assertions about me are grossly inaccurate. Please be more accurate in any discussions about my editing. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 03:52, 1 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your input. I will retain your post as a badge of honor. Milkunderwood (talk) 03:56, 1 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Inaccuracy is an honour? Is that what you are saying? -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 04:02, 1 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I was not inaccurate. What I said on your talkpage was that your assertion "is just about the most flagrantly POV assertion I have ever found here at Wikipedia". I might add that I am not responsible for what "[you] fail to see". (For the benefit of any page watchers, the discussion at issue is at User talk:Alan Liefting#Removing censorship categories). Milkunderwood (talk) 04:18, 1 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I am not worried about that one at all. That is just opinion. I don't like these: [17], [18]. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 04:25, 1 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ah. I thank you again for posting those. The second seems entirely innocuous to me, but I can see that in the first one, "Liefting went on a rampage with every glossary page he could find" was indiscreetly phrased, and probably something of an exaggeration with regard to "rampage". The "every glossary page he could find" was merely my understanding, possibly inaccurate, of what you yourself had posted in a different discussion. Of course both of them, again, are "just opinion". But I shall try to be more accurate in future, to the best of my ability. Milkunderwood (talk) 04:46, 1 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Nocturnal penile tumescence

You might want to report Pass a Method at the WP:Edit warring noticeboard, since not only is he edit warring, but also violated WP:3RR (counting his first revert on the 29th), and since reporting this may be the only thing that halts his inappropriate "morning wood" editing on Wikipedia. Right now, he's trying to shut me up by calling me a block evader and saying that my reverting him like you did is vandalism. 107.20.63.220 (talk) 16:19, 1 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Republic of China challenge of challenge

With regards to this I moved it for several reasons - firstly Salix's bases their decision on a discussion which closed as no-consensus which in general is pretty dubious as the community didn't reach a clear decision in that discussion.

Secondly it is clear from HJ Mitchell's closing rationale that there might well have been a consensus to move Taiwan to Taiwan (island) but that the primary reason he closed it as no-consensus on the basic technicality about what to do with the disambiguation page. And that really has no possible relevance at all to what we should do with the Republic of China article.

If you don't agree with my rationale here you really should move the point back to the oppose section, we shouldn't be keeping stuff marked as challenged which isn't clear cut and the closing admin should be able to make their own judgment about the relative weight of the argument. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 20:39, 5 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I didn't move your comment. I moved Salix's. I hope I wasn't unclear :(. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 22:45, 5 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I've now struck your challenge to my challenge. -- Eraserhead1 <talk> 07:40, 6 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Compromise

As a compromise, how about you move the morning-wood and morning glory part to the lower section as you suggested in this edit summary? Pass a Method talk 20:11, 6 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your note. Yes, that had been a suggestion; but I'm actually more convinced by SMcCandish's subsequent argument that this is not "Slangipedia", as he put it. His suggestion had been that such terms would be more appropriate in Wiktionary than here, and I'm inclined to agree. In the meantime I'm hoping that a urologist or similar professional may eventually find the article and chime in, so I think my preference would be to not go that route for now until we can get some more authoritative input. In any case, if we start adding slang terms it becomes a question of which ones might be widely recognizable, as different editors have already pointed out. If I recall correctly two editors had never heard of your suggested terms, just as I myself had not - I was only familiar with "piss hard-on". This might be not only a geographic but also perhaps both a gender and generational problem, so again this is probably an argument for Wiktionary rather than Wikipedia. (I noticed that McCandish left "hair pie" out of his list of vulgar terms for vagina, but in this age of depilation that and other terms suggesting pubic hair may now have dropped out of general use. And of course the word "vagina" itself is very widely misunderstood and misused in reference to the vulva and its components.) Milkunderwood (talk) 21:46, 6 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Milk, take note that Pass a Method may start to edit under a different account and that therefore any future conflict you have with a "new editor" over the same things may, in fact, be Pass a Method. See here. If it comes to that point, you will have the right to report him for inappropriate use of WP:Fresh start. If you two can work out a compromise under his current account, before he changes to a different one, then good. 222.45.72.124 (talk) 23:27, 6 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Republic of China -> Taiwan

Hi Milkunderwood, by chance I found your post on Benlisquare's talk page. I fully agree with your statement "it is not the purpose of Wikipedia to "ratify" or perpetuate ignorance". Thanks. Hanfresco (talk) 09:05, 9 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Make whatever use of it that you can. I'm out of that difficult discussion now. And I still think a lot of editors are being challenged inappropriately. Milkunderwood (talk) 09:36, 9 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Tennis

I think you may have misunderstood. "It depends" isn't really responsive to the question, which is about wikiproject behavior and scope (essentially a form of WP:OR here); what you raised is an case-by-case issue of whether reliable sources about a particular player indicate a name change (legally, adoption of the spelling as a pseudonym, or whatever), rather than simply being labelled in blanket fashion by lazy orthography by a sport union. We know for a reliable fact that the main tennis orgnizations do this labeling; that's not at issue. We don't have any reliable sources except in a few rare cases, for tennis players (or hockey, whatever; this isn't really about tennis) have personally adopted the spellings the organization prefers. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ Contrib. 22:25, 19 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, and....

Hello, you seem a level headed editor and I say thanks. My words on the talk page (only) of the Western Betrayal article were removed by the editor volunteermarek, in his capacity as both owner of the article and owner of the talk page. You noticed and tried to encourage peaceful discussion. This article is held hostage by a 1-3 editors with historical punishment on Wikipedia, and I hope you will not give up interest in promoting Wikipedia's ideals. I admit I have a POV, but I refuse to give up when other editors try to publish their POV exclusively. Many thanks for our time. 72.145.253.232 (talk) 01:31, 25 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your interest, as you can see another editor has gone so far as to delete mere talk page words I write. Follow volunteermarek trail and you will see. He deletes entries even on individual editors' talk pages. I admit to a POV, all I think is helpful in the article at controversy is a neutral review of who is running the article and what, if any, edits are allowed. 72.145.253.232 (talk) 01:45, 25 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Please stop enabling a banned user whose only interest in Wikipedia is harassment of other editors.VolunteerMarek 01:53, 25 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Fine. Demonstrate please that this person is a banned sockpuppet. In the meantime *NEVER* delete posts from a talk page, including mine. You may ~~strikeout~~ a post, giving evidence that the poster is a banned sock. But you may NOT simply delete posts you don't like. Milkunderwood (talk) 02:00, 25 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

For starters [19]. And:

1. I don't think I've removed anything by you from any talk page.

2. I will remove posts which are only meant to harass and abuse others, per WP:TPNO and WP:BANNED.

VolunteerMarek 02:05, 25 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry for the confusing sentence construction. You deleted someone else's post from my talkpage. Milkunderwood (talk) 02:13, 25 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Deleting comments on talk pegs by another editor

It seems you may have achieved the obvious facility of owning a talk page not edited by other editors. May i ask that you look at the talk page of the contentious article in question and see that the article's owner continues to delete talk page entries which the editor so desperately wishes to avoid seeing the light of day. Note especially how the unilateral deletions of TALK page contributions so painfully show someone who can't stand even the slightest hint of disagreement with their POV or tolerate any challenge to their ownership of the article. 184.36.234.102 (talk) 04:33, 25 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]