User talk:EncMstr

Tung Chee Hwa

Hi! I notice you deleted Dǒng Jiànhuá saying it is an implausible redirect.

But that is the Mandarin Pinyin with all of the tones. People redirect the pinyin to the articles all the time. It is plausible WhisperToMe (talk) 00:13, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

There are no links to it (see Special:WhatLinksHere/Dǒng_Jiànhuá). While I don't doubt that there would be such redirects on other projects, they would be very unlikely in English. Is there a guideline which recommends their presence—or at least discourages their deletion?

New List of mountain passes in Oregon article

		The Geography Barnstar
		Thanks for creating the new List of mountain passes in Oregon article, and improving Wikipedia's coverage of geography-related topics. Northamerica1000(talk) 20:09, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

Talkback

Hello, EncMstr. You have new messages at Coaster1983's talk page.
Message added 22:15, 28 February 2012 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Coaster1983 (talk) 22:15, 28 February 2012 (UTC)

"How to" request from an almost newcomer to wikipedia

Hello,

I am a a stereographer and technical writer with 20 books in my biography, so I am often eager to correct/improve several articles on 3D related subjects. I attempted to add to the Stereoscopy word a reference to the James Cameron Ten Rules that are more and more frequently cited in the literature about how to shoot 3D movies. Doing so, I added an external link that doesn't seem to be in line with WP policy. The goal was mainly to assert the reality of the "Cameron rules" text and I think the link was to the first historic appearance of the text.

My question is "How can I insert a reference to an external text without using a link? Do you use usually other ways to give a possibility to externally verify a fact (i.e. a few carefully selected Google search keywords?"

I had problems with at least another edit for the same reason (external links to assert the reality of things and make the edit verifiable), so the answer may help me to edit other articles as well.

The diff link is here : http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=476660972&oldid=476652733

Regards and thanks for your help,

BenoitMichel 18:33, 29 February 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Benoitmichel (talk • contribs)

Hello Benoitmichel,

You are indeed being affected by several mechanisms intended to protect the integrity of Wikipedia.

Attempts to link 3D Cinecast are automatically reverted because it is hosted on a blogging website, Blogspot.com. Blogs are considered inherently unreliable, so this kind of filtering does more good than harm. Alas, this particular forum seems valuable. It would be better to cite a source which is subject to some amount of editorial review and fact checking. Perhaps there is a trade magazine with similar content?

Any editor whose body of work has significant numbers of external links receives increased scrutiny. Spammers, marketing people, and others with conflict of interest are so frequently encountered by editors enforcing the external links policy, they tend to lose patience and revert without giving even WP:EL as a reason.

I placed a welcome navbox on your talk page in October. There is an overwhelming amount of material linked from there, but almost all of it is derived from Wikipedia Five Pillars. Please see that for a condense explanation of why some content is acceptable and other content is not. Thanks, —EncMstr (talk) 20:06, 29 February 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia layer on Google Maps and other coords questions

I've been fiddling with the Wikipedia layer on Google Maps lately. It's astonishing how many places we've written about that show up there! But I've noticed "missing links"--articles I've written that have coords but no infobox don't seem show up on the map. I figure it's a function of the way the coords render in the infobox. I kind of hate putting giant infoboxes on tiny, unlikely to be expanded articles but I'm starting to rethink that. However, do you know if there's some way to get the coords from the plain {{coord}} templates to show up as "Ws" on the map at the next data dump?

Also, Re: Category:Oregon articles missing geocoordinate data, I tackled some of the "coords needed" articles (mostly by BOLDly deleting the template from a bunch of articles) and saw you did a ton of them that took a bit more legwork. (thank you!) I was curious about your thoughts on adding coords to defunct national forests and the like. (If we can figure out where to center the coords) I'm thinking they will clutter the Wikipedia layer and also confuse people. Should we put coords on those articles or not? I like the idea of the coords being clickable but not showing up on Google Maps if they are placed in an infobox. Do you know if there's some way to do that? Most of the defunct national forest articles don't have infoboxes right now, but it might come up later. Valfontis (talk) 07:08, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for helping!

Depending on the Google Maps' zoom level, many [W] points show up or disappear. Mostly, it does the right thing, but sometimes it is completely mystical why itsy bitsy airfields are shown at large scales and disappear at small scales. Or why they don't appear until zoomed almost to individual trees.

As for making an article appear, the documented method is to use a {{coord|...|with 'display=title'|or 'display=inline,title'}}. The template {{infobox settlement}} also uses coord, but it needs the coordinates_display = inline,title parameter to provide a coord title display. There is a one to three month delay from adding them to having them appear. (Sometimes longer.) I have added that to all the major Oregon settlements, but not for the Podunks. I think it best to use {{coord|...|display=title}} on those.

I see you added a coordinate to Bloucher last August, so it should appear. I always assumed that Google scraped the geo tag microformat from the HTML, so using display=t instead of display=title should work fine. But since it is not appearing, maybe that messes things up (and Google is doing something different than I expected). Do you know of any articles which use the short form and appear on the Wikipedia layer?

For the former forests and whatnot, I was stumped finding any definitive description of their locations. If any are ever found, the new KML mechanism for drawing an outline (or maybe shading a region) on a map will be the way to go and help choose a reasonable point in the future. The KML mechanism is still being alpha tested at WP:WikiProject Highways—and well supported by WP:GEO—though progress is quite rapid. (See Mojave Desert and click on the globe icon.) Given what I know of things, I think the best thing to do is leave the missing coordinate tags for now. Maybe they could be moved into a new WP:ORE-specific coord missing category?

Yes: someone else worked on coordinates a few weeks ago too. I did not figure out who it was. I worked the list down from 160 (missing coordinates) to about 90; next time I checked—about two weeks later—it was around 70. I, too, ended up deleting a handful of coord missing tags since selecting a meaningful coordinate was too challenging. —EncMstr (talk) 08:09, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

It was Finetooth. He's also been improving articles on school districts as he goes, the scamp. More later. Valfontis (talk) 15:02, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

I think spelling out "title" is the key. I started going through my list of created articles (starting with "A", naturally) and you updated the coords tl on Agate Beach here, three years ago (that makes me feel really old in WikiYears) and it shows up on Google. Valfontis (talk) 20:06, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

On the other hand I updated to use the coord tl on Orenco here, not spelling out "title", 4 years ago and it shows as a W on the map. Do these have to do with the old {{Geolinks}} template being on there before? P.S. Here's a link to an old discussion. I think I'm just going to assume that Google Maps is one of the Great Mysteries and not look behind the curtain. Valfontis (talk) 13:02, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

This is amusing. Apparently this is off the coast of San Francisco. Valfontis (talk) 13:56, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

I suspect there is the superstitious pigeon effect or pattern matching occurring here- I don't know if the t vs title matters, but I would expect the update is dependent on Google's crawl frequency of the pages. If they crawl Wikipedia like most other sites, they determine the frequency to revisit a page based on how often changes are made. Some of our Oregon community pages change perhaps yearly, so we can expect Google to crawl them very infrequently. Compare that to the home page, which changes daily- I'd expect Google crawls it several times a day. (as an aside, that pattern matching effect is really common. When we were hunter/gatherers, the cost of reacting to a bush that moved like a tiger was effectively zero. But if you ignored an actual tiger, you became a meal.) tedder (talk) 14:02, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

Is Google doing it or are these folks doing something with Wikipedia data dumps, per here. Or is that the same process as you are describing? Somewhere I found a listing of when the latest data dump was done. It was fairly recently, I think. Valfontis (talk) 14:38, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

I don't know how it's actually done- I was making some guesses based on normal interweb crawling. tedder (talk) 15:14, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

Oregon Constitution

Hello, thank you for your courteous reply to your deletion of my addition. I ask that you determine for yourself that there are indeed spelling errors in the Oregon Constitution. Please notify me within 24 hours or I will be forced to take further action, 3:43pm3-22-12. Thank you sincerely.