User talk:Doktorbuk/Archive4

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European Parliament constituencies

Doktorbuk, hi! I was archiving my talk page when I noticed that you'd left a message there that I hadn't replied to (apologies for the oversight). The answer is "yes, I do approve": the more people add detail to the constituencies, the quicker they'll be done. Thank you for your help, regards, Anameofmyveryown (talk) 23:57, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Sheffield South East (UK Parliament constituency)

Hallo, Why not just create the new page yourself? It's dead easy, honest, and someone described how to do it further up the thread about BarnsleyE. (In a nutshell: Click on the title which is redirected. When you get to the wrong article, click on the line where it says "redirected from Sheffield South East" (or whatever). That gets you to the state where you're looking at the "article" which is just a redirect. Then hit the edit tab, and go ahead.) Just go for it - and if it gets in a muddle someone can help unpick it afterwards. Cheers, PamD (talk) 18:57, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Wimbledon Parliamentary constituency

Hi there, I partially undid your change to the Wimbledon Parliamentary constituency page - UKpolling report is un-referenced (and occasionally wrong!) and I think better to link to the official pages of each candidate for the next election. As it happens, I am originally from Preston, and now involved with the Liberal Democrats in Merton. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.152.233.11 (talk) 16:02, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Happy Birthday!

I got a cake for you!

Happy Brithday! Tiddly-Tom 06:46, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Here's to you on your birthday, Doktorbuk/Archive4! From the Wikipedia Birthday Committee! Have a great day!

--SMS Talk 16:23, 13 March 2008 (UTC)


Happy Birthday from the Birthday Committee

Wishing Doktorbuk a very happy birthday on behalf of the Wikipedia Birthday Committee!

Don't forget to save us all a piece of cake!

--Nadir D Steinmetz 19:21, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Constituency maps

Sorry been busy at work during the Easter period. You may have found these yourself but I done a quick search and found their own ward map here on the Preston Council site here. I also use this site a lot, it covers the whole country, you can see all the names and boundaries of many different units by ticking the different boxes.

I tend to look closely at existing maps like these and use for reference to draw my own in Microsoft Paint, Preston Council's own map looks OK to use as reference for this, I might try to draw a map for you if I have enough time. Thank you by the way I am pleased someone is interested in my contributions.

I made this, it shows the wards of Preston, and is ready to be coloured however you want, I'm not sure what the constituencies are but I looked at the map of wards on the Preston website, that had bold lines and thin lines but didn't explain why.

Carlwev (talk) 15:49, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

Emergent Party

A proposed deletion template has been added to the article Emergent Party, suggesting that it be deleted according to the proposed deletion process. All contributions are appreciated, but this article may not satisfy Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and the deletion notice should explain why (see also "What Wikipedia is not" and Wikipedia's deletion policy). You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{dated prod}} notice, but please explain why you disagree with the proposed deletion in your edit summary or on its talk page.

Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised because even though removing the deletion notice will prevent deletion through the proposed deletion process, the article may still be deleted if it matches any of the speedy deletion criteria or it can be sent to Articles for Deletion, where it may be deleted if consensus to delete is reached. Do you want to opt out of receiving this notice? BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:40, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Rock the vote 2008-05-11

Thank you for your contributions to the discussion on Talk:Political groups of the European Parliament. You may wish to take part in the vote here if you have not already done so. Regards, Anameofmyveryown (talk) 14:06, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

the links to BBC mentioing Vietnam

Hi, you last edit of adding the link didn't seem to work (it broke the section), so i reverted it. Can you do that again if you still stick by your argument? Thanks (Cowboybebop98 (talk) 21:50, 12 May 2008 (UTC))

Thx

Thx for u help in Talk:2008 Sichuan earthquake, give me so much confident. Maybe u know I'm a jackaroo in English wikipedia, and i know my English may not good enough (I only get 5.5 in IELTS - -)maybe he is right ,i should stop my work in English Wikipedia, my edits are not helpful.--Prinz.W (talk) 18:39, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Earthquake split proposal

Thanks for your comments regarding the above; if I've interpreted your views correctly, you won't then disapprove of my idea mentioned in 2008 Sichuan earthquake#Proposed split (Reactions to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake) to "move both "International Reaction" AND "Foreign and domestic aid" into a 'see also' sub-article called "Reactions to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake" ?

I agree there should be a para or two in the main article as a summary, but I'm leaving that for later - it's hard to write such things until the situation stabilizes a bit.

I particularly want to chop it into 'see also' as I think it's detracting from the quality of this otherwise reasonably good article (good, as far as possible, with such a 'moving target').

--  Chzz  ►  21:02, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Reactions to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake

You are invited to participate in in the discussion at Wikipedia:Deletion review#Reactions to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, in which I have quoted you for thorough elaboration.   — C M B J   23:36, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

A closely related discussion is now underway at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/International response to Hurricane Katrina.   — C M B J   10:21, 22 May 2008 (UTC)


Proposed deletion of Money Reform Party

A proposed deletion template has been added to the article Money Reform Party, suggesting that it be deleted according to the proposed deletion process. All contributions are appreciated, but this article may not satisfy Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and the deletion notice should explain why (see also "What Wikipedia is not" and Wikipedia's deletion policy). You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{dated prod}} notice, but please explain why you disagree with the proposed deletion in your edit summary or on its talk page.

Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised because even though removing the deletion notice will prevent deletion through the proposed deletion process, the article may still be deleted if it matches any of the speedy deletion criteria or it can be sent to Articles for Deletion, where it may be deleted if consensus to delete is reached. Do you want to opt out of receiving this notice? Terraxos (talk) 01:29, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the note about this. I agree with you and with the editor who placed the prod tag - there are no independent sources available and no real evidence of notability. Incidentally, have you seen Wikipedia:WikiProject Political Parties? It's not really got started yet, but it may be of interest to you. Warofdreams talk 16:55, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

Proposed policy for notability of political parties

Thanks for letting me know. I have added my comments at User talk:Doktorbuk/pp. Terraxos (talk) 19:51, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Azerbaijan

Hi. The reason why is because it is up to human editors like ourselves to sort out incorrect links initially. We are dabbing any links which lead to wrong articles like this, As for how to dab articles which account to multiple places in each country, this will have to be worked out ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ $1,000,000? 10:49, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Your comments about FritzpollBot - some misunderstanding?

Ummm...you have now pointed out both at the Village Pump and on my talk page examples of pages pointing to the wrong locations, or being of inferior content. Unfortunately, these were not created by the bot. In fact, beyond the 100 articles created by the bot in its trial (and the bot ignores all existing articles, so the existing Afghan pages would not be affected), the bot hasn't created any articles. This means that the Azerbaijan articles are nothing to do with me, and you really need to check the page history of these articles before bandying around accusations of inaccuracy Fritzpoll (talk) 11:35, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Dr. Buk, the whole community had their opportunity to xpress their concern at the Bot request for approval. Of which they didn't, so it got approved anyway. But then, it got added to the watchlist and some people began making irrelevant points about how no one would touch these articles (myself and Blofeld already have begun) or that they only have a population of 3 (remember overpopulation?) These can be expanded using fallingrain (but not if it is only present). Also, some of the worst arguments I've seen (not yours) is that, de facto, the English wikipedia should show the information relevant to English speakers with computers. That, and the fact that most of the opposers aren't content editors, is the ignorance of the discussion. I'm an Editorofthewiki[citation needed] 22:31, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

FritzpollBot Discussion - breaking away from Village Pump for the moment

Hi Doktorbuk - thanks for the message at the pump: I do indeed care about the project, and I am certain that you do as well. The backlog issue is an interesting semi-philosophical question in a way: after all, with so much work to do on existing articles, should we allow any new ones to be created? That is, not, however, your salient point - I think to answer your concerns more directly, I would have to say that if the backlogs exist at present, it is because editors aren't doing the work. If the bot uses up the time of editors in creating articles, checking the data, etc. it isn't detracting from the backlogs, because the nature of the backlogs existence means that these editors weren't working on them to begin with.

I would personally love the Village Pump thing to conclude so that I can set things rolling, and then get back to some decent editing. I want to work at cleaning up articles, as I said at my recent RfA, but am distracted at present trying to do this - purely because it is a temporary distraction. My actual work with the bot will be intermittant under the proposals, as I will just have days where I am waiting for sources, waiting for approval, etc. And then the coding for a specific country will take less than a day - the first version of the bot took me 3 hours to write, and I have worked out many more sophisticated means of making it work now.

What we don't want, as I hope we can both agree on, is that this bot increases the load at the backlogs. To that end, there have already been some suggestions that we can implement, such as placing the bot's articles into a separate category for things like orphaned articles whilst the human editors actually get them linked into "the web" that is Wikipedia. I am hopeful that this process can engage some of our editors more firmly into Wikipedia - the bot's lifetime is inherently finite as there are only so many places that it will be called upon to create, after which it's usefulness will be at an end - and afterwards, this sense of engagement may translate into improvements elsewhere. Still, that is rather speculative!

To summarise - I do understand your position on the bot. No, it's not going to go insane and create the millions of articles that it could theoretically create, but it is important to keep human editors engaged in the process. Oddly, this was always the intention - even in the original Bot Request for Approval, human editors were going to be involved in checking the output, verifying data, etc. I think there was a lot of panic about it, and the resulting negative reaction both to proponents such as me, and likewise opponents such as yourself was at times appalling in its ferocity. What I hope we've achieved here is at least a civil discussion, despite not necessarily agreeing. Anyway, that's quite an essay I've dumped on your page! Best wishes Fritzpoll (talk) 15:21, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Whilst I agree that wikipedia isn't a crystal ball; not sure on removing the announced (but not nominated as yet) "candidates" in the Henley by-election. If only because I've seen the damnable BNP out and about canvassing already. The candidate list has been taken from the ukpollingreport site; long before the writ even arrived with the council; so if we were following your argument that because they're not listed on the SODCC web site then no-one would have been there at all. Does that make sense? Maybe we should have worded it as something like UKIP intends to stand, or Labour intends to stand etc. Not much point in rolling back though; as the nominations close today anyway, so we'll have full list soon! --Blowdart | talk 12:08, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Political parties

The page is in my watchlist and I control it every day, but thank you for informing me. The reason why I did not comment the changes is simply that the more the discussion goes on I am more convinced on the fact that we don't need rules for political parties at all. --Checco (talk) 12:20, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Preston

you're welcome. I'm fairly experienced in editing location articles. Certainly I'm interested in improving their readability. I note on your user page you mention conflict of interest. the policy is here WP:COI , I appreciate your honesty in declaring your affiliations, something most editors never do! cheers Michellecrisp (talk) 11:07, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

Hey

No problem. :) --WoohookittyWoohoo! 16:43, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Political parties notability proposal

Hi - discussion on the proposal seems to have come to a general consensus. Are you planning to move forward with it? If so, I'd suggest moving it to Wikipedia:Notability (political parties), adding it to {{Notabilityguide}}, and marking it as a proposal in the same manner as the other proposed notability guidelines in order than it gets a wider audience. Warofdreams talk 19:30, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

UKIP in the EP

DoctorBuk, hi! I've got an interesting problem and, given that you are British and active in WP:POLITICS, I wonder if you could help me. I'm attempting to rewrite the article on IND/DEM (the Eurosceptic group in the European parliament). Pursuant to that and other issues, I have presented Hix's data (see Hix page 32) on the positioning of the EP groups as a Hix-Lord diagram of the EP for the first half of the Sixth Parliament. The diagram is a political compass, and each square on the diagram is the position of a political group in the Parliament. The diagram looks like this:

Vertical axis is europhilia: 0% = anti-EU, 100% = pro-EU. Horizontal axis is economic left-right spectrum: 0% = extreme left, 100% = extreme right.

So far so good, but it's thrown up an anomaly which I don't know how to cope with. We know that IND/DEM are a coalition between the pro-EU Eurosceptics (the "June" parties) and the anti-EU eurosceptics (UKIP). Unsurprisingly, Hix's analysis of roll-call data indicates that IND/DEM should be represented using two (orange) squares: one for a centrist europhobe subgroup, another for a euroneutral very-right-wing subgroup. Surprisingly, the euroneutral very-right-wing subgroup appears to be UKIP (at least according to their roll-call votes: again, see Hix page 33). This is surprising because UKIP are ferociously eurosceptic in their speeches. I am at a loss to explain this. Possible explanations include:

  • IND/DEM are under the 40 seat threshold and so cannot initiate a motion for resolution to express its Euroscepticism (see this), and/or
  • UKIP's Euroscepticism cannot find expression in the nuts-and-bolts discussions of the EP, and/or
  • UKIP's become acclimatised (see this for accusations of same).

My quandary is this:

  • If I put in the possible explanations for this, then that's WP:OR on my part.
  • If I put in something that says "...the data covers a period before Lega Nord and the League of Polish Families left IND/DEM, and that may account for the split...", then that's misleading on my part.
  • If I put in something that says "Surprisingly, the euroneutral very-right-wing subgroup appears to be UKIP: the reasons for this are unknown." and let it go at that, then that's my ass covered but it's rather uninformative.

Any ideas? Anameofmyveryown (talk) 21:04, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for your reply on my talk page. Dealing with your points in order:
  • "I guess the small membership of IND/DEM and UKIP's rather wayward conservatism has skewed the results." - Hix/Noury's doodad wasn't a sample-based analysis (in which the characteristics of a sample are used to make inferences about a wider population), it was a population analysis (the whole population data is considered): specifically, the tens of thousands of MEP roll-call votes (seven hundred-odd MEPs, lots of plenary debates...do the math). UKIP couldn't skew the figures: they were the figures (as was every other MEP who voted).
  • "I think, if you can manually amend the image," - Er, no: deconvolving the data was uncontroversial but even that gave me the heebie-jeebies; further amending the data manually to put spots where people think they should be is the very def'n of OR and bad, bad, bad. Right now, I've got a defensible diagram with academic backing and I'm keen to keep it that way, even if it does leave me with a UKIP-sized headache.
  • "Very interesting links, though, I may study that further!" - Tell me about it :-). One of my consistent headaches in this gig is the lack of pan-European definitions of political terms, so academic analysis that says "this party is left-wing" or "this party is right-wing" is gold dust: otherwise we're just left with newspaper articles, the party's own self-identification and that of its opponents, and it's like trying to weigh fog. I assume you've encountered similar problems within your WP:POLITICS purview: do you know of any other academic sources characterising parties en-masse (this party is centrist, this party is conservative, this party is social-democrat, this party is christian-democrat, and so on)? It'd come in handy for lots of parties.
Regards, Anameofmyveryown (talk) 00:07, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Opinion Polling Article

Sorry, but I'm not sure what you mean that Labour is ahead month by month. Could you clarify? I've tried to make it clear that the Conservatives are in the lead by making the 'Lead' box at the end blue (or red when Labour were in the lead). Spiritofsussex (talk) 12:32, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

I didn't want to make this part of the actual discussion, because I'm trying not to get too heavily involved in that debate, but one thing I'm just really confused about is this use of the term "Original Research" for tallying qualifying goals. Pardon my saying so, I assure you that this is in good faith, but I truly can't see how this can be seen as OR, short of a complete misunderstanding of what OR is. WP:OR is about preventing people from using Wikipedia to diseminate their views and analysis where it otherwise wouldn't be accepted - for instance, scientific theories or essays on human psychology. In the real world, to have such a paper accepted as a viable theory, it has to be approved by one or several doctors of the same field, so WP:OR is about preventing people from using the open nature of this Wiki to dupe people into believing their work is legitimate by passing it off here, where noone checks the veracity or source of a statement. As I noted earlier in the same UEFA Cup debate, WP:OR states that OR is:

...unpublished facts, arguments, speculation, and ideas; and any unpublished analysis or synthesis of published material that serves to advance a position. This means that Wikipedia is not the place to publish your own opinions, experiences, or arguments...

A list of goalscorers is not an argument, speculation or an idea, it is not an analysis or a synthesis to advance a position. It is a collection of facts, and published facts at that. I'm sorry if I came over the wrong way, I didn't mean it, but I would like to know how WP:OR could come into this debate; I just can't see how this subject could possibly be OR. Falastur2 (talk) 22:06, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

I understand, thanks. However, I still find myself disagreeing. The nature of Original Research is that it must be actual research - in fact, I think the term was poorly-chosen, as I think "Original Research" is perhaps too ambiguous or confusable. It's about actual studies and theorems, not just any old research. If we applied your logic, then surely we should have to delete most of what is seen here, for most of what Wikipedia has can't be found compiled in one article like it can here. If that counts as original research, then so do the lists of transfers for each team and the squadlist stats, because not all teams publish those, and those who do rarely compile them in one place. Similarly, most all of the information on various competitions here hasn't been compiled anywhere before. If they were OR, we would be deleting most of Wikipedia's articles. But it's not important - as WP:OR states, and I quoted above, OR pertains to arguments and speculation, not a column of goalscorers - that's published fact, reorganised in one place, which doesn't violate OR...or even really touch upon it. Falastur2 (talk) 23:48, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

Invitation