User talk:Picapica/archive0606

Deutschlandsender

➨ ≡ЯΞDVΞRS≡ awards this Barnstar to Picapica for making great additions and clarifications to articles that benefit Wikipedia as a whole and me in particular!

Hi Picapica! How's your German? This article was originally translated from the German Wikipedia entry on the subject. I've got most of the info from there into this article, but the original article suffers from the same cultural imperialism that many English-language WP entries suffer from - an assumption of basic knowledge of the subject in all cultures.

The original article cites one source - Klais Arnold: Kalter Krieg im Äther. Der Deutschlandsender und die Westpropaganda der DDR. Münster: Lit, 2002. ISBN 3-8258-6180-5 - and I used a sadly long out of print English-language book for clarification, Burton Paulu's "Radio and Television Broadcasting on the European Continent" from the University of Minnesota Press, 1967. The latter is fascinating but contains very little about external services in general so was of limited use.

Everything else I could find for clarification was from a Google search and then translating. Google's results provide an awful lot of false hits, but some of them were gold dust. Please do try to find more - but the stream of reliable-looking websites in English looks dry and I've not been able to find a book for sale in English specifically about the subject (although there will be many books that mention the subject... but how does one find them?). If your German is worse than mine (this, apparantly, is possible ;) I'll be happy to try to help out on translations of anything that looks promising. ➨ ≡ЯΞDVΞRS≡ 22:24, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Danke vielmals, Redvers – I think that must be the first time anyone's awarded me a star since junior school! And I've been interested in "foreign radio" for just about as long a period (shall we say about half a century?).

I'm not so much short of source material as I have been of time to marshall it properly. Your translations of some of the radio articles from the German Wikipedia inspired me, however, to renew my investigations and start getting some of the information I'd previously collected into proper order. This weekend, I intend to start stub articles, at least, on the nine regional companies established in 1923-4 as well as the Überregional Deutsche Welle company which was responsible for the first Deutschlandsender.

Incidentally, the Deutschlandsender itself was not, strictly speaking, an "external service": that was the task of the Deutsche Kurzwellensender, or Weltrundfunksender Zeesen, which shared the site at Zeesen / Königs Wusterhausen.

Now that you mention it, I remember that book by Burton Paulu. I never owned it but frequently borrowed it from the public library (that was, of course, in the days when even small-town public libraries still had plenty of books in them!) -- Picapica 13:21, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Minister of State: Westminster system

Your comment on this was, I felt, entirely correct, so I've been bold and updated the article. Captainj 19:47, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, Captain. -- Picapica 09:19, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

WP:RFD

I noticed your nominations at WP:RFD and just thought I would let you know that in the future if you mistakenly create a page, and you are the only editor, you can use {{db-author|reason}} and an administrator will delete it for you. Happy editing! --Hetar 19:14, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

Thank you, Hetar. I knew there must be an easier way! I have to say, though, that at least for this editor (who said "old dog, new tricks"?), explanations about how to do things of this sort are not only very hard to find via the Community Portal but, even when you find (or think you have found) them, they so often tend read rather like those instruction manuals that only make sense to those who don't need them!!

I was originally looking for something on "speedy deletion", seeming to recall having come across that term somewhere in my Wikitravels. Trouble is, when you find Wikipedia:deletions the first thing that greets you is this text:

If you've come here having recently created a page that has just been marked to say it may soon be deleted, then please understand that we mean no harm in deleting your page...

Well, that put a bit of a stopper on things, as it wasn't at all why I'd come to the page. But, press on... Next, on the same page, I read:

If your article was not a test, you may have created a page that met the criteria for speedy deletion. If so, please see our guidelines on writing perfect stubs to see how you could improve the page to something that will not be instantly deletable.

But I want my page deleted! Next, it says:

For more information, please read our deletion policy.

Go there, but it doesn't look promisng from the first couple of paragraphs, so return to the Speedy deletions page and try clicking on "How to" on the right. This takes me to Template:AfD in 3 steps, which at least gives me some "what to do" instructions -- and that is why I followed them. Sorry if all of the foregoing just makes me sound like the techno-dullard I undoubtedly am -- but I thought it might be of some value for you to see an example of how some of the less computerate amongst us respond (or fail to respond) to the challenge of following a typical set of Wiki-instructions as currently presented... Picapica 20:48, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

No worries, the help system around here can be confusing at times. There is currently a lot of discussion about this going on at Help talk:Contents and at Wikipedia:Help Project. Oh, and thanks for the spelling tip! --Hetar 22:29, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

Rude forcing

Re your comment at Hinckley railway station (edit history): "Forcing thumbnail sizes is generally rude". I had no idea! Background to this notion? And what are the permissible exceptions to this generalization? Most thumbnails in Wp appear to me to be posted with an indicated size – whether "forced" or not I cannot tell. Or have I just led a particularly sheltered life? -- Picapica 23:38, 16 May 2006 (UTC) (doubtless often, but seldom knowingly, rude)

The background is that if you set a particular image size, you override the user's selection in the "Files" tab of their preferences. There are doubtless some circumstances where this is justified (e.g. where important details disappear below some size), but I don't think those include random photos. I found out about this from User talk:Tagishsimon#images and User talk:Our Phellap/2005#Images. Of course, it's possible that there's a policy, guideline, or informed consensus that I've missed, in which case feel free to ignore me. --bjh21 12:35, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

Hmm. Thanks for the explanation, bj. This is a change I didn't know about, either. It might be said that it is the technocrats who are being rude by quietly creating this very poorly advertised new "rule" (if such it be), and then squealing when it is broken. I find it saddening that the Wikipedia seems to be more and more driven by what I would call the "automatization freaks" (bot-masters are often the worst) who often seem to be far more interested in devising technological "solutions" (just because they are possible) than in the accuracy or style of the project's contents or – in particular – its openness to easy editing by non-techie contributors. <end rant> -- Picapica 14:33, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

Re:Tramway network

I have two other articles ready for translation, see my userpgage, (please). Myrtone@Picapica.com.au

And the magic word is...? -- Picapica 21:00, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

Well what is it? 'Please,' maybe. And what relevance does it have in this context? -- Myrtone@Picapica.com.au

You're close. The context is: you invited help; I gave it; your response looked to me like a straight "here's some more work for you to do". I know no-one's forced to contribute to the project; I do it because I want to. But -- "Call me old-fashioned", as Dame Edna would say -- "thanks" takes no longer to write than "please", which you did include in your original invitation, so I thought I was dealing with more than just a taskmaster. :-( -- Picapica 08:42, 30 May 2006 (UTC)