This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Hello. I saw you discussing some coding related to Wikipedia and thought you might want to get developer access if you don't already have it. You can find out more and request it on that page. Best wishes! Sumana Harihareswara, Wikimedia Foundation Engineering Community Manager 02:21, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
Hi RexxS, I've just written a few paragraphs in reply to queries about the forced shading of row headers. If you have anything further to add or other ideas, I think we'd all appreciate them. Thanks, Matthewedwards ( talk · contribs)
Hi RexxS, do you know of a good reference for definition of metres sea water and feet sea water? I want to write an article on them, and all I have is USN Diving Manual R6 Table 2.10. Google doesn't seem to help. Peter (Southwood) (talk): 10:12, 22 May 2012 (UTC)
Thank you for your courteous comments. I was going through a bad time and said some things I regret, but it was you and your allies that stopped me from editing; it wasn't worth fighting an improbable battle. I think that wikipedia is flawed, in that people have key interests, yours being medicine, and you will die to defend it. I believe in medicine, I study it, I just also believe in having an open mind and a balanced argument. Sometimes one editor can completely prevent a page from being unbiased (the LBGT parenting page springs to mind - a couple of years ago one editor commandeered the page for a very long time and it was extremely biased for a long period of time).
Javsav ( talk) 22:51, 22 May 2012 (UTC)javsav
at my successful RFA | |
Thank you, RexxS, for !voting at my successful RFA; I am humbled that you put your trust in me. I grant you this flower, which, if tended to properly, will grow to be the fruit of Wikipedia's labours. — Crisco 1492 ( talk) 11:33, 3 June 2012 (UTC) |
RexxS, first off, let me say that I appreciate the spirit of what you said, and am certain that your intentions were good. However, I do feel that your response on my page was too strong, especially given the chain of events. "Edit war" - hardly. Experienced or not, the other party did cross a line in suggesting vandalism; note that I did post on their page and I also attempted to make their material conform to standard encyclopedic practice. I feel that it is important to note that I have no particular interest in the content at all, and was merely dealing with overly promotional-sounding material that was repeatedly inserted. Again, I don't fault you for your intentions but do feel that in future a slightly different approach might be more appropriate. Cheers. -- Ckatz chat spy 19:09, 4 June 2012 (UTC)
It has been suggested by User:The Rambling Man that your opinion is sought on the accessibility of tables in List of chronometers on HMS Beagle. Would creating an untitled zero-width column which can be col-spanned when additional material is to be inserted solve the problem. Demonstration in my sandbox. Thanks for your help. Spinning Spark 10:57, 5 June 2012 (UTC)
Hi RexxS, hope you're well.
Just embarking on a brief peer review of Agatha, wife of Edward the Exile and saw a family tree, and it got me wondering how accessible it was. Does it read out nicely or is it a pig? No great rush, just a thought... (and thanks again for your input at FLC, particularly with the chronometers most recently...) The Rambling Man ( talk) 07:33, 7 June 2012 (UTC)
Monmouthpedia Barnstar | ||
This is a barnstar to say thanks for your work on MonmouthpediA both online and off, really appreciate all your help. Mrjohncummings ( talk) 15:49, 11 June 2012 (UTC) |
FYI: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ice Hockey/Archive52#Accessibility, Round 2. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:28, 15 June 2012 (UTC)
The Teamwork Barnstar | |
For your outstanding support and dedication in getting Yogo sapphire from a new article to DYK to GA to FA and FOUR. The team effort of the uncountable people involved in getting this unique article to FA is a textbook case of teamwork in article improvement, ie, what Wikipedia should be, not what it all too often is. I can never thank everyone enough. PumpkinSky talk 23:19, 20 June 2012 (UTC) |
Following up here on some things, partly to do with the WT:AC thread and partly on other matters.
Oh, and article improving, I sometimes make notes at work when I notice articles that have mistakes, and fix them when I get home, but sometimes I don't have the time or inclination even then, or it needs a bit of research. One example is Georg Andreas Böckler, which has different birth and death years (the en-wiki ones are more the years he was active) than in the German article, see de:Georg Andreas Böckler. I could leave a note on the talk page, but thought I might as well just mention it here and see what happens. I also thought the notability tags at Robert Wright (surgeon) were overdone. And there are huge numbers of biography pages out there (like that one) that have no talk page and no {{ WikiProject Biography}} on the talk pages, though that might in some ways be a good thing. There used to be people and bots around that made sure biographies had WikiProject Biography tags on the talk pages, but that seems to have stopped a long time ago. I would make a bot request about that, but last time I made a bot request it got archived with nothing done.
Weekends like this, I think I'll have time to catch up on stuff like that, but it never quite seems to work out that way. Endless amounts of fairly easy to moderate stuff to be done, but difficult to get into that mindset when you want to settle down and do something more substantial, or are putting off doing other things. Though thinking on that a bit more, I think the thing that annoys me most about some of the recent stuff is that with a whole encyclopedia out there to work on, why do some people get so caught up in the interpersonal stuff around here, or walk around with huge chips on their shoulders or points to prove about how unfair the system is (I'm talking in general about several editors here, not any single editor specifically, both currently at arbitration and outside that). Anyway, if you are serious about taking up that challenge, could it work as a system? WP:Collaboration Challenge? Hmm, maybe a better name is needed. I do have a long list of potential articles that I would happily suggest for article collaborations. I made a note in July 2011 that we didn't have an article on Joseph Oakland Hirschfelder, but that was created in January 2012. Maybe Gunnarea capensis? Carcharoth ( talk) 02:13, 4 June 2012 (UTC)
Part of what happens when we set up a civilised society is it allows people to become specialists. I don't need to know how to kill a chicken or raise crops or build a television set or drive a garbage truck. There's all kinds of people with all kinds of niches in a civilisation, particularly in an urban setting, that do those jobs on my behalf. We shouldn't all have to be generalists, because that precludes the depth of knowledge required to do the more subtle or technical or wildly creative things such as sequencing DNA or building bridges or making great art. And that's what Wikipedia could be like, too. Some people could be specialising in writing articles, and others in formatting the citations or developing the underlying mark-up or building and maintaining navboxes. It would be true collaborative editing, with various editors bringing different skills to the table.
Some of the rules we have on Wikipedia actually get in the way of collaborative editing, though. For example, we have a rule that the first primary contributor to an article gets to choose the citation style. Well, most of our core articles were already written long ago, and if we have a rule that we can't change the citation mark-up without permission of the original primary contributor, we have a problem. (Alternatively consensus can be obtained to change a particular article, by initiating a discussion on the talk page.) Because it means that we can't upgrade the mark-up when new and better ways to do things come along. The ownership of the article by someone without a technical mind-set will preclude introducing better implementation of the citations or other technical aspects of the piece. So that's a mindset that needs some re-thinking. -- Dianna ( talk) 20:52, 4 June 2012 (UTC)
Though it might all be a bit moot, as a TV programme I saw today speculated that civilisation is a bit of an evolutionary dead-end, and Nature was wrong to think that making apes smarter was going to lead anywhere. A bit doom-and-gloom, and a damning indictment of global economics being just a way to strip the planet of its resources and concentrate wealth in the hands of the oligarchs, and that, coupled with overpopulation is bad news unless science and technology can shift the paradigm and overcome all the problems that aren't really going away. The usually cheery stuff you get in such programmes. Carcharoth ( talk) 02:26, 5 June 2012 (UTC)
Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Dispute resolution noticeboard regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. The thread is " X-ray_computed_tomography". Thank you. -- Nenpog ( talk) 04:14, 26 June 2012 (UTC)
Hi, Mr. Sheen has been fettling John Horsefield with the finesse that is far too often not appreciated. He's mentioned you in this edit summary. I am assuming that the issue relates to accessibility, since that is one of your spheres of interest. Can you point me in a suitable direction for more information? I am not doubting him or you, merely seeking to further my knowledge. Thanks. - Sitush ( talk) 01:56, 26 June 2012 (UTC)
Definition lists are not a sensible way of marking up subheadings. The markup ;Notes produces this html:
<dl> <dt>Notes</dt> </dl>
which is a definition list. See
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/lists.html#h-10.3 . Although it may look like bold markup to a sighted reader, anybody using a non-visual agent will hear the start of a definition list, but no definition. We should not be making our text any more confusing for the visually-impaired than we have to, so I have reverted to using the wikimarkup for bold to delineate the headings. That at least is harmless to most screen readers. Ideally, however, the subheadings should be marked up as third-level headers (using ===) but I understand that some people dislike seeing them in the table table of contents. If there is no objection, I'd like to markup those subheaders as <h3>...</h3>
Now, can we get something sorted so that all the referenced videos are subtitled? <g> - Sitush ( talk) 01:02, 27 June 2012 (UTC)
How do you like today's good story (hidden message: "open mind"), you awesome Wikipedian of 12 November 2009 and 9 April 2012 ;) -- Gerda Arendt ( talk) 15:29, 30 June 2012 (UTC)
Hi Rexxs, Sorry to bother you. You have been recommended to my by GreatOrangePumpkin in relation to a small bit of formatting for an article which is currently in PR prior to an FLC listing. I have recieved a comment from GOP who states this:
I'm a bit confused with "and column lines to "!scope=col". " I have tried to do this but I'm struggling to format it correctly. I think I have managed to do ""!scope=row"" successfully and I have added the "plainrowheaders" successfully. It's just the "!scope=col" which I am having big problems with. Can you help? I would be most greatful. -- Cassianto Talk 21:31, 1 July 2012 (UTC)
Hey RexxS, I often see (and have done so myself) people using a semi-colon to produce a "heading" which therefore isn't indexed in the TOC on a page. Reading User:Malleus Fatuorum's talk page, it seems that this is sub-optimal for screen readers. Can you elucidate for me? If it is a problem, then I'll make sure we don't use that approach in future in FLs! Hope you're well. The Rambling Man ( talk) 18:51, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
If anybody is still confused, have a look at
The Coral Island. It contains a Level 2 References section which is subdivided into Notes, Citations and Bibliography. I could mark up those subheadings as level 3 headings like
this version in my user space. A lot of folks don't want those showing up in the table of contents, so I could limit the TOC display using {{
TOC limit|2}}
. You can see how that works in
this version. Unfortunately, an editor couldn't then split up any of the existing sections into subsections, and have the subheadings show up in the TOC – as adding subsections to the Plot summary illustrates in
this version. So we might use bold for those subheadings as a 'least worst' solution for the visually impaired. As mon cher ami Dodoïste remarked to me once, "We mustn't let the perfect become the enemy of the good." --
RexxS (
talk)
22:56, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
{{
TOC limit|2}}
instead of bold? Cheers,
Dodoïste (
talk)
23:21, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
Hi, I hope you're doing well. As for me, starting september 2012 I should study occupational therapy if all goes well. I'm all fired up! :-)
Now to the point. I need as much advice as I can, on a field you're more experienced than me. Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Accessibility#Changes_in_thumbnail_alt_text. Thank god some developers are dedicating their time to accessibility. Before writing something at bugzilla, I want to be sure we agree on what should be done. And I want to understand what's being changed, because I currently feel very confused by PHP and MediaWiki coding.
In short: RexxS superhero please rescue me! I'm a young maiden living in a castle nerd boy living in a far far away land.
Dodoïste (
talk)
23:43, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Hello. I saw you discussing some coding related to Wikipedia and thought you might want to get developer access if you don't already have it. You can find out more and request it on that page. Best wishes! Sumana Harihareswara, Wikimedia Foundation Engineering Community Manager 02:21, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
Hi RexxS, I've just written a few paragraphs in reply to queries about the forced shading of row headers. If you have anything further to add or other ideas, I think we'd all appreciate them. Thanks, Matthewedwards ( talk · contribs)
Hi RexxS, do you know of a good reference for definition of metres sea water and feet sea water? I want to write an article on them, and all I have is USN Diving Manual R6 Table 2.10. Google doesn't seem to help. Peter (Southwood) (talk): 10:12, 22 May 2012 (UTC)
Thank you for your courteous comments. I was going through a bad time and said some things I regret, but it was you and your allies that stopped me from editing; it wasn't worth fighting an improbable battle. I think that wikipedia is flawed, in that people have key interests, yours being medicine, and you will die to defend it. I believe in medicine, I study it, I just also believe in having an open mind and a balanced argument. Sometimes one editor can completely prevent a page from being unbiased (the LBGT parenting page springs to mind - a couple of years ago one editor commandeered the page for a very long time and it was extremely biased for a long period of time).
Javsav ( talk) 22:51, 22 May 2012 (UTC)javsav
at my successful RFA | |
Thank you, RexxS, for !voting at my successful RFA; I am humbled that you put your trust in me. I grant you this flower, which, if tended to properly, will grow to be the fruit of Wikipedia's labours. — Crisco 1492 ( talk) 11:33, 3 June 2012 (UTC) |
RexxS, first off, let me say that I appreciate the spirit of what you said, and am certain that your intentions were good. However, I do feel that your response on my page was too strong, especially given the chain of events. "Edit war" - hardly. Experienced or not, the other party did cross a line in suggesting vandalism; note that I did post on their page and I also attempted to make their material conform to standard encyclopedic practice. I feel that it is important to note that I have no particular interest in the content at all, and was merely dealing with overly promotional-sounding material that was repeatedly inserted. Again, I don't fault you for your intentions but do feel that in future a slightly different approach might be more appropriate. Cheers. -- Ckatz chat spy 19:09, 4 June 2012 (UTC)
It has been suggested by User:The Rambling Man that your opinion is sought on the accessibility of tables in List of chronometers on HMS Beagle. Would creating an untitled zero-width column which can be col-spanned when additional material is to be inserted solve the problem. Demonstration in my sandbox. Thanks for your help. Spinning Spark 10:57, 5 June 2012 (UTC)
Hi RexxS, hope you're well.
Just embarking on a brief peer review of Agatha, wife of Edward the Exile and saw a family tree, and it got me wondering how accessible it was. Does it read out nicely or is it a pig? No great rush, just a thought... (and thanks again for your input at FLC, particularly with the chronometers most recently...) The Rambling Man ( talk) 07:33, 7 June 2012 (UTC)
Monmouthpedia Barnstar | ||
This is a barnstar to say thanks for your work on MonmouthpediA both online and off, really appreciate all your help. Mrjohncummings ( talk) 15:49, 11 June 2012 (UTC) |
FYI: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ice Hockey/Archive52#Accessibility, Round 2. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:28, 15 June 2012 (UTC)
The Teamwork Barnstar | |
For your outstanding support and dedication in getting Yogo sapphire from a new article to DYK to GA to FA and FOUR. The team effort of the uncountable people involved in getting this unique article to FA is a textbook case of teamwork in article improvement, ie, what Wikipedia should be, not what it all too often is. I can never thank everyone enough. PumpkinSky talk 23:19, 20 June 2012 (UTC) |
Following up here on some things, partly to do with the WT:AC thread and partly on other matters.
Oh, and article improving, I sometimes make notes at work when I notice articles that have mistakes, and fix them when I get home, but sometimes I don't have the time or inclination even then, or it needs a bit of research. One example is Georg Andreas Böckler, which has different birth and death years (the en-wiki ones are more the years he was active) than in the German article, see de:Georg Andreas Böckler. I could leave a note on the talk page, but thought I might as well just mention it here and see what happens. I also thought the notability tags at Robert Wright (surgeon) were overdone. And there are huge numbers of biography pages out there (like that one) that have no talk page and no {{ WikiProject Biography}} on the talk pages, though that might in some ways be a good thing. There used to be people and bots around that made sure biographies had WikiProject Biography tags on the talk pages, but that seems to have stopped a long time ago. I would make a bot request about that, but last time I made a bot request it got archived with nothing done.
Weekends like this, I think I'll have time to catch up on stuff like that, but it never quite seems to work out that way. Endless amounts of fairly easy to moderate stuff to be done, but difficult to get into that mindset when you want to settle down and do something more substantial, or are putting off doing other things. Though thinking on that a bit more, I think the thing that annoys me most about some of the recent stuff is that with a whole encyclopedia out there to work on, why do some people get so caught up in the interpersonal stuff around here, or walk around with huge chips on their shoulders or points to prove about how unfair the system is (I'm talking in general about several editors here, not any single editor specifically, both currently at arbitration and outside that). Anyway, if you are serious about taking up that challenge, could it work as a system? WP:Collaboration Challenge? Hmm, maybe a better name is needed. I do have a long list of potential articles that I would happily suggest for article collaborations. I made a note in July 2011 that we didn't have an article on Joseph Oakland Hirschfelder, but that was created in January 2012. Maybe Gunnarea capensis? Carcharoth ( talk) 02:13, 4 June 2012 (UTC)
Part of what happens when we set up a civilised society is it allows people to become specialists. I don't need to know how to kill a chicken or raise crops or build a television set or drive a garbage truck. There's all kinds of people with all kinds of niches in a civilisation, particularly in an urban setting, that do those jobs on my behalf. We shouldn't all have to be generalists, because that precludes the depth of knowledge required to do the more subtle or technical or wildly creative things such as sequencing DNA or building bridges or making great art. And that's what Wikipedia could be like, too. Some people could be specialising in writing articles, and others in formatting the citations or developing the underlying mark-up or building and maintaining navboxes. It would be true collaborative editing, with various editors bringing different skills to the table.
Some of the rules we have on Wikipedia actually get in the way of collaborative editing, though. For example, we have a rule that the first primary contributor to an article gets to choose the citation style. Well, most of our core articles were already written long ago, and if we have a rule that we can't change the citation mark-up without permission of the original primary contributor, we have a problem. (Alternatively consensus can be obtained to change a particular article, by initiating a discussion on the talk page.) Because it means that we can't upgrade the mark-up when new and better ways to do things come along. The ownership of the article by someone without a technical mind-set will preclude introducing better implementation of the citations or other technical aspects of the piece. So that's a mindset that needs some re-thinking. -- Dianna ( talk) 20:52, 4 June 2012 (UTC)
Though it might all be a bit moot, as a TV programme I saw today speculated that civilisation is a bit of an evolutionary dead-end, and Nature was wrong to think that making apes smarter was going to lead anywhere. A bit doom-and-gloom, and a damning indictment of global economics being just a way to strip the planet of its resources and concentrate wealth in the hands of the oligarchs, and that, coupled with overpopulation is bad news unless science and technology can shift the paradigm and overcome all the problems that aren't really going away. The usually cheery stuff you get in such programmes. Carcharoth ( talk) 02:26, 5 June 2012 (UTC)
Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that there is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Dispute resolution noticeboard regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. The thread is " X-ray_computed_tomography". Thank you. -- Nenpog ( talk) 04:14, 26 June 2012 (UTC)
Hi, Mr. Sheen has been fettling John Horsefield with the finesse that is far too often not appreciated. He's mentioned you in this edit summary. I am assuming that the issue relates to accessibility, since that is one of your spheres of interest. Can you point me in a suitable direction for more information? I am not doubting him or you, merely seeking to further my knowledge. Thanks. - Sitush ( talk) 01:56, 26 June 2012 (UTC)
Definition lists are not a sensible way of marking up subheadings. The markup ;Notes produces this html:
<dl> <dt>Notes</dt> </dl>
which is a definition list. See
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/lists.html#h-10.3 . Although it may look like bold markup to a sighted reader, anybody using a non-visual agent will hear the start of a definition list, but no definition. We should not be making our text any more confusing for the visually-impaired than we have to, so I have reverted to using the wikimarkup for bold to delineate the headings. That at least is harmless to most screen readers. Ideally, however, the subheadings should be marked up as third-level headers (using ===) but I understand that some people dislike seeing them in the table table of contents. If there is no objection, I'd like to markup those subheaders as <h3>...</h3>
Now, can we get something sorted so that all the referenced videos are subtitled? <g> - Sitush ( talk) 01:02, 27 June 2012 (UTC)
How do you like today's good story (hidden message: "open mind"), you awesome Wikipedian of 12 November 2009 and 9 April 2012 ;) -- Gerda Arendt ( talk) 15:29, 30 June 2012 (UTC)
Hi Rexxs, Sorry to bother you. You have been recommended to my by GreatOrangePumpkin in relation to a small bit of formatting for an article which is currently in PR prior to an FLC listing. I have recieved a comment from GOP who states this:
I'm a bit confused with "and column lines to "!scope=col". " I have tried to do this but I'm struggling to format it correctly. I think I have managed to do ""!scope=row"" successfully and I have added the "plainrowheaders" successfully. It's just the "!scope=col" which I am having big problems with. Can you help? I would be most greatful. -- Cassianto Talk 21:31, 1 July 2012 (UTC)
Hey RexxS, I often see (and have done so myself) people using a semi-colon to produce a "heading" which therefore isn't indexed in the TOC on a page. Reading User:Malleus Fatuorum's talk page, it seems that this is sub-optimal for screen readers. Can you elucidate for me? If it is a problem, then I'll make sure we don't use that approach in future in FLs! Hope you're well. The Rambling Man ( talk) 18:51, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
If anybody is still confused, have a look at
The Coral Island. It contains a Level 2 References section which is subdivided into Notes, Citations and Bibliography. I could mark up those subheadings as level 3 headings like
this version in my user space. A lot of folks don't want those showing up in the table of contents, so I could limit the TOC display using {{
TOC limit|2}}
. You can see how that works in
this version. Unfortunately, an editor couldn't then split up any of the existing sections into subsections, and have the subheadings show up in the TOC – as adding subsections to the Plot summary illustrates in
this version. So we might use bold for those subheadings as a 'least worst' solution for the visually impaired. As mon cher ami Dodoïste remarked to me once, "We mustn't let the perfect become the enemy of the good." --
RexxS (
talk)
22:56, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
{{
TOC limit|2}}
instead of bold? Cheers,
Dodoïste (
talk)
23:21, 3 July 2012 (UTC)
Hi, I hope you're doing well. As for me, starting september 2012 I should study occupational therapy if all goes well. I'm all fired up! :-)
Now to the point. I need as much advice as I can, on a field you're more experienced than me. Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Accessibility#Changes_in_thumbnail_alt_text. Thank god some developers are dedicating their time to accessibility. Before writing something at bugzilla, I want to be sure we agree on what should be done. And I want to understand what's being changed, because I currently feel very confused by PHP and MediaWiki coding.
In short: RexxS superhero please rescue me! I'm a young maiden living in a castle nerd boy living in a far far away land.
Dodoïste (
talk)
23:43, 3 July 2012 (UTC)