Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Ohconfucius (talk | contribs) at 16:50, 14 February 2009 (→Extra! Extra! Read all bout it!). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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Are you kidding me?

"no source provided to show that the Southern Baptist Convention is either American or conservative."

FYI, that's the most hilarious sentence I've read in quite some time. TAway (talk) 00:20, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

TRANSFORMER HISTORY

Transformers didn't exist before 1885. There were only colis. In 1885, the ZBD was first structure what was called as tranformer. The basic priciple of tranformers (the second point of the transformer article) regards and works only for closed core coils. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Celebration1981 (talk • contribs) 18:52, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

I suggest the person who wrote the preceding comment lacks sufficient mastery of the English language to be editing technical Misplaced Pages articles. I just don't understand the point of the comment. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 21:41, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

Creating Gregorian/Julian mixups

The current autoformatting has an issue with Gregorian/Julian date mixups. So I said that an autoformatting specification should include:

• Autoformatting shall not reformat any date into the form yyyy-mm-dd
• Autoformatting shall not reformat any date from the form yyyy-mm-dd

However, some people think 'son of autoformatting' should do this. Unless this issue is sorted out at the specification stage, we are going to be presented with a fait accompli by the programmers that think it is nice to have. I think you are the most eloquent on this issue. Can you comment at Misplaced Pages talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)/Specification for 'son of autoformatting' please?

verifying microformats

You were the person asking about hot to verify the microformats, correct? Did you get Operator working ok? -J JMesserly (talk) 00:45, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

I didn't see the comment about Operator; what is it? --Gerry Ashton (talk) 01:07, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

It is a toolbar for Firefox that will display icons if microformat data is available. If you don't have firefox, it is free and works fine. Add Firefox's free Operator toolbar, then visit an article like Battle of Chaeronea (338 BC) and click on find with google maps. -J JMesserly (talk) 17:05, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Do you know of a roman republican calendar converter? It's obvious to me that I messed up on the gregorian version of the death date for Augustus. -J JMesserly (talk)

To illustrate the problems with the Roman Republican calendar, let me quote some passages from Blackburn & Leofranc Holford-Strevens, The Oxford Companion to the Year, Oxford University Press, (1999, reprinted with corrections 2003), pp.669–670.

...yeilding a regular year of 355 days; .... Every so often a board of priests known as pontifices (who were active politicians, and often behaved accordingly) would curtail February at the 23rd or 24th and insert an extra month ... of 27days to give a year of 377 or 378 days.

... The discrepancy between the calendar and the solar year might have been made up with 11 intercalations in every 24 years, but regularity was sacrificed to political convenience and superstition. In particular, the supposed ill luck attaching to intercalation (as in many other cultures) apparently caused it to be suppressed during the Second Punic War (218–201 BC), when Rome was fighting for her life; at all events, in 190 BC the solar eclipse that according to modern astronomers fell on 14 March was recorded on a.d. III Non. Sept., or 3 September ...

In short, there is no hope of converting Roman Republican calendar dates with a bot; only dates that fall near a recorded astronomical phenomenon, or are also dated in a better preserved calendar, can be accurately converted.

As for the Julian calendar, the rules set up by Julius Caesar were not properly followed between 45 BC and 8 BC; the general idea is that leap years were observed every three years rather than every 4 years because of the Roman's habit of describing what we would call a three year period as 4 years (for example, the period 2005–2008 would be counted by a roman as 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, or 4 years). The records about which years were or were not leap years are contradictory, so even Julian calendar dates are uncertain by a few days from 45 BC through 8 BC.

Maybe the best thing to do is just not process any date before January 1, 9 BC. Of course, it still remains essentially impossible for a bot to tell if a date is intended to be Gregorian or Julian. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 21:06, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

I am also of the school of not second guessing contributors. Let's evaluate the cost benefit of sometimes bad gueses vs. doing no guesses. Note that all of this guess work only impacts the microformat data emitted, and there are currently no historical apps that can use this data anyway. The text in[REDACTED] text shows a Roman civic calendar date (expressed in the second parameter). For the first parameter, the bot made a calculation and rounded up to a month as we discussed before with Augustus birthday but the date was on a boundary, and the estimate winds up in the wrong month, so the wrong value is placed in the first parameter. Ok, now in 2015, the first history sites with animated historical sites start showing up leveraging all the historical data that[REDACTED] is exposing. Joe Roman History buff clicks on a[REDACTED] article button to go to see that time in history at the google time machine site and is plunked in the wrong month. Fine, he goes back to[REDACTED] and fixes it himself. So the bad data is fixable, and now we have people motivated in making the refinements. Sure we can limit the scope of bot runs. We will anyway because some wikiprojects are going to flat out ban them when they are proposed on general principle. That's ok. So I don't really see much harm in not doing dates before 9BC, but not even trying to make best guesses on Julian means we won't be emitting a huge number of dates, because realistically, we are back at the chicken egg problem and no users are going to go to the trouble of using a microformats template unless they can see the benefit. -J JMesserly (talk) 22:19, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

More recent history has a greater number of dates (as opposed to vague indications of when something happened). There will be a substantial number of dates between the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar in Rome in 1583 and its adoption elsewhere, which I believe stretched out to about 1920. Since this is the English Misplaced Pages, I would expect an emphasis in articles about English-speaking people and countries; the British Empire adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752. A great many errors would be introduced by processing articles about affairs in English-speaking countries between 1583 and 1752. I think a better attitude would be, lets let the history buffs of 2015 get motivated by the annoying gap in microformat dates between 1583 and 1752, rahter than motivating them by telling lots of lies and geting them so furious with us that they run around fixing dates. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 22:32, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

That's a reasonable position. Another fact in support of what you say is that we have far higher volumes of multimedia material for the more recent period. I can go along with your POV on this. -J JMesserly (talk) 23:09, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Just to clarify, are you ok with using {{start-date}} or something comparable for non gregorian dates (eg the example in the docs for a julian date? Or do you oppose any microformat emission of Julian dates- on the general principle of the objection that the dates are in ISO8601 format which is gregorian calendar? If so, then what if the gregorian converted form is hand entered and supported by citations?- -J JMesserly (talk)

Emitting a microformat Julian date in the ISO 8601 format is a falsehood. Those who persist in doing so after having been warned are liars. If a template allows separate entry of the date to be displayed in the article, and the date to be emitted as a microformat, it would be acceptable to display the Julian date in the article and emit the Gregorian microformat. For dates after 8 BC, the conversion is sufficiently straightforward that no citation is required. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 00:06, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

On the face of it, it looks like {{Start-date}} meets your requirements. I will contact you when there are further developments on this matter. Thanks, and Regards -J JMesserly (talk) 08:52, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Spell check

By the way (and this is unrelated to our original conversation), you might want to take a look at the Firefox web browser. It has built-in spell check, which would help you avoid making spelling mistakes like "dicipline" when writing articles. —Remember the dot 05:34, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

I've tried Firefox, and decided against the extra overhead on my computer. When writing articles, I usually spell-check with EMACS, but usually don't bother for talk pages. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 05:48, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Okay. I'm curious though: what extra overhead did you run into? What browser are you currently using, and what version? —Remember the dot 06:00, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

I use Internet Explorer 7. I don't claim it is the best, but I have to have it around for the sites that won't play nice with anything else. I have a bunch of applications that constantly want to be updated, and since I normally run with a limited user account, that means I have to log on as administrator and manually ask for the update. The last time I updated Firefox, it installed some kind of daemon (service, in Billy-speak) at system bootup, and I'm trying to pare the number of daemons to a minimum, so I just ditched the whole Firefox browser. Message to developers: DON'T YOU DARE INSTALL A DAEMON ON MY SYSTEM WITHOUT ASKING ME! --Gerry Ashton (talk) 06:06, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

That's very odd. I looked through the list of services on my computer, and didn't see anything Firefox-related. Do you remember the daemon's name? —Remember the dot 06:22, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, I don't remember. It was a while ago; maybe I'm confusing it with some other behavior I disapprove of. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 16:41, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

I see. How long ago was that? What sites did you run into that wouldn't work with Firefox? —Remember the dot 16:54, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

It was around 6 months ago, and no non-working site comes to mind at the moment. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 17:10, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

So why are you giving up Firefox's advantages, if it didn't install a daemon and it's compatible with all the web sites you visit? Even if you did run into a site that did not support Firefox, you would still have Internet Explorer to fall back on. —Remember the dot 17:18, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Although I didn't write down the precise behavior of Firefox that I didn't approve of, I recall that it did something I'm not going to accept. I also recall that sites exist that are a problem with Firefox, though I don't recall which ones. Finally, if it was installed, it would be one more program that would require constant updates. Finally, I didn't notice any advantages that impressed me. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 17:29, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Better performance, better security, and spell check are the main advantages that I see. I should also point out that millions of people use Firefox with minimal site compatibility problems. However, it is your choice what to use and if you really think it's easier to copy and paste your edits into emacs to spell check them, more power to you. —Remember the dot 17:37, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Extra! Extra! Read all bout it!

Even Rubin and Cole say Tennis expert has lost it. Ohconfucius (talk) 16:50, 14 February 2009 (UTC)