Hi, my name is Graeme McRae, and this is my User talk page. If you want to get my attention, to leave me a new message. Remember to refrain from personal attacks, to be civil, and to assume good faith. Then watch the page; I'll reply right here. Thanks!
—GraemeMcRae 08:03, 12 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I tried to fix the backlink, but that broke the forward link. (I reverted that change.) From this, I would say that {{ref num}} is incompatible with {{note}}. I would like to suggest eliminating {{ref num}} from this document, and change it to suggest using {{ref label|GraemeMcRae|314|^}} and {{note label|GraemeMcRae|314|^}} instead, as demonstrated here.^[314]

^[314]

I like your use of the disamb template on the Illinois page! :-) Tedernst 13:56, 12 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, Tedernst. I went through all 50 states, and tried to use {{Otheruses1|the U.S. State}} to refer the readers to the Dab page, if one exists. When I have time, I plan to look at the 15 states that currently do not have a Dab page, and following the Wikipedia:Disambiguation guidelines, I'll make Dab pages if they're needed. --GraemeMcRae 14:30, 12 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

While I'm at it, I would like to standardize all 50 states according to a naming convention that is acceptable to all. 49 of the 50 states have entries named identically to the state name. Georgia is the problem, because Georgia is the name of a country as well as of a state. The current solution for Georgia is to name the entry for the state Georgia (U.S. State), and use Georgia as the Dab page. I think the whole thing would be a lot neater and more organized if we move all the states to Statename (U.S. State), and make redirects from the simple names to the U.S. State names in every case but Georgia, where the redirect should go to either the Dab page or to the country. (If it goes to the country, then there will be a simple redirect notice at the top of the article, just as there is in many of the U.S. State articles.) --GraemeMcRae 14:30, 12 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I'm pretty new around here so have a hard time finding the policies I'm looking for. I researched article naming policies last week, however, for a different purpose (not US State names) and found that consistency with other articles was not one of the criteria for article naming. Having searches return the right result more often was seemingly much more important. So Georgia is simply going to be a special case, I'm afraid. Good luck with your efforts! Tedernst 15:21, 12 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

That's a good point, Tedernst. The most important thing is for searches to return useful results. My wild and crazy proposal does nothing to change the results that are returned for any search, so it doesn't run afoul of that primary criterion. There are secondary considerations, though, which are discussed at length in the Talk:Georgia page. One of the secondary considerations is that Wikipedia not be viewed by the growing non-U.S. user base as too U.S.-centric. As a general rule, across the board (not just for U.S. States), it makes sense to qualify names of places and things with the type of thing it is. Mississippi (U.S. State), and Mississippi (river) for example. And in cases where one use of the word predominates searches around the world and across a wide spectrum of users, it makes sense to redirect that one search to the most common result, in accordance with the first principle (that searches return useful results).
--GraemeMcRae 15:44, 12 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe I don't understand how searching and redirects work. I thought that if I searched google for "Illinois" and there was a page at Wikipedia called "Illinois" I'd be much more likely to find that page ranked high. If the Wikipedia page is actually called "Illinois (U.S. State)", won't it be harder to find? Does the fact that the Illinois redirect page exists solve my perceived problem here? As for being U.S.-centric, this argument only applies for ambiguous names, doesn't it? Tedernst 17:22, 12 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, Google. I was thinking about search results from the Wikipedia search bar. But when I google for "Georgia", it comes up with Georgia (country) first, then Georgia (U.S. state) second. This makes the google search results more valueable IMO, because the user can click the U.S. state of, say New York, directly from the Google search results without wondering which New York he'll get. As for the Wikipedia search bar, if a redirect has the exact state name, such as New York, then that's exactly where a search for New York will go, as one would expect.
--GraemeMcRae 17:54, 12 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I'm in way over my head here so will respectfully bow out and check out the U.S. States project as your other commenter below suggests. Tedernst 20:19, 12 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I'm with you on that, Tedernst! I think I'll join that project and see if I can pull in the same direction as the team.
--GraemeMcRae 20:26, 12 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Your contribution to the Montana article was a good one, but would prefer you not appear to single someone out as you did in your edit summary. That article and a few others had undergone a few minor edit wars due to the insistence of a few that what are actually not normally recognized as Great Plains states, but rather Rocky Mountain states, still be recorded as the latter over the former. I tried to reword it to compromise and must have inadvertently left in and or added redundant wording as a simple oversight.--MONGO 18:09, 12 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I also see you are a new user so I very much welcome you! Let me know if I can be of any help.--MONGO 18:11, 12 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sorry, Mongo, I certainly meant no disrespect; quite the opposite. I singled you out in an effort to draw attention to a potential philosophical debate over how much "stuff" should appear in the italicized indented area above the first words of the article proper out of respect for possible reasoning I was unaware of. Before I did so, I checked Montana's Talk page to make sure there was no discussion there of any such debate. I think a more politic way I could have handled it (and I will do it this way in future) is to go ahead and make the edit with a comment that doesn't mention any particular person, and then put an entry in your Talk page explaining my thinking.
--GraemeMcRae 19:11, 12 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

You are most welcome here and are obviously going to be a fine contributor. If you feel alienated by anyone or if you want to become more involved with a group, consider joining Wikipedia:Esperanza or simply ask me a question and I'll either have an answer or direct you to someone who does. Happy editing!.--MONGO 20:02, 12 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

You may wish to check out a WikiProject Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. states as that may have more info on naming conventions and the standards that apply to articles involving U.S. states.--MONGO 20:07, 12 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hello,

No grand scheme, just making the lists more complete.

I wasn't planning on doing more than that, but got "drawn" into editing a few disambiguation pages as well a bunch of river pages.

I wasn't planning on composing from scratch actual river pages, but I might put in some basic information for the many blank pages, then let others elaborate - I like the format you propose.

Thanks for your input  :-)

--Gjs238 03:34, 13 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

  "Thanks for noticing how I mixed up 14,494 and  14,994.  Just  an  oversight
  as  I  was  quite tired when I did the edit.  By the way, since I am sort of
  new here, how do I write something without getting this box around my text?"

  Jer 16:03, 13 October 2005 (UTC)Jeremy[reply]

Hi, Jeremy. Welcome to Wikipedia. I'm pretty new here, too, and I gotta tell you, this is just great!. There's a real sense of community, because we all have a shared purpose: to make the thing better and better. If you look at "recent changes" you will see from the sheer number of changes that lots and lots of little fingers are working day and night to improve it. Your change was no exception, even though you made a little goof. If you hadn't gone in and made the change, the height would have stayed 500 feet too high. You changed it by three feet, which caused me (how? see next paragraph) to wonder why the meters and feet disagree with one another. If you look at the talk page, you'll see I goofed, too, reverted my own change, scratched my head, and then fixed it. It all started with your involvement, so that's a really good thing. Keep it up!

You might wonder how your change caused me to get involved. It's because I made a previous change to this page (having nothing to do with Mount Whitney), and so I started watching the page, mostly to see if someone would get annoyed at my change and revert it. I don't want to annoy people, as you can imagine. Since I'm watching the page, whenever it changes, my curiosity is piqued, and that's how I got involved in this. There's a ripple effect, too, because I went to the Mount Whitney page, and saw the elevation is wrong there, too, but in a different way. I went to its talk page just to see if there was a raging debate there over the height of this mountain, and if so, I would contribute on the talk page rather than making a change that would annoy people. It's a good thing, too, because there was a discussion there, and a request not to make changes to the elevation without first discussing them, so I respected that, and added my two cents to the talk page.

Regarding your question, if you begin your paragraph with a blank, then not
only does a box appear around it, but the font is monospace, which is  good
for examples of computer printout and the like.

--GraemeMcRae 16:55, 13 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for rolling your sleeves up on the Human sexual behavior article, I have that on my watch list for vandalism, but the more recent inclusion of the 'how to' flummoxed me on how to start improving it. Alf ^melmac 17:05, 16 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I asked Al-Andalus the following question (his reply follows):

I notice you changed the term "Native Americans" to "Amerindians". Does this reflect a consensus? Are you planning to start a war with the bot who seems to be changing "Indian" to "Native American" across the board? --GraemeMcRae 02:44, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

No, I am not at war with the bot. My change of Native American to Amerindian is not as dramatic as you paint it. You mentioned how the bot is changing "Indians" to "Native Americans", and I agree with this because it disambiguates "Indians".

Having said that, when I replaced "Native Americans", I did not replace it with "Indians". I replaced it with "Amerindians", which like “Native Americans”, has no ambiguity in whom it is referring to.

Now, the reason I chose "Amerindians" over "Native Americans" - both of which are good, unambiguous terms, unlike Indians - was for the benefit of the American reader. The reader might think "Native American" was referring to Amerindians native to America (i.e. USA), rather than Amerindians native to the Americas in general. Although "Native Americans" applies to everyone native to the American continent, the use of "Amerindian" diminishes the possibility of people inadvertently assuming "Native American" is referring to those of the USA only. Al-Andalus 07:59, 17 October 2005 (UTC).[reply]

Hi graeme - just wanted to let you know that I've slightly modified the messages you put on Talk:List of New Jersey rivers and talk:Albertson Brook. if you use a live stub template on patges like that, they end up in the stub category with all the "real" geography stubs, so I've "neutered" them. Oh, and thanks to all the good work on NJ rivers, it's possible there may soon be a separate NewJersey-geo-stub (I'll be proposing it in the next series of geo-stub splits at Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Proposals in a few days time). Grutness...wha? 09:59, 17 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

That's fine, Grutness, I didn't think about that problem when I wrote that. Maybe I should have "nowiki-ed" the whole thing, and then we could copy and paste it from the "discussion" view rather than the "edit this page" view. I'm still learning this craft, as you can see. It's good that I have a whole lot of teachers such as yourself and the other editors in this community. --GraemeMcRae 15:30, 17 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks of making me look like an idiot. --Boothy443 | comhrá 05:20, 18 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

If you're going to do it, you have to do it to excess. Not merely six or seven words in the middle of a line but the better part of an entire paragraph.

I would suggest looking at some of the examples on the Talk page to see the density of links that others have found necessary to make their points. By the way, it's actually worse if not quite every word is hyperlinked - and even worse if some of the hyperlinks are rigged so they will always be red. Good luck. Rossami (talk) 03:12, 20 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, yes, and yes. I had thought about leaving an apologetic note here about shortening your summary, but when I saw how little I had managed to take out, I thought that apology might be presumptuous. I would still like to trim it some, but, as you have indicated, its pretty close to the bone already. And yes, the New York History article certainly needs work; I'll see what I can do (and when).

So thanks for the summary— it was greatly needed, and thanks for the (implicit) promise to work on the NY History article.

— Mwanner | Talk 17:46, 20 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Congradulations, you finished them off! If I new how to give people barnstars i would give you one. Night--Rayc 04:29, 23 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with your suggestion, esp. creating separate articles about the singer and the album. Unfortunately I know too little about either one to help. There should also eventually be a separate article on the train line named after Phoebe, I can work on that. Regards, Sysin 10:51, 23 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hello Graeme, I think your April Fools template idea is pretty good. I did in fact make some comments that Wikipedia should try to work with April Fools instead of against it, but the idea is more important than the particular implementation. With that said I think the verbiage you left on my talk page is pretty good. Have you started to discuss it with others? Perhaps Wikiproject April Fools is in order (I would join that in a heart beat). I had the idea that a set of standard joke articles could be maintained and brought into the Wikipedia on April first, taken out on the second. I definitely think that working with the April Fools jokes is the way to go; I was on the receiving end of an admin's frustration at the April Foolers when I was a brand new contributor here (over the M1126A Fryker article (which I maintain is tasteful, well done, and high quality - perfect attributes for a Wikipedia April Fool's joke)). One question: are you interested in April Fooling out the Wikipedia when the time is right or are you just planning ahead and trying to relieve some of the stress when the next April Fools comes around? Either way I think it would be a step in the right direction. Take care, Triddle 16:48, 25 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

In the spirit of boldness, I moved your reply back to your own Talk page, because I like to keep conversations together. I hope that's OK with you.--GraemeMcRae^talk 17:35, 25 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Dear MarSch, I made a change to the "details" template that provided more flexibility in wording to an editor. I understand that details is used for the summary format, and I read the whole rationale for the format, which is like news format, in which the reader gets to choose how much detail they want to read. Rather than attempting to defeat or circumvent the spirit of the format, my change was intended to make the format more accessible to editors. In particular, my change wasn't intended to allow editors to move the "details" template to parts of the article other than immediately following the heading.

Consider the section on state symbols in the Washington article. That section once said simply, see Washington state symbols, and had no content whatever. This wasn't particularly helpful to the reader, because it didn't give even enough information for the reader to decide if he was interested in knowing more. So I added a single sentence to the section giving some examples, and I wanted to put a "details" template at the top. This is how it looked:

This was OK, and I suppose I could have left it at that, but I wanted to stay in the spirit of "summary format" and yet provide better cues to the reader. That's why I boldly proposed a change to the template (by actually making a change to the template). Now the section looks like this:

Why am I going on about this instead of just taking your advice and using Template:For? Because the most important reason to use the Details template is not to generate text. I could just type the text myself. No, it's because if editors embrace the summary format and use Details just under every heading, then (1) the Wikipedia will contain a much richer source of "subject breakdown data", and (2) the Details template could be changed later to systematically provide an icon or other cues to the reader that would enrich the reader's experience of the encyclopedia -- something that changing the "For" template just couldn't do. In short, the change to Details was done to allow the Details template to be used more often by editors for exactly the purpose it was designed for.—GraemeMcRae^talk 16:31, 31 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Graeme,

thank you for your explanation. I'm glad you like the idea of this template. However I feel that in proper usage it should become clear from the summary what is to be expected of a summarized article, together with that article's title. If the text of the template is variable, then I think it is less clear what is going on. Specifically on the washington article, one sentence paragraphs are not well liked in featured article candidates. The Washington state symbols article should probably be moved to list of Washington state symbols. The plural title is hinting at that too. I would be interested to hear more of your views on making this template more useful, specifically your point (2). BTW your talk link on your signature is not working.--MarSch 11:23, 1 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

MarSch, for point 2, I was just thinking of some small icon like a file folder opening up -- nothing very clever, but then I'm not a very clever person. I think someone else might come up with a much better icon. The point is that if the templates were applied (nearly, because nothing's perfect) uniformly in all the articles, then a "sprucing up" of the templates would dramatically improve the look and feel of every article.—GraemeMcRae^talk 12:45, 1 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. Unfortunately a lot of people also insist on templates like this one to be plain text. See for example the {{disambig}} discussion.--MarSch 12:58, 1 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for correcting my error. :) freestylefrappe 05:13, 2 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Recently, I wrote an 822-word discourse on the subject of efforts to improve the Flesch-Kincaid readability of a single sentence of an article. I write in a personal style — a lot of first- and second-person pronouns — but I stuck fairly closely to the subject at hand, raising what I thought were genuine issues: to improve the readability of an article, it's hard to avoid making it choppy and losing nuance. Yet, to leave it at a grade level of 17 or higher might disenfranchise a large fraction of our audience. After posting this story on the talk page of the article in question, I received the following heartwarming response from a Sysop:

Please stop wasting the time of other user's with your personal stories -- no matter how tantalizing they may be. No one cares. And you're wasting space.

            —Posted with an edit comment of Stop complaining

Can you feel the love?—GraemeMcRae^talk 05:47, 2 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

In fairness to the Sysop in question, I admit he was right. I was wrong to put such a wordy treatise on the talk page of this article, because the gist of it wasn't about the topic of the article, but rather about the process of improving an article, using this article as an example. My writing would have been more appropriate here in my User talk area, and to the extent that the subject of style is raised, my writing might have been also appropriate for the talk page of the appropriate article on style guidelines in the Wikipedia namespace. The way I took care of this particular transgression was to simply move the entire text off of Wikipedia and onto my own personal website.

Even though he was right, the Sysop could have gone about correcting me in a more friendly manner. The fact is that I'm still pretty new around here, and my judgment regarding what kind of writing is appropriate for each kind of page is, well, still in need of some refinement. As it turned out, this was a very positive learning experience for me. I learned two things. First, on the Talk page of an article, it's important to stick pretty closely to the subject of the article, and not so much on aspects of writing articles, tantalizing though they may be to me. Second, when addressing someone who seems unaware of proper Wikipedia protocol or decorum, assume they mean well but are a little confused about what is appropriate, and treat them with kindness.—GraemeMcRae^talk 20:56, 2 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

314. ^{^} This is an example of an out-of-sequence numbered footnote 314. ^{^}  This is an example of an out-of-sequence numbered footnote

You wrote (on my talk page): DESiegel, I saw your explanation of copyright, and I understand that court decisions are not covered by copyright. However, the website http://www.justia.us/ asserts a copyright, so I wonder if it would be proper to copy, say, large sections of the Roe v. Wade decision. Would that violate Justia's copyright? Or are they simply wrong to assert a copyright to this text?—GraemeMcRaetalk 20:24, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

First of all IANAL. That said, my understandign is that no one can validly claim a valid copyright in Public Domain content, which includes US court decisions. (There was I belive an early court case where one publisher of SCOTUS decisions sued another claiming copyright infringment, and the suit was dismissed on the ground that there could be no copyright in them in the first place, so the question of copying was irrelevant). Anyone can compine PD content with original content, and claim a copyright over the combined work. Thus Justia's site as a whole can be copyrighted, the arrangemetn, highlighting, indexing, and commentary they add to decisions are protected. But the raw text of the decisions themselves are not protected by copyright.

Now given that there are no copyright issues, it might be argued whether copying "large sections of the Roe v. Wade decision" to wimipedia would be appropriate. in general large sections of original text are not appropriate, but should be linked to, or copied to wikisource. But that depends on the details of what you were going to copy and what page ypu were going to copy it to. DES ^(talk) 07:08, 6 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you.—GraemeMcRae^talk 22:36, 6 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

What are you trying to do to {{ref_label}}, and where did you document the behavior? (SEWilco 06:05, 10 November 2005 (UTC))[reply]