Hey another sporting wikipedian. Cool. Liked your articles on Nurmi, van Langen et al. Interesting choices, as well.
What, another computer science student! Just kidding. Wanted to say that I like your contributions to Olympic sports articles. Also wanted to apologize for not not welcoming you to the 'pedia sooner (I must have fell asleep at my desk or something when you first popped up on the 'Recent Changes' page). Welcome to wikipedia! --maveric149 (Yes, I am a confessed wikipediholic)
Hello! re: your note on my talk page on Olympic template: have at it! I like the idea of a WikiProject. RjLesch Follow-up: I went ahead and created WikiProject Sports Olympics. - rjl
DEAR Jheijmans:
AS THE AUTHOR OF THE MATERIAL YOU REMOVED FROM THE BASKETBALL ARTICLE, I MUST SAY I THINK THE ARTICLE IS MUCH WEAKER IN ITS CHANGED FORM.
I'M NOT AN EXPERT ON NPOV, BUT SURELY IT DOESN'T REQUIRE SUCH A BLOODLESS FEEL AS THE ARTICLE NOW HAS IN ITS REVISED FORM.
AS FOR BEING TOO "AMERICAN" IN ITS BIAS, WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY THAT? THE GAME WAS INVENTED IN AMERICA, AND ITS CULTURE IS LARGELY AMERICAN. IF YOU WANT TO ADD FOREIGN MATERIAL ABOUT BASKETBALL TO THE ARTICLE, FINE. I'M SURE IT WOULD BE A USEFUL ADDITION.
BUT ISN'T IT BETTER TO TREAT BIAS BY ADDING MATERIAL, SO AS TO ROUND OUT THE PICTURE, AND RESPECT THE HARD WORK OF OTHERS?
TO DELETE SO MUCH... I'M NOT AT ALL CONVINCED YOU'VE DONE THE RIGHT THING.
MY APOLOGIES IF THIS OFFENDS YOU. I DON'T MEAN TO HURT YOUR FEELINGS -- JUST TRYING TO CONVEY MINE.
SINCERELY YOURS ANDREW SZANTON
Andrew, I must say that I sincerely doubted when rewriting the article, and I have placed the parts I removed in the Talk page of basketball. The article certainly wasn't bad, but I felt it lacked a little structure, and had some sentences that needed replacing - but I was unable to do so. While the anecdotes about tobacco burns and hatpins are nice, I doubt if they belong to an encyclopedia - if they do, the rest of the article could use some as well, they stand out a little.
I don't know anybody who compares basketball with jazz (except for the Utah team), so it sounded very odd to me.
And some of the US 'biased' (perhaps focus is a better word) parts could be put back in with a little addition. For example: In the US, the game is often called "the city game". This makes it easier for non-Americans to read it.
If you're not convinced about my changes - feel free to change it back ("be bold in updating pages"). Alternatively, we could try to work out something that suits us both, probably giving rise to a better solution.
DEAR Jheijmans:
I'm pleased by your gracious tone and sensible suggestions. I had worked hard on my article and had the usual author's pride. Plus, I'm passionate about basketball. So I got touchy about what you did.
But I recognize this is a collective project so... I have to give up some control over what I write.
The point about basketball being like jazz seems to be right, and is not an original insight of mine. Michael Novak, in his well-regarded book, "The Joy of Sports" makes the point, and many others probably have too.
Let's try to work out something that satisfies us both, okay?
Thanks again for your civil response.
Andrew
Different sources give different numbers of participants, see: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=1896+athens+olympics+245 http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=1896+athens+olympics+311 I don't understand the discrepancy. The official olympics site gives your figure (245). I'll try and see where the other 66 go... -- GWO
- The 311 was the official figure, but counted people who entered multiple events multiple times. 245 would seem write -- GWO
- I think the 311 figure is an older one (I've seen it a lot of times), the 245 is (afaik) from Bill Mallon's (excellent) book on the 1896 Olympics (will add that to bibliography soon). I think the 311 figure comes from the fact that there are quite a number of unknown participants (mostly Greek). Mallon's approach to obtain the number is rather 'scientific'. He has extensively checked many resources (mostly contemporary) and discussed the discrepancies between other sources. I would therefore say the 245 number is the most accurate (I believe still 60 of these competitors are actually unknown). The number of nations is also a point of discussion. Many sources list Chile and Bulgaria as participating, but this has shown to be false. Furthermore, we have have a number of 'Greeks' from Cyprus and Smyrna, which were officially part of the Ottoman Empire at the time. Also the lone Egyptian participant has a rather Greek name. Then, two of the Hungarians (which was then actually the Austro-Hungarian empire) are from (present-day) Slovakia and Yugoslavia. But now I'm going into too much details, I'm afraid... jheijmans
I like the Games of the I Olympiad page, and I like the day-by-day addition to the format. The title convention, "Games of the N Olympiad" rather than "[Year] [Summer/Winter] Olympic Games" might be more precise but seems counter-intuitive to me; what are the advantages of this approach?
I've been busy with other projects but have collected some materials on the 1964 Games for entry. RjLesch
- Thanks! I used the "Games of the Olympiad" approach, the official name. Otherwise, we would get "Olympic Games", "Olympic Summer Games", "Summer Games", "Summer Olympic Games" or "Summer Olympics": what is the best then? Since this is an encyclopedia, I thought the official name would be the best. I agree that for inviting other editors, this may be less intuitive. jheijmans
Fair enough. I updated the WikiProject Sports Olympics page to reflect this convention; what do you think? RjLesch
On a related topic... I finally got around to answering your question on my user page. Cheers! --maveric149, Thursday, April 25, 2002
Hello Jheijmans -- Concerning your additions of "primary" text pages to the deletion queue:
It might be a better idea to simply remove the primary text from the article and provide a good external link to the primary text yourself and add a one line stub explaining what the primary text is.
Chances are good that somebody at some point has bookmarked the wikipedia page with the primary text and one of the most important rules of webpage design is to avoid breaking links (besides, the external links will be useful too). Also, adding so many entries to the deletion queue causes a bit of exhaustion for the sysops that have to review them. Thanks! --maveric149
- Yes, actually my votes should designate the actions you write above - I should have put them under rewrite, not delete.
- I think in many cases, something like "In the inaugural address of president X many attention was paid to Y" should do, maybe - as you suggest - amended with a link to the full text.
- Then again, I think these (mostly subpages) should be deleted - though your link argument is a good one. Pages like "Constitution of Canada" don't provide any information at all currently - unless you want to read all of it, which you probably didn't, since you came to an encyclopedia. Replacing it merely by an external link will make "Wikipedia a link collection", so there should be some structural information there. I'll look at the problem in detail later, maybe next week. Thanks for the note, jheijmans
- Good point. It wouldn't look very good to have a one line stub and a one line link. In those cases we can just redirect the sugpage to the main page and list the link in that page's external link section. --maveric149
Hum. Any agreed upon format for the country pages really couldn't be made into any type of policy, per se. However through the process of working on one good example, making this obvious to the community, getting feedback and help from interested parties and integrating the best ideas would in fact be creating an established framework for how the country pages should be formatted. This couldn't be enforced the way policy is, but by peer pressure and editing boldly whenever someone oblivious to the framework does something outside the scope of it. But even after we all feel that the Netherlands article is a damn near perfect example of a great framework we still will probably modify the general format as we go on -- integrating even better ideas. This really is inevitable anyway. It would probably be a good idea to start a countries WikiProject as soon as the development phase of the Netherlands article is complete. --maveric149
- Ah yes, the WikiProjects. That was my first thought, but I'm not sure of its status. Maybe there should be some links then to the WikiProject page somewhere, such that (new) users can read about them, can add to them, and least get an idea of what is desired - they can then decide for themselves if they want to obey it. For the countries, I guess there's a lot of work still to be done, but for the chemical elements, isn't that one "finished" already? Or is that only the side-table? jheijmans
- You will have to talk to Manning about the status of the Wiki Project idea - I just suggested it because it is a logical place to post an uber-framework for article classes. It might be a good idea to have a link to the WikiProject page from wikipedia:Help -- but I want to see what Manning has to say first (He's the one who developed the idea). As for the elements articles: Well, that has been on the back burner for some time now (I got totaly carried away with the Beryllium article and got burnt out -- 100 edits!). Truth is, I'm still not totally happy with the order of the headings and still have some minor issues with the table, but I am close to working these out. In fact I am almost done with Magnesium (new version is at Magnesium/Temp). I've also pasted a template for the elements articles at Periodic table/Temp (which needs to be updated to reflect changes I've made to the new Magnesium article). I'm a pragmatic perfectionist so I probably won't get around to creating WikiProject Chemistry (elements) until I have perfected the format (which hopefully will be soon). The wiki awaits... --maveric149
Interesting ideas for the elements template. As it is, there is a history and uses section in the template that should say something about the discorery of the element and derivation of the name (I will make sure to look for and add this info). I didn't know Discovery of the chemical elements article existed. Thanx for telling me about it. --maveric149
- That's pretty weird - you are mentioned in the History of that article. Anmesia? ;-) BTW, the half-life times of 41Ca differ between the text and table (106 y - 103 y)
Thanks again for finding another bug in the table -- I'm sure there are more (especially with my cgs to SI conversions). --maveric149, Friday, June 21, 2002
The (city, state/country) naming debate is going on right now on the wikipedia mailing list. The emerging consensus is that US cities should be in the [[city, state]] format and non-US cities should be in the form of [[city, nation]] (with the caveat that other nations may also need to be in a US-format if there is extensive internal ambiguity with city names for those nations). One list member is just acting on the emerging consensus a bit early (which I am not certain will actually become an official naming convention yet). I added some thoughts along these lines over at talk:Kiev that you may find informative. Cheers! --maveric149