User talk:Tarquin

Tarquin's Talk page: leave comments & questions here. I usually reply on this page.

I'll continue the discourse you started on my talk page here, if you don't mind. The Wasp Factory article was something I put off doing at the time I did the framework for the Banks article. Primarily, we hadn't come up with the Wikipedia contains spoilers concept at the time and the last thing in the world I wanted to do was blow the plot away for anyone. Well, we had a big debate last autumn about Twelve Monkeys and determined that the best way to deal with it was to put the WCS notice at the top of any page which we think might spoil it for anyone.

Anyway, it's nice to see another fan of Banks here on Wikipedia. sjc

Hello there, welcome to the 'pedia! Sorry nobody welcomed you earlier -- shame on us. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you need any questions answered about the project then check out Wikipedia:Help or drop me a line. BTW, I like what yor have done to the place. Cheers! --maveric149

Hullo. :-) You've already welcomed me, though -- see the bottom of user:Tarquin -- Tarquin.

Opps! --maveric149, Saturday, June 15, 2002

user:Ant Well, I think we're getting there with I(M)B. We seem to have had the same urge to combine the articles at the same time... odd. I'll leave it to you for the moment. /@ 21 June 2002

un-subpaging the Banksie novels has been on my unwritten list of Things To Do for a while, seeing it bumped on RC spurred me into action :) -- Tarquin, Friday, June 21, 2002

Cool! I just saw your addition of Periodic table/Wide Table. As a geek I love this version of the table -- too bad it is too wide to have as the main table (all those damn Windows users that keep their displays at the default 800 by 600 res screw everything up). PS, please don't read the text in parenthesis if you are a Windows user with a screen resolution of 800 by 600. ;) --maveric149

Thanks :) I'm 1152x900 myself, but I keep a narrow browser window (the ten words per line rule). My chem lab at school had this full-width version of the table on the wall; I've always found it clearer than having the Lanthanides & co as footnotes -- it's worth widening the browser window for :). Plus it exposes a regularity in the way the periods widen. I remember the transition groups were numbered in an extension to the Roman numeral system; I can't rememebr the details though. I *think* it was (after the normal I, II): IIIb, IVb.... VIIb, VIIIb, Ib, IIb, then resuming III, IV, etc. I'll seee if I can dig it up -- Tarquin

Tarquin, I didn't understand your comment concering A Tale of Two Cities. What did you shunt? -- Zoe

Someone had added a paragraph on the novel to the page about one of the films. I added a link to the novel to the film page, and integrated the material on the book to the page on the book. It sounds more complicated than it was ;-) -- Tarquin, Saturday, July 13, 2002

Gotcha. Thanks. -- Zoe

Bonjour Tarquin,

Tes remarques sur le logo sont très justes, mais le fait est qu'il est probablement mieux de ne pas en parler. Tu as pu le voir, le silence assourdissant indique des "plaies encore vives". Le logo etait sans doute un détail; son look importait peu en fait. Rinaldum etait tres heureux je crois, de nous avoir concocté un joli logo avant son départ en stage (jusqu'à la fin de l'été), et franchement déçu d'avoir le sentiment d'un controle de en.wiki. Il a voulu nous faire une surprise, et on a pas été très cool (dont moi, je le regrette), car évidemment, personne n'avait été consulté, on est tous tombé des nues, et à l'apparition du logo, et aux menaces proférées. En interne, on a surtout reagi à la non-consultation de la communauté. Donc, ca a été un peu chaud, et certains ont été blessé. Dc, on en parle plus et c'est mieux comme ca. Oui ? J'aimerais bcp plus qu'on passe enfin a la version upgradée, sinon l'écart va de plus en plus se creuser entre les wiki. Ca serait dommage. --anthere

Compris. :-) On est quand meme plusieurs a croiser entre en: et fr:, mais ici aussi je souffre un peu du culture shock face aux Americains. Differences d'habitudes, differences de facons de s'exprimer. Efface mes remarques si tu trouves que j'ai ete trop direct. -- Tarquin 07:38 Jul 26, 2002 (PDT)

mais non, tu n'as pas été trop direct, ne t'inquiete pas. C'était juste pour t'expliquer que 1. il y avait grande chance que tu n'ais pas de réponse à ta question (parfois le silence est d'or) et que 2. le forking n'était à mon sens pas une question d'actualité. Voila. Et puis non, je n'efface pas les commentaires de toutes facons, même pas les miens quand je les regrette :-)

ps : euh, je n'ai pas répondu à ta question sur les 6 premiers arts, mais j'ai "déliré" sur la philosophie de l'Art [1] à la place . bonne journée -- anthère

Just a quickie, Tarquin and not a matter of life + death; why do you change html blocks to old-style wiki? We'd be better served by using HTML format medium to long term in my view. user:sjc

I think ' tags are preferable to < b > and < i >: they are easier on the eye in raw form. A property required of Wiki pages is that it must be readable in both raw & rendered forms. http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?RawHtmlWiki

OK, I will probably continue with them, though, mainly because I parse my code through an HTML editor. user:sjc

Hello, I posted a question at wikipedia talk:editing policy about whether a section on quotes vs. italics should be added. I haven't acted on it otherwise yet. Thanks for adding it to meta. :-) --KQ

Regarding naming on the meta pages and the meta trees. If we are to favour the English form of names it should be French departments and not departements. It is not being used as a proper noun.

The French form "département" is used on Wikipedia pages. Also, while it flouts the rules it's a natural form of disambiguation. -- Tarquin

I get the feeling you're following me ... Heh. Seriously, thanks for going round helping my newbie articles to fit in better, I get the idea that the first line should be a brief summary now. And reading your chat page has sent me off to the Banksie page, where I may have to add a few things ... -- Bth

Believe me, it wasn't intentional, it just happened that the titles which caught my eye on Recent Changes were yours. Another voice on Banksie would be great (I still disagree with sjc's interpretation of the Culture novels... be interesting to have a few more opinions) -- Tarquin 13:25 Aug 7, 2002 (PDT)

The Note article is much better now. I'm logging off for the day, so consider this a virtual handshake for a job well done!JFQ

I've just had another hack at it. We're getting there! :-) -- Tarquin

Hi Tarquin,

Thank you for your tireless work. Please be advised that it is not necessary (indeed, wrong) to remove accents from capital letters in French.

[L]es majuscules prennent les accents, le tréma et la cédille lorsque les minuscules équivalentes en comportent. (Capital letters take accents, diaeresis, and cedillas when the equivalent lowercase letters take them.)

- Guilloton and Cajolet-Laganière (Direction des services linguistiques de l'Office de la langue française), Le Français au bureau (Ste-Foy, Quebec: Publications du Québec, 1996), p. 119

The only case in which you omit the accent from a capital letter is when it is part of an acronym (ALENA, not ALÉNA) (op.cit., 167). - montréalais

As far as I know they're optional. I don't have any French style manuals, but I'm going by my 1993 copy of Quid, which consistently omits, and my paperback copies of A la Recherche, which omit more often than not -- tarq

As far as I can tell, they were optional, when it was difficult to put them (e.g. chiseled inscriptions, typewriters). Now that we have access to the Magic of Technology, however, we're supposed to put them. - montréalais

Further confusion: my copy of Livres Disponibles 1995 has "Éditions du Cercle de la Librairie" on the cover, but no accents on the initial "A"s of Proust's novels, and the names of authors are in full caps, with accents. It seems no-one can make their mind up!

I've seen somewhere that caps should take an accent where they affect pronunciation (Editions / Éditions), but not where they don't ("A la recherche").

The Magic of Technology makes serifs obsolete, yet we find that they make reading easier on the eye. This could of course be a Francais / Quebecois difference. (as an aside, when I was in Montreal, it took me several days to understand anything I heard. very bewildering: my mind kept saying "this is french. We know french, remember?") -- t

Had the same experience in reverse in France. :)

BTW, how are serifs obsolete, if they still make reading easier on the eye? (If anything, eliminating accents makes it more difficult to read - even if it's totally clear from context, there's a little jump when you expect the A in A la récherche [sic] to be a verb, not a preposition.)

One interesting thing - I work for the Société de transport de Montréal, so one of my references is the fact that the nameplates in all the metro stations have got accents, despite being in all caps, with one exception - it's Berri-UQAM, not Berri-UQÀM, because it's an acronym. The Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) has recently started using the grave accent on the A, to graphically balance out the tail of the Q in their logo, even though it's technically wrong. Oh well, I suppose if they can put up with the Fédération des professionèles [sic] du Québec... - m

Serifs (wiki link to check the article exists once I save this ;) are in a way technically obsolete because they were originally used to strengthen the extremities of metallic type, to make the metal less brittle and increase its lifespan. My dream job when I was a kid would have been designing metro maps. It probably still is... -- t

Sir Tarquin, Please forgive me, for I cannot locate a direct e-mail link to ask you a question... It was posed in a color basic color theory class: Q: Why do humans with blue eyes find bright sun more "painful" than their brown-eyed conterparts? deb [email protected]

probably something to do with the pigment in brown eyes, but it's a wild guess. (I'm a bit bemused by your question... have I given the impression that I'm knowledgeable in this field?) -- t

Tarquin, I have a new idea for page titles over at Talk:Orders of magnitude that you might be interested in. --mav

tarquin, I've kept meaning to mention this, and I've kept forgetting - I've got to thank you for writing that La Vie mode d'emploi article. I'd known of Perec for ages and had kept thinking I'd read something by him one day, but I never had until I saw that article. Sounded like a really interesting book, so I rushed out and bought it, and I'm really loving it. Seems to me that anybody who enjoys working on wikis ought to enjoy it, actually. Anyway, thanks, and keep up the good work and all that --Camembert

thanks. I hope you enjoy it. One thing I forgot to mention in the article is that the page numbers are important: pages such as 111, 222, 333 etc have important things on them (plot points, etc. I think 111 has a family tree). Apparently palindromic page names are marked similarly too, but I've not checked this. -- Tarquin

Hey--could you give me an explanation of how to ban an IP in UseModWiki? I notice you're an admin at http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/ and they're having persistent problems on the French wikipedia (I remembered the admin password from way back but don't know how to block the perp). Thanks, --KQ 13:21 Aug 30, 2002 (PDT)

Do you have the admin bar patch installed? That has a link to the special page. Otherwise, you need the right URL command. the usemod site has a list of system commands. -- Tarquin

I don't think they do (I'm not seeing it). I'll look for the usemod site. --KQ

http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?System

I found it too, but now it seems that the vandals are blocked already? I emailed anthere asking for clarification; I don't watch the French wikipedia b/c I don't speak French. :-/ Thanks though. --KQ

merci tarquin. User:anthere

Tarquin, I left you a note here -- ant

Yeah, thanks for pointing out, but I realized the flaw in my user greeting on my own eventually :) -- Michael

--- Hello. I'm glad you didn't mind me fiddling with Jane Austen - who was looking a bit sick compared with some quite minor authors I could name. I understood why you got confused about her engagement, because there are lots of false trails in her life story. Glad you didn't take offence, as some people would have (no names). Deb

"Wikipedia:Village pump; 23:47 . . Tarquin (Is there a way to rename images? )"

Presumably the kludge (if necessary) would be to re-save the image under the new name and alter the page to refer to the new name. (Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about. :-) )

OK, so now I'm being petty, but those references to "Gillinham (Kent)" on your user page - aren't they meant to be "Gillingham (Kent)"? --Camembert

er. oops. yes. That whole city naming kaboodle is all resolved now anyway. I really need to give my page a big, big, big spring clean. -- Tarquin

These user pages are a right pain, I must say. I think they should all be added to Wikipedia:Votes for deletion - really, what are they for? They're very non-NPOV, none of them would be in a "proper" encyclopaedia, and most of them are very dodgy on the grammer / spelling / punctuation / whatever front. By the way, how is the place-name issue dealt with these days? Wikipedia:Naming conventions (city names) seems to suggest it hasn't been dealt with at all. --Camembert

Thanks, Tarquin. I'm still a bit shy about doing certain things. What is the Wiki etiquette about merging pages? Does one consult the author(s) first? User:Renata

No problem. I remember feeling the same too when I started here. Articles don't have an "author", so (IMO) the etiquette is this:

if they're close duplicates, like the two Gerard Depardieu articles, go ahead and merge. (check naming conventions to see which page should be the "real" one)
I often find two or more articles which are on close topics, both short, and which could be merged into something meatier -- in that case, I usually raise the idea on the Talk page, leave it for a week or so & see what other people think

I've found this page: Wikipedia:Duplicate articles -- I've put a few links to it for other people to find. -- Tarquin

Hi, Tarquin. Thanks for your welcome. I really enjoy this place and just regret, that I haven't found it earlier. -- Cordyph

About raw URLs...so I though, but find a page with hidden links and press "Printable Version" --AN

Ah. didn't know about that. thanks. :-) -- Tarquin