User talk:Zoe
I'm moving the earlier versions of the Talk page to talk archive 1. -- Zoe 20:57 Oct 8, 2002 (UTC)
I just noticed that you reformatted the whole wikitext of the Mayonnaise article when you edited it. Is that a default setting of your browser or something, or is there some other reason for that? It's annoying to many of us, and makes the "diff" function all but useless (see http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Mayonnaise&diff=348274&oldid=347752 for example). If there's a setting you can use in your browser, or some other way you can avoid doing that, I would greatly appreciate it. A good Wikipedia article should not only have good content, but be easy to edit as well. --LDC
- FWIW, I find the diffs are much more legible on changes after the text has been put into paragraph form (ie, not filled with line breaks at random intervals). When diffing across the divide, any actual changes are conveniently colored red, so it's a very minor inconvenience. I say thank you Zoe for making the page formatting clean! --Brion 23:55 Oct 10, 2002 (UTC)
- I've never understood why people can't be bothered with formatting the things to begin with. Whenever I encounter badly-formatted articles like that, I tend to fix them. Besides, the diff shows in different colors, so it shouldn't really matter. -- Zoe
- Single line breaks in articles are a pet peeve of mine: IMO they strip diffs of context, and so are annoying and contrary. --KQ
- I've never understood why people can't be bothered with formatting the things to begin with. Whenever I encounter badly-formatted articles like that, I tend to fix them. Besides, the diff shows in different colors, so it shouldn't really matter. -- Zoe
OK, I guess I'm outvoted. I prefer line breaks in source text primarily because it makes editing the article easier. And lines are reformatted on display anyway, so there's no reason to format source text for any reason other than ease of editing. --LDC
- Line breaks that look great in your edit box may be screamingly difficult to work with on mine -- if my edit box is not as wide as yours, lines are hideously jagged; if my box is wider than yours, you're wasting my screen space, and lines I add will be jaggies to you. Things that are uncomfortable to wrap (long URLs for instance) may be more convenient as separate lines, but most text no. Additionally, line breaks aren't 'silent' in : indents or * and # lists, so the line-breaker has to remember to change his habit -- I've fixed more than one of those in my time here. --Brion 19:48 Oct 11, 2002 (UTC)
"Annoying and embarassing"? I rather thought "mentally ill." --KQ 02:15 Oct 13, 2002 (UTC)
- Well, I was trying to be polite. :-( -- Zoe 02:34 Oct 13, 2002 (UTC)
- I applaud you for it. :-) No need to frown, unless you're frowning at me (which I can understand). Cheers, --KQ
Zoe, the trouble with replacing the US Supreme Court with the USPO is that non-Americans like myself have some idea of how the Supreme Court fits into the US Constitution and thus I know that the comparison I made with the BBC is fairly close. However I, and probably most non-Americans, don't know anything about the Constitutional situation of the US Post Office. So it's not helpful to us to make a comparison with it. I thought that it was just an arm of the Executive in the same way as the General Post Office is a British Government department. Therefore not independent in any way unlike the BBC. What's the true position ? -- Derek Ross 23:03 Oct 18, 2002 (UTC)
- I see your point. The US Postal Service WAS, at one time, a Department of the Executive Branch. It has since become privatized, in which the President appoints the Postmaster-General, but it must support itself by its own income, instead of using tax money. If you don't like the anaology, like I said, go ahead and change it back. -- Zoe
Zoe, How does one do a revert on vandalism? Thank you. Christopher Mahan
whats gonna constitute proof? why don't you people go read up on Columbus or leave it to those who have? Why can't a little common sense come into play? The dude was a slave trader. He got rich off slave trading. He slave traded as soon as he got to the New World. He was slavetrading years before he ever thought of sailing west.
- Proof would be what it usually is in historical contexts: citations of your sources, preferably primary sources. That is, Columbus's journals are evidence, as are his ships's logs, and records of the Spanish court. An article in a reasonably trustworthy publication (as opposed to, say, the Weekly World News) is a starting point. "My brother said this guy told him this in a bar" is not evidence.
- Common sense means, among other things, that if you're telling people to read up on something, and you're using that to back an idea that they/we aren't familiar with, it helps if you say "go read XYZ". Otherwise they'll just go back to what they read before, and not find what you're pointing at. Vicki Rosenzweig
You sound like somebody totally ignorant of the subject. Go to the library and get a damn book on Columbus.
what proof do you want? Im not insulting you. You are insulting me by attacking what I have written without justification. Any iota of attempt on your part to verify this basic fact would reveal that I am correct.
zoe. you havent tried to find any information on the topic.
Well, yes. I just wrote an email about that, in a roundabout way. ;-) --KQ