User talk:Scipius/Archive 1

Hello there, welcome to the 'pedia! 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, fantastic job on the Euro pages! Although I'm not totally happy with the pluralized naming (per wikipedia naming conventions), I can't think of a better system of naming right now. Anyway, where did you get those gorgeous images of the currencies? Cheers! --maveric149

Thanks very much, I think I'll be around fixing minor things here and there, but I can't say when I'll find the time for some more extensive articles (there's still quite a bit I might contribute to the Netherlands pages). I got the images from the ECB site, where they offer images of all the coins for viewing, but also as a .zip file (.gifs and .jpgs) for other uses I presume (they can be found at many other sites, though rarely at their full size like here). I did however convert the .gifs to .pngs because of Wikipedia's stance on .gifs, saved a bit in image size as well ;) --Scipius

Hi & welcome. The Euro articles are great. As a semiBrit I found them very interesting; they prompted much speculation down my local pub as to what designs we'll have eventually... -- Tarquin

Thanks, BTW I was surprised to find in gathering information that Britain is in fact already producing euro banknotes. I wonder if that is known to the anti-euro camp... ;) --Scipius

Nice edit of the Provinces of the Netherlands article! I didn't know the names changed twice during the Batavian/French period (of which you still have to add the names). -- jheijmans

Hello, there's discussion on Talk:Countries of the world/Status of the porting of Dept of State info about how to desubpage the country entries, or whether to do so; if you're still interested in getting WikiProject Countries off the ground you should go vote about what to do so we know how to proceed. :-) --KQ

- The royal mint already made some possible designs for coins in 1998 or roughly then. You can buy them in sets. - fonzy

Hoi Scipius, you mentioned you would probably be writing on history/geography of the Netherlands. I've been adding articles on the First Anglo-Dutch War and Second Anglo-Dutch War (also Anglo-Dutch War); could you have a look at them, the information in there's still pretty basic right now. Thanks, Jeronimo

Thanks for all the flag images, they're very nice. Are they all from a single source? If so, that should probably be mentioned. --LDC

They're all from the CIA World Factbook, with corrections for the sometimes off-beat colours, as has been discussed in Talk:WikiProject Countries. I plan on a full list of all flags once done with adding them, we can perhaps mention it there, or on the individual image pages. -Scipius

Please mention this on each individual flag by stating the source in the upload summary - doing this will automatically place that text on the image's description page. --mav

Well, I'm going to keep it consistent and not add the source there. Rest assured, it'll be added when I start adding the description on the image pages, which has to be done anyway. Of course, anyone can start doing the ones that are already there ;) -Scipius

That's fine then. --mav

Looks like your medium-sized Libya flag image file got mangled somehow. I went the the CIA site to fix it myself, but I couldn't find any good flags--the only ones I saw there were incorrectly encoded as JPEG, and didn't have original source for me to make PNGs out of (converting JPG to PNG is pointless--the data data has already been lost and that will just make it worse). Am I missing something? --LDC

You're not, but they were converted to .png regardless of policy, because I feel this case does not apply. I tested it on the Spanish flag (large) and couldn't really see any discernable loss of quality. Remember, these aren't photos, they're just drawings and should of course have not been .jpg, but even compared to the mostly .gif flags of FOTW they still look very good. .Png then has the further benefit of getting rid of any patent/license issue (see JPEG) forever and it can also prevent us having to rename the file should anyone ever produce a new .png flag from scratch.

I certainly think they're clear enough, but you can always point out the ones you feel suffer from a loss of quality from the conversion or those that were already lousy as .jpgs. BTW, how is the med-Libya flag mangled? It shows up to me as a green flag of 125x63px, as was intended. -Scipius

In this case, I think continuing as you are now is OK for the important reason you mention: the flags will get called from a lot of places, and making them PNG now will mean we won't have to change all the references to them if we ever do find really high-quality originals to replace them with. And as you say, the sacrifice in quality is minimal, and the file sizes aren't that bad either. But as an example of the problem, look at the manual edit I did on the Lithuania flag. The original JPG-converted-to-PNG had fuzzy edges with gray shadows, speckeled colors, and was 4.6k. Fixed by hand it has sharp edges, clean colors, and is 600 bytes. --LDC

Oh, there is always room for improvement, so good work (though I'm not sure we want to get rid of the edges. They could serve a function in flags with white running to the border). The work I'm doing is not to establish the definitive flags of Wikipedia, but rather to finally supply Wikipedia with a good base assortment of flags, especially since we now need them for the new countries' template. Some countries had flags from the meta server and there are multiple orphaned flag images, of all sorts of sizes and colours; I'm hoping these new ones will become the standard flags, perhaps also for the non-English wikis. Another thing to consider is that most flags are not carbon-copies of the Factbook ones; many have had their colours changed slightly and quite a few were resized to their proper ratios. At least we now have a base from which people can start to work from, should they wish to do so. -Scipius

Yes, I agree that it would be good to have these set the standards for size and such. I can see where edges might be useful, but those should be done in the stylesheet rather than on the flag image itself, and in any case they should be real, sharp, thin, intentional edges--not just JPEG encoding artifacts. I wrote the CIA factbook guys to see if I could get some original artwork, but I haven't heard back yet. --LDC

Original artwork would certainly be good to work from ;) Will you let us know what the response is? -Scipius

Absolutely! BTW, the Libya flag was fine, and displayed fine in my normal browsers, but for some reason IE wouldn't display it. So I downloaded it and re-saved it, and now IE is happy. I'm sure it was just an IE bug. --LDC

Hi! on WikiProject Countries: Moved all the mistaken "Demographics" pages to "Demography" and re-set the redirects to "Demography". Let me know if I missed any. However, that brings up a question. Several articles have been, by persons various, moved to Government_of_Wherever. Should these be moved (and redirects edited) to point to Politics_of_Wherever? -- April

As far as I know, yes. The idea is to have "Politics of <country>" be the main article on everything related to politcs within that country, including the government. Since most we have on many countries is the Factbook info, which deals with more than just the government per se, we should indeed place that info on the general "Politics" page. Once that article is fleshed out, we can probably have a page that deals with just the government. -Scipius

Great job with the flag porting! You still do plan on putting where the flags came from and their copyright status in each image description page right? --mav

Of course, but not tonight ;) Also, I plan to have a link in the description to a list of all flags available on Wikipedia, which needs to be made first. I was thinking of something like Flags of the world, redirecting to List of flags or something like that. I'm undecided on whether we should show the (medium) flags itself on that page. On the one hand that would kinda be helpful, but it would probably be too graphics-intensive (mostly in terms of the number of images). -Scipius

I second mav's kudos. Great work! -- Zoe

Hi Scipius,

In your Provinces of the Netherlands maps, there is a lot of invisible noise that unneccessarily bloats the files. I would like to clean them up, but perhaps you have got originals that it would be better to work from?--user:Branko

Scipius Ave,

Might you be able (time permitting of course), to add a kilometre scale to your excellent map of the Netherlands? It would greatly assist those of us in the antipodes to understand how much bigger New Zealand is from Zealand for example.

Lisiate

Scipius, I'd be interested to hear your opinion on my template proposal for the Dutch provinces, presented in Talk:North Brabant. Jeronimo

Scipius could you possibluy create and place it in the Flag of Alaska, also the reverse an obverse sides of the Flag of Oregon. - fonzy

Sorry, but I'm no good for the US state flags. Most of them contain drawings and coats of arms that are beyond my ability ;) If you could find a good public domain resource for all of them, I'd certainly be willing to do give them the same treatment as the national flags. Until then, I don't think there's much use in starting articles on those flags. Scipius 22:12 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)

i already started as you can see by ogin to those links. - fonzy

(This is in reference to my deletion of a Das Kapital article that only contained "moon boom")
wuts moon boom mean? - Lir

I have no idea, Lir, but it surely has little to do with Karl Marx or his famous book. I only gave the text to demonstrate why it was deleted. Now that I have your attention, could I point out that we generally place comments on Talk: pages at the bottom? Thanks. Scipius 13:43 Oct 5, 2002 (UTC)

Scipius, what is your opinion about the creation of interlanguage links to other wikis when the article doesn't exist yet? For things like dates I think it would be great if interlanguage links displayed differently if the target page doesn't exist yet. But many other things may vary a great deal based upon the different naming conventions of the different wikis (such as people's names). So if I make an edit-interlanguage link to the future Swedish article on Max Planck how can I be sure the article will be created at that title and not Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck. Just thinking out loud and using you as a sounding board. What do you think? --mav

I concur that there's no problem with the date-links, they'll all be added eventually. As for personal names, I suppose the risk of directing to a wrongly titled page is somewhat lessened when it's a well known short-name such as Max Planck, since there will likely be a redirect to the full name. Perhaps there could be a way for the software to automatically see if an interlanguage link points to a redirect page and subsequently fix it? Scipius 14:52 Oct 5, 2002 (UTC)

I guess that is possible, but so long as a redirect exists then the reader ends up in the right place. It is still a bit worrisome. BTW, I've been mostly holding off on adding interlanguage links lately because I heard of the possibility of having a feature whereby making an interlanguage link in one language will automatically make a reciprocal link. So if I make an interlange link from an English article to a German one then a link is automatically made in the German one (if it exists) to the English one. Cool eh? --mav

That is cool ;) Is there any timeframe for implementation yet? Will it only make interlanguage links between two languages or will the software also check if other language links exist on one of the two and add the links to all of those as well? I suppose interlanguage links will probably be best of with some kind of automation, as it is going to become a massive tangled web of interwikipedian links, especially once all wikis are upgraded... Scipius 15:34 Oct 5, 2002 (UTC)

Since your message to me made me aware that you're the flag expert, I'm directing this to you -- putting it on the talk page for Delaware a month ago didn't accomplish anything: The state flag that was on that Delaware page was the wrong color. I replaced it with a photo of one the right color, but its ratios are wrong. Would you please get the right Delaware flag into our system? The official state webpage whose link is below the flag image discusses the right colors, and please believe me that having the state flag the right shade of blue (wherever it "flies") is a big deal to people who live here, so I feel a certain obligation to try to get it fixed. -- isis 01:28 Oct 11, 2002 (UTC)

Well, I'm just the volunteer who added the national flags ;) I'm all for accuracy, so could you tell me what the ratio is supposed to be? I normally reference with the Flags of the World site, but it doesn't say (entry on Delaware here, you should recognise that particular image...). The current image is 2:3 and FOTW has a flag of 3:4. I've coloured in the current image to make it look less like a photo and I can resize it if we have the correct ratio. Are you happy with the colours as they are now? Scipius 22:16 Oct 11, 2002 (UTC)

No, I don't know what the ratios are and don't know where to find out -- if you read the official blurb on the flag at the link I put under its image in Delaware, you noticed that the State's big concern is getting the color right (because, as I said, it's a real sore subject here), not getting the ratios right -- but the outer dimensions of the flag aren't the ratio I was talking about. What's wrong with the image is mainly that the diamond (and with it the date under it) is too large, because I had to crop the edge all the way around to square it up. I can't judge colors on my computer monitor, because it's too dark (I can't even make out a lot of images, in Wikipedia and elsewhere), but I think it's okay, because it doesn't set my teeth on edge the way the royal blue one did. Thanks very much. -- isis 23:33 Oct 11, 2002 (UTC)

The flag is 3:4. - fonzy

Cheers for moving my 'to do' list to a user page- I hadn't even noticed up until then that the background colours of the pages were different... Cheers quercus robur

Hi Scipius, I saw your article about the ZuiderZee.
Part of the text hides behind the images. Also text and tables overlap (at least in Explorer 5, Win 2000)
Any idea why this is? Erik Zachte

I now see that on XP/Explorer 6 everything looks fine. Erik Zachte

Scipius just informing you i have a new up to date flag book with all the propotions in. - fonzy, also a book with list of leaders of countries might be useful elese where. - fonzy

Scipius, where did you get the image of the Spanish coat of arms at Spain? I'd like to do an article on it in detail and I was wondering if you had a larger image. - Montrealais

I "stole" it as all of our coats of arms seem to be. I took this image and downsized it and made it transparent. It's not that much bigger I'm afraid. Scipius 20:12 Nov 4, 2002 (UTC)

on teh flag artciles words like State Flag, Civil flag, canton etc should be linked to Flag terminology - fonzy

Well, sure, but I don't try to use those terms as it is, as I focus mostly on the history of the national flag, without getting into its different uses. Feel free to add them where you think they could be added, but mind your spelling of course. Scipius 23:01 Nov 5, 2002 (UTC)

But some countries have more than one national flag I mean the finland has one with out teh coat of arms in and one with it in. - fonzy so to say this is the national flag of a country and leave its as that si wrong as thre maybe 2 or 3. - fonzy

Hi there Scipius, thanks for alertin me on my talk page to your comment on Baldwin I of Romania Talk. You're absolutely correct, I've moved it to Baldwin I of Constantinople now. I can't say I know a great deal about alot of the stuff, but I try to do more good than harm while adding these biographies to wikipedia, as although they may not read great they will encourage more editing and hopefully improve Wikipedia. Anyway, thanks for pointing out the error. Smelialichu 17:54 Nov 6, 2002 (UTC)

Do keep up the good work, Smelialichu. Mind you, "of Constantinople" may not be the best title either, but my aim was to avoid confusion with modern Romania, at least until we have someone more knowledgable write an article on the Latin Empire. Scipius 18:05 Nov 6, 2002 (UTC)