User talk:Karen Johnson

see also User talk:Karen Johnson (old)

I hope that the children had fun arguing on my talkpage while I was on holidays... These comments have now been removed and the argument is closed. Please take it to the relevant Atlantium article/s if you wish to continue the debate. KJ 07:49 Jan 2, 2003 (UTC)

As one of the children involved in the debate I would like to apologize. My initial response was to defend you from a nasty message left by George. --mav

He was rather unprovokedly nasty, wasn't he... thank you for defending me when I wasn't here to defend myself! I'm glad I wasn't here actually, because I would have gotten rather upset about it at the time... but since I wasn't here I didn't read it until it was all over. :) KJ

Thanks for your typo correction :-) -- Youssefsan

Hello, & welcome back! I look forward to seeing the pics. :-) best, KQ

Thanks KQ! I've been back for awhile but this was the first day I've actually been inspired to add useful new content intead of just dithering around correcting typos :) I was actually surprised that these basic 'skeletal' entries haven't been done long agoKJ

Yes, wikipedia has some odd omissions still. Just a few days ago I was surprised to see on Outkast that Erykah Badu still has no article. (and, having just done a fair amount of research, didn't care to write it myself). --KQ

A complaint!!!!!! How the @#!@## am I supposed to wikipedia-weed if all of the access pages are disabled? And how the !#@$%^%% am I suppose to know when 02 UTC is in Australian time? I am NOT impressed... my major method of wikipedia contribution (correcting typos, editing badly spelled articles and mending/deleting stubs) have all been disabled for 12 hours of the day. KJ

See UTC and Time zone for help with times. If the fact that our database performance crashes to *utter unusable crap* when we leave the heavy lifting functions enabled during the busiest times (day in North America, evening in Europe) bothers you, I suggest you remember that this project is maintained by volunteers, very few of them, who have other things to do in their lives and receive not one penny and little thanks for their efforts here keeping this site up and running for you. --Brion 23:59 Jan 19, 2003 (UTC)

Hey - I try to thank you every so often. Here it is again: Thank you Brion! :) --mav

Karen, if you're in Eastern Oz, add 11 hours at the moment, 10 normally, to UTC to get local time. It's 10.5 hours in SA/NT (9.5 out of daylight savings), 10 in Queensland (all year), and 8 in WA.'

I'm a volunteer too, doing a job that nobody else can be bothered with (or has the time to do)... and if you want me to bloody well go away and leave you all alone I WILL. I'm pissed off at the world today and ready to tear my hair out or to hit somebody very VERY hard.

I would argue that slow access is better than no access, and that disabling functions for any reason other than that they plain don't work is a bad bad BAD idea. KJ

The trouble is that when these options are available then the whole website goes down - including the other language editions. I vote for having these functions static during what are now blackout periods. This would mean that right before the site is hit with heavy traffic a static page is made of the current view on each maintenance page. This should allow people to do what they need to do while at the same time keep the server load minimal. Of course, there needs to be a note saying that the page will not be updated until x hour. --mav

I see your point. And I think I agree with you Mav. One of the most frustrating things is coming to do a job and not being able to even start (hence my explosion)... If there was a static display I'd have some kind of starting point and some idea of what was going on. Couldn't these pages be updated maybe once an hour or once every two hours intead of constantly? It's always seemed kind of unnecessary that it updates the 'short entries' page every single time you make a change to it. To avoid that I try to remember to right-click and open stuff in a new window until I've made 20 or thirty changes to the original listing. KJ

Mav just said everything I was gonna say. :) Note that the other day Magnus put in an experimental static result display for Special:Wantedpages; we hope to get this or a smoother system rolled out to the other pages as well soon. --Brion 02:00 Jan 20, 2003 (UTC)

Hey Karen,

Hi!

Thanks for being here.

Please don't be angry.

Please don't be hurt.

Love, Love, Love (is that part of a beatles song?)

with friendliness and joy,

Me. :-)

Thank you Me... (boy, that sounds schizophrenic :)) I'm sorry I'm in such a foul mood today... the whole city is wreathed in smoke from the bushfires in north-eastern Victoria, and I think it's poisoning my mood as well as my lungs :( I promise to stop screaming and having tantrums, for today anyway... and Brion, of course I appreciate everything you do for the project - without you there wouldn't BE a wikipedia. I'm just being an ungrateful b##ch today, but I'll try to stop. KJ

Back to the disabled page subject - now it seems that the function pages have been permanently disabled. Or at least every time I come to try to use them I can't access them and get the 'this is temporarily disabled during peak hours' message, which now doesn't say when those hours are at all. Are 'peak hours' 23 hours a day? I've tried at nine o'clock in the morning and it's 'peak hours', I've tried at midday and it's 'peak hours', I've tried at five o'clock in the afternoon and it's 'peak hours' and I've tried at about ten o'clock at night before I got ready for bed and it was STILL peak hours... Right now it is 6pm on a Friday night in Australia, which is about three or four am Friday morning in America, so the majority of internet users are sleeping like babes... (and no, I'm not going back to the mailing list to raise this discussion because there was too much 'discussion' there that was of zero personal interest to me and that I didn't BEGIN to understand.) If the function is permanently disabled then please change the message to reflect that fact, and I'll stop trying to do anything useful... KJ 07:18 Jan 24, 2003 (UTC)

I'm sorry to hear that you are upset - I would be too. But the load on the server has quadrupled since we were Slashdotted and received other press attention. As a temporary measure many special features have been disabled so that at least people can still view pages and edit (see Talk:Main Page). If these features hadn't been disabled then the server would bog down and nobody would be able to use Wikipedia. I'm sure you've noticed that every minute there are anywhere from 3 to seven new edits on Recent Changes now. Previously during "slow" times there would be up to 10 minutes between edits. Please understand that the developers are doing the best they can. --mav

There still is Wikipedia:Votes for deletion and Wikipedia:Find or fix a stub if you are bored. I know it makes me feel good sometimes to nuke crappy non-article pages. ;-) --mav

I'm not upset Mav. I'm just frustrated! I've noticed that server access time has slowed to a crawl... and I appreciate that the shutdowns were essential, but it's STILL driving me up the wall not to be able to do any real work on the wikipedia because of the vast flood of curious passerbys (it took about ten minutes and three tries last night to save a simple page correction!)... I'll stop trying to access the 'forbidden' functions because obviously they're going to stay shut down until something can be done. I've found a (slow) way to check for garbage too - I'm lurking on the 'new pages' listing and checking out all the pages made by an anonymous IP address to see whether they're real articles... I might go back to my 'cat' project instead though - I'm getting bored with new articles! lol btw how do you go about setting up a wikiproject? I was wondering whether maybe the 'cats of the world' should become one of them instead of being a singleperson operation...

Something that's occurred to me is wondering whether the wikipedia crew had ever considered setting up a mirror site or two to ease the traffic load? I know that that leads to the difficulty of updates, but what about a static mirror for the merely curious and information-seeking? They could read to their hearts content, and flip over to the 'real thing' if they decided to contribute. The mirror could be updated once every 24 hours or something to keep it relatively up-to-date. KJ

The idea has certainly been ponied about, but no one's yet offered up a host for such a mirror so there's been no serious talk. --Brion 15:40 Jan 24, 2003 (UTC)

RE WikiProjects: Just fill out the template and spread the word on related WikiProjects (like WikiProject Dog Breeds and Tree of Life). --mav 16:33 Jan 24, 2003 (UTC)

Hi Karen. Is there any reason that you know about why Canberra was moved to Canberra, Australia? Or, putting it the other way about, why it should not be moved back? There seems to be no chance of ambiguity (as discussed on the talk page), but maybe there is something I haven't thought of. Cheers -- Tannin 12:14 Mar 15, 2003 (UTC)

There was a push to have Australian cities preemptively disambiguated a while ago (just as American and Canadian cities are), but that movement seemed to loose steam. I'm not sure what the Aussies want now. --mav

Okay, I had a quick look at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (city names). Wow, lots of talk. Anyway, here's something I thought is relevant to us:

As an American, I don't normally say the full name "Chicago, Illinois", just as I don't normally say the full name "John Aschcroft". There's essentially only one "Chicago" in my life and only one "Ashcroft", and their importance to me isn't idiosyncratic either. Nevertheless, if somebody says either of these full names, it doesn't sound at all weird, it just sound a little bit more precise. Is "Toronto, Ontario" like that to Canadians, or does it just sound wrong as (I've read) "Oslo, Norway" sounds wrong to Europeans? — Toby 21:35 Aug 9, 2002 (PDT)

I think Tannin and Karen would agree that an Australian would never answer a blunt "Maleny, Queensland" to the question "where are you from". They would say "Maleny, you know, about 100 km NW of Brisbane", or "Coonabarabran, in outback NSW", or "Morisset, just south of Newcastle". Unlike in America, state names aren't very useful in tracking down just where someone comes from, because our states are so damned big. Also, about the only things which are ambiguous in Australia are suburb names, since we have far fewer cities and large towns than America.

Here's what I propose: names which (according to Wikipedia) exist only in Australia should have the plain name, e.g. Canberra and Fremantle. If some day discover a Fremantle in Denmark, and some Danish people want to write an article about it, we can move our page to Fremantle, Australia to avoid offence. I also vote for block disambiguation of Brisbane, and any similar cases (see Talk:Brisbane). Suburb names need more aggressive disambiguation, but that's not really a problem at the moment, since AFAIK we only have one or two. What do you think of this proposal? -- Tim Starling 01:19 Mar 17, 2003 (UTC)

Sounds good to me, Tim. Tannin 12:01 Mar 18, 2003 (UTC)

I think the moving is a job for a sysop. Pity neither Karen nor Robert Merkel are around. -- Tim Starling 12:30 Mar 18, 2003 (UTC)