User talk:Mav
If you've been frequenting the RecentChanges page, you might already expect that I am a Wikipediholic -- yep, I admit it (score = 82).
Problem now is, sleeping has switched from a full (i.e. normal) to part time occupation.... oh well - you only live once, there's plenty of time to rest later...
Saddams’s not my hero. But he sure looks like her hero. I mean, I’ve never held up a portrait of a US president (not even my favorite, FDR) with such fervent-looking devotion.
Regardless, I like your wording better. But I’ll still say that my intial wording wasn’t ridiculous.
- Please don't use the guys first name instead of his last name (it is too personable and therefore amateurish - I wouldn't dream of using "Bill" in the Bill Clinton article when referring to him). It is not our job here to interpret and make judgments, only to report what the current prevailing views on subjects are. --mav
Arabs have a tendency to call their leaders by their first names. But I’ll change that. I’ll try to find some more neutral-sounding synomyms for words like “egalitarian” too.
- Also noting who thinks so would be nice. Remember you cannot be the one expressing opinions in articles per our NPOV policy. But if there is a legit opinion that is widely-held then simply report on that; say "such and such group thinks this, but so and so thinks that". --mav
The article goes into detail about the oppressive nature of his regime. I believe that there’s even a paragraph on this topic.
The gasing of the Kurds is not mentioned (it wasn’t mentioned before my edits either) because the article doesn’t go into great depth on the Iran-Iraq War. I believe that there’s a separate article on that war and I’m sure that this incident is mentioned in that article. However, I will check to make sure.
All the information in the article is accurate, as it was before my edits. The article isn’t necessarily biased or non-NPOV; it’s just incomplete. More is needed on the current war. More is needed on the Iraq-Iran War. Once it is complete, all the notable autrocities will be mentioned.
- Maybe it is just me but I would have mentioned the bad with the good if I were the one adding so much text. If I gave the impression that I thought the added text was a violation of NPOV then I apologize - the text itself isn't so necessarily POV but it is just that certain very important negative aspects of this man's life were left out (like his brutal rise to power, the fact that he was a hit man, had/has a reputation for not hesitating to kill somebody, and that his first day of rule he culled all his opponents by having somebody read-off names of the "disloyal" members of the Baath party). --mav
]--mav
I'll try to get to that. Right now the article just gives a broad overview of Saddam's impact on Iraqi society. It lacks, for now, details regarding his rise to power and the Iraq-Iran War autrocities. But the despotism of his regime is evident in the article although the chronicling is incomplete.
Why did you delete "Nagasaki Massacre"? If you think, "much more on the bombing already at Nagasaki", isn't redirect to Nagasaki far better than erasing it without leaving any trace? -- Nanshu 13:36 Mar 29, 2003 (UTC)
- It was a badly-named orphan with two badly-written sentences. The first sentence mentioned the time, date and number of deaths of the bombing (which is exactly what is in Nagasaki already) and the second sentence was a highly POV statement condemning the US. --mav
- So, was it neccessary to delete without leaving any trace? It looks abuse of privilege to me. -- Nanshu 02:23 Mar 30, 2003 (UTC)
- There was no reason to have it - it was a poorly named and written newbie experiment that had zero information in it that wasn't already at Nagasaki. Dozens of pages like this are deleted daily. --mav
Why did you delete my work ? You think you want to protect a rule,you should carry out not erasing but rewriting.And you should know the fact before erasing. Cozy 13:49 Mar 29, 2003 (UTC)
- The text was too badly POV and written to be salvagable and the titles were too wrong as well. --mav
I’m asking you to mitigate an NPOV dispute.
Danny has written a blatantly propagandistic introduction to the Robert Mugabe article. He says that he’s ‘calling a spade a spade.’ Frankly, this is an admission to violating NPOV guidelines.
Quoting only sources hostile to Mugabe’s land reforms is inappropriate in an introduction. Saying that he’s been rejected by the “international community” is also inappropriate. Since when did the Western ex-colonial powers account for the entirety of the international community?
You’re a fair arbitrator of many disputes, so I’m looking forward to your intervention.
- OK, I'll look into it - but Danny is usually pretty good about being NPOV. --mav
Thanks Mav for putting Turkish Airlines at the main page's current events category. And to 172: Mav is not fair, he's the best!!
God bless you
Sincerely yours, Antonio Hurry, let's get Saddam!!! Martin
- No problemo y gracias! --mav
Hi Mav. I see 172 has already been complaining about me. Let me just say that I wasted the entire morning on his removal of material and addition of plagiarized texts. So did some others. It wasn't a POV dispute, but rather a case of him/her trolling. Then again, I'll let you form your own opinion. Danny
Hey, mav. As one of the people who has expressed the most interest in Protista et al., I was wondering if you had any opinions on what we should be doing with it. Please see Talk:Protista. Thanks! --Josh
Hey, mav, not a problem, I can work on the day pages ahead of time. -- Zoe
- Coolness! Thanks. :) --mav
Hi, mav! Are you up late, or up early? I'm trying to distinguish between the political phrase (or slogan) coalition of the willing and the actual countries which have indicated various degrees of support or opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. (I think I'm being thwarted by someone who wants to (a) keep all this info in one article and (b) ridicule the White House use of the term coalition of the willing.)
I think the Wikipedia should remain neutral on such political questions such as:
- Does a "coalition of the willing" actually exist, or is it a figment of George Bush's imagination?
- What countries really support the US position on the war?
- Is Bush full of shitake mushrooms, or what?
Rather, I would prefer we contribute articles which provide the background information that will enable readers to make up their own minds on these and other important questions. --Uncle Ed 11:47 Mar 30, 2003 (UTC)
- If not "coalition of the willing", then what do you propose to call the group of nations that are providing support to the US-led war? This seems like a perfectly natural title to me. --mav
- How about U.S.-led_coalition_against_Iraq? It's neutral and timeless. I'd like to have have another article called coalition of the willing or, better, slogan: coalition of the willing to discuss the term itself and its political use by the White House and criticiasm of the term by opponents.
- The article as I found it this morning veered off into countries which (a) are not US allies in the war and (b) weren't even mentioned as "coalition" members.
- I have no position on the war. I just want clarity in the articles. --Uncle Ed
- "slogan:"? Since when did we get a namespace for slogans? Please use natural titles for things unless: 1) there is an ambiguity or 2) the term is unreasonably offensive. U.S.-led coalition against Iraq is as good as anything if you feel it is necessary to separate the slogan from its subject. Peace be with you - I need to get into bed before the sun rises. :) --mav
Yo. could you bring up on wikipedia-L the idea of re-establishing something like "article a day queue," but with an rss feed that allows syndication, sending the first paragraph of 1 - 5 articles a day? maybe setting up voting/submission system to work out which articles to send, and making it multilingual? just some ideas. thanks, Koyaanis Qatsi
- Seconded, that's a great idea. --Brion
be much easier for wiktionaries word of teh dya too. -fonzy
- We already have an article a day - A new day page is automatically displayed each day which in turn has many articles linked from it. I also add at least three new historical anniversaries onto the Main Page daily (and then there are the updates to the other parts of ==Selected Articles==). But the syndication idea would be most useful at promoting Wikipedia. Perhaps we could syndicate the whole ==Selected Articles== section? --mav
Hi Mav, I am not quite satisfied with the image of Robert Mugabe. The image quality of the original image (before downscaled) was already far from perfect, but now after downscaling his face is harldy recognizable.
Do you think there is an other solution for that? Yes, I know the policy about images. But in this case I would prefer to stay with at least 400 pixel width by removing parts from the left and right (this should be within the limit of the policy) and only slightly downscale. Other possibilities would be 1. removing Kofi Annan from the picture 2. access to the original picture as an additional link
What do you think? Thanks in advance for your input :-) -- mkrohn 19:10 Mar 30, 2003 (UTC)
- Response in on your talk page. --mav
Mav, I'm puzzled by what you are doing to the Mugabe picture. Why do you keep removing the embedding? Without a cearly defined box in runs all over the place - when I looked at it a moment ago, its box was running into the browze commands. It looked even worse when I went in using Mozilla. Pictures are never entered that way in laid out documents for two reasons. 1. Not embedding it makes it dominate text, in effect editorialising it. So every publication always embeds a picture in text not separate from it, to illustrate not editorialise. In the form you put it in it is now dominating the page through running (very clumsily) over one entire column, even though its size does not justify it. Giving a picture whose size does not warrant it is a fundamental 'no no' in graphic layout, by appearing to give special weight to the image and what it contains, in this case yoy must look at this: Mugabe with K. Annan, 'he's an OK guy, or else the UN General Secretary wouldn't be meeting him'. 2. Unless you 'limit' a picture, it moves and throws text boxes out of shape. (I've just finished layout out an advertorial for an Irish politician. It involved nineteen pictures and every image, to avoid POVing a text, to create a reader-friendly standard recognisable layout and avoid images shifting on the computer page and screwing up text wraps, had to be embedded.)
In any case, this picture is clearly POV and takes the image completely out context, not mentioning that the UN General Secretary reluctantly agreed to be photographed with him, Chirac gave him the coldest of handshakes and the others there would not be photographed with him. All that is completely missing from an explanation of the image.
I am going to re-embed the image in the text as it would be in any professionally laid out document or any uncyclopædia but it should be removed completely. Pages on wiki that embed pictures look professional. Those that don't look weird and amateurish. Hope you understand where I am coming from. :) STÓD/ÉÍRE 19:40 Mar 30, 2003 (UTC)
- What the heck are you talking about JT? All I did was reduce not ENGLARGE the size of the image and then killed the set width (which was at 450 px). Why is it important to set a width in the image's table the the special type of rendering here in Wikipedia? I tested the display of the image at lower resolutions and it was fine - I didn't see any text overlapping at all. Could you perhaps provide a screenshot and tell me which browser/platform/screen resolution you were using? I'm also not the one who uploaded the file - that was 172. So please don't imply that I was trying to use the image to advance some type of POV agenda (I in fact don't care much for Mugabe at all). The only reason I dowscaled the image to 300 px instead of the more friendly 250 px was becasue the size of their faces would have been too small to offer much by the way of identifying detail. BTW, it is very obvious to me the Annan is not at all happy about having his picture taken with Mugabe and the image, in fact, backfires as fare as Mugabe propaganda is concerned (a crop of just Mugabe's face from the large image still might be better). And please don't lecture me on graphic design - I do this stuff daily at work and have won several awards and promotions for my graphic design. So before you give somebody a lecture in the future could you please do your homework first? ;-) This isn't the type of thing I like to read right after getting-up. Thanks! --mav
In 172's defense by 172:
Mav:
A lot of contributors have accused me of loving my dictators. While I admit to being sympathetic to Mugabe’s land reforms, this reputation really stems from the fact that I’m a modern historian with expertise in single-party states, colonialism, and de-colonization who refuses to tolerate simplistic history that fails to understand events and historical actors in a social, political, and economic context.
We don’t need lists chronicling all the things that make Saddam Hussein, Stalin, and Mugabe evil men. Instead, we need articles that are both illuminating and informative that describe what kinds of agendas these men have had, what kinds of often-shifting support bases they’ve cultivated or represented, what kinds of ideological, material, institutional, or factional interests they’ve represented or appealed to, what kinds of conditions, geo-strategic or domestic, have laid the groundwork for their dictatorships, what kinds of adversities (foreign and domestic) did they face and how they responded to them, what kinds of foreign interests influenced their domestic policies as well as their diplomatic and military policies, and especially how they rose to power.
Understanding a dictator's society is also critical. There are stark contrasts in the societies that have fallen under dictatorships, from Nazi Germany to Idi Amin's Ugabda (a couple of the most repugnant). Historical conditions, social systems, development levels, cultural traditions and concepts of values greatly vary throughout the work. Understanding the unique realities of a particular society is critical. What's often unacceptable and even unimaginable in the United States is commonplace and even essential in other societies.
An encyclopedia will explain why these figures are noteworthy; thus, primary attention must be paid to how their regimes responded to problems in their societies, or if they exasperated them, or if they reconciled them. If you studied the great dictatorships of the twentieth century, you’d see that they’re often riding the waves of great, often revolutionary social transformations or attempting to keep the lid on conflict in order to prevent such a social revolution. Often, when a new group seizes power they resort to autocratic forms of rule to prevent the old regime from making a comeback or to prevent rival interests from seizing power. Dictatorships, in short, are the products of conflict. And conflict tends to be heightened during early stages of modernization and industrialization, explaining why they’re very much a twentieth century phenomenon. I have yet to discover a modern dictatorship that hasn’t been.
Conflict (often conceptualized by radical ideologies) and authoritarianism (often rationalized by a radical ideology) are inextricably linked. If I’m pointing that out, I’m not defending a dictator; I’m just explaining his role. In short, I’m going to resist values-laden chronicling that would evaluate a figure like Robert Mugabe as if he were an American statesman.
And regarding the Mugabe article, I defend my edits and persistence.
Here’s that introduction to the Mugabe article that I was trying to remove:
Robert Gabriel Mugabe (born February 21, 1924) has been the head of government in Zimbabwe since 1980. Zimbabwe's hero of the country's war of independence is widely viewed internationally as an authoritarian ruler bent on maintaining his grip on power. He is sharply condemneed by Amnesty International for his human rights abuses against both minority Ndebele people, the opposition MDC (movement for Democratic Change), white residents, and homosexuals. According to South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, he is a "caricature of an African dictator." Because of his controversial policies, Zimbabwe has been refused participation in the Commonwealth.”
Is that NPOV? If that’s not propaganda, I don’t know what is. It sounds like an essay by a 6th grader explaining why he thinks Mugabe is a bad guy. Though it hurt my reputation among lay readers of history who think that I love totalitarianism, eventually I forced other contributors to tone the bias of that introduction down.
As for the Saddam article, those charges of me being a dictator-loving ideologue are even more ridiculous. Information on the autrocities brought up by one reader during the Iraq-Iran War wasn’t in the article before my contributions. Why should I be faulted for its original lack of content?
Regardless, there are links in that article that chronicle his atrocities.
In short, I don’t deserve my infamous reputation as an uncooperative apologist for dictators.
- I think you are confusing "neutral in tone" with NPOV. It is true that your text is by and large "neutral in tone" but given the large amount of text you add to articles "neutral in tone" text that only has information in it that is favorable to the subject is a POV of omission. It is still a violation of NPOV if you know what the other side thinks about a particular policy and then don't report on that at the same time as you are going into great detail on why the subject (or like-minded people) thinks it was a good policy. That is only half the story. Normally "neutral in tone" text is perfectly fine for contributors to input into articles becasue usually it is at most a paragraph. But when you input pages of text then there is an added onus on you to make sure you are presenting the subject in a balanced, as in NPOV, mannor. It is also not at all called for to copy large chucks of national history into an article on a dictator. But it is appropriate to comment on aspects of that history that the dictator directly influenced (this also should be made obvious to the reader). --mav
172, althought I agree you do not deserve some of the hostility shown to you. I also do not feel you deserve your belief that you are so much more knowledgeable than others. You are not the only historian.... Furthermore, your work can not possibly be POV because it comes from YOU and will always be your POV until somebody else comes and adds their input. Dietary Fiber
Mav, thanks for your message. Regarding "useless headings", I added them because the principles of information mapping say that each chunk of information should be clearly labeled as to both its content and function. This aids comprehension, use and recall. If you have the time, look at that concept and tell me what you think of it. User:Mkoval
- I'm sorry - I was being cranky. But we do tend to keep things simple around here and have a certain style (See Wikipedia:Manual of Style). One big part of the that is to always have a definition in the first paragraphs, so it is redundant to specify a ==Definition== heading. It is also bad heading nesting to specify a H1 heading (=) in the article following the title (which in the great majority of cases will be the only H1 heading). --mav
Let me respond again.
I usually get a l lot of negative reaction when I introduce something with which lay readers are not familiar.
I don’t have a pro-dictator bias. It just seems like that because I’m correcting articles that were already one-sided. History's not a pros and cons analysis anyway. Historians want to know why and how.
Also, I don’t use one explanatory model (like Marxism, World Systems Theory, Dependency Theory, Modernization Theory, etc.) solely. I don’t keep my mind closed to one interpretation.
If an article chronicles any facts, I leave them if they’re accurate. But they must be explained in a context. Statements like ‘he’s an authoritarian dictator bent on staying in power at all cost rejected by the international community’ will go in favor of statements like ‘because of his controversial policies he’s been ejected from the Commonwealth at Britain’s behest'.
If an article mentions that Mugabe has been seizing white-owned farms it must also mention that 4,500 white farmers own 70% in the land in a country of 13 million. The article must also explain why land reform is a touted goal in the Third World. To many, that unacceptable because that's pro-Mugabe POVing. But quoting anti-Mugabe insults by as many famous people as possible is possible because it's a fact that they said those things.
Some can’t tolerate that. To them, Mugabe persecutes homosexuals; he’s a racist; he subverts democracy; he cracks down against NGOs; he rigs elections; he’s unmitigated evil; and he does that because he’s evil.
There are not that many social historians who would accept such simplistic, sweeping conclusions based on superficialities.
- But my point is that, after going into great detail about how oppressive the Whites were and that Mugabe was just trying to reverse this, you failed to mention the negative aspects of those particular policies - which in fact is the most notable aspect of them. This is a POV of omission. --mav
I don't want to make the Mugabe article into a pros and cons list. But if you insist, the "cons" would be the productivity issues, rule of law issues, and the investment climate issues. We'll let the readers make up their minds regarding the "morality". And I agree that these issues have to be mentioned. After all, Look at Zimbabwe's terrible economic contraction last year.
But I myself didn't mention these issues because the destabilizing effects of the reforms because they were already detailed in the article. It's not that I myself didn't expound on the "negative aspects" because they were already there, not because I'm advancing an agenda.
Almost all the time, the “negative aspects” are already detailed in articles pertaining to dictators. The problem is that the history is not.
Hope this puts an end to the pandemonium.
Mav, I see that you added "The first women arrived in the camp on March 26, 1942" to Auschwitz. I find this is rather late. Are you sure that they talk about Auschwitz I, and not about Auschwitz II (Birkenau) here? AxelBoldt 01:25 Mar 31, 2003 (UTC)
- It may very well be Auschwitz II. This was a correction to a day page entry that said the first person arrived in the camp. After checking via Google I saw a whole bunch of references to the first women arriving to Auschwitz on the 26th. Please correct as needed. --mav
- It was definitely not Auschwitz I, which was in operation in 1940. Like I told Axel, I have the authoritative History of Auschwitz at work. I will check the date there tomorrow. Danny
Mav!!!! I downloaded netscape 7.0.2. and compared pages with images on under both it and explorer. And guess what? The image commands are incompatible. If you leave out the width command on explorer, two things happen: the image goes dead centre of the page with a lot of ugly white space around it, and the next paragraph overruns by what appears to be the length of four letters. But if you put in the width command to keep the image to a set location on a page in explorer (and but the line width at .1px to make the box line disappears, it appears in netscape with a clumsy bloody line and a box that may be far too big or far too small for the image. So whichever you use will produce major alignment problems for the other browser. (Pardon me for a moment if I use a common Irish swear - ironically, given the 'row' we had over him - Jesus Hooring Christ!!! Fuck fuck fuck. ) There, got it out of my system. And using table rather than <div><div> doesn't seem the to help. I used it for images on a page on the Blessed Virgin Mary and that also is fine on explorer, messed up on netscape. And Mozilla seems to be a cross between the two. So it seems that whichever version you use on one (width or no width) screws up the other. (That's why I was complaining about the Robert Mugabe page. On explorer, his picture appears like this:
opening paragraph
image dead centre with white space all around
second paragraph
Whereas on netscape it is embedded as a right-align in the text. So apologies for appearing so grumpy over images lately. Our computers seem to have been to have been showing us two different layouts. And when I changed something to make it 'work' on explorer, it promptly screwed it up on netscape. And when someone fixed it for netscape, it screwed it up on explorer, leading me to 'fix' it (muttered 'what the fuck???'), screwing it up again on netscape. It was like a very perverted game of vandalistic table tennis! I don't know if you have access to explorer but if you do, look at Papal Tiara. I removed the width commands in two pictures, Pope Paul VI wearing his tiara and the Vatican Flag and both are now centre page with the next paragraphs screwed up! But on netscape with the width commands they looked ridiculous. So what do we do about images??? Put notes on each page saying 'This page should only be viewed on explorer/netscape'. 'if this page looks screwed up, blame your browser'??? I'm just mega pissed off having spent so much time working on some pages with images, now to discover that depending on what browser a person is using, they will either look superb or crap. (And I was paying by the minute to do this!!! Should it send my massive phone bill to explorer, saying 'you pay, you sons of bitches'!!! Anyway, sorry for the grief I was giving you. Blame it on the technology! STÓD/ÉÍRE 03:52 Mar 31, 2003 (UTC) PS: On netscape (which I on right now) when I type this in it comes out in courier font. I HATE COURIER FONT!!! Though it did solve one mystery for me. On the papal tiara page, you reduced the size of the picture of Pope Paul being crowned. It located the new image dead centre and in that location it looked swell. I found myself 'how did he do that?' and for all my first class honours PhD I couldn't work it out. Now I know. When you took out the width, explorer displayed it that way. Whereas with you it was right-aligned with a text-wrap. *sigh* I'm at a loss at what to do. (except maybe sleep!)
- Other than the fact that the images are interferring with each other at higher resolutions that page looks fine (all the images that have align tags are aligned as expected). I've tested Konqueror 3.0.3, Mozilla 1.1 (both on Linux Mandrake 9.0) and Internet Explorer 6 on WinXP. --mav
Maybe it is related to a mac? (My version of explorer is 5.2.2. for a Mac) I was thinking, if absence of width causes problems with explorer on a mac, does that mean that maybe we should use the width command, with trial and error on browsers to make sure the box and the picture and properly aligned? STÓD/ÉÍRE 04:16 Mar 31, 2003 (UTC)
- Most contributors don't even know what a pixel is, let alone know how to find out how many pixels wide any particular image is. So we can't mandate that people always specify the image's width. Brion already mentioned a possible way to do this with the software and have it not be noticable to the user or require user input. --mav
- I'm having the same problem with IE on Microsoft Me. -- Zoe
Hey, Mav...
Thanks for putting the Onyumishi Kanjuro Shibata XX page in the standard bio format. Sorry I didn't do that myself (typical newb ;) -- [[User::Jordan Langelier|Jordan Langelier]]
Hi Mav, ... Chesapeake Bay retriever - what is the logic regarding the "R" being cap or l/c please? I don't get it and can't (yet) find a ref to a format. Thanks, Nevilley 07:17 Mar 31, 2003 (UTC).