User talk:Jack Merridew

BLP

Ok, give it to me straight – what exactly were you trying to say on the BLP noticeboard? Did I screw something up or do something wrong? Minor 4th 22:14, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

Naw, you didn't do anything wrong, it's just that it's best if section headings are well chosen from the outset. Changing them does break links to things; they're everywhere. The anchors can be added, and a few editors know to do this. If something needs renaming, you should do it at the same time as the rename, which I think is what Lar was suggesting. In areas that are all about edit warring, expect the edit war to propagate to all the discussions, which is why you got reverted. It's all about taking threads off track and getting seventeen issues going at once, and pretty soon, they've got a wall of text going that people stop reading. I hope the PD lands soon; this shite's got to end. Cheers, Jack Merridew 22:25, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

I hope so too because as it is it appears there is no way to even resolve what should be a straightforward BLP issue and that really is a problem. Minor4th 22:43, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

FWIW, I believe humans are to blame for global warming; this is not about that. It's about teh faction excluding other views, attacking the bios of the critics, a whole lot of edit warring, article ownership, and biting of editors who trespass. This is a real-world political fight being waged on this project. That's disruptive.

Interested in another BLP issue? Talk:Dawn Wells. My last comment on this is actually at: User talk:Crohnie#jumping in front of you?, and there's WP:BLPN#Dawn Wells, too.

Cheers, Jack Merridew 23:03, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

I have not studied the issue enough to have a strong opinion in either direction. So, yeah, this is not about that. It's about the behavior, and you don't have to be a scientist to figure that out. I'll take a look at your other BLP shortly. Minor4th 23:08, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

The global warming issue has been, ah, simmering for years, as you'll mostly have seen. Mary Ann is about some wanting to maintain the image of the 'good girl' character as personified by the actress. The weed issue is minor and it's not something she was dinged for; someone else's weed. But the whole media frenzy had serious impact on her and I see that being excluded. Her Institute and Festival were wiped out, she lost work, and her state, Idaho, potentially lost millions in influx to the local economy. Cheers, Jack Merridew 23:18, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

Schadenfreude. Can you feel it? Minor4th 23:45, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

You mean this sort? Mostly they're just littluns. Now, what did I change, above ;) Jack Merridew 23:51, 23 July 2010 (UTC) [facepalm]; forgot all about the Mary Ann bit. I'm multitasking, too much. Ya, that's a bit piece of it. Find the ClusterFox vid.

Pardon me? I"m not following you. Minor4th 01:40, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

Not your fault; I was focused on other things. That was a troll I was leading to the block. A CU will nose through the muck. I thought you were commenting on *that* and forgot about Mary Ann. Crohnie asked me to crosspost my comments to the article talk, and I just did; added a bit out of the Wayback Machine, too. You're question is open to interpretation and I went several places with it, but not the Climate Change case, which is what you're looking at; mostly, at least. The vid was one by O'Reilly, being his usual self re Wells.

Most of the disputes on Wikipedia have a common element, although people stick different labels on it: Schadenfreude, MMORPG, Blood and Roses, Lord of the Flies; all faces of the same thing: Wikipedia, the free-for-all that anyone can edit. The key to success here is to have fucking clue, which you've already shown ;) Success is not about power, it about listening to the right people, and about being listened to by the right people. There's an old saying in one of my fields: There are only ten thousand real people in the world, the rest are bad special effects. Choose wisely.

Cheers, Jack Merridew 02:13, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

Table formatting

At Fight Club (film)#Casting, I have an unusual table listing five actors and their roles. I saw your edit at Surf Ninjas, and I was wondering how this particular table should be formatted. (I removed the non-breaking spaces per Surf Ninjas.) Also, what are the subtle differences should I know about formatting tables when I work with them in the future? Regards, Erik (talk | contribs) 12:07, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

Hi. There was a lot of gunk in there that really didn't do much of anything, so I cut it. The stuff in the {{}} was left over from template code and did nothing at all and the inline styles are poor form per WP:Deviations and were pretty much the ambient look, anyway. I added a commented out caption option and commented-out the heading row; these should really be entirely omitted, unless actually used, and the caption is the better mechanism;

• |+ Cast

I like this better than the surf one, and whatever the other one that was being discussed... wherever that was. Cheers, Jack Merridew 18:23, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

The I went with the above caption of "Cast", and then added sortability which can be useful. Cheers, Jack Merridew 18:41, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

Thanks! I figured it needed some straightening up. Erik (talk | contribs) 22:57, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

Harry Connick, Jr.#Filmography

Could you mosey on over to Harry Connick, Jr.#Filmography? You know why. You're quicker at it than I am. I don't feel like messing with it; if you don't get to this before I feel like it (read: tomorrow some time), I'll do it. No biggie.  Chickenmonkey  05:28, 25 July 2010 (UTC)

 Done ;) Jack Merridew 06:07, 25 July 2010 (UTC)

And the crowd goes mild! (it's a tough crowd) Thanks.  Chickenmonkey  06:51, 25 July 2010 (UTC)

You're welcome. fyi, I've been beating up bad tables for a long time. I don't think we had class="wikitable" or class="infoxbox" back then; we had raw html *everywhere*. Cheers, Jack Merridew 06:58, 25 July 2010 (UTC)

The tides are forever changing.  Chickenmonkey  07:12, 25 July 2010 (UTC)

moar a relentless waterfall. some are still digging their hole deeper ;) Jack Merridew 07:26, 25 July 2010 (UTC)

I really need a vacation; that waterfall actually seems inviting. So does the hole, actually.  Chickenmonkey  08:06, 25 July 2010 (UTC)

Do see the world ;) although that's a slave pit that the TNI forces the Papuans to work, mostly by hand. I believe it's the biggest hole in the world. Jack Merridew 08:15, 25 July 2010 (UTC)

The biggest hole in the world, you say? Maybe the second.  Chickenmonkey  08:34, 25 July 2010 (UTC)

Edit summaries

.... sometimes a simple phrase can cover a huge range of situations. I like this one, and I may use it sometime for brevity.  ;) Rossrs (talk) 11:23, 25 July 2010 (UTC)

such things really are a too-common problem ;) Jack Merridew 11:30, 25 July 2010 (UTC)

Assassins (musical)

Thanks for your comments, there certainly is a lot to think about. For the record, I am not at all computer-literate so a lot of stuff just flies over my head. A quick question, do you think that all of the song lists on the musical theatre articles (I don't know how many there are) should have the format you suggest for Assassins? If so, I am obviously not the one to talk to (I'm not even a member of the MT group), but that group might want to hear what you have to say. By the way, if you would like to revert to your format, or if you want me to self-revert my edits, let me know or go ahead--I do not insist that, just because "that's the way its done" need to be the only way.JeanColumbia (talk) 20:00, 25 July 2010 (UTC)

I'm going to keep this over on your page... Cheers, Jack Merridew 21:20, 25 July 2010 (UTC)

Stealth

Jack .....

What exactly were you "fixing"on my talk page? You are sneaky ;) Minor 4th 01:28, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

this added a newline; it has the effect of getting your post and the one you were replying to, to be on separate lines: see;) — Cheers, Jack Merridew, who sees everything. 01:33, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

Clever. Minor 4th|

Thanks; my socks and I do try ;) Jack Merridew 02:14, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

Butterfly article

Nice tweaks here. I tried to add the commoncat thing but it went to a page not yet created via the category. What did I goof? — Rlevse • Talk • 10:14, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

See: WP:CITE#List-defined references re the tweaks. Everything should be done this way, it's the future; references belong in the reference section.

See: Greta Garbo#cite note-FOOTNOTEBainbridge1955a12-53, then click the "Bainbridge 1955a", which will take you to the full details in the bibliography. (That link will change when the article changes, so here is an oldid.) This sort of ref lives in the bibliography section is invoked from the prose via {{sfn}}. This is Harvard style-referencing and is about not duplicating most of the cite goop for all of the specific pages referenced.

I'm not seeing the commonscat problem; it takes me to Commons:Category:Butterfly Conservatory, which offers my nineteen pictures; yours, I assume. The template was added here; {{commoncat|Butterfly Conservatory}}. Mebbe you only previewed it and were not using the pipe?

Cheers, Jack Merridew 16:54, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

Help needed

Hi Jack, I know that I am in the wrong area, this is not the place to ask this help, but still I am doing that. I have been very busy in Urdu Wikipedia, I am translating a lot from Norwegian and English to Urdu. I asked there for help but it seems, people there are sleeping. Can you PLEASE, upload this logo

• File:So You Think You Can Dance.svg

in the urdu section, here is the link to that.

• ur:اچھا، تمہارا خيال ہے کہ تمہيں رقص کرنا آتا ہے

I spent almost whole day to make it work but did not make it. After you have uploaded it there, I can check how you did it, and in future I would try to do such things myself. Thanks in advance. regards. Jogibaba (talk) 19:01, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

Well, my account is active on ur:, now. I don't speak, or read, Urdu. I have no idea what that project's views on non-free content are. Some projects do not allow it at all. If this were not a non-free things, Commons: would be the appropriate route. it makes stuff available to all other projects.

I'm not going to blindly upload something into that project. You might ask at WP:Pakistan; folks there would be much more likely to know what's appropriate over there. Better: chill-out and wait for a response from whomever you asked on that project. Jack Merridew 19:46, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

File:GoldeneyewiiDam.JPG

Just letting you know, I have reverted the image size reduction made to the above image. WP:NFCC specifies that an image should be of reduced resolution, yes, but reducing the resolution to such an extent makes the image completely useless in illustrating the point, which I'm sure was not your goal. If you note, the image size is already 277 pixels high, which is significantly less than the actual image of game play footage which would be at least 400 pixels high. As a result, it is compliant with NFCC in its current format. If you disagree I would be glad to discuss the matter. --Oni Ookami Alfador^Talk|@ 20:03, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

You reverted to a 949×329 size? Go away, you're revered back. I'll look at the appropriateness of the ridiculous image, next. Jack Merridew 20:07, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

• Wikipedia:Files for deletion/2010 July 27#File:GoldeneyewiiDam.JPG

"Go away?" Nice job. Try not to be such a WP:DICK--Oni Ookami Alfador^Talk|@ 21:00, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

Think WMF-wide; that's m:Dick. Cheers, Moby 21:05, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

Since you've edit warred to restore the NFCC-flaunting 949×329 image, you should learn that rationale's for size are for the size used in articles space, not the size available in the file space. Any resolution beyond what is used in the article is superfluous and unwarranted. Jack Merridew 21:11, 27 July 2010 (UTC)

Boys Boys, please lets not argue over the image, Let me take care of it, I uploaded, I'll fix the problem, I just need to know why its proposed to be deleted. --Smalln (talk) 00:14, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

• Wikipedia:Files for deletion/2010 July 27#File:GoldeneyewiiDam.JPG
  Should sort the problem just fine. Jack Merridew 00:25, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Sigh... (request)

I have been trying to avoid this for a very, very, very long time.. but it seems I have no where else to go.

Your command of html is beyond my own... to what I believe to be a very vast degree. For who knows how long, I have been trying to fix my userpage to my own liking.. but I just can't seem to get it to do what I want it to do. I was wondering if you might help me achieve that goal. Thank you for your time, whether you accept or deny(in lieu of taking the time to read this message).— Dædαlus ^Contribs 05:54, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

At the moment, I'm trying to figure out how I fucked-up: User talk:Jack Merridew/Archive 4. I quick glossed your user page and you're doing odd template things in there, {{!}} and the like, that don't seem warranted. I get the "Special:NewPages/5" and will look at the bug report. You should know I don't much like user boxes and find them not worth fussing with; they're all sorts of poorly coded. What do you want fixed? I'm not seeing anything grossly broken; mebbe some of what you're not liking is due to your system or browser. And there's your user page edit notice that says if I edit there, you'll be getting me blocked...

—Sincerely, Street-Legal Sockpuppet Jack Merridewthis user is a sock puppet 06:08, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

Help Requested

Hello, i put in a request at Wikipedia:User page design center/Help and collaboration/Help requests and was told to try asking you. I doubt it but is there any way that i can hide my coding for my page? Or at least keep from people "copy" and pasting the codes? The page i want to do this on is located here. You can reply here as i am watching the page. Thanks alot :) (CK)Lakeshade✽talk2me

It's rather teh nature of the interwebs that stuff is copyable. There are ways to sort of hide stuff, by transcluding and generally obfuscating thing, but it's kinda anti-wiki. Much of my current user page is nods to folks who've copied the code implementing earlier versions. To the best of my knowledge, no one's stepped-up and taken this one to a new level.

see the text just below your edit box: You: release your contributions when you hit save. If you don't want to do that, fine. Just don't save your codes here ;) The page you pointed at looks like it's a knock off of some copy of that sort of menu that's on hundreds of pages. Jack Merridew 02:52, 30 July 2010 (UTC)

I had a feeling you were going to mention the edit box thing lol. Thanks anyways :P (CK)Lakeshade✽talk2me 03:52, 30 July 2010 (UTC)

Film title sorting

Hi Jack, could you please have a look at Isabelle Adjani#Filmography. After I did it, I wondered if the sorting was correct. I don't speak French, so I'm not sure if the "Le" and "La" at the beginning should be omitted for sorting in the same way as the English "the" or "a". I confused myself with sorting disambiguated titles at Amy Adams#Filmography but finally figured out how to do it. I think that one is right. Cheers Rossrs (talk) 14:55, 31 July 2010 (UTC)

Hi. I fiddled with a few things, but mostly all was fine. On the French titles, I'm not sure. What about L' Année prochaine... si tout va bien??? I spoke with a friend about this (French speaker) and grammatically, you're right, but from an English language perspective, she thought it might not be best, as many would not be able to grasp the rationale. This sort of thing (;) must have been discussed somewhere before... Cheers, Jack Merridew 16:14, 31 July 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. I'll leave it as is for now, and see if I can find any discussion. Rossrs (talk) 09:05, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

File copyright problem with File:GoldeneyewiiDam.JPG

Thank you for uploading File:GoldeneyewiiDam.JPG. However, it currently is missing information on its copyright status. Wikipedia takes copyright very seriously. It may be deleted soon, unless we can determine the license and the source of the file. If you know this information, then you can add a copyright tag to the image description page.

If you have uploaded other files, consider checking that you have specified their license and tagged them, too. You can find a list of files you have created in your upload log.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them at the media copyright questions page. Thanks again for your cooperation. Rockfang (talk) 02:09, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Pay attention; I didn't upload the original, User:Smalln did; I uploaded reduced and portrait versions and took the damn thing to FfD, already.

• Wikipedia:Files for deletion/2010 July 27#File:GoldeneyewiiDam.JPG

Jack Merridew 02:17, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Anna Kendrick article

Hi, thanks for stepping in to adjust the image. Though I think having images to the left is appropriate at times I learned something new with what you just did to the article. Thanks again, --CrohnieGal ^Talk 08:27, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

No problem; iz wut I do ;) {{fix bunching}} is a hack; it wraps things with a vertical layout table. I see you've replied at HJ's page, too, so I'll comment there. Jack Merridew 19:33, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Bette Davis filmography

Hi Jack. I think you have made the first two sections a little too accessible. ;) I'm not sure what your intention was, so I'll leave it be. Could you please take a look when you have a moment. Thanks. Rossrs (talk) 09:27, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

It's a big page, so I did a partial step. Next would be adding class="sortable" and {{sortname}}. I'm also thinking of merging the arbitrary decade tables into one table; note that the last one is two not-very-active decades. This is just 'chunking'. The sorting by title makes little sense if you're only dealing with, say, the 1940s. Merging the decade tables will also have the effect of getting the column widths to automagically look better.

Cheers, Jack Merridew 19:30, 2 August 2010 (UTC) — Did you see this?

No, I'd not seen the date sorting at Jane Alexander, and I didn't know how to name sort a title without an article, so that's two things I now know how to do. Merging the Davis filmography makes sense. Sorting only within one decade makes no sense. Julie Andrews is coming up slowly but surely on my list, and I noticed the award table there is partly sorted. Made me realize that on something like Jennifer Aniston it allows the legitimate awards like Emmy's to be looked at without all those inane People's Choice awards. Did you happen to look at Pamela Anderson? There's a Dancing with the Stars table there. Although I think it's superfluous and undue emphasis, I didn't know what to do with it, so I decided "nothing". Rossrs (talk) 21:45, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

And I check my watchlist and you were at Pam! How's that for timing? ;) Rossrs (talk) 21:46, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

It's not a coincidence ;)

There are a lot of tools about, it's just a matter of finding them; check the categories at the bottom of the template pages, and look for stuff in other articles. A lot of pages on teh serious subjects have a lot more stuff in play.

I see you're going rather alphabetically, and have those huge lists (I didn't catch the spelling difference, but there's only one Neve Campbell). I did see Pammy's nasty table, and I'm inclined to cut such things. I moved on, though. A huge number of awards should be cut, and I see the inclusion of such shite as a lot of what drives the use of tables for filmographies. See Anna Kendrick; she presumably 'won' the North Texas Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress (it doesn't say won, it just omits nominated). Note that the link just points at Texas. The bar should be much higher for nominations and for teen/fan/tvland stuff. There is the issue of 12 year old editors who have opinions. Cheers, Jack Merridew 22:28, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Yes, I'm working through my ridiculously long lists. eh, it's systematic, of sorts. I merged them from a number of smaller lists hence Neve Campbell and her doppelgänger. I may one day progress beyond "A". I'll follow up on the awards thing some day too. It's out of hand, and there's a gulf of difference between Aniston's "award" for snogging some bloke on film, and a (for instance) SAG Award which we assume is for her acting talents. We treat them with equal weight, so the bar seems to be sitting on the ground.... in the mud.....with someone's foot on it..... Rossrs (talk) 09:36, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Help!

Jack, I need your expertise with fiddly markup! ;) I'm trying to get a quote box thingy into the plot section of Up in the Air (film), similar to how it's done in Amanda Seyfried, but it's not working! :( Any chance you could fix it for me? Oh, btw, I'm trying to locate a mediawiki page, I don't suppose you'd be any help with that...? Thanks, HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 01:00, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

(Talk page stalker) I took a whack at it.  Chickenmonkey  01:19, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

And I edit conflicted with you ;) I think we did the same thing except that I reformatted it into a vertical style. And I'm gonna cut both yellows. Damn template should not be allowing user supplied colours. Cheers, Jack Merridew 01:23, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Don't you want to see quotes with pink backgrounds? It would be lovely...  Chickenmonkey  01:33, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Agreed on the colour. It's just unnecessary. Thanks to both of you for fixing it. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 01:42, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

When is is appropriate? Ever? We could drop support from the template and they would all become big-standard. I'll go better than 'a penny' — I've got a five Swiss franc coin on my desk for fixing this ;) Cheers, Jack Merridew 01:49, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Tempted to go make and {{edit protected}} *now*. Or search and destroy per this. Cheers, Jack Merridew 01:49, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Help

With File:428JKLM.JPG, which has been tagged for speedy per "obviously wrong copyright tag". Not sure if there's a better tag for the image or not. There is no other image of the subject available. N419BH 03:30, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

It's a brand new account that tagged it and they're demonstrating significant prior experience with Wikipedia, right out of the box. How's your bucket of good faith? It would seem a reasonable fair-use claim. I see two issues; is it really a CG image? It looks like a real photo, to me. Could be, of course. duh; "Number built 0." Also, the source site's not answering at all for me. Check that and you're probably good. Oh, It will need a size reduction, which I'll do for you (WP:NFCC). Cheers, Jack Merridew 03:55, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

I've also asked User:neutralhomer, he seems to think the author not being conclusively determined is a problem, as do the IRC people. I think the image has been deleted from the source page. That's my main source for the article, too. I thought the brand new account speedy tagging images was a bit fishy too. N419BH 03:59, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

I was thinking that was off the source site I can't see. I'm looking at Special:Contributions/Athlem and am not much impressed. I'd suggest you check them out further and determine if they're really up to much good. They seem on a bit of a rampage. Cheers, Jack Merridew 04:03, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Seems like they've been here before. Dunno who they might be. N419BH 04:32, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

You may be interested in...

Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#Unban discussion for User:Drew R. Smith. AniMate 22:31, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Ya, and I'll bring a nuke ;) Cheers, Jack Merridew 22:33, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Reflinks

Hi Jack. I'm baffled. You made [1] this edit to Ursula Andress and filled in 8 references. I had already run reflinks on it and didn't pick up any. Now I'm looking at Ann-Margret and I can see a number of references that are similar to the ones that were at Ursula Andress, not in cite web form, but I can't work out how to convert them. Do you have any idea what I could be doing wrong? Thanks in advance if you have any suggestions. Cheers Rossrs (talk) 13:50, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

First, note my prior edit; and the bit in the edit summary re bot-trick. In that edit, I did prep for the bot:

• <ref>Mark Anstead (December 7, 2002). [http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2002/dec/07/features.jobsmoney2 Bond girl who made a killing]. ''[[The Guardian]]''. Accessed 2008-06-30.</ref>

became:

• <ref>[http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2002/dec/07/features.jobsmoney2 Bond girl who made a killing Mark Anstead (December 7, 2002), The Guardian. Accessed 2008-06-30]</ref>

I did that for about 8 refs, I guess.

The next edit was a mix of the bot's output and me fiddling with it to remove 'nits', mostly duplicative stuff in the title attribute of the cite template. The tool is cautious about making changes when it sees stuff that's formatted already; a do-no-harm approach. By cutting the link in the ref to a simpler form, I enable the bot parsing. Things to cut are quotes, wiki-styling with apostrophes, and internal links such as The Guardian. This is all a quick way to push the references to a better state. These are things I'm doing since I'm there, and I may not always fuss over the bot's output, so I usually leave the information in the simpler form, in case the bot can't read it from the linked site; the effectiveness of the site scraping varies based on the semantic structure of the target site. If they code-well, and use things like microformats, the tool is able to more effectively parse the site and build a cite, for use here. Manually going through refs and fully expanding them into templates is tedious, although tools like WP:Cite4Wiki can help with that (I'm using an unreleased beta version I got from User:SMcCandlish;).

I'll do about the same to Ann Margret without combining the steps; see its future history ('future', as of this timestamp;).

fyi, when invoking reflinks, I typically click the 'Plain links' option, as it expands the range of links parsed. Cheers, Jack Merridew 21:22, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

Thank you. I appreciate the edits and the explanation. I was looking too closely at the last Ursula Andress edit to see the previous one, and that's where the answer was. I'll have a close look at the Ann-Margret edits. It will be useful to be able to refer back to them. If you ever look at an article I've edited, and see that nothing further is required, please let me know. It'll make my day ;) Cheers Rossrs (talk) 08:34, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

Glad to hear it ;) Mostly it's been little stuff. You were running the citation bot, not reflinks; they do different things. There are bot-prep tricks that work for each. For example, using the best cite template; change cit web to cite journal and the bot might add volume and issue numbers; issns, and such, too. Cheers, Jack Merridew 04:04, 6 August 2010 (UTC)

Sock Puppets

Can you please explain who is a sock puppet, who isn't, and why you (or whoever) is permitted to have all these sock puppets? I read the WP policy on sock puppets, and I'm hopelessly confused as to what's going on with your account(s). Thanks.--Bbb23 (talk) 00:24, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

• See WP:SOCKPUPPET, and User:Jack Merridew/History. It's a long story ;) How is any of it your concern? Jack Merridew 00:31, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

Thank you for the link to the history. I had already read the policy. The problem I had was in reconciling the policy with "you." It concerned me only to the extent that I wanted to understand the application of the policy, just as the application of any WP policy might concern me. The question certainly wasn't intended to be offensive.--Bbb23 (talk) 23:48, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

Colspan and rowspan: issue or not?

Hey Jack, I may have signed you up for some extra work at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (accessibility)#Colspan and rowspan: issue or not?. Maaf. Well, you sent me there originally, so it's probably your own fault :D. On the other hand, there's an opportunity to firmly convince members of WP:WikiProject Accessibility that better markup is part-and-parcel of improving accessibility. Hearts and minds, little by little ... --Ralph (talk) 01:26, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

I saw your comment from yesterday, and liked. The scope attribute is appropriate to use and whoever is pushing that is right. It is a bit of extra markup, bit it adds important information. I'll check out the state of the talk, today. Terima kasih. Jack Merridew 01:32, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for your input. I for one am completely converted to good markup and semantics. The goal of accessibility is to use standards to make the content understandable by machines. Which includes browsers, search engines, mobile devices, screen readers...

However, I decided to revert you on the scope attribute and quotations. MediaWiki will parse this Wiki markup into HTML, the result is exactly the same. It's just like fighting over <br>, </br>, <br/> and <br />. It's a useless distraction for editors and an endless debate. Let's try to avoid it.

By the way, nice design on your page. I love it. One day when we both have some time to spend we should make a contest on a home page redesign and see who wins. ;-) Dodoïste (talk) 03:35, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

I've long been an advocate of semantic markup, and I agree it's not just for accessibility by people, but by machines, too; Googlebot and the rest. I don't agree with omitting the quotation marks, though. Sure, I know MediaWiki fixes things up on the way out the door, but it doesn't always get it right. I see using proper form in the wikitext as encouraging an understanding of markup and assisting with interoperability with other tools that may read the wiki-text. My external editor, for example.

Did you see that my user page is dynamic? Check back in an hour, and you'll see a new quote; in a day and you get an whole new layout and imagery. Jack Merridew 03:47, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

I assumed that most help pages were inconsistent about the use of quotations mark within attributes and that we could find both cases (like on the french Wikipedia). Looks like I could not have been more wrong. I will revert myself for consistency's sake with the current guidelines. Yours, Dodoïste (talk) 14:22, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

Done in the guidelines and articles I've edited. Dodoïste (talk) 15:27, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

Good to see. Proper markup is a very solid position. Wikitext is about brackets and apostrophes and while MediaWiki can sanitize poor markup, it's better to promote a proper understanding. With things like HTML5 coming down the pike, older forms of markup will only be leaned on, harder. ref and center will be falling away, for example.

May offer a bit of advice? You're new here, and you're going too fast. Rather than simply dropping the scope attributes into the MOS and a fistful of articles, you need to engage in up-front discussion. Hard-coding a gazillion instances scope="row" into every table under the sun is not going to happen. A better solution needs to be sought, such as having MediaWiki dynamically generate them, or looking to the latest CSS3 table model. Mebbe an enhancement to wikitext-syntax? ;) Cheers, Jack Merridew

I'd gladly take any advice, since I'm not really familiar with how things works on this wiki. The few articles were a test, to see if editors would complain about it. That's why I chose articles from the featured article candidates. Just to make sure it was not a major disturbance.

I thought about a change in Mediawiki already, but the way tables are coded is really inconsistent. The result will be wrong in a lot of tables, and we can't even know how many of them. Almost no user is going to look at the source code of the page to see if the output is correct. Sounds like much more trouble in the end. Plus, the tables often have other issues. In the WikiProject Discographies the tables had no row headers and the rows at the left were years instead of albums. And those tables were decent examples.

CSS can only add one attribute to a header (tag <tr>), and cannot tell if it's meant to be a row or a column. And what about those who have CSS disabled?

But the CSS 3 Flexible Box Model will make a good replacement for our layout tables. That's one thing to tell to MediaWiki developers once IE9 will be released.

Enhancement to wiki syntax... scope="col" doesn't feel that different from other elements of the wiki syntax, so a change to this particular attribute would not make any sense. Sounds like Usability Initiative's job.

My priority is to improve tables in templates, like Template:Infobox weather. This one is used on more than 3'000 articles. I'd like to have a list of such tables in templates so I could prioritize and follow the changes. Dodoïste (talk) 23:04, 6 August 2010 (UTC)

It's obvious that you're not familiar with how things work on this wiki; slow the fuck down with your changes to guidelines and help pages, for a start. You made changes to see if editors would complain about it? That could be viewed as disrupting Wikipedia to illustrate a point.

The discography tables are not properly structured; they've been designed with too much focus on pretty layout and not enough on accessibility and functionality. They need to do a major re-think on their approach rather than a digging-in of heels. For what it's worth, I've never like {{Infobox weather}}, but have never much looked at it or the usages other than ones I happen upon; it has a habit of messing-up page layouts. I also agree that moving away from tables for layout is quite appropriate and have no intention of waiting for internet explorer to get with it; it is ok if users of poor browsers get a poorer experience. Jack Merridew 16:23, 8 August 2010 (UTC)

OK. I'll slow down. Being bold was not the best thing to do indeed. I made the change only because the paragraphs on colspan/rowspan are unintelligible and partially wrong. It was a temporary fix until we write something decent about it. Dodoïste (talk) 20:05, 8 August 2010 (UTC)

Gonna take the GA plunge

Putting up the Varian article for GA. Want to brace for defense of your ref tags? I can probably manage the rest. It may get a few dings on review, but I won't get them cleaned up without some incentive. Stay tuned! Montanabw^(talk) 20:11, 6 August 2010 (UTC)

Sure, count me in; I'll look at the current state of it and tag along for the ga-review. Cheers, Jack Merridew 15:58, 8 August 2010 (UTC)

Discussion invitation

Hi Jack Merridew, I would like to invite you to a discussion on setting up good guidelines for tennis player notability. Please feel free to give comments and suggestions there. Thank you. Arteyu ? _{Blame it on me !} 09:46, 7 August 2010 (UTC)

Kelly Rowland discography

I would appreciate it if you stop trying to change the reference style when there is no clear need to do so. I understand that in some cases, it does make the prose clearer however I took it upon myself to be main article editor at Kelly Rowland discography and have spent a lot of time trying to get it to FL status. It would have been nice of you to have discussed the changes to the citation style rather than just trying to force/implement it. I don't wish to make use of it because its nothing something I widely use accross the many articles I edit or something which I've encountered in other FLs or GAs. I certainly don't think its worth the time converting all of the references certainly not when the current citation formatting is allowed and breaks no rules or policies. Whilst I accept that your method removes long citations from the prose, it is not accessible to others as many other editors will not know how to use it. Also there is no guideline/policy etc. which states that citations have to be given in the form which you've attempted to implement. That's why I reverted it back to the old style. I request you to please stop trying to convert the ref style and instead open discussion about making the use of it more widespread because you appeared to suggest in your edit summaries that it was something recommended by wikipedia as the new/modern formatting style. (sorry if this come accross as harsh/WP:OWN its not supposed to at all).

On a side note, apart from not using scope="col" I'm not sure what other issues there are with accessibility. I don't think I've understood what you meant. --Lil-unique1 (talk) 14:17, 7 August 2010 (UTC)

A quick note about this new way of making references. It is an improvement of the current syntax and it does makes the syntax clearer. Slightly. But it's a lot of efforts to move every references. And the Usability Initiative is currently working on template folding. Template folding will be incredibly better than this reference hack. In short: it's not worth the effort to change the references syntax just to change it back a few months later when template folding will be released. I'll leave a message about that on Wikipedia:Citing_sources#List-defined_references. Dodoïste (talk) 00:32, 8 August 2010 (UTC)

I'm not impressed with either of your takes on this. And thanks for calling-out WP:OWN before I did. List style references were developed and deployed for very good reasons. You, other editors, and the project would be best served by learning to use them, rather than revering appropriate enhancements to articles. Jack Merridew 15:57, 8 August 2010 (UTC)

First of all I want to apologise. I can now see the usefulness of them to reduce the size of the citations at the discography tables in Kelly Rowland discography. With regards to you to not being 'impressed' its because of the way you've gone about it. You can see that I nominated the article for FL. It would have therefore been better for you to have discussed it with me first and said hey there's a better way of formatting citations. You seem to forget that as I'm taking responsibility for updating the article any changes to the citation style will affect me most as it is something I have to get used to. However given that there will be other changes e.g. template folding coming soon I am going to hold off any changes for now. --Lil-unique1 (talk) 18:02, 8 August 2010 (UTC)

This is good. The template folding argument holds no water; it will be a complementary thing. I assumed your initial removal was inadvertent and believe I said so in my edit summary. Inline citations are on their way out; it's really a pretty clear paradigm shift. The inline-clutter also serves as a deterrent to editors using all of the fields in a citation template as it only bulks things up further. By being off in the references section, that deterrent is removed. I was doing a few to provide examples of how it's done. It was not my intention to step on your toes. You should re-think the ownership thing; you don't have primary responsibility for any page, although you may be the primary contributor.

Kelly Rowland discography is going to end up serving as a test of WP:DISCOG's MOS-flaunting approach. I've no knowledge of her music; this just happened to be what's up at FLC when I noticed the discussion re accessibility. The table structure is inappropriate and all such tables will end up changed. See the huge heaps of markup in the tables? line-by-line styling and alignment? It's all inappropriate; see WP:Deviations. I'm quite well known on this project, and several others, for my expertise on these issues. Not on fr:wp, however ;) Jack Merridew 18:20, 8 August 2010 (UTC)

Allow me to clarify. I didnt wish to implement the reflist citation style because I was waiting to see how template folding effects the outcome of reflists. Of course you're input is noted... and I don't think the reflist thing is necessarily a bad idea but it is not a functional improvement as such. At the moment there is nothing in the guidelines stating that that the in-line citation style is incorrect or defunct. The current style is perfectly acceptable and easy to understand.

With regards to the MOS:DISCOG it is not my fault that the format style conflicts with accessibility guidelines and therefore I have modified the article to make it match other current FL standards. On the talk pages we're thrashing out the details of just exactly how the accessibility guidelines will impact on discography tables and thus we're aiming to create an example that in future all FLs (including Kelly Rowland discography which is currently just a nominee) will follow and that MOS:DISCOG will show as the acceptable standard. So a bit of patience is required as there will be different ways of implementing such changes. The aim of MOS:DISCOG is to create a standard for discographies to follow and so coming up with a new accessible singles/albums table is the priority at the moment. --Lil-unique1 (talk) 23:20, 8 August 2010 (UTC)

The template folding is months away, and more likely on the order of a year away. Such changes occur slowly; FR, for example. And I'm familiar with the concept, having used it for years in other forms of software development; it will be nice, but it will not obviate the appropriateness of moving the refs into the references sections. I would encourage you to come to grips with this, as it is clearing a happening thing; it's widely used in other areas of the project and is simply a part of a broader goal of raising the standards of referencing project-wide.

"MOS:DISCOG" is an inappropriately named redirect; The target of that page is not part of the MOS. You understand that it it merely a wikiprojects local view of things and that it conflicts with the real MOS. If WP:DISCOG wants that to have MOS-status, they have to seek consensus for it. And they won't get it. Anyway, I understand that you've been following that look and the look of other pages. I have little interest in discographies as a topic and have only peeked into that area and seen poor practices. I'm a developer and an advocate of standards. Not local wikiproject standards, but web standards and WMF standards. Stuff of wide applicability. The nutshell of what we're talking about is that the norms to date regarding discographies are poor and are going to change. Now would be a good time to see this and get on the right path. Cheers, Jack Merridew 23:54, 8 August 2010 (UTC)

Me and you appear to be getting off on the wrong foot here. You're obviously more knowledgable about the whole accessibility thing which is great, we need people who know the technicalities to help us update our policies/guidelines. My point is I don't want to make any significant changes to any individual articles without making the changes to MOS:DISCOG first. Therefore once we have established a proper standard which meets the accessibility changes then we can edit all appropriate discographies accordingly. Does that make sense? Your input, I'm finding, is extremely valuable if a little complicated. This discussion involves a lot of technical stuff which editors of a non-computing background like myself would find difficult to understand. With the current level of depth in the discussions in a way the information being presented is not accessible. I apologise if any of my behaviour/comments have come off as brash or harsh. I'm just trying to get my head around things and implement the changes in a way that the whole community will benefit. --Lil-unique1 (talk) 22:19, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

Don't worry, I'm not down on you, specifically. You're following guidance that doesn't have more than a local consensus, though. I'm good at this; professional-grade, although I'll not adopt the term 'expert'. You saw that I took "MOS:DISCOG" to redirects for Deletion Discussion? It's a local group's styling preferences masquerading as a limb of the real MOS. Just as you posted here, I was posing at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Discographies/style, so have a look-see. I understand that you feel responsible for the Kelly page at the moment. I want to make changes to it, too, however, and I don't care what WP:DISCOG recommends, because their recommendations are poor and out of sync with reality. You seem to have seen the value of list style references; good. They are the future, they're a lot of the present, too. I understand that the technical language is getting deep; these are technical issues, however. I like the pun re accessibility of teh language. We're on the same page re 'whole community'. Cheers, Jack Merridew 22:35, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

Would you consider a compromise? If I convert the refs in the tables can we leave the ones in the prose as they are? --Lil-unique1 (talk) 22:58, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

I'd consider it a step in the right direction. I see moving refs to the reference sections as most important for those that are used more than once, for the ones an article is really relying on. Getting inline cite templates out of the sea of gooped-up tables would help clarify those, so they're good candidates, too. I've not gone back to that page since you went back and forth on the issue, but will help if you're game. This sort of attention to proper referencing is best done on stable articles that the Battle of Kursk is not rolling over. There are a lot of pretty contentious articles out there. Cheers, Jack Merridew 23:08, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

If you take a look at the article that's how far I want to go with the ref listing technique. Once things are a bit clearer at the talk page discussion then I'll update the discog to meet accessbility requirements. There is still no definate conditions about using or not using colspan/rowspan within the table --Lil-unique1 (talk) 23:46, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

I'll take a look. Think about layouts that do not use any row or col spans, as that enables sorting, which is a trumps-all feature. This is above and beyond the accessibility concerns, which are quite real. Cheers, Jack Merridew 23:49, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

Can you give me a few moments. I'm mocking up something I'd like you to look at.... --Lil-unique1 (talk) 23:58, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

Of course, I'm busy on other things, myself. Jack Merridew 00:04, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

OK I've done an example of what I think your asking for. I've taken some date from one of the single's tables at Kelly Rowland discography and transformed it into what I think and what I've understood from your comments. Please scrutinize it closely and tell me if that is what you meant. see example User:Lil-unique1/Sandbox/8 --Lil-unique1 (talk) 00:17, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

Because we have split level headings I.e. Chart Positions then Charts, table sorting doesnt work. (is it really required?) --Lil-unique1 (talk) 00:37, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

I just edited your sandbox; I added "sortable" to the class list at the top. See Help:Sorting and WP:TABLE. The structure of the table is not compatible with sorting, so if you click the controls, it quite falls apart. The table structure needs to change, a lot No rowspans, No colspans, not even in the header. This is on top of the accessibility reasons for not using these. See Brad_Pitt#Filmography, which I just edited. I see you tool the style="text-align: center;" that I mentioned recently; that made the align="center" unnecessary, so I cut those. The code is more readable for it. All the other styling stuff in there is inappropriate, too; style="width:3.5em;font-size:75%;" over and over again. Cementing in such things is wrong. How do you think that table looks on a handphone? Accessibility is not just about the blind, or some other level of vision impairment, it's about keeping things open to possibilities other than what you had in mind. Jack Merridew 00:42, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

I dont see the 'sortable' feature as being part of accessibility. The whole point of the small font thing is to make those columns smaller than the others. As long as a screen reader can read the upper example that's the first hurdle. --Lil-unique1 (talk) 00:45, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

Sorting is not an accessibility issue, it's a usability issue. See WP:TABLES, too; WP:Deviations. There are three strikes against the row/col spans; a) they are less accessible to different user agents (screen readers and text-to-speech, Googlebot), b) they preclude useful features such as Help:Sorting, and c) the deter less experienced editors who are unfamiliar with the syntax. Harshly put, these are anti-wiki approaches to the wiki. The guidance against hard-coded markup is in general about making the look and feel of the whole site consistent. The systems that people use to access the project vary. A lot. When you make text 75% of the size that it's supposed to be you make make it illegible for some people. I'm on a high resolution display, and tiny fonts all but disappear.

I see you've a second example going that sorts, and that's moving in the right direction. Try a third with all styling and aligning removed. That will maximize accessibility and usability and significantly open up the editing to less skilled editors. Code here can get pretty hairy, when you embed lots of fancy stuff. This is a bad thing in articles, but user pages are another matter ;) Scroll slowly through that. That's what teh disco tables look like to many editors. Cheers, Jack Merridew 01:06, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

I remain yet convinced of the value of sortable in this instance. whilst yes sortable is useful as given at the two pages on wiki it is less of a concern than accessibility. We won't be able to please everyone when making tables useable and accessible. There is going to be some conflict here. I think the main priority is making them accessible. I've yet to see any complaints that omitting the sortable function from disocgraphies is causing a major issue and I think that might be more of a preference thing rather than a genuine issue. Since the guidelines dont state it is a requirment I dont think its a necessary change. I'm sorry but it looks like we're gonns disagree on this one. And it seems to me that rowspan/colspan are causing an issue because of this and not necessarily because of accessibility. --Lil-unique1 (talk) 01:13, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

P.s. in your 3rd example I find the layout of the table too picky. As a near-fully able-sighted editor I find that table harsh on the eyes and I'm viewing on a 16" x 16" laptop screen with default resolution. We need to focus on fixing one problem at a time and currently as I've said above accessibility is the main issue here. --Lil-unique1 (talk) 01:25, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

Sorting has been asked after for years. A key concept in user interface design is to give the user control of as much as possible. These issues have come to the fore in the last six months. The WMF is solidly behind such initiatives, too; they've a whole project dedicated to it; usability:. Anything that inhibits users' access or facility at editing will fall. I made a third: User:Lil-unique1/Sandbox/8#E.g. 3. Cheers, Jack Merridew 01:30, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

Lil, you're quite right that usability and accessibility are two different issues. But the steps you take in making a table sortable will virtually guarantee that it is also accessible. The real problem is that editors want to control the presentation of a page so that it looks aesthetically pleasing to them. However, HTML is a markup language, not a presentation language, and we simply cannot control the user agents (browsers) that readers use: one person's beautiful layout becomes another person's jumbled mess. The answer is to let go, and simplify. The best HTML pages deliver information in a way that any user can have presented in the way that best suits them. --RexxS (talk) 01:45, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

I support any proposal in User:Lil-unique1/Sandbox/8 because they are all improving accessibility greatly. However, the best choice is User:Lil-unique1/Sandbox/8#E.g. 3 that Jack Merridew made. The table is greatly simplified, and the refs are outside the headers. This third proposal will be accessible to everyone. The second is like the third but the refs in the headers might be annoying/confusing. The first example will be accessible to users of fairly recent screen reader, which is not the same as everyone. :-) Dodoïste (talk) 19:24, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

I missed this; teh orange bar has been stuck-on, lately. I wonder what else went by...

first, I saw your other post; Hi, guy. No, I don't know French, and 'they' was just a gender-neutral thing. I'm the sockpuppet, here.

In that example the right-hand stuff with the bulleted list is still a bit messy. Mostly I think you and I need to get on the same page, as you do seem to know the technical side of things.

—Sincerely, Street-Legal Sockpuppet Jack Merridewthis user is a sock puppet 23:30, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

I'm sorry but both of you are confusing the current issues with the existing guidelines at MOS:DISCOG so far the discussion is focussed on changes to the accessibility guidelines which have been enforeced accross wikipedia without consultation. I don't have issues regarding the changes but I have issues regarding the ways in which they have been implemented. You must understand that each project will need time to implement the changes in a way which satisfies accessibility guidelines as well as project specificalities. There are different ways to implement the changes. Yourself and Jack are using the accessibility clash with MOS:DISCOG as an excuse to enforce other changes which you both wish to see being made. Whilst I don't necessarily think what you're asking is wrong or right you are trying to control the outcome. This is not the way discussion works. Also you're taking my view as the only one even though the Discography Project features many thousands of editors. You also appear giving the impression that somehow Accessibility and Userbility are amongst the same line of thought when in reality there are clear differences. As I've stated with Jack above, making it will be impossible to make things 100% useable and 100% accessible. You and Jack seem more bothered about using the recent accessibility updates as a window of opportunity to demolish all other style recommendations within lots of different projects. Allow us to first get wikipedia discographies accessible as this is clear policy. Then you can discuss the other changes by all means. However there is no consensus that disography pages need to change as drastically as either you or Jack are suggesting. I'm sorry but you have to look at your comments in perspective. The answer will be decided by the community as a whole, not by your's or Jack's recommendations alone. You appear to be of the opinion that what you/Jack are suggesting is automatically correct. There needs to be a thorough and proper discussion clearly outlining ALL of the issues after the accessibility guideline is implement. That later discussion needs to identify all of the issues and discuss each on a case-by-case basis. If there is no central policy then of course each project will vary. --Lil-unique1 (talk) 19:15, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

MOS:TEXT shows clearly when italics text should/shouldn't be used. GA/FA/FL reviews conistantly state that a whole article from start to the end of the citations must follow all formatting styles given in MOS. Therefore things like VH1 in a reference should not be italicized just as it would not be italicized in the body of the text. Think logically about this. --Lil-unique1 (talk) 19:24, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

A quick note on usability and accessibility: those two may not always blend in well in the current Wikimedia projects because of software limitations. But in most Web projects, usability and accessibility are working hand-in-hand because they are complementary (and often needed to eachother). Dodoïste (talk) 19:30, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

Which I agree with however I don't like how Jack appears to be suggesting that he has all the answers and is looking for a quick fix. We will get a better solution to the problem and better outcome if we take our time. This is a much bigger issue than either of us realised and it is going to involve patience as well as getting more editors experienced in both fields involved. The solution will not come instantly because there will need to be a stage by stage resolution and before an articles are drastically changed MOS:DISCOG will need to be updated because that's the standard people are following at the moment. If MOS:DISCOG is inline with the rest of the Manual of Style then it will be easier to ensure discogs are. --Lil-unique1 (talk) 19:35, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

Positive section break

Hi Jack just wondered if you can have a look at some of the changes I made today to Kelly Rowland discography. I'm sure you'd approve? -- Lil_℧niquℇ №1 (talk2me) 22:06, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

I'll look... notice I've said that twice already on this page, today. A high-traffic page. Cheers, Jack Merridew 22:15, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Well you are a busy-bee and it looks like you're getting stuck right in with the accessibility thing across lots of articles/projects. -- Lil_℧niquℇ №1 (talk2me) 22:38, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

And there are other WMF projects. Care to comment on the question of using citation templates, or not? Take a peek at Talk:Halle Berry#citation style. There's a similar discussion at Talk:Uma Thurman#References. Cheers, Jack Merridew 22:44, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

I'm going to decline to comment because on both issues i'm undecided so my answer would be a ramble and therefore of little use to clarify the situation. -- Lil_℧niquℇ №1 (talk2me) 22:53, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Colspans etc

I've come here to challenge your assertion that this is an undiscussed change.

As with 98% of the MoS, this has gone unnoticed for periods of time because it was uninforced (and therefore irrelevant). In this instance it was unenforced because WP:ACCESS has only come to prominence in the last year, and become part of the MoS in the last few months. Someone tried to enforce it, and once the question was asked. In particular, I don't see it as particularly helpful to use an edit summary amounting to "reverting undiscussed edits", go to the active discussion, announce that you have reverted, and add nothing to it. RexxS reverted, but he reverted on the correct point that removing these even temporarily was going too far, something I was in the process of addressing.

I'd be grateful if you could comment on my latest post as soon as practicable. I'm inclined to re-revert or add my suggested text, but appreciate that doing so would be unproductive until you have had the opportunity to expand upon your position. I will therefore leave it for the time being, provided that you engage in the discussion. Regards, --WFC-- 16:29, 8 August 2010 (UTC)

and just as I saved my reply, I got your message here... Jack Merridew 16:39, 8 August 2010 (UTC)

Gender

That's odd. My reading of the user's talk page led me to believe they were male, but your French could easily be better than mine :D --Ralph (talk) 01:32, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

Oh, I'm by no means sure. I'll go with whatever they say. This discog stuff is all being discussed in parallel on their wikiproject talk page: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Discographies/style#Accessibility issues. And see Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2010 August 8#MOS:DISCOG. Cheers, Jack Merridew 01:51, 9 August 2010 (UTC)

I think you'll get a kick out of seeing this

The awards table for Gossip Girl. LMAO. Nymf _hideliho! 13:28, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

Caution: Eye protection might be necessary ;) - Josette (talk) 14:53, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

Holy smokes! ++Lar: t/c 15:42, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

Priceless. And ask Tony, teh goggles, they do *NOTHING*.

See also

Theoretical genetic mutations that would have arisen if Leia had married Luke.

Cheers, Jack Merridew 17:28, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

Courtesy note

You are receiving this message because of your participation in this discussion, now continued at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Microformats. –xeno^talk 13:44, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

Re: MOS

What?, You don't like the blue color, I was just following this template: Template:Filmography table begin, that you created. Also, It would be a lot better not to have a separate year line for a separate title work, like the edit you did. Lastly, I'm actually in the process of expanding the article a lot more. QuasyBoy 17:34, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

There's no consensus for that blue, and that template is being phased-out. The years and some other stuff should not have the rowspan thing done for several reasons: accessibility and sorting. See User:RexxS/Accessibility and Help:Sorting. If you put the spans back in, it breaks the sorting. Badly. Otherwise, expand away. It needs sources. Cheers, Jack Merridew 18:03, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

I know that article will need sources, When I expand it, Duh. But anyway rowpans are not so bad, especially in Ms. Pevec's case. With her doing a number of projects in a particular year, as she did within the last 8 years. QuasyBoy 18:43, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

I was just peeking at the tag up-top re referencing. The use of rowspans is quite problematic and is being discussed all over in the context of accessibility and sorting. Listen to the example RexxS put up. It's also a usability issue; sorting enables users to view the data the way they want, such as by title. When you sort by title, the years are no longer consecutive; another reason they need to be explicitly given for each row. Note the use of {{sortname}} in some of the others, such as Brad Pitt. Cheers, Jack Merridew 18:52, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

It only seems to be in issue if there is an audio file for the article and if awards and nominations are also included. But that's not a problem with the Denzel Washington filmography table, it's done pretty nicely, it uses rowspan and awards and nominations are included in it. But if it is such a problem in Wikipedia right now, I'll just leave as your edit as is in the Katija Pevec article. :) QuasyBoy 19:06, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

It's a problem for anyone using text-to-speech to access an article; that audio file is a specific demonstration. The MOS says to avoid them, too; people have merely been ignoring that. The Denzel Washington table needs fixing, too; thousands do. hint, hint ;) Jack Merridew 19:12, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

This is not strictly proven. You're basing your opinion one test. In the discussions at MOS:DISCOG as well as various other pages it says that there is NOT enough evidence that this is a genuine issue with modern screen readers. Until we have more expert opinions and extensive testing we cannot make massive changes like this based on simple tests. --Lil-unique1 (talk) 19:18, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

I'm basing my opinion on years of professional experience. There's also a large body of discussion on-wiki about this going back a long time. Jack Merridew 19:23, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

So where is the concrete evidence for this? Everyone who seems to be involved in the Accessibility discussions is going on and on about screen readers and col/row spans yet the evidence has not been presented to all parts of the community. If this is clear cut issue like your making out then why havent yourself and other editors put together a proper page detailing exactly why changes need to be made with the relevant supporting evidence. This would then act as a manual for change. However there is numerous editors requesting such changes and suddenly the community is supposed to play ball? It would be fair and easier if people centralised the discussion and notified every relevant project/page etc. to discuss how the changes will definately impact on wikipedia. Its fine to decide things centrally but then that has to be communicated at a local level. --Lil-unique1 (talk) 19:27, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

This has been discussed to death for six months in the context of actor bios. It's been in the MOS for a long time. Time to do things right. There are like 600 wikiprojects; I've never looked at most; sorry. There is fucked-up stuff everywhere; see #I think you'll get a kick out of seeing this, just above. Jack Merridew 19:34, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

OK I admit you trumped me there. That is bad example. A really bad one. But a little time and patience would be appreciated. Lets work through things together not chuck things at one another. It is upto the project to decide how best to implement accessibility because there are multiple ways of doing so. --Lil-unique1 (talk) 19:41, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

It is up to The Project (i.e. Wikipedia) to decide things, not up to wikiprojects, which are often full of bad ideas. I initiated an RfC on this very question last month. Wikiprojects' guidance falls in the face of wider consensus. I've been patient about all this for a long time. You're just late to the party. fyi, I reverted you on the Kelly page; those were good fixes, please keep them. Jack Merridew 19:51, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

FYI per MOS:TEXT things like VH1 should not appear in italics in the referencing. It wouldn't be italicised in the text and so shouldnt be in there references. That's what I was trying to revert. --Lil-unique1 (talk) 19:53, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

The cite templates take care of formatting the stuff passed-in. This is really the same issue; don't seek to be so controlling of stuff. If you're not liking the effects the template applies, possibly you're passing the wrong stuff in; mebbe 'publisher', not 'work'. The template parameters should be plain-text. See the ref fix I did, too. That something you should use for all those disco pages. Jack Merridew 19:58, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

Allow me to explain. For something like VH1 the publisher is MTV Networks (Viacom) therefore work (what is being cited) is VH1 or VH1.co.uk either way neither of these should be italicised per MOS:TEXT. The moral of this incident is that now your trying to enforce standards which wikipedia itself cannot enfore. Nowhere does it state that template formatting trumps MOS. The MOS for italics font style trumps the formatting for templates. This is not my error in understanding. If this is incorrect its an issue between MOS:TEXT and WP:Deviations (or whatever that policy is) that you keep referring to. Please restore the unitalicizing of the revent references and seek to correct the differences between those various MOS pages first. --Lil-unique1 (talk) 21:01, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

See {{cite web}} under the section:

'work'

If this item is part of a larger "work", such as a book, periodical or website, write the name of that work. Do not italicize; the software will do so automatically.

Passing in stuff with styling is inappropriate. What you should be passing in the 'work' argument is 'vh1.com' (or vh1.co.uk). You may want to include (VH1) in the publisher. The cite templates seek to implement the appropriate styling per stuff like MOS; they're carefully developed, assume good faith, and all. If you're not getting the right look, review how you're using the template, but don't try to force the issue. When styling is attempted at multiple levels, things get fucked-up; too many apostrophes, parsing errors. Jack Merridew 21:13, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

This is fast becoming a Lil-unique1 vs. Jack Merridew battle which it shouldnt be when we clearly agreed that we're on the same side. I follow other FL standards and the relevant guidance at MOS (which in this case is MOS:TEXT. I'm well aware of what the template has said and I've followed guidance correctly. I've unitalicised per the manual of style. You've reverted per the template. The template cannot trump MOS. We're fast falling out because you have all these ideas but you're telling me exactly upon what basis/policy/guideline your making such changes. I was sceptical at first but now it seems that your determined to make me accept that everything your saying is correct and that every policy I quote or follow is incorrect even though it is a community standard. I've accepted where things might be wrong and given compromise but you're now taking advantage of my compromise. I changed the ref style because I partially agreed with you but you seem to have taken that as a green light to make whatever changes you like to the article. I'm sorry but its quite clear that you've used accessibility as a disguise to push through a whole heap of stuff some of which, may/may not be correct. This is not the correct way to go about things even if you are right. I'm trying to work with you and improve the discography standard on a community level but I can't do that if you insist on making changes to a live FL candidate which I'm also editing. You're making it very difficult to work together. You must understand I have very little if not any professional ICT background and so everything discussed over the last couple of days is a massive learning curve as it is for much of the community. I'm trying hard to understand and listen to the things you're saying but like I said there's big leaps between mine and your understanding which need to be overcome first. I don't believe you've offered any significant reason as to why its ok for the references in the 'Kelly Rowland discography' to break MOS:TEXT which is exactly why I think you should focus more on establishing a consensus amongst what needs to be done directly with MOS:DISCOG because now I'm starting to feel bullied into accepting your changes. I'm sorry it might not be your fault that I feel like this but this whole thing is becomming a little overwhelming. I feel like you've come down on me, my editing and an example of my editing (the Kelly Rowland discography) like a tonne of bricks even though I am trying to explain to you that all of my editing is based on the manual of style from the relevant projects and also from the relevant pages. If the discography I edited was incorrect it certainly isn't any fault of mine since I followed the applied Manuals of Style to the tee (apart from Accessibility as this was unknown to exist previously). I'm sorry for this long essay but something needs to be done because we can't work together like this anymore until there is a standard to work towards and until we have a clear understanding of exactly what the discog issues are. --Lil-unique1 (talk) 21:39, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

I'm not looking at it as a battle. The stuff with the cite template is technical: do not pass such formatting in to the template; it causes problems; the template says to not do this, and that's right. If you really feel that the templates are doing something wrong, take it to the talk pages re the templates and get some answers there. They'll say much the same as I have. Read the template docs carefully to learn how they're supposed to be used. I see that a lot of this is new to you, and I've tried to explain. The template is not 'trumping' the MOS, it seeks to implement it. The core issue here is the WP:DISCOG is way out of sync with how things should be done; you're getting bad guidance there and from the extant pages you must be looking at as examples. I'm commenting on the Kelly page because it is a 'current' issue. I've never even heard of her, before. Or you ;) I've commented on the other talk pages, too. Really, you should listen to my advice; I know what I'm talking about. Sincerely, Jack Merridew 21:57, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

But surely you can understand that "Really, you should listen to my advice; I know what I'm talking about" is a difficult creditial to back-up especially since you're not really providing evidence for why what your saying is correct. Also if in the future some says why is 'this article' styled in 'this way' what answer am I supposed to give? oh a user named Jack Merridew overwhelmed me with loads of his expertise and told me that I had been given bad guidance so I corrected the article per his professional standards and expertise? That is why I've said to you several times that it would be better to establish the central policy for discographies at MOS:DISCOG so that such questions cant arise in the future. The whole point of MOS:DISCOG was to co-ordinate all of the policies from Manuals of Style that apply to discographies to try and centralise them for the agreed standard. I realise that over time the two have drifted apart but you're approach to me seems a little illogical to change one article and then the project page. Can you at least not see things from my point of view? --Lil-unique1 (talk) 22:06, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

(edit conflict) on my own talk page... I just quoted the template doc at you; you need to use the template correctly, as most anyone will tell you. That "MOS:DISCOG" is not part of the Manual of Style and is all off, as I've said. I said above that you should consider that you may be passing the wrong information into the 'work' argument of the template. You've got it backwards about wikiprojects; they have no authority. If a wikiproject advises something inappropriate, ignore it. You want that page to pass FL? It needs to be correct, and that means invoking the templates properly (among other things). That was a technical fix that is absolutely appropriate.

You have the opportunity here to move a DISCOG page to an appropriate format that all the others will have to be edited to match. I'm pretty sure that every DISCOG FL would fail a FL review, because they are all improperly structured, references, etc. That odd mechanism for "endnotes" used in others? Ick. Jack Merridew 22:26, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

You'll find that the two FL directors would be offended by those comments you have just made. They mark the candidates against other FLs and MOS:DISCOG primarily as well as the other MOS pages. Like I said all the stuff you've been talking about is all relatively new to many people and so yes it wouldn't be encountered. And again it is no fault of mine. It is the fault of those who decide to change central policies without informing others and of wikipedia for not having a mechanism of transmitting such changes. Whilst yes you see this an opportunity to create an article which would be a standard for others it is based on your understanding knowledge. It is not based on the understanding of the community, of the FL nominators, directors etc. And there's hardly any policy pages to refer to, in reference to the proposed and recent changes being correct other than Jack Merridew's expertise. Please look at this from other people's POV. Its no fault of yours, its the great, substantial and fatal error of those higher up in the pecking order.--Lil-unique1 (talk) 22:38, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

I'm on the edge of protecting the article until this dispute is over. As for the issue at hand, both sides are right: passing formatting codes into a template is a bad practice, but the template does misformat online sources unless you do. This particular instance doesn't cause a problem: it simply undoes the incorrect formatting. That said, talk about it and stop reverting back and forth.—Kww(talk) 22:17, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

Im guessing the answer could be to remove the template from the said references and manually format them? Thanks for the interjection Kev but I don't think protection is required. Though me and Jack have had disagreements we have agreed on somethings and I'm not about to risk losing my editing privilage on wikipedia for silly edit war over italics. --Lil-unique1 (talk) 22:20, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

Well, I'm gonna watch where this goes. Poorly, I expect. Removing the templates would be a really, really, regressive step. Jack Merridew 22:26, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

Well its the only option if you're going to refuse to allow me to unitalicize the references. --Lil-unique1 (talk) 22:33, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

I said I was going to watch, I stopped caring about that page twelves orange bars ago. Jack Merridew 22:38, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

Just so you know I'm going to retain the changes to the referencing (the reflist thing) but I wish to re-unitalicize the referencing or even better if you could do it as I dont wish to get in trouble for edit warring. --Lil-unique1 (talk) 22:50, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

Well, I'm not going to edit that page to incorrectly invoke templates. You seem to have ignored my comments to the effect that you should learn what should be passed in what parameters. Jack Merridew 23:14, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

See Template talk:Cite web#"Work" vs "Publisher" parameters for a well-thrashed discussion of this very issue. After much consultation of external style manuals, the consensus seems to be arriving at the view that websites should be italicized in references, and a few days ago it was suggested that MOS:ITALICS should be updated to recognise that this happens. Nobody at that discussion is now suggesting "cancelling" the italics introduced by the |work parameter, but Lil might feel that it's worth further discussion there. --RexxS (talk) 04:18, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll go look. You're pretty handy to have at my back. Cheers, Jack Merridew 04:24, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

Separate question

I hope that there's no 'bad blood' between us. We obviously both want the best for wiki. Can I pick your brains on something?

Out of question would |scope="row" have the same effect at !scope="row" or does it defeat the whole object of the game? --Lil-unique1 (talk) 22:50, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

If this is related to my question at WT:Record charts, I'm only impacted by rows and, as I said there, I'm convinced that singlechart is unaffected by this issue: there's no reason to have row headers on tables that only have one data field after the header. If there's a guideline somewhere that needs to be updated to make that obvious to everyone, point me at it.—Kww(talk) 23:03, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

Yes sorry that should have been row not col. Yes I thought that this is an area that Jack might be able to shed light on. --Lil-unique1 (talk) 23:04, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

Actually, scope is appropriate regardless of how many data cells it applies to (well, unless teh number is zero). But don't pay me any mind, I just go by what the W3C says. And experience. Jack Merridew 23:10, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

scope on a data cell is meaningless; it's about indicating what a header cell is the 'heading' of, i.e. which data cells. Want sources? html 4.01, xhtml2. I don't have a HTML5 spec bookmark handy. Jack Merridew 23:10, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

The question comes down to how it is read by the screen reader, doesn't it? So far as I can tell, if all we modify is the column header our example table at WP:Record charts would be read as "Chart two thousand eight Australian Singles Chart peak position one chart two thousand eight Canadian Singles Chart position two chart two thousand eight Spanish Singles Chart position three ...", which seems like just what we want. The only time a row header is necessary is when there are multiple entries in the row, and that isn't normal for chart tables. Only the column headers will need changed. Making the chart names into row headers and then using CSS to undo the bolding and centering seems like a lot of running to stay in place.—Kww(talk) 23:19, 10 August 2010 (UTC)

But blind editors don't always navigate tables linearly. Graham87, using JAWS, says that he will sometimes go up and down columns. In that case the data like "5" won't mean anything without the reader telling him that it's the "Peak position" (column header) for the "Norwegian Singles Chart" (row header). So yes, it's an accessibility issue as well as being correct semantic markup. Oh - and the references belong with the data they support - in those cases the positions are what is being verified (not the existence of the country's singles chart). --RexxS (talk) 04:33, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

It can be done, but the caller of the template will need to put an exclamation instead of a pipe in the template call. I know where the references should go, but sortability and user resistance issues make that unlikely to ever be implemented. It certainly won't become some magic overnight change in the template. It's been hard to get users to change to the template at all just because I won't let it print imaginary things like "Norwegian Singles Chart" and I use the chart as the "work", not the website that happens to be archiving the chart. Another appearance difference and the template usage will fall to zero.—Kww(talk) 04:44, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

Kevin, I missed your reply; I went and answered another msg about then. More than 50 edits to my talk in the last 24 hours...

The notion of a 'header' is that it's indicating it's a label for the data cells under it, or to the right of it. We have site-wide styling to differentiate 'headers' from 'data' by tweaking the background, bolding, and centering. Some where, I posted a possible CSS rule that would change the centering to left for headers that are for rows (keying of that). This would be for all wikitable, everywhere. 800 WMF wikis if it makes it to shared.css. The problem is everyone's a control freak, and has their own ideas about what their tables should look like. Fuck that. These people mostly mean well, but they're sowing havoc. As Tyler Durden said (to Tyler Durden;) Just Let Go! People need to quit seeking to hijack the site styling per their own views. See the thread above, where I was telling Lil to go to the cite template talk pages... I'd not even looked, but RexxS did and there's been a 10 week discussion that basic is arriving at what I tried to do simply by knowing what was right. fyi, the billshite 'cancelling' is problematic in the extreme, so much so that smackbot is smacking it on sight. Now I try and get around teh next ec... Jack Merridew 05:00, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

Gossip Girl (TV series)

They was all in the wrong columns for a start. And I don't think Gossip Girl should be any different than every other article on Wikipedia, the awards table should be kept within it's scope. Jayy008 (talk) 10:30, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

I have once again reverted the edit based on that. If you revert again it's an edit war and we'll have to bring it up for discussion then consensus will decide. I just don't understand why you want GG to be different than all other TV shows using the original template. Jayy008 (talk) 10:38, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

Hmm, maybe because all or most of the tables in all of the TV show articles are not done correctly? And we need to start the clean up somewhere. But I'm sure the User:Jack Merridew has better and more important things to do then worry about such an article. - Josette (talk) 15:03, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

RE: Jayy008; The Gossip Girl awards table is not currently formatted like "all other TV shows", whether Jack's changes are applied, or not. I believe that's the point: various TV shows use different colors and formats, and they shouldn't.  Chickenmonkey  17:27, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

O RLY? ;) This began on User talk:Jayy008#Gossip Girl (TV series), taking it there; ya'll tag along, if ya like... Jack Merridew 19:24, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

I don't know if you're trying to be ammusing, but my talk page isn't an open discussion. I'd appreciate if you would not do that again. Also if you made that table, can you fix it please. And I don't know about you but I follow guidelines and big changes to pages need to be discussed before being bade, Wikipedia consensus? No? Jayy008 (talk) 21:36, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

Talk pages are for discussions, and discussions should be kept in one place, not split between two pages. This discussion began with you calling my edit vandalism, which it most assuredly was not. I began a discussion on your talk page about it and that is where this should be. You might not have realized it, but this is a pretty high traffic page that's watched by a lot of people; yours, not so much. And my edit was pretty minor, really; compare with my immediately prior article edit, for example. Cheers, Jack Merridew 21:51, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

Yes, I was hasty to call you a vandal but that's because you made such a large change without discussion on the Gossip Girl talk page. I don't have a preference to how the box is, as long as it's clean. Which it isn't, all the dates are separate, they should be dragged down. Same with Teen Choice Awards should be expanded, why didn't you finish the job? And it wasn't that, you told people to go to my talk page, which is rarely used anymore and then you started bringing up other stuff that had nothing to do with the subject, like the jewellery link? Erm, why? Jayy008 (talk) 22:14, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

You're a sockpuppet? Oh dear. Jayy008 (talk) 22:17, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

What part of keeping this discussion in one place are you not getting? That place is your page, where it started. If you call editors who've been here for 6 year vandals, don't be surprised that you get some attention.

—Sincerely, Street-Legal Sockpuppet Jack Merridewthis user is a sock puppet 22:20, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

Because this isn't a discussion anymore, this is a conversation. And obviously you've vandalised a lot in the past or you wouldn't be a sock puppet. All I'm asking is you fix the box. Jayy008 (talk) 22:23, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

Forget it, I'm not going to get into an edit war with you again. I'd rather not have discussion with unreasonable sock puppets. I will make the edits myself. Good day. Jayy008 (talk) 22:27, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

Per the below, do not go back to the rowspans; it's inappropriate and I'll simply revert you, again. Jack Merridew 22:35, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Kindly pay attention; it is inappropriate to split this discussion between two pages. And no, I've not vandalised 'a lot'. Not at all, in fact. You just making this up as you go along?

The 'separate date' meaning that they're not using rowspans? That's correct and appropriate. It's both about WP:Accessibility and necessary for Help:Sorting. Try clicking the controls to sort by one of the other headings, such as 'Recipient'. The years are then in some dis-contiguous sequence. And see the {{sortname}} usage in there that has the recipients sorting properly by last name. Jack Merridew 22:33, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

I didn't know that, I guess most of Wikipedia will have to be changed. And no I'm not making things up, you're a sockpuppet so you've obviously vandalised on previous accounts, badly without negotiation. Or you wouldn't be listed as a sockpuppet? :S Jayy008 (talk) 22:38, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

Comment: No. As far as I can see none of Jack Merridew's blocks have been for vandalism. TFOWR 22:44, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

Oh right. I will look into that. Jayy008 (talk) 22:49, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

I told you a lot of people watched this page ;) Jack Merridew 22:50, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Yes, a lot of Wikipedia needs changing, as a lot of editors do things wrong. And no, I've never vandalised Wikipedia with this or any other account. Or as an IP. No one has ever even claimed that I have, until you showed up. You really should not make such personal attacks. Jack Merridew 22:50, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

***You really shouldn't (correction). I just don't understand why you was blocked permanently on another account then? enlighten me. Usually a person is only blocked for good for excessive vandalism. Jayy008 (talk) 22:54, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

(edit conflict) [with apologies to Jack for discussing in the wrong place] To be helpful, Jack's past is complex, and you should not assume that sockpuppets are necessarily vandals. Many users (but not Jack) operate legitimate alternative accounts (which may be technically considered sockpuppets) for many reasons. If you're really interested in Jack's background, it's all here on Wikipedia, but you'll need quite a bit of time to read it all.

If I can also help you with your problem concerning tables, it's worth looking at WP:TABLE, WP:Accessibility#Tables and WP:MOSTV which are the guidelines belonging to the Manual of Style and enjoy general consensus. I see nothing there that recommends spanning rows for dates in "Award tables" (nor for the use of colour as previously), but I do see some advice that doing so may negatively impact accessibility and usability. You may need to point Jack to the guideline that you are following and the consensus that it enjoys, if you wish to convince him that your preference for the layout of "Award tables" is better. --RexxS (talk) 22:56, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Yes, I've tweaked my typos; you inflict a lot of edit conflicts by posting further while recipients are attempting to reply to your initial comments. Want me to call out your poor grammar? You seem to not understand the word wikt:indefinite; it means no specific time, not 'permanent'. You also seem curiously intent on harping on teh vandalism theme. It's not my job to enlighten you; my history is public and I've even given you links. And I'm going to go eat ;) Jack Merridew 23:11, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

It's not your job to do anything if you want to say it like that. And yes, sometimes I do because most of the time everybody is unwilling to discuss, doesn't use edit summaries or is plain ignorant. So yes I revert first ask questions later nowadays. It is sometimes a poor way of doing things, unfortunately experience has tought me so. I am always willing to discuss things though, as long as it's appropriately sourced (where needed) and isn't overly detailed then whatever. This is my last message on the matter, it's giving me brain-ache. Jayy008 (talk) 23:15, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

Didn't miss much

Maybe not at Gene Hackman (and I thought it was perfect!) Seems I've missed a lot of other stuff. Internet connection has been off and on the last couple of days due to a "power outage" that my provider is unable to comment on. No internet, no cable TV. Life has become very primitive. Rossrs (talk) 02:32, 12 August 2010 (UTC)

You didn't miss the slightest bit with Luise. There's been a bit of traffic across this page, but the good fixes seem to have survived ;) Hope you're having a calm day. There's an option; them paper things, tehy haz pagez, too. I'll be starting Nathaniel's Nutmeg soon, it just came... OK, Nathaniel Courthope is a taste.

You doing the horizontal "||" to vertical changes by hand? I use a command that gets it right in a few clicks. All of them. Cheers, Jack Merridew 03:04, 12 August 2010 (UTC)

no?. Sure. Why not? ;) Yes, I'm having a calm day. I remember them papery things from school wot the teacher made me to read. Actually, I have quite a number of them but I'm not in the mood for them. I'm in the midst of a photo project between my internet connection in its death throes. Yeah, I do the vertical changes by hand. It's not a problem as I don't seem to find too many in that format. I don't understand why there's a resistance to moving the references down. I started doing that with Bonnie Hunt but I lost my connection, and decided not to start all over again, but it makes the article much easier to read. Especially useful, I think, in some of the huger articles. Hey, I got Luise! I knew it would happen one day. Cheers. Rossrs (talk) 04:14, 12 August 2010 (UTC)

Leave the long "||" ones for me. I think some people like the horizontal form because they're on small screens or don't know how to set editing prefs. Me, I'll put spaces and newlines most anywhere they work. For about the same reasons some edit only in sections, get lost scrolling. And some don't get tabs; I have 17 open at the moment, and often have three browsers running. Anyway, I see refs in the references section a lot in pages on more serious subjects; this has been expanding for almost a year. This should be a FA requirement. It's not just about de-snotting the prose, it's about viewing the refs as proper content; something to be worked on and maintained. In large articles, the process of moving them is also a process of cleaning them up. Mebbe there's a wikiproject for that...

You should try http://www.telkom.co.id/ as an ISP ;) I'll do Bonnie, and I was stunned that Luise is still with us. Have a good day, Jack Merridew 04:40, 12 August 2010 (UTC)

100 is an impressive age. Gloria Stuart turned 100 recently also. I hope she's around to enjoy the Titanic revamp in 2012. That may be asking too much. Can you please check the filmography for George Reeves. Can't get 'Til We Meet Again to sort properly. I tried improvising, but none of my experiments work. Thanks Rossrs (talk) 13:56, 13 August 2010 (UTC)

I had not known that was her, as 'Rose'. I specified a 'sort' key. This is for such situations; ligatures (æ), too. See Diane Keaton, where I used it to get the three Godfather films to sort into their chron-sequence; omit it, and the first film sorts to the bottom. Cheers, Jack Merridew 17:48, 13 August 2010 (UTC)

They're all gratuitous colors

Please point me to where this policy is stated. These colors have been in the zoo templates before I ever started editing for WP. If it is WP policy that different projects should not have their own colors, then I've seen an awful lot of gratuitous colors. If it is WP policy or even style, then this should be discussed on the WPZOO page BEFORE you start changing things, so that we can properly coordinate a change. If it is just your personal opinion, then please desist. Donlammers (talk) 00:58, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

WP:Deviations

Deviations from standard conventions are acceptable where they create a semantic distinction (for instance, the infoboxes and navigational templates relating to The Simpsons use a yellow colour-scheme instead of the customary mauve, to tie in with the dominant colour in the series) but should not be used gratuitously.

What's the semantic rationale for the green? For what it's worth, I've been here 6 years and have never heard of WP:ZOO (not a slight, just that there are more than 600 wikiprojects)

Wikiproject preferences fall in the face of wider-community consensuses per Wikipedia talk:Consensus/RfC. {{Navbar}}s in particular have been criticized for inappropriate use of colour because they typically abut other bars and result in all manner of garish colour clashes. We call this The Skittlepedia Effect. It is embarrassing. Cheers, Jack Merridew 01:20, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

As the current coordinator for wikiproject zoo I think your actions of changing the colors is absolutly rude. You have made no mention of your actions on the talk page and have infact gone against our consensus. I would invite you to visit ALL 600+ wikiprojects and attempt to change their color schemes and see if they take it lying down. Our colors were chosen by our members to suit our project, if you look at our other sister projects and parent projects all have there own unique color schemes. I would suggest you leave the wikiprojects alone to there members and find something else to do. I have no doubt the other projects will feel the same way, Some of them have been around for a very very long time and dont take kindly to people randomly changing things. ZooPro 03:32, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

Hi. Your WikiProject does not own those articles. A consensus of your members does not overrule the wider views of the community. Think about some of the terms you are using: "Our consensus", "Our colors", "Our Project". You understand the idea behind Wikipedia:Ownership of articles? It applies to templates, too. I made one edit cutting gratuitous colour from one of "Your" templates that I happened to see; another fixing a few minor nits in the template with an edit summary commenting on the fact that I'd been reverted. I feel that the use of colour is a site-wide decision, and not one appropriate for any local group. See the rest of my talk page, as the issue appears in other threads, such as the one immediately below, where, regarding another wikiproject, I said:

• Local consensuses never override site-wide consensus. This is a common problem with WikiProjects; they get editors thinking in terms of a subset of The Project, which is One; no secessions, allowed. Wikipedia is not a Federation of WikiProjects.

I asked a question above, of Donlammers;

• What's the semantic rationale for the green?

Neither of you answered me. The question is rooted in our Manual of Style. Know Wikipedia:BOLD, revert, discuss cycle? I was bold, Don reverted me, and now we're supposed to discuss it. Frankly you're the one being rude here; just read your post, again. I'm sure that some of the WikipProjects go back a long ways; yours says it was founded on 2 December 2006, which seems far longer than you've been around. I, by the way, have been here more than two years longer the WP:ZOO. Cheers, Jack Merridew 04:06, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

I've been thinking...

Based on RexxS comments and comments I've read at various pages I've come up with some new designs for discography tables. I dont want to argue so that's why i'm asking your opinion because I would like to see if it there is a solution which works for the problem. Please do not make any edits to the examples. There are several things which would be good for you to comment on:

1. Does the album table fair well against WP:Accessibility?
2. Is there any value in using colors to represent certificates (bare in mind there's only three certificates gold, silver, platinum so only three different colors)
3. Does the single table fair well against WP:Accessibility?

Find the examples at User:Lil-unique1/Sandbox/10 -- Lil_℧niquℇ №1 (talk2me) 03:43, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

Hi. I'll comment again, tomorrow, as I'm a bit lit. There are still row/col spans, which I'm quite down on for reasons stated. The colour is not appropriate, and the word 'gold' is inappropriately abbreviated. A key hurdle to groking accessibility is to relax your attention on presentation. Any effort seeking to take firm control of the look is at odds with accessibly; hence my comments to: Just Let Go. It is a presentational concession in a lot of cases. Part of this is due to the site scale. On a modest site, say hundreds of pages, it is practicable to have specific styling for, say, most of a hundreds classes of pages. But we have millions of pages, and this means that the acceptable granularity of 'classification' gets coarse. We can not maintain a hundred thousand looks to things; even hundreds is problematic. This leads to things being forced into standard forms, ignoring local concerns. This is about taking a site-wide perspective. You're focused on some of the few thousand discography pages out of the 6,814,529 article we have. That's a tiny aspect of the site and customization of 'look' at that level is unmaintainable. There are thousands of other localities, too (some of which you will know, of course). See camel's nose for the guiding idea. When I and others succeed in forcing some sort of site standards on the discog pages, it will be a huge amount of work to rework them, because too much effort has gone into setting them on their own road, apart. I described this site once, to a friend, as a flea infested mammoth. It's rather derived from the story of a group of blind men all touching different parts of an elephant and gleaning different ideas from their impressions. We're the fleas, crawling about in the hair of this beast. No one, not any of us, has a good idea of what the hell is on this site. I've been here for a very long time and I've seen mebbe a few percent of the pages, and only snapshots of pages, at at the moment I looked. The site is bigger than any of us. I seek to rein in rogue areas, as I encounter them. I've a history of sockpuppetry, and call myself a 'rogue sockpuppet' on my user page. As the fellow who orchestrated my unban said, I have meant well, all along. I am seeking to nudge this project onto better paths than I see bits of it on. That's it, in a nutshell. Sincerely, Jack Merridew 06:44, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

OK I think I finally get the point. Yesterday I went on Wikipedia on a portable device (my mobile phone) and I was genuinely shocked how bad things are. For a start the big Wikipedia globe logo obstructs the links at the top of the page meaning you can't edit articles because you can't click on the edit link. When I did make my was to a discography I completely understood what was being said. Therefore you must have noticed over the last couple of days that I'm making an effort to be less abrasive and more support/helpful of the accessibility changes. Taking everything into account I've reworked things once again. Take a look (but not edit) User:Lil-unique1/Sandbox/10. -- Lil_℧niquℇ №1 (talk2me) 18:13, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for looking with the handphone; I recommend Opera Mini but if you're on an iPhone you should stick to Safari (web browser); most people, however, will use whatever came built-in and a lot of that stuff is poor. I use them all, but mostly drive Firefox. The range and diversity of ways people access the web has exploded in recent years and much, much more is to come.

You're moving in the right direction. The refs in the header are kinda messy and the forcing of font-weight:normal; on row headers is arbitrary. I offered:

.wikitable th[scope=row]
{
 text-align: left;
}

the other day; this is *not* inline CSS, it's a possible addition to the site-wide css and, if adopted, it would make all row-headers left-aligned. An argument could be advanced that font-weight: normal; should be stuck in there, too. I'm thinking not, though. I expect you're forcing normal because all the detailed stuff in the row-headers looks bad when bolded; the real issue is that you've go too much in the row header. See WP:TABLE#Captions and headings: Table captions and column/row headings should be succinct and self-explanatory. In most cases, individual words or sentence fragments should be used... So, song names only, methinks. These discogs have heaps of information in them, and too much is being lumped into individual cells; the 'details' cells are the primary example of this; really, they should be four columns of cells. This would enable proper sorting on things. And see {{dts}} for the template that will get date sorting working correctly. Cheers, Jack Merridew 19:12, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

Sorry I don't understand the notation in the shaded box. I'll work on the other things now. ---- Lil_℧niquℇ №1 (talk2me) 19:17, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

I've just had a look at the information in the detail cell cannot be split into four cells without drastically increasing table size. Based on what I've come up with do you not at least feel that it is a good interim solution. Sortability is more about usability rather than accessibility. I strongly feel like the news tables at my sandbox do at the very least satisfy WP:Accessibility which was my/your main concern. Also its not too much work for the conversion of other discogs either. I still don't see a 100% need for 'sortable' but added it to show that it could work. The only thing I could concieve is seperating the release date so one can sort by date at least (the album table). -- Lil_℧niquℇ №1 (talk2me) 19:25, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

It's a mechanism that would change how *all* wikitables display. Specifically, row headers built using: ! scope="row" ... would all be left-aligned, not centered. Getting this adopted would require getting a consensus to do so, which I think could happen. I believe the core intent of the current header-centering is to do so to column heading, not row headings, and that the center-all presentation has served to discourage much row header use because too many people do not like the centering-effect when applied to row headers. Cheers, Jack Merridew 19:27, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

Oh right I understand. Yes this would be helpful. Could the same thing be done for font weight? Also take a look at the sandbox again because I think all the other stuff from the detail column was redundent? -- Lil_℧niquℇ №1 (talk2me) 20:26, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) RE: Lil-unique1; it may be useful to use {{sortname}} for the "sales" column in order to have them sort by number. {{sortname|US:|273,000|nolink=1}} {{sortname|Worldwide:|1,200,000|nolink=1}} The same thing could be done for the certificates. It would make sortability a useful tool, in this case. Also, I'd say the bullets are unnecessary. Just a couple of my cents.  Chickenmonkey  19:45, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

↑↑ yup ;) Jack Merridew 19:49, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

I think the fact that {{sort}} are required creates too much work. Therefore I'm going to recommend that sortable IS NOT used for the time being. Once the majority of FLs use the new format being proposed then we can make use of sortable later on. Lets get the accessibility thing nailed first. -- Lil_℧niquℇ №1 (talk2me) 20:29, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

I'm a pretty strong advocate of sorting ;) It's useful. And WP:TABLE refers to Help:Table#Sorting, which advise that:

• Since this can be very useful, it is wise to keep the possibilities and limitations of this feature in mind when designing a table.

No, it's not required but it is good and forward thinking. So what if it's more work? We have thousands of free workers; they just need to be appropriately guided. Accessibility is important. Usability is important, too. Keep raising the bar. Think of the readers. "What would Jack do?" (ok, I'm getting silly;).

Oh, I said above that the global styling for font-weight could be changed, too, but don't think it appropriate. And see my last comment on User talk:RexxS regarding this. Jack Merridew 20:50, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

Okies we'll im not cutting off the sortability thing but in terms of becomming FL and interms of setting a new standard dor MOS:DISCOG the format we have now in my sandbox clearly in favor of and follows suite with WP:ACCESSIBILITY. I suggest we implement this (i'll do this to Kelly Rowland discography) and then I'll update MOS:DISCOG. With regards to "sortable" we can then work on exactly what's required to make the sortabling work and implement that afterwards. But lets be clear about this, "sortable" is arbitary and most definately not the priority here nor is it the aim of the massive discussions that's been taking place at MOS:DISCOG. You might be an advocate of it but you're gonna have to win the support of an entire project for it to be used in discographies. I find your approach a little abrasive and brash which is why its taken a long time for us to find common ground. But I believe that I have found a way of meeting WP:ACCESSIBILITY with discographies which has to be the priority. I want to put sortabling on the back burner for the time being and focus on showing others how to implement the new discog tables. -- Lil_℧niquℇ №1 (talk2me) 21:02, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

I'm not meaning to be abrasive. I've said I think you're trying to do the right thing, but have been following poor advice. Consider your view of the role of WikiProjects. "WikiProjects do not own articles." "Article editors do not own WikiProjects." That's taken right off WP:WikiProject Council/Guide#Inter-WikiProject coordination; ya, the context is a bit different, but these statements apply. Local consensuses never override site-wide consensus. This is a common problem with WikiProjects; they get editors thinking in terms of a subset of The Project, which is One; no secessions, allowed. Wikipedia is not a Federation of WikiProjects. Cheers, Jack Merridew 21:39, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

Are you at least happy to some 'degree' with the changes that are being made? I wish to implement them at Kelly Rowland discography as well as at MOS:DISCOG but I need people like yourself to state whether they satisfy the new accessbility guidelines. I know that projects don't over-rule general consensus or manual of styles thats why I want to change project discography so that it cordinates the relevant aspects of each Manual of Style which is applicable to MOS in one central place to examplify exactly how discogs should appear. -- Lil_℧niquℇ №1 (talk2me) 21:49, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

Ya, most of what you're doing amount to steps in the right direction. I've said, already. I'm not sure if it's going to be enough; I said I'd watch the page and I guess I should go look at the FL discussion... which I've not in a day or two... ↓↓ RexxS is talking about database design, which wikitable design is really a very basic application of. Jack Merridew 22:54, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Ah, would that it were, Jack. Then we'd only have to convince one big WikiProject about usability, and all the others would be clamouring "Why can't we have sortable tables as well?" <grin>

Seriously, I'd think again about the 'Details' section. If you were coding the table data in XML, then a parent of type 'release details' would be appropriate and would belong to each album; that node could have children like 'date', 'label', 'catalog', etc. which actually belong directly to the particular release, rather than to the album (think about an album being re-released on a different label). Now tables are flat, so don't have another level of structure required for this, but we can mimic it with a list within the cell - that's why I think the "bullet-points" (hehe) are appropriate. As for sortability, we have our own wiki-work-arounds as you know, but simply ensuring that the first list item is consistent will allow the sort to work on that. So, do you see any downsides? --RexxS (talk) 21:58, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

• WP:WikiProject Usability ;)

So, we stage a coup and seize the Ring Reins of Power at Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedia; One Ring to rule them all... but we skip the whole Dark Side. While writing the above, I though it might make a good Jimbo-post. One 'pedia, under Jimbo, indivisible, with a Manual of Style of all.' And I see your reply on your talk, but I've got teh orange bar on 'stuck'.

The details section is a hodge-podge of Too Much Information; kinda like the misc bucket in the filmographies labeled 'Notes'; an attractive nuisance that functions as a trivia magnet. I've been thinking 'Details' should be four columns, but there's really nothing wrong with a list in a table cell. If sorting is enabled, a sort template can be used; a hack would be to simply use YYYY-MM-DD for all, which would sort, ok. Or make it an unsortable column. One thing I'd like to see, for all tables, are classes to define the cell alignment for whole columns; it would have to be scripted, methinks, but a pure CSS technique might work; for modern browsers, at least. There would likely be code examples out there a few Googles away. This would allow the cutting of a lot of rote 'align' and 'text-align' done on a row or cell basis. Lists look like crap when they're not left aligned. This will force them *all* left;

.wikitable td ul,
.wikitable td ol
{
 text-align: left;
}

Mebbe a few of these ideas should be floated at MediaWiki talk:Common.css?

 Done: MediaWiki talk:Common.css#some wikitable ideas

Also, you've go me wondering if anyone has ever discussed embedding some non-flat database into wiki pages? Design concept would be that of embedding a spreadsheet in a word processing doc. Such things will happen in some form, somewhere, out there... out where dreams come true... ;) Jack Merridew 22:54, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

Could it be? Are we all actually writing with the same color ink? -- Lil_℧niquℇ №1 (talk2me) 22:57, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

Yer, I think we're arriving at the same hue, just need a little work on the saturation and lightness :P

Jack, I'd normally deal with text alignment per column by applying a class styled with 'text-align' to a colgroup, but there's no implementation via wikimarkup ("However, the thead, tbody, tfoot, colgroup, and col elements are currently not supported in MediaWiki"). It would need modification to the mediawiki itself. Pity. --RexxS (talk) 00:47, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

And support for styling of colgroup in browsers has been lacking and buggy; still, it can work sometimes, and would be goodness. Styling of table captions has long been dodgy, too. Mebbe I need to skip adminship and seek me a developer bit? Follow the 'Done' link, above. Cheers, Jack Merridew 00:54, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

Please wait. I asked for an accessibility expert's advice. He replied a few hours ago. I will translate his answer soon. In the meantime, please do not take any rush decisions. You're currently trying to conform to debated guidelines. This matter will be sorted out soon, so please wait. Dodoïste (talk) 23:03, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

Ok thank you Dodoiste. That would be most helpful. -- Lil_℧niquℇ №1 (talk2me) 23:18, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

Dodoïste, this casting of yourself in the role of the bearer of revealed truth is getting old. You seem to be referring to someone you know on fr:wp who does not speak English, at least not at a level that they feel comfortable posting here. Please cite your sources ;) There are others here who can speak with them, read the guidance on fr:wp... Not I, of course, as you know. I am, of course, interested in insightful comments from whomever. Cheers, Jack Merridew 23:58, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

If you know anyone who is willing to read – or even better to translate – the french guidelines do not hesitate to ask him. I'd be very glad to get some help.

fr:user:Lgd is the one I'm referring to. He's the founder of the french accessibility project, and he's an admin on fr:wp. I won't reveal his professional identity because he doesn't want to. But I saw his for real as a speaker in renown conferences about accessibility. As you can see on his cross-wiki contributions that he doesn't like to get involved in other projects than fr:wp. But he came on en:wp to read the discussions, and his level of english is pretty good since he's one of the translators of W3C's WCAG as a part of his job. I hope it answers your concerns. I'll translate his answer this evening. Dodoïste (talk) 11:16, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

Microformats

You recently !voted on Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Microformats. This is a courtesy note to let you now that I have now posted, as promised, my view there], and to ask you revisit the debate. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 15:00, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

Template:S-ach

I just ran across this template on Magic Johnson, and it appears to be widely used. It seems like a good template (and it's much needed), but the color feels gratuitous. I was wondering what your take is on that. It hasn't been edited in two years, which would have to miss a lot of interim changes in policy and what have you, I'd think.  Chickenmonkey  06:30, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

Ya, I've seen all those. It was painted yellow here, by someone who probably just did it on their own. Later it was protected per high usage. There are thousand of cases like this. Anyone could make an {{edit protected}} per WP:Deviations, but it would be questioned. See the thread above: #They're all gratuitous colors (I expect you did;) and the parallel one at User talk:ZooPro#WPZOO Navbox colors. Wanna join WP:ZOO with me? There are only about three active members, and one agrees with me. We're going to have to do an RfC specifically on gratuitous colour use. Being bold about it is effective. Anyway, succession navigation is way overused. Cheers, Jack Merridew 06:48, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

I agree, succession navigation is much too officiously tacked onto anything and everything followed or preceded by something else.  Chickenmonkey  07:10, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

Citation templates

Hi Jack, if you could work on improving references without adding citation templates that would be much appreciated. They really can be a menace, especially in large numbers. They slow down load time considerably when there are lots of them, and they add to in-text clutter. And it's just as fast to write out the parameters without a template as with one. Best, SlimVirgin ^{talk|contribs} 21:24, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

I don't much believe in old-style refs. They're quaint relics of an earlier age of the project and of MediaWiki itself. Page load time is really not much of an issue; I *know* as I've spent years on poor connections. The template expansion limit should be increased, faster servers, and more of them, deployed. As to in-text clutter, I don't like refs of any form inline; they're much better in the references sections using WP:CITE#List-defined references. Inline, we should have named refs with the trailing '/' or succinct templates like {{sfn}}. Editors adding refs inline as plain text are doing fine, but over time, things should develop into better, modern forms. Using templates, out-of-line, removes a disincentive to editors providing full details for the refs (isbn, links, all the stuff the templates support...) *because* all that rich detail snots-up articles in a massive manner, when it's done inline; this results in editors only providing minimal ref details. The process of moving refs to inside a {{reflist}} is tedious, but it serves as a review and clean-up stage. Far too many of the refs I've seen are incomplete, contain rotted links, etc. Part of editing of pages over time is a continual review and maintenance of the referencing. And consider a traditional book with footnotes; an unobtrusive number appears inline, and the actual references appears at the bottom of the page, end of the chapter, or as the back-quarter of the book. All this inline clutter is an artifact of earlier implementations of MediaWiki, not any inherently 'good' style choice. Cheers, Jack Merridew 21:51, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

Page load time is a huge issue, Jack. I'll send you some links to previous discussions later so you can read the technical reasons, but lots of templates do slow down load time horribly. There are lots of articles I can barely read on WP because of them (try Lyndon LaRouche), and doing diffs or preview is very frustrating, so I mostly avoid them for that reason. Anyway, point is if you want to change CITE you have to argue that there. It's a well-accepted guideline, not one of the side guidelines that can safely be ignored, and the principle of not changing from one style to another over objections without good reason unrelated to style itself (whether citation style or any other) is one that's been upheld by ArbCom several times. SlimVirgin ^{talk|contribs} 23:32, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

RFC?  pablo 22:08, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

I'd not seen your reply; busy. I'm certainly thinking along the RfC lines; prolly dip-in at WT:CITE, first. Cheers, Jack Merridew 22:14, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

I don't understand the purpose of this edit, SlimVirgin. The article now has a combination of cite web and plain refs and is no longer internally consistent, and that's just going to confuse any editors who may work on this, or similar, article, without adding any value. Rossrs (talk) 22:59, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

Just as an FYI, as this discussion led me to the article, I've posted a request at Talk:Uma Thurman#References, asking for an agreement to clean up the references.

@Slim, you'll find that the ArbCom decisions on retaining a single consistent style pertain exclusively to unnecessarily changing from one equivalent style to another. It simply is not the case that cite templates and manual formatting are equivalent. We want to encourage more editors to contribute to articles and once they have learned (or copied) a cite template, it promotes the consistent results that the very first general principle in MOS documents. --RexxS (talk) 00:03, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

Then argue at CITE that it should be changed, but please don't assume CITE doesn't exist. :) SlimVirgin ^{talk|contribs} 05:41, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

Slim

I'd rather not have to wikilawyer this, but CITE says "Once a style is selected for an article it is inappropriate to change to another, unless there is a reason that goes beyond mere choice of style." Obviously this raises the question of who selected the style – first contributor is hardly realistic for this issue. Then there is the issue of new implementations of cite.php. Surely the "other reason" exception means exactly the issues we've been debating. I hope you're not suggesting we enforce a rule that says LDR can only be used on new articles. If this is disputed, then a content RfC is the way to settle it – as is happening at Halle Berry. An appeal to authority of the CITE guideline is going to lead to the same route on every article, because that guideline is over-simplistic and doesn't reflect reality here. I'd much rather see where we have common ground first, before taking a debate to CITE, as it would otherwise simply turn into the polarised disputes that I've spent much time on researching today.

Jack

Slim's concern about templates is very real. Look at the end of the HTML source for this page - mine says "Served by srv234 in 21.312 secs". Now look at the end of the HTML source for this page – "Served by srv234 in 10.872 secs". And the only difference between the two pages is that the latter uses vcite templates instead of cite templates. It's all discussed at WT:Featured article candidates/Citation templates (technical). I'm not arguing for replacing cite with vcite, btw, but it's surely proof that large, well-referenced articles take a noticeable server hit purely by using templates when they are being edited. Of course, the problem generally doesn't exist when viewing an article, as most folk will get what's in the squid cache, but 30 sec delays each time start to wear you down when trying to edit. There's a very interesting proposal at WP:Centralized discussion/Citation discussion#Demo of specific proposal where the template would be replaced within an expanded <ref> tag – don't laugh; it took me a while to see the sense, but it means that the template expansion parser doesn't do shitloads of recursive calls into the deeply nested templates, because it bypasses the template parser altogether! I have no idea if developers will ever give us this, but until they do, we are going to have to balance Slim's problem against what we feel is the benefit of templates at every turn. --RexxS (talk) 23:46, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

I've been through most of that proposal and it's awesome. Dude's on wikibreak but will be back in September. For the talk page stalkers: see here and then find the other stuff. Cheers, Jack Merridew 09:09, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

Hi Jack, if you could work on adding citation templates that would be much appreciated. They really are useful. Best, Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 10:02, 21 August 2010 (UTC) ;-)

Cheers, Andy; I do try. Do look into the above; it could be the future. Terima kasih, Jack Merridew 11:12, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

Reach for the stars......

Well, a starbox template anyway - see Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Astronomical_objects#starbox_template_issue - all input on halfway decent scripting appreciated. Casliber (talk · contribs) 02:04, 17 August 2010 (UTC)

Finally up for review

Hi Jack, We finally have a reviewer (Malleus, so a good one) for the Varian article. You may want to watchlist the review page at this point. Oh, and can you check my new citations? Added two more sources. Also, I finally noticed your ref name on that Hall of Fame web site -- you brat! (grin). I'm slow, but the train gets there eventually! Montanabw^(talk) 01:48, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

I'll look... Cheers, Jack Merridew 15:37, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

IT PASSED! Thank you so much for your help and support! Montanabw^(talk) 23:02, 23 August 2010 (UTC)

{{multiple image}} again

I hit upon the idea of using {{nowrap}} instead of manually calculation the horizontal width: this also allows for the use of width=auto to get images which use the user thumbnail size. Have a look at the text cases and let me know what you think. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward: not at work) - talk 09:05, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

I'll look... Cheers, Jack Merridew 15:37, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

when you think you've seen it all ...

• Jeff Bridges#Filmography

Am I missing something very subtle or is | rowspan=1 as pointless as it looks?  pablo 11:58, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

To be fair, adding in "rowspan=1" makes the code a bit more consistent and easier to edit if the rows in question need changed later. It's like putting semicolons after the last element in a CSS declaration; doesn't do anything, but makes it a tiny bit quicker to add another attribute later. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward: not at work) - talk 12:18, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Thanks Chris, just looked a bit odd to me. I kind of see what you mean, but would have thought that if you change rowspan=1 to rowspan=2 (say) in one instance you would then still have to remove the next row's rowspan, so not sure how much time it would save. I don't edit a lot of tables though, so I'll bow to your superior knowledge.

btw {{filmography table begin}} is deprecated, apparently.  pablo 13:47, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Hmmm. Why's that? It's surely not deprecated in favour of handwritten table code? Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward: not at work) - talk 14:25, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Dunno. I'm sure himself will fill us in when he wakes up though.  pablo 14:47, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Hallo ;) First off, I would not leave a rowspan=1 in a page I edited (with or without the proper quotes on the attribute value); it's quite superfluous, although I see how someone might have been thinking as Chris suggests. And I do use the semi-colons on css even though they can be omitted in lieu of a closing quote or curly. It saves on annoyance when you look by a latter omission.

File:Sorted table.png

If you drop the next block in the right place ...

Rossrs and I have been addressing the template and embedded markup; see WP:ACTOR#Filmography tables for our current recommended best practice; see Halle Berry#Filmography for a live example. The sorting is a winner, and this moots the rowspan issues. Have a listen to User:RexxS/Accessibility for a demo of the issue with rowspans vs text-to-speech. There were about 370 pages using that template, which is rather more than the hundred HJ had suggested as an initial trial; there are about 250 now. Another issue that became apparent was that a lot of people were omitting the -end template; I've addressed a lot of those, but there are still about 50 that are unbalanced. Find some eye-protection and check this out ;) And try to re-sort it. Cheers, Jack Merridew 15:31, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

But trying to re-sort it is the funnest part! It's trickier than a Rubik's Cube .... and more colourful. Rossrs (talk) 15:59, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

You have to smash it, and then put it together correctly ;) Or try this. Cheers, Jack Merridew 16:04, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Wow! I really hope Lar stops by and spots that last one :) --RexxS (talk) 16:26, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Where do you think I got it? Cheers, Jack Merridew 16:44, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Hehe, I should have known. But on the other hand, that table is more versatile than Rubik's Cube. Look where you can get to in just one click! Anyone for Tetris? --Ralph (talk) 16:48, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Tetris had not occurred to me, but is way-funny. Mebbe I use that image in my user page... Cheers, Jack Merridew 19:42, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

All good. What's this about the header template being deprecated, though? Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward: not at work) - talk 19:29, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

We've been 'addressing' it, and teh blue, by cutting it in favour of bog-standard wikitable syntax and colours, and since the only function of the template is the colour, we're asking people to stop using it. I expect to TfD it once it's orphaned, or near enough. <aside>somewhere out there is some hard-coded markup with background-color: #bOC4DE;... and that's not a zero, it's an 'O'. I saw it one night while reading, not editing. It may be something that's been copied about, a bit ;)</aside>

Seen Talk:Halle Berry#citation style? Cheers, Jack Merridew 19:42, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Aha. Right. So as a stop-gap for those, ummm, unenlightened pages still using powder blue it's acceptable? Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward: not at work) - talk 20:05, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

I thought I already replied to this; must have lost it in an (edit conflict).

If a page gets the template added, I'll notice, it will serve to bring a page to my attention, which is certainly acceptable. There's no consensus for the colour and I may just cut it from the template. There are lots of pages out there full of blue cement; other colours, too; and malformed markup. This stuff has been copied further to all sorts of other pages with whatever colour strikes someone's fancy pasted in. It's a wiki-disease. Key to properly sorting the Skittlepedia Effect will be cutting colour-support from major templates. Cheers, Jack Merridew 21:22, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

I had a bash at that ghastly mess as an exercise, would probably edit more of these but I cannot visualise wikitable code very well; had to copy the html because I know where I am with <tr><td> etc, but then had to replace lots of <a href= ... </a> with [[ ... ]] and then spork it back into wikicode. Any easier way I'm missing?  pablo 19:51, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

You might like this tool; it's been around a while, and there are other tools doing this. I should spend more time on my tools-bookmarks; I have a lot but that folder is overflowing and a few have died. Cheers, Jack Merridew 21:22, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

You win, I give up! I need these to see with.  pablo 20:51, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

But I skipped making the recipients properly sortable with {{sortname}}... and with a new extension to MediaWiki we could embed some Flash animation behind the content of each cell. With sound playing; Trumpets, or something... We could have audio rewards when you point at specific items. Mebbe vote controls, too; I'd click Halle Berry ;) Cheers, Jack Merridew 21:09, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Your restraint is admirable.
I think often the main reason for bad design is that where many things are possible there are always people who want to include them all. I spend time most days explaining to people that if they are trying to convey a message via text it does not help to use bold, underline, italics, many different font sizes and many, many colours all together on the same page. (And that's just paper). They're aiming for eye-catching, and get an unreadable mess.  pablo 21:17, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Editing restrictions

invalid

[2] Enough is enough. You are trolling and in violation of WP:NPA. You have violated your arbcom-applied editing restrictions by abusive editing. You won't be warned again. Gimmetoo (talk) 02:29, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

I quake in my bare feet ;) Jack Merridew 02:32, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

Within my administrator's discretion, I am now banning you for one year from changing citation styles in articles. You may, of course, make edits in the established style of an article, but you will be blocked for changing the style. Gimmetoo (talk) 02:34, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

Baseless. You make this shite up as you go? Jack Merridew 02:36, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

Vacated pending ANI discussion of your behaviour. Gimmetoo (talk) 03:17, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

Bullshite; it was never valid. Cheers, Jack Merridew 03:18, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

Just FYI

I referenced your openness about your past here. –xeno^talk 20:31, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads-up; I commented there. Cheers, Jack Merridew 22:07, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

And now that you're tidying your page, you ought to tidy up your sock drawer. Amongst the fellow travellers, you're missing the biggest and best: the only admin sock who speaks Dino! Little stupid probably won't know she's been left out as well. --Ralph (talk) 00:38, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

We likes the 'zilla-family. A fine idea, methinks. I think I'll add v: to the other drop-down, as I've been typing that in the search box more than a bit, recently. Cheers, Jack Merridew 00:43, 20 August 2010 (UTC)

Re: Stuff

It's all gone now. Enter CBW, waits for audience applause, not a sausage. 05:17, 20 August 2010 (UTC)

Terima kasih,^wossitmean? Jack Merridew 05:21, 20 August 2010 (UTC)

Takiunniin. Enter CBW, waits for audience applause, not a sausage. 14:18, 20 August 2010 (UTC)

Robert Bathurst filmography

Hi, Jack. I'm not completely fluent with the new sortable tables, so could you explain what exactly the "table captions" you've added[3] do? (beyond add an extra "television" and "film" header!) Bradley0110 (talk) 17:24, 20 August 2010 (UTC)

(TPW) The table captions don't do much in that article, particularly in the way it's structured – but that's to do with how filmographies seem to have evolved. A caption is actually part of the table, so if anyone wanted to reuse the table (unlikely, I know), they would take the identifying caption with them. Unlikely, but I hope you can see the general principle. The reason they seem to duplicate the level 3 headers is that the Television section, for example, is effectively empty except for the table. It would be possible for the sub-section to actually discuss Bathurst's work before the table (and only summarise that in the lead, as is normal practice for most articles) – then the table caption would make more sense, although I'd prefer something like "List of Robert Bathurst's Television work" to make it clear to a non-sighted reader what was about to follow. Others may prefer "List of Television work" as the subject is presumed obvious from the context. Anyway, this isn't a criticism on how you write filmographies, just an observation that they don't quite follow the usual convention of "lead is a summary; detail in the text". I don't know how appropriate expansion of the article would be? Would it be usual to include critical commentary or reasons why he chose particular roles, etc. in this kind of article? Maybe the sources don't exist to say more, but if we were looking at a higher profile actor, wouldn't the subsection contain more than just a list (table) of his work? Jack can no doubt contribute more reasons for table captions, but I know how busy he is, so I hope you'll both excuse my interjection. Cheers --RexxS (talk) 18:48, 20 August 2010 (UTC)

Hi. The table caption is simply the label that appears above the table. They're appropriate for most all tables, really. They're directly associated with the table as opposed to the section headings which are primarily about overall document outline. I see that there's a whole 'Theatre' section just below; I missed that, yesterday. I should have edited the whole page. It looks to need some {{sortname}}s added, too, so that it sorts properly; the directors column, too. The performance history should be made unsortable. Cheers, Jack Merridew 03:56, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

Thanks RexxS and Jack. RexxS, I wouldn't choose to include reasons for why he chose roles in the filmography as that is better served in the main biography article. In terms of further expansion, some standalone filmographies have further annotations within the sections (the film section of Christopher Walken filmography states that Walken appears in studio films, indies, TV films, shorts, etc, which I have put in the "Description" column in the Bathurst list). Jack, thanks for your reply. I'll sort out the theatre section. Bradley0110 (talk) 08:04, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

Stinking badges

Hmmm. Notwithstanding the fact that you're apparently a Wiki-miscreant, I figure that anybody who seizes on the opportunity to use the Stinking badges quote in the middle of a CFD discussion can't be all bad... I'm just sorry you beat me to it! Cgingold (talk) 21:20, 20 August 2010 (UTC)

This user sock puppet also

'Zilla too is trickier than a Rubik's Cube  ! Clever girl! Admin sock, sigh... ['Zilla has fit of melancholia when she remembers the good old days of scandal and outrage, when she was the admin and little 'shonen the sock ].[4] bishzilla _ROARR!! 00:46, 21 August 2010 (UTC).

Wow, love the t-shirt :) Casliber (talk · contribs) 02:49, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

I think 'Zilla saw this, on offer above at #when you think you've seen it all ... Cheers, Jack Merridew 04:02, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

/me recalls with horror the time 'Zilla had nearly a year as admin, continually embarrassing the family firm. And how a reptile who can only count to one, two, three, hrair can solve a Rubik's Cube is just weird. Anyway, Jack, could you take a look at my page please? I do want the animated flower centered, but not the posts below it. How can I uncenter them? Bishonen | talk 13:14, 21 August 2010 (UTC).

• [e/c] Thanks. Evil, is it? Let me tell you, young man, I'm very proud of knowing any tag whatsoever. Perhaps I ought to start a career as developer. Bishonen | talk 13:30, 21 August 2010 (UTC).

  teh font-tag is evil, too ;) It's the future. Cheers, Jack Merridew 13:40, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

 Done. It's a pretty busy morning out there, isn't it ;) I miss teh old days before *every* anybody showed up. Jack Merridew 13:23, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

3.6. Absent Attributes

• axis and abbr attributes on td and th.
• scope attribute on td.

Now that was something I hadn't taken notice of before. Should make wiki-tables even more f..f..f..fun! --RexxS (talk) 16:59, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

Harvnb

The {{harvnb}} template was designed by someone who was expecting to only see author lastname(s) and year in the shortened reference. In a way that makes sense, because the shortened ref ought to be ... well, short :) – and the full detail is in the full reference later on. The result is that harvnb has to make a decision when it encounters anything other than alphanumeric characters in the parameters when it creates the link name ("CITEREFBloggsSmith2008"); it's even finicky about spaces around the pipe bar, replacing them with underscores (I annotated the documentation to point that out). The other side of the problem is that if you use '|ref=harv' for the corresponding anchor, it seems to only take alphanumeric text to create the anchor ("#CITEREFBloggsSmith2008") and you may need to explicitly define '|ref=CITEREFxxxxxx' to match the link name created by harvnb. As a purist, I'm against punctuation in the name of any element, as it opens the door to problems like this. Personally, I'd have used {{harvnb|Varian|2004|loc=9:99:99}}, since the shortened ref gains nothing from the author's first name nor from the month, KISS. Apologia: Jack Merridew is not my grandmother, and he already knows how to suck eggs. --RexxS (talk) 17:59, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, Ralph. I was thinking from the other direction and looking at the {{cite video}}/doc. I've taken it two steps further, and like it: tidy name, harvnb→sfn. I don't like punctuation in identifiers, either; spaces are problematic, too; so not-on, in real software. So, spaces or tabs, for indenting? and curly pref? Cheers, Jack Merridew 22:55, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

Tabs of course, semantically a single marker is right, and it unbundles the markup from the actual presentation (which can then be varied to taste). Speaking of unbundling, when I saw <references style="vancover">, my jaw dropped it's so right: unbundle the underlying structured data from the presentation!

I prefer newline always after curly; even for short contents, I just know I'm going back later and adding more stuff – it's somehow easier in "vertical format". --Ralph (talk) 23:26, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

Spaces, because too many tools do different things with tabs. And I only indent in steps of one, anyway. I prefer a newline before and after each curly and align pair in the same column; it just looks right.

I like it a lot and the fellow needs to be hauled back to the discussion. Did Slim comment anywhere about this? She may have missed the above section. The syntax may need slight tweaks; are we ever going to want to pass CSS to a reference pseudo tag, or a ref? Even more kewl will be the user pref for cite style; that could calm a lot of people, at least those not intent on forcing a look on everyone. Cheers, Jack Merridew 23:45, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

Pick better editing tools! A simple one that gives you control over tabs is Programmer's File Editor – makes you wonder why more modern ones can't be as flexible.

Hehe, too much PASCAL with the newlines. I kinda like leaving the opening brace on the previous line; it helps keeps the block with whatever's calling it, but I know the attraction of column matched braces (on the other hand, I like newline+indent before compound block markers like '<%', '<?php', etc.), which I guess is odd.

The idea of enhanced tags is still too obscure for most of the wiki to have noticed, let alone see why it's revolutionary. Did you check the load times on Nth Mediawiki after purging the page? The enhanced tag version was almost three times quicker than the transcluded template version for me, and the advantage can only increase with bigger pages.

I'm not sure about applying CSS to an enhanced tag. A <ref> tag gets expanded into a lot of HTML on the server, so it would depend on what parts we wanted the styles to be applied to, remembering that implementation of CSS styles is a client-side process on the user agent. On the other hand, choice of citation style realistically will be server-side. Each page will still need an explicit citation style for IP viewers, and considering all the crap that date preference generated, a user pref to override citation style might not be very high on developers' joblists.

All that above is just my first thoughts, though, so I don't expect it to be necessarily right. I'll put more thought in tomorrow. BTW, you don't really expect any of your other 169 TPWs to read this, do you? It should have a section warning: "This discussion may contain intricate syntax, and may not be suitable for those of a nervous disposition". --Ralph (talk) 00:55, 22 August 2010 (UTC)

Mostly the tools are much better today, including the ones I use. The the tab vs space and curly debates go back years. ATM, I'm looking at Special:Contributions/Aryan song's disruptive edits and inappropriate user name. Cheers, Jack Merridew 01:00, 22 August 2010 (UTC)

This is probably a stupid question

What exactly does {{unbulleted list}} do? Other than complicate a simple act, that is. Ostensibly, it creates an unbulleted list, but does its apparent value outweigh its creepiness? I'm asking you for seemingly obvious reasons.

• This
• Seems
• A little
• Silly

When
I could
Just do
This.

There's probably some significant--and obvious--difference that I'm missing, I'm sure, right?  Chickenmonkey  20:25, 22 August 2010 (UTC)

It produces a semantically meaningful list structure that happens to not have the default ornament hung next to it. This is better than merely breaking-up text with br-elements. See Semantic HTML. Cheers, Jack Merridew 21:01, 22 August 2010 (UTC)

Interesting. I assumed it was probably something technical that I had no idea about. Thanks.  Chickenmonkey  21:12, 22 August 2010 (UTC)

This thing is also a website and all the realities of building one of those apply. Paper-specific views are inappropriate. Cheers, Jack Merridew 21:16, 22 August 2010 (UTC)

That's why you and your ilk are valuable to a website any one can build; me and mine are not so technically inclined.  Chickenmonkey  21:22, 22 August 2010 (UTC)

That's the core idea behind the ref implementation discussions. The hand-typed, entombed in amber viewpoints, are from a paper-perspective. This website is driven by a database and they have structure that is by design. Cheers, Jack Merridew 21:33, 22 August 2010 (UTC)

I was/am neutral on the ref discussion, because I don't feel I'm quite knowledgeable enough on the topic to make an informed contribution. With that said, in reading the discussion thus far, I'm more than leaning toward your viewpoint. No matter the outcome, I simply don't understand why WP:CITE is allowed to remain in direct opposition to consistency. It's like, everything should be consistent, unless the guy who got there first consistently did it wrong; then, just do what that guy did. The idea of "internal consistency" seems asinine, considering every article is part of the encyclopedia as a whole. It's the same basic principle of WikiProjects not deviating from the Wikiproject.  Chickenmonkey  22:21, 22 August 2010 (UTC)

The problem in the ref discussion is that the camps are actually talking about different things. "They" are focused on the rendered look of things and want to bake that right into the refs, themselves. See separation of presentation and content; the visual appearance of things is the 'presentation', the title, author, date... of a ref are it's 'content'. The proposal is about extending the mw:cite.php code to allow new syntax in the ref-elements. It will still support everything done now. It is designed to address all the concerns that have been batted about for years. The deference to the first mover is a stunning cop-out; it feed ownership and favours patterns that were set years before other ideas occurred to people. Like doing things better. This means that some of our oldest articles, which should be our most developed, are being held back in really out-of-date forms. I'm new to this issue; I don't give a crap about whether a link says when it was 'accessed' or when it was 'retrieved'. The date should be part of the ref, whichever word should not. The cite templates do this; the enhanced ref-tag does, too. Hand-typed refs say whatever, with whatever case, punctuation, and nits someone uses. They're free to use yet some other word, or to get the spelling wrong. It's a wiki; most anything goes.

There will be topics that warrant a specific style; Law, Medicine... These areas should make their case (prolly have) and 'their' articles should hew to that. But that doesn't mean hard-coding it on a ref-by-ref basis; it means setting <references style="med/law/foo/bar"> and getting every ref on the page in whatever look was specified. For most articles, 'general' stuff, like Halle Berry there's no academic style that is appropriate. We should have a house style and I see that as what {{cite web}} and company do. The proposal also allow user preference, so if some one like reading most stuff with a certain look, fine, go pick a setting. One of the options could be "I hate refs, don't show'em at all."

Articles should be internally consistent, but that's not practicable when the 'style' for each ref is determined on a ref-by-ref basis. Most editors are going to add a ref in whatever style they know, or prefer, or copy from somewhere else. Fact is, most articles are not internally consistent. Different area of the project are different in many ways because most editors only edit a specific range of article topics. You see riots of colour in articles on court cases? I don't, but I see it in tv stuff. Different editors. Halle Berry doesn't cite a single book. It's full of People magazine and celebrity news sites. Salacious bits about how much she was paid for flashing her tits, how she's taken responsibility for her orgasms. I'm not surprised the editors of medicine articles are not much concerned about her bio. Might be good to get a few lawyers in on the discussions, though; they're good at framing arguments.

I didn't target her bio, I just was there fixing the table and did some other clean-up where I was there. And I've found an article stuck in 2006. And this is good, because it exposed a much more significant issue. Citations seem to have been a contentious area for years, and such contentions need proper sorting, not cop-out guidance. Cheers, Jack Merridew 02:23, 23 August 2010 (UTC)

Hey, don't bemoan tits, or the flashing thereof. Seriously, though, I don't see any reason installing a setting of some sort in user preferences could possibly be a bad thing. At least, then, things would be presented consistently. Of course, there would have to be a default setting, unless the current system would be the default. I don't know; this is all above my pay grade.  Chickenmonkey  02:45, 23 August 2010 (UTC)

It's quite a nice shortcut to produce a structured list in a table without making a cell unnecessarily wide. Very handy when one cell needs to contain a few related pieces of data that don't deserve a column (field) of their own. The release date, label and catalog number for a album/single (row) in a column called "Release details" would be a possible example we discussed earlier. --RexxS (talk) 22:00, 22 August 2010 (UTC)

That's from Andy's proposal at MediaWiki talk:Common.css; the use described there is infoboxes. I think he;s got a good idea there, but have not had time to focus on it. I need to read the microformats RfC again, too. Cheers, Jack Merridew 02:23, 23 August 2010 (UTC)

Wut?

Wut..? Huh..? Maybe I put it badly, or does the flower keep still on your screen? That's what I wanted: still flower in drooping mood. Bishonen | talk 21:27, 23 August 2010 (UTC).

No, I didn't understand that you wanted a single frame; you have your choice, now. Enjoy, Jack Merridew 23:05, 23 August 2010 (UTC)

Thanks!

I uploaded one of the frames — probably did it all wrong, Commons had invented fresh horrors since I last did something there — I expect I'll get slammed with some incomprehensible template any second — but, anyway, it looks just like I wanted! :-) Bishonen | talk 16:40, 24 August 2010 (UTC).

hit anyone who squawks about the license with radioactive flames. And pick a new frame, next week; i.e. really get there. Best, Jack Merridew 17:24, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

Unusual placement of a references tag

This was the first time I had seen a references tag purposely placed inside a citation template. Plastikspork _―Œ^(talk) 23:43, 23 August 2010 (UTC)

(TPW) I've had a go at the wayward references tag, and removed the EL to twitter - need a third opinion on the YouTube links. Or rather, somebody to explain to me why the whole article hasn't been just deleted. --Ralph (talk) 01:36, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

Thanks! I was trying to avoid an edit war. By the way, watch out, you may be blocked. As far as why it hasn't been deleted, it has been deleted. Why it hasn't been deleted again is beyond me. Plastikspork _―Œ^(talk) 01:41, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

I suppose Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ashlee Holland is the reason why it hasn't been deleted. Apparently all reality television show "winners" are now WP:N. Plastikspork _―Œ^(talk) 01:44, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

I don't really see that. The only "precedent" linked to was Windsor's AFD, which actually resulted in a redirect. That close appears rather weak on its face. Ucucha 10:14, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

Yes. I have to remember that sarcasm doesn't work if you can't hear the intonation in my voice or see me rolling my eyes. Cheers. Plastikspork _―Œ^(talk) 16:07, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

We could always use template {{Sarcasm}}. The "Jack Merridew Ingenuity Award" will be available for the most constructive uses. --RexxS (talk) 17:03, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

You've not gotten one of my custom barnstars, yet...

Perhaps one of mine would do? --Ralph (talk) 18:13, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

That diff makes my head hurt; clicking the image helped, sorta. I've watchlisted it, whoever she is. Cheers, Jack Merridew 03:40, 24 August 2010 (UTC) (who has endless crap watched)

Yer, I'm trembling in my boots about block threats from 12-year olds whose toughest reading material is Heat (magazine). As for fame vs notability, maybe "Wikipedia" should redirect to "Celebipedia"? Andy Warhol was right; Requiescat In Pacem WP:BLP1E

Clicking the image as suggested just set off alarm bells here. File:Saaphyri Windsor Bathing Suit Shoot 2008.jpg is claimed to have been taken by User:Losangeles22, so either that's untrue, or there's possibly a big COI here. The camera metadata is present, but that's not quite a guarantee of authorship. See commons:Category:Saaphyri Windsor for more.

I'm also less than impressed by I Love Money (season 2)#Episode Progress. Which bit of "Don't convey information by colour alone" didn't the author get? Do we have a cleanup template to flag accessibility issues? --Ralph (talk) 10:03, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

That author also appears to have missed some part of "Don't write in all caps" and "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia", considering the style of the episode summaries below. Ucucha 10:12, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

Those images are all copyvios; 4× on commons. My magic cluestick told me. That's the dark side of SUL; your copyvios get deleted here, so re-upload them onto commons. More of the road to project failure. ProTip: always go by upload logs; cats may not include everything. Cheers, Jack Merridew 17:33, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

shite's everywhere. I cut some de:blue, too. Jack Merridew 17:43, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

I threw them against the wall on commons ;) Jack Merridew 17:45, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

damn the tables

Chiranjeevi#Filmography appears to have an extra, empty column at far right. I can't see where this occurs in the code, could you (or any of the savvy regulars here) take a look?  pablo 08:08, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

I'm one of the regulars but my savvy is limited. There were extra lines peppered throughout. I've removed them, but it could do with sorting etc. This is just a quick fix. Rossrs (talk) 08:18, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

I did another pass of quick fixes. This is a fine example of why I don't thing tables are right for filmographies. Endless anons with no idea how to edit the structure of a table. It becomes a huge burden on the regulars and there simply is not enough time to stay on top of the mess being made. The ratios are fucked and this is the road to project failure. Jack Merridew 17:24, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

That page is much-edited by Chiranjeevi fans and foes, there is always, always, something to clean up there.  pablo 21:34, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

Film fans and critics and political factions, too? That must make for an active page. Cheers, Jack Merridew 21:45, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

Uh?

Did you delete my thanks? Bishonen | talk 18:24, 24 August 2010 (UTC).

No; moved it ↑up↑ with the rest of the thread; deleting that would have been rude ;) Cheers, Jack Merridew 18:29, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

Linearisation

I've done the next chapter in my essay on accessibility at User:RexxS/Accessibility#Linearisation. Get ready for more flak. --RexxS (talk) 01:37, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

Ah, but I have a plane to catch. I'll be chillin' for the next week. I'm not much liking the "My fr:expert says..." approach to discussion. Cheers, Jack Merridew 02:02, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

As long as it's not Oceanic Flight 815. Have a good break. One of your 169 TPWs will doubtless keep their eye on things here. --RexxS (talk) 02:10, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

No one seems to have figured out that the Oceanic logo is a Nazar (amulet). Cheers, Jack Merridew 02:25, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

I'm off to Portugal, Finland, Germany, France, Italy, Poland, and Commons. No, wait, that was fixing Blinked Kentwood (talk · contribs)'s copyvio mischief. My flight's to LA. And see good eggs. Cheers, Jack Merridew 02:25, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

Filmography tables

FYI, someone doesn't like your edits. Plastikspork _―Œ^(talk) 14:56, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Question (filmography)

Hi Jack. I'm wondering why over the filmography tables (see Tobin Bell#Filmography ) we are using "Actor"? Thanks. :) MikeAllen (Talk) 01:20, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

That does seem redundant. Plastikspork _―Œ^(talk) 01:34, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Have a look at this thread above. The caption is possibly most useful to someone using assistive technology where it could introduce the table. Personally, I'd prefer something like "List of films and roles by year" as a caption, for that reason. Cheers --RexxS (talk) 01:44, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Oh, I agree with adding captions, just in this case it seems redundant. After all, the individual is an actor. The "film" and "television" captions seem fine. What you suggested is even more descriptive. Cheers. Plastikspork _―Œ^(talk) 02:35, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

RexxS is right. Even more, "Actor", "film" and "television" are no good as table captions. A table caption is meant to explain roughly what the content of the table is. So that a screen readers user don't need to read half of the table to find it out by himself, and can eventually skip it right away if he find out it's of no interest to him. "List of films and roles by year" is a correct table caption as it is descriptive enough. Yours, Dodoïste (talk) 07:23, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks guys for the replies. :) MikeAllen (Talk) 08:02, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

If the table is sortable, the "by year" part of the title becomes redundant as the table is by whatever column is selected to sort, even if the year is the default. I've tried a variation "List of credits in film, television and videogames" at Julie Benz#Filmography. Would something like that work? I've also been wondering why we use "filmography" in a section header and then include things that are not films. I think "credits" (or similar) would be more generic/inclusive. Rossrs (talk) 14:34, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

As long as it describes the content of the table, it's fine. It's rare to need more than 9 words to achieve that. Your solution is fine. :-) Regards, Dodoïste (talk) 16:39, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

As you say, the table seems to be sorted by year by default, so the first time it's read, that's the order, but it's no big deal anyway. Some tables would benefit from more accurate column headings, for example in Tobin Bell#Television, I'd have suggested "Program" as the second column header (and alter the caption to fit). --RexxS (talk) 21:37, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Hi, Mike; welcome aboard. When I first looked at that, I thought the question was why did *I* do it that way. I think I did about that, but on some other article; something you may have looked at as a model. I've made a fistful of edits to that page; step through'em one-by-one to get a better idea from the edit summaries. The key thing about captions is that they directly adhere to the table, not to the more coarse sectioning done with headings; this is most of what Ralph was pointing at in an above section. The longer form for accessibility purposes is not about the caption element, it's about the summary attribute of tables. <tech>captions (|+) are full html elements that are specifically to be embedded in tables (at the top is preferred). They are intended for all users, fully-sighted, no-so; everybody. They are semantic in nature and are simply about being the specific label that indicates what this table *is*. The summary attribute of table elements is specifically about accessibility; it is typically not seen by sighted users (pun noted, but was merely emergent), but are read to users of things like screen readers; Googlebot will see them and may, or may not, give them some weight. Summary attributes on tables are akin to WP:ALT on images (or fieldsets on forms, labels on form-fields)</tech>. I did a few other things in Tobin's page, such as change the 'film' column headings to 'title' as some of the tv ones are not even tv films, they're tv show episodes.

I cut back on the section headers (-television) in preference to the captions. I see such third level headings as cluttering-up the TOC and think a main 'Filmography' heading should suffice. It may be that for a few really long ones we might like to have interim edit links, but there are other mechanisms that can offer that.

The 'chunking' of these tables in to discrete tables for 'film', 'tv', 'stage', 'director', 'honey wagon guy' are all arbitrary and force structure at readers. Another approach could be to have a 'type' column that could be used to allow sorting on that key, but also allow the reader to look at the data in other ways. Good user interface design empowers users and gives them the driver's seat. We should seek to give them more of a role in their wiki-experience and not pre-decide things for them.

I'm not all-back, today, so I've still stuff to look at; like Julie, Shawnee... Someone get DocMac to get back to work, yet? Cheers, Jack Merridew 01:41, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Simply put, you're doing it wrong. And I'm not surprised anymore. In your example:

{| class="wikitable sortable" summary="List of Television appearances and roles"
|+ Television

The table caption is meaningless. The content of the summary should be in the table caption. The summary should be much more detailed, it is not a table heading.

The corresponding resources are H73: Using the summary attribute of the table element to give an overview of data tables and Using caption elements to associate data table captions with data tables. Dodoïste (talk) 11:06, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Please stop reverting. You can see in this discussion that I'm not the only one who disagrees with you. The summary is meant to provide detailed informations on how to use the table. See Wikipedia:WikiProject Accessibility/Manual of Style draft/Data tables tutorial#Providing a summary. Regards, Dodoïste (talk) 09:00, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

Shawnee Smith

It seems I've caused some commotion over at the Shawnee Smith article. Could someone try to explain to the user on the talk page the technical advantages over this code compared to the rowspan. They say the format I'm using looks "tacky" and will keep "fixing" it. Sigh.. Thanks. Mike Allen 00:56, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Seems I have a fan club

Thanks for cleaning up after him. :-) They pop up every now and then. Nymf _hideliho! 01:08, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

Looking for your input

Here we have a user establishing a history of socking. My name-dropping of you in that thread is meant with the most respect possible; do you know of any other former sockmasters made good? :) BOZ (talk) 03:13, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

Kindly explain this edit

[5] Gimmetoo (talk) 23:37, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

(TPW) It's not too difficult to unravel what happened:

1. 10 September 2010: You reverted vandalism, but also changed the en dash in two date ranges to hyphens, contrary to WP:ENDASH bullet point 1 and WP:MOS#Dates bullet point 4. Edit summary was: (-v).
2. 15 September 2010: Rossrs (talk · contribs) removed height, unlinked two well-known countries, and changed the hyphens you substituted back to en dashes. Edit summary was (removed height. not sourced and not relevant. delinked common words per WP:OVERLINK, fixed dashes using a script).
3. 15 September 2010: You removed the sortable functionality from both tables. Edit summary was (undo sortable then, incompatible with dashes).
4. 15 September 2010: Jack restored the sortable functionality to both tables. Edit summary was (sortable works fine).

You recognised the problem that in the second table (which contains date ranges), a descending sort on 'Year' places the '2007' entry before the '2007–present' date range, which is not what we would expect. However, that behaviour is the same whether you use en dashes or hyphens, and your second edit summary seems to miss that point. If a table is not sorting properly, it is usually more beneficial to fix the problem than to remove the functionality. This is particularly true when only a single case gives unexpected results – it smacks of "throwing out the baby with the bathwater", if you'll pardon my using that analogy with your edit.

Anyway, the fix for the problem you saw is to place a hidden sort key in the problematical cell. I've done that and can assure you that the table now sorts as expected. I'd generally recommend first raising your concerns on an article talk page – or here if it's a technical problem that Jack or other TPWs can sort out for you. Hope that helps. --RexxS (talk) 01:43, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Well, yes. I didn't realize I'd changed the sortability by changing the dash/hyphen, and even if I've realized there was a problem, I wouldn't have known how to fix it. Thanks. Rossrs (talk) 07:50, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

No Ross, you didn't do anything wrong. You didn't change the sorting. The sorting behaves in the same way whether there's a dash or a hyphen, so nothing to worry about. --RexxS (talk) 12:29, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

I see. Was it "present" that caused it to missort? Because it was alpha rather than numeric? Rossrs (talk) 13:39, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Not really, Ross. The sorting algorithm is clever enough to recognise numbers (so that it knows 10 is bigger than 9, the opposite of their 'alphabetic' order) and effectively treats '2007 anything' the same as '2007', so those two cells come out in the same order whether you sort ascending or descending. We know that '2007–present' is later than plain '2007', so we expect '2007–present' to come above '2007' when sorted descending (but the sorting algorithm isn't that clever!). The fix is to precede it by a higher number hidden inside a span that does not display. I used '9999', which the javascript sees and then knows that cell has a higher value than '2007'. That should keep the sorting working even if more years are added (although it may need to be tweaked in some circumstances). Hope that helps. --RexxS (talk) 14:54, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

I think I understand what you're saying, although if another year is added, it would sort ahead of '2007-present' because the year would be less than 9999. I did a test edit, assuming Strahovski had another TV credit in 2010, and it didn't sort correctly. Didn't save it of course. Rossrs (talk) 21:32, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

I lowered the number and used {{sort}}. That should allow for future years to be added without breaking the sorting, I think.  Chickenmonkey  23:44, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Many thanks for that CM. '2007.5' does a better job than my '9999' for adding future rows. I had envisioned that anybody adding another row would modify the '9999' to a number between 2007 and the 'Year' for the new row, but your tweak saves them having to work that out. I also think, on balance, that adding yet another template is also preferable to the raw markup, as it's easier for other editors to copy. Nice work! --RexxS (talk) 01:50, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

That's interesting. I'd wondered if changing it to "2008" would work, but then I thought that would just move the problem to "2008" (if there was one) rather than fixing it. I didn't think of "2007.5". I think the template would make it a bit easier to people to understand why it's there. Rossrs (talk) 09:57, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

I asked Merridew for a reply. RexxS, is there anything in your reply here that you want to change? Gimmetoo (talk) 10:57, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

As you can see from his contributions, Jack has been away for a week, and may still be quite busy IRL, so please accept my apologies for responding to your question in his absence. This is a collaborative project and I hope you'll accept my humble attempts to fix the problem that seems to be concerning you. If there's anything else I can help you with, or something I've missed, please feel free to ask; I have this page watchlisted. Regards --RexxS (talk) 12:29, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Pending changes/Straw poll on interim usage

Hi. As you recently commented in the straw poll regarding the ongoing usage and trial of Pending changes, this is to notify you that there is an interim straw poll with regard to keeping the tool switched on or switching it off while improvements are worked on and due for release on November 9, 2010. This new poll is only in regard to this issue and sets no precedent for any future usage. Your input on this issue is greatly appreciated. Off2riorob (talk) 23:37, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

Edits at Christine O'Donnell

Hi. I've noticed you've made a lot of edits at Christine O'Donnell like this one. I was hoping you would consider stopping that. I'm not sure what automated tool you're using, but I don't feel you're contributing anything productive. For example, converting the refname "in spotlight" (two words from the title) to "Chase2010-09-15" does not make editing the article easier. In fact, I believe it only increases the chances of a mistake with the a future soft reflink. In addition, since your edits make tiny tiny changes to basically the entire article, you break the page history diff functionality. It is often useful to scan an article diff (over several intermediate revisions) to look for vandalism or BLP violations that have gone unnoticed. This is made impossible if one of your edits is in between. -Selket ^Talk 03:01, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

Mostly I was splitting author names into last and first, and the ref naming is normal; your cite what people say, so it appropriate to name the reference after the author rather than say a fragment of the title. It's not about making editing 'easier' it's about properly referring to the sources. I'm not using any 'tool' there other than editing. Tools like reflinks leave their sig. The diff tool is easily confused; it's something that someone probably should improve because there are better algorithms out there that cope better with larger differences. Besides, life's too short to edit one section at a time. Jack Merridew 04:07, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

My point wasn't to make one edit at a time, but rather that I find edits that are purely syntactic in markup (making no visible changes on the page) that occur throughout the article distracting when trying to review actual changes that are visible to the reader. The point of refnames is not to say who you are citing, it's to make the mechanics of citing easier for the editor. If the reader wants to look at a citation, they click the number and are taken to the text. The refname is opaque to the reader. They are there for the editor. --Selket ^Talk 04:18, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

Alternating row colors of sortable tables

Since you love sortable tables I bet you will be interested in this discussion: Help talk:Table#Alternating row colors?. Since I don't know how it works here I do not know how to make it happen. Should we fill a RFC or something? How will we convince an admin to make this edit? Yours, Dodoïste (talk) 15:46, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

I've proposed that before; MediaWiki talk:Common.css/Archive 12#CSS striped for .wikitable. Commented in the current discussion, too. Jack Merridew 16:59, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. So the previous discussion didn't made it. Any idea to gather more attention to this proposal? Dodoïste (talk) 17:26, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

Common.css is a hard-sell, appropriately. This is, however, a core-good-idea. Key things to push for are grey, a good balance with the status-quo, and the whole-shebang being optional (class="wikitable zebra"). The weak point of the prior argument was the specific colours on-offer. The problem there was that there was too little wiggle-room between the header-cell colour and the data-cell colour to establish as reasonable intermediate colour for the off-rows (note that I was suggesting changing the default-header-cell colour; prolly-why no-fly). Another kicker here is that with a header-row present, it will be the zeroth-row (even) while the first row of a headerless table will also be the zeroth-row; this will result in the zebra-stripes being reversed per the presences of the header-row. The appropriate rebuttal is that proper-tables have header-rows. 'Zebra' is the appropriate English-idiom here, and it re-enforces the black-white-grey colour-neutral approach.

• http://www.alistapart.com/articles/zebrastripingdoesithelp

Jack Merridew 03:49, 25 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. Yes, "zebra" will be really easier to use and remember than "alternategrey". And it's more fun. :-)

I had to look up a few work to understand the rest of your message, but I managed somehow. :-) So, should we choose "even" or "odd"? Probably "odd" will be right in most cases, I believe that is what you are trying to say. Dodoïste (talk) 05:24, 25 September 2010 (UTC)

I read somewhere (maybe on the help:sorting page) that the table sorting code adds .odd and .even classes to table rows. Except when you look at the source code, it doesn't. However, I found this:

/** Table sorting fixes ************************************************
  *
  *  Description: Disables code in table sorting routine to set classes on even/odd rows
  *  Maintainers: [[User:Random832]]
  */

ts_alternate_row_colors = false;

called from <script src="/w/index.php?title=-&action=raw&smaxage=0&gen=js&useskin=monobook&283u" type="text/javascript"></script> the penultimate js load on each page. It seems to me that if the last js loaded (our skin.css) were to contain the line ts_alternate_row_colors = true;, it would override the previous value and switch the classes back on again to test it.

So, if that "fix" were disabled, we'd have the ability to zebra-stripe any sortable table without needing a CSS3 selector. Of course, the fix must have been done for a reason, so I was wondering if you knew why, or anything else about it? Turn off that fix, and imagine being able to say, "You can have your zebra striping on every browser now, all you have to do is make your table sortable"! --Ralph (talk) 03:33, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

Two battlegrounders

I'd appreciate your looking at User talk:VernoWhitney#Two battlegrounders. You may or may not be familiar with the archives at Wikipedia talk:Article Rescue Squadron and most of the past year's back and forth, at MFD and elsewhere. But you did participate at the AN/I discussion a year ago, and I thought, of all of the third people to ask, yours would be an interesting perspective to have. (I was going to ask DGG, but I didn't want to overburden xem.) I'm particularly interested if you can see any way of getting both of them to reform and stop this nastiness. Uncle G (talk) 15:47, 30 September 2010 (UTC)