User talk:Dandrake

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Hi Dandrake, and welcome to Wikipedia. Hopefully you will soon join the vast army of Wikipediholics :-). Take a look at Wikipedia:Help to get started, and drop a question on Wikipedia:Village pump if you get stuck. Have fun! --Eloquence 02:39 10 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Hello there, welcome to the 'pedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you need pointers on how we title pages visit Wikipedia:Naming conventions or how to format them visit our manual of style. If you have any other questions about the project then check out Wikipedia:Help or add a question to the Village pump. Cheers! --maveric149

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Im hoping somebody will oneday explain why he is referred to as Galileo, the same goes for "Tycho" - I find it odd that we are all on a first-name basis with them. Pizza Puzzle

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Da Vince and Aligheri are not surnames? The wiki policy is to use the most common name - so Galileo is considered correct. I have a bad habit of not following the naming conventions very well. Pizza Puzzle

lol Pizza Puzzle

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Hi, thanks for your note. I think I must have read the stuff about the Inklings in A N Wilson's biography of C S Lewis. However, in view of your comment I'm starting to wonder if I'm confusing Dorothy Sayers with Helen Gardner? Deb 21:01, 7 Oct 2003 (UTC)

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Looks as though you didn't realize that you were replying to year old quoted text over at Talk:Settlers of Catan/copyright and fair use. Might want to revisit it and your comment over at the Wikipedia:Village pump. Understanding of what fair use means is now, I hope, better than that in the completely wrong definition you objected to. The point of the quote wasn't that nonsense definition of fair use but the discussion which followed it in the quoted text. I've switched the quoted text to italic so others don't fall into the same trap. Jamesday 23:06, 18 Dec 2003 (UTC)

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Thanks for informing me -- I am not invested in my edit; I really thought it would be an innoccuous change and my only concern was grammar -- but I'll keep out of it, Slrubenstein

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Hey buddy. You deleted my vote (among others') from the votes for deletion page. I'm sure it was just an accident, but I'd like some explanation forthwith. Thanks. I know I'll be hearing form you soon. orthogonal 20:22, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)

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Good detective work on Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Wik/! (And yes, this is meant as a compliment.) -- llywrch 02:17, 17 Feb 2004 (UTC)

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Try {{msg:inuse}} at the top of the page.:) -- Decumanus 00:11, 20 Feb 2004 (UTC)

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Hi, I have a fast connection I guess :) I haven't really been following the arguments over those pages, so I hope I am not reverting useful changes (but I know for sure that changing Oder to Odra calls for a quick reversion). Adam Bishop 23:56, 21 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates

I have no idea what your talking about on here, but it comes across as a bit provocative. Are you intending to come across to me as abrasive and haughty? Were you even intending to respond to me at all? I can't seem to figure out how your comments just below mine relate specifically to what I have said. I hear you to be saying that you dispute my interpretation of the terms "majority" and "consensus"? Sam Spade 05:41, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I left out mention of "super-majority" because I don't find it to be a the right answer for this situation, and because I think it is similar enough to majority at this point in the discussion for me not to have done a diservice to my reader by failing to mention it. As far as how the word "consensus" is misused on the wiki, that is a regular source of irritation to me. I have had people scold me for suggesting that "consensus" ment anything more than a simple majority! To be honest, I think many here have probably had their probably initially accurate impressions of the term (consensus) degraded by their time here on the wiki, and the regularity of its misuse here. Sam Spade 06:31, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)

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The problem with Copernicus is called Nico. He questiones current Polish borders, justify German annexations during Nazi times and wants to rewrite the history of Middle Ages following chauvinist German propaganda of Imperial Germany and Nazi times. I think he should be banned. Cautious 10:37, 2 Mar 2004 (UTC)

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reply on my page :-) Fantasy 20:35, 2 Mar 2004 (UTC)

You changed the time of Galileo's detention from 22 days to a week, what is the exact source for that? 22 days seems to be very commonly cited, is this number incorrect and if so, where does it come from?--Eloquence* 04:13, May 10, 2004 (UTC)

Duh, I miscounted. However, everyone else seems to be wrong, too. He went to the Inquisition's offices on April 12, and was required to stay there; he was released to the Tuscan embassy on April 30, after the second interrogation; this makes 18 nights as a guest of the Holy Office. I get the second datum from Fantoli's book, p. 319, where the Tuscan ambassador reports on May 1, "Signor Galilei was sent back to my house yesterday..." I don't know where the traditional 22 days come from. But documents are still showing up (like a lot of Inquisition records released a few years ago, though this isn't one of them -- it's in Favaro, I see) Dandrake 04:29, May 10, 2004 (UTC)

These dates are used by the Galileo timeline as well.--Eloquence* 04:42, May 10, 2004 (UTC)

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Please, read changes before you revert them. And spare me your little sarcasm. Get a family and patronize them. Sheesh!Space Cadet 23:55, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

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It's cool, Dandrake! My "Britannica" comment was supposed to serve the same purpose as those ":)" smiley faces other people use. Thanks for putting up with my unorthodox, oddball sense of humor. Space Cadet 18:56, 16 May 2004 (UTC)

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Hi Dandrake, your last comment on Maxwell's demon shows that you have access to a pretty big collection of Scientific American: it goes back to 1958 ! Maybe you can help me check a statement that I've made in the cold fusion article: "In July 1987, (Steven Jones) co-authored an article in Scientific American titled 'Cold Nuclear Fusion'." It comes from the book on cold fusion from C. Beaudette, but I could not convince myself to really believe it. It would be great if you could check it, if you can still find that issue ! Pcarbonn 18:47, 31 May 2004 (UTC)

Many thanks for your reply. So it is true then.

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I'm in the process of completely rewriting history of science and technology (which at the moment makes no distinction between the discipline of "the history of science" and "the history of science" as a general notion, and is little more than a POV rant about "challenge to orthodoxy" which tries to equate the rejection of Cold Fusion to the inquisition of Galileo). If you wanted to help with proof-editing or have any comments about it, as I work on it, it would be most helpful. I am working on it at User:Fastfission/HST and expect to have the base text done by the end of the week. Thanks! --Fastfission 20:30, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)

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Sorry about the edit conflict in [[cold fusion]. Do you mind re-checking your edits? Mine were too large to easily diff. Maury 23:55, 28 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Revert

I reverted your recent change to the FAC - it duplicated the DNA repair entry. Please re-add your comment. →Raul654 20:47, Aug 8, 2004 (UTC)

Grand intelligences

Anyone who writes phrases like "any of you grand intelligences" is asking for trouble. (It's not enought to be brilliant: a little courtesy and humility are needed, as people CONSTANTLY are reminding ME. "Ed, you're always bragging out how NPOVier than thou you are...") If he's gonna be that much of a pain, I say let him walk. For every prima donna who leaves in wrath, we'll get ten better writers who have no patience for jerks like him. --Uncle Ed 19:59, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)

• And Ed must be the grandest of them all. Looks to me that the magnus prima donna is you pal. I wouldn't brag about the quality of your writers either. I don't think you can afford to hemorrhage when you're so intellectually anemic. prometheus1 12:42, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)

P.S Thanks for inspiring me to stay!

P.P.S Wow - I've just been referred to as a jerk by the queen of cretins. ;)

Mentioning countries and nationalities even if they are American (Cold fusion)

Hello Dandrake, what bothers me in Wikipedia is that in quite a lot of articles countries and nationalities are only mentioned if they are non-American. This encyclopedia is international in English language. I saw cold fusion as an example of this American bias. But in hindsight I agree that is not so important in a scientific endeavor that was so clearly worldwide. Was it pedantism by me? May be. The omitted nationalities were certainly a minor thing. It was not my intention to hurt the reputation of the American scientific community. Andries 06:18, 15 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Bricker Amendment

Thanks for your comments on my peer review request for my article on the Bricker Amendment. I've posted a reply on the Wikipedia:Peer review page. Always good to know folks are reading. Say, you know there's a Daniel Drake who was an important historian here in Ohio? He was a doctor in Cincinnati in the early 19th century and wrote some of the earliest works on the history of my area. Now it's considered primary source material. Ave! PedanticallySpeaking 15:40, Aug 30, 2004 (UTC)

Heliocentrism

I'm happy to give a reference for the Aristotle reference- in fact I'm so happy to do so that I had already included it within the in the text I added. :)

The sentence I quote was from Aristotle's On the Heavens, Book II, section 13, part I. The sentence I quoted is the fourth in that part. I don't know how to format a link such that the web page would open to that particular section. I'm not exactly sure what sort of formatting you mean, but I think the above link could be useful as part of a references section. Noren 21:27, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Thanks

The name Flying Rabbit isn't familiar. It was probably an identity of User:Mike Church; he's the only person I've had any conflict with on Wikipedia. Thanks for cleaning up. Isomorphic 19:33, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Heliocentrism

Hello. Maybe you've long since figured this out (since it was you editing of heliocentrism six months ago that prompts this comment), but just in case: There is no need to write [[planet|planets]], since [[planet]]s has the same effect. Similarly with [[Austrialia]]n, [[apocrypha]]l, etc. Michael Hardy 16:45, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Adminship

Salve, Dandrake!
I nominated myself for adminship at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/PedanticallySpeaking2 and would appreciate your vote. Ave! PedanticallySpeaking 19:41, Dec 9, 2004 (UTC)

Article Licensing

Hi, I've started a drive to get users to multi-license all of their contributions that they've made to either (1) all U.S. state, county, and city articles or (2) all articles, using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-by-sa) v1.0 and v2.0 Licenses or into the public domain if they prefer. The CC-by-sa license is a true free documentation license that is similar to Wikipedia's license, the GFDL, but it allows other projects, such as WikiTravel, to use our articles. Since you are among the top 2000 Wikipedians by edits, I was wondering if you would be willing to multi-license all of your contributions or at minimum those on the geographic articles. Over 90% of people asked have agreed. For More Information:

• Multi-Licensing FAQ - Lots of questions answered
• Multi-Licensing Guide
• Free the Rambot Articles Project

To allow us to track those users who muli-license their contributions, many users copy and paste the "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" template into their user page, but there are other options at Template messages/User namespace. The following examples could also copied and pasted into your user page:

Option 1

I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:

{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}

OR

Option 2

I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions to any [[U.S. state]], county, or city article as described below:

{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}

Or if you wanted to place your work into the public domain, you could replace "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" with "{{MultiLicensePD}}". If you only prefer using the GFDL, I would like to know that too. Please let me know what you think at my talk page. It's important to know either way so no one keeps asking. -- Ram-Man (comment| talk)

Peer review request

I noticed you had attempted to list Six Sigma for peer review. The problem you were having was listing the article name as Six sigma (the name of a redirect) instead of Six Sigma (the name of the article). I have corrected the capitalization of the article and added the entry back to the current list of peer review requests. If you would prefer not to have this article listed, please let me know and I can make sure the entry is archived. --Allen3 ^talk 00:40, Jun 4, 2005 (UTC)

Galileo Galilei, references

I recently came back to the Galileo article after a long hiatus and found your note about the project to improve references. I completely agree that it's not well documented, particularly for a featured article on a controversial subject. I have little time currently to devote to improving it, but I intend to hack away.

I have some difficulty, though, deciding on the appropriate level of references to achieve checkability without undue pedantry or clutter. Looking at the page for Project Fact and Reference Check, I saw that the J. S.Bach article was a special target in May, and Egyptian pyramids before that; so I looked at them for examples of good practice. It hasn't helped me much. The footnotes seem, frankly, rather spotty, with a note for something as widely known and uncontroversial as Bach's birthday, but considerable gaps elsewhere (e.g., construction techniques for the pyramids).

If there are a couple of articles that people on the project see as exemplary, I'd appreciate hearing of them, either on my Talk page or on that of the article.

BTW, in-line superscript numbered footnotes seem to be favored. While I admire the elegance of the templates that generate these, I'm dubious of their value when there may be multiple references to different pages in a book: one would get into a two-step process to track down what the actual reference is, and ibid.s and op. cit.s don't always work well. (Perhaps good examples would convince me.) --Dandrake 01:20, Jun 21, 2005 (UTC)

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be an ideal system yet, as it hasn't reached a high enough priority for someone to write the code for it. The manually number footnote systems allow multiple references to the same book and allows page numbers I believe, so that might work for you. Also, you may want to check out the invisible note system as a way to have the notes not clutter up the text, but still contain all the information you want. Since there is not ideal system that meets everyone's needs, any system that does what you want is acceptable. Anything is better than nothing. As for what level of checkability, I would say just prioritize the article/subject from two standpoints: most important to the topic, and most contentious. Start with the highest priority facts and find the highest quality references for them, and work down. Twenty plus or more would eventually be great, but a start is better than none. Thank you for you interest and efforts. - Taxman ^Talk 11:55, Jun 21, 2005 (UTC)

Just a note, but there is no single way to do book titles in reference in the English language. There are many different styles. I don't care either way, but without a given style predetermined it's not like one way is "wrong" and the other is "right". Many style systems in English capitalize only the first letters and proper nouns, and such is a very common way of doing citations in academic works. --Fastfission 23:04, 7 September 2005 (UTC)

Sherlock Holmes

Are you a Sherlockian. If yes , please contact me. sumal 06:17, 25 September 2005 (UTC)

Footnotes reminder

A while ago you expressed interest in Wikipedia:Footnotes. As that article was updated through a renaming process, you might not be aware of changes during recent months. I invite you to read the article again in case it is now more useful. (SEWilco 08:47, 15 December 2005 (UTC))

Nicolaus Copernicus' nationality

"Look at the history of this article, and you'll find that its previous wording was not a matter of casual ignorance; it's the product of years of more or less bitter edit wars between German and Polish factions...

Thanks for taking the time to warn me about all the time and energy that's been expended on this issue; I am aware that it has been (made) and probably forever will be an issue. I suspect (and imagine you have already experienced) that not only is consensus impossible as regards stating some kind of nationality but also impossible as regards how to handle this lack of consensus. Given a 'nationality-free' version of the article, do you think the Wikipedia powers-that-be would consider (for example) barring any editor reported as adding an explicit mention of nationality from editing the article for a period of time – or, if they persist, barred permanently from editing it?  Thanks in advance for your thoughts. David Kernow 00:09, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

I think the available tools are too clumsy. Remember that someone can walk in off the street and make any change and never be seen again. Of course, you can revert that. And people who have a Wikipedia identity may drop in and change things, and you can revert that, with an eye out for edit wars. But the Wikipedia structure can't do much about limitedly obnoxious people; it can only take very slow and cautious action against monsters; and it may not always get that right.

Once upon a time I subscribed to the Wikien-l mailing list, and I saw a number of complaints and counter-complaints there about people who were abusing articles, and I don't have a good feeling about Wikipedia's ways of keeping order. With that and my experiences on my pet page, Galileo, I get the impression that there really is nothing to do except keep eternal vigilance if one cares enough; otherwise, try to avoid the subject. You've started in the right directon with comments in the Talk page and in the source text. BTW here's a habit I've learned: when an old familiar bad change is made, compare the versions using the History feature; and note that the contributor's name is accompanied by a link to "contribs"; follow that link, and see if this lloks like a one-time poster (or a vandal) or someone who might be serious; handle your reversion accordingly, since people who come back and see that their stuff has been reverted may get resentful, but most posters never come back. This is a nasty bit of manipulative politicking, perhaps, but as Madison said (very approximately), if men were angels there'd be no need for politics. Dandrake 02:28, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

"BTW here's a habit I've learned: ... This is a nasty bit of manipulative politicking, perhaps..."
Doesn't seem a nasty bit of politicking to me, but a wise move... if anything, it might prevent an otherwise ill-advised revert that might look like the nast bit of etc etc. Thanks for the method. I'll keep the article on my watchlist for a while at least, if nothing more then just to see how regularly the nationality ding-dong occurs these days. I know it sounds like censorship, but, if possible, I wonder how effective the automated removal of words such as "German", "Germany", "Poland", "Polish", etc might have!  Best wishes, David Kernow 04:03, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

History of Science

Please consider joining the proposed History of Science Wikiproject.--ragesoss 18:19, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

Warsaw Uprising FAR

Warsaw Uprising has been nominated for a featured article review. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to featured quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, articles are moved onto the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article from featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Reviewers' concerns are here.

nadav 05:59, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

An ancient edit to Galileo Galilei

Hi. Glad to see you're still active on Wikipedia. You may no longer be interested, but an editor has criticised as "nonsense" the following sentence

"A planet with smaller planets orbiting it was problematic for the orderly, comprehensive picture of the geocentric model of the universe, in which everything was supposed to circle around the Earth."

which I found on investigation to have been added by you to the article Galileo Galilei way back in 2003. The same editor asked for the statement to be sourced or deleted. I haven't yet been able to find a source to support the statement as it stands, but I was able to find a couple for a somewhat weaker version which I have now substituted for the original. If you have any objections to the revised version of the statement, or would like to provide sources for the original version, please join the discussion on the talk page at the link above.
—David Wilson (talk · cont) 17:08, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia Mobile Feedback

My name is Kenan. I am the product manager for Wikipedia Mobile. I'd love to ask you some questions and get your feedback on Wikipedia on mobile. This would be a great chance to affect the way that we build our website and apps. Let me know if you're interested: kwang@wikimedia.org

KWang (WMF) (talk) 23:29, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!

Hi,
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