User talk:Slaunger/Archives/2008/7

Ecozones and TOL

I am not certain what you are doing there. I know that I kept an eye on things (kind of) and thought that the whole thing came and went without incident.

I am just trying to figre out what is the right thing to do in order to make available useful, informational and educational media in the best way possible. I don't understand your second sentence.

I rather like the most recent exchange that is there about doing real work here. I am in need of a map which is not politically accurate but is subdivided for easier use.

I agree that your ecozone category work is valuable, the maps are very nice, and I like the way they direct you to more and more specific categories. I agree that ecosystems do not follow political boundaries. The challenge now is to figure out how to best merge that neat category structure into the existing (political) structure in a manner which is understood and accepted by a majority of users as a reasonable compromise. Something along the lines of World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions perhaps. It is futile to introduce such a thing without doing some up-front lobbying work involving relevant stakeholders. I know from project work that the most important stakeholders to get involved are your usual opponents. If they are not involved they will not feel ownership, which leads to resistance, misunderstanding and destructive work.

Being blocked at wikipedia by the people who write articles for old musical comedies is not the best way for my frame of mind for explaining the problems and what has gone on and what is going on -- all the while, I see file histories being changed.

I followed the debate at en. Quite frankly I was saddened by the way you handled it, and it ended exactly as I had anticipated. Concerning your repeated claims of changed file histories, I think you are out on thin ice and it seems like the kind of comments a conspiracy freak would do. Conspiracy theories are a typical convenient denial of truth. By setting up a conspiracy theory you avoid being confronted with how things really are, face them, deal with them, and move on.

In my mind, people are different but equal in abilities. Or another way, people have different abilities and those should not be considered to be greater or less than other people who have abilities doing other things. Or, yet another way, everyone is equal but their abilities are different.

Or yet another way, you do not seem to know what you think currently.

At english wikipedia right now, it looks like a scam that people might be paid to edit my edits or to whatever. It is difficult to determine a reason for problems like are happening there now without injecting other reasons into it. I am being blocked, I think, for referencing my articles and not knowing enough about the upper levels of the taxonomy to take sides in the 'war' there. It is difficult not to imagine that there are other reasons (like money).

You are blocked for plagiarism AFAIK and for not taking things seriously, and I see yet another conspiracy theory popping up, which reminds me again that you should never underestimate the power of denial.

That user Durova, did not exist before I entered my wright flyer into the Featured Pictures thing. I watched that go on for a long while to know that. Diliff is another "commons photographer" who did not have so many entries that he should have met the qualifications to become one.

And...?

I just want to make things easy to work with here -- so that uploads can be fun and easily get to the right places. Covering all the requirements (the real ones like the license and adequate descriptions and putting them where they can be found) is already difficult enough.

Well that is good.

So anyways, I am being blocked there by unreal users and the tree of life project here only seems to have two extremely avid members left in it. -- carol (talk) 11:10, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Is that good or bad?

-- Slaunger (talk) 21:59, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Valued Image Promotion

★ Your nomination has been reviewed and promoted ★
Congratulations! The image you nominated was reviewed and has now been promoted as a valued image. It is considered to be the most valued image on Commons within the scope:
Dryas integrifolia (Entireleaf Mountain-avens).
If you would like to nominate another image, please do so at Valued images candidates.

review

 Support--Mbz1 (talk) 13:25, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

Result: 1 support

=> Promoted. -- Slaunger (talk) 00:06, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

the conversation in village pump

Thanks for the note on my talk page, there is a huge discussion about the same thing in one of my Archives of talk pages I shall look it up, it goes in my support of having galleries and not both galleries and categories for plant species. This was back a couple of years and I have been taking their advice mostly, WayneRay (talk) 02:16, 3 July 2008 (UTC)WayneRay

Most of the conversation regarding duplicate images in Cat's and Galleries and also duplicate name Cat's is in my #1 archive WayneRay (talk) 11:36, 3 July 2008 (UTC)WayneRay

Additional discussion page at VP, I added a comment in favor of cleaner Categories, not sure if I was too wordy WayneRay (talk) 14:14, 3 July 2008 (UTC)WayneRay

I commented on categorizing biota just now.[1] Thanks for reminding me of the discussion. Walter Siegmund (talk) 04:33, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

intelligence

I am not going to dig it out of the history from the last few days, but I am really wishing right now that I did not question the intelligence of anyone until after that user had reverted my application of the delete template.

I think though, that I questioned the intelligence of adding that "the" into location categories in the first place. I think I said that 70% (or more) are able to determine that a name of an area like Northern Territory, is a name that is words that describe areas. I think that anyone new or not comfortable with English would do better without it (in Farsi, they have a popular rice dish there which when translated means "rice rice", that made me laugh but I did not find it to be confusing). Then I said that the decision to do that was pandering to a 20% of the population who just likes to inject rules into things.

I have seen arguments between translators of English end with which version to use and (of course) books that had to be bought before all those rules could be followed.

I suggested that there might possibly be a 10% of the population who would be unable to understand something like the Persian rice rice dish, and they would probably not be able to actually use the information here much anyways.

Probably the 70% is much closer to 80% and the 10% is much closer to 3% to 6% and what I said about typing the category, pasting the category and making software to work with it is 100% accurate.

I have made some decisions in my life which I regret. To claim that everything one does (either an individual or a group) is 100% well thoughtout and perfect when evidence says differently is not intelligent, in my opinion. -- carol (talk) 11:04, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Category:Nature of the Denmark I made that so that the Aussies who are putting "the" into Flora of and Fauna of categories would not be confused and think that it was a category for marks in dens. It is a compound English word and one of the words is a location. The other word is both a name and a word that means blemish.

I should probably ask that it be deleted. It is silly of me to think that inclusion of the word the there helps anyone understand the category more. -- carol (talk) 11:08, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Yes, you should ask it to be deleted. Again, you are not being helpful to the project by pulling these tricks, carol. As I have told you previously, it is not the way to make a point. - Slaunger (talk) 11:40, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Category:Nature of the Denmark? come on Category:Nature of the Northern Territory, Category:Flora of the Northern Territory and Category:Fauna of the Northern Territory are different to Category:Nature of Denmark. All I'm seeing of CarolSpears ATM is making Categorys that don't even need the in them such as Category:Nature of the Denmark and Category:The Northern Territory just to prove a point which has already been talked about in the deletion pages of Category:Flora of the Northern Territory and Category:Fauna of the Northern Territory. Making categorys such as the ones I've talked about isn't helping infact she's just confusing the situation for her advantage. Bidgee (talk) 11:17, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

You also may want to check this Commons:Deletion requests/Category:Fauna of the Northern Territory and Commons:Deletion requests/Category:Flora of the Northern Territory. Bidgee (talk) 11:33, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for defining "being stalked" as this is a clear example of Bidgee stalking my edits. Is that "cool"? -- carol (talk) 12:28, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

In fact Slaunger's talk page is in my watchlist about an past issue about a month or so ago. I'm not stalking you. Bidgee (talk) 12:32, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

I can confirm that. Independent of what other users do you have the option to edit constructively, and making a bogus category just to make a point is not constructive. -- Slaunger (talk) 12:41, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Rank the creation of that bogus category by aggression, stalking and abusing another user uncommunicatively who is editing. And also by difficulty of removal.

How to rank other users contributions on an agression level scale is for my part irrelevant and yet another attempt to stray of from the subject matter. Just because another user makes aggressive edits, this is should be de-coupled from how you edit yourself. If you have a problem with another users edits, go solve that with that user instead of referring to the particular users behavior to third parties. -- Slaunger (talk) 13:20, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Additionally, it would probably help me if a list of diffs of people encouraging Bitgee to be cool was provided. And a similar list of diffs showing where Bitgee is encouraged to not stalk or even to give an appearance of stalking by interfering with a private conversation. And, the quick deletion of a silly category is <fill in the blank>. <-- ? © carol (talk) 12:59, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

You've failed to read on what others have said to you Carol. Yes I may have been aggressive but you insulted me but I have not stalked you and I've chose to stop communicating you when you failed to talk about this issue that was at hand. and again you have insulted me with the above comments. and how have I interfering with a private conversation? Bidgee (talk) 13:04, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

With all due respect, I would appreciate if you (Carol and Bidgee) could address further disputes elsewhere than on my talk page. Although it adds a certain level of entertainment and spice to an otherwise boring talk page, it is really not the right place to have a dispute. Thank you for your understanding. -- Slaunger (talk) 13:20, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

my grocery store experience

I worked for 5 years at a grocery store. I observed and participated in many aspects of the task. I am going to write here about how the shelves were stocked; I observed this more than I participated with it. With the exception of the tobacco products, I tended to often work the lane that sold the most of those so I knew usually what we needed and what we did not need -- that is relevant to what I am going to write about the process.

The day shift (like 7am to 3pm) stocked the "endcaps" the special stuff that were on the ends of the set up shelves. They were smaller areas than the shelves and usually held things that the store had an excess of or a deal on or was featuring for some reason or another. It made sense that the day staff did this work; it is when the sales people were around and in my store, they were called to help bag because the day cashiers got a little nutty if they ever had many people at one time in their line. The nighttime cashiers did not have the same number of staff, we learned how to ease the people who were in line with a calm demeanor and personal words. The two shifts were different, I cannot say that one shift did more work than another; it has been said though.

The shelves were stocked at night after the store closed. People whose only job was to stock the shelves. They could put their pallet movers anywhere and the box scraps could be dealt with after the shelves were stocked and not worry about shoppers being hurt and such.

The person who was paid extra to order things for the store had to ask the person who worked the night shift the longest what to order. The person who was responsible for the store probably had a specialty in the sales people and also the daytime shoppers. That the structure had him order the stuff for the store was comical -- the people who were seeing what was missing from the shelves and replacing it had a natural knowledge of it.

More cigarette sales occurred between 3pm and 9pm than at any other time during the day. It was not just me who knew what to order, it was anyone who was good at that lane and worked it often enough and stocked that shelf. The ability to do this had nothing to do with using the tobacco or not. It had to do more with the experience of the product.

I have seen real life pay people who cannot do the tasks they are paid to do because there is not a definition for the things they are really doing. I cannot say that the person working nights who knew what to order was more or less important than the person who was working the day shift.

At a grocery store, the shelves are more important than the endcaps. People need a lot of different kinds of stuff and the endcaps just cannot display it all.

One of my biggest challenges at that store was to explain to people the reason something they wanted was not available or to know the person to request products from. I enjoyed the work. I wasn't paid enough to do it. If you need me to explain my point with this real life experience, I will be happy to do that. Until it is requested though, I will just leave it as it is. -- carol (talk) 11:38, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Ok, I will keep myself in suspense for a few days and think real hard about that. Somehow I think it relates to categories and botany botanical images, but that is just a vague feeling... -- Slaunger (talk) 12:20, 8 July 2008 (UTC) -- phraseology corrected (not a rudeness stike) carol (talk) 12:26, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

OK, I give up. I will have to live in suspense for almost 24 more hours though it seems. -- Slaunger (talk) 20:01, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

How it works?

Hi, Kim. I'm not sure you know the answer to my question, but maybe you know the one, who does. I'm interested how support votes, which might be posted in different languages are recognized and transled in green support votes? I mean is there a table, which is used to do it and where could I see the source code for this task? Thank you for your time.--Mbz1 (talk) 20:12, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Hi Mila, I saw your question to Dschwen and this is indeed one of the most challenging parts of doing the FPC counting you plan to do. The support votes all use the Image:Symbol support vote.svg. What you need to do is to open the image page of that one and look at the links section. Now you have to filter out all links beginning with "Template", i.e., Template:Support (the most prevailing one) is the first one on the list. If you click more links you'll see also, e.g., Template:I love, but this is currently banned according to the description. Continuing among the myriad of FPC links you find Template:A favor and so forth. Cross-check with Category:Polling templates, but I would be surprised if all polling templates were correctly categorized (you could do the project a favour and categorize those, which are missing). Hope this helps. Although compiling such a list will catch 97% of all votes, you never know when additional polling templates are added. Therefore, I think the counting has to be marked as indicative and to be checked by human hand before approving. Another slightly complicated thing will be to correctly exclude strikes out votes. I guess that can be done with some regular expression magic, but that is not my speciality.

Good luck with Python. I enjoy programmming in that as well as I recently began using it at work with the SciPy scientific extension. It is a syntactically very clean language without all the usual braces with a powerful API and minimal boilerplate work. Have not made my first bot yet though... -- Slaunger (talk) 20:31, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

It is, unfortuantely even worse than that as some of the templates you will find this way have links to other templates, which redirect to these templates. For instance, if you take a look at Template:Support and hit the "What links here" link you will find other redirected templates such as Template:Pro...a lot of work. Maybe someone with the right bot could help you to automatically find all the templates.

Actually, if you bot was really cool, it would autocompile a list of support (and other) templates by traversing through all the what links here links prior to each run. That would be cool, as then human intervention could be avoided (once stabilized, tested and bugfixed). -- Slaunger (talk) 20:39, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

My 2 cents: I have a feeling that this trouble is just not worth getting into (of course Mila is free to do what she wants in her free time). But weighing the work such a bot would save versus the pain implementing it, the zillion things that could go wrong, the bajillion cases of odd/wrong votes that we cannot even begin to think about, the uneasiness such a bot is likely to cause in the community (you will never be able to replace human intervention to spot sockpuppets, plain stupid vote reasons (which are taken into account on some FP projects), honest mistakes, people not using a template but pro, etc. etc.). All that to save someone from counting 5-10 (in some cases 20) votes, which takes maybe 5 seconds anyways? Nah. --Dschwen (talk) 21:10, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Thank you, Kim and Daniel. You both are very helpful! I just like to play with Python a little bit to understand how it works with Wikipedia. I do not even think to implement anything any time soon. I wonder who wrote the code, which knows what kind of vote was casted no matter in what language it was posted. Maybe I could clone this code to my play progam. I am sorry I am taking your time with my questions.--Mbz1 (talk) 22:12, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure that such a code even exists. Where did you see it or its workings? --Dschwen (talk) 23:00, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Hi, Daniel. It is all my English. I never cannot explain properly what I mean. Sorry. Let me try to do it again please. Let's say I supported an image from FPC, but instead of using English word "support" I am using Russian word, which stands for support. I hit "save" and right away I see the image Image:Symbol support vote.svg with my Russian support vote. The word is still displays in Russian, and somehow the code behind the screen knows what it stands for and displays the proper symbol. As a matter of fact I just thought that there might be a function, which translates from all different languages and maybe I will be able to use this function - to pass to it a word in any language and get English translation. Thank you for your time.--Mbz1 (talk) 23:25, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Ah, I see what you mean. The votes are templates, and all these templates have been coded by humans and in that code the icon for support (Image:Symbol support vote.svg) is always included. For instance, the template implementation for Template:Support is simply (the stuff inside the <includeonly>...</includeonly>) when you use the view source tab)

[[Image:Symbol support vote.svg|15px]] '''{{{1|Support}}}'''

The stuff in tripple braces means that if no additional parameters are used, the text "Support" is shown. This can be overrided by specifying another text, e.g.,

{{Support|I reluctantly support}}

results in

 I reluctantly support

So, the localization is not done by some magic. The russian variant works because someone has created a specific Russian version of the template. Hope that helps in the understanding. -- Slaunger (talk) 07:23, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Thank you very much, Kim!--Mbz1 (talk) 13:00, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

• Hi, Kim.I wrote the code, which correctly calculates support, oppose and neutral votes casted in all languages and in all templates as long as a template is using the right image. It is a very easy code. The actual vote count is done with 15 something lines of code.Of course my code cannot catch sockpuppets, plain stupid vote reasons . My code also will not catch honest mistakes. If somebody voted without using "{{" and/or "{{", my program will ignore this vote, yet I believe it will work in 99.99% of the cases. At this point I'm not sure what to do. Should I continue working at the program, or you agree with Daniel that implamentation of such bot would cause unesines in the community? In any case I'd like to thank you for tremendous help.--Mbz1 (talk) 18:51, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

  Oh, you are fast, considering you have not programmed Python before and the task you are undertaking is non-trivial!! Well, I think it would have value to continue working on, but I agree with Daniel, that the final decision in the voting process should always be human. Notwithstanding, a vote counting bot could be handy for assisting the closer as long as the results are clearly marked as a bot counted result, which should not be interpreted as definititive. It could have value for COM:VI as well as here the final decision is governed by a transition of the status to either declined, undecided or promoted. As long as the vote counting was done without changing that state it would still be valuable. Actually, I had thoughts and queries about such a bot early on in the VI work and have sort of prepared the system for bot-assisted vote counting. There is some business logic for VI which needs to be considered though. One thing that comes to mind is logic for managing scope changes. Here all votes, except oppose votes are reset. -- Slaunger (talk) 18:59, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

• The idea of the bot was to calculate the votes and put the result template in the nomination. I was not going to move the nominations to archive, to post the images, which passed, to FP, just count and display result that's it. I've got the idea of writing the bot after me and Calibas used a silly support template in this nomination Commons:Featured_picture_candidates#Image:Ten-lined-June-Beetle.jpg and Simonizer complained about closing FP. Kim, I would not be able to write the code, if you did not help me. It was really kind of you.--Mbz1 (talk) 19:29, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

  Yeah, I saw that FPC nom. Only glad to help. I am amazed you find my advice helpful, as I have never done bot-work, nor do I know the pywiki extension to Python. -- Slaunger (talk) 20:03, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

• Hi, Kim. The bot is almost ready to be tested with the real posting of the results to the FP nominations. I enjoyed working on it, but now I'm not sure what to do next. I know at least one person (Daniel), who is against this bot. Should I post request for the aproval somewhere? I guess the way to proceed is to create at least 2 test nominations and let me play with them really calculating and writing results. In any case I am not sorry about my time. It was interesting and I like to learn something new.Thank you.--Mbz1 (talk) 16:07, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

• Whoha, hold on. I was merely laying out how I felt that the outcome of the task is probably not worth the effort that would have to be put into it. Well, not that you implememnted it anyways that changes the picture :-). I'd test the bot on a copy of an actual nomination in your userpage, then post a link on FPC talk and get some feedback. --Dschwen (talk) 16:13, 11 July 2008 (UTC). P.S.: I did not consider the educational benefit for you, writing the bot, when I gave my assessment above. --Dschwen (talk) 16:15, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

• Thank you for your input, Daniel. No mater what happens with the bot, I thank you for your help and your time.--Mbz1 (talk) 16:27, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Re: Commons:Valued image candidates/Anticline (PSF).png

Thanks for the message to my talk page. I have replied and changed the scope. Anonymous101 ^talk 21:22, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

OK. I am not sure I will review it further though as i am really on this ice concerning domain knowledge. I guess a good generic illustration of an antiform would be something like this. The one you have nominated may be the best candidate, but there are other close competitors, so I am really not sure... -- Slaunger (talk) 21:33, 31 July 2008 (UTC)