Mav wrote:
> I have tried to make sure my tone is respectful in these matters
and
> copyediting, formatting and moving articles per standard English grammar
> rules and Wikipedia conventions ... /are/ useful ways to contribute. Or have I
> been wasting my time for the last year and a half?
Indeed, you are always respectful, and you have made a massive
contribution to the 'pedia. Everyone knows that, and we all respect it.
I for one am grateful for it. But your stubborness on this matter,
though undoubtedly well intentioned, is not adding to that respect.
Bluntly, we, the people who actually WRITE the fauna entries, are sick
and tired of being buggerised about, for no good reason, by people who
do NOT contribute to them. Over the last month or so there has been a
massive improvement to the bird sections in particular. There is a huge
amount more still to do, but the concentrated efforts of three or four
regular contributors is really starting to show results. Please, if you
don't want to help with this project, at least stop interfering with
it.
Tony Wilson
(Tannin)
Zoe wrote:
> I just checked. My preference is to word wrap at 55 characters. I don't know why my messages aren't wrapping, but I have no idea what to do about it.
Thanks for checking, Zoe. I just signed up for a Yahoo account to have
a look for myself and I don't blame you, they don't make it obvious!
It turns out that what you have to do on Yahoo is _un-tick_ the 'Allow
HTML tags' box. That's on the basic free version. I guess it's the same
if you are using one of the premium services.
Tony Wilson
(Tannin)
--- Zoe <zoecomnena(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
>> Mine are among those? How odd. It's a problem
with
>> Yahoo, apparently (whose email I don't really like,
>> by the way.) I'll research and see what I can do.
>> Zoe
Daniel Ehrenberg writes:
> Couldn't be. I use Yahoo, but my texts are word
> wrapped, aren't they? I'm not on that list.
KQ writes:
I think if it's a problem with clicking "allow HTML
tags"--that might explain both the rampant < div >
tags and the inclusion of the message twice, once
without wrapping, and once with the code displayed
rather than parsed. In the 2nd message you can see
that Zoe is using line breaks in a typical way, but
they're all within < div > tags and essetinally being
ignored. Take a look at
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-April/002815.html
for an example.
I have no clue what might cause Ed's email to fail to
wrap.
best
kq
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The Cunctator wrote:
>Look at those straw men burn! "Clam Dip" is a
>generic food; if it were a specific recipe, like "Martha
>Stewart's Famous Clam Dip", then it would be capitalized.
>"Global Warming" and "Ozone Depletion" are not specific
>scientific phenomena, nor would they be capitalized as
>such by specialists in climatic and atmospheric science.
>"Map Projection" also is a class, not a particular thing, as
>is "Topographic Map". Etc.
I choose those examples for the exact reason that they have spurious
capitalization - and I agree with you on why those terms should not be
capitalized. Thanks for explaining the reasons.
>The irony is that the one thing that could *almost* be
>plausibly capitalized above (other than "John Doe"), is
>lithium, which you didn't capitalize.
I should have capitalized that too because I was trying to show examples of
incorrect capitalization. All element names are common, not proper nouns in
the same way as "diamond" is a common noun. But the Hope Diamond is a
specific rock of diamond and is therefore a proper noun. The word "diamond"
is a "kind" while Hope Diamond is a very specific thing - there is only one.
>...
>On the other hand, for uncommon or somewhat ambiguous
>species, it would be odd to write "Shy albatrosses greeted
>Sir Putney Drake when he first set foot in Newfoundland." instead
>of "Shy Albatrosses greeted Sir Putney Drake..."
In textbooks newly-introduced terms are either bolded or italicized /and/ at
least the textbooks I've used almost always use the down style for common
nouns (I have had a couple course texts which were not textbooks but highly
specialized field guides employing up style though). So since the first use
of the new terms stand out as a unit there is no ambiguity as to wether
adjacent adjectives are part of the new term or just happen to be next to the
term. In Wikipedia we link at least the first occurrence of a
newly-introduced term - this has the same effect.
>Whatever the case, I don't think we'll be hurt either
>way, and I don't think it's worth antagonizing useful
>contributors by changing their work (and making no other
>contributions) and then implying that they're elitist bastards
>for complaining.
I have tried to make sure my tone is respectful in these matters - if I have
given a negative impression then I apologize. My point is that in order for
Wikipedia to be useful to the largest possible audience we should use general
rules of grammar and not specialized ones (which are different from
discipline to discipline and not predictable by non-specialists).
And copyediting, formatting and moving articles per standard English grammar
rules and Wikipedia conventions (which aim to make linking predictable and
resulting sentences look natural) /are/ useful ways to contribute. Or have I
been wasting my time for the last year and a half?
--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
It's easy to tell, Fred. Just look at your post in any web browser.
Start with:
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-April/date.html
For examples of unwrapped email that scrolls of the side of the page,
see:
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-April/002283.htmlhttp://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-April/002300.htmlhttp://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-April/002313.html
(Just random examples from the top of this month's list).
Yours, by the way, are fine. It's only about one poster in 20, and
sometimes posts that quote the un-wrapped ones as well. Mostly, I just
ignore the post unless it seems particularly important. But it's a
reasonable guess that, human nature being what it is, most of the
others who read the list via the web interface do the same: i.e.,
ignore non-wrapped posts because they are too hard to read.
(PS: to anyone wanting to fix the problem. It is usually very easy.
Most (all?) email clients have an option to wrap text. Look for it in
"tools" or "options" or "preferences".)
Tony Wilson
(Tannin)
--- wikien-l-request(a)wikipedia.org wrote:
> Send WikiEN-l mailing list submissions to
> wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org
>
> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web,
> visit
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> or, via email, send a message with subject or body
> 'help' to
so all that above is a mess and I'm typing here below
the mess, though I could as easily type above it, or
clean the mess up with new line breaks and forward
marks if I felt especially kind, but I don't right now
so I'll just fire this off and go check the web
archive to see if this sucker wrapped or not. Because
I haven't heard any complaints about my emails not
wrapping and I'm also using yahoo.
kq
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com
Please, can those who don't have wordwrap switched ON in their email
clients do something about it? This horizontal scroll caper is getting
beyond a joke.
OK, I have to admit it. Hephaestos and anthere have shown me the light. I'm just a terrible person. They are so right, I don't have anything positive to add to Wikipedia, I'm only here to cause trouble. Darn, why haven't I seen this for so long? If you really think I'm nothing but a horrible person, please let me know, and I'll happily leave. Zoe
---------------------------------
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The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
Or, we can take a look at how the recognised authorities do thgings.
Here is what the Audobon Society has to say:
There are rules governing the capitalization and hyphenation of birds'
names..... It might be helpful to go over a few of the general rules of
written bird names. When writing your own name you always capitalize
your first and last names, e.g., Sam Spade or Lucy Brown. When writing
the English name of a bird species, you should always capitalize its
first and last names, e.g., Scarlet Tanager or Winter Wren. This avoids
confusion with other modifiers in the sentence. For example, "the
secretive, tiny, Black Rail..." If you are referring to unspecified
birds use lower case letters, e.g., "those herons over there," or "that
sparrow on the ground." If a species has a three-word unhyphenated
name, all three words are capitalized. For example, "the graceful
American White Pelican..." Many birds have compound or hyphenated
"first" or "middle" names. Only the first letter of the compound name
is capitalized: Red-throated Loon, or Long-billed Curlew. However, if a
bird has a compound "last" name, then both parts of the compound name
are capitalized: Eastern Screech-Owl or American Golden-Plover.
Can't get much clearer than that.
If we are to fly in the face of recognised convention in the case of
bird and mammal names, why is the so-called "rule" so
self-contradictory?
Why are we (according to the name-change people) supposed to use
different rules for dogs, and aircraft on the one hand, and birds and
mammals on the other?
Tony Wilson
(Tannin)
sannse wrote:
>I'm in agreement [with Tannin] here. One of my own
>areas of interest, dog breeds, has a similar issue.
>So far the capitalised versions have (mostly) held
>here, but it would be nice to clarify the issue and be
>sure of a consensus.
>
>In the case of dog breeds, all my books on the subject
>(five) capitalise, as do the various kennel clubs. I've been
>careful to check in each case - it's "Airedale Terrier" but
>"Maltese terrier" for example. I would like to move
>"Chesapeake Bay retriever" back to "Chesapeake Bay
>Retriever" to follow this principle.
Dog breeds seem, as a rule, to be a special case. All the research I've done
has indicated that most dog breeds are /almost always/ capitalized whenever
they are written.
The only exceptions seem to be with the really well-known breeds. In fact I
spent an hour "fixing" the capitalization of the [[List of dog breeds]] page
only to find this out - it was darn difficult to find many sources that did
not capitalize the breeds. So I reverted myself.
But when you think about it the reason becomes fairly obvious ; dog breeds are
an invention of selective breeding with well-known pedigrees and historys
(almost like a family history). This is similar to the names scientists have
given to certain "breeds" of mice that have been selected for a specific
purpose.
That type of specificity turns what looks at first blush to be a common noun
into something that looks a lot like a proper noun.
Thus the capitalization.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)