User talk:Pi zero/Archive 1

Please do not edit the contents of this page. It is for historical reference only.

---

Hello, and welcome to Wikibooks!

Here are some tips to help you get started:

• To learn the wiki-markup-language syntax, see Help:Editing.
• Make sure to sign your posts and comments with four tildes, like this: ~~~~
  • There is a box at the top of the edit window (if javascript is enabled on your browser) that will insert it too (looks like part of a signature). This will let others know who left it, and make it easy to reply back to you.
• Remember to conduct any editing experiments in the sandbox.
• You can tell the community something about yourself in your userpage.
  • You can get to this page by clicking the tab at the top of the page labeled with your registered username.
• Wikibooks is a collection of open-source textbooks. (What is Wikibooks).
• If you are a Wikipedian, see Wikibooks:Wikibooks for Wikipedians for a primer on how things work here (it's a little different).
  • If you want to base your work here on materials from Wikipedia, please use WB:RFI (requests for importation) to bring the material over in compliance with the GFDL.
• If you're an instructor and plan on using Wikibooks for a class project, see Wikibooks:Guidelines for class projects
• Please say hello at the Reading Room with any questions or ideas.
• Eventually, you might want to read the Manual of Style and Policies and Guidelines.
  • Help us by participating in policy and guideline creation.
  • Please take a look at Wikibooks:Naming policy before starting a new book.
• Remember to maintain a Neutral point of view.
• Explore, be bold in editing pages, and have fun!

You will find more resources in Community Portal. If you want to ask a question, visit the Study help desk, the Reading Room, IRC channel or ask me personally on my talk page. For site news, see the Bulletin board. It might be a good idea to add that page to your "watchlist" so that you can see when any new information is posted there. You can do that by clicking the tab labeled "watch" at the top of the page.

Good luck! --Panic (talk) 16:20, 11 December 2007 (UTC)Reply

You mentioned that you have been working on esoteric templates lately. Would you be interesting to helping to improve Help:Advanced templates? I recently scrapped what was there and started fresh. What was there was largely outdated, unmaintained and very hard to follow. I think having multiple eyes working on it could help to make understanding esoteric templates much easier for the average person. --darklama 02:09, 28 January 2009 (UTC)Reply

For what little my input might be worth (and what little time I actually have to devote to yet another part of wikibooks on any given week), I'm certainly willing to try to be helpful. (My fatuous remark over at template_talk:wikipedia was, inasmuch as it served any useful purpose, a way of saying that I'm currently unlikely to forget to flush the cache when testing a template.)

What is meant to be happening? There seem to be three pages still with content, all with merge tags — and BTW each merge tag unfortunately links to the talk page of that page, so that even the two that are proposed to merge with each other wouldn't have their merges discussed in a single place. To my mind, all the merge tags would ideally link to a single section of a single talk page. I've also been reviewing Wikibooks:Votes for deletion/Help:A quick guide to templates, but that too has the familiar feeling of walking into the middle of a complicated conversation... --Pi zero (talk) 12:50, 28 January 2009 (UTC)Reply

For what its worth, I was actually thinking of FlaggedRevs' caching for stable revisions which might of effected the use of a template on some page when I made the remark about revision cache in my edit summary to {{wikipedia}}.

Besides the proposals to delete some help pages and some discussion that has happened on Help talk:Contents there isn't really anything going on discussion-wise that I know of. I think some goals are to improve the help pages to make them current and useful for new users and contributors of Wikibooks, and to use a consistent style for pages along the way. So far this seems to have taken on the form of rewriting completely or large portions of help pages, trying to keep explanations simple, and trying to use diagrams, tables, examples, etc. that are self-explanatory.

I think the merge templates use to link to the same discussion page, I'm not sure what's happened, I guess I'll look into it. --darklama 13:45, 28 January 2009 (UTC)Reply

I've noticed that on your Conlang pages, your navigation links are not working. Not being familiar with the "esoteric" templates you created, I couldn't say whether it's your list of pages or the template that is the problem. However, I thought I'd point it out. -- Adrignola ^{talk contribs} 17:05, 18 June 2009 (UTC)Reply

Adding the category markup to Conlang/Navlist broke the navboxes, and the noincludes I added later didn't fix it because they weren't noinclusive enough. The immediate problem is fixed now; thanks. --Pi zero (talk) 19:00, 18 June 2009 (UTC)Reply

I don't think you need them. It should evaluate properly when the template it's put in is transcluded onto a book's page. The additional benefit is that helps categorize any new pages that are created with the book template used in them. Correct me if I've missed an instance where this isn't desirable, though. -- Adrignola ^{talk contribs} 20:53, 24 June 2009 (UTC)Reply

Depends on where the template will be used. For example, if a template is used inside a link, extra markup in the expansion will disable the link (which is what happened when category markup was added to Conlang/Navlist). If a template is used on a talk page, there shouldn't be a call to BookCat in the expansion, because BookCat will file the talk page in  Category:Talk:My Book. (If there's a simple way to detect talk spaces, we could modify BookCat to suppress output when called from those.) The dicier the template, the more cautious I'd be inclined to be about it. Some of the techniques being used in False Friends of the Slavist are fairly dicey. I'm downright paranoid about Navlist.

That said, you're right, there should be at least a few of those False Friends of the Slavist templates that don't need the noincludes; the sheer mind-numbing repetition of all those  Template:FFWhatever's has had me just cutting and pasting the same generic markup onto everything. I'll think about which FF templates are safe to de-noinclude. --Pi zero (talk) 22:40, 24 June 2009 (UTC)Reply

I've changed the code so that only Wikijunior and the main namespace get the standard BookCat code, with the Template: and Category: namespaces still getting their custom code. No worries about any of the namespaces that aren't specifically defined in {{BookCat}} anymore. -- Adrignola ^{talk contribs} 23:26, 24 June 2009 (UTC)Reply

There's also the  Cookbook:  namespace (I'd forgotten about that myself). I think I'd recommend listing excluded cases rather than listing included ones. To exclude talk spaces, how about this: Wrap the old version of BookCat markup — the one with just three cases, Template Category and #default — in a conditional that compares FULLPAGENAME to TALKPAGENAME, and does nothing if they're the same.

{{#ifeq:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|{{TALKPAGENAME}}|| ... }}

Another specific exception might be made, I suppose, for  Subject:  space. --Pi zero (talk) 00:48, 25 June 2009 (UTC)Reply

I don't know why it would be used in any of those namespaces, but I suppose it can't hurt. Done -- Adrignola ^{talk contribs} 01:01, 25 June 2009 (UTC)Reply

I've reworded, corrected and extended the information. See if you agree with the changes. I also attempted to transfer to the content the notion that people were not directly forced to learn Portuguese and that no coordination of efforts was made to promote the language (or is still being made at least in level equal to other languages like English, French or even Spanish). --Panic (talk) 07:12, 25 January 2010 (UTC)Reply

One thing that is still missing is the w:Flag of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (it isn't on Wikimedia Commons) and w:Reforms of Portuguese orthography that to my understanding is now rectified (the Wikipedia article doesn't reflect that). --Panic (talk) 07:23, 25 January 2010 (UTC)Reply

Made also a small change to the description of colonization on the Wikijunior:Languages/French page. The later English colonization was not as peaceful, even in the long run, but it was too harsh a wording, used in part what was added to the Portuguese page and made a distinction to North America. --Panic (talk) 07:33, 25 January 2010 (UTC)Reply

How did my change mess up formatting? It's a box floating to the side and I checked several of the pages using it and didn't see any problems. Can you point me to a page it messed up? -- Adrignola ^{talk contribs} 15:20, 23 April 2010 (UTC)Reply

I observed a couple of anomalies whose specific common cause, if they have one, is unclear. (Keep in mind — this occasionally matters — that I'm viewing these pages with Javascript turned off, which is the way I almost always operate.) Conhistory ended up with text overlapping with the colored border of the box, but I might not have noticed that if I hadn't gone looking; what I immediately checked was Conlang (of course), and it had wrecked the layout there. Instead of some text on the left, the flag image in the middle, and a stack of two notices on the right (with their blue borders effectively blending into one), it came out as a clutter of three boxes of miscellaneous height and style strung out horizontally all the way across the top of the page. Besides which, the ambox had smaller text — if I hadn't found problems on another transcluding page I'd probably have customized Conlang to use mbox-side directly.

What was the motive for switching to ambox? --Pi zero (talk) 15:35, 23 April 2010 (UTC)Reply

I noticed you put comments on the talk page of the template. I've responded there with explanations for possible formatting errors and the motivation for the change. -- Adrignola ^{talk contribs} 15:44, 23 April 2010 (UTC)Reply

Just a small point regarding the last change. The bit "...such as proposing theories and solutions..." is problematic since solution based on established theories and practices are good content. I know the difficulty of coming to a consistent text, but that section is becoming too verbose and redundant on the affirmations it makes without providing any good clarification. In that regard I think the examples of unwanted content should be moved to the back of the section and "solutions" (the word) be removed (I can't come up with a good substitute that would make it less objectionable, unless extending the text even further to provide the distinction, the text already points to "If you have done primary research on a topic, publish your results in normal peer-reviewed journals, or elsewhere on the web,"). I will tweak that last bit. --Panic (talk) 02:11, 31 May 2010 (UTC)Reply

See if you agree or see any problem... --Panic (talk) 02:26, 31 May 2010 (UTC)Reply

Seemingly the use of "seem", seems problematic. I seem to, in a seemly manner, avoid it most of the time. The word and its relatives. But seemingly it is still very popular, if badly used most of the time. Do you know if the subject is well covered on the Subject:English language ? Can you point me to a good location. Most google searches I made on the subject point to extremely convoluted or unreliable discussions. Thanks. --Panic (talk) 07:19, 1 June 2010 (UTC)Reply

There's nothing special about the verb to seem. The third person plural is "seem" (as in "they seem"), while the third person singular is "seems" (as in "it seems"). "Some bugs" is a third person plural subject, so it takes the third person plural form of the verb.

	Right:	Some bugs seem to be, there.
	Right:	There seem to be some bugs.
	Wrong:	Some bugs seems to be, there.
	Wrong:	There seems to be some bugs.

The wince-worthily bad grammar of "There seems to be some bugs" is the sort of thing that one can often forgive in spoken English, on the grounds that the speaker started out by speaking the first part of the sentence, and didn't plan out the end of the sentence until they'd already committed to the first part — so that the singular verb was already "out of their mouth" (or at least, on its way down the neural pipeline thereto) before the plural subject had been chosen. "There seems to be...", and only after having already said that, "some bugs". There is no such excuse when writing, though. (Much of the electronic text on the Internet is, in effect, transcribed speech rather than "writing" in the traditional sense of "formal writing". The key difference is that traditional writing is composed by an iterative process that is able to apprehend the whole, and thus avoid this sort of lag-based subject–verb disagreement.)

In the hope of simply avoiding the immediate practical problem, I've proposed a rephrasing of the sentence that doesn't use the verb to seem. I'm only guessing that your difficulty (and, apparently, Thenub's) is tied to that verb. --Pi zero (talk) 12:07, 1 June 2010 (UTC)Reply

Hi, I am not quite sure how, but I seemed to have been editing an old version when I changed your sentence at Category:Pages where template include size is exceeded‎ with the explanation "grammar". My face is even more red when I realized the version I put up wasn't quite correct. As the british say, "Good show". Thenub314 (talk) 17:30, 1 June 2010 (UTC)Reply

This is, I think, the second time I've heard of an incident on Wikibooks in which it seemed that somehow an old version was edited. By an admin, I'm pretty sure (it's an awfully vague memory — Mike.lifeguard? Darklama? I have a feeling it might have been before Adringola's time). --Pi zero (talk) 20:41, 1 June 2010 (UTC)Reply

I think that was me. It was incredibly embarrassing too (which begs the question - why am I admitting it? ;-) --Jomegat (talk) 23:05, 2 June 2010 (UTC)Reply

I think the answer might be that misery loves company. To be honest I have been sleeping an average of 4 hours a night for the past few weeks. This makes me suspect it is not so much a software issue as it is me... Thenub314 (talk) 07:33, 3 June 2010 (UTC)Reply

I nominated you for adminship here. I believe that you will use admin tools for the use of Wikibooks. Kayau ( talk | email | contribs ) 13:02, 2 June 2010 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for agreeing to help with project maintenance. There are several scripts you may be interested in using to make common administrative tasks easier. All can be enabled on the Gadgets tab of my preferences:

• Twinkle Speedy
• Range and wildcard contributions
• Modify rollback
• AJAX patrolling
• Clean delete reasons
• Autodelete links

As well, you may wish to join us in IRC at #wikibooks for work and play, or on the mailing list textbook-l. If you need help with the tools, feel free to leave a message on my talk page.  — mikelifeguard@enwikibooks:~$  15:29, 11 June 2010 (UTC)Reply

Thanks. (<gulp>) --Pi zero (talk) 21:14, 11 June 2010 (UTC)Reply

Congrats! Kayau ( talk | email | contribs ) 00:41, 12 June 2010 (UTC)Reply

{{shortcut}} adds an anchor to the page at the location it's specified at, using the shortcut value specified. – Adrignola ^{talk contribs} 16:16, 13 June 2010 (UTC)Reply

Yes, I noticed that, and experimented with it. However, it doesn't go to the top of the section, but awkwardly to a point slightly further down on the page, just below the top of the shortcut box (like this). I was trying it out because it allows for more robust redirects and because it allows shortcuts that use # (like WB:WIW#OR  and so on); but it's got a nasty side-effect. When you edit a section with an anchor in its title, the anchor markup is included in the default edit summary. --Pi zero (talk) 16:45, 13 June 2010 (UTC)Reply

Hi, I wonder what the changes are at Wikinews about FlaggedRevs. Please comment there. Thanks Kayau ( talk | email | contribs ) 14:44, 15 June 2010 (UTC)Reply

It seems to be an organizational weakness of the way we have things set up that the template provided for proposing discussion of a page deletion has built into it the assumption that the discussion will be here [at RFD]. The process of discussing a page deletion within the book community is implied by the fact that consensus at the book is speedy-deletion criterion 4, but the template structurally discourages it. We ought to have things set up to encourage trying local discussion first before coming here. --Pi zero (talk) 14:43, 30 June 2010 (UTC)Reply

I think {{rfd}} is fine as is and serves its purpose well, but I think you do have a point about the need to have a way to alert book contributors that there is a discussion on the talk page about whether to delete a page. How about a new maintenance template like {{qr del}} to match up with some of the other query templates available? --darklama 18:14, 30 June 2010 (UTC)Reply

What I envision seems somewhat different from a {{qr-em}} (or a Wikipedia prod). A query/prod is primarily oriented toward the outcome of no local discussion, in which case it escalates to a speedy-deletion request. Here, I think the preferred outcome is local discussion, which is more like, say, {{mergeto}}. (And of course escalation if it happens is to an RFD rather than a SPEEDY.) Of course, {{mergeto}} may sit around for months or years without anything coming of it — but it isn't actually necessary that that not happen here, either; it's just that if there isn't any local response at all after a reasonable time, it's okay (not necessary, but okay) to escalate to an RFD.

BTW, is there a standard length of time to wait, after proposing a structural reorganization of a book, before assuming that the book is abandoned and adopting it? (I'm sure I've heard this advice given a few times, but I don't remember it clearly.) That would seem to be much the same sort of situation as locally proposing a page deletion and then waiting before escalating to an RFD. --Pi zero (talk) 19:32, 30 June 2010 (UTC)Reply

It occurs to me that a straightforward name for it might be {{local rfd}}. --Pi zero (talk) 19:42, 30 June 2010 (UTC)Reply

I've seen it stated that a book is abandoned if noone responds in a week. That's on the short side, certainly. On the other hand, I've seen one person come running the same day after being gone for months because the page was on their watchlist and they had it set to email them on changes. That's another argument for such a template, in that another person like that wouldn't come back after a sabbatical to find their book nominated for deletion with the clock ticking to improve it before consensus turns against them. – Adrignola talk 19:47, 30 June 2010 (UTC)Reply

I'm not tied up on a specific template name. I don't see query templates as moving towards a specific outcome though. FWIW Query templates are intended as a middle road where what happens next depends on whether discussion surfaces or not. In this particular case it could mean if no discussion surfaces take it to RFD.

I think there isn't any standard length of time to wait. When I was new to Wikibooks, I didn't wait at all before making structural changes. I think only one person ever gave me fuss about doing that too. --darklama 20:01, 30 June 2010 (UTC)Reply

That is legal, I would say. I didn't add or take away from it, and I know that he is not a native English speaker and does have trouble with grammer. I could tell that he wasn't sure how to put it and from his edits it was obvious what he wanted to say. Arlen22 (talk) 22:40, 6 July 2010 (UTC)Reply

Don't redact others' comments. It's falsifying the record, by claiming that they said something other than what they said. You may believe that some other phrasing would be a better expression of what the writer intended, and you are welcome to believe that. You're also welcome to make comments about your belief, ask questions about what was meant, etc. — under your name. However, others are also free to judge for themselves what was intended — and to do that they need to see what was written, rather than what you have replaced it with. --Pi zero (talk) 22:49, 6 July 2010 (UTC)Reply

Well, you have a point. Arlen22 (talk) 22:57, 6 July 2010 (UTC)Reply

To be picky, it should be refactor, rather than redact, unless the implication is one of censoring. – Adrignola talk 23:21, 6 July 2010 (UTC)Reply

Hm. It fits definition 1 at wikt:redact. So I was curious, and checked our hardcopy unabridged dictionaries. Although I wasn't surprised to find Wiktionary's definition 1 (in expanded form), I was surprised that I didn't find censorship in any of them. I'd speculate that the censorship sense may be a development of the last decade or two, in which it was first used as a euphemism for censorship and then that sense became a primary meaning of the word because more people had heard that than the historically primary sense. --Pi zero (talk) 00:10, 7 July 2010 (UTC)Reply

There is no need for the RfD a few pages will need a history merge. I removed your signed post (and the one from proponent), since there is no other way to abort the RfD. See if you have any objection to my actions. I have also left a post on the proponent talk page. --Panic (talk) 17:27, 11 July 2010 (UTC)Reply

I commented at User talk:Xerol. --Pi zero (talk) 18:33, 11 July 2010 (UTC)Reply

Ok. --Panic (talk) 18:44, 11 July 2010 (UTC)Reply

Just a note. I've looked at the permissions at Commons and it's not as easy for casual vandals to mess with any of the images as one might otherwise think. You have to be logged in to upload a file and you can't overwrite any files you yourself haven't uploaded until you're autoconfirmed (which I assume has a wait of four days). – Adrignola talk 20:19, 10 August 2010 (UTC)Reply

Thanks; good to know. That does eliminate vandals toward the casual end of the spectrum, which is something. --Pi zero (talk) 22:38, 10 August 2010 (UTC)Reply

Is "I kindly please ask" wrong? --Panic (talk) 02:05, 13 August 2010 (UTC)Reply

Well, I don't think it's right. The meanings of the individual words don't fit together that way, and I don't think it would be a globally recognized idiom. --Pi zero (talk) 02:00, 14 August 2010 (UTC)Reply

"Please, I kindly ask..." or "I kindly, please ask" ? I kindly ask is commonly used, I please ask too, even if similar the meaning is not the same. Please denotes a request for a favor for compliance to the target, kindly goes further and denotes the manner the question is being performed . --Panic (talk) 02:20, 14 August 2010 (UTC)Reply

I prefer "would you kindly..." myself. – Adrignola talk 02:33, 14 August 2010 (UTC)Reply

In the situation I was using it, "you" would make it a direct request to one person (since you would become ambiguous), and "kindly" in that form would apply to the requested action not as to qualify the way the request was being made. --Panic (talk) 02:54, 14 August 2010 (UTC)Reply

Honestly, to me neither "I kindly ask" nor "I please ask" sounds right. If you're asking someone to do something, "Please do something" is straightforward, and for a difference set of overtones, "I ask that you please do something" can work, too. The word "kindly" can be used in place of "please" in either of those, but when used in that way it will sometimes come across as quite aggressive, depending on subtleties of context. --Pi zero (talk) 06:52, 14 August 2010 (UTC)Reply

(I know this is a public page but would like that if Pi zero doesn't object, that the dialog would run without any intervention from other parties, this should be considered a private dialog between me and Pi zero, other user may create another thread for any intervention or comment)

1. We have discussed your situation and it was found that we don't have any motive to block you locally, in fact it has been determined by the normal decision process that the block should not stand as there is no consensus to support it.
2. The only voice objecting to restore you to the normal was by Mike but based in unsubstantiated allegations that you are globally banned.
3. Mike has unilaterally and without backing from the community reblocked you (in violation of the local policy) in a reversal of the action by Adrignola in behalf of the community.
4. At present you are in fact in limbo, you shouldn't consider yourself blocked or banned by the Wikibooks community but without an admin willing to act there is nothing more we can do.
5. This situation you find yourself is not new and is based on the fact that no one is obliged to act, it is comprehensible that Adrignola has excused himself to continue to act further on the subject.

I think these are the only facts I presented, as a reply to the user request for "summarize for me about where we stand on this process, and what is the pathway ahead for us?". I understand that you don't agree with how I see the situation and would like to understand in what we diverge.

I will again state how I see each point and why, it will be a bit of a repetition but since you didn't participate from the beginning it may help us to find a common ground.

1 - I'm particularly referring to the more general exposition to the community of the situation that I initiated in 8 August 2010 (not the start of the discussion and analysis of the problem, that was started with the block of the user in his talkpage) resulting in changes that in 10 August 2010 permitted the user to finally formalize a request for unblock, leading me to initiate a countdown of 3 days since the situation was pending resolution as of 5 May 2010 and the block was yet to be validated per request of the steward. In 13 August 2010 and without any opposition besides the harassment made by Mike, Adrignola under normal practices and with the express support of several other Wikibookians acted to restore normality to the situation, since Mike never provided any validity for his argumentation in 13 August 2010 we had a consensus of no support for the blocking the user.

2 - No validation to the claims were presented, in fact I personally talked to the steward that originated the first block and examined the other project as to verify the claims Mike made, no validity was found. This is also corroborated by other Wikibookians posts, Mike is the only one defending that position on Wikibooks (That "Thekohser is banned from all WMF projects.").

3 - By contradicting the action of Adrignola at 13 August 2010 Mike acted unilaterally and in contravention to all other statements made, all against the continuation of the situation (at this point and due to the visibility of the discussion it must be considered that the will of the community was not respected), by the claims and retorts made by Mike there can be no contest to the fact that Mike's action is a violation of the administrators policy and the expressed will of the community.

4 - Since the user has never been blocked locally by a local admin except by Mike (3x IIRC and if we count the sock puppet), we never got a consensus about blocking the user or a violation of our rules that permitted the block to be performed. The user status is pending administrative action to resets the user to normal.

5 - I don't see what you can dispute on this one.

These are the facts, do you disagree or reasonably see how they can be interpreted in another way ? --Panic (talk) 00:15, 27 August 2010 (UTC)Reply

Please bear with my slow response times; I do mean to compose suitable comments in reply, and must set aside a sufficient block of time in which to do so. --Pi zero (talk) 15:01, 27 August 2010 (UTC)Reply

Thanks, If I failed to make anything clear, let me know.... --Panic (talk) 17:34, 27 August 2010 (UTC)Reply

In order to try to sort out the relations between our views, I'm going to first describe some of my positions, and then comment on your items one at a time. The two lists don't line up one-to-one, which is why I'm keeping them separate.

• Mike.lifeguard is a Wikibooks admin who happens to be (just recently) a Steward. Mike's admin actions on Wikibooks are therefore not necessarily outside interference.

• In this particular case, I don't think the local effect of Mike's global action constitutes outside interference, either. (I'm not interested, for this comment anyway, in whether or not it's legitimate as a global action.) The only way IMO it could be seen as outside interference would be if Mike actually thought, when doing it, that its local effect on Wikibooks would not be in the best interests of Wikibooks. It seems clear that Mike considered the local effect of that global action to be in the best interests of Wikibooks; therefore, I do not consider it outside interference. If we were to count on external evidences the fact that the user was recently restored to freedom on Wikiversity would have then have also an impact.

P01 --Panic (talk) 07:55, 30 August 2010 (UTC)Reply

• Blocking is ultimately a matter of judgment by admins. The Wikibooks policy even says that, although it's not as explicit as it might be about the corollary — that the rest of the blocking policy is guidance. We choose admins that we trust to use the tools only in the best interests of Wikibooks, and then instead of just turning them loose, we give them general guidance on what is going to be acceptable or unacceptable to us. Such guidance can't be followed properly without exercising common sense, which is one of the reasons we have sapient admins. I like the way the Wikinews blocking policy makes both of these key points right up front (which is a very Wikinewsie thing to do — comparatively, the Wikipedia policy buries the lead):

"In certain circumstances it may be necessary for an admin to block a user or IP address in the best interests of the site. It is up to admins to use their discretion to decide when to block, and how long for, however for guidance: ..."

It goes on to talk about when blocking is appropriate and when it isn't; but it's already been made very clear, up front, that that's guidance. The Wikibooks policy has the same nature, but doesn't do as good a job of clarifying how the parts fit together.

P02 --Panic (talk) 07:55, 30 August 2010 (UTC)Reply

• When the Wikibooks blocking policy talks about circumstances under which blocking would be an abuse of the tools, it excepts users demonstrably disruptive to the community. Again, that's guidance subject to common sense. It doesn't say what constitutes demonstration (nor should it). What constitutes demonstration on Wikibooks is already a matter that requires judgment; and judgment is also called for when considering evidence beyond actions taken on this project. It's possible for evidence outside the project to be irrelevant, and possible for it to be relevant; common sense applies.

P03 --Panic (talk) 07:55, 30 August 2010 (UTC)Reply

• A community discussion on unblocking a user is just that: a community discussion. It's a valuable way for the community to evolve its thinking about the issues involved, and for admins to tap into that thinking. It's not binding on anyone, per se.

P04 --Panic (talk) 07:55, 30 August 2010 (UTC)Reply

• Assumption of good faith, as a principle, doesn't necessarily apply to someone who has demonstrated lack of good faith in the past.

P05 --Panic (talk) 07:55, 30 August 2010 (UTC)Reply

Now, about your points.

1 - I see a couple of difficulties with this statement.

• As far as I can see, there is no normal process for deciding whether a block should stand (such decisions are not a normal situation); the discussion that there was, was on the short side (which matters only in proportion to how high a quality of consensus one wants out of the discussion — but for such a serious matter one would presumably aspire to a high quality); and even if there were a normal process for deciding whether a block should stand, one of the questions to be decided in this case would be whether the default, in the absence of consensus, should be to keep the block or remove it. So if the consensus is on shaky ground, then the judgment of what to do in the absence of consensus would also seem to be on shaky ground.
• Whatever level of agreement there was when the process was "completed", there is less than that now; so, simply saying that the decision was made is an incomplete depiction of the situation.

P06 --Panic (talk) 07:55, 30 August 2010 (UTC)Reply

2 - In a moment of sanity, I decided not to go back and actually check all of Mike's comments in the discussion, to see if the existence of a global ban was the sole basis of Mike's objections there — but then the moment passed, and I went back and checked. The global ban was not the sole basis of Mike's objections.

P07 --Panic (talk) 07:55, 30 August 2010 (UTC)Reply

3 - I disagree that Mike's action was in violation of local policy. (Many of my positions and comments above contribute to this.)

P08 --Panic (talk) 07:55, 30 August 2010 (UTC)Reply

4 - This one is patently false. Thekohser is in fact blocked, by Mike, who is a Wikibooks admin. "The Wikibooks community" doesn't block users; that is done by admins, such as the local admin who did it in this case.

P09 --Panic (talk) 07:55, 30 August 2010 (UTC)Reply

5 - The phrasing of this seems to be based —but implicitly, so that it's hard to be sure— on the premise that the block is invalid. That's not the case.

P10 --Panic (talk) 07:55, 30 August 2010 (UTC)Reply

(I'd write some sort of summary at the bottom, here, but I actually ran off the end of my allocated time block... a while ago, as you might have guessed from the way my later comments got shorter.) --Pi zero (talk) 04:42, 30 August 2010 (UTC)Reply

I will probably mess this up a bit since it would require a lot of copy-paste to contextualize my comments. Feel free to reshape it as you like, if it confuses you (I personally don't like people inserting text inside my posts).

Some of the issues we are discussing goes outside of the established rules we have, but we can address them by our own view points based in acknowledging that both of us have the best interests of the project and the morality and rationality behind the events.

P01 - That is a contradiction and oversimplification. A contradiction because he basis his actions on outside events (by his own admission), even if I agree with you that he acted locally as an admin.

Would you sanction an admin unilaterally blocking a registered user here because the user was blocked at Wikipedia ? (We don't do that, even unregistered users have a special treatment and are given special considerations, you can read more on previous discussions about open proxys) Or even more problematic case, would you accept to block a user that was condemned in court, lets say for rape or murder ?

I know that the subject is problematic but it relates to the motivation behind the action, the relation about the blocked user actions and the "danger" to our project and a need to establish a limit of our scope, as also the freedom that admins have to exert personal judgments. In fact it is clear that Mike stretched that freedom, beyond the acceptable, by consecutively ignoring stated objections and refusing to provide any sort of validation.

And a oversimplification because the user was not initially blocked by Mike as an admin but by a Steward, with a statement that clearly indicates that the community should validate the situation. If the first was not sufficient, this second fact makes it clear that it was a situation brought to our project from the outside...

P02 - No, the administrative policy is not a guideline it is a policy, it must be enforced (policies tend to be also more carefully written we shouldn't expect them to intentional give great latitude to interpretation). Admins are free to block but are required to validate their actions by our rules and be rational not violating the BeBold policy, if they expect opposition then they should initiate a discussion. The administrative policy clearly states conditions that a admin shall not block. The user does not fill any of the present conditions therefore it shouldn't be locally blocked by an admin.

Mike's actions have clearly not been on the best interest of Wikibooks that was made evident not simply by ignoring the direct objections to his actions (as required by BeBold), but by the discussion that took place to validate the steward block, in that discussion he was the only opposing voice, his attempt to "abort" the process was clear, that is demonstrated by his participation on that discussion, that is why I refereed to it as harassment, it shouldn't be acceptable for an admin to act in that way at least without demonstratively provide evidence about his allegations, as was required.

Sadly we don't have a block policy (aside from the expectations about how admins should act), in any case in the discussion about the validity of the steward block it was clearly established that the user did not present any danger to the project, that in fact he has been a productive Wikibookian. Having the user blocked clearly is prejudicial to Wikibooks not only by the potential of the user but as the message it gives to the other Wikibookians and because it would just be the path of less resistance and lower conflict, if in fact the user misbehaved or WMF decided to block it the subject would be closed.

P03 - I agree with you in general terms with this view. But not in this particular event, there was a clear opposition to the actions and the community clearly (from the beginning of the block) established that the user was not dangerous, this is corroborated by evidence and no evidence to the contrary was presented, even the alleged issues outside of Wikibooks that people brought forward did not validate any preemptive action. In fact we should by default avoid preemptive actions in our project as any damage can be easily reverted.

P04 - In general terms this view is problematic, and we already had a problem with it in regards to my own account. We don't have a block policy but even if I regard that special consideration should be given to the acting admin (the one that blocked), by the normal law about reversions and the precedence of consensual decision (communal or not) any action not previously validated by a consensus decision shall be undone until a consensus is archived by an effort to reach a compromise, if it fails to materialize then the action is not consensual, with all the regards to situations of block (like the recent block attempt made to the editfilters). As I have stated that law is the basis of the BeBold and the way we validate any issue, for instance it was made clear in regards to the restitution of the Check User tool. That is the only viable way to address conflicts and prevent prevarications.

P05 - Assuming good faith is a highly problematic premise (that is the reason that the text is a draft), it is a good starting point to any relations on Wikis but it can quickly be seen as unrealistic and it an extremely fuzzy notion, good faith toward what? In fact I expect that several Wikibookia don't see Mike's actions as in good faith, especially toward the project, clearly not toward that user, as he clearly didn't act impartially and I don't have any expectations that thinks that I have any expectation in his good faith, I made that clearly so when I've gone out of my way to make it clearly stated when I voted against his position as a steward.

I had however until now an expectation that he would defend our project's best interest, but these recent actions clearly demonstrates that he doesn't. It was repeatedly requested that he closed the issue himself by backing up his actions or by fixing them himself. A clear headed admin would have excused himself from acting more on the issue after the first objections regarding silencing the user on his own talk page.

P06 - The discussion was running long before I made the issue public to the community (as there was no expectation that people should be aware, besides the administration, that should review the logs, especially the block logs regarding registered users), if you are raising the issue of time I already cleared that point and the way normalization of a contested action should occur. Blocks or unblocks are not specifically stated as a community decision, there is no requirement regarding how publicly announced they should be (I would support making alterations to our draft in regards to make unblock request more visible), the fact is that I established a running process for the discussion an no objection was presented to it and all the arguments made outside of that discussion where considered at least by me (in fact besides Mike no one objected to it in the 7 subsequent days).

We normally have a 7 days timeframe, but that is only based on practicality, that may vary from situation to situation, and the time may be counted differently being the norm from the last post, barring stated rules that is the normal expectation Wikibookians have), after that time a decision is considered made (for instance in the VfD or Promotion discussions we explicitly close the discussions), in this case the issue is less problematic as we only needed to prove the lack of consensus (I already covered the reasons on another point). So I can clearly state that there is no consensus in the community for the block of the user, this is an established fact.

P07 This is not extremely relevant as Mike failed to contradict the factually established good intentions of the user, that are even supported by the still unaddressed request for unblock (that was pending the steward request for the community to validate the block). We don't have even to assume good faith. This has to deal with the sequence of the actions is the unblock request addressable if the block is not valid ? If the block is valid then how do we address the unblock as clearly we don't have consensus for the block...

P08 I'm not invested on establishing this point. I do disagree with you since by his participation and logged actions he clearly is imposing a personal and objected upon position to the community (he isn't working for the community, and it is at least debatable that he has our community best interests in mind). I know that numbers do not count but it wouldn't be sane not to notice that he acted against the stated objections of other Wikibookians, without a basis on local rules, even violating at least one, he then did escalate the issue by reverting a fellow admin and in general has been a cause of disruption (as is stated on the policy, and by several non productive allegations made during the discussions, or even by his lack of participation in issues that he is at least responsible for). It would be fruitless to act like him and request a pull down of his tools, it would indeed be extremely ironic if someone acted like him and without discussion removed his tools, or even blocked him, locally the ground for that action is stronger than those used to block the user.

P09 You are contradicting something you said above, admins act for the community, not for themselves. Any action can be objected to and the community can be called to validated anything on Wikibooks. Admins are mere Wikibookians on administrative functions, enforcement power belong to all Wikibookians, the special distinction is that admins are granted the tools to exert some of those functions but for the benefit of the community. They aren't sole representatives of the community or even a special cast of enlightened Wikibookians, it is even dangerous if they coordinate actions and establish restricted interpretations of our rules outside of the community view, participation and control.

P10 The block is invalid, as I defended in the above points, it doesn't have the consensual support of the community (if you still disagree then you should address the user request for unblock and close it). In any case the logical step-aside by Adrignola clearly indicates that he has put the good of the project above his personal judgments as to avoid direct and open conflict, he already made his position clear. This contrasts in the way that Mike has acted, in regards to the good of the project. I made several appeals for him to consider the value of pursuing his personal antagonistically position against the blocked user. The present situation is clearly not on the best interest of the project, as I stated, the user will probably be in limbo until someone decides to put things right.

I would respect a clear declaration by the WMF to block the user and I'm indeed aware that Pathoschild (the blocking steward) has yet to reply to my last query, in any case I defend that we shouldn't put our spoon in other peoples soup, they should resolve their own problems.

My interest in this relates to the protection given to Wikibookians and the fairness of the processes we fallow, especially because of my personal experiences here. --Panic (talk) 07:55, 30 August 2010 (UTC)Reply

Having already missed several dates on which I'd hoped to get to this, I really thought I'd surely be able to clear time for it today. I'm very disappointed that it didn't happen. But I have neither forgotten nor given up; I will get to it. --Pi zero (talk) 23:52, 5 September 2010 (UTC)Reply

No problem, respond to it when you have the time. --Panic (talk) 01:43, 6 September 2010 (UTC)Reply

I think this discussion is dead (with unpleasant associated memories, to boot), and best laid to rest. I'm thinking I'll do some more archiving soon, and this will go with it. --Pi zero (talk) 23:51, 10 January 2011 (UTC)Reply

I'd like to create a table with comparisons between our pseudo-magic words and the built-ins at Help:Variables. I also hope to document all the templates in Category:Magic word templates (unless you get to it first upon seeing this). The purpose of this message is the hope that Template:ROOTBOOKNAME can be reconfigured to accept an input for a page other than the current one, much like Template:FULLBOOKNAME. I suspect that an if to detect the presence of input will be required, but I don't have the confidence to mess with that template since it's used on a tens of thousands of pages. – Adrignola talk 22:18, 16 December 2010 (UTC)Reply

I'll take a look at Template:ROOTBOOKNAME. --Pi zero (talk) 23:56, 16 December 2010 (UTC)Reply

Well, I carefully researched it, tested my prospective changes exhaustively, edited the page, and doing a diff before saving discovered that Darklama had made a change a few seconds ahead of me. There goes an hour of my life that's never coming back. --Pi zero (talk) 00:40, 17 December 2010 (UTC)Reply

But at least you're a better person having gone through the effort? It's always important to keep those parser functions skills sharp. Thanks anyway, though. – Adrignola talk 00:51, 17 December 2010 (UTC)Reply

Ya I saw Adrignola's message here before your reply, and decided I could go ahead with getting it done. --darklama 00:53, 17 December 2010 (UTC)Reply

Perfectly understandable. Happens all the time, because in cyberspace we tend to pass unseen until we change something (or, perhaps, noticed only by Google and the NSA). Frustrating for me in this case, sure, but it's nobody's fault but maybe mine that I'm a slow worker. --Pi zero (talk) 01:36, 17 December 2010 (UTC)Reply

Looks like Template:FULLCHAPTERNAME could use a parameter. To save time and effort, the following is what I think should make it work:

{{#if:{{#titleparts:{{{1|{{FULLPAGENAME}}}}}||2}}|{{#titleparts:{{{1|{{FULLPAGENAME}}}}}||2}}|{{{1|{{FULLPAGENAME}}}}}}}

– Adrignola talk 01:10, 17 December 2010 (UTC)Reply

This looked solid (and admittedly, it's a lot easier after the rigors of ROOTBOOKNAME than it would have been before :-), so I implemented it and then did a bit of testing to make sure it worked. --Pi zero (talk) 01:36, 17 December 2010 (UTC)Reply

Thanks. But I have some bad news. Something broke in the updates. I was looking for examples for documentation and, for instance, Wikijunior:Languages/Esperanto isn't calling its template anymore (see the red link at top). – Adrignola talk 01:38, 17 December 2010 (UTC)Reply

I've put in the version I'd done all that testing on. --Pi zero (talk) 01:51, 17 December 2010 (UTC)Reply

Oops, ya I meant to use FULLPAGENAME not ARTICLENAME. --darklama 02:07, 17 December 2010 (UTC)Reply

Looking through the edit history for Wikibooks:Administrators I notice the very first action was to move it to the Help namespace. Would you object to a history merge of Help:Administrators into Wikibooks:Administrators, which would effectively be like moving it back? --darklama 16:46, 16 January 2011 (UTC)Reply

No objection. Looks like as clean a history merge as one could ask for. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 17:24, 16 January 2011 (UTC)Reply

Hi, I'm wondering if you will accept a 'crat or CU nomination? Regards [[::User:Kayau|Kayau]] ([[::User talk:Kayau|discuss]] · [[::Special:Emailuser/Kayau|email]] · [[::Special:Contributions/Kayau|contribs]] · logs · count) 16:32, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Not at present. I've got too much on my plate as it is. Sorry. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 17:44, 28 March 2011 (UTC)Reply

Hi!

I seen that you are assessing Linear Algebra and have contributed to it. It's quite good! Thank you for your contributions!

Yet, I think that I have spotted two flaws that I'd like to draw your attention to. I've posted them on the discussion pages:

Talk:Linear_Algebra/Strings, Talk:Linear Algebra/General = Particular + Homogeneous and Talk:Linear Algebra/Eigenvalues and Eigenvectors.

I'd be very grateful if you could take a look at my short remarks. Wisapi (discuss • contribs) 19:27, 3 August 2011 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for correcting the template mistake. Thought I'd fixed them all but seems that I missed that one.--ЗAНИA ^talk 21:26, 19 August 2011 (UTC)Reply

The idea is that if you use continuing there is the implication that a previous state of opposition has to exist (more or less the issue of using remain, it implies that something previous was present). The use of lingering is more versatile in this instance (it implicates delay, since a straw poll wouldn't not occur if all positions were understood, a position of objection not stated or understood can correctly be considered delayed on its expression). --Panic (discuss • contribs) 17:01, 7 September 2011 (UTC)Reply

I see the same difficulty with "lingering" as you describe with "continuing" and "remaining", plus to me "lingering" suggests dubious legitimacy.

Would "unresolved" work better?

A call for consensus is made and any unresolved opposition may be measured with a straw poll to determine the degree of consensus.

--Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 00:22, 8 September 2011 (UTC)Reply

Seems to work. I believe that lingering suggests something of out of place, waiting correction or definition (not a lack of legitimacy) since consensus is the default state I thought it was perfect for expressing the ideas. I will update the text with "unresolved". --Panic (discuss • contribs) 03:18, 8 September 2011 (UTC)Reply

Hello!

I will be delivering a Talk at the Wikimedia Conference India 2011 on the topic of "Accelerating Wikibooks".

Over the next few days, I aim to make the proposal more and more wholesome and relevant. I'd like to discuss with you about the proposal and hope you can recommend me a few names on Wikibooks with whom I can discuss this.

I'd be very happy if you could discuss the proposal at User:Thewinster/Accelerating_Wikibooks

--Thewinster (discuss • contribs) 08:05, 26 September 2011 (UTC)Reply

This is not a summary of the final talk, only a tentative guideline.

• Create Roadmaps for a book
• Define Learning Outcomes
• Annotate and Discuss new content available from around the web.
• Minor tweaks and fixes which concentrate on crowdsourcing.
• Identifying Small Contribution that advance a book and designing good UIs and triggers according to B.J. Fogg's Behavior Change Model, 8 Step Design Process. The paper can be found here at Persuasive Design : Eight Step Process by B. J. Fogg

I just read somewhere the project forked? What happend? --Thenub314 (talk) 23:35, 10 November 2011 (UTC)Reply

Heh. More than you wanted to know, I'm sure. :-)

There's long been a political division at Wikinews over our review standards. It looks like a sharp division until you look closely at it, and things get really complicated. It's all mixed up, for example, with the Wikipedian AGF issue. Anyway, the most discontented Wikinewsies drifted away or resigned, one gathers they found common cause with some who'd resented being told they had to learn to contribute, and finally a couple of ring-leaders created this fork. Didn't copy our article archive (over eighteen thousand articles), but did copy templates and gadgets and such.

They contacted individual Wikinewsies off-project and persuaded most of our active reviewers to join the fork. I'd always said, if one tried to have two different "tiers" of review the upper tier (full publication with push to Google News) would starve because everyone's time would be consumed by trying to fix the lower quality stuff coming through. Most of the Wikinewsies who left didn't retire from Wikinews, and very occasionally one of them will come by and help out just a bit with the odd administrative task — but they clearly don't have time to do anything significant on Wikinews, even if they'd hoped to work both projects.

And then, of course, it got worse. One of our remaining actives suffered a bad head injury, and another of our remaining actives resigned from all wmf projects on the grounds that wmf had abandoned their neutrality policy by endorsing Italian Wikipedia's shutdown. Both of them are at the other project now. We had two new folks we were training up, but after some training with us they left to work on the other project (and one of them is now turning out to be a major-league troll and sockpuppeteer; go figure).

There's inevitably some tension, but not actual animosity, between the projects (I'd say, at least on the Wikinews side), and mostly we're on okay terms with Wikinewsies who went over, though we don't hear from most of them much. We're getting along, and keeping up morale. We keep the porch light on, our standards up, and review articles that come along (which includes articles from a class of journalism students who've been assigned to learn to write for us as training!). But certainly things are a lot slower atm at en.wn. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 01:02, 11 November 2011 (UTC)Reply

I'am just going around asking people if they want to help with my books. If you would like to help feel free, ok thanks. --Fdena (discuss • contribs) 16:35, 29 November 2011 (UTC)Reply

hi Pi Zero,

I've been reading the Technical Assistance page about the read counter on wikinews. I was wondering if you have found out any more information about how it works and whether we could look at getting a version on wikibooks? Cheers Pluke (discuss • contribs) 23:17, 13 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

I see that thread has now accumulated a comment from bawolff; he's the one I'd eventually have humbly asked to explain it, after I'd tried and failed to figure it out myself. :-)  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 04:06, 14 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

I do not support the text being passed as a policy but as a general rule it has been applied and worth defending. The reason why it is at times important to remember people is that even if n:Wikinews:Never assume is general in life and when dealing with what in not fully comprehended, there is something that we at times forget here on this project we are all volunteers and most come here with a positive intention... --Panic (discuss • contribs) 08:14, 2 April 2012 (UTC)Reply

But, 'we are all (well, most of us) volunteers and most come here with a positive intention' is itself not an assumption but a deduction, based on our knowledge and experience. And it only gives us probabilistic information about any individual.

Volunteer projects thrive on idealism. The moment when I was actually hooked on Wikipedia was when I read AGF. I thought, 'wow, the idea of building an encyclopedia based on assuming everyone means well is insane; these people are idealists — count me in!'. It took me about a year on Wikipedia before I reached the deeper understanding that AGF doesn't mean what it says; that's roughly when I discovered w:WP:ZEN. And then it took me about another year before I felt I grokked what it actually does mean, at its best. And since then I've spent about three years trying to understand its effect on the dynamics of Wikipedia. Although idealism is important to a volunteer wiki, frankly Wikipedia could have gotten that from some other principle. When I got to Wikinews, after acclimating to Wikipedia's AGF, I thought, 'wow, the idea of building a wiki without AGF is insane' (as I say, by then I'd been thoroughly brainwashed into AGF); 'these people are idealists; count me in!' I then started on a similar learning curve about 'never assume' on Wikinews as I had about AGF on Wikipedia, only without an existing expression of the principle. 'Never assume' has been best practice on Wikinews practically forever, and we (and I) were struggling to articulate it since about two years ago, but we didn't actually get it written down until about three months ago. And that is an expression of it tailored to Wikinews; how to generalize it for other sisters, such as Wikibooks, or Wikipedia, is a further challenge that I could imagine taking additional years.

The bottom line on AGF, for me, goes something like this: It's misleading because it doesn't mean what it says;  what it actually says to do is something that shouldn't be done;  and once the user understands what it really means to have people do, doing that too is bad practice (between what it says should be done, and what it means should be done, I believe it's been largely responsible for the long slow deterioration of the atmosphere on Wikipedia)  and the discrepancy —between what it says and what it means— teaches people the intellectually dishonest practice of saying one thing while meaning another. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 13:09, 2 April 2012 (UTC)Reply

I agree with all your analysis, just not that we should let the AGF message pass as idealism. I see no reason for it in a system that relies of consensus (strict consensus if applied correctly), that because of that is conservative in nature (slow changing, if the right of block is respected). In such a system any attempt to subvert AGF becomes impossible. I admit that what you call idealism was part of what attracted my to Wikibooks and fully agree with your analysis that each Wikimedia project is distinct, especially in its political/coordination aspect.

I actively avoid contributing anything to Wikipedia, at best I use the talk pages to raise points (I may correct some spelling on the articles) and that is it. I confess that Wikinews never attracted me as a reader, or a writer, in fact it is the Wikimedia project that I see as less useful. The first time I became aware of it I was expecting at least a good coverage of what is going on in the Wikimedia's projects but that doesn't even seem to be on the radar... --Panic (discuss • contribs) 22:00, 3 April 2012 (UTC)Reply

Sorry about that, sometimes shared commonalities on the languages slips in. Not that it is incorrect, in fact because one word or expression is rare or outdated it does not prevent anyone from bringing it up into use (nor should it, my view is that it enriches the language), on the other side creating new words is indeed more problematic, but shares the same core issue, the lack of common understanding. I have more issues personally with weasel words, PC correctness and erosion of meanings for creating ambiguous understanding about the intentions of what is being stated that spending some effort finding a common ground to understand or remember a words meaning. Kudos for you for understanding what I meant, I was extremely tired when I wrote it, it was not my intention to be obtuse. --Panic (discuss • contribs) 02:50, 6 April 2012 (UTC)Reply

I supposed it was probably a matter of cognates between languages, resulting in an unusual English usage. I just thought it would helpful to you to be aware the usage is unusual. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 14:59, 6 April 2012 (UTC)Reply

Thanks. --Panic (discuss • contribs) 15:06, 6 April 2012 (UTC)Reply

I posted a note on template talk:BookCat about some trouble I'm having with the "deep-filing" part of that template. Since you seem to be the editor maintaining it, I thought I'd drop you a note. Liam987 12:44, 12 April 2012 (UTC)Reply

Replied there. Thanks. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 14:07, 12 April 2012 (UTC)Reply

7 days calls to conclusion or for determining consensus have been and are common practice and in accordance with Wikibooks:Decision making.
Multiple examples are abundant, for instance Wikibooks talk:Blocking guideline and others (it even was a consideration on Mike's discussion regarding global blocking of users).
I personally take offense on how you turned my use of a normal practice as an attempt to bypass or hear your opinion. I also find it disingenuous that you claim that "Wait, didn't I say something earlier about assuming my position was unchanged until-and-unless I retracted it? Wouldn't that mean that the opposition you wanted within seven days already existed at the start of the seven days?" when a request for restatement of opposition is clearly indicated.
More I do sincerely do not believe your claim that you hadn't noticed the statements in a timely fashion, due to the amount of editing I performed on the page and it being put in clear evidence underlined and bold lettering. I had the intention of reminding you to participate but you have been making posts on the same page. So please at least assume that I had no intention to "hide" it from you o4r anyone else, and I will assume that you were indeed blind to what I was doing... Once again, speaking to me on my talk would have been preferable, it is not that I'm not present or uncooperative. --Panic (discuss • contribs) 04:40, 30 April 2012 (UTC)Reply

Some miscellaneous thoughts:

• Panic, I'm not without sympathy for your plight. You're aware, I know, that you tend to be verbose; you've remarked on it recently, I believe. I do suspect you're not conscious of how much of a problem your style can be. The verbosity of your posts tends to make it difficult to read them, not only because of the length but because it can be difficult to pick out the key points. There's also more to it than that. Just as one of my weaknesses is spending unseen hours revising a comment before posting —not an exaggeration, in fact some of my shortest posts have taken the most time to write— you tend to post and then revise, resulting in a large number of edits for a single comment, and leaving the comment unstable when first posted (or even, occasionally, a few days later). Consequently, to be honest, further edits on your part to a previous post don't tend to attract my attention to the post; rather, I tend to stay away from the post when first submitted out of an awareness it won't be stable, which makes it unfortunately easy to forget to check it later for the stable version.
• I tend to systematically hedge when talking about others' intentions, because such intentions are largely unknowable by others (as well as sometimes unknown by the person doing the intending), and most often don't need to be known for the point at hand, anyway. The one word, I think, in my comment that might, conceivably, be taken as suggesting intent on your part was the word "strategy" — and even there, I didn't say what I was describing was your strategy, I said it seemed to be. If I'd spent a number of additional hours trying to compose that post, I might have come up with something better (or I might have invested the extra time —that I didn't have to invest anyway— without getting anything for it).
• The point I was trying to make was relevant to the actual thread; it wasn't some private issue to be settled "off line" on user talk pages. (Indeed, the last time I recall you wanting to take something to user talk pages with me, the net result was that I ended up not having any input into an important discussion on which I had strong opinions that consequently did not get heard. Note, illustrative of one of my previous points, that I'm saying exactly nothing about your intent, which is irrelevant; I'm saying this was the consequence of the way the weaknesses of my discussion style and the weaknesses of your discussion style interacted). This is likely related to a difference between my perception and your perception of the nature of the thread, which brings me to my next point.
• I do not see the seven-days-without-objection principle as applicable to this situation; indeed, it seems far, far too bureaucratic for the informal discussion taking place, and informal discussion is far preferable whenever possible. (The principle that "voting is evil" can also be generalized, in spirit, to discourage excessive rigidity of form.) I'll try to comment on that point at the reading room thread — but, as a short comment seems called for there, even this long and rambling comment here has taken me over an hour to write, and I do have other demands on my time, I don't know how long it will take me to do so.

--Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 12:16, 30 April 2012 (UTC)Reply

Being verbose may be an issue but was something that I've learned that I must do to be understood, especially when people rarely read more than the last post on a conversation. This is what I've learned from my time in the project, I do try to be concise.

What I disagree is the format and mood you imparted on the reply and in its inaccuracies. If I scold someone I do it in private since if done in public it has other implications.

The point you did try to makes was about the format of my actions, open criticism surrounded by some minor veiled innuendos. It was not about your position or mine, it was an abortion of the ongoing process. It could as well been done directly with me.

I recognise that you may dislike the time limit but the format is permissive to a request for extension, it is better than leaving a discussion open to an inconclusive and end being automatic archived. If there is something that needs to be formal is discussion proposal, so I strongly disagree with you there. Rigidity has noting to do with the concept of voting, any formal process, especially of decision to be valid and fair has to be established before it starts. The informal part was what the discussion we had before I called for consensus.

The problems of not being clear is reflect by how you claimed that my previous summarization was a declaration of consensus. --Panic (discuss • contribs) 18:51, 30 April 2012 (UTC)Reply

Being verbose does not, in itself, impart clarity. I'm quite willing to believe you've had experiences in the past in which you said less and were misunderstood, but saying more and being misunderstood is also quite possible. Long statements can easily become very opaque; and while some short statements are unclear, the very clearest statements are short.

I can't tell whether you are ascribing inaccuracies to yourself, or to me. I tentatively hypothesize that you're claiming my comment had minor veiled innuendos in it, which is false as I understand the word innuendo; I was not attempting to hint at or veil anything, but rather to be open and honest about my concerns.

Your approach to the discussion was high-handed in the extreme. I've noticed you have a tendency toward that, which you should watch out for.

On each of the two occasions, as I recall, you claimed afterward not to have made claims about the existence of consensus. This appears to me to be blatantly false; supposing (as I would prefer to suppose) that neither of us is being disingenuous, this rather strongly reinforces my remarks about failures of clarity (and I'm unsure whether I'm agreeing with you or disagreeing with you on that point). --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 21:49, 30 April 2012 (UTC)Reply

I'm also stating that I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with you. I only do not accept that you can extrapolate your own observations (even if I take them as valid for you, and a consideration for future discussions) to a general felling in the community.

"Your strategy here seems to be to flood the thread with words until everyone is sick of the thread and boycotts it, and then claim that what you want has "consensus"."

It is not your place to speak in behalf of everyone and if you have more information that is not publicly accessible to support the assumption that "everyone is sick" or "boycotts" discussion because of my verbosity or opacity, I would like to read it so I can better address any flaws. I never claim consensus unless there is at least a clear statement on non objection. I do not support the view of a need for expressed support, this is not always possible or even required to validate well defined decision processes. That requirement generates group-think and statements of support not contributive to the discussions but in political support of participants, this is clearly observable.

Since I had previous refuted it, the phrase "Seems like you may even have twice presented a biased "summary" of what had come before and then claimed consensus (I haven't got the stomach to go back to check exactly how it went down before)." is a compounded misrepresentation of facts that had been corrected by myself. It would be acceptable that you invoked confusion of misunderstanding on your part, but clearly there was no basis to affirm that after my correction, I had made such claims.

"I hadn't even noticed the "unless there is opposition within seven days" clause you'd unilaterally imposed, until just now.", as we talked before this is if not only a veiled accusation of me attempting to steam-roll the decision, is a grave misinterpretation of something that is normal practice with overtones of declaring me as being acting with bad intentions.

"On each of the two occasions, as I recall, you claimed afterward not to have made claims about the existence of consensus. This appears to me to be blatantly false" This again includes a veiled accusation that I am at best surreptitious in my actions and a liar at worst. What I said was "It seems that there is a consensus" the key word is seems and that I clearly indicate that it was intended to "help reformulate the proposal". This clearly shows that you are in the wrong on your assertion of my actions and that I've been since then attempting to assure you that I had no intention to close the process with a false claim on consensus in favour of my view.

Do you disagree or can prove that I'm being deceptive in attempting that you acknowledge and even retract claims that clearly, even if non intentional, attack my good name and reputation ? That is all I'm after here. --Panic (discuss • contribs) 22:31, 30 April 2012 (UTC)Reply

You set the edit review of Template:Wikijunior:Countries A-Z/Page layout/Sandbox as defaulting to stable. Since the page is intended to be a Sandbox for the template, that sort of spoils the point. Can that be undone? Also since your an admin could you please perform the edits I've requested at MediaWiki talk:Perbook/Wikijunior:Countries A-Z.css. Thanks, Liam987 Talk 11:52, 25 May 2012 (UTC)Reply

I did wonder about the sandbox. The questions raised are

1. who is expected to use the sandbox; if it'll be used by people who've been around long enough to have been autopromoted to reviewer, it'd seem there can't be any downside to stable-default; and
2. who is expected to see the sandbox; if it really won't be seen by the young target audience of Wikijunior, there's clearly no need for stable-default.

A halfway measure is to simply de-sight all the revisions of the page, which should probably be done anyway.

I had a vague thought that a potential content page named for Wikijunior ought to be default-stable just to avoid possible future confusion (keeping the bookkeeping simple).

Meanwhile, I'll take a look at the css. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 12:02, 25 May 2012 (UTC)Reply

Well... I did take a look at the css. But I don't know css, so I'd really better leave tinkering with it to somebody at least minimally clueful. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 12:07, 25 May 2012 (UTC)Reply

Yes, well, I'm not really sure what to do about the sandbox. It probably won't be used much except by me, anyway. Liam987 13:52, 25 May 2012 (UTC)Reply

Hello, I saw you reverting my edits on the notion of them being spam. I would like to know why it is considered spam considering it is a wiki intended for conlanging and offering resources for it. TheZelos (discuss • contribs) 10:25, 5 June 2012 (UTC)Reply

Skipping incidental issues —and being brutally honest— the bottom line was that the target of the link screamed "tourist trap" — very loud advertising that, from its volume alone, represents the commercial gaming industry. The list of links doesn't contain links with that level of commercialism. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 14:12, 5 June 2012 (UTC)Reply

I fail to see how those pages comes across as it, but could you check the Link here and see for yourself that it is no tourist trap or anything, it is just a wiki intended to be a source for information about conlanging. I would appriciate if you could atleast look =) TheZelos (discuss • contribs) 06:53, 6 June 2012 (UTC)Reply

Is it possible that you thought I hadn't followed the link that you'd added? In any case, since you ask I've looked over the set of guide pages you now recommend to my attention.

Here's how it looked from my perspective; and then I'll have a suggestion for a possible way forward. The list of "Other resources" on the Conlang wikibook is very spare; it starts, naturally, with those closest to home and works its way cautiously outward — first, other wikibooks (only one, atm); then, links to sister projects (only atm, and not a very good one, so I should really upgrade that part); then a couple of exceptionally high-quality non-wmf pages (with, at most, conservative commercial information directly relating to the content of the site), to which I can think of at least two others of similar quality that should probably be added; and finally a sublist of fairly commercially-conservative pages of a more specialized class. Even things like ZBB are not listed atm. There are, from what I've observed out there, a number of wikis related to conlanging, driven (from what I gather) by commercial advertising and therefore understandably always hungry for ways to rake in more traffic, but none, to be honest, seeming to have anything particularly exceptional about them to make them especially worthy of inclusion, and I believe most are more developed than the one you added. And the one you added, at least, has loud commercial-gaming ads splashed across the top of each page that do not appear to have anything really to do with conlanging. And your natural inclination was to add this link —twice— to the top of the list of other resources.

If I might suggest a possible course of action. There are, as I said, a number of wiki/bulletin board/etc. sites out there, and it might be useful to begin collecting on the book's main talk page a list of such things; once we have several of them, we might start a subpage of the book to contain the list, to be linked to from the "Other resources" section visible on the main page of the book. This would allow an outlet for inclusion of such things —which are not, after all, wholly irrelevant to the subject— without giving them the excessive emphasis of placing their individual listings on the same level as the wikibook's table of contents. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 10:46, 6 June 2012 (UTC)Reply

Very well, I understand and it sounds reasonable. Thank you for your time. TheZelos (discuss • contribs) 11:05, 6 June 2012 (UTC)Reply

are my wikibooks appropraite? --Hexkc245 (discuss • contribs) 01:22, 2 December 2012 (UTC)Reply

Well, there isn't much to them, yet. A book is a large thing, made up of a number of pages. You should have a notion, when you start a book, of what its approach to its subject will be, and probably about what its table of contents will look like. I'm not sure John Cena has the potential to be developed into a book. (A whole book about this one person?) A book about Germany seems quite possible, but you should think about what kind of stuff you want in it, etc. And a book about Portland, Maine may be more challenging, but again, it seems possible if you work out how you want to approach the subject.

Take a look at our book Using Wikibooks. It's both an example of a complete book, and has a section about creating a new book. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 01:32, 2 December 2012 (UTC)Reply

Regarding your edits, it would be helpful to add a navigation panel, but I don't wanna start an edit war. So could we reach a consensus on this? (And by the way, I'm also studying off of this, so...)FlashingYoshi (discuss • contribs) 00:01, 6 December 2012 (UTC) EDIT: Also, thanks for welcoming, but I'm from Wikipedia, so...Reply

Hm. I hadn't thought the thing I'd seen there was going to be useful. How to do navigation templates is something of a puzzle; I'm not sure there's any one way of doing it that really works well from all points of view. Perhaps look around some, see some styles, and judge what you'd like most? You could even ask for suggestions at the reading room. I tried something I was hoping would work well on Conlang, but that too has weaknesses, and I always meant to further improve the tools for it but was distracted by other things.

(I'm not exactly sure what being from Wikipedia has to do with being welcomed; but, as may be. :-)  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 00:06, 6 December 2012 (UTC)Reply

It's just that Í edit on many different projects, so I'm kinda getting tired of being welcomed at every single project. Regarding your suggestion, I might just do a simple "Back" button. But the page has a Print version, so how can I keep the TOC and <==Front/Back==> buttons off of the printed? I'm trying the Acoustics book method, but still keeping the TOC for now on the pages that contain them. FlashingYoshi (discuss • contribs) 00:14, 6 December 2012 (UTC)Reply

Not to put too fine a point on it, every project is different from all the others. One of the functions of those welcome messages is to give contributors a guide to what about that sister is different. If you aren't reading the welcome messages, you're missing stuff. Myself, I've never gotten past contributing to three sisters because I found that it was so much work to learn enough about each new project, so as to do justice to it when contributing, that once I'd learned three of them I just couldn't afford the effort to learn a fourth.

If by "print version" of a book, you mean a page called "bookname/Print version" that transcludes all the pages of the book, you can configure a navigation template to suppress itself when transcluded onto a page that ends with "Print version". You'd put a condition around the whole content of the template, something like this (writing this off the cuff):

{{#ifeq:{{SUBPAGENAME}}|Print version|| ... content when not the print version ... }}

--Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 01:15, 6 December 2012 (UTC)Reply

Oh s--- that didn't work...FlashingYoshi (discuss • contribs) 22:18, 15 December 2012 (UTC)Reply

Never mind, thanks bro! FlashingYoshi (discuss • contribs)

Hi, thanks for your welcome message :). Regarding my question, who's the most technical savvy user in this site? Thanks. Bennylin (discuss • contribs) 08:07, 10 December 2012 (UTC)Reply

Depends on what kind of thing you want them to be technically savvy about. On some topics, I know about as much as anyone (categories, subjects, templates, flaggedrevs come to mind). --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 13:14, 10 December 2012 (UTC)Reply

Strange, but suddenly id.wikibooks behave like en.wikibooks. I dunno, probably it's a new feature just rolled out with the new deployment, and I happen to catch it in here first, then it got rolled out on id.wb recently. Thanks, btw. Bennylin (discuss • contribs) 13:25, 16 December 2012 (UTC)Reply

I've been meaning to check our page where we've recorded all the customized project configuration settings we've requested for en.wb; I suspect that may be where it is. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 19:37, 16 December 2012 (UTC)Reply

JavaScript has been nominated for deletion. Please share your thoughts. You are being notified because you have contributed to this work. If you haven't read it already, please see our deletion policy. Jeepday (talk) 23:55, 11 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for spotting that wording on the Proteus page. I checked the IP editors changes with data on Wikipedia and saw that it was correct but wasn't sure of the best way to phrase it as describing it as a 'day' or 'year' on a moon just didn't seem right.--ЗAНИA ^talk 23:18, 14 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

Hi, I've imported n:template:picture select L, thinking I could just modify the wikicode to make into into a slideshow. As you most likely already know, that didn't work because there was JS required. Could you help with that, probably by altering my monobook.js (you're an admin so you alter others' monobooks/vectors)? Thanks. Kayau (talk · contribs) 03:58, 18 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

In fact, I'd never dealt with that template. Will try as I can scavenge time. On first look at the docs, seems to be partly js and partly css. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 12:10, 18 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

Thanks. :) Kayau (talk · contribs) 12:31, 18 January 2013 (UTC)Reply