User talk:Grendelkhan/Archive1

Hi there. It seems you've been around for a while but haven't ever been properly welcomed, so let me be the first. It looks like you've done a lot of useful work on the Library of Congress classification system - thanks.

A tip: you can sign your name on talk pages by using " ~~~ " for your username and " ~~~~ " for your username and a timestamp.

Some useful links:

• Welcome is a good place to start.
• Wikipedia:How does one edit a page gives editing help.
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style gives formatting info.
• Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines tell about the principles we operate on. It's important, but don't try to read it all now.
• Wikipedia:Help covers a broad range of useful topics.
• Wikipedia:Village pump is a place to ask questions.
• Wikipedia:Show preview explains how to double-check your edits before saving.

You should also feel free to drop me a question on my talk page. I'll answer if I'm here.

Happy editing, Isomorphic 08:14, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Hey, thanks! Good to know that the LCC additions are okay, and aren't considered data-dumping. I asked a question here and there, and also on meta, but haven't gotten anything back yet. I'll be patient. Got plenty of stuff to add, and there seems to be more to do every time I go to a random page... Grendelkhan 21:14, 2004 Apr 16 (UTC)

Thanks

Thanks for suggesting I talk with DRGnu. PunkPod 00:03, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Where's Wikisophia?

from the pump

What happened to WikiSophia? I was using it to generate PNG versions of PPCHTeX diagrams, and now the site's down and doesn't want to come back up. Does anybody know where I can at least get a copy of Wikitex so that I don't have to do these by hand? Grendelkhan 16:47, 2004 Apr 17 (UTC)

Seems to have been dead for a while... I miss it also. Dysprosia 09:47, 18 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I asked on meta; the response by Eloquence[1] says that the developer disappeared. The punk. Grendelkhan 23:58, 2004 Apr 18 (UTC)

I too would like to see it (I only found out about it after it went down)... in the mean time I hacked together a way to do it on my linux machine, see my user page. Rkundalini 09:14, 19 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Bills are paid, and we're back up. ;) Danenberg 09:36, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)

P.S.  You mentioned looking into dvipng vs. dvi2bitmap for WikiTeX; I was only able to achieve consistent results across an array of browsers using dvi2bitmap's gif output, though I purposed png.  You may find otherwise, or we may be able to forego transparency; opaque png's worked wonderfully.  Danenberg 12:31, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)

WikiTeX chess

WikiTeX' new <chess> package renders at c. 400x400 with \largeboard (check out the SAN/PGN notation, too); were you looking for still larger boards? Danenberg 02:32, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)

That's frickin' sweet. I changed it so's it shows how to make an unornamented board, which is what I think more folks'd be interested in. I'm going to start replacing the maybe-free, maybe-not chess screenshot diagrams I find and make a note about how it would be obsolete to upload those images if we had WikiTeX over here. Plus, 'plot' seems to be broken for user-supplied data, but I'll bother you about that at your place... grendel|khan 04:11, 2005 Mar 13 (UTC)

from pump

I'm adding information about authors' library classifications to their pages, from the LCC, and from the Dewey where I can find it. I'm looking for some advice as to formatting and possible automation. Is there any way to make a custom little bit so that I can type

Funky!Syntax![LCC PS 3515.E288 Dewey 813.54]

(which isn't even any kind of syntax; I'm just looking for a way to get parameterized boilerplate) and have it show up as

The fictional works of Robert A. Heinlein are classified under Library of Congress PS3515.E288, or under Dewey 813.54.

To be honest, I'm not even sure what the best way of doing this is. (I'm just looking to classify fiction right now, so authors published in multiple areas shouldn't be a problem.) Maybe copy/pasting the relevant text is better. But what's the best text to use? Suggestions?

I'm planning on doing this for a long list of authors; I'd like to not have to go back and fix them after the fact.

Also, I'm putting this at the top of the "Bibliography" section for now; I don't think it deserves its own section. Thoughts?

Grendelkhan 17:36, 2004 Apr 15 (UTC)

Excellent! MediaWiki 1.3 [2] will apparently support this, via key-value pairs in templates. Hopefully that's why they're going to be offline for a bit... Grendelkhan 16:09, 2004 Apr 18 (UTC)

It's a fine project to do, if you're motivated. Call numbers do change with different editions of the LCC and DDC, and though the Literature sections haven't changed in several decades, who knows when they might adjust the numbers. You might mention that most public libraries shelve fiction in a separate section, alphabetically by the author's last name, instead of using 813 (American literature) and 823 (British literature). GUllman 00:56, 24 Apr 2004 (UTC)

You might want to remove your questions from the pump when you've found out the answer. :) Helps with the maintenance... Martin 14:46, 24 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Excellent point. I shall do so in the future. Grendelkhan 06:57, 2004 Apr 26 (UTC)

Moment of inertia images

In reply to your question: The images are not my creation. I simply did a search in Google for "moment of inertia" +"public domain", and eventually found a site that had the images shown, with a statement by the author that they're placed in the public domain. Nonetheless, I'll try adding dimensions to them in the next couple of weeks using the limited graphics programs I have, but it has to be done right (not in Paintbrush) so that the dimensions don't detract from the aesthetics of the current graphics.J-Wiki 23:50, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

Actually, I've figured out how to use MetaPost at this point. I've taken the liberty of replacing the first image on the page; I think the MetaPost ones look better. (Since you didn't spend time making these yourself, I figured you wouldn't be insulted if I replaced them.) Let me know what you think; I'm working on doing the rest of them. Grendelkhan 17:56, 2004 May 7 (UTC)

George Armstrong Custer

I gave it a go-over for NPOV in a way that hopefully doesn't trigger a whole PC/non-PC debate over this. Let me know what you think. Alcarillo 15:58, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

Definitely an improvement. Thank you. Grendelkhan 15:03, 2004 May 11 (UTC)

You're welcome. I leave it up to you to decide whether to pull it off the Needy page. Alcarillo 17:49, 11 May 2004 (UTC)

Medium size flags

Is there any rationale for removing medium-sized country flags? I tailored Media:Croatia flag medium.png specially for that purpose, the large version is just a blown up version of a smaller image, and thus pretty much sucks... --Shallot 22:35, 12 May 2004 (UTC)

Gravy! Why did you replace the high-quality image with a scaled-up smaller image? It looks chunky and pixellated---the 'large' images are used full-scale in some places, and something like that looks pretty bad in that context. I edited the CIA factbook picture from [3] to match the new version. I've taken the liberty of replacing it.

Err, as far as I saw, it didn't match it. If you can fix the issue described in the talk page, use that. I don't think the colors in the initial version are exactly right either, at least I never saw those exact shades of red and blue on mvp.hr, usud.hr, sabor.hr, vlada.hr, ... --Shallot

Damn, I must have been asleep. I see what you mean; I should have been paying more attention. My bad. I've listed the flag as in need of a large version on Wikipedia:Requested pictures. Grendelkhan 05:01, 2004 May 14 (UTC)

As for your question, I've just about completed the task described on Wikipedia:Images for deletion/Flags. The system makes autothumbnails now; unless there's some compelling reason to keep the old thumbnails, they should be orphaned and deleted, then replaced with |125px autothumbs. Grendelkhan 00:06, 2004 May 13 (UTC)

Thanks for the link. Perhaps it would have been a good idea to post it in the commit log messages, but oh well. --Shallot 16:34, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

Image:Croatia flag large.png/Wikipedia:Requested pictures: I have downloaded the coratian flag from the CIA World Factbook, and corrected the coat of arms (COA) placement and 2:1 ratio using OpenOffice.org (Draw). I assumed with the incorrect placement you meant the horizontal lines of the COA aligned with the red/white/blue borders. I also trimmed the edges a bit to get the COA centered according to the previous low res version, and the flag into a 2:1 ratio. Now the only difference is a slighly different blue color in the top left, center, and right part of the coat of arms. Not sure which version is correct or if it needs correcting. Let me know and I can GIMP it. -- Chris 73 | Talk 04:56, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

Sweet! The colors are a bit off---can you try to match the ones from the older, low-res version? Specifically the blues in the emblem. Also notice that the three (not sure what they are) items in the middle drawing above the shield are supposed to be yellow; the CIA factbook has them as red. Shallot can probably tell you a lot more. Thanks again! Grendelkhan 05:03, 2004 May 14 (UTC)

Colors better now? I picked up the colors from the last lo-res flag. -- Chris 73 | Talk 05:53, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

---

Whoops! I just converted a bunch of BMPs to PNG (Espirito Santo maps by User:Kurogawa), and then noticed that you'd already uploaded PNG versions. Problem is, we now have duplicate PNGs, since I saved mine with a lowercase extension, and yours are uppercase. Mine turned out to be about 50% smaller, though. Should we list yours on IfD? By the way, thanks for the pointers on IfD usage. I'll put deletion notices on the BMPs, at any rate... -- Wapcaplet 19:53, 29 May 2004 (UTC)

My bad, looks like it was Kurogawa who uploaded the revised versions. At any rate, we still have some duplication. -- Wapcaplet 20:02, 29 May 2004 (UTC)

Fixed Category link

Hi. Your user page showed up on the Harry Potter category. I took the liberty of fixing a link on your talk page. In the section Pages I've made significant contributions to I changed the link from [[Category:Harry Potter]] to [[:Category:Harry Potter]]. Now you are no longer a harry potter character. I usually do not touch other peoples user pages, but I hope adding the : is OK in this case. See also the comments about that on Wikipedia talk:Categorization. Hope you're not slytherin ;-) Chris 73 | Talk 12:27, 31 May 2004 (UTC)

Ah, yeah, that was my bad. My skin (Cologne Blue) didn't display category links until today; I didn't notice that suddenly I was an HP page. Thanks for the fix. grendel|khan 22:03, 2004 May 31 (UTC)

SNES screenshots

Hello. First of all let me begin with praising you for the images you have added to the FFVI-article, they are all great. But why such heavy anti-aliasing? Is it even at all proper to use anti-aliasing on in-game screenshots as it enhances the quality of the graphics? Would it not it be better to use unaltered (albeit compressed) in-game screenshots and then maybe add some pictures from Mr Amano's official artwork if those do not suffice? Masken 17:37, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)

They aren't antialiased, not really. The scaling is done by a really nifty interpolation program (hq2x or hq3x; links are on the image pages) which makes results worlds better than simple scaling-up. (If the images weren't scaled up, they'd be fifty pixels wide in some cases. Definitely not useful.) As hq[23]x makes them, they're readily vectorizable, not to mention rather pretty as well. As for Amano's artwork, I think it'd definitely have copyright problems. That's my rationale; hope it clears things up. grendel|khan 19:17, 2004 Jun 23 (UTC)

VFD dates

It has been June 26 (UTC) for almost 2 hours, and those are the dates that apply to VFD. The only thing wrong w/ the heading you removed was that Igpen made the same mistake and mislocated their post.

I'm not only logged off (and thus can't do section edit), but have to leave this wide & thus VFD-friendly pipe. Could you restore the 26th hdg, just after Cat & Mouse Game? Tnx.

--User:Jerzy, for the moment 64.65.234.202 02:03, 24 Jun 2004 (UTC)

No, it's been June 24 for about two hours UTC now. I'll put that section heading back. June 26 isn't for a few days yet. Note your autosig. (I think there should be a "You might be a wikiholic if... even though you don't live anywhere near the Prime Meridian, your system clock is set to UTC." grendel|khan 02:09, 2004 Jun 24 (UTC)

Omigosh; i've never used that watch for that before, and probably never worried about whether the date is right on it. Thanks for cleanup & assistance! (My mistake was fairly obvious as soon as i got home.) Of course that means i moved stuff to /Old prematurely too. [Sigh] --Jerzy(t) 05:58, 2004 Jun 24 (UTC)

Auto diagrams

Thanks for the compliments! I'm not sure whether I'll need supercomputing capability for rendering; Yafray is slow to render on my Athlon (a couple hours for a grainy high-res version of any fairly complex scene, and probably overnight for a non-grainy version), but as I'm finding out, it's usually better for illustration purposes to use cartoon-style rendering (like Pin tumbler lock and disc brake have), for which by far the greatest amount of time is spent tweaking lighting and materials and finding the right camera angle; Blender renders those in a few seconds. I've toyed with the possibility of rendering some nice photorealistic versions in Yafray to give a clearer idea of the actual appearance of various parts. Such renderings could have a few advantages over photographs of the actual item - it's easy to color-code and isolate parts of interest, and there's potential for animation - but I'd be wary of using those if quality photographs are available, since I'm not that confident in the visual accuracy of my model :-) Anyhow, I appreciate the offer, and will keep it in mind just in case. Thanks again! -- Wapcaplet 17:20, 4 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Fictional

Thanks for doing most of the Category:Fictional cleanup. I was a bit disappointed that nobody else so far was interested in the discussion. -- Pjacobi 09:18, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Screenshots

Yikes! You overwrote my firefly image! That image was displayed on my user page. Please, next time, give your image a different name. --xjaymanx 03:18, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Paragraph 175

• Article: de:Paragraph 175 (Geschichte)
• Corresponding English-language article: Paragraph 175
• Worth doing because: Interesting topic; I'd like to know more, and the German article certainly looks more informative than the English one.
• Originally Requested by: grendel|khan 22:56, 2004 Aug 30 (UTC)
• Status: Basically done. Review by a native or near-native German speaker would be very welcome. Jmabel 07:07, Sep 9, 2004 (UTC)

Cameras and lenses

Thanks for your kind words! I do enjoy doing the diagrams. I've made a start with zoom lens, let me know what you think of it. I don't know that much about cameras or photographic lenses, unfortunately, but I do have references to hand. If you can link those non-free diagrams you mentioned, I can have a shot at adapting them. -- DrBob 04:31, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Alyson Hannigan Pic

Ok it took me months to actually answer this!

I'm talking about Image:AlysonHannigan.jpg. You'd asked me whether I had a bigger version of it. Well, I do, but it's not that good actually. It's 654x798. (And she's got red eyes). What should I do? Leave the small one, where flaws are invisible, or put this one anyway?Lazarus Long 18:32, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Re. 2step

Have posted something in response to your question. - Uncle Fester 16 November 2004

The Humungous Image Tagging Project

Hi. You've helped with the Wikipedia:WikiProject Wiki Syntax, so I thought it worth alerting you to the latest and greatest of Wikipedia fixing project, User:Yann/Untagged Images, which is seeking to put copyright tags on all of the untagged images. There are probably, oh, thirty thousand or so to do (he said, reaching into the air for a large figure). But hey: they're images ... you'll get to see lots of random pretty pictures. That must be better than looking for at at and the the, non? You know you'll love it. best wishes --Tagishsimon (talk)

Article Licensing

Hi, I've started a drive to get users to multi-license all of their contributions that they've made to either (1) all U.S. state, county, and city articles or (2) all articles, using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-by-sa) v1.0 and v2.0 Licenses or into the public domain if they prefer. The CC-by-sa license is a true free documentation license that is similar to Wikipedia's license, the GFDL, but it allows other projects, such as WikiTravel, to use our articles. Since you are among the top 1000 Wikipedians by edits, I was wondering if you would be willing to multi-license all of your contributions or at minimum those on the geographic articles. Over 90% of people asked have agreed. For More Information:

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

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

Option 1

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

{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}

OR

Option 2

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

{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}

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

Images for deletion

Thanks for listing unneeded images for deletion. It helps keep the place tidy. I also wanted to let you know that duplicate images, or scaled-down (but otherwise identical) versions of existing images, can be speedily deleted. Keep up the good work! – Quadell ^{(talk) (help)}[[]] 15:15, Dec 11, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks! Always good to get feedback and know I'm doing a helpful thing. I've started listing unused thumbs and duplicates on speedy-delete using the {{db}} template. grendel|khan 01:46, 2004 Dec 20 (UTC)

Untagged images project

Hi. I'm working on the untagged images project and came across a note of yours on a user's talk page asking them to tag their images. That's great – thanks for the help! But oughtn't you be tagging those images as {{unverified}} and removing them from the project list? That keeps me and others in your tracks from having to check the same images over and over, and it guarantees that the images are tagged somehow in case the uploader never resonds to your request. Thanks! Kbh3rd 17:27, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Good point. I've started to do that. grendel|khan 18:30, 2004 Dec 21 (UTC)

Thanks

Thanks. :-) Evercat 12:24, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

P.S. http://www.imaging.robarts.ca/%7Elgardi/html/index2.html has a lot of these if you're interested. Evercat 21:31, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

SHINY!!! Thanks. Methinks I have some new wall decorations to make. grendel|khan 22:52, 2004 Dec 22 (UTC)

Thanks for advise on fixing Nicholas Lemann redirect

I removed the redirect, and fixed the article. Morris 14:16, Dec 22, 2004 (UTC)

You're most welcome---and thank you for writing. grendel|khan 03:17, 2004 Dec 29 (UTC)

You're a MACHINE!

Thank you for all those stub fixes!! Tarek 04:10, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I'm framing that comment. Thank you. Thank you very much. grendel|khan 04:27, 2004 Dec 28 (UTC)

I could use you too please

Color temperature was nice, them bombarded by photographers (I'm one) but still I wish they would have left just the physics. So I gave up.

Let's delete the CRI in Color temperature and just reference yours. But I still think the 8 patches still makes it easy to create a lamp with a high CRI and render color like poo. --Dkroll2 02:39, Dec 29, 2004 (UTC)

Done. I still can't really speak to the inaccuracy of high-CRI fluorescent sources as compared to incandescent lamps, so I left that bit out. If I could find an external link, I'd put it up. grendel|khan 04:16, 2004 Dec 30 (UTC)

Stub sorting policy

I need your help in deciding the policy. See: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Stub sorting/Policy

-- AllyUnion (talk) 05:37, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I'm there. grendel|khan 05:44, 2004 Dec 29 (UTC)

opps?

I probbably did get the pd-flag things wrong :-(, but my line of thinking was this, ok, it comes from a pd source, therefor pd, however it has been alterd, therefor can be in any copywight (anyone can take a pd image and then licence it under any terms they want, but its been uploded by the person who made thoses changes, therefor they have agreed to hte terms of the GFDL, therfor GFDL.

I forgot the part about flags not being elegible for copywight anyway...

oh, on the multilicence thing, it may be not be compleatly right to say that its only under one licence, when in fact its under two, or more. but i would hardly say that its wrong to only list it under one lincence, (even if it would be preferable, and i do try) tooto 11:42, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)

a few things

1: there is no such thing as a 100% quality jpeg. even at the highest setting of the encoder jpeg will STILL NOT BE LOSSLESS. 2: if you use a digital camera then if what you get from the camera is a jpeg then please upload that jpeg (rather than a decode and reencode of it). If the camera gives a tiff then you either have to convert to either png or jpeg. png is lossless and therefore prefereable from an archive point of view but if you do so then thumbnails will also be png which may make them a bit slow to download. 3: do you know of any programs for the pc that can losslessly convert between baseline and progrssive jpeg?

Jews Praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur, by Maurycy Gottlieb

Are you referring to the copy-stand images I put up on the Commons, like the one at right? I'm well aware that the images aren't lossless, but the difference is not noticeable. Seriously, looking at the image at 300% magnification and toggling the JPEG export preview on and off, it makes no visible difference whatsoever. TIFF (or PNG, I suppose) files are not for storing photographic data. The file size is disproportionately large---an LZW TIFF is over 5MB, a fully-compressed PNG is 4.2MB. This would be fine if it made a difference, but there is no visible change. It is pointless to use a lossless image. (On the other hand, for line art and illustration, it definitely makes a difference, and I'm going to have to do some thinking about how to import that type of media. Continuous-tone painting, on the other hand, shows up just fine.)

I'm not sure what the real difference between baseline and progressive JPEGs are. If it's critical to squeeze every last drop of data out of it for printing purposes or the like, the progressive JPEG could be converted to a baseline lossless format. If you're thinking of turning all of the progressive JPEGs to baseline, I'd recommend you didn't. Can you name applications which don't handle progressive JPEG? I haven't run into any. grendel|khan 05:01, 2005 Jan 12 (UTC)

point 3 was inspired by "and the software to make them baseline is free for anyone who needs specialized use" you said on commons. I know it is technically possible to go between baseline and progresssive with no loss but the only peice of software i could find to do it was for the mac. I was wondering if you knew of any such software for the pc.

point 1 came from the following quote on your user page "This doesn't mean that JPEGs should be saved at 100% quality" JPEG quality settings are NOT percentages too many people have the impression that quality 100 JPEG is lossless it is not.

As for point 2 as you say a single generation of high quality JPEG is hardly noticeable. The problem is when you get repeated edits on a jpeg the generation losses can build up. If the commons is to be viewed as a serious image archive then we need to try and keep as much quality as possible. Plugwash 12:16, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

You're right; I don't think I ever used percent quality, but if I did, it's definitely wrong. The factor offered by Gimp ranges from 0.0 to 1.0; that's what I'm reporting. Would it be clearer if I said "quality factor" instead of "JPEG quality"? And I agree about generation losses, but the first-generation JPEGs straight out of the camera (well, after one generation of cropping and 0.2-degree rotating, which Gimp doesn't offer a high-quality filter for, so I complained to the developers on IRC and, surprisingly, a sinc-based interpolation filter is now in the CVS tree) will continue to be available. It's not like they cease to exist when someone tweaks a few parameters and reuploads their own version. grendel|khan 15:14, 2005 Jan 12 (UTC)

Wait, now I see what you mean; didn't notice you mentioning my user page. Fixed now; thanks for pointing that out. grendel|khan 22:13, 2005 Jan 15 (UTC)

Pic of the Day

Hi Grendel

Just to let you know that your/DrGnu's X-ray of polydactyly is coming up for Picture of the Day on 20th Jan. You might like to check Wikipedia:Picture of the day/January 20, 2005 to be sure that the accompanying caption is OK. In particular, I wasn't sure that I'd got the photo credits right. - Solipsist 10:28, 15 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Re: Image copyrights: chess images.

Hi Grendelkhan, I snarfed the images from a public domain chess book, available here. I guess they could use the {{GFDL}} image tag, or maybe there is one for PD stuff, I don't know. -- Merphant 07:07, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)

TRACE image of [[sunspot]s

Hi Grendel,

Just to let you know that the Featured picture of TRACE image of [[sunspot]s is up for POTD on 22nd Jan. You may want to check the caption at Wikipedia:Picture of the day/January 22, 2005. I've also created a stub for the TRACE satellite which would be worth checking too. -- Solipsist 23:03, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Image sleuthing

There's a new project in town called Wikipedia:Image sleuthing, and you are hereby invited to become an official image sleuth. – Quadell ^{(talk) (sleuth)} 00:47, Jan 25, 2005 (UTC)

Stub sorting guidelines

I sincerely believe that we really need to lay down the law in stub sorting, and really provide a guideline. I believe that we should all attempt to reach a general consensus by April 2, 2005 in a set of rules that we can follow. Once we have built a set of guidelines, we can formally create a policy out of those guidelines. We need to define what a specialized topic stub is, how many articles it should cover, when is it appropriate to create it, what defines its need for its creation, what defines its need for deletion, what criteria it should follow, what are the general steps should one take when sorting a stub, whether or not to start using subst: for all templates, whether or not use subst: for all templates created by the meta-templates, and any other matters that may come up in consideration. I thank jag123 for initially creating the subpage for the project at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject Stub sorting/Guidelines. Even though they have been discussed, I feel that we really need to confirm everything. For that, we should discuss each issue with its own sections, and raise a list of issues that we need to nail down before really continuing on. The English Wikipedia is nearly at 500k articles. Either the MediaWiki software needs to handle stubs such that they can be found with a simple union of categories, or the sorting is done manually by Wikipedians. Personally, I think the latter is less taxing on the server load, especially when we use subst:, which I think would help the Wikipedia out, performance wise. Please make your comments at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject Stub sorting/Guidelines. I apologize for making this somewhat of a spam notice, but since the project has more members, the project can finally decide on these important issues at hand. -- AllyUnion (talk) 23:23, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Return of the Untagged Image project

You were kind enough to contribute to the Wikipedia:Untagged images project; I beg to draw your attention to part 2 of the project - there are about 12,000 more images in need of tagging. Any assistance you could provide would be most welcome. thanks --Tagishsimon (talk)

Louisiana Dot Project tag fixes

No problem with the changes. Thanks for fixing them. I do batches of the Dot Project maps at a time and that particular bunch got the wrong line copied in place of the GFDL tag. Once I paste in the wrong tag, the rest of them "inherit" it and in this case, I didn't notice. I'm going to remove those directory listings that I put in by mistake. It makes me feel insecure to have them there.Catbar (Brian Rock) 17:00, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Astronomy Picture of the Day

You mistakenly tagged Image:Dark.neb.arp.750pix.jpg as PD-NASA because the source was listed from the Astronomy Picture of the Day website within the nasa.gov domain. While NASA administers the APOD website, in general they do not own the copyright to images presented there and hence PD-NASA does not apply. In this particular case, the image copyright is owned by the ESO, is unfree, and requires explicit permission. Consequently the image has been retagged imagevio and placed on the copyright problems page.

Dragons flight 02:38, Mar 4, 2005 (UTC)

Darn! Mea culpa; I think I did that one while I was flipping through scads of images already tagged as PD and giving them more specific tags. Good to know there's someone checking up on these things. grendel|khan 02:53, 2005 Mar 4 (UTC)

Stanislaw Lem -- categories

Is the category "science fiction writer" really redundant with "polish science fiction writer"? If the more inclusive category is removed, won't someone goign to that category fail to see Lem in the lists provided? I think I will restore the more general category if no one posts an objection on the talk page for this article shortly. DES 16:07, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)

help needed for citing email

Hi Grendelkhan, sorry for the late reply. You wrote me about the copyright status of my Dominion2 - screenshots. I found the original email and want to quote it, but the result look very ugly. Help needed, preferable at my email adress Horst.Jens at gmx dot at bye, --Horst_F_JENS 18:47, 2005 Mar 9 (UTC)