User talk:AlainV

Thanks! I have not quite managed to create new pages from scratch in the way you say or in the two other ways noted in the help pages. Fortunately I have had no problems in adding ones from the Armoire desk article and then back again from others like Desk and Desktop.

I am glad to see that Nikolas Tesla is not forgotten in the Wikipedia.

AlainV

Hi AlainV, welcome to Wikipedia! :) Hope you like the place and you will stay. You can visit Wikipedia:How does one edit a page for help on creating articles and adding markup to them. If you have any questions check out Wikipedia:Help or add a question to the Village pump.

I noticed your article on Armoire desk you made in the Sandbox and moved it to main namespace. There is no need for creating articles in the sandbox, you can create them in the main name space right from the beginning! Just type the name of the article in the URL line, like this: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_article_name If you wonder how to title a page, see Wikipedia:Naming conventions. Nikola 09:05, 16 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Hi Alain, concerning the "fancy" language - I don't remember! It was probably just the "long-lost ancestor" and the "atavistic grandchild", especially since they're right at the beginning of the article. The rest seems fine. There's no real reason for the language to be dry and technical in articles on antiques - readers probably would expect a friendlier tone. Marj 19:16, 29 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Thanks Marj! I will try do be a bit more formal on contemporary forms like the Cubicle desk though. Alain V., noticing that the snow has finally stopped on this Saturday 29 afternoon.

Hi. Good work you are doing; I just have some minor style notes. Although =x= style headers are available, we have a convention never to use them; and definitely never as the first thing in the article - can you in future not use them, and make sure that the first use of the article name within the article is boldfaced, (like '''this''')? Thanks, Morwen 07:48, Dec 16, 2003 (UTC)

I had been wondering what that was all about. After I put in a new article sometimes other editors would do this change from the equals x style header to boldface. Some other times the other editors would go through my text very thoroughly, cleaning up all kinds of things (and thus giving a good name to the concept behind Wikipedia) but leaving the equals x style header alone! Not being too sure what was the proper usage (independently of the indications in the text which is titled "How to edit a page") I left everything they changed "as is" and went on creating new pages as before. After reading your comment I went to the "list of desk forms and types" and did the change over to boldface and it seems to work. I also had a slight impediment in that my keyboard does not show the ' symbol properly: It looks just like another comma. The snow is thick outside and shows no sign of disappearing on this 16th of December 2003.

Thanks for your corrections on Jean le Rond d'Alembert and L'Encyclopédie. Much appreciated. (maybe I shouldn't edit with that much alcohol in by blood ;-) --snoyes 05:23, 12 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for the note, and I always forget to check these things. I have redirected the page, and all you need to in the future is put #REDIRECT [[Wooton desk]] as a single line in the page, and it should work. Thanks! Fuzheado 04:55, 13 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Ah yes, the "pipe trick". A very useful variation of this trick is that you can simply put a "pipe" (|) after something enclosed in parentheses in a link, and the parentheses (along with their content) will disappear, like so: Pound is a quicker form of writing Pound (have a look at the source text). Don't hesitate to ask me if you have any questions. --snoyes 05:21, 13 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Merci Alain for fixing up Jacques de Vaucanson. That sentence in the first section was horrible. I must have been very tired when I wrote it. I hope I have fixed it somewhat. Decumanus 04:51, 20 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Alain, do you know if Alexeieff & Parker were ever considered members of the NFB? my understanding is that they were invited to make one film there.Dhodges 17:12, 25 Jan 2004 (UTC)

They were invited several times over a period of more than 30 years. I have just dug more to find out what exactly was their contractual relationship with the NFB and have found conflicting reports. I am going to remove or change what I put in the pinscreen article to reflect this ambiguity.

I've been enjoying your cabinet-making input! At Arts and crafts movement you might add a note on the distinction between "cabinet-maker" and "furniture designer" after all. In the mid-19th century the big English commercial furniture-makers had designers who weren't trained as cabinet-makers, or as upholders/upholsterers either. The Arts and crafts movement was consciously trying to re-integrate the roles, as part of their reform efforts. Wetman 17:21, 1 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Thanks! I will put this in (somewhere in the A and C mvt article but maybe somewhere else also) given the specific request for it. I had been meaning for months to put the 4-5 cabinet making links I put in yesterday (or was it the day before? Those wikiholic "lost weekends" are addling my brain and making me leave for Montreal later and later)and I am always telling myself I have got to finish those rough sketches for all the desks, and put the bibliographies in, and put more non-Brit craftsmen in the list of furniture designers and... and... Whew, first of all I have to get back from Montreal and take my usual place in front of my home computer, next to my reference works, and then maybe I can take a few minutes to succumb to the temptation of adding a Greene and Greene desk article, since they were part of the Arts and Craft movement in the States and then... Whew! AlainV 00:32, 2004 Feb 2 (UTC)

Ah yes, I almost forgot. Among the things I absolutely just have to do is add a section on the desk as a symbol of power (political, literary or other) in the general desk article. I have been telling myself this nearly every day, since the day you added some fine paragraphs to the "Bureau du Roi" article I had started, thereby making it a real honest to goodness historical article.AlainV 00:50, 2004 Feb 2 (UTC)

Photocopying corrected typewriter pages... Yes, ain't that the truth. I almost thought about mentioning it myself. It of course also solves the problems of the corrections showing through.

I was finishing my degree around 1975, and one of the happiest moments of my graduate-student life was when, just in time, the university library announced that they would accept photocopied thesis submissions as long as the photocopies themselves were made on proper high-rag-content thesis paper. So I was able to prepare my thesis on erasable bond and photocopy it onto thesis paper! Hooray! What a boon to humankind! Dpbsmith 03:26, 11 Feb 2004 (UTC)

US units of measurement

Hi, thanks for telling me about U.S. customary units, although I knew there was a better page than US units of measurement, I'll make it a redirect. --Monsieur Mero 01:35, Mar 14, 2004 (UTC)

hi alain, I'm not sure of the convention, so I answered your query on my talk page where you posted it -- Kwill 14:58, 26 Apr 2004 (UTC)

National library

Hi, thanks very much for your contribution--when I started the article, I hoped it would be expanded, but didn't know enough myself. Anyway, just one question--when you say that a goal is "total bibliographic control of all the books published in that country", what exactly is meant? Thanks very much.

Also, if you know of any other prominent national libraries, those would be useful. My knowledge here is very limited. Thanks, Meelar 03:56, 2 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Admin

Hi, on reviewing your contributions, I've decided to nominate you for adminship. You can accept or decline at RfA. Good luck! Meelar 04:01, 2 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Gahh, my mistake. I thought that RfA would be a link to Wikipedia:Requests for adminship; in fact, rfa was the redirect. I'll move your acceptance. Yours, Meelar 06:51, 2 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

hecklers

Nice addition. Thanks. I might add something about Blair there ;o) --bodnotbod 23:06, May 2, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for the contribution in Iraqi Most Wanted Playing Cards, I need help keep it coming. :) GrazingshipIV 06:29, May 9, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks

Hey thanks for the copyedit on the Hackers entry. I think most people shy away from my brain dump on that entry :) It doesn't look like a good article even to me, but I have no idea how to fix it. Dori | Talk 07:24, May 9, 2004 (UTC)

Sysop

Congratulations! You are now an administrator. You should read the relevant policies and other pages linked to from the administrators' reading list before carrying out tasks like deletion, protection, banning users, and editing protected pages such as the Main Page. Most of what you do is easily reversible by other sysops, apart from page history merges and image deletion, so please be especially careful with those. Good luck. Angela . 14:52, May 10, 2004 (UTC)

Good morning. I saw your listing of the Chapman Space "Station" on the VfD listing and took a look at the pages. May I recommend in the future using the "move this page" feature when you find a mis-titled article? It automatically cleans up the old page. Note: It will leave a redirect at the old site, but I think that's okay. Obviously at least one person already made this mistake or the page wouldn't have been created with the wrong title in the first place. Redirects take up no space and do no harm. (If it does create a conflict in the future, the redirect can always be cleaned out then.) Thanks. Rossami 13:23, 14 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Typos

Thanks for following me and cleaning them up. I'm sorry so many slip through. Wetman 03:43, 16 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

Come now, not that many! AlainV 00:33, 2004 May 17 (UTC)

Balinville / Blainville

I've moved Thérèse-de Balinville County Regional Municipality, Quebec. Thanks for the correction. You also said you needed help editing {{msg:______}} boxes. These boxes are controlled by the MediaWiki namespace. --Merovingian ↕ T@Lk 17:57, May 16, 2004 (UTC)

National Libraries!

I will leave Wales and the Faroes and Catalonia and Quebec to your good judgement! As an American it's slightly hard for me to grok national libraries that aren't state libraries, so maybe I should just stay out of it! :) jengod 15:03, May 21, 2004 (UTC)

Military history of Germany during World War II

Hi, i've just seen your edit on Military history of Germany during World War II, good work, really good work. My intention was just to have some kind of a foreword. Do you feel TM is trustworthy when it comes to German organization and tactics in specific? --GeneralPatton 23:16, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I have not read the manual, just your reporting of its summary of the German army in WWII. However, if it is a recently re-edited government publication of the US government I would trust it for reporting the straight facts about the order of battle and other aspects of the organization of the German army. I would be wary of any evaluation of tactics howver. If you want something close to an official US evaluation of WWII German army tactics you might want to look iinstead at some of the writings of colonel Trevor N. Dupuy. AlainV 23:31, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Direct manipulation interface

Hi, I saw the message you posted on my talk page. (Is this where I'm supposed to reply ? I'm not sure.) You would know better than me how often the term "direct manipulation" is used outside of academia, so please feel free to put back material regarding this in the article. The main reason I edited the article so much is I don't think "direct manipulation" and "wimp/gui" are equivalent terms. However, I probably have a biased view of things; I would welcome more editing of the article to achieve a more balanced view. MichaelMcGuffin 12:22, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I was at UIST 2003 as well, but missed Horvitz's talk. I'm not sure what controversy you're referring to with respect to direct manipulation and Shneiderman. There are multiple (possibly complementary) approaches to designing interfaces and interaction styles. An encyclopedia can define each of them; list the generally agreed-upon pros and cons of each approach; and also present more controversial arguments for or against each approach, attributing these arguments to the people or groups who advance them. MichaelMcGuffin 13:00, 23 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Hello...

Have you been working on anything lately? If not I wouldn't mind some help with this list: Noted_translators - suggestions and additions welcome! -- Simonides 03:33, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)

The Simmons space opera question

Hi Alain. Thanks for your addition to the page on Dan Simmon's Ilium. I did not know that extropianism derived originally from H.G Wells - well done!

One gripe though. You also added this comment which seems to me to have NPOV issues:
> Because of the literary style it can be considered as something more than space opera,

That sounds like your personal opinion. Do you have a source for this?

>though some critics repeatedly pin this label on nearly everything Simmons produces.

I respectfully suggest you remove this para or alternatively write a more neutral version that outlines the views of the 'literary' and 'space opera' camps? You seem to have a chip on your shoulder about people who think Simmons writes space opera? Who thinks this? Why do they think it? And why does a 'literary' style elevate it above space opera? If we're being neutral here, what's wrong with a novel being a space opera, or some people thinking that it is?

I suggest that, if you remove the paragraph altogether, the question about whether or not Ilium is a space opera never arises...perhaps you are the only one worried about whether or not critics think it's a space opera? The page hasn't exactly been inundated with hordes of writers rushing to call the book a space opera....so why mention it at all?

You might as well assert that the literary stlye means it can be considered as something more than a cookbook, or a Volvo maintenance manual.....it just doesn't seem to me a pertinent point.

My $0.02

Thanks for listening. Mercurius 07:40, 27 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing out that Gary Pullman is unknown -- I've now listed him on wikipedia:votes for deletion. Deb 07:25, 2 Jul 2004 (UTC)

dyslexia

Pas de deux blah, thanks for fixing that, i have dyslexia and just can't see things sometimes. i really should wait to do this at home where i can spell check. Ohka- 14:42, 4 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Palazzo del Te

Palazzo del Te Thank you for doing the typos in Palazzo del Te. User:Wetman and I were working on it yesterday. I have been rereading it for 24 hours, could not believe there were still some there. Thanks Giano 09:10, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Typos #2

Hi Alain, many thanks for watching my stuff. Its good to know somebody out there is reading it! Apwoolrich 10:33, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Hi, I will rename it thanks for correcting me. I am sorry for the goof up.WHEELER 13:48, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Invitation

I fraternally invite you to add your name, to join the new section Wikipedians/Quebec. Thanks!
Je vous invite fraternellement à ajouter votre nom, à vous joindre à la nouvelle section Wikipedians/Quebec. Merci!
--Liberlogos 04:21, 2 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Merci beaucoup de t'être joint à la communauté. Parle de la nouvelle communauté aux autres Wikipédiens Québécois ou aux personnes avec un lien au Québec que tu connais pour que l'on puisse mieux se connaître, mieux partager et mieux s'aider. À bientôt.

--Liberlogos 14:46, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Tadoussac

for the tip. Tadoussac is now a redirect to Tadoussac, Quebec, and the two have been merged. --Merovingian✍Talk 09:26, Aug 2, 2004 (UTC)

Latécoère 28

Hi Alain - the data table has been a constant headache for WikiProject Aircraft - not only has it been a bear to edit (as you discovered), but when the main skin of Wikipedia changed a few months back, the table that had been painstakingly added to so many pages was rendered very hard to read. There has been a general consensus among Project participants to replace the old blue table with a text section. You can find a full description of the standard here. You can't be blamed for the confusion - the new standard was rolled out only hours before your contribution.

I agree with you that a bit of colour - something to "brand" the articles with would be desirable, but in the end the practicality of the text format has won out. Maybe there's another way of achieving this?

Rest assured though - this can be thought of as "stable". The tables were in use for nearly a year, but it was the fact that any table format we came up with was always going to be vulnerable to skin changes that was really the killing blow.

Sorry for your frustration and disappointment... I fully sympathise and relate! --Rlandmann 22:35, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Linking room

Thanks, Alain, for adding more content to linking room. I thought the linking room meme was more prevalent, but once I had sat down to write the article, I realized most of my memories of examples of linking rooms were half-remembered images from my childhood. After seeing it in The Matrix, I knew I wasn't the only one.

Branding aircraft articles

Thanks for the ideas - most of us try to furnish articles with a picture of the aircraft in question, but finding copyright-free ones is usually the stumbling block, especially for more modern aircraft.

The idea of adding roundels or insignia was kicked around for a while, but this creates all kinds of problems for aircraft that were used notably by a large number of users. I personally like your idea of a placeholder image - I seem to remember seeing something similar around Wikipedia somewhere. WikiProject Aircraft dicussions are currently being held on an external web-board at aeronaut.ca/wikiforum - I'd like to invite you to make a suggestion about the placeholder there so other participants can comment. Cheers --Rlandmann 01:07, 17 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Impoverishing Wikipedia

I can certainly understand your being upset, and I shall briefly explain my reasoning for removing said paragraph from Industrialisation.

"Pre-industrial economies generally rely on sustenance standards of living, whereby the population focuses collective resources on producing only what can be consumed by the population, though there have also been quite a few pre-industrial economies with trade and commerce as a significant factor."

As far as I know it is entirely common for pre-industrial societies to produce far beyond sustenance standard, ie. Italy, Netherlands, Britain, Spain, China, India, +others all knew prosperous pre-industrial periods of great abundance. I did not feel like adding a caveat saying, that pre-industrial economies generally rely on sustenance standards of living, but quite often do not. It seems like we can't make up our mind if we say that. Which is it? Do they or don't they? Seems to me that some do, and some don't, just as some industrialized countries suffer from lack of food (N. Korea?). It doesn't seem to me that living at a sustenance standard is a mark of a pre-industrialized country, but maybe that depends on your definition of industrialisation?

Peregrine981 06:25, Sep 13, 2004 (UTC)

allright, I shall soon rewrite the paragraph to suit your concerns. Almost all of these societies faced famines periodically, I still do not think that constitutes living at a subsistance level. Perhaps some elements of the society did, but some of these societies as a whole were more than capable of producing more than they needed. Ronald Seavoy's book, Famine in Peasant Societies seems to argue, to me, that pre-industrial societies do not necessarily live at a subsistance, level, rather pre-commercialised societies do. However, his book is far from universally acclaimed, so perhaps we should not base an encyclopedia article on his theory. Still, I will, when I get a moment, soon rewrite the offending paragraph.

Peregrine981 23:46, Sep 14, 2004 (UTC)

Pirate Utopias

Thank you for your grammatical input. I have to ask: how did you come across this article? It is tucked away into the dusty ol' corners of Wikipedia, and all. EDGE (Concordia student)

Transitway

Thanks for the insights and comentary. I just picked up the project yesterday (and the comments about downtown crowding aren't mine; they're cribbed from Transitway, which I'm merging into the new article). I'll be sure to go on more with the Gatineau dichotomy as well; it looks like the STO might need an article.

Incidentally, I'm no Ottawa native; I was visiting last month, then I noted the poor shape of the OC Transpo articles and dove in yesterday.

Thanks again, Radagast 12:04, Sep 24, 2004 (UTC)

==Mallomars Good additions! You caught precisely the right tone. Wetman 03:00, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

A reply from fbd

And the second reply :) (User:Fbd)