User talk:Generalstudent

Hello Generalstudent, and welcome to Wikipedia! Here are some recommended guidelines to help you get involved. Please feel free to contact me if you need help with anything. Best of luck and happy editing! Newport 20:28, 14 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

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Revert prod

You cannot delete Redirects at PROD, they have to be deleted at WP:RFD. It's in the PROD rules. 132.205.93.86 02:21, 15 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

ETH Zurich

dear wikipedia user,

thanks for spoiling the removal of redirects for ETH Zurich. You obviously didn't read carefully enough, since one of my arguments for deletion was that members of the ETH Zurich couldn't be found easily enough with pages of redirect links. And trivially, ETH Zurich shows up first if you type in ETH Zurich. that is the way search engines supposed to work, isn't it?

this is why we have redirects: please, if we would have one link for every possible misspelling of this institute Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, plus the english name Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, adding redirects with or without Zurich or spelled natively with Zürich, then there would be a vast number of redirects.

this institute if struggling with consistency for its naming particularly abroad, since rankings were effected recently because not all papers from this institute could be identified as such because of 113 different namings for this institute in notable science mags.

oh, you mean every page is cared for by the wiki community? would you please tell me why i am the first one here to nominate misspelled redirects for deletion that were used in a few articles about members of this institute? my point is, you wouldn't care, or you don't know about the misspellings, and that is why the misspelled redirects must go, since people who read the articles containing misspelled redirects that work anyway will memorize the wrong names, and that i consider spreading of false information, though arguably, it is of minor significance in this case.

thanks for reading. Generalstudent 20:55, 25 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

First of all, redirects are cheap. If we have 13 redirects to ETH Zurich because of the myriad names/spellings/codings of the name, that's trivial. I don't feel that I "spoiled" anything, as redirects are kept according to guidelines and consensus, not one user's opinion (except in a few special cases, none of which applied here). On the other hand, there's no reason for us to have 113 redirects, unless people are actually using them (accidentally) when trying to link to the article. They're easy to make and don't take up much disk space, so there's generally no reason to delete them just for neatness' sake.

I don't feel like I understood your search engine comment yesterday, so thank you for the clarification. When you put a staff person into the search engine, you're getting a lot of ETH redirects before their name? Can you give me an example, so I can see the same screen you're getting? If you're not getting their name early on, that's definitely a problem, but the Wikipedia search engine is far from perfect, I'll grant you that. I went through yesterday and cleaned up some of the obvious redirects from biographical articles, which might help.

It's probably an overstatement to say that every page is cared for, but most are watched after in some fashion, either because of Recent Changes patrol, or Random Page searches, or whatever. I personally have an unusual connection to ETH Zurich, ebcause despite never having been there I played a MUD that was ETH's servers in the early 90s, Ancient Anguish. That's actually the only reason I recognized the name at all, as I'm neither Swiss nor speak the language, so I'd look forward to any suggestions you have about how to handle our pages related to the school. It is undoubtedly a mess in some dimensions, but I think it's fixable. For instance, would it be proper to change the name in cases where articles refer to the school in the current tense to use ETH Zurich? Historical information should probably be a piped link to the name at the time the person attended/taught there, such as [[ETH Zurich|Eidgenössische Polytechnische Schule]].

Feel free to reply here, I will keep your talk page watchlisted. -- nae'blis 21:07, 25 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

AfD Nomination: Michele Besso

An article that you have been involved in editing, Michele Besso, has been listed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Michele Besso. Please look there to see why this is, if you are interested in it not being deleted. Thank you.

--TruthbringerToronto (Talk | contribs) 19:41, 27 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]