User talk:Bryan Derksen/Archive 6

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Compliments

I don't know if its the mediation or what, but to my perception you are being particularly reasonable, agreeable, and able to compromise as of late. The result is not only an ease of editing with you, and a pleasing demeanor overall, but much more importantly, a better article. I still feel strongly that the oild "logic of atheism" was awful, but I feel just as strongly that the new chart, and explanation thereof is excellent. I feel that is mainly due to what I percieve as a radically different attitude on your (and perhaps both of our, its hard to guage myself) part(s). While getting along and enjoying editing is vital, the most important reason for it is the production of high quality, NPOV articles. It would seem to me that both of us have resolved that NPOV is not a bias in favor of our own POV, but rather is the state of the article being accurate in the eyes of (or at least respectful of) all POV's. Thank you for the fine work. Sam Spade 23:13, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Thanks. Perhaps it's simply that while we still disagree about a lot of stuff, we are each no longer quite so quick to assume that those disagreements are inevitably going to result in irreconcilable conflict. We could have each been "hitting back" thinking it was the other guy being unreasonable. :) Bryan 23:51, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)

To me, it is clear that the best article is one that no reasonable, informed person can diagree with. And from what I have seen, you are also agreeable to that sort of article :). POV's are fine, as long as they can be cited, and are presented as such, w opposing POV's to balance them. It seems to me I was too quick to assume irreconcileable differences, and that perhaps our divergent POV's can assist us in providing the reader w a balanced article, rather than a mess based on pointless squabbling. :) Sam Spade 00:53, 1 Mar 2004 (UTC)

taxobox

Heya... take a trip over to Wikipedia:WikiProject Tree of Life for some taxobox formatting updates. Check out the Talk as well. - UtherSRG 00:10, 1 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Bryan Derksen

I don't see a need for this page, and would just as soon archive it, but I remember you saying something on it in regards to not wanting me to do that. Do you object if I archive it? Sam Spade 01:55, 3 Mar 2004 (UTC)

It was only the archiving of issues that were still under discussion that I complained about. I think that RFC is done with now, so it should be okay to archive. I assume this means moving the link from Wikipedia:Requests for comment to Wikipedia:Requests for comment/User conduct disputes archive?

yep Sam Spade 02:17, 3 Mar 2004 (UTC)

No problem, then. Bryan 02:19, 3 Mar 2004 (UTC)

ship disambig msgs

FYI, I thought about adding disambig notices to ship index articles but decided against it, because for every one of those there are several different cases where we don't want the ambitious to be messing with the links; one from the list of ship names, one from the namesake (see Kentucky for instance), and one from each specific ship pointing back to others of the same name. Perhaps a different message would be better, tailored to the situation? Stan 10:18, 6 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I considered that, but I think the current disambiguation message is okay; it says "you might want to go back and fix that link" (emphasis added), so it isn't like it's saying "no pages should ever link here". On the other hand, there are plenty of situations where the usual need for disambiguation does apply; see for example what links to USS Vincennes. Many of them should instead be linking to Iran Air Flight 655 or USS Vincennes (CG-49). Bryan 20:31, 6 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Thumbnails

I agree it looks OK in this case. What happens with some of those JPEGs is that the native MediaWiki JPEG creator makes one of too low quality with a mixture of solid graphics (lines) and the photo-like background. I have to save the original JPEGS at high quality or they look like a mess with artifacts around the solid lines (usually its worst for sea voyages. I think it works OK here because the solid lines are against a "fuzzier" background (the mountains)). Unfortunately the PNGs, which should be the natural format, come out bigger, >100 K in most cases. -- Decumanus 21:40, 7 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Personally, I'm hoping that eventually WikiMedia's thumbnail generator will be made "smarter" and gain the ability to select jpeg or png for the thumbnail on a case-by-case basis. It could do this automatically by generating one of each and comparing filesizes, or manually via some attribute that could be added to the image tags. Until something like this comes along, though, I've tried to be careful about what images to thumbnail and what images to leave as-is. I hope that others will do likewise. Bryan 22:11, 7 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Star Destroyers

Funny! Perhaps we could go through all of the Star Wars articles and think up random comparisons? Because of his small size and rounded top, R2D2 bears a certain resemblance to a fire hydrant, because of his height, Darth Vader bears a certain resemblance to Michael Jordan, because of it's large trees and friendly natives, Endor bears a certain resemblance to Northern California! Mark Richards 06:30, 9 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Human League pic prob?

Hi Bryan.

No unkind criticism is intended: I don't really understand the new pic format (though it's nice) so I can't fix this, but it looks like you may in reformatting a pic at Human League have inadvertently demoted a caption into alt text as, in my browser at least, it has vanished from the static display. Unless of course this was what you meant to do! :) If you'd like to point me at where there is a description of the elements of the new format, that would be helpful too. Regards Nevilley 08:26, 9 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Yup, looks like I did that. Sorry, that's the one part of the new syntax that really frustrates me; you only get a visible caption if you thumbnail the image. The new syntax is described at Wikipedia:Extended image syntax. It looks like there's still ongoing work on the coding behind it, so perhaps the caption situation will be resolved at some point; until then, I try to leave images in the old format when it would make a caption vanish. Must've not been thinking when I did this one. Bryan 01:50, 10 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Thanks VERY much for the pointer to the syntax description. Most useful. Nevilley 17:55, 10 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Hey

I see some some of our classic "comprehension conumdrums" (as I like to call em) coming up, and I'd like to either solve em or side step em, rather than start digging the same old trenches over again. The mediation went great, but prob. the main thing it DIDN'T solve was the basic disagreements. If you want to work on those, or leave them alone, or anything other than re-igniting the same useless back and forth, I'm game. I think banno has a point, but I don't think its worth losing article quality (or our current editorial truce) over it. Sam Spade 05:46, 11 Mar 2004 (UTC)

As I see it, the current article is factually correct, but uses awkward wording for no good reason. I think the wording should be changed, but not strongly enough to spend the sort of effort that went into the past couple of months of arguing with you about it. So I've left the article alone. However, if the article gets changed in such a way that it becomes factually incorrect, then I'll feel obliged to step right back in again. So yeah, the mediation basically didn't change anything about my stance on the article itself. I think that was basically settled by the poll you initiated, even though it did become a bit messy when extraneous options were added. Bryan 05:56, 11 Mar 2004 (UTC)

the poll was messy and solved nothing. Eloquence solved everything IMO. He found a concensus compromise that may not have overjoyed anyone, but mollified everyone. As I said, I understand banno's complaint, but I also know he is MUCH happier as is, than either of us would be w either of the more radical options. Anyhow, I am perfectly able to discuss any and all particulars (altho I assume I share your aversion to doing so?) with you, and intend to be nothing other than polite and compromising, so long as my (and the articles) integrity remains intact. Cheers, Sam Spade 06:02, 11 Mar 2004 (UTC)

The current solution is stopgap at best, IMO, because I believe it plasters over some very fundamental disagreements about what atheism means. I still have yet to figure out why you think atheism is even relevant to an entity that is not a god, for example, and I've given up trying to explain the distinction between denial and disbelief. The first time someone wanders along and helpfully tosses in anything mentioning "god", because that really should be mentioned in an article about atheism IMO, everything comes crashing down again and we start arguing over whether it should be capitalized. Bryan 06:11, 11 Mar 2004 (UTC)

You make extremely insightful points. Atheism (and its inclusion of disbelief or lack of belief, or denial of God) is both profoundly relevent (when it is synonymous with satanism and amalek, i.e. denial of God) and irrelevent (when it simply means agnosticism, or confusion, etc...). And your right, the current state is unstable. I've known that all along. Eventually someone will place God or god or who knows what on that page, most likely all three ;). You and I are not going to change that. You understanding God, or me understanding your particular form of "atheism" is not what the page needs. The page needs to be accurate in a way in which no reasonable, informed person can dispute. To me that is the bottom line (NPOV). Sam Spade 06:17, 11 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I think the best approach to that is to try to be inclusive of all the different interpretations of what atheism means. If naturalistic pantheists have a particular approach to atheism, there should be no conflict in saying "naturalistic pantheists believe atheism is hooey because blah." Actually, as I reread the article right now, I think the current version does a pretty good job of that; it does mention god and God in contexts that make it clear what's being intended, and has descriptions of various different interpretations of what atheism means. For some reason I remembered there being a lot more tortured usage of "deities" than there is now. Perhaps our disagreements have been plastered over so thoroughly that this thing really is stable after all? People have been quietly adding interesting content since last I looked. Bryan 06:33, 11 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Dragon Ball Z Powerlevels

Just thought you might be interested to know that there is now a Dragon Ball Z Powerlevels page that has been listed on Wikipedia:Votes for Deletion. --Lowellian 22:14, Mar 14, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks. Looks completely unintelligible to me. :) Bryan 22:22, 14 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Local Church Movement

Thanks for discussing your concerns on the Local Church Movement article in Talk:Local Church Movement. I have added a few comments of my own and would appreciate your thoughts on that page. Please understand that I have no intention of spending enourmous amounts of energy constantly revising the entry on this topic, given its highly controversial nature. For example, there is a mention of "two books" on the page; however there were more books, articles, and websites published with critiques of the movement than these two. Further, the retractions mentioned in the article were due to enourmous legal pressure - not on the basis of the materials presented in the books mentioned. People who are involved with this movement have the unusual impression that it is because of these two books that they are criticized; however criticisms arose prior to these books and have come from independent researchers since then. At this point, no criticisms of Witness Lee, Watchman Nee, their respective theologies, or of the Local Church Movement have yet been posted to Wikipedia, that I am aware of. My hope is that these entries can serve to be an open forum for discussion in the future. Please also be understanding of my desire to remain anonymous, under the circumstances :) The history of litigation is quite significant with this organization; hence a large part of the controversy.

TheLocalChurch 06:21, 15 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Heh. I actually know nothing at all about this subject, I just notied that an article that claimed to be under dispute hadn't been edited in any way for two months without any apparent protection or talk: discussion. That suggested to me that the dispute was over, or at least forgotten about by its participants. If I'm wrong, well, it's easy to reapply the header. But an article in Wikipedia should not be permanently in dispute, so please try to continue working out the problems with it if you do. The aim is to ultimately overcome all factual and NPOV disagreements. Bryan 06:50, 15 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I dispute TheLocalChurch's explanation above of the situation, because it is a misrepresentation of the facts. For one, in nearly 100 years of history, with thousands of churches and hundreds of thousands of members, the local churches have only ever been involved in three (3) litigations, one of which resulted in a public apology and retraction, one of which resulted in an $11.9 million judgment in favor of the local churches, and one of which is ongoing. Is this a history of litigation that is "quite significant"? Obviously, it is significant mainly to those who were found guilty of libel. Secondly, none of these three cases were/are about criticism—we welcome healthy criticism that is grounded in truth—but are about libel, malicious slander, and willful misrepresentation with the intent to inflict harm. Please read Libel Litigations Filed by the Local Churches to learn the facts of these matters (from local church POV, though original court documents are also available here). Thank you! --Nathan w cheng 23:56, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

This is not the place to be arguing details of that article. As I said to TheLocalChurch, I don't actually know anything about the subject, nor am I interested in it. The only reason I got involved was that it looked to me that nothing at all was being discussed or edited on a page that was supposedly under dispute, and so I concluded that the dispute label was no longer applicable. If it really is under dispute, then by all means dispute away - on that article's talk: page, where the dispute can be seen and resolved. Bryan 00:37, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I realize that; sorry...I'm just balancing the viewpoints expressed on this page for the other 6 billion people who may read it.--Nathan w cheng 21:53, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Ah, okay then. Still make sure to copy your concerns to the article talk: page too, though; every once in a while I delete my user talk: page when it gets long, leaving it up to the article history to keep a permanent record. Future users will be unlikely to see this here unless they're looking through my old talk for some other reason. Article talk: pages have more rigorous standards for maintaining archives of old discussion in easily-accessible places. Bryan 01:24, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Europa

Hi, thanks for the hello, about Europa... By 'positively identified' i meant that the astronomers had identified features and compositions on the moon that are in most probability formed by liquid thermal jets. Positively as in 'yes we see' not 'definitely'. They have noted the features, and the interior, from the new info, so they are drawing their conclusions. Of course we won't really know till something/one lands there.:~)sunja 11:32, 15 Mar 2004 (UTC)

• OK sorry. I just looked at it again an I must have been half asleep or something. :~) sunja 03:51, 18 Mar 2004 (UTC)

• Or perhaps drunk.sunja 05:36, 18 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Heh. The Achaemenids supposedly liked to make decisions when they were sober, only to reconsider them when they were drunk. Nothing wrong with doing it the other way around too, IMO. :)

List of Indo-European Roots

I will have to revert your image to character change; many browsers don't support the "schwa" character. --Monsieur Mero 21:43, Mar 15, 2004 (UTC)

Well, I remain ideologically opposed to it, but I'm not going to get into an edit war or anything. :) I think it's a terrible idea to use an image of a character in place of an actual character, since it's semantically meaningless. You can't resize the font, you can't copy and paste the text elsewhere, text-to-speech programs are thwarted, etc. Bryan 00:30, 16 Mar 2004 (UTC)

talk:agnosticism

Your sounding curiously like a pragmatist! ;) Sam Spade 09:36, 17 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Image:Stamp US 1870 2c-130px.jpg

Why should Image:Stamp US 1870 2c-130px.jpg be deleted? Thanks - Texture 18:04, 18 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Because, thanks to the new image markup, thumbnail versions of images are no longer required. That image is a thumbnail of this image: Image:Stamp US 1870 2c-500px.jpg. The only article that used it was Fancy cancel, but I changed the text so that it uses the full-sized image instead (compare the old version, [1], with the current text). So now the 130 pixel version of the image is an orphan, and it likely will always be an orphan from now on since the 500-pixel version can be used everywhere instead. Thus, I put it up for deletion. Hope that fully explains my reasoning. :) Bryan 00:57, 19 Mar 2004 (UTC)

---

As an occasional contributor to the Nivokov self-consistency principle article, I'm hoping that you have some familiarity with Newcomb's paradox. I am asking for informed comment on that article. Thanks for any assistance you can provide. Rossami

---

Hi Bryan hope you don't mind I reworked your smiley image. I saw it show up on the happiness page, and while I think it is cute to add the smiley, I just thought the image was a bit rough. Robbrown

Oh, no problem at all; this is the kind of thing the GFDL is all about. I threw that picture together in five minutes, IIRC, simply because I happened to have Photoshop open at the time. :) Bryan 02:26, 25 Mar 2004 (UTC)

---

Hi, Bryan... I wanted the infobox in Charon (moon) to be closer in vertical size (length in pixels) to the whole article, because I thought people would not scroll down beyond the end of the article and may not absorb the rest of the infobox. In general, I think it is odd for tables to be longer than the articles that they live next to.

It's a matter of consistency vs. layout-goodness for users. I did it for a few of the other very short moon and asteroid articles. I could revert if you hate it. --- hike395 13:44, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Actually, I've just been playing with this, and realized that slightly tweaking the font only gets a little more infobox information on the screen, so I'll go back and restore full-sized fonts on the ones that I touched. -- hike395

IMO, a better approach to evening out the lengths would be to add more information to the text of the article. That'll probably happen over time in any event. :) Bryan 15:39, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

wikipedia:Requests for comment/172

That was a contentious and unhelpful thing to do. Our conflict has nothing to do w 172. We have been doing well for sometime now, and I really can't imagine why you would do something like this. Are you going to continue to bring that up everytime I point out someones poor behaviour? Have you bothered to review any of the links provided in regards to 172's hostility, or did you simply assume that I was the source of the troubles and therefore wanted to help get the ball rolling in my direction? Needless to say I'm fairly P.O.'ed. Sam Spade 03:47, 27 Mar 2004 (UTC)

On the one hand, you do seem to pick fights a lot in my experience. On the other, our conflict ultimately resolved itself with mediation. From what I've seen of other mediation results, ours seemed to go textbook perfect. Shouldn't that count as a positive? Bryan 04:08, 27 Mar 2004 (UTC)

There is no similarity between the two situations, and since you are clearly unaware of the particulars w 172 giving people ammo (and that’s what that link is, flames against myself) without knowing the specifics of the situation is thoughtless and highly divisive. I wouldn't mind so much if you had been involved, or even knew what was going on, but you basically brought up an old attack against me, out of context, for no discernable reason. How could I be anything other than offended? Sam Spade 08:43, 27 Mar 2004 (UTC)

It was a request for comment. I was commenting that you've got into lengthy conflicts with people before that turned out to be based on misunderstanding, and which were resolvable. It takes two sides to fight, you know; this isn't just about 172. Bryan 16:25, 27 Mar 2004 (UTC)

The request for comment on 172 is about him, not me, but thank you for removing the link, that was polite of you. If you think about it, I am bound to be involved in a great deal of conflict, I seek it out actually. I am a Members' Advocate and a Harmonious editer and thus am supposed to seek out conflict in order to provide an assist. Besides I seek out conflict anyhow. The subjects I am interested in focus on religion and politics, and are almost all contentious. In high school I was on the debate club, and in grade school/middle school I had prob 3 fist-fights a day on average ;). My friends and I are are always debating something or other (pretty much all of them are either atheists or democrats, so you can imagine...) when were not busy laughing about something else. I feel strongly, but you must understand that my passion first and foremost is for good and truth, for mutual understanding and fairness. I really want the wiki to be NPOV, it would unsatisfying to see only my views presented. I want the reader to be given multiple POV's, along w enough info to make up his own mind. Anyhow thanks for not picking up where we left off before the mediation, I was concerned that was what you had in mind, and it proved not to be the case. Cheers, Sam Spade 19:59, 27 Mar 2004 (UTC)

In hindsight, there was rather a lot more "this is why I think Sam's a flaming blue meanie" on that page relative to "this is how we ultimately resolved things" than I was remembering or aiming for. I'd be lying if I said I liked you, since for about two months you made it not-fun for me to work here (that's never happened to me before; the only previous "fight" I can recall being in was a few days of being shouted at by Lir regarding the infobox on Earth maybe a year or so back), but my opinion of you coming out of mediation is still a lot better than it was going in. I suppose it just struck a nerve with me how similar the beginning of this RfC was to the one you started on me, so I jumped in without additional background. I'll add comments to this effect on 172's RfC. Still, try not to escalate arguments needlessy; my nerves aren't the only ones that are vulnerable to being struck, and very few people around here seem to be doing what they do out of actual malice. Bryan 02:57, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC)

A good point, assuming bad faith is a particularly bad thing to do. I think the central problem to disputes in on the wiki is the difficulty in reading one another, since our interaction is so much more limited than IRL. Cheers, Sam Spade 03:42, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC)

On the other hand, there are 0 fist-fights per day on Wikipedia. That may help balance things out a bit :) Bryan 03:46, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I think we'd be about as likely to have fistfights in person as scholors, historians, librarians, or volunteers at a charity, since were pretty much a mix of all of those as wikipedians ;). By my view the hostility is caused entirely by the unusual form of interaction, and lack of accountability and normal social interactions/outlets. Sam Spade 04:26, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Atheism and realism

What's your problem, doc? 666 21:19, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC)

My problem is what I explained in the edit summary when I reverted your addition. Who among us, atheist or theist, doesn't consider themselves to hold a realistic position? Should we go around adding that comment to every such philosophical or religious position? Bryan 21:23, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Why not? 666 21:26, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Because it's needlessly redundant. Bryan 21:36, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Formatting of Sergeant page

In reference to this edit the <div> method isn't rendered very well in Mozilla/Firefox. I'm only guessing, but I think your objection was that the 2 floating insignia were stacking horizontally? If that was the only issue, I reviewed my CSS, and that can be fixed without resorting to <div>s. I wouldn't normally put so much effort into this, but there are many other pages with the same format which I can fix, too. :) - Wguynes 18:47, Mar 30, 2004 (UTC)

Yup, that was the only reason I did that; they weren't just stacking horizontally, they were diagonal. However, I use Mozilla exclusively, so I'm not sure what you mean about them not rendering very well. :) If you've got an alternative way of fixing that, though, go ahead and try it out; I'll be interested to see it. Bryan 02:14, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

How about it now? The clear:both; property is specifically to address this problem in CSS floating. Notice, at least in my browser, the USMC version is pushed down below where its start point should be in the text, but it will scale perfectly if any text is added to the Army section. (i.e. once the Army text gets long enough, the marine insignia will move down and stay even with the Marine Corps text) - Wguynes 05:39, Mar 31, 2004 (UTC)

The floating looks right (on Mozilla 1.7), but using tables for formatting like this isn't really good HTML practice IMO. In theory, shouldn't switching the tables to a pair of divs with the same styles have the same effect? Bryan 06:22, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Here is how the <div> version looked in Firefox. I hear you, and will look into replacing the tables with divs. Not sure what's happening, but I need to experiment. - Wguynes 06:51, Mar 31, 2004 (UTC)

Weird. Both images are 50px wide, perhaps adding "width:50px;" will force Firefox to behave a little more conservatively? Bryan 06:54, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

How about it now? - Wguynes 07:07, Mar 31, 2004 (UTC)

Looks perfect. I'll have to remeber that "clear:both;" trick for future use. :) Bryan 07:21, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Exploding head

It looks fine now, it was just that there were some phrases that stood out like "springing open" and the section on rapid heartbeat after the attack. Upon my review, I don't think it was fair of me to characterize the article as containing large sections of verbatim text, but rather large sections of clearly copied and subtly modified text. In contrast, the article as it CURRENTLY stands is clearly a derivative work, i.e., you didn't just reword, you did a complete rewrite. :) Good job! --Dante Alighieri | Talk 15:56, Apr 1, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks. I thought those particular phrases might be the problem, on second reading. I guess I wasn't creative enough the first time through. :) Bryan 16:17, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)