... gan yr hen Gymro; rwy'n gobeithio eich bod wedi cael gwyliau Nadolig gwych ac rwy'n dymuno 2019 heddychlon i chi! That is Welsh and translates to: Spicy hot wine for you from the old Welshman; I hope you have had a great Christmas holiday and I wish you a peaceful 2019! Thank you for your excellent work on the 'pedia.
Please do not refer to any editor as a psychopath as you did here[1], It's one thing sarcastically calling them "Comrade" but it's another to call them the other word,
I understand and appreciate you're frustrated but that's no excuse for that edit summary,
If you make similar comments like that in future you could be blocked,
On a happier note I wish you and yours a very Happy and Healthy New Year,
I appreciate that my judgement may well have been at fault in this. Your chum had already told me he did not wish to be addressed or identified by his user name which would be the more usual solution. Your own aggressive reaction is unhelpful and, from you, hypocritical. And your "merry Christmas" flag is both inconsistent and out of date. But I note that you feel strongly about the matter, and of course I respect your right to do so. Happy day! Charles01 (talk) 15:53, 1 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I was blocked for saying calling someone a sad prick ... sure it's not exactly polite but it's nicer than being called a psychopath!,
I was unaware of that but if he's fine with that then great,
The signature is used for the festive period and I don't remove the Christmas part when Christmas ends- It all stays as is until I can be bothered to change it back but thanks for your comments,
Just address me as Nim, plain simple. Its not hard, its what I've been addressed as by people and I shall be addressed as that. So please, address me as Nim. Also Davey2010 is not a 'hypocrite', the block log that happened in the past can be forgotten after six months or more, its time for him to move on and do bigger stuff. Davey2010, please note, I do enjoy you as a friend, despite out differences --EurovisionNim(talk to me)(see my edits)14:08, 3 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for the reassuring off-wiki messages in respect of this outburst. I think it is correct that "Davey" is not an admin, but in fairness I don't think he actually wrote that he was! Regards Charles01 (talk) 18:48, 3 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Charles, My apologies I was indeed meant to have readded your edit back so apologies for that, Thanks for readding your edit back :), Thanks, –Davey2010Talk14:51, 20 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]
While I was categorising and sorting, this photo from one of your scans peaked my interest, not because of the car but the background and the people. That what I always like about your scans by taking pictures of cars of that time but inevitably catch a glimpse of what life was like in that time period. Things to point it out is how people were dressed and wondering the fate of them. The middle age chap as well as the parents with the child must be in their 70s today, the child in the pram would be around in it 40s but the elderly couple are likely left this world by now.
One of the many things I speculate about you ever since I joined Wikipedia is your age (I apologise if this is embarrassing or personal to you). Using your earliest photo from 1968, my guess is that you were in your 20s at the time and was born just after the war. I find history and past life like this fascinating but unless you want to keep this semi-ambiguous character to yourself then that's fair enough but it does mean my curiosity will continue to itch me overtime. --Vauxford (talk) 23:12, 26 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Well, an acknowledgement felt more friendly than a steely silence. But yes, I had intended to reply only after I'd thought what to write. Maybe now I have. We've just got back from visiting rellies which involved a splendid chilli con carne (is that how you spell it?) and a 400 mile round trip. It's been a good day, but not strictly compatible with working on the wikipedia talk page. So however old I am, I'm not so old that they've completely nailed me to my perch .... But yes, I guess I'm probably several notches older than I think of you as being. Then again, I find it impossible not to have a bit of an image of people n my mind when I exchange emails or wiki-messages or whatever. But sometimes those images can be terribly wrong. I was very surprised when your former partner in crime told us how young he was. Then I clicked around his contributions and found he'd uploaded two pictures apparently of himself, and then I thought a bit more and then a bit more and, yes, it made sense that he was unusually (for a wiki-addict) young. I had completely misjudged his age, without really meaning to try and judge it in the first place.
And as you get older you do indeed think more about time. At least I do, though I'm not sure I am unreservedly flattered to be reminded that some of my earlier car pix look like historical records. There aren't so many dimensions around that most people are programmed to understand (or think we understand) intuitively, but time is one of them. I did indeed have a surge of something or other thinking that the little chap in the push chair passing the red Nissan must be around 39 by now. He's had plenty of time to have become a father of ten in his own right. Though I guess since infant mortality at our end of the planet went down so dramatically during the first half of the twentieth century, few people any longer feel the urge even to attempt to become fathers of ten. And yes, on the subject of time I also sometimes catch myself wondering what happened to people in the backgrounds of car pictures and indeed sometimes wondering if they are even still alive. None of us lasts for ever, though there's a bit of a taboo about mentioning it in public: as you get older I think it's normal that you think more about death if only because you are likely to come across it more. I guess the reduction in infant mortality may be part of that change too. Children growing up in Victorian England couldn't avoid coming across death. Now lots of kids - not all, but lots - manage to avoid serious bereavement till well into adulthood. Sorry to be so cheerful. But these are my thoughts right now, so I hope you will not mind that I share them before going to bed. As to my own age, there are by now more than enough clues among my wiki contributions to pin it down pretty precisely, but you should probably have more important and more useful things to do. I'm certainly MUCH too old to go in for all those late nights that so many wiki-contributors seem to favour. Best wishes and sleep well. Charles01 (talk) 21:28, 27 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I saw your work on articles related to anarchism and wanted to say hello, as I work in the topic area too. If you haven't already, you might want to watch our noticeboard for Wikipedia's coverage of anarchism, which is a great place to ask questions, collaborate, discuss style/structure precedent, and stay informed about content related to anarchism. Take a look for yourself!
Feel free to say hi on my talk page and let me know if these links were helpful (or at least interesting). Hope to see you around. czar18:06, 9 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Thank for the contact. I really come to this stuff through the prism of translation. My mother-tongue is English but I have a passing-friendly relationship with one or two other European languages as well. These last few years I've been giving many of my wiki-hours to translating "potted biographies" to English. It's a great way to fill in the gaps in my own education, and sometimes - sometimes quite unexpectedly - suddenly and seriously fascinating. I tend to start with entries in German-language or French-language wikis because those two both have quite a lot of articles and I don't need to look up EVERY funny word in order to infer with reasonable confidence what the originator of the text intended. These days I tend to select characters for treatment from my own lengthy list of red links. I start with a random number based selection process, modified/massaged to ensure the selected translation candidates aren't ALL men (i.e. rather than women). Then I boot out the ones concerning folks for whom I can't find a reasonable number of usable online sources and the ones I'm sure will send me to sleep. Though often I find I have to be quite a long way through before I decide I've picked on a particularly interesting subject with lots of good sources and juicy factoids. Or haven't. I don't exactly have a particular interest in the anarchist-libertairan movement, but it's certainly part of all our historical contexts - albeit more if you start with the world according to French-language wiki and it's underlying pre-wiki knowledge base (or Italian) than with German-language wiki. And I don't think I am telling you or anyone anything you didn't already know with the observation that there's far more biographical information "out there" on those on (or beyond) the left of politics than on those on (or beyond) the right of politics. Similar considerations seem to apply in arts, literature and academe and other wiki-prone categories. Smarter folks than I have attempted to answer the question "why?". Anyhow, that would be way beyond the scope of a casual wiki greeting. But yes, thanks for getting in touch and I did manage a couple of pedantic improvements (or...?) on a couple of biographical articles which appear to be currently up for discussion along one of the links to which you kindly directed me. May go back for a longer look around later. Success Charles01 (talk) 20:38, 9 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Noted. Thanks for the reaction. I don't have time (nor technical expertise, nor access to your sources) for a massive overhaul of your interesting contribution. Nor would you (or anyone else) necessarily thank me if I did. But I do know English better than you do. (I hope ... it is my Muttersprache!) So with your encouragement, as here, I may indeed nibble away a bit more at some of the lumpier pieces of syntax over the next few days / weeks / years. Success Charles01 (talk) 10:29, 26 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]
And thank you for the thank you. Nice picture of a mug of beer. If only I had the metabolism to drink it without getting a headache.... Also please continue with the good contributions. Please. Success. Charles01 (talk) 11:40, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Aurus Senat, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Bosch (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver). Such links are usually incorrect, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of unrelated topics with similar titles. (Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.)
Hello Charles01. Though you left a comment at WP:AN3 about the photo issue, there is a risk that the post you left there will just disappear into the archives, now that the report is closed. Consider adding your two cents worth at Talk:Toyota Hilux#Photos where I think they are trying to agree on a plan, and they should ideally be getting input from more than just the two original protagonists. Thanks, EdJohnston (talk) 03:38, 3 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Though courtesy of the "tactic" of instantly rambling off-topic at inordinate length I am not suprised that people hesitate to jump in. The thing became impressively incoherent within less (MUCH less) than 24 hours. I did get involved in an equivalent discussion on that same talk-page a few months ago, but it ended up with Vauxford doing what he did (and does) regardless of the discussions. That, as it happens, was my point in my intervention this time. Strangely consistent. Possibly because the conduct only gets more "Vauxfordy". Or am I missing something obvious?
As for your belief that archives are places where things go to disappear .... Well, there are those of us who think that archives are places where things go to be kept. Otherwise, why archives? But yes, those apparently contasting appreciations of the nature and purpose of a decent archive long pre-date wikipedia. And if we're smart, I suppose the technology now gives us hitherto unprecented opportunities to reconcile the irreconcilable through intelligent srategies for accessing the archives and retrieving stuff as and when necessary. Happy days Charles01 (talk) 06:49, 3 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I just read your respond, honestly I don't think it bad to be persistent of doing the things you love, except if it becomes disruptive and breaking Wikipedia policies. You still seem to not understand what I mean that I have no association with EurovisionNim whatsoever.
"If we just retained 10% of Vauxford's pictures linked to car entries, wikipedia quality would be enhanced and wikipedia readers would have every reasons to be grateful to the fellow." Seriously, I don't see how my pictures is degrading Wikipedia they are obviously being used without my intervention and this is not a vanity project I'm doing. It just so happen pictures I insert were taken from me, which I know is hard to believe but I can tell you that the honest truth.
I'm simply fed up with you looking down on me, constantly making sarcastic remarks and treated me like I'm a sub-human. Is this how you treat people below you when you were in education? university? jobs? life?. I once looked up to you as a inspiration to what I do when I first started, a highly respected individual but I guess I was wrong. There no other better word I could find that fits what I really think of you; a bully.
Instead of talking negative and indirectly about how my pictures should all get removed and how I'm a thorn to everyone side on Wikipedia when I have sincerely no intention of doing that, I always want to maintain good faith and not be disruptive although I failed to proven that with the recent edit warring which I deeply apologise of causing.
I still have some faith that deep down your a decent gentleman and you can approach what you disagree more positively or realistically, constructively. Most genuine users are in this together, not all of them are boomers who got degrees and graduated from prestige universities. Rather then continue talking down a editor who did wrong until they break, try and help them, sometimes it difficult to get both parties to agree over something but I don't think of myself as the type of person who will just go back to their old selves afterwards. --Vauxford (talk) 10:00, 3 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not asking much but I find replying to my statement with only a Thank on my edit shows that you know very well of how you treat other editors but reluctant to admit so. --Vauxford (talk) 11:02, 4 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I didn't rush to reply because I couldn't think of anything to write. But you choose to intrerpret my failure to jump in as somehow disrespectful to you. And it's the second time you've done that to me. I'm afraid I do not have the expertise or experience to be able to diagnose with any confidence what is going on here. Clearly there are issues, and right now you have issues with me. I think of them as your issues, but you may find it easier to think of them as mine. Either way, one of my concerns was that anything I wrote might make said issues worse rather than better. My overall reaction, of pushed, is that by dumping this little rant on my talk page you leave me wondering what on earth you must be on when you write it. (Me? Boring old coffee. Well, not that boring, actually ...)
I don't think I've changed my mind significantly about the way you carry on. But if, by expressing myself as I do, I trigger in you distress, well I regret the distress. I try to treat everyone equally; and on wikipedia my default assumption is that everyone "here" is an adult.
But it's not really about you. It's not even about me. This is a wikipedia talk page. There's a clue in there somewhere. I do think you have produced some good picures for wikipedia - and a few that are better than good. I think you have produced, linked to erticles, and then stubbornly defended rather more that are not very good. I think that because of the number of simply ok and bad you have uploaded, to put it as gently as I can manage, you have on balance not made wikipedia better. I may be wrong but that is what I think. And I think the way you behave when someone dares to disagree with your "judgment" concerning "your" pictures is appalling and dangerous because it discourages other people from contributing at all. Wikipedia is a collaboration. That's the only way it can work. If you treat it as a personal vanity project, then you miss the point, and the damage you do to the constructive collaborative approach extends far beyond the damage you do simply by linking a large number of mixed quality images.
On the simple matter of linking pictures to wikipeida entries, I have already indicated several times that most conributors are content to upload their pictures to commons and leave it to someone else to determine which pictures fit best with any given article. Many car articles are compiled over ten or more years by ten or twenty thoughtful and careful constributors. Each one of them is just as entitled as you are to have an opinion about what is an imnprovement and what is not, whether regarding text, tables or pictures. There can be exeptions, but my starting point is that once you start inserting "your" pictures without regard for their appropriateness or quality, you are being unnecessarily arrogant. Where your pictures of cars are brilliant, of course, no one will care or in most cases even notice. But otherwise, you should expect people to notice. And, in rare and extreme cases, care enough to do something about it.
As I wrote already, it's about wikipedia. Both you and EurovisionNim, when you get excited (which seems to come easily), insist on treating wikipedia as a personal fiefdom. But none of my insights on your behaviour - whether or not you share them - should normally belong on my talk page or on anyone else's. Nor yours on mine. Wikipedia is not about you.
Well, I try to tell it like it is, or at least like it looks from here. I hope I do not upset you when I do that, but if I do, then of course I am a nasty old bully and you hate me and we're back to the Kindergarten. Which is all more than a little bit sad. And not stuff that should normally be included on a wikipedia talk page. Getting reptitive. Time to stop. Regards Charles01 (talk) 10:08, 6 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, I'm Sadads. I wanted to let you know that I saw the page you reviewed, Christian Didier, and have marked it as unpatrolled. If you have any questions, please ask them on my talk page. Thank you.
Message delivered via the Page Curation tool, on behalf of the reviewer.
For the last time it isn't a vanity project! I'm not the only one that does that though, other users has done it and they didn't get frowned upon. The logic I have with using images on other Wikiepdia is that if the foreign users on there doesn't like it, they can happily revert it and I leave them be but rare that anyone does. I swear you guys are just trying to push me over the edge to borderline retirement or worst, I got U1Quattro on my backside and talking to him is like talking to a brick wall and have you constantly making snarky remarks and stuff that isn't true, I'm sick of it! I'm still going to fight my corner regardless and defend my edits are in good faith, I might of slipped up in the past such as with the 1 day block but even so the accusation I got from U1Quattro, telling me that he going get me a "permanent banned" for "misconduct" and trying to use every single word I say against me! I feel like this project is simply a echo chamber haven and you guys simply want me to disappeared just because you don't like the way I edit. --Vauxford (talk) 17:53, 7 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
It's interesting - reassuring even - that you state that where "foreign users on there doesn't like it, they can happily revert it". It is a pity that you fail to extend the same respect on English wikipedia. It's revealing that you see nothing wrong in scattering images that you yourself have taken all over what you identify as "other Wikipedia". What looks to me like "vanity project arrogance" is defined not by what you choose to write about yourself, but by the way in which you choose to behave. That, at least, is how it looks from here. If you and EurovisionNim behave badly and degrade wikipedia in pursuit of your private "not a vanity project" you cannot expect people not to notice or not to care about the results of way you both carry on. No one wants you to disappear. But if you could use the temporary exclusion of your former partner in crime as an opportunity to stop treating wikipedia as your own private property, that would represent valuable progress.
I do not know who you have in mind when you write "other users has done it and they didn't get frowned upon." If you mean EurovisionNim he really did get "frowned upon". Especially, in the end, by you. Is memory really so short?
Meantime, you do indeed sometimes appear to be close to the edge of something - "borderline retirement or worst" or ... um ... whatever it is - but neither the cause nor the remedy are likely to be found within wikipedia. It is not fair to wikipdia to inflict whatever it is on the rest of us. Most of us simply don't have the expertise to deal with your unusual approach, especially when, as you like to do, you start writing about yourself. Which is one of several things that make me wonder if it is ever wise to reply to you when you start writing about yourself. But when I do not reply - reply more or less immediately - you choose to take it as an indication of disrespect. But, well ... it does damage wikipedia that you still have not bothered to learn to collaborate, and that matters. And yes, I wish you could bring yourself to recognise it. Is that such a terrible thing? Charles01 (talk) 19:08, 7 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Because I don't speak anything but English so communicating with foreign users when under a dispute is really difficult. Seriously, I am not like Nim, if my images really degrade Wikipedia, why aren't I gone? My image do have values I think and people do indeed appreciate it. I can collaborate and it works before, but when it comes to certain tricky users, it goes a different direction. --Vauxford (talk) 21:22, 7 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I'm going to maintain my stance that this is not a personal vanity project and I'm kindly telling you to stop the accusation that it is. I replaced it during discussion because at the last min the picture on the article was a replica and I believe it shouldn't be used in the article. I admit I could of waited until the discussion was over but Eddadio seem to have intentionally avoiding my confrontation. He then suggested a picture which nobody said anything about except me which I said it wasn't a good choice due to it being overly blurry, but replaced it anyway. It seem to me that almost every comments you made on discussion over stuff like this is mostly a personal grief rather then actually contributing to the problem. --Vauxford (talk) 15:39, 27 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Your eye-watering arrogance is not in itself the defining issue. But where it leads to appalling behaviour which discourages collaborative and constructive ccontributions to wikipedia from other people, your behaviour does indeed become "the problem". I am mightily bored with repeating myself ad nauseam simply because your behaviour has not improved and, indeed, since EurovisionNim quit, had become more EurovisionNIm-like / Vauxfordy than ever. Your pictures are not universally terrible, but mostly they are mediocre and you damage wikipedia by refusing to differentiate between the ones that are competent, the ones that are mediocre and the ones that are terrible. You damage wikipedia by replacing inages that are perfectly ok with your own pictures even where these are frequently significantly worse. Before you and EurovisionNim came along people only rarely attached pictures that they themselves had taken to wiki-entries, and only when they were, by most mainstream criteria, unambiguously better than the alternatives. That way, little by little, quality improved and variety was sustained. You guys changed the rules and conventions. Not in a good way. Monotonous messy backgrounds in Leamington Spa have their place, and if all your pictures were brilliant no one would mind - or maybe even much notice - a certain uniformity of approach. But they're not. So yes, that is why I object to the Vauxford Vanity Project. Is your suggestion that your behaviour is just fine and your behaviour is constructive and collaborative? Otherwise why do you insist on dumping your little outbursts of self pity when I do something with which you disagree? I freely admit, I don't understand you at all. And your behaviour just seems to get worse. Please make a special effort and improve it! Charles01 (talk) 16:12, 27 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
The way how people edit and conventions on automobile articles has changed, I don't think I have become worst, before I used to be a lot worst and reverted people edit that objected me constantly, without discussing it with them but it obviously not right and I got a 1 day block for edit warring. Now when someone disagree with my edit, I do take it to the talk page and discuss it, the problem is other users aren't playing fair, they go and do their own action before anything could be agreed on. What else could I do, I tried to improve my behaviour by discussing rather then rejecting and I still feel like I been duped.
"people came along people only rarely attached pictures that they themselves had taken to wiki-entries" -- That because their was barely any users who was dedicated to that subject, I presume you are talking what the environment on Wikipedia was like back in 2007-2008 and back then any pictures that weren't your scans were either taken by ancient PowerShot cameras or are super tiny for fair-use because there wasn't any pictures in the Commons that they could use. --Vauxford (talk) 16:24, 27 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Now I don't see why this should be taken to my talkpage when you brought this one up yourself and the fact that even when gave my defence in this and telling you I have been improving behavioural wise, you blatantly ignore it and try and move the entire thing somewhere like it not yours to deal with when it clearly is because nobody except you has been making these condescending comments towards what I do. I'm doing my half to try and eventually solve this discord between us, please do your part on it. --Vauxford (talk) 17:50, 27 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
You are right in at least one sense. It should not be necessary to name an individual "contributor" in an edit summary. Unfortunately you have repeatedly made it clear that special rules apply for Vauxford and EurovisionNim. Since - triggered by your complaint on one of the relevant noticeboards - EurovisionNim has been excluded, your own behaviour has become worse. Even worse. If you treat wikipedia as your personal vanity project you damage wikipedia because other contributors with less time and less arrogance than you will simply wander off and do something else. I do not like to see you damage wikipedia and I am frustrated that you think, for your own reasons, that the price is one wikipedia should be happy to pay. I am also mightily fed up with having to repeat myself ad nauseam because you resolutely ignore all polite requests, frustrated urgings, pleadings even, to mend your ways. We should not be wasting our wikipedia time trying to attend to your unique bundle of personal needs. It is not what wikipedia is for. Please - even now - make a special effort. Contribute collaboratively. Success Charles01 (talk) 07:58, 29 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated files}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the file's talk page.
It was useful when I set it up, but for the purposes originally intended it has subsequently been superseded by a more wiki-standardised approach. I don't think it does any harm, but if it is getting in your way feel free to delete it. (Do wiki-bots read messages? Hell no .... so why do I bother to write this?) Happy days Charles01 (talk) 12:40, 2 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for helping to make the Volvo 300 Series article a little better. It still needs a lot of rework, but at least I was able to give John de Vries the credits he deserves, as the original version stated Michelotti. Michelotti was actually quite miffed about DAF turning his design down! I have met John de Vries a couple of times, he is a very friendly man, and can talk for hours about his designs. Brinkie (talk) 15:44, 15 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Noted. Thank you.
I lived in England in the 1980s and never entirely understood the appeal of the Volvo 343 which was included in the top ten sellers for month after month during the late 19780s / early 1980s. I guess the Volvo brand had a reputation for reliability and safety, and the British auto industry was in a terrible mess. Anyway, folks (in England) who owned them seemed to be appreciative of their merits. I don't remember seeing so many in West Germany or France, the other major European car markets, though I seem to have found one to photograph in Switzerland. The Swiss market was always considered especially competitive because all the automakers competed on more or less equal terms. Though away from the cities of the central belt I seem to remember Subaru rather scooped the pond with their affordable four-wheel drive cars.
With wikipedia - especially in the english language version - it's important always to source anything that might become contentioous. I wonder if there is any basic biographical information "out there" about Mr de Vries. Why is he called John rather than Jan? Does he have English ancestors? Or was he just born at a time when English-language names were fashionable? Where was he born? Obviously more on his career would also be interesting. That Volvo 480ES was an influential design. I wonder if he ever gave an interview to Autovisie that could be mined for information.
I have really no independent source of his bio, maybe I should interview him (I have his e-mail and phone number) and publish that somewhere. But he is really called John, not very uncommon for people who were born shortly after the liberation by Americans and Canadians in 1945.
The Dutch-built Volvos are generally unliked by the fans of Swedish-built Volvo, because the build quality wasn't quite stellar. I know the 300 series has been very popular in the UK, as was the 400 series (especially the 480). In The Netherlands, the 300 series was popular, because it offered like its DAF predecessors a small car with automatic transmission; many people had a driver's license restricted to automatic gearboxes. They kept the 340 with automatic transmission in production until 1991, because there was no 400 series with an auto box available. It also ran great on LPG, which made it suitable for fleet sales. Nevertheless they had a very dull image, generally bought by elderly people, it was a standing joke that a Volvo 340 was always driving in front of the queue. ;)
Thank you. If you have the gentleman's e-mail and 'phone number (and the time and willingness to go ahead). It might indeed be worthwhile to contact him.
Wikipedia is full of biographical entries that people write about their chums or colleagues. Nevertheless, where it is obvious and where it takes place on entries that significant numbers of people read, it tends to attract criticism for rather obvious reasons. Entries should be objective. Where there are two versions of truth that the available sources promote with approximately equal weight, then the starting point is that you should normally include them both. (Though bear in mind that some sources are seen as more reliable than others: there seems to be a much debated consensus that several of the less reliable English mass-market newspapers should not normally be used as sources at all. You don't believe it? Did you ever read an English mass-market newspaper?) There is also a presumption against what gets called "original research". Wikipedia should be based on existing sources.
In this case, therefore, since you say Mr de V loves to talk about his work, and is fascinating when he does it, then he must surely have given interviews to enthusiasts with pens, type writers or word processors. Some of them must have been journalists writing for the specialist (or indeed general) press. Some of them must have been people writing books about DAFs. People are interested in DAFs. Ditto Volvos. So an important thing to try and note down, if you do get to speak to him, is the details of the pubished sources to which things about him might be sourced: title, date of publication, author, publisher, page numbers (sometimes helpful), isbn (if book). You won't (normally) get every detail for every source, and you may well get other details that I forget to mention. url is an important one where stuff is online, of course. Of course what he tells you about himself and about his work will most likely be more than worth the visit - if you get to visit him - and will provide important context for anything you are able to contribute to the wikipedia on him. But from the wikipedia perspective, taking the opportunity to write down details of a few sources is important.
That lovely line you mention about "a Volvo 340 ... always driving in front of the queue" (so it must be the fastest car on the road, to spell out the logic), I originally heard in connection with much earlier DAF designs. We have a Dutch born uncle who became a priest and emigrated to Canada. Whenever he returned to NL on a visit he always insisted on renting an old (ever older) DAF: that nice old joke always got rolled out each time he came back to Europe for a visit! Ach, nostalgia isn't what it used be! Charles01 (talk) 10:48, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I see that they have failed to inform you that they have re-opened the report about you. At any rate, please tone down the innuendo regarding vanity, and so on. I'm sure you can get your point across without resorting to that rhetoric. El_C21:18, 15 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Thankyou for your hard work and consistency in keeping the Intertranswiki project running. One of the most worthwhile projects! ♦ Dr. Blofeld07:04, 1 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
After reading your lengthy paragraph, I'm honestly shocked that you suggest I have been abusing multiple accounts. If you really want to know what accounts I use, it this one and Vauxford2 which used to be use for Flickr-to-Commons upload. I am curious of who had the suspicions have me using them. --Vauxford (talk) 09:01, 2 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Charles01, I deleted User:Charles01/SandboxVauxford as an attack page. Please don't do that again. If your suspicions are enough for a proper SPI, just do that. If they're not, please just leave it alone. You can't have your own informal SPI report in your user space. El_C21:39, 2 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Noted. Thank you. I had not appreciated that anyone - as in "Vauxford" - might make a habit of rummaging round in the sandboxes of other folks. But I guess we already know that the fellow likes to do things differently. I wonder what else he found. I have, of course, removed the offending reference in the draft response document. Regards Charles01 (talk) 15:47, 3 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
It wrong. You can't just make such slanderous accusation to someone like that, I wouldn't even do that myself. You making that so-called paragraph about me is a new low. --Vauxford (talk) 16:21, 3 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Grüß dich as in greetings. Not necessarily in that order. And I'm sorry if I make the wrong choice between Sie und du: You see, this German is not my mother tongue! Parmi les anglophones on ne se tutoye plus!
My user-boxes just come from copying other people's user-boxes. I think that's how it works for most of us. Where it doesn't work (which quite often happens) I simply reverse it and try again three months later. Though quite often if it doesn't work there is an embarassingly low-tech explanation. Like I put in the wrong number of "|"s or "}"s in the right (or wrong) places.
You look as though you think you may be going to have more time to help with Wikipedia in the future. I hope so. There's so much more to be done, as I think you already noticed! Success Charles01 (talk) 08:26, 4 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
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I've done that. Thank you. I should probably write more, but I guess "thank you" probably covers the most of it. Sorry you've been put through this. The draft report has not changed much since you last saw it. (Still unfinished!) So although I know you just can't wait to read it one more time, I'm not sure you actually need to. Your call. Of course. Regards Charles01 (talk) 22:15, 17 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I assume you have translated the German page. Are you sure that the immoral phrase is precize? It says allegedly, doesn't it? I understand that he was forced to leave rather than found himself guilty.Xx236 (talk) 10:40, 31 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, the German wikpedia page was the starting point, though I seem to have found one or two online source notes. More would be good.
I appear to have done this four years ago, and I have no idea what was on my mind at the time, but German wiki currently says "Wegen seines angeblich „unmoralischen Lebenswandels ....". So yes, I appear simply to have translated the sentiment into my version of English, using the text as it appeared in German wikipedia. If further googling yields up a different version, then provided we can present the thing with a plausible source, there is no reason not to correct it. And of course if further googling yields up conflicting versions - not so unusual - and one has difficulty deciding, there is nothing wrong in summarizing both versions and adding that "sources differ".
Do you have a source for your understanding that "that he was forced to leave rather than found himself guilty"? If so, there is no reason why you should not modify the text. Or send me the link if you prefer that I should do it. Otherwise, I may click around with google myself at some point, but ... um ... not today! Success Charles01 (talk) 10:54, 31 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]
The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Henry Canning until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.
Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. Collaboratio (talk) 10:10, 4 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Hello, There's a discussion of the Evans' obit at Talk:Norman Stone#Reputation you may wish to comment in. From my perspective, it would be helpful if you could note any sources which rebut Evans' statement regarding Stone groping students. Regards, Nick-D (talk) 11:01, 4 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think Norman Stone should be answering your "When did you stop beating your wife?" question. He's dead. And I am in no position to do so on his behalf I have no very strong facts based opinion on the matter. Such opinions as I can muster on it are unlikely to be a million miles from yours.
I have added some thoughts concerning your edits of the Norman Stone entry to the appropriate talk page as you requested. Best wishes Charles01 (talk) 08:36, 7 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Poland has its law, its culture, even if the Germans wanted to destoy it. You have translated a German nationalistic POV into Polish Wikipedia. What happened to the basic explanation "„Bierut-Dekrete“ ist eine von Vertretern der deutschen Vertriebenenverbände geprägte Bezeichnung für die von der polnischen Regierung 1945 und 1946 erlassenen Dekrete, Verordnungen und Gesetze, die Eigentums- und bürgerliche Rechte der aus Ostpreußen, Pommern, Schlesien und Ost-Brandenburg vertriebenen Deutschen sowie der Volksdeutschen aus dem Gebiet Polens in den Grenzen vor dem 1. September 1939 aufgehoben haben. "Xx236 (talk) 06:32, 7 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
How you view the Polish government actions and other surrounding events 1945 and 1946 is necessarily defined or at least contextualised by the way you were taught about those events during the first twenty years of your life. Self evidently if you were at school in Warsaw during the 1960s and 1970s you will have learned about a different set of events even from within the same place and maybe quite small time-frame, and you will have been encouraged to look at them through a different set of prisms, from those that would have been included in the curriculum if you were at school in Berlin, Bonn, London, Minsk or New York. Indeed, the differences would have been pretty stark even between how things were taught in Munich and how they were taught up the road in Leipzig. Where governments control the schools, that's a powerful set of influences. And on top of all that schooling comes the inherited knowledge and insight passed through surviving family members. Did you come from a family that thought the Krajowa Rada Narodowa (State National Council) was a heroic or at least necessary homegrown development or from a family that thought it was a well designed tool of Soviet imperialism? I suspect I may know how you might yourself comment in 2019, but in 1979 your 2019 view of those events would presumably have been less mainstream in Warsaw or Krakow. So you should not be surprised if, a generation or two later, those events are differently viewed according to whether your parents (and/or you) grew up in Poland or Germany (or Belarus or England). One of the delights of wikipedia is the opportunity it provides better to see just how folks from different generations/places/tribal traditions have been taught to view history so differently. Not necessarily better or worse or more true or less true. But different. There is no internatationally agreed version of which events were significant, far less of what it all means 75 years later. But if you think the nuances in the German language entry are closer to "objective history" than the nuances in the English language entry, then you should make the changes. Objective history does not exist and never will. But as a great aspiration, I would not presume to denigrate it. Success Charles01 (talk) 07:37, 7 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, any chance you could transwiki this. the current article is poor and should probably be restarted with a full translation from the sourced German article. Looks an interesting place Gerda Arendt, Bermicourt and Ipigott might be interested, no worries if not though.♦ Dr. Blofeld09:50, 9 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think the entry in English language wiki is soooo very terrible, though it's a bit brief. And I agree it would have been a kindness if the many originators had bothered to pepper it with more source notes. And yes, there are lot of things in there on which I catch myself thinking "I wouldn't have done it quite like that myself..." You too, it appears.
The German wiki entry is a bit on the long side for my taste, but maybe if one got into it further one would come across things to leave out or at least to prune with savagery. There are lots of inline citations - more than one might expect with this type of entry on German wikipedia - but they mostly go back to books that may or may not be readily accessible. Which can be a frustration. The German entry benefits from having been compiled by one person, and has a resulting structural coherence that you don't often find on wikipedia. I like that. On the other hand the scholarly person who drafted it appears to have contributed nothing else to wikipedia. A bit of a labour of love? Or a little project by a bored former curator? I guess once one got into it one might find a certain ignorance of the "rules". Then again - irritating national but well supported stereotyping coming up - German people really do find it easier to understand and see the point of "rules" ("Richtlinien?") than Welsh and English people, I find!
Anyway, without making quite a lengthy start it's a little hard to know just what is involved and just how far it may get. But I'll list it for September. Might even finish it! If someone else gets in first I will not weep. It's a pity Eustachiusz has (like you) more or less retired. On tearing it up and starting again, I think that might indeed be what it would amount to, though I would not myself rush to delete stuff until I was absolutely sure that all useful information was being preserved! Success Charles01 (talk) 10:15, 9 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
It's a lot of work, don't worry about it. Looks an interesting place though! I'll be aiming to translate a paragaph from a Spanish, French or Italian wiki article 3 or 4 times a week now, 10 minutes a few trimes a week is better than nothing!♦ Dr. Blofeld19:48, 9 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, thanks for your work. Please note that "painter", "writer", and other common terms are not normally linked on en.WP. An en dash – should be used as a range separator, not a - hypen. See below the edit box for the button. Tony(talk)07:24, 2 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Interesting. I do tend to link "painter", at least in an intro para, because of the ambiguity of the word. There might be readers who think that a "painter" is / was a fellow repainting the Sydney Harbo(u)r bridge, or the neighbour with a steady hand who gets called in to redo the interior paint work if you live in a house with smokers. Or .... it's a wannabe van Dyck. Depends, of course, on taking time to evaluate the context. (And on being deeply familiar with your and my version of the English language or something similar.) "Writer" is ambiguous in other ways and I tend to prefer "novelist", "dramatist" or "poet". But sometimes - as with the example that I think you have in mind here - none of the three is overwhelmingly the focus at the expense of these (or other) others. I will try and remember to look out for the – and the − and indeed the — underneath the edit box. I'd never noticed the characters there before and they look like time savers. Thank you. Still haven't worked out which of those three dashes I "should" prefer for each situation, but no doubt you'll let me know at some stage where I guess wrong! Best wishes. Charles01 (talk) 09:15, 2 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I've got something that has been bothering me on German Wikipedia since June; to come straight to the point: There is a very weird translation from English into German in this German article on La chanson de Jacky (at the very end of the section "Der Text"). An editor claims that the phrase cute in a stupid-ass way contains a pun. He says that stupid-ass means "folly" (in German: Eselei, because he thinks that arse = donkey = Esel) and that it sounds like stupid arse, which he thinks literally means "stupid arse" (in German: Dummer Arsch, as in stupid butt(hole)), but as far as my understanding of English goes, I'd rather say that "stupid ass" means something like "idiot", "stupid person", or "muppet"? I've already had a very frustrating discussion where this editor indirectly acknowledged that there is no source for this claim (apparently, this is original research). I think that you know English much better than me, but you also seem to know German pretty well, so you could possibly have a look at it? I just want to know whether or not the claim makes sense (I reckon it is utter rubbish). Best regards, --Johannes (Talk) (Contribs) (Articles) 15:30, 26 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I'm afraid that street-slang in German (or French) is not my speciality. (It changes so fast, from generation to generation!) But I can see what the writer is getting at with "cute in a stupid-ass way" even though his/her mother tongue is most likely some variation of American English and my mother tongue is a version of British English. The pronounciation of "arse" and "ass" is very close in American English and I think I can understand what your correspondent means about the pun. In "Oxford" British English "arse" and "ass" are pronounced more differently, but we hear plenty of American English here in England. In Germany (and I think Austria) American movies get dubbed out of American English and into German. My children used to love the way "The Simpsons" sounds dubbed into German when they picked it up on a German channel. But here in England - as, I think, in the Netherlands, where they can all understand both variations of English with a shaming level of ease - we get the Simpsons in American English and we don't give it a thought.
So yes, between "arse" and "ass" it is reasonable to infer a pun. Most Brits would spot it (or cruise through it) without thinking and without suffering mental indigestion along the way. And I understand the intent behind "cute in a stupid-ass way" and I enjoy the impact of the phrase even though I don't think I would have written it like that myself.
I'm afraid I didn't explain properly what I mean. Seen from an "English" perspective, I can see this pun, yes. But let's imagine there isn't any arse/ass spelling differences: If I get this right, stupid-ass can be used as a "prefix" or "adjective" as in "bloddy" or "shite"? And stupid ass just means "idiot", "very stupid person", "muppet"? Or would you think of different meanings? Would it feel unnatural if somebody took "stupid arse" literally, like if he or she actually thought it meant "stupid butt"? Can stupid-ass/stupid ass translate into "folly"? And would changing the spelling from ass to arse make any difference? Best regards, --Johannes (Talk) (Contribs) (Articles) 17:33, 26 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Yes. Not simple, and I'm not sure that if there was a war going on I would know which side to back! So I would abstain in the vote. This is a French language song by a francophone, and there is an English language version of it. The "official" English rendering of the line in question, as far as I can make out, is "Handsome, handsome, handsome and stupid at the same time". In the French original the line appears to be "beau, beau, beau et con à la fois". The official English translation is tame by comparison: it does not attempt to deliver the anatomical reference to the English reader. The person writing the wiki entry has substituted an English language version which, in my judgement, better captures the French language original. He has used "ass" (which prompts thoughts of "arse") rather than attempting to incorporate the more directly translated word "cunt" because "cunt" is more offensive to more English readers than "con" is to most French language readers. At least, that is my judgement, though these are neither of them words that I would normally incorporate into my daily conversation. (But I have friends who do!)
To answer directly one of your points, no of course stupid ass is NOT a conventional adjectival phrase. But nor is the usage so remarkable as to damage the understandability of the phrase. There are some details where the German language is more flexible than English language. You can often resequence a German sentences five different ways without damaging the meaning or the poetry of it. English is less flexible there. But in lots of other ways the English language is more flexible than German, and its users (who learn very little grammar in the schools: we used to learn a bit of grammar when we studied Latin and German but these days very few kids in England study Latin or German...) are content to break the "rules" without even noticing that they have done it. So ... in terms of using "stupid ass" as an adjective ... for me, I think "stupid ass" works here. And I sympathise with the fellow who finds the "official" English language translation ("Handsome, handsome, handsome and stupid at the same time") lumpy, tame and inelegant when compared to the French original ("beau, beau, beau et con à la fois"). The more I think about it, the more I think I agree with him. Or, of course, with her. Has s/he come up with the best available solution? No comment. Except I don't have a better idea. Best wishes Charles01 (talk) 18:16, 26 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I appreciate your unsuccinct reply, but I suppose it has got way out of the range of replies that I was looking for. I am not very good at being succinct myself; but I will try my best. You have said that you are not sure whether or not there was some kind of "war": Well, there hasn't been an edit-war, but I presume, the editing that has happend can be called a war. I do not inted to drag you into anything, I am honestly just interested in your native-speaker-opinion. To sum up that "war": This editor has created several articles on songs, and he has clearly used original research; for instance, he has used a song's lyrics as an inline citation for an interpretation of the song's meaning. I presume that this stupid-ass → Eselei (donkey egg?) and stupid ass → Dummer Arsch (stupid butthole?) is also original research (there is no reference for this). This was all part of an "article for excellent article vote". I have given a "strong oppose", which made him say that I have only proven my "ignorance". (Does disagreeing with someone for a very good reason make me ignorant??) But anyways, take a look at the reference section in the diesel engine article and decide for yourself whether or not I know what good references ought to look like.
I have never liked Romanic languages, and I only have a very limited understanding of French. But it is certainly good enough to get the meaning of the original French lyrics. However, the translation from Frnech into English is not the point here. The "English translation" is part of an English version of the song that was performed by American singer Mort Shuman. The writer of the Wiki-entry has taken the lyrics of the English Shuman version, and he has then translated this little piece of lyrics into German. He claims that stupid-ass/stupid ass means something like "Eselei/Dummer Arsch", which translates into English as "folly/stupid butthole" (Eselei can also mean donkey egg), but not the claimed stupid-ass/stupid ass, I reckon? I just wonder whether or not this translation from English into German makes any sense. I really hope I'm not stealing your time here! Best regards, --Johannes (Talk) (Contribs) (Articles) 19:25, 26 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I understand better, now, where some of this is coming from. But I do not very often involve myself in any "article for excellent article vote" even in English language wikipedia. I would certainly not presume to share my own opinions with too much passion when assessment of an entry auf Deutsch is involved. So many of the underlying assumptions that you bring to your wiki contributions and your interpretation of wiki guidelines are based on things your mother told you before you were five, and of which on a conscious level you yourself are not aware. At least .... that's how it is for me. (Yes, my mother had soooo many strong opinions to share!) Sure we need Richtlinien in order to avoid producing complete garbage. But how to interpret and apply these? I like to leave this to others. I really enjoy and respect the variety of approaches you get in wikipedia. If you apply too many "rules" too rigidly you will reduce the variety, making Wikipedia less fun to read, and drive some of your most productive and committed contributors away. For me it is usually enough that the thing is interesting and that it is true. (What is truth? That is a question for another day, God wot.) I understand the "rule" about original research and I can see the point of it very well. And after living many years in Germany (plus even aa couple of months iin Vienna) I appreciate very well that in Germany and Austria there is more respect for the rules precisely because there is more agreement over what the "rules" should be than we have in England or North America. But if I were King of Wikipedia I would, under many circumstances, enforce guidelines with a carefully light touch! Of course, I am drifting ouy of scope. But this is MY talk page so I can! Oder?.... Best wishes Charles01 (talk) 18:58, 27 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
This is your talk page, and sure, you can write whatever you want. Sorry, I know that "Article for excellent article vote" is a very silly way of expressing the thing I want to express; it is certainly not like featured articles in the English language Wikipedia: On here, there are currently 46 articles nominated, the nomination process is difficult, it takes a whole lot of time, and articles that end up being "featured articles" don't seem to be a mixed bag. On the German language Wikipedia, there are usually not more than five articles nominated at the same time. And the quantitiy of comments on your article (and therefore the result) depend(s) upon the easiness of the topic (and your wikifriends). Articles like "Diesel engine" or "petrol direct injection" are likely to fail because of a lack of votes/comments, no matter how good their quality actually is (in my case, they almost failed). But on the other hand, articles that are utter rubbish are likely to become "excellent", if the creator has a lot of wikifriends.
I spend a lot of time (most likely too much time) "rating" other editors' articles. And I happen to vote "this article is not an excellent article" at times, because I look at things like: Is the article well written? Is it verifiable? is it broad in its coverage? And so on. What annoys me the most about "excellent article votes" (I shorten this now) is the reaction of other editors (wikifriends); I receive replies such as "Oh yes this article is so good" (and I can tell that the person who wrote that has not even read the article), or even better (or worse?) "Johannes says this article is not good, so I have to act as a counterweight and say it is good indeed" de:Special:Diff/192457881. Mate, what exactly is the merit of your comment?
I get frustrated because I spend time writing good articles myself. I was never taught how to properly use English style elements, and I make very awful mistakes at times (often?). What I write must look it was written by a bungler, or at least someone with a very monotonous writing style. I mess up tenses a lot, I guess. And you have seen my attempt to improve the English diesel engine article (and you have corrected so many things I had got wrong). But what I actually want to say here is that I can assure you, that the bloddy diesel engine article (the English one), as it was "improved" by me, including all its grammar errors, is still much better than many of these German articles that were nominated for "excellent article" (maybe that is a way to say it!). Maybe I am exaggerating, who knows, I cannot judge myself, but that is how I see it. I mean, yes, I am being very strict. But I hope you can agree that purposely writing something that is not at all covered by the cited "source", is disruptive editing. And that grammatically incorrect sentences that look like poorly translated English phrases, don't make an article an "excellent article".
I don't want to start ranting. You have still not given me an answer to my initial question, whether or not stupid-ass/stupid ass can translate into German as Eselei/Dummer Arsch. But anyways. We have somehow lost track of what we were talking (writing) about, I reckon? Best regards, --Johannes (Talk) (Contribs) (Articles) 10:25, 28 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I admire (and to a considerable extent extent share) your urge to make wikipedia perfect. That makes wikipedia better. But you must have noticed that the more deeply you get into the detail the more you will discover that other people define "perfect" differently from the way you do. Fascinating indeed, but it means that all of the best entries end up looking somewhat incoherent because of the conflicting insights of contributors.
I can - though it is against many of my deep instincts - attempt an answer to your question "...whether or not stupid-ass/stupid ass can translate into German as Eselei/Dummer Arsch" which is both truthful and (at least for me) succinct. My knowledge of the German language (and culture) - and my insights into the wiki and wider context of the wiki-entry in question - is nowhere near complete enough for me to attempt a useful answer to your entirely sensible question. And - since I live in England where everyone keeps apologising to everyone else whether they mean it or not, but here I really do - sorry! Best wishes Charles01 (talk) 09:03, 29 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I reckon you are the first editor who has told me the he admires my urge to make Wikipedia perfect. Yes, I do have this urge. And yes, I have noticed, that, the more I get into detail, the more I discover that other editors have other definitions of perfect. What I have found to be the most frustrating difference in the definition of perfect is how editors deal with sources, and what kind of merit sources have in their definition of perfect. In my definition of a perfect article, all major points are well sourced, and the sources cited are reliable books, that describe the subject well, were published by a decent publisher, and were written by specialists. What I don't like is poor online links of underwhelming quality. And what I really hate is when editors cite sources without even realising that the source doesn't cover the article's subject at all. It makes my toenails furl.
On the other hand, I have found very entertaining contributions, too. You say that you have spent quite a lot of time in Germany, so I presume you know how hilarious Denglisch can be. Most Germans (and Austrians) believe that they speak English very well, but in reality, they do not. You can substract at least one point from every German's English babel in his or her userbox. I don't know English perfectly well, but I don't know Austrian German perfectly well either. You should check out the recent changes in the German de:Fireman Sam article. Someone who possibly doesn't know what a fire engine is translated the intro song's "his engine is bright and clean". The result is ridiculous (or was, I have corrected it). It made me look up the intro video on YouTube, and to my surprise, they have changed the "When he hears the firebell chime" to "when he hears the fire alarm". Apparently, children nowadays don't know the verb chime anymore?
Well, that is a very nice way of expressing that you cannot answer my – frankly speaking – weird and difficult question. Possibly, there is too much background behind it. I tried substracting that, but that doesn't work in this case, I suppose. Anyways, it was nice hearing (reading) from you Charles.
Best regards, --Johannes (Talk) (Contribs) (Articles) 13:42, 29 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
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Thank you for your recent articles, including Gustav von Schlabrendorf, which I read with interest. When you create a new article, can you add the WikiProject assessment templates to the talk of that article? See the talk page of the article I mentioned for an example of what I mean. Usually it is very simple, you just add something like {{WikiProject Keyword}} to the article's talk, with keyword replaced by the associated WikiProject (ex. if it's a biography article, you would use WikiProject Biography; if it's a United States article, you would use WikiProject United States, and so on). You do not have to rate the article if you do not want to, others will do it eventually. Those templates are very useful, as they bring the articles to a WikiProject attention, and allow them to start tracking the articles through Wikipedia:Article alerts and other tools. For example, WikiProject Poland relies on such templates to generate listings such as Article Alerts, Popular Pages, Quality and Importance Matrix and the Cleanup Listing. Thanks to them, WikiProject members are more easily able to defend your work from deletion, or simply help try to improve it further. Feel free to ask me any questions if you'd like more information about using those talk page templates. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here08:59, 21 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Noted. That first pass at a translation / adaptation into English that you came across is far from completed. There are plenty of juicy sources. More than I had intially anticipated. But when I get closer to completing it I will take a closer look at how those templates work.
I do have a bit of a blindspot with templates. It's never quite clear, to me, what they will do! But I am indeed beginning to understand some of the effect of the ones for Project Biography and Project Germany, Project Poland etc.!
Hello Charles, I allow myself to thank you for your kindness which made me very happy. Thank you for your huge contributions on the subject of vehicles, I enjoy the pleasure of seeing all these known and unknown cars that encourage me to participate in their rankings to continue your work so that your contributions are highlighted and encourage you to offer others. To the great pleasure of crossing on the big planet of the contribution that is Wikipedia encyclopedia. Best regards, —— DePlusJean (talk) 08:42, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
What a delightful message! Thank you. You make me happy, too.
I see that you live in Montpellier. Between 1978 and 1985 I worked in the travel/holiday business, based in London. They paid us very little, but there were compensations. We got periodic "educationals". Somewhere round 1983 my number came up and I was included on an "educational" orgaanised by the French National Tourist Office based at that time at 178(?) Piccadilly, London. (They seem to have moved the shop since then.) It involved visiting holiday destinations in south / south west France: Cap d'Agde ... Toulouse ... Carcasonne ... TGV: Orange à Paris. They took us to Montpellier one evening and we had a wonderful restaurant meal which centred on oysters. At least, my meal did. I don't remember anything else about Montpellier: maybe they drove us round the town for fifteen minutes and pointed out the best bits to visit if we ever came back (or sent paying visitors on package holidays), but all that I remember is that wonderful meal. But it was enough. (I'm quite greedy.) I like Montpellier, even though Wikipedia says it has changed a lot since 1984. Mes meilleures salutations. Also to your fine city .... Charles01 (talk) 18:51, 25 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. LizRead!Talk!15:01, 5 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Charles, I was doing some research on thirties' Plymouths and realized that they made a rare small-bore tax special of their four-cylinder engine in 1931 and 1932. 1931 was also when they established a British assembly plant. The skinnier bore of 3+1⁄8 in (79.4 mm) brought the RAC rating down from 21 to 15.6 hp. For 1932 the bore was made a little slimmer yet, down to 3+7⁄64 in (79.0 mm), bringing the tax horsepower rating to 15.47.
My question for you is: do you have any additional info on these engines, such as output?
Secondly, and of more general importance, how were the tax horsepower rounded? Does 15.47 equal 15hp for the taxman and 15.6 equals 16hp? This would explain the re-engineering, whereas if they taxed fractional hp it seems completely pointless. Best, Mr.choppers | ✎ 21:19, 16 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Ah yes, the last time the Yanks and the Brits went protectionist. Didn't end so well.... Interesting stuff, though, about Plymouth taking trouble to change the engine cylinder diameters in order to penetrate the British market. I have spotted the occasional Plymouth / Chrylser in England from the 1930s at oldtimer fests, but very occasional. I've a feeling they assembled them in Canada for the UK market at one stage, because Canada benefitted from "imperial preference" tarriff benefits. Presumably that was one of the reasons the US automakers set up a sort of mini-Detroit across the bridge over the "Detroit River" at Windsor, Ontario
We do get LOTS of US old timers in England from the 1950s and 1960s, left behind by US squaddies stationed at the airbases where they'd moved in during the 1939-45 war, when they went back stateside. But not too many from the 1930s.
I do not have additional information on these engines, no. I will google it for my own curiosity and if I find anything I will share a link. But I suspect you already tried Mr.Google. Hang on .... here's G.N Georgano, the Complete Encyclopedia of Motor cars 1968 edition .... pages 452-453:
"Plymouth (US) 1928 to date ...
Plymouth adhered to four cylinders until 1933, when the PD-series 6-cylinder was listed at less than $600. 1934 de luxe models had independent front suspension, but this was dropped after a year and did not reappear for some time. The standard engine in the later 1930s had a capacity of 3.3 litres, rather smaller than that used in comparable Chevrolets and Fords: a small bore 2.8-lire vrsion was made for export up to 1939, but the name Plymouth was not usually found on cars sold in England, which were nominally [sic] Chrysler Kew and Wimbledon sixes..." With apologies for the typoes which are (probably) all my own work. There are lots of copies of Georgano around so probably second hand copies crop up on www.abe.com from time to time. I particularly liked the phrase "... was dropped after a year and did not reappear for some time" because it touches on my answer to the next question.
I don't have a source for this, but I am as sure as I can be that British hp values are rounded - probably down - to the nearest whole number. The Brits and the Germans have much in common, but when it comes to precision they are opposite. I remember when we were students we rented a boat on the river. One of us was a German girl, and when someone asked what time it was (the boat had to be back by six) she looked at her watch and solemnly told us it was twenty-one minutes to six (or whatever...). The Brits all laughed at the level of precision. The German could not understand why being accurate was funny. Now that I have lived in both England and Germany I still have the idea that in general conversation a German will give you the most precise answer he easily can provide, whereas the Brit will say "it's about X" or "a little less than Y". However .... when it comes to tax horsepower, I've a feeling that even the Germans used to round it (up). (Then again, I think in Germany they abolished car tax around 1934 in order to boost the auto industry: without car tax, no one really cares too much about tax horsepower.)
I have come across English cars where they used an incorrect tax horsepower as the name of a car, so you get a model called 15 hp when for tax purposes it really was only a 14 hp. One explanation is to define your competition. If your new model is competing against the Standard 8 and the Morris 8 and the Ford 8 you will (would have in the 1930s) called your new model the Choppers 8 even if its cylinder bore meant it was taxed as a 7 or a 9. I think, also, that sometimes a car simply got a name and the name stuck even after they change the engine size. But off the top of my head I can't think of an example for that.
Just the right length. The six seems to have been 2.6 liters in 1933, from 1934 until 1939 it was indeed a 2.8 liter thanks to a longer stroke. I'll see what else I can find. Mr.choppers | ✎ 22:26, 16 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
There has been an RfC here which needs close-by an uninvolved user. As you're uninvolved, I am requesting you for it's closure. Its non closure is resulting in an edit war at the BMW M3 page. U1quattroTALK03:11, 19 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I'm flattered by your request and I will certainly take a closer look at it. A lot of it harks back to discussions that have been rumbling on in the background for many years. Feels like for ever. If there were easy concusions accessible someone smarter and more patient than either of the two of us would probably have landed on them by now. Some interesting points have been made this time round and some good argumments have been put (along with the others). I find, at least at first blush, that I agree with a lot of them - including several that are mutually exclusive.
My own preference with wikipedia is to contribute content that (in my judgement) makes it better. Where I see people repeatedly adding content that (in my judgment) makes wikipedia screamingly worse, I cannot (always) resist the urge to say so. But I do not really enjoy the more political side of wikipedia. I have never closed one of these discussions in my life, and I think if I wanted to make a start down that route (which on balance I really don't) I'd start with something on which my own opinions were less conflicted. As in, something easier to judge.
Never exlude the possibility that I might change my mind, but on this one I think I am unlikely to. I think the discussion you have drawn to my attention might very well be left to run into the sand in its own good time: they often do. But if you have a strong opinion that it urgently needs closure today or, failing that, tomorrow, I would recommend that you ask someone less encumbered by sef doubt than I am. Success. Charles01 (talk) 09:39, 19 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. If the page is deleted, and you wish to retrieve the deleted material for future reference or improvement, then please contact the deleting administrator. Dr42 (talk) 11:21, 14 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Eugen Wiedmaier until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.
Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. Dr42 (talk) 11:46, 14 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I think this page obviously looks viable, but if you would please translate the rest of the article, the part that is commented out at the moment, it would look even more persuasive. Geschichte (talk) 14:44, 14 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Noted. I have, in fact, expanded it significantly (and may yet do more of the same) since it was nominated for speedy deletion by Dr42 within two hours of my starting it. But I am disinclined to take too much time with it while it is being actively trolled. There is, indeed, much more to be done! There is an argument for doing the whole thing in a sandbox, but that means no one else will have a chance to make improvements as one progresses the translation. The overwhelming majority of contribtions from other people when one starts a new translation or other entry are, of course, constructive ones. There is no obvious reason to want to discourage them. Regards Charles01 (talk) 14:52, 14 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Would it hurt to use the sandbox to draft the article prior to publication? If you're planning on expanding the article, the sandbox is the appropriate place. This is not an attempt at trolling at all, this was a bona fide attempt to make a good faith effort at judging what I thought was a final product. Regardless, I'll remove the tag since you are still working on the progress of the article. However, I think the sandbox is the more appropriate place for drafting articles. Dr42 (talk) 15:01, 14 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I guess that's what passes for an apology with you! As good as it gets, even. But you do not appear to have read what I just wrote. Let me try and make it really simple. Wikipedia is a collaborative project. I am more than happy for you to make improvements before I've finished the translation, which can easily take a whole day. Several days, even. Most people don't have a problem with this. I don't understand why you do. You are not a fellow who likes to explain what's on his mind. Your right. Of course it's a free country. On a good day. (And it depends which country.) Happy days Charles01 (talk) 15:09, 14 December 2019 (UTC)the[reply]
Mate, I have no idea what you're on about. There's nothing to apologize for. I removed the nomination and indicated that the sandbox might be the more appropriate place for drafting articles that are unfinished or otherwise unprepared for publication. Have at it, but if I see a non-notable individual that doesn't meet GNG I am going to nominate him/her for deletion. End of. Have a good day. Dr42 (talk) 15:14, 14 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Interesting thought which thanks for sharing. I certainly wouldn't trust them on international or domestic politics or politicians. But I think you have to accept that some "facts" are more contentious than others. And when improving sources, the place to start is with the contentious facts. The type of automatic transmission available for a Morris Marina is unlikely to be too contentious (though it's also likely to be easy to source from multiple sources if it becomes contentious). If you write that a particular car was a terrible car - even with a Morris Marina - I would contend that finding a halfway decent source for the opinion becomes more important than the simple assertion that it had four wheels or indeed a Borg Warner automatic transmission as an option extra. Where cars are concerned, there are far more motor magazines accessible online than there used to be. AutoExpress comes up with something usable for most cars as does Auto Motor und Sport. But of course, the Morris Marina was rather a long time ago, from the perspective of now. Still, no doubt judicious googling can take one quite a long way with some of this stuff. Ho hum Charles01 (talk) 17:47, 2 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Allow me to wish you a Happy New Year 2020, Charles!!! To wish you excellent health and happiness, happiness and happiness.
Thank you for all your kindness which accompanies me on a daily basis and gives me the courage to continue the long sorting of cars and other vehicles in the time chronology which is part of the history of the industry. I find this categorization all the more important as it allows us to identify changes and then it will allow us to cross them with the other automobile brands to better understand the history. Best regards, —— DePlusJean (talk) 07:02, 4 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]
You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.
Thank you for the work you put into Peter Minich! One minor point: I don't think we need to translate names of common institutions, at all, if they have a link and a translation is only a click away for those who really don't know, and once in the theatre's article instead of possibly all artists who performed there. Especially when such a translation is misleading: Volks refers to the common people, rather than popularity, for example. I'd drop them all, but you decide. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:43, 14 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Interesting thought triggers: thank you. I think it depends on the case in point. I am not keen on one-rule fits all solutions, though I know some of our wiki-comrades rather tend in that direction. In this particular case, I think you can argue it either way. Are we just writing for people who know Vienna - possibly quite well - already understand a certain amount of German and have themselves enjoyed a number of performances at the Volksoper? Or are we writing for the interested generalist fluent in Mandarin and competent in English but otherwise unfamiliar with European languages? Well, the obvious answer is "both". And all points in between. The word "popular" in "Popular Opera" means something in English that is both more ane less than the word "popular" in the context of hamburger chains or Toyota light trucks. "Volk" and "popular" are both words that carry a large amount of baggage. For a car nut, when I see "Volk" the first thing I think of is my father's old Beetle or, indeed, a generation later, my Volkswagen Passat in the 1990s. In England, with a choice from more than a thousand years of history, from which to choose, the bureaucrats in charge insist that half the school history curriculum is devoted to five of the twelve Nazi years. It makes them feel good about themselves. (The other half is devoted to the deeds of another - albeit remoter - man-monster about whom the responsible English bureaucrats know even less called Henry VIII.) So in England the word "Volk" makes the kids think of Hitler. Not just the kids. So does the word "People's". Dear Gerda, I had not thought through all this on a conscious level when I chose to translate "Volksoper" as "Popular Opera". But since you set me trying to understand why I translate it as I do, then that is why. I think. Still not persuaded after thinking through what I write for yourself? Then feel free to introduce your own improvements. That's how a lot of wikipedia works. (Though if you can wait another half day till I've finished muy own first pass at a translation, that will avoid the risk of edit conflicts which tend to confuse me where they occur... even though the result is often a simple elimination of typoes or other improvements.) And in your own case - doesn't apply to too many wikipedia contributors - where you introduce changes with which I disagree, I will unhesitatingly respect your opinions! Happy days. Charles01 (talk) 10:09, 14 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Please do not insert multiple spaces after the end of a sentence. A single space suffices. And look for spelling errors before submitting an edit. Thank you! jellysandwich0 16:25, 21 March 2020 (UTC)
You inserted a melodramatic as well as quite long message on my talk page. Mentioned were "Maybe they get a day job. Maybe they die. Maybe the two were not mutually exclusive.", "aggressiveness", "rudeness", "a breathtaking absence of empathy", "gratuitously rude", "work on your self-knowledge", "pissing off folks", "hectoring style of the approach and narratives", and "feelings of anger or resentment that I raise up from the surface layers of your inner your (sic) soul". Please reflect on this.
At Wikipedia a certain level of quality is expected in contributions, corrections are made when this is absent, and explanations of edits are made and expected.jellysandwich0 17:21, 21 March 2020 (UTC)
I had been about to provide a cogent reply to your earlier contribution (now) a couple of paras up. But from your latest contribution here I get the impression that you're not listening! Maybe I'll get to it later: maybe not.
Meanwhile I can't help wondering why you here indent your contribution like a geriatric with a type writer, therefore ending up with your contributions appearing in the courier font. It makes them stand out. Maybe that's what you want. But I don't think it makes them stand out in a good way. If I enjoyed telling other folks how to do stuff I would respectfully request you to avoid this disruptive and distracting piece of eccentricity. But actually, I don't think it matters. Much.
Charles who is the owner of the 1939 Vauxhall I type. I am trying to find him as my father and built the car from chassis up in the late 80s and I'd like to purchase it back. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.24.170.225 (talk) 19:03, 31 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I do not know which car you mean. Do you mean this one? Otherwise please tell me which one you mean by providing a fuller description or (which would be better still) a link.
I do not know who owns the car in this picture. I think, from the date and the background, that I must have photographed it at Woburn (somewhere between Bedford and Milton Keynes and just off the M1) in the parklands surrounding the stately home at an oldtimer show which, in those days, was an annual event at Woburn over the first bank holiday weekend in May.
From this website I just found that the car is still registered for road use in the UK. That means the owner's identity (or at least the identity of the "registered keeper") will be known to the car tax office in Swansea known affectionately as the DVLA. However, unless they think you're a policeman I don't think they're allowed to tell you. Since it looks well maintained and is older than most people still alive, it may well also belong to someone who is a member of a Vauxhall enthusiasts' club. You might check out the Vauxhall owners' Club. Even if they do not know the answer to your question about the ownership of whichever Vauxhall it is that interests you, they may very well be able to suggest someone else whom you should ask.
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On 22 April 2020, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Peter Minich, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that Peter Minich was a lead tenor for Viennese operettas at the Volksoper in the 1960s and 1970s? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Peter Minich. You are welcome to check how many page hits the article got while on the front page (here's how, Peter Minich), and it may be added to the statistics page if the total is over 5,000. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.
Well done. And thank you. I'd started a couple of lines suggesting that maybe you'd like to finish what you started, but when I went to save it I found that ... now you have. Perfect!
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Hi, a big favour. If You know and/or use the Supercars.net page and also think it is a reliable source for Wikipedia, please pop over to the Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard and show Your support by adding: *Reliable. I used this source many times on created articles and had no issues with correct facts as compared to other sources. It also has multiple authors that can be clearly seen on the mainpage and therefore is not a one-man operation. Thank You. YBSOne (talk) 20:02, 18 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Someone reverted this before I'd had a chance to read it. I think I may have been asleep in bed at the time. I have put it back here simply because I prefer to do my own thinking!
That said (written). Even the Daily Mail - which wiki-consensus generally evaluates as not dependable - can be a reliable source for something ... for instance if you want to include, for good wiki-reasons, a line on what was on the "editorial mind" of the Daily Mail at a given time about Hitler or Johnson. But for most purposes:: no, I do not share your evaluation of "Supercars.net". If you include it for a good reason, possibly to corroborate something already backed by another source, where Supercar.net has better pictures or uses more fathomable syntax, then do it. But I think one would urge a measure of thoughtfulness as to the individual case in point under in those circumstances.
I certainly do not feel positive enough about your source to place a ringing endorsement of it on some obscure wiki-noticeboard of which I don't think, till now, I was aware. But know that I thought about it!
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I just updated your page on Peter Nichols to include his third son. My father is one of Peters children from his first marriage.
I noticed that you mentioned my aunt Sarah by name, did you know her?
Thanks for the correction/addition in respect of the third child, Tim. And thanks for making wiki-contact.
No, I never knowingly met your aunt. As far as I (more or less) remember, I included Sarah's dates simply because she appears to have died (relatively young) and there seems to be a wiki-convention - especially on English language wiki - that you don't name the children of wiki-subjects if they are (still) alive. There are exceptions to that, most obviously where the "child" in question already has his / her own wiki entry.
Back when I was more itinerant (and before a generation of Rome-based rellies went and died and/or moved permanently to Umbria) I used to visit Rome sometimes: I "discovered" your grandfather through reading "Italia Italia". As far as I remember he wrote English very well (no qualification to determine how well he wrote in Italian) and wrote about things that interested me. So .... after about ten years of being surprised / disappointed that he did not have his own wiki-entry I got round to starting one. I still, for what it's worth, think he was one of those who made the world (1) better and (2) more interesting. Though since you knew him, you will no doubt have your own views on that. Congratulations, in any case, on your choice of grandparent....
Naturally if you can think of anything alse that should be added to the entry - and especially if you can include a source for it - please do it.
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I already have >1500 translation candidates sorted alphabetically in a set of pages in my wiki-sandbox. On the other hand, I am becoming more fussy about studying the available online (and on occasion offline) sources before even embarking on a new one, so I certainly don't think I have 1500 viable translation candidates listed there.
Also, I've been got at by folks who think that the number of biographical entries relating to female members of our tribe really ought to be >20%. I tend to agree, even. And having done potted biographies for a disproportionately large number of the female people on my list of red links, it becomes harder to find ones with both adequate entries in German (or French or Dutch or whatever) wikipedia and adequate accessible sources.
All of which is a slightly long winded way of (1) sorting out my own thoughts for my own benefit - so much more tempting and less trouble than actually attempting to add some wiki-content somewhere - and (2) repeating my thanks to you. A list of prize winners is indeed a good place to go for sniffing out more potted biography red links.
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The reason Typ932 bailed out of here is because he couldn't get his way on WP:AN3. He left messages on user pages full of hatred and personal attacks. Called the admins biased when they took action and acted like he owns this site. I think he deserves a break to cool off and think more rationally about what he has done. Thanks. U1quattroTALK14:16, 17 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I admit I've managed to avoid following it, but I did check out a bit of the history on his talk page when I noticed he'd apparently all but blanked the thing in a rage. Thanks for your complementary update. And hmmmm. I agree that "he deserves a break to cool off and think more rationally about what he has done" sounds reasonable, and it looks, through the filter of his outburst, as though he agrees.
Most of what this guy contributes is content. That seems to me a whole lot more constructive than dancing around on the notice-boards and talk pages. And most of what he contributes - at least when I notice it - expands and improves the entries in question. I don't know how you view these things - but as far as I know you, too, are principally a creator of content. That's how we build wikipedia. The thing has not been set up simply to become a substitute forum for office politics at the wrong end of a late night. Anyhow, it's on account of his bias in favour of content creation that I suggest we need to value Typ932's participation in the project, and it's why I think trying to drive him away would be, on balance, destructive of the project.
While I agree that Typ932 has contributed to his site over the years, but this does not give justification to his rather childish behaviour he has shown today. He does not own the content he adds on his site, per WP:OWN. According to him, users cannot tell him to stop but an admin can and he did. But still disruption from his end continued. I understand he might be upset about leaving but really, one should not be this hot headed that they continue the same thing even after they have been warned. U1quattroTALK15:09, 17 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Seen your message on his talkpage;
1. I have no issues here all is good and well so no I don't have a lot of issues as you put it!,
2. "But you should try not to let him pull your strings along with all the other stuff" - I don't believe I've pulled anyones strings ..... He chose to open old wounds not me, He chose to restore the same content that nearly got him blocked last year not me!,
I too contribute productively to the project (as seen here and generally keep away from noticeboards unless I really have to go there!, Really not knocking him but all of his edits so far this year have been nothing but reverts and edit wars and that isn't really something we should be clapping about!. I'm certainly no saint and have my fair share of ANI reports but you don't see me reverting everyone and getting into edit wars over things that really just don't need to be reverted. –Davey2010Talk23:45, 17 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I work for Turo a car sharing app/company. In compliance with WP:COI, I have proposed some changes to the page about my employer here. I’d like to update the infobox, add our latest funding round, and update some statistics on the page with more recent sources. I saw that you were interested in car-related topics and was wondering if you would be willing to take a look at the changes I suggested. Thanks in advance.Jroeyturo (talk) 20:02, 27 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Noted. I know nothing about the business sector in question, and not too much about the WP:COI guideline and the ways in which folks may read and interpret it. But I took a quick look at your proposed updates and I didn't spot anything that I would want to object to on COI grounds. I'll try and take a slightly longer look tomorrow. (Bed time here.) But as a first reaction, the entry already has a large number of different contributors, and your own proposed updates appear (1) carefully factual and (2) independently sourced. That "feels" correct.
I think that you may be recommended to enter a statement on the talk page covering your WP:COI concerns, but you have most likely already read up on that on the policy guideline page(s) in question.
Jroeyturo (talk) 20:34, 7 August 2020 (UTC) Thanks Charles and apologies for the delay on getting back to you. I believe best practice for corporate participants is to propose changes that are approved and implemented by independent editors like yourself. However, I agree these changes should be fairly straightforward. Thanks again. Jroeyturo (talk) 20:34, 7 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Grete Walter, you added links pointing to the disambiguation pages Wustrow and Trawler.
Hell, why me? Is it because I once wrote something positive about Solothurn? I already have more than 1,500 redlinks on my own "to do" list and that's just the ones I get round to writing down. And I'm not really very knowledgable about power tools. Ask my neighbour who is: he's a brilliant carpenter too. My wiki-starting point these days is usually a German language or (in this case at least) Italian language wiki entry. And then I google round the relevant words for a bit more beef as necessary and start a new entry. Or abandon the attempt for lack of accessible sources.
Anyhow, I agree that setting up a usable wiki-stub on Scintilla AG would be a positive move. A stub+ would be better. And I'll happily do a bit more investigatory googling, out of respect to you and your own many brilliant and well considered contributions to wikipedia over what feels like - and these days probably is - more years than I can count.
But I still come back to "Hell, why me?". These days I'm tending to focus on potted biographies that I find in wiki-de (or wiki-fr or wiki-nl or ... or.) Don't think I should be trusted wiki wiki-sv, but fortunately lots of folks in Sweden are happy to do perfectly good German or English, so an interesting Swedish wiki-topic will already also have an interesting wiki-en (or at least wiki-de) entry. Anyhow, I'll take a longer look, but don't hold your breath and feel free to get in first.
Ready for breakfast, now, but first I guess I should weigh myself. I'm having a routine medical consultation with "Nurse Kate" which thse days involves a random telephone call "some time this morning". (Well, we don't get out too much just now.) and after they tick off the box for "Still alive?" I think "what do you weigh on an empty(ish) stomach?" is fairly high up their list of fascinating questions.
Best of luck, I hope the scale agrees with you. I was thinking of you since Scintilla manufactured magnetos and lights and things for pre-war cars, I figured it was something you had tried to link to before me. Anyhow, I am picking my little one up from camp so I gots to go. Mr.choppers | ✎ 21:08, 5 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
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I have no idea what was on my mind in 2010. I have a certain amount of trouble figuring out what was on my mind today at breakfast. (I think maybe it involved fish.) But you are more than welcome to google around for more and better sources. Most wiki-entries need that. Though I think most wiki-contributors are more systematic about documenting sources in 2020 than we were in 2010. Which is good! Be well. Charles01 (talk) 08:54, 3 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Not sure how interested you are in old British trucks, but Bedford TA was created by a vandal and had very little useful content. Was there even a TA? This vandal does their best to add disinformation so I am suspicious. Best, Mr.choppers | ✎ 14:17, 21 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
There were certainly plenty of them around when I was small, but we simply called them "Bedford lorry" ("Beford Truck" in modern/American English, I guess). I think our local builder had one. It was only much more recently, when I started attending oldtimer shows, that I discovered it looked just like a Chevrolet equivalent, so presumably GM badge engineering. And it looks to have turned up in Germany as an Opel Blitz. I can see people have been round the houses with the wiki-entry over the past couple of months, but the way it had ended up when last I looked, it looks to me ok as a starting point aka wiki-stub. As with many British trucks from that (and every other period) there's a desperate shortage of usable sources. I only became aware it was called "Bedford TA" when I started on wikipedia. I think probably I tried to start an entry on it myself and then stopped, for lack of sufficiently plausible / usable sources. As for that name .... well, I guess they had to call it something. But I think that with the Vauxhall Victor FA they only started calling it that retrospectively - after they replaced it with the Vauxhall Victor FB - and I strongly suspect that may have been the case here, too. No, according to my next para I guessed wrong about that with the Bedford TA. Besides, I am convinced - you too, I suspect - there were Bedford TJs, TKs, TMs and TLs (not necessarily in that order), and they all have (rather brief in most cases) wiki entries. So TA is not implausible.
Hang on .... I just found a picture of a manual for a Bedford TA. If anyone was feeling very keen (no ... I don't trust ebay and I tend to get lost in the login protocols and I hate spending money) they might order the manual and use it to start expanding the wiki entry with non-contentious factual stuff. BUT I do think this constitutes persuasive evidence for someone somewhere having called it Bedford TA back in .... well, here it says that manual was printed in 1953.
Thanks, even the four blurry photos of that manual were useful and does confirm the name. As far as I can tell, there was no badge engineering; that is something a few trolls have been adding all over the place. The Blitz is somewhat smaller and doesn't look to share a single panel (notice the door profiles for instance). Until the seventies, I feel that GM just let their various subsidiaries develop the same kinds of products in duplicate, as long as they followed the current design language at HQ. Thus, Victors that looked like Chevys and Opels that looked like Buicks. Best, Mr.choppers | ✎ 17:36, 21 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Badge engineering is indeed a can of worms in this context, and not one that I'm willing to kick open at this precise moment! Best wishes Charles01 (talk) 18:21, 21 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
You deserve a slightly more thoughtful reply, but for now, thanks for getting in touch. An unexpected delight indeed. Maybe I'll reply at greater length tomorrow or next week. Ten years? Feels like one, but at my age one tends to experience time on a slightly uneven version of the logarithmic scale. It's not been a great year for photographing cars, but other pleasures are still available, including (other) aspects of wikipedia. Be well. Charles01 (talk) 19:58, 5 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Doug, the enthusiastic windmilling salesman from California, insists on calling it a "Honda City" but when I took the photograph I thought of it as a "Honda Jazz". Still do. Ach ... it says in another clearing in the wikipedia forest that in Europe "Opel owned the City name". NOW I understand.
Thanks again for touching base. Yes, we're still alive and more or less well and I'm still "doing wikipedia", though I've rather drifted away from the car articles, after doing most of the easy bits of the easier ones (from the point of view of the sources I have here at home). Otherwise, we've not been getting out much this year for the usual reasons, so I think I'm probably spending more time on wikipedia than last year. One of the kids is still living with us and keeping us on our toes, having finished his uni with a top degree in (of all things) Japanese. I guess that's what happens if you marry a linguist. Languages teaching here in England is dire. They don't even learn the grammar of their own language (as you can see from wikipedia). But uni level Japanese is mostly taught by people from Japan whose approach to languages teaching is at least in part derived from the way they learned it at home, so I think probably our Japanese speaking kids are more proficient in their "first foreign language" than if they only had languages degrees from a British uni in German, French or Russian. Not that I'm in any position to judge (especially the Japanese bit). It all started when our daughter got involved with a manga film club at school some years back....
And I'm down (on purpose) to 87 kg (from 117 kg in August 2019 - and a whole lot more longer ago) so have become insufferably boring on the subject of what not to eat. The downside is that in a household of (currently) three people, we all seem to be eating completely different meals. Though not without the occasional overlap!
On the subject of Japanese, that video on the NSX looks interesting. For some reason the speakers on my desk top computer haven't worked for at least ten years, but I've been bullied into learning how to use my Handy as a minicomputer, so I'll take it upstairs for my siesta (yup, old enough, now, to admit to trying to fit in a siesta with my coffee) and see if it runs to U-Tube videos. I've discovered already a website that plays you radio channels from all around, so do already use my "telephone" for listening to German, Swiss (and more rarely, other language) radio stations for a change of perspective from the music channels and, for that matter, on the news. Still depressing, whatever the language/perspective. And it still feels odd that the last thing one thinks of that involves the telephone is ... telephoning someone.
A particular frisson of "smug-git" pleasure comes from seeing that the video includes, roughly 5 minutes from the beginning, a half second glimpse of picture I took of a Honda Jazz in 1980 - and uploaded to wikpedia thirty years later - turning up in Salesman Doug's video on the NSX. It was taken during a particularly rainy week in Luzern. (And Switzerland was good at producing rainy weeks back then: even though I think they were already complaining that higher up in the mountains the lakes feeding the hydro plants were most years three quarters empty by the end of summer.) Is that why you thought to get in touch after long silence? No ... unlikely that you would have noticed. Incidently yes, I agree Doug has a lot of interesting stuff about the NSX to share, too. Though I still wish his arm and hand gestures weren't quite so intrusive-repetitive. Sorry if that'a too personal to mention. I'm sure he's a lovely fellow in real life, and probably conventionally restrained with his gesturing when they take the camera away.
Looks like I never got any notice that the page was further changed or maybe I just forgot the Wikipedia style of checking pages actively. A little awkward move of mine to reply with such a big delay but thank you for the detailed answer - makes me feel sentimental. Congratulations to your son's degree - I've been quite a failure in Japanese - four years of private training in the country itself and just barely touched it enough to somehow get around.
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wow, I didn't realize you were quite the senior editor when I nominated Anna Feldhusen for DYK and started messing around with the article's wikilink formatting. Feel free to adjust it again if I changed some arrangement that you preferred!
However, I would actually recommend you to forego the common piped interlanguage links in favour of interlanguage links. While that might sounds weird, I believe that the latter (Template) variant has two major benefits to it:
a) It does not confuse the reader by potentially leading him to different language Wikipedia without sufficient warning.
b) It does highlight articles that are missing on the English Wikipedia by creating redlinks for them. This can make it easier for future editors to identify which articles could be created.
c) If/Once the English language article has been created, it will automatically link to the English article and no longer point to the foreign-language one. Otherwise this would have to be checked manually!
Thanks for the greetings. I have no quasi-religious objections to the "common" piped links, and when they were first introduced I became fairly dutiful about using them for quite several months. But I do find the pre-existing approach less trouble. That is particularly the case where faced with something like "Johann Mueller (Politiker)" which obviouly, in English wiki, would need a different name. Either "Johann Mueller (Politician)" (if there's already a "Johann Mueller") or else plain "Johann Mueller" would be the usual anglophone solution. Same objection (but more fiddly) where other languages use accents where the English language doesn't: it's a particular problem with Spanish - which I don't really understand too well at the best of times - in which I find the accents particularly (1) inscrutible and (2) more frequently turning up in names of people and places than in French or German. I think it was when trying to struggle with these cases, and trying (and in most cases failing) to (1) figure our and (2) remember for more than thirty seconds, how the "common" (I prefer "new-fangled") piped links handle the challenges involved, that I started reverting to the system I first learned.
We all have wiki-strengths and wiki-weaknesses. If you are fortunate enough to have mastered the ticklish interface between the way computer geeks think and the way the rest of us think, then you are a rare talent, to be both cultivated and commended. I'm happy for you and for us because of it. But my starting point, when dealing with "systems analysts" back when I had a grown-up job in an office, was that the computer is there to serve the human. Not vice-versa. It's up to the computer to adapt itself to the way my brain works and not vice-versa. Well, over the years there have been compromises on both "sides", and I appreciate that you young guys don't necessarily see the dichotomy between computer-think and human-think in quite those stark terms. The dedicated constantly evolving wikipedian software does, in fairness, try and accommodate itself to those of us who don't think like computers and in many ways it does a fantastic job with that. BUT it would be a tragedy if we got to the point where the only people who could be arsed - and had the necessary skills - to contribute to wikipedia were people who have learned to think like a computer. We'd have very few contributors. And after five years even the ones who thought they were capable of thinking like computers would find they were "out of the loop", because the computers would have learned to apply a new language while they were having breakfast. (Now there's an idea....) Me? I still haven't gotten over the trauma of having to switch from Lotus to Excel. (Yes, the switch from MS-DOS to Apple Mac was less traumatic: Apple understood back then that it was the computer's job to work for people and not vice-versa. Maybe they still do: I can't and won't afford their prices these days so I have no way of knowing.) All of which is shamelessly digressive, but it (1) helps me clarify my thoughts for my own benefit and (2) gives a bit of background, which might - or might not - be of interest to you, on why I react as I do to your friendly promptings.
Reverting to my intitial reaction, if you take time to try and (1) understand and (2) address the concerns in my first para. And if (3) you can come up with more persuasive arguments in support of your recommendation, I might be open to conversion. Meanwhile:
"a) It does not confuse the reader by potentially leading him to different language Wikipedia without sufficient warning." ... looks a bit of an overstatement. But if a reader gets diverted to something in an alternative language without "sufficient(?!)" warning, it might provide just enough of a mental jolt to prompt him or her to start a stub article in the language s/he prefers. Sometimes works for me. And I think that's a good thing. At least it alerts the reader to awareness that not everything that's worth knowing has to have the sheer human (and / or Godly) decency to be knowable in English. Given the monoculture than prevails in most of England and much of the anglosphere further afield, I think that can be a good thing too.
"b) It does highlight articles that are missing on the English Wikipedia by creating redlinks for them. This can make it easier for future editors to identify which articles could be created." It's a fair argument. It's a powerful argument. But, following an overlapping argument, you might simply set up an old fashioned red link, save yourself mental space and time, and still (on a good day) attract the necessary attention from folks with a specific interest in certain classes of missing wiki-entry. I'm thinking "Women in Red" here, but no doubt there are other equally deserving specialist groups looking for red links they can turn to blue. It's just those other groups are a tad less shrill. With unreserved appropriate apologies if that thought came across to you as sexist and/or otherwise offensive.
"c) If/Once the English language article has been created, it will automatically link to the English article and no longer point to the foreign-language one. Otherwise this would have to be checked manually!" Indeed, I think this is the best - at least the purest - of your three arguments. I can't surface an immediate counter-argument and shouldn't wish to. I think, probably, it's why folks invented the "common" piped links. Is it also a powerful argument? Well, it certainly goes in what you would, in putting your own case, see as the right direction.
"d) wow, I didn't realize you were quite the senior editor when..." Wow indeed. And it's perfectly true that I'm older than I used to be. You too?
Thank you for your thought triggers. Makes a change, for both of us, from adding content. And you raise a serious andn interesting set of issues here.
@Charles01:: Thank you for such a detailed response ^^
Indeed it helps me to understand were you are coming from. I'll reply in slightly more brevity to your bullet points:
a) I fully agree about the monolingual Anglosphere. I'm not a native to it, so to contribute here I had to already learn to broaden my horizon (more or less obligatory, however, in this modern world). I'm actually trying to learn a bit French right now, although without much practice it's not progressing much (I've even dipped into Arabic a bit which is... too complicated). I'm probably thinking not-your-average-reader here, someone who would be easily confused. However, such a person would very likely not be reading the articles you are focusing on, so your point still stands.
b) Fair point. I'm probably thinking mostly about people like us here, who occasionally wander between the German and English Wikipedia - I've a few articles in my sandbox that have German versions. But, to be fair, I've created these article not because I found some redlink, but because they existed on the German Wikipedia and I found them there. So again, it would merely be a slight booster for something that might happen anyway or irregardless of a redlink.
c) Yep, that's probably also the strongest argument I would believe. However, a counter-argument might be that if the article names do not match (e.g. "Art Colony Worpswede" instead of "Künstlerkolonie Worpswede"), then the automation would fail (you mentioned this problem in your initial paragraph). So in the end, it's still best for a human to check related articles and fix wikilinks in there.
d) Heh, I'm not even sure I've worded that correctly (see a), non-native here): I just meant that you have more experience with Wikipedia than I do, which would mean you might have good reasons to do as you did. Reasons you kinda explained in your post above. Maybe "veteran editor" would be more appropriate? In any case, the remark was probably not needed; I just genuinely felt like that at the moment and wrote it.
In conclusion, I can mostly understand your point of view. And frankly, your way of doing things is still far superior to just not linking at all, and imo also to creating only redlinks. My post was merely meant as a suggestion, in case you might not have been aware of it (like the even more useful Template:Rp, I feel the {{ill}} template is hidden away too much). So I'd say rather keep putting out new articles than giving this too much thought :)
Thoughtful - and thought generating - reactions much appreciated. And sofortig! At least I got time to get my second coffee first! I have no further useful thought to share, alas. Except thanks again. Best wishes Charles01 (talk) 09:52, 8 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Saw your pic of Austin A40 Farina Mk I in a field in Essex
I have a picture of my dad's, in a field/event just like this and the number plate matches. Can you confirm that the letters/numbers you erased are M, 8, 9 ? Just trying to confirm that the one on Wiki is my dad's car.
Sadly my indexing from 2009 isn't so good that I can easily locate the earlier version of the image. I think I have replaced my desktop since then, too, which wold add an additional layer of challenge to finding the original "unexpurgated" image on (if I was doing stuff right) a backup disc somewhere. It is - as you no doubt spotted - one of the earlier Farina A40s, so manufactured - and, other things being equal, first registered - between 1958 and 1961. The "field in Essex" would have been being used for an oldtimer / classic car show, most likey just outside Brentwood, Essex, which I remember tramping round one time or more when I was using that camera. However, I also went to the odd oldtimer show at Battlesbridge (somewhere between Chelmsford and Southend) and in another field called then, I think, "Barleylands", just outside Billericay. So if you think it likely that your dad's car started out in life between 1958 and 1961, and that he took his car to a classic car show in ny of those places in July or more likely August 2008, then I think the probability that this is the car you think it is is "beyond reasonable doubt - as in "yes".
On 23 January 2021, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Anna Feldhusen, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that Anna Feldhusen was for a long time the only female German artist to acquire a business license? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Anna Feldhusen. You are welcome to check how many pageviews the nominated article or articles got while on the front page (here's how, Anna Feldhusen), and if they received a combined total of at least 416.7 views per hour (ie, 5,000 views in 12 hours or 10,000 in 24), the hook may be added to the statistics page. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.
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The Reply tool is available at most other Wikipedias.
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As of January 2021, more than 3,500 editors have used the Reply tool to post about 70,000 comments.
There is preliminary data from the Arabic, Czech, and Hungarian Wikipedia on the Reply tool. Junior Contributors who use the Reply tool are more likely to publish the comments that they start writing than those who use full-page wikitext editing.[3]
The Editing and Parsing teams have significantly reduced the number of edits that affect other parts of the page. About 0.3% of edits did this during the last month.[4] Some of the remaining changes are automatic corrections for Special:LintErrors.
A large A/B test will start soon.[5] This is part of the process to offer the Reply tool to everyone. During this test, half of all editors at 24 Wikipedias (not including the English Wikipedia) will have the Reply tool automatically enabled, and half will not. Editors at those Wikipeedias can still turn it on or off for their own accounts in Special:Preferences.
The new tool for starting new discussions (new sections) will join the Discussion tools in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures at the end of January. You can try the tool for yourself.[6] You can leave feedback in this thread or on the talk page.
During Talk pages consultation 2019, editors said that it should be easier to know about new activity in conversations they are interested in. The Notifications project is just beginning. What would help you become aware of new comments? What's working with the current system? Which pages at your wiki should the team look at? Please post your advice at mw:Talk:Talk pages project/Notifications.
Thank you, Gerda. I hope that 2021 will deliver plenty of the good stuff for you. too, and for those you love. And ... maybe a little less of the other stuff would be helpful.
I don't think I know where Ehrenbach is, but that's a beautful and intriguing picture. At some stage my mother went through a phase of boiling up nettles and eating the result as a kind of slimey green gruel, because someone told her it gave health benefits. It may have been in the 60s. I don't think it actually did her any harm.... And there is a kind of cheese with specks of "Brandnetel" through it that they sell in the Dutch cheese shops. Not unpleasant: it has a subtly musty aftertaste, so you don't mistake it for some of the other similarly exotic hard cheese options.
Please do not insert multiple spaces after the end of a sentence. A single space suffices. And look for spelling errors before submitting an edit. Thank you! Jellysandwich0 (talk) 18:10, 17 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
When newcomers had the Reply tool and tried to post on a talk page, they were more successful at posting a comment. (Source)
Earlier this year, the Editing team ran a large study of the Reply Tool. The main goal was to find out whether the Reply Tool helped newer editors communicate on wiki. The second goal was to see whether the comments that newer editors made using the tool needed to be reverted more frequently than comments newer editors made with the existing wikitext page editor.
The key results were:
Newer editors who had automatic ("default on") access to the Reply tool were more likely to post a comment on a talk page.
The comments that newer editors made with the Reply Tool were also less likely to be reverted than the comments that newer editors made with page editing.
These results give the Editing team confidence that the tool is helpful.
Looking ahead
The team is planning to make the Reply tool available to everyone as an opt-out preference in the coming months. This has already happened at the Arabic, Czech, and Hungarian Wikipedias.
You can turn on "Discussion Tools" in Beta Features now. After you get the Reply tool, you can change your preferences at any time in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing-discussion.
I know it's been a minute and I am hip-deep in researching/writing women's nationality, but I keep running into this dude John Higginson [fr] and found it astonishing that he doesn't have his own page in en.wp nor is he included on the page Nickel mining in New Caledonia since this and this and this all seem to indicate to me that he was the dominant figure in the development of the industry. I was wondering if you could work him in to your translating queue. If not, or if you don't find him interesting, not to worry. Hope all is well with you. SusunW (talk) 16:36, 23 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Good to touch base. Thanks for the prod.
I agree John Higginson [fr] looks interesting and industrial pioneers who made our world what it is - like it or lump it - are desperately underrepresented on wiki-en when compared to movie stars and the numberless icons of whichever sport it is you fancy. I've added him to "my" list. However, there are more than 2,000 on it already..... Well, one wishes to live for ever, of course, and never to get fed up with wikipedia along the way - at least parts of one do - but.... and so .... I know SusunW likes us to think she can't handle the French language, but if anyone (else) reading this wants to get in first, please go for it.
(As I mentioned before, I select from my ever growing list using a pseudo-random process based on an Excel random fraction function. Then I cheat to ensure the gender balance isn't too mysogenistic and I haven't got too many subjects that will send me to sleep or for which I can find no sufficient sources. So not necessarily a "queue". Which means simply, for better and worse, that IF no one else gets in first, the fact that I already have >2,000 listed when I add John Higginson doesn't necessarily mean I'll hold off revisiting his francophone entry till I've first done the other 2,000. Then again...)
Yes thanks, we're more or less well, subject to the odd creak and crackle correlating with advancing years. England is pretty alarming these days, but I guess that - for instance - Mexico is probably just as alarming, if differently. I do hope you and your man are working through these things ok or better.
"Women's nationality" could be a(nother) bottomless theme.
Thanks for the informative update. I appreciate you and your language skills and hope someone picks up Higginson, if you don't get to him. (Were he a woman, his internationalism — England, Ireland, Australia, New Caledonia, France, Vanuatu — would make me put him on my list in spite of the French language obstacle.) We're doing well, it helps that it is sunny year round and we have a huge garden/patio to putter in, so all the covid quarantining/avoidance did not bother us overmuch. And yes, women's nationality is daunting. Took some strong convincing to get me to go down the rabbit hole. I've been working on it since December and have managed to work my way through the legal part in most of the Americas and Oceania, but that still leaves me with Europe, Asia, and Africa to do. Then there is the whole activism movement to gain back their stolen nationality which I've barely started. So much to do, so little time ... SusunW (talk) 18:27, 23 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
It would be a wise advice to not jump to conclusion over things like you did with this edit summary. First thing that blue car taken by me wasn't added by me, if I recalled correctly the others on there were added by different users over the years. Since I been busy with real life and not been as active here, I wasn't aware that Nim made both a sudden comeback and mental breakdown. I just read up what was the hassle between him and Davey2010 as of writing on your talkpage. I only reverted the edit of the blocked IP since it clear they were a disruptive user known for cross-wiki spamming, it wasn't anything to do with maintaining images taken by me on the article. If I knew about the Nim situation earlier, I would've left it out of respect since it clear he having a hard time at the moment. Hope this clarification helps. --Vauxford (talk) 15:15, 15 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I have been following it. I'm not sure I have so much to add, though my cautious adjustment in 2019 to which you include a link in your para directly above does (still) make sense to me. I do have a sense that with too many contributors on the automobile articles we are dealing primarily with competing psychopathies. Logic and reason far too often take a back seat. Or end up in the boot/trunk. But of course we all have psychopathies of our own. The trick is - should be - to try and keep them to ourselves. And if we "move forwards", as in recent years we did, to allowing the automobiles-section to become a psychopath playground, we none of us can claim that we come to the thing with completely clean hands. (Though I would say that you and I - and a depressingly small proportion of others - do have usefully cleaner hands than most.) Most of the constructive contributors who were driven away (or maybe simply died old age or switched away from Wikipedia) during the destructions of 2018/2019 have stayed away and - possibly more surprisingly / depressingly - not been significantly replaced. It is soul destroying and the few who remain are to be commended for loyalty and fortitude, You and Stephen the Australian Toyota enthusiast among them. But yes, the damage done to the automobiles section is largely unaddressed: most of the affected pages remain something of a dead zone and subject to intensified edit warring. I'm in no hurry to jump back in, I'm afraid. "My bad", no doubt.
But the mantra that Wikipedia exists - should exist, at least - for its readers, way ahead of its contributors, remains important at least to me. And it is far too frequently overlooked by too many wiki-comrades. The project should not be seen in the first instance or even the second instance as an opportunity for the personally gratifying pissing contests and atavistic culture wars into which it too often descends. Nor, of course, as a therapeutic device for folks evidently keen to share with the reast of us that they and/or people for whom they feel quasi-parental sympathy are "on something(s)" that really could not (say I) be mixed with contributing constructively to Wikipedia.
Or .... maybe we just need to accept the gospel according to Vauxford and leave them to it: "The way how people edit and conventions on automobile articles has changed" ....not, methinks, in a good way! Which probably makes me sound about 110. Guilty. At least, of having lived long enough to think about it. And of course, quality and trustworthiness in Wikipedia was always going to be at risk of becoming a victim of the wider cultural trends of the age. Always will be.
I completely understand and share much of your feelings. All I want is for this to be a useful depository of information, but alas, some people only come here to delete everything they see, some to apply some absolutist reading of an editing guideline, while some are just desperate to add their own photos or whatever. I find myself using mainly the Italian and German Wikipedias as the editors there seem to have understood what it takes to make a useful encyclopedia, rather than being strictly engaging in winning arguments. Mr.choppers | ✎ 16:07, 2 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
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Hello Charles, I would like to use a part of one of your photo’s in the artwork of my CD cover, is that okay with you? (the blue Peugeot J7 van) According to wikipedia I can use the images here, as long as I mention the source. So I would like to add your name in the credits, but what name should I mention?
I hope to hear from you soon! Since I’m planning on releasing my CD in September 2021. (by the way it's not very commercial, I'm a freelance musician and not a famous artist ;-))
Li Chickpea (talk) 10:17, 20 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
You give very little information. Presumably you mean one of these two? But which? Where will the CD be issued and where will it be sold? Will it be sold anywhere here in Europe? Would I like the music? I am interested and I wish you well. But on so little information I can only answer in very general terms. You should adhere to the conditions set out in the standard wikipedia licensing agreement which accompanies the image at the pages linked through the images shown here (on the right of this paragraph, at least with my screen set-up): I'm sure you will. One of the pictures is photographed in a museum in France. There might be additional copyright claims that the museum might wish to invoke if you will use the image of the silver-grey van for commercial purposes. I am not a copyright lawyer and you should obtain your own advice on that for the country / countries involved. Or ... maybe easier to stick with the blue van? Depends what you are trying to communicate with the CD cover, of course. Where you credit me as photographer, I am "Wikipedia contributor: Charles01" or "Wikipedia user: Charles01".
Also, thank you for asking. People sometimes don't. Your courtesy is very much appreciated. And of course ... I'm flattered!
Hello Charles, thank you so much for your fast reply! I created an account here today just to ask you this question about the photo ;-) I am an independent musician and music teacher from The Netherlands, I’ll be releasing an EP with 5 originals (style: singersongwriter/americana-ish). The theme of the songs for this release, turned out to be about memories; the cover would be an art photo from a little girl (that a friend made) and another layer with a part of the blue van (a part of the side, a headlight, the front and side windows…). I looked for this particular type of van because we used to have that one when I was a child, in the seventies, my parents rebuild it into a campervan. In another colour though, but I loved this blue one when I saw it, the colour is a perfect fit with my website as well (although it will be edited a little bit). I would be very happy to mention you in the credits, and also put a link on my website to your page if you’d appreciate that. I’d love to send you a copy of the EP when it’s ready as well, but then we would have to exchange our personal information ;-) (maybe I can put a link to my website here, and you can contact me through that?) Hope to hear from you again, cheers! Li Chickpea (talk) 16:01, 20 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Noted. Thank you. Yes I think the angle for the blue van image at Schaffen-Diest is "about right", and I would be interested to see how it will get integrated into the artwork.
I would welcome a link to your website, or if easier (and if it works) please use the "Email this user" link at the top left of this page to send me a link to it that way. Either will work for me, but yes please, I would be interested to receive a copy of the EP. Back to campervans ... my schoonzuster is currently co-owner of a "motorhome" in NL (though I cannot remember if it the badge on the front is from a Peugeot or from a Fiat). I was allowed to visit it a couple of years ago when it was being converted: long job. Like yours (was), it - the conversion is a one-off! These days, of course, they don't like to let us off the island, so we've not visited since 2019. Blijf gezond Charles01 (talk) 16:30, 20 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Hello Charles, I can email you from here?! That's great, I had not seen that option yet. So I'll try that first, and if it doesn't work I'll put a link here in this section when it's ready okay? (and reveal my identity here, but hey: 'all for art's sake' ;-))
I hope you'll be able to visit your family in NL again soon... And yes I remember that the rebuilding and refurnishing was a lot of work for my folks. But they were very skilful, and we've seen a good part of France with that van.
Thanks again!!! :-) Li Chickpea (talk) 18:25, 20 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Please refrain from making unconstructive edits to Wikipedia, as you did at PageName. Your edits appear to constitute vandalism and have been reverted. If you would like to experiment, please use your sandbox. Repeated vandalism may result in the loss of editing privileges. Thank you. Please do not insert multiple spaces after the end of a sentence. A single space suffices. I have already discussed this with you on 2021 May 17. Jellysandwich0 (talk) 15:43, 20 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
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On 19 September 2021, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Maurus Gerner-Beuerle, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that the Lutheran theologian Maurus Gerner-Beuerle wrote an autobiographical work about tales and pranks from his childhood? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Maurus Gerner-Beuerle. You are welcome to check how many pageviews the nominated article or articles got while on the front page (here's how, Maurus Gerner-Beuerle), and if they received a combined total of at least 416.7 views per hour (i.e., 5,000 views in 12 hours or 10,000 in 24), the hook may be added to the statistics page. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.
I too say "Alas" to learn of the death of a baronet of Kittybrewster. I shall edit his Familypedia pages accordingly. Was he a friend of yours?
I enjoyed reading your user boxes. Is "This user drinks relatively infrequently. they are probably the better for it." an occurrence of the singular "they" (which could be eliminated very easily by replacing ". they are" by " and is")? I imagine you and I could be good pals if we were to meet; lots of things in common, including a decade and a half on Wikipedia though with a great disparity of contribution numbers. My late lamented mother-in-law had a dark green Morris "Traveller" and we were lucky to inherit it. The one on Coronation Street has lasted longer.
He was. Thanks for updating the genealogy page(s) as indicated. I am being persuaded - not leastly by wiki comrades - towards a softening of my formerly stated stance on the "they" thing these days, I guess! Failing to "get it right" in the context can sometimes feel a little bit like getting someone's name wrong, which I try to avoid for obvious reasons.
As for Morris Minors, the one in the picture was still taxed for road use till 2013 [7], but since then ... not. At some stage it looks as though someone fitted a new and larger engine and also - unless completely suicidal - replaced the anaemic drum brakes with discs. The brakes on the Morris Minors as delivered were the stuff of nightmares, especially after a hot day in the mountains with the hydraulic fluid evaporating during downhill runs. Not really a car designed for mountains. Still, one learned not to sit on the tail of the car in front, which is probably a good thing to have learned. They are cars that people with basic knowledge, spanners and scredrivers, and good mechanical hands - which rules me out - can keep going more or less for ever, though the propensity of the chasis to rust away means that serious welding skills also come in handy every few years. There's been a shortage of skilled welders here in England (and, as far as I recall, in Australia - no idea about NZ: sorry) for as long as I can remember, but I suspect that in NZ there are more folks willing to take a diy approach to learning and applying said skills. And I sense, from the pictures one sees and the things folks say/write, that in NZ cars don't corrode so readily as here in foggy old England. (Still, the fog doesn't cartch in your throat as much as it did - and still does - where the particulates were/are bigger. And the rain is less acidic when it lands on bare metal than it used to be.) There was a sort of middling green with a hint of grey that was a standard colour on Morris Minors for many years, though if it was really a rich dark green on your mother in law's car, then I guess it might have been specially resprayed. Unless there was an assembly operation in NZ spraying the panels in a different set of colours. I seem to recall that may have been the situation in Sri Lanka back when we were being taught to call it Ceylon. Sounds like your mother in law's was a much loved car. In Germany green is the colour of hope. In England they used to think green was unlucky; though I haven't heard anyone say that recently. The first cars for whch I was able to choose the colours were green, but then they started charging extra - at least on new cars - for everything except basic white or basic red or basic blue (but never more than one or at most two of them). Nasty trick. These days in Europe, and especially here in England, cars are mostly black or grey since about ten years. British spirit for the twenty-first century?
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Although I did at one stage work in the car parts sector, I knew very little about Alfred Teves beyond his name, which I guess is part of why I enjoyed working on the wiki-entry. As virtually always with wikipedia, I depended almost entirely on what I could find in sources. And since I don't have the patience to use the University Library - even to renew my ticket every few years these days - I end up depending on what I can find online, In the case of AT, I seem to remember (and at my age I don't remember much that happened after about 1975) there was some interesting stuff online, but I was still left feeling that there must be soooo much more that isn't online.
Very many thanks for your further work on the Nathan Sally Stern article. It looks, at least at first glance, as though you found some useful sources. I've added him to my list of potential translation candidates, most of which start out from my own "red links". However, the list has more than 2,000 entries on it, including more than 300 "S"s. I tend to select which I will do using random numbers and an Excel spreadsheet, but then I sometimes cheat in order to increase the proportion of women (still woefully low!) and avoid the ones which, on closer inspection, don't have enough accessible sources.
So .... I don't necessarily have >2,000 viable translation candidates on my personaly witing list. Even so, at my rate, these days, of approx 10 per month I cannot promise top get round to Nathan Sally Stern any time soon. Or even, necessarily, ever. In other words, if you - or someone else reading this - wants to get in first, please do not hold back on my account. Meantime, whoever ends up starting it, if you come across any more useful online sources for NSS, I shall not complain if you add the url lonks at the end of this message. The again, if you add them to the German entry, anyopne starting a translation is likely to have come across them easily already
Thanks again for making contact and for your wiki-contributions.
Frankfurt I remember from a three week exchange visit to Langen in the 1970s, when I stayed with a lovely family. I don't know that I learned too much German, but I did get as far as Darmstadt (by bike) and Frankfurt (by train). Sadly I refused the offer to accopany my kind exchange partner to join in with her gymnastics evening: I hope I wasn't rude over the it. I've been back to Frankfurt and the area a few times since then, but that was usually work related. My memories of the city's Palmengarten and the Tiegarten and the Kinos and the record shops tend to date back to the 1970s! Friendly people.
I know nothing about badminton, but as far as I can tell it looks like a competently written wiki article which has already been improved (in most cases) by a number of well informed contributors. Success Charles01 (talk) 09:51, 17 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
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This pic is a placeholder for the traditional pic (see further up, a year ago) which has been modified. I hope to get it restored. This pic is of the same stone, but not as good as the other. I am well, - see my talk anytime you want to know what I'm doing, - opera yesterday. How about you. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:25, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I'm more or less fine, though I'm needing to watch what I eat more carefully than I used to. I see a picture of the Frankurt Opera on your talk page. The last time I attended a performance there it was (I think) in 1973 and the Opera was Zauberfloete. We were quite high up on one side as one tends to be in opera houses. Kind people with whom I was spending three weeks in a place called Langen (by the road towards Darmstadt) to try and learn German. Wonder what happened to them. As always in West Germany once people identified you as English, it was very hard to find anyone willing to talk to me in any language or dialect except a kind of English. No doubt I helped, very marginally, with de-americanizing their kids' already impressively fluent - at least in the case of the girls - English (which seemed to be what folks in the ehemelige American Besatzungszone were wanting to do back then)! Still memorable (the Mozart), as it was my only visit to the Frankfurt Opera and the only "live" performance I ever attended of Zauberfloete. Very brilliant. Very shrill. My wife's really the opera person in this house, though she's definitely more a partisan for Puccini than for Wagner. Still, I guess we can all love Strauss! When you go to the opera is it as a singer or as an audience person? Or, for that matter, as a scholarly critic? On with Monday ..... Best wishes Charles01 (talk) 09:43, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you, made me smile and laugh! I go as audience to opera, but to churches sometimes as choir singer, - much reduced by the pandemic. For details, follow the link above a performance, or simply watch User:Gerda Arendt/Images 2022 for this year. Zauberflöte was also among my early experiences, I loved Papageno, - was 15 I think. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 10:09, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, I'm Ipigott. I wanted to let you know that I saw the page you reviewed, Dorothee Hess-Maier, and have marked it as unreviewed. If you have any questions, please ask them on my talk page. Thank you.
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I have no idea what you are talking (writing) about; but if you think I need to do something about it, please let me know what. Be well. Charles01 (talk) 11:20, 10 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
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Hi! Thanks for working to improve Cipriano Efisio Oppo – it certainly needs it! However, a word of caution: you may not copy-paste content from Treccani or any other non-free source into Wikipedia, even temporarily or as hidden text or both – to do so is copyright violation, plain and simple. A more difficult area is material translated directly from such sources; that may be considered a derivative work, and so is also not acceptable under our copyright policy. Could I ask you to go through your edits there and remove any remaining copying from Treccani or any other source, and then either remove or completely rewrite any material that's directly translated from those sources? Thank you! By the way, what's the accent on Oppo for? None of the sources uses it other than the Enciclopedie online, which routinely indicates accentuation in that way; it isn't part of his name. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 08:50, 19 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Short of making stuff up - not a good idea under the circumstances - you - we - are left to paraphrase what we find in the sources. On a good day, and where anything looks halfway contentious, you need to get more than one source, each one differently worded: and blend them seamlessly. Not always possible to find enough disparate sources, of course. There can be no question of copy 'n paste except, possibly, in the case of a few direct quotes for illustrative purposes, clearly presented as such. Paraphrasing is what I am doing here, I think. But if you think differently, please identify the text(s) that you are objecting to rather than coming along with these bizarrely generalised assertions.
The accent on Oppo is included in some sources and not in others. It is indeed something that may need to be removed when there are more sources from which to infer a "vote". Regards Charles01 (talk) 09:13, 19 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm, I'd hoped to resolve this with minimum drama (alternatives are to revert to an earlier version of the page, or blank it and list it at WP:CP for investigation/review). As far as copy-paste is concerned:
this edit (which you made after my message above) included text copied verbatim from here, starting "Come ricorda Mario Corsi ..." and ending "... del Caffè Aragno»."
here you copy-pasted the preceding paragraph from the same page
here the short paragraph before that
here part of the preceding paragraph, starting "... nella primavera del 1912 esordì ..."
here you copy-pasted text beginning "Cipriano manifesta presto ..." from this source
this edit includes a short passage copied from this blog.
Leaving aside the question of possible close following in translations (which I don't have time to look at now), that is not allowable here. Please do not again copy-paste content from non-free external sources. Thanks, Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 10:32, 19 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
There's more than a little scope for lawyerly interpretation on most of this stuff, and on a brief review I think you're own intepretations are demonstrably incorrect here. But I'll happily look at your examples more carefully later. Charles01 (talk) 10:44, 19 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
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You have no idea how much your "country bumpkin" solved a language discussion that has been going on on 3 different pages. I truly appreciate you skills! SusunW (talk) 17:14, 13 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
And thanks for sharing your reaction. Most kind. And thereby charcteristic. I had indeed come across that "language discussion" while not quite randomly reviewing my far too fat to handle "watch list"! Be well Charles01 (talk) 18:21, 13 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Simple translation is not always adequate especially when it comes to idioms and cultural references. Since I had no clue the film title was related to a well-known children's folksong, translation was nigh on to impossible. The meaning became obvious once that link was made, but still the best equivalent for "Burlebübele" wasn't apparent until your skillful interpretation. I do appreciate you and your skills so much. SusunW (talk) 18:29, 13 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you much, Gerda. Memories fade, but if I've done something useful with Cosima Wagner, that's good. I'm not a huge admirer, but anyone who founds a religion must have a certain something going for them. And the travelogue elements on your own talk page are a regular nostalgia trip for those of us less mobile than we once were. Stay well. Charles01 (talk) 15:21, 1 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you even more for what you did for Maria Frisé. She should go to the Main page, please check once more. I'll do so tomorrow and then nominate. I am no fan of Cosima Wagner but think she'd deserve an infobox, like Clara Schumann and Imogen Holst. I'll give Frisé one, hopefully with less opposition ;) - I also belong to those less mobile than I once was, btw. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:06, 1 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Back to Frisé: some of the early life reads perhaps a bit like story-telling, but no wonder for an author of autobiographical books. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:27, 1 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I would not presume to "mark my own homework", but you have moved me to add a couple of commas to "Maria Frisé". (And of course she deserves an "info box": I must have been in a hurry to move on for some reason. Mea culpa.) It is indeed a well-nigh universal issue that when dealing with widely-read writers, and especially with writers whose output includes significant quantities of autobiographical material, one is in danger of quoting the subject excessively, if only indirectly. For English speakers, Winston Churchill comes across as a particularly egregious example of that. As a journalist he had a very considerable talent, and of course he loved to write about himself: many have been seduced by that silkenly readable rose-tinted prose over the generations. Fortunately (well, fortunately in a lot of instances) he did other stuff too. In most cases it becomes possible to source wiki entries through the filter of other people who have critically evaluated a wiki-subject's autobiographical writing, and to take a balance of the eulogistic, the hostile and the neutral. But we are always prisoners of the available sources, of course. For folks wishing to make stuff up, other websites are available, they tell me. Best wishes. Charles01 (talk) 07:11, 2 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Usually in England we like to apologise all the time, whether we mean it or not. But with you it's always "thank you" even if, as here, I've no idea why you thank me. Anyway, thank you too, Gerda. As for the sunflowers, the last pre-Covid holidayish trip I did was with our youngest, back in Sep 2019 along the Rhine tourist route from Cologne to Ruedesheim and back. Good times. And it looks like there's still a beautiful world out there, though somehow I need someone else to capture the beauty of the countryside through the lens. My bad? Be well. Charles01 (talk) 15:11, 13 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
You are right about "thank you", that's key for me. I thought by placing it below Frisé, it was clear that it was for having created that article, and going along making changes. Danket, danket dem Herrn is a fitting tune ;) - Look at the church where I heard VOCES8, near the Main. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 14:07, 30 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
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Thank you, Moops. You too: I wish you all the things you should reasonably wish for yourself and for those you love for 2023. And of course, provided we make it that far, beyond! Be well Charles01 (talk) 09:11, 2 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I wonder what happens if I click on this new fangled "reply" box. Ah, yes.... I guess that counts as progress.
Most kind, Gerda. Very many thanks for the anniversary reminder. In the Nertherlands they tend to have a birthday calendar in the downstairs bathroom so that when you look up from your place on the throne you are reminded of the month's birthdays. You clearly have something similar, albeit presumably computer related. I guess that counts as progress too. Reassuring when the world - at least where humanity and politicians in the angloshpere are concerned - are resolutely charging backwards.
Thank you, and I agree about progress and what's not. Click on the link and you'll find my list, too long to be studied on the throne ;) - It's my morning exercise to find out what to be thankful for, and it's always a pleasure to find a name I not only remember but remember to have seen with recent pleasant contribs. Stay well, watch my stories if interested. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:41, 21 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
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Thank you much. Greetings warmly reciprocated by me; if not by the state of the weather outside my office window. (Essex weather looking distinctly Welsh this morning.)
Great that you're still contributing to wikipedia with a wise and constructive albeit semi-retired spirit. I'd expected to return to the fray within a couple of weeks of the last time I quit, but somehow other stuff has intervened. Still, never say never... Well, hardly (n)ever.
The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/European route E95 until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.
Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article until the discussion has finished.
I have no recollection of what was on my mind when I started this one, but presumably the German language version provided a good jumping off point and I (and others) do indeed seem to have found some nice sources along the way.
And if I read you correctly, I agree that it is indeed easier to derive an informative and readable biographical essay in respect of someone one never met where the subject is interested in the world and his/her place in it. And has generously shared some of the resulting insights with others.
Stay well, Gerda. Wikipedia needs human beings. I am sure the bots and tick-box junkies have their place, but for some of the ones that currently adorn Wikipedia, their place is surely in the bin. Tiens, I sound like a grumpy old fart. As if. Charles01 (talk) 10:18, 13 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you, and I try to stay well. - The image, taken on a cemetery last year after the funeral of a distant but dear family member, commemorates today, with thanks for their achievements, four subjects mentioned on the Main page and Vami_IV, a friend here. Listen to music by Tchaikovsky (an article where one of the four is pictured), sung by today's subject (whose performance on stage I enjoyed two days ago). --Gerda Arendt (talk) 15:50, 20 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Serendipitously, that does indeed take one aka me back to a (very) amateur performance in the Cambridge Corn Exchange somewhere in the mid 1970s. Hmmmm.... And thanks for the memory jogger... I think Charles01 (talk) 15:58, 29 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
there's nothing like the love that goes into amateur performances! - in memory of the birthday of a friend who showed me art such as this, and we went to Oper Frankfurt together --Gerda Arendt (talk) 12:59, 7 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for the article, still on the Main page! I like to see Appalachian Spring there as well (not by me, just interested and reviewed), and I also made it my story. How do you like the statue (look up places)? - I was undecided so show three versions ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 16:48, 6 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Ah yes. I never investigated what or who places articles on the main page and then removes them. Nor the associated whys and whens. But I can see why I picked Hans Joachim Meyer for a translation or makeover. He deserves a biographical entry in English wiki, be he alive or dead. Alas, the images to which you linked me did not show up / download on / to my screen. Some combination of isp and vpn and the generally scerotic nature of infrastructure here in England, I guess. But I think you must be referencing Eibingen Abbey, which looks interesting and which alas I never visited even though for a number of years we lived an hour or so upriver via the A61. Eibingen looks interesting, and with all that painted stone on the inside, I fancy there is likely to be a useful stoney echo for the singers. But never having been inside the place I hesitate to opine further. On the subject of "do you know?" in that area, did you ever visit the music box museum in Ruedesheim? Having gotten to know it a bit in the 1980s I went back a few years ago with our youngest, and it's still magical and unusual and, as they (used to) says in the guides Michelin, worth a detour. Though alas the originator, Siegfried W, went and died as folks do. I think it was still "in the family". Ruedesheim is usually overrun with Touring coaches. Best approached, vertigo permitting, by cable car from the car park up the river bank by the Denkmal to (as far as I remember, but I might be confusing it with Edenkoben) Einheit; unless you enjoy crawling round downtown Rued looking for a parking slot from where you can actually open the car door. I also have a terrible confession which I have long wondered about sharing with you. I never set up / linked up the speaker cables on my computer. The self-serving explanation would be that if I could get music out of the thing I'd never get anything done. Otherwise put it down to some combination of laziness and techphobia. Also the computer is not linked to YouTube because you have to agree to a whole lot of tedious rubric before google will let you use the thing, and I ws never sure it was worth it. So alas - another alas - when you send me links to music that I know, then I remember it and you trigger a frisson of joy in my heart. Occasionally, otherwise, you send me on a mission of begging to listen to something on the computer of a family member. But essentially, I never got past thinking of the computer as a word processor wired up via the web to others similar. Looks like a dinosaur, honks like a dinosaur .... Probably On with Sunday. Stay well, Gerda. Charles01 (talk) 08:38, 7 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you, Charles, and confession accepted, please just ignore "listen" links, - I will not remember to delete them when copying. I invite Graham87 to read your account of the museum he reserved to hear together in May. The acoustic is good for singers in the Abbey, - the nuns sing vespers every day. Here's a link to the statue pic 2, File:Hildegard von Bingen by Karlheinz Oswald, Eibingen, 2.jpg, Hildegard of Bingen created by Karlheinz Oswald after a ballet dancer model. Hildegard's Physica is on the Main page today, and Marian Anderson as my top story (by NBC, 1939), top of my talk, and below three people with raised arms, - and the place is the cherry blossom in Frauenstein. If you can't listen to the NBC broadcast of 1939 which is so telling, perhaps there's some other way, - such as a neighbour. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 14:48, 9 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]