You removed date links from Maurice Couve de Murville citing wp:context. I see from this talk page that you have been asked before not to do this. I am asking you again: please do not do this! Scolaire 08:35, 10 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Could we at least agree that there is no need to link 'February'? Lightmouse 11:43, 10 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I also find this a bit annoying (in my case at reinforced concrete). In the absence of any policy prohibiting single-year links, can I ask you to hold fire until it has been discussed a bit more at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)? -- Kvetner 11:22, 11 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

My intention is to improve articles, certainly not to annoy you. Thanks for taking it there. I look forward to seeing the debate there. Lightmouse 13:02, 11 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Indisciminate mass year-delinking is forbidden, just like other stylistic-warring campaigns (e.g. BC/AD vs BCE/CE or "American" spelling versus "British" spelling). Please cease and desist, in the lack of a consensus in your favour. I don't mean to sound unpleasant, but if you persist you are liable to be blocked -- even permanently.
-- Lonewolf BC 21:44, 12 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This is your last warning about your indiscriminate mass de-linking of year-alone dates.
I am sorry to see that you have returned to this activity. Stop these edits now, and desist from them them unless you managed to get consensus to make them. The language at Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers) remains the same, and you do not even appear in its talk-page history between 12 June and now. It therefore seems that you have not even tried to get consensus for these edits, but instead have just waited a month (or perhaps less, depending on how long ago you resumed) and then begun them again, hoping that it would be overlooked. Don't expect to be warned about this again.
-- Lonewolf BC 22:45, 12 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

My intention is to improve articles. You will notice that before I edited them, the articles had stupid links to days of the week like Tuesday or to months like June. Alternatively, there were other problems with the articles that I fixed.

You have not mentioned an article. Pick one and we can debate it. A good debating question would be:

'Has the article been improved?'

Lightmouse 16:20, 13 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not questioning your intentions, nor your de-linking of months and of days-of-the-week. Those are not the issue, and you've been given no reasonable cause to suppose that I think they are. Nor it this an issue of any one particular article. The issue is your indiscriminate de-linking of years across many articles, and the standing is that you need consensus before you may make such edits. Mixing them with other kinds of edits does not affect this; if anything, it makes them more troublesome. Whether year-delinking improves articles or not is precisely the crucial question upon whose answer a consensus would need to be achieved. You are welcome to try; Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers) is the place to do it. I frankly think that you would be wasting your time, given that the matter has been argued to death in the past, without being resolved beyond that there is no consensus (and some quite strong opinion in both directions).
For your own sake, and the sake of the peace of Wikipedia, please do not continue on the path which Bobblewik trod to his woe -- the path of stubbornly carrying on with these edits regardless of opposition and lack of consensus. No one needs the aggravation. -- Lonewolf BC 17:27, 13 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Your de-linking of dates has been brought up on WP:ANI. Please desist until a consensus has been formed for such de-linking. Failure to do so will result in your being blocked without further warning. --Richard 01:50, 14 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Proposal

Following on from the discussion of your formatting edits at WP:ANI, I would like to offer to help coach you towards making more productive edits. I too see certain problems with your edits, though they are undoubtedly well-intentioned.

If you are interested in working with me to make your edits less problematic to some in the community, please reply here or in my talk and I will discuss further with you my proposals. Best wishes. --John 22:59, 14 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I am not sure what you mean.

You imply that my edits are not productive and I think they are, otherwise I would not be making them. If you want to discuss a specific page edit, feel free to name the page. If you want to discuss general style, then the talk page of the styleguide may be a better place than here. A debate about style will be of interest to many. Regards Lightmouse 00:21, 15 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Certainly, I take your point. Unfortunately as I observed at the AN/I board, previous central discussions have not proved fruitful in achieving consensus. The complaint about you, as far as I can understand it, centres around the fact that most of your edits are minor ones, and that such minor edits changing one style preference to another are deprecated here. I would be happy to work with you in more detail to improve your edits, which have caused at least two people to ask you to stop. I would not have offered to help you if I did not believe you were adding value to the project; I am offering to show you how to add even more. Best wishes, --John 00:33, 15 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I appreciate your positive approach. Compare main page articles with 'what links here' for date-bit articles such as June. The former have few date-bits linked, the latter have many. There are many weird formats out there such as [2nd] or [June 2|2 June]. Several hours ago, I voluntarily and temporarily halted fixing year-only links. I do not believe that there is ban on such edits and I hope that greater clarity for implementation of main page style can be provided in the styleguide.

Actually, I am sure that a systematic approach would be better to address this. Leaving it up to individual editors to edit article-by-article does not seem right for such a widespread problem. I am sure that I am not the only one that notices. Regards Lightmouse 01:17, 15 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Well, here are my suggestions. First one is you could try and find a way to generate a community-wide consensus that (for example) delinking standalone years is worthwhile. Unfortunately don't think there is a stylistic consensus to be had on this issue at present. Don't let me stop you trying though.

Secondly, you could take a little more time and correct other formatting and stylistic errors as you go. Capitals in headings, links in headings, date formatting, reference formatting, unit formatting, and of course spelling errors (I just use the spell checker in Mozilla Firefox; but be careful about WP:ENGVAR when doing this.) Amazing prevalence of POV qualifiers like "actually", "interestingly", and my real bugbear "ironically". I would say that people are less likely to question what you are doing if it is accompanied with real and visible improvements of the article rather than just a stylistic change.

It's also maybe worth bearing in mind that in the unlikely event we ever do get a consensus to delink all years, we have bots to do stuff like that.

In summary: Make real improvements to articles; even formatting and especially spelling corrections are valued, but multiple edits which only or predominantly delink (say) years are highly frowned upon. I frown upon it too even though I agree with your stylistic preference, and here is why; for those like me with very many articles on our watchlist, it is time to check each edit isn't vandalism. Making many edits which only make small formatting corrections is ok, but I would rather see you making fewer edits and correcting more of what you work with.

Finally, always leave a good edit summary, like "copyedit, spelling; delink date fragments" so that people may scan your contributions and get an idea what you're doing. You're doing good work and please don't be put off by the suspicion you have encountered; it's just that this sort of issue has been the focus of needless conflict in the past, which is no fault of yours. Best wishes, and I really hope these ideas are some help, --John 06:18, 15 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

First off, my apologies if my communication to you yesterday were brusque and confrontational. I was reacting to your exchanges with (and apparent blowing off of) LonewolfBC. I was under time pressure so I took the easy way out of threatening to block you rather than seeking to engage you as John has.

Let me make one more argument why you should abandon this campaign to de-link years. What you have to consider is that years are linked in many articles and they are linked because many editors like them to be linked.

Now, you may argue that this is irrelevant because those editors are wrong and you are improving the articles. However, even if it is true that you are right and that, where you de-link years, you are improving the articles, this doesn't mean it is useful or effective for you to spend your time de-linking.

You see, unless you can convince the editors who are watching those articles that you are right to de-link the years, all you are doing is aggravating them. If they dislike your de-linking, all they have to do is revert you and, by the way, all your other edits get reverted at the same time. What have you accomplished? Very little except to aggravate those other editors.

This is why it is incumbent for you to edit within the framework of a consensus rather than outside it. The collaborative nature of Wikipedia is such that your contributions will be edited mercilessly whether or not they add value to Wikipedia. It is better to operate inside consensus than to be right. Sounds strange but it's true.

If you don't think you can form a community-wide consensus for de-linking years, then try forming such consensuses on an article-by-article basis. This may seem tedious but it's likely to be more effective than getting your edits reverted. Try leaving a note on the Talk Page of each article to the effect of "I plan to de-link years in this article if nobody objects within the next 24-48 hours." This at least creates the possibility that someone who objects will notice and let you know so that you don't have to waste your time.

Hope this helps.

--Richard 09:04, 15 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

You've changed your name and you've changed all of the kbps on the Digital Audio Broadcasting page to kbit/s. I asked you not to do this on your talk page when you were called Editore99, but you didn't see fit to reply, and now you've done it again, so I will repeat what I said then:

"I've just changed your changes on the DAB page back to 'kbps' but with a link to the kbps page. The reason I did it was because if you see the units for 1000 or 1 million bits per second you invariably see kbps or Mbps used - e.g. on an advert for a broadband package or in the Properties in a media player - and you never see kbit/s. I would therefore argue that it is more useful for a layman to see kbps rather than kbit/s, because they may have come across this term before, whereas they won't have seen kbit/s used.

In the literature, e.g. for DSP, audio coding, digital communications etc, kbps and Mbps are very widely used as well - probably about 50/50 in my experience - so whether someone uses kbit/s or kbps is down to personal preference rather than being right or wrong, IMO. If you do change kbps to kbit/s, could you at least put it in a link to the kbps page?"

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 82.3.224.201 (talk • contribs) 10:56, 13 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Part of the problem with the bps/Bps/BPS formats is that they are ambiguous as to bits and bytes. The 'b' and 'B' are supposed to disambiguate but editors are not reliable enough. You can see: 'KBPS', 'kb' and 'b/s'. It is also inconsistent with the kilobit format i.e. 'kbit'.

With kbit and kbyte, there is one unambiguous form. It can be used with or without division by seconds i.e. kbit becomes kbit/s. I presume that is why it dominates Wikipedia pages for 'kilobit' and 'kilobit per second'.

I don't believe that anyone is confused by the format 'kbit' or 'kbit/s'. So I do not see what value a link would add. Furthermore, a link to 'kb' and 'kbps' gets redirected. Take a look.

Since this is of general interest, perhaps it should be discussed on the wp:mosnum talk page? Lightmouse 16:20, 13 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, Lightmouse and thank you for your contributions on articles related to The Apprentice UK. I'd like to invite you to become a part of WikiProject The Apprentice UK, a WikiProject aiming to improve coverage of The Apprentice UK and related articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to help out and participate, please come over and visit us here for more information. Thanks! Dalejenkins 13:36, 14 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]