Glad you now have an account, welcome aboard. Do check out the tutorial if you haven't already; don't hesitate to ask me (or pretty much anyone) if you have questions. Do you know about watchlists? Probably the biggest advantage to you of having an account is to "watch" pages, which means you can easily get a report on what articles you care about have changes. And, again, welcome! -- Jmabel 16:45, Oct 7, 2004 (UTC)

Could you please go back to the articles you've edited and take the link to http://quickfacts.census.gov OUT of the text? External links belong in the External Links section, not inline in the article's text. Welcome to Wikipedia. RickK 06:42, Oct 18, 2004 (UTC)

I like the NPOV edits you made by rewording the text on the Texas page in the demographic section. I've been thinking about doing it myself but have never gotten around to it; in part out of being preoccupied with other subjects and in part out of being from East Texas and generally being resigned to the state being represented in that manner. (Thanks for pointing out that the state is actually part of the South and actually has Black people in it.) Thanks for the wonderful edit and welcome to wikipedia!. - JCarriker Talk 07:52, Oct 18, 2004 (UTC)

The picture you added to Islamophobia is of a Muslim extremist, and therefore doesn't belong in the article. The caption "Muslim extremists often exacerbate anti-Muslim sentiments, such as this recent Muslim demonstration in Berlin" is, well, let's say POV. Also, please reserve the "minor edit" checkbox for very small edits like fixing a typo or a link. Ashibaka tlk 20:11, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Why did you distort my edit re comparison of Islamophobia with racism? If military conquest alone would destroy Islam, why wasn't Islam in Algeria destroyed by French colonial rule? Even the Spanish Inquisition failed to produce sincere conversions from Muslims (though they did with Jews) - the Spanish monarchy was ultimately forced to expel or exterminate the 'Moriscos'. GCarty 09:25, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Got your reply, but how can I be an Islamist when I'm not even Muslim?! Anyway, in the first paragraph I was mainly concerned with toning down language. I also mentioned how the Crusades were a reaction to the initial Islamic conquests. It only makes sense to call my change of "attacks against Westerners" to "attacks against Israelis and Westerners" biased if you are equate the defence of Israel with the defence of the West itself.

About the paragraph I added suggesting that Islam could be destroyed only by genocide (and which you distorted in one of your own edits) - can you name any countries where de-Islamization by forced conversion (as opposed to ethnic cleansing or genocide) has been successful? I know of none... GCarty 11:52, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Hello Bert! Is there left some Norwegian languaged papers in the USA? Or organisations with Norwegian languaged netpage? If a Swedish-American father and a Norwegian-American mother get a child, is the child then both Swedish and Norwegian or how is it counted? Jakro64 14:11, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Arlington is not smaller than Bristol County, RI according to this link which gives Bristol's size as 24.68 square miles or this link where the size is rounded to 24.7 square miles. It is also not hard to find reliable sites which confirm the size of Kalawao at around 13 square miles. If you look carefully at the links you gave for each of these places showing much larger numbers, you will see that the larger areas you mention include offshore water, so that the actual land areas are about the numbers I give above. These smaller numbers are consistent with the sizes given in printed World Almanacs. Is landsize not what we would normally compare? The sites you give where people have said that Arlington is the smallest county in the country do not seem to be so careful. It is possible to find all sorts of misinformation. For example, Snapple in its "real" facts (#146) claims that New York County, NY is the smallest in the country. As an Arlingtonian I love to see superlatives about the county getting their due mention, but it seems misleading to make a claim that Arlington is the smallest in area (though not in land size) without further explanation. Simply saying that Arlington is one of the smallest counties in the country is accurate without going into a long, confusing explanation.

Servais

Calling Arlington "the smallest self-governing county in the United States" is, to my mind, an improvement over just calling it "the smallest". However, I think the rationale should be explained in a footnote, so that anyone reading it can understand exactly what is meant. This is especially true with respect to Bristol County, RI, which appears to be self governing and in many standard sources is shown having a smaller area than Arlington. The justification for not counting Kalawao is pretty straight forward, if it is not self governing. I could go with the above characterization for Arlington, though I wonder about the wisdom of not counting land under federal jurisdiction. Might there be other counties with very large amounts of land in National Parks, Forests, Reserves, or Indian Reservations which when deducted would leave an even smaller area than Arlington, VA has? I am not so much concerned that people will doubt the veracity of a verifiable, qualified claim, but whether they will wonder why anyone is so concerned to try to claim a unique status.

Servais 00:52, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Bsveen wrote: «What saddens me is that this convsersation we are having might be totally meaningless in, e.g., 100 years. By that time there are projected to be non-European majorities in many of the countries we are discussing, isn't that correct (Sweden especially, I hear)? So what will it mean to 'be a Norwegian' in the year 2100 AD? Due to immigration, will the concept of "being Norwegian" be totally meaningless by that time, beyond an empty expression of one's citizenship? What's even more troubling for me is that many in Scandinavia (and across Europe) keep quiet about these things because they don't want people to think they are racists. But in my view, there is nothing racist about wishing for the survival of your people and your nation.»

I am very glad you take up this topic, because it seems it is politically uncorrect to touch this at all. Since I am also a genealogist this is of great interest to me. White Norwegians have probably only lived in Norway (of today) for a few thousand years, but during all centuries there have been migrations and ethnic mixings. Therefore there are blond, redhaired, darkhaired, blue-eyed, green-eyed and brown-eyed Norwegians. Still there are several Sami enclaves in South and Middle Norway which tells that white Norwegians have taken over these territories from the Samis who populated the area earlier. If you look to Finland the Ethnic Finns who are a Nordic people speaking a Ugric-Finnic language (as the Samis), took over the present Finland, but assimilated with the "Samis" and therefore took over their language and to some extent also their culture. (Finns are somehow different from neighbouring Swedes and Norwegians concerning culture and behaviour.) Because ethnic Norwegian women wish to get less children the number of ethnic Norwegians will decrease dramatically. Until 2100 not so much will change, but already about 30% of Oslo's population are inhabitated by ethnic non-Europeans. (Most ethnic non-Europeans are living in Oslo.) Therefore in order to let the Norwegian culture survive the Norwegian authorities are now stressing very much to teach immigrants Norwegian language and culture. The same is happening in Denmark and Germany (where islami services are suggested to be kept in German language). I think it was a Norwegian and Pakistani tragedy in the early 1970s to invite to Norway guestworkers from remote places of the world as Pakistan. But done is done. Now we need to repair the damages. In the coming years we will get many more immigrants from Russia, the Baltic countries and Poland. This will maybe help to keep the country European. Many Norwegians oppose also the EU membership because it forces us to give up many achievments as strict quality controls, regulations which is resulting in the highest living standard in the world. Norwegians are following laws very strictly, most other Europeans are not. The result is that in Norway we are obeying most EU laws much more than people in e.g. Germany and Austria. The Norwegian immigration authorities are now much more strictly concerning immigrations from non-European countries, and I think this will help to reduce crime and ethnic conflicts as we can see them in multi-ethnic countries like the USA.

But there are bigger problems in our society as tobacco smoking and fatness. In Norway it is now prohibited to smoke in any restaurant or other public building and soon maybe Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola will be banned. I hear that 60% of all Americans are suffering from fatness.

Maybe all this can help us to understand why the Etruscan civilization disappeared..? Jakro64 10:12, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

You’re right that nearly 2/3rds of American adults are overweight, and it is a big concern for the American people. One reason why Americans are so fat these days is because of the way that American cities are layed out. Many people live far away from their place of work, from restaurants, from stores, from movie theaters, etc. so they must drive their car, or ride the subway, or ride the bus everywhere. This results in the people getting much, much less exercise than they normally would if they walked place to place. I am lucky to live in an area where I can walk almost anywhere I need to go, so I get much more ‘normal’ exercise in my everyday routine than others do, plus I do not waste so much money on gasoline and other automobile expenses, which is certainly a bonus.

.

From my own experiences living in a diverse area here in the diverse USA, I would offer this advice to the people of Europe who are currently embarking upon the great experiments of multi-racialism and multi-culturalism:

It is impossible for a truly ‘multicultural’ society to work. Multiculturalism means the splintering of society into camps avoidant (or openly hostile) to one another, increased crime, and other problems. And even more dangerous are multiculturalism's long-term potential problems -- multiculturalism will quite probably mean Balkanization at best, Rwanda at worst.

Although multi-cultural societies will inherently have serious problems, it is possible for multi-racial societies to work, as long as the different races or ethnic groups in the society are not divided from each other by culture. For this reason, it is definitely very important that Norway pursue its program of assimilation that you described. Although a safer program would be to stop immigration, re-patriate immigrants, and get Norwegian women to have more children to solve any potential labor problems and make immigration unnecessary. (I suppose it is easy to say this, but difficult--maybe impossible--to actually do it; e.g. how could any government "bribe women to have more children"? Is that possible? Probably not).

I wish more people in Europe would realize these things, realize the perils of multi-culturalism.

You mentioned that the current situation in the West resembles what happened to the Etruscan people. I am not so familiar with what happened to the Etruscan civilization, I thought that they fell simply because they were absorbed/conquered by the stronger Romans? I suppose there must be more to it than that though; could you explain or elaborate on what you meant by this:

“Maybe all this can help us to understand why the Etruscan civilization disappeared..?” This is something that is very interesting to me. I have also heard people compare the fall of Rome to what is currently happening to the West, you may have heard this as well.

--B Sveen, December 5 2004

Hey, thanks for your endorsement in the admin 'election campaign' I'm running these days! (An extremely inexpensive 'campaign', I might add :-) -- totally self financed.) --Wernher 17:43, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I presume you've "won" by now (it was never a contest since everyone approved)... so good luck ! -BSveen 03:27, Dec 9, 2004 (UTC)

Bert, thanks for the addition of baptism to the Luther article, but it is not accurate for these reasons:

• Luther's sacramental theology was still very catholic at this time. At first he had not worked out the mechanics of how God gives us the righteousness of Christ. This he does not fully get right until 1520 and the three great treatises, specifically the Babylonan Captivity

• Luther saw baptism as only one means of grace -- the Lord's Supper and the hearing of God's Word are also ways God gives His grace, instills and strengthens faith and gives the forgiveness of sins, life and salvation. The way the article now reads, it suggests only baptism does these things.

I'd like to suggest we revert the language and insert a little paragraph on the 1520 treatises. Is this OK with you? Bob --CTSWyneken 03:53, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Actually, I didn't write that, an anonymous user did. So I would agree by all means to the revert. - BSveen 04:00, Dec 10, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks! I'll do that! --CTSWyneken 14:10, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Hi, I've started a drive to get users to multi-license all of their contributions that they've made to either (1) all U.S. state, county, and city articles or (2) all articles, using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-by-sa) v1.0 and v2.0 Licenses or into the public domain if they prefer. The CC-by-sa license is a true free documentation license that is similar to Wikipedia's license, the GFDL, but it allows other projects, such as WikiTravel, to use our articles. Since you are among the top 2000 Wikipedians by edits, I was wondering if you would be willing to multi-license all of your contributions or at minimum those on the geographic articles. Over 90% of people asked have agreed. For More Information:

• Multi-Licensing FAQ - Lots of questions answered
• Multi-Licensing Guide
• Free the Rambot Articles Project

To allow us to track those users who muli-license their contributions, many users copy and paste the "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" template into their user page, but there are other options at Template messages/User namespace. The following examples could also copied and pasted into your user page:

Option 1

I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:

{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}

OR

Option 2

I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions to any [[U.S. state]], county, or city article as described below:

{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}

Or if you wanted to place your work into the public domain, you could replace "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" with "{{MultiLicensePD}}". If you only prefer using the GFDL, I would like to know that too. Please let me know what you think at my talk page. It's important to know either way so no one keeps asking. -- Ram-Man (| talk)

I noticed your edits on the demographics section of the Utah article. Can you explain why you made some of the changes you did? If I'm not mistaken, the original numbers were from the census, and it looks like you've changed some numbers in the section on religious denominations. For example, originally it showed Episcopalian 3%, Baptist 2%, and other Christian denominations 2%; you changed it to 12% Protestant. You also changed Non-religious from 17% to 9% and added a 1% Other Religions category. What is your source for these numbers and this recategorization? By the way, your disambiguation of the ethnic category links was nice—thanks for that bit of work. Alanyst 04:07, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Actually, it is against US law for the government to ask the people about their religion, so the Census Bureau does not collect information on religion. I was the one who added that religious data several weeks ago (it is from surveys that universities and such have conducted), and now I have compiled even better religious data for the states, so I am replacing all the state edits I made with the better, more straightforward numbers. --BSveen 04:11, Dec 12, 2004 (UTC)

Good to know, and I stand corrected on my assumption about the numbers being from the census. That said, can you add a reference in the article to the source of your data? I think it would be helpful to know in case anyone asserts at some future time that the numbers are incorrect. (That wouldn't be me; I have no reason to disbelieve your figures.) Thanks! Alanyst 04:17, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

The data is compiled from Adherents.com. The original source is Kosmin, B. & S. Lachman. One Nation Under God: Religion in Contemporary American Society; Harmony Books: New York; pg. 88-93. Religious Composition of State Populations. Self-identification of religious loyalty, phone survey w/ 113,000 people; by City U. of New York.

On Adherents.com's state pages (for example, New York's page), there is a long list of figures & sources for the religious makeup of the states. I copied down all the entries for all the states which quoted 'Kosmin' as the source. This Kosmin data is the best and most comprehensive around.

I added the source to the Utah article, let me know what you think. (the source is in external links section) - BSveen 04:30, Dec 12, 2004 (UTC)

Looks great! Nice work. Alanyst 05:03, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

One question about your changes to the Utah demographics. (Now that I look back over most of them, I see my mistakes; thanks for correcting them!) I think that we should include * 4.2% Other races, so that people have an idea about the racial makeup of Utah. Some people might interpret it as being even more minimally diverse than it is, and assume that those mentioned races are the only races living in Utah! Other races simply clarifies the fact that there are more unmentioned races living here. --Iamunknown 15:46, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)

'Other races' usually just means non-white Hispanics, and since a 'Hispanic' category is already included, I thought that using the Other races figure would be redundant and confusing. But if you think it should be there, you can re-add it if you feel so inclined (you may already have, I'm not sure); I have no strong objections to re-adding it. --BSveen 02:36, Dec 13, 2004 (UTC)

Right. I see where you're coming from, so I won't change it now. (I was planning on it, but wanted to talk to you for I reverted your changes.) Thanks! --Iamunknown 09:12, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I've nominated the Norman Borlaug article as the next Collaboration of the Week, as the article is pretty short considering that he saved a billion lives. Please vote for it at: Wikipedia:Collaboration_of_the_Week#Norman_Borlaug --brian0918™ 23:48, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)

You probably won't care much about my saying this, but the "Europe will have an Islamic majority by the end of this century" article is complete bogus. No scientist would make naive extrapolations of population trends to the year 2099: world population growth will probably curb around the 2050s and any prediction beyond that, let alone predictions about migration patterns, are highly non-trivial. This "prediction" was very obviously made in bad faith to stir irrational fears and has nothing to do with "science" (but I imagine your link has a similar purpose). I'm not denying Europe has a problem with North African immigrants, though, but it's just one among several problematic groups, and restrictive legislation will kick in long before any group gets anywhere near the 50% mark. dab (ᛏ) 21:25, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)

An image you uploaded, Image:Upper Midwest AIRUM.GIF, has been listed for deletion because it does not contain source/copyright information and is not being used by an article. If you do not want the image deleted:

1. Update the image description page with source/copyright information as well as an Image copyright tag such as {{GFDL}}.
2. Add a comment to its entry on Wikipedia:Images and media for deletion explaining that you have provided the requested information.

If no action is taken on your part, the image will be deleted in 7 days. RedWolf 02:14, Mar 4, 2005 (UTC)