Note that every once in a while when this page becomes inconveniently long I delete a chunk of older discussion to shorten it again. I do not move it to archive subpages, trusting instead in the edit history to preserve the record, so if you want to look at old material use these links to earlier versions. Bryan

Dates when I deleted old content: 15 Aug 2002, 21 Dec 2002, 22 Nov 2003, 4 Feb 2004, 28 Feb 2004, 3 Apr 2004, 11 Jul 2004, 1 Oct 2004

I did remove a lot in terms of word count. But did you actually read both versions or just eyeball it? If the latter, please look again. The original was very poorly written, long-winded, and include a lot extraneous detail, such as practically the full text of "challenge". If you read it and still think there is something important lost, as I said on the discussion page, I will work it back in. I spent quite a lot of time working on those edits, with the aim of improving the article, and I would be saddened to simply have it lost, because I made the article shorter. Surely these matters are not decided only by word count. --BM 01:03, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Greetings:

I'm still learning about images - I noticed that your positioning in individual thumbnails is now "none", but preceded by **div class="floatright"**

Could you please inform me more about this technique? How does this differ in effect from positioning each image "right"? I note that those editors with tiny monitors (800 px) object to the larger images - my theory is that a reasonably sized image may obviate the necessity of a click-through to what is in some cases an over-large image (see Three Gorges Dam and click on one of the first few images - I have not yet produced an intermediate as is needed in this case, not my contributed image), so I tend to prefer a 300 pixel minimum. I have also had a carefully constructed gallery destroyed by an editor - it appears that the editor did not like the detachment of image from text, as the gallery followed the text. This destruction resulted in some of the ugliest image layout I have yet seen on WP. I restored it by putting the gallery before the text and then referencing the specific image within the nested sub-article with a postage stamp sized image - see seismic retrofit#Exterior reinforcement of building. At least that has (thankfully) been left undisturbed for a while. Where a large number of images are to be shown I have been putting these in floating galleries (see Shanghai#Architecture as an example) specifically so that they may be of reasonable size, and where the image is central to the theme of the article, to make it large and prevent text wrapping with appropriate coding. See Sundial Bridge for a large article preface picture with a trailing gallery. That article would definitely loose its impact with a smaller image as the image is a representation of the visual impact of the object. I do think that 250 pix is too small for my preferences in the particular case of Catherine Palace, but that a gallery is not yet appropriate for that article, and a large image would be inappropriate as the article is about the palace - not its visual importance as with the bridge article. What we really need is a variable image width by user screen width - at least it would be nice to set this up as a user preference. I think that there methods to get the user's width - at least the window size, but the Wiki engine would have to have some extensions to process this correctly.

By the way, what size monitor do you use and why did you feel that the images were out of control (a bit)?

Please respond here - I will watch your page.

Best wishes, -- Leonard G. 00:47, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Heh, many comments in one. I'll try to answer them all.

Firstly, the div. I use the "classic" skin rather than the "monobook" skin, and although I didn't know it at the time the "monobook" skin apparently automatically stacks floating images in a column down the side of the page. In "classic" it doesn't; try switching your preference over to "classic" skin temporarily and have a look at the version before my edit: [1]. All the images are in a row at the top instead of a column down the side, which squeezes the text into a tiny little column on the left. By turning off the built-in layout code (using the "none" keyword) I forced the images to form a column, and by wrapping the whole group in a div I was able to tell the whole group of images to float to the right. Here's a quick demo, using a div with a visible border (and note that I'm still in "classic" skin):

without div (the "before" version):

In classic skin, this results in a row of images beside each other.

without div and with "none" keyword, putting images in a column in Classic skin:

with div floating the column to the right:

I have since learned that Monobook handles image layout better than Classic does, however, so I've mostly stopped doing that (but I haven't worried about going back and removing it from articles I've done that in, since it looks the same in Monobook either way). At some point I'm going to file a bug report and see if I can get Classic fixed to work like Monobook does.

As for resizing them down from 350 to 250 pixels, that was just due to my own personal preference for what a "good sized" thumbnail was. I agree that it'd be nice to have an adaptive thumbnail setting, once upon a time I used to just use the "thumbnail" keyword without specifying a size in the hopes that that would be implemented soon. Personally, I think Wikipedia articles should be primarily focused on the text and use images only to accentuate the text rather than as the main centerpiece of the article. Generally speaking I would only leave images larger than around 300 pixels if it was a map or diagram that would become illegible at smaller sizes. In my opinion a thumbnail should be large enough to let the reader know what's in the image so that he can decide if he wants to click and see the full-sized version and not much larger than that. However, I don't feel strongly enough about this that I'd argue if you made those images 350 pixels again. :) Bryan 01:20, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Thank you very much for your prompt and very informative response. I agree that many find 350 pixels too wide, but I feel that the 250 pixel WP "standard" is too small - I have been recently been setting to 300 pixels in the hope that this will stick, but it still gets downsized in some articles - which I why I have taken to galleries and (only in a few and especially appropriate cases), wide images isolated from the text (not only the Sundial Bridge but also a bridge panorama in the Wuhan#History section of the article. This latter example simply would not work well in a more restricted format. I admit to pushing the envelope further down in the article with the concert group panorama, especially since it is not isolated.

I will follow your model for right hand images in my new work and will try to go through my older articles as time permits. -- Leonard G. 02:34, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Unfortunately, I believe the Sundial Bridge article is a perfect illustration of what I said about how images should serve the text of the article rather than the other way around; that first 700 pixel image completely dominates the article, with the descriptive text about the bridge tucked away at the bottom where I have to scroll down to see it. Furthermore, at 700 pixels the image is too wide for people browsing on 640×480 or smaller screens (don't laugh, I bet Wikipedia's going to be a popular item for small handheld computers once a properly downloadable version is available :) and even an 800 pixel wide screen is a bit too small when you allow space for the sidebar, scrollbar, etc. And the image size is 93.5 kilobytes, which is a bit hefty for dialup users especially when combined with the four other thumbnails below. I'm going to shrink it down into a "conventional" right-floating thumbnail, I hope you won't mind too much. Bryan 02:52, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)

OK, I moved the main pix to the gallery - since it follows all text, this should answer your download objections. Note that some nontrivial computations are involved to get the images to flow without hangups (see my User Talk:Leonard G.#Floating galleries. As the max size is now 505 wide [Sat AM - reduced to 404, other from 200 to 160, still looks good], this should be fine for small (800 pix) screens — I do not believe the WP should be crippled by considerations for handhelds and cellphones - this should be a max image width option set as a user preference. This is a multimedia environment, after all. Now if 505 [now 404] is too wide for 800 pix screens, all images in the gallery must be reduced in width proportionally to maintain image layout flow under various widths - but I do not expect that these should fit on a 256 wide (or whatever cellphones are) screen, It is bad enough that people are driving, walking and eating while talking on these infernal distractors, I don't want them watching too! (Help! I'm turning into my grandfather!)

By the way, I followed your instructions on four images in the seismic retrofit portion of San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, but as the first image was (appropriately) wider than the following, the images were left justified within the box. I set up two separate image flows to accommodate this problem. So this should work with various skins? - Leonard.

I did check the classic skin. Fortunately, monoblock works the same as classic when left aligned, the images stack in a wrapping row (otherwise my several floating galleries would not work). It appears that the problem is actually non-stacking to the right in monoblock, not a defect in classic. It would be nice to have more image control. Could you tell me how to get a centered image? That would be nice for certain isolated bridge images, e.g. first bridge at Wuhan and others that are by nature wide and short and cannot have text at the sides anyway ("center" does not work). -- Leonard G. 16:04, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)

There used to be a "center" tag that you could use in place of "left" or "right" in the wiki image markup, but unfortunately that got disabled at some point for reasons I'm not aware of. A lot of people do centering by setting the image's float tag to "none" and using a <center></center> tag pair, and although I don't like using deprecated HTML like that I don't know of a better way offhand. I never use it myself because I never center images, I always float them right.

Very nice! - (I pushed this to 550 pixels. What do you think is "too wide" in the context of a centered, text free image? I intend to use use this on a few important bridge images, including some not yet uploaded. These have 5 to 1 or better horizontal to vertical aspect ratio and would look very nice as centered, isolated images. If too narrow for a wide screen they might look strange, so I want to go for the max (excluding PDAs), which I think would be somewhere around 600 pixels. I will still force text isolation "br style=clear:both] as done above, even though a test (without colons) of the example above showed it to not put text into the margins - that may be skin specific.

The current Sundial Bridge images are 404/160/160/160/160. If you think this is still to wide the next appropriate size would be 303/120/120/120/120 - feel free to experiment. Note that the main bridge image at this size in isolation I would consider too small, but in the context of the numerous trailing narrow images it may look fine, as the context of the gallery allows the dramatic sweep of the initial image to be seen clearly. -- Leonard G. 21:30, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)

URGENT! Which browser do you use? I was at my son's house today and he uses IE on the Mac, was showing him some pages - YECHH!. This does not work - all pictures are on left, no text until after bottom most image. I am removing the div stuff and returning to old form. Center is OK because at worst on IE the pix is left, rather than centered (I always kill boardering text for these anyway). Leonard G. 03:53, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I use Mozilla 1.8a. Internet Explorer is notoriously poor at supporting some parts of web standards such as CSS, which is what the "style" attribute is using to do its thing. Bryan 03:57, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

So exotic layout things should be tested in IE, right? Since "center" ... "/center" works, I tried it with "right", but this was worse as the coding was displayed on the page. Since the only problem is with one seldom used WP skin (the default setup is other than that), and there are millions (or as Carl Sagon would say ....) of IE users, we should not use the method suggested above. (I use Safari on Mac.) Leonard G. 04:15, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I've already mentioned that I've stopped using divs like that in most cases. However, I don't feel any particular need to bend over backwards for IE when it's IE's own fault for not understanding perfectly valid HTML markup. Bryan 04:24, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I'll bet that they do understand it, they choose to not implement things properly - remember their (supposed) mantra - Embrace (the standards)- Extend (to be noncompliant)-Dominate (the market) &mspace; or something like that.

Probably. Embrace and extend. :)

On the page, List_of_strange_units_of_measurement in the history, you mention that you found out why the section on the hubble-barn is commented out, but you don't explain what it was. What was it? I want to add it to the commented out section so people like you and me don't keep being confused. JesseW 07:33, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC) I found out it was done by User:Palapala so I asked on eir user page. JesseW 07:41, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Oo, hard to remember. I think it was because I noticed the edit summary of the edit where it was originally commented out:

(cur) (last)  02:22, 5 Mar 2004 Palapala (last entry awaiting confirmation)

But I'm not absolutely certain. I note that barn (unit) has an article that matches this description of it, but I don't think I was able to dig up anything confirming the length of a Hubble. Bryan 07:44, 18 Oct 2004 (UTC)

As I saw that you edited Roman Catholic Church sex abuse scandal I would like to invite you to help with conflicts in the article about the "North American Man/Boy love organization" as well. Get-back-world-respect 20:24, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

All I did was categorize it, and I'm already involved in another conflict about an article on a subject I'm not familiar with (PNAC) so I think I'll beg off of this one, sorry. :) Bryan 23:29, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Please remember to list pages that you protect on Wikipedia:Protected page (see the protection policy). Thanks. Angela. 00:29, Oct 20, 2004 (UTC)

Oops. I had assumed Category:Protected obsoleted that without checking. (I don't do this sort of thing very often :) Bryan 01:36, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I had hoped it would, but unfortunately there wasn't consensus on that. Angela. 05:35, Oct 21, 2004 (UTC)

someone said "THIS IS REALLY GAY...THIS IS NOT WHAT I WANTED...I HATE THIS SITE"

I don't know how to change it back.

user:lumingz

To revert to an older version just click on the "history" link, go to the version immediately before the vandalism was done, then click "edit page" and save. Bryan 01:36, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Hi there. As someone who has displayed a fairly rational and objective attitude towards micronation articles in the past I thought you might be interested to note that the rabid deletionist lobby is on the march against them again.

The latest target is New Utopia, which although a poorly written article in its current form concerns a subject that is eminently encyclopaedic, being the latest in a long line of libertarian "new country projects" (and therefore representative of a notable social/historic phenomenon), being the subject of dozens of international press and TV stories, as well as the subject of a widely-known US Securities & Investment Commission investigation for fraud.

You might want to take a look at the VfD and respond accordingly.

For future reference you might also want to note the articles in the Micronations Category, in order to keep an eye on its contents; I’ve been adding a number of well-researched, illustrated, fully referenced articles to this category in recent months, but there are moves afoot thanks to a highly suspect ongoing arbitration of process to have me banned completely from writing anything at all about micronations on the basis that as the founder of one, anything I write is somehow self-promotional and/or controversial. --Gene_poole 22:36, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Hi

I'm posting this to invite you to participate in WP:LCOTW , a project you may be interested in. Please consider nominating and/or voting for a suitable article there. Filiocht 12:27, Nov 8, 2004 (UTC)

Hi - A while ago, you changed category:fictional places to redirect to category:fictional locations (actually was a redirect, but you added the leading ":" before "category"). I suspect you already know, but category redirects effectively don't work (articles added to the redirected category don't show up in the "redirected to" category, etc.). I'll put category:fictional places in WP:CFD. -- Rick Block 02:12, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Yeah, I recall that for a while I was using the redirect syntax with categories simply as a shorthand to let other human editors know "this stuff should be over there instead." Thanks for cleaning up after me. :) Bryan 02:48, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

"… When you created the Commencement class category for them and moved them all over into it en masse, this distinction was lost and I'm going back through all the Commencement class ship articles to restore the WWII categories. …"

O, the embarrassment! Seriously, I'm sorry, I thought I was helping.

—wwoods 08

58, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

S'okay, it was only a dozen or so articles so it didn't take much effort. I just wanted to make sure you didn't do the same thing later with a category containing hundreds of ships, that would take rather a lot more effort. :) Bryan 16:11, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Hello Bryan - I just wanted to let you know that I'm running for bureaucratship, and I would like to ask for your vote, be it good or bad. I'm sending this message to a few users I respect who have interacted with me recently. Thanks, Andre (talk) 00:33, Nov 16, 2004 (UTC)

Someone has vandalized the entry for composer Johann Nepomuk Huber (found via the Random Page function). Could you be so good as to set it back? Thanks. DS 19:40, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I have listed Category:Political parties by name on CfD, your input would be appreciated. - SimonP 22:34, Nov 22, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks, I've cast my vote and given my reasoning. Hope I don't get kicked out of the Derksen Conspiracy, I didn't notice Gangulf's real name until after I cast my vote. :) Bryan 00:57, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

From Timeline of fictional future events, you changed it to a distant future event with the claim that:

"actually, it's not 3991 or 1993 but some extremely far distant period in the future when the universe has begun collapsing towards a Big Crunch.)"

changing the content to:

"The Red Dwarf crew travels into the far distant future to a point after the Universe has begun collapsing towards a Big Crunch, causing time to run backwards until it is the equivalent of 1993 on Earth again (or 3991, as the locals write it). They spend three weeks there."

On what do you base this explanation? Yes, I understand reversing entropy and whatnot, but your explanation is the result of bringing in outside knowledge, and not necessarily the actual explanation. Unless the writers actually state that your explanation is the correct one, you can't claim it to be the correct one.

In any case, moving in reverse isn't going to make us write "3991" instead of "1993" (the numbers were all facing in the right direction). Time would move in reverse, but our actions wouldn't be mirrored like that. The use of "3991" is what is called "funny". Since that Earth was obviously meant to be some weird version of 1993 where time goes in reverse, we should ignore the "3991" as just being a joke, and put under 1993 that they traveled to a parallel universe or something where time was going backwards to their own. As for the "3991", you could add a comment in, something like "even the date was humorously written backwards as 3991."

--Brian0918 03:53, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I realize that it's not realistic, but that's what the explanation was in the episode itself. Here's a link to a transcript of the episode: http://www.darkdreamstealer.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/backwardsscript.html

The relevant exposition is this, from right after the Starbug crashes:

HOLLY: (vo)  It's perfectly consistent with current theory.
Everything starts with a Big Bang, right? And the universe
starts expanding.  Eventually, when it's expanded as far as it
can, there's a big crunch, right? And everything starts
contracting. Perfectly possible that time starts running in the
opposite direction, as well.

So there you go, it's not a parallel universe, it's the distant future of our own universe. Bryan 04:52, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for clearing all that up. --Brian0918 17:58, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Hi, I've started the Free the Rambot Articles Project which has the goals of getting users to multi-license all of their contributions that they've made to...

1. ...all U.S. state, county, and city articles...
2. ...all articles...

using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-by-sa) version 1.0 and 2.0 Licenses or into the public domain if they prefer. The CC-by-sa license is a true free documentation license that is similar to the GFDL (which every contribution made to Wikipedia is licensed under), but it allows other projects, such as WikiTravel, to use our articles (See the Multi-licensing Guide for more information). Since you are among the top 10 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. So far over 90% of people who have responded have done this.

Nutshell: Wikipedia articles can be shared with any other GFDL project but open/free projects using the incompatible Creative Commons Licenses (e.g. WikiTravel) can't use our stuff and we can't use theirs. It is important to us that other free projects can use our stuff. So we use their licenses too.

To allow us to track those users who muli-license their contributions, many users copy and paste the {{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}} template (or {{MultiLicensePD}} for public domain) into their user page, but there are other templates for 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 at my talk page what you think. It's important to know, even if you choose to do anything so I don't keep asking. -- Ram-Man 16:30, Dec 2, 2004 (UTC)

Sorry for my mess, I didn't notice. --Jondel 08:51, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)

S'okay. It's a big user page and that's the only error that was on it that affected other pages; it wasn't so bad. :) Bryan 16:22, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Hi Bryan. Please avoid Category:Medicine whenever possible; you put it on hepatosplenomegaly, which is a medical sign and qualifies for Category:Sign (medicine). The former is getting unbelievably huge, and I don't even know where to start... JFW | T@lk 09:55, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Yeah, I figured it probably belonged in a subcategory of medicine, but I was just cruising by on the random-page express so I tossed it into the root category for someone more knowledgeable to deal with. I occasionally go on category-cleaning sprees so I figure others must do that from time to time too, in which case putting this in Medicine would be useful. Bryan 18:21, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Sure, that's how I caught it :-). A function that Mediawiki could seriously do with is the rapid migrating of all articles in a category to another, without having to edit every single one individually... JFW | T@lk 16:19, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for showing some interest in the Weaubleau-Osceola structure article I wrote. Unfortunately, the formatting change you made to the images doesn't work well under Firefox or Mozilla browsers. And although it works with I.E., it that's not the effect I was after. Since the caption relates both of the images to each other I put it between them without it being attached in a box as a caption to either. Of course, when submitting the article to Wikipedia I agreed to allow "merciless" editing by others, so it's not "my" article any more. Before putting it back the way it was, I'm interested in knowing why you weren't satisfied with the way I had originally put the pictures and caption into a table. --Kbh3rd 15:57, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Hm. My main concern is that using tables for attaching captions to images isn't "meaningful", in that the software can't automatically understand that the caption text refers to the image and deal with it accordingly. Things like accessibility (alt tags), automatic removal or resizing of images, that kind of thing. So, when I see an image that has a caption attached to it via table, it's kind of reflex to just merge the two together in proper wiki formatting. A caption that refers to two different images is a bit awkward in that regard, though. How about I try splitting it between the two images, and see if that works better? Also, I'm curious in what way what I did "doesn't work" on IE and Mozilla. It looks fine to me in Firefox, and I was doing the same sort of thing routinely back when I was using Mozilla without trouble. Bryan 05:12, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

BTW, if it turns out that you can't abide by my changes, it's not like I'm going to fight tooth and nail to preserve them. Go ahead and revert, just make sure to preserve the category update I made at the same time. :) Bryan 05:17, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I was working from strictly a visual perspective and hadn't thought of the uses of the caption as a form of meta-data attached to the image. It would be possible to not use "thumb" but still have a caption on the image that would show up on mouse-overs and be available for other computer-mediated uses, while maintaining the original visual layout. But what you've done works pretty well, too, and passes the "keep it simple" test. Maybe I'll play with it some more, or maybe I'll leave it be. Thanks for your contribution.

The problem I saw with both Mozilla & FireFox is shown in this screenshot. Odd that you report not seeing a problem in FireFox. Perhaps it's manifestation depends on window size affecting the layout of the elements. This screenshot is from Mozilla 1.7b on Linux, but I saw the same thing with FireFox 1.0 on Windows. --Kbh3rd 17:05, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Ah, I see. I use the "Classic" skin which doesn't have underlines under the headers, so I wouldn't see that problem on my browser one way or the other. One sec, I'll switch to monobook and check the old version... yup, there it goes; I get the same thing when I view in Monobook. Could it be that the PNG has a transparent background? Checking... yup, so it does. I suspect that if the background of the PNG was white this little bug would never have been noticed. :) Now that the thumbnail keyword is being used there's a box around the image that seems to be preventing the header underline from spilling over into it any more, but if you like I could switch the image over to a non-transparent white background as well. That would also prevent problems if for some bizzare reason someone decided to read Wikipedia with a black page background. :) I'm going to see if I can find a place to post a bug report about this, it seems likely nobody's ever noticed this happen before since it's a pretty unusual circumstance. Bryan 01:39, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Hi Brian - I've moved the category "Islands of New Zealand" back where it belongs (under "New Zealand geography", but NOT under "Locations in New Zealand"). Please read the reasons at the discussion page for the category, or the detailed discussion of why it is categorised as it is at Wikipedia:WikiProject New Zealand places and/or Wikipedia:New Zealand Wikipedians' notice board [[User:Grutness|Grutness ^talk ]] 06:11, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know. Pedant 23:46, 2004 Dec 4 (UTC)