User talk:GUllman

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hello there, welcome to the 'pedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you need pointers on how we title pages visit Wikipedia:Naming conventions or how to format them visit our manual of style. If you have any other questions about the project then check out Wikipedia:Help or add a question to the Village pump. Cheers! --maveric149

[edit] Lists

Hello again. I am in the middle of a dsicussion about lists and charts of lists. Please contribute at Talk:Wikipedia policy on charts if you have any comments. user:mydogategodshat

[edit] List of books

Hello! For your list of books, you might want to check out Western canon. - Efghij 00:38, Aug 23, 2003 (UTC)

Thanks Efghij, I was already aware of it. After all, it was one of the first links I placed on List of books. I'm going through all the lists one at a time, and will get to it in turn. GUllman 05:13, 23 Aug 2003 (UTC)

[edit] El Metro de México

You're probably right about not every station deserving an article (although the Londoners seem to have managed). But putting all the links in on the list page at least allowed me to establish a uniform naming system! Thanks for helping out with first one. –Hajor 22:17, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Hats

Hi, thanks for your edit on list of hats and headgear, it's very patchy at the moment. :) I was wondering why you removed Cardinal's Hat though? Cheers, fabiform | talk 22:26, 17 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Because a bishop/cardinal's hat is called a 'miter', which was already on the list. Although it was misspelled 'mitre', which I just corrected, and I added bishop's hat in parentheses after it. I think the uncommon words should have a short definition afterward so people don't have to click on all the links if they don't know what the hat they have in mind is called. GUllman 20:23, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Well, this list aims to (eventually) cover hats for all periods and cultures, so a couple words after each link (and eventually more sub-divisions) will be a very good idea.

I'm going to put "cardinal's hat" back though as it is the name of an older style of hat a cardinal used to wear (CARDINAL'S HAT (from 13c.) Red hat with short, rounded crown and broad flat brim. Rank was designated by the number of tassels which terminated the cords.[1]).

By the way, miter/mitre can be spelled either way, so we might as well include both to avoid confusion. I've just discovered that a mitre can be several different kinds of headgear, including an Egyptian headdress. The scope of this project it quite daunting! I'm going to copy and paste this conversation into the talk page since it probably deserves to be preserved/continued there. :) fabiform | talk 20:43, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Number pages

Hi,

I would like you to reconsider your vote on the inclusion of articles about numbers on Wikipedia. I am not opposed to number articles per se, but I am opposed to the trivial cultural properties which have been heaped upon many of these articles.

My rationale is that numbers are such a fundamental part of human culture, an article that lists all these associations would have proportions probably larger than all of Wikipedia taken together. To give you an example, Google returns 209,000,000 hits for the number 100 alone.

Please take a look at 1 (number)#Other fields. This is the type of lists I am referring to. Right now the article arbitrarily lists a few things where the number one has some significance: a DVD region, a personality test, a slang term (Wikipedia is not a dictionary), American currency, a single dial code, several roads ...

If you think this information is valuable I am probably wasting my time. But I hope that after looking at several of these pages you will agree that these kind of lists make a joke of Wikipedia. They will always be arbitrary, they will always be in violation of the rules of Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not (list repository, dictionary), and they will seriously damage our reputation.

If you see a compromise option which is not currently included in the poll, please add it. But please do not give these triva lists your rubber stamp of approval.—Eloquence 11:14, Feb 22, 2004 (UTC)

It appears some people have the misconception that you, GUllman, cast your votes lightly without any thought. But I know better. Your user contributions page shows that you work in a methodical, thoughtful manner. Your procedures for the number pages 20 - 90 set precedents that are still followed today. It follows, reasonably, that you vote seriously and thoughtfully, in a manner that is the complete opposite of a "rubber stamp." PrimeFan 22:07, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)

I started setting up space for the number articles last October, and the discussion has elevated this far in only four months. Wikipedia is not a task with a blueprint and an immediate deadline -- is a unique volunteer experiment in community decision-making that explores the limits and usefulness of hypertext linking. We cannot predict the path that a user's thought process will follow, so the more links we provide, the better. The number articles have not just increased in number -- the content and layout has evolved and is still evolving. Four months is too young to cut an experiment short -- let it grow and mature in the coming years, and it will prune itself as useless, forgotten parts wither and die. GUllman 04:12, 9 Mar 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Heads of state by year

I agree that the heads of state is a neat idea. User:Jonel has made a start of it, but only with a limited number of states, in the year pages. Please feel free to go ahead and make further pages. rulers.org or worldstatesmen.org are good resources. john 18:54, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Thanks, I will. But slooooowly. GUllman 19:49, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Yup, that's my plan, as well. john 00:55, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC)

[edit] 2004 Pulitzer Prize

Why did you list 2004 Pulitzer Prize as a copyright violation? If that's a violation, then so is every awards list on Wikipedia, such as all the Grammy pages. Ambivalenthysteria 12:36, 17 Apr 2004 (UTC)

(Example of entry from 2004 Pulitzer Prize copied from www.pulitzer.org:)

beat reporting: Daniel Golden, Wall Street Journal, for his compelling and meticulously documented stories on admission preferences given to the children of alumni and donors at American universities.

The list of people and books that won is factual and can be copied, but the annotations are the creative expression of the writer, and are protected by copyright. Words like 'compelling' and 'meticulously documented' are clearly the opinions of the spokesperson, not the Wikipedia contributor. In case you didn't know, if a newspaper reporter receives a press release (which is what this is) or a wire from AP or UP, no matter how brief, the reporter is obliged to rewrite the story in his own words for publication in his newspaper. GUllman 17:18, 27 Apr 2004 (UTC)

P.S. One way to get around this issue is to simply put quotation marks around each the annotations. GUllman 18:08, 27 Apr 2004 (UTC)

[edit] ISBD article and ISBD (or other) all over the place

If you were to put up a proposal (or the start of a discussion) for using the International Standard Bibliographic Description or ISBD (in some form or other) or some other standard for getting a good handle on articles which describe books, where would you place it? I was thinking of putting it on the Wikipedia:WikiProject Novels discussion page since the Infobox controversy for books was indrectly discussed there. I would announce it elsewhere too. But where? The appearance of a book-related Infobox in the article onComics and Sequential Art got me started on this path, along with a recent flowering of articles related to book collecting. In a sense, my putting together the ISBD article a few hours ago, with parts from the Catalog article was my first step towards this. AlainV 07:04, 2004 Apr 27 (UTC)

There really should be a Wikipedia:WikiProject Books as a parent project of Novels, Comics and other literary Wikiprojects. And you wrote a good article on ISBD. However, I'm hesitant to require an ISBD in all book articles. Requiring too much formatting might kill WikiProject Books just as people are reluctant to contribute to Wiktionary -- it would place all the burden of researching the info for each book on the few people (you and me?) who know ISBD format well enough. If you want a standard description in the Infobox, then show them how to cite the book for a bibliography using Chicago Manual of Style which more people know how to write -- and so those who don't know can learn. GUllman 17:48, 27 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I started Wikipedia Wikiproject books to continue this. AlainV 02:58, 2004 Apr 28 (UTC)

[edit] A crowd of two?

We have a gaggle of geese, a flock of birds, and so on. What do you call many librarians? Since I have a two year MLS diploma I suppose I am part of that crowd. The reason the crowd is thin has probably much to do with certain ressemblances between Wikipedia and some things particular kinds of librarians just can't stand.

Wikipedia sometimes looks a lot like a product from a Vanity press because its contents don't go through a traditional publishing process and it is given away free. Selection librarians, collection development librarians and head librarians see red just when they hear "vanity press", because it reminds them of the problems they have just in refusing "books" that come out of them.
Wikipedia is produced by volunteers. Librarians who are responsible for public libraries in small (or medium sized) towns often have severe staffing issues, and sooner or later persons on the town council or the Library Board suggest that volunteers could help out instead of slinging money at the problem. In most cases the trouble begins right there, because volunteers are usually not willing or able to receive the needed training or the sole librarian does not have enough of 24 hours in a day to do that training in addition to her/his job. Librarian then cries on shoulders of former library school colleagues and volunteers get a bad reputation in library circles. This is repeated endlessly all over North America.
Wikipedia metadata looks like a chaotic information stream coming out of a madhouse, to the eyes of a cataloguing librarian. Those cataloguers go mad when they see a single semi-colon or ". blank - blank" (also known as dot space dash space) out of place in an AACR2R derived entry, so you can imagine what they feel like when they take a look at our bibliographic descriptions. Fortunately, reference librarians are made of stronger stuff, given their position at the "trenches" of the reference desks, and I have seen so much worse in archives, records management centers, and Web site design committees that I don't think there is anything to despair about, yet. There is still some hope for Wikipedia. AlainV 07:29, 2004 May 6 (UTC)

An index of librarians? I'm pleased to see that you like Wikipedia enough to seriously consider the need for improvement. You are not alone in understanding the need for better metadata; there is a name-value pair scheme being considered on the developers lists which should soon provide a platform for improved metadata. We can really use your help. -- The Anome 07:56, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

A collection of librarians? The rant on my User page is a result of Wikiaddiction and Wikiburnout at the same time. So many new articles are being created because wiki is so easy to edit, but it's so disorganized -- orphan articles, hidden articles with a single link to an article with a single link, and so on. Not many clear overviews of everything has been done on a subject. Metadata is the cataloger/computer scientist's solution to the problem, making searching easier for those that understand it, but not enough people understand it to do all the editing that's needed. I hope the implementation will be very easy to understand, so that people who are knowledgable in each subject can do their own markup. GUllman 18:58, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

Just a quick note to let you know that there is yet another librarian contributing to Wikipedia now. Steve Casburn 16:55, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Disneyland past attractions

I started working on List of past Disneyland attractions from memory but it's way too late and I've spent too much time and I'm going to bed. Elf | Talk 06:33, 26 May 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Your Username at 200

I'm sorry I got your username wrong at Talk:200 (number). I just got confused about the L's. PrimeFan 22:22, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Categories

Where are all the librarians? Well, I'm one of them -- 30 years on the staff at Dallas Pub Lib. (I recently expanded the Library article, for that matter.) But I agree: There certainly ought to be more.

But I have a specific problem that I think maybe you could give me some guidance on, because of your posts on the categorization talk page, and because even an experienced reference librarian knows when to ask for help! I've been doing a bunch of Texas-related historical & biographical articles, and I have a bunch more coming up, and it finally occurred to me that there really ought to be a category called "Texans". At present, there's only a manual "List of Texans" under "Category:Texas".

I've been reading all through the how-to pages, and all the articles having to do with categories and categorization, and I've not found anything that tells me how to actually establish a new category. Is this an admin-only ability? Or am I just overlooking something? --Michael K. Smith 20:19, 14 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Michael, by the time I read your message, I saw that you already found help for your glitches in creating categories at Wikipedia talk:Categorization. As you now know, anyone can create categories, and the instructions are hidden at Wikipedia:Categorization between when to create one and what to name it. One of us should reword it, use a more familiar example besides felis silvestris catus, and make it more prominent on that page. I don't think the new glitch you found (that you have to delete and re-add the category tag to articles that were created before the category) is even mentioned yet.

I haven't done much with categories since the bottom-up method and the many glitches discourage most people from contributing, which is what Wikipedia is all about. I'll help discuss classification theory, but I'll keep supporting the lists until they get the bugs out of the procedure, and then use them in creating categories. GUllman 19:38, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Hi I have just joined Wikipedia:WikiProject Novels and noticed you are part of the parent Books, also see you are a librarian and interested in Categories. I trained as a Librarian and dislike seeing things in a jumble. However the categories around fiction and novels and their genres appear to be in something of a middle. Do you have any thoughts or recommendations? Would you like to get envolved? Please get back to me. :: Kevinalewis : ^{(Talk Page)} 15:11, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Article Licensing

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 1000 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:

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:

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 (comment| talk)

[edit] New Mathematics Wikiportal

I noticed you've done some work on Mathematics articles. I wanted to point out to you the new Mathematics Wikiportal- more specifically, to the Mathematics Collaboration of the Week page. I'm looking for any math-related stubs or non-existant articles that you would like to see on Wikipedia. Additionally, I wondered if you'd be willing to help out on some of the Collaboration of the Week pages.

I encourage you to vote on the current Collaboration of the Week, because I'm very interested in which articles you think need to be written or added to, and because I understand that I cannot do the enormous amount of work required on some of the Math stubs alone. I'm asking for your help, and also your critiques on the way the portal is set up.

[edit] Librarians

I've just set up a project page for librarians interested in contributing to Wikipedia. I hope you'll drop by! --Helperzoom 06:53, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

Please direct all comments to my user-talk page, the Math Wikiportal talk page, or the Math Collaboration of the Week talk page. Thanks a lot for your support! ral315 02:54, Feb 11, 2005 (UTC)

I heartily agree that Wikipedia needs more librarians keeping after things. Unfortunately, the nearest I come to being a librarian is that I come from a long line of them. (I'm 25 and don't even have a BA, let alone an MLS!) — Anna Kucsma 19:06, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] SoCal WikiProject

Since you are in Southern California, you might be interested in the Southern California WikiProject (and its parent California WikiProject). Please take a look at the project's page and see if there is anything that you find interesting. If you have any comments or questions, please contact me. BlankVerse ∅ 02:13, 13 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Jimbo Wales to Attend San Diego Meetup on October 18 2005

Hello, Jimbo Wales will be in San Diego to attend OOPSLA and has agreed to come by and visit with the San Diego wikipedians. If you are interested, you will find more info on my talk page. Johntex\^talk 00:54, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] "Unofficial" regions

Hi Gullman. A long long time ago you suggested renaming this list of "unofficial" regions on its talk page. I, too, think that sounds like a sensible initiative. But what should be the title of the article? =J //Big Adamsky 12:22, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

I had already suggested Lists of regions by country, and I still think this is descriptive and succinct enough. Being called a 'region' implies there isn't another official word for these plots of land like 'state' or 'province'. You don't even have to say whether they are historical or traditional since some of them may have some other origin. GUllman 23:09, 24 February 2006 (UTC)

I know, but "region" is also the name of first-level subdivisions within some states, just like "state", "republic", "province", "district", "emirate" etc. And so it might be better to disambiguate with an adjective in the title. //Big Adamsky 00:40, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

Well, then why can't the official and unofficial regions be listed in the region article? -- it already includes the list of unofficial regions under its "Geographical" subheading, and duplicates most of the list under its "Traditional" and "Geographical subheadings. Just copy the rest of the list there and get rid of the Lists of unofficial regions. Alternatively, the first few paragraphs of Region can be a disambiguation page, and create List of regions for the rest of the article. GUllman 01:50, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Family History

I am proposing a Family History Wiki. I hope you are interested enough to add your name in support at Wikimedia. --Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ) 07:55, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

As much as I like genealogy, I studied your proposal and all the relevant links and decided the project just isn't appropriate for a wiki, let alone Wikimedia. Case in point: lots of relatives have seen my genealogy web site (and a few actually say thank you), but very few are coordinating research on the same persons, which is the benefit of using a wiki. I might think this project had merit if the articles were about people who had their "15 minutes of fame" and were known outside their community; as a minimum, we could link unrelated people who were in the same club, officers in the same organization, or worked for the same company. GUllman 01:57, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

"Nothing is as interesting as hearing stories about your ancestors, and nothing is as boring as listening to someone else talk about their ancestors."

[edit] Non-fiction Template

Since you are part of Wikipedia:WikiProject Books I thought you might know of a non-fiction template that I can use. Is there such a thing?

-Todd 19:03, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

We have not developed an official nonfiction template yet. Nonfiction books cover a much wider field than novels, so different aspects might apply for discussion (not all could be called "culturally important", for example), so they're still as freeform as most Wikipedia articles. The infobox you added on The Guns of August appears to follow the example of the Book infobox. It looks good! GUllman 21:34, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Hi!

Hi there! We've not interacted, as far as I know, but I've seen your edits on various LIS pages and thought I'd introduce myself... I'm also a librarian, up in Northern California. I'm involved with doing outreach to librarians and with wikimania this summer, which you might be interested in; we're trying to get a lot of librarian involvement. Anyway - just thought I'd say hi :) Brassratgirl 03:30, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for saying hi, and I have noticed your contributions to LIS pages and their talk pages as well. I'm not able to travel to wikimania at this time, but I'm glad to see librarians will be represented, and I hope that any other librarians reading this will consider it. We'll each do our part to increase our visibility and contribute our expertise to Wikipedia as we're able. GUllman 18:21, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] FamilySearch

As you have contributed to a related article, you might want to know about the AfD for FamilySearch. -- 63.224.136.62 04:43, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Electronic article RfD

An article I have contributed to relating to libraries, Electronic article, has been listed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Electronic article. DGG 02:23, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

On the RfD Talk page, I proposed keeping this useful article, but moving it to Electronic journal. GUllman 21:50, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

I'd have no objections to merging them.DGG 01:52, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

It having been decidedto keep them both, I have started trying to make them each distinctive. DGG 04:42, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] databases

The article, List of bibliographic databases, has just been turned into a redirect, and simultaneously the Academic databases and search engines article has had all the links changed--all of this in the last few days- at the rate of several hundred edits a day. See discussion on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Academic_databases_and_search_engines#links DGG 04:43, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Request for help

Hi GUllman,

I saw your name on the list at the books project page and I'm hoping you could help. I made a number of contributions to the Against the Day article which I think would be extremely useful to readers of that difficult novel who come here looking for more information on it. I may be wrong or I may be right in the types of additions I've made, but I've gotten into a dispute with another editor who has some support from others and wants to delete some portions of the article. I strongly feel that the critics aren't even thinking about the points in dispute from the perspective of book readers. If you have the time and the inclination, I hope you'll visit the discussion and put your two cents in. Essentially it's about whether to retain a list of years and a list of abstruse words in the article. Whether you agree with me or disagree, I'd appreciate the opinion of someone with a clear interest in books. Thanks for taking the time to read this far. Noroton 21:08, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../g/u/l/User_talk%7EGUllman_02a1.html"