User talk:Anoted

Archive page
diff of the following post on CzechOut's talk page

Why aren't the discussions I archived showing up in User talk:Anoted/Archive 1?? Anoted ☎  02:57, April 28, 2013 (UTC)
 * Fixed. Should work normally from here on out. Just make sure that you actually select something to archive in future.  You appear not to have done so in the creation of your first archive, which had a knock-on effect for later attempts at archive creation.  But /Archive 2 created normally after manual population of /Archive 1.   03:16: Sun 28 Apr 2013
 * diff of the following reply on CzechOut's talk page
 * Ummm...I'm confused. I did select a few sections to archive the first time. See this diff. It did delete them from my talk page, but it didn't put them anywhere. If I didn't select then why did those conversation disappear from my talk page? And also, while I like that it's fixed (thank you!), a lot of the stuff in archive 2 I wasn't prepared to archive yet. And I probably would have added it to archive 1, not create a second archive. Can you help with any of this? Anoted ☎  03:24, April 28, 2013 (UTC)


 * Well, my goal is just to make the feature work for you. I leave it up to you to decide what bits you want to keep where.  As your correspondent, though, I don't really need the previous conversation on this page to keep up.  I can just summon a diff if I really want to read previous posts.  Or I can hop over to /Archive 2.


 * I did see the diff of your first attempt at the archive and, well, it just didn't take. You could have hit a very temporary internet outage that screwed ya.  The Wikia network could have temporarily gone down, so maybe we weren't able, in that moment, to establish contact with the remote wiki providing the archiving javascript.  It's hard to say.  What's pretty clear, though, is that diffs on /Archive 1 establish you only successfully brought over enough characters to establish the  note, which is typically read as an "error" by later attempts to create new archive pages. The important bit, I'd say, is that /Archive 2 created without a hitch after /Archive 1 was fixed, so you look good to go for the future.


 * If it helps, this kind of error is rare, and has only happened to one other user in the entire time the archiving script has been active. I really don't expect it to affect you again.   04:46: Sun 28 Apr 2013
 * diff of the following reply on CzechOut's talk page
 * I'm fine with adjusting the archives manually if I can auto-archive in the future. I'd do it, but I don't want to mess things up again, or worse. I really don't understand what went wrong the first time. Heck, for all I know I really don't understand how auto-archiving works period. The help pages don't really go into detail. It just says that it's really easy and to follow the instructions after clicking the archive button. Only, there are no instructions. I figured out the whole selecting thing, but it didn't work, or I did something wrong, or...I don't know. Also, it's probably irrelevant but why the edit summaries "Shouting"? Anoted ☎  03:52, April 28, 2013 (UTC)
 * "What's pretty clear, though, is that diffs on /Archive 1 establish you only successfully brought over enough characters to establish the note".
 * Um, no, I had to add the myself. Manually. Sections disappeared off of my talk page, but Archive 1 didn't exist. I thought I had to manually add  to get things going.
 * Everytime I archive in the future it will create a new archive? Is there a way to archive sections every x number of days to the same archive? Anoted ☎  05:00, April 28, 2013 (UTC)

Food cats
I'm very troubled by your statement at #8. Of course we wait around for the DWU to define things for us. That's the point of the wiki. We absolutely do not go forward with real world classification unless there's absolutely no other choice. I think there's plenty of choice with food stuff. Consequently, I'm not bothered at all by anything you've said in #7. They don't have botanical classification because their culinary classification is much easier to establish within DWU sources. No biggie.

I think your comments at #4 are where your whole theory of separation (which you still haven't explained, really) falls apart. Fine Jellied eels are one culinary use of eels, so in that case maybe you can think of eel as the animal and jellied eel as the food. But fish? Nah. Fish is the zoological and culinary. So is shellfish. If i'm understanding your separation theory, it falls down at the water's edge. It also falls down with lasagna. Lasagna is both the type of pasta and the meal. I've got a package of lasagna in my pantry right now. The label says lasagna. The noodles are lasagna. It's a word with dual meanings. I mean, if we wanted to be really pernickety, I guess we could go lasagna noodles and baked lasagna, or something' like that. But why? It's easier to have one article defining the two meanings, especially if that's what DWU texts tell us to do. And I'm really not understanding your Fruit thing. Is there a culinary word for fruit that's different? If not, you're going to end up with category:fruit under both botany and food. So how is that "separation"?

Overall, that's one of the big flaws in your proposal. You've made a special emphasis of your desire for "total separation", but you've provided little evidence that it's possible. You also originally said you were going to simplify and reduce the number of categories, but you're proposing a ton of new ones. (I don't oppose the notion of creating new categories — it's necessary — but I don't understand where the simplification claim fits in.)

But the biggest thing that's still worrying me is that you seem so cavalier about whether valid sources allow for category names. And you seem to have a misapprehension about the text that should be on a category page. You refer to them as "category articles" and that scares me. They're not articles. They're merely descriptions. They're only there to help editors find their way. They're not supposed to be elaborate affairs. Think of them as signposts only. And the thing is, most users don't read 'em anyway. I mean, it's important that they're there, but the far more important thing is clarity in the category name. That's what gets used. That's what 13-year-old kids using the site find through the category module. One of my category failures that I've not yet corrected is that I started using proper taxonomic names for some of the zoology categories, and it led to confusion. Category names need to be simple, direct, and as unambiguous as possible. Because of oddities like tomatoes, I really think the way forward is just to create category:fruits and vegetables from the real world. Combine the two; don't split them apart. It's just easier than fighting the "is it a fruit or a vegetable? battle". I'm with David Mitchell on this one: botanists' turf battles to justify their grant funding mean nothing to me. As I've said before, this isn't Wikipedia. This is a wiki about Doctor Who, where exact categorisation ins't as important.

Finally a technical note. Could you do the grunt work? Maybe. But it's gonna be faster for us to just keep talking about this for a while and then for me integrate what you're saying into a plan and knock it out in an hour or so. Then you can finish off with writing category descriptions and suggesting follow-up actions. I may have said no about a lot of your proposals, but I do basically agree with you that this area of the tree needs a bit of a spring cleaning, as it's grown considerably since the category structure was first laid down. 04:33: Sun 28 Apr 2013

I know I've gone out of order, with your points, so let me just quickly give a yay or nay to your stuff by point number:
 * 1) I assume you're talking about T:CAT NOT here. If not, please provide link where you encountered vague language.  I really don't see it as vague, but I'll try to give it another pass soon.
 * 2) Answered above
 * 3) Answered above
 * 4) When you roast a whole pig it's called a pig, not pork. And I'm sure there is a DWU story that has roast pig in it.  So even pig is another thing that flummoxes your separation theory.  Also, I think a "foods by meal" approach is a non-starter, as it's far too subjective. Way too many cultures and times in the DWU to definitively call anything a food for a specific meal.  Where you gonna put bacon or spam or eggs, just for a start?  Those are "every meal of the day" foods.
 * 5) Answered above
 * 6) Addressed above (should just be category:fruits and vegetables for simplicity
 * 7) Answered above
 * 8) Answered above
 * 9) Hmmm, I think that by adding categories that have no real DWU support, we'd be adding meaning to an article, too. If we only add the culinary cat then what we're saying is that in the DWU, only the culinary meaning is known. We can only add the botanical cat if we know that meaning is given in a DWU story. (Except when there's no other possible category it could go into.  Again, articles have to have at least one category, and if the mention of a thing is so brief that we have no in-universe identification of a category, then, yes, we can use common sense there and only there to attach to the category tree.  But that's a relatively rare case.)
 * 10) Well, strictly, fungi aren't even part of botany at all, are they? Fungi are their own kingdom, as I understand it.  The error is probably with fungi, not fruits.
 * 11) I'm not super happy here. Flowers seems a non-starter to me.  The common sense of flower is that you're just talking about the bloom.  I can't see us having articles just about the rose bloom.  I know that's not properly botanic, but I think we could just as easily go "plants and flowers" here to avoid this false distinction.  Roots, okay, fine.  But seeds?  Nah, that's a little too precious.  We'll start another border war with that.  We should just add it to existing cat, making it Category:Seeds, nuts and Legumes, maybe.  Finally, I don't think we need a new category to keep fruit trees and tree fruit separate.  I really doubt that we have a lot of instances of fruit trees specified in the DWU.  Remember, we need a specific reference to an apple tree; we can't say, "Because apples are grown on trees in the real world, apple trees must therefore exist in the DWU because there are apples in the DWU."  We need at least a picture of an apple tree to start an article called apple tree.  So I honestly think category:Trees from the real world will be able to handle the load without adding anything new.

Needing sources
of the following reply left at CzechOut's talk page

Your response to #8 has me really confused. Should I be removing the category Mineral from the page Salt? And changing the first sentence which defines salt as a mineral? Because Four to Doomsday never defines salt as a mineral, we do. Doctor Who never tells us that water is an inorganic substance. It's not like we need the category, we have it a food category and a currency category and could easily add a weapon category. The way I see things we add things all the time that are never outright said, based on our understanding of what we're seeing and hearing. When we see potatoes on the planet Earth in our time we assume that they are the same as what's in our pantry unless we're told otherwise. When Jackie Tyler talks about dishes she cooks we assume that they are the dishes we know. You said somewhere on the forum that "for a wiki to be useful, words must have meaning." We assume as little as possible and try not to draw conclusions but we do assume. Otherwise real-world perspective pages would be all that we had. Following the source carefully is incredibly important, but if we can say nothing that we aren't directly told we then we have to get rid of most of the wiki. You might not be bothered at all by #7, but it's a problem for me is because of #6 (our current organisational structure). You say we don't so this stuff unless it's absolutely necessary and that it's not necessary for foods that are plants. So then why have we categorised Anchovy as Earth fish? We're never told that they are Earth fish. We don't see them swimming around. The answer that seems obvious to me is that even though Doctor Who doesn't tell us that Anchovy is a fish we know that Anchovy is a fish. Doctor Who doesn't tell us that tea or garlic are plants, but they're plants. The opening sentence of the tea page says "Tea was a drink made from the dried leaves of the tea plant, created by brewing the leaves in hot water." Doctor Who never tells us that. At most, we see tea being steeped. We're the ones who ascribe the words "dried leaves" to describe the little floaty things. We're probably also are ascribing the words "brew" and "hot water." Maybe we see water being heated for tea or maybe someone mentions that their tea is too hot. But if those things never happen do we not mention that tea is a hot drink? You're response just has me beyond lost. Are we currently over-categorising by applying terms that we haven't been outright told? When an article says that tea is made "with the dried leaves of a tea plant" are we assuming too much? Should that be changed? If not, why would putting cabbage in a botanical category be a problem? I'm putting the rest of my reply in another section because it seems to me that this conversation about the extent to which we rely on Who as a source should be discussed on it's own. I either need a massive education or there's a lot of confusion happening and I think it's the later and I think it's happening because we're discussing to much at once. Anoted ☎  08:01, April 28, 2013 (UTC)

My theory and other things
of the following reply left at CzechOut's talk page I think you are misunderstanding my "separation theory". I was simply trying to say that I wanted foods to be organised both in terms of their culinary usage and in terms of their scientific origin. Imagine dumping every food that was a plant into the plant category. Then going through creating subcategories that make sense scientifically. Then do that with animals. Then dump all food articles into the food category and make subcategories that make culinary sense. Once that's done every article that can would have a science category and a food category. Now there is currently one category overlap, Fruits. The process of going through and categorising these things separately makes it obvious that not everything that is fruit by botanical classification is fruit by culinary classification. We can deal with this by creating two sets of fruit categories Category:Fruit (food) and Category:Fruit (plant). But that is complicated and confusing and we'd have to put a lot of articles in both categories. We can handle this by coming up with alternate categories but there aren't ones that are as good. The best solution is taking the couple of articles that are technically fruits (walnut, cocoa bean) and putting them in the general plant category. The separation theory is really just a way of thinking about it, approaching the problem. Approach science and food separately and see what we get. See if there is any overlap or problems and come up with a solution where all edible plants and animals are categorised in terms of science and food in whatever way is functionally best. Separation was really just referring to how I was planning to look at the situation. My theory was really just that I thought that we should categorise edible plants both as plants and as food. That we should categorise edible animals both as animals and as food. I think my using the word separate implied something I didn't mean. Other points:
 * 1) I was referring to T:SPELL. It says that policy doesn't apply to (amoung other things) pages with a category prefix. Which should have been clear enough but I was stuck wondering, "then what does apply? what spelling should I use?".
 * 2) Why combine fruits and vegetables into one category? Because of tomato? That doesn't make sense. We already say on the page that while it's technically a fruit it's perceived by many to be a vegetable. Isn't that enough? I'm not sure it really matters what category it's in, and besides it's one article. We could easily put it in both-that wouldn't cause recursion issues. We have other foods that are in more than one food category. This seems to be a case of 6 of one to half a dozen of the other--hardly worth combining two categories over.
 * 3) I think you misunderstood what I meant about in regards to pig. I was suggested that one possibility was a subcategory of Meat be Pig. It would have the pages bacon, sausage, spam, AND pig, boar, wild boar. My point was simply that we have a lot of pages for edible animals that are considered pigs as well as food products made from pigs. More than enough for their own category. It's not necessary, they can all be a part of the category Meat, no subcat required. I was just trying to point out one way that we could create a meat subcategory.
 * No, I don't think we should split foods up by meal. But breakfast is a meal that's referred to a lot in Doctor Who. It certainly needs a page. Depending on how much I found, I thought I might create a category to go with it. Yes, it's subjective, which is why I wouldn't be using my judgment. If something is referred to as a breakfast food in Doctor Who it would go in the Breakfast foods category. It's not a necessary category, all of the foods in it would be in another food category, but I thought it might be interesting. There's been a fair amount of discussion in Doctor Who about breakfast foods. The article breakfast (when I get around to writing it) should suffice and I wouldn't even consider making a category until the page was written. I thought once the categories were properly sorted and the page was written it might be an interesting category to have. But I was never considering sorting all foods by meal and I'm several steps away from even thinking about the category or what might go in it. Completely a question for another day.
 * 1) Botany is the study of plants, fungi, algae and viruses. So fungi is exactly where it should be, a sub-cat of botany not of plants. Trees, fruits, etc should be a sub-cat of plants.
 * 2) I know that the text on category pages isn't an article but a description. I was searching for something better and ended up using the work article because it seemed to me to obviously refer to the text on the page. The words text and description seem obvious but at the time I was massively blanking!
 * 3) I'm not really hung up on precise botanical categories or precise science categories. Botanically speaking root has a much narrower definition than how I was proposing it be used. I'm thinking in terms of functionality here, that's really all.
 * 4) I see your point about the flower category, which is why I originally proposed flowering plants. The downside of flowering plants is that it's really broad. It includes all of our fruits and other things as well. In re seeds, too precious? What do you mean? Not that it's a great suggestion--it's really diminishing marginal utility. We can just as easily stick articles like rice in the overarching plant category:
 * Category:Botany
 * Category:Botany from the real world
 * Category:Plants
 * Category:Plants from the real world
 * Category:Fruits
 * Category:Fruits from the real world
 * Category:Roots
 * Category:Roots from the real world
 * Category:Trees from the real world
 * Category:Fungi

We could probably come up with more subcategories but I don't see it as necessary. This creates a new subcategory for plants and moves fruit and trees into their proper places. Which really should be done soon I think. Trees not being a subcat of plants has led to both categories being using on a lot of pages. In this category scenario would you have any trouble putting lime into the fruit category instead of the tree category? I've been spending a fair amount of time sorting things out in Sandboxes. Things that we've agreed on or that seem commonsense are in this to-do list. If there's anything on that list that you think needs to be discussed, let me know. Otherwise it can be put into action.

I also have a related question about precisely what is real world. The article meat covers all meat. Most meats are real world foods, but meat from a Cash Cow isn't real world. It's an article about both real-world and non real-world things. And then there's seaweed which is about a non-real world thing that is basically just a living version of the real-world thing. Category wise, are these real world or not? Do we add a "behind the scenes" section to seaweed with a bit about real world seaweed? Anoted ☎  08:01, April 28, 2013 (UTC)

inappropriate stuff on article talk page
diff of the following post on CzechOut's talk page Not sure how to handle this but Talk:Trenzalore is a mess. There's a section on Men in Black, which makes no sense. Almost everything on the talk page is speculation, theory, and worst, 50th anniversary spoilers/rumors. A large portion of the page was deleted before (not sure why). The talk page is a clear problem but I'm not sure what to do. I don't want to archive the discussion so far because most of it is vastly inappropriate but I wasn't sure if it was ok to just delete it so... Also, is there a place in the forum to ask for help. If something isn't working, or there's a problem (like this), or something else? The board descriptions don't seem to include this and I haven't seen any threads like this. Anoted ☎  12:36, April 28, 2013 (UTC)

Semantic mediawiki parameters
diff of the following post on CzechOut's talk page Does this wiki not have the parameters name or surname? I was playing around trying to see if I could use SMW to create lists by name. I was doing some disambig work and thought this could be of use. So I whipped this up, but name and surname parameters seem to be being ignored. It occurred to me that we might not have them. Oh, here's the code I was playing with, in case it makes a difference:

Thanks. Anoted ☎  09:57, April 29, 2013 (UTC)

Varmint
Hi there. I've had a look at the user's contributions for the last few days, and it seems like most of his edits are in good faith, despite their flaws. I'll leave a message on the user's wall about the Hath page, and if the message is ignored and if anymore -what I pretty much see as- fan pages being made then further action will be taken. Thanks for letting me know, and if you see anything else you think needs solving then just drop me a message. Thanks! --Revan\Talk 11:26, April 29, 2013 (UTC)