User talk:Boblipton

Grasshoppers
I actually deleted both your attempts, because neither was really possessed of the minimum requirements for an article here. Here are some tips for the future.
 * T:BOLD TEXT requires that you embolden the topic of the article in the first sentence of the article, but T:NO HTML forbids you from doing it with HTML, as you tried to do. You must use ordinary wiki markup.  This means: Giant grasshoppers were ...
 * Plural nouns may not be used to entitle articles, except in extraordinary circumstances. Thus, of the two articles you tried to write, giant grasshopper employed the correct title.
 * When citing a source you must link it, every time. Please review T:CITE.
 * T:TENSES requires the exclusive use of the past tense. Your attempts were both written wholly in the conditional tense.  When writing about things which are mentioned in a tentative way within narratives, the best approach is to frame it in terms of something a character said.  For instance, it might be correct for the article to read:
 * According to the Doctor, giant grasshoppers were . However, he also admitted that they could have been.
 * As I don't know the cited novel well, I couldn't rewrite the article. Since you apparently do know the novel, skim through, figure out who supplied the info about grasshoppers, and rewrite accordingly.

Hope that helps :) 03:42: Sun 06 Nov 2011

Stevie Wonder
Hey, your image on Stevie Wonder's page is not very good.

1) It's an out of univurse pic, thus I doubt it is usuable.

2) It features too many people. How do I know Stevie Wonder isn't a Woman? He might be the Blond one there. The main issue is him and who I think is Kanye West. If I was ignorant, it would be very difficult for me to tell the two apart, exspecially sence both have glasses. OttselSpy25 talk to me 05:46, November 13, 2011 (UTC)

Timelink: Volume 1
In my 100,000 Post/Article it's saying that it is the Nerva Station not the Beacon

TimeTraveller34 talk to me 11:40, November 14, 2011 (UTC)

Hey, thank you so much for fixing the picture problem with the "Tenth Doctor" page; I couldn't find a suitable photo in my attempt previously. Thanks! Patrick Watt talk to me 23:21, November 18, 2011 (UTC)

Thanks
I'm not being sarcastic; a few hours ago, the "Tenth Doctor" page was missing an image. I tried to solve the problem, but to no avail. Thanks for solving the problem for me. Patrick Watt talk to me 23:27, November 18, 2011 (UTC)

Hey there. Thanks for bringing this to my attention, I have blocked the user for a month. --Revan\Talk 17:17, November 20, 2011 (UTC)

Individual Rutans
I removed "Individual Rutans" from Elizabeth Winters because it's a non-existent category, and there aren't enough pages linking to it to require such a category. -- Tybort (talk page) 00:50, November 26, 2011 (UTC)

Pic suggestions
I've noticed recently that you've been uploading some pictures at or near 250px. I think you've slightly misunderstood T:ICC/image use policy. When we say that the minimum width is 250px, that doesn't mean to take a pic which is available at a larger width and shrink it to 250px. We mean that the absolute minimum is 250px, since that's infobox width. But really, a better minimum to shoot for is 292px (or, better, just remember 300px), since that's the width of an advertisement. You probably don't see a lot of advertisements, because you're always logged in, but in some Wikia configurations, advertisements have appeared above infoboxen at a width of 292px. Having all pics at 292-300px means that they can be still be used in infoboxen if Wikia decide to go back to such a layout.

For this reason, if you have the option of saving at a size greater than 250px, please do take it. Also, please be sure to crop out any watermarks or logos.

Futhermore, when placing a picture on a page, please include caption text, like so:

02:11: Mon 05 Dec 2011


 * Hmmm, well, consider this. If a new editor saw that you, with thousands of edits, placed a picture that violated our rules, they'd probably think it was okay to do that.  More, similar pictures would proliferate.  The knock-on effect of our more experienced editors failing to follow basic rules is significant.


 * Also, you say it's just a placeholder, but what's the likelihood that you personally are going to go back and replace it? If the answer is "not very high", you probably shouldn't place the picture.  In my experience, people usually don't put in alternate images on low traffic pages for years.  So we'd end up with a "placeholder" for a very long time.


 * I understand the argument that it's better to have something than nothing, but I'd argue that it's more harmful in the long run to have something that's not up to spec than nothing.


 * Think of it this way: would you deliberately insert "placeholder grammar"?   02:38: Tue 06 Dec 2011


 * By "placeholder grammar" I mean the deliberate introduction of poor grammar with the intent that someone else might fix it later. It's one thing to add an incomplete entry, or to make a genuine mistake.  It's another thing entirely to deliberately circumvent the rules of the wiki on the theory that someone else will clean up your mess later.  It's really important that low-traffic pages, in particular, have pics that follow all the rules of the wiki, because these pages are entirely unlikely to receive much attention later.   03:12: Tue 06 Dec 2011
 * Yes, Bob, it's wrong for you to put in images that you "feel are appropriate", when those pictures violate our rules. Just turn it around and look at it in terms of language.  I might feel that it's "appropriate" to render all titles in lowercase because I'm a fan of e.e. cummings.   But that doesn't make it right.  You might feel it's appropriate to add thumbnails without captions, but it's not.  It's a layout eyesore. You can't just do what you "feel is appropriate" and hope someone will fix it later.  The point of having a manual of style, and the policies that flow from it, is to establish conventions and minimum standards that need to be followed by all editors.  In short, it is better not to put up an image, than to put up one that doesn't completely follow the rules listed at T:ICC.


 * Now, I'm not telling you to stop putting up images. I'm just asking that you take about one ounce more care with your pictures.  Given the obscurity of the pages to which you've been adding pictures, you should consider yourself effectively the only editor of those pages.  If you work from that assumption, you'll see that you should do your best with the pictures, rather than assuming someone else will come behind you and fix things.  13:39: Tue 06 Dec 2011

Don't revert legitimate edits
My note in "The Wedding of River Song" about the Silent at the end was legitimate and I even provided a link. -- MisterRandom2 talk to me 23:40, December 8, 2011 (UTC)
 * Thank you. I'm glad we sorted this out. -- MisterRandom2 talk to me 00:01, December 9, 2011 (UTC)

"In youth"
I dunno, maybe I phrased it incorrectly, but "in youth" sounds kind of ambiguous as to whether they mean the youth of the Doctor or his companion. That could be just me though. -- Tybort (talk page) 00:55, December 12, 2011 (UTC)

250px
I again ask that you not upload your pics at 250px, as you did with 250px-David Spenser as Thomni.jpg. Clearly, that image is easily available at widths well above that, so it shouldn't be cropped down by the uploader to 250px. Let the thumbnail feature take care of any necessary cropping. As I tried to explain above, a better minimum to shoot for is 292px, or the more easily-remembered 300px.

Again, 250px is the absolute minimum width. It should be the goal only when there are no other options, as happens with a very few cover or comic images.

Additionally, naming your files with the prepending "250px" makes them harder to find through autosuggest.

The other thing, of course, is that this David Spenser thing is a duplicate image, which should of course be avoided. All you've done is saved the thumbnail of the image David Spenser as Thomni.jpg to your computer, then uploaded that image again. That's why there's a prepending "250px", and, actually, the system should have asked you whether you were sure you wanted to do that. In future, the proper answer to this question is "no". If you really felt the need to illustrate David Spenser with the picture at Thonmi, then you should have just used the existing picture by typing

The above matters are, again, questions of policy which are covered at T:ICC and tardis:image use policy, amongst other places.

There's also another thing to consider, which has never been addressed by direct discussion, but is worth a ponder. It may not be the best idea in the world to simply duplicate the picture of a character at the actor page. We have thousands of minor actors in the database whose articles are not illustrated. Do we really want to set the precedent that these pages should be illustrated by a picture that already exists on their character page? And if we're not going to do it for all of them, should we even start with a random few? Also, many hundreds of minor actors had multiple roles over the years. Which one do we choose as representative of the actor?

It is therefore probably sufficient that these pages have a clear, lead-sentence link to their character(s), which will allow the reader easy access to any available pictures. I don't know for certain if that's the best approach, of course. We probably need a forum discussion on the topic to shake out some good ideas. But I do know that there's little question it would be a hell of a lot of boring, repetitive, and must-be-done-manually work to illustrate these thousands of minor actors using pre-existing character images. And the end result of that wouldn't necessarily be that much more helpful to readers than just the character links. After all, many of these actors won't be recognisable from their characters, either due to makeup or the fact that most minor actors haven't appeared in Doctor Who at the absolute top of their careers. David Spenser, for instance, is awfully young in Snowmen, and readers might not recognise him from 68. This is why the best pictures of people are from publicity stills or things otherwise drawn from outside their DW appearances. The pictures we choose to place on actor pages should probably provide additional information, not just a duplication of something the reader can see by clicking a link on the same page.

15:10: Mon 12 Dec 2011


 * Man, for someone who prides himself on concision, you have a roundabout method of self-expression. Perhaps it's my fault for musing a bit in the previous post, but you seem to have ignored the important, policy-based part of the message.


 * So let's cut to the bone. What I need from you is your agreement that you will not:
 * upload pictures pre-cropped to any width less than 292px, unless it is physically impossible for you to do so
 * upload any more pictures which are merely smaller versions of pictures that exist on the site already; and, that if you wish to use a pre-existing image, you will place it on the page using traditional thumbnail wiki markup.
 * give files anything other than plain text names
 * I also need to make sure that you will:
 * read and abide by T:ICC and tardis:image use policy.


 * If you could indicate your agreement on my page, that'd be great.  21:14: Mon 12 Dec 2011
 * I'm very confused. Why aren't you willing to follow these simple rules?  I'm not asking you to stop posting pictures.  I'm just asking you to abide by some fairly simple guidelines.  21:31: Mon 12 Dec 2011
 * In what way do you disagree with them?  21:35: Mon 12 Dec 2011
 * Bob, you're kind of putting me in an awkward position. You seem to be saying that you feel at liberty to ignore any rule that you don't like.  Is that what you're saying?  Also, if you think that the rule regarding pic width is "too simplistic", how exactly would you change it?  21:50: Mon 12 Dec 2011
 * Bob, I'm sorry, but you're not leaving me an option to keep this "private". If you were an administrator and someone told you straight up that they didn't feel bound by our rules because "they were old" and made by "strangers", what would you do?  The age of a rule isn't really a reason to disobey it. In some cases, rules have persisted precisely because they are sensible.  I'm not sure how much luck you'd have in an American court saying you only felt bound by laws passed by people you personally knew.


 * You say you're not going to place any more pictures because you disagree with the very sensible and non-controversial rules as to minimum size and non-duplication. If that troubles you, what else won't you follow? I'm sorry you find compromise distasteful, but that is what wiki editing ultimately is. There are plenty of rules I find to be absolutely stupid around here, T:ITAL chief amongst them, but collective decision-making went against me.  All admin have at one time or another floated balloons that got shot down.


 * We need your help in changing bad practises. You have a wealth of grammatical knowledge that we desperately need.  But you can't just choose to disobey the rules you don't like.  Please, if you don't like how things are set up around here, argue the case for change.  Let us know why our rules are outdated.  But equally, be prepared for  the possibility that our rules may consider things you never thought about.   22:27: Mon 12 Dec 2011

04:20: Tue 20 Dec 2011 18:23: Thu 22 Dec 2011

Re:Thanks
Your welcome! Thanks for all the nifty edits you make around the place! --OS24 15:27, December 25, 2011 (UTC)

Actor pages
Please learn how to format actor pages correctly. You should put the title of the show, i.e. Doctor Who in full then the name if the episode. You must then add a heading called 'External links' and place the actor's IMDB link there or if you cannot find it, place 'to be added' under the header and mark the page as a real world stub. Also, you msut use the real world template at the top of the page. Thanks. MM/ Want to talk? 22:08, December 25, 2011 (UTC)

I have been considering this for some hours. I have failed to figure out whether it is better to live in MM's world where you can give an order like "Invent the nuclear bomb" or "Achieve world peace"  and everyone knows how to do it. On the other hand, it might be frustrating when they defy your clear instructions and keep on not making the Bomb or let there be fighting. Perhaps someday someone will deign to explain how to do these things to me in a fashion I can follow. In the meantime, I will go on my my awful fashion fixing bad grammar, bad writing and filling in gaps that no one else seems interested in filling at all. I will also go on thanking folks like Ottelspy, who is happy to make himself useful by filling in the technical details and whoever was kind enough to tell me how to do simple links. Any time this anti-social behavior on my part becomes unbearable, I understand I can be banned from editing. You're welcome. Boblipton talk to me 00:29, December 26, 2011 (UTC)

What? No Geronimo?
Hmm, maybe. I suppose that's much more tangible a concept.

Although given how few times he said it post-Beast Below, I'm not even sure if that specific one counts as a catchphrase. -- Tybort (talk page) 23:43, December 29, 2011 (UTC)
 * Hmmm. I think you've got the totally wrong end of the stick. I didn't say anything even mildly approximate to, "Why do you have a problem with this if Bob thinks it's okay".  Your name was mentioned simply because you had signed the post which brought up the point in the first place.  You factually did imply that he would have a problem with Geronimo when you said,
 * "I understand your reasons for being annoyed at the page for 'Geronimo' . . ."
 * so I'm not quite getting your complaint. Please re-read my statement carefully.  At no time did I appeal to authority, or browbeat Tybort into some kind of rhetorical submission, or harp on actual policy.  I merely pointed out that as we already had Gordon Bennett in the system, we had precedent for Geronimo.


 * Why would I possibly see you as either a "bad example" or a "higher authority"? I was merely attributing.  Hopefully, you'll be able to see that when you re-read.  04:08: Sat 31 Dec 2011

Latest changes to Amy Pond
Yeah, I sort of see what you mean by that. Not sure what my specific reasoning was for doing it that way given how tired I was at the time, just that it seemed to flow better by saying it more chronologically (Meets the Doctor, grows up with Mels and Rory, finishes waiting twelve years later). -- Tybort (talk page) 12:31, January 4, 2012 (UTC)

Howling:Are Stories in Paralell Universes Canon?
Your contribution of 19:53, January 5, 2012 (UTC) produced an edit conflict with mine. Usually, I'd have inserted mine after yours but, this time, I think yours would make the better "last word" on the subject, so I put mine above it. I'm not confident it will be the last word -- but it ought to be. --89.241.69.54talk to me 20:23, January 5, 2012 (UTC)

Commas
On putting a note at user:Mini-mitch's page, I noticed your opinion about the proper use of commas with dependent clauses, and I'm a little worried about your advice.

While I agree with the analysis that  does not require a comma, you have to weight the benefits of "absolutely correct" punctuation over "consistent, understandable punctuation". Remember that this is a site that voted to use italics on every type of title because it was easier than following standard English punctuation. It's my opinion that the user base is simply not going to readily appreciate the difference between:
 * 1) ; and,

Though you and I easily grasp the grammatical distinction between these two sentences, the difference is incredibly subtle.

The question then becomes, "Which of these two is the bigger problem for the website?" I think that the tiny amount of overuse of commas in near appositive, but dependent, situations is worth having, if it means that appositives will always get commas. In other words, it's far easier to remember the rule, "Use a comma any time you define a noun", than to remember the subtle cases of dependency. Consider this example: You might not even blink at this optional omission of an appositive comma. But then, you've been runnin' around the site for a while now. You may have come across the page for Qetesh and the page for Ruby White. You might understand instinctively that Qetesh is likely a species name and Ruby White is a person's name.

But imagine the casual DW fan, the non-editing user of the site who may not have any exposure to SJA. All they see is a straight line of three blue words in a row. Without a mouseover, they'd be unsure where to put the comma in their minds. Is it ? Or. Or is there no comma and the whole thing is the name of a species that doesn't add an -s to indicate plurality. The word "white" is there. Maybe this is a shark-like thing. Maybe it's like saying,

The point is that the sometimes-optional appositive comma is actually much more important on this site than it is in sites that aren't so concerned with aliens. When you read your sentence about the Partisan, you still understand what it's talking about, even with the according-to-most-grammarians extraneous comma. To the average reader of English, it doesn't parse as incorrect or confusingly punctuated. You get the one and only sense of the sentence with or without the comma. But the lack of the appositive comma in my example is much more confusing. Since none of those are words with unambiguous meaning, the comma makes all the difference in the world.

Thus, my philosophy is that commas which name or rename a noun are compulsory on our site, even if they may not be in general English usage. They add a great deal of clarity to sometimes impenetrable sequences of words, by at least indicating part of speech. We need to get people in the practice of using commas every time they rename a noun, even if they occasionally put a comma on a dependent clause.

Now, understand, I'm not saying that you should punctuate against your training. Obviously, according to most people, example #2 is wrong. I'd expect you to fully try to correct such extraneous commas as you see fit. This isn't like the italicized title thing, where we've had a clear consensus for the "improper way" of doing things. It's not currently wrong to withdraw a comma preceding a dependent clause, in the same way it is to enclose a short story title in quotation marks. But do consider, as you admitted on MM's page, that it is a very subtle point which, if made, may stop people from using the comma appositively, which is actually especially needed on this site. 17:34: Mon 09 Jan 2012

IMDB
Never had a complaint of a 404 issue with any of our IMDB templates. Not sure which one you're using, but it's recommended that you use imdb name if you're dealing with a person. (imdb is a bit more complicated to use, and can accept links to any type of imdb listing, such as titles and companies.) If creating a new page, I'd suggest that you use the standard preloadable formats, and pull down to "actor or crew member". This will put the IMDB template on the page in a VERY user-friendly way. Just follow the instructions provided and you really won't be able to screw it up.

If adding imdb name to an existing page, it's actually really easy! Here's how. Just cut and paste the following onto pages:

External link
Then, insert the IMDB number after  but before   and you're done!

Just to explain the fields:
 * The  number is the purely numerical string which follows the letters   in an imdb.com URL.  You should include any leading zeros.  So, David Tennant's is 0855039.  Put that into imdb name and you'll have a working link to DT.
 * There is a "hidden" variable of  here.  It assumes that the name of the actor/crew memeber is the same as the name of the page.  In well over 99% of cases, this is true.  Very occasionally, though, you'll run into a person whose name is disambiguated, like Andrew Collins (writer) or Adam Smith (director).  In these cases you'll have to add the name field manually, as in

So that's straightforward enough, I think. As for your 404 problem, well, I dunno. The only way you could get a 404 with this template is if you simply didn't put in the right id number. If you want me to diagnose a particular 404 you're getting, I'd have to have a link to the page that's giving you grief. Without seeing an example, though, I dunno specifically what you've done wrong. I can only imagine you've transposed some digits, or that you've actually included the "nm" prefix before the actual id number.

I looked a little bit for an example in your contributions list, but instead noticed another problem. It seems you've become so frustrated with attempting to put in the IMDB link that you've resorted to just putting a blank section called "External Links" on pages. I know you have a theory that "every little bit is progress", but this is a case where that philosophy definitely doesn't hold.

Two problems. First, all headers should be in sentence case per T:HEAD SC, So even though you're adding text, you're actually introducing a problem the page didn't have before. Second, putting a completely empty section is rather worse than having none at all. It makes it look more incomplete than having nothing there at all. You'll notice that most blank sections around the site at least have the phrase "to be added" underneath. This lets readers know that we didn't just "forget" the information in the section; we just don't have that info yet.

However, I would urge you not to even include a "to be added" external link section on actor/crew pages. Please take the time to use imdb name or don't do anything. It's such an easy template to use — literally you're just plugging a seven-digit code into it — that there's no reason not to just finish the job.

Hope that helps! 16:49: Tue 10 Jan 2012