Encyclopedia > User talk:David Martland
User talk:David Martland
- Nevermind, I moved it. --mav
Background: We try to place user-specific stuff in the user "namespace" and wikipedia-related stuff in the wikipedia "namespace". See Wikipedia:Namespace. Cheers! --mav
Hello David! I notice in your work area you mention that you don't know how to create pages without making links from another page. That's the idea! Generally, you find an article related to the new page you want to create, and make a link there. That keeps our database of articles connected to each other and prevents orphan articles. -- Stephen Gilbert 14:44 Nov 14, 2002 (UTC)
RE the messgae on my talk page: Maybe I can be of help to you. Let's look at your two example problems:
- Where can we link a new article called Rockingham china[?]? First, I would do as you did, and try to find a page on china as pottery. We have none, unfortunately. Next, I would look in a more general direction, and do a search for pottery. Ah, there is one (quite rough, but not too bad). I see the pottery article has a link to China (pottery)[?], but there is not article for it yet. So, at this point I would settle on one of two options: whip up a quick stub article for China (pottery)[?] and link to [[Rockingham pottery from there (this is a bit of work), or simply link to Rockingham pottery[?] directly from the pottery article's "See also" section. That being said, there's really nothing wrong with simply creating a link from your work page and not going through the trouble of finding another article to link from. Eventually, as the pottery articles expand and multiply, things will get linked together. Even if your new article is not linked to other articles, the search page will still find it.
- Now the second problem: how to handle the different topics labeled induction. This is covered by the fine art of Wikipedia disambiguation. In this case, induction serves as a disambiguation page, with links to articles for each use of the word: inductive reasoning, mathematical induction, and electromagnetic induction. The trick is to find a more specific name for each topic.
I hope you find something useful in all that rambling. Really, you don't have to worry much about "not getting it." Others Wikipedians will help you if you feel lost. Take your time, have fun, browse the Wikipedia:help pages and the Wikipedia:FAQs, and if you have any questions, ask at the Wikipedia:Village pump (or just ask me, if you like). Cheers! -- Stephen Gilbert 22:11 Nov 17, 2002 (UTC)
2)2 Lir 10:57 Nov 18, 2002 (UTC)
Hi David, I noticed you edited the Amersham page. Do you live there? It would be good to have a Wikipedian live nearby.
-- Ramin Nakisa
Howdy David. In re: the note on my page, the notations on "Recent Changes" are "N" for new page (new pages often attract a bunch of copyedits); the "M" stands for "Minor Change", which you can set by checking the check box labelled "This is a minor edit" when you edit a page. If you check your "Preferences", you can suppress minor changes in the Recent Changes List. Checking this box is a courtesy to people who suppress seeing minor changes; I usually check the box if the change I'm making is a simple spelling or grammar change.
Where does one find this kind of information? The easiest thing to do is to ask on the Wikipedia:Village pump; which is a sort of bulletin board for the project. It should probably be added to one of the Wikipedia:FAQ pages if it's not already there.
Another handy little tip - when signing messages (like on people's talk pages), typing three "~" in a row will automatically insert your user name; typing four "~" in a row will insert your user name and the date and time - like this - Chas zzz brown 18:17 Nov 20, 2002 (UTC)
- Chas, hope you don't mind, I've copied some of your above answer and ruthlessly transformed it into an item on the FAQ page. :-) -- Tarquin 14:45 Dec 3, 2002 (UTC)
Answer to query - copied from Wikipedia Village Pump
Wikipedia Implementation and performance
During the last few weeks I have been thrilled to discover Wikipedia. However, it is not perfect, and there appear to be very significant performance issues with the software/hardware.
Is there information about how WP is implemented, and is there any form of discussion going on about how to improve it?
What sort of loading does WP server out - 10 page requests/second, 100?, 1000?
Also, what proportion of the load is due to edits - it should be quite low - but maybe it's not. Is it possible to prioritise edits over searches? This would be useful, as quite often these days waiting for an edit to Load takes so long - it really is quite a nuisance.
Would performance be enhanced if WP were distributed over several servers? Is this feasible? If not, why not?
Who is looking at these issues? --User:David Martland
- David--
- Wikipedia is open source software. See the SourceForge page (http://wikipedia.sf.net) for details. See Wikipedia:Statistics for detailed access statistics.
- The performance issues are discussed on the wikitech-l mailing list. The server is reasonably huge and not suffering from the load. The main problem appear to be locking issues (we use MySQL's MyISAM tables, which only support table-level locking) and unoptimized queries (some columns do not have indexes where they should have etc.). These issues are slowly being worked on by Wikipedia developers, feel free to participate. See m:How to become a Wikipedia hacker for a growing tutorial on the code. --Eloquence 12:22 Dec 3, 2002 (UTC)
- Regarding the number of page views per second: On Special:Statistics. In the past 4 1/2 months (since 20 July) there have been about 20,000,000 page views and 400,000 to 450,000 edits. This is equal to slightly under 2 page views per second. As we are still growing dayly, the number will be higher at the moment, put it will probably be well under 10 per second. Andre Engels 14:29 Dec 3, 2002 (UTC)
Thanks for the quick answers. I suppose it's possible the poor performance I get sometimes is due to network problems - besides the locking problems. Another possibility is that a mean rate of 2 queries/second still permits a much higher peak rate. It quite often takes a minute or so to have an update during editing from my locations in the UK - maybe that's the locking problem? David Martland 20:22 Dec 4, 2002 (UTC)
I suggest you move GPO. Aswell as GPO in Ireland (Easter Rising) having different connotations It's usual to allow acronyms the possibility of having different meanings with a disambiguation page. Mintguy 15:46 Dec 6, 2002 (UTC)
Nice article on Maurice Duruflé. I've been able to look up the Poulenc Organ Concerto, and he did indeed give the premiere. There is also a web source [1] (http://www.allclassical.com/cg/acg.dll?p=acg&sql=2:161342~C#DES) which says he premiered the Vierne, so I'll add that to the article (I'll check that it's correct in Grove when I get the chance). All the best --Camembert
Some comments from students....
Hello david, Gary McNamara has completed your assingment! My wikipedia name is Garymcnamara (NB wiki name begins with capital G)
"Hi David Martland" Michael Sandys here i have also completed your assignment my wikipedia name is Michael_Sandys or just Michael Sandys User:Michael Sandys
David--re your Berliner Luft query on my talk page: you're right, Berliner Luft is an entire operetta - the march in question from it appears to sometimes goes under the name "Berliner Lüftchen". As you say, it's extraordinarily difficult to track down recordings of it given that it is relatively well known - the only recording on CD I can find is on a disc released by Classic FM themselves called "Classic Discoveries". They have it at Amazon (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000025VIA/qid=1039959719/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1_1/202-1341884-1535846), but as it says it will take 4-6 weeks to deliver, I don't suppose they will be much use for Christmas. You may be able to find a copy in somewhere like Virgin or HMV. Otherwise: I run a record shop - we don't normally stock this kind of thing, but I'll have a look tomorrow if we might be able to get a copy of this before Christmas if you're interested. Anyway, good luck in tracking it down. --Camembert
Hi. I just noticed that DMworkArea still exists as a redirect to User:David Martland/DMworkArea, you might want to request this to be deleted via Wikipedia:Votes for deletion. Mintguy
Hi David - we weren't really fighting over du Pré. It was just that when you moved the page the edit history got broken so that bits of it were at the old spelling (Jacqueline Du Pre) and other bits were at the new, correct, one (Jacqueline du Pré) - I was just stitching them back together again. If you use the "Move this page" link (down the side of the page) instead of cutting and pasting the contents, it will keep the edit history intact automatically (it's also a much easier way to move a page). --Camembert
Maybe I should have said "gasoline IS petrol" instead? ;) Like I indicated in the rest of the comment, I just took a look at the articles for gasoline and petrol, and put whichever one had the heftier article first, which happened to be gasoline, and petrol, with its links to gasoline and diesel and that's about it, was consigned to the parentheses. But I would never call it "gas" (well, in casual conversation, but not here, ever). All in all, I'm pretty sensitive to Americanisms/Britishisms/etc.isms; there are probably people who think I am British, I tend to spell words like "favour" and so forth enough (though I draw the line when it comes to "-ise" and "-isation", unless I'm consciously trying to, which I never do). Probably comes of re-reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings too much as a young adult. ;) -- John Owens 09:58 20 May 2003 (UTC)
Hi David. Yup, flutist is a horrible ugly blight on a perfectly good language. Unfortunately, the rule is "first in, best dressed", and those of us who speak English (as opposed to that trans-Atlantic pidgin thing we hear on TV) will just have to live with it, I'm afraid. (Trans-Pacific in my case, but you know what I mean.) You can have both after a fashion. Just make your links to flautist. They will still wind up on the same page (alas) but at least the links will look OK. Any new pages you make, of course, you can chose whichever term you prefer. Not to worry. Sooner or later, if we perserve, we will teach those backward Americans to talk properly. It will be a great day for the world, because at around about the same time, I believe, we are going to teach the French to be modest, the English to spell rationally, and the Australians to be more polite. Well, that last one might be a little more difficult ... but we will try. :) Tannin 08:09 22 May 2003 (UTC)
Hi David, not seen you around for a while, good to see you again. I sort of agree with you on string quartets - my thinking was that Haydn, Beethoven, Bartok and (to a lesser degree) Shostakovich are, I think, generally seen as the most important string quartet composers, both in that they really pushed the genre into new terriotry and in that their string quartets are among the most important pieces they wrote. This probably isn't true of Mozart, for example, where I guess you'd point at his operas, piano concertos and symphonies at least before his string quartets. Of course, this is somewhat subjective and you're right that we could do with rewriting it. I was thinking we might make a bullet-pointed list of composers detailing how many string quartets they wrote, together with a brief summary of their contribution to the genre. I'll have a go at making a start on this later tonight, I think (don't have time to do anything just at the minute). --Camembert
I'm afraid I don't know very much about Mendelssohn, especially his string quartets. Some passages in them do seem to be modelled on Beethoven: the introduction to the finale of Mendelssohn's second is very like Beethoven's Op. 132, for example, and apparently Mendelssohn quotes the Cavatina from Beethoven's Op. 130 in the same piece. Also, I've seen it said that the slow introduction to Mendelssohn's first is similar to the introduction to Beethoven's Harp quartet (though I don't know Mendelssohn's first, so can't vouch for that personally). I should think that M's later quartets show the influence of Beethoven, but whether they're as close as his early ones I don't know - as I say, Mendelssohn isn't really my thing. I'm afraid I wouldn't be confident enough about any of this to add it to an article (not without listening to or looking over the scores to all the pieces, anyway). --Camembert
- No problem, David. I'm actually going to have a tinker with that para in a moment, but don't I think you'll be upset by the result. Tannin
__________________________________
Are you also going to do product churning[?] about which I know almost nothing.... ??? -- David Martland 13:57 5 Jun 2003 (UTC)
Thanks for the idea about churning. I might get to it eventually, but first I want to do all the marketing basics. If you're not familiar with churning, you're obviously not a stock broker. So far I've edited most of the existing marketing articles, about 15 of them (some of them were quite well done,but most of them were not), I've reorganized the marketing section on the root 'business' page, and I've contributed about 30 marketing articles. I think it will require about another hundred articles before the marketing section of this encyclopedia becomes really useful at the university level. I am currently doing the product management topics. Next I will do the pricing, and then marketing research areas. mydogategodshat
The lack of certain accents can be annoying, I agree, but I think it's done to try and ensure compatibility with as many machines as possible. There's some explanation of the matter at Wikipedia:Special characters (I believe the characters which work in article titles are those in the first table on that page). By the way: I did have something better to do, I was just shying away from doing it! --Camembert
___________
Your colleague is right. The strategy used by these printer manufacturers could be concidered a form of churn. Churning in general terms is just selling more product than is benificial to the customer. The classic example is a stockbroker that regularly buys and sells securities in your portfolio. You may or may not gain, but the broker sure piles up commissions. I can see how a strategy of selling the basic product at a loss, but charging outragious amounts for refills (printers), useage time (cell phones), blades (razors),or prints (photography), can be concidered a form of churning. user:mydogategodshat
All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
|
Search Encyclopedia
|
Featured Article
|