User talk:Paul A

Hello there Paul, 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

Thanks for the welcome!

You hope I stay? As well to hope that a rock will fall downwards when you let go of it. :)

I'm having trouble tearing myself away from the place...

-- Paul A

Ah. Welcome to my world. ;-) --mav

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[Moved from User:Paul A:]

(For the record, my first contribution was to correct a couple of spelling and punctuation errors in an entry about an obscure British science fiction series, thus neatly encapsulating my two main fields of obsession.)

It was a bad program, and I'm a huge fan of anything to do with time travel. Mintguy

Well, I can't argue that - I've never actually seen Crime Traveller. It's obscure British science fiction series in general that I'm obsessed about. Plus, I'm the kind of person who worries about whether the plural of "series" is also "series", which is why most of my Wikipedia contributions to date have been spelling and punctuation fixes. :o)

--Paul A

It wasn't that bad... the use of future echoes, and the whole 'meeting yourself' in the past bit was quite well handled. And I like Anthony Horowitz, too... :o) ntnon

[end moved]

Well, yes — more Anthony Horowitz is almost always a good thing. — Paul A 03:12 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)

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its an odd characheristic of mine. I dont know why. thanks for the correction - Stevert

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Hi Paul, great article on Alistair Cooke! In 1973 he also published a book -- a history of the US -- entitled Alistair Cooke's America[?] (BBC Publications, London) -- should that be mentioned as well?

All the best, KF 05:04 Feb 6, 2003 (UTC)

Thank you for your kind words. And thank you for reminding me about Alistair Cooke's America - I've added some information about it to the article.

--Paul A 06:04 Feb 6, 2003 (UTC)

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Hi Paul. My wife's surname used to be Wonitoway. Do you have her beat in the difficult names category? :) -- Stephen Gilbert 13:42 Feb 6, 2003 (UTC)

I don't know. Wonitoway looks pretty straightforward to me. :o)

--Paul A 01:53 Feb 7, 2003 (UTC)

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Hi Paul, I've set up a page at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (lists) and started moving the discussion at the pump to the related talk page. The pump is getting too long again and this is a better place to discuss the issue. I hope to see you there -- sannse 11:01 Mar 9, 2003 (UTC)

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Hi Paul, I noticed that you made a minor change to The Beatles, and the change puzzled me. You changed markup to the headings so that there's no space between the markup and the text of the heading. I always put a space between. And so while I prefer "== heading ==", you prefer "==heading==". (I first started my way to make automatic spell checking shut up in Word.) I checked back on Wikipedia:How to edit a page to see how they did it. They have spaces in between. Is there another place with guidelines that I'm missing? Arthur 23:04 Mar 13, 2003 (UTC)

That's my background as a web designer showing: leaving no space between the markup and the heading text is my small rebellion against the general untidyness of the autogenerated HTML code. (That makes it sound deliberate, but it's not really; it's just something I automatically do whenever I edit a topic, like deleted trailing spaces at the end of paragraphs.)

I think the standard of including spaces, if it is a standard, is just to make the wiki markup more readable. As far as I know, it makes no real difference to the actual presentation of the headings on the actual Wikipedia pages.

--Paul A 01:35 Mar 14, 2003 (UTC)

(PS. You edit Wikipedia articles in Word?)

yes. Word is helpful because it does spell checking (very useful) and grammar checking (almost entirely useless for educated and good writers, but always good to check). To use Word, I edit the article so I get the marked-up version, select all, copy, paste into Word, edit the article, select all, copy, paste into edit field, and save article. You're right, it makes no difference to presentation. There does seem to be an implied standard on the page i referenced, however. Arthur 03:04 Mar 14, 2003 (UTC)

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I don't know what happened at rocks. Apparently, I made an accidental redirect from rocks to rocks, but I got confused because on "What Links Here" there was a triple redirect of rocks. But, whatever, User:Salsa Shark seems to have fixed it by redirecting to rock, which is what I meant to do in the first place, so I'll ignore it. Tuf-Kat

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Hi Paul, please see Talk:Carthusian where you can enjoy my mental confusion over erroneousness! Thanks, Nevilley 09:25 Mar 24, 2003 (UTC)

Replied to at Talk:Carthusian. Thank you for pointing that out... --Paul A 01:16 Mar 25, 2003 (UTC)

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Hi Paul. You may, or may not, be interested to know that Crime Traveller is now available on Region 2 DVD. Also available and perhaps to your taste would be the late 50s British TV version of The Invisible Man[1] (http://us.imdb.com/Title?0051285). Mintguy

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Thanks for wasting my work on Robin Cook the novelist. You better do it now, because I'm pissed. You can't copyright facts, lists of facts, etc., so there is no 'suspected copyright violation' - but who can tell you anything?

There's no need to be personal; this is standard Wikipedia procedure. We have to be careful, because any problem with copyright violation could bring the entire 'pedia down. If that means that sometimes we're too cautious - well, that's the price we have to pay.

In response to your second point: of course you can't copyright facts, lists of facts, etc - otherwise the Wikipedia would be completely impossible. But copyright does protect the form in which the facts and such are expressed; and your contribution is expressed in terms almost identical to those in the American Collection biography.

You're "pissed" because you feel your work has been "wasted"; but do you really think copying an article and moving some of the words around required as much work as writing the article in the first place? How "pissed" might the author of the article be to find someone was taking advantage of her work?

(Incidentally, your work hasn't been wasted: in case you hadn't noticed, Wikipedia keeps backups of old versions of articles, so we can easily restore your work if necessary.)

--Paul A 03:03 Mar 27, 2003 (UTC)

Obviously you still don't 'get' it. A copyright that isn't enforceable in a court is all that they've got. The fact that they give it away free already on the Web is another point: they can sue for "damages", which equal "zero" since they already give it away. Be that as it may, a little more editing and adding some new facts into what I did would finish the article off. But you reverted it away, and pissed me off, so if you revert it back, it's now your responsibility. I could have already finished with it but you wasted so much of my time I won't even consider it now. Besides, I can't get away from the image of what made you do it in the first place :)

What image is that, then? --Paul A 03:42 Mar 27, 2003 (UTC)

Don't worry about it, Paul. This idiot has just been blocked. Of course, he'll probably just come back with another IP address. -- Zoe

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Hapi two bee of sum help. :) --Brion

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Paul,

Thank you for expanding the page for My Word. I haven't heard it for awhile, and couldn't remember it that well. The article is much better now. Thanks again! --Two halves 05:41 Apr 17, 2003 (UTC)

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the browser or somethign keeps killing my text:

I've tried six times, 4 in IE and 2 in Mozilla, to add this text to Alien: Ressurection[?]:

never mind. I found a workaround, and posted a question about the problem at wikipedia:village pump. Koyaanis Qatsi

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Yes, I'd found the Wikipedia:Multilingual coordination page and its link to ISO 639 not long after I put that comment about Latin on my user page. I suppose I ought to follow up on that there, in case anyone else ever wonders while looking at that. -- John Owens 07:33 Apr 30, 2003 (UTC)

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Re: your question on my page. United Kingdom/Basic Topics was an old neglected page that I was unaware of when I created List of United Kingdom topics a few weeks ago. When I found the former page I redirected it to the latter and moved the content to the talk page, to be merged in later.

Thanks for the explanation, Mintguy. -- Paul A 08:08 May 12, 2003 (UTC)

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Hi Paul, thanks for correcting my page, my english is not yet so good as i would like it to be, but i am working on it. Thanks a lot, Fantasy ;-)

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It wasn't lazy, it was rushed and distracted. Koyaanis Qatsi

My apologies. I should have guessed; or at least given the benefit of the doubt. -- Paul A 05:57 21 May 2003 (UTC)

No offense taken. :-) Koyaanis Qatsi

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Hi Paul. I noticed in Blade Runner that you reverted 2003 back to as of 2003. I just wondered what the logic was, since the latter is a redirect to the former anyway. I'm not going to get into an edit war on something so minor, just curious. (Although as a Brit, the American usage grates a bit anyway) jimfbleak 06:38 21 May 2003 (UTC)

The reasoning, as it was explained to me when I asked someone else the same question, is that there is a fundamental difference between "In 2003, something happened" and "As of 2003, something was the case" - namely, that when 2004 rolls around all the former will still be true, but the latter will need updating. Making "as of 2003" a link means that, in years to come, it will be relatively easy to find pages that need updating by seeing what links to [[as of 2003 (/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Whatlinkshere&target=As_of_2003)]]. (Just as, this year, one can find pages that need updating by seeing what links to as of 2002, as of 2001, etc.)

Each "as of x" page was made a redirect to the corresponding year page because the page needed to have some kind of content, and nobody could think of anything better at the time.

-- Paul A 09:16 21 May 2003 (UTC)

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Thanks for starting The Three Musketeers. I've been waiting for that article! --Dante Alighieri 10:03 30 May 2003 (UTC)

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Yes, I double-checked that after you did the reversion on Quotation mark (unfortunately my reference book lied to me about what was and wasn't officially in the ISO 8859-1 character set). Thanks for catching that; I went ahead and reverted the changes I made to Diacritic also. Hephaestos 08:58 5 Jun 2003 (UTC)

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Hello, Paul. Thanks for my welcome yesterday and for notifying me I was not logged; I post a question on the Village Pump and now the problem has been reported to Brion. About your question, I consider The Warlock in 1st. and 3rd. person; in 2nd. person only as a title or for a question (So you are The..., Are you The...?), but not familiarly; so, for you and the Wikipedian community, just Warlock. Hope the problem can be solved soon, so I could continue surfing the Wiki and pasting some contributions I have prepared (additional tip, redact them on a text processor and then paste them on "the box below", or your phone bill will be the cause of a massive heart attack if you use a telephone modem as I do :-)).-- The Warlock June 12, 2003, 9:33 (GMT)

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Hi, Paul, and thanks. It's fixed. My browser was setted to reject cookies. Now it's O.K. Grateful again.-- The Warlock June 13, 2003, 6:24 (GMT)

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Thanks again, Paul. About the time, I use to put the GMT (not mine indeed), to allow anyone to know what time is in his/her country. But the other is too useful. PS, I do enjoy the site.-- The Warlock Same day, 7:06 (GMT).

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Hi, Paul. At last my stone head understood the difference between UTC and GMT, just a few minutes... Slow but sure :-) The Warlock 05:30 14 Jun 2003 (UTC)

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Hey Paul, just wanted to tell you that I carried out your suggestion for a Wikipedia:As of page. --Nelson 20:31 16 Jun 2003 (UTC)

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Hello, Paul. I had misunderstood the idea of the "summary" field, and more than once I forgot to put even the title... Hope it does not happen again. I'm somewhat torpid, but I'm trying to learn. Thanks for your tips, they are very helpful to me :-) The Warlock 09:10 27 Jun 2003 (UTC)

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Paul, I'm a little curious about your revert to the spelling & capitalization of Mediaeval in C. S. Lewis: of the 4 occurences of the word, I think I understand why it is Mediaeval in the title of his chair at Magdalen College, Oxford and Medieval in the title of his work The Discarded Image..., but why are the 2 other occurences spelled Mediaeval and medieval? Why is there a "medieval world view" but not "medieval literature"? Regards, Harris7 11:06 27 Jun 2003 (UTC)

The short answer is that I wasn't really thinking about it. It was a knee-jerk reaction: "Lewis was English, so 'medieval' is wrong. Revert." I didn't pay any real attention to the capitalisation, or to any instances of the word other than those changed in that particular edit.
There may be someone who has a clear and systematic view of which instances should be spelled which way, but it isn't me. —Paul A 01:23 30 Jun 2003 (UTC)