Taking a wikibreak. May not adhere to this, but wanted to get off the site (I will even be removing my watchlist from my RSS feeder!). Reasons include the start of the school semester, the fast-approaching January 15 unprotection of my talk page, dissatisfaction with a recent message left on my talk page, and fatigue after completing January 2025 Richmond water crisis. Hopefully, I will be able to be back soon!
If you're being mean, this is who you're being mean to.
I regularly remove Signpost, election, etc. notifications from this talk page. However, any other notices, including bot-sent notices of possible missteps, are kept for transparency. Thanks for visiting!
I have checked the modification to the page that you wanted to make, and the information is already there, so I don't think the modification is necessary. Please refrain from contacting me, as you have exhausted my capacity to assist you further.
Hey besties
Welcome to my talk page!
December 2024
Hello, I'm A1Cafel. I noticed that you recently removed content from Gender modality without adequately explaining why. In the future, it would be helpful to others if you described your changes to Wikipedia with an accurate edit summary. If this was a mistake, don't worry; the removed content has been restored. If you would like to experiment, please use your sandbox. If you think I made a mistake, or if you have any questions, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Thanks. A1Cafel (talk) 10:16, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hello JuxtaposedJacob, may you be surrounded by peace, success and happiness on this seasonal occasion. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Sending you heartfelt and warm greetings for Christmas and New Year 2025. Happy editing, Abishe (talk) 23:39, 24 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Chesterfield County Public Schools & UVA professors
Hi Jacob,
Planning on getting the library pics tomorrow. Wanted to run two things by you:
I have pics of every elementary, middle, and high school in Chesterfield County uploaded to Commons. Do you think it would be worthwhile to do a similar chart for the elem. and middle schools as you've done for the library?
Have you considered seeing if there are any UVA professors whose pages are missing pics? I found this pic from an old lecture, and I wish I had gotten a pic with Paul Cantor before he passed, but alas I was not then the Wikipedian I am now. (I only starting doing pics after college.)
Both ideas are great! I had thought about the first one in passing but thought it was too much of a pipe dream lol. I will check the category and might send some emails.
Sounds like a good idea! I've put the draft up, but have put in nothing yet.
Oh, and two other things:
I realized I know your name, but you don't know mine. Despite my alt. account indicating otherwise, my name's Ryan.
I was thinking about holding a photography contest with some of my students to see if they can get any pics of the Henrico or Richmond schools to teach them how it works/incorporate it as a club activity or even a class lesson. I'm still figuring it out, so don't refrain from taking pics if you want/can, but don't worry about getting all the pics yourself.
All good; I've never co-edited an article simultaneously (article creation is rare for me), so I had no idea how to proceed. I've nominated the draft for deletion. I've also created the Wikidata item for the event. JohnSon12a (talk) 21:44, 8 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Taking a quick break; the 10 more sources I have assembled seem increasingly daunting, lol.
Yeah, I've been watching the diffs of those pages; the edits look great. What I am perhaps happiest about is that hopefully the chart will invite some more picture-taking by other interested collaborators. Checked out ACPS and it looked awesome too. You could stand to do Charlottesville as well but don't worry about it too much. Again, hopefully The new charts will invite other collaborators to take pictures.
Thanks for the Wikidata stuff; do you find that that takes too much time? I find it a little tedious lol.
That sounds really cool about the photography contests! I am in agreement that Wikimedia should be brought more into the schools; I would have enjoyed that, at least. Are your students able to drive?
Also, thanks so much for your help with the water outage article.
@JohnSon12a@Packer1028 I was also thinking about the virginia elected officials and their district pages, many of which have not been updated since the redistricting, elections, etc. - what do you think about a class project for that?
I, of course, cannot seem to find the message that you left me originally that i believe says what you teach, so I forget if you are a history/government teacher or not. Have a good night!
You're welcome; happy to have gotten those school-districts done. I really was quite inspired by your idea for the libraries and I'm glad we've been able to apply it beyond. The table wasn't something I'd thought about doing until then; happy coincidence I'd taken pics of all the Chesterfield schools for a personal challenge. Hopefully we will be able to attract some collaborators!
In regards to Wikidata, it honestly depends. I learned about it thanks to WikiShootMe, so it was kind of a learn-as-I-went experience, so there may be shortcuts I don't know about. (I'm a big Wikidata proponent in part because, if I'm looking to grab data about, say, all the listed cemeteries in Chesterfield County, Virginia so that I don't add any duplicates, it's so easy to look them all up at once. It's like learning a new way of thinking, but you adjust.) My process for the elementary and middle schools was:
Create the basic Wikidata entry, pasting the description from the previous one
Once I've finished creating all schools for the area (middle or elementary; I wouldn't do both middle and elementary at once), I'd go back (created Wikidata pages being saved to the Watchlist by default) and fill things out in a certain order. I would have to redo the process to remember exactly how it worked, but a system was there. It takes time, but with a good system I was able to do the 46 elementary schools in 3-4 hours, with only Google Maps, the school-district website page with addresses and links to the school pages, and Wikidata itself open.
I'm happy to help pass on whatever else I know about Wikidata to you.
Some students can drive, some can't; it's probably going to be a club contest, so it wouldn't be required for an assignment or anything. The big problem is that they don't have access to Commons on school laptops, and neither do I, so in order to upload at school or even to show them how it works (and because the school laptops might be their only ones), we'd have to use the old-school method of uploading to Wikipedia itself first. (I'd then export their files to Commons.) Part of the reason I got the File:Store low on water, Richmond VA.jpg pic was so that I could test out the process for myself, and it seems to have worked decently. Still figuring out a couple kinks, but coming up with the contest and prepping a Google Doc with all the instructions has at least been something to do while we've been off from school.
You're welcome for the help! Happy to do it; Wiki-related work is genuinely one of two or three of my most favorite things ever, and it's so rewarding to help out in any way I can. You probably noticed, but I put a coordinate location for the page, which is at the Douglasdale Road water treatment facility; felt that was appropriate, and that a pic of the facility (if we could get it one day) would be better than my water-shortage store picture.
Currently, I teach English. I don't think our gov. teacher is a big Wikipedia buff, so it probably wouldn't go through. Would be a good idea, though; I wonder if some teachers at another high school might look into it, but it's so hard to explain all the intricacies of these processes to people who aren't motivated to learn them in the first place. That's why I enjoy seeing other Wikimedians from my area on here.
Speaking of other Wikimedians from the area, User:SDudley is someone to get in touch with. A lot of the pictures of VA state politicians are ones he's taken or found on Flickr, so he might have advice on your gov. info idea. He also deals with copyright law & related stuff. Excellent resource and a nice guy!
I think that's a good point about the process that you use; my process was usually to create one object at a time, but if I created multiple at a time then I could add the same data for each one, which would be less tedious.
Oh wow, I didn't know that about Commons on school laptops. That sounds like it would be a cool club contest. Good luck with the project, it is definitely an important area for attention.
I never really noticed the coordinates thing on Wikipedia until you mentioned it, so thank you, and thank you for adding that to the page.
This type of thing really reinforces my belief in the idea that teachers should be given a bit more freedom to do things like this in the classroom, as I definitely see your point about one teacher's strengths being different from another's. I've been lucky to experience many different types of teachers throughout my career and I wish that creativity was amplified in our system. (How cliché I sound!)
Thank you for introducing me to him, and I'm glad we got in touch.
I just did; do you know how to make the userbox (the one at the top of my page) correlate with the category, such that when somebody adds the userbox it also automatically adds the category?
Holler if you need anything! Have a good day!
(Don't be sorry; you had stuff to say. I wish certain Richmond officials would be a bit more sharing, but we can't always have our way, can we?)
@SunDawn:, thank you friend, it's been a long process of creating this article. Thankfully, I am not in the region currently, but many colleagues, family, and friends are. JuxtaposedJacob (talk) | :) | he/him | 03:26, 9 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
DYK nomination of January 2025 Richmond water outage
Hi @JuxtaposedJacob: I know I may sound a pedant, but to refer to the primary content as articles not pages. This isn't a book and they are not pages. They are articles. When you refer to them as pages, it is the wrong nomenclature, sends the wrong signal and folk get confused. Thanks. scope_creepTalk08:03, 11 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
