This is an archive of past discussions with User:Neil916. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Thanks so much for your feedback ages ago to the [Technologies] page. I'm just posting here because we've taken the insight that both you and Jeremy112233 offered, and have made updates along what I hope are the correct lines.
It would be lovely to have your feedback. Hopefully we got it right this time.
Hello Neil,
I would just like to let you know that the changes I made were correct. I am a history teacher myself, and the contributions i made come from a very long career of studying californian history. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.4.35.198 (talk) 05:27, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
Your assertions about the naming history of Monterey Bay are contradicted by reliable, printed sources. Neil916 (Talk) 05:35, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
Hello from the team at Featured article review!
We are preparing to take a closer look at Featured articles promoted in 2004–2010 that may need a review. We started with a script-compiled list of older FAs that have not had a recent formal review. The next step is to prune the list by removing articles that are still actively maintained, up-to-date, and believed to meet current standards. We know that many of you personally maintain articles that you nominated, so we'd appreciate your help in winnowing the list where appropriate.
Please take a look at the sandbox list, check over the FAs listed by your name, and indicate on the sandbox talk page your assessment of their current status. Likewise, if you have taken on the maintenance of any listed FAs that were originally nominated by a departed editor, please indicate their status. BLPs should be given especially careful consideration.
Hello TWL users! We hope JSTOR has been a useful resource for your work. We're organizing a cleanup drive to correct dead links to JSTOR articles – these require JSTOR access and cannot easily be corrected by bot. We'd love for you to jump in and help out!
Neil916, I'm not sure why the bot never posted this to your page, but the nomination was failed three weeks ago by David Eppstein, after waiting for a response for over six weeks after the review was posted. (The article's talk page shows that the nomination was failed.)
You may wish to renominate the article, once you've addressed all the issues that were raised by David, but the review you just replied to is closed and cannot be reopened. Best of luck, whatever you decide to do. BlueMoonset (talk) 02:38, 26 January 2016 (UTC)
Well, that would be pretty disrespectful to David, since he's put such a large amount of time into reviewing the article already. I've pinged him on his talk page to see if he's interested in following up with it. Neil916 (Talk) 06:40, 26 January 2016 (UTC)
Hi there, I'm pleased to inform you that I've begun reviewing the article Grodziskie you nominated for GA-status according to the criteria. This process may take up to 7 days. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you might have during this period. Message delivered by Legobot, on behalf of David Eppstein -- David Eppstein (talk) 01:00, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
To the Gates of Richmond follow-up
Hello Neil916,
Regarding the comment you left on my talk page a few months ago, yes, it would be absolutely excellent if you could scan the missing pages in Stephen Sears' To the Gates of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign. I'm sorry I couldn't respond earlier. (check here, if you don't remember. :-))
Come to think of it though, I will be working extensively to improve articles related to the topic. If you don't mind, and if it won't be a burden, could you scan as many pages as possible? The pages I've already gotten (210-248; 338-352) don't need scanning. Thank you in advance. Don't worry if it's a burden. Cheers, --ceradon (talk • contribs) 05:23, 22 June 2015 (UTC)
Well, I'm a long-time lurker at RFA and usually agree with the final outcome and have rarely (if ever? Not sure if I've ever publicly) made a statement. When I saw how sideways yours was going, I took the rare step of making a comment. I don't think the community made the right choice in this case, but if you ever felt like putting yourself through that again, at least you know what concerns you will need to tackle head on in the beginning. From what I saw, even though you might have disagreed with the outcome, you always respected the process, even if it didn't go "your way" in the end. I think your supporters didn't emphasize this enough. Good luck. Neil916 (Talk) 08:32, 6 February 2016 (UTC)
The article Grodziskie you nominated as a good article has been placed on hold . The article is close to meeting the good article criteria, but there are some minor changes or clarifications needing to be addressed. If these are fixed within 7 days, the article will pass; otherwise it may fail. See Talk:Grodziskie for things which need to be addressed. Message delivered by Legobot, on behalf of Kpalion -- Kpalion (talk) 03:01, 9 February 2016 (UTC)
Hi there, I'm pleased to inform you that I've begun reviewing the article Grodziskie you nominated for GA-status according to the criteria. This process may take up to 7 days. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you might have during this period. Message delivered by Legobot, on behalf of Kpalion -- Kpalion (talk) 14:41, 30 January 2016 (UTC)
I am trying to reorganize the references on the Grodziskie article as outline at Help:List-defined references and Template:Reflist. Now, in the article, the references all have numbers to the appropriate citations, but in the list of references, they all use the "·" character instead of the number of the reference. I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. Can you spot it? Neil916 (Talk) 16:44, 21 March 2015 (UTC)
Additionally, some references that are only used once in the article show up with two reference locators in the reference list. Neil916 (Talk) 17:07, 21 March 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for doing that. It's odd, the courier typeface that Wikipedia uses for its demo/source code is really hard to read on my screen (Google Chrome, zoomed 100%, 1920x1080 resolution) and the equals sign doesn't show up at all, so I couldn't figure out what was missing, even when I went back and stared at the help page. Neil916 (Talk) 20:03, 21 March 2015 (UTC)
Featuring your work on Wikipedia's front page: DYKs
Thanks, Piotrus. DYK hasn't been high on my list of priorities, so I don't think I'll have time to wade through all the process of getting that done. Glad you liked it. Neil916 (Talk) 17:27, 2 February 2016 (UTC)
Hello, Neil916. Grodziskie, an article you either created or significantly contributed to, has been nominated to appear on Wikipedia's Main Page as part of Did you know. You can see the hook and the discussion here. You are welcome to participate! Thank you. APersonBot (talk!) 22:56, 2 March 2016 (UTC)
Danziger Jopenbier?
Hi Neil, I just thought, if you're into rather obscure historical Central European beer styles, then maybe you'd like to write an article one day about Jopenbier [de] / piwo jopejskie [pl]? In English Wikipedia we have an article about Jopen, which is a Dutch beer brand, but I'm talking about a thick, syrupy porter historically brewed in Danzig/Gdańsk. The barley wort was fermented in open vats under thick layers of mold (probably impossible to recreate today as the original mold strains have been lost). If you're interested, I can help with Polish sources. — Kpalion(talk)10:20, 5 March 2016 (UTC)
Hmm, interesting. I would be interested in looking into that. I'll do a bit of digging to see if I can turn up anything. Neil916 (Talk) 16:23, 5 March 2016 (UTC)
On 19 March 2016, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Grodziskie, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that the light, crisp, smoky, and highly carbonated Grodziskie beer was once nicknamed "Polish Champagne"? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Grodziskie. You are welcome to check how many page hits the article got while on the front page (here's how, daily totals), and it may be added to the statistics page if the total is over 5,000. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.
Well, that's interesting. According to the page stats, the page gets an average of 75 pageviews a day, but on the day it was on DYK, it generated 1768 pageviews. Neil916 (Talk) 17:38, 21 March 2016 (UTC)
Africa Destubathon
Hi, thanks for your work so far! Can you do me a favour though and always add every entry you do to the main list here as well as the entries page, regardless if yet approved or not as that's the master list of all articles being done. It's just veyr time consuming for me to be judging the articles, trying to contribute myself and chasing up what people have done and filling it out for people each time. So if you can take care of that this would be a great help, there's some part filled out ones underneath so you just need to add country, article name and then you username. Thanks.♦ Dr. Blofeld20:33, 16 October 2016 (UTC)
Impressive work coming in for the African Destubathon, playing the game well too as you've moved into the top 3. Great job! ♦ Dr. Blofeld09:03, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
Original prose
Hi, an editor has alerted me to the fact that you've been copying a lot of the text exactly for multiple articles. The idea is more original prose. I can understand in species where it is difficult to find enough text for a destub that some text may be used again to pad it out but in some cases it's 3/4 of the whole article. If he's working hard to destub articles with original prose each time it's a bit of a mismatch. I don't want to put either of you off though, as it's still destubbing work, and you're both working hard, and it's much appreciated. What do you think on this?♦ Dr. Blofeld22:17, 7 November 2016 (UTC)
It is a valid point. I'll let you decide. Obviously, two species of the same genus are going to share a lot of the same physical characteristics and I believe that the edits/entries meet the spirit, as well as the letter, of the goal of expanding stub articles, and that the newly destubbed articles represent significant improvements (compare this to this. I have also invested a significant amount of work in creating the articles, and being able to reuse writing that applies to multiple species does allow me to save a significant amount of time compared to someone who is starting from scratch each time. The genus Synodontis is large, with 131 species. There will be a lot of duplicated material, but it's more work than changing a few words between articles. I'm working on those articles because they are low-hanging fruit, so to speak. If you want me to stop, I will. Neil916 (Talk) 22:45, 7 November 2016 (UTC)
Perhaps if you kept it to no more than 750 bytes copied text Brigade Piron would be happier with that? I personally don't mind of course as I greatly appreciate the work you've done on this, I just want to keep everybody happy :-)♦ Dr. Blofeld10:59, 8 November 2016 (UTC)
Well, I appreciate your reassurance. I don't see the 750 byte limit as being terribly helpful for a few reasons. First, what is "copied text"? I have three species of fish, two of them are commercially harvested, and in those two articles, I put the phrase "This species has commercial importance in the fisheries industry", or something to that effect, with a citation. Is that copied text because it appears in two of the three articles? Some information remains the same across species, but changes in others. Sometimes, it's just not known. Take the diet. In some species, the diet has been studied, and it is known. If I have it, I write about it. Other species may only be known from preserved specimens, and they have not been studied in the wild. I feel it's more helpful to the reader of the article to give some context to the reader to identify the fact that where studies have been made on other species in the same genus, we have found that they generally have an omnivorous diet at a certain trophic level, rather than just let the reader wonder if these fish feed on algae, or are they eating crocodiles? That's boilerplate text, copied between articles. But it adds more value than leaving it out because someone is worried that I'm not working hard enough to expand the article. Statements about the physical appearance of the fish are the same. I know that since the fish is a member of Synodontis, it has a downward-facing mouth with thick lips, three pairs of barbels, strong spines in the dorsal fin and pectoral fins that the fish uses for protection, and a forked tail. Yep, so that's going to be duplicated across all 131 articles. I think including a general description of the fish is helpful. Sometimes I know information about the coloration of the fish, and I include that, other times I don't, or I'm not confident enough that the source meets WP's reliability standards. Sometimes I just don't have access to a resource, but let's not lose sight of the fact that this is a destubbing project, not a project to bring these articles to featured articles. I don't feel the least bit guilty at just taking one step with an article and leaving it at Start class. I guess I'll start winding down this rant, but the nuts and bolts of it is that the WP:FISH project lists 13,200 fish stubs, at least some of them are in Africa and can be used in this project. If another editor is concerned that I'm not working hard enough, they are welcome to tackle as many of those 13,200 articles as they want, and they can see that there's real work involved. I started with Synodontis because it's a genus that is widely distributed across Africa, and the existing stubs were had good categorization and taxoboxes. And after I went through some of my other resources that described the Genus, I started hitting the fish by country category and started working on destubbing the Synodontis species articles that I hadn't gotten to. And yes, DRC was the first country I hit. And yes, there were a bunch of Synodontis species that are endemic to DRC. There are a lot of fish that are endemic or native to the area. There will probably be more. But that's why after scattering my entries across a bunch of different countries, I suddenly dumped 10 articles over two days entered under one country. There are actually more that I've already destubbed that are native to DRC but I haven't entered because they're native to more than one country and I haven't decided where to enter them. And I was planning to do the same with other country categories until I finish out Synodontis. Because doing it that way is the most efficient way to spend my time. And after I'm done with Synodontis. I'll move on to other genera, and maybe I'll be dumping a bunch of more entries in DRC again later, if I get to it.
Ultimately, it's your contest, you're the judge. If you say stop doing it, I'll move on to other projects. If you say you want me to include less information in the articles, I'll probably just move on to other projects. There won't be hard feelings either way. But the argument that the work I'm doing is unfair because it's too easy for me trivializes my contributions. If someone wants to get a slice of the easy work, they can take a crack at Barbus, there are 302 species over there, most of them are stubs. Neil916 (Talk) 21:48, 8 November 2016 (UTC)
Since no one is responding and it appears you stopped with the contest, as another contestant I say carry on. Sometimes a lot of info is shared between articles; be it a satellite family, Olympics information, etc. That is how it is, and I think you should keep going. Good work so far either way! Kees08 (talk) 06:59, 11 November 2016 (UTC)
Thank you for responding, Kees08. I haven't been contributing recently because I've been a bit under the weather, but will resume in the near future when I feel better and have more free time. Neil916 (Talk) 20:20, 11 November 2016 (UTC)
I'm really sorry that you stopped contributing to this as I certainly had no problem with your articles myself. You were one of the most valuable contributors. But I had a complaint so had heoped to find a solution, I hadn't read your response until now as you didn't ping me unfortunately. I would likely allow you to have continued as before, but if health is the issue, that's vital to productivity, so hope you feel better soon.♦ Dr. Blofeld15:06, 20 November 2016 (UTC)
Prizes
Hi, as you did a lot of wildlife articles I think you could claim enough articles to win some vouchers under "Most geography and wildlife articles destubbed" if you want them at here.♦ Dr. Blofeld10:53, 28 November 2016 (UTC)
Dr. Blofeld sending a ping because my recent edits cleaning up my talkpage, ending with my revert of the talkpage spam about arbcom elections with the edit summary "rv spam" might have unintentionally sent the wrong message, if you only had my talk page on your watchlist. Neil916 (Talk) 08:06, 29 November 2016 (UTC)
Hi. We're into the last five days of the Women in Red World Contest. There's a new bonus prize of $200 worth of books of your choice to win for creating the most new women biographies between 0:00 on the 26th and 23:59 on 30th November. If you've been contributing to the contest, thank you for your support, we've produced over 2000 articles. If you haven't contributed yet, we would appreciate you taking the time to add entries to our articles achievements list by the end of the month. Thank you, and if participating, good luck with the finale!
