User talk:Paul A/2003-2


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)

Re: Spelling of "medieval". According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "mediaeval" has basically no recent uses, and "medieval" is used on both sides of the pond. Moreover, C.S. Lewis himself consistently used "medieval" in his writing. (See "The Discarded Image", which is helpfully quoted by the OED!) There is nothing distinctively British about "mediaeval", unless it's a certain antiquarian spirit that prefers old spellings for their own sake. Scholars in both Britain and the U.S. use "medieval" these days--notabling including Lewis. I should think the OED is a trustable source! 

 --Tb 06:13 16 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Fair enough. —Paul A 06:24 16 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Hi Paul, some queries about Barrow's Goldeneye

  1. What is the difference between the old and new pages - the titles look the same to me?
  2. If there is a difference, why was the move necessary?
  3. As it is, on "What links here", the main links, eg from Merginae, are now redirects. If the move was necessary, shouldn't they have been repointed to the new page? (I've not done that myself, because I wanted to understand what was happening first). jimfbleak 05:01 16 Jul 2003 (UTC)
  1. The difference is the apostrophe: it's now an ordinary plaintext apostrophe (') rather than a curvy one (’).
  2. It is my understanding that plaintext apostrophes are preferred in article titles, because it makes the links easier to type and because it avoids a bunch of potential wacky-glyph-glitch errors.
  3. Yes, I should have repointed the links when I renamed the article. I'm just lazy.
—Paul A 06:24 16 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Hi, Paul -- I'd like to invite you (if you haven't seen this already) to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Criteria for inclusion of biographies/Fictional characters, as your knowledge on the subject would be invaluable. :) -- Kaijan 08:21, 22 Aug 2003 (UTC)

[see User talk:ranjran for original message]

Paul, reg the Cocos (Keeling) Islands updation. Will be more careful in future and sorry for the trouble caused. -- ranjran

Hi Paul, nice work on the PKD entry. I hope my additions of short stories and novels didn't make it too unwieldy! -- User:echidna

OK, I now understand your rationale for as of 2004. See discussion at Wikipedia:As of. --Dante Alighieri 22:16, 25 Aug 2003 (UTC)

[see User talk:David Martland for original message]

OK - I didn't realise that page moving could be done that way - using the side bar command. Not sure if it was available when I started - can't remember - this place is changing gradually, and new features are being added. Sorry if I messed things up a bit. Next time I'll try this. David Martland 06:53, 7 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Just in case you were wondering why your sidebar looks so cluttered now: I just made you a sysop. -- Tim Starling 08:24, Sep 17, 2003 (UTC)

[see User talk:sugarfish#Humphrey Bogart for original message]

Congrats on the sysopship!

Re: —... I was always aware that Netscape didn't like either of the correct 'emdash' entities. I guess that's all squared away now. I have some other pages to edit now... Thanks for the tip! -- sugarfish 00:38, 18 Sep 2003 (UTC)

["retroactive continuity" not a portmanteau word -> Talk:Retcon]

Separating Failed Predictions into more serious and fictional examples makes sense. - Skysmith 20:40, 24 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Thanks for expanding my She stub. Great Job -- Daran 16:06, 29 Sep 2003 (UTC)

[see User talk:Chris K for original message]

Hi Paul,

I read your note on the photos. I am certainly aware of the copyright issue and do not upload images which could infringe such rights. The photos you talk about can be purchased as postcards in stores and are also in several websites, some of them for downloads.

Nice "meeting" you.

Chris K 16:28, 29 Sep 2003 (UTC)

[see User:Adam Carr/Talk Archive1 for original message]

They are "found wandering on the Web without any visible copyright warning" Daleks. Adam

[Moved from User:Paul A:]

Please stop altering my spiderm-man entries. Many people enjoy reading them and you are the only one that is deleting them. Let the majority decide if something is irrelevant.

[end moved]

I am not the only one deleting your additions - and you know that, because I'm not the only user who you've complained to about them being deleted.
And I don't believe that "many people enjoy reading them" - frankly, I don't think many people care one way or the other, or even know that your additions exist.

In any case, there are other considerations than whether "people enjoy reading them" - this is an encyclopaedia, not a role-playing handbook or a Complete Guide to the Marvel Universe, and most of your additions are inappropriate. —Paul A 04:31, 2 Oct 2003 (UTC)

[in response to an edit at Red Dwarf]

You're probably right re Rimmer, but what about The Rimmer Experience as a classic example? Could show for some self-infatuation going on there? And what about Ace Rimmer - essentially the same person, but everyone loves Ace...? Just some points :)

tx Dysprosia 03:27, 13 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Okay, so Rimmer has a love-hate relationship with himself. But I think "everybody loathes Rimmer" is good enough for a one-sentence summary; details can be gone into in his own article. —Paul A 04:09, 13 Oct 2003 (UTC)

[see User talk:Jeandré/2003Archive#Homepage 404. for original message]

Jack's homepage 404

Thanks for pointing out the problem with my homepage. Looks like my service provider had disk errors my pages went bye-bye. I'm busy uploading them now, tho it could be argued that even when I'm finished my homepage won't be pointing to anything particularly useful :). -- Jeandré, 2003-10-18t22:19z (Re: note on my talk page.)

[in response to an edit at List of fictional robots and androids]

Ahahaha, yes, Mycroft is not a robot. How embarassing -- what was I thinking? Ahh well, thanks for the quick correction. -- Tlotoxl 07:45, 27 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Ooops. Thanks for spotting my mistakes on the Maverick disambiguation. Angela 02:30, 27 Nov 2003 (UTC)

[see User talk:Auric The Rad for original message]

Really. Auric The Rad 07:50, Dec 1, 2003 (UTC)

[see User talk:Lowellian#Marvel Comics for original message]

Re: Marvel characters

I was already working on updating the broken links when you dropped your message. --Lowellian 08:10, Dec 4, 2003 (UTC)

[see User talk:Noldoaran/archive#broken IMDB links for original message]

The imdb links work fine, see InterWiki Namespaces. I'll Remove them anyway. Noldoaran (Talk) 05:55, Dec 9, 2003 (UTC)

I think you misunderstood what I meant by "don't work". I can see that the namespace translator successfully expands [[IMDB:tt0305357]] into http://us.imdb.com/Title?tt0305357 - but http://us.imdb.com/Title?tt0305357 doesn't work. It is a broken link. If you click on it, you get a Page Not Found error. (Why don't you know this already? Did you not even check the links when you added them?) —Paul A 06:50, 9 Dec 2003 (UTC)
I'm sorry, I thought they all worked. I believe they're all fixed now. I never meant to vandalize wikipedia. Can you forgive me? Noldoaran (Talk) 16:56, Dec 9, 2003 (UTC)
Don't worry about it. It was an understandable mistake, and there's no harm done. I'm sorry I was grouchy about it. —Paul A 01:50, 10 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Apology accepted. —Noldoaran (Talk) 02:05, Dec 10, 2003 (UTC)

[historical note: IMDb's link interpreter has got smarter since then, and all Noldoaran's links would work now. Oh, well.]

[in response to an edit at The Hellfire Club, now The Hellfire Club (comics), removing a link to Dark Phoenix]

re: The Hellfire Club: You don't think Dark Phoenix should be its own article, or at least a redirect? leigh 08:39, Dec 11, 2003 (UTC)

I don't think there's any point having a link to Dark Phoenix when there's nothing there. If you want to write an article, or can think of a good place to redirect it to (probably Jean Grey or Phoenix (comics) - but which?), go right ahead. —Paul A 02:19, 12 Dec 2003 (UTC)

If you are going to visit all my Australian Governor-General pages, plese note that the photo captions should be

Small, centred and italic

I have been meaning to go through and standardise them but if you want to do it you are welcome. Adam 03:00, 19 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Paul A, greetings! Thank you for the spelling correction in Abaris irismeister 11:25, 2003 Dec 24 (UTC)

[see User talk:Petermanchester for original message]

A mis-conception formed many years ago, compounded by my own conceit, I'm afraid. Peter Manchester 10:37, 31 Dec 2003 (UTC)