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Hey Bryan; I've started a new thread over at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Elements about a concept for nav bars and locator maps. Your views, opinions and HTML skills are requested. :) --mav

Bryan, if you have some time, will you write something about horseshoe orbits? I don't quite understand how they work and I am curious. Thanks. PattonZarate

Sure, I'll take a crack at it. I'll have effectively zero time tomorrow, but the day after is good. But I barely understand them myself, so I'm not sure how much I'll be able to help. :) Bryan
Thanks. I will also look somewhere to see if I can find some sort of graphical representation. PattonZarate
The site http://www.astro.queensu.ca/~wiegert/3753/3753.html has a great deal of good stuff about weird orbits like this, and not just 3753 Cruithne's. I once wrote the author for permission to use some of it on Wikipedia, but never got a response.
Also, go over to www.xoverboard.com and read the entry on September 25, 2002 regarding Scrooge McDuck and his purported wealth. I think you'll get a kick out of it. PattonZarate
Heh. I can sort of believe McDuck's relatively low ranking; I mean, his idea of investing his money is just throwing it all in a giant money pit. But what's with Lex Luthor only having a measily four billion dollars? This is the guy who single-handedly financed the rebuilding of Gotham City and Metropolis! And Thurston Howell III is listed as having twice as much! Can you imagine Lex Luthor being stuck on that island? Gilligan and the rest would be dead within a week, and the island itself converted into a secret LexCorp research facility of some kind.
I'm sorry, I seem to be digressing. :) Bryan 07:11 Sep 30, 2002 (UTC)
Funny! PattonZarate

Why did you remove the text centering from the table of line-ending characters in the ASCII entry, and replace it with cellpadding/cellspacing attributes? You should note that these table-level attributes have no effect if the user has chosen a skin/stylesheet like Cologne Blue, which specifies them via CSS properties at the td level. -- mjb

Just personal aesthetics, I guess; I find tables more readable in general when the text all starts at the same spot, whereas centered text makes my eyes go jagged when I scan down the column. The cellspacing/padding attributes are ones which I add to virtually all the tables I edit, also for aesthetic reasons (and if they're overridden, that's fine; that's what style sheets are for). Bryan

Bryan: I'm working on developing sep11.wikipedia.org. Until it's ready, I would appreciate it if you didn't delete the Memoriam page. Your help is welcome. --The Cunctator

It hasn't been deleted, copies of the page are stored in both the page's history and on the meta site. When sep11.wikipedia.org is ready, it will be trivial to retrieve this for it. Bryan

I believe you know what I'm talking about when I said "delete".

Yeah, but I was glad it was finally gone from Wikipedia and the fact that its contents were still accessible if and when someone wanted to make it available elsewhere was good enough IMO.

sep11: doesn't work fine. It has broken links. It's not fully set up. The blue background needs to be changed. Etc. It's still, as they say, in beta. But now that there are clean redirects the primary detriment to user experience has been removed. I'd appreciate your help in improving the site. --The Cunctator

No thanks, I barely have time for Wikipedia itself these days.

Hi Brian, Maverick149 thought you would like to knwo about this bug (I also filed a bug report)

See screendump ScrPrint.gif

Explorer renders somes pages in a weird way.

Mav says the Periodic Table should always fit on the screen (Table width = 100%)

It does not in Explorer 5.5. and 6.

What is even more horrid: when I scroll to the right the tabIe moves underneath the menu, showing both intermingled (see screen dump)

I've seen this now on three PC's: Win2000 MSIE 5.5 Win98 MSIE 5.5 (screen dump) lowres screen Win XP MSIE 6 hires screen

The effect occurred on other pages too. Even if it is an Explorer issue only, some 90% or more of the Wikipedians probably use Explorer, at least half of them 5.5 or higher.

Erik Zachte

the text doesnt shrink for me Lir 06:45 Nov 12, 2002 (UTC)

When you make the table wider and the total width of the screen stays the same, the space available beside it gets narrower. That's only part of the problem, though. If the factsheet template changes, then I've got to go around and update all of the other planets and moons that have them as well; before I go to all that trouble, I insist on being convinced that it's a good idea. Please take this up over on Talk:Solar system/Factsheet template.

well id love to take it up on that talk page but as far as i can tell you and I are the one ones reading it. now if you want, you could have the table be above the text instead of beside it. Frankly, I never liked having the damn boxes besides the text to begin with. I think having to update the other stuff is a pretty lame excuse since thats what im trying to do...Lir 06:53 Nov 12, 2002 (UTC)

Jeronimo, Maveric, and Fonzy have all contributed significantly to the talk page and to the template, and Maveric has been active there during the past hour or so while this kerfuffle has blown up. As for what you think about the table design, why should I care if you're not willing to work to convice me in a reasonable manner? I can revert stuff just as easily as you can, regardless of whether you think my excuse is "lame", and will continue to do so until you show me why I shouldn't. Bryan

Your excuse is lame! You don't want me to update the Earth page because then Id have to update all the pages? What the hell concern is it of yours if I go through and update all the pages?

what concern is it of yours if I go through and revert all of them?

You still haven't explained what your problem is with the damn table except that you didn't make it. Lir 07:04 Nov 12, 2002 (UTC)

I have explained what my problem is, and none of the reasons I gave were "I didn't make it" (in fact, the current template has a number of sections and details which other folks added to it, so I didn't make all of the current one either). If you are interested in a more detailed discussion, there's a certain talk: page I've been suggesting where we could do that.
BTW, saying that my excuses are lame is a lame way to have a debate.

Hey Bryan. I am discussing on the talk page. But where are you? You haven't given any reason whats wrong with my table except you are using a substandard and atypical resolution. Lir 07:18 Nov 12, 2002 (UTC)

I've been trying, but I've been getting edit conflicts every time I try to save for the past five minutes or so. Slow down a bit. :) Bryan

So why doesn't anybody add some chatrooms? That would save a lot of trouble and time. Lir 07:28 Nov 12, 2002 (UTC)

And I'd just like to point out that basically, I've never, had an issue with someone modifying or adapting my text. It's only when I add new info that nobody disputes BUT GODDAMN FUCKING EVERYTHING GETS REVERTED because somebody doesn't like one minor point. Lir 07:29 Nov 12, 2002 (UTC)

What was with the changes to Earth? I notice Lir changed Cm to M in one place, and removed <sup> tags within a link, changing the link. I was about to check the additions when you reverted it. --KQ

Sorry, that last one was just a straight reversion-to-previous-version, assuming that Lir had only gone and replaced the table again. I'll check the diff for anything that should have been merged instead. Bryan
Just double-checked, and as I'd surmised Lir's most recent change was just a replacement of the table again. No other changes were undone in the reversion. Bryan

Well wahts the problem with it now? I can't fix something if I don't know what you think is wrong with it Lir 07:47 Nov 12, 2002 (UTC)

I've been telling you what I think over on the template talk page. You've been ignoring it completely, as far as I can tell. Why shouldn't I ignore you right back? This is getting boring. Bryan
And ive been fixing every complaint you have, so clearly Im not ignoring you.

ring current needs its own page. Whether to describe Earth's ring current on the van allen page or ring current is another question_I tend to see the ring current as NOT being part of the van allen belts as they are two van allen belts, inner and outer, and the outer belt is surrounded by the ring current. Lir 00:48 Nov 13, 2002 (UTC)

Hey Bryan,

The Factsheet is really a WikiProject, no? It would be great to move the Factsheet and its talk page to a WikiProject page. What do you think is a good title? Either Wikipedia:WikiProject Astronomical Objects or Wikipedia:WikiProject Heavenly Bodies would work in a pinch but we could probably come up with a better name (and then link it on the WikiProject page and under the Astronomy heading at Wikipedia:Wikipedians by fields of interest. Ideas? --mav

Hadn't really thought about it, but I guess it is. :) If this were to be put under the heading of Heavenly Bodies I'd probably giggle every time I thought about it, so my vote's for Astronomical Objects. I'll have to look at the other WikiProject pages to get some idea of what's involved in one of these before I think of anything else to change, however. Bryan
Okay, I think I see how this works. I'm still bogged down with work right now, though, so I'm going to put off moving everything over to a WikiProject page for a day or so. Bryan
Well all I did for WP Elements was move the template - I never really bothered reformatting everything to follow the WikiProject guidelines. Yeah, "Heavenly Bodies" would make me giggle too. No hurry. :) --mav

On a similar line, I want to do a WikiProjectette about the 88 constellations. I've already started doing it on the French wiki, and I've done Andromeda (constellation) here. I would like your view on disambiguation (Mav pointed me to you on Talk:Andromeda.) I would like to make Andromeda a disambiguation page, moving the current article to Andromeda (mythology), and so do with the other constellations that are named after mythological characters, much as has been done for other objects (see Ganymede for an example). Your input please? - Montrealais

Thanks for importing the Tower of Hanoi algorithm. It was actually me that wrote it on Know-How, it was a pleasant surpise to see it arrive here! :-) -- Tarquin 14:05 Dec 14, 2002 (UTC)

No problem. I was uncertain how best to attribute it, though; I thought perhaps I should add something to the talk page. But I ended up deciding that the history of the article contained attribution, so no more was needed. :) Bryan

Hi Bryan. I thought you might be interested in the editing that's currently going on in astrology, zodiac, and horoscope. If you want to see something really funny but really sad, check out the editing history of Walter Mercado. I've started a discussion on the village pump about this. It's very discouraging to see how the true believers in astrology have undone your work on zodiac and tried to turn it into a one-sided, credulous "how-to" article. Something similar has happened with Walter Mercado -- repeated attempts to change the article to a neutral point of view, followed by reversions to the biased version later. Well, I'd appreciate any help I could get, because it takes a lot of energy to argue and argue, and edit and edit.

Bryan, thanks for the very nice formatting change to my two pics in the opal article. They certainly look a lot smarter embeded in the text. Is there any way to avoid the use of br's to adjust the length of each caption line? It seems that if I want to insert or remove text in the caption I have to readjust all the br's.
Thanks again, Arpingstone 08:31 Feb 17, 2003 (UTC)

I think it should be possible to tell the tables to only be as wide as the images they contain, and then the text will automatically reformat itself to fit. However, this requires that you know how big the images are in pixels. I was just about to head off to bed right now, but I've got a bunch of time tomorrow so I'll fiddle around with it and see what I can do. Bryan
Well, I guess I'm really bad at leaving Wikipedia when there's work to be done. :) I just added the width="250" attribute to tell the tables to be 250 pixels wide, and removed the line break tags, and that seems to have worked out okay. How's that look? Bryan
That looks very good, Bryan. Thanks for your help. Now I have to edit my ten or so picture sites to make them look the same!
Arpingstone 16:40 Feb 17, 2003 (UTC)

A view has been expressed by another editor on Talk:Star that the nuclear reaction pathways merit their own article. An article titled stellar nucleosynthesis already exists. How do you feel about refactoring? -- Alan Peakall 12:23 Mar 4, 2003 (UTC)

Hi Bryan. I contributed an article under "Ferdowsi", and I noticed that you deleted the first two paragraphs from it and moved the rest under Shahnameh.

While I think the Shahnameh page that you have created serves well for the book itself, I kinda feel all my efforts for the Author (Ferdowsi) were thrown into a bit bucket. What ever happened to my original article and how can I do this right? Thanks. --Keyvan

I didn't delete anything, I just split the article into two; one for Ferdowsi and one for Shahnameh. I felt that the bulk of the Ferdowsi article you wrote was actually focused on the book, and would be better suited standing on its own under that title.
To get at material from older revisions of an article, click on the "Older versions" link at the top of the page and then select the one with the stuff you want in it. You can then copy and paste material from there into the current revision of the article, to restore stuff that was deleted. However, in this case, it looks like a merge is required since there was already an article on this person over at Ferdosi. Bryan

K1 as I mentioned on your discussion page, I have redirected Ferdowsi to Ferdosi. Your article was only a duplicate of the one I had written before. If you have anything other than what is written you may edit the page Ferdosi. Alireza Hashemi

Looks like be have an abuser here, can you please look into this? thanks.

Re: Earth Standard template? What standard template? I've looked high and low for any kind of table standard, and I've yet to find it.

It's over at Wikipedia:WikiProject Astronomical Objects, and currently all planets and moons (except for some of the smaller outer moons I haven't got around to updating yet) use this template for their factsheet. The format of the caption is a pretty minor thing, but even so I think it's important that these tables try to look as consistent as possible; it looks more professional that way. Bryan

-- Ambiplasma is an orphan. Could you find some articles to link to it? Kingturtle 02:15 Apr 16, 2003 (UTC)

Hi Bryan, there are literally hundreds of articles in Wikipedia comparing a movie with the book on which it is based (there are very few exceptions such as The Boys from Brazil, where there are two separate entries). As far as Mildred Pierce is concerned, the comparison of the two was one of the major points of the former article, which you split up into two parts. Each of these new articles lacks information contained in the other one. In addition, you created a disambiguation page where none was needed before. My question is short and simple: Why? --KF 19:50 24 May 2003 (UTC)

Because I was repeatedly clicking "random page" that evening, and I came across an article that appeared to be about two different things that shared the same name. When I see an article like that, I disamgibuate. If you think it works better as it was go ahead and revert, I don't have a strong opinion on the matter. Bryan 20:04 24 May 2003 (UTC)
Okay, thanks. KF 20:15 24 May 2003 (UTC)

Thanks for the Explosion stub! -- Tarquin 16:12 30 Jun 2003 (UTC)

No problem. I'll add more now, I only had a few minutes to throw it together this morning. :) Bryan 23:22 30 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Hi Bryan, I saw some of your discussion with User:Docu which has now been moved to Wikipedia talk:How to use tables. As I am the principal author (to date) of the table examples, I can understand where you're coming from about the lack of closing tags. I prefer to always use closing tags, but according to the HTML 4.01 specification, they are indeed optional (and always have been). In XHTML and XML they are a requirement. For Wikipedia articles, it may be better to leave off the optional closing tags to make editing easier, especially for newbies. As you probably know, it is often the case that a table is being used inappropriately in the first place. Converting those to lists or another appropriate structure may benefit both readability and editability.

I'd appreciate any input or contributions you may have to the Wikipedia:How to use tables article. Also, you may want to check out the m:Wikipedia accessibility meta page I've started for discussing accessibility issues - it'd be great to have your feedback! Thanks. -- Wapcaplet 20:28 6 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Hmph. Guess I should stop my mad quest to fix all the tables after all, then. :) I'll pop over and see what I can add to the discussion. I'm hoping that Wikipedia will move in the direction of XHTML someday, so that MathML support can be more easily added, but I suppose that will require some sort of built-in translation for table code either way. Bryan 21:24 6 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I agree! It'd be nice to see Wikipedia move to XHTML (or even XML) someday, but it'd be a bit harder to stay valid with those, since they are stricter than the loose HTML DTD used now. As someone pointed out to me, we can pretty easily fix closing-tag issues with a conversion script, if/when that day comes. -- Wapcaplet 22:47 6 Jul 2003 (UTC)

There is a problem with the placement of elements 71 and 103 that I've mentioned at talk:periodic table. --mav

Table white space

Just so you know, white space (blank lines) between HTML table elements are displayed as blank lines before a table when it is displayed in at least Konqueror. --mav 22:38, 10 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Well, shoot. The HTML tidy program I run most of my table code through after I'm done working on it inserts those blank lines automatically. I'll have to remember to trim them out manually before pasting them in. Bryan

1017 tesla

You wrote in tesla that 1017 T is the maximum possible field strength for any known phenomenon. Can you give me any clues about how this value was calculated, please? I'd like to add an explanation to the article (assuming I know enough physics to understand your reply). -- Heron 13:44, 19 Sep 2003 (UTC)

It was a factoid that I read in an article about magnetars, I think it was in a recent Scientific American. As I recall, that was the maximum field strength that a neutron star was calculated to be capable of holding, and that nothing more capable than neutron stars were known - so it's a practical limit, rather than a theoretical one. I'd have to go back and find that article again to say more, I'll search tonight when I get home. Bryan

Thanks. Excuse me if I don't respond quickly next time, but I shall be away from Wikipedia for a few days. -- Heron

Okay, here's what the article says. "An upper limit to neutron-star magentism is about 1017 gauss; beyond this limit, the fluid inside the star would tend to mix and the field would dissipate. No known objects in the universe can generate and maintain fields stronger than this level." The fluid-mixing thing is in reference to the convection currents inside a neutron star that generate a dynamo effect. This is from the February 2003 issue.
Right off the bat, my face is red; the article uses gauss throuhout instead of Tesla, so all the neutron-star-related values I put into the Tesla article are off by a factor of 104. I'll fix that immediately.
The Scientific American article has a couple of other interesting factoids about extreme magnetism. It mentions the quantum electrodynamic threshold of 4×1013 gauss, above which X-ray photons freely split in two or merge together. Polarized light waves change wavelength when they enter very strong magnetic fields, and the scattering of photons by electrons or other charged particles is suppressed if the magnetic field prevents the charged particle from accelerating in the direction it needs to. Fields above 109 gauss squeeze electron orbitals into cigar shapes; in a 1014 gauss field a hydrogen atom becomes 200 times narrower.
Don't know if you want to incorporate any of these, but if you want to here they are. :) Bryan

Thanks. I put a short note in tesla about the upper limit. I'll wait on the other stuff until I'm feeling more ambitious :-) -- Heron

This isn't really a big deal, but regarding your edit to harp just now - is there really anything wrong with using an apostrophe when pluralising single letters? Every style guide I've looked at (which admittedly isn't many) says that it's acceptable, or even desireable, to use an apostrophe in this case. --Camembert

If there's a style guide that covers that specific situation, then that's probably the correct way to do it. I was operating only under the general guideline that apostrophized s is only used as an abbreviation of "is" and as a possessive. I see incorrect apostrophized s everywhere these days and it grates on me, so I get a bit trigger-happy. Bryan
Well, the AP style guide says to use an apostrophe on plurals of single letters, but not on plurals of multiple letter abbreviations, and somebody's told me that Chicago says to use apostrophes on lower case single letters, but not upper case. The idea is to avoid ambiguity between multiple letter As and the word "as", for example. It's not a big deal, as I say. --Camembert

"lightcraft" is non-standard naming for beam-powered propulsion, for which you have a largely identical article. Wouldn't a redirect be more than enough?

"beam-powered propulsion" is a very general term. It covers lightcraft, solar sails, magsails, and possibly other types of ship as well. Lightcraft are a specific type of beam-powered ship, and as such I believe they warrant their own article. Bryan

Bryan, I think I may have found an error in a page you wrote; can you check out Talk:Liouville-Neumann series? Carl

Hello! Thanks for the brave move of moving Arpad (etc) into Árpád. Are you sure that it won't cause problems for the USA guys who cannot probably write accents? Other thing: isn't it expected that if someone moves an article then fixes the links/references to the new one? --grin 09:11, 5 Nov 2003 (UTC)

It's not a problem, fortunately, because thanks to redirects linking Arpad still works just fine. Since this redirect is automatically created when a page is moved using the "move this page" function, one normally doesn't have to do anything to fix other page's references. The only exception that comes to mind is when there are already redirects pointing to the original location; since redirects only go one step (to prevent loops from forming) double redirects need to be updated. I've just checked (via the "what links here" function) and there are no double redirects for Arpad, so everything looks to be in order to me. Bryan 02:49, 6 Nov 2003 (UTC)

I'd like to coordinate w/ you re IFF article: you may have noticed that i created one despite the one you worked on, and someone collapsed "yours" into "mine". I have two concerns:

  1. The more substantial history got disconnected from the article.
  2. The unofficial title is the article and the official is the redirect.
  3. The old article title is misleadingly described
  • I think i know how to repair #1, and would like the practice; if you don't follow what i'm talking abt, let's discuss.
  • As to #2:
    • IMO, the WP MoS recommendation should be no punctuation in article titles except hyphen, paren, & apostrophe; but include redirects to WP-std name where an outside standard or other common usage says otherwise
    • IMO, what it should be is irrelevant if cases like this have been anticipated in a previous consensus
    • IMO, #1 & #2 need to be corrected at the same time, not piecemeal
  • #3 is natural to fix as part of the above. --Jerzy 07:50, 2003 Nov 18 (UTC)
It looks like my only contribution to that article was to add a link and to remove a stray HTML tag that had no real effect on the article's display. I know nothing about how IFF works or anything like that, I probably just came across the article at random one day. So don't worry about coordinating with me, just do your thing and I'm sure it will be fine. :) Bryan 08:05, 18 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Tnx, B; i'll go read up on the punc'n issue. --Jerzy 08:18, 2003 Nov 18 (UTC)

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