User talk:Thortful

Here are some tips to help you get started:

Read the Tutorial, and feel free to experiment in the Sandbox.
Eventually, you might want to read the Manual of Style and Policies and Guidelines.
If you need help, post a question at the Help Desk or ask me on my talk page.
To sign your name on a talk page, please finish your comments with ~~~~ (four tildes). The wiki will insert a link to your userpage and the timestamp.
Not every subject needs its own page. Sometimes it is wiser to deal with certain subjects together on one page. See Wikipedia:Merge and Wikipedia:Redirect for some background. You may want to review Avoiding common mistakes to get started quickly.
Explore, be bold in editing pages, and, most importantly, have fun!

Good luck! JFW | T@lk 08:00, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Australasia

Greetings from across the Ditch, cobber! I'm glad your children nagged you successfully. I keep urging mine to contribute to Wikipedia, in vain.

One might guess you live in Townsville. I had a penfriend living there. I think I owe him a letter, rather than the other way around. If you come across a David Rainey, who used to live at Hermit Park in the 1950s, please pass on my apologies. As with Wikipedia, I found that there was too much to do.

I suppose I can't interest you in Zeal?

My closest relative in Oz is Dr John Harrison of Mildura, a first-cousin.

Kind regards, and good luck with the next netball series. Robin Patterson 19:06, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)

North Shore Line

Why did you remove those stations, and the link to the main list of stations? Ambi 13:59, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Hi Thortful. Have you seen Wikipedia:Manual of style? It might be worth reading for some hints on formatting articles, such as bolding the first mention of the subject of the article. Secondly, while any contributions are of course welcome, it's nice if new articles are more than a couple of sentences. :) Ambi 01:32, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Railway station article

Hello Thortful, As an author of articles on railway stations, you might be interested to know that an article on a railway station, Route 128 Station, was recently deleted from Wikipedia by a vote of 4 to 2 (I voted against deletion, as did the author). The reasons the voters gave for deletion were

It's an advertisement for a railway station. (?)
It's non-notable. (Is that a reason for deletion?)
Wikipedia is not a travel guide. (Right, but what does that have to do with the station?)

The article was well organized and written. It covered a station on a line connecting Washington, New York and Boston.

I'm surprised by the decision and wonder what fate awaits other articles on railway stations.

Fg2 08:18, Oct 19, 2004 (UTC)

Old article is here

please move article rather than cut-and-paste

hi thortful, i saw that you disambiguated willoughby which was fine, but in the case when there is a fully developed article (with a reasonable number of edits) which you are replacing with a disambiguation page, you should move the page to preserve the history, then replace the generated redirect with the disambiguation text. otherwise the page history is lost. thanks. clarkk 09:20, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC)

see here for how to fix cut and paste moves. clarkk 09:22, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Seconded. You've moved several pages this way (Manly, Willoughby, Cessnock, Coogee) and in the instance of Coogee, New South Wales the formatting has been damaged, as everywhere I had a newline between sentences within a paragraph (this is supposed to make diffs more readable) it has been doubled, so almost every sentence now has a paragraph to itself which looks stupid. Note that the "how to fix" has to be done by an admin (see plea on Wikipedia:Australian wikipedians' notice board) --xoddam 08:12, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Although the rules are bendy and controversial, a good rule of thumb is that if a place is the principal or only place with its name, or the only place with its name to have an article in Wikipedia, there's no need for a disambiguation page at [[Name]]. If there is one, lesser place of the name (such as one which no-one has yet written even a stub about), a disambiguation note at the top of the page is sufficient. If there are several significant other articles, the principal place (like Exeter) can have a notice pointing to [[Name (disambiguation)]]. Most American towns and cities have aricles at [[City, State]] for wiki-historical reasons. There isn't a compelling reason to move Australian towns at the canonical location if there is no ambiguity, though. As long as a link to [[Suburb, State]] works, it doesn't matter if the article is there or if that is a redirect to the article at [[Suburb]]. Don't take the criticism to heart -- just "don't do it again"! --xoddam 08:12, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Xoddam's advice is actually incorrect. Naming formats in regard to Australian towns are still a matter of dispute, so he's got no business saying that the matter is closed - either way will do at the moment. Ambi 13:12, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)

i agree with Xoddam's position, it seems silly to move all articles automatically to (town), (state) automatically, especially with larger town/cities like wollongong, in which this wollongong should not be further disambiguated, just as sydney is not further disambiguated. it irritates me no end that in the us articles that chicago is actually located at Chicago, Illinois when 99.99% of the time that's what somebody wants to link to. also non-anglo or aboriginal names are less likely to require disambiguation. for smaller centres and especially anglo names, then, yes disambiguation makes sense. anyway, i'll rant further on wikipedia talk:WikiProject Sydney. clarkk 11:13, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I don't mean to come across as rude, but why are your town articles always so short? I'm sure you can do better than two-sentence article on a town like Kingaroy. Ambi 13:12, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I've never been to Kingaroy either, but I'm sure that with a little bit of a Google search, one could find a fair bit more than two sentences. That little bit of research just makes all the difference - at one or two sentences, someone really needs to come along and clean up, whereas one or two paragraphs makes for an at least relatively informative stub.

P.S. If you want to contact me, please use my talk page, rather than my user page. And yes, I am busy with exams - it's just that it's a) midnight, and b) my day off - my next one isn't until Friday! Ambi 13:24, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for putting that bit more effort, like with Palm Island, Queensland - it makes for much more interesting articles! Ambi 05:22, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Changing location formatting

Why are you replacing something of the format [[City, State|City]], [[State]] with [[City, State]], [[USA]]? Why are you intentionally adding links to [[USA]], which is a redirect to [[United States]] and removing a link to a state? I've looked a bit, but can't find anything about this in manuals of style, etc. so please provide a link that shows that your changes are consistent with some consensus on style with respect to US place names. Thanks. CryptoDerk 02:35, Nov 22, 2004 (UTC)

I don't know what makes you think I'm arguing with you about including the country. I was merely pointing out that 1) you removed a perfectly good link to a state, and 2) you added a link to a redirect. You took one step forward and two steps back. CryptoDerk 16:02, Nov 22, 2004 (UTC)

Location formatting still bad

You're still adding links to USA, which is a redirect. Unless there is a good reason (such as as of 2004, which allows people to keep track of when information needs updating), please do not link to redirects. Also, do not link to the same thing more than once in an article unless there is, once again, a good reason. CryptoDerk 20:43, Nov 27, 2004 (UTC)

Once again, you misunderstand my message. I'm not asking you to stop adding the country name, nor did I ever suggest that adding the country name was a bad thing. It's the same exact thing as last time, you're taking one step forward and two steps back by 1) linking to a redirect and 2) linking to that same redirect multiple times in an article.

The article about the USA is [[United States]]. All you have to do is link it like this [[United States|USA]]. That, as well as not linking it multiple times, is all I asked. Don't "avoid Wikipedia" when someone corrects you -- that's what Wikipedia is all about. We all make formatting mistakes. CryptoDerk 23:03, Nov 27, 2004 (UTC)

Article Licensing

Hi, I've started a drive to get users to multi-license all of their contributions that they've made to either (1) all U.S. state, county, and city articles or (2) all articles, using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-by-sa) v1.0 and v2.0 Licenses or into the public domain if they prefer. The CC-by-sa license is a true free documentation license that is similar to Wikipedia's license, the GFDL, but it allows other projects, such as WikiTravel, to use our articles. Since you are among the top 1000 Wikipedians by edits, I was wondering if you would be willing to multi-license all of your contributions or at minimum those on the geographic articles. Over 90% of people asked have agreed. For More Information:

Multi-Licensing FAQ - Lots of questions answered
Multi-Licensing Guide
Free the Rambot Articles Project

To allow us to track those users who muli-license their contributions, many users copy and paste the "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" template into their user page, but there are other options at Template messages/User namespace. The following examples could also copied and pasted into your user page:

Option 1

I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:

OR

Option 2

I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions to any [[U.S. state]], county, or city article as described below:

Or if you wanted to place your work into the public domain, you could replace "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" with "{{MultiLicensePD}}". If you only prefer using the GFDL, I would like to know that too. Please let me know what you think at my talk page. It's important to know either way so no one keeps asking. -- Ram-Man (comment| talk)

Image source

Thank you for uploading Image:Bowen big mango-e.jpg. Its copyright status is unclear, so it may have to be deleted. Please leave a note on the image page about the source of the image. Thank you.

It seems that the original image has been deleted, for some reason, probably copyright. In that case, the same goes for this image.. --fbjon4649(talk) 12:36, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Hm. The history says the old pic is Image:Bowen_big_mango.jpg, which has disappeared. Do you have any memory of where it might have come from, if it was user-created, or if it already had a license tag?

Interesting comments on Fbjon's talk page. Perhaps if your articles showed off that knowledge instead of being generic one-sentence stubs that then expected other people to turn them into remotely useful articles, then people wouldn't have complaining. Ambi 03:04, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Shame, that. I'm sure I would have liked to have read some of those longer articles, had you chosen to take credit for them instead of just using this account to pump out substubs. And why buy books, when you can go to a library, borrow them, learn a lot - and for free? Ambi 06:47, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Image source/licensing for Image:Bowen big mango-e.jpg

The image you uploaded, Image:Bowen big mango-e.jpg, has no source information. The image page currently doesn't specify who created the image, so the copyright status is therefore unclear. If you have not created the image yourself then you need to argue that we have the right to use the image on Wikipedia (see copyright tagging below). If you have not created the image yourself then you should also specify where you found it, ie in most cases link to the website where you got it, and the terms of use for content from that page. See Wikipedia:Image copyright tags for the full list of copyright tags that you can use. Unless the copyright status is provided, the image will be marked for deletion on 24 October 2005.

This message notification has been automatically sent by NotificationBot managed and run by AllyUnion. Please leave comments regarding bot operations at AllyUnion's talk page. Please direct all comments regarding licensing information at Wikipedia talk:Images for deletion. --NotificationBot 13:11, 17 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Cut 'n' paste disambig

Just noticed you did a cut and paste disambig on the Manly article. It makes it extremely difficult to have proper edit history attribution now, since there are a lot of edits to the new article. Please use the Move this page feature in future, as it preserves edit history. Thanks Dysprosia 12:56, 20 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Image tagging for Image:Regent St06a.jpg

Thanks for uploading Image:Regent St06a.jpg. The image has been identified as not specifying the source and creator of the image, which is required by Wikipedia's policy on images. If you don't indicate the source and creator of the image on the image's description page, it may be deleted some time in the next seven days. If you have uploaded other images, please verify that you have provided source information for them as well.

For more information on using images, see the following pages:

This is an automated notice by OrphanBot. For assistance on the image use policy, see Wikipedia:Media copyright questions. 10:04, 5 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Palm Island, Queensland ACOTF

Hi Thortful, the article you created in November 2004 has become the Collaboration of the Fortnight, it would be great to hear any thorts you have about how we can improve the article :) (to do list). Thanks, Wiki Townsvillia n 06:13, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Removing interwikis

Hi Thortful. Did you have a reason for removing the hi and ka interwiki links from New South Wales. They look like perfectly good links to me, so I ahve put them back in, but I thought I would check with you. JPD (talk) 09:09, 28 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

OK. They seem to be fine, though - maybe you just don't have appropriate fonts for these languages? If in doubt about interwiki links, try clicking on them to check that they are correct. The ka link is definitely an article on NSW, and the hi link is a stub with something to do with Australia. JPD (talk) 11:40, 28 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Jimbo is coming to Sydney

Sorry to spam you if you aren't interested. See Wikipedia:Meetup/Sydney#April 25th for more info if you are interested. - Ta bu shi da yu 08:48, 10 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Notability of Edward Hunt

Hello, this is a message from an automated bot. A tag has been placed on Edward Hunt, by another Wikipedia user, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. The tag claims that it should be speedily deleted because Edward Hunt seems to be about a person, group of people, band, club, company, or web content, but it does not indicate how or why the subject is notable: that is, why an article about that subject should be included in an encyclopedia. Under the criteria for speedy deletion, articles that do not assert the subject's importance or significance may be deleted at any time. Please see the guidelines for what is generally accepted as notable.

To contest the tagging and request that administrators wait before possibly deleting Edward Hunt, please affix the template {{hangon}} to the page, and put a note on its talk page. If the article has already been deleted, see the advice and instructions at WP:WMD. Feel free to contact the bot operator if you have any questions about this or any problems with this bot, bearing in mind that this bot is only informing you of the nomination for speedy deletion; it does not perform any nominations or deletions itself. To see the user who deleted the page, click here CSDWarnBot (talk) 14:50, 24 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Sydney edit-a-thon invitation

Sydney Meetup
Next: 13 October 2012
Last: 23 July 2012

Hi there! You are cordially invited to a classical music edit-a-thon Saturday week (13 October) in Sydney. The theme will be Music of France, to coincide with the ABC Classic FM countdown between 8-14 October. If you are unable to attend in person, we will also be collaborating online during the countdown. Details an attendee list are at Wikipedia:Meetup/Sydney/October 2012. Hope you can make it! John Vandenberg 09:49, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

(this automated message was delivered using replace.py to all users in Sydney)

Sydney edit-a-thon invitation

Sydney Meetup
Next: 10 November 2012
Last: 13 October 2012

Hi there! You are cordially invited to a disability edit-a-thon Saturday week (10 November) in Sydney. If you are unable to attend in person, we will also be collaborating online before, during and after the meetup. Details an attendee list are at Wikipedia:Meetup/Sydney/November 2012. Hope you can make it! John Vandenberg 15:29, 29 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

(this automated message was delivered using replace.py to all users in Sydney)

Sydney meetup invitation: January 2013

Sydney Meetup
Next: 10 January 2013
Last: November 2012

Hi there! You are cordially invited to attend a meetup being held on Thursday 10 January 2013. Details an attendee list are at Wikipedia:Meetup/Sydney/January 2013. Hope you can make it! John Vandenberg 10:08, 27 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

(this automated message was delivered using replace.py to all users in Sydney)

Sydney September 2013 edit-a-thon invite

Sydney Meetup
Next: 21 September 2013
Last: Higher Ed Symposium

Hi there! You are cordially invited to an edit-a-thon this Saturday (21 September) in Sydney at the State Library of New South Wales (SLNSW), where you can collaborate with other Wikipedians throughout the day. Andy Carr, a senior librarian at SLNSW will also be helping out. The theme of the edit-a-thon is paralympics sports, but you are free to come along to meet other wiki contributors, and edit other topics.

If you are unable to attend in person, we will also be collaborating online. Details and an attendee list are at Wikipedia:Meetup/Sydney/September 2013. Hope you can make it! John Vandenberg 09:53, 19 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

(this automated message was delivered using replace.py to all users in Wikipedians in Sydney)

ArbCom elections are now open!

Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:51, 23 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]