User talk:Dennis Bratland

Suzuki Swift

I added some data in the Suzuki Swift article from the same oficial Suzuki Australia website as a reliable source, is that correct?

Mafi roll trailer

Hi Dennis, a user created https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafi_roll_trailer (possibly) in good faith. Mafi is a brand name of roll trailer. It would be perfectly valid to have that content under the catch-all term of roll trailer as it is a common piece of machinery at ports and doesn't appear to be covered under types of trailers (the user has bluelinked it here with the brand name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trailer_(vehicle)). I've put a maintenance template there but it needs an editor/admin to look at it and determine whether it should be deleted and reformed sans brand names. Is this something you can help with? Motorracer (talk) 03:01, 24 July 2019 (UTC)

Seattle Wiknic 2019

In the Seattle area? You are invited to the Seattle Wiknic 2019 on Saturday, August 24, 2019, noon to 3pm at the Washington Park Arboretum, in the meadow area to the south of the Graham Visitors Center, approximately at 47.637435°N 122.293986°W / 47.637435; -122.293986. Click here for more details!

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Disambiguation link notification for August 13

An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Hero Splendor, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Economic Times (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver).

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Formatting/layout guideline

Hi Dennis. I'm having an issue with another editor who thinks it's a good idea to insert whitespace and other stuff to try to control image placement and layout. Obviously I disagree, with concerns about the universality of this "manual layout" across different browsers and user preferences. I thought this was strongly discouraged, but I can't find the relevant guideline. Are you aware of whether and where this is codified? - Bri.public (talk) 15:47, 22 August 2019 (UTC)

MOS:LINEBREAKS "Between paragraphs—as between sections—there should be only a single blank line."

WP:OVERSECTION "Between sections, there should be a single blank line; multiple blank lines in the edit window create too much white space in the article. There is no need to include a blank line between a heading and sub-heading." Also: Help:Pictures#Forcing a break "Do not force page design just so that it looks pretty on your display."

Also, forcing image sizes is bad because... WP:IMAGESIZE "Except with very good reason, do not use px (e.g. |thumb|300px), which forces a fixed image width. In most cases upright=scaling factor should be used, thereby respecting the user's base preference"... and Wikipedia:Extended image syntax "only where absolutely necessary, users' preferences may be disregarded and the size of the image fixed by specifying a size in pixels". and MOS:IMGSIZE "Where a smaller or larger image is appropriate, use |upright=scaling factor"... " an image coded 275px—presumably to make it wider than most images on a particular page—is actually rendered smaller than most images if the user has changed his base width to 300px. In contrast, upright responds gracefully to changes in the user's base width, maintaining the relative size of images in any given article by enlarging or reducing all of them proportionately." --Dennis Bratland (talk) 16:13, 22 August 2019 (UTC)

I knew you'd have that at your fingertips :) Thanks - Bri.public (talk) 16:32, 22 August 2019 (UTC)

It actually wasn't where I thought it was, so I don't blame you for not being able to find it. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 16:37, 22 August 2019 (UTC)

Hi @Dennis Bratland: @Bri: @Bri.public: I fixed the white space problem it is up to the Toc limit. If I got you mad at me I am Sorry about that Jack90s15 (talk) 16:25, 22 August 2019 (UTC)

You do need to use |upright instead of |193x193px. The only reason the first images are the same width is if the user has set their default thumbnail size to 220px at 193x193px at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering. But if they set it to 300px or more, then File:Polish POWs shot by Wehrmacht 1939.jpg will be smaller than the other images. Users who choose a thumb width of less than 220px will see larger than the rest of the images. The only way to get a consistent, graceful result is to use |upright or |upright=0.8, |upright=1.2, or whatever, to scale images proportionately. All the other vertical images, like File:Dwight D. Eisenhower, official photo portrait, May 29, 1959.jpg or File:Bundesarchiv Bild 101I-179-1575-08, Ioannina, Deportation von Juden.jpg need to use |upright too.

If images look too small or too big on your display, you should adjust that at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering, not by forcing pixel width on images, tables, columns, etc. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 16:37, 22 August 2019 (UTC)

@Jack90s15: Do you plan to remove the |193x193px type formatting (thumbnail overrides) as Dennis suggested, at Myth of the clean Wehrmacht? Bri.public (talk) 16:22, 26 August 2019 (UTC)

@Bri.public: I need to Practice in Sandbox that So I don't mess up the page. @K.e.coffman: Showed me how to movie a page into sandbox. if you two have the time@K.e.coffman: @Szzuk: Could you help Since you two are a bit more experienced?Jack90s15 (talk) 16:41, 26 August 2019 (UTC)

Renton seaplane base

I was surprised at this. Spamminess aside, Renton does have a seaplane base [1]. ☆ Bri (talk) 18:20, 8 September 2019 (UTC)

Oh, I thought it was talking about planes landing on the airstrip at Renton Airport. If they're landing on Lake Washington, then it's relevant to an article about the lake. Either way I don't think names of the airlines themselves need to be namechecked unless we have some other relevant fact and a source to go with it. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 19:51, 8 September 2019 (UTC)

Agreed, specific scenic tour companies probably don't belong but maybe scheduled flights do. Carillon Point in Kirkland is also a Lake Washington seaplane base as of a 2017 hearing examiner's decision. So as far as I know, just those three -- Renton, Kirkland and Kenmore. Only Kenmore has scheduled flights. ☆ Bri (talk) 20:36, 8 September 2019 (UTC)

Huahualili

Hi. I saw the sock list at User talk:Huahualili but the user hasn't been blocked and I don't see an SPI for the socks (who are blocked). Does something else need to be done here? —[AlanM1(talk)]— 11:02, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

The other accounts were blocked for copyvio and promotion-only. SPI was probably an unnecessary extra layer of process. I just mentioned the sock relationship for purposes of tracking. By the time they got to the third or fourth sock accounts, Wpcrfans (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · nuke contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) and AnndyHua (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · nuke contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) and so on, I had requested wapcar.my be added to MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist. That appears to be effective, so chasing down new sock accounts is probably not necessary. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 15:59, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

Books & Bytes – Issue 35, July – August 2019

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 35, July – August 2019

• Wikimania
• We're building something great, but..
• Wikimedia and Libraries User Group update
• A Wikibrarian's story
• Bytes in brief

Read the full newsletter

On behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:58, 27 September 2019 (UTC)

Graphic design - Bitcoin price timeline

Hi Dennis. Just wondering what you think of the design of this graphic. The way it displays volume as an area seems intriguing but it took me a minute to "get it". Is there a better way that you know of to present this? - Bri.public (talk) 22:14, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

I think it's essentially the same as the stock price vs volume graph I made at Volkswagen emissions scandal#Stock value. You often see this approached with dual graphs, like these. That spreads the information out but I don't think they necessarily make it easier to get. Once you figure out what it is saying, you have to glance back and forth between the two stacked axes.

I guess my rule of thumb is that it's great if you can get a graph in a flash, like at Languages of the United States. It's only giving you a small amount of information. One dimension. When you start adding layers of meaning, and adding dimensions, a graph can pack more information into a small space. For me an ideal graph gives you a rough idea at a glance, and the longer you look at it, you glean more. So at Sinking of the RMS Titanic#Casualties and survivors, the base colors -- blues, greens, yellows -- give you a rough picture of the population. Looking closer, you see a light blue and a dark blue, giving you more detail. You have to zoom into full magnification to find relatively small data values, like number of first class children surviving. The treemap at Vehicle#Types of vehicles does that too -- at a glance you see the big volume models are a bike, a motorcycle and a car. But if you zoom all the way into the lower right, there is information, only one pixel wide, accurately comparing the most common plane, jet, and helicopter models. It's hard to see, but that's the point.

If I can get the raw data I could make one like the Volkswagen graph using line-width, of the bitcoin graph, just to compare. But I think it's basically fine. At a glance you see the rise and fall of the stock price, and you see it crashed when some huge transactions happened. The fact that it might demand more time to fully understand all of it is fine in my book, because it rewards your time and effort with more information. The reason I've fought so much with the Elections Prject over these color-graded maps like those at the top of 2016 United States presidential election in Alabama , and every other state election article, is that you can stare at them for as long as you want, but your knowledge of detail never increases. It's so difficult to figure out which percentage goes with which shade of blue in File:United States presidential election in Alabama, 2016.svg say, Montgomery and Dallas county, that you have no idea exactly how many votes that is. It's fixable with a different type of treemap, such as suggested at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Elections and Referendums/Archive 11#RfC on type of treemap, or by putting pie graphs on top of county maps, as done here 2016 United States presidential election in Michigan. All of these take the reader a minute to get their bearings, but some are worth your mental effort and some remain as fuzzy as when you first saw it. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 23:04, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

• I missed the fact that the data here comes from a 4chan post, since deleted. Totally unacceptable source. It should be removed unless a verifiable source for the data is found. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 19:12, 8 October 2019 (UTC)

• Oh dear, I didn't see that. I've gone ahead and removed it from the article using it. ☆ Bri (talk) 19:49, 8 October 2019 (UTC)

• If a reliable source ever turns up for that, though, we should do the graph. It has value, I think. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 20:55, 8 October 2019 (UTC)

• It brings up an interesting question, would reporting on transactions on the Bitcoin distributed ledger be considered original research? Is the ledger itself a primary source? ☆ Bri (talk) 00:01, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

• It's definitely a primary source, but that's OK as long as you're not doing any synthesis or interpretation. If the meaning of the data you're citing is totally straightforward and unambiguous, then it's fine as a primary source. If you cite a primary source to say that the Dow was at 60 in the fourth year of the Depression, that's fine. Source says the figure is 60. You say it's 60. What does that mean? What does it say about the economy? About life? About the progression of the Depression? All that has to be cited to secondary sources. But the basic data is OK.

  I'm not a Bitcoin expert but I think it's OK to create a table of dates and transactions, and it's OK to make a graph of it that doesn't draw any surprising conclusions. The example we have here actual was published in other sources, so the "interpretation" involved in creating this visualization isn't original research, it's attributable to secondary sources.

  I don't know how you extract this info from the ledger. Never looked into it. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 01:22, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

If you know the address then anybody with access to the ledger (which is basically anyone on the Internet) can look up related transactions. And there are web services to do this, e.g. [2] ☆ Bri (talk) 02:21, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

Editing as Activism: Edit-A-Thon to Correct Systemic Bias in Wikipedia

Allen Library, location of the Research Commons, University of Washington. Photo by Joe Mabel

Main page: Wikipedia:Meetup/Seattle § Editing as Activism: Edit-A-Thon to Correct Systemic Bias in Wikipedia Help address the systematic biases relating to gender, race, and social class that lead to under-representation of topics, people, and organizations on Wikipedia. When: Saturday, November 2, 2019 at 9am–1pm Where: UW Libraries Research Commons, 4000 15th Ave NE, Seattle, Washington 98195 Hosted by: Labor Archives of Washington, UW Special Collections, and Cascadia Wikimedians User Group Facebook event page Please register here To unsubscribe from future messages from Wikipedia:Meetup/Seattle, please remove your name from this list. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:54, 18 October 2019 (UTC)

Cascadia Wikimedians User Group

2019 US Banknote Contest

	US Banknote Contest
	November-December 2019
There are an estimated 30,000 different varieties of United States banknotes, yet only a fraction of these are represented on Wikimedia Commons in the form of 2D scans. Additionally, Colonial America, the Confederate States, the Republic of Texas, multiple states and territories, communities, and private companies have issued banknotes that are in the public domain today but are absent from Commons. In the months of November and December, WikiProject Numismatics will be running a cross-wiki upload-a-thon, the 2019 US Banknote Contest. The goal of the contest is to increase the number of US banknote images available to content creators on all Wikimedia projects. Participants will claim points for uploading and importing 2D scans of US banknotes, and at the end of the contest all will receive awards. Whether you want to claim the Gold Wiki or you just want to have fun, all are invited to participate. If you do not want to receive invitations to future US Banknote Contests, follow the instructions here

Sent by ZLEA at 23:30, 19 October 2019 (UTC) via MediaWiki message delivery (talk)

October 2019

Your recent editing history at Erica C. Barnett shows that you are currently engaged in an edit war; that means that you are repeatedly changing content back to how you think it should be, when you have seen that other editors disagree. To resolve the content dispute, please do not revert or change the edits of others when you are reverted. Instead of reverting, please use the talk page to work toward making a version that represents consensus among editors. The best practice at this stage is to discuss, not edit-war. See the bold, revert, discuss cycle for how this is done. If discussions reach an impasse, you can then post a request for help at a relevant noticeboard or seek dispute resolution. In some cases, you may wish to request temporary page protection.

Being involved in an edit war can result in you being blocked from editing—especially if you violate the three-revert rule, which states that an editor must not perform more than three reverts on a single page within a 24-hour period. Undoing another editor's work—whether in whole or in part, whether involving the same or different material each time—counts as a revert. Also keep in mind that while violating the three-revert rule often leads to a block, you can still be blocked for edit warring—even if you don't violate the three-revert rule—should your behavior indicate that you intend to continue reverting repeatedly. Chetsford (talk) 05:58, 27 October 2019 (UTC)

Nothing to say to the one with FOUR reverts? Okie dokie. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 06:06, 27 October 2019 (UTC)

You've already templated their Talk page sufficiently. I don't know more from me would be a meaningful contribution. Chetsford (talk) 06:12, 27 October 2019 (UTC)

You are fighting very hard to violate the BLP policy and that can get you blocked from editing. You need to err on the side of presenting living people in a positive light. Read the BLP policy. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 06:14, 27 October 2019 (UTC)

"presenting living people in a positive light" That's not our policy, I'm afraid. We provide WP:DUE facts sourced to RS. Our job is not to "present people in a positive light" (or any other light). Chetsford (talk) 06:37, 27 October 2019 (UTC)

You're wrong. BLPs give the benefit of the doubt. "it is not Wikipedia's job to be sensationalist, or to be the primary vehicle for the spread of titillating claims about people's lives; the possibility of harm to living subjects must always be considered when exercising editorial judgment." Gossiping about someone's Nextdoor.com account getting suspended? Gossiping about their drinking? Professional mistakes? All tabloid trash. It has no place. Read the policy. WP:BLPSTYLE says "Summarize how actions and achievements are characterized by reliable sources". Source after source used words almost exactly like " first reported on by independent journalist Erica C. Barnett". The policy says we should match that tone. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 06:42, 27 October 2019 (UTC)

Everything you said is correct. But it's also a different matter entirely from the suggestion we are required to present "living people in a positive light", which is not our policy. Thanks. Chetsford (talk) 06:48, 27 October 2019 (UTC)

It is. We hold negative content to a higher standard of due weight and sourcing than neutral or positive content. All else being equal, we subtract negative content because it's harder for it to meet the bar set for it. Take away the negative and what's left is a more positive portrait. It's a good policy. Readers should not be coming to Wikipedia to get dirt on anybody. Our "do no harm" policy means that we only publicize the negative after the whole entire world already knows it. Their reputation has already taken the hit because the bad news spread elsewhere, and nobody is learning it first on Wikipedia. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 07:04, 27 October 2019 (UTC)

We seem to be talking past each other. Chetsford (talk) 07:25, 27 October 2019 (UTC)

Why was my external link deleted on Roll Your Own Cigarettes?

This was an informational link, why was it deleted? — Preceding unsigned comment added by MGKlee (talk • contribs) 16:12, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

Spam is not allowed. As stated in the talk page warning you received, you may be blocked from editing if you use Wikipedia for advertising or promotion. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 16:16, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

Can you please describe why this was considered Spam? This external link has specific information related to the topic! — Preceding unsigned comment added by MGKlee (talk • contribs) 16:19, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

You're selling shit. Don't be dense. Look at the edit history. I reverted one of your spam links, and you returned and spammed the same page gain, and a completely different editor, User:KH-1, removed that spam. If they hadn't, somebody else would have. Everybody can see it's blatant advertising, and if you keep it up, somebody will remove it until you are blocked from editing. Do not use Wikipedia for advertising.

Find some other topic you are knowledgeable about and that you have no connection to or conflict of interest, and edit with no worries that you are using your editing privilege for promotional purposes. If the only reason you edit is to add links to this one commercial retail site, you will be blocked. Don't say nobody warned you. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 16:33, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

Military stress card

Please provide evidence for the following claims:

-The TIME source is talking about a card that incorporates a liquid crystal thermometer -The TIME source says this card can be used by recruits in boot camp to halt training -The image used in the article shows the military stress card (the card shown has nothing to do with the military; the Snopes article contains an image of the real card) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.72.102.7 (talk) 16:58, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

For the last time, the discussion is at Talk:Military stress card. If you're not willing to pay attention and learn, I'm not going to waste my time with you. Go to Talk:Military stress card and discuss this in a civil and respectful fashion. We are all happy to work with you if you can behave yourself. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 17:00, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

so you are saying I am impolite... while you are impolite... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.72.102.7 (talk) 17:02, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

I have posted the questions above on that talkpage so you can respond there — Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.72.102.7 (talk) 17:13, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

Kinda bitey reply at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Erica C. Barnett

Hi Dennis,

I thought I should take this to your talk page because I assume you meant well in your reply at Articles for deletion/Erica C. Barnett, but I thought maybe we could have a reasonable discussion. I honestly did not intend my edits to be construed as disruptive, so if you feel the tags were erroneously added, you may remove them and bring the discussion to the applicable article talk page. I'd just appreciate it if you could clarify for me why we need to have 2, 3, or even 4 reliable sources which prove such basic details as, "person X was a journalist," "person Y started website A with person Z," etc. That's all I meant by adding those tags.

Hoping we can resolve this amicably as I appreciate your contributions to the discussions and your editing.

Best,
--Doug Mehus (talk) 22:52, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

When the AfD is closed I'm going to take this to Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents to have your WP:POINTy editing and Gaming the system sanctioned with at least a formal warning, if not a block or topic ban. I am appalled at your behavior. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 22:56, 6 November 2019 (UTC)