User talk:Optimist/Archive1

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This is an archive page for discussion posts.

Please do not edit this page. To communicate with me (Optimist), please go here.

Contents

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Welcome

Welcome to the tinWiki. I am glad you have signed up now. Those are some very interesting subjects you have started. Great job!

Xkp 19:50, 16 April 2007 (CDT)

Thank you, Xkp. I was happy to see your welcome. I hope to be able to a little bit contribute positively to tinWiki. Optimist 09:11, 17 April 2007 (CDT)
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Editor Status

I would like to make you a tinWiki editor. Would you be willing to beef up some of the stubs you have created to article status? If so I will make you an editor. Usually we ask that to be considered for editor status you create 10 properly formatted articles rthat are acceptable. But you have done alot of work and I think you are deserving of the status. Let me know what you think.

William One Sac 09:55, 18 April 2007 (CDT)

Thank you, William One Sac. I was excited and felt honored and frankly also awed a bit by your comment/message. Actually I took a screen shot when I saw it. Anyway, yes I am intending to make the pages I started more complete; after I signed up I have collected on my user page a list of links to those pages and so now it is easy to look at the list to remember what the pages are. Honestly I'm not sure what editor status means specifically, but I would of course be honored to accept editor status. I wasn't sure if you meant you are making me editor if I plan to upgrade the pages or if it was after I upgrade them; either way sounds perfect, however. How I think about tinWiki is, it's a great place for me to try and help creating a "body" of important, but not necessarily talked about "on television", information. (...Not that I really know lately, on a little side note I don't actually own a television set anymore and also am not planning to aquire one.) Optimist 22:22, 19 April 2007 (CDT)
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Welcome Aboard to our new Editor!

Welcome aboard Optimist! I am happy you would like to be an editor. Keep up the good work!

Please review this short page Editor's (sysops) Mission

William One Sac 10:32, 20 April 2007 (CDT)

Thank you. I am honored and hope to live up to this membership status. Optimist 13:35, 27 April 2007 (CDT)
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Howdey

I've noticed you were unsure of a few TinWiki policies.
A few policies are covered on this page. Some things are covered in the tutorial such as linking to non-ATS forums and other wiki's. In regards to copying Wikipedia articles onto TinWiki, Wikipedia allows us to do that but we do not want to be a copy of Wikipedia.
Hope that helps and thanks for your efforts on TinWiki.
--Umbrax:|Sysop 16:58, 28 May 2007 (CDT)

Thank you, Umbrax. I am thinking I can refer directly to this reply if the topic comes up in the future where I notice "big chunks" copied from Wikipedia. Anyway, thanks again for clearing this up. Optimist 18:18, 28 May 2007 (CDT)
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See also

I've noticed that you've added several See Also sections. But why? Perhaps a lower amount of pages on the list, but they seem a bit long. After all, we do have categories for large lists of related subjects, correct? I'm not saying there's a problem with a see also section, just they're a bit too long for just a related page section. Maybe skim them down a bit?

And welcome :P -TinWiki Editor DP

DP, I know you are right, I guess I took off a bit with the See also sections recently. I will compact those longer lists, but keep the sections themselves like you suggest is alright. Anyway, thank you for the correction. :) Optimist 11:28, 30 May 2007 (CDT)
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Image Shack

It appears that all of the images people have hosted with image shack seem to have been deleted. Hopefully this is just a temporary situation. If not I will start trying to replace the images, but it is going to be very hard.

Xkp 18:43, 30 May 2007 (CDT)


Nevermind, I see it is just my provider is blocking their site for some reason! LOL

Xkp 18:46, 30 May 2007 (CDT)

Alright. For the record -- yes, image shack hosted images do show for me. Optimist 22:16, 30 May 2007 (CDT)
Ok, on a total side note, there was something I didn't like in how my reply looks... English is not my first language so I will come across oddly "not infrequently". Anyway, I thought to replace the "yes" with a "yup", I think that would have helped. lol Anyway... Optimist 22:51, 30 May 2007 (CDT)
lol Optimist 22:52, 30 May 2007 (CDT)
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Image Information Images

I think you did a really great job with those new image information images. Would you mind if I host them on Above Top Secret? The reason is sometimes Image Shack will stop hosting an image temporarily if the accounts bandwidth gets exceeded. It has happened here before, I had to replace all of Umbrax's images for just that reason. Thanks.

William One Sac 21:27, 5 June 2007 (CDT)

William One Sac, thank you. Yes, hosting the images on Above Top Secret's own hosting location sounds like a nice and practical idea. I'm not sure how it's done in practice when you give local hosting like that but if you let me know the images' new ATS URLs, by updating the images' links in the image information page or in some other way, I would then update the article pages where the images are displayed (and the information page if needed). In short, no, I wouldn't mind at all, it sounds good. Optimist 05:11, 6 June 2007 (CDT)
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Bohemian Grove

Thank you for fixing that page. I was getting very frustrated before trying to revert it using the rollback feature. As you saw I had no success. I see you said you fixed it manually. Thank you for clearing that up for me. William One Sac 18:14, 4 July 2007 (CDT)

William One Sac, It seems rollbacks are sometimes complicated when there are several edits that need to be reverted; first I thought maybe I could view a "last good version" and click somewhere to make it the current version but I didn't find anything to click to do that, then I discovered that when viewing a previous version and clicking "edit", the editable text is actually the wiki code of that version (as opposed to of the current version). So then it was easy to just copy that wiki text and replace the current version's wiki text with that of the earlier, good version. Tada! Or presto!, or what one says. :-)
A similar jumbling of the article has happened in the Main page discussion, like I mentioned in the Community portal, and I will try and help fix that too, this discovery that clicking edit brings up the wiki text of the version one is looking at will be helpful. Anyway, I am glad you like what I did, so thanks for letting me know. Optimist 01:04, 5 July 2007 (CDT)
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Please Help!!!

Hello, No idea if this is the place to message you but here goes :) For over a week I have been trying to reset my password on ATS, and never receive the email. I have also tried registering again as a new user from multiple email addresses, and have completed the contact form on the site 3 times now, all without a single mail back......

Please can you post something on the board asking one of the Amigos to check the SMTP queue, as I imagine it is stacked up. How they have not noticed this I am not sure (or the fact that anonymous posting has had nothing new for over a month, I did try that).

Cheers

Shambles :)

Shambles, hello. Yes, this is the place to message me. :-) As I understand you, there is something wrong with the ATS forums, both as far as signing up and resetting password, and even posting anonymously.
What I am thinking right now is that William One Sac comes by here regularly and so I expect he will be looking into the matter when he sees your message (I noticed you have posted this message both to him and to Umbrax, Umbrax does come here too but William One Sac comes more often I think). If you don't get a reply within a day or two from either of those two, or some other "amigo" type person, as you call them, I will try and help you by alerting people at the actual ATS forums. I do have an account there, but that's basically a coincidence; the thing is I don't know very much about ATS, I must admit, really I have only posted a couple of times, and that was in the tinWiki section.
I hope it's not more urgent than that this will be okay for you. (If it however is more urgent than that this will be okay, ...let me know.)
Btw., please sign discussion posts using the automatic signing code which is four tildes like this ~~~~, it's practical because then the date is inserted and so on. Optimist 19:09, 9 July 2007 (CDT)

Thanks Kindly for reading, I will try again later and will let you know if still a problem in a few days.....thanks also for the wikitip Shambles 03:27, 10 July 2007 (CDT)

Shambles, You're welcome. Anyway, I'll be here; the reason I want to wait, btw., is that I feel it makes most sense to leave this issue to people who actually know something about ATS, like William One Sac, Umbrax, or The Vagabond and others, considering they after all are around, whereas I myself am a complete "noob" if even that, so to speak, in ATS. I will however alert ATS administrators as best I can if you don't get help soon from others (or the problems gets solved "by itself").
Anyway, I'll be seeing if anything happens, if it doesn't I will then alert the ATS people. Optimist 05:37, 10 July 2007 (CDT)
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NWO and plagiarism

Hi Optimist. I removed the material from the NWO article that Ken said was plagiarized from his site. And after doing a quick google search, I see that there are two other websites that have the same material as we do on the Tavistock institute. My question for you is, was Ken saying we plagiarized the Tavistock Institute material as well, or was he saying it was just erroneous? If it is plagiarized, would you mind removing it? I have been ill off and on for a while now, and I am afraid that some people may have posted copywritten material without me catching it. In the future, would you keep an eye out for plagiarized material? And remove it when it is published? I have a bad feeling that user Ronishia may have posted alot of work written by others. I suppose we can edit the material enough so that we don't have to just delete dozens of articles as we come across them. But when we see an article that is 100% copy and paste, I think we need to remove it right away. I really appreciate your help with this Optimist!

William One Sac 11:45, 30 July 2007 (CDT)

Hello, William One Sac, My immediate impression as far as Ken Adachi's second point -- that is what he says about the Tavistock material -- is that he merely considers that the source has not been properly mentioned; I do not immediately understand him to say the actual text and sentences of tinWiki's Tavistock material to be plagiarized. Also, like you say, he also points out some factual errers in the text.
Of course about Adachi's first point however, what he is saying there is that the source there too has not been properly mentioned, but also that the text is lifted verbatim (or only slightly rewritten). So, I think he talks about plagiarism only in the first point, the case of the FEMA and Executive Orders material.
I will be happy to look out for plagiarism in the future. Especially long articles, am I thinking right now can be good to do a little Google checking of. Also, I am going to take a look at the other articles by user Ronishia in case there should be more of problematic things like we are talking about right now, like you suspect there may be. If it is feasible, I will rewrite plagiarized text that I might find, by replacing that text with a summary in my own words (and name the original source). If the text is too long however, I will remove the text entirely and wait to add a summary in my own words until I have read the (long) original text.
I will take a look at the Tavistock material likewise.
To sum up, I believe Adachi's complaint in his first point (FEMA) is about plagiarism and mention of source being missing; and his complaint in the second point (Tavistock) is not about plagiarism but only about lack of properly naming the source (plus he's pointing out a couple of factual errors).
I wish you perfect health. Optimist 13:07, 30 July 2007 (CDT)
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Community Portal Page

I just wanted to let you know that I was able to successfully delete that spam page without losing the redirect to the community portal. I noticed that the url was different for the page that had the spam and the link on the side bar. So I held my breath and deleted.

William One Sac 14:01, 2 August 2007 (CDT)

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TinWiki.org Wanted Pages

I initiated a wanted pages page as I read your idea on ATS. Is this what you had in mind? Any ideas on how to improve it?

Xkp 21:57, 7 August 2007 (CDT)

This is exactly the thing I had in mind, I was really happy when I saw this now. :-) One idea, that I happen to have seen in Wikipedia once, is that it can be practical if people write their requested page's title as a link, then creating the wanted page is as simple as just clicking the link if someone wants to create it when looking through the requests list. It's not an important thing, of course. I have written up one page title in the list, which I remembered of a couple of ideas I had recently for pages that I considered belong in TinWiki, when i wrote it I made it a link like that.
Another thing I borrowed from Wikipedia was to put a bullet in front of the list item. Anyway, I expect I will remember some more ideas and will definitely be using this new page in the future.
A final thought right now is that, if the administrators think it a good idea, it might be useful to borrow yet another thing from Wikipedia, which is to offer the opportunity to request a page, in addition to creating it, when people search for a term that does not have a page for it. I mean, when searching for a term that doesn't have a page, the result page says for example, "There is no page titled ":tesla". You can create this page." (Where the words "create this page" is a link to the as yet non-existent page.) Maybe it could be good to add, "or request it." Where the words "request it" naturally would link to the new Wanted pages page.
I also have to admit, for the record, that other users have mentioned having a Wanted pages page before me (I read it in some comment somewhere) so strictly speaking it's not my idea. I'm glad I helped make it happen by mentioning it in ATS now, though. :-) I think it's a great addition to TinWiki's features that you went ahead and created this. :thumbs up: (as it's said in ATS). Optimist 10:36, 8 August 2007 (CDT)
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Community Portal Page

Hi Optimist. I have been trying to figure out how to change the redirect of the community portal page. I got as far as this: http://tinwiki.org/index.php?title=TinWiki.org:Community_Portal&action=edit However I do not think that will work. I believe that is how our spammer originally made that page we had to delete. I will keep working on the problem, however I think that this may be something only SkepticOverlord has the ability to do. I will keep you posted.

William One Sac | tinWiki Administrator 13:09, 30 August 2007 (CDT)

William One Sac, Thank you. I replied to your forum version of this post here to perhaps make it more easy for others to follow the conversation. Optimist 12:56, 2 September 2007 (CDT)
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Confessions of an Area 51 Employee

Hi Optimist, I was curious about some comments you made on the message board. Do you believe that Confessions of an Area 51 Employee should be restored? With a disclaimer perhaps that the material may be false? I have a confession of my own to make :-) I was a bit curious about the deletion myself. (As to why was it deleted, etc..)

William One Sac | tinWiki Master 23:10, 3 September 2007 (CDT)

lol, all I know basically is that it said in the Recent changes page that it was deleted because *looks up* "Videos were hoaxes".
Although I know the page title is familiar, I don't know what was in the page. So about that particular article, I don't have any special opinion whether it should be deleted or not.
What I mentioned in the forum was a thought that I consider hoaxes are appropriate material for tinWiki -- obviously not in the sense pretending they are not hoaxes, but as deserving pages precisely as being a hoax. For example a page could begin: "Confessions of an Area 51 Employee is a well-known UFO related hoax"... and so on.
Another aspect of the thing about hoaxes are of course those cases that are not really established to in fact be hoaxes, which perhaps applies to the topic of the article in question, at least as I understand you regarding what you say about not being sure why the article was deleted. In those cases, I think your suggestion is something that sounds to belong very much in tinWiki, the possibility of "slapping" a disclaimer on pages about the material being suspected to be false. I would definitely say that such a practice of marking suspicious material would also increase the sense of tinWiki being serious and credible and so on.
The type of topics which tinWiki is all about naturally means there are various cases and topics that may be very reasonable to suspect as deliberate hoaxes. For example the claim that Tunak Tunak Tun is part of a plot to subvert the world, and was written as mind control by The Indian New World Order... lol I mean, I may of course be wrong, but personally I consider that a more than possible false article. lol
If the Confessions of an Area 51 Employee article could, within some degree of reason, be said to "possibly" be real information, then I assume it can be restored if equipped with such a disclaimer as you mention. Perhaps there could be a disclaimer banner, even, I mean like there is a stub banner for stub articles there could be a special disclaimer banner for articles suspected to contain hoax or false material. That's just a thought I had now when I saw what you mentioned about a disclaimer. Optimist 21:20, 4 September 2007 (CDT)

That is an excellent suggestion. I will work on creating a banner over the next day or two for pages that can be considered as being possible hoaxes. Perhaps one for articles that are generally considered to definitely be hoaxes, like John Titor and ... can't recall, that one with the ebans lol My brain is not functioning tonight. Oh yeah, the guys name was Bill Ryan and he was getting e-mails from someone named anonomous... It's not important at the moment. I will have to think of an appropiate icon for the banners. Thanks for your imput and thoughtfulness. William One Sac | tinWiki Master 21:56, 4 September 2007 (CDT)

Thank you, and I am glad you like the input. I have some further thoughts now after I read your reply, and in case my comment may be helpful, I am replying in the forum to let people follow the conversation who possibly won't be looking here. Optimist 19:15, 5 September 2007 (CDT)
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Heflin entry

Hey, I was able to follow your instructions! I think it looks much better the way you suggested. Though by dribs and drabs, it feels good getting some formatting technniques in my pocket. Thanks Optimist.

Yuefo, who posted on 06:55, 8 September 2007, thanks for letting me know, I am glad my description was possible to follow, and also that you think my input made for an improvement. I'll be happy to offer any dribs and drabs I can.
I already think you know much of what there is to know, though.
I have thought about maybe trying to collect some tips in a "batch" that can be posted to new users as a sort of crash course about how an article can be formed, including the basic formatting guidelines and such. But now I am also thinking about making an experimenting page for the Community portal which may be created. A Community portal could perhaps also be a good to collect some basic tips in. Optimist 15:17, 8 September 2007 (CDT)
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Assistance with my first article

Could you take a look at my Iapetus article? I don't know how to get the text to align to the left, starting with "The Wall" section.

Update: I figured out how to make it display correctly, but only by making large spaces under the photos. Obviously there's something wrong with the image codes I'm using that doesn't send the text back to the left margin.

While you're there, I'd appreciate any additional feedback you have. Thanks Optimist. Yuefo 21:03, 9 September 2007 (CDT)http://tinwiki.org/wiki/Mysteries_of_Iapetus

Good, first article. Congratulations! :-) About the text "floating" around tables and images, that is supposed to happen -- the "align" setting causes that. But you found a way to bring the text down under the images. Anyway, the topic is fairly interesting, too, and the images look great. Optimist 17:28, 11 September 2007 (CDT)
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Community Portal Page

Hello Optimist. I spoke with SkepticOverlord and asked him if he could make the changes to the community portal link that we would like. He said he would see what he could do, but he couldn't promise he would be able to figure out how to do it. As it has been several days since I asked him to look into it, and the link has not changed, I don't think it is going to be changed. I am sorry as I think that this was a really great idea you had. Maybe we can figure out another way to use the page you have created? William One Sac | tinWiki Master 09:31, 14 September 2007 (CDT)

Hi, William One Sac, I am glad you like my experiment page, then. :-) It's only meant as a kind of starting point, really. If the Community portal link in the navigation panel isn't possible to change for now, then I definitely assume it should still be possible to link from some good place to the experiment page.
I am thinking that I want to try and look at some WikiMedia help pages later, just to see if I can understand at least some minor details about that whole Sidebar "mystery". It does seem like it should be possible to figure out some way or another, and if I am not capable of solving it (good chance I'm not....), maybe it would be an idea later to ask if someone in ATS or something is like a WikiMedia expert or something, since I picture it might come in handy somewhere down the line to be able to adjust the Sidebar contents.
Anyway, I am glad that you like the whole idea to begin with, and of course the portal page experimentation page can be linked to from some other, fairly good place. And, again, that page is nothing but a brief sketch right now, so any and all ideas you or anyone else might have should absolutely be edited into it. Optimist 23:34, 14 September 2007 (CDT)
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Help Page

Hello Optimist. I took some of your suggestions and refined the Help Page. Could you give me your opinion on it? Can you think of any more links that could or should be added to the help menu? Also, do you think we should have a paragraph on the bottom of the page, sort of like what was there before at the top of the page? Thanks! William One Sac | tinWiki Master 14:41, 17 September 2007 (CDT)

Edit: Also, I would like your opinion on something else. I am wondering about the Help Desk page. Do you think we should use the help desk article page for questions? Or do you think we should use the discussion page for answering questions? I was thinking of using the talk page because I think it is much easier for novices to use. I created an introduction on both the article page as well as the Talk Page. Could you look at both and tell me what you think? Thanks again Optimist! William One Sac | tinWiki Master 15:06, 17 September 2007 (CDT)

William One Sac, The Help menu page looks way, waaay better now, in my humble opinion. I mean I want to say it's beautiful. :-) Perhaps it could be good to have a small text section at the bottom, a description like was on top before, like you say, but I imagine it would be good to make it very very concise so, this being a menu page, it didn't take any more time or attention than is 'warranted'. This is just my perspective, now, but you're asking me, after all. lol I would be happy to give it a try, by the way.
The new introduction in the Help Desk is a very appropriate upgrade, both the version in the article page and the one in the discussion. As for the topic about whether to talk in the discussion or to talk in the article, I remember that I saw a comment on this same type of issue in Tinwiki Initiatives. Right now, I disagree with the Count; my feeling is that, these pages are not articles, but are solely discussion pages, therefore the discussion portion should, as it seems to me right now, be a discussion about the discussion, if you see what I mean, which is to say the discussion portion should be reserved for talking about what goes on in the main article page. But I do see what you mean that the discussion is easier to use for talking, since that is what it is designed for. Anyway, again, this is just my view right now, and may very well be overly 'pedantic' or such. Optimist 19:05, 18 September 2007 (CDT)
P.S. About the Help menu and its links, my only idea right now that I have is that perhaps the Community portal experimentation page could get some link, probably best to put it towards the bottom of the page, like in its own little place, if so. Right now, that is perhaps the best way to make a/the Community portal easily available. I do believe that the Help page and a Community portal page both have their respective purposes. What do you think about having such a link there? Optimist 19:17, 18 September 2007 (CDT)


Thank you for your comments about the help page. :) I plan on revamping the help section, and adding new articles as I see they are needed. You said you would be willing to do a consise paragraph for that page, so please, by all means, go right ahead and do so.
I will change the links to the help desk to the talk page soon. I agree with you, I think it is easier for new users to use the talk page. I will also put some text and maybe an image on the article page, just so that it is not empty if someone decides to go there.
I will add the link to the community portal page you created. I am not certain how to put it on the bottom of the page right now, unless I just make alot of spaces after the quick tips section. In any case, you can fix it anyway you'd like after you ad a paragraph to the help page. Thanks for all of your comments and opinions, I really appreciate and value them.

William One Sac | tinWiki Master 11:25, 19 September 2007 (CDT)

William One Sac, It is good to hear that the Help section is being worked at, it already is improved, of course, but it is useful to have a good Help section with regard to new tinWiki contributors. About the Help menu page and the Community portal link, I think the link looks good as it is now really; what I meant about having the link at the bottom was actually what you have done, it's just that I expressed myself a bit awkwardly. Anyway, I will try and come up with a good, short description text, something like what used to be in the page introduction, except shorter, and insert it in the page as and ending.
About talk pages, I am thinking that perhaps it could be good to follow up the new Help desk practice also in the other talk page that I mentioned, Tinwiki Initiatives. That is just a thought, though. Anyway, I am thankful that my input contributes to this site, I feel tinWiki is extremely deserving of attention and support. Optimist 20:02, 20 September 2007 (CDT)
Nice job with the tables on the Portal page. It looks very sharp, and is a great reference for new users!
William One Sac | tinWiki Master 21:05, 21 September 2007 (CDT)

Yes, I like the new portal page. Great work! --Mig-17 16:45, 23 September 2007 (CDT)

Thank you, William One Sac and Mig-17. I have tried to do some things on the Help page and the Community page, and today improved a little more the Community page.
Any ideas you might have for improvements to what I did, feel free to go ahead, or post some comments. Anyway, it seems significant progress is happening here lately on a number of pages. Optimist 19:23, 23 September 2007 (CDT)
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