User talk:Jarnsax

PD-old-assumed

Please avoid using this template on files where no assumptions are needed. Pre-1923 photographs published in the USA of USA locations have no possible assumption needed to state they are public domain. Consequently changes like this are unhelpful and cause confusion for reusers. --Fæ (talk) 11:47, 9 September 2018 (UTC)

Reviewing some examples, you appear to have mass changed templates in an attempt to eliminate PD-old use. Unfortunately in that process you have misused {{PD-old-assumed}} by adding it to images which are 100% unambiguously public domain, such as the Robert N. Dennis collection as uploaded from the NYPL.

On the basis that your account appears inactive, having made no contributions for several months, I will make a proposal on Commons:Administrators' noticeboard/User problems to mass change these edits.

--Fæ (talk) 11:41, 17 October 2018 (UTC)

Notification about possible deletion

Some contents have been listed at Commons:Deletion requests so that the community can discuss whether they should be kept or not. We would appreciate it if you could go to voice your opinion about this at their entry. If you created these pages, please note that the fact that they have been proposed for deletion does not necessarily mean that we do not value your kind contribution. It simply means that one person believes that there is some specific problem with them, such as a copyright issue. Please see Commons:But it's my own work! for a guide on how to address these issues. Please remember to respond to and – if appropriate – contradict the arguments supporting deletion. Arguments which focus on the nominator will not affect the result of the nomination. Thank you!

Affected:

• File:Report of the Second Norwegian Arctic Expedition in the "Fram," 1898-1902 (volume 3).djvu

And also:

• File:Report of the Second Norwegian Arctic Expedition in the "Fram," 1898-1902 (volume 4).djvu

Yours sincerely, ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 14:08, 15 October 2018 (UTC)

US warship italics

What is [1] based on? I haven't heard such a rule before. The English Wikipedia uses italics, e.g. the featured article w:USS Missouri (BB-63). PrimeHunter (talk) 15:47, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter: That was a while ago, I've actually been changing them back (and fixing others, there was no real consistency) since. I had come across materials from 'back in the day' about how the Navy did such things, and they didn't italicize the names of ships in commission once they started using the USS prefix in the early 1900s... the actual "name" of the ship was Texas, and "USS Texas" was the designation of the ship while in commission (and ships went in and out of commission a LOT). What I realized more recently is that it doesn't matter, really, since all the various style manuals (Chicago, etc) say to write it as "USS Texas". I've actually been getting rid of that template and manually fixing the things as I dig through the DANFS appendix on battleships (and edit wikidata a ton). The description text it gives is rather irrelevant with the wikidata infoboxes, sometimes just wrong, and doesn't work for things like the cancelled first South Dakota class. I'm just scraping the source info (like actual date of completion, length, draft, and so forth) into Wikidata, and citing it there, and trying to get as many as possible to match the Commons naming schema (most do not) and actually be in the correct 'by name' index categories with the correct sorting, so it's halfway possible to actually find stuff without just randomly searching variations.

TBH, what I figure is going to cause more 'drama' is the designations of these early ships, like me removing "ACR1" from the USS Maine, but I can explain in detail exactly where it came from, and why it is wrong (and the designations in the names of early ships are broken on Wikipedia for exactly the same reason. Basically, the 'ships histories' from the "Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships" have been transcribed at least four times now, on websites going back to the 90s, and in each case they included an abbreviated description at the start (and for Maine in indeed starts ACR1). What people didn't do is look at the actual book, which had a long table of abbreviations (ACR means "Armored Cruiser"), and nobody has seemed to look at the appendixes, where it specifically explains "The symbols BB, CC, SS, and AS were not officially authorized until 17 July 1920. As used for vessels commissioned prior to that time, BB, CC, SS, and AS represent unofficial abbreviations used for the sake of convenience. The symbols C, CS, and ACR have never been official designations." The USS Maine was, at some point in the planning stages, Maine (Armored Cruiser No. 1), then built as Maine (Battleship No. 1), then later given the USS prefix when it came into use. The Act of Congress funding her and Texas just called them 'armored vessels' (they are included in the appendix).

And yeah, the name of the Wikipedia article is wrong, because everyone referenced the web copies of the histories instead of the actual book. If you look at the updated DANFS at [2] they have expanded all the abbreviations (and taken the description 'second-class battleship' from the appendix or some other source). Using "BB" for her is just completely wrong. I'm trying to make our names for those shipe what was used at the time, since that's what is in the captions of historical images people are uploading, and make sure there are redirects for the wrong names. Jarnsax (talk) 20:48, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

BTW, {{Italic title}}, neat, I wish I had known about that, much better than rewriting or adding an explict displaytitle. Thanks. Jarnsax (talk) 21:28, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

Thanks. I'm mainly interested in italics because I often clear out categories in Category:Pages with ignored display titles. Most of them are ship categories with a DISPLAYNAME to make italics on the ship name but mismatched in other parts of the name, e.g. after a move. I made {{Italic title|string=}} to deal with this. I will continue to use italics when I fix ship pages. The English Wikipedia has a common name policy to usually use the (currently) common name of a subject even if it's not the official name. We also have a ship-specific guideline which says to always use italics: w:Wikipedia:Naming conventions (ships). PrimeHunter (talk) 21:53, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter: Yeah, I just changed a number of cats I had messed with to use that template, and I will change pages to use it in the future as well. It's an elegant solution to the problem (and it turns out that the cathead template for US battleships wasn't, too many edge cases). As far as Wikipedia, I get it, I just strongly suspect that those applications of 'hull class' being common now specifically relates to early Wikipedia editors specifically citing web 1.0 sites like hazegray and hyperwar that transcribed the abbreviations verbatim before NHHC put up their version of DANFS, and everyone looking at Wikipedia, lol. It's circular, people picked up the 'mistake'. Jarnsax (talk) 22:21, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

Oh, and BTW, here's a link about the "USS and italics" thing. [3] I've also looked a things like [4], esp pages 284 and 286, which is as official as it gets, from 1938, and doesn't italicize names other than as to denote the previous names of renamed ships. Jarnsax (talk) 22:33, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

PDF categories

Hello, please do not mass-add categories by file type such as "Books from the United States PDF files" to tens of thousands of files. Such categorisation is unessescary, because to search PDF files, one can simply use Special:Search/filetype:pdf - the categorisation is therefore utterly redundant. I suggest to discuss such controversial edits more broadly before continuing. TheImaCow (talk) 21:44, 3 May 2024 (UTC)

That's an opinion. Feel free to point at any policy I'm breaking. I'm not particularly worried if you think I'm wasting my time.

I'm not under the impression that it's "controversial". I didn't create the category (it's been around since 2018). I also didn't create Category:PDF files from the United States, or add any significant number of the ~27,000 files that are in there. There are also other categories of "books" sorted by traits like city of publication that contain tens of thousands of files, which are also obviously not controversial.

I'm aware that you can search by "file type", but there is no actual way to search file pages for either "actually a book" or "from the US". People use all kinds of variations of the templates, and a huge number of those pages have completely garbled metadata. There are actually a ton I've found in various categories that are named things like "California Digital Library" followed by some Internet Archive identifier.

The point of what you call "unnecessary" is to make it easier to methodically work on cleaning them up and adding them to Wikidata. Jarnsax (talk) 00:47, 4 May 2024 (UTC)

Worse filename ever, lol.

File:IA Query "sponsor-(Sloan) date-(1000 TO 1925) publisher-((New York) OR Chicago OR Jersey OR Illan)" (IA floridagamewater00inroos).pdf that's (as of now) "File:IA Query "sponsor-(Sloan) date-(1000 TO 1925) publisher-((New York) OR Chicago OR Jersey OR Illan)" (IA floridagamewater00inroos).pdf". Sigh. Jarnsax (talk) 18:32, 6 May 2024 (UTC)