User talk:Balcer/Archive1

User talk:Balcer Archive 1

Santorini

What an excellent image, showing the caldera so distinctly! Wetman 05:09, 29 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Image:Map of Ukraine political.png

Give me a list of polish translations and I'll create a polish version. --Steschke 21:04, 2004 Nov 29 (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 2000 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:

{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}

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:

{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}

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)

Accents

Hi there! To answer your questions:

• Yes, the accents are quite essential. They show the stressed syllable, which is useful to people who don't know Russian all that well (but are able to read Cyrillic). Putting accents on words is standard practice, Russian dictionaries and encyclopedias always show accents. There are many words in Russian with which it is not quite apparent (even to a native speaker!) what syllable should be stressed.
• Accents are in fact used on Russian Wikipedia. They started doing it fairly recently, so there are still many articles that do not have accents. Of course, not every word is supposed to be accented, only the bolded subject of the article.
• I am sorry the accents look bad to you. You may want to tweak your fonts/settings. Also, just because they look bad to you does not mean they do not retain their value, especially to people to whom they look OK. I find Greek texts rendered pretty ugly on my machine, which is not a reason to remove all Greek words from the articles.
• Of course the accents are correct. There are quite a few Russian Wikipedians who'd correct them if they were wrong.

Hope this resolves the issue. Please don't hesitate to ask me if you have any questions.—Ëzhiki (erinaceus europeaus) 00:36, Dec 30, 2004 (UTC)

You are quite right about the search engines. This issue was already brought up before (also here and on Russian Wikipedia as well). Mr. Monedula, I believe, was the one who started accenting Russian words, not without protests from other users. The issue seems to come back up every once in a while. So, here's a summary of previous discussions:

• Search engines not being able to render the accented Russian words are a technical limitation, which will hopefully be overcome in the future. Yandex, for example, is smart enough to search for two different spellings of a word containing the letter ё (so, a search for полёт will also look for полет). Accents are no different in that sense. It is believed that the only reason why search engines can't yet automatically strip accents during search is that the accents aren't all that common on the net (except in encyclopedic and dictionary resources). Eventually this will be fixed.
• As far as Russian federal subjects go, I am trying to address this issue through the Russian federal subjects WikiProject. The template used by the project calls to using an accented version in the introduction, and non-accented version in the infobox header (see Ingushetia for an example). This is also done to aide some backwards-oriented search engines index the words properly (so, with two versions, both an accented and non-accented variant will be indexed). The Project is far from complete (only a handful of republics is done so far), but eventually every Russian federal subject will stick to the template.
• The "stupid user issue" is something that can never be resolved. I am sure that even when all of the articles on Russian federal subjects contain the English name, the Russian name (both accented and unaccented), its transliteration (and maybe even a list of all transliteration variants), a link to the article in Russian Wikipedia, and a bunch of links in the External Links section, there will always be some users who plug an incorrect word into the search engine. All we can do is to provide the end user with a selection to choose from and hope for the best.

—Ëzhiki (erinaceus europeaus) 15:17, Dec 30, 2004 (UTC)

Mapit

Hi, cool that you spread the template to the Polish Wikipedia. Several things you should be aware of if you aren't already:

1. I made a new set of templates that I would like to see replace mapit. There's not much difference, just a slightly different approach and slightly different name: Template:geolinks-US-streetscale.
2. There are numerous templates in this family other than just city scale. You can see this at Template talk:geolinks-US-streetscale or for the older templates Template talk:Mapit-US-streetscale.
3. After some debating, it was decided on English Wikipedia that these templates should only appear in External links sections and so the formatting was changed to fit into that section better. City scale happened not to have been converted to the new format because we were having a server error trying to edit it, but I've changed it now to reflect the new format. Of course, you're free to do whatever you like with it, but this is what we have currently decided for English.

Partitions of Poland map

Tnx for the info. I uploaded the map to WikiCommons, so it can be used on all Wikis now. [[Image:poland_partitions_1772.jpg]]--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 21:43, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Jan Nowak Jezioranski

Tnx for the info, I added the news to Wikinews, see Wikinews Main Page. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 20:36, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Davies quotes

I thought so. Still, what they say - if you copy from one source, you are violating copyright, if you copy from a dozen, you have wiki :) And it is 1-2 paragraphs in few dozens, in our case. I am all for rewriting the copied parts, but I will leave that up to ppl more familiar with English prose. Plus some changing order, etc., and in a few days there should be no problem. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 17:10, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Anti-polonism

If you mean the following phrase rv by Emax: "Anti-Polonism" is a controversial term even in Poland, and some people discourage or avoid its use. For example, it does not appear in the Polish Wikipedia, nor in the official online encyclopedia PWN. In fact, it is not even listed in the official Polish dictionary [1]. I would have to agree with him that it is mostly unecessary. Why it is a controversial term, the fact that it does not appear in Polish Wiki or PWN is hardly immportant, since 1) enWiki is bigger then plWiki and many Polish specific entries are better covered in enWiki 2) same goes for enWiki vs PWN. I will try to read through the rest of the discussion, but if I am missing sth key important here do leave me another msg. Btw, how is the work on PSW related international missions going? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 13:07, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Anti-polonism is rarely used - I count about ~300 hits on Google for various spellings, and not a single one on Google Schoolar. So I want mind if the main article is under a longer, more descriptive title, and the current one becomes a redirect - you are right Wiki is no place for new names*. As for sectioning - I think there is no need to create more separate articles, all should fit as normal section headings into one single article. And IMHO Emax English is good enough for a discussion - if it is good enough for him to write articles :> Few grammar mistake are better then discussion in a language totally illegible to 99% of Wiki contributors. * Note I have a similar name problem with my article on Moldavian Magnate Wars - the term I invented since I couldn't find any real name - the descriptive Cossack-Habsburg-Moldivian-Polish-Ottoman-Transylvanian War of 1593-1622 is a tad to long and literature I could find simply refers to the shorter 1-3 years wars by dates or rather erroneusly refers to the P-O conflict. :D--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 21:18, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Blitzkrieg

Bylbym wdzieczny gdybys zerknal na Talk:Blitzkrieg#Inaccurate_changes i ten revert. Byc moze nie mam racji - nie chce samotnie zaczynac rv wara z tym 119. Ale jesli uwazasz, ze mam racje, bylbym wdzieczny gdybys wspomnial o tym na talku tej strony i ew. zrewertowal 119. Dzieki. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 23:44, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Emax

I co ja mogę powiedzieć - Emax niekiedy zachowuje się poniżej krytyki. Jako Polak moge cię przeprosić za jego zachowanie, ale jako admin jedyne co mogę zrobić to go zabanować, a to jednak nieco przesadzone. Proponuję, abyś w przypadku konfliktu albo używał Wikipedia:Requests for comments albo, jeśli sprawa jest mniej ważna (a te szczegóły z Anti-polonismu nie są tak kluczowe - zachowywał się zgodnie z przysłowiem, że 'cymbał brzęczy, a milczenie złotem' i odczekał, aż się wszyscy uspokoją. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 17:02, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)

A3 / S3

Hello Balcer, on October 5, 2004 you wrote something on Roads and Expressways in Poland about a planned A3-project (running from Szczecin south to the Czech border), that was turned into an Expressway S3-project. I am very interested in that project. Do you have any more information about that or sources I could look up? You can contact me here: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spezial:Emailuser/Lc95 Thank you in advance.--Lc95en 09:05, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Zaklikow

Do you know more info about Zaklikow? Could you help improving the article? Any idea of more history pre 1940 and post 1945?--AAAAA 15:32, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)