wikipedia note

[jwgh]

A friend pointed out to me today that there's a guy on Wikipedia who uses my name as his pen name. Which is fine with me, but I'm naturally a little curious as to why.

On Wikipedia, as far as I know, the normal way of communicating with someone is by leaving a comment on their 'Talk:' page. But I've never bothered to figure out the proper formatting conventions for talk pages.

But of course that information should be in Wikipedia, right? I was pointed to this page. However, the page describes three different ways of formatting comments, one of which is deprecated, none of which exactly match what's on Jacob Haller's talk page. (For instance there's a table of contents on the talk page.)

So as usual when I consider doing something on Wikipedia I find that it requires more motivation than I have to figure out how to do it. It's too bad that there aren't any existing simple ways of sending messages between people via the Internet that Wikipedia could have copied.

Comments

[crazyanimallady.livejournal.com]

what subjects does he normally write about?

[jwgh]

Military history, mostly, I think.

[ikkyu2.livejournal.com]

You can leave a message on someone's talk page in any format. If the format is unacceptable to someone else, someone else can reformat it to suit themselves.

If you're logged in AND if User:Jacob Haller has provided an email address to Wikipedia, you will be given the option to email the guy. Look carefully; it's on the user page, under 'Toolbox', the link is titled Email this user. I'm able to see this link for that user and that means you can email him. Non-logged-in WIkipedia users can't email anyone, to prevent spam.

Wiki

[infrogmation.livejournal.com]

If you want to leave that"Jacob Haller" a note, just go to User talk:Jacob Haller, click "edit", and leave your note at the very bottom of the page. That's the only essential part. Optional formatty stuff would be to make it a seperate section in the table of contents by adding ==(your title here)== at the top of your message, eg:

==Hello from the real Jacob Haller==

And you can automatically sign and date what you wrote by adding 4 tildes ~~~~ at the end-- if you're a logged in user, it automatically links to your user page and give the date; if you're not logged in, it lists the date and your ip#.

While we're on the subject

[notr.livejournal.com]

of what's discouraging about Wikipedia, the thing that gets to me is the (recent?) anti-trivia bent. I've always thought trivia were one of the most important things that make an encyclopedia interesting to use. As a kid, I would repeatedly open World Book to "animal" to look through that odd little table of gestation times. I always look for odd facts in an article on one topic to make unexpected connections to other topics--and of course making connections is exactly what the Wiki design is all about. Discouraging inclusion of particular facts because they're trivial seems to me tantamount to discouraging curiosity. And why would we need an encyclopedia in the first place if we weren't curious?

Re: While we're on the subject

[infrogmation.livejournal.com]

I think the anti "trivia" section backlash started in response to the editors who were stuffing articles with random pop culture references. I tend to agree that articles on, say, Stephen Hawking, London, or cockroaches didn't need to list details of every animated cartoon episode or pop song that made a passing reference to the subject. I'm not sure how to codify some type of policy that allow informative interesting trivia while not drowning things in minutia, and I guess some others have had trouble figuring that out as well.

Re: While we're on the subject

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

Yeah, in Wikipedian, "trivia" means "...in popular culture", and let's face it, Wikipedia really could use a whole lot less of that.