User talk:Sceptre

Portal 2

This discussion is copied from the Portal 2 talk page.

Why did you revert all my changes to Portal 2? I have been careful to keep the number of quotes constant in accordance with copyright, and I have commented all my changes in case someone disagreed with them. Your "minor" change reverting all my work contains no comment at all, and your statements on the Portal 2 talk page are not indicative of any disagreement. – Vpsilon 18:09, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

As to the quotes: I don't see what's so quotable about, for example, the "air" quote. Or the fat joke from the test chambers (indeed, GLaDOS makes many of them). Likewise, the Cave Johnson quotes are good, but again, those aren't as quotable (read: funny) as the previous ones. It's a matter of preference, really; I don't see how the Space Core is so "quotable", and we could replace Wheatley's soliloquy with another Cave quote, or the Schrodinger's cat quote from the Fact Sphere. Will ^(talk) 05:02, 4 May 2011 (UTC)

I agree, humor is subjective. However, we could try to use Google results as a guideline for determining which lines are more quoteworthy, that is, which quotes humor the largest number of people. Also, this reddit discussion is useful since people vote on their favorite quotes (the Space Core gets quite a high score). Anyhow, the current revision is a good compromise between your favorites and my favorites, and we should welcome others to add their favorite quotes as long as they honor the rule of keeping the total number of quotes constant. A mixture of opinions is more objective than a single opinion. – Vpsilon 11:32, 4 May 2011 (UTC)

Welcome

Hi Sceptre. Welcome to English Wikiquote.

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Enjoy! ~ Jeff Q (talk) 01:26, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Imogen Heap

I have removed your nomination of Imogen Heap from Wikiquote:Votes for deletion because it did not follow the instructions listed at the top of the page. Please read these before nominating an article. Let me know if you have any questions. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 22:23, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

It's the fault of {{copyvio}}; I used that templated and it gave me a link to a new section, so I just did that. Thanks anyway, though. Will ^{talk) 22:29, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing out the technical problem. I'll look into fixing it. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 14:05, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

Odd IP page creation

Thanks for picking that up. Actually some form of "vandal bot" it is believed - always has some form of message very similar too "nice site". For me a block one & I did, cheers --Herby ^{talk thyme} 14:32, 28 June 2007 (UTC)

T-Pain

If the lyrics are copyrighted, why do we have them on other articles here? 71.233.232.243 19:44, 1 July 2007 (UTC)

Thankee! :)

Yay! :) Phaedriel 14:02, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

CU

I really do appreciate the thought but it should be folk well known to the community rather than me - my thanks & regards --Herby ^{talk thyme} 18:10, 4 July 2007 (UTC)

Scetre, in the future, it may be better to e-mail this user first or contact them on IRC before you nominate them. :) Cheers! Cbrown1023 talk 19:51, 4 July 2007 (UTC)

Michael Savage

Please see the note I left on this page's Talk page. I completely agree that much of what you deleted was justified, but I also think there was a lot that should remain as well (and of course cleaned up some). Thanks. ~ UDScott 20:11, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

In reply

That "test" as you called it, was no test. It was a doubled quote. And I'm referring to the Pat Benatar "Love is a battlefield" quote on love. It is listed under the letter P and letter B sections. But thanks for letting me know that improving articles is looked down upon here. --User:76.109.1.254 17:40, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

Greetings - Good, Bad, Ugly changes?

Greetings, apparently you made an update to Good, Bad, Ugly article? Cool. Hmmm, however, I don't see what changed, can you give additional info? - just curious, thanks...

Thanks

i have not vandalized any page on wikiquote or edit warred AFUSCO 01:12, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

Picasso

You recently created a page called "Transwiki: Pablo Picasso" which consisted of a number of unsourced quotes from another website. I merged the quotes with the Pablo Picasso article and deleted your article. But I'm curious as to why you didn't do it that way yourself. I believe the transwiki project exists for moving things from one wiki to another (for instance, from wikipedia to wikiquote, or en.wikipedia to fr.wikipedia), and that its purpose is to ensure that GFDL information doesn't get lost. I'm pretty sure it's not for copying things from arbitrary web sites to wiki sites. In fact, copying things directly is likely to be a copyright violation, even if, as you did, you mention the source. If you want to copy from another source, please be selective, change the order of quotes, and integrate into existing pages. If I have misunderstood your intent, please let me know. --Ubiquity 14:20, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Will, I am not impugning you, your contributions, your abilities as an editor or your value to the wiki projects. I am specifically addressing a single page, the nature of the transwiki project, and the problems of copying pages wholesale from other sites. I don't see what your credentials have to do with that. If you think I'm wrong, check with another admin. I'm pretty sure they would all agree with me. --Ubiquity 15:01, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

OK, I understand. I realize you were just trying to help. --Ubiquity 18:06, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

[Posted to both User talk:Sceptre and User talk:Ubiquity] … FYI, the process to transwiki into Wikiquote is described in detail at Help:Transwiki. It is completely appropriate for a transwikier to copy quote material from a Wikipedia article into a page called "Transwiki:name of article". (I probably would have used "Transwiki:Pablo Picasso" instead of Transwiki:Quotations by Pablo Picasso based on the likely destination page, but using the WP article title also makes perfect sense. It's a temporary page anyway and is in the Transwiki: space primarily so that the transfer process does not have to be completed by someone who may not know the policies and guidelines of the target project.) While Will did log its transfer from WP, he did not log its transfer to WQ in Transwiki per our policy (which follows Wikimedia-wide practice per m:Help:Transwiki). This informs people from both projects where articles are coming from and going to. (Some projects delete their logs after the transwiki is completed; we leave ours for future reference, as one never knows when someone might wonder what happened to their pet article.)

What is supposed to happen on the destination end is that a Wikiquotian will notice either the log entry or the new addition to Category:Move into Wikiquote. (That assumes the WP "Copy to Wikiquote" template is changed to {{Move to Wikiquote}}, which was not done here. I notice that our help page doesn't specify this step. Either I forgot to add that requirement, or WP's practice changed from using the template we still specify to using something that no longer works here. A redirect should fix that problem.) Anyway, the receiving Wikiquotian then decides whether to move, merge, or delete the incoming transwiki. Will did nothing wrong in leaving the merge to another editor.

Many editors bypass all the formalities and simply copy the material from WP to WQ. This is very bad and should be discouraged vehemently. It violates GFDL by providing no clear credit, link, or even association with the originating article. In the past year or so, we've tried to cut corners by at least mandating the inclusion of an unlabeled link back to the WP article (e.g., "w:Quotations by Pablo Picasso") in the edit summary (or on the discussion page if the copying editor forgets this step). Will did not do this, either, so there is no record on Wikiquote of where this page came from. We must have either the log or the edit-summary link as a very minimum record. NOTE, however, that if the transwikied material is an article that may be deleted, as this one was, this shortcut link is not appropriate, because the edit history will be lost to the general public when the source article is deleted. In these cases, one must provide a copy of the source article's edit history on the discussion page of the Transwiki page, which will then need to be transferred to the discussion pages of any articles that receive merged information. (If the Transwiki: page is simply deleted — and logged as deleted at Transwiki! — this is not necessary, just as it is not necessary to have a public record of contributions to any ordinary deleted article.)

It's now possible for some editors to export and import material between projects, which provides proper links and/or credits without much of the hassle of transwiki. I'm afraid I've been too distracted to investigate and document this, but Jusjih has been working on this recently.

Ubiquity says this material came from another website. That's good WQ detective work, but the misunderstading might have been avoided or lessened if he'd had the log to see that it was from WP and not this other website that Will transferred the material. However, it is not the responsibility of the transwikier to determine whether the transwikied material is acceptable to the project. We have the two-step process precisely to allow the destination project to make that determination, as Ubiquity did by finding that the WP material appears to be merely a copy of another website. (Even when the transwikier is a Wikiquotian, too, as Will is, one should consider that the transwiki process is enough of a bear not to expect them to do the full process at once. Of course, we have a serious backlog of material to finish transwikiing, but that's just one of our many backlogs.)

Ubiquity, in completing the transwiki, also failed either to log the transwiki completion or to credit the originating WP article in any edit summary, instead noting the apparent origin of the WP material. Technically, even this violates GFDL, as it fails to credit the WP editor(s) even if their work is borrowed. (One might ultimately determine they have no right to a copyright of their contributions, but it's a lot harder to work that out than just to add the article pointer or log the darn transfer and let others worry about the legal issues.)

I don't want to sound too critical about this. Most transwiki work that I've seen on Wikimedia projects, at least that done by non-bots, is horrendously improper. It's so bad that it could be used as an argument by Wikimedia copyright violators that we don't take our own licensing policies seriously, so why should they? But that won't change unless we read the instructions, improve them where needed, and follow them whenever possible.

My lack of participation in this work in the past 2 years has certainly contributed to these ongoing problems, which is one of many reasons I'm hoping to hand over some responsibilities that I think others would like to do. Meanwhile, I'd be happy to answer questions about this. Despite this critical review, I would like to thank you both for trying to get this right, which is more than most editors do. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 18:23, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

OK, I get it now. I was misled by the source at the bottom of the page into thinking the page had come directly from the other site, and didn't realize what you were trying to do, Will. Sorry about that. Thanks, Jeff, for explaining the process. --Ubiquity 18:29, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

By the way, I finished the formal transwiki by copying the edit history from Talk:Transwiki:Quotations by Pablo Picasso to Talk:Pablo Picasso#Wikipedia transwiki (in a slightly different format that adds WP links to the users to avoid confusion w/ possibly different WQ users), deleted the transwiki talk page, and logged the 3-part transfer (well, 2 steps with 3 pages involved) at Transwiki#Articles moved into Wikiquote. I'm afraid it's not hard to see why so many folks prefer to avoid this process. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 03:46, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

Portal (game)

I think some of the confusion with Portal (game) that you mentioned at WQ:AN#Portal may have come from your use of automatic "popup" reversion edit summaries without any description of why you were doing the reversions. Although you had cited "copyright" as the rationale for earlier edits on this article, the popup messages didn't provide any indication that this is what you were continuing to do. It's important to be explicit about why you're reverting edits, especially when someone disagrees with your reversions or the original edits. (That's why I never use my sysop ability to do one-button reversions unless what I'm reverting is obvious vandalism — the automatic edit summaries don't explain anything.)

Could you please try to include some reason when you do these popup-executed reversions? Also, when you find yourself in back-and-forth reversions with another editor, please post a note on the article talk page presenting your case. (There's already an existing discussion on "Excessive quoting" that you could add to.) Thank you for your consideration. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 05:38, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for including some specific text in your latest reversion, but an ejaculation like "sigh..." isn't a reason. Could you please make your summaries include a terse justification (e.g., "reverted addition not justified per discussion"), which would provide editors with some explanation of why the edit was done (a major purpose of edit summaries)? I would remind you that if you intend to stand for admin again in the near future, meaningful edit summaries will be more useful in incrementally helping your case than mere wry statements. (Wry is fine, but it doesn't obviate the need for clarity and specificity when dealing with editing controversies.) Thanks. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 00:39, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Um, Jeff, why'd you put an inappropriate word in there? - Arbok 00:59, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Arbok, I see no inappropriate words in my above post. The only word I can imagine you are referring to is "ejaculation", which has a connotation that is indecorous in some civil discourse. If so, I would refer you to wikt:ejaculation, which shows my usage as definition #2 and the biological one (arguably used inappropriately in some situations) as #4, and to w:Ejaculation (grammar), which discusses precisely my usage. (I'd considered "exclamation", but that was too strong a term for Sceptre's "sigh…", as he was apparently expressing mild dismay, not outrage.) I'd also suggest that people tend to focus a bit too much these days on ways to be offended, assuming the worst. As several editors have said in your current RFA, here we try to do better by assuming good faith. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 01:19, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Closing rights discussions

Will, please do not close WQ:RFA discussions unless and until you become an admin, and never when you are engaged with a serious conflict with the candidate. This is the kind of thing that gets admins de-sysopped, and you haven't even become one yet!

I've re-closed the discussion, even though I was also involved with Arbok discussions, because I believe I established that I had no axe to grind even in the face of his highly questionable edits. (Please see the RFA for more info.) I believe your implicit use of w:WP:SNOW was justified, but someone else should have invoked it because it is controversial even when disinterested parties use it. I'm taking the heat for this because I want to stop several bad precedents that were developing in this situation. Otherwise, I would have just reverted your closure and let it sit until someone else closed it. With Arbok blocked for a week, it would have been closed before he returned anyway.

We probably have been a bit slow to respond to Arbok, who is either a seriously and dangerously inattentive editor or a practiced troll trying to get a foothold on WQ. (I still favor the first hypothesis, but won't rule out the second.) But it's even important to calmly follow established practices (like making edit justifications in summaries, which you have yet to do even now in your Portal (game) reversions, and posting your disagreements with editors on article talk pages, even in the face of your opponent's refusal to do so) when things get heated. By being the calm and effective editor in a situation like this, you make it much easier for neutral parties to see the problem and fix it. But when you let careless or rude editors drive you to taking improper actions yourself, you not only complicate others' attempts to untangle the mess they find, you also disincline the community to trust you with more responsibilities.

I'm telling you this because I'd like to see you become an admin down the road. You are clearly committed to the principles of Wikiquote, and have been a very effective editor here. I'd like to see you demonstrate the patience required to be an effective admin in the face of editors who sometimes seem to be trying to annoy you, even when they are really just failing to pay attention. It's easy to wield the tools of adminship; the challenge is using them with patience, prudence, and as much good faith as can be squeezed out of situations where one cannot easily tell the difference between a stubbornly foolish person and a true vandal. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 01:24, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

P.S. As far as I'm concerned, there is no such thing as "copyright vandalism". One of my bête noirs is people using the term "vandalism" for anything they find disagreeable from editors who are not cooperating. Restoring material likely to be a copyright violation is not vandalism, even if it's done 20 times by the same person. It's a content dispute, and it should be handled on the article talk page, especially when it turns into an edit war. If the community and/or admins are slow to help in dealing with the problem, bring it up on WQ:VP or WQ:AN. If people are still slow to respond, find an admin who's currently editing (through "Recent changes") and ask them on their talk page. Don't become part of the problem by putting excessive labels on the issue. "Copyvio" is an serious and effective accusation on its own, and will generally get you quick action if you bring it up at WQ:AN. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 01:34, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

By the way, I said copyright vandalism in the sense of the policy: "Copyrighted material vandalism: Knowingly adding copyrighted material to Wikiquote articles in violation of Wikiquote policy is vandalism. Because users may be unaware that the information is copyrighted, or of Wikiquote policy in this regard, such action only becomes vandalism if it continues after the relevant policy and copyrighted nature of the material have been established." Will ^(talk) 11:32, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Ouch! I hadn't noticed the poor state of Wikiquote:Vandalism. This is yet another Essjay-copied WP policy that we haven't really adapted for Wikiquote. But I can hardly blame you for using it to cite problems. My apologies.

I've posted a bit of a diatribe at Wikiquote talk:Vandalism expressing my displeasure at the absurd number of unproductive actions that have been labelled "vandalism" by Wikipedia, no doubt out of their own frustration with uncooperative editors. I hope I can convince our community that there are better ways to deal with problem editors than treating them all like virtual graffiti artists. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 14:24, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Scrubs

I hope I am not being touchy, but please do not leave personal attacks in your edit summaries. If you feel I removed the quote you liked better (which as it happens is the one I found least quotable), just replace one of the others with that one, and if you want to talk about it, leave me a message on my talk page. -Sketchmoose 13:47, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Sorry.

I'm sorry. Anyway, I've changed a lot since joining Wikipedia December 2008. - Arbok 03:01, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

Julia Gillard

Thank you for your helpful contribution to Julia Gillard. However, the quotes should be a subdivision of the overall Quotes section. I have re-ordered it. Thanks again, and please continue contributing.--Abramsky (talk) 16:39, 28 December 2014 (UTC)