User talk:Alan Liefting/Archive 1

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I live in Christchurch, New Zealand.

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Where are all the greetings??

Welcome to the team! (Actually, you've been here longer than I have.) It seems we have a lot in common! Catch you later. Robin Patterson 01:59, 6 May 2004 (UTC)

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Tui

I am confused about your edit. See Talk:Tui Yogi de 12:09, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

See Talk:Tui for my reply. Alan Liefting 03:30, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Sabine River

You shouldn't have moved it by cutting and pasting. That destroys the history of the article.

Next time, move it with the Move page command, and write the disambiguation article at the old location. -- Cyrius|&#9998 11:54, May 10, 2004 (UTC)

I fixed the cut and paste move to restore the proper page history. There are still many links to Sabine River that need redirecting to the North American river page, however. Also, if you move a major article, there are often links in the other language Wikipedia. For example, there is a article in the German Wikipedia about the Sabine River. It's considered a courtesy by the person who moves a page to fix this links as well. :) -- Decumanus | Talk 15:35, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

Mackenzie River

Hello. I notice you had moved the Mackenzie River to disambiguate it. Disambiguation is good, but in this case, we have an established policy of letting well-known major rivers (which the Mackenzie certainly is) live at the regular name space (cf. Mississippi River (disambiguation), Jordan River (disambiguation), Fraser River (disambiguation), Swan River (disambiguation)), so I moved it back and created a separate disambiguation page Mackenzie River (disambiguation). Also in North America, and elsewhere, the convention many of us have established is to use parentheses to disambig rivers. The reason is that a name like Mackenzie River, Northwest Territories is in the form of a community, and in fact many times it will be such (cf. Toms River and Toms River, New Jersey). Also, the Sabine River in Texas and Louisiana is a pretty important river. Disambiguation is probably OK in this case, but doing so leaves behind lots of links that you need to redirect away from the disambig page, as a matter of courtesy (check "What Links Here" (like this, which shows the links that are now stranded): it's often one good reason to let major rivers stay in the undisambig article space. Moving them requires lots of link correction).

You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:WikiProject Rivers where we've had an ongoing discussion about river disambiguation for quite some time. We've only come up with some rules of thumb as guidelines, because rivers are a pretty complex topic with lots of exceptions, but they seem to do the job much of the time. Well, in any case, keep up the good work with New Zealand rivers.  :) -- Decumanus | Talk 15:22, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

Oban

Hi, I removed the link to England that you added in the Oban disambiguation page. It wasn't clear if you were saying there is an Oban in England, because the link just went to an England page. If you meant to suggest that Scotland is part of England, I can only hope you did this out of ignorance rather than malice. I suggest you actually read some of these articles before offending every single Scottish person. Eoghan 15:26, 10 May 2004 (UTC)

Copland River

Just wanted to check with you on the Copland River article you created today -- the title says "Copland" and all of the text says "Copeland", and I found Google references to both on a quick check. Could you clarify which is correct? If it could be either or both, please note that in the text. Thanks, you're doing good work! Catherine - talk 01:07, 13 May 2004 (UTC)

• fixed the error - Alan

Severn River

What's the purpose of the link to British River in this disambiguation page? --Smack 22:19, 14 May 2004 (UTC)

• obviously it was redundant and not very accurate. I have fixed it. Alan Liefting

Unitary authorities

How could I have forgotten Marlborough!!! Cheers. Ben Arnold 01:14, 28 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Dams are OK, but historic environment is not?

You include man-made dams in your environment proposal but deleted my suggestion because you say built enviro is not relevant. Aren't dams built enviro? The protection at Kerikeri basin is for the whole local environment, not just the buildings. The area is where missionaries established NZ's first (permanent) mission station and over the years caring people have been restoring the environment there as much as possible to the way it was in the 1820s. Same for Hongi Hika's pa there, where he lived and armed his warriors with muskets for forays down south. If they build a dam over the Kerikeri basin, will that qualify for your article? :)-. Moriori 22:16, Oct 7, 2004 (UTC)

Dams are disruption of a natural environment (visually, ecologically, physically). The Historic Places Trust is to protect a heritage built environment so is not a relevent heading in this article. However, a dam on the Kerikeri River will be of interest for this article. If that were to happen I would like to document the effect on the natural environment and the activities of the environmentalists. The historic environment or historic built environment would have to be an article unto itself. --Alan Liefting 20:16, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)

It is not only the historic places trust that has been working to restore/preserve the Kerikeri basin environment, and three buildings are only a part of the very important local environment. They are not going to build a dam. To the contrary, they are removing a busy road bridge which is a "disruption of a natural environment (visually, ecologically, physically)", to help restore the basin environment to the natural state it was pre pakeha . In an article dedicated to the environment of NZ, the Kerikeri experience surely justifies inclusion. And guess what, if an "article unto itself" was created about this "historic environment", someone would merge it with the article quicksmart. Moriori 21:06, Oct 8, 2004 (UTC)

NZ geography aticles

Hi Alan! You and I seem to be chasing down each other's geo-stubs on NZ's South Island and (mostly) improving them! I'm in the middle of a major rationalisation of the categories used for NZ geography at the moment and am hunting out any which aren't categorised... As well as the "NZ rivers, lakes, islands, etc" categories, every place in NZ is being linked to a category for its region (at the moment it's mainly S.I. ones that have categories, but give me time!). Can I ask you to add these categories with any new articles you do, please? All the categories are subdirectories in the Locations in New Zealand category at the moment, if you want to know what they are. Thanks, and keep up the good work!Grutness 13:54, 3 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Copland tunnel

Hi Alan - the idea about a tunnel through the pass was mentioned in an old (1969) copy of Wises's New Zealand Guide entry on Copland Pass: "It has recently been suggested that a tunnel should be pierced here to facilitate the flow of visitor traffic to the Hermitage." Grutness 00:18, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Not sure if it received widespread promotion or support. I guess it begs the question of where the cutoff point for relevence lies. Not sure how authoritive the statement in the Wises Guide would be. I wrote a tongue in cheek "Letter to the Editor" of the Christchurch Press newspaper suggesting a tunnel. Alan Liefting 00:57, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Delete it if you don't think it's worthwhile - I was surprised when I read the Wise's item, I must admit Grutness

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 1000 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)

Image links as text

Thanks for pointing out an image I uploaded long before we had the tags which I'd not gone back to put one on. Tip: rather than "nowiki", put a colon just inside the first bracket. "[[:Image:Fchristi.jpg]]" produces Image:Fchristi.jpg. Cheers, -- Infrogmation 07:04, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Endemic

Hi Alan - good to see some NZ trees being done, one small note, when mentioning endemic, it needs to be linked [[endemic (ecology)|endemic]], as [[endemic]] leads to a disambiguation page (there's also endemic as a medical term) - MPF 11:36, 23 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the reminder. I will be a little more careful on stipulating links since I am rather pedantic on these matters! Alan Liefting 09:26, 24 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Waltham, New Zealand

Someone has put this article of yours on VFD - thought you should know. Dbiv 19:13, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Wouldn't have happened if it had been formatted and categorised the same way as other Christchurch suburbs. It should be safe now. Any other suburb articles you've created that aren't categorised in Category:Christchurch urban districts? Grutness|^hello? Ahh, skip it. Didn't realise the article was created before the categorisation was reformed, sorry. Didn't spot it when working on the Christchurch suburbs because it was an orphan article, that's all.

Then again, I've just discovered Opawa. What other suburbs did you do at that time, Alan? Grutness|^hello? 22:54, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I cannot recall which ones I created. It looks like an unfinished project! I have not even added by own suburb od St Albans

I went back through your contrib history. I think they were the only two I didn't catch when putting Chch suburbs in the Christchurch urban districts category. The problem was probably that the "What links here" pages only list 500 links, so when I checked what linked to Christchurch (which is how I found the rest) those two must have missed the cutoff. Sorry if I sounded annoyed - just caught me at a bad moment :) Grutness|^hello?

I will leave you to do the geography of NZ since you are doing a wonderfully thorough job. My token stubs are embarrassingly stubbie! . I will concentrate on NZ botany which needs work to give a little balance to NZ articles on Wikipedia. This is my favoured topic. Alan Liefting 11:13, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the compliment! I'm taking a rest from the NZ articles at the moment, but still concentrating on the geography. I will get back to them later though... there are one or two that definitely need work. Keep up the good work with the plants! Grutness|^hello?

Daniel Fignole -- president of Haiti

You marked Daniel Fignole -- president of Haiti for speedy deletion. It doesn't seem to fall under any of the criteria for speedy deletion; could you please explain?

(Sure, it's a copyvio, and it's poorly formatted, and it's badly titled. Now, which of these meet the criteria for speedy deletion?) --jpgordon∇∆∇∆ 03:46, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

All the above points plus the fact that it represents two seperate potential articles make it an article worthy of discarding in my opinion. Perhaps it should be listed as Vfd instead? - Alan Liefting 08:03, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

• Exactly. Speedy deletions must meet the specific criteria; otherwise, VfD is the appropriate venue. As pointed out below, there are procedures that you need to follow for that, too. --jpgordon∇∆∇∆ 16:40, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

VfD

Please read the instructions at the bottom of WP:VFD (or at Template:VfDFooter) before trying to put anything else up for VfD. —Ben Brockert (42) UE News 05:21, Jan 29, 2005 (UTC)

Unique NZ place names given New Zealand qualifier in article title.

Hi Alan - you wrote: Is there a reason for giving unique NZ placenames a qualifier of "New Zealand" in the article title? Some that I have seen are Kumeu, Kawau Island and Bombay Hills, New Zealand.

Bombay Hills simply because of Bombay, India. I found references to Kawau Islands in both Hawaii and Australia on the web (though I've since checked and the "Australia" one was our very own N.Z. Kawau). As to Kumeu, I've no idea... I probably had a reason at the time, but that was 10,000 edits ago... Grutness|^hello? 00:10, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Back River

Hi Alan - you started a stub for Back River, New Zealand which simply says that it's a locality in the North Island. I can't find it in Wise's, or in my largest NZ atlas... whereabouts is it? Do you have any more info about it at all? Grutness|^hello? 00:43, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Hi Alan - you're probably right that it's too small for WP, but I'll leave you to decide whether or not it shuld go. I'll add the Northland category to it and the rough location, so that there's something more on the page at least. Grutness|^hello? 09:40, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Image copyright tags

Thanks for uploading Image:New NZ flag design.gif. I notice it currently doesn't have an image copyright tag. Could you add one to let us know its copyright status? (You can use {{gfdl}} if you release it under the GFDL, or {{fairuse}} if you claim fair use, etc.) If you don't know what any of this means, just let me know where you got the images and I'll tag them for you. Thanks so much, Tagishsimon (talk) 16:36, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

New Zealand plant

Hey, I recently started an article at New Zealand Tree Fern and thought I would invite you New Zealanders to use another name. I didn't know which one to use, so I went with the most informative one. If you don't do plants, pass it on to any of your friends who know New Zealand well. Feel free to rename it according to your standards. --DanielCD 21:23, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Thanks

Thanks for your comment on my work on New Zealand politics. It's nice to know that people are finding it useful, and also nice to know that people think it's NPOV. -- Vardion 01:08, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Environmentalism

Environmentalism was a page about the international Environmental movement but with a strong US bias. I have requested that it is to be moved back. A new page on the environmental movement in the US can then be created.

There already is a page on environmentalism: Environmental movement. The proper course is to move the non-duplicated material from the old Environmentalism page to Environmental movement. I have partially done this. This was outlined in the discussion page a week before the move. --Erauch 01:11, May 21, 2005 (UTC)

New NZ articles

Hi Alan! Just noticed the article on Stephen King (NZ) that you started. Not sure whether you know about Wikipedia:New articles (New Zealand), which is for listing new NZ articles. If you could add the names of any New Zealand-related articles you make to this it's be great! Cheers - and keep up the good work! :) Grutness...wha? 10:35, 27 May 2005 (UTC)

GM movement

I see that you're planning on moving the GM disambiguation page. Why? Josh Parris ✉ 02:54, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

Separating intentional links to GM (disagmbiguation) from uninitential links to GM is impossible without the distinction betweent the two. The reason I found out what you intended to do is because I frequently check for new, ambiguous links to GM.

Right now, no one links to GM (disagmbiguation). So right now, the move would have no effect. But given that no article links to GM, moving the dab page would equally have no effect other than to annoy me and make my life just a little bit more difficult. Josh Parris ✉ 03:15, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

Given that you still intend to move it, I bequeath to you the responsibility for maintaining the disambiguation of imbound links to GM. I suggest checking every couple of days. Josh Parris ✉ 03:29, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

Environmental Movement

Looking forward to your edits of Environmental movement this needs some work. Keep in mind Ecology movement and Green movement. On the deep ecology article, deep ecology is described as differentiating the ecological from the environmental movement, maybe this difference is important enough to be put in the introduction? Would it be correct to say that the conservation movement has evolved into the environmental movement and thence to the ecological movement? Muxxa 05:31, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Hot Shit!

I like your work! Fast fingers on the conservation! Good job! Troller Trolling Rodriguez 08:45, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Poa / Meadow-grass

Hi Alan - I've expanded and modified the text and descripion at the Meadow-grass page to include NZ Tussocks and have put in a request to have the page moved to Poa. Please add any more NZ species that should be in! (I added two that I could find details for easily) - MPF 16:42, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Tutu (plant)

Hi again - I've just been adding a bit to Tutu (plant). One of my books lists Coriaria microphylla and C. ruscifolia as native to both NZ and South America, but online sites suggest they are just South American, with no reference to NZ. Can you check to see if these two species occur in NZ as well please? - Thanks, MPF 17:50, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Hi Alan - thanks for the weblink on NZ plants; on Cordyline, I'm not saying that it is never called 'Torbay Palm' here, I'm sure it is occasionally (by uneducated people who don't know the difference between Agavaceae and Arecaceae!), but it certainly isn't in widespread use, and certainly not, as claimed, throughout the UK. It is called Cabbage Tree in all the UK tree books. I'd say 'Torbay Palm' is less common as a name than 'That Spiky Thing'. - MPF 10:18, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

poroporo

Thanks for straightening me out on that one. WormRunner | Talk 15:03, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Irreligion

The answer as to where I got the figures from would be the link that is now dead. It's quite a while ago I made the edit, I'm not sure I remember much else. Kind regards, jguk 3 July 2005 08:58 (UTC)