User talk:John K/Archive 1

Hello there, welcome to the 'pedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you need pointers on how we title pages visit Wikipedia:Naming conventions or how to format them visit our manual of style. If you have any other questions about the project then check out Wikipedia:Help or add a question to the Village pump. Cheers! --maveric149

Good work, but remember to follow Wikipedia:Naming conventions (names and titles) for royal titles. Because there are so many people from different linguistic and cultural groups on wiki, and readers from many cultures, a compromise had to be worked out in this area to create naming formats that could be universally applicable. So sometimes if you see a title that isn't 100% accurate in terms of how it was used at the time, there many be practical problems in using the correct native format that required a slightly different title to be used in an international sourcebook. Don't change without doublechecking first. User Deb and I are usually good sources of info on titles, so feel free to check out anything with either or both of us. ÉÍREman 10:26 Apr 28, 2003 (UTC)

I just read the article, and it generally seems sensible. What particular misuses of naming conventions did I make? I haven't generally been naming new articles, just expanding or editing already existing ones. Sometimes I've named the links different (and non-standard) things, but I didn't know that was a problem. In any event, I don't want to rock the boat, I just didn't realize I was doing anything wrong. In terms of ruler names, the convention seems rather inconsistent. Some names are anglicised, and some are kept in their native language. Wouldn't it be more consistent (and international) to use the foreign names. As far as inaccurate titles (at the time), the only one I can remember changing is a few references to the Hohenzollerns as "Emperors of Germany", which they were not. They were "German Emperors", and there was a big row between Wilhelm I and Bismarck about that very fact. I don't see why the term "German Emperor" would be offensive to anybody. (And I didn't change any article titles for that, either). Anyway, don't want to rock the boat, just trying to help out a bit. john 23:33 Apr 28, 2003 (UTC)

Where were you five months ago when I needed you!!! :-) Thank God someone with a knowledge and an interest in accuracy in titles is on wiki. There a couple of us (Deb is one of main ones, I the other) who came on here and were sickened by all the amateurish POV names used; Charles Windsor for the Prince of Wales, Harry Windsor for his son, and the incredible [[Edward VIII, Duke of Windsor]] (but that was from a complete nutter who has been banned a number of times but keeps re-appearing under false names - if you see big edit wars erupting and people being accused of being Adam, that's the guy! I think that time he was pretending to be Susan Mason, or was it Dietary Fiber, or maybe Shino Baku. I'm losing track of all his phoney names and identities and when he was which person!). I decided to stage a naming revolution, and with the help of Deb, Zoe and Mav and some others drafted major changes to the names and titles conventions and fought WWIII to get them accepted. We then spent weeks and weeks tracking down every royal and imperial name on wiki and changing their name to follow the standard.

So sorry if I scared you above. We regularly have new users who appear on and promptly change all the names to their own pet (and crap) versions. What I simply meant was that in using names, please follow the agreed convention which cost me weeks of work and a massive phone bill to fix. (or with one or two users, don't you bloody dare introduce Charles Windsor again!!!) But I can see you are someone who knows the correct names and wants to see them followed, which is like a dream come true for the handful of us who put so much work into trying to get things right. And you were 100% correct on the German Emperor thing. That is one I missed. I've just devoted ages to correcting some Russian names that were all over the place. But a word of advice: avoid Japanese emperors. We thought we had agreed a system, then one Japanese guy insisted on changing it to his way. Another changed them all back (and my God is there a lot!) only to have them all changed back again. I almost gave up on wiki on that issue. At this stage, someone seems to change each Japanese emperor's name on wiki on a weekly basis. This week, someone is changing them to [[{name}, Emperor of Japan]]. Next week Taku may decide to change the all again to [[{name}]] or [[Emperor {name}]] and the following week someone will come up with yet another version, maybe [[{name}, emperor]]. Compared with solving the Japanese naming issue, bringing peace to Iraq is cheesecake. So unless you want to experience the wiki equivalent of going 10 rounds with Mike Tyson, that is one mess to avoid. At this stage, the whole area of Japanese emperors is one unfathomable mess, the Bermuda triangle of wiki.

In any case, welcome to wiki. Keep up the good work. There are some occasions with complex royal names where we have had to make a compromise that isnt 100% accurate, maybe only 70% or 80%. But it is better than the 5% there used to be! As to names, the standard approach is that if someone's name in the native language is close to a recognised english equivalent (eg., Wilhelm II) , or if there native language name is widely used by english speakers (eg, Nicholas II) , then it is left alone. If however it is in a form that is unknown unknown as such except his or her native tongue and there is a recognised and used english alternative, that is used, purely because there are numerous wikipedias in different languages, this one is in english and it is important for it to be in a form that english speakers can follow. As a purist I would like to use the exact name, but often that isn't possible, particularly if there are a couple of variations used by different linguistic groups within a state. Often people who know a lot about royal nomenclature tend instinctively to know the right name to use. You have no idea the fight I had to get Wilhelm II rather than William II, or more recently Nicholas II instead of Nicholai Alexandrovich Romanov; one user deeply pissed off when I went though he long list of Russian Tsars and renamed them (or those that I knew there was international equivalent for). Every Peter the Great he demanded be put in a Russian version that no-one outside Russia and a fair few inside Russia would not have recognised.

Anyway, enjoy the wiki experience. And thank God another accurate 'name-nut' has joined the show. Along with Deb, Zoe and a few others we'll get wiki to get these names right whether it likes to or not!!! (Except of course, that darn Japan!) ÉÍREman 01:18 Apr 29, 2003 (UTC)

Thanks for the welcome. I still find the whole concept of this place rather difficult to grasp. Don't crazy people come along and just delete stuff for fun? In any event, I've been messing about a lot, writing British politician bios and messing about anally with titles/names. The Japan issue seems even worse than you describe it, since some of the Emperors are known by their personal names, and some by their reign names... For the list of monarchs, at least, one would have hoped that some sort of compromise by which both the reign name and the personal name could be listed, but instead we go from "Taisho" to "Hirohito". Ba! john 07:20 Apr 29, 2003 (UTC)

In reality, vandalism is reversed in 99% of cases almost immediately. We all have our 'pet' pages and if someone changes anything we go in to check. And others do nothing to surf from pages to pages checking stuff. If they are suspicious, they check what changes were made and if someone was messing they revert it. I have frequently been astonished at the speed in which vandalism is reverted. (I think the record was something like 10 seconds). re Japan, I know *sigh*. I made a lot of enemies saying Taku's renaming was wrong, but Taku assumed the role of saying as a Japanese man, I know the correct information. You all don't and too many people accepted that or backed away. (Unfortunately Taku's poor standard of english in some areas also complicated matters, as did his constant renaming, which produced broken links all over the place - name Emperor of Japan linked to Name emperor linked to Name Emperor of Japan lnked to name linked to name emperor of Japan . . . you ended up tangled in an utter mess, with all the renaming breaking links or giving links that were just too long for the computer to cope with. ) At this point, wild horses would not drag me to touch the Japanese pages again. Taku and his friends made the complete mess, they ignored all my advice not to do it, they refused to fix links they had broken even when I and Deb and a few others pleaded with them to be careful. (All we got was 'your convention are not my convention' garbage back from some of those responsible) Other people have chosen to try to clean up the mess. Having spent weeks warning of what would be the result and being abused for it (and told that I was this nasty western trying to impose western imperialism!!!) that is one area I never ever will touch again. Those responsible for the mess can be responsible for cleaning it up. And usually when one person sorts out the names, another Japanese person appears and renames everything again back to the impossible to follow crap that Taku introduced and unfortunately was allowed to introduce. The bottom line for me is, if they want no-one outside Japan to be able to make head or tail of details of the Japanese monarchy, that is their stupid decision and they are going to have to live with it. ÉÍREman 15:16 Apr 29, 2003 (UTC)

I've put the stuff from "Kurfürsten/Electors" at the bottom of the Holy Roman Empire elector article, with a redirect there from "Kurfürsten". Do you want a first go at merging it and dumping the duplicated material, or shall I? -- Someone else 03:06 May 1, 2003 (UTC)

Go to it. I've already caused enough trouble over Gustav III. john 03:16 May 1, 2003 (UTC)

No trouble at all<G>!. Please don't let my terseness offend. I'll do the mergie-thing now if you promise to check it after I'm done. :) -- Someone else 03:19 May 1, 2003 (UTC)

Ok, I've done with my bit, feel free to have your way with it. Most of the stuff from the duplicate article was already there, so not much has changed. -- Someone else 03:36 May 1, 2003 (UTC)

Looks fine to me. john 04:26 May 1, 2003 (UTC)

Eek, I just realized this is not your talk page. You may want to wipe it clean. -- Someone else 04:39 May 1, 2003 (UTC)

Jlk7e, just wanted to say hello and good to have a companion in working on medieval Germany. :-) Djmutex 22:44 May 2, 2003 (UTC)

Don't know if I'm working on anything in particular. I go through phases. I was mostly concerned at the fact that all the Emperors Henry were numbered wrong, thanks to some madness. Now that that's been corrected, I'm kind of burned out about Medieval Germany. I'll probably get back into it at some point, though. BTW, I'm not sure I found and corrected all the links to the various Emperors Henry, so if you find any that I missed, be sure to change them. john 00:28 May 3, 2003 (UTC)

Well, my interest in history lies not so much in numbering kings... I can never remember them in the first place. I'm currently trying to explain some of the structure and the major lines that led to the disintegration of the Empire. See Holy Roman Empire, which I reworked this week. Still much to be done though, and I go thru phases too. Today was spent on typography. :-) Djmutex 01:07 May 3, 2003 (UTC)

Well, my interest isn't particularly on numbering of monarchs either. It's just massively irritating that someone took the time to change them all so that they're wrong. I was just saying that if you're working on an article and it has a link to one of the Emperor Henrys, be sure the link is correct, because I'm not sure I fixed all of them. Some lunatic decided that since "Henry I" was never actually crowned emperor, he shouldn't count as one, and so changed "Henry II" to Henry I, and so forth. It was dreadfully irritating. In any event, the Holy Roman Empire article is looking pretty good. A couple of things. Even after 1648, only certain of the states (those with full votes in the Reichstag) were actually fully sovereign, and they all owed military detachments to the Reich. Also, in the section on structure, some mention of the Imperial Circle Estates might be useful. A site with some useful stuff about the structure of the Reich is http://www.geocities.com/vrozn, which also has some nice maps of the empire at different times.

Thanks for the pointers, I'll look at it. I didn't mean to come across as criticizing you for your work... I am glad that there is someone who would do such a task, and I can understand that this is frustrating. I was only saying I wouldn't have done it. :-) BTW, if you want to correct something, go right ahead. About the Circles, I just haven't gotten to the 1495 Reichsreform yet. Djmutex 01:29 May 3, 2003 (UTC)

Yeah, I tried my best to get somebody else to do it, but no dice. And there the Henrys were, still there, staring at me with their dead, dead eyes, saying "John, we're wrong, fix us,", and what could I do? I didn't want six dead Holy Roman Emperors (and one dead German King) to haunt the dark places of my imagination for the rest of my natural life. As far as correcting something, I'm not sure how much of the article you've gotten to yet, so I'll wait and take a look when you finish. Another possibly useful site, btw, is http://members.aol.com/eurostamm/mediatize.html , in which a genealogist describes the process by which the various states of the Holy Roman Empire were mediatized, mostly in order to moan about how ridiculous was the process by which houses got determined to be "equal" to ruling houses for marriage purposes. So, weird genealogist with weird genealogist quirks, yes, but still some useful info about the secularizations, mediatizations, the composition of the Rheinbund, and that kind of thing. john 01:41 May 3, 2003 (UTC)

The redirects for Disraeli all seem to be in place and working. Perhaps your browser was loading a cached version, leading to the confusing results you were getting? If it occurs again, try a forced "refresh" and see if that doesn't cure the problem. -- Someone else 03:33 May 9, 2003 (UTC)

Hmm...possibly. reloading doesn't seem to work, but it works fine with IE. So I guess my Netscape's just screwed up at the moment. john 03:34 May 9, 2003 (UTC)

Did you try a forced reload? In Netscape I think that's clicking reload while you hold the "Shift" key down. -- Someone else 03:37 May 9, 2003 (UTC)

Ah, thanks for the tip. Fortunately, it seems to be working now without the need for that, so all is well. john 03:52 May 9, 2003 (UTC)

You corrected the style of Prince Oscar Bernadotte, Count of Wisborg, but what about Folke Bernadotte himself?

Count Folke Bernadotte of Wisborg, or
Folke Bernadotte, Count of Wisborg?

Folke, Count Bernadotte af Wisborg, apparently. But that's probably a direct translation from the Swedish. Count Folke Bernadotte of Wisborg would probably be correct. john 16:49 21 May 2003 (UTC)

Thank you! I changed to Count Folke Bernadotte of Wisborg.

Googling around, I notice:

270 hits: "Bernadotte af Wisborg" (Swedish), often Bernadotte (af Wisborg)
130 hits: "Bernadotte of Wisborg"
100 hits: "Bernadotte Count of Wisborg"
20 hits: "Bernadotte Count af Wisborg"
5 hits: "Bernadotte Greve af Wisborg" (Swedish)

It seems to me as the Swedes see "Bernadotte af/of Wisborg" as a noble surname where the attached distinction usually is unneccessary to make, as there are no (known) Counts Bernadotte of-something-else. -- Ruhrjung 17:26 22 May 2003 (UTC)

Hi, John. Don't see it as capitulation, see it as cooperation. LOL Deb 19:12 21 May 2003 (UTC)