LlywelynII

Osy

Hello! I am assuming you have come over from the English Wikipedia, so you are probably familiar with the way this wiki works. I hope you like it here and decide to stay. Here are a few links to help you adjust:

• An English Wikipedian's guide
• Writing in Simple English
• Simple talk: our help desk, reference desk and village pump- in one page
• How to copy from English Wikipedia
• A very incomplete list of our active editors

There is much to do here. For example, there are a lot of articles that do not exist yet, which you can bring over from the English Wikipedia and simplify. Do have a look around and see what you would like to do. Thank you for joining us, and you know how to contact me if you need help. Osiris (talk) 13:59, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. For using actual Basic English (as opposed to "do I think X year students can understand me"-English), the dictionary provided in the IDP.zip file here was far more useful than most of the other links, honestly. It's important to have a source that can take "born" or "often" or "kill" and explain how to phrase it using the allowed words.LlywelynII (talk) 14:04, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

Would there be copyright issues in just pasting that text file to my user page? They're already providing it free on the 'net... — LlywelynII 14:08, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

That's an interesting guide. Although some of the suggestions I wouldn't follow, personally. "Kill" are surely easier to understand than "put to death". I'll add this to the tools people might find helpful though. It looks to me like the text is probably copyrighted, so perhaps you can find a work-around? Osiris (talk) 14:23, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

Pretty sure it falls under the whole idea of using Basic English, keeping the vocab count as low as possible. Still, given how much of English-language instruction involves first-person shooters these days, you're probably not wrong... — LlywelynII 14:27, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

And if I could get whatever's involved in page move powers, that'd be peachy.LlywelynII (talk) 14:05, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

Looks like that's done. Thanks! — LlywelynII 14:07, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

Chronology categories

Thanks for creating Category:260 BC births. You probably didn't know, but we have templates for setting up these categories. I have changed the category to use the standard template. Take a look at what I changed so you know how to do it next time. I really appreciate you creating the category -- often people don't and other editors (often me!) end up having to find categories that are used but not created. So thanks! --Auntof6 (talk) 05:47, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

You're welcome! =) — LlywelynII 14:51, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

Vocabulary

You are making huge changes to technical topics, and I suggest a more measured approach would be better. For example, you have changed almost all the technical terms on Template:Infobox planet to Simple English. Now we have discussed before, unknown to you perhaps, that on science and other technical topics, we are not going to reduce all technical terms to Simple English. The reason is that Simple English is exceptionally poor in scientific terms, and many of those those terms often are needed for their technical accuracy. Also, the English that results is often peculiar, not really English as it is spoken or used, and certainly not the English used in that particular subject.

A second issue is the huge changes made to Earth. Since this is one of our "Good" pages, you should have allowed others to comment first. It is really essential to use talk pages to give others a chance to see what you propose and give their comments. It is only courtesy to allow those who gave their time to editing the page a chance to respond. Macdonald-ross (talk) 14:05, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

Well, it's been the better part of a day or two that I've worked on those and (with respect) it's insane to claim that this is the Simple English Wikipedia and then use terms like "aphelion" and "periastron" when they can be perfectly well explained with more words. Granted, "orbit" shows in the first 9,000 words of the OED corpus but that's still 9,000... and "albedo" is word #57,883 and apoapsis doesn't show in the first 90k. I absolutely understand maintaining pages by those names and linking to them from the basic text, but if you're serious that there's some widespread consensus to use technical terms to the point of including words like those in the running text of normal pages, this entire Wiki has next to no purpose. That is so much the case that, when seeing that template, I naturally assumed someone had just ported it over lazily with no thought at all as to how out of place its terms were w/r/t this project. (Edit: That's not to say all of my translations are perfectly felicitous. If you can phrase the terms better—and especially if I misstated any—kindly do go in and fix that. Similarly, some few ideas like the ecliptic may be so wordy to explain it's better to just link them through: at the same time, it just can't be the case that we do that with all of the terms on that template or this is simply a duplicate English Wiki.)

Similarly, I appreciate your point as to the award bestowed on Earth and, at the same time, it included several factual errors and wasn't written in anything close to Simple English. With some allowance for people's tetchiness w/r/t evolution and climate change, pretty sure my version is an improvement in almost every way.

That said, it's a Wiki and you're perfectly able to revert the changes if you really found them a disservice. — LlywelynII 14:32, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

If you are in earnest that this Wiki uses completely technical scientific and medical vocabulary, a you very much need to edit the introductory pages to reflect that and
b... well... why do the introductory pages mention simple and basic English at all, including suggested word lists, if you have agreed not to bother with them? c Similarly, what purpose do you guys think this Wiki serves, other than just permitting rewriting of the mainspace Wikipedia articles? — LlywelynII 14:36, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

Selective vocabulary is just one part of writing simple English. But it can be detrimental to accuracy, particularly when it comes to scientific topics. Those topics are the hardest to write for, since there are many words for which there will be no simpler substitute without sacrificing precision or accuracy, or even changing the meaning entirely. Word lists are just suggestions, guides to use when dealing with vocabulary. Just as mathematics-based readability calculators are guides to dealing with sentence- and word-length. There will be many instances where following them will help readability immensely, but they can be overused. Placing too much emphasis on simpler vocabulary can potentially make an article harder to comprehend, if it results in an incorrect or esoteric construction of English. A basic example is, "the Earth is the only big rocky thing whose outside is broken into pieces that still move around": there is no way that the average reader will understand what is meant by this, I had no idea until I hovered over the links. We link to help a reader understand a term, not as a supplement to ambiguous phrases. If we're catering to English-language learners, among others, then we must try to use the language properly and precisely. Being mindful vocabulary is important, but there are more facets to it than sticking to a list. And there are other methods of dealing with words that don't appear on that list than switching them out. Our primary purpose is to be an encyclopaedia that helps as many people as possible learn to understand the topic they're reading about, in a way that's simple, accessible and easy to comprehend. You can't help a reader understand Earth without using words like "planet". Osiris (talk) 22:40, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

Sure you can. Just like, sure, if you already have a large vocabulary, saying "planet" (or even "apoapsis") is less ambiguous and more helpful.

In an article about Earth, I could see glossing planet at the top of the page and then using it through the rest of the text (always linked).

But I'll repeat the question: if you don't think such glosses are necessary; if you think simplified vocabulary is just a suggestion; if you think technical scientific terminology is the automatic go-to in all situations to keep topics easy for native speakers to understand... then what do you think the difference is between this wiki and English? They don't use hard words there to be assholes: they're already saying things as clearly as they think is possible, using the full range of English vocab. A simplified vocab (specifically some version of Ogden's project) is the only thing I see that explains why this exists. What is it you think you're doing? (Not to be combative: I genuinely don't understand what purpose you think this project serves if it isn't reducing the vocab and reading level of the English pages.) — LlywelynII 00:13, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

That is what the project is for, but not to the detriment of intelligibility and accuracy. Our target audience is too broad to stick to one scholar's suggested vocabulary:

"students, children, adults with learning difficulties, and people who are trying to learn English. Other people [...] to understand unfamiliar topics or complex ideas."

Sticking religiously to Ogden's Basic English might help some of those groups, but it alienates others. You need to find a balance between the most simple and the most precise words. It's not to keep topics easy for native speakers to understand, it's to keep them easy for everyone to understand (or at least as many people as possible). Nobody is going to know what "pieces that still move around" means except for the person who wrote it. Yes, vocabulary is important, but there's a limit where that list falls short of what's needed to get the message across. You just happened to have picked a topic where that limit is found a lot quicker. Osiris (talk) 00:57, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

Within the actual context, you're completely wrong and (for my money) the Simple English was much clearer than the "plate tectonics" that preceded it. That said, you're certainly correct about some of my translations into Basic and I've added more glosses and restored some of the more helpful terms. So, in short, yes, I take your meaning; I continue to disagree with the idea we should use the full range of technical jargon; I certainly overdid it going in; and thanks for your patience walking me through this. — LlywelynII 11:07, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

I commented on the changes you made to that infobox yesterday – on the template's talk page. I think many of those need to be undone. I haven't had time to look through all of it, but I will later today hopefully. Osiris (talk) 20:07, 3 January 2014 (UTC)

Plains by country categories

I saw that you created several categories for plains. You might not have known, but here on Simple English Wikipedia we want at least three entries in every new category. The categories you created had fewer than that, so I have recategorized the articles and deleted the categories. If you create new categories in the future, please be sure to have at least three articles ready to go into them before you create the categories. Thanks, and feel free to let me know if you have any questions. --Auntof6 (talk) 04:37, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Seems like an incredibly unhelpful policy for such a currently-small scale Wiki (the specific changes you made here certainly were: the new categories are much too broad and less helpful for navigation) but you've got your rules (even if you ignored them in the case of 260 BC births and actually went out of your way to thank me for establishing it and then ignored them again by this deletion: I did have well over three entries in Category:Plains by country. You simply deleted them on a whim). I (along with everyone else in the world) won't be making two extra stubs just to make new categories stick, but I will certainly try to avoid making them at all (even the needful ones like the Category:Rulers of Qin that the First Emperor and his family would otherwise need) in the future, if they're just going to be reverted this way.

If you come back by, though, kindly do let me know where I can vote against this policy. No help now and you seem to "enforce" it very arbitrarily but (one could hope), eventually, it could be abolished in favor of something that encourages putting things in their proper and most helpful place and the editors who do so. — LlywelynII 11:01, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

I do see your point. The reason we do this is to keep our category structure simple. You can read our guideline about this at Wikipedia:Categories#Is there a need for the new category?. If you would like to discuss changing it, you could do so on the talk page of that page. Yes, there were more than three entries in the Plains by country category, but those entries were themselves deleted because of this issue, so that category ended up empty. As for the chronology categories, those are an exception. I'm sorry I didn't explain that.

Please don't feel bad about this. You're a new editor here and it's understandable that you're not yet familiar with the way things are done on Simple English Wikipedia, especially the things that are different from the other Wikipedias. You aren't the first person to come up against something like this, and you won't be the last. --Auntof6 (talk) 20:09, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Congratulations

This editor is a Novice Editor and has the right to show this First Book of Wikipedia.

Congratulations, you have now made over 200 edits on the Simple English Wikipedia, and to celebrate that milestone it is time you were presented with your first book. The award also exists as a medal, a ribbon, or a user box, if you would prefer them to display on your user page. Thanks from the community for your contributions so far. --Peterdownunder (talk) 22:45, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

User:Iron-crocodile Tony

Please don't create user pages for other users. By the way, accounts cannot be deleted, only renamed. --Auntof6 (talk) 02:08, 27 October 2017 (UTC)