User talk:Ron Davis

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. BTW nice work on the cemetery articles. Cheers! --maveric149

On my user talk page you wrote:

I was not aware there was an obligatory format on an OPEN site.

Take a look at Wikipedia:Manual of Style, and particularly Wikipedia:Manual of Style (biographies). The styles outlined there are not exactly obligatory, but they are a community norm, and you may find people change what you write to fit in with them. Once you've submitted something to Wikipedia it's fair game for anyone to change, and you should expect it to be changed. If I've made it incorrect or misleading, feel free to fix it. --rbrwr

PLEASE TAKE NOTE

RESPONSE BY Ron Davis: Thank you, I do not wish to engage in any arguments over this matter but I regret I do not understand your broad and interpretive generalization: not exactly obligatory. It is or it isn't obligatory. The articles you referred to above are only articles placed there by a very small number of people out of the thousands who contribute to Wikipedia. While I respect their right to express an opinion, as I understand it, their views are not a condition of use or a requirement laid down by the operator/owner of Wikipedia. This fact seems to be clear in the owner’s user page in his User:Jimbo Wales/Statement of principles. Despite this, my format, that you deemed to be improper, is almost exactly to that suggested in the article Wikipedia:Manual of Style (biographies) and, I chose to create biographies in the professional format used by all major encyclopedia publications and quality organizations on the Web. As I understand the Wikipedia OPEN concept, the purpose of changing articles that I or anyone else may post, is not fair game (as you choose to call it) that was designed to allow someone to modify and impose the style of a so-called community norm, but is intended to be used to fix errors or mistakes, enhance and improve articles, and to correct grammar or spelling. While I am no expert, if you look at all my postings, I take a great deal of time on every single article to make it as complete and informative as possible. If you enhance or improve the content, or fix my mistakes, I would be very pleased and grateful, but you said in reference to my Allan Dwan article: If I've made it incorrect or misleading, feel free to fix it. Your statement is misleading and not even remotely the case at point. Quite honestly, when your only contribution to mine or anyone’s article is to force a community norm created by a select few that you have chosen to follow, it only insults and discourages me (and other necomers) from contributing more. I certainly want you or anyone who comes to Wikipedia to improve content on anything I post. It is that multiple worldwide input that is the value of Wikipedia, is it not? However, I have no desire to return to Wikipedia, let alone continue to put in the considerable effort to create any more articles, if it is your or anyone’s intention to impose the format standards of a select few on my work in contradiction of the owner’s Statement of Principles. By using your time to go to any well thought-out biography and change the presentation to the so-called norm established by one small group serves only to discourage any serious contributor and drive them away from Wikipedia. Perhaps, instead of imposing this small group’s community norm on contributors whose work is clearly from someone wishing to see Wikipedia succeed, you and other sincere contributors might use your valuable time more constructively by improving the content of my articles and fix the thousands of other incomplete and very poorly done articles that already exist on Wikipedia. In my humble opinion, that makes common sense if the desire is to be a positive contributor of facts rather than someone whose time is used to impose their views on others on heading formats. I, for one, will continue to contribute in that manner. Thank you for your consideration, I trust you will respect my and others efforts in the future…. Ron Davis

Ron, I have no desire to discourage you from using Wikipedia or making excellent contributions like that at Allan Dwan. As you feel so strongly about it, I won't put that page back into the style manual format. Somebody else might, of course, and I don't think you should feel offended if they do. They will come to the page seeing it as a Wikipedia article, not seeing it as your work, and they will feel free to edit it as they see fit. That's not a contradiction of Jimbo's statement of principles; it's central to point 3. You may not see the Style Manual format as an improvement, but if they do, they'll change it. Anyway, best wishes to you on your Wikipedia career. --Rob (rbrwr)

Hi, quick question. Are you the same person that used to edit here as User:DW? Thanks, Camembert 18:52 Feb 28, 2003 (UTC)

Will you please respond to my comments in Talk:List of communities in Quebec? If you agree with the reasons I stated for moving the article in the first place, I will be pleased to do the work of moving the rest of the lists-by-province to match. - Montréalais

Hi - I've responded to your comment on my talk page. --Camembert

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 2000 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:

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:

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 Tagging Image:CharlesChristie.jpg

This image may be deleted.

Thanks for uploading Image:CharlesChristie.jpg. I notice the image page currently doesn't specify who created the image, so the copyright status is therefore unclear. If you have not created the image yourself then you need to argue that we have the right to use the image on Wikipedia (see copyright tagging below). If you have not created the image yourself then you should also specify where you found it, i.e., in most cases link to the website where you got it, and the terms of use for content from that page.

If the image also doesn't have a copyright tag then you must also add one. If you created/took the picture then you can use {{GFDL}} to release it under the GFDL. If you believe the image qualifies as fair use, please read fair use, and then use a tag such as {{Non-free fair use in|article name}} or one of the other tags listed at Wikipedia:Image copyright tags#Fair_use. See Wikipedia:Image copyright tags for the full list of copyright tags that you can use.

If you have uploaded other images, please check that you have specified their source and copyright tagged them, too. You can find a list of image pages you have edited by clicking on the "my contributions" link (it is located at the very top of any Wikipedia page when you are logged in), and then selecting "Image" from the dropdown box. Note that any unsourced and untagged images will be deleted one week after they have been uploaded, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. Ricky81682 (talk) 02:42, 29 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Image:ChildebertRoydeFrance.JPG listed for deletion

An image or media file that you uploaded or altered, Image:ChildebertRoydeFrance.JPG, has been listed at Wikipedia:Images and media for deletion. Please look there to see why this is (you may have to search for the title of the image to find its entry), if you are interested in its not being deleted. Thank you. —Gay Cdn (talk) (Contr.) 01:51, 15 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Image:ChildebertRoydeFrance.JPG listed for deletion

An image or media file that you uploaded or altered, Image:ChildebertRoydeFrance.JPG, has been listed at Wikipedia:Images and media for deletion. Please look there to see why this is (you may have to search for the title of the image to find its entry), if you are interested in its not being deleted. Thank you. —Gay Cdn (talk) (Contr.) 01:51, 15 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]