User talk:Dbfirs

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Hello, Dbfirs, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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The above is the "welcome template." I noticed you reverting some vandalism on Bermuda Triangle; thanks for helping out with Wikipedia. Christopher Parham (talk) 23:39, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

Contents 1 Fighting vandalism 2 Perpendicular axes 3 Random changes to Sierra Leone and related articles 4 Trapezoid 5 Colony of British Columbia 6 Speedy Deletion of the Dingo 7 Lemba 8 Colours 9 Theory of Hitler´s escape

[edit] Fighting vandalism

I notice that you've been reverting a lof of vandalistic edits. In addition to that, you can help by leaving appropriate warnings on the talk pages of the vandals. This way, the persistant ones will get blocked. For a list of appropriate warnings, check out the WP:UTTM page. Corpx 23:55, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Perpendicular axes

I've redirected your new article to the existing Perpendicular axes rule. Please try and expand the existing one further. --Steve _(Slf67) ^talk 01:31, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, I was editing the parallel axis theorem, and was surprised to notice that the perpendicular axis theorem seemed not to be in Wikipedia, but I should have done an efficient search! I will have a go at expanding the existing article later. Dbfirs 11:10, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Random changes to Sierra Leone and related articles

I have noticed that user Sittaconde, together with two unregistered editors, have been making apparently random changes to the population figures, and to some geographical and biographical data of this country. I investigated population figures elsewhere on the web and concluded that some of the changes entered by these users could not possibly represent reality unless there are regular mass migrations and re-counts in Sierra Leone. One difficulty is that several less-reliable websites give contradictory estimates of population. I have left several messages on the relevant talk pages, but have not received any response at all. They continue to make unusual and unexplained edits, some of which have been reverted by other users. Am I allowed to restore the attestable 2004 census population data where appropriate? dbfirs 22:35, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Trapezoid

having looked into it I think you are right, I had a maths teacher who used trapezoid to no "quadrilateral with no parallel sides", but I cannot find and references to it. -- Q Chris (talk) 16:19, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

He (or she) was probably using the 1851 definition. Originally both trapezium and trapezoid meant a general quadrilateral with no speacial properties i.e. nothing equal, but in the USA the word trapezoid came to be applied to the ones with one pair of parallel sides, and in the UK it was the trapezium word which was used with this meaning. French seems to have the same usage as your maths teacher, but all the modern British and Commonwealth usages I can find (I've collected the best twenty which include implied definitions) use trapezoid either as a synonym of British trapezium or referring to a solid which has some trapezium-shaped faces. I would be interested to know if you come across any modern usage (as apposed to copies of out-of-date dictionaries) which support your maths teacher. I expect there will be the odd one or two, but I haven't found any.

• On a related matter, did your maths teacher regard a parallelogram and a rhombus etc as special cases of trapeziums? (possibly you called them trapezia at that time?)
  dbfirs 19:10, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

I think he would have done. I think his usage was probably out of date at the time. I my o-level maths in 1980, and the teacher was coming up to retirement, so it is quite possible that what he was teaching was already well out of date. -- Q Chris (talk) 19:48, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Colony of British Columbia

I'm going to assume good faith here. Did you revert back to vandalism by accident? - TheMightyQuill (talk) 17:47, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I was using popups to revert the edit by 70.71.224.36 - but something must have gone wrong with the process because Cluebot got there before me and the popup reverted the correction instead. Popups don't usually do that. Could it be because of my slow internet connection? How can I check that the popup has correctly reverted (without reading through the whole article)? dbfirs 17:54, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

(later) I see now what happened. There were two edits by 70.71.224.36 and I should have read more carefully and looked at the history. Is it a waste of time reverting vandalism, because the bots do the job automatically? dbfirs 18:03, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Unfortunately, the bots miss a lot of it, and sometimes take a long time. Then again, if it's a huge blanking or filled with profanity, they usually catch it pretty quick. - TheMightyQuill (talk) 23:40, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Speedy Deletion of the Dingo

I'm confused about this deletion. Here is a person with references from leading snowboarding magazines. He is the largest personality in snowboarding. Announces every major event. Why not allow me to build on the article rather than just delete. Please advise. Thundata (talk) 18:43, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

I was not involved with this deletion. I just happened to notice that the article was in danger of deletion, so I left a message on your talk page. As I said there, "The Dingo" is probably borderline on Wikipedia's notability criteria, so you needed to provide independent references to establish notability. (I don't know whether you had time to do this, but a {{hangon}} might have delayed deletion.) The fact that the article was written by his publicity agent, and contained links to The Dingo's own self-publicity web-page meant that administrators did not take it seriously. It is always better if articles are created by independent editors, with thorough research. You may wish to read the guidelines which have been left by other editors on your talk page. Best wishes. dbfirs 19:05, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Lemba

I wasn't the first to edit Lemba, as it turns out; Lincspoacher had already edited it here, so that makes three! I'll leave it to you to amalgamate them. I think where I put mine is the best place, but otherwise I don't mind how you edit it.
P.S. You were lucky your message reached me, as I don't have a static IP. If you want to reply you can reply here. 83.70.237.60 (talk) 10:35, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Colours

You have set them up incompetently, and they turn all the entries below blue or orange! Johnbod (talk) 17:16, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I realised that things were going wrong as soon as I displayed the page after my comment. I then corrected my error, but had two edit conflicts before I could put things right. Apologies for the problems I've caused! I'm puzzled about why the problem hasn't shown up before, but I'll remove my colours until I learn what went wrong. Best wishes. Dbfirs 17:26, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

(later) I've checked all other pages where my coloured signature appears and there was no affect on the rest of the page, so I think the problem must be an interaction with other coloured signatures (there was an orange one higher up that page). Does anyone know of a bug with colours, or had I missed a cancelling command? Dbfirs (talk) 18:26, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Theory of Hitler´s escape

Let me know if/how you would like some help cleaning up this article. The biggest issue I see is referencing, so if you find any let me know and I'll go to work with citations. Otherwise I'm better at formatting and copyediting, but one foot in front of the other :-). -FrankTobia (talk) 20:02, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

I am hoping that someone with reasonable knowledge of Germany in & after WW2 will improve the article. I haven't read any of the theories in detail, and History is not my subject, so I don't really feel qualified to re-write the complete article (which is what it needs). www.hitlersescape.com would give a start, but there are lots of other websites, though I haven't found many Google Books references yet. Dbfirs 20:52, 4 May 2008 (UTC)