User talk:Dirtlawyer1/Archives/2010/December

Red links

I am ambivalent either way, but curious about this edit where you removed red links from the coach navbox: [1]. The only thing I have seen commenting on it is WP:REDLINKS, which makes an argument for red links to notable subjects because it is supposed to encourage creation of the articles. Strikehold (talk) 23:38, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Strikehold, the redlinks looked like hell in several of these navboxes when half or more have no articles. At the time, I was more concerned with expanding the navbox information to include first names and years of service so we could do away with the bottom-of-the-page succession boxes for coaches, but if anyone wants to restore the redlinks and start actually creating the articles, I certainly have no objection. I'll get you a list of the dozen or so coaches navboxes that I've reworked; as I recall, Tulane had one of the highest percentages of redlinks. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 04:23, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

That's not necessary, I saw that and was just wondering. I can certainly see both sides of the issue on whether to keep them in navboxes. I do like the idea about doing away with the succession boxes though. Anyway, I think I started three or four of the Tulane coach articles. If I recall it was difficult finding sources for some of these still left. Think I'm going to see if I can do a few more. Strikehold (talk) 04:43, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

Just to be clear, I think we absolutely should keep the complete list of all coaches and their dates of service for each program's navbox, but I am ambivalent whether we keep the redlinks for all coaches pending creation of articles for them. Like you said, some of these early guys are pretty damn obscure. You're lucky if you can find a complete name, dates of service and a win-loss record. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 04:52, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, sorry I meant "whether to keep the red links", not whether to keep the coaches. Strikehold (talk) 06:00, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

William G. Kline

Dirtlawyer1, I found William G. Kline's records at Nebraska Wesleyan. See [[2]], [3], [4]. Jweiss11 (talk) 02:13, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, JW. Kline is one of those "lost" Gators coaches who I would really like to understand what happened to him after he left Nebraska in the mid-1920s. I found several coaching books that he authored in the 1930s and 1940s, and I also found a New York Times article where he was called as a trial witness in the late '40s. After that, he dropped off the grid. Pee Wee Forsythe and C.J. McCoy both disappeared from the public record after their time as the Gators coach. George Pyle was the West Virginia AD in the late 1910s, and I found his 1940s obituary. Al Buser turned up later as the Hamline AD. From Gen. Van Fleet forward, the lives and coaching careers of the Gators coaches are pretty well chronicled in contemporary newspaper articles and the various books about the history of the Florida football program. The first four or five guys get short shrift because the early UF UAA records are so sketchy and program didn't really rate a lot of newspaper coverage outside of Florida, which was still a very small state from 1906 through the early '20s. Kind sad, because guys like Forsythe, Pyle and Kline were apparently quite the interesting characters. Forsythe was a stud player for John Heisman at Clemson, and Kline was a UF law school professor while he was the football coach (and apparently attended Michigan and Nebraska for his law school education).

Next time I'm in Gainesville, I plan to spend some time in the rare books section of the UF library looking at old yearbooks and school newspapers to see what additional information I can glean regarding these early Gators coaches and the first three or four University of Florida presidents. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 04:42, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

The Sports-Reference.com site for college basketball lists Kline as W.G. Klein for his Florida stint; see: [5]. They probably picked that up from somewhere, so it might be worth keeping that alternate name/misspelling in mind when searching for stuff on him. Jweiss11 (talk) 05:41, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

Dashes

Thanks for the detailed reply to my post regarding the resurfacing of the spaced en dash controversy. I wish you luck, and won't object again on that page. I see you're a very active editor, primarily in article space, which is good to see -- I haven't run into you before but then we don't seem to edit a lot of the same pages. Anyway, good luck with it.

Judging from this, it looks like this is your first time getting involved with what could be a large number of Wikipedians with strong opinions about an aesthetic issue. I hope you don't mind if I offer a couple of comments based on my own experience in similar discussions -- I am sure you don't need professional advice, but still I hope I can give you a couple of insights. (I really hope this doesn't come across as patronizing in any way; I just hope that I have some useful information I can pass on to you.)

One point, perhaps the most important, is that it is remarkably hard to do what you suggested you would like to do: to pursue the issue with "an attorney's zeal and sense of organization". This is because without a prior consensus that someone be nominated as the organizer of a discussion there is not a great deal one person can do to ensure that a discussion follows a logical progression. It's a consequence of the lack of hierarchy here, and it can be frustrating. In addition, many editors won't want to participate in the tedious work of constructing the debate; they will simply show up at the end and support or oppose the points of view expressed. So my advice here is not to get your hopes up too high with regard to what a willingness to organize the debate can achieve. There's no doubt it can help, but there are limits.

My other suggestion is about tone, and this is more personal to my style than it is a suggestion about Wikipedia. I am not a lawyer myself, but by chance attended the closing arguments of a corporate law trial recently (an antitrust case). If I may be excused for characterizing your comments, I'd say you sounded like you were talking to a jury, not to your fellow editors, at a couple of points:. For example, when you said "Rarely have I seen so much sophistry, rhetoric and bad statistics adamantly employed in the support of so trivial a point", my immediate reaction was that you were a warrior for your point of view rather than truly interested in consensus. You've posted less adamantly since then and I no longer think that. However, I think it is true to say that the accuracy of an argument is more potent in these discussions that the rhetoric. Rhetoric has its place here, of course; but one has to take care with it.

As I said, I wish you luck, and will watch the talk page to see what happens. Perhaps we will run into each other in article space at some point too. Mike Christie (talk – library) 17:55, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Hi. TCO (talk) 03:07, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

Archiving

Hello, Dirtlawyer1. You have new messages at SunCreator's talk page.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Regards, SunCreator ^(talk) 12:29, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

Sorry, the archiving didn't really go to plan. Two unexpected things, neither useful. When you archive by month, it puts it in the month the original message was posted in, a minor thing really. The next is the archive box doesn't automatically put the month on(unlike the numbered version) and so you have to manually add each month it archives. I've added the months for you manually at present including for November 2010 which it will be archived to next. In the future you'll have to either add the months manually or switch over to archiving by number. Regards, SunCreator ^(talk) 23:05, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

Talkback

Hello, Dirtlawyer1. You have new messages at Baseball Watcher's talk page.
Message added 03:28, 19 December 2010 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

College football head coaches categories

DL, I've noticed you've been removing college football head coaches categories from articles, e.g. Wallace Wade. Are we killing all of those? Jweiss11 (talk) 23:50, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

JW, given their bastardized history and the banishment of their creator from any further category work, I was under the impression that they were "deprecated" and gradually being eliminated. It's even goofier when you discover both the parent category (e.g. "Alabama Crimson Tide football coaches") and the subcategory on the same page (e.g. "Alabama Crimson Tide head football coaches"), and I have yet to find one college football program where the entire succession of head coaches was classified under the "head coach" subcategory. That's an invitation to delete. It looks like this head coach subcat evolved out of the creator's work on NFL cats, and he never got the chance to complete his work on the college basketball and football cats before the plug was pulled.

I take it you've noticed that I've been up to some other college coach work lately, too? Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 00:35, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, the head coach categories have always been a pain, but I wasn't sure if there was a consensus green light to go and kill them. There are many teams for which the head coach category is fully populated. In most cases, this was done by transcluding the category from the nav box. I've cleaned out those includeonly cats from all the DI-FBS nav boxes, but they are still lingering in the lower divisions. Bad practices never seem to move alone.

I see you are doing a lot of work on upgrading the head coach navboxes and killing the succession boxes. Despite my reservations about breaking parallelism with things like baseball and politics, the new practice is really coming out very nicely. Thanks for all your work on that. One little point: on the head coach nav boxes, when you see {{PAGENAME}} in the categories, you can just kill that. I think those were put in to make sure the templates sorted under the meaningful alphabetization and not T for template, but that happens anyway; the code knows to ignore "Template:".

Also, I just did some work to standardize the athletic director nav boxes of which there are only handful. I see you recently created Tennessee and Florida. Kansas State has been around a while. I just created Michigan and Notre Dame. Have you seen or created any others? I renamed the Tennessee and Florida ones to be singular to match the standard of the football coach navboxes. I also created a category to cull these together: Category:NCAA Division I athletic director navigational boxes.

Yes, my work on the college football coaches continues. I've been at it pretty heavy since early in the year trying clean up and standardize things like the infobox and head coaching record tables. I've made sweeps through just about all the Big Ten guys, most of the Hall of Famers, a lot of the SEC, and few other places here and there. Just made a complete run through Akron and now cracking on Kansas. I'm also coordinating with Paul McDonald to get things synced up with his work on the small schools. Jweiss11 (talk) 23:15, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

Congrats

		The Original Barnstar
		For being such a great asset to the community and for working diligently to improve the encyclopedia. Cheers! —Eustress talk 15:38, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

Admired your work lately... keep it up! —Eustress ^talk 15:38, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

Done

I've completed the review of Andrew Sledd. I tried to be as thorough as I could; I hope it doesn't come across as irritatingly nitpicky, but everything I mentioned could come up at FAC, so I thought it was wise to be thorough. I hope it's a helpful review. I'll watch the page, so if you make changes and comments there there's no need to ping me -- I'll keep an eye on it. Any questions or complaints, let me know. Mike Christie (talk – library) 00:24, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, Mike. Very thorough, and not "nitpicky" at all. Valid criticism and solid suggestions for improvement. I'll chew on it over the next several days, do my best to make good use of your comments, and then we'll see what you think of the revised version. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 01:56, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

I look forward to seeing the changes. One last comment, not really a criticism, but a suggestion: are you familiar with the option to separate notes and citations as is done here? It's becoming more popular, and though it is by no means required I like the effect -- it makes it easy for a reader to tell if a footnote contains more of interest than a bare citation. You have some informative footnotes in Andrew Sledd, and it might be worth splitting them off in this way if you like the effect. Mike Christie (talk – library) 03:21, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

Secession box update

DL, the SEC, ACC, and Big Ten are now all clear of college head coach succession boxes. Jweiss11 (talk) 21:26, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

Is that a little Yankee bon mot? "Secession box?" Funny Wolverine, you are.

All teasing aside, that's quite an accomplishment. I don't work that quickly. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 22:04, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

That was just a typo, Johnny Reb. Okay, so I've purged all of the six "BCS" conferences, the MAC, Notre Dame, BYU, Army, and Navy. Keep me posted when you finish upgrading another conference and I'll do the cleanup in your wake. Jweiss11 (talk) 05:02, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

JW, CUSA and MWC are ready for a succession box purge sweep. That's a total of 106 of 122 FBS navboxes upgraded so far. I think that just leaves the WAC and Sun Belt. BTW, howsabout you upgrade the navboxes for Youngstown State, Glenville State, Maine and all those random navboxes on Jerry Kill's page, so we can check off the last 4 current Big Ten coaches as having been fully swept? All lower division navboxes for current coaches of the ACC, SEC and Big XII have all been fully upgraded. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 14:09, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

Jrcla2 already did Maine and I just took care of Youngstown State, Glenville State, and Jerry Kill's schools. Jweiss11 (talk) 09:40, 30 December 2010 (UTC)