User talk:J'raxis/2005

Template:Lang-ar

You made this template and, well, since it only replaces a little bit of text and the {{{1}}} could be in the template or out of it, it wouldn't make a difference. I was wondering... do you have any more plans to chage this template or not? If you don't I think it just ends up increasing server load time because it has to call a template and for something so small it doesn't even make the page less cluttered. (I know the squid server will minimize some of this) I am not sure it's a good idea... but I'd definitely like to hear your reasoning. gren 22:36, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I saw the Template:Lang-ru one and thought it was a good idea. In general, I think of templates like the idea of constants or function abstraction in programming; if you're going to reuse some repetitive piece of data or functionality over and over, it's good to put it in one place and just reference it rather than have copies all over the place.

I was thinking it might even be a good idea to have a general language template:

{{lang|ar|Arabic}}

that fills in the bits and pieces like:

[[{{{2}}} language|{{{2}}}]]: <span lang="{{{1}}}">{{{2}}}</span>

but didn't know if it was a good idea to get that abstracted with it yet.

— J’raxis 11:51, 2005 Jun 15 (UTC)

al Queda or Al Queda ?

I see you changed the spelling of "al Queda" to "Al Queda" in a bunch of article. "Al", is just an article, like "a" or "the". We almost never capitalize English articles in English. Are you sure it should be capitalized? It isn't when it occurs in a proper name. -- Geo Swan 19:12, 15 July 2005 (UTC)

Actually my intent was to change Al-Queda (and other misspellings) to Al-Qaeda, which is where the actual article is, in order to minimize redirects and for general consistency. See what links there to see what I mean. I changed variant spellings, outright misspellings (ones containing qu), and also unhyphenated ones. I didn't change Al-Qaida and a couple other very popular variants, since there are dozens of these links and I was doing this manually. (My preference is actually Al-Qa`idah, a more literal transliteration from the Arabic, but since the article's at Al-Qaeda, I went with this spelling.)

As for capitalization, I'm not sure. I've always thought that capitalizing the is acceptable when it's at the beginning of a compound proper noun, even in the middle of a sentence. Here's an example with the The capitalized all over. I've seen Al-Qaeda and other Arabic names that've become popular in the English-speaking world like Al-Jazeera using both capitalized and uncapitalized als, and I've even sometimes seen the al lowercased at the beginning of a sentence. Additionally, sometimes they're written with a space in place of a hyphen, or with nothing at all between—in the actual Arabic the definite article الـ is joined to the following word.

— J’raxis 20:21:50, 2005-07-15 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Arabic)

Greetings! Since you recently contributed to Arabic transliteration, I thought you might be interested in the following project: Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Arabic). It's designed to create standards for Arabic transliteration to use on Wikipedia, to make it easier for users to find articles consistently. – Quadell ^{(talk) (sleuth)} 15:02, August 4, 2005 (UTC)

Accents in Titles -- Minie ball

I propose to revert your move. See Talk:Minié ball. Robert A West 18:12, 13 August 2005 (UTC)

Compliments... are your ears red yet?

Hello, mate. I just wanted you to know that when I stumbled across your website several years ago, I loved it. I stop by every now and again to see how it's doing. I was tickled by the God simulator, and enjoyed the articles on Atheism greatly. Cheers, --Blackcap | talk 06:29, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

Featured article for December 25th

I noticed you have listed yourself in Category:Atheist Wikipedians. That said, you will probably be interested in my suggested featured article for December 25th: Omnipotence paradox. The other suggestion being supported by others for that date is Christmas, although Raul654 has historically been against featuring articles on the same day as their anniversary/holiday. — BRIAN0918 • 2005-11-28 08:19