User talk:Hair Commodore

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Language

Welcome, and thank you for correcting spelling on the Great Central Railway (preserved) page on Wikipedia! However, both spellings of the word you "corrected" are acceptable.

Please familiarize yourself with American and British English spelling differences before making further spelling corrections to articles. Wikipedia has 47,384,979 registered users on this English Wikipedia. These editors use different versions of English including American English and British English. The list of dialects of the English language goes on and on.

When many styles are acceptable, avoid changing from one style to another unless there is some substantial reason for the change. It is acceptable to change from American spelling to British spelling only if the article concerns a British topic or vice versa or if you are making the article internally consistent.

More information is available on Wikipedia's Manual of Style. Enjoy your time on the internet's fastest growing encyclopædia/encyclopedia . Thank you. HawkerTyphoon 19:34, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Your note re Pheloung interview

Thanks for the note. I apologize for being a bit of a stickler about sources, but it has come to be important to me over my time herre at wikiP (though I can't claim to be perfect as I have made errors w/o sources in my early editing days). I think that if you put the info that you gave me in the edit summary or better yet if you copied the message you left me and put it on the Morse discussion page that it would suffice. I have a small connection with his music and wikiP's page on Morse as someone had but a citation needed tag on the info about his occassionally putting a red herring about the murderer into his code and I searched my Norse documentaries til I found the one where he mentioned it (it was in The Mystery of Morse) so I could get those tags (as I do find them a bit annoying when I am reading an article) off of the page. Again apologies if my being a pest has been too frustrating and happy editing. Oh - and if you ever do contact Mr P. tell him that you know at least one other wikipedian who really appreciates what his scores bring to anything that they are a part of. MarnetteD | Talk 17:12, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Please be careful when editing mathematics articles

Hi,

You made this edit to Hurwitz zeta function on 8 November 2006, which introduced an error. I'm reverting to the original form, which was correct. Please be careful, and double-check your sums when making edits. linas 04:58, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

Thiele's interpolation formula

Wow, it's a long time ago that I heard somebody use Algol 68 and the word abscissæ in the same breadth. If you think that the implementation is useful, I'm happy to take your word for it. I don't know much about the subject; in fact, I think this is the only place I ever came across the formula. So please feel free to add your implementation. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 12:31, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

LlanfairPG and "-gogogoch" form

Hi Hair Commodore (intriguing name!), thanks for your message and welcome to Wikipedia.

On the English Wikipedia, placenames are supposed to be in English. It's fine to give relevant translations of the subject of the article, but there's no need to translate Anglesey — where would we stop?

There are many misspellings of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, but none of them can be called legitimate alternative forms. Of course, as we know, the long name is just an invention in the first place, but it sort of makes sense, and randomly dropping a couple of letters from the name doesn't constitute an alternative form, just as mistake that's sometimes made. After all, given that the long name is never actually used for practical purposes, it would be hard for such a form to catch on and achieve any real currency. Another common error is ...tisiliogogogoch... but I don't think we should start filling the entry with all credible misspellings of such a ludicrous name. Since it might as well be Chinese to most people who quote it, it's surprising it's not misspelt more often! And after all the entry is mainly about the place, not the name. However, there may well be a case for adding a redirect from that form to Llanfairpwllgwyngyll: you simply search for the 'gogo' form, create the entry and type "#REDIRECT [[xxx]]" where xxx is the name of the entry it's to go to.

Best wishes, Flapdragon 18:18, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

Many apologies for accidentally posting this on your User page rather than your User page (explains why I found no "welcome" message) Flapdragon 00:00, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

"Britannica" and ligatures

Sorry! My reference to Britannica was simply a joke, because of the spelling of the name (Encyclopædia, as opposed to the nowadays standard British "Encyclopaedia"). I didn't intend to insult anyone. I removed the ligature because here in Wikipedia it is, say, "standard" to spell "ae" as "ae", not "æ" (I remember a while back someone changing "Æsthetics" to "Aesthetics" in an article, simply because it is the Wikipedian-style spelling.) Also, the Latin-specific ligature looked a bit strange in the English text, especially in the abbreviation, so my cause was partially æaesthetics as well. So, no insult intended, sorry if it came out wrong. Apologies for the "issue", and will not do such things in the future, if that's a problem. --NetRolller 3D 22:17, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Incorrect "correction"

You've changed "Flat Foot Floogie" to "Flat Fleet Floogie" on a number of articles. This is an error. The original title of the song is "Flat Foot Floogie", which gets 25,200 results from a Google Search, while "Flat Fleet Floogie" gets only 256 results. It's pretty obvious from that fact alone which title is correct. Those 256 results likely stem from somebody uploading a copy of the song to the Internet never having seen an actual record (I have) and so just guessing at the title and getting it wrong. Wikipedia is mirrored by hundreds of other sites, though, so if this error is allowed to remain here it will soon flood the Internet with this false information. I'm reverting your changes as quickly as possible, and wanted you to know why. Whyaduck 23:47, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

From what I've heard so far, I'd say there's a good chance you might be right and I might be wrong. One problem is that I can't think of anything on vinyl as being antique, since I remember when records weren't vinyl, and "albums" were collections of 78s. Between 1938 and the time vinyl LPs began showing up there was plenty of time for an apocryphal story about a modern interpolation to get started. Sheet music or a record from 1938 or soon thereafter would be a much better source (though, if "foot" is indeed an interpolation, but early rather than modern, then they might be wrong too). You certainly have the advantage of having heard the song more recently than I have, but I have to say that in my memory of many (admittedly low fidelity) listenings to the song decades ago on a Silvertone console radio-record player, it's flat rather than fleet.

And I'm certainly aware of how common misinformation is on the Internet—it's why I'm chronically skeptical of what I read at Wikipedia—but when the ratio of one result to another in a Google search is almost 100 to 1 I am inclined to believe there's a good chance that this cumulative data from the Internet's rabble is more accurate than the claim of one Wikipedian. If Google is wrong in this case (I've only found it to be wrong in the past when the ratio was far smaller than 100 to 1), then I apologize for doubting that you are more knowledgeable than the masses. (But also, do note that even the websites to which the Stewart and Gaillard articles link use "foot" and not "fleet". Assuming you are correct, that's going to undermine your work.)

But it's also true that, in this case, the Google results were in line with my own real world experience. You referred to the "notorious" interpolation, but in decades of hanging out with musicians and quite a few years working in recording studios, this is the first I've ever heard of it. I appear to be part of the great majority. If there's an interpolation, then notorious ("Known widely and usually unfavorably") is something it surely isn't. Obscure would be accurate. What I'd consider definitive evidence that "foot" is an interpolation would be a direct quote from one or another of the composers of the song. Since they lived until fairly recently and were probably interviewed many times, and because the lyric is so widely believed to be "Flat Foot Floogie", if this was wrong then one or the other of them must have had something to say about it. You didn't specify what source the Rough Guide used for its claim of an interpolation. If it was Gaillard or Stewart, please say so and don't leave me wondering.

Also, go ahead and revert my reversions (I won't revert myself while I remain unconvinced) without fear that I'll mess with them again (unless I stumble upon a quote from one of the composers backing "foot" as the correct word, of course.) I'm not the one you have to worry about. It's that vast majority of the digital unwashed who, right or wrong, will go on believing that it should be "foot" and will keep changing the articles. There's also the fact that many recordings of the song do use "foot" rather than "fleet", and thus "foot" would be proper on any pages referring to those particular recordings. In fact, if you're right, and if you intend to continue fixing WP pages about this song, I'd say you'd been cursed with a Sisyphean task. You could easily end up wishing you'd been wrong. Whyaduck 00:18, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

Connexion

Much as I enjoy etymology and cherish the various spellings of different forms of English, I dispute your assertion that "connexion" is in any way the "standard" spelling in British English. It looks 18th century to me. Connection is far commoner. --John 19:08, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

Here's where you said it: "it's (standard) British English". It isn't. --John 20:49, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

My apologies, then, John. Not for the first time, what I said and what I meant were were not, if you'll pardon the word, coterminous. Alternatively, what I typed was (slightly) stronger than what I meant. (And, as usual, it was because I was in a hurry when I typed it, and was not thinking as clearly as I ought to have been.) What I meant to say is that the Oxford English Dictionary has no problem with a wide range of words whose spellings end with -exion (instead of -ection), and that such spellings are therefore acceptable. (The exception is the word correction - and I don't use correxion because, unlike its siblings, it looks wrong when spelt in that way.) I do not need to repeat that I always use them - but I will. (To strengthen my point, these spellings are not listed as obsolescent - let alone obsolete; they are therefore considered to be in regular usage. That everyone does not use these spellings does not matter ...) My original point - about comprehensibility - stands. Hair Commodore 20:10, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Matthew Engel

The ref for Carmel College didn't work, so I replaced it with another I found by googling. If you want to try again, there's no reason we can't have two refs for the same bit of information. I just didn't want you to think I deleted your ref for no reason. Flatterworld (talk) 21:29, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Riesz function

Hi,

Thanks for the nice note on my talk page ... I replied there. The upshot: remind me again where I wrote about that particular function? linas (talk) 03:03, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!

Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:20, 23 November 2015 (UTC)