User talk:Charles01/Archive 15

Guy Blaikie

Thank you so much for adding to this article. A lot of the cricket biographies we do in WP:CRIC tend to be a bit dry and concentrate only on the statistically verifiable side of players' careers. It's so nice to start to get a more rounded picture of past people whose names, for people like me, are but single occasional lines in dusty old copies of Wisden. Johnlp (talk) 09:42, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

Thank you for sharing your generous reaction on this.

Articles drafted by enthusiasts are often the best informed (and easiest to source convincingly), but they can indeed be a bit dry for those who don't fullly share the enthusiasm. And wikipedia really ought, I say, to be about filling the gaps in the knowledge of those who don't know about ... whatever, and not simply a chance for enthusiasts to trade batting statistics concerning a "memorable" test series in 1925. I've no objections to enthusiasts trading statistics, of course, which is just as well because they always will. But there's surely more to this encyclopaedic endeavo(u)r than that. At the same time, one needs to avoid moving so far towards 'readability for the general reader' that one becomes shamelessly populist and/or descends into trivia. I have spent a lot of my wiki-time improving entries on cars, and one does sometimes ... wonder about the enthusiasm for communicating the finer intricacies of the clownings of Jeremy Clarkson or Richard Hammond to a global public. (I am assuming you are familiar with the English television culture: if you're not, then this Clarkson/Hammond reference will make no sense. In that case, ignore it, please, and I believe that you are not significantly impoverished by having done so. Same would apply if - which I think you are not - you are one of the millions in China, mainland Europe and elsewhere who have excellent English as a second language, but still will have some difficulty seeing the point of Jeremy Clarkson if they ever come across his television work. Which, as it happens, I personally find gloriously entertaining. Mostly. I was at school with people like that.)

Ho hum. I guess for wikipedia one can only urge toleration and moderation in all things including, even, moderation.

Success. Charles01 (talk) 08:54, 5 July 2010 (UTC)

Expperiment

Bugatti Type 57S Atalante (57502)

This car seems to be left for dust by Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantic (57374) - source [1]. - Kittybrewster ☎ 11:05, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

I don't have the background knowledge to know what to believe here, but the one in the wiki picture certainly looks dusty.

(I tend to avoid using web-based sources for wiki contributions unless they are broadly substantiated by what I know or have access to in print, because half the time when the reader becomes sufficiently excited to click on it, the webpage has disappeared, and the other half of the time, whenever one knows a little about the subject, it is partially or wholly wrong. But you may well view this as unfashionable fuddyduffiness on my part: I would not necessarily argue with that judgment.)

Regards Charles01 (talk) 11:29, 6 July 2010 (UTC)

Request

Hi Charles01 - sorry to disturb you - i picked you up randomly from the new pages list - i was looking for someone speaking english as his mother tongue to proofread an article i recently created Gun politics in Italy - if you are unable or unwilling please notify me and i'll bother someone else ;-)--Itemirus^{Message me!} 16:20, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

In the perfect world you need someone who knows more about the subject than I do, especially because there does not seem to be an Italian article that I can look at where I do not have confidence that I have understood the writer's intention. Then again, I think Italy is the only country where I have ever used a gun (well, an airgun, in my distant cousin's loft, shooting towards bits of plant pot).

In fact, I just looked at it and I think the English is mostly pretty clear. So I will happily go through it more carefully when I have a moment. The bit I find most difficult is the very first line. I think 'gun politics' may be a phrase used more in the USA than in England (where I currently live). But there is a definition in the first line of the Gun Politics in the USA entry which I think we can take for the definition (and you can change if you do not think it fits.)

Stepping back, I think we all have a tendency to write wikipedia as though we are writing for people with a high level of knowledge. So I will write about an Italian car on the basis that the reader knows what and overhead camshaft is, and I will write about a cake on the basis that the reader knows a little about how to cook. But if the thing is to work like an encyclopaedia, then I think we also need to take account - in my case at least take more account than I always do - of people who are intelligent and interested but who never, till now, had the time and motivation to read up on .... whatever it is.

Ach well, I chatter (on paper) too much when I really need to clear up the kitchen. After that gun politics in Italy does indeed look an interesting one.

Regards Charles01 (talk) 18:09, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

Well, thanks for the polite and funny response :) Gun politics looks like an article series here on WP (gun politics in the UK, Gun politics in Germany etc. etc.) , how was i to choose a different incipit?? I did not write the article from scratch; i worked on a very bad translation (probably an automatic translator) and tried to simplify it a bit. I am very satisfied with your assessment of my english :))) BTW, i do know what an overhead camshaft is :p Hope to collaborate again with you sometime in the future. Greetings from Como (another article that has taken way too much of my time) --Itemirus^{Message me!} 18:19, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

		The Random Acts of Kindness Barnstar
		I offer you this barnstar in recognition for helping me with the Gun politics in Italy article --ItemirusMessage me! 19:08, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

Thank you. There are one or two other things about it that I may want to change but I'm not sure. I think I'll come back in a couple of days, because 'solutions' on such things often come to me when I am asleep or driving the car, and I only realize that I know the solution much later. I THINK my issues mostly come from the difference between US and British English. I've worked in the US, but my thought patterns are stubbornly English English so I still have to think twice something when something looks "odd" and actually it is simply a north American word order or selection that is different from the kind I grew up with. And it's unnecessary (and in some instances gratuitously annoying) to go round "translating" American into English (or vice versa), though I do try and go for consistency where there are few enough contributors to an entry for it to be possible.

Incidentally I spent a night in Como once in the 1970s when I was taking a long weekend of autostop in January while working with the dish washing machine in an hotel in Lenzerheide (GR Switzerland). (I got the job to improve my German, but of course all my co-workers were Italians. And probably you should not wish to learn the German the local people use in Grigioni.) Anyhow I do not claim to 'know' Como (except the frontier crossing by autostrada at Chiasso which I know I should try and avoid) but I have found it a friendly and civilised city when I passed through it. I have even uploaded to wiki a picture of a car there, though I'm not sure it looked that sunny when I was there... (Of course, it is possible I had decided it was civilised before I ever went near the place, simply because of Pliny.)

Regards Charles01 (talk) 19:30, 24 July 2010 (UTC)

W111, W112 and W107

Hi there, I recently expanded the W111 and W112 articles and would like to do so for W107, (Mercedes-Benz) I put a comment on the talk page about merging the R107 with SLC-class and was wondering if you could give some though on that, as well as copyedit the W111 article, and give some feedback as to what can be added/removed from there. Regards. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.170.84.179 (talk) 07:48, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

Hmmmm

Usually I oppose merging entries. I live in a country with a very primitive telephone system so I have a personal interest in keeping entries short so they will download before my ISP/telephone company loses the will to live. Also my own brain tends to drift out of focus when I read longer entries.

BUT there is clearly a logic argument in favo(u)r of your suggestion here because one of the cars - the longer one with more seats - is implicitly included in the titles of both entries.

BUT (another BUT) there is not what computer people call a direct "one to one" relationship between the two entries that you want to merge. One of them could logically be included wholly in the other. BUT the other could only partially be included in the one. This is important because a lot of wikipedia contributors work a lot with computers and, to some extent, many of us end up thinking like computers.

Also, a lot of people (including me) get very confused by Mercedes chassis numbers and a lot more people don't even understand enough to get confused. That means that you could merge the SLC entry into the R107 entry (which of course also includes the shorter SL), and take a lot of time to do it, only to have someone else who doesn't think in the same "thought frame work" (Richtlinien) as you do come along and set up a new SLC entry. Up to a point you can address that with a redirect page, but those can get changed too. There is a risk of using a lot of time to do something that will not last very long, and in the process some good information may be semi-lost into an old archive. So although if you press me I tend (if only on balance) to agree with you, I would not get involved in a discussion over this on the entry's talk page.

Two more thoughts.

Mercedes are unusual in terms of the extent to which large numbers of cars are and since many years were sold into DIFFERENT (including several large English speaking) markets. There are A LOT of potential contributors to a page on a Mercedes, and a lot of those have good information and good insights to share. So you are unlikely ever to get the consistency of approach with these entries that you would get with a car that was rare in the US and virtually unknown in Europe (think Hudson Super Wasp) or vice versa (think Audi Front). Thus wikipedia. It as a medium with many good things and many bad things, but if you want a consistently structured approach on a subject where many good people have views, I don't think a consistent approach will easily happen. With cars there are particular issues, because cars that people with technical knowledge think are identical may be sold with different brand names and different model names in Germany and the US. And England and Brazil may give you another set of "labels". So, thanks to the different ideas of different marketing departments in different countries, we have grown up categorizing the same cars differently in our minds depending on where we grew up.

I cannot tell which are your own contributions to the W111/W112 entries, but if you want to launch a campaign for merging (or unmerging) entries, you are likely to win more committed support if you get yourself a wiki-name. Though I can on a personal level very well understand that a person may have good reasons for remaining anonymous.

No further thoughts. Regards Charles01 (talk) 09:10, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

I see what you mean and you do have a point. My advice is to have a look at the German and Italian wikis which are very well written wrt Mercedes-Benz. Long vs short entries? Well a fully written article on car development, technological description and data is bound to lengthen it one way or another. Keeping a condensed version is possible wrt writing out a complete pictorial history, model by model. As for chassis numbers, then here wikipedia becomes a complete mess. You have for example the Mercedes-Benz 300, Mercedes-Benz 600, Mercedes-Benz 300SL. Yet, what if I wanted to find out about a 1985 R107 or a 1989 R129 300SL? For the 600, I am from Russia, and here the 600th Mercedes is a jargon term from the 1990s that refers to all the W140s. Since 1993 MB rectified this with the classes, and today markets them as the this or that class. Yet what do we do with the predecessors? Mercedes-Benz 190 was not a C-class, yet on the Mercedes-Benz C-class article its entry is missing. However the Mercedes-Benz SL-Class seems to go right to the gullwing, yet officially the SL-class came into being in 1993. The S-class does begin at the W116, but how do we fit in the Pontons, the Fintails, the 300s, the 600? As for the account I have one, but I do not wish to use it at present. Regards. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.170.84.179 (talk) 10:54, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

Département > department

Hello Charles- I see you've been working to create articles on former French departments. Thanks for your work, but please note that we use the English spelling for département here on the English Wikipedia (by consensus). The English word department includes as one of its meanings the French political subdivision. For reference, please see the articles Departments_of_France and Department_(administrative_division). Cheers. Eric ^talk 20:02, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, Eric and sorry. I noticed this, but I noticed only when setting up those links, so a bit too late. I did copy my approach on this from somewhere but (1) I'm not sure where and (2) belatedly I appreciate that I followed a minority approach on this. Regards Charles01 (talk) 20:23, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

No big deal, just wanted to alert you. And thanks for your informative (and sometimes amusing) edit summaries! Eric ^talk 21:11, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Answer to your question

Hi Charles :)

That is definitely a picture of an old Seat 1500 taken in Cordoba. The logo on the front belongs to old Seats ; it cannot be confused with the Fiat logo: both are red but the former is round while the latter is rectangular. Also the front car plate is an old spanish plate; Italian ones beared the Coat of arms of Italy and the province code was printed after the registration number, not before. Have a nice day. --Itemirus^{Message me!} 13:33, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

1976-1985 front and rear Italian vehicle license plates from Rome.

SEAT's old logo

Thank you very much. Regards Charles01 (talk) 13:37, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

actually Fiat's car logo used between 1965 and 1968 can be confused with Seat's, but i am absolutely sure that the front car plate is a Spanish one because the Italian coat of arms has been placed on front and rear plates since 1948 and front car plates in use until 1985 were black with white letters and numbers. --Itemirus^{Message me!} 13:49, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

Thanks again. Useful clarification. Best wishes Charles01 (talk) 07:11, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Ponton

You are absolutely correct, my bad! 842U (talk) 10:43, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

BMW 528 Coupe 1988

Is there such a car? Kittybrewster ☎ 01:35, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Not to my knowledge. Charles01 (talk) 07:07, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Pierre Denfert-Rochereau traduction: merci!

Hi, Thanks for your useful corrections on Pierre Philippe Denfert-Rochereau. It is fine and the article is much clearer I guess for english-language users. Thanks again. guigui169. —Preceding undated comment added 13:11, 28 August 2010 (UTC).

Rover 16

It seems you are quite correct - though you're also correct in thinking that I didn't remember anything about it. Luckily, I am able to see the deleted edits from 2005. The article contained a couple of words: "Car", etc, and a reference to a non-existent image, so I deleted it on the grounds of no substantive, meaningful content. I'm quite surprised it's taken so long for someone to create a proper article on the subject - I wish you luck! Deb (talk) 14:53, 30 August 2010 (UTC)

Ford Consul Mark 1

I concede your point that the Zephyr was a little longer than the Consul, to provide room for the in-line six; however I suggest that "larger" is not the best way to describe the difference - to me that implies an overall increase in size, whereas the width, passenger area and boot were much the same. RGCorris (talk) 09:40, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

Agreed. Sorry for being tiresome! Charles01 (talk) 10:20, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

Mitsubishi Galant/Lancer

Your photo

A Lancer -
note the headlight bezels

Hello Charles,

Thanks for being willing to share all of these marvellous old pictures of yours. I am glad that you (like I) spend half of your vacation photos on automobiles. I'm glad you went to Tenerife, there seem to have been interesting cars driving around there at the time.

This here picture from Luxembourg, though, is not a Mitsubishi Galant but rather a Lancer A70 series, as pictured right next to it. Are you good with me renaming and categorizing the file accordingly?
 ⊂ Mr.choppers ⊃  (talk) 01:50, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Thank you for your kind comments and it is of course reassuring to learn that there are folks (in addition to myself) who do not regard wandering round photographing cars as a symptom of being barking mad. Though as I liked to tell my daughter when she was younger, you can at least make the argument that "weird is the new cool". However, I think these days maybe "cool" has gone out of fashion again. It can be tough keeping up.

To the beef.

This is a real can of worms. I have no objection to anyone changing anything on Wikipedia where it involves replacing falsehood with truth. But the naming of Japanese cars in general and Mitsubishis in particular is a real can of worms. Therefore please get your head around the following before you start renaming stuff

The second picture you show is this car, yes? I call that a Mitsubishi Lancer. That seems to be fairly universal according to Wikipedia (in English), although if you were growing up in the US you may think of it as a Dodge and if your were growing up in Australia you may think of it as a Chrysler. Mitsubishi seem to have been pretty schizophrenic about how they named their cars around the world. There is a wikipedia guideline which says that in such circumstances you should give cars the names they had in their home markets, but for Japanese and German cars that can leave you with names that no one reading the entry in English wikipedia knows, and most of us can't pronounce. For my money, the best work-around for that is ample use of redirect pages.

The first picture you show - mine of a car in Luxembourg - I think is a car that was marketed if only briefly in the UK as a Colt Galant. That's relevant to me because I lived in the UK. I've no idea what they called it in Luxembourg. I think it is the station wagon version of the car that turns up on the English language entry (per the attached picture) as a Mitsubishi Galant. I think that is what they called it in New Zealand. In Australia it was badged as a Chrysler and in Canada as a Plymouth. I don't know if they sold it in the US. This naming stuff is slightly outside the scope of your original question, but it is still worth stressing (I say) when discussing the naming of Mitsubishi cars

As I understand it, you think that the grey car here is a station wagon version of the blue one. Am I right about that? I do not think I agree, but it is difficult. Although we have both cars in profile, you cannot expect the front door to be the same shape on a two door car as on a four door one. I think "my" identification was probably based on the repeater indicator lamps at the front and also on the front bumper (Europe/Aus spec: for export to the States back then they may have put on a big crude bar to satisfy naderist legislation). However, I freely admit that I also, when uploading it around 2007, named it according to what I remembered about what I was thinking several decades earlier, around 1977, when I took the picture late on a dull afternoon in Luxembourg outside a US-style fast food/hamburger restaurant (very exciting back then) and between rain showers. My memory is not a good source for anything much, but I am not entirely sure that I agree with you on the simple matter of identification. Sorry to be difficult. I wonder if more googling might clarify the matter.

BUT - and this risks getting repetitive - although I am capable of being dogmatic when I know I am right, on this subject I am not 100% sure of my own judgment. If you ARE sufficiently confident in your own judgment, change the name as you have indicated and no doubt, if you are nevertheless wrong, someone will tell us of it.

Thanks for your good work on this project. Yes, Tenerife was an interesting place to photograph cars when I used to work in the holiday trade in the 1980s. Shame I wasn't doing it full time (the photographing) though I remember a holiday companion who seemed to think I was: I wonder what happened to her.

Regards Charles01 (talk) 06:19, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

73-76 Galant (Dodge Colt in US)

76-80 Galant Sigma
one of your pictures again...

Hello Charles! I am very certain indeed that your wagon is a Lancer, and I am as certain as one can be about Mitsubishi names that this car has never been labelled a Galant in any market. This generation Lancer had chassis codes beginning with A70 (later A140 series), the seeming differences over the bumpers and side repeater indicators are due to a November 1976 facelift.

Here is a facelifted four-door sedan, a facelifted coupé and finally a veeery small picture of a Lancer Van like the one in question, but one showing the front better. Oh, and "ランサー" does indeed spell "Lancer". As for the Galants of the period, the shots on the right are of the second and third generation Galant wagons. Considerably larger and both of a more square design.

Thanks, hope that settles it all.  ⊂ Mr.choppers ⊃  (talk) 15:58, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes, I thought these wagons were the successor models. Anyhow, I've nothing to add (except that my Firefox installation didn't trust those links, probably because they were in Japanese, but I'm afraid I didn't like to over-rule Firefox). I'll just sit back and see if anyone disagrees! Actually, there's one thing I just can't resist adding. My own third car was a Mitsubishi Colt Galant (as they were branded in the UK - 7 syllables before you get the the GL 1.6 bit) which I inherited when my father died, and here's a picture of it to go with all the others! Time to think about something else! Charles01 (talk) 16:09, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Nice - too bad there aren't any rear views available. As for the links, the third one is to a Japanese bookstore that I have used many a time for buying catalogs (the one pictured is on its way...), while the first two are to a blog on Japanese 70s cars. I trust Takahara books with my credit card ##s, so no risk whatsoever there.  ⊂ Mr.choppers ⊃  (talk) 16:15, 16 September 2010 (UTC)