Ancient of age: 1


ArbCom 2023 Elections voter message edit

Hello! Voting in the 2023 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 (UTC) on Monday, 11 December 2023. All eligible users are allowed to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority 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 in the 2023 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. If you no longer wish to receive these messages, you may add {{NoACEMM}} to your user talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:27, 28 November 2023 (UTC)Reply

Antietam casualties edit

Hi, CWenger, This is about my noting the ambiguity in the Battle of Antietam casualty count. I run into this issue frequently when discussing casualty counts with people who are not U.S. Civil War history types. USCWHT's like to include both sides in casualty counts, but only for this war. Others, especially Europeans, are flabbergasted that this happens, particularly when comparing casualty counts from battles in different wars (e.g., Ken Burns' comparing Shiloh with Waterloo). I have found that you have to be REALLY clear--almost painfully obvious--or they don't get it. That's why I made the edit I did. Minturn (talk) 18:54, 17 January 2024 (UTC)Reply

@Minturn: Thanks for the message. It already says "a combined tally of 22,727 dead, wounded, or missing", so I'm not sure what else "combined" would mean, unless it means dead + wounded + missing, but that's implied because it's only a single number. Maybe you can rewrite it to be more clear without the parenthetical? CWenger (^@) 19:28, 17 January 2024 (UTC)Reply
Dead + wounded + missing was just what I thought "combined" could be taken to mean. I'll cogitate on a clearer way to put it. Minturn (talk) 19:44, 17 January 2024 (UTC)Reply

Disambiguation link notification for February 1 edit

An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Chinatown, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page New York.

(Opt-out instructions.) --DPL bot (talk) 05:54, 1 February 2024 (UTC)Reply

Parallelism and compounds edit

@RecycledPixels: You reverted my edit to Paradise Airlines Flight 901A to read: "That crew said that they had encountered icing conditions at 12000 ft, snow showers over Lake Tahoe, and that clouds had obscured the tops of mountains in the vicinity." That sentence contains a misuse of parallelism, arising from a compound object within a compound object. The crew "encountered" "icing" and "snow showers" and "reported" this encounter and also that "clouds had obscured the tops of mountains". The three objects are thus not all equal (parallel). Displayed hierarchically, you get:

"That crew said

[1] that they had encountered
[a] icing conditions at 12000 ft,
[b] snow showers over Lake Tahoe,
[2] and that clouds had obscured the tops of mountains in the vicinity."

Because [a] and [b] are the only two parts of the compound object of "encountered", they should be connected by an "and". A second "and" is needed to connect [1] and [2], the two parts of the compound object of "said". The alternative would be to rewrite the sentence to read something like: "That crew said that they had encountered icing conditions at 12000 ft, that there were snow showers over Lake Tahoe, and that clouds had obscured the tops of mountains in the vicinity."

Compound-compounds and the related parallelism are among the hardest things to learn about English. My students got 'em wrong all the time. Minturn (talk) 17:06, 4 March 2024 (UTC)Reply

Good suggestion. I have changed it to the wording you suggested. RecycledPixels (talk) 18:06, 4 March 2024 (UTC)Reply

Minturn (talk) 20:10, 4 March 2024 (UTC)Reply