User talk:Teratornis/2006

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Greetings!

Greetings, Teratornis!

Saw your page because of your work on my Middletown and Cincinnati Railroad page. I also did the Cincinnati, Lebanon, and Northern Railroad article. I've written a number of southwest Ohio articles and am glad to see another contributor. Let me know if I can help you out. Good work on the Lebanon Countryside Trail article, by the way. PedanticallySpeaking 15:11, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the kind words. I'm new at this, I'm sure I'm flubbing up something, so if you see that my fly is down, be sure to let me know. (I routinely ride a bicycle in traffic, and if I can handle that, I doubt any criticism could be worse. Tell it to me straight, doc.) My main early consideration is to do no harm. That's why I started with the Lebanon Countryside Trail; it didn't appear to intrude on anyone, and it filled an actual gap in other articles that mentioned the trail. As you can see from the May 13, 2006 version (I don't know how to hyperlink to a specific article version yet, other than maybe this ugly brute-force way), my use of the geolinks template in the article appears to be incorrect. Evidently a page should only have one instance of that template. So I will try the {{coor d}} template instead. I'm not sure of the best article layout to describe features along a trail (especially a long trail with lots of features to describe), and I haven't found any clear winners elsewhere on Wikipedia yet, not that my review is anything like comprehensive. Judging from the comments on User_talk:Tom_guyette, there seem to be some questions about whether bike trail articles are even valid Wikipedia articles. I think they are, but my point of view is hardly neutral on that.

Anyway, just a bit of rambling there. Yes, I did look at your user page to see whose articles I was tweaking, and I'm so new at Wikipedia that I didn't even know yet how to contact you. Please see my comments on the Little Miami Bike Trail talk page. I suggest moving the article content to Little Miami Scenic Trail (which I made initially as a redirect to Little Miami Bike Trail) and making Little Miami Bike Trail a redirect to Little Miami Scenic Trail, for the reasons I listed in the talk page (especially the disparity in Google search result counts). (I'm probably referring to this page-moving process much more awkwardly than a fluent Wikipedian would. I have some nerd credentials, but not yet in this domain.) Since I'm so new at this, I refrained from being bold and unilaterally moving it without asking the earlier author(s) first.

I downloaded a copy of Google Earth yesterday to give myself a convenient way to look up latitude, longitude coordinates of geographic objects (I guess using the WGS 84 datum), and now I would like to go around adding map links to articles about various objects I personally see when I ride my bike (for example, the Jeremiah Morrow Bridge---I had some trouble finding the exact location of the Golden Lamb Inn, however; I know it to within a block, but I think the geocoded position from the street address that the map sites return is a block or two too far south. Next time I ride to Lebanon I will have to note the exact position).

I have a dilletante's interest in mapping, because I have found route planning/navigation to be a surprisingly significant barrier to the smooth functioning of group bicycle rides. A typical recreational group ride on secondary roads may have from 25 to 75 named intersection turns, resulting in a level of complexity that baffles most people. This forces all participants on a group ride (on roads lacking painted marks) to ride within sight of someone who knows the way (for example, me), but the typical distribution of speed preferences is wide enough to make that difficult if the group is at all large. There are several possible solutions to the navigation problem, each with its own set of undesirable tradeoffs. Ultimately, GPS technology might solve the problem, but prices must come down, and there must be at least one cyclist who knows some nice routes and can put them into a format usable by all the others. That's the long-term goal driving my interest in mapping now. It's also just cool to click on a hyperlink and see where something like the Middletown Junction (which article I just updated with a geolink template) is on a map, and marvel at the satellite and aerial photos. Maps seem to make otherwise dry topics come alive in a way words alone rarely do, especially for things that are inherently geographical. Perhaps someday, someone will integrate Wikipedia into Google Earth, so users can fly around geographically and pop up articles on things by location. Then eventually it will all get integrated into ultra-miniaturized computers we can wear in contact lenses, to provide pop-up explanations on whatever we happen to look at in the real world, assuming the current situation is safe enough to permit the distraction, which the smart contact lenses must of course be smart enough to judge.

If we need to discuss anything at length, I'd find e-mail possibly more convenient, and if you agree, I think I have set my user preferences to allow me to receive e-mail. Teratornis 21:17, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

I recently stumbled across OpenStreetMap. This looks useful as a way to build up geographic information via the Wiki model. Teratornis 20:54, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

I see you've done some work on an article I began, Jeremiah Morrow Bridge. Good to see your contributions. PedanticallySpeaking 17:12, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

I gazed up in quasi-wonder at the Jeremiah Morrow Bridge from the Little Miami Scenic Trail, many times, before I knew its name. So it was natural for me to add some info and links about the Jeremiah Morrow Bridge from the Trail perspective. Thousands of people bicycle, inline skate, or walk under the bridge(s) each year, and it's possible they are more aware of the scale of the bridge(s) than the thousands of people who drive over them on I-71. I think bridges are cool. I noticed some of the bridge articles do not have coordinate templates yet. It's easy to locate the larger bridges in Google Earth, and get their coordinates with the method I described here. When I read an article about some fixed object or place, and it does not have coordinates yet, I just add them. It only takes a few minutes, and it improves the articles with those great coordinate template links. Teratornis 20:54, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

simple links

Hello. You really don't need to write [[Misnomer|misnomer]], as you did at quantum leap. Just writing [[misnomer]] suffices. Also, just writing [[hyphen]]ated, [[logic]]al, [[cat]]s, [[evolution]]ary, [[rabbi]]nical, [[Egypt]]ian, [[dogma]]tic, [[apocrypa]]l, etc., makes the whole word, not just the part in the brackets, appear as a clickable link, which links to the article whose title is in the brackets. The more complicated thing can be used for things like [[philosophy|philosophies]]. Michael Hardy 22:36, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

I'm aware of that. I make a habit of linking to canonical article names because I do a fair number of edits to computer software articles, in which many terms are regrettable overloads of common words such as find, cat, web, log, more, less, tar, gnu, zip, compress, patch, hash, head, tail, etc. (for more examples, see Category:Unix software); and even seemingly innocuous case variations in a link can refer to a different article than I intended. What's worse, new computer programs continuously appear, further eating into the namespace of ordinary terms. Thus there is no guarantee that case variations on an existing article will continue to point to the canonical article in the future. It's easier just to stay in the habit of linking to canonical article names, rather than have to check to see whether all the variations of case and so on link to what I want, and to keep checking forever. Besides, who suffers if the markup is a little longer than the theoretical minimum? Most Wikipedia visitors are merely readers rather than editors, and they never see the markup. — Teratornis 10:09, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

Hello. I added an image for your Wikipedia user:Teratornis page, mostly for practice as the image upload has taken some learning on my part and since it was a wiki task that we had discussed. You may also be interested in viewing my first image upload attempt in the article Brittany (dog). If this image edit on your page is unsatisfactory, certainly feel free to delete it or modify it. To view recent images uploaded, go to [1]| Gallery of new files. I will be glad to share any pointers on image editing. Marycontrary 21:09, 23 December 2006 (UTC)