User talk:Arensb

By the way, have I met you? I'm assuming you're a Non-Prophets listener, do you show up in the chat room? Great job on your contributions so far, by the way. -- Kazim 11:30, 18 July 2006 (MST)

I doubt it. I've never been to Austin (though if I'm ever there, I'd love to stop by Threadgill's and meet y'all). I ran across the Non-Prophets and Atheist Experience podcasts by chance while looking for something to listen to while doing yard work.

And no, I haven't contributed to the chat room. They tend to turn into major time sinks, unfortunately. --Arensb 11:41, 18 July 2006 (MST)

Famous atheists link fix

Thanks for catching the redlink I caused on the Main Page when I deleted the "Famous atheists" category. I recategorized the relevant articles but forgot to check "What links here". (I didn't think there was a good reason to have a separate category for "famous" atheists since if an atheist isn't famous in some sense, they really wouldn't warrant an article here.) - dcljr 00:00, 27 March 2007 (CDT)

Nae problem. I figured that was what had happened. --Arensb 08:29, 27 March 2007 (CDT)

Status and admin stuff

I've upgraded your permissions to sysop and bureaucrat. It seemed reasonable, but let me know if there's a problem with that. Also - drop me an e-mail when you canSans Deity 13:03, 6 April 2007 (CDT)

Sysop

Welcome to The Inner Circle. <g> I see Matt has made you a sysop. I've added an entry to Iron Chariots Wiki:Administrators for you. You can describe yourself briefly there, if you wish. - dcljr 17:33, 17 April 2007 (CDT)

One syllable?

Regarding the pronunciation of your name, how do you make it one syllable? I would have thought "Eh-rensb" (hence, two syllables). What is the appropriate vowel sound? So it rhymes with "farms" or "cairns"? - dcljr 17:44, 17 April 2007 (CDT)

Gah. You're right. (Counting syllables is easy in Russian and French; it's much harder in English.)

As for the initial A, the easy answer is that I don't really care as long as you get all the letters in the right order. The fuller answer is that in English I pronounce it as in "air" or "cairns", and in other languages I pronounce it as in "father".

Hopefully this brings some much-needed confusion to this issue. --Arensb 23:06, 17 April 2007 (CDT)

Category sortkey question

You asked about my categorization of Religion using the "*" sortkey. It is customary on Wikipedia to force articles having the same name as a category to be listed first among articles in that category. The "*" sortkey does this (as does a sortkey starting with a space, which some people prefer). I've just carried that convention over to this wiki. We don't have to do it that way, if you want to lobby for a different style. - dcljr 17:40, 8 May 2007 (CDT)

Thanks. I suspected as much, but wanted to check. I'm not as well-versed in either MediaWiki or Wikipedia lore as I'd like to be. --Arensb 17:52, 8 May 2007 (CDT)

More categorization issues

I don't agree with your decision to remove Category:People from articles already in one of its subcats, such as Category:Atheists. I know there is a big push on Wikipedia to avoid categorization into "adjacent" categories (i.e., a category and its immediate parent), but if a reader doesn't already know whether a given person is an atheist, they will have a harder time finding the article for that person using our category structure. Besides, keeping atheists separate from everyone else just don't feel right.... OTOH, thanks for adding the last-name sortkeys. BTW, did you notice my other comment above? You haven't edited Project:Administrators, so I wasn't sure. - dcljr 14:46, 10 May 2007 (CDT)

I figured the whole reason for having categories within categories was to put articles in the most specific categories. You're right that there's a certain logic in putting articles in both a generic and a specific category, but there ought to be some guidelines as to how to do it: Douglas Adams goes in Category:Atheists because he's an atheist, and you could argue that he goes in Category:People because he's a celebrity. But what about Richard Dawkins, who is well-known for being an atheist?

I suppose the guiding principle should be to put articles in those categories where they'll do the most good, but I don't know how to turn that into a set of editorial do's and don'ts.

Oh, and I haven't updated my line in Project:Administrators because I haven't come up with a pithy one-liner with which to summarize the totality of my life and relevant experience.

--Arensb 17:01, 10 May 2007 (CDT)

We can discuss this at Project talk:Categorization if you think other people should weigh in on this issue. (Which reminds me... it's still hard to get the attention of a lot of editors at once, since the wiki is relatively low-traffic, and discussion of the wiki as a whole has been going on mostly off-wiki, in the forum(s). In particular, see this post of mine.) - dcljr 14:59, 10 May 2007 (CDT)

One of these days, I should probably sign up for the forum. --Arensb 17:01, 10 May 2007 (CDT)