User talk:Lightmouse

Date links

You removed date links from Maurice Couve de Murville citing wp:context. I see from this talk page that you have been asked before not to do this. I am asking you again: please do not do this! Scolaire 08:35, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

Could we at least agree that there is no need to link 'February'? Lightmouse 11:43, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

I also find this a bit annoying (in my case at reinforced concrete). In the absence of any policy prohibiting single-year links, can I ask you to hold fire until it has been discussed a bit more at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)? -- Kvetner 11:22, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

My intention is to improve articles, certainly not to annoy you. Thanks for taking it there. I look forward to seeing the debate there. Lightmouse 13:02, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

Indisciminate mass year-delinking is forbidden, just like other stylistic-warring campaigns (e.g. BC/AD vs BCE/CE or "American" spelling versus "British" spelling). Please cease and desist, in the lack of a consensus in your favour. I don't mean to sound unpleasant, but if you persist you are liable to be blocked -- even permanently.
-- Lonewolf BC 21:44, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

This is your last warning about your indiscriminate mass de-linking of year-alone dates.
I am sorry to see that you have returned to this activity. Stop these edits now, and desist from them them unless you managed to get consensus to make them. The language at Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers) remains the same, and you do not even appear in its talk-page history between 12 June and now. It therefore seems that you have not even tried to get consensus for these edits, but instead have just waited a month (or perhaps less, depending on how long ago you resumed) and then begun them again, hoping that it would be overlooked. Don't expect to be warned about this again.
-- Lonewolf BC 22:45, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

My intention is to improve articles. You will notice that before I edited them, the articles had stupid links to days of the week like Tuesday or to months like June. Alternatively, there were other problems with the articles that I fixed.

You have not mentioned an article. Pick one and we can debate it. A good debating question would be:

'Has the article been improved?'

Lightmouse 16:20, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

I'm not questioning your intentions, nor your de-linking of months and of days-of-the-week. Those are not the issue, and you've been given no reasonable cause to suppose that I think they are. Nor it this an issue of any one particular article. The issue is your indiscriminate de-linking of years across many articles, and the standing is that you need consensus to before you may make such edits. Mixing them with other kinds of edits does not affect this; if anything, it makes them more troublesome. Whether year-delinking improves articles or not is precisely the crucial question upon whose answer a consensus would need to be achieved. You are welcome to try; Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers) is the place to do it. I frankly think that you would be wasting your time, given that the matter has been argued to death in the past, without being resolved beyond that there is no consensus (and some quite strong opinion in both directions).
For your own sake, and the sake of the peace of Wikipedia, please do not continue on the path which Bobblewik trod to his woe -- the path of stubbornly carrying on with these edits regardless of opposition and lack of consensus. No one needs the aggravation. -- Lonewolf BC 17:27, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

kbps vs kbit/s

You've changed your name and you've changed all of the kbps on the Digital Audio Broadcasting page to kbit/s. I asked you not to do this on your talk page when you were called Editore99, but you didn't see fit to reply, and now you've done it again, so I will repeat what I said then:

"I've just changed your changes on the DAB page back to 'kbps' but with a link to the kbps page. The reason I did it was because if you see the units for 1000 or 1 million bits per second you invariably see kbps or Mbps used - e.g. on an advert for a broadband package or in the Properties in a media player - and you never see kbit/s. I would therefore argue that it is more useful for a layman to see kbps rather than kbit/s, because they may have come across this term before, whereas they won't have seen kbit/s used.

In the literature, e.g. for DSP, audio coding, digital communications etc, kbps and Mbps are very widely used as well - probably about 50/50 in my experience - so whether someone uses kbit/s or kbps is down to personal preference rather than being right or wrong, IMO. If you do change kbps to kbit/s, could you at least put it in a link to the kbps page?"

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 82.3.224.201 (talk • contribs) 10:56, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

Part of the problem with the bps/Bps/BPS formats is that they are ambiguous as to bits and bytes. The 'b' and 'B' are supposed to disambiguate but editors are not reliable enough. You can see: 'KBPS', 'kb' and 'b/s'. It is also inconsistent with the kilobit format i.e. 'kbit'.

With kbit and kbyte, there is one unambiguous form. It can be used with or without division by seconds i.e. kbit becomes kbit/s. I presume that is why it dominates Wikipedia pages for 'kilobit' and 'kilobit per second'.

I don't believe that anyone is confused by the format 'kbit' or 'kbit/s'. So I do not see what value a link would add. Furthermore, a link to 'kb' and 'kbps' gets redirected. Take a look.

Since this is of general interest, perhaps it should be discussed on the wp:mosnum talk page? Lightmouse 16:20, 13 July 2007 (UTC)