User talk:Michael Geldorp

Welcome!

Welcome to the Citizendium! We hope you will contribute boldly and well. Here are pointers for a quick start. You'll probably want to know how to get started as an author. Just look at CZ:Getting Started for other helpful "startup" links, and CZ:Home for the top menu of community pages. Be sure to stay abreast of events via the Citizendium-L (broadcast) mailing list (do join!) and the blog. Please also join the workgroup mailing list(s) that concern your particular interests. You can test out editing in the sandbox if you'd like. If you need help to get going, the forums is one option. That's also where we discuss policy and proposals. You can ask any constable for help, too. Me, for instance! Just put a note on their "talk" page. Again, welcome and have fun! D. Matt Innis 20:14, 23 May 2008 (CDT)

Thank you for the welcome message. I hope to get caught up reading the various help pages soon and begin contributing. --Michael Geldorp 12:46, 25 May 2008 (CDT)

A few tips

Hi, nice article on Alpheratz. A few tips: i) Don't add workgrounp, etc categories manually - they are added automatically based on data in the metadata. ii) You couldn't have known this, but we are in the process of renaming many of the constellation articles for disambiguation purposes. If you look at Constellations, in the source of the table, you'll see the new (permanent) names. While Andromeda etc do work at the moment (via redirects), they may not continue to do so as we get disambiguation here on CZ sorted out. Thanks! J. Noel Chiappa 10:02, 27 May 2008 (CDT)

Thanks for the tips. As far as the constellation pagenames go, I was actually wondering why Andromeda (constellation) redirected to Andromeda and not vice versa. I will make sure to keep an eye on this in future. On a somewhat related note (concerning redirects etc.) could you please have a look at my question here. Thanks, --Michael Geldorp 10:13, 27 May 2008 (CDT)

That's because eventually the article's going to be moved from Andromeda to Andromeda (constellation), and the redirect is to keep everything working while we do the update incrementally; e.g. constellations has already been modified to point to the new name.

I'll go look at the {{NGC 224]] thing now. J. Noel Chiappa 10:30, 27 May 2008 (CDT)

Country vs. Government nomenclature

You may or may not be following the discussion, right now on the talk page at United States Department of Defense, of working out a number of naming conventions.

I happen to agree with you about "United States of America" versus "United States", although at least one individual has been arguing against that. Where you made that change, did you notice "United States government"?

That has several ramifications on which I'd welcome comments, probably on the page where most of the discussion is located at the moment. It's important, I think, to distinguish between a country (geographic, demographic, etc.) and the people that are in charge of the country. The latter is an awkward phrasing, because "government" and "administration" have opposite meanings in various countries, referring variously to the civil service or the political leadership.

Thinking about usage, I lean in the direction of disambiguation in the direction of things like "United States Government" (see Department of Defense as a disambiguation example), because in common usage, even internationally, "USG" (U.S. Government) is widely used on official documents. Just from a CZ usability standpoint, there has to be a way that someone can try to go to a page that is explicitly or implicitly United States of America, and, perhaps through redirects or disambiguation, get to where they need to be. Howard C. Berkowitz 11:25, 31 May 2008 (CDT)