User talk:TVerBeek Travel Guide
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IB concerns
Thanks for your comments, I agree with your reasoning here. I shall carry on editting and adding for the time being, and if such a time comes, I will protest a bit more loudly if IB does start messing things up. I guess I'm rather wary of a corporate entity being in ownership of such a community driven site like this - can't quite see how it will work beneficially for them without some serious changes to the site. But, as I said, I shall continue until these changes come! Tsandell 12:57, 26 July 2006 (EDT)
Warningbox
of course you are entitled to believe that a warningbox is not required, however there was significant uproar over the allegedly unjust arrest of a British Citizen, many British people are unaware of the US procedure, and it would be much better for all concerned if our citizens weren't being arrested for having slightly odd senses of humour! Dan, 30 July 2006, 19:34GMT
- That's not being arrested for having an odd sense of humor, it's for being incredibly stupid. I was given a stern lecture not to make jokes of that sort when I visited London ages ago (due to "the troubles" in Northern Ireland), so I know that most Brits of normal intelligence know better. The only difference is that now U.S. security agents take it just as seriously as you folks have been doing for the past several decades. We do not include warningboxes on Wikitravel articles to protect against incredible stupidity. - Todd VerBeek 18:38, 30 July 2006 (EDT)
- And what happens in case of a difference of opinion like this, I believe the warning is required, you do not, but I was under the impression that there was no hierarchy of command in wikitravel?
- Wikitravel operates by consensus. Whenever possible, we try to work out differences of opinion by discussing them and reaching an agreement about what to say that's reasonable and fair. If an agreement can't be reached through that process, and it's a situation where one person wants something and no one else agrees, the one person cannot expect to get his way. And by the way: I've been that person a couple times. - Todd VerBeek 08:09, 31 July 2006 (EDT)
Hypocrisy
Although I am not normally the type to disagree, it irritates me that you have written derogatory information regarding political freedoms in Iran, but refuse to allow any information about the immoral practices of your own government, perhaps this is right-wing totalitarianism, perhaps this website is not neutral after all and is controlled by Americans? dan
- Although there are quite a few editors from the US, Wikitravel's contributors live in many countries (including the two founders in Canada). I assure you that I am no jingoistic patriot; I've protested at the gate of the White House over some my government's moral failings. But I'm not about to turn a travel guide into a political screed against anyone's government. So unless a government's moral failings have a direct impact on travelers (like Iran's possible death sentence for homosexuals), I'm not going to support adding them to the article. While you might argue that detaining a feeble-minded person for making an unwise and disruptive joke about carrying a bomb onto a plane is "immoral", almost any government on the planet would probably do the same. So adding that warning to just the US article would be rather unfair, and adding such common sense advice to every country article would be absurd. - Todd VerBeek 08:09, 31 July 2006 (EDT)
Counties
I know you generally dislike the idea of using counties in Wikitravel, so if you have any opinion on the matter could you add your comments to the region discussion on Talk:Ohio? In the case of Ohio, which is a big and mostly flat state where the license plates display county and, in the opinion of this former resident of Northeast Ohio, counties are fairly well known, they seem to be an easy way to determine regional boundaries, but you've made strong arguments against them in the past that should probably be considered. Thanks! -- Ryan 18:01, 1 August 2006 (EDT)
Polish pronunciation and its perceived difficulty
By paroxytonic I meant that in Polish the accent is always on the penultimate syllable. My point is that the perceived difficulty may be different than the real difficulty. If you think Polish pronunciation is difficult, try for example Danish. And then try a tonal language, like Mandarin. Now this is difficult. Not mentioning clicks, which are not just difficult but impossible to master for an adult person.
Of course, there are no easy natural languages. There always is some challenge, but where would you how would you rate Polish pronunciation relative to Danish and Mandarin?
Polish has its difficulties but they are in the grammar, not in pronunciation. In Polish you can actually read the pronunciation from the spelling. You are correct that you need to know the letters and digraphs first, but that's the case with every language. However, in Polish it ends here because knowing how the letters and the digraphs are pronounced plus a few rules you can pronounce almost every word.
Believe me or not, you would be able to pronounce perfectly intelligible Polish instantly if I transcribed a word or phrase into English for you. Of course, you wouldn't be able to reproduce certain phonemes, but it wouldn't matter, as it would not introduce any lexical difference (like sh*t/sheet, sorry for the example). And it can be like that because Polish only has 6 vowels: a e i o u y as compared to twentysomething in RP English and the vowels are not reduced (they sound the same whether accented or not).
It's not trivial, but it's easy. Sorry for such a long tirade but I know that I'm right, It's just that I can't pronounce it :)
Edit: I've forgotten the signature. Here it is: CandleWithHare 19:48, 1 August 2006 (EDT)
Another edit: fixing my typos
- "Polish only as 6 vowels"... Is that per sentence?
- I am sorry if this is overly blunt, but if you really believe your flippant remark that "no Indo-European language is... a difficult language for a speaker of English," you don't know much about native anglophones' linguistic skills. Many of them have trouble with even Spanish. English is my native language, and even though I'm pretty darn good at Spanish, and I'm good enough at French pronunciation to not be sneered at by Parisian waiters, I can enunciate German and Dutch pretty well (even if I don't know what the words mean), I still find Polish pretty inscrutible. It's a whole different branch of Indo-European, after all. (Since you ask: Danish, being fairly Germanic, wasn't too intimidating, but I relied mostly on their English for the couple days I was in Copenhagen.) Maybe each Polish letter only has a single pronunciation, but they're apparently different from how they're pronounced in English (especially the letters we don't have). I've looked at Polish names and I've heard them pronounced, and the code is not obvious to my eyes and ears. (That and we're used to finding vowels every two or three letters.) Understand that because English is not very phonetic, we don't necessarily learn it phonetically, using whole-word recognition instead, so phonetic languages aren't inherently easy for us. I'm not asking for lessons; I have little chance of using them any time soon. And don't give me linguistic arguments proving that what I know from my own experience is wrong. I'm asking you to spare me the "I know better than you" attitude, because you do not. Are you aware that most anglophones think that English is an easy language? (They learned it when they were only a few years old, after all.) They're wrong. Any chance you might be? - Todd VerBeek 21:15, 1 August 2006 (EDT)
Ha!
This is why I love reading your comments on various posts - "...a certain class of Chinese masseuses will go the extra five-and-a-half inches..." - Andrew Haggard
Other destinations
Greetings. I notice that you dismantled the list of nine places I listed under 'Other destinations' on the UK article. I couldn't find a policy that states that there should only be one list of nine, and I orginally began this list in order to take the pressure off the 'list of nine' cites, where there seems to be a continuous battle for places. However, I can understand your concern that the establishment of a second list of nine may be stepping on a slippery slope. Still, though, I believe that some of the places listed are of sufficient interest to the traveler to merit a front page listing. So, taking into consideration your comments and with the view to saving the traveler time in locating these famous landmarks, I have re-written the list. I hope it is agreeable to you. I don't need a reply. If you agree, leave it. If not, then hit the edit button. Cheers. WindHorse 3 Aug 06
Hello from wikia
I have moved the discussion as suggested below. - Todd VerBeek 15:51, 4 August 2006 (EDT)
- Please see (and maybe move this more general community discussion to...) Wikitravel:Cooperating with World Wiki. Maj 15:24, 4 August 2006 (EDT)
- Should that be Wikitravel talk:Cooperating with World Wiki? ,-- Colin 15:31, 4 August 2006 (EDT)
- Yup, but I leave it to TVerBeek if he'd like to move/copy the above to that talk page... Maj 15:40, 4 August 2006 (EDT)
- Thanks Todd -- Colin 16:08, 4 August 2006 (EDT)
- FYI - I talked to Evan - and calmed down a bit. Sorry about that. What set me off was this: Acura at wikicars was under CC until today (when they changed it to GFDL), and also does not provide attribution to Wikipedia for the same article Acura. I went slightly crazy, seeing that wikicars had stolen the content, without attribution, and put it under CC with what looked like an attempt to fork wikipedia, which would really suck. Gil
Deleting my work??
Even though, it would be utmost polite not to delete my work on Lower-Saxony, but move it to where you think it belonged. Aside Grafschaft is the German word for County or Duchy, and some regions are counties, i.e. Grafschaft Bentheim, an Lower Saxon enclave in the Netherlands. This was just deleted as well. Although the dukes have -as in the UK nothing to say in the political affairs, the regions are still historically named after them. Then you might also find a way to have the Canadian Lunenburg distiguished from the German one and to have Nienburg removed for it is really not a great tourist attraction. Last, but not least, there are just 8 cities in Lower Saxony, most of which is rural, but has with 8.5 million inhabitants the same population as Sweden. Of the 8 cities there are maximally 5 tourist attractions (or do you like box like housing estates and shopping centres?), but towns like Hamelin (the pied piper) would not feature at all, if we would go by the city notation.
Cheers mate. Kris. How do I create an account then?
Russian region names
I took the names from Wikipedia, but have changed them as per WT policy. WindHorse 12 Aug 06
- I have made further changes. Please have a look, and let me know if there is still anything outstanding. Otherwise, no need for a reply. Thanks. WindHorse 12 Aug 06
Where's VerBeek?
You can be a crusty pain in the butt sometimes, but I miss ya. I believe you would be the litmus test for my idea to break Bermuda into parish articles and am holding off pending your return. There was a report of a VerBeek sighting in Montana, but later it was corrected to be Elvis. I'm sure you're "enjoying the journey"(tm) wherever you are. OldPine 11:40, 2 September 2006 (EDT)
When you get a second
Could you send me an email at evan@wikitravel.org? I'd like to add you to the admins mailing list, but I can't do that because you gave a fake email address when registering for Wikitravel (shock!). --Evan 10:07, 12 September 2006 (EDT)
