User talk:Julian Cervantes

Hello Julian Cervantes! Welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. If you decide that you need help, check out Getting Help below, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking or using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. Finally, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field. Below are some useful links to facilitate your involvement. Happy editing! Waitak 03:09, 3 February 2007 (UTC) Getting started Wikipedia tutorial • The five pillars of Wikipedia How to: edit a page • upload an image Getting help Frequently asked questions Where to ask questions or make comments Request administrator attention Policies and guidelines Neutral point of view • Reliable sources Verifiability • Citing sources • No original research What Wikipedia is not • Biographies of living persons Manual of Style • Three-revert rule • Sock puppetry Copyrights • Fair use • Image use policy External links • Spam • Vandalism Deletion policy • Conflict of interest • Notability The community Build consensus • Resolving disputes Assume good faith • Civility • Etiquette No personal attacks • No legal threats Community Portal • Village pump Signpost • IRC channels • Mailing lists Things to do Be bold in editing • Help develop an article Pages needing attention • Peer review Join a WikiProject • Translating articles Cleaning up: General • Spam • Vandalism Miscellaneous Categories • Disambiguity • Stubs User pages • Talk pages Useful templates • Tools • User scripts

== Changes to List of Chinese dialects ==

Hi! Thanks for the changes that you made to List of Chinese dialects. Just wanted to explain why I've reverted your work. In a nutshell, while logically sensible, the changes make it a lot harder to see the structure of the list - that is, which dialects are in which category. If, for example, you look at the top of the category list in your version, you have to really look carefully to see where Gan stops and Guan starts. In the original, there's a nice, visible horizontal line there. Since the point of the article is the list, it makes sense to optimize the formatting for seeing the structure easily. Waitak 03:09, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Hi again. I'm not inclined to get into an edit war here... but I wanted to point out the policy of consensus. Wikipedia is a community, and when editors disagree about something, we talk about it. That's why I put a note on the talk page asking for feedback. The edits I made to your table were an effort to try to make the concept work, without throwing away the idea of a table, which it seems you favor. I'm not at all convinced that a table works here, but I'm trying to work with it - mostly to honor the effort that you've been putting in. My own preference would be to just revert it back to how it was, to be honest. It'd be great if you could more effort into working with the other people who have invested in this page, okay? Thanks. Waitak 02:04, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Hi, I didn't realise that there might be a disagreement there, I reduced the font size since it's already highlighted. I think it can be separated by colour or font size, but doesn't need both. Julian Cervantes 03:26, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Fair 'nuf. I think that a more subtle highlighting with color isn't inappropriate, but the font makes it clear that it is highlighting. This is pretty micro, but the things I don't like about the existing color highlighting (and tried to fix) are:

• The color's too dark, and makes it hard to read the entry, which ought to be the easiest entry to read, given that it's the header for the whole section
• There's nothing in particular about the color that tells the reader which color entries are more important than the others. In the section on Cantonese, for example, the reader has to work way too hard to figure out what the colors mean. (That's why I added the bold.)
• Using the table, the contents summary at the top is now missing all of the entries for the language groups, making it much less useful.

Take a look at List of plants with edible leaves as an example of hierarchy encoded in a table. I think that the large font works really well to give the reader a quick understanding of what the sections and their elements are. In short, a reader ought to be able to just glance at the table, and understand the hierarchy without having to remember what colors mean what. Waitak 04:19, 4 February 2007 (UTC)