User talk:Therequiembellishere

Muggle's Guide
Good to see that we have a new editor, and while I understand the idea of "being bold", might I suggest that perhaps you have misunderstood part of the idea?

This is intended as a textbook. The "Questions" may well be answered already; but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be there. They are there for a reason -- to hopefully inspire thought in the student.

Specifically: The questions under Ron's name are all answered, or many of them. Should they be yanked? No, because if you just skim the text you'll miss the answers; answering the questions sort of requires that you either go back and read the text more thoroughly, or that you already have an encyclopedic knowledge of the series.

Hacking out an entire section with the one-word comment "Bull" is not helpful. You may disagree; feel free to post a contrarian opinion. The Discussion page on that particular article does have some comments about that topic already, IIRC. But the fact that the opinion was placed there means that someone feels it is valid, or at least worth consideration.

Perhaps a good idea would be to consider whose toes you might be stepping on before you get too happy with the deletions. Chazz (talk) 20:31, 12 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Also, don't take my actions the wrong way. I have no problem with how you started (by adding useful stuff to a good number of pages), and some of MG's pages might indeed need a bit of clean-up; i just put back a few parts that aren't yet decreasing the quality of those pages. When we have a good-enough quality overall, we can cut off the lesser parts. Looking forward to seeing you in action. And do have fun editing. -- Jokes Free4Me 07:30, 13 April 2007 (UTC)


 * PS If you forget about something you know you edited, you can use the "my Contributions" link to see if it's in there. Also, maybe you could find it useful to look into using the "my WatchList" feature. ;) -- Jokes Free4Me 07:41, 13 April 2007 (UTC)


 * MG = Muggles' Guide, the subject of our discussion. :D -- Jokes Free4Me 17:41, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

Dates
I see you've gone and put a bunch of dates in for the dates people did things at Hogwarts. I'm going to suggest that you take those out... because while they are accurate, and we have got dates in the Timelines, that's the only place we have them. And since dates are not actually mentioned in most of the books, it makes a heck of a lot more sense for our readers if the years given in our articles are listed as relative to the books, rather than to the outside world. For instance – Kettleburn was Dangerous Creatures teacher until June 1993, right? But that doesn't make it obvious that he left at the end of book 2. We've been basically following the same rule throughout... actual calendar dates are not at all important to the series, but dates relative to the books themselves are, so we leave it at "first year" rather than "1991-1992". Chazz (talk) 21:43, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Granted my reasoning is a little... awkward, but as I got raked over the coals for it in my early days, I feel a little sensitive about it... To restate: You know and I know that Harry's first year starts September 1991, yes? But to the naïve reader, that is not obvious; it does not become apparent until the second book, what year it actually is supposed to be. (And even there, our supposition is wrong; Harry's parents were, by that logic, murdered on Hallowe'en 1981, which is a Saturday, so November 1, the first day in the first book, ought to be a Sunday, yet the book quite clearly states that it is a Tuesday.) JKR plays fast and loose with the dates in a number of other places; most importantly, school always starts on September 2, the Hogwarts Express rolls on September 1, and it seems that September 2 is at least always a week day, and a disproportionate number of times it is a Monday. GoF is at least consistent within itself as to the way days of the week and days of the month line up, but it is not consistent with 1994 / 1995. And I could go on for hours... but the important thing is this: The fact that book 1 largely falls in 1991 and 1992 is not important to the reader. The fact that it is Harry's first year at Hogwarts is important. So with the exception of the timelines, where the structure of the timeline generator forces us to put dates on things, the actual physical dates are largely unimportant.
 * Matt and I had a lot of words about this at one point; I think some part of our debate is still on the Discussion tab of the Timelines page. Chazz (talk) 07:17, 10 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Actually... I can do that reversion for you. Hope you don't mind too much if I do that... Chazz (talk) 07:18, 10 May 2007 (UTC)