Those cats needed waxing

[ritaxis]

I wish I understood the Wikipedia talk pages better.  I wanted to put on the discussion page a plea to clean up the article about Szlachta (Polish nobility and for some reason notes about other regional nobilities that don't have that name and whose historical relationship is not clarified by the article).  It hops around in chronology and whole sections of it talk about historical progression but do not have any dates or understandable references to events in other paragraphs so they can be easily put into the same timeline.  I'll have to re-read it several times I think to have gotten anything from it.

The part where it talks about the russification of Lithuania, for example, can only be dated by following links to entirely other articles.  How hard would it be to throw a date in there? 

Meanwhile, the epithets given to kings never ceases to amuse me.  You know how humorous writers tend to give kings unflattering epithets?  That's because real kings tend to have unflattering epithets.  There's a Mieszko Tanglefoot and a Władisłav Elbow-high.  And apparently "ell" comes from "elbow," but the French ell is 137 centimeters long and the Danish one is only 64 centimeters long.  And an ell-wand is a standardized stick for measuring an ell, and what does that say about Elrond?  Doesn't this mean we've been portraying him all wrong?

Anyway, through waxing all those cats I think I've figured out where to begin.  Yanek is twenty, Sascha is sixteen, and the bad stuff is going to happen in a few months.

Comments

[redbird]

That talk page appears to, in large part, be arguments over whether things are Polish or German. Which gets a depressed sigh from some of us (I spent far too long looking at edit wars to do with Copernicus, which came down to that). I say "appears to" because chunks of it are in what I assume is Polish, or in German.

As for "how hard would it be to throw a date in there," I suspect the answer is "too much trouble once you've gone to the other article and found the information." The page is noted as having failed "good article" status for lack of references; many people don't find the dates as interesting as whatever their specific interest is.

[zeborah]

If you want to put a note on the discussion page, first click on “discussion” then next to “edit" There's a +. click that, and you can say what you like. How it's the prioritised by the people who are most active in editing that page is another matter...