User talk:Michael Richters

Welcome!

Hello, Michael Richters, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome!

Djegan 16:06, 10 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Dance capitalization[edit]

I have also seen this kind of capitalization used a lot, especially on web pages made by people who are not experts at language uses - studios, organisations etc. The field of budo is similar, where lots of people write Judo, Aikido, Karate, Dogi, Dojo, Ukemi, Keiko without being able to give a good explanation why they should be. Some errors are common - to me, this looks like a such. However, this question is not something for you and me to decide! and so, this kind of discussion is better held at more general talk pages where others can find. I am not sure if there is any more general talk page for dance related stuff, or if the talk page of one/some of the articles is the place. We'll find out. // Habj 18:54, 13 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The references that I produced to support my argument that the name "Lindy Hop" is a proper noun were all written by people who are very careful and skilled with language. I have only seen the term written as "lindy hop" when the author is otherwise lazy with punctuation, spelling, etc. If you have any evidence for your argument that the term is used mainly as a common noun, it would be nice if you could contribute it to the discussion that is now taking place on WikiProject_Dance. --Michael Richters 04:34, 14 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hello and welcome. If you're interested in the history of lindy hop and other swing dances, you may also be interested in the range of approaches to capitalisation in a few academic works on the topic. Using the books and articles I have at hand, here are a few:

Stearns, Marshall, and Jean Stearns. Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance. 3rd ed. New York: Da Capo Press, 1994. (perhaps the most influential reference to jazz and African American vernacular dance, used by recreationists of the 80s like Lennart Westerlund). Stearns and Stearns use 'Lindy'.

Malone, Jacqui. Steppin' on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996. (another key work). Malone uses 'lindy hop', though she does capitalise dances like the Charleston (perhaps for their reference to the place).

Hazzard-Gordon, Katrina. Jookin': The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990. Hazzard-Gordon uses 'lindy hop'.

...and so on and so on. There are as many variations as their are authors and historians, it seems. It's an interesting issue, and I'm sure that if you asked someone like Frankie Manning or Sugar Sullivan or Norma Miller whether the written version of lindy was capitalised or not, they'd probably puff our their cheeks and tell you to "just dance it". As a vernacular dance - a folk dance - it has something of the oral history in it, particularly when you keep in mind that it developed in one of the poorest parts of New York, in one of the poorest communities of the day, where not everyone went to school, let lone was literate enough to query whether it should be 'lindy' or 'Lindy'.

If you're interested in archival sources from the period, you might try places like this: http://memory.loc.gov/learn/features/timeline/progress/prohib/rent.html, which provides a scanned copy of an original document from the 1930s (though I'm not sure it uses the term lindy hop). Keep in mind, though, that these sorts of materials were usually written by white observers, rather than by members of the community in which lindy developed, and so you will be seeing elements of cultural bias in these sorts of documents.

You might also be interested in participating in discussions on articles such as the capitalization one.

Welcome to wikipedia ! PlainJane 06:18, 21 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hey Michael, in case you don't have Lindy Hop watchlisted (I'm almost sure you do): the dance capitalization issue has RE-opened, but is finally being taken up (hopefully only) on the Wikiproject Dance page here. Please weigh in, I very much appreciated your previous comments on it.--Will.i.am 02:42, 11 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

30 January not required as a style[edit]

Hi. First of all, welcome to Wikipedia. I noticed your changes to the dating format in the Gregorian Calendar article from "January 30" to "30 January," along with several other date changes. Your edit summary for the change was (standardized date formatting, except "Friday 13"). I'm not going to say what you did was wrong, but it may have been unnecessary, and perhaps in another article could be seen as provocative.

The date "30 January" is certainly acceptable and used both in the United States and around the world, but according to the manual of style, "either format is acceptable" unless the article is aimed at a particular nation in which the style is clearly one and not the other (also see this article on national varieties of English) . If the 30 January format is standard now for the entire world, including the U.S., and the other is now unacceptable (and this would be news to me) perhaps your edit summary should have also read "standardiSed" with an "s", to bring it in line with the Queen's English. - Nhprman ^List 21:40, 15 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

My reason for the change was that the article used dates inconsistently. In at least one case, both styles ("30 January" and "January 30") were used in the same paragraph. I changed all instances of the the less frequently occurring style to match the style predominant in the article. I did not mean to imply that my change was in order to conform any particular style, thus the "z" was more appropriate. (I only noticed the inconsistency because my date preference was not set. Anyone who has taken the trouble to set this preference will notice no visible change in the formatting of the article.) --Michael Richters 21:49, 15 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That explains it quite well. Thank you. - Nhprman ^List 00:41, 17 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Aerial rewrite[edit]

Hey Michael, I noticed on here that you might be planning some major revisions to the Aerial article. I'm in the process of sending many dance move articles over to the Swing Dancing module of Wikibooks, especially those articles which (1) Don't cite any sources, and (2) are generally just a How-To guide. A lot of it's good information, but not really appropriate for an encyclopedia, so the Swing Dancing manual is a good repository for it.

Unfortunately, the current Aerial article for the most part and reads like a How-To guide. There are a couple of options here:

I transwiki the whole article to Wikibooks, you essentially would have to recreate the page from scratch.
I just take the instructional sounding text, and leave you ... the history section.
I can leave you anything else you think you'll need for the article (a list of the aerial names? any other sections, the whole thing?).

Any preference?--Will.i.am 23:41, 19 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]