Talk:Golden Rule (ethics)

message: I feel extremely glad to remedy WP's lack of a useful, practical article on the "golden rule."  ("Ethic of reciprocity," I think we can all agree, is not very  useful to the average citizen, although good on history and the academic side of the golden rule.) 
I note that my upper case "Golden Rule" title or pagename does not follow WP guidelines to usually use lower case, but I don't really care one little bit.  So I followed what WP currently does for this particular name.
For7thGen 04:16, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

message: Because of the deep division between users who autonumber their footnotes and users who autonumber their embedded external links (eLinks), I have decided to treat the latter as they would like to be treated, i.e., decided to give up autonumbering of the footnotes in this article until simultaneous autonumbering becomes possible.  So I'm adopting historical ordering of a bulleted list of footnotes in the Footnotes section and of the same footnotes in the text, so no maintenance is needed (other users just drop a new footnote at the end of the list and use the next available footnote number, or are free to use autonumbered eLinks, or whatever they wish to do).  Thus the order of appearance is currently 3 1 4 1b 2 in the text. 
However, these manually numbered footnotes (using ref_label and note_label templates) seem to be right on the edge of working -- for their backlinks in the Footnotes section, the numbers 1,3,4, and 5 work fine, but  I could not make a superscript 2 click-link appear, the  appeared instead.  Therefore I settled for , for this one case.  As I say, these templates may somehow be on the hairy edge of working.  I myself don't choose to report this at Bugzilla just yet, but anyone else may choose to do so, after confirming the problem to their own satisfaction.  For7thGen 15:12, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Dropped automatic numbering of footnotes

message: Shouldn't this be merged into "ethics of repriocity" or whatever it's called? They're the same subject, really.
-Alex, 12.220.157.93 00:49, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, I was thinking the same thing myself.  It's hard to imagine how they could be separate articles, especially in their current state. Scott Ritchie 08:55, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

text: Removed NPOV tag, following deletion of "Exceptions" section (see above). Added clean up tag, as the article looks like it needs it. Does the title need to be moved to "The Golden Rule" with the "Ethic of reciprocity" a redirect? The Golden Rule is the more common phrase. --nirvana2013 21:40, 10 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge 

message: I hope the main culprit was my footnote 2, and I believe I've changed it to attain the "professional tone expected of an encyclopedia."  I knew it fell short, but there are other things more important, so I gave it the old college try...  I believe the article itself always has been almost a model article in this regard, except for my currently unconventional footnote numbering, changed for good reason as discussed above.  If the WP community thinks they have to be numbered in order of appearance rather than in chronological order, okay, I'll do that and the footnotes will then be conventional.
I did look at the guideline for improving articles and found my article itself to be a model article.  I looked at the link on things to avoid, found no problem, not even my use of Encycopedia Brittanica as a source -- which I believe is frowned upon in our community but which I couldn't avoid.  How can one find any website which says that the term "golden rule" goes back 400 years?  A book could be found to use as a source, of course...  Well, I did avoid using that footnote (#3) by rewording the first sentence of the article, without spoiling the sentence totally.  Thus, the remaining footnotes are now in order of appearance as well as chronological order.
So I will need help to see what specific words or sentences in the article remain as culprits.  (I do realize that some people will object to an article on the golden rule that tells how to apply it.  If that is the problem, I'm sorry, we'll have to take it to the Wikipedia community to decide.)  But any other problem I'm sure I'll be able to agree to redo as needed.  And I very much liked the posted notice allowing me to change the article and to ask for help on the talk page, which I am now doing.
I just looked at the article's history, and I saw that removal of personal reference was called for.  So I did that.  Thanks for your help, Scott Ritchie.  And I checked your user page and contributions, to get acquainted.  I too would like to improve our voting system, such as by an instant runoff system, which both main parties should like.   For7thGen 11:48, 14 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Improvement of article to have "the formal tone expected"