User talk:Chad A. Woodburn

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Welcome to the Wikipedia[edit]

Here are some links I thought useful:

Feel free to contact me personally with any questions you might have. The Wikipedia:Village pump is also a good place to go for quick answers to general questions. You can sign your name by typing 4 tildes, like this: ~~~~.

Be Bold!

[[User:Sam Spade|Thomas Jefferson for President]] 02:19, 3 Nov 2004 (UTC)

12 days of Christmas[edit]

Dear Mr. Woodburn: I have been entering holidays to the calendar pages. I have removed the "third day of Christmas" etc. entries because AFAIKnew there are only 2, until someone put a link to Twelve Days of Christmas. However, the list appears off-set: 27 Dec. is listed as "second day of Christmas", while it should be third: the Twelvetide page says the count starts at 25 December, and also (outside Britain) 26 December is widely known as the second Christmas day. One source (Oxford Book of Days at 6 Jan., p.21) tells me that in some countries (Sweden mentioned) 6 Jan. is called the 13th day. I'm not sure if and on what day inclusive counting would apply; anyway, there are 12 days BETWEEN (first) Christmas day and Epiphany. So the names "nth day of Christmas" are very confusing. Please clarify. Tom Peters 13:08, 30 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Chad - About your unicode corrections to "Saint"[edit]

Hi Chad,

For some reason I can't read the changes you made, they now appear as little squares. I could read them before. Any Suggestions? Phiddipus 18:09, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)

The Greek for the words in question includes not only a rough breathing, but also a grave accent. In order to represent this combination in Unicode, one must use the Greek extended section of Unicode. Those numbers extend from 7936 to 8190 (of course, one places these numbers between the ampersand ("&") and the pound sign ("#") and then place a semicolon after the number. Also, another character was the upsilon with a circumflex. For you to see these letters with the proper accents and breathing marks, your browser must be fully Unicode compliant. If you see the little squares, it means that your browser is not fully Unicode compliant. (I just bought the latest version of GoLive for doing web pages, and amazingly this Adobe product is NOT Unicode compliant and also represents the Unicode as little squares too! Yet I have other programs by dinky little no-name companies that are fully Unicode compliant.) My browser (Safari) has no problem with the "upper" Unicode characters. Yours obviously does. I still assume that all the major browsers in their current versions are fully compliant with Unicode. As for what to do, perhaps you need to update your browser. I suspect that you probably use MS Explorer. Is that right? Do you have the latest version? If so, I'd like to know. I don't have the latest Explorer version because Microsoft stopped supporting IE for the Macintosh, because Apple came out with Safari, its own browser for Macintoshes that is vastly superior to IE. (However, the issue is not that I use a Macintosh and you use a different platform, because Unicode is a platform-independent system.) PLEASE, let me know what kind of browser you have, if indeed you have the latest version of it. I would hate to think that I have been gleefully changing Greek words to these "Greek Extended" Unicode numbers to properly represent the Greek characters, only to cause the majority of readers to see little boxes. Shalom! Chad A. Woodburn 20:23 EST, Dec. 14, 2004.

Out of curiosity, I just downloaded the new Netscape browser. It displays the Unicode characters correctly. --Chad

Hi Chad,

I have Internet explorer 6.0.2900.2180. I am checking to see if there is a more up to date version.Phiddipus 13:51, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Hi Chad, What’s baffling me is that I have the newest IE browser and I also have Lucida Sans Unicode, MS Ariel Unicode, and Aristarcoj and still I can’t see the characters. You might consider that all the aspiration marks and so forth were designed for people reading Classical and Biblical Greek, granted, the texts in question might be written that way because they were written back then, but we aren’t ancient Greeks and the Wikipedia is written for modern men, so why not use Modern Greek. Phiddipus 21:52, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Christian views of Hanukkah[edit]

Apparently, you wrote the original text in 2004. Do you have any source books or articles to cite? They deleted this, claiming

I am unaware of any Christian denomination having a specific policy towards the religious festivals of other faiths,
The "Christian" view of Hanukkah is like the "Dutch" view of Mount Kilimanjaro: not something to have an article about,
and a copyright violation (since proved wrong).

--William Allen Simpson 21:08, 23 May 2006 (UTC) watching here for reply[reply]

Wikipedia -- and any encyclopedia for that matter -- is supposed to reflect what IS not what certain people think SHOULD BE. The comments that argued against the Christian view of Hanukkah are a clear violation of this. First, the view that I am unaware of any Christian denomination having a specific policy towards the religious festivals of other faiths misses the whole point. It is not that these Christians have a specific policy towards the religious festivals of OTHER faiths; it is their policy and practice toward a festival that is a part of THEIR OWN faith. They celebrate Hanukkah and the other Feasts of Lev. 23, because they are part and parcel of their own religion. Second, it really doesn't matter whether others think they should or not. The issue is, they do celebrate it; they do have a view about it; it is something that is a large part of their religious view. Therefore it should most definitely have an article about it.

The fact that so many are unaware that many Christians do indeed celebrate Hanukkah is a reflection frankly of their own provincialism. Hanukkah is mentioned in the New Testament (not by the name Hanukkah, but it is still mentioned). Furthermore, a large number of Christians celebrate all seven of the feasts of Israel mentioned in Lev. 23, including the other feast: Purim. Since early Christianity was completely Jewish, it is not surprising that all the feasts of Israel continued to be celebrated by them. This practice did indeed dissipate as Christianity became more and more Hellenized and Latinized.

Throughout the ages many Christian theologians have seen a continuity between the feasts of Lev. 23 and the Christian redemptive / prophetic history. Thus, Christians celebrate Passover (also known by them as Good Friday), they celebrate First Fruits (also known as Resurrection Sunday or Easter), they celebrate Pentecost. It is widely held by them that the feast of trumpets is tied into the Second Coming, along with Yom Kippur and Tabernacles.

The idea that "The 'Christian' view of Hanukkah is like the 'Dutch' view of Mount Kilimanjaro" is quite parochial and not really analogous. Regardless of whether the Orthodox Jewish community likes it or not, many Christians celebrate Hanukkah. If a large community of Dutch people who had formerly lived in Tanzania held Mount Kilimanjaro as a sacred mountain, such would indeed be "something to have an article about".

I will rework the article extensively, find an overabundance of documentation on subject, and repost it if I am able, once I have shown incontestably that there are indeed significant "Christian views of Hanukkah".

Sincerely,

--Chad A. Woodburn 7:40 AM EDT, May 29, 2006.