Talk:Resilient control systems/Archives/2014

Questions
Does the reference in the introduction really make sense? Shouldn't that be somewhere else? -- Wrigjl —Preceding undated comment added 05:53, 3 July 2009‎.

Close paraphrasing
Since this article was put up for an AFD it has been substantially rewritten, however I think it may still be too closely paraphrased to free of copyright concerns. The original document
 * C.G. Rieger, D.I. Gertman, M.A. McQueen, Resilient Control Systems: Next Generation Design Research, 2nd IEEE Conference on Human System Interaction, Catania, Italy, May, 2009
 * Which is online at:
 * But it a carries a caveat "This is a preprint of a paper intended for publication in a journal or proceedings. Since changes may be made before publication, this preprint should not be cited or reproduced without permission of the author."

Now let us assume that the document is under a PD licence from the U.S. Government. It is being put forward that it has been sufficiently rewritten that we no longer need to display attribution. Some editors (none of whom have commented at the AFD) are convinced that if a document is derived from an initial copy then it is a derived work and if it were under standard copyright they would argue that the derived work was a copyright violation unless the original creator give permission. As this is a PD document I do not think that does not applys, but such editors would say we have a moral obligation to place a general attribution on this work no matter how much it changes.

I have a more practical concern WP:PLAGARISM say

My concern is that because this started off as a copy, the rewrite has not altered the structure of the article and as such it is still a close paraphrased article that needs general attribution and inline citations to the original article. I will give three obvious examples

In other words the structure of the Wikipedia article is nearly identical to the original paper.


 * External Papers References


 * Current internal references

All but the last reference in the original paper are in the rewrite in the same order as in the original paper.

Now for a diff between [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Resilient_control_systems&action=historysubmit&diff=461988964&oldid=460977983 Revision as of 17:57, 16 November 2011 Jojalozzoand and Revision as of 20:03, 22 November 2011 Mild Bill Hiccup]

There a lot more than this but I have pulled out an obvious one to make the point:

Given that the overall structure of the paper has been kept after the recent edit and the structure of the sentence and their placing in the sample paragraph I pulled out has not been dramatically altered, I conclude that although the article is no longer a direct copy of the original it is still too close to the original not to need Attribution in the References section and inline citations to the original source for all of the text copied and then recently changed.

As there are more experienced editor than I who deal with issues like this I will place a request on Copyright problems so that an informed editor can give a second opinion. -- PBS (talk) 00:40, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

Concerning tone
I hate to raise further debate on the page after it's successfully survived and AfD debate already, and especially as Crieger went through so much trouble to respond to concerns about the content (it's nice when AfD leads to an improved article instead of just acrimony), but I think there are still some issues here. Specifically, the language employed is not terribly accessible and lacks encylopedic tone. Even coming from a field of academia where such an overly-wrought and self-referential style is employed, there were several statements in there that I had to read twice to parse correctly. I think for the average Wikipedia user it would be difficult to determine what this article is about. There are contextual uses of terminology which are likely to confuse readers who are not operating from within the same context as the author. The first sentence is an excellent example: "Resilient Control Systems extend the evolving definition of resilience for critical infrastructure to the nervous system that provides the industrial applications." Now, I can gather by the context provided by the reference to the Patriot Act in the next sentence, that this refers to theory on preserving critical physical infrastructure in the event of threatening circumstances, and that the "nervous system" involved is a reference to the backbone of information technology and institutions which regulates this infrastructure. However, there must a plainer, more obvious and less context-dependent way to write this, and using metaphors which rely on terms which have a much more common plain-face interpretation is the wrong approach for Wikipedia. Unfortunately, much of the content of this article is like that, using terminology which is unwieldy in the context of providing information to as many users as possible regardless of their previous familiarity with the subject matter -- which is where the language employed in Wikipedia articles should focus.

There are a number of reasons why Wikipedia policy often advises against researchers contributing articles connected to their professional work and being too close to the subject matter is one of the big ones. Usually this manifests itself in the author being unable to keep perspective or work in conjunction with other editors; neither of these is the case with Crieger, obviously, as he has worked hard to address past complaints. However, he has made the mistake of writing this page very much in the same language as he would if providing a report to others in his field who understand the context of his references, who have worked with and share that academic/bureaucratic dialect, if you will, as applied to a very specific field -- and to most people outside of that narrow context, I think this article is likely to read as awkward at best and, for a great many others, as absolute word soup. Wikipedia articles should not sound like they were taken verbatim from a sociology major's doctoral thesis, no offense meant to Crieger.

There's also a concern of WP:COI; if this is Crieger's own research then there's definitely a conflict of interest in his placing it here as factual content. In general, this is not as bad as it might otherwise be simply because, once you get beyond the needlessly overcomplicated language, it doesn't say much that you would think is controversial. Still, a researcher referencing his own documented perspective as established theory is a little wiki-ethically grey, if you ask me. Snow (talk) 05:57, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

New lead section
Crieger, I've reworded the lead section to try to give you an idea of what I think the overall tone should be moving towards. As you can see, I'm not really veering away from technical language especially, but just using a more widely-accessible form of it. If you could proof that section to make sure I haven't made any statements that are grossly inaccurate with regards to what you feel defines a resilient control system, I'd appreciate it. Snow (talk) 12:09, 15 June 2012 (UTC)

First image
Crieger, as regards the image you've included in your most recent edit which concerns the elements which influence the resilience of a control system, the text is a little too small to be legible to some users, I think. I tried reverting to your original upload, but for some reason the formatting was screwed up when I tried to scale it to the page, and the text disappeared altogether! So I reverted again and the page now uses your second upload once more. Would it be possible to get another version which is larger than the current version but will maintain it's text under formatting? If you uploaded a .png, perhaps try formatting the file as .jpg (but of the appropriate size) before uploading. Snow (talk) 01:46, 16 June 2012 (UTC)

Done.--Crieger (talk) 01:06, 19 June 2012 (UTC)