Talk:Tabetha S. Boyajian

Neutral point of view
For the person who made this misguided revert:


 * Fellow astronomer Sarah Ballard has used Boyajian's truly remarkable work creating this precious sample of data
 * Obviously not neutral
 * ''Fellow astronomer Sarah Ballard has used Boyajian's "truly remarkable" work creating this "precious sample" of data
 * Identical content, only the formatting differs, and therefore also obviously not neutral.

Promotional text is promotional text whether or not you indicate where you copied it from. Encyclopaedic text is a different thing. This whole sentence is problematic because it is only tangentially about the subject of the article. But if you desperately want to include it, you'd need to write it encyclopaedically. That would be something like:


 * Boyajian's work on creating a dataset on nearby small stars has been described as "truly remarkable" by [whoever said it and is quoted in a reliable source as having said it].

109.180.164.43 (talk) 11:52, 27 May 2017 (UTC)


 * Hi. Well done for starting a talk page section about this, but please read WP:BRD which describes the widely followed "Bold, Revert, Discuss" process. We should start the discussion when a bold edit is reverted, not after restoring the contested change, which approaches edit warring.
 * I have added the citation to this talk page (look at the source to see how) exactly as it appears in the article. From this it is entirely clear that the quotes are attributed to Sarah Ballard. I will though change the text in accordance with your suggestion to make the attribution clear in the content itself.
 * A thorough discussion of a professional subject's major contributions is of course necessary in an encyclopaedia article. Reliably sourced evaluations of the quality, impact or subsequent uses of the work by colleagues are entirely appropriate, so I don't accept the "tangential" objection. If there are also reliably sourced negative comments or any other controversy then of course these must also be included for a neutral point of view. I have not come across any, but you are welcome to search...
 * --Mirokado (talk) 15:15, 27 May 2017 (UTC)

False narrative?
In the section "Tabby's Star", the claim that on 14 October 2015 a strange pattern of light was captured is not true. It is true there was a flurry in the science press just after her name appears when "interviews Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” published something where she was one of many authors from Planetthunters in October 2015. The observation was not made that day or even that year. It had been being discussed by many others over the course of several years.

NASA couldn't keep up with the incredible data flow from Kepler so they figured out a way for individual scientist and astronomers to use their home PCs to process chunks of the data. I think hundreds of thousands participated. But this was all from data that have been collected by the Kepler telescope between 2009 and 2013. That's when Kepler lost its fixed orientation on that portion of the sky and the data flow stopped. So it is not possible for it to be seen in 2015.

It clearly says the observations were discovered by many in Planet hunters in 2011. It was October of 2015 when flurry of press articles went out about this anomaly. Others in planet hunters used it as an excuse to talk about alien civilizations and Dyson spheres and such. I don't know the she ever bought into that stuff, but a new years long survey involving hundreds of pro and amateur observers, including telescope time in several different observatories closes the door on the advanced civilizations talk.

But my point is that the article is wrong and I'm not sure I'm the one to try and re-write it. Also, I find mentions of the published article from that time but I can’t find it. It would be nice to have a link in her page pointing to the paper that made her semi-famous. Jackhammer111 (talk) 02:20, 27 March 2018 (UTC)

TED (Conference)
I found the reader-unfriendly markup for that article-title link, which made the WP article title look as if we think the technically effective WP convention corresponds to established realworld usage. I trust that on the contrary, "TED (Conference)" is our naming convention for distinguishing (from other meanings of "TED") the organization that started out sponsoring conferences where people hear live TED talks, and i retrofitted the wp:pipe trick, since confusing readers by publicly ritualizing our blessedly effective solution to the article-name-disambiguation problem was misguided. (Even in the unlikely case that there it reflects a TED naming practice that happens to coincide with the wiki syntactic convention, use that phrase as plain text, and jigger your link so it goes to that article, but in a way that uses more words and avoids confounding our syntax for handling "title collisions" with whatever they find they need a similar-looking convention for. --Jerzy•t 09:14 & :17, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

Birth Date
For what it's worth, it seems her birthday is on or about September 2nd 68.15.38.86 (talk) 20:08, 23 January 2019 (UTC)