User:N2e/Sandbox

Stuff on this page is, necessarily, either DRAFT material being worked up for future use in the Wikipedia mainspace, or snapshot-in-time-but-still-being-refined thoughts on my (evolving) personal philosophy for using Wikipedia and interacting with other editors.

as was -- entire section in emergence
The stock market (or any market for that matter) is an example of emergence on a grand scale. As a whole it precisely regulates the relative security prices of companies across the world, yet it has no leader; there is no one entity which controls the workings of the entire market. Agents, or investors, have knowledge of only a limited number of companies within their portfolio, and must follow the regulatory rules of the market and analyse the transactions individually or in large groupings. Trends and patterns emerge which are studied intensively by technical analysts.

INTRO

The concept of emergence has deep roots in economics. As noted above, the term emergence was not used to describe this behavior or thought until recent times.

On sources and citations, and cleanup of the same

 * I support BOTH adding sources AND adding verifiability-related citation tags to articles that need improvement. I frequently add citations to articles I work on, and also on those I stumble upon that are in my area of interest or expertise.  These actions however are orthogonal to other actions that I also choose to take to tag unreferenced material.  WP:Verifiability is not optional.  Policy is unambiguous, it is up to the editor who wants to retain material in Wikipedia to get it cited with verifiable sources; it is NOT WP policy that every editor who stumbles upon significant unreferenced material must stop their lives and endeavor to improve THAT particular article, nor ignore that the article has no sources.  So I tag it and move on.  It seems to me to be a simple courtesy to flag it for a month or two to see if "the community" cares enough about an article to fix it before material is deleted from Wikipedia for being unsourced.  N2e (talk) 23:36, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

On Cleanup Templates

 * Cleanup templates are valuable. We cannot control what motives bring various editors to Wikipedia. WP allows the removal of uncited/unverified material per policy.  Wikipedia is an emergent phenomenon in a human complex adaptive system.  Since all editors are volunteers, they will each, by virtue of the nature of their interests, work on quite different aspects of what it takes to construct a great online encyclopedia resource.  The core Wikipedia policy of verifiability makes it explicit that the "Burden of Evidence" is on the editor who wants to add (or retain) an assertion to (in) a Wikipedia article.  It seems simple common courtesy to place some notification on an article before removing the unsourced material that WP policy allows to be removed.
 * Different strokes for different editors. Some editors will want to make assertions about Garithaianik, and edit the content of that article; other editors, who might not know a thing about Garithaianik nor be interested in learning, will merely want to make Wikipedia (in the aggregate) a more reliable resource in the long term by gradually, in an often slow and evolutionary manner, making explicit the unreferenced state of  the Garithaianik article, getting a date assigned to that state by SmackBot, and then allowing editors interested in that article, or that category of articles, to fix it if they wish.  I am squarely in the latter camp.  I simply want to take a very small action that sets articles up for future improvement, or AfD if necessary, in future months and years -- which makes Wikipedia a stronger informational resource over time.  N2e (talk) 13:03, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

Verifiable sources and citations
Courtesy note for Talk page: No.1

Citations and sources are needed
Please be sure that all additions to the _______--__________________-- are verifiable. Any new items added to the article should have inline citations for each claim made. As a courtesy to editors who may have added ________ claims previously, before Wikipedia citation policy is what it is today, some of the existing unsourced claims have been tagged citation needed to allow some time for sources to be added.

No.2

Article needs substantial citations
(SOURCED BY OTHER WP ARTICLES) This article is a good and useful one; however, per WP:V we should not be sourcing assertions with other Wikipedia articles, nor should we have substantive assertions that are unsourced by reliable secondary sources with inline citations. I have tagged just a few of the assertions that need cited with citation needed. Anyone have a good book that might _________________________

No.3

Citations and sources are needed
( AS/AFTER MATERIAL HAS BEEN REMOVED ) Please be sure that all additions to the articlename are  verifiable. Any new items added to the article should have inline citations for each claim made.

I have removed the major part of the unsourced material that had been previously tagged citation needed for at least a couple of  months with no sources added. If you have a source, please feel free to add the material back in, along with the citation.

No. 4

Other WP articles as a source for "List of..." articles
Actually, Wikipedia policy does call for any substantive claims in all articles—including "List of..." articles—to be verifiably sourced per WP:V, a core wiki-policy. Wikipedia itself is not considered an adequate source: see the section Wikipedia and sources that mirror or use it in the WP:V policy. The lone exception, where sources are not required, is disambiguation pages. We need not cite every detail about any particular old growth forest, but if a claim is made about the size, or as to the fact that the XYZ Nature Park contains any old growth forest at all (which is an assertion), then a citation should be provided that will source those two claims about that particular forest.

or ( AS/AFTER MATERIAL HAS BEEN REMOVED

So the unsourced material has been temporarily removed. It can be added back by anyone who cares to take the time to cite a source for each claim, but it should not be added back without sources.

OR

Wikipedia policy does call for any substantive claim in all articles to be verifiably sourced per WP:V, a core wiki-policy. Wikipedia itself is not considered an adequate source: see the section Wikipedia and sources that mirror or use it in the WP:V policy. The lone exception, where sources are not required, is disambiguation pages. We need not cite every detail about any particular rocket, but if a claim is made about the size, capacity, successes/failures, etc., (all of which are assertions), then a citation should be provided that will source those claims about that rocket. The very acceptable alternative is to make fewer claims in these "List of..." or "Comparison of..." articles and leave the detail to be claimed, and then only sourced, in the article that covers the individual rocket.

Other WP articles as a source for non-"List of..." articles
Thanks _____ for your good faith efforts to make Wikipedia better. Actually however, Wikipedia policy does call for any substantive claim in all articles to be verifiably sourced per WP:V; this is one of the very few core wiki-policies. "Wikipedia itself is not considered an adequate source": see the section Wikipedia and sources that mirror or use it in the WP:V policy. The lone exception, where sources are not required, is disambiguation pages.

It is probably true that we need not cite every detail about any particular usage of _______, but if a claim is made about the usage of __________, _____, or ____ (which are assertions), then a citation should be provided that will source such claims. A very acceptable alternative is to make fewer claims in this particular article and leave the detail to be claimed, and then only sourced, in the article that covers ______.

It is no problem with me for a little more time to pass so this can be sorted out before deleting the unsourced claims, but the citation needed tags should stay until the sources are provided. Cheers.

Jan 2016 Teahouse discussion
May be possible/worthwhile to discuss the slight improvement of the guideline at WP:CITEVAR to include this case, and discourage such unproductive mass reformatting of source citations by editors (as a matter of editor style and variation in preferences). If so, this discussion will be a reminder to a Jan 2016 Teahouse conversation. N2e (talk) 22:54, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

Mass reformating of the source code of references
There seem to be a number of different ways commonly used to format the source code of the  templates. Some with lots of carraige return characters, some with none, and some in between. It seems different editors like to put there {cite ...} refs in in various formats.

My question: what has been wiki-policy or guidelines on making mass reformats of others cite templates? E.g., if some editor wants to say remove all the paragraph marks in a citation formatted like this (which is a format we see quite often in the English Wikipedia) on all of the many citations in an article:

Others code refs this way (two-line format, with no extra carriage returns). My question would apply if someone went into articles and changed every reference from this format, by adding a bunch of paragraph breaks in every citation.

This could obviously cause some conflict between editors who might prefer format A, or format B, or some other/different format C, and all of the changes would not improve the article space, but may likely cause a bit of editor conflict. So has this been discussed previously? Or is there a policy or guideline on it? Cheers. N2e (talk) 22:18, 15 January 2016 (UTC)


 * In my experience, much commoner than either is this one-line format  with no carriage return after the initial . I find this odd, as the multi-line format is much easier to understand and edit, and makes the surrounding text easier to follow. My guess is that because the templates conveniently provided in the edit screen use the one-line format, most editors go with what they do. I believe that all these formats are acceptable. Maproom (talk) 22:46, 15 January 2016 (UTC)


 * Yes, I agree. The single-line format is more common, as is the super-expanded multi-line format.  I've also seen the two-line format as it puts the tag on the line with the prose, and then leaves the citation clearly visible (  aligned with left-margin).
 * But that just makes my point. There are more than one (or two, or three) ways this is done.  So I'm assuming that some editor conflict has occurred on this mass-reformatting over the years; that is why I'm looking for policy or previous discussion of the matter.  Cheers.  N2e (talk) 23:17, 15 January 2016 (UTC)


 * I've wrapped the citations in and , since the point of the question is about the layout of the citation in the source. --ColinFine (talk) 22:55, 15 January 2016 (UTC)
 * The closest I know of to anything in policy or guideline that addresses this is WP:CITEVAR. The letter of its language ("style") could even be interpreted as making it directly on point, but in application, I don't think the intent of "style" was to address this formatting issue, but rather (as indicated in the "To be avoided" section), a more radical change of the type of citation itself, e.g., a switch from some other system to list-defined references. But it certainly could be pointed to in any discussion of the issue (in support of saying please don't do that). It's pure individual preference AFAIAC but I find the multi-line format very annoying to look at and never use it and find editing single line no barrier. An article with 100 reference is not uncommon and if each has: template name, last, first, title, url, page and date (if not more) that's 600 extra lnes in edit mode to view.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 00:40, 16 January 2016 (UTC)
 * The "Cite" toolbar generates on-line citations, so it's no surprise they are the most common. Other templates such as Infoboxes are more often multi-line. Personally I don't mind and I think if anybody went on a rampage to try and convert them all to their preferred layout then "animated discussion" would ensue.--Gronk Oz (talk) 02:10, 16 January 2016 (UTC)
 * I think the best guideline/approach here is probably "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". If you are doing a big cleanup of the citations (adding missing template parameters, correcting template or parameter usage, generally improving them significantly), then you generally get to choose your preferred style for the source code.  Similarly, if you are doing a lot of good and legitimate work on a section of an article, you will probably be ok including minor adjustments to citations in that work.  On the other hand, if you go around trying to just impose your will in terms of the "better" source code style, without actually making any substantive improvements to either citations or content (minor copyediting wouldn't really be a good justification for mass citation reformatting, for example), then storm clouds may well form in the vicinity of talk pages.  If you blast through hundreds of articles changing format and very little else, without a strong pre-discussed consensus behind your actions, you should probably consider investing in some Nomex clothing!  If someone else changes a citation you worked on, and the generated reference is still good and of equivalent quality, it's really not something to start a fight over, and there are far more useful things to put your energy into caring about.  --Murph9000 (talk) 10:03, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks very much Fuhghettaboutit, Gronk Oz, and Murph9000. Sounds like a consensus that such mass reformatting of all refs in an article is not good practice, but that there seems to be nothing in policy or guidelines that clarify that specifically. I might take the guideline Fuhghettaboutit referred to (WP:CITEVAR) and propose a bullet that clarifies its application to this situation. Would any of you care to be invited to comment on such a proposal? Or any others who read this? If so, I'll be sure to get back to interested parties an and invite then to the discussion if I ever start one. Cheers. N2e (talk) 16:16, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

Articles being worked
(in more than an occasional drop-by way)


 * Ciliopathy
 * Floating wind turbine
 * Richard Cantillon
 * Outer Continental Shelf

Miscellania

 * by the way, this source supports that the Endurance of the CST-100 (on-orbit, at a space station) is seven months.  (Page 2 of the weblink contains the relevant source info.) N2e (talk) 20:06, 4 August 2010 (UTC)