User:Salix alba

Hi. My real name is Richard Morris. Salix alba, the white willow, is a search term I tend to use when working on plant databases. And I'm Salix alba on meta and Salix alba on the French wikipedia. I was renamed from Pfafrich in Feb 06.

I'm wikitech:User:Salix_alba and operator of the User:Texvc2LaTeXBot which fixes deprecated latex syntax.



Handy links:
 * Special:MyPage/vector-2022.js
 * Special:MyPage/vector-2022.css
 * Special:MyPage/common.css
 * Special:MyPage/common.js

Some handy bits of javascript I also monitor Category:Pages with math errors and Category:Articles with math errors to check for any problems with rendering mathematics equations.
 * User:Salix alba/vector.js Adds some handy links to the toolbox, customises the look and feel of VE edit tabs, with simple Edit and VE Edit tabs. Also sorts categories alphabetically.
 * User:Salix alba/TDSkell.js toolbox link which generates a skeleton of Template Data when clicked on a template page.
 * User:Salix alba/TDList.js lists all the template pages with Template Data sections. Used to generate VisualEditor/TemplateData/List
 * User:Salix alba/Citoid.js calls the citoid server to generate a reference from a URL.

Inside interest
I am a member of/have interest in
 * Ignore all rules - the most neglected policy on wikipedia. My interpretation, above all we are here to create an encyclopedia, for every action think does this make the encyclopedia better? If so do it to if not don't. But what is a better encylopedia? Often this is not obvious, often not the same as your personal views, often you'll need to lose a bit of ego, but more importantly engage your brain and think.
 * No angry mastodons - learn the art of hunting on wikipedia.
 * WikiProject Mathematics
 * Grading of mathematics articles
 * Sub project on maths graphics
 * statistics on maths articles the mathematics articles with the most links and fewest links.
 * 2018 statistics on maths formula Analysis of mathematical and chemical formula across all wikis June 2018
 * User:Salix alba/welcome maths welcome template. --Salix alba (talk) 12:22, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
 * User:Salix alba/One day of mathematics page views the top 1000 mathematics articles ranked by number of page view is a twelve hour period.
 * User:Pfafrich/Blahtex en.wikipedia fixup - you can help, fix incompatible latex errors. [[Image:blahtex-logo.png|150px]]
 * Blahtex a MathML extension to MediaWiki - [test wiki]
 * Blatex related bugs on wikimedia, activity on these may help get this moving
 * http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=672 - Complete MathML output mode for texvc
 * http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4915 - Use Wikicities' TeX fonts for rendering math on Wikimedia projects
 * http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3504 - MathML with input $$hello$$ causes tidy to die


 * Semantic MediaWiki
 * Category math feature intersection of categories.
 * ParserFunctions
 * DynamicPageList2
 * Database download
 * Help:Formula
 * Help:Template
 * List of available templates
 * Essay on brilliant prose
 * Permaculture
 * Deep ecology

Meta-wikipedia

 * Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past On of the best articles I've read about wp.
 * DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism, to my mind the strongest critique of the wikipedia process, in that is suppresses the individual voice if favor of the collective consensus.
 * How to run an opensouce project Great video of a speach about problems which can occur with open source projects and how to overcome them. Quite a bit of relevance to wikipedia here.

Outside interest
I've involved with a permaculture project called Plants For a Future. I'm intrested in creating an colaborative online plant database which information the uses of plants, growing plants and the relationship between plants. We'v a website for the project and been much inspired by wikipedia.

A second interest is mathematics, I've developed an online java applet for visulising algebraic surfaces, a library for parsing mathematical equations, and a 3D polyhedral viewer.

I study Ki-Aikido, in the past I've studied Li style T'ai Chi Ch'uan and have practiced the Five Rhythms. I have 13 initial after my name (21 if you include those in brackets).


 * User:Pfafrich/Books Some of my favorite books.

Email the Academics!
On three occasions I've emailed an academics to ask for clarification on certain points. In all occasions I've had speedy and informative responses, and in one case a preprint was sent. This could be a model for improving wikipedia-academia links, it avoid the Vanity problem and Orignial research. If you do decide to email an academic, be courteous, do not assume they know the in's and out of wikipedia policy, and be specific in your request.

Name calling
I seem to be seeing an awful lot of name calling in wikipedia, but that I mean applying tags with negative connotations, be it applying the terrorist tag to Earth First!, calling just about anything which falls under Category:Alternative medicine pseudoscience, calling people (Jim Hoffman) who style themselves 9/11 researchers conspiracy theorist. So much effort goes into fights over these tags. Surely we can do better than that?

To me these tags represent a very black and white view of their subjects whereas the reality is much more complicated. Is there a fixed boundary between a researcher who's scrutinising the governments claims (a much needed public service) and conspiracy. Where is the boundary between Non violent direct action and terrorism.

And pseudoscience. There is an inbuilt implication that only the scientific paradigm is worthy. Even though many of these traditions have served their communities for thousands of years, had their own methods of investigation. We know so little about how ourselves work, why the caring touch can do so much. End of the day different disciplines serve to provide models of the mind, body and spirit. To dispose of one model so quickly and without thinking does a great disservice to the aims of an encyclopedia trying to capture the wealth of human knowledge.

Take Jung who studied that most pseudoscience of pseudoscience Astrology, together with many other traditions. His work gave rise to one of the first personality topographies MBTI closely correlated to the more statistically sound Big5 typography, which in turn has traits strongly correlated with gene expressions. So astrologers may have got a lot wrong, but observed variations which today are begining to be revealed by by genetic. Who'd have though it.

Often what we seem to find is odd balls who made a lot of mistakes (indeed that's the way science often progresses) but do attempt to study fields outside the mainstream, and often uncover something of worth in their travels. Edward R. Dewey is a prime example, devoting his life to studying cycles, he's recently taken a bashing from the rationalist brigade, who seem to want to deny any form of periodic behaviour, leaving us with only a list of different cycles and no overview page linking the topics together. Yes many of Dewey's theories are flawed but sometimes he hit gold.

It might be alright if science itself was perfect, but its scope of investigation is limited. Quantifiabilty works well when the different factors can be easily separated, but the world was not constructed like that, and anything really worthy of study (say how to bring a child up well) has so many interacting variables that our current scientific paradigm is doomed to fail.

p.s. my interest in Jim Hoffman, is that we were both interested in mathematical graphics and he visited my old department once.

One million arguments
About the time when wikipedia reached its 1,000,000 page I had an idea for an interesting April fools sub-title:
 * Wikipedia: one million articles, one million editors - one million arguments.

Here's my guide to where to find the best arguments on wikipedia.


 * Deletions
 * WP:AFD - You run of the mill day-to-day argument. Editors can happily waste days on the hundreds of borderline articles.
 * WP:CFD - slightly more contentious as these effect multiple pages and the overall organization of WP. Inbuilt problems with categorisation as implies binary labels to people and articles, when in reality things are not always so clear cut. The Sorites paradox has much to inform on labelling. These get worse for emotive labels like Category:Terrorist and Category:Pseudoscience.
 * WP:TFD seems quiet now but the great userbox debate caused so much grief, when the rights of people to express themselves conflicted with WP:NPOV.
 * WP:RFD, WP:IFD, WP:SFD generally quiet, often just maintenance.
 * WP:MFD can get very contentious as about non standard pages.
 * WP:DRV when all the above go wrong, for those who just won't let go.
 * GA /FA
 * WP:GAC WP:GA/R WP:FAC WP:FAR the flipside to deletions - whats best in wikipedia. Generally a more positive discussion although a featured article review can be withering. Great for those of a pedantic disposition. Lovely clash when The Two Cultures of science and humanities clash over inline-citation.
 * WP:ACID most humorous, lots of people vote for their personal favorite topic in the hope that someone else might actually do some work on the page.
 * Admin and users
 * WP:ANI your one-stop-shop for all manner of arguments, to get here people must have lost their cool, check regulary for latest war reports. Plenty of sub-pages for the more discerning argument watcher.
 * WP:SSP WP:RFCU these get nasty, sockpuppetry is about deceit (pretending to be something you are not). Uncovering sockpuppetry involves accusing users with scant and circumstantial evidence. I've seen a number of good editors leave over particularly bitter cases.
 * WP:RFA wikipedias Miss World, watch the tears, watch the joy, and watch the flack when inside candidates get promoted.
 * WP:RFAR the pinnacle of wikipedia arguments with regular appearances by some of our most well know users who are always getting into scraps.
 * Classics
 * State route naming conventions poll a byzantime process to determine how to name a road. Classic example of the Color of the bikeshed phenomena.
 * Democratic peace theory its strange how the subject of peace could generate such a big battle.
 * MFD/Esperanza - oh dear some people have a problem with the idea of community, dispight the fact that without community there would be no wikipedia. How to piss off a great swath of our best editors. Initially there was no consensus so the deletionist chose to reopen the dabate in the quite period before new year, proposed 28 Dec, closed 4 days later on 1st of Jan. Was a resepresentitive discussion held? Were the users involved in the project informed. Should a discussion of this magnitude be concluded so quickly?
 * Category:Erdős numbers, so far CfD 8 Oct 06, CfD 9 Feb 07 CfD 28 Oct 07 DRV 7 Nov 07 DRV Nov 10. We just can't decide useless trivia or important cultural meme.
 * Historic debates lots more.

See also: The Wikipedia FAQK In fact, Wikipedia is the largest and most comprehensive collection of arguments in human history

Subpages

 * User:Pfafrich/test A list of uniform polyhedra created using a variety of template techniques.
 * User:Pfafrich/usertemplatestats statistics gathered on usage of user boxes.
 * archives of deleted or potentially deleted pages
 * User:Pfafrich/Flowerpot technique
 * User:Pfafrich/Democratic peace theory (Specific historic examples)

My Contributions Database download.

Random Quotes
idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality the cost becomes prohibitive William F. Buckley, Jr. (nice quote shame about the politics) quote found from the daily Logos Quotes.

Contributions
Some of the articles I've started.

Started

 * Brosimum alicastrum or Maya nut. A nut used as a staple crop by the Mayan civilisation, but largly neglected today.
 * St Andrews Prize for the Environment 2006 award was to Erika Vohman who is promoting the use of above nut.
 * Keyline Design a technique for water management based around land contours.
 * P. A. Yeomans who developed Keylines.
 * John Seed stub on a Deep Ecologist.
 * List of edible flowers using PFAF data.
 * List of useful plants
 * United Kingdom Biodiversity Action Plan
 * Nine Ladies a stone circle and protest camp.
 * Tree bog a type of compost toilet.

Significant contributions

 * Deep ecology adding context.
 * Robert Hart (forest gardener)
 * Forest gardening
 * Permaculture greatly expanded.
 * Sustainable habitat prodded, AfD, tidied up.
 * Twyford Down expanded section on protest
 * Manchester International Airport created section of the protest camp.
 * Earth First! section of EF in the UK.
 * Earth Liberation Front clarified how it all started.
 * Flora

Started

 * Suàn shù shū or writings on reckoning the earliest know Chinese mathematical text.
 * Bowers style acronym a notational system for polyhedra. Bo, hiss, got deleted see User:Salix alba/Bowers style acronym and User:Salix alba/Jonathan Bowers
 * List of uniform polyhedra by Wythoff symbol
 * Category:Polyhedra templates many templates implementing a database of polyhedra properties.
 * Category:Mathematical films
 * Category:Mathematics fiction books
 * Category:Biographies and autobiographies of mathematicians
 * Rand index just a stub.
 * Encyclopaedia of Mathematics acidentially discovered a very useful and comprehensive online resource.
 * Parametric surface really must work on this.
 * Medial axis stub on a method to find the skelington of an object.
 * Proofs from THE BOOK a book describing some of God's algorithms for mathematical proofs.
 * Algebraic manifold
 * The Geometry Center
 * Procrustes analysis
 * Oriented projective geometry

Significant contributions

 * Springer Science+Business Media merged with Springer
 * Jonathan Bowers tidied up all his names of large numbers.
 * Minimal surface expanded info of newer polyhedra.
 * Image gradient expanded stub
 * Gallagher Index helped clarify some points and emailed Gallagher.
 * Singular point of an algebraic variety new section to cover the more general smooth mappings.
 * Contact (mathematics) added three images.
 * Singular point of a curve extended and clarified differences between parametric and implicit curves.
 * Manifold sections of different types of manifold.
 * Quintic equation split of Bring Radicals merged in Quintic functions reworking of solvability stuff.
 * Egyptian fraction tried to tidy up a very messy article. Various other fraction related material as well.
 * Homogeneous coordinates section on their use in computer graphics.
 * Algebra section on group theory.
 * Algebraic structure tried to clarify why a field does not count.
 * Venn diagram clarified difference with Euler diagrams, Edwards Venn diagrams.
 * Number added history.
 * ADE classification refered to its use in singularity theory.
 * Least squares and related, trying to clarify different terms.
 * Euler characteristic section on examples with pictures.
 * Mathematical singularity
 * Trajectory simplified mathematics.
 * Catastrophe theory added section on umbilic catestrophies, arnolds notation.
 * Sphere Long section on Eleven properties of the sphere

Started

 * Grand Designs TV show on buildings.
 * Five Rhythms a system of esoteric dance therapy.
 * Category:University of Leeds
 * Cancellation (disambiguation)
 * Goss Moor NNR A nature reserve in Cornwall.
 * Kneehigh Theatre Cornwalls most notable theater company.
 * Category:Gardens in Cornwall
 * Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument
 * Walter Segal an architect who developed a system of Self-build housing.
 * Lerryn a cornish village.

Significant contributions

 * Qi section on Qi in martial arts.
 * Edward R. Dewey tried to bring balance and add critiques.
 * Business cycle added critiques lifted from Philip Ball Critical mass notably Levy Flight.
 * The Gadget Show reverting persistant vandalism.
 * Education in England reworked and expanded, esp further education.
 * Harpenden minor bits of information
 * Democratic peace theory tried to help resolve disputes, with an accusation of gaming the system on Articles for deletion/Possible wars between liberal democracies 2.
 * Cannabis tried to clarify sub-species.
 * Human habitat sort of disambig serving as main article for Category:Human habitats
 * Objectivity split off from Objectivity (philosophy). Was this wise? Did work on related disambigs so no one confuses objectivism with Objectivity. Should we be worried that Jimbo is an objectivist? Does this have implications for the philosophy of wikipedia?
 * Paradox of the heap tried to extend this, with some examples, but some bugger undid all the work.
 * Ship of Theseus same as above. Note to self: keep clear of philosophy.
 * List of subjects in Gray's Anatomy: Alphabetical split one big list into A-Z lists.
 * Michael Heseltine section on Hezza the gardener.
 * Flowerpot Technique rewrote to avoid copyvio and AfDing.
 * List of people who have claimed to be Jesus merged in article.
 * Kathryn Holloway some canadian green party worker I've never heard of, trimmed unencyclopedic material.
 * English Rebel Songs 1381-1984 added notes of the history and context of each song.
 * Paul Jaworski who staged first armored car robery, sourced, saved from deletion.
 * Emergy mathematical definition
 * Cerebral hemisphere info on difference between sides.