User talk:DavidStern

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Magnetosphere
Mr. Stern, Thank you for all of the wonderful information you've added to the Magnetosphere entry. I see bits and pieces of politics going on here or there, but overall, I think the community as a whole appreciates and benefits from the time you've spent.

I did have a question about the entry. Earlier this year, you added multiple references to an as yet unwritten section or article on magnetic storms and particle flows or MSPF. Do you have copy available to insert for this? I briefly searched google, wikipedia, and your phy6.org website and couldn't find anything immediately suitable.

There are many of us who, while not suited to astrophysics as a career, are very interested in all that we can learn. Your experience and expertise is greatly appreciated. Sincerely, Xaminmo 15:12, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

Image
As far as I know the image you referred to doesn't exist. Are you sure you uploaded it to Wikipedia and not the Wikimedia Commons? - Mgm|(talk) 19:00, 14 December 2005 (UTC)
 * Out of curiosity: how did you get to me when you needed to contact an administrator? Did you just pick a name of the list, or did you see me at work elsewhere? - Mgm|(talk) 19:13, 14 December 2005 (UTC)
 * Ah, that makes things a lot clearer. If the image you added is a reduced version of an existing image, all you need to do is list it at Deletion requests. If you want to improve an existing image all you need to do is upload it under the exact same name as the image you're trying to improve. So if you want to improve Example.jpg, all you need to do is upload the improved Example.jpg (capitalization counts). It helps if you rename the improved image to the correct name before uploading it. Does this help? - Mgm|(talk) 20:09, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

 Thanks a lot! I am getting the hang of it, maybe. If not, I'll write again.  David 20:13, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

Aurora
I came across your pasting of the Aurora article in the sandbox. Sorry I'm not qualified to help you, though I would like to give a big "thank you" for your wanting to fix what you see as a problem. I just wanted to warn you that a) the sandbox is automatically reset every 12 hours, and b) the standard warnings left to vandals suggest that they direct their efforts to the sandbox:


 * Thanks for experimenting with Wikipedia! Your test worked, and has been reverted or removed. Please use the sandbox for any other tests you want to do. Take a look at the welcome page if you would like to learn more about contributing to our encyclopedia. Thank you!

So you probably don't want to rely on the sandbox for working on rewriting articles except for a very brief period. It isn't immediately obvious, but you can easily create new pages under your name in the User namespace. E.g., you could keep a working copy of the article in User:DavidStern/Aurora and leave a message in the article's talk page directing would-be contributors there.

Thanks again for your contributions. &mdash; Kbh3rd talk 21:52, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

On bolding external links
Hi. I wonder why you bold the external links you add. The fact that you put them on top of the links is, I would say, visible enough. Wonder what you think. Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 22:33, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
 * By the way, I would encourage you to use an edit summary when you contribute, which is a Wikipedia guideline. You can write say "link to phy6" if you add an external link. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 22:36, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

 Hello, Oleg  I have just started my involvement with Wikipedia (about 2 weeks ago or less) and any advice is highly appreciated. I was unaware of the role of "Edit summary". Now I am.  I have added some links (e.g. "vector", "William Gilbert," "sundial" and "lightning"), also an article on the polar aurora (there is a story here). I do not always use bold face in links, nor do I always put my contribution at the head of the list. It depends: I look at other links and then decide. The basic rule is "what helps the user best?" Sometimes, a lot of good and general material is available, and all I can do is supplement it.  However, it usually helps the user to have an overview, a description which can serve as a useful introduction. If I cannot find any link listed that fulfils the role better, I put my link on top and bold-face it. I also describe in a few words what it provides.  If you are willing, I would like you to check me out on this. I am a retired physicst and have spent years creating collections of sites which I think users appreciate. I won't put them on Wikipedia--where others can change them beyond my control--but I can link to them. Tell me if my links meet the above criteria!  One of my collections is about the Earth's magnetosphere, and I am currently writing a Wikipedia entry for it (the one which was there is pretty shallow--and I already convinced someone to remove a Velikovsky claim he inserted there). To see more of my stuff, go to  http://www.phy6.org/prospect.htm  Please tell me more about yourself! I am looking for volunteer Russian translators (there exists a translation of the above page, but no more:   http://www.phy6.org/Vadim.htm  )  (I tried to send this one before. It looked horrible, I tried to re-edit and could not come back, something about the talk file being too long already. Hope this one goes through--let me know if it does)

 David P. Stern Greenbelt, Maryland, USA http://www.phy6.org/stargaze/Sstern.htm




 * Hi David. Thank you for your message. Glad to help! So, let me try to answer what you wrote to me, one by one.


 * 1) I still think that one should not make external links bold, but that's up to you. Arranging them by relevance is good indeed.
 * 2) External links are of course very good, and I am sure that yours are relevant (I checked one or two), so thank you!
 * 3) Information about me is available at User:Oleg Alexandrov. I am not Russian, rather Romanian with a Russian name. :)
 * 4) Don't worry about warning that this talk page or any other file is too big. That's a leftover from old days, when web browsers would just cut off pages over 30KB in size.
 * 5) You said things looked horrible on the page. I would like to suggest some style tips. On wikipedia, you should not start a paragraph with an empty space or tab like writing an e-mail (that's why things looked horrible). You don't need to use <P> to start a new paragraph, just leaving an empty line is enough (but no more than one). There is not much need for <BR> that much either, again, just an empty line should do the trick of separating two paragraphs.
 * Let me know if you have any questions. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 02:28, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Aurora (astronomy)
Hi, David. I see that you've done a rewrite on the article on Aurora. Good job on the changes, but I did remove your note requesting that changes be run past you first. It's part of Wikipedia policy that articles can be edited by anyone at any time. See Ownership_of_articles for more info. I also see that you're engaged in a dispute with another user regarding the inclusion of a particular image. I agree that the most common forms should be at the top of the page, but I do think that when dealing with a phenomena that has so much variety, it can't hurt to have a few extra examples. To that end, I've also added the image you removed further down the page. I hope this will help resolve the dispute, as revert wars are never very productive. I left the caption the user had been using, not knowing if there's a better description for that image. Thanks! -- Vary | Talk 18:38, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Sharing the decision making in this environment - Paul Moss
David, you can hopefully see that there is much more to this, and that process is more important than outcome to many wikipedians. There are some fairly serious (and funny) disputes going on about this, especially where an administrator comes along and just deletes stuff without reference to the other contributors. I myself find it a challenge to work through what is best for the greatest number of users, but I hold the principles of sharing to be important as well. It might just be an unsuitable image to you, but its something different to everyone who sees it. Even with that aside, if you peruse the many thousands of images available, you will see that there is no such thing as a typical image, it depends on where you view the display for a start, and thats more significant than anything else. You may well have the science of how it works figured out, but I have vast observational experience and evidence for what actually happens, both personally and collectively, worldwide. The mathematics of it are in reality models, constructs of the best explanations, created from the collected data, whereas the visual and photographic evidence is mostly a different sphere of human activity.

You now have a new challenge, someone else (a stranger) comes along and tries to resolve the dispute by replacing the image. You cant have it both ways, either you stick to your opinion and remove it again, or you adjust and tolerate it. I dont think that you would see any value in wasting any more time and energy on this, unless there is some other hidden reason to do so. The most important principle here is transparency of action, and even you must be prepared to be judged by your peers in this environment, despite your vast knowledge and experience, which incidentally is something I respect and value.

There are two halves to a planet and each half has a fair right to having a representative image? I am certain that most observed aurora australis displays have plenty of red content, due to the population densities being at higher geomagnetic latitudes thant he northern hemisphere, and backed up by the image libraries. If you take poulation density within the polar circle then you win hands down, but that is extremely low (almost nil) in thee south, and would be an unfair method, you are a scientist of theoretical space? I'm a demographer with real data about real people.

I have said much more than enough on the relevant talk pages, it's time to move on. Mozasaur 20:36, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Silly Comment?
Mine wasn't a silly comment it was to remove one - bit slack with the "Edit summary"

Ring current of the Magnetosphere
Hi. At first my appologies that I didn't answer that quick to your comment at my userpage in de.wikipedia and thanks for pointing out this issue with the "ring current" in the article de:Magnetosphäre. As I do not have such detailed knowledge about the magnetosphere I did read over Magnetosphere and Ring current and want to ask you first to a correction. In Ring current it gets speculated that the plasma of the ring current has probably more than one source (ions from the atmosphere and solar wind particles?). In the german article de:Magnetosphäre it is said that during magnetic storms the ring current particles are mainly oxygen ions out of the high atmosphere whilst at "quiet" times these particles are mainly protons. So my question is: Is this correct and if it is correct where do the protons come from directly if not from the Van Allen Belt (must say that I'm a little bit confused by the amount of information). And does the ring current disappear if there are no magnetic storms for a while? Arnomane 18:11, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Magnetosphere
As per your revision note: "Please communicate and I will explain revert." I am curious as to why you reverted Magnetosphere.

I believe the | older revision, which you removed, was substantially improved. The current revision looks tremendously unencyclopedic and is not up to the professional standards of an encyclopedia.

I also strongly question reverting an non-vandalism entry without any discussion of comment. Not all changes by persons without a username are vandalism, and the reversion of good faith edits should not be undertaken lightly. --Matthew 22:03, 18 February 2006 (UTC)
 * I've gone ahead and replaced the changes. If you'd like to discuss why they are problematic, please see the article's talk page - you may have noticed that the user who added the changes is fully willing to discuss them with you there.  I also removed over thirty links to your web site, phy6.org.  Repeatedly adding external links to your own web site to wikipedia articles is considered linkspam.  Wikipedia is not a vehicle for advertising or a mere collection of external links.  Please see How not to be a spammer for more details.  Thanks. -- Vary | Talk 06:49, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

Magnetosphere categories
Hi! I noticed that in your draft / alternative article User:DavidStern/Magnetosphere you have the categories still activated. Could I suggest that you deactivate them (by putting a colon before 'Category' in the link) until such time as the article is in the mainspace rather than the userspace? (As per WP:CG, "If you copy an article to your user namespace (for example, as a temporary draft or in response to an edit war) you should decategorize it.".) Cheers, Ziggurat 00:13, 27 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Hi again. The way to 'de-activate' a category when you're working on a draft or whatever is simply to put a colon before the link, like this:
 * -> Category:Living people
 * This makes it a link to the category instead of adding the page to that category. All the best, Ziggurat 22:18, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Image copyright problem with Image:Plasmoid.jpg
Thanks for uploading Image:Plasmoid.jpg. However, the image may soon be deleted unless we can determine the copyright holder and copyright status. The Wikimedia Foundation is very careful about the images included in Wikipedia because of copyright law (see Wikipedia's Copyright policy).

The copyright holder is usually the creator, the creator's employer, or the last person who was transferred ownership rights. Copyright information on images is signified using copyright templates. The three basic license types on Wikipedia are open content, public domain, and fair use. Find the appropriate template in Image copyright tags and place it on the image page like this:.

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 * OK, thanks for the info update! When you're referring to yourself on such a page, it's a good idea to say "I" or User:DavidStern, because when overworked admins are frantically thumbing through thousands of images to find the copyright violations, we can easily miss that a casual third-person mention is actually a self-reference. Stan 19:11, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Columbus with a telescope
When you mentioned a stamp showing Columbus anachronistically looking through a telescope, I had a distinct memory of seeing such a stamp, but I just re-examined the US Columbian issues of both 1893 and 1993, and both have no telescope in evidence. A number of third world countries license out their names to foreign printers to make low-quality colored stickers that purport to be stamps, although they just go straight from printer to dealer to collector; it's quite likely that one or more of those stamps would have this kind of a mistake. Stan 19:36, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Image:Aurora australis panorama.jpg
I know this is a bit out of date but I've only just realized what has happened. Why did you remove my image : Image:Aurora australis panorama.jpg from the aurora article? I'm just wondering on your rationale as it is the only image there that is a FP. It is also much higher res than any of the others. I have reverted your removal and removed a smaller image. Feel free to discuss reasons why it shouldn't be there --Fir0002 style="color:#C6CACC; background:#F8FCFF">www 12:29, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Reply
I do not remember the details. I believe at one time "aurora australis" was displayed to balance "aurora borealis" with the implication these phenomena deserve separate billing. Actually, they are the same effect, and I would be happy if everyone just wrote "polar aurora", the way all scientists seem to do.

In recent months though I have not worked on the site. Too many well-meaning people with too little knowledge are tweaking it. I take responsibility for my own web sites, which go under my name, and if any problem exists, I am answerable. Wikipedia is too much of a free-for-all.

David P. Stern http://www.phy6.org/stargaze/Sstern.htm DavidStern 22:42, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Unspecified source for Image:Reconn.jpg
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