User talk:Jmcgnh/Archives/2019/12

User wishing to provide online assistance in seral areas of expertise.
Good Morning Jim,

If I am correct, this is the mechanism for contacting an individual within Wikipedia. I believe we are having this conversation because you responded to my original enquiry. I wouldn't mind addressing you when I have questions/concerns/comments. Your responses are intelligent, very detailed, and very useful. I plan to save these responses and re-read them as necessary. But my concern is that there is another volunteer who is the proper person to approach in these matter. If so, please let me know so I can address my questions to them. Otherwise, I prefer to address my (often frequent) questions to you.

As to your concern about my possible lack of 'stick-to-it-tivity'. My PhD thesis took every minute of four years to write, and I cannot recollect a moment when my brain wasn't marinating in the damned thing. Furthermore my advisor actually assigned me the subject of my thesis: Quasitriangular Hopf Algebras (also called 'Quantum Groups'). Pure mathematics, which I despised. Furthermore, the chief advocate of Quantum Groups published a huge tome (hot pink) describing all the problems in physics that would be solved by this new algebra. In it he promised a volume II in which all these promises would be fulfilled. No second volume appeared. And I soon realized, and Dr. Wan and the professor conducting my viva informed me, no practical application for this algebra will ever be found. I succeeded, but after four long years of useless work, tedium, frustration, and tension I still succeeded in the end. So don't worry about the possibility of my suddenly giving up. This type of atmosphere and I are old, close friends.

Now two quick questions:

First, I will want to refer to books and peer reviewed papers before going online (except for reliable sources like NASA, NOAA, or the IPCC. Also I have a library of hundreds of mostly science books, carefully selected, and to these I will generally turn.  This is because (i) I will always turn early to Wikipedia because of its professionalism, but there is so much camouflaged biased garbage out there... (ii) From 1974 on textbooks morphed into a bunch of watered down pieces of simple ideas, written by people nobody have ever heard of, and periodically edited (rearranged) just enough to claim it as a new edition in order to make more money.  So I want to refer the REAL, primary sources for a given subject.  So for Relativity (1905, 1916) I would to the contemporary books and documents of Einstein, Minkowski, etc.  For Quantum Mechanics (1925-6), Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, among others. My question is, would Wikipedia have concerns about my proceeding in this manner. Someone may complain that my reference are somehow "obsolete", or "out of date". They are not. I do have some curious antiquities in these fields, but I would never use them as references.

Second, I am acutely aware of how much work is put into these articles. Thus I am extremely wary of blundering into another author's work, adding large paragraphs beginning with 'In reality..'. Are the actual authors informed that someone has altered their work? Specifically, is the author able to express any objections they may to my editing? Ideally, could their concerns be communicated to me so we can discuss (not argue about). At the end of the day it is their work and they should have the final say.

There are actually two parts to this question:

(i) If it is a case where I feel there are actually factual errors in the article, and reliable sources are presented by the author, and equally reliable, but contradictory, sources are presented by me (this does actually happen), is there a higher adjudicating body that can step in?

(ii) If it is merely a case of gaps in the article's presentation of a topic, I would much prefer, if possible, add small articles, linked to the main article, rather than putting a bunch of words into the author's mouth. That is how I study a subject on Wikipedia: read the main article, then explore all the links for additional subject matter.

Sorry about the length.

If I don't hear from you beforehand, I hope you and your family have a merry Christmas!

James.--Sanctandriensis (talk) 17:50, 19 December 2019 (UTC)
 * , I'll answer as much as I am able. You are very complimentary. There are plenty of other editors with more experience and more knowledge than me and asking at the Teahouse will generally get you a faster answer than asking any one editor. Wikipedia practice actually prefers secondary sources to primary sources. Therefore, a reference to a college-level textbook would generally be more acceptable than a reference to the ur-text seminal book on a subject. One way of viewing this preference is that the way Wikipedia works is, in part, by "outsourcing" judgment about what is important and noteworthy and preferring the interpretation of other authors to any interpretation by Wikipedia editors. We don't cite sacred texts directly, offering our own interpretations - instead, we cite some other author, one whose creds can be defended, for how that text is to be interpreted. Conflicts between sources happen fairly often and we are expected to consider all sides and, after eliminating truly fringe views, do our best to summarize the state of scholarly discussion on the topic, acknowledging that there may be differences of opinion. You can do a request for comments if you think a broader consensus is required to resolve differences of opinion between editors. Very few articles can be considered the work of a single editor; the relevant policy is described at OWN. You should not hesitate to add to an existing article. An encyclopedia article should treat its subject in considerable depth, if there is depth to be had, and should not split off subsidiary articles unless needed to keep the main article from becoming too long. In most cases, "too long" means more than 100k of text. If you are tempted to write a paragraph beginning with "In reality,..." please reconsider. If you think there might be controversy over a correction or amplification that you want to make, you should probably discuss it on the talk page of the article first, just to see what the reaction from other interested editors might be. One approach to editing, called BRD, for "Bold, Revert, Discuss" would have you make the change to the article first, but there's no reason you can't have the discussion first, especially when you are wanting to sound out other editors before getting into a potential conflict situation. But errors should be corrected in place, not rebutted by additions. When you want to go on about a topic in ways that are not quite right for Wikipedia's rather cramped approach, there are many other wiki-based venues you can put that stuff on. Rational Wiki, Everipedia, Everybody Wiki, Fandom, etc all have rather broad policies for acceptable content. I want you to contribute to Wikipedia, but there is no barrier to writing on those other sites as well.  — jmcgnh (talk) (contribs) 18:59, 19 December 2019 (UTC)

New Page Review newsletter December 2019


This year's Reviewer of the Year is. Having gotten the reviewer PERM in August 2018, they have been a regular reviewer of articles and redirects, been an active participant in the NPP community, and has been the driving force for the emerging NPP Source Guide that will help reviewers better evaluate sourcing and notability in many countries for which it has historically been difficult.
 * Reviewer of the Year

Special commendation again goes to who ends the year as one of our most prolific reviewers for the second consecutive year. Thanks also to and  who have been in the top 5 for the last two years as well.

Several newer editors have done a lot of work with CAPTAIN MEDUSA and DannyS712 (who has also written bots which have patrolled thousands of redirects) being new reviewers since this time last year.

Thanks to them and to everyone reading this who has participated in New Page Patrol this year.

(The top 100 reviewers of the year can be found here)

A recent Request for Comment on creating a new redirect autopatrol pseduo-permission was closed early. New Page Reviewers are now able to nominate editors who have an established track record creating uncontroversial redirects. At the individual discretion of any administrator or after 24 hours and a consensus of at least 3 New Page Reviewers an editor may be added to a list of users whose redirects will be patrolled automatically by.
 * Redirect autopatrol

Set to launch early in the new year is our first New Page Patrol Source Guide discussion. These discussions are designed to solicit input on sources in places and topic areas that might otherwise be harder for reviewers to evaluate. The hope is that this will allow us to improve the accuracy of our patrols for articles using these sources (and/or give us places to perform a WP:BEFORE prior to nominating for deletion). Please watch the New Page Patrol talk page for more information.
 * Source Guide Discussion

While New Page Reviewers are an experienced set of editors, we all benefit from an occasional review. This month consider refreshing yourself on Notability (geographic features). Also consider how we can take the time for quality in this area. For instance, sources to verify human settlements, which are presumed notable, can often be found in seconds. This lets us avoid the (ugly) 'Needs more refs' tag. Delivered by MediaWiki message delivery (talk) at 16:10, 20 December 2019 (UTC)
 * This month's refresher course

On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects
The book On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects is actually an absolute references on the subject. I don't understand why you removed the page. Gagarine (talk) 02:12, 31 December 2019 (UTC)
 * It's fairly simple, really. The article you had created on the book had no citations that might help establish that the book was WP:notable, in the way Wikipedia uses that word. After doing some poking around, I wasn't able to find anything right away that would help support notability, either. When this happens, there cannot be an article on the subject - the book itself cannot establish its own notability and there is no such thing as an "absolute reference". In cases like this, where it makes sense, we redirect the page title to another page of a notable subject (in this case the author of the book) and that way people searching for the book will not be entirely disappointed.
 * Wikipedia policies on notability can seem a bit strange sometimes, but the goal is to make sure we present articles on subjects where a) there is enough written about the subject for us to summarize the information into an article and b) there has been enough written about the subject to elevate it at least a little above the ordinary; otherwise we'd be pretending to be Google rather than an encyclopedia.
 * If you can find discussions of the book in scholarly books or journal articles that don't happen to be online, then it would be fine to recreate the article citing those references and summarizing what they say about the book (with the limitation that we can't use books or articles where Gilbert Simondon is a substantial contributor to help establish notability). There are a couple of blogpost-like essays on the web, such as https://www.boundary2.org/2018/11/existenceoftechnicalobjects/ which makes me think there might be reviews from pre-internet journals closer to when the book was published, but someone will have to dig them up and provide citations.  — jmcgnh (talk) (contribs) 06:14, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

Happy holidays


Interstellarity (talk) is wishing you Happy Holidays! This greeting (and season) promotes WikiLove and hopefully this note has made your day a little better. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user Happy Holidays, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Happy New Year!

Spread the cheer by adding {{subst:Happy holidays}} to their talk page with a friendly message. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Interstellarity (talk • contribs) 11:22, 20 December 2019 (UTC)