User talk:Mike Serfas/Archive2008

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Hello Mike. Very nice approach! I left you a message at WP:KIS. Thank you for your interest, your idea is a very nice one ℒibrarian  2  19:51, 23 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the encouragement! Mike Serfas (talk)

De-userfying butterfly info
Hey Mike. Not sure if you are still around but we made stubs for a few plants such as Salix caroliniana, so reffing the butterfly info would be great. Cheers, Casliber (talk · contribs) 04:11, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

AfD nomination of List of amendments proposed by Barack Obama in the United States Senate
An article that you have been involved in editing, List of amendments proposed by Barack Obama in the United States Senate, has been listed for deletion. If you are interested in the deletion discussion, please participate by adding your comments at Articles for deletion/List of amendments proposed by Barack Obama in the United States Senate. Thank you. Do you want to opt out of receiving this notice? Tomdobb (talk) 18:33, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

Green slime (Dungeons & Dragons)
You mentioned Agricola's De Animantibus Subterraneis, but confessed that you don't remember where you originally saw this. Any chance this has changed? If Agricola mentioned green slime (or anything like it) I would be very interested in knowing. But so far my casual perusal of De Animantibus Subterraneis has turned up nothing of the sort, nor indeed much of anything on animals, real or imagined, that are actually subterranean! Weasels, dolphins, hamsters sure, but thus far nothing from caves. So if you can offer me any hints I'd greatly appreciate it. --Iustinus (talk) 08:20, 30 June 2008 (UTC)


 * I'm sorry, but it's been years since I read this, and I'd already forgotten the source that suggested this at the time. Certainly he describes encountering highly corrosive compounds in De Natura Fossilium and I think De re metallica.  Wherever I encountered this other suggestion, it had made it sound like this other text might describe something living, like the corrosive "snottites" and "green slime" (in the modern sense) found in young caverns.  (Despite his use of terms like "genus" and "species" for substances corrosive enough to eat unnoticed through flesh to the bone, his descriptions in De Natura Fossilium seem pretty clearly inanimate)  I'd been meaning to look back more on the metallurgic practices he described, but I never got around to it.  Nowadays I wouldn't consider adding something like this without source in hand, even with a "citation needed" tag... it's too likely I had some detail wrong.  I changed the text to what I could support with a current search. Mike Serfas (talk) 23:44, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Palin and "Sarkozy"
Thinking that this material was too wonderful to go unmentioned yet would be unlikely to stand much of a chance within the main Palin article, viewing it as arguably an example of inadvertent self-parody, and sadly observing that "Parodies of Sarah Palin" has already become a dumping ground (see its ghastly forced feeding today of an interminable if dutifully written article about something on Saturday Night Live), I did a very small amount of formatting work on your material and stuck the result within the "Parodies" article. I regret that I can't do more work on it in the next few hours because I have other things to attend to and I have a slow and expensive net connection. However, if it does seem that the material might survive in the main article, you may wish to move the material back.

Incidentally, I note that the main article on Palin nowhere mentions that there's also an article on parodies of her. This strikes me as an odd exception to a general rule of long biographical articles.

Over and out for the next few hours, I'm afraid. Good luck with this stuff. -- Hoary (talk) 10:05, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

Obama agenda pseudo wikiproject
I tracked you down from a contribution you made to the wikipedians for Obama blog. I am organizing folks that are interested in Barack Obama Agenda items.

I have been a longtime wikipedia and commons contributor under a pseudonym. Because I want my activities relative to this project to be more transparent, I have used my public name.

It appears likely that there will be a flurry of legislation in the first 100 days. As you may recall on the barackobama site, there wasn't a heck of a lot of depth of collaboration on educating people on the facts regarding particular issues or proposals.

What I am imagining is something like a wikiproject, implemented on user pages that would identify the WP articles that need serious attention that relate to Obama agenda items (listed on the barackobama site, now stripped from the change.gov site). This would not violate NPOV rules, and in fact the group would include advocates, neutral observers, and yes, even opponents of Barack Obama agenda items.

Interested? If so see: User:J JMesserly/Obama agenda wikiproject What policy areas would you be interested covering? I am working on energy articles. -J JMesserly (talk) 21:19, 20 November 2008 (UTC)
 * thanks for your thoughtful response at the project talk page. I will consider it in detail especially regarding focus.  For reasons of recruitment, the title of the wikiproject has drifted into a superset of what I am most interested in: informed opinion concerning technology that strongly influence Obama agenda items enumerated at Change.gov.  The intersection with the set definition you described appears small, but I shall consider your pov in more depth give a comprehensive response shortly.   -J JMesserly (talk) 10:17, 29 November 2008 (UTC)
 * I agree that the Obama agenda is likely the most interesting fraction of an Obama administration WikiProject. I'm not sure that the change in title and scope will increase recruitment nearly as much as it increases the work required to cover everything about the Obama administration.  Perhaps an even narrower focus ("Obama agenda technologies"?) might be better to begin with.  But if we prefer to make the WikiProject as broad as possible, while recognizing that we will focus only on a small subset to begin with, we should note that WP:WikiProject Obama (and WP:WikiProject Barack Obama) do not yet exist.  Perhaps it would be best to propose an "Obama" project first as a staging point for all potentially interested, and use it as a place to work out subcategories for active editing.  It may also be better at first to create it as a task force within WP:WikiProject U.S. Presidents and WP:WikiProject Politics.  I've implemented this last at WP:OBAMA... until someone more deserving takes this redirect! Mike Serfas (talk) 22:31, 30 November 2008 (UTC)