User talk:RebekahThorn/Archive 3

It is 13:17:00 Central Time in Houston Texas on 20 Dec 2012
The world is ending shortly. A new one will be reborn. --RebekahThorn (talk) 19:18, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

Haplogroup names
Big thanks for your fantastic effort in renaming all the haplogroups - Wow!!

One question, though, (that I have also Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Human_Genetic_History at WT:HGH): for the top-level haplogroups, does e.g. Haplogroup J still make sense, rather than Haplogroup J-P209 -- alerting the reader that this is considered a top-level group, rather than just another clade; and because if the mutational definition of Haplogroup J ever did happen to change (e.g. because a number of previously degenerate mutations were split, so that one was found to be older than the others), we would typically still want the article to survey the whole of haplogroup J, rather than what would have now become a principal subclade of it.

Just wondered about what your thoughts would be on that?

(BTW, I've had the text of the Haplogroup O-M176 (Y-DNA) locked for two weeks, to encourage User:Chriting to learn to use talk pages. If, after discussion, you think there is anything to his concerns, perhaps a footnote might be appropriate, e.g. wondering if some results might appear anomalous in respect of other results.  But of course the default must be to require WP:RS unless you can both agree that there's something obvious that doesn't add up.

The page locking will last for 14 days, but feel free to apply to WP:RPP for it to be lifted sooner if you and User:Chriting have been able to agree a way forward, and if there's work you want to do on the page).

All best, Jheald (talk) 21:29, 5 January 2013 (UTC)


 * P.S. I really like your new Phylogenetics table footnotes, but as a special ask, could we make them reverse-chronological, rather than chronological, i.e. so that readers saw the YCC names rather than the archaeologically-old names first?  I think that might help readers get to 'Aha' much quicker, though I do realise it would be a rather tiresome amount of editing.  Jheald (talk) 21:36, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Ahhh The Great Nomenclature Change of 2013. I know this poses a problem with the ummm special interests you deal with, so I am testing out some ideas on how to show the progression of nomenclature through the literature. I would really like to see experts from each branch fill in the Phylogenetics discussion sections on why and where each of those older names was important.
 * Sure, I can flip those around. Did you realize that there were some articles that began with chains of This is the haplogroup that was called and was then called and was then called and that ISOGG called... It was scary and at least one article had an intro too technical warning at the top.--RebekahThorn (talk) 22:54, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Should the split happen and J-P209 not come out on top, I think I would like to see a forced split in the article where a new one is created and a clean up of the old one happens.
 * Thanks for the help on O-M176. I have trouble believing that the data User:Chriting wishes to purge is problematic in the way he states. First, it is pooled data from multiple papers. Second, two of the lead authors he is accusing of falsifying data are Hammer and Karafet. I do have all of the papers from the last 3+ years that are missing from the O articles. It is a matter of time, because I do have a day job and other volunteer work. Nor though am I an O expert.
 * Where the h*ck did all of the human population history editors go? Why are so many articles years out of date?--RebekahThorn (talk) 22:54, 5 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Where did any of the WP editors go? Across the board, or at least everything I have on my watchlist, participation is way down from a few years ago, there's much less interaction and much less collaboration.  Myself, I have much less time to spend here; I suspect, at least for many people, most of the time, WP is mostly good enough, and they've already scratched the key itches that spurred them to edit in the first place.  Though as soon as you start digging into almost any subject, you realise how noticeable are the limits and limitations in WP's coverage.  It also, I suspect, requires more commitment and dedication to return to something again and again to keep it up to date, rather than to create something more or less workable, and then move on to other things.
 * I know very very little about Haplogroup O, so I knew I wasn't equipped to assess anything that was troubling User:Chriting. I just wanted to get him away to a revert-cycle to actually discussing what his concern was, to try to get onto a more productive path.  If there really are multiple papers all pointing the same way, and we're talking about people of the calibre of Karafet and Hammer, then with luck getting that onto the table might be sufficient to get him to re-evaluate.
 * On to J-P209. If a split happened, and J-P209 didn't come out on top, would it need a separate article?  If it's taken this long to separate the SNPs, that suggests that the population with one but not the other might be really quite limited indeed, so that it would make sense to treat both in the same article, and save article proliferation for where there really are distinguishable very substantial populations.  What I think is undeniable is that there would still need to be an article on the root of Haplogroup J, and I suspect it would continue to look pretty much the same, the inference being that population proportions testing for J-P209 were a pretty good proxy for the distribution of J-new-top-SNP.
 * Of course big changes have happened before -- for example Karafet's paper which created Haplogroup T and radically changed Haplogroup K. If that happens, then there is no alternative to major surgery, I think. But not a reason, I think, not to still have a Haplogroup K and Haplogoup T page.  We do distinguish these top-level haplogroups in the nomenclature, by using them as consistent prefixes; and I think it's helpful to people first getting into the subject if the article titles were also distinguished by just referring to them as Haplogroup K or Haplogoup T -- I suspect it helps new (and not so new) readers keep their key bearings straight in what even so is going to become a very involved sea of different clade names.
 * "Did you realize that there were some articles that began with chains of This is the haplogroup that was called and was then called and was then called and that ISOGG called... ?" Mmm.  (Hides face).  I suspect, if you looked into the edit history, I might very well have been the one who edited that in there.  But because people don't necessarily click on footnotes (or can't, if they're reading hard copy), I still suspect that at least some mention in the running text of the most important names the clade has previously been known by is probably of some use, at least to a significant minority of readers.
 * But the real message I should be underlining is still the first thing I wrote: huge respect to you for taking this on, and doing so much to drag these articles into 2013. Jheald (talk) 23:49, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I am not against article proliferation only bad article proliferation. :-)--RebekahThorn (talk) 01:26, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

E-M215 problems noticed
I do not have time to track back who did what but somehow E-M215 now has E-M243 replacing all instances of the much better known name E-M35, and then someone has replaced this with the more esoteric name E-M35.1. A quick glance gives a lot of concern about the kinds of edits that must be being made. Presumably in this case you are using things like automated rules to do edits, because the changes have even been made in direct quotes and names of websites! Some obvious points:
 * Wikipedia needs to takes its direction from what is found in publications. So we mainly use common names which are the main ones found in publications. We do not try to use WP as a place to keep score of things so recent that they are not yet found elsewhere.
 * Obviously we should not be changing the text of direct quotes! And more generally editing in such a way that creates such events is concerning.
 * You are the one making a big surge of edits. Good on you but honestly no one asked you to do this, and you have no right to demand that others clean up errors introduced by you. I am not sure that there is anyone currently following what you are doing as much as I am, and I am not following it closely. So errors might remain for a very long time. So you basically should only be doing this big surge if you can do it in a way which does not introduce errors.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:41, 6 January 2013 (UTC)
 * If I introduced an error, I am sorry. It was not intentional.--RebekahThorn (talk) 20:28, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

The IP you mention on my talkpage is not me but someone trying to work with you it seems. As mentioned above changicing M243 to M35.1 is however not the right fix. They have also made a change to the basic paragraph about high frequency populations that I think is not helpful. Once again I am sorry I really have limited time now.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 06:06, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

citation format concern
You seem to have spent a lot of time changing all the citation formats on articles like R1a. I am not against Harvard style referencing myself (the article used to have lots more) but the way you have done it does not look good, and it seems to solve no problem that needed solving. Please note that parenthetical harvard style referecing does not normally work like you have done it (just some brackets at the end of sentences where the footnotes would be). Anyway, all the harv links are now broken. Try clicking on a few. I remember putting an enormous amount of work into making those all work, and putting them all into footnotes. (I was always pushed to convert my old parenthetical referencing to footnotes, so I guess this pressure will come back. Big tags one the top of the articles are not really a neat solution either.) I know you are doing lots of effort, but that is not necessarily worthwhile if the effort makes articles worse, and that is clearly what is happening. As a practical thing, I strongly advise you to keep your waves of editing efforts limited to small doable steps that you can complete properly in each wave. Instead you are mixing controversial with uncontrersial jobs, and jobs that you are able to complete with jobs you are leaving uncomplete. I am not sure how many editors are watching this, but I am sure if any are actually thinking of trying to help they will be unable to. Concerning the broken links, apart from big reverts to old versions maybe the quickest solution, though still awkward, is to copy some of the old harv templates that will be visible in archived versions of the R1a article. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 09:53, 10 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Just what citation isn't clicking for you?--RebekahThorn (talk) 16:16, 10 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Hmm. All working that I checked now. Did you fix something? BTW you did not create an R-M17 redirect. I just did it.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 16:45, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

attempt to make ISOGG article
I know you might be interested in this subject. A new user who has been doing some fairly controversial edits has made an ISOGG article in a fairly awkward way. It will probably be deleted if it is not improved. This could then make any eventual new creation of the article a bit more difficult.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 10:37, 1 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Let me just go make a move to have it zapped with all due haste. As Katherine Borges always says, ISOGG is not a real organization but more like a book club. That is not the stuff of Wikipedia articles. --RebekahThorn (talk) 11:35, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

Talkback
Dougweller (talk) 13:31, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

Talkback
Dougweller (talk) 15:53, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

replied again
Dougweller (talk) 16:10, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

Your help requested
Haplogroup E-V38, an article that you or your project may be interested in, has been nominated for a community good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 22:54, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!
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