User talk:RobertSegal

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Hello, RobertSegal, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful: I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place  before the question. It is great to see a new user with the technical background you desceibed on your user page. You might find interesting the Reference desk, where volunteers act much as reference librarians and answer questions on a variety of subjects. If you have questions about any technical issues, just contact me on my talk page. Again, welcome! Edison (talk) 16:07, 16 March 2011 (UTC)
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tags for 'by whom' placed in fukushima power plant accident article
Hello. I noticed you have just placed a number of tags on the article page and was wondering why you did this. For example, below.

'It was hoped to restore power to units 1 and 2 on 19 March and the other units on 20 March. '

There were quite a lot of tags added, but perhaps you could explain why you added this particular one as an example? Sandpiper (talk) 22:09, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

[Is this where I place a reply to your inquiry, Sandpiper? I'm sorry it's the best I can surmise from a rapid check of the help pages regarding "messages".] Hello. I added the tag because my experience copy editing shows "it was hoped" conveys no useful information. In truth, even if the writer had attributed the hoping, that attribution would provide very little of use in the article. But at least doing so would turn an (unintentionally) vague absurdity into a straightforward statement of fact, an improvement. The passive construction is poor writing and that's only the half of it. The correct thing to do would be to gut the sentence, review the source, remove the nonsense about anyone's hoping (if not supported by the source), and reconstruct it as an active voice, declarative statement. There are, as I've noted in discussion pages about Fukushima Wiki articles, significant problems with nothing more peculiar than sloppy writing. One post on a discussion page expressed dismay sources weren't being well cited and a reply to that post got into an epistemological thrust, insisting only the omniscient could phrase things otherwise. That's just nonsense. In fact, the confusion in that case simply resulted from bad writing. So I added the tag (amongst others) to indicate examples of lousy writing. Could I review the "it was hoped" source and re-write the offending sentence? Yes, I could. However, there are so very many examples of sloppy writing in this particular mess of a large, expanding, and constantly shifting article, I've opted to copy edit the errors ("blue pencil" them, if you will) and then return to fix the ones I can, whilst leaving the remainder to be addressed by other editors. But fix them someone must. I ran a nuclear reactor for several years but I'm happy to let the contributors sift for addable content. I'm satisfied with the research being done, here. But I am greatly dissatisfied by the (lack of) writing skill. I look at the article and see a mess in a large percentage of sentences. This article is important to the internet and I'm addressing the messy writing as best I can. I'm a good copy editor and happy to work for improvements. That said, I know next to nothing about the machinations that create Wikipedia articles and I stand by for recommendations as to how best to correct the mistakes in them. Let me know how best to do so. Thanks! - Robert RobertSegal (talk) 23:06, 18 March 2011 (UTC)]


 * if you post something on a users talk page, they get a post it sticker saying they have a message. So doing it pure you post your reply on my page and vice versa and we get half a conversation each. Or reply here and just say hi check back and I come look and find it. It worked.

I cant agree about the passive style. Why do you dislike it... but this seems a matter of taste. A little hard to follow which examples you are talking about in your reply...seem to have had a rather eventful life...and then it again seems to be a question of taste in how to structure sentences rather than the content to which you did object.

The biggest problem the article has is getting accurate facts. I judge that more important than style. But this is somewhere you do what you choose to do and I would not disagree the article lacks polish. It is hugely a collection of facts, but in my opinion also tricky to string them together because it is far from clear which will finally prove important and which irrelevant. Many people collecting things enthusiastically because it is of interest, so the article sprawls, and fights break out between those who think it too long or too short, and where.

I see the article has been amended to 'It was anticipated to restore power to units 1 and 2 on 19 March and the other units on 20 March.[16]'. Is this what you had in mind, because I don't think the response above did in fact say what you would have done with it?

I was tempted to revert the lot you did because I dont regard scattering a page with little complaints as very helpful. Just seems to me trying to annoy people when editors fly past a page, spot something they dont like, flag it, and never appear again. If you had just edited it, I might not even have noticed. (because I knew it needed fixing but hadnt studied it) So in a sense, I agree with you. And I am also failing to disagree with you because I havn't seen the before and afters of what you would have done with it. This is a situation where a snap decision is called for because the page is very busy and it rapidly becomes difficult to undo complex changes to a page after many others have added changes over the top. But to repeat myself I hate irritating flags, which you must agree do not improve the readability, if that was the objective in placing them.

In this case, I thought 'It was hoped' and other such phrases dotted about the article accurately expressed the situation. This was imputing something to Tepco and nisa which strictly speaking was not stated in the source, but given the companies string of failures to satisfy expectations of improvement as expressed in their press statements, I felt it was not stretching a point too much to transmute their stated schedule for completing repairs into an aspiration to do the same. Thus a literal representation of the source material. I havnt examined the other flags in detail though I did spot another where I thought you had a much better case. Leaving 'it was hoped' in the text then allows the saga to roll on over the next few days when we shall see whether the predictions prove justified or not, and the whole saga of claim and result remains in the record.

So perhaps you might again give your thoughts on the sentence? I find the article very difficult to edit because virtually every sentence requires research to find out what the original statement was before amending anything.

Oh, I think there are a lot of non-native english speakers editing for what are probably obvious reasons. I dont know any Japanese but there is a certain flavour in the press releases and edits which seems similar. Some difficulties over appropriate tenses. Sandpiper (talk) 03:22, 19 March 2011 (UTC)


 * where to start? I too write too much, because I enjoy it. I presume most people are here because they enjoy what they do here. What people do depends on what they want to do. There are structures inviting you to get involved in different kinds of things but its entirely up to you. Some people like running things and organsise rules and procedures. Some like organising words and copyediting. Some like hunting out content. All are needed.


 * At risk of repetition, I do not like those who fly by and leave tags without actually doing anything. It just makes things look messy. If editors already know there is a problem, it doesnt help to have it pointed out. If they dont know there is a problem, then they are probably badly placed to fix it. If they do not agree there is a problem, they arent going to. Your tags have disappeared from the article, but you saw the result in the example I quoted. That was the correction someone had posted in response to your flag. I think someone who persistently came back re-flagging the same sentences which editors felt were perfectly fine would not be considerd especially helpfull.


 * Having said that I had a bit of a look at the summary section, but immediately got bogged down in facts. As is usually the case, this section started off as something else, and as a result the distinction of which events happened on which days had become somewhat blurred, particularly at its start. I therefore had to check which facts were which days, and to be quite honest am not happy this is yet correct. This is the sort of thing I mean about not worrying too much about style at this stage. The whole article will turn over repeatedly before it settles down, which will be firstly when the current crisis is resolved, and then perhaps when we get official enquiries into what happened, which presumably we will, which will have all those little details which no one is mentioning just now.


 * You have still failed to convince me that 'It was hoped' was not appropriate. Your tags linked to wiki's page on weasel words, which is about the issue of editors using phrases like, 'it is believed', when they have no evidence whether something is believed ot not. My annoyance with this is that sometimes vagueness is appropriate, because it happens to be the true condition. In the case of the english press releases from the japanes organisations, this seems to be particularly true because of the cryptic writing style, which I suspect is the conspiracy of translation and reticence. A probably very precisely limited original has further suffered in translation. I am not left with any real idea of who is doing the hoping. The documents seem to suggest a confidence in the timetable, but I have to be intensely sceptical that this is what the author truly meant. I think 'It was anticipated' quite justifiably could be taken that the entire world anticipated that power would be restored at a certain time, but with a certain scepticism.


 * You may have looked it up to check, (in case you havn't got there yet, the article history does allow you to track down any edit if sufficiently motivated) but I picked that example because I wrote it. But it doesnt pay to edit here if you are too obsessed with the purity of your own edits. I was minded to suggest that the company was being positive in 'hoping' for success, rather than overconfident in 'anticipating' success. I don't agree the subject was entirely lacking even if unstated, because it was entirely clear what general organisation was responsible for repairs. Yet also somewhat opaque who exactly was responsible. State that it was TEPCO? what hand would the government now have in directing their actions? Contrary to wiki policy, I somewhat  believe in accuracy in articles, and this may require vagary. An alternative in a more ordinary article would be to go into alternative interpretations, but no no no no in this maelststrom. Apart from that it becomes very boring repetitiously saying tepco said at 11...nisa said at 12...Even worse than writing up officers war records.


 * Best not to think about the 250,000 page hits per day. I reckon the world needs to understand that issues are seldom clear cut, everything has errors, rather than wiki pretending it is perfect.


 * "I see the article has been amended to..." Passive voice, Sandpiper?
 * Is recommended somewhere in guidelines when editors converse, to make conversations as impersonal as possible so as to discourage fighting. Sandpiper (talk) 17:24, 19 March 2011 (UTC)


 * (you do know about auto signing your name using four tilde characters in a row ....? I just ask because the sig above has an extra square bracket and i dont see how it would have got there if auto signed)
 * are you yet an initiate into the deletionist debate? dont know what you may have said, but I always favour giving something time to see what will become of it. Maybe nothing useful will be said, or maybe we shall yet have a state funeral or two. Sandpiper (talk) 18:05, 19 March 2011 (UTC)


 * There seems to be a certain view that wikipedia is quite comprehensive and it is forseeable that it will be 'finished' in a reasonably short time. This tends to go hand in hand with more and more rules intended to improve quality, which however make it harder and harder for the average person to do anything. You might be interested in a debate at http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/March_2011_Update which is about the question of whether wikipedia is in terminal decline at the moment it seems most successful.
 * I havnt looked at any deletion debates for some time so dont know how they are going. It strikes me there is a very aggressive policy of deleting any  stub article very quickly unless it aquires a minimum standard of information. This is wholly not how the original thing got started, where articles grew in a darwinian way with the most successful flourishing. Sandpiper (talk) 21:12, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Making an Edit to See Why Wiki Elsewhere Thinks I'm Not Logged In
Here's my edit! RobertSegal (talk) 13:54, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

24-hour clock
You can find the the physical digital clock showing 24:00 at an old version of the article, for example (I did not check when it was removed, shown here as well).

The discussion about Siemens you can find in the talk archive (search for Siemens, occurring in several places)

You still mix the clock system with a clock display. The article and the table are about the former, of which the latter is only one aspect. In the system, 24:00 is quite prominently present and omitting it would be unjustified. Consistency between article title, definition and table is of importance. The current status was reached after long discussions. Any change should be a clear and real improvement before it's acceptable.

&minus;Woodstone (talk) 16:04, 31 March 2011 (UTC)