User talk:Walkerma/Archive21

This archive covers up to the end of Aug 2008. Topics include rollback rights, CAS-Wikipedia collaboration, 1.0 (style issues, vandalism, exemplars, changes to assessment, etc), Zotero, Dispatch. For other talk page archives see User talk:Walkerma/Archives. Other close archives include: Archive10 &mdash; Archive11 &mdash; Archive12 &mdash; Archive13 &mdash; Archive14 &mdash; Archive15 &mdash; Archive16 &mdash; Archive17 &mdash; Archive18 &mdash; Archive19 &mdash; Archive20 &mdash; Archive22 &mdash; Archive23 &mdash; Archive24 &mdash; Archive25 &mdash; Archive26 &mdash; Archive27 &mdash; Archive28 &mdash; Archive29

Dispatch
Hi. Regarding this, it seems that there was some miscommunication. The idea was that you guys should draft the piece; I and others can then help copy-edit. Can you assure us that you can get something done by the 14th? If not, we will have to postpone this for another week, and look for someone else for that one. In the meantime, please watchlist WP:FCDW. Thanks. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 01:24, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
 * I'm sure we can manage something by the 14th, if that is the best option. However, I want to check exactly what you want.  The "second (final) round" poll is currently under way, and it will still be running on June 14th.  Do you want to use the dispatch to drum up interest in the poll (so more people participate), or do you want to talk about the result of the poll?  If it is the latter, then obviously the following week would be better.  Please let me know here - I'm still on vacation, but I'm trying to check in here every 2-3 days. Thanks for the FCDW link, that should be helpful.  Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 18:01, 5 June 2008 (UTC)
 * That's in your hands. (I'm not following the poll itself.)  If you do not think that June 14 is a good date, we can switch, but would have to know asap.  It's also best to reply to WP:FCDW, so we can have a centralized discussion, and to which I will copy this correspondence. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 20:59, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Hello!
Hello! Are you interested in a serious Wikimeetup? -- Crea m y! Talk 01:49, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

WikiProject Good articles newsletter
Delivered manually due to long talk page. giggy (O) 02:27, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Dispatch 2
Hi there: how's it going for 16 June? Wikipedia_talk:Featured_content_dispatch_workshop TONY   (talk)  15:34, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
 * Walkerma, if you can begin to rough something out at WP:FCDW/June 16, 2008, with the idea of having a draft by the 13th, others will help ce and round it out. You can see other sample Dispatches at . You could begin roughing in basic definitions, the history of the Assessment scheme, some data/stats on article assessments Projectwide, things like that, so that everything else will be in place to add the poll results once they're in.  Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 16:12, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
 * I'll work on this a bit tonight. Walkerma (talk) 08:54, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Walkerma, we're past publication date, and there are still three inline comments that should urgently be addressed (search on <!) ... the description of C-class is missing, we need better examples, and the description of B-class is inconsistent with info in the Grading scheme relative to C-class. Readers who are unaware of and uninvolved with assessment need a clear idea of what B and C are. Best, Sandy Georgia (Talk) 16:45, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

C-Class
I have just read your wrap of the discussion and was impressed by the quality of your analysis. Like you, I went into the discussion with a reasonably open mind but opposed mostly because of an inate conservatism when it comes to large-scale changes and because broadly I prefer to see effort going into article improvement rather than article administration. I don't know yet whether Milhist will adopt the new class - that's a matter on which we need to seek consensus ourselves - but if we do it will be relatively easy to implement. We recently had a huge clean up on our B-Class articles, demoting about a third of them, so the ones that remain are solidly B-Class. Milhist articles which fail B-Class by any of the five B-Class criteria are automatically Start-class, and categorised by the failing criteria. It is not too difficult to extract those Start-class which fail B by one or two criteria and regrade them as C. Those failing B by three or more could stay as Start. For new assessments, this could be template driven. Anyhow, these are musings rather than anything else ... -- R OGER D AVIES  talk 05:09, 19 June 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks a lot - I take a very deep breath when I post things like that, so I'm glad that you approve. I also try to avoid large scale changes if possible, but I think sometimes they are necessary.  I was wondering about inviting one or two of the skeptics to assist in the rewrite of the definitions, and you made some of the strongest points against the proposal - would you be willing to provide some input?  I agree that I don't want to pull people away from writing, but your comments could be very helpful, if you have time, particularly as the new version of the scheme may look a lot like Milhist but with Start split into Start + C.  Can you help out a little?  Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 05:21, 19 June 2008 (UTC)


 * Sure. No problems at all, -- R OGER D AVIES  talk 09:48, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

Hi, Martin. It is nice to be able to go out and rehearse for a few hours and then look at a very-well thought-out assessment of the entire discussion. Even if you had indicated that C-Class didn't have enough consensus, I would have backed the result.

Now, there are a few things to do. The first task you mentioned (defining C-Class precisely) I think goes hand-in-hand with the second task (rewriting tables, definitions, criteria, examples, etc), so I would prefer if we did those sort of concurrently at Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment or Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment rewrite. (I prefer the first page as there are more eyes watching it, and more eyes = more better.)

B-Class will have to be modified as well, yet I'm still not sure about what would be the best course of action for this. I'm a bit uncertain about whether we should codify WP:MILHIST's B-Class criteria into the main scale, because smaller projects may not be able to handle it properly. That said, I certainly want to encourage WikiProjects who are capable of this type of review to do it. So, maybe codifying the idea, but not the procedure might be the best outcome?

As for the technical arena, there's only so much I can do there. I saw that you dropped notes on WP:IGOR's talk page and WT:1.0/I about the change. Those are by far the largest components of the technical tasks left to do. It's really up to ClockworkSoul, CBM, and Oleg to implement those changes, as I don't have access to the code. (Ideally, we should start the mentioned overhaul of the code sometime soon, while the winds of change are on our side.) The other tasks would be to modify seeder templates like class parameter and WPBannerMeta and other similar templates that may or may not exist, but that I don't know about. A more minor hassle will be getting a new color palette for the scale, as the color I picked for C-Class is just a temporary hack. (Maybe reviving the lighter green we used before for B-Class?) I'll notify the maintainer of Pyrospirit's tool about the change to the scale, but he'll probably have to change it again when we pick new colors for classes. (Outriggr seems to have abandoned his script, and I don't know how to fix it, to be honest, so I just left a note in the talk page and we'll see what happens there.)

In any case, there's a lot of work to do to spread around, but thanks for the closure. Although I think that we'll head down this road soon (A v. GA), it's nice to set this issue to rest once and for all. Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 09:40, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
 * {{tlx|WPBannerMeta}] is done, but I'm not sure if it was a good idea: as I've said at the poll, we need to create a hell of a lot of Category:C-Class foo articles before we can really get this show on the road. I think we need a central place to co-ordinate this process, something like Wikipedia:talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment/C-Class rollout.  Otherwise we'll miss things and make a mess. Happy‑melon 12:09, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
 * I'm not a fan of making new pages only for one purpose, as discussion gets really fragmented. We can just use Wikipeida talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment making a new section there. Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 19:46, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

Wikiversity invite
Hi Walkerma, I saw your new user page on WikiEducator, and wondered if we could also tempt you into dropping into Wikiversity where your wiki expertise and teaching/research knowledge could be invaluable? -- Jtneill - Talk 02:51, 25 June 2008 (UTC)
 * I'm happy to set up an account, but I can't really spread myself too thin! I signed up on WikiEducator because it has specific features that relate to Wikipedia offline releases, I don't expect to be very active otherwise.  I'm already over-busy here!  However, I'm definitely very interested in Wikiversity, and if there are major things happening in chemistry, be sure to let me know. Walkerma (talk) 03:54, 25 June 2008 (UTC)
 * In related news, looking here, I see that you haven't enabled single unified login. You can just click on Special:Mergeaccount, follow the instructions there, and then be able to visit any Wikimedia wiki with your username and password. Additionally, it guarantees that any Walkerma in Wikimedia is you. (my report, if you're interested, by the way...) Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 06:47, 25 June 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks, that's great! I even checked my report, and see it remembers my edits to the 2006 Wikimania wiki - amazing!  Periodically I go into other language wikis (I even have an Indonesian account - I used to know a bit of Indonesian!), so this will be useful.  I also like the fact that people will know it's the same Walkerma (until I blacken my name!).  Thanks a lot, Walkerma (talk) 21:13, 25 June 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks for signing up at WV, Walkerama, it's always good to have some positive sleepers :) If chemistry gets active, I'll let you know. -- Jtneill - Talk 12:04, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

IRC
Dirk, PC, Dmacks and me are online now, if you're interested. :) --Rifleman 82 (talk) 16:36, 26 June 2008 (UTC)

Version 1.0 Editorial Team
I've signed up, particularly because I see the nominations backlog isn't going down. I have three questions though (and am asking you because you seem more active): --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:10, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

(1) Where does most of the team discussion occur? What page(s) should I watch?

(2) Do I have to wait for an article to be nominated to review/pass? If you notice, I've been nominating many basic biology articles. I could process most of these (since I was not involved in editing but a couple of them), but wonder if this would be frowned upon as "out of process". So, do I need to wait for articles to be nominated, or can I brainstorm for the obvious candidates and verify they are of suitable quality without going through the nominations procedure?

(3) What is the relationship (if any) between WP:VITAL and Core topics - 1,000?


 * (1) Most discussion occurs on the main project page, with technical issues (concerning the assessment tracking bot) discussed here. If you do decide to get actively involved in the upcoming Version 0.7 release (see below), it'd be good also to watch this and the corresponding nominations talk page (particularly if you're reviewing).  I warn you, this project is one where there may be nothing much for several months, then something important crops up (like the current assessment debate) and you may get 20 posts on a particular page in 24 hours.  Most major things are at least crossposted from the main project talk page, though.


 * (2)It would be great if you could help with reviews, thanks! I've tried to persuade new members to get involved with this, but most people have shown little interest.  This is probably because the Selection Bot will be automating much of this selection process (see our March test output here).  However, we need to have manual nomination and selection open to ensure that we don't miss obvious articles; I don't think we should rely on a bot ALONE to choose our articles! Since I got back from vacation, I've been wrapped up in the introduction of the new C-Class, normally I would have been busy reviewing.  I will review your nominations, as these should be reviewed by another person, though they all look to be obvious passes at a quick glance.  (We need many of this type of article, so I thank you!).  If you're willing to look over the other sections and review some articles there, I'd appreciate it.


 * We are planning to release Version 0.7 this autumn. This may seem ambitious, but we've been doing much behind the scenes to keep things progressing.  User:CBM tells me he will be working on the selection bot actively in July, and I believe we are close to a working system.  Please can you help us during this critical run-up to our next release?  I'd really appreciate having another person involved (especially someone with your experience), besides the old stalwarts!


 * (3) Finally, regarding WP:VITAL and the Core 1000, unfortunately these somewhat duplicate each other. The latter was created by our once very active organizer of WP:CORE, to be something that fell under the jurisdiction of WP:1.0.  The former is a rename of an old list from David Gerard called something like "Articles Which Every Language Encyclopedia Must Have", which was translated into many other languages.  It was a good list, but of course now every language has a changed version!  Neither list has been actively maintained; the VITAL list has had a higher profile, but this has meant that often people have dropped by to add in their favorite religion/pop star/whatever.  I think the selection bot will make it redundant, because (although imperfect) that judges importance more objectively based on several specific criteria rather than "I think this is important."


 * I hope this answers your questions. I also hope that you'll be able to help us with the upcoming Version 0.7.  Thanks, Walkerma (talk) 03:56, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

My phone
Is apparently somewhere in my office-boxes, should reappear when I unpack Monday and I'll get back to you... DMacks (talk) 04:20, 28 June 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes, there's a voice echoing out of the boxes, "Dr Macks, I'm sorry I can't take the quiz, as I'm really sick (cough cough)."  If it's anything like my office, good luck in finding it! Walkerma (talk) 04:40, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

DIPAMP
Hey Martin

If you have a moment, can you check that the image depicts the (S,S) enantiomer? I assigned it, but I've not assigned R and S in years. --Rifleman 82 (talk) 16:21, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

WP 1.0 assessment request
Posted at User talk:Titoxd and User talk:Walkerma I noticed that you are a member of the 1.0 Editorial Team and you have an interest in assessment, so I am requesting that you assist me in making an assessment table for WikiProject_Bahá'í_Faith. As you can see, I have made WikiProject Bahá'í Faith/Assessment, WPBF, and Category:WikiProject Bahá'í Faith articles, but for some reason Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Bahá'í Faith articles by quality statistics is not being generated. Walkerma added Category:Wikipedia 1.0 assessments almost two weeks ago, but the table hasn't been generated yet. I really appreciate your time and I wish I knew what I was doing wrong here. Also, I know that there was discussion about C-class articles, but did that get approved? If so, is it obligatory to add a C-class? Please respond on my talk or Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Bahá'í Faith. Thanks. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 21:06, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

A discussion
An important discussion on ''Should WikiProjects get prior approval of other WikiProjects (Descendant or Related or any ) to tag articles that overlaps their scope ? '' is open here. We welcome you to participate and give your valuable opinions. You are receiving this note as you are a member of WikiProject Council --  TinuCherian  (Wanna Talk?) - 12:44, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

E coli
Is Escherichia coli selected by the WP 1.0 team or not? It isn't listed, but it does have the "2006 CD Selection" tag on its talk page. I never know how to intepret that tag. --EncycloPetey (talk) 04:33, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Overhauling the WP 1.0 bot
You may be interested in looking at User:WP 1.0 bot/Second generation... Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 21:28, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

C-class question
I know C-class was rolled out a week ago but do we need to update our project templates to allow the statistics to be compiled by the bot? Ireland and Philately both need it, but I have no idea how or what to do, though I do see that a C-class category has been created for each. Who do I call? Cheers ww2censor (talk) 00:01, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
 * According to the latest Ireland stats, all C-class articles are listed as unassessed. TIA ww2censor (talk) 12:58, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Updated both banners. Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 19:13, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Cool stuff. Thanks Titoxd, I did not have a clue what to add. ww2censor (talk) 19:22, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Having run the assessment statistics bot manually there is one small issue. The bot only picks up articles that use a capital 'C' in the template and ignores any where a lowercase 'c' has been used. Is there a way to ensure that both are counted? Cheers ww2censor (talk) 19:53, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
 * That's odd. On which template does that occur? Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 20:04, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Hmm, I tested both and I couldn't replicate the problem. What I did find is that the templates don't accept ; they only accept . Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 20:29, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

1.0 version selection
You still have the problem I mentioned before with Recent Changes patrol. As a quick e.g. which your automated process has to catch look at Physical Cosmology. This edit by a very high ranked editor reverts the previous piece of vandalism but leaves the immediately preceding one:. The preceding one has stood for a week and is still there. We are finding a lot of these... I think it is a function of the way Recent Changes patrol operates but its a pain. We take two separated versions by high rank editors and compare AND then get someone to skim read. --BozMo talk 20:04, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes, I think I heard this has been a problem with the flagged revisions as well. I've seen some vandals do a set of three edits, where the third reverts the vandalism of the second, but the first vandalism remains - sneaky!  We simply don't have the resources to do what you suggest, manual reads of the diffs for our planned 20,000-30,000 articles, but if we coordinate things for our releases we can both use such checked versions wherever possible.  We can also run Wizzy's "bad words" script as another check, but minor vandalism of this sort will continue to be a pain.
 * FYI, I had a good phone conversation today with User:CBM, who is writing the SelectionBot script, and we are modifying the code. We pointed out the problem with lists like the mammals one you mentioned, and this will be solved by using a machine estimate of importance whenever the manual importance rating is unavailable.  In addition we will be weighing these manual importances based on the importance of a particular project's scope (e.g., a "High" in History is higher than a "High" in History of Poland.  We're both actively working on this, and we're talking again in a week, so hopefully we'll soon have an updated set of selection lists. Walkerma (talk) 20:30, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
 * We couldn't do 20,000 either. The 2008/9 Schools selection will be 5500 articles (just fitting on a DVD) but a much higher relevance than last year and with a few fun gizmos. The good news is that once you have a set of checked versions the updating for most articles is a glance at the diffs versus last checked version. Less than 10% have been completely rewritten and a surprising number just have pages of vandal/revert/vandal/revert --BozMo talk 07:17, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

OLPC WikiBrowse slice
I noticed you're the project coordinator for the Wikipedia 1.0 release version that aims to have ~30k articles. I thought I should drop a note here pointing you to the WikiBrowse activity on One Laptop Per Child's XO computer. For this project we put together a subset of Spanish Wikipedia that is currently shipped on laptops to children in Peru, who (if I recall correctly) have ordered around 100,000 laptops...

I'm the person who put together the article list for this, which ended up being around 24k articles (not counting redirects) in 80MB (without images; we use another 20MB for highly compressed popular images). I used traffic statistics to do this, you can read about it here:. Maybe you already heard about it but I thought I should mention it because the project is probably interesting to people trying to create slices of English wikipedia. I found traffic statistics to be a very simple and successful method for getting a good subset of pages from Spanish wikipedia. Madeleine ✉ ✍ 15:59, 18 July 2008 (UTC)


 * I'm pretty happy with the slice we made. If you want to see the list, you can download it from here:, and also a list that has the traffic stats (less lines because redirect traffic was merged into main article traffic). Here are some of my observations regarding the various methods for ranking articles...
 * Importance ratings - As you noted, these don't exist for other wikipedias... In my experience with looking at article importance assessments for wikiprojects I find that there are often large errors of assessment. This is natural, it's a single person that has made the choice, and different people have very different ideas of what is important.
 * Incoming internal links - this was are initial attempt at making a slice. It worked very poorly - it missed a couple core articles - eg. the Atom article. There are also unpopular areas that have a high level of interlinking, eg. lists of car race winners. I was very unhappy with it, this goaded me into acquiring the traffic stats.
 * number of interwiki versions of the article - maybe this would be good. There are some problems in trusting that the appropriate article has been linked (like importance, these are also human generated?). For example, the article "Business" maps to "Negocio", a stub article that has a traffic count of 9,399 / 29 interwiki links. More appropriate & popular articles are "Comercio" (43,315 / 34) and "Empresa" (154,168 / 23). In the end I chose a link to Empresa for the starting page of the activity after discussing it with a Puerto Rican.


 * In the end, because the set is so large, I judge that our biggest fear should be that of missing key articles from the set, rather than of including extraneous stuff. (Hence my usage of the Atom article as a test case.) The traffic based method easily included all the core articles I placed on the opening page of the activity.
 * Look at it this way - the cost of each article overrated due to traffic stats (and who are we to judge that, anyway?) is marginal. Unless a significant percentage are overrated (and in my observation they are very much the exception), this isn't a big problem. The cost of missing an article like Atom is much worse.
 * I've no doubt that a lot of work went into using the other statistics, but my experience with creating the wikislice would incline me to support heavy usage of traffic statistics to pick articles. Madeleine ✉ ✍ 18:37, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks a lot, I've been taking a look. I agree with all of the points above, though my conclusion was different.  The log scale ensures that no single parameter dominates the weighting, and that no important articles get missed.  But I think you're right, that probably hitcount is the most reliable single parameter, certainly if you are aiming to be inclusive rather than exclusive.  Thanks again for making contact, we should stay in touch. Walkerma (talk) 19:51, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
 * I meant to add this postscript, I was curious if you've made a diff comparison of purely traffic based selection vs. the composite method for English Wikipedia. (I also wonder if disk space / size is a better normalization between the two rather than total number of articles.) I'd be curious to see what the difference is between the two sets. Thanks! Madeleine ✉ ✍ 23:58, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Hey, I wrote the current Sex, it's a core topic! :-)
 * Thanks for the report back! It's funny how sex is so much more popular in the English wikipedia traffic stats, I think it must be a side effect of high google rank (a search for "sexo" on google.es doesn't get the same result)...(wonder if there's a way to recognize and sort out google traffic!)
 * I guess diffing the top 1000 most relevant to a paper encyclopedia. For OLPC, not so relevant - since we can compress tens of thousands of articles into less than 100MB, it might not play out so dramatically if one diffs the top 20k?
 * As a sidenote - you're merging the traffic to redirects into the main page's traffic, right? I haven't tried doing that with English wikipedia, although I know it was important that I did so with Spanish. Madeleine ✉ ✍ 01:19, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

The trick is compression using bz2; the entire English wikipedia article text (without history or images) compresses to about 2GB. Patrick Collison wrote an app for the iPhone that can uncompress individual articles as you call them up. (Uncompressing an individual block is very fast.) Also, I think the German DVD had redundant information in the form of separate HTML code for each article. OLPC adapted the wikipedia-on-iphone code to use on the XO, which is described in the WikiBrowse page.  I'm not really a programmer, but I guess I'd be interested in listening in on the IRC discussion. Thanks! -- Madeleine ✉ ✍ 15:48, 5 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks, that's good to know; that may come up at the IRC. I'm not a programmer either; the IRC discussion will focus on what still needs to be done to publish Version 0.7.  If we get a nice selection, it may be good to use for the OLPC project in Anglophone countries, with some tweaking (that's my hope, anyway!). Walkerma (talk) 16:25, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Spread the word
There is a discussion about getting more people involved in Philately on Wikipedia. Join the discussion and share your thoughts here. ww2censor (talk) 16:42, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

Article Development timeline
Sorry for replying late. I am glad that I was able to help. I see you have illustrated the timeline nicely - it looks very amazing! Unfortunately I chose an article to analyze that passed the last few stages of its lifecycle, i.e. GA->A->FA very quickly. But none-the-less, I believe your timeline is an extremely useful addition the the assessment scale.  Arman  ( Talk ) 01:39, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your kind farewell message
Martin, thanks for your kind farewell message on my Talk page. See the Talk page of Standard conditions of temperature and pressure. The only thing that make me consider returning is if Headbomb were to admit he was wrong in changing the Table in that article ... which is very unlikely considering how full he is of himself and his belief that he is always right. There simply is no way to reason with him. Thanks anyway, mbeychok (talk) 05:13, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

Hydrochloric acid FAR
Hydrochloric acid has been nominated for a featured article review. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to featured quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, articles are moved onto the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article from featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Reviewers' concerns are here. Nishkid64 (Make articles, not wikidrama) 13:41, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

0.7 IRC
It would depend on what day and at what time. My schedule in August is rather erratic (as I have to teach a few people every now and then) and then I start the regular academic semester in the middle of the month. So, for now, I don't know, although it's most likely that I can attend. Who else would attend? Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 08:34, 31 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Also, I'm not sure whether you've seen it, but if you haven't, you may want to see this... Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 06:17, 5 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks for that link. I'm familiar with the page, and I was looking for it tonight and couldn't find it - I was trying Second version, etc. Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 06:20, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

CD question
Hi,

I have a quick question for something I'm working on about reuse. How many CD/DVD releases have there been (in English)? I know about the Schools CD, the Schools DVD, and Wikipedia on DVD; have there been any others? Just want to make sure I know what I'm talking about :) -- phoebe / (talk to me) 20:57, 5 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Good to hear from you! Those three you mention are the only releases that I know of that have involved the community and had a presence on WP itself.  However, there have been a few "outside" releases - you may recall the free Webaroo DVDs given away at Wikimania 2006.  BTW, we hope to get Version 0.7 out this fall, if things go well; we are close to having our article selection. Walkerma (talk) 03:27, 6 August 2008 (UTC)
 * thanks! Ah, Webaroo, I wonder what happened to them? They were pretty enthusiastic... good to hear 0.7 is on its way! -- phoebe / (talk to me) 07:29, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

The Barnstar of Good Humor
Thanks! Walkerma (talk) 03:45, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

RE: Dow Chemical
I wanted to thank you for your kind words to my edits of the Dow Chemical article. However, I don't have a COMPLETELY neutral interest in the company. I used to be an employee of the Company while I went to college (co-op) and I am currently a meager shareholder. My current stake in the company is not large or significant by any stretch of the imagination. Nonetheless, I do share in the Company's success. My emotional attachments are much greater to Wikipedia though and seeing it become an accurate, unbiased source for researchers to begin gathering information. I look forward to seeing your contributions to the article.Plhofmei (talk) 03:16, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

Freebase chemicals
Have you seen the chemicals on freebase ? Following the CAS number and ChemSpider curation discussion I was wondering how up-to-date freebase is. I left two comments on their site clarifying the CAS number issue and recommended adding more identifiers. Any comments? JKW (talk) 10:49, 13 August 2008 (UTC)
 * I'd heard about freebase but hadn't seen this collection. It's a long way behind ChemSpider but still very nicely set up.  Sites like this are a concern to CAS, though.  Thanks for letting me know.  Will you be in Philadelphia? Walkerma (talk) 03:48, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Another quick 0.7 query
Are you including image pages this time? Given the Wikimedia Foundation more or less insisted on this with us last time around I guess you are going to try to? It makes a big difference to the size of the download file. Oh, I won't do WP:Beans here but there are some obvious issues with version numbers and the portal pages if you hadn't figured that so far. You may recall the sponge bob squarepants vandal last year with image over-writes: it is along those lines. --BozMo talk 15:04, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Actually, we used just thumbnails of images last time, and I think we included a list of the contributors and copyrights. We took images from Commons, and threw out anything iffy (fair use etc).  Kelson handled it, so I'm fuzzy on the details - I'd recommend emailing him directly.  That's how we hope to get 30,000 on one DVD.  As for version numbers, we've been discussing that a lot, and I'd like to chat with you about it some time since I know you're very experienced with that aspect.  We haven't touched portals at all, but I was unaware of vandalism on them. I'm away at a conference at the moment, perhaps we can chat later?  Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 03:33, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

WikiProject Good Articles Newsletter
Sorry about the delay. AWB has been having a few issues lately. Here is the august issue of the WikiProject Good Articles Newsletter! Dr. Cash (talk) 20:58, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

WP 1.0 bot v2 redux
Welcome back. While you were out, CBM and I (mostly CBM, though :P) worked on the new version of the bot. While there's still a few things to do, a quasi-stable version of the bot is available at tools:~cbm//cgi-bin/wp10.2g/alpha/cgi-bin/index.pl and tools:~titoxd/cgi-bin/wp10/index.pl. (Both are essentially the same thing, just working with slightly different debugging data.) Please feel free to browse it and play with it, and we'd really appreciate any feedback. Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 08:55, 24 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the update. CBM has also sent me a lot of updated info from SelectionBot, and that has been my priority tonight, but I'll be very interested to see Version 2.0 of the Version 1.0 bot (confusing, isn't it!). Cheers, Walkerma (talk) 07:07, 26 August 2008 (UTC)
 * The "1.0" in the name does lead to confusion.. I settled on "second generation" to try to work around it. But I still don't know what I'm going to call version 1.0 of the second generation WP 1.0 bot :) &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 14:23, 26 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Titoxd: you're too modest about your contributions. The code would not be where it is without the work you put into it. &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 14:25, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Hydrochloric acid is in dire need of some refs
Hi Martin,

the Hydrochloric acid article, one of the first FA articles of WP:Chem is under FAR now regarding the 1c criterion (in-line referencing). At the time, you contributed significantly to the article. Would you please now too step in and add some explicit references to the sections with limited referencing?  Wim van Dorst  (talk)  19:13, 29 August 2008 (UTC).
 * I'll try, though I'm very busy with Version 0.7 material at the moment. Walkerma (talk) 01:40, 31 August 2008 (UTC)