User talk:Aleta Curry/Archive 6

Aleta Curry

Current talk page

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

 Where Aleta lives it is approximately: 10:28

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Aleta stops into the forums somewhere between 0630 and 0900, and works on the wiki between about 1200 and 1500, time and weather permitting.

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Archive

Hi, Aleta, hope that's what you wanted. --Peter Schmitt 01:06, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

Just so. Thank you! Aleta Curry 01:47, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

;-)

Hi Aleta and thanks, it's nice to see you too...

Disambiguation

Your points are well taken. I have a challenge myself with what I think is reasonably proper disambiguation, although it may well need to become a cluster -- Nazi Chancellery (disambiguation). There were three Chancellery organizations, plus the Old and New Chancellery Buildings, plus the former Office of the President of the Reich that had a similar function. "Chancellery" in general needs to be disambiguated, in the formal use in international relations: the "Embassy" is where the Ambassador lives, while the "Chancellery" is an office building with diplomatic immunity.

I'd welcome some collaboration in trying to develop an EC guideline here, as well as ideas on the specific topic -- I'm debating whether to create Chancellery (disambiguation) and if the Nazi disambiguation should move there. Right now, the individual Nazi chancelleries are lemmas, but certainly could become articles of their own. Howard C. Berkowitz 01:47, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

Because we now have a cluster system, I'm conservation in disambiguation. I'd say disambiguation pages are like introductions, properly made when you *have* to, not whenever you could. I would think the Nazi Chancellery would work best as one well-developed cluster, rather than separate articles with a paucity of information on each. You wouldn't, for examples, have separate annotated bibliographies, catalogues and related articles for each, with no overlap, would you? Aleta Curry 02:42, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

New user Thomas W. Reynolds

Aleta, this new user has just been confirmed as a Literature author. Perhaps you might wish to post a welcome on his Talk page. Milton Beychok 19:02, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Done! Thanks, Milt. Aleta Curry 23:25, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

ABC Drive Suggestions

Suggestions Aleta:

Gödel, Kurt

Any breed beginning with a 'G', e.g.

• Gordon Setter
• Glen of Imaal Terrier
• Great Pyrenees

Thomas Simmons 20:23, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Financial Report as of March 15, 2011

Please read our Financial Report as of March 15, 2001 for complete details on our financial history and our current financial situation. If you have any questions, please ask them on CZ Talk:Donate. Milton Beychok 01:00, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

You can see my talk page comments

You can see my talk page comments concerning Aviation Week. Thanks and have a lovely day! Mary Ash 10:13, 10 May 2011 (CDT)

Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri

This is really interesting. A community neighboring the one where I'm planning to do my dissertation research in Ecuador is well known for indigenous art so I've been thinking a lot about indigenous people and the art market. I want to know more! -Joe Quick 14:37, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

It's an area in which I am woefully ignorant, Joe. I'm going to make an effort to learn more, too! Aleta Curry 20:48, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

Hmm. Maybe I can find time to write an article about the painters in Cotopaxi. A Google image search for "Tigua Ecuador" brings up some nice examples of the style that has developed. -Joe Quick 21:21, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

Images are a problem here, on two scores: 1) the usual intellectual property stuff and 2) aboriginal beliefs about the (non)use of images of deceased persons.

I'll have a look for "Tigua Ecuador", though, I'd love to compare styles - wonder if they're similar or nothing like?

Aleta Curry 21:38, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

And there's my answer: 'nothing like'! :) Aleta Curry 21:40, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

Stubs

You recently made this comment regarding stubs on CZ:

Our general policy is to encourage people to write to the full extent and limit of their knowledge on a subject, rather than just to put down a sentence or two with random statistics. That latter approach seems to work well at wikis with thousands or hundreds of thousands of users, where somebody will come along and expand on one's work within just a few hours. Here at CZ, it's been consistently upheld that the emphasis should be on quality rather than quantity. In fact, several years ago, some people said we shouldn't allow 'stubs' at all. The final consensus, though, was that stubs were okay as long as you wrote a really good stub.

Citizendiums policy on stubs says:

You are welcome to contribute a short start of a new article, called a "stub", of about 150-250 words usually.

Stubs may be written solely to introduce the topic of the article in such a way that you or other authors can use the stub as written to continue on to develop the article.

Some people believe that stubs encourage others to help "build the web." Many people can write excellent stubs or short developing articles even when they don't have the knowledge to expand them. So if you feel tempted to "turn a red link blue" with a stub, feel free.

CZ:Under Construction says:

The Citizendium, like virtually all wikis, could have an "Under Construction" sign on every page. Wikis are not conducive to instant perfection; high quality is achieved gradually, over time and usually after quite a bit of interaction with others.

So what does that mean? It means: go ahead, add something. It doesn't have to be perfect.

This means that we will tolerate what are called "stub entries" or just "stubs."

Please pay attention to the Citizendium literature that you do not contradict its message when advising new users. David Finn 10:01, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

A long "Stub" becomes a "developing" article. Just change the meta-data. Anyway, the whole concept of a "stub" is a WP artifact, and the category probably should be re-thought. Russell D. Jones 15:26, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

There was a very lengthy discussion of this by the EC about a year ago at http://ec.citizendium.org/wiki/EC:PR-2010-021, resulting in a passed Resolution of the same number. Hayford Peirce 16:05, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

Okay, so according to that resolution, what's the method of implementation? How do I categorize an article as "Insufficient"? and doesn't that resolution make the policies that Aleta was working on and that David was commenting on obsolete? The meta-data still has me categorizing articles as Developing, developed, or stub. And the Subpages template still categorizes the same way. It seems we have a distinction without a difference. Russell D. Jones 16:20, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

My recollection is that it started out as something very different, then got replaced by an amendment that completely changed the meaning of the original proposal. You may note, if you scroll down to the bottom of the proposal, that I was the only person to vote against it, one of the very few times I have ever voted against a Motion. My reason was that the Motion didn't actually do anything useful. It may surprise those Citizens (like the now-banished Howard and a couple of others) who think that I impose my dictatorial will upon a supine Council whenever I feel like proposing some new idiocy that I am, actually, but one of seven, and that what I want does not always get enacted. Hayford Peirce 17:50, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

It got started as a suggestion from me (sorry!) to define the minimum and maximum length of a stub, since some stubs could be recategorised as 'developing' on the grounds of length, and likewise others downgraded to stub status. (A robot could have been used to count the words and change the metadata, but robots aren't around much these days). This spawned instead a rule that would require quite a bit of technical work to implement, for the most part simply relabels existing categories, but does not clearly distinguish external articles from ones that are simply poor. I hope the Category:External Articles tag would be maintained, especially since a bug some years ago knocked off the WP checkbox for many articles. John Stephenson 02:51, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

I don't think that a purely "mechanical" classification (by length) is useful because -- depending on the subject -- even a few words can transport the basic information while a text consisting of many words may be almost meaningless or even misleading. Even if non-external pages are marked as "status 4" they can easily be identified from the page histories (of page, talk, and Metadata). This is not a real complication because such checking is always necessary when evaluating a page. --Peter Schmitt 11:55, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

That is broadly true, but more seriously, how can external articles be automatically marked 'insufficient'? Many of them are lengthy and likely to be quite comprehensive; recall that the original task CZ set itself was simply to review and further improve imported articles. Perhaps an 'action required' category would better-describe them. But in any case, we need categories to identify articles that contain external material. John Stephenson 12:22, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

More precisely, status 4 means "not live", and therefore the "external articles" does not list the articles containing external material but those not modified. This category therefore already contains only "action required" pages, and extending its use to other cases that require action is quite natural. As far as I know, the "WP content"-box is not attached to a category, and since it is not reliable (because it easily gets marked or unmarked by accident, not only by a bug in bot) sll credits should be stored in the metadata (and be connected with a category), but this (again) needs technical changes. --Peter Schmitt 13:30, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

(unindent)
Unfortunately, in many cases it is a long way to implement some new features. But one has to begin somewhere, even if the realization remains incomplete (and sometimes even contradictory). Both the subpages and metadate templates will need revision, but this needs time and careful planning in order to avoid chaos.
Until technical changes can be made, the two systems will have to coexist, but this is quite feasible because the difference between the "old" and the "new" system is not too large:

• comprehensive and extended can be seen as (re)definitions of developed and developing,
• basic is a more restrictive classification than stub -- the content must make sufficient sense,
• insufficient is meant for all pages that need some action, and this includes the previous classification external, but also too incomplete, unreliable, or badly written, pages. Thus some "stubs" (if detected) should be downgraded to Status 4.
• The newly introduced "removal" procedure can be used to deal with the worst pages.

--Peter Schmitt 01:14, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

Perhaps the EC can recruit citizens (agents) to perform the tasks to help implement their decisions. If we wait too long, it gets too confusing to remember which respolutions were made. I forgot about this one. D. Matt Innis 01:54, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

It went out of my mind since 2011 has been a bit of a year from hell :( But it raises the question of how we can implement far-reaching regulations introduced by the councils, when we're still a small project. John Stephenson 02:51, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

There was nothing in my response that contradicted CZ's 'literature', David. Aleta Curry 03:48, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

Jean-Philippe de Lespinay and La Maieutique

Aleta, thank you for coming to my rescue. You tell me you don't see a required action, however I made it concluding: "Do you Agree With The Proposal?" (8:53, 10 November 2011)

What I asked is simple. I submitted two articles to CZ : a biography about me and a description of an invention I made, both written in English by a group of French authors. These articles were accepted by English WP but refused one month later by French WP members who intrigued to cause their suppression in the two WP (francophone and anglophone) and they were deleted. However the two subjects have strong notoriety (as evidenced by the sources presented in the articles). Team of authors found that this determination was motivated by the fact that, in the interest of IT developers, my invention must be ignored. Indeed it shows that everybody can write better programs without IT developers.

The best evidence of this conspiracy is the "expert system" article in English WP. I wrote it but it was proposed by the main author of two articles: Pat Grenier. Though it was a complete overhaul, it was accepted. But the article told that from 1986, the history of expert systems technology was driven by my invention La Maieutique : "The torch was taken by Jean-Philippe de Lespinay who could no longer use Intelligence Service to produce expert systems. He developed his own expert systems generators: Maieutica, Miao (1991) and T. Rex (2001), all using the same reasoning engine (Moca)." This paragraph was deleted by IT developers, so that the history of expert systems stopped in 1985 ! Then, recently, the entire chapter on the history was deleted! Not replaced by anything.

WP is not an encyclopedia, it is a propaganda tool.

CZ, without any discussion with me, refused these two articles and Peter put them in my personal pages. The reasons: it is "autopromotion" (Peter) and "as long as I am Secretary of the EC, it will only be over my cold, dead body that articles from elsewhere are imported into CZ and pasted here as new articles" (Hayford Peirce 03:36, 10 November 2011 ). There are not good reasons. No matter who wrote the article, only its content must be analyzed in the best interests of humanity.

According to CZ, an encyclopedia is "information regarding all human knowledge or in a particular field and is used for reference purposes." I'm an entrepreneur and an inventor, my companies were famous, my invention is used by big companies since 1986, numerous newspaper articles talk about it. So I ask that my two articles are accepted or else give me please a good reason.

Bye and Happy Christmas ! Jean-Philippe de Lespinay 09:21, 24 December 2011 (UTC)

Help, made two identical Battle of Waterloo articles by mistake

Hi Aleta,

I need help. I thought I knew what I was doing and made a mistake. I decided to dash out something quick for The Battle of Waterloo. That topic was something listed on the military history workspace area but not written, yet.

This led me to accidentally create the same article twice. There are also two corresponding identical article discussion pages. Here are the links to the articles: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Battle_of_Waterloo and http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/The_Battle_of_Waterloo.

I hope you can fix this or tell me how to fix it. I hope it's easy to fix.

Thanks, Gary Leonard Cameron 22:24, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

Hi Gary

I'm so glad to see you here. I see in the forums that Matt Innis is onto this. He's extremely competent, so I'm sure it will all turn out all right!

Ciao!

Aleta Curry 23:46, 28 April 2012 (UTC)

Hi Aleta,

It's nice to meet you as well. I'm feeling sheepish of course, but I'm on my way to learning. This is very new to me.

I believe Matt has a plan. He assured me it's fixable.

Thanks for your help. It sure was nice to have someone to turn to who I was already a bit familiar with when this "humorous" problem arose.

Yours, Gary Leonard Cameron 00:18, 29 April 2012 (UTC)

Ha, ha - I know how you felt, trust me!

About a hundred years ago, I made a correction to the dog article at WP, and blanked the entire article! My panic and chagrin knew no bounds. Someone fixed it for me and assured me that it was really hard to do any permanent damage on a wiki, so just to continue working away and I'd soon learn. It was very reassuring.

Aleta Curry 00:25, 29 April 2012 (UTC)

Ah yes, my first day and the chagrin and panic are now familiar feelings. Perhaps the funniest part is my expertise in the history of technology (emphasis on history). ;) Similar to your story's happy ending Matt assured me I can't "break the internet" but not in so many words.

Thanks, Gary Leonard Cameron 00:37, 29 April 2012 (UTC)

Onion the dog

Would you, as our local expert on all things canine, care to take a look at this one? Sandy Harris 02:47, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

Woof, woof! Hayford Peirce 03:20, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

Advocacy, controversy, a blanked article, a call for deletion, WP copying our version, a full rewrite by Mary & then a partial one by Hayford. This one has it all! Sandy Harris 00:30, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

Many layers. Anthony.Sebastian 23:08, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

Hi, folks. Sorry, for those of you who don't know, I was ill. Then of course I was behind on everything.

My, my, this article *has* been fun, hasn't it?

I'll put in tuppence's worth on the talk page, but in a nutshell, we do not have Wikipedia's notability requirements. It should remain pending a resolution in the Nevada Supreme Court and the test of time.

Aleta Curry 23:06, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Nominations for Management and Editorial Councils

You have been nominated for seats on both the Management and Editorial Councils in the July-August Special Election. The nominator was myself. To accept or decline these nominations, please visit the Nominations page here (for the Management Council seat) and here (for the Editorial Council Editor seat) by midnight UTC on July 27th. You may write an election statement for each if you wish (linked from the Nominations page).

The Management Council seat runs until June 30th, 2014 or June 30th, 2015 (the successful candidate with the fewest votes receiving the shorter term) and the Editorial Council seat expires on December 31st, 2014. In the event that Referendum 1 is passed, all seats will expire on June 30th, 2014. Thanks! John Stephenson 16:58, 22 July 2013 (UTC)