User talk:EdJohnston/Archive 3

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Thanks re ancient names

Thanks for helping with the translation of Hellenistic Art! I've been searching around on the English and French Wikipedia to try to track down appropriate versions of the names of various places, people etc. and appreciate help with that as I'm not always completely sure I've got it right, and have been leaving some names (temporarily?) untranslated. I've put in some links while translating (especially if there were links in the French) but feel that someone should probably go through and add more. You're right, the ancient name is probably usually best, with a link to a page on it. I simply wasn't familiar with Miletus. In the case of Pliny the Elder for example there is a conventional way to refer to him in English. Thanks again for your collaboration. --Coppertwig 21:44, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply on my talk page -- my first incoming message!! I do not have any active collaborators; according to the translation page two other translators quit months ago, and I just took it up a couple of days ago. Or to put it another way, you're my only active collaborator. I didn't create the translation sandbox, they did and I just continued using it. But just now I read about creating subpages and it says you're not supposed to create pages with names like that because they can get confused with encyclopedia pages. Drafts are supposed to have names beginning with "Talk:" e.g. "Talk: Hellenistic Art/Translation sandbox" or "User: " or other, not mainspace. So I may move it. I'll try to remember to tell you where I put it. If I figure out how to move it. :-) By the way, TERMIUM is very extensive in some fields but has big gaps in others, and I don't have any very big French dictionary, so I may need help with some words. --Coppertwig 22:54, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

I've moved the translation sandbox to Talk:Hellenistic Art/Translation sandbox. I created the page beginning with "Talk:" by putting a link to it in my sandbox, clicking on the link and it gave me the option to create the page. The old sandbox still exists but don't use it: I'll probably delete its contents later today (after I make a backup copy and check that nobody's edited it) and see about getting it deleted. (I created a sandbox by putting a link to it on my user page.) I guess we're both new here? I've been doing Wikipedia editing for maybe a week. --Coppertwig 14:51, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing out not to do cut-and-paste moves. Clearly you've been around a lot longer than me and know more than me about renaming pages. I think I've fixed it. I've moved the page to User:Coppertwig/Hellenistic Art translation sandbox. It said it moved the talk page too. There were 3 pages linking to the moved page; I changed those links. I now have a goal of getting instructions for translators put onto the translation page, i.e. how to create a sandbox, suggested name for sandbox, encouragement to put a link to the sandbox in the "status" section to encourage collaboration, etc. The relation of talk pages to their associated page makes things a bit confusing. --Coppertwig 19:02, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

OK, I listed the redirect for deletion. This is getting complicated. I'm just learning the ropes. Thanks again for your help. --Coppertwig 20:38, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

I see you did a few fixes; thanks. I'm putting notes on the talk page of the translation sandbox User:Coppertwig/Hellenistic Art translation sandbox re things I'm having trouble translating. Did you start translating the determinants article? If you'd like any help from me let me know where you're working on it. --Coppertwig 04:01, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

barcode

- I've created this barcode to illustrate the ISBN barcode. Thought everyone easily would recognise those barcodes printed behind books when explaining the concept of ISBN. The ISBN used is valid & owned by me, but not used on a published book. I thought it would be less misleading to use an actual ISBN than say a hpothetical string like 1234567890 to generate a barcode for illustration :)Pratheepps 03:49, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Welcome!

Welcome to the Molecular and Cellular Biology Wikiproject. :) – ClockworkSoul 16:22, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Hellenistic Art translation complete!

The translation is finished (except maybe for proofreading and stuff). I moved the reference to it from the Requests for Translation to Recently Translated on the Wikipedia:Translation into English/French page. I put a note on the talk page of Aldux, who originally requested the translation.

Can you help or advise re moving the actual text onto the main encyclopedia page? I.e. how do you handle retaining the page history, or do you not worry about that? The sandbox version can be considered superior to the current English Wikipedia version of the first few paragraphs, since I referred to those when polishing up the sandbox version of those paragraphs. Thanks --Coppertwig 22:00, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the tip re looking at translation procedures on the French wikipedia. Good idea: I'll do that. Actually I was thinking of trying a bit of English-to-French translation; maybe I'll do that and in the process find out what their procedures are like, then try to emulate them here. (In the sense of setting up pages to be self-organizing.) I just translated another short piece: Derveni krater. --Coppertwig 20:19, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Boxeur des Thermes/du Quirinal

Bonjour ! L'emplacement des thermes de Constantin est bien le Quirinal :-) Il n'y a donc pas d'incohérence. Jastrow 20:15, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

ISBN info for my own information

The following is a list of national libraries that have online catalogs (for looking up ISBNs): http://www.library.uq.edu.au/natlibs/index.html

For some commentary on use of ISBNs, and when they could be wrong, see: http://staff.library.mun.ca/staff/toolbox/bibcontr.htm

OCLC: Online Computer Library Center. Here's what they are planning to do for ISBN-13: [1]. There will be an interim period where MARC field #020 will still be reserved for the old ISBN-10. At a future date, each book record will hold BOTH an ISBN-10 AND an ISBN-13. During the interim period, searching by ISBN-13 will be limited if it can be done at all. EdJohnston 23:43, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Aaron Klein vandalism

About the vandalism in the Aaron Klein article (the two or three people posting promotional material), I just reverted it to my previous edit if that's okay. A previous edit of mine removed a large section (which is still up) because it really adds nothing to the article. I also had it tagged for a re-write. Robocracy 04:55, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

My response is at [2]. EdJohnston 20:11, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Ed, since it's obvious that they're working for Klein's promotional agency, then their promotional edits would constitute vandalism because it's spam. I removed the section not just for vandalism, but because it's poorly-sourced and the entire section isn't really noteworthy. The entire section only cites WorldNetDaily, makes claims that go beyond the scope of what the source actually says, and the section is basically just a list of stories Klein has worked on. Anyway, I have found some credible info on Klein and I'm going to re-write the article now. Robocracy 21:37, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Actually, I take it back. I'm not really sure what to put. I found some info on the guy from this site, but it's confusing, I'm not sure if it's accurate, and it all seems to be in the form of links. For instance, there's another Aaron Klein who's an ex-member of the IDF, who has been an analyst for CNN and others, but that appears to be a different person. But ZoomInfo's pages on the two individuals show them both writing the same book, "Striking Back," published by Random House. So, the only definitely credible source for ANYTHING on Aaron Klein would be his bio on WorldNetDaily's website. Well, if that's the only legitimate source we have, then I'm thinking we should just delete the article for lack of notability. Because the claims made about his career by that site are dubious (not necessarily false, but exaggerated in ways we can't be sure of). And if we toned down some of the claims made, we wouldn't have really any article at all. Robocracy 22:41, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Robocracy, I agree about removing unsourced biographical details. We do lack any printed source for the work history that's given in the article. It's true that the current references on the Klein page are mostly to web sites that would not count as reliable sources. We have the NY Times covering the event of theft of student paper copies at Yeshiva Univ. [3]. That probably would not be enough to give Klein notability. You might need to research some of the policies in WP:WEB to see if Klein makes the cut. The book "Striking Back" is by a different Aaron Klein, which you can confirm from the picture in the NY Times review of the book. EdJohnston 01:58, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

The WorldNetDaily article looks fair, if not in fact having left-wing bias from all of the criticism of WND. Robocracy 02:43, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Wilcox-McCandlish law

I have restored this article which you commented on during the last AFD following a reasonable objection raised by the primary author. However I have relisted it at AFD in an attempt to reach a consensus. You may like to give your opinion. Cheers, Yomangani^talk 11:13, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

New policy wrinkle on use of semi-protection (keep as a reminder)

Here is an extract from Wikipedia:Semi-protection policy:

Like full protection, it is usually not a pre-emptive measure. However, Jimbo Wales has suggested semi-protection may be used in cases of "minor bios of slightly well known but controversial individuals" which are not widely watchlisted, if they are "subject to POV pushing, trolling [or] vandalism." In such cases, semi-protection "would at least eliminate the drive-by nonsense that we see so often."[1]

EdJohnston 18:56, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

Chief complaint

Thanks for bringing Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Chief complaint to my attention. I have forwarded this to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Clinical medicine for further input. -AED 17:34, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Notes to myself for the Student's t-distribution article

Here is the first full-length article in which Fisher uses the term 'statistic': Fisher, R.A. (1922). "On the mathematical foundations of theoretical statistics" (PDF). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series A. 222A: 309–368.

The article already cites Fisher's Metron paper of 1925. In that one, he talks about 'Student's distribution', and uses the letter 't' for the normalized deviation, but doesn't call it a statistic.: Fisher, R. A. (1925). "Applications of "Student's" distribution" (PDF). Metron. 5: 90–104.

The 'Earliest known uses' web site gives this as the 'best reference for the evolution of t': Eisenhart, C. "On the Transition from Student's z to Student's t, American Statistician, 33, 6-10, 1979. However this reference is effectively superseded by Lehmann's article, below.

'Earliest known..' gives OED2 credit for finding the first use of the phrase 'Student's t' in a 1929 paper in Nature, but they do not say which paper.

Student(1908) did not call it 'Student's t-distribution'. He just called it 'the frequency distribution of a quantity z'.

Lehmann gives a high-quality summary of the sequence of historical events, with many references, in a paper available free on-line: Lehmann, Eric L. (1999). ""Student" and small-sample theory". Statistical Science. 14 (4): 418–426.

Thanks for semi-protection of Aaron Klein

Recently User:MikeJason has removed the {sprotected} banner and the {cleanup} tag on this article. (See for instance [4]). It remains semi-protected so far as I know, he just took off the banner, with no comment on the Talk page. Isn't at least one of these against policy? The same user is starting to re-apply some of the same POV edits that occasioned [User:Robocracy]'s original request for semi-protection. EdJohnston 01:37, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

I re-added the {{sprotected}} template because it is indeed still semi-protected. He may have thought removing the template would have actually unprotected the article, so I won't hold him for that. However, his insertion of the terrorist sentence is enough to constitute vandalism, especially since it appears likely that he is one or more of the IPs that was taking part in the vandalism prior to semi-protection. -- tariqabjotu 01:53, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

Re: Signpost/ French Wikisource

Thanks for letting me know! I've fixed the link by changing it to s:fr:Accueil. Thanks again! Flcelloguy (A note?) 17:32, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

Articles for deletion

Hi, just a note to let you know that I've responded to your opposition at Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion, and thought you might like to know about it. Thanks! Daveydweeb (^chat/_review!) 23:57, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion.

This is a test, to see how many links can usefully be packed into a journal reference

• This source code:

{{cite journal | author=John Smith | title=Some article name | journal=American Mathematical Monthly| volume =1 | issue = 1 | ISSN=1234-5678| url = http://en.wikipedia.org }}

• Produces this result:

John Smith. "Some article name". American Mathematical Monthly. 1 (1). ISSN 0002-9890.

• However the 'url' is associated with the article name, and makes it clickable. I'm not sure if the semantics of Template:cite_journal is documented in this amount of detail, but it's worthy of study. For completely documenting references, we may want to associate several URLs: 1. the article (of course), 2. the journal (to link to a WP article about the journal), 3. the ISSN (to prove that the journal actually exists and we have spelled its name right). The problem I'm still hoping to solve is to allow both 2 and 3 to be specified in the same template and be clickable by the user, without giving too much clutter in the visible reference. EdJohnston 22:02, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

I think its important to include doi and url, in order to design for the worst/best case.

Using the citation on Zonohedron with url as well.

* {{cite journal | author = Taylor, Jean E. | year = 1992 | title = Zonohedra and generalized zonohedra | journal = [[American Mathematical Monthly]] | volume = 99 | pages = 108–111 | doi = 10.2307/2324178 | url = http://en.wikipedia.org/ }}

that appears as:

Taylor, Jean E. (1992). "Zonohedra and generalized zonohedra". American Mathematical Monthly. 99: 108–111. doi:10.2307/2324178.

How about this:

Taylor, Jean E. (1992). "Zonohedra and generalized zonohedra". American Mathematical Monthly ^issn 99: 108–111^doi.

or:

Taylor, Jean E. (1992). "Zonohedra and generalized zonohedra". American Mathematical Monthly ^{wp | issn} 99: 108–111^doi.

John Vandenberg 22:26, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

That last one seems especially good. It does conserve space in the visible encyclopedia. Maybe it could be generated by adding an additional parameter to Template:cite_journal. I'm imagining that you could leave off the 'wp' superscript in the case where no article exists for the journal. Similarly, omit any superscript that has no working URL behind it. If it were created by calling 'cite journal' with an extra parameter (like new_format) then it would be easy to change the format in the future if tastes change. Whereas hard-coded superscripts would obviously not be so flexible. EdJohnston 03:31, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

The template can adapt to the parameters that have been given, so omitting unnecessary decorations wont be hard. However, Template:cite_journal is a protected page, so we would need to recommend any change on Template talk:cite_journal, and wait.

Are there any other complex citation elements that should consider before making a recommendation? John Vandenberg 04:23, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia_talk:List_of_missing_journals/Queue.

Discussion at User_talk:Jayvdb.

books.google.com

I ran into this today: [5]; Google Book Search is using OCLC's as a keyword and I found that the URL can be trimmed to only use the OCLC:

http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC30986706

On a book where the copyright has expired, the book can be downloaded as a PDF (again using OCLC numbering: OCLC 12811733 )

http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC12811733&id=6I97byFB3v0C&pg=PR13&lpg=PR13&dq=isaac+newton

The link can be trimmed down a bit...

http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC12811733&id=6I97byFB3v0C

... however this book breaks without the id param in the URL:

• http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC12811733

Others by Isaac Newton works with the URL trimmed:

• http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC15792875
• http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC06807536

And others that are not available for download using ISBNs all work when trimmed:

• http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0520088174
• http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0486602052

Some more using ISBNs that are available for reading (note that these can be downloaded but the download link doesnt appear using these links)

• http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN1428921273
• http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN1428925406
• http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN1428928294

As far as I can tell, only one OCLC doesnt work with a trimmed URL. As usual, more investigation required ;-) John Vandenberg 22:27, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Saving the text of the page history of the committee's draft of William G. Tifft

11:07, 20 December 2006 EdJohnston (Talk | contribs) (Blanked this page to prepare for requested deletion. Added 'db-userreq'.)

19:00, 18 December 2006 EdJohnston (Talk | contribs) (Added explanation and Archive banner. Regular Talk archives will continue in /Archive5)

18:55, 18 December 2006 EdJohnston (Talk | contribs) m (moved User talk:EdJohnston/Tifft draft to User talk:EdJohnston/Archive4: Preserve edit history. The content of this draft has already been cut-and-pasted to William G. Tifft)

15:07, 18 December 2006 Lou Sander (Talk | contribs) (link Big Bang, minor rewording)

13:26, 18 December 2006 EdJohnston (Talk | contribs) (Peebles reference now in footnote style)

13:21, 18 December 2006 Dr. Submillimeter (Talk | contribs) m (Small capital letter fix)

13:18, 18 December 2006 Dr. Submillimeter (Talk | contribs) (Minor layout change; some minor word changes)

12:49, 18 December 2006 EdJohnston (Talk | contribs) (Add full reference for Sobel(1993), trying to make clear the interview was for a popular magazine)

12:33, 18 December 2006 EdJohnston (Talk | contribs) (→Redshift quantization - New URL for Salpeter. Adsabs did not have the abstract available)

05:31, 18 December 2006 Dr. Submillimeter (Talk | contribs) m (Very minor layout fix)

05:30, 18 December 2006 Dr. Submillimeter (Talk | contribs) (Edited layout; Added references in footnote stype)

23:01, 17 December 2006 EdJohnston (Talk | contribs) (His PhD thesis is freely available as a PDF file)

22:54, 17 December 2006 EdJohnston (Talk | contribs) (Trying to make notes and references line up)

22:52, 17 December 2006 EdJohnston (Talk | contribs) (→Sources and notes - Explain what this link does (Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System))

22:21, 17 December 2006 EdJohnston (Talk | contribs) (Trying to make the stuff about Tifft's citation count more encyclopedic, in response to comments left on my Talk page.)

14:06, 16 December 2006 EdJohnston (Talk | contribs) (Add the Peebles 1993 reference (found in Redshift article))

13:50, 16 December 2006 EdJohnston (Talk | contribs) (Keep the draft page out of the categories temporarily)

13:48, 16 December 2006 EdJohnston (Talk | contribs) (Created a user sub-page for the Tifft group draft (by Dr. Submm, Lou Sanford and myself))