SeniorScribbler

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Hello, SeniorScribbler, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome! --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 18:26, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

First comments

To correct my edit of Mathematical Sociology article Tom Fararo 13:54, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

[1] I assume you want it reverted? --Pilot|guy 13:55, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

My edit is fine except that the generated table of contents did not appear at the start of my added long entry but near the end of the previous very short entry. I'm a new user. Is there a way to move this table of contents to its proper position? Or ...?

Tom, that is the way the table of contents is supposed to work. (it appears at the end of the first introductory paragraph, and before any specific sections begin). I suggest you integrate your new sections with the rest of the article (such as by moving the Notes to the end and merging it with your own, and by putting elements of your "Introduction: mathematics and sociology" section into the first paragraph). Don't be afraid to change other people's work: Be bold, and do what is best for the article. If you need any more help, please feel free to ask, and put the {{helpme}} template on your talk page again so we know when to check back. Cheers, Tangotango 14:04, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

---

Hi, Thanks for all of your contributions here at Wikipedia. I've noticed you've created and are currently editing Thomas Fararo...is this you? (The user name is a tipoff) You should read WP:VAIN--creating an article about one's self, no matter how notable the subject, can create an "apparent conflict of interest." I'd suggest leaving the proper stub on the article and perhaps a cleanup message to let other users work on this article. -- Scientizzle 21:13, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

PS-are you, by chance, also User:Tseeker?

I am not Tseeker. I'll have to look into stub and cleanup in terms of how to perform the operations you suggest. It appears, just from this talk page, that people do not use their actual names here -- so maybe I should look into changing that. Meanwhile, thanks for the message. Tom Fararo 20:33, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

From Piotr

Hello, this is Piotr Konieczny. I'll reply to your email soon, but I'd like to leave you some useful links here, including our traditional welcome message which always goes on top of the new user page and which provides some useful links. I would also like to thank you for your contributions to Mathematical Sociology and other articles - I hope you will keep on editing Wiki, we most certainly need input from respectable schoolars.

Regarding the article about yourself, Wikipedia:Autobiography likely offers the most useful advice. You are certainly notable (see Wikipedia:Notability (academics)) and I don't see any problems with WP:NPOV that would make Wikipedia:Vanity guidelines applicable here. Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons may also prove useful.

Regarding table of contents, you may want to check Wikipedia:Table of contents which has many useful tips on how to use TOCs in Wiki.

Regading using your full name on Wiki, it is not common, although it is something I personally support and encourage. Wikipedia:Signature may prove useful here. If you decide to change your username, Wikipedia:Changing username provides information on 'how to'.

Again, welcome to Wikipedia and enjoy the experience!--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 18:26, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

re: Hello Piotrus

Hello again. Those days I am a professor too, so things did work out for me, I'd say :) Glad to hear from you again. I have fixed the code in the article, so the image will now display properly. I hope you'll consider making further edits to Wikipedia; there are many sociology-themed article that are in dire need of expert attention! Our project page at Wikipedia:WikiProject Sociology lists some of them. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 06:45, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

Editing Mathematical sociology

Welcome back! I see you still remember how to edit (your post to my talk page was well formatted!). There are no restrictions on editing mathematical sociology, you should be able to edit it just as you'd edited my page. The only comment I'd make is that any additions should be referenced, see WP:INLINE references. I recommend using WP:VISUALEDITOR, it's more friendly than code. See the linked VE page on how to enable it (big blue link/instruction in top left of the page). Let me know if you have any further questions (there are also VE guides on youtube like [2]). Finally, you may want to visit Wikipedia:WikiProject Sociology and Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics and take a look at their features and discussions! --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 10:16, 6 July 2018 (UTC)

It's nice to see that Sociopiedia article (at least this one) is freely available, the last time I check few years back all of its content was locked, hence nearly useless. I will add a link to this article to the MS article; that said I stand by my view that initiatives like sociopedia remain these days inherently futile: 99% of the interested readers will stop by Wikipedia and won't follow any links (even if present there) to other websites. Further, I'll note that if one Googles for 'mathematical sociology', Wikipedia is the first hit, and sociopedia is not even in the top 10. Studies show that 99% of people using Google won't click to the second page of Google results. Therefore, I will strongly encourage you to consider contributing to Wikipedia. With the Visual Editor tool, editing Wikipedia has finally moved beyond the daunting code and reached the complexity level not worse then the average World-like word editor software. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 19:37, 6 July 2018 (UTC)

Dear T., don't worry about editing articles directly, this is one of Wikipedia's principles (WP:BOLD). If you make an error, others will fix it soon (I usually check my talk page on Wiki every 24h, through soon I'll be on a week-long holiday with limited web access). You can ask for help from me or the friendly community at WP:TEA anytime, and we can review your edits and polish them if necessary for wiki-code and other technical aspects. I hope you have activated the Visual Editor I linked above, it is much more friendly then the old code editing (through it doesn't work on talk pages). Wikipedia software is not as advanced as that of other big websites, but it's worth remembering it is a non-profit with budget composed of donations and at a size of a fraction (<1%) of what giants like Google and Facebook have. I am unsure if we have anybody who could meet you in person, but you could ask at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Pittsburgh + Wikipedia talk:Meetup/Pittsburgh - perhaps we still have active volunteers there.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 08:09, 8 July 2018 (UTC)

Dear T., the expansion is indeed great, and I have only a few minor technical (code/style) comments based on Wikipedia:Manual of style: 1) Blue links (hyperlinks) are recommended 2) Inline citations (footnotes) I mentioned earlier are also recommended and 3) in general, you may find various parts of Wikipedia:WikiProject_Sociology/Assessment#Quality_scale helpful in shaping the article. Content-wise, the article is certainly ready for being recognized as Wikipedia's Top 1% (the process starts with the Wikipedia:Good article nomination) but blue links and inline citations are necessary at that point. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 14:00, 9 July 2018 (UTC)

About blue links: the density of them in the article is too low. It was too low before your edits, and the sections you've added (like 'Theoretical research programs') seem completely devoid of them. As noted at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Linking, "Articles on technical subjects might demand a higher density of links than general-interest articles, because they are likely to contain more technical terms that general dictionaries are unlikely to explain in context." Summarizing the rest, it is best practice to link a technical term or a proper name (ex. scholar's name) the first time it is used in the article, not counting the abstract (lead section above the ToC). While checking what needs to be linked involves checking the use of such terms in the content preceding (located above) your additions, I'll just note that articles like probability, rational choice theory, social group or Stochastic process were mentioned in the article but never linked to (I've added those three links, I've also added links to the awards section for recipients names). I will also note that per WP:RED, red links are perfectly acceptable, as they are indicators of missing topics and a de facto invitation to the Wikipedia users, in the spirit of collective intelligence and collaboration, to contribute (I've linked Harary's Structure Theorem, a seemingly important concept, in that form).

Regarding the footnotes, you are roughly correct. Perhaps it might be best to start by looking at an example: at Wikipedia:WikiProject Sociology/Assessment we can see a matrix of sociology topics by importance and quality (if you disagree with rating on any topics, you can change it at will by editing the talk page and adjusting the plain text code on an article's talk page, for example following your edits I've re-assessed MatSoc article from start to C class, see [3], if I wanted to change the importance rating, I could've changed the word high to mod - as you can see the code here is not that bad). Back to the citations topic, the articles which are ranked in the top three rows (FA - Featured Articles, FL - Featured Lists, and GA - Good Articles) should follow all of the Manual of Style requirements (through very old articles, from 10+ years ago, might not follow some of the newer requirements; those articles will eventually get either updated or reassessed to a lower quality level, but I digress). I was going to show you the article on sociology, but sadly, I note that it has deteriorated since it's GA assessment in early 2010s (primarily because some unrefenced - i.e. missing footnotes/citations - content has been added since). However, I've noticed that the key concept of Language was recently (in 2017) passed as GA and this article is certainly up to standards (at least on a cursory glance). Compare the density of blue links and inline citations, and note that there is not a single sentence in that article which cannot be traced to its source.

Lastly, I will note that sociopedia.isa is a perfectly acceptable source to be cited here. In fact, primary sources should NOT be cited, to prevent Wikipedia:Original research (see also WP:PRIMARY). What I mean here is that, for example, an article on Plato should not use Plato as a reference at all. Of course, Plato's works need to be mentioned and discussed, but interpreting them ourselves is a violation of the original research rule. Instead, works by Plato's experts should be cited instead. You may want to ask at that point: but what if an expert on Plato wants to contribute? Shouldn't they be allowed to make their expert calls here? The answer is no, because there's no mechanism that allows the reader to verify whether the article (or a part of it) was written by an expert or an amateur. Instead, the quality is assessed by proxies of density and quality of citations. Our expert on Plato is more then welcome to contribute to Plato's article on Wikipedia, but they have to cite their sources - and they cannot cite the primary sources, presenting their analysis here for the first time, since Wikipedia, an encyclopedia - a tertiary source - is not a publisher of original research. Of course, our Plato expert is welcome to cite their own works, which have been published and presumably peer reviewed elsewhere. Now, I understand that this entire referencing requirement is much stricter then what we are used when it comes to traditional encyclopedias (I've myself contributed to a few academic encyclopedias few times, and I am sure you've done it much often). We know that they don't require a high density of inline citations, nor do they have a strict policy against making original research-like judgement calls. Thus, contrary to some expectations, contributing to Wikipedia is actually more challenging (assuming one wants their work to be assessed as a quality contribution on Wikipedia, of course; one can contribute content missing citations, blue links, and such, but such content will never be displayed on Wikipedia's front page, for example). The way I look at it is that Wikipedia, which is not only the most popular encyclopedia, is also the one with highest quality requirements. Research already has shown that an average article on Wikipedia is comparable to an average article in another encyclopedia, but IMHO the highest quality articles on Wikipedia are significantly better then articles in other encyclopedias (general or specialized); perhaps I'll write a paper on this argument in the future. I could be biased, of course, since I've long been a Wikipedia partisan, but - still when at Pitt - I wrote the three GA on Wikipedia on Marx, Weber and Durkheim, using several secondary works as a source (all those Blackwells companions to whatever, and so on), and I remain convinced that they are strictly better (being more comprehensive, for example) then any other secondary encyclopedia-like entry out there. As various articles on Foo-topic are published, get obsolete, and are forgotten, Wikipedia's articles generally only improve in quality (through as noted earlier, they can occasionally lapse behind due to well meaning but not well executed edits - on that note I'll have to review the changes to sociology... nothing is white and black, no ideal types in the world). --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 09:15, 10 July 2018 (UTC)

Dear T. Let me thank you for the tremendous work you are putting into this. For disambiguations, have you clicked on this tool? I find it very helpful. There are many more links, which is great - and don't worry about red links, they are great way to show how much more content is still missing. A few, perhaps, could be discussed on case on case basis - for example, should we have a dedicated articles on emergence of norms, or should the link be changed just to norm (sociology)? Is block modelling to be piped to Stochastic block model? Social diffussion to Sociological theory of diffusion? As for citations, I'll note that when citing books, a page range, preferably a single page, is advisable (just like in ASA/APA styles, I think). Properly citing a Wikipedia article can be interesting (since we are forced to look for claims that would often be accepted at face value in average scholarly publications) - it can sometimes challenge our opinions, when we cannot find a cite for a claim we thought 'would be out there' (the good news is that it can lead one to a discovery of a new topic for a real paper, too). Of course, it can also be frustrating for the same reasons, not too mention - tiring/tedious. Nonetheless, I hope you'll enjoy discovering how many more topics still need a proper treatment (I am still happy I was the first to write smaller or better treatments on so many topics that I am sure are useful to many students of sociology, ex. repertoire of contention, etc.). On a final note, I'll point to the page view stats - while skewed by our page loads in the last few days, the article is usually read (well, accessed...) by 20-30 people each day. If you'd be curious what are the most popular (little correlation with quality, btw) sociology-themed articles on Wikipedia, here's an interesting page: Wikipedia:WikiProject Sociology/Popular pages. PS. Because of holiday trip with my father, I'll have limited net access for the next 10 days or so, so my apologies if I'll be slow in replying to your queries in the near future. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 21:36, 11 July 2018 (UTC)

I am sorry, I must have missed your prior messages (holidays, etc.). I've restored your version, which I consider superior, and started a discussion at Talk:Mathematical_sociology#More_informative_version. The editor who reverted you, more experienced in Wiki-guidelines, should've engaged in more substantial discussion with you per WP:BRD. Hopefully any issues will be now properly discussed in more than generalities. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 22:30, 17 August 2018 (UTC)

July 2018

Hello, I'm Chrissymad. I noticed that you made one or more changes to an article, but you didn't provide a reliable source. It's been removed and archived in the page history for now, but if you'd like to include a citation and re-add it, please do so! If you need guidance on referencing, please see the referencing for beginners tutorial, or if you think I made a mistake, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Thank you. CHRISSYMAD ❯❯❯¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 21:11, 15 July 2018 (UTC)