Talk:MIT Science Fiction Society

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fixed a bit[edit]

Former HonSec who heard Gernsback etc. and figured this is far more important than a stub. Collect (talk) 22:43, 25 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Wikiproject class from Stub to Start[edit]

The article had gotten to Start class, so I reassesed from Stub for all three Wikiprojects. — Lentower (talk) 01:52, 18 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Good article nominee?[edit]

GA toolbox
Reviewing
Toolbox

Turned I about quadrupled the actual size - and it is far better than "stub class" so now on to reaching "good article" status. Collect (talk) 21:48, 17 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

You have made modest and useful improvements to the article, but I think your GA request is very premature, based on a comparison to other Wikipedia:Good articles. I leave it to others to render an opinion. Reify-tech (talk) 01:08, 18 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The objective is to find out what more is needed - it is now not a stub, has images relevant to the topic, and wikilinks to a substantial number of Wikipedia articles, is well-categorized, has no blatant grammatical errors I find, is readable (F-K score of 54 is well above the Wikipedia average), and well-sourced. What I need to know is which areas specifically need improvement. And quadrupling an article is a tad better than "modest" in my modest opinion <g>. Collect (talk) 01:17, 18 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@Collect: I agree that the request is premature, as there are things you can do before asking for a GA review. Asking now will just be wasting the reviewer's time.
Things to do:
So, I removed the GA review request for now.
When you have done these things, tell us here, and one of us will do a B-class review. — Lentower (talk) 01:47, 18 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@Collect: More things to do:
  • Add an Infobox (current best practice).
  • Convert all the citations to the {{Cite templates, appropriate for each (current best practice).
  • Add more citations. Review The Tech (newspaper), Tech Talk, Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Harvard Crimson, NY Times, etc. on-line archives. Contact the current skinner, and see if there are any clipping files that could be gone through.
  •  Done (for now) Fix the formatting, so it works well on very wide and very narrow windows.
Best — Lentower (talk)

I had checked the boston.com archives, NYT, etc. and checked the current twitter posts already<g> as I am a tad obsessive on sourcing. The old Boston Record American was great for racing results, but was a Hearst tabloid which did not cover university stuff much at all. "Tech Talk" (which is not fully archived AFAICT as it was for many years an ad hoc newsletter for the community) is found through my mit.edu searches. Information from the current club members, unfortunately, does not meet the WP:RS requirement as not even being "self-published" alas. Images work on the mobile devices I have - but can change to %ages as needed for images. "Harvard Crimson" archives checked only insofar as they are available online. MITSFS is only 65 years old. And the adding of infoboxes has been the topic of ArbCom decisions - and appears deprecated for relatively short articles - as I think you should know. Changing ref format is interesting - but I had thought not related to "quality of article" from discussions on that topic, but certainly doable. And yes - my intent was for a vetting of the article - I know that is at about the 25th percentile for length among good articles based on the last stats I found. Cheers. Collect (talk) 09:16, 18 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for all your hard work. It's a significant step towards improving the article, and has already sparked work from other editors.
  • The article has gotten long enough for an InfoBox. GA/FA class articles usually have them. And when brought up to GA standards, should be even longer.
  • I wasn't suggesting citing current members anecdotes, but seeing if the Library had a collection of printed articles from WP:RS that could be mined for citations.
  • Time physically spent in MIT's Institute Archives, in Cambridge, would gain access to the early issues of Tech Talk and other WP:RS paper sources not on the Internet. These would include Technique, MIT's yearbook, as well as The Social Beaver and earlier equivalents - a published handbook sent to entering students. The archivists there usually know of resources that are not obvious to others.
— Lentower (talk) 13:38, 18 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
All back issues of The Tech have been online for years (http://tech.mit.edu/browse.html), probably one of the first comprehensive newspaper back issue archives to appear on the Internet. For the other publications, including Tech Talk (no longer published as such), the MIT Archives (https://libraries.mit.edu/archives/) are the place to search. The archive staff are usually very helpful, especially if you appear to be a serious researcher who is likely to publish their findings (this includes Wikipedia). They appreciate getting acknowledgement of their help, even if this consists only of footnoted pointers to the MIT Archives.
Regarding building fully-formatted and complete references, see the tutorial Help:Referencing for beginners. I find that the refToolbar method (described there) is very efficient, even for experienced editors, but YMMV. Reify-tech (talk) 15:12, 18 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
At 40K edits, I am not actually a newby - and since I already use mit.edu resources, I knew about that as well. Cheers. Collect (talk) 15:27, 18 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The Tech gives the ten word meeting notice as a rule - was not surprised at all <g>. Cheers. Collect (talk) 15:38, 18 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The Tech Indexing Project, which also got The Tech microfilmed) is interesting history (and is how their web server find the scanned page to display, from before they had digital text to archive on the web). I doubt the sources exist for Wikipedia coverage. — Lentower (talk) 17:54, 18 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not suggesting that you are a new editor, but I am suggesting that you should add more-complete and well-formatted references, especially since you seem likely to add many of them in your effort to reach GA status. Give refToolbar a serious try, as suggested above; you may be pleasantly surprised at how it eases the process of building good references by facilitating efficient and error-free cut-and-paste from online sources, and even semi-automatic data entry. If you prefer to build everything manually, that process is also described there. Your efforts are appreciated; I am just trying to help you do things more thoroughly and effectively. Reify-tech (talk) 16:18, 18 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
TY - I did not mean to sound like Andy <g>. Generally I have found over-referenced Wikipedia articles to be a nuisance - and have generally provided "the sources actually needed to confirm the sentence" as a rule. Cheers. Collect (talk) 16:28, 18 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • As Reify-tech has already noted, Wikipedia has moved beyond your preferred citation style, and an article is unlike to get GA status with citations in the style you prefer. Reasons include: what encylopedias are about is scholarly research and citation; the growing WP:Linkrot problem; etc.
  • Your preference for citations that are minimal in length, and few in numbers, is also not where Wikipedia has gotten to. There are many sentences that should be cited and are not.
  • It's not clear if either you (Collect) or Reify-tech got my point about the Institute Archives: That physical time spent in a high quality reserach library can turn up much research that can be cited and useful in an article, that can not be found over the Internet. This limits Wikipedia in meeting it's goal to summarize all citable human knowledge. For this article, probably also true of the MITSFS library, as I suspect they have copies of Locus_(magazine). SFWA's zine, etc. (Though contacting those organizations directly, to pinpoint which issues, might be quicker than paging through all the back issues.) BTW, since I got my college degree. I have over a man-month at the Institute Archives, and several man-years in research libraries.
  • All three of us are experienced WP editors.

— Lentower (talk) 17:54, 18 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I also urge you to visit the MIT Archives, with a list of specific questions you wish to research. It appears likely that some of the unresolved and incomplete aspects of the article cannot be finished by using online resources exclusively. I have found the Archives staff to be very helpful each time I have gone there. As noted, the goal with references is to improve the completeness and usefulness of each one, and not just peppering the article with redundant footnotes. Reify-tech (talk) 18:16, 18 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
As an exercise and a demonstration, I have upgraded a single cite to the current Wikipedia standard, by using the automatic ISBN lookup feature of refToolbar, plus a manual cut-and-paste of the Google Books URL. For details, see the edit diff, or search the Wikisource for "MITSF" or "Tulloch". I don't plan to do the other needed cite upgrades myself, but will leave them to User:Collect and others (or not, as they may choose). The point here is to show what results can be achieved by using the auto-lookup ISBN feature of refToolbar for cite upgrades (and thus, for doing cites to a high standard right from the start). This is one key element needed to upgrade the entire article to GA status.
TL;DR - See how to do cites effectively (or refuse to learn how, suit yourself). Cheers! Reify-tech (talk) 16:02, 19 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Early history[edit]

More on this student activity's early days as a "club" would be a useful add. Can anyone provide the exact name of the club, or useful references? — Lentower (talk) 13:42, 18 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The precise name is "MIT Science Fiction Society" and is so noted on all the MIT sites. The big impetus was the microfilm project, for sure. The library is smaller than the Eaton Collection[1], but that is an official UCR library - not a "student club". One must understand university sociology to understand a few things - virtually all fraternities were across the Charles, thus they basically stuck to "visible organizations" such as "The Tech" and student government.
The "invisible organizations" (the ones where one could arrive at 2 a.m. and find people there) basically drew upon non-fraternity students as a base. Overlap was not really tremendous - one found computer hackers all frequented the "open all night" organizations. One finds, alas, cursory coverage of the invisible organizations by The Tech.
Gernsback spoke at least twice to the club - but only once made The Tech. Cheers. Collect (talk) 15:51, 18 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
We are talking from different contexts, and with different version of the MITspeak dialect, and the MIT culture, that has changed over time. E.g. The Tech has gotten better at recognizing "invisibele" culture at MIT over the decades.
  • MITSFS has been known by that name from it's original smallest beginning?
  • By "club" you mean an association of people with no "official" recognition? Is this how the word "club" is being used in the article? As the text is, it's confusing. The word "club" is not used that way at MIT these days. More importantly, we want to be clear for all our readers.
  • When was MITSFS started? By whom? When did it get given office space? Was Walker the first office space? What other steps of recognition happened? Sources would be nice.
— Lentower (talk) 17:17, 18 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
In 1950, one must recall the huge number of people returning from WW II - many students were suddenly older than before, and many new organizations were created. While MIT officially recognized the MITSFS in 1951 (actually covered in a ref given- seemed odd to need to cite the same source too many times <g>) the group certainly existed in 1950 as the darkroom used was in Walker Memorial - then the only "student center" at MIT. Other organisations flourished at the same time - TMRC dates to 1946, and was located in a building used for major classified research into the 1960s - it was the only "student activity" I know if in a "secure building" <g>. The MITSFS "office space" was a room in the basement adjacent to WTBS - the student radio station (someone later gave them money to give up their call letters - and got their phone number "TNT-WTBS" in the bargain). The MIT Rocket (Research) Society dated barely pre-war, and took off after the war (so to speak) and was also in the basement of Walker Memorial (along with two ancient bowling alleys, manually operated). Collect (talk) 20:48, 18 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Some comments on the article[edit]

If you want to get this article up to GA it needs a lot of work, here are some suggestions:

  • The lead isn't long enough - there should be at least one sentence summarising each section
  • The article is lacking structure and just seems to be a collection of facts. I would suggest that it would make more sense to start off with the history, then go on to the society as it is today and then talk about the library.
  • What was the original club called? It's not clear from the article that there was one - I only know that from the previous section on this page.
  • There is very little information about the society itself - how is it constituted, how often and where does it meet?
  • What does the development of Spacewar! at MIT have to do with the society - were any of the developers members? If some link between the two can't be made it shouldn't be in the article at all as it's wp:synthesis to just use this an an example of people at MIT being interested in Scifi.
  • What does "the club was instrumental in microfilming Astounding Science Fiction" mean? Who was it done for? Did they actually do the work themselves? Was it all issues up until then or just some? Is the collection complete to date?
  • What is the point of the temporary shelves picture and what are the quotes for? Is there some point being made here that I'm missing? Richerman (talk) 18:47, 18 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
All are good questions. The lede will probably be written as or after the article develops. I only know the answer to your last question, and have updated the caption accordingly. Reify-tech (talk) 20:04, 18 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

A few more, if you're aiming for Good Article status:

  • Citations to the same work (website, newspaper, journal, website, etc.) should have the information for that work identical. Much less confusing to the reader. Not true for the two citations to the MITSFS website, as of [2].
  • Several ISBNs needed.
  •  Done Several ISSNs needed {{tl:ISSN-needed}}
  • Citations should be done in a consistent style.
  • To prevent WP:Linkrot, the citation should be archived, and the three parameters filled in for the {{tl:cite}} template used. Also useful to fill in the "|quote" parameter: both to handle Linkrot; and let the reader see the source, when he can't access it due to Internet outages, or when it's not on the Internet.

— Lentower (talk) 19:31, 19 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Pronunciation[edit]

Is there an official pronunciation of "MITSFS"? Just spelling out the letters is 6 syllables, so I usually heard it said as "mits-fuss". If this is the case, could somebody expert in International Phonetic Alphabet add it to the article? Reify-tech (talk) 19:46, 12 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

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