User talk:Salix alba/Archive 1

Hello Salix alba/Archive 1, 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 have any questions, check out Wikipedia:Where to ask a question or ask me on my talk page. Again, welcome! 

Good to see another mathematican in wikipedia, you might like to have a look at Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics where the mathematicans hang out.

It is surprising nobody welcomed you so far. I guess it's because you are rich. :) Anyway, thank you for your work, your careful use of edit summaries, and discussions on the talk page. Usually I use the welcome to bug people about wrong style and other minor sins, but with you I have noting to pick at. :) Enjoy! Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 01:37, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

Hi rich- fancy seeing you here! (Just traced you back through the Tree bog article! Fancy giving some attention to the permaculture page??? Cheers for now quercus robur 17:34, 18 December 2005 (UTC)

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Hi Rich- there is a proposal to merge the article on Veganic gardening with Vegan organic gardening, personally I'm against this as I feel that people often mix the two terms up anyway, but maybe you might like to have a look and add your thoughts?? Cheers quercus robur 17:38, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

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I agree to the edit counter opt-in terms

Thanks

Hey Salix, thanks for reverting my mistake on the "lying" page. I wasn't aware of the specific use of the word in this instance. EKN 04:32, 2 April 2006 (UTC)EKN

Re: Emergy math

Nice one. Haven't had the time to follow this up further. Have you had a look at the emsim the emergy simulator? Raph Valyi wrote the code. You might be interested in contacting him and collaborating and ironing out the code. Sholto Maud 08:27, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Hi. I'm poor.

I envy your wealth. HAHAHAHAHA. BTW, congratulations on choosing to use my lovely creation, the vegan userbox. Daykart 06:53, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

Probably

but only admins can delete pages and I'm not one >_< --Mistress Selina Kyle ^{(Α⇔Ω ¦ ⇒✉)} 21:45, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

Yeomans forest

I have no idea what I'm doing, and whether what I am now doing is correct. This is my first venture into the WIKIPEDIA thing. You doubted that overnight carbon dioxide release would equal daytime sequestration. If it didn't the forest floor in a jungle would, after thousands of years, be hundreds of feet thick in litter or decomposed litter. It's not, and nobody ever says it is. Jungle soils are never more than a few inches deep. I just published a book PRIORITY ONE Together We Can Beat Global Warming . It's at my web site www.yeomansplow.com.au Then go to PRIORITY ONE. If this is not sufficient then come back and tell me.

It dosen't make sense to me but it seems to say I to sign to sign things Yeomansplowchris1 12:53, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

Education in England

Hi. You added the {{education}} template to the Education in England page before Christmas. I am not sure why. What was your intention ? Would you like to discuss it on the talkpage? Frelke 21:16, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

Style tips

Hi Pfafrich. I have a remark. On Wikipedia one should use uppercase only at the beginning of sentence and for proper names. A look at this diff will probably explain it better.

By the way, your new article Procrustes analysis needs a bit of work too, I will try to fix it up a bit. Cheers, Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 23:34, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

Polyhedral category changes

I don't understand why you're removing some categories, like Category:uniform polyhedra from antiprism.

I could understand removing a more general category, if it is implied by a more specialized one, but the other way makes no sense to me.

Tom Ruen 23:53, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Testing sig --Salix alba 00:18, 16 January 2006 (UTC) Testing sig --Salix alba User talk:Pfafrich 11:37, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Paul Jaworski

You were right after all about the hangon tag, although technically I was correct. Anyway, I got the article restored by an admin and as you can it's up for AFD and will be a keep. So all is well, lol. Englishrose 00:02, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Bill Gates/Jesus

I was trying to revert vandalism, but it turned out that the spurious Bill Gates stuff has been there since the 9th. I reverted to a much earlier copy to fix it. Thanks for catching that, OhnoitsJamie^Talk 21:00, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

CFR

Sorry about that. I entirely forgot. Mea culpa. --John^DO|^{Speak your mind} I doubt it 17:11, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Syracuse

And I was thinking it should have been the Italian city. I guess my fingers weren't cooperating with my brain. TimBentley 14:13, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Your note on Category:Boolean templates

None of those template (eventually except for or) can be exchanged by parameter default. _→AzaToth 00:45, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

help with blahtex

Hi pfarich, you said you might be able to help with some coding. Our project falls naturally into two rather separate pieces: (1) the underlying TeX-to-MathML converter, and (2) getting MediaWiki to spit out all the right stuff. I'm running part (1); part (2) is run by User:Jitse Niesen. Right now (2) is where the action is. You should contact Jitse if you think you can help. Dmharvey 22:43, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Danke sehr

• JA: Thanks for the user box, it looks very nice! Jon Awbrey 17:06, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Applying MySql Skills to WP

Hi, I see you are mathematician by training. This amuse you if you don't already know it: when I was a graduate student I wrote a long expository paper on category theory in which I used the "join" operation in a relational database as one example of the pullback construction!

Oddly enough, I also have some experience in trying to hack up a plant-related database. I guess you know that Kew Gardens has a vast database of their collections (including a seed collection and their library)? If not, try this with "Salix alba" :-/ They commissioned a software firm to write a special purpose database for them, which is vastly complicated (I have seen the technical specification!).

Have you considered applying your MySql skills to tracking WP problems? I have some modest ongoing projects myself. Did you know you can request a Wikimedia developers account to produce some semi-official tools? As you no doubt realize, security issues are a big deal in writing webscripts which will query a mySql database. Do you know all about that by any chance? I am particularly interested in using the "trigger" capacities of MySql 5.0 and higher to help automatically track certain events.---CH 04:43, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

Yes I have been thinking a bit about MySQL and wikipedia, and a few other fun extensions. I'd like to produce a tool for displaying graphical repesentations of linkage patterns in parts of wikipedia, I've also been doing a few simple grep|sed|sort|uniq hacks to derive some statistics on interconetion of wikipedia articles from the database dumps, see User:Pfafrich/usertemplatestats.

I'm still relativly new to wikipedia, about a month of serious contribution, so I'mm still finding my way about. I'm up for some fun suggestions. --Salix alba (talk) 12:27, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

BlahtexWiki

Just a short note that I finally had time today to go through your remarks on BlahtexWiki. My replies are on m:Blahtex/Bugs/Bugs in BlahtexWiki. Basically, I think I fixed the issue with the W3C Validator, the automatical closing of HTML tags is difficult, and I can't reproduce your problems with templates, <center> and <gallery>. Could you please give a link to a page on BlahtexWiki showing what's wrong? Cheers, Jitse Niesen (talk) 00:12, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

blahtex compatibility project

I suppose you saw my comments at User:Pfafrich/BlaxTex_^\frac_bugs.

In case you missed my message on Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mathematics, I've put a link up at http://blahtex.org/errors-20060203.txt with a list of all errors. You'll get a much better sense for what works and what doesn't work on that list. You seem to have sufficient grep-xpertise to deal with that file. (Actually I think I could learn a few things from you --- I am only a very basic grep user.) I'll notify you when I update it next. Not sure when that will be due to delays in new dumps.

Also, I've added a few remarks on meta about some of those blahtex bugs you mentioned.

Thanks so much for your help!

Dmharvey 04:10, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

Selector calculus, difference operator

Hi there! Thanks for your edit here - you're right, indeed, I missed the factor of 2. Those formulas come from Heim's first book in his treatise, chapter 3, pages 99-114. In particular, those formulas come from pages 104 and 105. The reference I am using is Elementarstrukturen der Materie - Einheitliche strukturelle Quantenfeldtheorie der Materie und Gravitation, by Burkhard Heim; published by Resch Verlag ISBN 3-85382-008-5. --HappyCamper 03:47, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

Permaculture

Thanks for correcting the entries to the Permaculture page. Hope things work out well for the Devon project.

Waitak 08:03, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Underutilized crops

I see that you spotted the category, and are now adding to it! Very please to see that, thank you.

Waitak 08:36, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

TX

Thanks. Kosebamse

Permaculture wiki

Hi Rich, I've just launched, or perhaps rescued (as it seems it already existed in a moribund state) a Permaculture wiki at Wikicities http://permaculture.wikicities.com/wiki/Main_Page . I know there have already been a few attempts at staring up permculture wikis, but what I think might be different about this one is atht it more or less has the same format as wikipedia, thus is more user friendly than some of the others I've seen. At the moment I'm copying and pasting in alot of relevant wikipedia aritcles in the hope that these will 'fork' and become more useful to permaculture folks and become a Permaculture POV encylopedia on organic gardening, tree maintenance, landcare, eco-building, peoplecare, etc, as well as a useful resource for 'cutting edge' permaculture ideas and thought. Fancy having a look and maybe an edit spree if you are feeling a bit bored some time? I thought I'd announce it on the UK and international lists once a very basic structure and framework is in place - what do you think??? quercus robur 22:09, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Hi Rich, you are a computer whizz, any chance you could help with this one? http://permaculture.wikicities.com/wiki/Talk:Fruit_tree_forms Cheers quercus robur 16:12, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

Gray's

I want to thank you for splitting the gray's pages up. I think that was an excellent idea. --Arcadian 13:02, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

Possible wars between liberal democracies

Hi. I am writing a text about possible wars between liberal democracies. Any suggestions for improvement? User:Ultramarine/sandbox3 Ultramarine 16:26, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

Challenging and useful database projects

First let's see whether we have a consonant view of problems faced by Wikipedia in the next five to ten years. Could you take a look at User:Hillman#What do I think of Wikipedia so far? and User:Hillman/Wikipedia quality control and let me know on my talk page if we are on the same page, as it were? ---CH 10:35, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

Algebra

I see that you added closure to the group axioms listed on the algebra page. Technically, the closure requirement follows from the definition of a binary operation. While I can see an argument that since this page is meant to be introductory, it might be worth pointing out this closure requirement on the binary operation, it also seems as though we should avoid being redundant, as this may confuse readers as well. Perhaps we should set it off from the other axioms and note that it doesn't actually need to be listed, as is done on the group page? I'm not going to make this change immediately, but let me know what you think. -- Zarvok | Talk 17:35, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

Additionally, thanks for the other clean ups you made to that section, it looks quite a bit nicer now than it did when I finished with it. -- Zarvok | Talk 17:52, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

I really like your edits to the page. Excellent job! - grubber 14:34, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

Rename

I've renamed you as requested. Best wishes, Warofdreams talk 01:59, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

Sustainable habitat

Hello. I saw that you tagged this article with the {{prod}} tag. However, you did not leave any comments. Therefore, I have moved the page to AfD. I invite you to comment on the article's AfD page. James084 02:18, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

the naming of names

White Willow as in Chosen? —Tamfang 20:10, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

Categories

Categories should generally not be used to classify Wikipedians. They can be used to the extent that the categorization helps us write an encyclopedia, which includes skills, interests, WikiProject memberships, etc. Combining categories with templates is redundant, because the template already serves as a means for identifying groups of users. --MarkSweep (call me collect) 10:34, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

Is there any way to persuade this crusader to go back to actually editing articles? I will support any reasonable measure to this effect. Septentrionalis 17:50, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

mathematical induction

"Form 2 can be easily be rendered as form 1, by a simple renumbering." That is utterly false. The fact that a certain set has two members would then be relied on in a absolutely crucial way in the step that would have been renumbered so as to be called "1". A property of the number 2 would still be relied on at that step in an essential way. Michael Hardy 21:25, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Links&Cats

Hi Richard. I saw that you have have good skills in dealing with database dumps, and I have a question. How hard would it be to list all Wikipedia articles in decreasing order of how much they are linked from existing mathematics articles or link to existing mathematics articles?

Out of this list, again in decreasing order of links, I would be really intersted in the ones which are not redirects/redlinks, and which are not categorized. That is very important because my bot adds articles to the list of mathematics articles based on whether they are categorized. I am sure that there is a good chunk of god-forgotten articles which are math, but neither in a math category nor in listed in any math list.

At this stage I don't actually ask you yo do the work, just how hard it would be. If it is too hard, I can drop this. You can reply here, thanks. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:27, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

• Yep that should be easy enough. --Salix alba (talk) 18:22, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

That would be nice indeed. When you make that list of articles in decreasing order of links to/from math articles which have no categories I would be really interested in seeing it. Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 19:06, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

I've now got version no 1 of the list. Articles which:

• are in the Main namespace
• are linked from articles listed in 'List of mathematic*'
• are not redirects
• are not red links
• are not disambig pages
• ordered by number of maths articles linking to them.

I haven't yet identified articles with no categories. Theres about 27,000 articles, so that should give you something to work on!

How do you want the data, is a little over standard article size. --Salix alba (talk) 15:47, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! But I would be really interested in the ones without categories, as I plan to use that information to actually categorize them. So I wonder if you can list such a sublist. Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:29, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

Yep think I've got those with no categories now. See User:Salix alba/maths/uncategorised maths. --Salix alba (talk) 18:33, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

Awesome, thanks! I did some sectioning, and will try going through them today. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 19:38, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

Objectivity, be bold and wise

I noticed you decide the recreation of an Objectivity article which you distinguish from the philosophical discussion of the term. Although it is an illusory distinction, why not? But why did you reverse all the attempts to reduce noise and unite all those different articles which deals of exactly the same subject: objectivity? Didn't you noticed that i had merged objective approach with objectivity (philosophy)? Then, if you decide - on questionable grounds - to create again the objectivity article, why don't you just transfer those sections (politics, etc) back to it, without creating again "objective approach", which is where those sections first appeared? All of this just to propose a merge? In other words, you reversed part of my (questionable) work, just to propose to repeat it, with the only (questionable) difference that there is now two general objectivity article, objectivity and objectivity (philosophy)? Well, in any cases, your proposed merge has got more than support from me, since i proposed the same a few weeks ago... One step forward, two steps backward... Lapaz 19:11, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

Bios theory link in Chaos theory page

Hello. I would appreciate your oppinion on this issue on the Talk:Chaos theory page. Regards, Lakinekaki 04:57, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Hi Richard, Did you actually review the bios theory page before issuing an opinion on it? As far as I can tell, bios theory is just bunkum, and barely living on this side of a deletion for being "non-notable original research/crank science". Lakinekaki has been trolling this issue for a long time, doing nothing at all to improve things, and mostly picking arguments. That's what this is about. linas 16:03, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Lie groups

I note you deleted homogeneous space from the Lie group article see-also section. I didn't really like this change. I've been trying to keep to the following policy on "see also" sections: if the article already links a topic, it should *not* be in the "see also" section. If the topic is related, but not otherwise mentioned in the article, it is appropriate for see-also. Thus, homogeneous spaces are the quotient of a lie group and a discrete subgroup ... its certainly related and of potential interest to the reader. linas 16:03, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

I replied on my talk page. linas 00:28, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

Compass and straightedge

I'd appreciate your comment on Talk:Compass and straightedge. Thank you. John Reid 23:50, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

The democratic peace

Hi! Have you read User:Ultramarine/Possible exceptions to "Well-established democracies have never made war on one another". I would be very glad for suggestions for improvements.Ultramarine 09:54, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

See also User talk:Ultramarine/Possible exceptions to "Well-established democracies have never made war on one another" Ultramarine 10:37, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

You make also find this overview interesting.[1] Ultramarine 09:57, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Also, I would be happy to discuss your objection to User:Ultramarine/sandbox4. Note that it is a work in progress. I have added several points today. It contains many of the excluded arguments and findings I have argued should be included in the DPT article.Ultramarine 13:48, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

I would also appreciate your opinion about the difference between Ultramarine's draft and Democratic peace theory. I have not intended to exclude any argument from that article, although several of them are now less detailed and verbose.

Ultramarine has found a couple of new papers, which were never mentioned in DPT. Of these, the only one that seems to me significant is the paragraph about Imre Lakatos. This appears to be a correct summary of one of his views, but the application to DPT vs. Realism is mere partisan cheering on Ray's part. Septentrionalis 15:30, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Tags on DPT

I came here, however, to ask your opinion about the article itself. Ultramarine has justified them with a list of some 40 (!) objections. Of these, I find very few meritorious, but I have asked for a general assessment of what overall tags are justified. Septentrionalis 15:30, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

I would be happy to discuss any of the points with you. I do think that it is important that Wikipedia should be correct on this important theory with many real-world implications. So I would be very glad if you could join the discussion regarding the validity of specific points raised. My general point is that views of most researchers and their studies and arguments are not farily represented. It should also be noted that Septentrionalis has on several other articles constantly tried to exclude well-sourced advantages of democracy and related research. See for example this, where he deletes every sourced advantage of liberal democracy while keeping many claimed unsourced disadvantages.[2] Or this, where he completely deletes the painstakingly made table regarding world-wide democracy from Freedom House.[3] Ultramarine 15:58, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

I see that Ultramarine has learned what argumentum ad hominem is. My reasons for believing the paragraph in liberal democracy inaccurate and off topic are explained on its talk page. I do not believe that the article on Freedom House is improved by a cut-and-paste of their description of methodology. nor by a lengthy and literal reproduction of their chart; that's what external links are for. Septentrionalis 17:21, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Suggestion

If you want me to reply to your comments in the same place, let's do that on Talk:Democratic peace theory or a subpage somewhere. I prefer to keep things on my talk page relatively short, and it will need archiving quite soon anyway.

If you have a response to this, or questions on what I wrote, which I have moved to Talk:Democratic_peace_theory#A_Lakatosian_View_of_the_Democratic_Peace, please leave them there or on my talk page, so I will be flagged. I don't like to watch user talk pages, if it can be avoided. Septentrionalis 03:40, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

I've set up User talk:Pmanderson/Salix. If you want my opinion, uninterrupted, on something, ask me there. (I am watching it; but I have a long watchlist. If I don't answer for a long time, ping my talk page. Septentrionalis 21:19, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

Future research

Just in case you missed it, I found this article interesting and also a commentary on Ray's review: [4] Ultramarine 23:56, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

Ultramarine reediting

Ultramarine is in the process of re-editing the article from top to bottom; he has deleted one passage a third editor explicitly approved of, and has deleted several sourced passages. I have commented on his changes, and he has refused to reply.

During the long time he declined to touch the article, I have been careful to edit slowly, in part to give him a changce to respond. I hope you will be able to talk him out of this, which approaches the creation of a parallel version. Septentrionalis 19:51, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

Septentrionalis has extensively re-edited away the version that was present at the end of the arbcom case and to which no objection was raised by the arbcom: [5]. He has systematically tried to discredit the supporting arguments by selectively quoting old supporting research and including disproportionate criticism from a minority of the researchers. As noted earlier, he has also on other article related to democracy deleted supporting arguments and related research. Ultramarine 20:03, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

• I am amused by Ultramarine's straw man: it is not Arbcom's business to decide content disputes.
• I have carefully retained Ultramarine's arguments and claims; as an examination of his complaints (numbered 1 to 41 on Talk:DPT) will show. This is the chief reason the article is as long as it is; if I had left all his bloviation it would be much longer.
• Ultramarine appears to read largely in three authors, all of the same faction; where he has introduced material from other authors, his text has usually been a cut-and-paste from the advocacy articles of one of these.
• I already have answered this repetitive ad hominem; I will add that Ultramarine appears not to understand writing for the enemy. Septentrionalis 19:34, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

But I came here to request your opinion on the present discussion on Talk:Democratic peace theory#General structure. From my PoV, Ultramarine, having already inserted vast quantities of direct quotations from his favorite three, proposes to rearrange the article yet more.

I really would like to have a chance to read through the article as it now stands, prune a little, and read some more papers before dealing with these efforts to impose a PoV on the article - and oh, yes, I would like some time to edit other articles, and even do things off Wikipedia. Septentrionalis 19:34, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

I agree, its best to hold the article as it stands. Of the recent edits some I don't yet know enough about to comment.

The section on Progressive research program? is the start of a good section which I feel is missing from the article. For the recient papers I've read there does seem to be a shift in emphesis. You can chacterise DPT as really two seperate things the Deomcratic Peace Hypothesis - i.e. whether democracies tend not to engage in war with each other; and the study of how democracies affect peace. The current work now seems to be more about the latter, say Ray's Lakatosian analysis, Huntley's system level democratic peace analysis, more studies with multiple regression parameters so its not just whether a country is a democracy which is being measured, a range of aulilarray hypothesis. It seems like the field is maturing, perhaps becoming more a case of modelling. The Progressive research program section is the start of documenting this, a better name could be Contempory analysis, or possible system level democratic peace analysis which might be an emering sub field, there was a confrence on the subject.

Ray's new approach is what his faction have always believed, assisted by a half-dozen papers, some of them over a decade old; for a review of this literature, see Müller, Harald, and Jonas Wolff (2004). "Dyadic Democratic Peace Strikes Back" (PDF). {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link). Observe that they see a renaissance of DPT in general; but even the people who think democracies are more peaceable against non-democracies find the effect slight, and Müller and Wolff find this extension of the democratic peace "neither necessary nor convincing." Septentrionalis 01:28, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

POV, I'm still unsure about. I intend to redo the refencece, doing that will give me a chance to weight the ballance of the article. --Salix alba (talk) 21:09, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

I am redoing at least the references here into Harvard: User:Ultramarine/sandbox4 Ultramarine 22:05, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

You'll find a lot of Ultramarine's three friends: Ray, Weart, and Rummel. They are one faction, out of at least three or four, within DPT; and Ultramarine pushes them everywhere he can. Septentrionalis 01:32, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

Who are the other faction? Gowa, seems to be one although dated. --Salix alba (talk) 09:16, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

No, Gowa and other Realists deny that there is an actual democratic peace altogether. There are three questions which divide those who accept the democratic peace.

• Are democracies at peace only among themselves, or are they more peaceful in general;
  • Peaceful among themselves only: Doyle, Russett, Weart, Gleditsch, Owen, Singer and Small, Mansfield and Snyder, Mueller, Wolff in fact, almost everybody.
  • Peaceable with non-democracies: Rummel, Ray and half-a-dozen other papers listed above in Mueller and Wolff
• Is the democratic peace an automatic and mechanical thing, or is it a strong statistical tendency?
  • Automatic (and so without exceptions): Rummel, Ray and Weart (as far as I can tell nobody else)
  • Statistical tendency:Wayman, Bremer, Chan, Cederman, Doyle, Russett, Owen, MW, Gleditisch, Mansfield and Snyder
    • Of these some say there have in fact been no exceptions yet, but explicitly reject view the chance of interdemocratic war is zero: Wayman, Bremer,Manfield and Snyder
    • Some hold no exceptions, and are tatistical, but don't go out of their way to refute determinism: Doyle,
    • Some discuss one or two exceptions:Gleditisch, Maoz
    • Most use words like "rare", "very rare", "'virtually' immune to war".
    • Multiple correlation studies don't talk about exceptions, only outliers (and there aren't really enough here to be serious outliers.
    • Russett is a special case; he thinks there have been no such wars in the last two centuries, but somewhere between 13 and 35 in ancient Greece, and that the democratic peace is growing with time,
• Is liberal democracy enough, or do the other factors Kant discussed have independent effect?
  • Kantian:Doyle, Russett, Owen, Hegre, Cederman,...
  • Non Kantian: Gleditsch, Rummel, Ray, Weart.

As you can see, these divisions cross one another, and so there are many factions possible. Every major theorist rolls his own DPT. and it only agrees 80% or so with other people's. Rummel (with Ray) and Weart are probaly closer together, and Ultramarine belongs to this same faction,

• Gowa, Mearsheimer, Layne, and so forth, are striaght opponents, and outside these questions.

Ultramarine is still removing referenced material and throwing paragraphs around like boulders, but I think both Democratic peace theory#Types of theory, and Democratic peace theory#exceptions are readable. Also, this is from memory; statements in the article are sourced. Septentrionalis 20:00, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

Septentrionalis old tactic, there are not large differences among the supporters. Of course there are different views. 1. Monadic theory. Even supporters of the monadic theory agree that it is a weak tendency. And the 10 researchers mentioned in Muller papers + other more recent are not an insignificant group. And Muller do not deny that there is a tendency, only that it does not apply equally to all democracies. 2. Regarding no wars. Septentrionalis has refused to give any explanation from the literature for why a specific war should be an exception, except Gowa. Most of the researchers supporting the theory also agree that there have been no wars, if using for example Rummel's definitions. If they use rare, they often refer to MIDs. 3. All researchers agree that democracy is not the only thing affecting the chance of war. Septentrionalis has only provided one researchers, Doyle in 1983, who argues that all the 3 Kantian factors must be present. As noted in User:Ultramarine/sandbox4, some very recent papers have found that trade has no effect apart from democracy. Many different explanations have been proposed. So certainly, some differences, but that is only to be expected. There is little disagreement regardig no wars, the dyadic peace, and little internal violence among supporters. Ultramarine 20:34, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

Excelent, thanks to both of you for this. I think this sums up the root of the editing disputes. As I see it there are really two things worth addressing in the article

1. Historical disputes, i.e. pre 2000 where there was serious disagrement on the DP-hypothesis.
2. Current disputes. Last five years or so.

For the article we do need to document the history of the development of the theory and also the current state of the art. Is this currently a deeply divide field or is there some convergence, 80% agreement seems to indicate some convergence. I'd be worried if there was 100% agreement in any field: a sign that the field had lost its edge.

The three Kantian factors are not well spelled out in the article at the moment, correct me if I'm wrong but I think these are

1. democracies
2. trade
3. intergovenmental bodies

these are mentioned but you do need to delve deeply into the article to find them out. The fact that trade does not seem to have a large effect, is interesting and worthy of note.

Still too many words in the article, in some sense hiding the main questions in the field. --Salix alba (talk) 23:43, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

I agree. The following paragraph about Kant, which was trimmed from the article for length, may be a useful starting point.

Kant's plan for a perpetual peace included more than a government answerable to the people. He proposed a League of Nations to keep the peace; and a right to "hospitality" which should be recognized everywhere. This latter was a freedom of international travel and commerce, which in some ways resembles the European Union, including the Schengen Agreement. (He also proposed preliminary confidence-building measures, including disarmament; but these were a means rather than an end.)

There is also a link to Kant's text in Perpetual peace.Septentrionalis 01:30, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

I agree. The article has too many words and contains too much old research, hiding the current status. Ultramarine 13:36, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

Experience suggests that what Ultramarine means here is that the article cites people who disagree in one way or another with what Rummel has been saying since 1983; his several recent removals of sourced materials, which are listed on the talk page under that heading, are of such disagreements. But I will see what he has done lately. Septentrionalis 01:34, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Your response is requested

A request for peer review on the article regarding Democratic Peace Theory has come to my attention. I am interested in helping. I am willing to act either as a reviewer or as a mediator. I have posted a comment on the talk page for Democratic Peace Theory. I invite you to respond and let me know how I can help with this article (an article that seems important but is in somewhat bad shape). --Blue Tie 03:07, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

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re Math talk

I have been thinking about the trouble I had with some, but not all, of the mathematics articles, and the role of an encyclopedia. Some of the people who responded to my criticism felt that a reader without a certain background should not be reading the encyclopedia, presumably because it would be above his head. I, on the other hand feel that an article in an encyclopedia should be a self-contained introduction to its subject matter for the general reader, as deep as can be managed in a reasonable space, and a pointer to further reading in the subject. It should, as much as possible, be written in ordinary english, and when special jargon or symbols are necessary they should be either explained on the spot, or linked to another article defining them. It should neither be too verbose nor too curt.

For instance, most of the symbols in the Table of mathematical symbols and the syntax with which they are used could be avoided by simple English utterances, thus avoiding the need for the "background" that some of my critics thought necessary for anyone consulting a article with a mathematical subject. This might make the articles somewhat longer -- too bad, they are too short and curt now, most of them. (By the way, an article on the syntax of combination of the mathematical symbols would not be amiss, by which I mean, for example, strings including the "upside down A" ["for all"],the "backward E" ["there is a"], the signs for "union" and "intersection", etc.) These symbols are useful to the mathematician, they ease his train of thought, but they hinder the train of thought of the non-mathematician. It is somewhat as if, to read an article on Pushkin, one had first to be proficient in Russian; something is lost if one cannot read Russian, but not all. (See the recent article on Pushkin in The New York Review of Books.)

The Mathematics articles seem to be written with the feeling that, if they are as concise and exact as possible, that is all that they need. No: that is all a mathematician would need, but this is a general not a specialized encyclopedia, and should be accessible to non-mathematicians.

Scientific American regularly has articles on quite abstruse subjects, but the magazine makes every effort, by side-bar examples, clever drawings, and other means, to make these subjects accessible to the reader without specialilized knowledge, and a list of references for further reading was formerly always given. Perhaps Wikipedia could benefit from this example. Too Old 07:53, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm sorry to butt it in here, but please Too Old, you really do need to be more specific. Your complaint is something that many of us here on Wikipedia take very seriously, and it's an issue that arises fairly frequently. For example, if the article on modular arithmetic was inaccessible to someone without much background, then I would be extremely worried. On the other hand, if your concern was about say symplectic form, then I would argue that perhaps requiring some more background is justified. Please don't be embarrassed to say which article(s) are causing the problem. If you don't say which articles are the problem, then we can't fix them. Also, I agree with your comments about the table of mathematical symbols; unfortunately sometimes there are schoolkid-types who think it makes them look clever to replace all occurrences of "for all" by "∀", but most of us think that's a very unhelpful approach, for precisely the reasons you give. Dmharvey 12:54, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

OK, the article on modular arithmetic is fairly accessible to me as a non-mathematician (but see my edits there), but, in the section heated The ring of congruence classes, it lapses into a jargon that forces the reader to instantaneously learn "mathematical lingo" in order to understand it. Some explanatory material could easily be included there. And there is a reference to ring in which we encounter the sentence: ∀a ∃(−a) such that a + −a = −a + a = 0, which can be easily rendered into ordinary English. Why impose such a burden on the non-mathematician? I have not yet sufficiently digested symplectic form to be able to critique it. I promise to get back to you on it. Too Old 16:03, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

You're quite right about ring (mathematics), and I've adjusted the text accordingly. There was no need for that notation there.

Concerning modular arithmetic... as you point out, the first part is quite accessible, which is a Good Thing. But after that it starts getting more technical, which you are concerned is a Bad Thing. Well, I have to disagree. From where I stand, modular arithmetic is best thought of as arithmetic in a quotient ring, and certainly anyone studying introductory abstract algebra will want to start thinking of it that way. So we have to take into account that there are people reading this for whom this information, presented in this way, is useful. Furthermore, it is an unfortunate fact of mathematical life that there is "irreducible complexity" (a phrase bandied around far too often these days!) in mathematics... sometimes it's just not possible to explain a more technical term to a general audience in a way that makes any sense at all. One of my favourite examples here is class field theory, which happens to be about things called abelian field extensions, and there simply isn't any way (that I know of) to make it more accessible by explaining it without technical language. It's not like class field theory is about something simple that everyone is already familiar with, and I'm just using the words "abelian" and "field extension" to be perverse; it's just that using those concepts really is the simplest way of thinking about it.

In other words, I agree that every article should have some portion that is as accessible to a broad an audience as possible, but I don't agree that the entire article needs to be aimed at that audience. I use Wikipedia to remind myself of various technical mathematical definitions quite frequently, and I would be disappointed if all the text was aimed at a non-technical audience. To get an idea of how that would look to me (and to all the other mathematicians who use Wikipedia for similar purposes), check out the simple English wikipedia. :-) Dmharvey 19:35, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

And I should re-iterate: if there's an article on something that you are interested in, but the description is too technical, then please leave a note on the talk page, explaining as clearly as you can what's causing the problem. People do read these things and respond. Dmharvey 19:37, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

Alternativly you could use the template {{technical}} to mark the article. --Salix alba (talk) 08:44, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm beginning to see that I need a degree in mathematics even to talk to you. For example, you talk of quotient ring in a way that makes me think that it is related to the section headed The ring of congruence classes in the article on modular arithmetic, but, although I thought I understood the latter section, I was swamped when I looked at quotient ring. I have difficulty even saying what is mystifying me. To begin with, there is the undefined term ideal which, on looking up, led to other confusions. I suppose, given a week or two, I could figure out what you, Dmharvey, were talking about, but if one needs that much effort even to participate in such a casual discussion as this should be, it makes me wonder how you communicate in general. As to "irreducible complexity": does that notion mean that you folks start out speaking Mathematics as your mother tongue, and only learn English as a second language? I hope not, and if not, you must have had such things explained to you initially in English. Now, on a somewhat different tack: to me, and I fancy, to most others, mathematics is only as important as it is necessary to understand the world around me, as is, for instance, the physicist's idea of time, which is quite different from our intuitive understanding of time, and yet, given a very small amount of effort, I fancy that I can get some understanding of how the physicist's concept affects me and my world. I can also, not being a geneticist, yet feel that I understand something about evolution. And lawyers also have a peculiar jargon that one must strive to understand. In contrast, the kind of mathematics that you folk busy yourselves with is utterly without meaning to me in the ordinary course of living. And yet I flatter myself that I am not a complete dunce. I will try to make liberal use of the template mentioned by Salix alba. Too Old 09:52, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

A few comments.

• You're right that quotient rings are related (very closely) to the ring of congruence classes. I'm not going to go into the details here. My point in bringing up "quotient ring" was precisely this: from your point of view, "quotient ring" is a complicated and almost completely meaningless concept which doesn't help at all to understand what modular arithmetic is about; whereas from my point of view, "quotient ring" is a fundamental concept in algebra that clarifies the notion of modular arithmetic and indicates in what ways it can be extended. The difference in our points of view has nothing to do with intelligence, it's entirely because I've spent the last ten years thinking about things in these terms, and (I'm assuming) you haven't.
• "but if one needs that much effort even to participate in such a casual discussion as this should be, it makes me wonder how you communicate in general." Well you're right, sometimes it can be very difficult. For example: in the department where I study, people generally divide into two groups, those who study number theory (such as myself), and those who study geometry (this is an extremely rough classification). If I try to listen to a mathematical conversation going on between some geometers, I probably wouldn't understand a single word of what they were talking about. That's just how it is.
• "does that notion mean that you folks start out speaking Mathematics as your mother tongue, and only learn English as a second language?". No of course not, we learned it in English first, or whatever our native tongue was. So it's not quite irreducible in that sense. The real underlying problem is not that the terms are hard to define, but that one needs experience with using them before the definitions acquire meaning. Here's an example, going back to elementary arithmetic: some day in the dim distant past, you learned what it meant to "multiply" numbers together, things like "2 times 3" and "4 times 6" and so on. Now I'm assuming that your teacher did not introduce the distributive law (i.e. a(b+c) = ab + ac) in the same lesson. The distributive law comes much later, not because of any logical problems in getting from "multiplication" to "distributivity", but because human brains require some time to digest the idea of multiplication before they can make sense of distributivity. You need to have practiced lots of examples of multiplying numbers together before you can really appreciate what distributivity means. It's the same thing here; I can give a definition of "quotient ring" in terms of ideals, but it won't make sense to you until you've seen and thought about lots of examples of ideals; or alternatively, until you've seen lots of examples of quotient rings, even if you didn't know they were quotient rings until someone told you, because it would give you some idea of the common idea that "quotient ring" abstracts. I should add that right now, in my graduate studies, I am learning new definitions of mathematical concepts at a far greater rate than at any earlier time in my studies; in other words, it's not like I can now "speak Mathematics"; it's an ongoing process.
• In contrast, the kind of mathematics that you folk busy yourselves with is utterly without meaning to me in the ordinary course of living. Yes! The kind of mathematics I do is entirely without day-to-day relevance. I'm sure there are plenty of number theorists who would disagree with me, and might even try to hold up cryptography (see for example RSA) as an example of how number theory is relevant to the real world, but I'm afraid that's missing the point of what most number theorists actually do. So why do we do it? The answer is because of delightful and surprising facts like these: Fermat's theorem on sums of two squares, Quadratic reciprocity (two of my favourite more elementary results in number theory). If you think these results are worthwhile, then mathematics is for you, otherwise maybe not!
• Be careful with the "technical" template. When that template appears on a mathematics article, usually I just think "This person just hasn't put in the time to read the article". More likely to have an effect is to write some more specific complaint on the talk page.

Dmharvey 13:56, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

Well! You've finally said it: "The kind of mathematics I do is entirely without day-to-day relevance." What an admission! I find that certain kinds of scientific theory are extremely difficult to get my mind around. String theory comes to mind (but can it even be counted science until someone figures out a way to test it, which has evaded its practitioners for several decades?). But those interested in string theory are convinced that it has everyday relevance and try mightily to communicate it to us. You, in contrast, seem to be saying that we need a special initiation before you can even talk to us. But I wouldn't be arguing with you (life is too short) if I wasn't drawn to the subject by my outside activities. For instance the site for the computer game Planarity, which I play as a way of combatting the brain damage I incurred as a result of my CABG surgery, has a link to Wikipedia's article on Planar graph, which I followed out of curiosity. (This frustrating experience was the reason for my initial remarks in Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics.) By the way, I think that I can see possible everyday relevance of Fermat's theorem on sums of two squares. Too Old 00:40, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

We I supose both Dmharvey and myself have gone through the a long mathematical initiation to gain familariaty with a range of mathematical concepts. And yes it does take a long time, the first year of a maths PhD is often a year of complete confusion. Whilst we can and should try to make WP articles as accessable as we can there are no short-cuts. From an educational POV we completely miss on exercices, which are one of the most important techniques for helping people learn about a subject. Inappropriate in an encyclopedia but wikibooks might be better. I do occasionaly wonder if an encyclopedia is really the correct form for explaining mathematics. As for relavance you might like to read Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology where he discusses why relavance is a criteria which should be avoided, its often found that some of the most abstract mathematics turns out to be very relavant fifty years later. --Salix alba (talk) 07:44, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

I just took a look at planar graph; it appears the current version is more or less the same version you probably saw. Can you explain what you found frustrating about it? Since this was your impetus for your remarks, I think it would very helpful to discuss it. I have a couple questions also of a precise nature: Were you able to get to and read through the section on Kuratowski's theorem? At what point did you find the going rough? --C S (Talk) 08:15, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

• Salix, that's so funny, in my previous response I came *this* close to mentioning A Mathematician's Apology. Good call!
• Chan-Ho, I could start by pointing out that to the typical reader, a "graph" is a drawing of a function y = f(x) on a coordinate plane. Already this is likely to cause confusion in the first paragraph.

Dmharvey 11:18, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

That's a good point! But is that what frustrated you? My purpose in asking these questions is to get to the root of what made one reader (you) find the article frustrating, incomprehensible, etc. --C S (Talk) 11:31, 17 April 2006 (UTC) (oops, I wrote this thinking I was responding to Too Old!)

I started rewriting the intro (in a rough draft in my userspace), and it became clear that there were two very closely related concepts that needed to be explained before the reader could even understand the intro's definition of "planar graph". The two concepts are the idea of a graph as an abstract space (vertices, edges connected in a certain fashion) and the concept of "embedding", i.e. putting the graph into a bigger space, like the plane or 3D space, without creating self-intersections. Unless the reader has seen these ideas before (especially the definition of a graph in the sense of graph theory), it's going to take a while to understand them. You had something of an advantage in that you at least were playing for some time on Planarity (which gives you a lot of intuition about what's going on).

Anyway, it struck me that this is an excellent demonstration of what David and others mean by "background". Unless you've developed the mental models in your head that's necessary to proceed, you can get explanation after explanation without understanding what's going on. In fact, the planar graph article is interesting, because I don't find it's actually written that well IMHO. The first half is significantly better (trying to at least give a consistent presentation), while the latter half is just a grab bag of facts. But even if it was written far better, there will only be so far you can get. Some of the ideas in the article will require extensive re-modelling of your brain, so to speak. Unfortunately, I think too often that's used as an excuse to not clean up an article. At the very least, the presentation could be simplified oftentimes so that at least the beginning is understandable. I think one thing to keep in mind is that pretty much any math article is going to have something that is really puzzling. Mathematics is a deep subject, and you can always get deeper; you shouldn't expect to have complete understanding of even an apparently easy topic. --C S (Talk) 14:38, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

In resonse to the request that I explain my problem with planar graph:

• In the section Kuratowski's and Wagner's theorems there is a link Kuratowski's theorem, which, after a redirection, goes back to the same article that contains it, namely planar graph.
• The link finite graph redirects to an article Graph (mathematics). It seems that I must read the entire latter article in order to get a definition of finite graph, but in doing that I encounter other terms that need definition. Then I do find a link to Glossary of graph theory, which seems to define the term. Should [[finite graph]] be instead [[Glossary of graph theory|finite graph]]? (In passing I note in Glossary of graph theory the statement: Some authors use the same word with different meanings. Some authors use different words to mean the same thing. Ouch!)
• Back to planar graph. The link Complete graph goes to an article which uses the terms simple graph and complete bipartite graph and minor, each of which needs to be consulted, each of which leads to other links which must be consulted.

In response to the remarks about Hardy's Apology and the remoteness of Mathematics from everyday life:

I remember, many years ago, (60's?) having read an excerpt from Hardy's Apology. At that time I, much younger and less sophisticated, thought Hardy a great man. Now, much older and more experienced, I feel that he probably wasted his life cooped up in his ivory tower. (But I will read the Apology in its entirety - it's on the Web.) Humanity is now on the brink of drowning in its own wastes, on the brink of draining the resources that sustain it, overpopulating the earth like a plague; taking up arms, each nation against each, in the vain hope, that, by depriving one's neighbor of his, one might add to one's own. In today's world we have weightier tasks than intellectual masturbation, and you folks, with your youth and your undeniable intellectual gifts might take them up. As for me, my race is very near run.

Too Old 22:10, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Wow, what a depressing turn this conversation has taken. Maybe you're right, but I'm going to continue my intellectual masturbation for the time being. It's so much easier and more pleasant than solving the real problems of the world. Dmharvey 23:24, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Whos to say if another person has wasted his life. Hardy persued his passion and his skills, for that he deserves some respect. Some may say (principally my father) that I've wasted my life by abandoning my academic mathematical career to work for a small environmental charity Plants for a Future, and I come to wikipedia principally for relaxation ;-). Maybe there is also a sense that if we are to truely understand the world and the problems it faces then there is a need to understand its basic workings, which does lead to its mathematical underpinnings. I'd say that mathematics is one path to understanding nature, ultimatly all of nature must be in accordance with the rules of mathematics. By this I do not mean just the current formulation of mathematics but the as yet undiscovered mathematics (Godel showed that we will never know all of mathematics). The current study of dynamical systems I feel is particulary fruitful in providing a mathematical basis for a wider range of problems and I've a particular liking for catestrophe theory which can offer insights in to the nature of how things change.

I did like you comment on The Glass Bead Game which can serve as a check on the inward looking nature of isolated academia. But rember the ending when the central character leaves the game only to find disapointment in the outside world. --Salix alba (talk) 08:19, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

Congratulations on becoming more engaged in the great struggle, Salix. I must apologize for being such a heavy. I find it hard not to be a pessimist. There are several areas of mathematics, as you have pointed out, which are more relevant to our world (dynamical systems & catastrophe theory, perhaps), than, for instance, abstract algebra (or perhaps I mean universal algebra?), which seems to me to be, except for its beauty (beauty must always be encouraged), the most useless construct of human intellect. But you must understand the point of view of such an old man as I am. When I was in my 20s there were perhaps one quarter (or less) as many people on earth than there are now. My country still had huge empty areas. I now see, very near me, the withdrawal of the most fertile land one can imagine from agriculture for the building of houses. The most magnificent trees are cut for cash and for building room. I well remember my father's contemptuous dismissal of Thomas Malthus's thesis. But we now see how prophetic Malthus was. The business people and the mystics agree on one point: there is no substitute for experience and it is perhaps impossible for you to understand my point of view, not having had my experiences. Too Old 15:53, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

I feel that I must intercede here:

• Please, point out the faults of others in a more constructive fashion. Also, the topic of discussion has gone from the readability of mathematical articles to pessimism and the faults of today's society. Try to stray away from this deviation if at all possible.

• I am very interested in Pure Mathematics, and any mathematician, deep in his heart(?), realizes that mathematics (at the very least) do not have obvious applications. Well, at least in some modern mathematics. Algebra and Geometry are very useful.

• I believe that in the arguement above, someone was trying to make the point that mathematical articles should include some informal description so that a non-technical reader could at the very least see what the idea is about. ( algebra about unkowns, calculus about rate of change, geometry about shapes and their properties, etc ) I believe this should be included in article intros.

• However, referencing the "unreducable complexity" from above, I believe that the entirety of the article should not have to be explained in layman's terms. We dont want to explain matrix multiplication in every single article that has it, but rather only in its own article. Also, some mathematical ideas require very strict use of words so as to correctly convey meaning and not be mixed up with other concepts. Jargon makes it easier because one doesnt have to search around for some words to say what he or she is trying to say, but rather just use a standard term. Although we dont need to be overly technical and use as much as we can to look smart. This is an encyclopedia.

EulerGamma 00:44, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

Encyclopaedia of Mathematics

Hi! I saw your entry on the Encyclopaedia of Mathematics and became intrigued: How is it possible that this work is available online for free? Did you see an announcement somewhere, or did you just stumble across the site from a web search? I'm kind of afraid that it will go away again... Cheers, AxelBoldt 18:20, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

I purely stumbled across it by acident, I was search for an obscure maths term and it was one of the links which came up. I was suprised no one had discovered it before. Springer do seem to an impressive amount of stuff online in the journals a large number have free full text articles (those with the eye-glasses). I might be able to help you out if it disapears. --Salix alba (talk) 22:13, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

I also looked at the Encyclopedia, and noticed that those links with a yellow background were unreachable with my browser (Firefox). What has been the experience of others? If other browsers have this problem I will contact Springer; if it is unique to Firefox I will submit a bug report there. Too Old 01:14, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

The yellow links work in Internet Explorer (they pop up a menu of links), but in Firefox I can't get them to work either, even if I allow popup windows and give Javascript all permissions. Hard to say who is to blame; it could be unclean Javascript programming on Springer's part, it could also be a Javascript bug in Firefox. AxelBoldt 23:44, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

How to do the same to Flora (plants) as Fauna?

Hi, I would like to move Flora (plants) to Flora to be consistent with the move of Fauna (animals) to Fauna. I have created the Flora (disambiguation) but I can't move Flora (plants) to Flora. How is this done? Thanks...--Francisco Valverde 16:57, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

• Thanks... just for curiosity what does CSD G6 mean?? --Francisco Valverde 18:04, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Moving pages is like moving houses - something is always forgotten ;-)

Thanks for your advice on the collaboration of the week Fauna. We did manage to move the disambiguation page & got help with the deletion of the left-over. Fauna, as in animals, is now at its new place Fauna but the talk page - quite essential to a collaboration is still with the old entry Talk:Fauna (animals). The discussion is a little cut off. This is my first moving and renaming. I tried to check for relevant pages on the wiki but the procedures detailed there are long and complicated. I'm not sure whether I used the templates in the right way. Could you help out? Thanks, Jasu 08:48, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

PS: The same is true for the talk of Talk:Flora, previously at Talk:Flora (plants). Jasu 08:58, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Yep, just in the process of doing both. --Salix alba (talk) 09:00, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks a lot for moving the talk pages. Could we have done this ourselves or do you need to be an admin? Jasu 19:05, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

You do not need to be an admin to do this (I'm not one) but it could make things quicker. WP:CSD is one place you can use to get admin help. --Salix alba (talk) 14:21, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Cycles Studies / Foundation for the Study of Cycles / Edward R Dewey

Firsty, thanks for saving the page User:Salix_alba/Cycle_studies.

This guy Hillman is totally out of control - on the page Talk:Cycle_studies I have quoted his arguments for deletion and every single one is erroneous. He just makes stuff up.

You state that you want to work on Cycle Studies but without Edward Dewey. Well that would be a bit like doing gravity without Newton. I would like to work together to make new pages for Cycles Studies (and FSC and Dewey if you are interested). I am unsure of the procedure for getting pages reinstated and would welcome your advice and assistance. Please feel free to contact me by email at ray(at)tomes(dot)biz Ray Tomes 00:21, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

The appropriate place to request the review of a AfD delete decision is WP:DRV, not the talk page of the former article. Do note, however, that the deletion was very well supported, and it is unlikely that it will be overturned. --Philosophus ^T 04:11, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bios theory

Hi, Salix,

Kovacevic's deception regarding his undisclosed employment by Sabelli, or at least by an organization which appears to be very closely associated with Sabelli, is probably making me a bit paranoid. I noticed that you wrote we have at least 7 articles in peer review journals, 1 book published by a respectable publisher (World Scientific). You didn't mean to imply that you also have some undisclosed affiliation with "bios theory", did you? I hope not!! ---CH 02:22, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

This query is in bad taste. Give it a rest, ok? --C S (Talk) 04:13, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

For what its worth my CV is at [6], no connection with Bios theory or FSC, (I did meet Kauffman once in a knot theory context), a little less paranoia/conspiracy thinking might help and I should remind you to abibe by the policy of Wikipedia:Assume good faith.

As you can see from my CV I have done work in applied statistical analysis on spatial-temporal data. From that context the Bios work is pretty much par for the couse in analysing data, gat a dataset and throw everything you can think of at it to try and find some meaning in the data. The novality idea does seem interesting and powerful, if there is some pattern which can be found in the ordered data which cannot be found in a shuffled version then this provides a good statistical test for the data. Don't know if others have done work in this area. --Salix alba (talk) 08:24, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

Chan-Ho, Salix, tone can be hard to read in text discussions, and I think you both misread the tone of my query, which was partly ironical/jocose. Sorry that you apparently both thought it was offensive. FWIW, I never really thought that Salix's "we" implied that he was personally involved. Still, given what I regard as remarkably deceptive behavior by User:Lakinekaki (see the comment by User:Melchoir in the AfD for another instance of manipulative/misleading writing which I had missed), I appreciate the information.

BTW, Salix, thanks for rethinking your vote in the AfD! :-) ---CH 23:30, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

Oh, BTW, you wrote "wikipedia community is not prepared to bother to examine the rather interesting statistical technique of comparing shuffled and unshuffeled data." Fear not; I've been interested in connections between entropy and group actions since I was an undergraduate, and discovered a beautiful connection in 1990. Google this to see that I have occasionally pointed out the connection since my graduate student days. Hope you enjoy the posts! Unfortunately, the links to my website (since taken down) are defunct. Sigh... I'm too lazy to reconstitute it.---CH 23:50, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

Category:Dyslexic/Aspergian Wikipedians

Category:Dyslexic Wikipedians which you have included on your user page has been proposed for deletion you can comment at Wikipedia:Categories for deletion#Category:Wikipedians by mental condition. --Salix alba (talk) 16:41, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for telling me know about the Category:Dyslexic Wikipedians Fallen Angel ^talk 17:03, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Great idea. Notify me on my talk page when you'll start this project. Anonymous_anonymous_Have a Nice Day 17:47, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

I guess I'm having a bad feeling about putting myself in this category; officially, I've been diagnosed with PDD-NOS, with many of the same symptoms of Asperger syndrome, when I was little. There was no category on Wikipedia for PDD-NOS when I added myself, and my mom (who is a nurse) has said I might have Asperger syndrome anyway (a rediagnosis is needed.) As to the point, thank you for notifying me about this category being nominated for deletion. --Geopgeop 19:02, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Horray my fist block! Questions

1. Is it vote stacking to tell those people who use a particular category that that category is being proposed for deletion? Note I did not advocate a particular vote one way or the other.
2. Is it right that the admin who blocked be was the same person who proposed the deletion.
3. Is it right to stand up for the rights of minorities with recongnised medical conditions.
4. How does this all relate to equal oportunities?

--Salix alba (talk) 19:55, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Really, it's about talk page spamming. We don't allow people to spam hundreds of talk pages like that. It's disruptive and a waste of resources. If people were allowed to do that your user talk page would be getting hit many times each day by all sorts of robotic messages announcing recent activity at TFD, CFD, AFD, DRV, and what have you. --Cyde Weys 19:59, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Judging by the various thank you comments I receive above, it would seem the other users appreciated being informed. --Salix alba (talk) 20:13, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

That's rather irrelevant considering that it directly contradicts policy. I'm sure users would appreciate being able to host their personal sites on Wikipedia too, but we don't let them. --Cyde Weys 21:29, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

please don't spam talk pages

You were blocked for automated spamming of talk pages using AWB. Please don't do that in the future. I have unblocked you. -lethe ^{talk +} 20:32, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#User_talk_spamming. -lethe ^{talk +} 20:35, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Thank you. I will not spam further pages.

Some short thoughts on rights and disabilities

The ability to place a particular userbox on their page does in effect convey a right of a wikipedia editor. The same goes for the right of free association which is acheived by placing you user page in a particular category. These rights echo the legal system in the United Kingdom where citizens have right be default unless there are specifically removed by the law.

If a particular userbox or category is removed then this is a restriction of the users rights. This is not to say this is necessarily a bad thing.

There is a question as to whether a user should be informed of a proposed loss of rights. Alas wikipedia is has now outgrown the deletion system. Most users no longer regularly read AfD or CfD. There is a further problem with user boxes and categories, most users will not add the templates or categories to their watchlists. This leaves us with a problem, in that users will not in the normal course of events be informed of a possible loss of rights. The growth of wikiproject have in some way overcome the weeknesses of the deletion system, however in this case there is no such project, although I feel there is the need for the creation of one.

There is a further question specific to these particular userboxes. Many of the people who have placed the boxes on their pages have been medically diagnosis as such. In some jusristrions this diagnosis conveys legal rights against discrimination in the UK this under the equal opportinities act. This is becoming very evident in the CfD discussion where a representative sample of those suffering these conditions have stated similar cases. Still wikipedians with

• AD/HD
• Depression
• Obsessive-Compulsive disorder
• Paranoid
• Schizophrenia

and a host of other conditions are unrepresented and un informed of a potential loss of rights. --Salix alba (talk) 21:25, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Just to get a little procedural about this how does

You may also consider adding {{ cfd-article }} to the main article's talk page to notify users that the category has been nominated for deletion or renaming. See the talk page for more information on how to use this template.

It could be argued that as a category/userbox is an integral part of each particular user page, and that a proposed deletion will have an effect of that page. Perhaphs it would be civil to always place a notice on the pages talk page when a particular category/template is porposed for deletion.

an of cource there is WP:IAR

If the rules prevent you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia's quality, ignore them.

--Salix alba (talk) 23:32, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks

Thank you for alerting me to the potential userbox deletion.--Lkjhgfdsa 23:47, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Many thanks and hello!

I appreciate you taking the time to User talk:Salix alba/Archive 1 to me and let me know about Aspie's deletion. I can't see why but I WILL go an comment now. I was just reading about the issues surrounding UB's. Again, thanks. cpswarrior 01:03, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Heads up!

Thanks for the heads up on that vote. I have had many real life pressures and demands on me lately and I count on all the help I can get these days! In fact while I have a few minutes to do some work at a terminal I have to catch up on a whole bag of issues regarding User:Prasi90 that is way overdue. Good luck, thanks for your message and for contributing to Wikipedia (the most important internet reference resource!) Hamster Sandwich 21:32, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

I also want to say thank you for the notice. Being home for summer, I'm going to have more time to devote to the Wikipedia projects I'm aligned with, and getting my user page up and organized was a nice treat before leaving school. Being an Aspie, having connections to other Aspies through Wikipedia (a joint-venture people like us enjoy working on) is a great thing socially. Cybertooth85 03:10, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

Association of Wikipedians with Mental Health Conditions

Propose the project here Anonymous_anonymous_Have a Nice Day 10:17, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

It is now proposed on Wikipedia:Wikiproject/List of proposed projects and the draft project page is at User:Salix alba/Association of Wikipedians with Mental Health Conditions. Feel free to add your name to the participants list or work on the draft project page. --Salix alba (talk) 11:47, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

Why I copied your message to that WP:CFD page

Hi. I have a tendency to give people facts and leave them to draw their own conclusion, as opposed to expounding my thinking. I copied your message to Wikipedia:Categories for deletion/Log/2006 May 14 so that people could see that User:Lkjhgfdsa's statement ("Salix's notes did not attempt to persuade people, only to alert them to this vote. You seem to be jumping to conclusions.") was true.

Of course, this tendency of mine is not always the best approach (for example: with Aspies) which is a large part of the reason I'm strongly in favor of retaining those mental-condition categories. This just-the-facts approach is often helpful but it sometimes confuses people. I hope I didn't annoy or confuse you.

Cheers, CWC(talk) 10:17, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

No problem. Its turing out to be a most interesting discussion. --Salix alba (talk) 12:48, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

Please help on Mathematics

Posted by Pruneau 21:45, 23 May 2006 (UTC), on behalf of the AID Maintenance Team

Association of wikipedians with mental conditions

There are 5 people interested in joining the project but I'm not sure whether it can proceed. You should also asked an experienced wikipedian. Anonymous_anonymous_Have a Nice Day 06:50, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

Lostwithiel

I do indeed live in Lostwithiel. IMO this article is full of inaccuracies and bias, but I haven't time to fix it. Goodgerster

Deletion

Hi. Septentrionalis has put up Possible wars between liberal democracies for deletion.Ultramarine 21:48, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

This was never an effort to show arguments on both sides of the issue. This is, and always has been, a polemic on one side of the issue. Ultramarine declines to rewrite it, but insists on his original prose, giving vastly undue weight to views that only Weart and Rummel hold. This is what makes it subject to G4. Septentrionalis 16:28, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

So precicely which authors charaterisations of particular conflicts are missing? --Salix alba (talk) 18:39, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

For a more reasonable discussion of the question, see this website. Ultramarine hates it; I gather it wasn't updated to include every claim Weart makes. Septentrionalis 19:42, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

Certinaly worth including a link, may even be worth including some in the table. Depending on you view of democracies 1-10 can be discounted, as there was not universal sufferage. Most other seem to involved new or unstable democracies which are again generally discounted in the litrature. I think most authors would now agree to the weeker hypothesis that it only really counts for stable democracies with universal suferage. --Salix alba (talk) 09:27, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

The problem with that link is that it is from a personal webpage by a librarian. It has almost no references for its statement. It has a reference for this statement "Even so, both nations had government that had been put in place through free elections. Even Weart admits that." Unfortunately, while Weart admits that the election was technically free, he also states that Milosevic controlled the Serbian television and other major media. A massive protest in Belgrade was suppressed with bloodshed. A parallel process worked in Serbia. More recent research has also shown the massive electorial fraud that took place. Similarly, the webpage generally misrepresents the arguments used in the debate.

White is a librarian; Weart is a historian of twentieth-century physics. So? This is not rocket science. Of the two, the skills of a librarian are more relevant to this; and Weart appears to lack the ability to look things up and get them right. Septentrionalis 16:56, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

Weart is an academic historian who has written a scholarly book published by Yale University Press with hundreds of references. White is a librarian who has an unreferenced text on his personal webpage.Ultramarine 17:37, 3 June 2006 (UTC)\

Weart has received, and deserves, scathing reviews; like many academics who go off on a hobby-horse at some point, he is out of his field and out of his depth. His Greek claims are the nonsense that the classicists reviewing them have found; Russett also contradicts them at some length. His knowledge of modern history appears to be only slightly better. Septentrionalis 15:00, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

Far more reviews has been positive than negative. History is his field, not his hobby. Ultramarine 17:49, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

On the contrary, it is his hobby; and he writes, and reasons, like a man with a hobby-horse. Septentrionalis 02:24, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

I have asked Septentrionalis to provide any arguments from the academic literature, but he has refused.Ultramarine 14:12, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

This statement would appear to be an invention. Septentrionalis 16:56, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

See for example this: [7] Ultramarine 17:37, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

Enough! I don't much care. The less bikkering about past debates the better. Now there is a question as to whether White should be included even though he is not a published academic in the field. Well White has a google page rank of 6 which is very good for internet citations, so by that measure its a notable critique. Wikipedia is not just academic only, and if there is sufficient criticism from outside academia then we should include it. By the same measure to last link in DPT The Missing Democratic Peace: Bush’s Latest Explanation for the War in Iraq by John Hickman has no page rank, so not an influential article.

Its odd. The differences between the two are not so marked, the majority of the conflicts are mentioned in both with roughly the same comments. Perhaphs what we having going in is a difference between internet memes and an academic disipline. For internet memes a nice binary battle with no solution will always result, academia is a bit more subtle than than less interested in the battle, more interested in the understanding. Alas wikipedians seem more interested in the former. --Salix alba (talk) 15:50, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

There are the wikipedians who are interested in a nice binary battle; and then there are the wikipedians who are only interested in one side of that battle. Both are undesirable. Septentrionalis 15:00, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

If Salix wants to rough out an article on this subject, he is welcome to use User:Pmanderson/Salix, which is for his use. Ultramarine's POV essay is not an acceptable starting point, however. Septentrionalis 15:00, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

From Wikipedia:Reliable sources: "Personal websites and blogs should not be used as secondary sources.

That is, they should not be used as sources of information about a person or topic other than the owner of the website. The reason personal websites are not used as secondary sources — and as primary sources only with great caution and not as a sole source if the subject is controversial — is that they are usually created by unknown individuals who have no one checking their work. They may be uninformed, misled, pushing an agenda, sloppy, relying on rumor and suspicion, or even insane; or they may be intelligent, careful people sharing their knowledge with the world. It is impossible to know which is the case. Visiting a stranger's personal website is often the online equivalent of reading an unattributed flyer on a lamp post, and should be treated accordingly."

It is especially strange that Septentrionalis insists on a personal webpage and at the same time wants to exclude the results from the academic literature.Ultramarine 17:34, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

The problem is, while you may be able to argue on policy, this will be always be seen as POV by the rest of the community. This will mean that the article will never be able to survive the vote and the arguments will continue for evermore. --Salix alba (talk) 15:30, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

In fact, I have already included even many of the most stupid arguments from that personal webpage. No one writing an academic paper would dare to suggest that a regime change due to an unsuccessful war is evidence that the leader was elected democratically before the war. However, the personal webpage thinks this is very important regarding the Spanish-American war. I have included it and several other arguments out of courtesy. This is the reason that this personal webpage has some resemblance to the list in Wikipedia. Note that Serpentrionalis refuses to do the same. He has previously tried to delete all the arguments from the literature and only leave this personal webpage. Ultramarine 16:51, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

For the record, what I actually want to do is, if this level of eye-glazing detail is necessary at all, include all the arguments on the subject, not just those from Ultramarine's two or three favorite authors; they are an extreme minority even in the academic literature. In particular, the prima facie case for those wars which have actually been claimed as wars between democracies should be included; it is plainly prejudicial to omit it. Septentrionalis 22:44, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

Which is false. Most researchers support the DPT. Again, Septentrionalis, present your arguments from the literature regarding these conflicts.Ultramarine 22:48, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

I have already done so; both in Talk:Never at War and in the archives of Talk:DPT. The facts have not changed. Most reasearchers support some theory of the democratic peace; only three regard absolutely no wars as both important and true. I expect Ultramarine to repeat his usual list of distortions, misquotations, and quotations out of context. It would be a courtesy to link to them instead, since they have already been answered. Septentrionalis 23:00, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

False, many others have stated no wars. You have not given any further explanation from the literature for why some conflicts should be considered wars between democracies. If your claim that there are many researchers who find wars between democracies, then why can you not give any explanations for specific conflicts from the literature? Ultramarine 23:05, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

One other. Wayman does say that there happen to have been no wars, while (explicitly and at some length) disagreeing that this can prove any more than that wars between democracies are very rare. This has been discussed at some length, most recently here. The reason it has not been discussed more in the literature is that no=one except the three extremists cares; Maoz, for example, contents himself with a flat declaration that when he did his own ranking, he found the Spanish-American war an exception. Septentrionalis 16:35, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

We have previously discussed this and I listed many papers and researchers stating no wars. Again, If your claim is correct, that there are many researchers who find wars between democracies, then why can you not give any explanations for specific conflicts from the literature? Ultramarine 16:39, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

This is Ultramarine's solitary opinion. The link gives my reasons, and Mr. West's, for holding that it is a misunderstanding of the papers he cites. (His last question was answered four minutes before he posted it.) Septentrionalis 02:22, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

I did a quick citation count on the main DPT article and judging by the number of works cited it seen that all the major academic voices are covered. I think my view on the article is that it is still too focused on proving/disproving the DPT hypothesis, which does not seem to be the thrust of the more recient work. It seems like there is now concensus in the field on some form of the hypothesis holding probably the weaker statistical tendancies, one. Th thrust is now more of more sophsticated models bringing other factors and examining boundary conditions and seeking a better understanding of the why? I'd like to see a setion on the state of the art today and maybe less on past debates. --Salix alba (talk) 10:59, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

I agree; this is one reason I am largely stepping back from this for a while: I do not care to repeat past debates. Septentrionalis 16:35, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

There is a statement in the into. "Most studies have found some form of democratic peace exists; although neither methodological disputes nor doubtful cases are entirely resolved". One can gain a sense of current questions by looking at the year of the study.Ultramarine 16:47, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

Like any good academic dicipline I would not expect a final answer. A different way of phrasing this could be: current research is now examining more advanced models incorperating other factors, examining the transition to democracy and seeking to explain why the deomocratic peace seems to hold. --Salix alba (talk) 17:27, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

Objectivity (science) listed on AfD

FYI, Objectivity (science) has been nominated for deletion. --Lambiam^Talk 21:55, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

Category:Alternative Medicine

Just wanted to say thanks for your contributions there and on category:pseudoscience. Your compromise idea of a "see also" section on the former is excellent. cheers, Jim Butler^(talk) 02:34, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

nomenclature

I'm always curious about naming systems. In Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bowers style acronym you mention that you had your own scheme for polyhedra, but dropped it in favor of Bowers. Is your scheme written up anywhere? —Tamfang 19:44, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

Yours is akin to Conway's. I approve. —Tamfang 19:59, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

DPT

Do you agree that the templates are incorrect? Then you can remove them. Pmanderson cannot stop you, at most he can revert once, since he is must follow the arbcom ruling. I do not think he has been acting constructively when listing articles for deletion or now.Ultramarine 22:53, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

Personally I think that a Cleanup template should remain and maybe a Neutrality templates on the wars section. I am working on an improved version on your userpage again. But I dot not think Pmanderson's many other templates are justified. I see no reason to state that the whole article lacks Neutrality or Balance. I do not think there is anyting Factually incorrect with the wars section. Do you agree? Otherwise, I would happy to try to correct.Ultramarine 23:13, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

Homogeneity - agreed

I agree about the move and disambig stuff. I was just a bit confused when I nominated the article for AfD and then discovered it was all changed. I still think there needs to be an AfD for Homogeneity (statistics), and I can start one - but how do I remove the old one? (I'm fairly new to WP). Madmath789 16:00, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

That was quick - many thanks! Madmath789 16:29, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

This is a very strange place - Wikipedia

First I am told that they are prejudiced against having information about high schools here -- which seems nasty right there.

Next I get a nasty note on my page from someone I do not know. Then I get a banner and I am told I am a sockpuppet by someone (not you). And now your are involved and I have no idea who you or the other persons even are.

I got involved with Wikipedia because I was told there was extreme hostitity toward high schools and that it was very necessary for me to vote to defend them. I can only believe that this is true and that my interest in high schools is the reason the guy called User:Hipocrite is attacking me and calling me a sockpuppet, which, I gather, is a slur and an ugly thing to accuss someone of -- not only accuse me but put a big banner on my personal page and publically label me.

This does not engender good feelings in me about Wikipedia and I am beginning to understand all the hostility that is around. Capit 19:52, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for leaving a pleasant message

But please ask the Hipicrite guy to leave me alone. I can't be cool or feel good about this place while he contiues to send me hostile messages.

I don't know how you guys operate but it seems there is a definite hierarchy and I am at the bottom. The Hipicrite guy just sent me another message. Nothing constructive for me has come out of any interaction with him. I am not going to answer him and I hope I don't get into trouble for that and get another attacking banner on my personal page. He seems to think I am up to something when what could that possibly be? I feel like I am in a police state. Capit 21:17, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

Capit

I'm happy to leave him alone. I certainly hope that his disruptive personal attacks will stop. Hipocrite - «Talk» 21:29, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

Do you see how this Hipocrite has a fixed idea of me and seems to assume I am prone to make personal attacks? And he spreads this around on other talk pages such as yours? Because I did one person on Wikipedia a favor on one issue, which maybe that user led me wrong, now I am being labelled forever as a person who makes "disruptive personal attacks". This is over one issue - schools -- which this Hipocrite seems overly sensitive about. I think I will complain on the link page you gave me. Capit 12:10, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for your explanation about schools

My grandma got kicked off Wikipedia because she nominated a school for deletion. She and my cousin said to never vote against a school if I did not want to get into trouble. My grandma was going to file a complaint about all the personal attacks she received about her nomination of a school for deletion but she was too intimidated and my cousin became very upset.

She changed her name through the proper process because she was really serious about being good person on Wikipedia and had a long list of good edits. That is the way she is. But she could not get support for her complaint because the adminsatrators all supported the school guy RjHall. See her talk bage: [8] and you can see what happened recently under her new name. That's her second name as her first one, KarenAnn, she was told by several people that if you are using a female name you will be bullied.

My grandma is a Licensed Psychologist, a very educated person, and a forensic psychologist. The murderers and serial killers and other criminals she has dealt with are much more rational and civil than many of the Wikipedia people, especially the administrators. There is something very wrong with this place, even I can see that. I don't understand the school thing but I didn't vote against them -- which would get you attacked my grandma said. But then the Hypocrite guy attacked my for voting to keep schools.

So, I am confused. But as soon as I get home again and have my own computer I won't come here again, so you don't have to worry. I am a pretty normal almost teenager (almost in the 8th grade), and I am very smart in school. I think I am not the kind of person Wikipedia wants. Several people wrote my grandma that Wikipedia is for young aggressive males. That is why she changed her name but it didn't work as she is not aggressive like they are. I don't think she is interested in Wikipedia anymore because she was treated meanly for no reason and the people who tried to protest her were unsuccessful. The really bad people are protected for some reason and they pick on people like my grandma and me.

Thanks for answering and giving me a chance to explain, because no one listens to you here. GrapePie 02:01, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Oh please

Are you honestly going to doubt me about another sockpuppet accusation, after I've been right all these other times? Hipocrite - «Talk» 21:28, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Your assurance

The best assurance I can give you that I won't ignore the rules and flourish the mop at Ultramarine is:

• I know you'll be watching
• Much of the opposition to me is by admins who feel that rules should be ignored and I don't understand this. I do understand it; I simply disagree. Septentrionalis 05:00, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

Homogeneity

Hi Salix Alba,
Thank you for your nice welcome, though I am not really back. There are too many things with Wikipedia that are profoundly wrong. As your name is Latin based, maybe you could be interested in my new site www.latintextbook.com. It is peaceful there. Best Wishes, David

Jim Hoffman

Why the hell do you want to revert an article a week back? --Sloane 12:38, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Nice . . . I see that you have to put up with this behavior as well. Anyway, just wanted to say thanks for the help on the page. I'm not from the math end, but from the 'conspiracy' end, so put the math in piecemeal and in the dark. I know Jim, but am not him, as some have suggested. bov 14:53, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

Talk:Boston Tea Party

Howdy, I noticed that you and I seem to post in one or two articles dealing with progressive issues in political science/sociology. There's currently a debate beginning in Boston Tea Party as to whether the article should include the category [9]. It meets definitions set in the articles Terrorism and Definition of terrorism, however, there are several self-proclaimed patriots who watch BTP who refuse to recognise the fact. The simple criteria for terrorism generally seem to be intimidation or destruction of property in order to change public policy or public opinion while a state of war has not yet been declared. Some users would rather use recent acts of terrorism as a yardstick, rather than using a firm definition, and hence lose their ability to discuss matters calmly. Would you be able to pop in to the Talk page and join in the discussion? Thanks much, samwaltz 05:00, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks!

Thanks for broadcasting that I am female. The primary reason I changed my name was have a name that did not reveal my sex. I have had a glorious few months with people assuming I was male. The abuse is so much less. It's been wonderful.

But I am ditching the name and no transfer this time. I don't want people like you to be able disable me into the female category again. And although I have a big edit history which I had wanted to retain, now I don't care.

So, goodbye. And thanks again. Mattisse(talk) 19:08, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Userboxes

This user has read the political compass test that is mentioned in a userbox in your main page.

This user has read the statements within the test, and wants to mention the first one: "If economic globalisation is inevitable, it should primarily serve humanity rather than the interests of trans-national corporations". This user has tried to answer with "Economic globalisation should primarily serve trans-national corporations, and trans-national corporations should primarily serve humanity, so that all needs were covered. There shouldn't be a need for a 'rather than'.". But all he could answer in the test was "Strongly Disagree", "Disagree", "Agree" or "Strongly Agree". Because of the lack of different possibilities and shades within the answers provided to the test statements, this user suspects that the test is either badly made, that it is made to favour a certain political tendency, or that it doesn't have to be taken seriously. In conclusion, this user has taken the userbox in your main page which mentions the test as one of those many useless userboxes that users put within their main pages. This user is amused at such thing :P

This user's signature is --Michael Retriever 15:26, 4 September 2006 (UTC)}}

This user, is aware of the limitations in any test which tries to reduces a vast spectrum of opinions, into a limited number of characteristics. This user is also aware of the statistical nature of such tests, which attempt to gain a more accurate value by asking a number of similar questions, and how even if one question may give an incorrect answer the process of averaging will according to the law of large numbers give a reliable result (within a certain confidence interval). This user cannot vouch for said userbox, not having studied the details how the test was constructed and whether the labelling of the axis is reliable. This user has studied principal components analysis, a related statistical framework which allows a high percentage of variation present in a sample of multi-valued data to be summarised by a few characteristics. This user is amused by employing such a strange grammatical construct to hold a conversation. --Salix alba (talk) 16:18, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

Photo credits in "Hippie" article

Hi Salix. I understand your removal of the photo credits, however I wonder if we might design a compromise. Robert Altman is an extraordinary photographer, and just yesterday he consented to the use of these photos in the article, provided they were accredited. He wishes to release his entire collection of photos, covering a wide variety of topics and personages, for use in Wikipedia articles. I would hate to lose this resource.

I wonder if we might simply have his name appear in the captions, perhaps in somewhat smaller, italicized print. To me this would seem a small price to pay for such enormous benefit. What do you think?Founders4 21:36, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

I guess its a question of notability, is the fact that Altman took the photo notable? Indeed is Altman him self notable. Wikipedia:Captions is the guilde lines for image captions, the only place it mentions including credits in the caption is for works of art. I've asked on the talk page there for guidence.

Have you considered nominating them for feature pictures? They seem to be of quite a high quality, although I'm not sure how the licences fits with that? --Salix alba (talk) 23:27, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

Yes, Altman is quite well known--notable would be a good word to describe him. He has photographed many famous people, and his prints command high prices.

The photos he allowed us to use are exceptional, the best shots I have seen from the era. How does one nominate them for feature pictures? Meanwhile, I think I will add his name to the shots, though smaller and italicized, if you have no objections. And I'll read Wikipedia:Captions.Founders4 04:09, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Just a quick follow up on Robert Altman. From the Wikipedia article:

Robert Altman (October,1944) is an American photographer. Altman attended Hunter College at the City University of New York. After graduation, Altman was taught photography by Ansel Adams. He was soon hired as a photojournalist by Rolling Stone Magazine. Following his early success as chief staff photographer for Rolling Stone Magazine he expanded into the realm of fashion photography and fine art. He also became a television producer/director for KEMO-TV, an independent station in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the 1990's he transitioned from film media to digital media and is now active as a digital photographer.

As the chief staff photographer for Rolling Stone Magazine, Altman has photographed most of the well-known rock musicians from the 1960s forward.Founders4 07:23, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

See WP:FP for the featured pictures page and WP:FPC for candidate articles. Be sure to read the criteria at Wikipedia:What is a featured picture?, the process is tough, only about 4 pictures pass each week.

A link to his wikipage is better than one to his website, as his notability can be established there, I've change hippie accordingly. --Salix alba (talk) 07:32, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Thanks Salix! That looks fine.Founders4 07:37, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Copyright is a little concern, on Altmans webpage he has standard non free copyright. I see that he has given explicit permision to use them on wikipedia, by allowing these images on wikipedia he also allows their usage on any other page on the internet, with credit. I hope he understands that. --Salix alba (talk) 07:56, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I explained this to him, and he did seem to understand. He e-mailed me saying that it was fine. Founders4 08:48, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your picture in Four-vertex theorem

It looks very good. Now you've got me thinking about whether I can meaningfully summarize Mukhopadhyaya's proof in a way that ties in to the picture.Shonk 23:45, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

Sounds good. I don't have access to his work so I would need to be careful of commiting original research. --Salix alba (talk) 07:59, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

Mathematics rating

I'll be happy to help. Just one question- who determines the rating on the articles? I'm guessing whoever puts the template on the article gets to rate it, but I can't find anything in any of the process pages that say so explicitly. Borisblue 16:27, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

Indeed, I think it is upto the person who put the tag on. Its supose to be a non beauratic system and if anyone disagrees with the rating they can change it. I've changed a few rating, which the WP biography team has applied. Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Mathematics articles by quality log is a good place to monitor rating activity. --Salix alba (talk) 16:45, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

Re. Matisse

I think Matisse is just an innocent party in this instance. He's posted a comment on the page distancing himself from the page. Nunquam Dormio 19:49, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

Agreed. --Salix alba (talk) 19:50, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

See this

	{{Infobox Scientist}}

Sockpuppets

A check user Wikipedia:Requests for checkuser/Case/David Justin has shown "that Wright, Creighton, and Wise are sockpuppets". These accounts are Bryant Wright, Ralph Creighton, Stu Wise. Other suspected sock puppets are too old to check. I will keep everyone informed of progress. Nunquam Dormio 09:29, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

Eigenvalue, eigenvector and eigenspace

Hi Mets, Thanks for the good work on Polar coordinates, I see your interested in taking it to FA status, which would be good. You might like to have a look at Wikipedia:Featured article review/Eigenvalue, eigenvector and eigenspace which is going through FA review at the moment.Unless it get some good copy editing soon its likely to loose the status. I occured to me that some editing on this article good get you up to speed on whats required for FA status. --Salix alba (talk) 18:13, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the reference! I'll check it out. —Mets501 (talk) 18:39, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

Mccready is issued a 30 day community probation related to Pseudoscience articles

Hello

Based on the comments left on AN/I, I issued a 30 day topic ban to Mccready. (see Community probation log [10]) Discussion on talk pages is encouraged. Admins can enforce the ban if needed. Crosspost from AN:

Based on this discussion on AN/I [11] and the numerous comments on Mccready's talk page, Mccready (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · page moves · block user · block log) is issued a 30 day ban from editing all articles related to the Pseudoscience. Mccready is encouraged to discuss his ideas on the talk pages of these articles. The the suggested sanction for disregarding the article ban is a 24 hour block with the block time adjusted up or down according to Mccready's response. Admins are encouraged to monitor the ongoing effectiveness of this article topic ban and make appropriate adjustments if needed. FloNight 23:26, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

Further discussion about the ban or request for enforcement can be made at AN/I or AN. FloNight 01:04, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

CIFA disambiguation

Dear Salix Alba, in your subpage User:Salix alba/Cycle studies you refer to the acronym CIFA. I have just created a disambiguation page at that address and it would be nice if you could add in what the CIFA you refer to means. Until now CIFA has been a redirect to the Cook Islands Football Association which I'm pretty sure you didn't mean! Thanks, Witty lama 21:43, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

maya nuttery

MR. Pfafrich, Ms. Erika Vohman requests that you contact her regarding your affinity for maya nuts. Her contact details can be easily googled.

Cats

It's very silly, and it started because of Grutness. For reasons best known to himself, he proposed that Cat:Animal liberation movement be moved to Cat:Animal rights. Either that, he said, or a separate Cat:Animal rights should be created. I said fine, and did the latter, thinking that was the end of the matter. I started separating the articles into the two categories (hours of work): groups/activists in one cat; general issues in another. Now a bot has come along and reversed my work, and everything is back lumped together in one cat. It's the usual Wikipedia thing: one step forward, two steps back, time-wasting all round. :-( SlimVirgin ^(talk) 19:05, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

I've read that you were planning on taking this to deletion review. Please do so. The consensus at CFD was to rename the category. Thanks. --Kbdank71 20:19, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

Salix, would you mind commenting at Wikipedia:Deletion_review/Log/2006_September_26#Category:Animal_liberation_movement. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 17:15, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Math nav aids

The idea of doing some nav aids for the math pages really sounds like fun. I am thinking of maybe trying to set up a group to design a nice system like the one used on the German pages... What do you think about that? Would you be interested in participating? - grubber 00:15, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Gold versus feathers

A pound of gold = 373.2 grams. A pound of feathers = 453.6 grams. An ounce of gold weighs more than an ounce of feathers, though. ClairSamoht - Help make Wikipedia the most authoritative source of information in the world 23:24, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

So you seem to be using inconsitent units for pounds? --Salix alba (talk) 23:29, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Precious metals are measured in troy ounces and troy pounds. A troy ounce is bigger, but there are only 12 to a pound, so a troy pound is smaller.

As to that other matter, the noncompliant tag warns readers that the article does NOT meet Wikipedia standards for content. It alerts editors that the article needs work. Both are highly admirable goals. The noncompliance tag is not disruptive of Wikipedia's goals; untrustworthy articles are, however. ClairSamoht - Help make Wikipedia the most authoritative source of information in the world 00:34, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

Sounds to me like saying that miles at sea are longer than miles on the ground because one uses nautical miles in one instance and survey miles in the other. It's not where you are that counts, it's the standard used. An imperial pound of gold weighs the same as an imperial pound of feathers. --Ramdrake 00:52, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the welcome

Thanks for your kind introductory comments! I definitely agree that the mathematical proof article needs some more meat to it, even if it is a survey article. I think that reorganizing all of those related pages is going to take some work, and I'm glad to help, but I'd rather get some direction on it first (it's a big project). BTW, I learned that ~Q→~P is called the contrapositive of P→Q, but the article uses the term in a much broader way. Is this just a distinction of formal vs. informal logic that I'm not familiar with, or was I taught the wrong term way back when? I ask because, especially if we want to keep the article "non-technical," adding a term that more people might be familiar with might help out. (Granted, I'm no logician. I clicked the reference to ZFC in the intro to the article and freaked out a bit. I should see if I can procure a copy of Sweet Reason by Tom Tymoczko and Jim Henle.) But, on the other hand, if it's not the correct term, we probably shouldn't use it, though I at least want to reference it. Silly mathematicians, using the same term to mean different (slightly or otherwise) things. It's not normal, I tell you. --JaimeLesMaths 06:52, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

Cannabis article

Thanks for weighing in. Other voices are needed. I just don't want to see the article fall into disruption because it is a very good article. A new user, user:Chondrite I think, added a new reproduction section that I believe needs to be addressed also. Is it suitable for its size or does it require a whole new article? A new one would be better I believe. Keep the first two paragraphs and develop the rest. That would be amazing. I would help there. I updated the article a bit. It would be great if you could spend time on it with us. Thanks again :) (Simonapro 09:55, 2 October 2006 (UTC))

Pi-unrolled

I recently cranked out a new and greatly improved version of Pi-unrolled.gif and (why not?) nominated it for FP. You tagged the previous version of the same graphic A-Top and though I can't imagine why you did, perhaps you'd like to comment on the new nomination. Thank you. John Reid 04:43, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Probability

My mistake. Saw changes but hit wrong earlier version to very content. Have restored inactive tag. Thank you for your quick catching of my mistake. Badbilltucker 18:58, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

Derivative

I put some additional comments in the talk pages. I hope you find them useful. RelHistBuff 11:53, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for that. Some good coments. --Salix alba (talk) 14:12, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

Erdos 4 for Abbott Entry

Hi Salix, I noticed you put the comment "no source for entry." Please can you let me know what you mean? If you are asking how I found the Erdos number, that's easy: just use the MathSciNet database. You can use this for any Mathematician. Googling is a very unreliable way to find Erdos numbers. MathSciNet is the most authoritative way. SuperGirl 22:05, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

To do that would be WP:OR. MathSciNet is not a complete list of all publications especially in less mathematical fields, hence its calculations of Erdos numbers may be inacurate, so it does not class as a WP:RS. To be frank you would be better off writing some content in the article rather than focussing on this trivia. Sorry in a pissy mood. --Salix alba (talk) 22:10, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

Darling Salix, I hope you feel better soon. Not to worry. In the field, when one cites "Erdos number" it is shorthand for saying "lowest known Erdos number." This is understood by all folks in the Erdos business. For this biography, 4 is the lowest that can be found. If you find lower, let me know! Oh, and as for content, yes, I'm getting around to that. I have a real life too, y'know :-) Your image of me as some geeky female who is glued to the wikipedia 24 hrs a day is a fantasy that just ain't true. I'm kinda hoping other wiki editors will collaborate and pitch in too. Spread the wikilove. Kisses, SuperGirl 00:22, 16 October 2006 (UTC) PS: On the "original research" issue, getting on MathSciNet has about as much originality as Google. So I believe your argument is cute but false.

Hope you are doing O.K.

Just got on your page accidentently (I think Wikipedia is have overload problems or something). Thank you for being semi-nice when many people were being awful. Also for being a buman being -- believe me not a statement I have ever make on Wikipedia before (but did believe about people here in the olden days -- still do believe about those people). And you being a mathamatician and a humanist! Good guy, you, althoough I wasn't always able to listen to you at that point. I realize enough now just to desert situations where people just want to do their own commercail thing and let is happen since I can't stop it amyway. (But just wait until you are an old person like me and have not just your own grand kids running in and out (which never occurred to me would happen - and they (my grandkids are O.K.) but also the grandkids of lifetime friends who all seem to be addicted to drugs - very awful but the way it seeems to be in this country I live in.)

Anyway, wherever you are, I know you are a good guy and truly apologize for whatever trouble or effort I may have caused you then. Mattisse(talk) 01:49, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the Wikipedia:No angry mastodons link -- it is very good to read it. You say you are "tending towards the GA/FA process and general grading" and I don't know what that means. (I looked at your front page which has some very interesting links. Followed some that went to surprising places - Wikipedian things I knew nothing about but will try to understand.) Mattisse(talk) 17:12, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Thanks!

I read the rules and it did not seem so. Plus, they are accusing me of being User talk:Timmy12 and I just looked at his page. I'll read over that Wikipedia:No angry mastodons piece you sent. Mattisse(talk) 00:11, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

citation guidelines comments

Hi, I responded to your comments on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Physics/Citation guidelines proposal. Sorry for the delay, I must have misssed them coming up on my watchlist. –Joke 17:50, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

Timmy12

FYI, Timmy12 just slipped up and identified herself as Mattisse on WP:ANI. Timmy12 complained that two different users had reverted "his" tags, when in fact the tags had been placed by Mattisse. The details have been added to the request for checkuser by one of the users in question. Will you still continue to defend Mattisse after yet another incident of sockpuppetry? I think an indef block is in order. Ekajati (yakity-yak) 18:30, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

I will wait for the RFCU before I comment. --Salix alba (talk) 20:24, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Requests for checkuser/Case/Mattisse has confirmed that Timmy12 is not a sockpuppet of Mattisse. The only one which was from the same IP was User:Xampt. However, this acount was only used for 16 edits over two days when Matisse decided to work under a different username due to all the hassle she had been receiving. This account was not to avoid a block, vote stack, or other underhand activities.

From WP:SOCK - Jimbo Wales has said: "There's no specific policy against it, but it's generally considered uncool unless you have a good reason," and " ... multiple usernames are really only a problem if they are used as a method of troublemaking of some sort. For example, to generate an appearance of consensus, or to vote more than once, or to hide from public scrutiny."

I'll take any further acusations to WP:DR. --Salix alba (talk) 09:00, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

RFCU

Hi Salix. No accusation intended, I really just 'did not know why it was run'. Now that I do, I definitely see the logic in 'silencing accusations of sockpuppetry', but I think it might be better to just say 'knock it off'. My reasoning is thus: Using sockpuppets is actually allowed so long as there is no evidence of coordinated 'voting', 'good hand / bad hand' puppeting, attempting to get two admin accounts, et cetera. Absent an indication that two accounts have engaged in activity which would be prohibited if they were the same person I don't think that a checkuser should be run. If it finds that the two accounts are the same person that will inevitably be used as an excuse to harass them (i.e. placing 'sockpuppet' tags on their user pages, constantly referring to them as 'known sockpuppeter', et cetera)... when in fact they may have done nothing whatsoever wrong. Proving that two accounts are not the same person could (it is to be hoped) shut people up, but it also tends to open the door for 'outing' of people who have more than one account for permissible reasons. --CBD 13:01, 27 October 2006 (UTC)