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Nature/Accuracy

I certainly applaud your efforts to use this opportunity to improve our articles, but I wonder if there isn't a better way to do it than using the "dispute" tag. (Independent of you, for example, I dropped a note on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Clinical medicine.) We have no way of knowing what version of the articles were used, and so no idea if Nature's reviewers would have any issues with current versions, and we will have no way of knowing if or when all the issues have been/will be addressed. (Also, Nature's numbers refer to "factual errors, omissions or misleading statements" not "errors". I don't know how we can identify what their reviewers mean by that without the input of the reviewers, which I hope we will, directly or indirectly, get). - Nunh-huh 02:44, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

If they are unable to provide Wikipedia with a more specific list of their findings, then we may have to remove the disputed tags (hopefully following at least a look-through by a knowledgable editor). In the short term, however, I think it is important to acknowledge that we take criticism from such a reputable source very seriously indeed. Also, as a PR matter, realize that many people are going to be visiting those pages right after they read the Nature article, and it will give an instant bad impression if the pages do not have some admission of their potential problems. —Steven G. Johnson 03:01, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
I think it's fine to wait to see if we can get a list of problems from Nature. I just don't want the "tags" to become permanent, or for it to become acceptable to use them without actually specifying a dispute on the talk page. - Nunh-huh 03:11, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
This is clearly an exceptional case. A random netizen making an unspecified accusation of inaccuracy would not merit a "disputed" tag. And, unless specifics are forthcoming, the tags will inevitably be removed, so I think your worries are premature. —Steven G. Johnson 03:14, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
Nature's reviewers having made unspecified accusations of inaccuracy is clearly worth noting, but I don't think it should be noted with a tag that sends people to the talk page for a discussion of the specifics which necessarily will not be there. How about a purpose-built tag? - Nunh-huh 03:28, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Specifically, the Disputed template is intended to be used in conjuction with the procedure outlined at [[1]]. In particular, it invites the reader to see the details of the dispute in a Disputed section of the talk page. But without the details of which statements are considered wrong, it is impossible to use this procedure, and the use of the Disputed tag confuses as much as it informs. Shimmin 03:41, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

I see there's now {{NatureDispute}} that seems to answer this concern. - Nunh-huh 03:58, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

I object to claiming x number of errors without identifying the errors. It is PREMATURE, rather than wrong. We need to know what errors are CLAIMED. Then we can act. I bet at least ONE claimed error is not an error. That they made an error is at least possible. And until the actual errors are identified, who knows really? Ommisions? maybe its on a see also page. Are spelling errors counted? Is our "NPOV" counted against us (they have a POV too ya know). WAS 4.250 05:18, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Take it to Wikipedia talk:External peer review. —Steven G. Johnson 06:38, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

# as argument to nature template?

It would be nice to include a # in the template to indicate how many errors Nature found... speaking of which, is there any info on whom is in contact with them re: their standards and definitions of inaccuracy? +sj + 05:39, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

(Please do add the #.) The best I could find was [email protected]. I already sent them an email asking for more information, and I think some other Wikipedians have too. Of course, the best person to contact them is Mr. Wales, since he was already interviewed for the article and no doubt has the coordinates of the reporter in question. —Steven G. Johnson 05:45, 15 December 2005 (UTC)


Nature

How is the Robert Burns Woodward comparison wrong? I can't find his name anywhere else in Encyclopedia Britannica, just in that 2-sentence entry. We have 13.5 KB and 3 errors, they have 2 sentences (200 bytes), and 0 errors. — 0918BRIAN • 2005-12-15 15:32

Scroll down — you'll see that there are links to subsections on his "Education and early career" and his "Synthesis of steroids". As I explained, they break up long bios into multiple sub-pages. —Steven G. Johnson 17:06, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
Oops. I did scroll down when I read it the first time, but I scrolled past that :) — 0918BRIAN • 2005-12-15 17:29

Did Nature take any unbiased random sample and report in how many of the sampled articles errors were found, and the total number of those errors, and the sample size? That could serve as the basis for an estimate of Wikipedia's error frequency in articles of the kind from which the sample was taken. Michael Hardy 17:38, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

All I know about their sampling methods is what they said in their article. It sounds like they didn't pick articles completely at "random", but they did pick them somewhat arbitrarily. If I had to guess, I would speculate that they picked articles randomly and then rejected any that they thought were on uninteresting topics or for which the Wikipedia and Britannica articles were of vastly different lengths. (In most cases, the article lengths were within a factor of two, according to a word count.) —Steven G. Johnson 17:42, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Yes ... word count should also be included in such data... Michael Hardy 18:29, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

"Somewhat arbitrarily" is a notorious way of allowing inadvertent biases into the analysis. But on the other hand, estimating rates at which errors enter was probably not really their purpose. Michael Hardy 18:32, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Yes, they explicitly say that they don't have a rigorous statistical survey, and that they invite library scientists, etcetera to do a more careful comparison. What they have is an interesting rough pass, which is more rigorous than earlier anecdotal comparisons at least. —Steven G. Johnson 18:56, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

I now find it reported that they also counted Brittanica's errors and looked at how Wikipedia compares. I hadn't realized that when I saw what you've posted on this. It seems the score is Wikipedia: 4 errors, for every 3 errors in Brittanica. So we're not doing too badly. Michael Hardy 01:16, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

Discrete-time Fourier transform

At http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Discrete-time_Fourier_transform&diff=32124402&oldid=32123635 I don't think you quite grasped the significance of "DFT". There is one underlying DTFT, which contains an infinite number of non-zero values. Since we cannot compute all of them, we choose a DFT size (N) to sample the DTFT. Different choices produce different DFT's (i.e. different resolution). So "DFT" is really what I meant to say. --Bob K 18:11, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

It's not a DFT if you have , for example. Anyway, please use the Talk page of the article. —Steven G. Johnson 18:16, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

How long should an article be semi-protected?

I've raised this question here, as now it's actually real and happening I expect more people will want to comment. Dan100 (Talk) 14:55, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Nature review

Nice work getting hold of the Nature review details and mirroring them. I've created Wikipedia:External peer review/Nature December 2005/Errors from that document now. violet/riga (t) 17:58, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

  • Okay, will add the diffs. I do think that one is hair splitting — I think it is worth distinguishing between true errors and people being overly pedantic in their reading of things — but anyway I'll tone it down, for appearance's sake. --Fastfission 19:10, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

I think the Nature reviewers are authoritative sources in and of themselves (more references would of course be useful). I agree, it was wrong of me to mark my edits as minor (I have it set to make all as minor and sometimes I fail to take it off, I think I'll change that setting now). I was in to much of a rush to make the changes and should have been more careful. As to your other point: yes, many of these articles do need larger fixes but, for the moment, I think the greatest need is the correction or removal of the specific errors or facts . Broken S 22:50, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Post script: While writing this I took a look at other changes people had made to the page. It seems the reviewers were quite fallible. Alright, I'm going to go back and try to source all of the corrections I made. Thanks for pointing this out to me. Broken S 22:50, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

why??

Image:Nagasaki.jpg I corrected. --WonYong 10:25, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

Scalar

Hi Steven - your input on the scalar (physics) talk page would be welcome. I am having a discussion with another editor and the more opinions the better. PAR 17:00, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

Hi Steven - thanks for your input (even though I disagree with part of it) - also, please note that logical positivism is the polar opposite of the metaphysical. PAR 20:56, 2 January 2006 (UTC)


Permittivity

Could you tell me why you reverted me on this page/--Light current 02:01, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

See the talk. Actually I just rewrote that entire paragraph. —Steven G. Johnson 02:13, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

Steven, could you take a look at

Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Rbj and possibly add a comment, if you feel so inclined? r b-j 16:09, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

No professors allowed

Sorry, people with degrees who know what they are talking about are not permitted on wikipedia.  :) Pfalstad 06:05, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

Protection on Linux

Thank you! It has been a long day trying to clean out the anon user's spam without triggering a 3RR myself. --StuffOfInterest 01:00, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

It was encouraging to see the protection kick in but Splash has removed it. If you can keep an eye on the page and reinstate the protection when (I doubt if it will be if) they come back then we'll be grateful, yet again. Thanks Stevenj. — Graibeard 04:29, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

linkspammer is back from another ip, spam notice added to User talk:195.56.8.125. Note also left with User talk:Splash — Graibeard 08:57, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

The editor uses one IP at a time. One IP can be blocked on sight in this case, without needing the 3RR. I don't think we need to prevent all anons editing if blocks have not even been tried properly yet. -Splashtalk 15:47, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

The vandal was switching to a new IP every time he/she was blocked. —Steven G. Johnson 04:30, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

EB article on Dolly

How did you find out the length of the EB article on Dolly the sheep for the Nature review project? I can't even find an article on Dolly on EB Online or EB on CD. -- mav 18:42, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

If you search Britannica Online, you find that there is an article "A Lamb Named Dolly". It is actually listed as being a part of the Britannica Book of the Year 1998. I assume that this is the article reviewed by Nature, as it is the only substantial one I can find on the topic. —Steven G. Johnson 23:40, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Plot standard??

Hi, you wrote on my talk page about changing the style of the other plots in the Bessel function article. I'm not very sure about it... My aim was to make a plot in SVG, with colors to make it nicer, but it had to be understandable in grayscale as well. That is why I used dotted lines and a legend. My model was Image:BesselJ plot.svg. In the legend I wrote J_n instead of Jn because, as far I know, SVG does not support subscripts on text. All you can do is to make it similar to a subscript putting a different text box in the bottom right. But that is something you can do post-processing with Inkscape or similar, while I wanted to keep it as close as possible to the original output of the gnuplot code I used to make it. I don't know. I think we should ask the people of Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics for help: they made a useful Manual of style, but they don't talk about any plotting standard. We should propose a discussion about it and, once a decision is taken, I'll change all the plots to the standard format we agreed. Alessio Damato 13:35, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

edit on fourier series

You reverted a more general formula to a more specific version for consistancy. I posted comment on the talk page for it. Fresheneesz 21:59, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

Electromotive force

If you are going to add a "disputed" tag to an article, you could at least have the courtesy to write a brief explanation on the discussion page for what facts are in dispute, and what your position is on those facts. I have read your comments on the emf discussion, and I cannot tell what your opinion is, or even what you think is in dispute. -- Metacomet 18:37, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

Nevermind, I spoke too soon. I see that you have done exactly that. I apologize for jumping the gun -- Metacomet 18:40, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

Sprotects

Hello there... I see you're going round protecting some articles. I don't want to get into a wheel war with you, but I don't think you should be protecting articles that haven't actually been receiving large amounts of vandalism recently. Cheers, — FireFox • T • 18:33, 5 March 2006

I'm only protecting articles where the edit history shows that almost all recent edits are vandalism or reversion thereof. Why should editors' time be wasted on things like this? —Steven G. Johnson 18:35, 5 March 2006 (UTC)
90% of the articles you protected haven't recieved vandalism in the last two hours. For example, vandalism hasn't actually been vandalised in over three days. Semi protection should only be used in cases where vandalism is imminent. — FireFox • T • 18:37, 5 March 2006
Per WP:SPP, semi-protection should only be considered if it is the only option left available to solve the problem of vandalism of the page. In other words, just like full protection, it is a last resort, not a pre-emptive measure. In the case of one or two static IP vandals hitting a page, blocking the vandal or vandals is a much better option than semi protection as semi protection causes more collateral damage. It seems that you are using it as a pre-emptive strike, where it's really only designed for situations where there is chronic rapid vandalism that can't otherwise be dealt with by reverts/blocks. (ESkog)(Talk) 18:39, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

You mean well but we don't normally sprotect pages except when there is a dire need. Haukur 18:42, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

If you take this literally, no page will ever be protected, because it is never the only option — continual reversion is always possible. And the articles in question were clearly not just being vandalized by one or two people. They were being persistently vandalized on a daily basis by multiple addresses. —Steven G. Johnson 18:44, 5 March 2006 (UTC)
Yes, but we can handle it. Reversions and blocks go very far and lots of people monitor those articles for vandalism. Only in really egregious cases (think George W. Bush) is there a consensus to sprotect semi-permanently. Haukur 18:50, 5 March 2006 (UTC)
But what is this? This is Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Vandalism hadn't been vandalised in three days! My userpage gets vandalised more than that! And another small thing. When you protect pages please don't forget to add them to WP:PP - it makes tracking these pages much easier. — FireFox • T • 18:46, 5 March 2006
Anyone can edit 99.999% of the pages. Protecting a few persistently vandalized pages from new/anon users is hardly a contradiction of that policy. As for Vandalism, I have to admit I didn't notice that the most recent date was a couple days ago — what caught my eye was that almost every single edit for weeks has been vandalism or reversion thereof, on essentially a daily basis except for weekends. —Steven G. Johnson 18:56, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

A good rule of thumb: Is the vandalism infrequent enough that it can be effectively reverted and the users warned/blocked as needed? If yes, then there is no justification for sprotection. See m:Foundation issues for more about why we shouldn't be mass-sprotecting articles. (ESkog)(Talk) 18:49, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

99.999% of the pages on Wikipedia are unprotected, so any argument about "mass protection" is spurious here. If a page gets persistent vandalism from multiple sources on a daily basis, to the point where it completely dominates the edit history of an article, that seems to be a good rule of thumb to me. —Steven G. Johnson 18:56, 5 March 2006 (UTC)
This concerns me a great deal. "Seems like a good rule of thumb to me" is not policy. WP:SPP and m:Foundation issues are. (ESkog)(Talk) 19:01, 5 March 2006 (UTC)
I am concerned also. Sorry, but you've got messages from three admins here, who all disagree with your actions, and are all taking the courtesy not to revert your protections and to discuss the issue instead. — FireFox • T • 19:05, 5 March 2006
Eskog, you were the one who suggested your own "rule of thumb"; I was simply replying in the same terms. The fact is that deciding how to interpret whether semi-protection is "needed" is ultimately a judgement call, and you and I clearly have different opinions about this.
As for the three admins here, no offense but please realize that you are highly a self-selected subset of editors/admins and there's no particular indication that your opinions are representative. (An editor who doesn't object to the sprotection is hardly going to comment here.) —Steven G. Johnson 19:22, 5 March 2006 (UTC)
True enough, people who disagree with an action are more likely to comment. Please bring your actions up for review at WP:AN/I then, that way you get rid of the self-selection. As it happens I do think we who have commented here speak for the majority but maybe you can make your case at the noticeboard. Haukur 19:35, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

I have posted the pages as a request for unprotection at WP:RFPP, trying to seek a broader consensus one way or the other. (ESkog)(Talk) 19:50, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

RE: unfree Image:Nyumbani.gif

REHupa published Image:Nyumbani.gif in a fanzine from 1978, that is where the original image appeared. Which is why the organization was given as a reference. The map was reproduced here http://www.dodgenet.com/~moonblossom/Iatlas.html and this was my source. Would you rather I changed the source to the website it was gotten from? Basique 16:28, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

The problem was not that you didn't list a source (you did), but that you claimed without evidence that the copyright holder had relinquished all rights to it. You have to assume that all rights are reserved unless there is explicit written permission by the copyright holder. —Steven G. Johnson 16:31, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

Image:Milena.PNG

Hi Steven,

About the image you mentioned, it's the same situation of Image:Milena_5.jpg, but I've never used that image, maybe I should just let it be deleted.

Thanks,

Milena 14:19, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

Barnstar

(This barnstar was placed on my user page by User:MITguy; I've moved it to the Talk page — SGJ.)

Steven G. Johnson works tirelessly to edit copyrighted materials and improve Wikipedia. — User:MITguy, Mar. 15, 2006.

Joan of Arc image
An image created by you has been promoted to featured picture status
Your image, Image:Joan of Arc-Notre Dame.jpg, was nominated on Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates, gained a consensus of support, and has been promoted. If you would like to nominate an image, please do so at Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates. Thank you for your contribution!

--PS2pcGAMER (talk) 06:14, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Red hot pun

Hi, thanks for helping out with the red hot stuff, nice work. Sorry for the pun, I couldn't help it. Hmm... If I add puns to the category:accordionists will you help me there too? This Wikipedia has all too few articles on accordion competitions and festivals. --LA2 22:41, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Image:Dandelion clock dft dct.png

> It might be clearer if you didn't center the FFT spectrum, however.

do you think so?? representing the DFT shifted as I did is a standard way to represent it... I find it more confusing in the non-centered version, because you can find lower frequencies on different parts of picture. But, on the other hand, it may be clearer having the lower frequencies on the top left for both pictures... I don't know, tell me what you think is better and I'll change it according to that. Alessio Damato 10:00, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

RE

The photos which i uploaded from trekeart.com, are for free use and copyrights of images do not belongs to TrekEarth as you can see here: "TrekEarth is not responsible for unauthorized usage of your images outside the TrekEarth site." a web-site everyone sharing their photos eachother.

As for wowturkey.com, here: [2]

Ajda 15:15, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

See my response on User talk:Ajda.
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