User talk:Nigelj/Archive 3

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American and British English differences

Dear Nigelj,

You undid my addition with the comment "No, that's just unnecessary confusion. What you refer to is called "home education" in UK. " Perhaps I didn't make my point clearly, but I was referring to the historical derivation of the term "public" school in the UK. While what you write may be true today, in the 16th century the term "public" education came into use in a similar fashion to the word "public house" (pub), i.e. a house that was open to the public. Prior to the 16th century education of other than the nobility was only available to a very few people through the religious orders. In the 16th century, as a result of the reformation and the rise of Protestantism, the idea that an educated populace might be desirable began to take hold, and grammar schools--public-schools--became established in order that the children of the growing middle class might receive as good an education as had previously only been available to the people in the very top stratum of society. Public schools were established throughout England, even in small towns, for example the King's New School in Stratford-upon-Avon where Shakespeare received his superb education, one so good that even today people argue that his plays must have been written by someone else because he wasn't one of the "University Wits".

This is explained in detail in the Oxford English Dictionary: "Public education, education at school as opposed to being privately 'educated' ..."

jdoniach

OK. I've copied your comment above to Talk:American and British English differences, and replied there, so that others may also comment if they wish. --Nigelj (talk) 18:35, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

tkWWW

Hi, can you help me and take a short look at tkWWW article? Either I or User:Pmedema is not familiar with the wp rules. THX mabdul 19:18, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

Hi Mabdul, I too am a bit busy with 'real life' at the moment. I also had never heard of tkWWW until just now, but it does sound like it has a place in history. I've added it to my watchlist and will read up and try to help there starting next week. Thanks for the heads-up. --Nigelj (talk) 12:51, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

RESTful web services

Methods by themselves are not idempotent. It is very common for people to use GET to do all sorts of non-safe things. By declaring a method as idempotent, you basically telling your users that calling the method repeatedly would give them the same result. So, what counts is the semantics implied with each method that counts. Back to PUT and POST, the only essential difference is that PUT should be idempotent while POST is not. However, not all updates are idempotent. If you use PUT for such situation, a user would wrongly assume that repeated PUTs would give them the same result but in fact it is not. In situation like this, POST should be used because it conveys the correct semantics.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.178.228.149 (talk • contribs) 00:53, 26 November 2010

Yes, that's the point of REST - not to redefine what HTTP methods are for. In a RESTful interface, all PUT actions must be idempotent and POSTs are not. People have been defining GET and POST to do whatever they like in web applications and RPC web services for years, and the point of REST is that we look up how the existing HTTP methods are defined and use them only as defined. If the developer feels free to decide whether a PUT or a POST is going to be idempotent or not, s/he is not designing a RESTful interface (which is what the article is about). --Nigelj (talk) 15:50, 26 November 2010 (UTC) P.S. I'm copying this to the article talk so that others may comment too.

Renewable energy task force

Please see Portal talk:Renewable energy#Task force ?... Johnfos (talk) 19:29, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

Copy from http://www.zimbio.com/

Dear Nigelj

I tried to contribute an article only to discover you reverted my contribution. Could you explain your reason for doing this as I'm sure this issue can be resolved.

Regards Chris — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lickandqui (talk • contribs) 10:33, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

Hi Chris. After a bit of research, it appears that you mean this edit. Since this isn't about me, and others have previously reverted your edit, I'll copy this discussion over to Talk:Geoengineering and reply there so that other editors can join in. --Nigelj (talk) 10:44, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

Hi Nigelj

Thank you, I see your point. I'll go away and research how best to transfer text to wiki. Ref one of your points, the general flow does not go with the main article, could you suggest where the edit might be placed on Wiki. I'm the author of the document, there is no copyright concern. I realise the text needs proof reading, which presents as poor punctuation and will work on this.

Chris —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.132.223.135 (talk) 15:00, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

rm opinionated swipe

... at "the distain of many standard evangelists", which is sourced to a personal blog that does not even mention "the distain of any standard evangelists") I'm sorry that you see this as an "opinionated swipe", but I'm not willing to butt heads with you over this issue. However, the blog post I quoted as source is an overview of some of the most influential web developers' negative reactions to the logo. Amongst them the Web Standards Project (WaSP) -- and if those guys don't count as "standard evangelists", who do? --Takimata (talk) 18:50, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

If you want to discuss an article, please use the article talk page so that other editors may join in. This isn't about me. Or you. --Nigelj (talk) 18:55, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

impersonator

Did you notice this? An IP impersonating Winkmann99 at Talk:Vulva. Slightsmile (talk) 18:57, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

Hmmm. I wonder if Winkmann99 just forgot to log in? --Nigelj (talk) 19:27, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

I didn't think of that. But if if you look as Winkmann99 contribs it doesn't really fit that user's pattern. Slightsmile (talk) 19:37, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

It doesn't really matter unless we get the IP saying, "I agree with Winkmann99" and Winkmann99 saying, "I agree with the IP". Without that, it's just one comment that somebody made - it doesn't really matter who. --Nigelj (talk) 19:46, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

Radio - the American version

Hello, I like your cut of your jib !!. I have tried to raise a smile or three with a new related section on the Talk? (novelists corner, weepy show revisited) page. Francis E Williams (talk) 21:35, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

Nice job on "Phase-out of incandescent light bulbs"

I think your recent edits to Phase-out of incandescent light bulbs are very well done, improve readability, and strike a good balance of neutrality on what is apparently an emotionally charged topic for some people. Thanks for the time and effort you put into improving the article. In particular, I think the phrase "...one supporter of the incandescent light bulb is..." flows much better than my earlier attempted edit. --AdamRoach (talk) 21:23, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Thank you so much. My very best wishes to you too :-) --Nigelj (talk) 22:31, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

File:Diamond-caution.svg

Hey Nigelj, are you the IP from (2007) the Diamond-caution.svg talk? If yes, your are right (the PNG is better), but where is your SVG, you have not uploaded any file here? You know now, how you can upload files? Greetings --Perhelion (talk) 19:51, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Hi Perhelion! I hadn't thought about that file for years! It was one of my first attempts at making hand-crafted SVGs. I just uploaded a new copy there to make the circle of life more complete :-) --Nigelj (talk) 22:07, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

My edit of the JSON page

Dear Nigelj

I modified this page because I couldn't find the MIME type of JSON text. However now I see it's called Internet media type. Should my edit be removed? talk —Preceding undated comment added 16:11, 31 March 2011 (UTC). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Hfmanson (talk • contribs) 16:11, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

First I moved your comment to the bottom - you can add new topics to the bottom of any talk page using the 'New section' link to the top right of the page. Then I signed it for you - you can sign and date your posts on talk pages by typing four tildes (~~~~) or by clicking the 'signature and timestamp' button just above the edit window (it looks like a pencil and an f).

Now the edit. I'm going to link a few policy and guideline documents while I talk about it, as you might want to read these as you get more involved in editing - there's hundreds of them, but there's only a few that really matter day-to-day. The lede or lead of an article (the bit above the first subtitle, appearing above the contents listing) should, according to WP:LEDE, summarise the main points in the article. Therefore having a short section on MIME/internet media type in the article, and a brief mention in the lede is exactly what we should have. The trouble is, someone else added it only to the lede in the past, and now we have a summary there that is longer than the section you created. One option is to swap the text by copy and paste, and maybe tidy it up a bit. The brief mention should use the new terminology (internet media type), while the longer section could mention both this and the older name MIME, for example. The trouble for me is that I can't think of anything else to say on the subject, so that section may always be a bit thin. Perhaps a bit of research in the RFC or elsewhere on the web may show up alternative, old, deprecated or related MIME, errr, internet media types to mention in the section, or something else related, that is noteworthy and interesting to add. The point to remember is that everything we add to an article must be WP:V verifiable to at least one WP:RS reliable source, and referenced to that source per WP:CITE. That's not so true of the summary in the lede - somewhere in the docs (can't find it now) it says that as long as the text in the section is well referenced and cited, there is no need to cite the summary too.

So, I see these were your first few edits. You're on safe ground here - you're not trying to re-write the outcome of the second world war, for example - so I suggest that rather than I rush in and alter what you've done, I'll leave you to it. Have a read around the subject, make sure you're not depending on unverifiable stuff from blogs, see what you can find, and see if you can make a nice little section out of what you started. Wikilink any terms you use, like MIME, by putting them in double square brackets; open those related articles too and get more background (you can't cite a wikipedia article, but you can see what citations have been used in the other article and lift them into ours). Maybe lift some stuff out of the existing lede for your section, and finally summarise what you end up with where this used to be mentioned at the top. You don't have to do this in one edit, take it in steps and save each bit with a suitable edit summary, keeping the article readable while you do so. And enjoy! Welcome to wikipedia, to being a wikipedian, and to encyclopedia building. Do ask if you want any more pointers. Oh, alternatively, you could just delete that little section and work on something else, that's up to you. --Nigelj (talk) 18:08, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

Main Page

Would appreciate your help regarding this: "The ozone layer experiences the highest level of depletion on record as a result of cold temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere last winter." which currently appears in the "in the news section" of the main page and strikes me as misleading. --IanOfNorwich (talk) 19:07, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

Ignor me. Fixed now.--IanOfNorwich (talk) 19:30, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

Jones death threat quote

Hi Nigel:

Would you like me to send you a copy of the Spalding Guardian article that quotes Jones, that you removed from the CRU controversy page AWB? I have a local copy (which I had misfiled) on my desktop now. I just double-checked, and our quote is accurate.

This assumes I can figure out how to put a web page copy as an email attachment ;-] ... Best, Pete Tillman (talk) 20:43, 5 May 2011 (UTC)

Hi. This isn't about me or convincing me personally. WP:V is quite clear, "Other reliable sources include [...] magazines, journals, and mainstream newspapers." There is a section about this quote on the relevant talk page, all I did was find a BLP sentence sourced to a broken web-link. If you have a better source, offer it up for general discussion on the article talk page and let's see what the consensus is there. --Nigelj (talk) 22:29, 5 May 2011 (UTC)

I posted a proposal to restore this at Talk, and thought I should also notify you, as that page has gotten pretty busy. See what you think. Thanks, Pete Tillman (talk) 04:12, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

Question about your revert of my addition

Just noticed that you reverted my edit of Phase-out of incandescent light bulbs regarding how energy efficient bulbs may not save nearly as much energy as we're made to believe. I thought my addition, though not explicitly cited, went along well with the previous citation. For those not familiar with the concept (and since most people would not bother to look up the citation's article), I was trying to make it clear why energy efficient bulbs may not actually save ANY energy in colder climates, and in fact may actually waste energy (perhaps depending on thermostat placement, as you pointed out).

My concern & frustration is that packaging on virtually every CFL or LED bulb claims that they will save the consumer some specific dollar amount on their utility bills over the life of the bulb (neglecting differences in killowatt-hour billing rates). And of course the packaging says that the bulbs are "eco friendly", making us all feel better about it at the same time. But they mention nothing about the fact that these bulbs will save NO energy AT ALL; none, nada; if they're used, for example, inside the heated living quarters of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station or any other buildings that are constantly heated anyway. ALL of the "wasted" energy of a conventional bulb serves to reduce the heating requirements of the building's furnace, and energy efficient bulbs merely make the furnace run more to make up the difference. An energy efficient bulb in that environment will cost its user more than the equivalent incandescent bulbs over the same period of time, and will save no energy at all. The only difference would be due to the bulb (obviously) using electricity, while the furnace uses another form of fuel, and the relative cost differences for the same amount of energy between the two energy sources.

Of course most homes do not run their furnaces year-round, so the real savings is somewhere between "zero" and the stated savings on the CFL/LED bulb packaging, and of course dependent on the portion of the year that the home runs its furnace and the portion of the year that the home runs its air conditioning. And, have you ever walked into a room in your house in the middle of winter, where the room had been un-occupied (with its lights off) for at least several hours? Unless the heating vents are opened wide (heating the room disproportionally from the rest of the house), the room is probably several degrees colder than other rooms that you've been occupying (with their lights on). After being in the room (with the lights on) for an hour or so, the room won't be nearly as cold. My point was that if the whole house is lighted with CFL lights, then NONE of the rooms will be heated up as much by the lights as they would have been with incandescent lights, so the furnace will have to work more to heat the house to the same temperature. As you pointed out, minor differences such as the location of the thermostat may make significant differences, but my point still stands: If the furnace has to make up the difference between the heat output of incandescent lights vs. CFL lights, the whole house is affected, not just occupied rooms. Normally one would think the thermostat would be in a typically occupied room, and since that room is now lighted with CFL bulbs, the furnace is now pumping out more heat to the WHOLE house to make up for the difference, and even unoccupied rooms are now being heated more, which would waste far more energy than the incandescent lights would have "wasted" in the first place. Of course this condition only exists during the portion of the year when the home's thermostat is set to 'heat', the reverse condition exists when the home's air condition is in service (and the CFL bulbs come out shining as real energy-saving heros during that period). One would hope that CFL-related energy savings during the summer exceed CFL-related energy losses during the winter, or else we're really doing ourselves & the environment a disservice by using CFL at all.

I'm sorry if you thought my contribution was confusing; I thought it was pretty clear. Is there another wording of the same idea that you'd like to replace it with? I don't think the existing article adequately addresses this issue.

      --Phonetagger (talk) 21:48, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

I think what you're trying to say is well summarised at Compact fluorescent lamp#Heating and cooling. We could possibly summarise that treatment somewhere in Phase-out of incandescent light bulbs, but there's certainly no need to repeat it, let alone expand on it there, IMHO. In general terms, if you want to discuss edits to an article, it's best to do it on the article's talk page so that other editors see the discussion and can join in. If you want to pursue this further, I suggest you start by copy and pasting it all to Talk:Phase-out of incandescent light bulbs. --Nigelj (talk) 21:55, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Anything to stop User:Arthur Rubin from deleting other's User Talk?

Anything to stop User:Arthur Rubin from deleting other's User Talk? User:Arthur Rubin (wp:Arthur Rubin) continues to hide other's Talk, this time on User Talk:Zodon (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Zodon&diff=429845197&oldid=429841834) ... on March 30th 2011 it was User talk:Granitethighs (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Granitethighs&diff=prev&oldid=421531277) and User talk:OhanaUnited (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:OhanaUnited&diff=421531280&oldid=421528249) 99.190.85.26 (talk) 16:50, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

Please see WP:CANVASS. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 19:22, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

Please see WP:TPG Mr. Rubin. 99.109.124.16 (talk) 20:54, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

If of interest, more ... http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Large_Cities_Climate_Leadership_Group&diff=432283159&oldid=432278426 99.181.140.6 (talk) 04:52, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

"Proper adjectives"

Hi,

I came across this diff and felt obliged to comment. It is quite obvious that there is indeed a class of adjectives which are capitalised as though they were proper nouns: "English" is an excellent example. I would suggest that both "Web service" and "rich Internet application" are correctly capitalised (although the latter is usually presented in title case in the wild). Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward: not at work) - talk 10:23, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Sign

I think you forgot to sign here Pass a Method talk 18:41, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

Oops. Thanks. Fixed it. --Nigelj (talk) 21:28, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for your comments on Talk:Climate_change_mitigation

Thank you for your comments on Talk:Climate_change_mitigation#Add_Climate_of_Denial:_Can_science_and_the_truth_withstand_the_merchants_of_poison.3F. 99.190.81.239 (talk) 07:41, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Per your edits of Climate change policy of the United States ... any Talk comments?

Per your edits of Climate change policy of the United States ... any Talk:Climate change policy of the United States comments? 99.181.140.243 (talk) 05:15, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Vulva

My last edit to Vulva is not vandalism: I removed all real vulva images from the article. ColderPalace1925 (talk) 12:38, 17 July 2011 (UTC)

Precisely. Those pictures are there, by consensus, to illustrate the article. As you have been told before, Wikipedia is not censored. WP:NOTCENSORED. --Nigelj (talk) 15:45, 17 July 2011 (UTC)

School leaving age

The Education and skills Act 2008 raises the leaving age to 17 in 2013, and 18 by 2015. There are alternatives to school, but dropping out is not one of them. that seems to me to make it "compulsory". I did try to revert your edit and refer to the act in the note, but my work firewall is blocking my save of the page. Perhaps you would care to reverse your edit in the light of the above? Martin of Sheffield (talk) 14:40, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

OK, thanks for that. Re-inserted, with ref this time. --Nigelj (talk) 15:39, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

Merchants of Doubt

Thanks for catching all those "Argue"s.... especially since I put in a couple of them (to replace something worse, ims.) Cheers, Pete Tillman (talk) 19:33, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

No prob. --Nigelj (talk) 14:02, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

Comment requested

Per your encouragement, I've started the first subsection addressing the second statement in Mr. Rubin's "dispute". Please feel free to comment or make suggestions for moving forward. I will not be able to address statement 1 until sometime later tomorrow ("Global warming conspiracy"). Viriditas (talk) 13:37, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

Well done. I have to go out and do some RL stuff now, but I will look up those refs soon and comment specifically. Congratulations also on this edit of yours today, which was surely for the best. I would say that whenever you have to decide whether to say 'Arthur' or 'Mr Rubin' - scratch the whole sentence and talk about the article text, the source text, and not much else. (I believe it's actually 'Dr'). You never know how specific diffs may be used in the future... I learned that in the past. --Nigelj (talk) 14:01, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. Arthur Rubin has just admitted he has added the maintenance tags back into the article twice for no reason. What do you make of this bizarre behavior? He insists that the maintenance tags should be added for no reason. How does one confront this kind of disruptive behavior? Is there something a bit "off" about this person or is it just me? Viriditas (talk) 08:14, 22 July 2011 (UTC)

To make matters worse, Arthur Rubin has moved the goal posts yet again, claiming that the justification for adding the maintenance tags he gave to JakeInJoisey at 22:50, 19 July is now not the real justification. Can you believe this? As I predicted, he claims there is a dispute; when asked what the dispute is about, he says there is unsourced content; when the sources are shown to him in the article, he says that's not the real reason for his dispute. How long is this nonsense going to continue? Viriditas (talk) 08:30, 22 July 2011 (UTC)

I stand corrected.

Hi Nigel, I finally studied your reply on the Talk:Positive feedback page. I still have major issues with that page: 1) needs better discussion of the DANGERS of undampened (and otherwise unlimited) positive feedback in dynamic systems, 2) the preamble should begin w/a clear assertion: "Positive feedback IS -----"... Anyway, we'll come back to that... On one issue, I just wanted to say thanks, and I stand corrected. I have been working around digital electronics for ~30 years, and only with this discussion have I finally understood how a latch works. I couldn't understand why you were showing a digital circuit, which CLEARLY shows negative feedback, when you should really be showing an electrical circuit, which would better show the positive-feedback Schmitt effect. But NOW I see it!!!!! It is there.... For all these years, my eyes have seen an OR symbol, and substituted a static, logical representation for it in my mind, forgetting that there is a very live analog and non-linear electrical circuit underneath.... Thanks for helping me correct this false-view I was carrying :) --Bill Huston ^(talk) 01:26, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

I had totally forgotten this discussion! Glad it helped. I did electronics at university in the early 70s - that's nearly forty years ago now. In those days TTL logic chips (74xx) were the latest thing and C-MOS (40xx) wasn't available yet! Lecturers were very keen to draw the inner circuits of these early chips and make sure we were in no doubt (they have common-base transistors with multiple emitters!!!) When I first left college and worked in the industry, one product I bench-tested and calibrated all day was an alarm system with normal discreet transistors doing all the logic. In more recent years, I have baffled younger colleagues in software development by using Karnaugh maps to simplify the logic in complex if-statements. Thanks, Bill, and good luck. --Nigelj (talk) 10:27, 25 July 2011 (UTC)

You beat me to it

Hi, You were faster than me... I clicked post and got an edit conflict response. Thanks NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 21:31, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

Not only are there plenty of people who understand this, but it's good that the minority see that there are plenty of us! Well found. --Nigelj (talk) 21:32, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for your comments on Talk:Scientific opinion on climate change regarding image ...

Thank you for your comments on Talk:Scientific opinion on climate change regarding image. The image adds to the article, for some too much (Climate change denial) ... further discusssion? 97.87.29.188 (talk) 19:50, 3 September 2011 (UTC)

Picker78

Nigelj— FYI, see here. —Scheinwerfermann ^T·_C16:08, 25 September 2011 (UTC)

D'oh! Thanks. --Nigelj (talk) 18:04, 25 September 2011 (UTC)

Surely. Go see the SPI page again; now s/he's back at it as an IP. —Scheinwerfermann ^T·_C22:10, 25 September 2011 (UTC)

Otzi

Can you explain what you mean by "simple, bald statement" about his eye color? Surely a source that indicates they used genetic analysis to figure out his eye color is more useful than that Discovery reference with no real explanation of how they came to that conclusion? Hergilfs (talk) 21:22, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Answered on the article talk page so that other editors there may have a say if they so choose. --Nigelj (talk) 22:00, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Please comment

Could use your input on Talk:Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Consensus_on_median_in_summary. Daniel.Cardenas (talk) 18:47, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Hmmm. I've just read through about 100K of debate at Wikipedia:Mediation Cabal/Cases/13 November 2011/Usage share of operating systems and Wikipedia talk:Mediation Cabal/Cases/13 November 2011/Usage share of operating systems. I didn't know that was going on, so thanks for the heads-up. I don't have a strong opinion on the median questions, and, at the moment, I don't feel that I have any insights or perspectives to offer that may help settle, clarify or defuse the disagreements. I'll keep following the debate and thinking about it; if I think of anything that may help, I'll drop it in. --Nigelj (talk) 21:55, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification

Hi. In Positive feedback, you recently added a link to the disambiguation page Equilibrium (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver). Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. For more information, see the FAQ or drop a line at the DPL WikiProject.

It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 11:27, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks Mr Bot. Fixed. --Nigelj (talk) 17:57, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

Response at Talk:DOM

Hi Nigelj! Just wanted to check if you had any comment on the revisions I proposed to the draft at Talk:Document Object Model#Explaining what the DOM is without being vague? Thanks again for the feedback.

--Qwerty0 (talk) 13:06, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Hi again. I've added some thoughts there. Sorry I'm not being more help. --Nigelj (talk) 17:51, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Scientific opinion on climate change

Hi. Thank you for your reasoned response to my sincere but perhaps overly forceful question on the talk page. I really don't want to clutter that page so I'll clutter yours. :-) If I understand you correctly, you believe attaching the word "anthropogenic" to present-day CC or GW is redundant because that is the only kind that is occurring. If we limit the article to anthropogenic, we leave open the possibility that there is also non-anthropogenic (natural) CC or GW. Since NASA and NOAA and the IPCC, et al, don't believe there is any significant natural warming now, we don't want to open that possibility. (From p. 5 of the report: "During the past 50 years, the sum of solar and volcanic forcings would likely have produced cooling. Observed patterns of warming and their changes are simulated only by models that include anthropogenic forcings.") You're saying there's only one kind of change going on right now, and to specify that it is human-induced suggests a contrast to natural CC, which the experts say isn't happening now even though it has in the past. (NASA: "It's reasonable to assume that changes in the sun's energy output would cause the climate to change, since the sun is the fundamental source of energy that drives our climate system. Indeed, studies show that solar variability has played a role in past climate changes. For example, a decrease in solar activity is thought to have triggered the Little Ice Age between approximately 1650 and 1850, when Greenland was largely cut off by ice from 1410 to the 1720s and glaciers advanced in the Alps. But several lines of evidence show that current global warming cannot be explained by changes in energy from the sun.")

There, I said it twice. Did I get it? Yopienso (talk) 11:48, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

P.S. William's insertion of the graph supplied the timeline I was clamoring for, so my question about the word "anthropogenic" is more for my own understanding than to modify or improve the article. Yopienso (talk) 11:53, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

Hi, yes, I think you have got exactly the point I was making. And found RS cites to back it up! (Thanks for that :-) It's not a hugely important viewpoint in my mind. BozMo wrote something much better the other day in a different discussion: The net effect we are seeing is the tiny result left from a massive addition/subtraction sum. Some of the huge components in that sum are natural, and others are anthropogenic. The result is for warming, and wouldn't be (at the moment) if it weren't for the human-contributed bits. There's yet another way of looking at this, that I haven't used here yet, which is to say that the current climate is out of equilibrium with all the influences that affect it. This view takes account of the massive time-delays involved and emphasises that even if we removed all the man-made components from BozMo's big sum today, the climate would continue to warm before cooling again. Because of positive feedbacks like water vapour in the big sum, this could be quite marked and lengthy. Blah, blah. Don't start me off :-) Thanks for the chat. --Nigelj (talk) 15:01, 4 January 2012 (UTC)

Self references on World Wide Web

Hi! Technically, WP:SELF (as I read it) is designed to prevent people reading an article on an other website to feel lost (broken links, "this website", ...). I don't think using our domain as a little self promotion for the project hurts :). -- Luk ^talk 11:34, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

Yes, there were a couple of self-refs that I felt really had to go - "consider the Wikipedia page for this article..." and "(this Wikipedia article is full of hyperlinks)". While I was at it, I introduced the recommended 'example.org' and removed the rest so that it wasn't a potentially confusing mixture. I suppose you could argue that the others are only examples and not strictly covered by WP:SELF, but the best place to do that would be on the article talk page rather than here, so that other editors can comment too. Please feel free to copy this thread there if you like, to start the discussion if you want to pursue it. --Nigelj (talk) 13:06, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

Singular they and Wikipedia

A comment on your reversion of my edit to the Internet page, which was based on the concept that the "singular they" is acceptable English usage. In teaching writing, I try to impress upon my students that we have singular and plural pronouns for a reason. I like to see that even if the rules are broken often in colloquial speech, my students know them, and use them when they do formal writing. I'm a little saddened, if what you did represents any kind of official policy, that Wikipedia is going to be working against us on that front. I understand that the words I changed are acceptable in everyday speech, but I'm chagrined that you would revert my changes, as if there were something wrong with what I did. This contributes to students' getting the impression that correct grammar doesn't really matter, "See? Wikipedia said you were *wrong* and removed your silly edits." --Capouch (talk) 20:52 29 January 2012 (UTC)

If you want a deep and meaningful discussion with me personally about this, I'm afraid you have the wrong person. Maybe some of the contributors to this two-year-old discussion would be more interested. If however, you want to discuss the best wording of that precise passage, I think that starting a new thread at Talk:Internet would be more fruitful. --Nigelj (talk) 21:21, 29 January 2012 (UTC)

That was a simple typo, Dave--s/he missed the "n": In teaching. . . Use of the indicative rather than subjunctive mood in "as if there was something wrong" is the grammatical error, if we're going to be pedantic. :-) I don't really care for that singular they/their myself, but the feminists don't let us use the neuter he/him/his anymore. :-( Yopienso (talk) 23:39, 29 January 2012 (UTC) Whoops--edit conflict there, it's gone, like this will be in a few minutes.

Awww, if I'd known you were all coming round, I'd have got some beer and crisps ready. No, I think I'll leave it alone now - it all makes little sense to the casual reader, but I think that's how it should be. --Nigelj (talk) 23:46, 29 January 2012 (UTC)

A beer for you!

Thanks, Nigel; here's looking at you! Yopienso (talk) 00:23, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

Masturbation

I understand your concern :-) No worries! --Addihockey10 ^e-mail 20:22, 2 February 2012 (UTC)

Cool. Thanks :-) --Nigelj (talk) 21:40, 2 February 2012 (UTC)

Nigel, please find a new home for content you deleted in March 2011

Hello Nigel,

I see from you profile that you're a very experienced editor, way more than I.

I'm referring to the "bold deletion" on http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=JSON&diff=418834420&oldid=418815901

I can see where the discussion of other formats was getting a bit long and a bit off topic, but it WAS useful information. But it could have been moved to another page, perhaps the comparison of data serialization formations, or split off into a page like "other json-like formats".

When somebody is about to wholesale delete the work of many other people, I think the burden falls on the deleter to look for a new home for it, rather than just removing it.

My proof? It existed for quite a long time without causing problems. Many others added to it, including myself. I was useful, I discovered the deletion today when I wanted to review the info and went looking for it. It wasn't clearly wrong or profane. The only "violation" was your (seasoned) opinion that it was off topic for that particular page.

On a larger issue, I'm less likely to edit wikipedia these days due to the aggressive deleting of a few individuals. I've tried to follow guidelines better, and my stuff isn't normally deleted, but still there's the doubt in my mind "how much time am I wasting?" I also have a friend who's stopped editing all together.

I understand the need to delete things sometimes. And people should learn the guidelines. And I'm sure being a volunteer editor that deletes things opens you up to rants, which I'm not trying to do here. And in a case like this, where content was generally accepted and expanded for quite some time, shouldn't that burden of finding a new home fall to the person doing the deleting?

Would you please address this?

Thanks, Mark

Ttennebkram (talk) 21:25, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Hi Mark

Gosh, that was nearly a year ago. I'm not sure that it is my problem to find a new home for your material and paste it there. In fact WP:BURDEN says, "The burden of evidence lies with the editor who adds or restores material." Therefore if I did so, policy says that I would become responsible for the accuracy, relevance and verifiability of every word of it. Part of my edit comment said, "no WP:RS discusses [these things] as alternatives to JSON". Therefore I don't believe that the material is reliably sourced in its year-old form.

That was not the primary reason I deleted it, however. That reason was that it was largely irrelevant in the article where it was placed. If I put it somewhere else, I would have to go and find reliably sourced reasons why as to it is relevant there. That is not the way I normally write article text - start with the text and look for sources as to why and where it might be useful. I normally start with reliable sources and summarise and combine them into well-sourced article text.

Looking at the original article around the time of that edit of mine, it seems that Lightweight markup language was cited as the {main} article on the topic. That article might benefit from more prose - it is heavily tagged as needing review, and is largely in tabular form. I have been upset in the past, however, when an editor I've never heard from suddenly turns up on an article that I watchlist and dumps a couple of kilobytes of strange text into the middle of its flow, claiming they were told to do so by some merge or deletion discussion going on elsewhere.

I understand your pain - I have had large amounts of my own text radically altered and outright deleted over the years. Under the edit box it currently says, "If you do not want your writing to be edited, used, and redistributed at will, then do not submit it here." I'm sure in the past that used to be stronger saying something more like "If you do not want your writing to be altered, hacked about, deleted and copied mercilessly, then do not submit it here." But, I don't think I can comply with your request as you state it. What I can do is, if you tell me where you are planning to put it, I can watchlist whatever page or pages you choose, and give you every support as you try to reinstate it, and help you properly to source it, and to build it in relevantly.

Thanks for your note

Nigel

Nigelj (talk) 18:00, 18 February 2012 (UTC)

Hi Nigel,

I suspected the formal policy had something to that approximate affect. I'm not saying you violated a policy.

But where you say " I have had large amounts of my own text radically altered and outright deleted over the years...", that's not entirely applicable here. That content had lived in that article for some time, and been happily edited and added to by multiple users. I liked it so much that I was motivated to add one additional subsection. At some point I'm suggesting that the burden ought to shift a bit. I'm not sure it should be a "rule", but I think the burden should shift as content becomes more and more established and contributed to.

You mention "I'm not sure that it is my problem ...", I'm suggested that for long established and thriving content, maybe that statement isn't entirely true. Maybe it is still true in the "letter of the law", the official policy, but I think it's too easy to just delete things that others found useful. (which isn't the only criteria for WP, sure)

Also there's the efficiency of senior editors knowing how to quickly fork a page or relocate content, vs. the junior editors who might not even know what other options exist. Can't a page could be somehow forked then have overlapping content redacted. That still gives the "deleting" editor power to remove things, but with just a bit more effort to them to find someplace else for it.

There's probably some way to amend policies or whatever, some committee.... ultimately senior editors should still be able to trim articles, it's the /dev/null of content then was around for a while and had multiple contributors that I think needs some "adjustment".

I did see your offer to me, and I'll likely take you up on that.

I'd like to ask you: If I loosely define "long lived and thriving content" as large parts of an article that have been around for > 6 months, and have had at least 3 contributors (new content, not just edits), then how often is such content removed?

May I ask, do you even notice when you're deleting the work of a half dozen or more people that other Wikipedia users have found acceptable for months and months? Does that even enter into it?

Has there ever been any discussion about deleting that type of content? (vs. the "normal" deletes of spam or quickly removing 1 individual's off topic rants?)

I suppose an editor could argue that they shouldn't be encumbered with such things, that it's the content that matters, etc etc. I would take some exception to that, or at least in terms of "move" vs. "delete".

People stop contributing to Wikipedia because of aggressive deletes. A Sr. volunteer who understands everything might think that's acceptable, but then I hear the Wikipedia founders worrying about participation rates, etc. Without compromising the quality standards, there's got to be more that can be done.

I do appreciate your discussion of this.

Mark — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ttennebkram (talk • contribs) 00:32, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

As I said, if you can find any reliable sources that discuss the idea that Windows .ini files, PHP array initializers etc might be (or were in the past) considered as universal data interchange formats, then I'll happily support you putting a summary into an appropriate article somewhere. --Nigelj (talk) 11:01, 20 February 2012 (UTC)