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For other talk page archives see User talk:Walkerma/Archives. Other close archives include:

Archive1 — Archive2 — Archive3 — Archive4 — Archive5 — Archive6 — Archive7 — Archive8 — Archive10 Archive11 — Archive13 — Archive14 — Archive15 — Archive16 — Archive17 — Archive18 — Archive19

This is the August 2006 archive of Martin Walker's talk page.

Validation

Saw you message on fact and reference check. You may be interested in m:Wikicite. There's no code that I know of but many good ideas including allowing users to comment on the veracity of each citation. Multiple verified citations could conceivable bring our average information quality out of the cellar. - Taxman Talk 23:28, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, that's a great resource. I'm familiar with the meta validation page but this page was new to me! It looks as if you're quite interested in these issues yourself - it would be great if you could look at the Wikimania abstracts and let me know YOUR ideas for setting up a system for fact-checking. Thanks, Walkerma 04:57, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
Actually that pretty much embodied the thoughts I had on the issue. Breaking up articles into assertions and being able to certify that the cited sources verify the given facts would demonstrably show verifiability and provenance. The concept is solid, the issue is no concept alone gets anything done. It's the implementation in the code that matters. Unless something like Wikicite is coded up we're running in circles. Some version of Article validation (really more of article assessment though) features were stated to have been ready to impliment in the past but they never were. I never heard why they weren't brought live. - Taxman Talk 22:03, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for getting back to me. I've contacted the person working on Wikicite, it seems that significant progress was reported there in June. It would certainly help greatly the validation process, and if available it would give an added push to validation efforts. I don't think its absence prevents us from validating articles - after all, World Book and Britannica were doing this long before computers - but it would greatly help in recruiting people for validation reviews!
As for the "Article Validation" effort, you're right, it was assessment rather than validation (as you & I seem to use the word). It was in effect the same as Amazon star ratings, based on votes by users. The software was "almost ready to go" late last year, but then it ran into insurmountable snags, I'm not sure if it was software or copyright issues. Thankfully we now have a system that is better IMHO - review by the WikiProjects. I think the consensus view of a group of subject experts/committed Wikipedians is likely to be much more reliable than the quick opinions of random readers. In about three months it's gone from about 2000 assessed articles to almost 30,000, I'm very excited about how that is going. Cheers, Walkerma 04:06, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
Good point, you're right the lack of software doesn't prevent validation. Software just might make it manageable to demonstrate fact by fact verification that would be difficult to do without it. Even if the article assessment doesn't amount to fact by fact validation, review by Wikiprojects is indeed excellent, and it's also exciting to hear about the progess on Wikicite. - Taxman Talk 15:21, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

WikiProject Anglicanism assessment

Hi, I was wondering if you could take a "sneak preview" look at the worklist/assessment I'm creating for the Anglicanism project at User:Wine Guy/Sandbox. I'll be "going public" with this within the next day or two, and any feedback you can offer would be helpful. In particular, if your first reaction is "No! That's useless!", I would be happy to hear that before I move it into the project space. Thanks for your help. --Wine Guy Talk 01:34, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

I know Martin is busy, so I will add a comment here as his talk page is on my watchlist! The worklist looks fine as far as a non-expert on Anglicanism can tell. The only point I would question is the inclusion of the "Updated" column, which has never proved necessary at WP:Chem: in general, contentious assessments are challenged on talk pages, and often lead to objective improvements in the article, but are suprisingly (for me) rare. Physchim62 (talk) 17:03, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
Good to hear from you, PC! When there are a lot of people actively updating the worklist then I think it's as PC says. But at WP:Chem (which has used a worklist for over a year now) things have quietened down and we can't tell when a section was last assessed. I suspect some of our data are woefully out of date, and we're not even aware of it! So I think the updated column is needed not in case of disputes, but to check that data are up to date. It was very useful for the table at Core topics recently, the old dates on many prompted someone to come in and re-assess the whole list for us! Walkerma 18:17, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
Thanks to both of you for your comments. I did give a fair amount of thought regarding the "updated" column, and decided that it was more likely to be useful than not. Once the worklist has been in use for a while it can always be removed if it proves to be unnecessary. Other things which you mentioned, such as bishoprics and cathedrals, I am going to add soon. Also, regarding the Scottish Church and ECUSA, the SEC is certainly more important historically, hence the "top-class" designation as opposed to "high-class" for ECUSA. The SEC should perhaps be included with the key articles, but this is one of many things we'll discuss once the worklist is up and running. At some point we may want to use a bot to help out with this, I'll be in touch with you about that. Thanks again for your input! --Wine Guy Talk 19:44, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
Ok, it's live now at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Anglicanism/Assessment. BTW-I hope all is well at Wikimania! Cheers!! --Wine Guy Talk 01:12, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

Core bios

Hi, Martin. If you have the time and inclination, would you take a look at Wikipedia:Core biographies. I think it could use more scientists. Thanks. Maurreen 17:43, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Note to self: Work on Chemistry

Well, you just mentioned (in your excellent talk) that you ought do some work on the Chemistry article, after all your work on Gold(III) chloride....

Thanks for your work on the 'pedia and at Wikimania!

BCorr|Брайен 19:23, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Wikimania

Glad to hear everything went well. I left a couple of comments at Wikipedia talk:Pushing to validation about the things that were discussed there; but how was everything else? Hopefully the attendees were at least aware of Mathbot and the 1.0 assessment projects, and you received some feedback about things to do... are there going to be more talks about this by other speakers? Titoxd(?!?) 05:25, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for adding some comments. Yes, most people (probably not all) were aware of Mathbot. Many were at http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proceedings:MW1 the 1.0 talk] (right before the validation discussion) where I showed the overall information and the progress at Military History - with Kirill sitting in the front row! Walkerma 13:18, 5 August 2006 (UTC)
There are videos of some talks, go to the main schedule page to find links. I couldn't get it to work, but I'm sure you can! If you have time, you can take a look at the 1.0 talk for which a video was done - please let me know if I missed anything major. As for validation, I'm not aware of any other sessions on this topic. Very interesting to see the Calculus experiment, and the comments there! Walkerma 13:32, 5 August 2006 (UTC)
Thank you for your presentations at Wikimania 2006. They were well worth attending. --Ancheta Wis 08:43, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
I listened to your validation presentation via mp3 - I would have been more interested in the 1.0 discussions. Any new tools available for actually producing a snapshot from a list of articles ? Wizzy…☎ 11:18, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Astronomy COTF

 You showed support for Amazon rainforest at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Core topics/Core topics COTF. This article was selected as our collaboration. Hope you can help.

Maurreen 20:17, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

Wikicite

Martin- sorry for not responding sooner. I am mostly on the Meta site these days and though I usually visit Wikipedia at least a couple times a week the previous week was particularly bad for me so I didn't see your message until today. I was actually supposed to present a poster at this year's Wikimania, but had to suddenly cancel my plans for going to Boston, and so unfortunately did not get a chance to see your panel. I will definitely listen to the audio archive of it, though!

Anyway, regarding the status of Wikicite- parts of the software are alread functional, including changes to the Cite extension to make use of Wikicat's data import function. Here is a screenshot of live software, showing how bibliographic information is pulled based upon a key like ISBN number. There is actually not too much to be done, software-wise, before this can be rolled-out on Wikipedia. The real effort is making sure that the bibliographic catalog portion of the project- Wikicat- is designed correctly, which requires thoroughly researching the professional cataloging standards out there.

I announced the first phase of the project- the bibliographic catalog- on the foundation list about a week ago and though the reponse was fairly positive, I would appreciate it if you could help drum up "grass roots" support on the encyclopedia to help push this through (it seems like there's an official non-offical policy of rejecting any new project proposals at this point). The endoresement of a Wikiproject group would be especially valuable. BTW- an essential component of Wikipedia 1.0- stable version designation- is ready to be rolled-out so there's something else to lobby for.

Jleybov 23:22, 7 August 2006 (UTC)


Martin- I took a look at Wikipedia:Pushing to validation and will post my comments there shortly. The feature you mentioned, about being able to follow a cited fact to its source, is something that definitely can be supported, and in fact I eventually envision the ability to do detailed source reviews by mapping the authority relationships within a literature. Thus the reader will be able to follow a fact to its source with a click, and then see the standing of that source within its scholarly literature based upon how many positive as well as negative references to it there are. If the work looks to be of questionable repute, they can then use the citation map to find something more reliable, and then use that work as the basis by which to improve the article. I was thinking fact checking should be done in parallel by many users, though, rather than one. And so instead of seeing "User:Joe checked this fact in the 'Journal of Useless Facts'...", they would see aggregate results like "this reference to the 'Journal of Useless Facts' was deemed Accurate by 43 users (see list), Misleading by 1 user, Fabricated by 0 users, and 7 users (see list) Did Not Know". But in any case there will be lots of ways to visualize the reference and citation data captured in Wikicat/Wikicite, and I think we should be bold and innovative and explore new approaches instead of just trying to replicate the standard, ho-hum footnote. Jleybov 01:13, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Template:Vegetable oils

Please have a look at Template talk:Vegetable oils and write your opinion about including essential oils in Template:Vegetable oils. Thanks, Cacycle 02:54, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Version 0.5 FA Review

Please have a look at that. Maybe it is a better way to include them. I'll continue thiw kind of work step by step. Deadline is coming and I want to finish this project in time. What do you think? NCurse work 10:45, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

As you can see, I've finished Biology and Chemistry sections. It means that I took a look at each article searching for edit wars, mistakes, "bad" templates. All the articles, I've included in the last days are "clean". I wanted editors to sign up if there is no objection regarding architecture related articles because it is not my topic. So to be cleaner: I want people to sign that if they don't want to nominate an article of that section to be excluded. NCurse work 14:05, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

History of Solidarity

This is a situation I haven't come across before in a GA candidate. This article has several bits like "Henryk Jankowski" with an external jump immediately after it to a Polish web page needing translation. What should I do with this? See discussion on it's talk page too. Please leave answer here on your page.Rlevse 02:43, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

It seems to me that Polish sources on this may be some of the best! I can also understand using wikilinks to the Polish pages when there is no English page available. I think you need to find a Pole unconnected with the article who can confirm the authenticity (and lack of POV?) - perhaps through the Polish regional notice board? I would look at it this way - if we were looking at a page on the Thai Wikipedia about an American political event, say the Watergate scandal, we wouldn't be surprised to see some sources written in English. So as long as they look OK, I'd say they were fine. Walkerma 15:31, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
Thanks, fair enough.Rlevse 15:34, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

School counselor and .5 nomination

I have searched all over for info. on school counselors or related occupations in other countries. I have am a school counselor, and I have all kinds of books on school counselor. I've tried to get others from other countries to peer review it. It's hard to find bilingual educators that are willing to help with the article. School counselors carry the role of career advisor and academic advisor in American secondary schools. In grades prek-8th, elemetnary and middle school, they funcution as mental health counselors. I don't know if the UK school employs such people. I was able to find Korean information on the topic.whicky1978 talk 21:59, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Thank you

Thank you for your help. Does wikipedia have a way that will help an article get the attention of bilingual people? I think there needs to be a page for this, and a way to tag it. Maybe the tag you listed would work. School counseling is an expansion of career counselor position--as it developed in the US. Career education/counseling seems to be mainly American in origin. Most of the thoeriest that I have seen to be Amerian. I plan to write articles on these people. However, it may be that school counselor is primarily an American occupation.whicky1978 talk 22:16, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Asking in Wikipedia:Translation into English could help, depending on who is watching that page. Titoxd(?!?) 05:51, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for your thank you. :) Do we finish now V0.5? What about FA reviews? When will we start V0.1? NCurse work 08:10, 18 August 2006 (UTC)


Two weeks

Are we on for a physical production of a static version in Oct? Would you like an sos v2 (5000 articles including yours) a v0.5 (just your chosen articles) or both? Do your approval guidelines include checking image copyrights? --BozMo talk 08:51, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

I think we will be ready with a static version in Oct, though it probably won't come to 2000 (1500, probably). Open nominations close soon, but we will continue reviewing right through September. Personally, if you are ready to produce a CD this year I'd like to keep the V0.5 separate for now, whereas the SOS v2 can be bigger, being (SOS v1 + V0.5 + New). I think you are a bit ahead of us, and if we are to be an "official" release we also have more bureaucracy to deal with. I'll have to see what the other folks think. What I'd also like to do is to "plunder" your list of articles to find decent articles to cover any important missing topics. Hopefully a few of our choices have helped to fill in some holes from your V1. We haven't kept track of images, I think that's something we'll need to do once we have a firm list of articles. It may be we can negotiate that the publisher help with that. You should also take a look at my report from Wikimania, there were several interesting things I found out about and some useful contacts made. Let's make sure we keep in touch over the next few weeks. All the best, Walkerma 16:11, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

Laboratory glassware article

Hi  :-) I noticed you evaluated 20 (or so) articles under the chemistry subtopic "Lab techniques and analytical methods" under Wikipedia:WikiProject Chemistry/Worklist on April 26, 2006. At about that time, I was expanding "Laboratory glassware" from a stubby article to a full length article including adding 6 images, 4 of which I made. At the end of this article, there is a list of laboratory glassware, the majority of which have their own separate articles. I wrote the article to cover aspects of lab glassware that may be in common to multiple glassware items, and let the separate articles cover the individual glassware items themselves separately, but I covered a couple items without their own separate articles.

I also noticed the "Melting point test" seemed to be a red (not yet written) link in the "Lab techniques and analytical methods" list of articles. I added "Laboratory glassware", a rather well-developed article by now, as a potential replacement for it. Since you did the assessments in this list, would you care to take a look at "Laboratory glassware" as a possible addition or replacement and perhaps assess it. H Padleckas 16:03, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

See my response to your response at User talk:H Padleckas#Lab glassware article (placed there for continuity). Also, thanks for complimenting my work on this article. H Padleckas 22:57, 18 August 2006 (UTC)
See my additional response there also, if you haven't already. H Padleckas 01:17, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

WikiProject Judaism

Hello, I read the notice you put on our talk page and am interested in helping. How should I start? Masterhomer 03:54, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

Certain high quality articles such as Jew (GA) and Kibbutz (FA) are beyond the scope of WikiProject Judaism, which only deals with the religion Judaism and not the culture or history. How should I handle these? Masterhomer 06:22, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

Core topics COTF

Hi, Martin.

You showed support for Amazon rainforest at Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Core topics/Core topics COTF. This article was selected as our collaboration. Hope you can help.
Maurreen 15:40, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Wikisort

I think it would be easier to use a bot + a script. The script would create a "rate" tab on each article and post the rating to a user subpage. The bot would look at the ratings on the user subpage and get the final rating somehow. This way, we don't have to wait for the developers to make changes to the software because the bot can be run by one user and the scripts can be posted on the scripts page. We could make the script more well known by posting it on the village pump. The bot doesn't need to be well known because only a single user has to run it. Eyu100 23:28, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Script (untested, requires addTab):

function write_to_ratings_page() { 

document.ca-edit.click();
document.editform.wpTextbox1.value = document.editform.wpTextbox1.value + "(" + quality + " and " + importance + " and " + pagename + ")";
document.editform.wpSummary.value = "Added rating";
document.editform.wpMinoredit.checked = true;
document.editform.submit();

}

function get_rating() { var quality=prompt("Please enter a quality rating from 1 to 6, 1 is stub, 6 is FA","") var importance=prompt("Please enter an importance rating from 1 to 4, 1 is low, 4 is top","") }

function rate() { 

  get_rating();
  document.ca-cumbersome_tab.click();
  write_to_ratings_page();

}

addOnloadHook( 

function() { 
  var pagename=getPname();
  addTab("javascript:rate()", "rate", "ca-rate", "Rate this page", "");
  addTab("http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Eyu100/Bot_area", "DO NOT CLICK THIS", "ca-cumbersome_tab", "PLEASE _DON'T_ CLICK THIS", "");
}

);

Isotopes

Something that just ocurred to me: are isotope articles (e.g. Uranium-238) part of the Elements WikiProject, or another project? Kirill Lokshin 03:44, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

No, there's a separate project called Wikipedia:WikiProject Isotopes - they are fairly inactive now, but that's because they actually completed their task amazingly well! Walkerma 03:49, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
Ah, ok. Thanks! Kirill Lokshin 03:52, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Wikisort discussion

Could we keep the wikisort discussion here? You check it frequently, unlike my talk page. I posted a new message on my talk page. Eyu100 05:11, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Version 0.5 work

Hello, Martin. I'm sorry I have been somewhat MIA as of late, but meatspace has become quite busy, leaving almost no time for on-Wiki work for me. My school schedule is insane (every Wednesday I spend more than 12 hours at school alone!) and homework has picked up, as well as other personal things I have had to attend to. However, I will take a look and try to leave some comments about it. Titoxd(?!?) 05:37, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

Heh... particularily the badly written, huh? It reminds me of a time I had to judge speeches for USAD... some of them were quite good, but there were as always a few that were quite awful... anyways, I've tried to reply as much as I could to your points; however, the best thing that should happen is for Meta to see these things. There is going to be a meeting of the Special Projects Committee tomorrow at 22:00 UTC, so you may want to hop onto IRC (irc://irc.freenode.net/wikimedia) and try making a sales pitch to the bosses. I'll try to be there, but I'm not entirely sure yet, but in either case, it would be excellent if you could attend too. Titoxd(?!?) 06:41, 26 August 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, you do need to download an IRC client to use IRC networks. I personally use ChatZilla, which is an extension for Mozilla Firefox, but many other users use mIRC, IceChat, etc... There's a whole list of IRC client software available on-Wiki, if you would like to take a look. By the way, once you install the software, click the link above to enter the #wikimedia channel, for example. Titoxd(?!?) 07:11, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

Bhutan

Hi! I've tried to explain your post here: Talk:Bhutan#Can someone clarify this?. Hope it makes sense. PS Nice to page you after our meet in wikimaia. Regards, =Nichalp «Talk»= 17:35, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

WikiProject Seventh-day Adventist Church

Gday! Thanks for offering to assist in setting up an assessment of WikiProject Seventh-day Adventist Church articles. Your offer is much appreciated. I have followed your suggestions and started the process whereby the bot can process the assessment of the project's articles. However, I have become stuck in the process of developing a template for the purpose. I have created the template, Template:WP Adventist in the hope of making the assessment procedure an easy work flow. However, I believe that it needs code tidying, and I am unsure what to do with the red links it creates. Any assistance you could offer would be most appreciated. Thank you. MyNameIsNotBob 06:14, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

Regarding wikipedia 1.0

Two questions come to mind. In the event that it does seem that a given project may be inactive, but that at least some of the more significant individuals involved in a project are not, would it be at all acceptable to contact them individually? Also, when dealing with those projects which are active but have yet to respond, would it be acceptable to add to the content of the comment something to the effect that this same information could be used by the WikiProject Council to help these projects improve those important articles which fall within their scope which might seem to benefit from the additional efforts of at least one other project? It seems to me that this latter point might help to get a response in some cases, but I'm not sure of protocols in a matter like this. Badbilltucker 20:56, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

Regis Philbin

Thanks for rating the Regis Philbin article as a B and close to an A. I contributed a lot to the article and I'm happy it received compliments. But if you have time, can you provide comments to improve the page, and if you'd recommend it as a Good Article? Thanks so much. Tinlinkin 09:15, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm not a TV celebrity expert, in fact I've never seen Regis's shows, but I'll give a few suggestions. Based on my limited knowledge I think the article could easily be polished up to a GA, but being outside my area of expertise it may of course be missing some major content I'm unaware of. I think the topic is important enough to be worth some effort. Walkerma 20:09, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

Reviewing

I'll try, I already placed 2 key baseball biographys with ok quality in there, skipping the nom process if that was ok. I'll try to work on adding the key sports articles. I have some extra time in my hands because of Hurricane Ernesto. Thanks Jaranda wat's sup 21:03, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm a bit relutlent to add Donald Bradman to the 0.5 for obvious lack of refs though. Thanks Jaranda wat's sup 01:52, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

I added Bradman, along with an cricket list, I'm not sure if I should nominate Brian Lara another cricket great I heard of, lack of refs. Also can u try to check on Jack Tatum or Ryan Leaf today. Thanks Jaranda wat's sup 21:58, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

Re: Version 0.5 FA Review

No prob. Will work on it tonight. -Runningonbrains 01:11, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

Re: Huh?!?!

Thanks, so there was a cd of 2000 english articles released?100110100 04:46, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

@What's this about a cd of 2000 english articles released?100110100 09:30, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

KLF FA nominations

Hi there. Since you've taken the time and trouble to support my FA nomination for The KLF's ***K the Millennium, I'd like to ask your advice about which - if any - of the following articles I should nominate for FA next. If on the other hand you think none of them are up to par, please say so!

Since my cohort Vinoir is on an indefinite wikibreak, I'm just looking for a little guidance as of course to me all 3 are great! ;) Please reply on my talk page or at WP:KLF. Thanks! --kingboyk 09:56, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

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