User talk:Stephen Ewen

Stephen Ewen

Current talk page

Archive 1, Archive 2, Archive 3, Archive 4, Archive 5, Archive 6, Archive 7, Archive 8, Archive 9, Archive 10, Archive 11

Anthropology

Thanks for taking the lead on Anthropology. I had you in mind as an exception when I posted my comment on the Big Write page, and I'm glad to see that my intuitions were correct. I still need to finish up a couple of things for the end of the term here (it's a pesky thing, school), but you can expect to see my work to start showing up soon... --Joe Quick | Talk

Hey, I was wondering if you could wander by anthropology a bit in the next few days. I've got the sub-disciplines section in passable shape (though it will need a lot of work yet) and will be focusing on the history section for a while, but I don't really know what you had in mind for the last few sections.

If we can get everything to the point where we at least have something written for each section, I think we'll be in good shape to start refining the content. --Joe Quick (Talk) 01:49, 23 March 2007 (CDT)

Advisements

What is this, the court of Louis XIV? I was annoyed, and I was making that clear, without being abusive. My experience as a journalist and subeditor was relevant to the point I was making. It is true that Wikipedia suffers from an excess of personal abuse, but let us not go to the opposite extreme. Robust debate is part of academic life, as I'm sure you know. Adam Carr 18:32, 27 February 2007 (CST)

NMI

Stephen, it just occurred to me that you might not have the thunderbird software that constables are using to process accounts. Did you get set up on that? If not, let me know and I can help you get started. -Matt Innis (Talk) 08:35, 28 February 2007 (CST)

I have used Moz T-Bird for...about 3 years. I lived and worked for two years recently in the Northern Mariana Islands, so I had a complete mental block about this "NMI". :-) Stephen Ewen 14:40, 28 February 2007 (CST)

you sure needed some more info then :) Robert Tito | Talk

Growth

I appreciate your thoughtful response. Jmerkey 02:06, 2 March 2007 (CST)

top

Hi, there are no more articles in "top" categories for workgroups, the last exception being logic which is protected. Could you unprotect it and change the category? I am about to delete "top articles" from workgroup table template (see Citizendium-l mailist for more details). Best, --Alex S. 01:03, 3 March 2007 (CST)

thanks, it was quick --Alex S. 01:11, 3 March 2007 (CST)

Account

Thanks for the thoughtful and kind email. Yes, please go ahead and move my account as you proposed. Let me know what the new password is, BTW. Thanks. Jmerkey 01:25, 3 March 2007 (CST)

Done. :-) Stephen Ewen 02:41, 3 March 2007 (CST)

Message from Bernie Haisch

Hi Stephen, Sorry I just now spotted your suggestion about Intelligent Design, but I need to leave that to someone with expertise in biology or a related field. I'm an astrophysicist.

Thanks for the bio!

Cheers Ben Louis Yates 22:27, 4 March 2007 (CST)

My pleasure. Let me know if I can ever assist you in any way. :-) Stephen Ewen 22:45, 4 March 2007 (CST)

An 'on-wiki' hello

Hi Stephen - as you can see, my account is now active..!

My IP address right now is 203.158.55.174 - my ISP is iinet here in australia. The message that I was blocked came when my address was 203.217.91.121 - hopefully this info is useful, and I look forward to seeing you around!

best, Peter Godbolt 22:21, 7 March 2007 (CST)

Ah, very good. Glad it worked out. See you around, and please let me know if I can assist you! Stephen Ewen 22:50, 7 March 2007 (CST)

WP or not

No Steve, if that was true everything science related should be related to their origins, some over 2000 years old. Some parts may be verbatim from WP but - tell me - why invent the wheel in phrasing something in a correct way? you have the same result and I have it, did we copy? no we wrote it. The amount originally left from WP is minimal and defendable - thats why I made it to be approved 1 month ago. Take a look at Physical chem, that needs being approved as well, as its time is DUE for quite some hours now. cheers. Robert Tito |  Talk  00:08, 12 March 2007 (CDT)

Well, obviously no one need come up with new wording for conventional terms like "pair bonding," and the like, but it concerns me when there are entire unattributed verbatim paragraphs with particularly nuanced phrasing such as at the WP article and our article. My concern is that WP folks will exploit such a thing to the hilt and we will see it all over the blogosphere. On the other hand, are you saying that you all wrote those paragraphs first at the Wikipedia article and afterward imported them here? Stephen Ewen 00:33, 12 March 2007 (CDT)

I agree with Steve, Rob--if we use any significant part (I'm not sure what that is, but say, a sentence) of the Wikipedia article, we must give Wikipedia credit. Unless you wrote those paragraphs yourself for WP (and no one at WP edited them since), we did copy them from WP. Please do be conscientious about this. Frankly, I don't understand the resistance to giving them credit. If you want to deny them credit, then simply rewrite those paragraphs. --Larry Sanger 08:44, 12 March 2007 (CDT)

The article when I first started working on did non contain any reference to WP, I am not a priori assuming people copied and pasted material without proper references. BUT more generic, IF any sentence is ""copyrighted"" by the mere occurrence of that sentence anywhere it would be a strange world if we have to comment E=mc^2®©Einstein, a^2+b^2=c^2®© Pythagoras. Since this so called article is nothing more or less then a stub, it is like an index with minor expansions, as such it seems logical parts will and actually do overlap with other articles covering the same territory. There is worldwide the problem of copyrighting, and sometimes even patenting certain colors, or even standard words. Insanity maximus? This should be abolished as it delivers nothing new. So, recapitulating, if people copied material from WP, their original material it rightfully is NOT linked to WP. Since there was no WP link I have to assume the latter. I still hold the professional scientific attitude as a priority. digital High Five, or ^101. Robert Tito |  [[Talk]]  11:32, 12 March 2007 (CDT)

Rob, I don't follow your argument. My argument, on the other hand, is very easy to understand. I'm saying that if we make use of a sentence or more of material from WP--not in a quotation attributed to WP--then we are making use of WP material. It doesn't matter if it's just a little: we're still using their content. Hence, we give them credit, regardless of what the license or the law requires. It's just decent behavior. --Larry Sanger 11:36, 12 March 2007 (CDT)

Larry, since I am not certain which article is original (WP or CZ) the people creating this article and working on it, before I did, removed any reference to WP (maybe because it was their original work). Therefore I assume it is rightfully done, and no link or credit to WP is needed. Credit of the doubt is given to the authors - as I assume all are with the proper scientific background and attitude.

thanks

for religion. I didn't want to presume in an area where I'm an amateur.DavidGoodman 05:15, 12 March 2007 (CDT)

Transfering stuff from Wikipedia

Stephen, Thanks for your comments. My main area of focus is aerospace engineering. I'm basing my strategy of transferring information from Wikipedia to Citizendium by starting from my Wikipedia article "Atmospheric reentry" and branching outwards. Most of the "low level" aerospace articles on Wikipedia are very good and require no additional editing, e.g. SR-71 Blackbird, Apollo_5, etc. I consider my "Atmospheric reentry" article to be low level. Also, most of the low level stuff tends to be infomation rich and would require months of work by many people to rewrite from scratch (which is unnecessary). Unfortunately IMHO, most of the "high level" stuff on Wikipedia is garbage, e.g. "Space exploration". This is the paradox of Wikipedia, i.e. the information that people first see tends to be garbage but the deeper level stuff is of good quality. My goal is to build a foundation of low level articles first with links to stubs for higher level articles. I'm a professional aeronautical engineer and qualified to judge the quality of the low level articles. Other people can come in later and fill out the stubs for the higher level articles. Also, I'm a little bit nervous about Wikipedia undergoing a sudden collapse. I can imagine most of the serious people contributing to Wikipedia suddenly realizing that they are wasting their time and abandoning ship. There could be a situation where there are far more vandals than editors and the whole house-of-cards collapses into chaos in a few weeks. I've seen this happen more than once with Space Exploration discussion forums on the Internet. Therefore I see a need for haste in getting the good stuff transferred over. Terence Quilpie 01:54, 14 March 2007 (CDT)

Dr. Quilpie, although I can appreciate your perspective, we really do need to operate by CZ:WP2CZ#Should you really upload that Wikipedia article to the Citizendium.3F (see the second emboldened point) or, alternately change it through discussion on its talk page, which you are very welcome to do. Until then, please do act mindfully of the guideline. Also, we do not need to really worry about Wikipedia content ever vanishing utterly. Even given a worst case scenario, most of its content is archived at webarchive.org, although it is not available there in wiki markup. Let me also say that I am really glad to see someone such as yourself here on the project, and that I am confident that your contributions will be valuable. Please let me know if you ever need a constable's assistance. Regards, Stephen Ewen 04:10, 14 March 2007 (CDT)

Stephen, I estimate that on Wikipedia there are about 200 low level aerospace articles of very high quality, e.g. SR-71, North American X-15, etc. Each of these articles were written as "labors of love" through the combined efforts of anonymous working and retired aeronautical engineers and amateur enthusiasts. The combined effort spent on each of those articles was anywhere from 2 to 6 man-months. I spent about 6 months writing and polishing my "atmospheric reentry" article on Wikipedia. I estimate the combined labor behind these accumulated aerospace Wikipedia articles is approximately 50 man-years. Nobody is going to expend another 50 man-years to regenerate those articles. There is simply no need to since most of the articles are excellent as they currently exist. Unfortunately all of those articles will eventually dissolve into excrement through the actions of non-experts doing micro-edits and vandalism. I know I'm preaching to the converted but writing something on Wikipedia makes about as much sense as building a sand castle on the beach when the tide is coming in. After writing my "atmospheric reentry" article, I've found myself acting like a parent watching spoiled children having a mud fight in the living room. I'm obligated to continually monitor the article or else accept the fact that my original efforts in writing it were a total waste of time. I'm sure most of the other people who contributed significant work to Wikipedia are having similar feelings about their efforts. The real problem with Wikipedia/Citizendium is not to create new work but to salvage what has already been written. There is significant value in that information. For example a trained aeronautical engineer usually bills out at about $100/hr. If you accept that most of the aerospace articles were written by aeronautical engineers and there is about 50 man-years of information out there then the raw cost of that information is worth about $ 43.8 million dollars (there are good reasons why airplanes and space exploration are so expensive). We must not sit by passively and allow this existing information to be turned into manure by vandals and idiots. Terence Quilpie 11:45, 14 March 2007 (CDT)

Dr. Quilpie, if meaningless gibberish were inserted into each Wikipedia article over the next week, it is irrelevant. This is because of the article histories. Your hard work is right there in the edit history, just as you originally placed it. I very, very, very seriously doubt that the English Wikipedia will suddenly turn up gone one day. I am certain there would first be an announcement if it were so and we'd upload the whole database overnight. Transferring articles from Wikipedia must be done in accordance with CZ:How to convert Wikipedia articles to Citizendium articles. Per your description of the articles, it may be that all that needs doing for most of them is just 2 minutes of minor editing such as removing Wikipedia-specific templates, etc. See Improving article mechanics. I know you may feel a bit alone right now, but please do not lose heart. After the public launch, I suspect the Engineering workgroup (to which I just added you!) will grow rapidly. - Stephen Ewen 13:36, 14 March 2007 (CDT)

Stephen, You said: "Per your description of the articles, it may be that all that needs doing for most of them is just 2 minutes of minor editing such as removing Wikipedia-specific templates, etc.". I found with importing my own article to Citizendium that the most time consuming task was getting all of the image files transfered. I estimate that it took about 3-4 hours to transfer my own article. A comparable amount of time would be required for each of the better quality aerospace articles of which there are hundreds. Although I understand the motivation, the decision by Citizendium to delete the Wikipedia data set and start from scratch may have been an error. It would have been much more time efficient to have gone through the Wikipedia data set with a meat clever and cut away the garbage. I assume there is an executive committee that has ultimate control over Citizendium. I'd like to send them a proposal concerning what I plan on doing at Citizendium. As it stands, I can not proceed until I know for sure what the precise constraints are concerning importation of the aerospace information from Wikipedia. Terence Quilpie 23:53, 14 March 2007 (CDT)

I'll reply on Terence's user talk page. --Larry Sanger 00:03, 15 March 2007 (CDT)

"we could really use a geography editor about right now!"

Well, perhaps. If you explain the deletion from the talk page of (as far as I can tell) the only geographer to have worked on Citizendium (ie mine), he might be a little better disposed towards the project.... Ian Cundell 09:31, 16 March 2007 (CDT)

Thanks for you note. You asked about why I removed a message from your talk page. You may or may not be aware that at one point during the period of self-registration, someone created accounts under the guise of Nancy Sculerati and did all kinds of mischief, to say the least, even spoofing all sorts of insulting messages "from her" to other users. We cleaned up after that mess, of course. However, when I saw the message on your talk page appearing to be from her, "Hey you idiot with a...", I thought I had perhaps found one that was missed. It appears now she may have been, in fun, quoting you?? Even after your note, I am still unsure about the nature of the message. Does this help you understand? Stephen Ewen 14:09, 16 March 2007 (CDT)

Thank you. I've replied via email (I got an email response before I got the notification of this message). Suffice it to say I will be astonished if the message was anything other than a good-natured response to a remark on my user page. Ian Cundell 14:28, 16 March 2007 (CDT)

Your comments re Life

Stephen: Thanks for your complimentary remarks on the Life article. I plan to work on the Glossary soon. BTW, Stephen: Thanks for the edits, good ones. Question: how do you code a 'dash' instead of a 'hyphen'? Can one code a short 'dash' as well as a long 'dash'? I prefer the latter for within-sentence clause separation. Where do I go to learn how to put diacriticals on letters? --Anthony.Sebastian (Talk) 17:02, 19 March 2007 (CDT)

Hi Anthony. You can learn to make some common diacriticals with keyboard shortcuts here. You can also insert them with character map in Windows XP (Start > Run > and type: charmap), use an online tool, or use the insert character feature of MS Word or OpenOffice. Another way is to code dashes is with html. To make a dash use one – and to make a hyphen place two –– Just click edit and look at the code here to see how I made these. Stephen Ewen 18:30, 19 March 2007 (CDT)

copyrights

Hey Stephen, you seem to know a lot. Can you tell me if this image is something we can use?[1] Follow the link in the text. --Matt Innis (Talk) 22:59, 24 March 2007 (CDT)

See http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/perez/copyright.html . In what context do you plan to use it? Stephen Ewen 23:09, 24 March 2007 (CDT)