User talk:Aleta Curry/Archive 6

Aleta Curry

Current talk page

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

 Where Aleta lives it is approximately: 12:48

---

Aleta stops into the forums somewhere between 0630 and 0900, and works on the wiki between about 1200 and 1500, time and weather permitting.

---

Archive

Hi, Aleta, hope that's what you wanted. --Peter Schmitt 01:06, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

Just so. Thank you! Aleta Curry 01:47, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

;-)

Hi Aleta and thanks, it's nice to see you too...

Disambiguation

Your points are well taken. I have a challenge myself with what I think is reasonably proper disambiguation, although it may well need to become a cluster -- Nazi Chancellery (disambiguation). There were three Chancellery organizations, plus the Old and New Chancellery Buildings, plus the former Office of the President of the Reich that had a similar function. "Chancellery" in general needs to be disambiguated, in the formal use in international relations: the "Embassy" is where the Ambassador lives, while the "Chancellery" is an office building with diplomatic immunity.

I'd welcome some collaboration in trying to develop an EC guideline here, as well as ideas on the specific topic -- I'm debating whether to create Chancellery (disambiguation) and if the Nazi disambiguation should move there. Right now, the individual Nazi chancelleries are lemmas, but certainly could become articles of their own. Howard C. Berkowitz 01:47, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

Because we now have a cluster system, I'm conservation in disambiguation. I'd say disambiguation pages are like introductions, properly made when you *have* to, not whenever you could. I would think the Nazi Chancellery would work best as one well-developed cluster, rather than separate articles with a paucity of information on each. You wouldn't, for examples, have separate annotated bibliographies, catalogues and related articles for each, with no overlap, would you? Aleta Curry 02:42, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

New user Thomas W. Reynolds

Aleta, this new user has just been confirmed as a Literature author. Perhaps you might wish to post a welcome on his Talk page. Milton Beychok 19:02, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Done! Thanks, Milt. Aleta Curry 23:25, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

ABC Drive Suggestions

Suggestions Aleta:

Gödel, Kurt

Any breed beginning with a 'G', e.g.

• Gordon Setter
• Glen of Imaal Terrier
• Great Pyrenees

Thomas Simmons 20:23, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Financial Report as of March 15, 2011

Please read our Financial Report as of March 15, 2001 for complete details on our financial history and our current financial situation. If you have any questions, please ask them on CZ Talk:Donate. Milton Beychok 01:00, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

You can see my talk page comments

You can see my talk page comments concerning Aviation Week. Thanks and have a lovely day! Mary Ash 10:13, 10 May 2011 (CDT)

Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri

This is really interesting. A community neighboring the one where I'm planning to do my dissertation research in Ecuador is well known for indigenous art so I've been thinking a lot about indigenous people and the art market. I want to know more! -Joe Quick 14:37, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

It's an area in which I am woefully ignorant, Joe. I'm going to make an effort to learn more, too! Aleta Curry 20:48, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

Hmm. Maybe I can find time to write an article about the painters in Cotopaxi. A Google image search for "Tigua Ecuador" brings up some nice examples of the style that has developed. -Joe Quick 21:21, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

Images are a problem here, on two scores: 1) the usual intellectual property stuff and 2) aboriginal beliefs about the (non)use of images of deceased persons.

I'll have a look for "Tigua Ecuador", though, I'd love to compare styles - wonder if they're similar or nothing like?

Aleta Curry 21:38, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

And there's my answer: 'nothing like'! :) Aleta Curry 21:40, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

Stubs

You recently made this comment regarding stubs on CZ:

Our general policy is to encourage people to write to the full extent and limit of their knowledge on a subject, rather than just to put down a sentence or two with random statistics. That latter approach seems to work well at wikis with thousands or hundreds of thousands of users, where somebody will come along and expand on one's work within just a few hours. Here at CZ, it's been consistently upheld that the emphasis should be on quality rather than quantity. In fact, several years ago, some people said we shouldn't allow 'stubs' at all. The final consensus, though, was that stubs were okay as long as you wrote a really good stub.

Citizendiums policy on stubs says:

You are welcome to contribute a short start of a new article, called a "stub", of about 150-250 words usually.

Stubs may be written solely to introduce the topic of the article in such a way that you or other authors can use the stub as written to continue on to develop the article.

Some people believe that stubs encourage others to help "build the web." Many people can write excellent stubs or short developing articles even when they don't have the knowledge to expand them. So if you feel tempted to "turn a red link blue" with a stub, feel free.

CZ:Under Construction says:

The Citizendium, like virtually all wikis, could have an "Under Construction" sign on every page. Wikis are not conducive to instant perfection; high quality is achieved gradually, over time and usually after quite a bit of interaction with others.

So what does that mean? It means: go ahead, add something. It doesn't have to be perfect.

This means that we will tolerate what are called "stub entries" or just "stubs."

Please pay attention to the Citizendium literature that you do not contradict its message when advising new users. David Finn 10:01, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

A long "Stub" becomes a "developing" article. Just change the meta-data. Anyway, the whole concept of a "stub" is a WP artifact, and the category probably should be re-thought. Russell D. Jones 15:26, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

There was a very lengthy discussion of this by the EC about a year ago at http://ec.citizendium.org/wiki/EC:PR-2010-021, resulting in a passed Resolution of the same number. Hayford Peirce 16:05, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

Okay, so according to that resolution, what's the method of implementation? How do I categorize an article as "Insufficient"? and doesn't that resolution make the policies that Aleta was working on and that David was commenting on obsolete? The meta-data still has me categorizing articles as Developing, developed, or stub. And the Subpages template still categorizes the same way. It seems we have a distinction without a difference. Russell D. Jones 16:20, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

My recollection is that it started out as something very different, then got replaced by an amendment that completely changed the meaning of the original proposal. You may note, if you scroll down to the bottom of the proposal, that I was the only person to vote against it, one of the very few times I have ever voted against a Motion. My reason was that the Motion didn't actually do anything useful. It may surprise those Citizens (like the now-banished Howard and a couple of others) who think that I impose my dictatorial will upon a supine Council whenever I feel like proposing some new idiocy that I am, actually, but one of seven, and that what I want does not always get enacted. Hayford Peirce 17:50, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

It got started as a suggestion from me (sorry!) to define the minimum and maximum length of a stub, since some stubs could be recategorised as 'developing' on the grounds of length, and likewise others downgraded to stub status. (A robot could have been used to count the words and change the metadata, but robots aren't around much these days). This spawned instead a rule that would require quite a bit of technical work to implement, for the most part simply relabels existing categories, but does not clearly distinguish external articles from ones that are simply poor. I hope the [[Category: External Articles]] tag would be maintained, especially since a bug some years ago knocked off the WP checkbox for many articles. John Stephenson 02:51, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

I don't think that a purely "mechanical" classification (by length) is useful because -- depending on the subject -- even a few words can transport the basic information while a text consisting of many words may be almost meaningless or even misleading. Even if non-external pages are marked as "status 4" they can easily be identified from the page histories (of page, talk, and Metadata). This is not a real complication because such checking is always necessary when evaluating a page. --Peter Schmitt 11:55, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

(unindent)
Unfortunately, in many cases it is a long way to implement some new features. But one has to begin somewhere, even if the realization remains incomplete (and sometimes even contradictory). Both the subpages and metadate templates will need revision, but this needs time and careful planning in order to avoid chaos.
Until technical changes can be made, the two systems will have to coexist, but this is quite feasible because the difference between the "old" and the "new" system is not too large:

• comprehensive and extended can be seen as (re)definitions of developed and developing,
• basic is a more restrictive classification than stub -- the content must make sufficient sense,
• insufficient is meant for all pages that need some action, and this includes the previous classification external, but also too incomplete, unreliable, or badly written, pages. Thus some "stubs" (if detected) should be downgraded to Status 4.
• The newly introduced "removal" procedure can be used to deal with the worst pages.

--Peter Schmitt 01:14, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

Perhaps the EC can recruit citizens (agents) to perform the tasks to help implement their decisions. If we wait too long, it gets too confusing to remember which respolutions were made. I forgot about this one. D. Matt Innis 01:54, 26 November 2011 (UTC)

It went out of my mind since 2011 has been a bit of a year from hell :( But it raises the question of how we can implement far-reaching regulations introduced by the councils, when we're still a small project. John Stephenson 02:51, 26 November 2011 (UTC)