User talk:Pat Palmer

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Revision as of 09:35, 15 June 2023 by Pat Palmer (talk | contribs) (→‎AI & WP: imaginable, but hope it doesn't come to pass)
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Returning

Thanks for the welcome message! I tried unsuccessfully to create a subpage tothe Montana article. Oh, well, I'll try again. Meantime, so as to not delay actual content creation, I decided to start the bibliography on the main article page. It can easily be moved using the cut and paste tools later when I figure out how to createt the subpage. James F. Perry (talk) 14:56, 5 November 2022 (CDT)

Login / logout problem

Every so often (like right now), I get logged out (repeatedly) while trying to make edits. James F. Perry (talk) 14:50, 14 November 2022 (CST)

indenting to clarify who is responding to what...

Pat, in this comment you interspersed your comments in the middle of my comment.

I am going to move your comments to the end of my comment, and then return here to explain why I did that. George Swan (talk) 12:47, 9 December 2022 (CST)


In my long long history on the wikipedia I routinely found myself going back and reading discussions that had taken place a long time previously, for various reasons, like that because someone claimed the discussion established a precedent.
Some discussions were easy to follow.
Some discussions were difficult to follow, because the underlying issues were difficult, but everyone had followed the general convention of indentation; of signing their messages; and of not sticking fragments of their reply in the middle of someone else's comment - as you did.
And some discussions were difficult to follow not because the underlying issues were difficult, but solely because the arguments of one of the parties had been fragmented, so it was incoherent.
If Peter, or someone else, had left a followup message, or followup messages, following one or more of your messages, the coherence of my comment would get more and more fragmented.
At first, before I had experience with these fragmented discussions, I often started off being cross with the person or persons who left those initial incoherent comments. And I would be cross with them for not even showing the basic respect for the rest of us to sign their comments.
I found I would have to use the revision control system, and step through those discussions, one revision at a time.
And, what I often found was that being cross with the incoherent guy or gal, who wouldn't or couldn't sign their messages was completely misplaced. I often found that they had left a coherent comment, and they had signed it. It only looked incoherent, because someone else responded to each paragraph, instead of leaving their comment at the end. And it only looked like they hadn't signed their messages, when they had signed them, at the end, not anticipating that it would be carved into pieces, and they hadn't signed every paragraph.
Those apparently incoherent fragments, when one made the effort to unravel them, weren't always convincing. But, yes, sometimes it was the individual whose coherent message had had its coherence destroyed who made the most convincing case.
That is why I regrouped the three fragments of your response, and put them all together at the end of the message. George Swan (talk) 13:12, 9 December 2022 (CST)
In future, when things get hot, I think it's safer to leave others' posts entirely alone and post your own new stuff always AT THE BOTTOM of a discussion. Your last 2500+ word post yesterday was placed ABOVE the post in which I had already apologized eight hours earlier and started trying to fix things. I took the placement of your response ABOVE my earlier post as you trying to justify that I was not responding to your concerns. Honestly I was really angry at you at that time. Posting at the bottom may get things out of TOPIC order but it keeps things in TIME order so people can sort of see how the exchange was going back and forth. This is my preference anyway.Pat Palmer (talk) 13:33, 20 December 2022 (CST)
  • My comment ended up in the wrong spot due to edit conflicts. I had been working on that reply, all day. I made, and abandoned, several drafts. Because my computer seemed to be on the brink of crashing, all day, I periodically saved my current draft in my keep app, and then restarted my comment. Frankly, I don't know how my comment didn't wipe out your comment. Yeah, I should have moved it to the end, but I was all tuckered out. George Swan (talk) 14:09, 20 December 2022 (CST)

responses to your recent content forum comments

I too don't enjoy confrontational adversarial interactions. George Swan (talk) 11:51, 20 December 2022 (CST)

public fora

You voiced a concern over my voicing my opinions in a (too) public a fora? Do you know who requested this move, to the public fora? George Swan (talk) 11:51, 20 December 2022 (CST)

We moved the discussion about articles about criminals to the Forum because it has wider policy implications. However, the discussion of the stub having been merged is specific to the topic of U. S. presidents, impeachment of presidents, etc. Whatever we decide on how that gets structured does NOT have any bearing on how people may decide to structure some other topic, at least as far as I am concerned right now. To me, given that no one has yet written the "Impeach efforts of all presidents" article, these little details would better reside in each presidential article in its own section. My intention in merging the stub was to strengthen the Ronald Reagan article with those juicy tidbits. Generally, I think the Reagan article is outdated and incomplete and could use tender loving care from someone. Unfortunately, I don't think I have time to tackle it myself. My first reaction to both it and Oliver North is that, to me at least, Iran Contra is one of the MAJOR things I recall about both of them, whereas at present it is glossed over quite lightly. So I would highlight those in each article. For the Reagan, also he broke the airline pilots union strike. That had never been done before and it was like an earthquake that started a huge slide of loss of power of unions in the United States, and this is (unless I missed it) completely missing from the article. Also, Reagan almost sent the country into a recession paying for Star Wars, which was also very controversial in the programmer world that I worked in, because no experienced programmer really likes the thought of trusting software that can aim a laser at the earth not to make a huge mistake.
  • Among the important principles I wrote about in the fora was my very strong concerns on the use of wikilinks to subsection headings, in article space. Your suggestion of a wikilink to Ronald Reagan#Efforts to impeach is an instance of a wikilinks to a subsection heading, in article space. If my reply was so long you didn't have time to digest my comments on that issue would you please return to it now? I really do think it is an important issue relevant to all articles. Feel free to initiate a new section there, Forum_Talk:Content#wikilinks to a subsection headings, if you would prefer to discuss it, in general terms, there.
I think it is a bad practice, for the reasons I stated, in the fora. George Swan (talk) 14:04, 20 December 2022 (CST)
I agree with you that it's not something to do a lot of, but sometimes, it's the only option at hand short of actually duplicating material. Your point about someone changing the section header later is a good one.Pat Palmer (talk) 14:19, 20 December 2022 (CST)

thanks for restoring the article

I see you restored Efforts to impeach Ronald Reagan. Thanks for that. George Swan (talk) 11:51, 20 December 2022 (CST)

Yeah, sorry I was grumpy. It being in the forums upset me, which I wasn't able to articulate at first. In the olden days of this wiki, there were these very nasty Forum fights and I don't want us to live like that any more. But it was a good brawl. I wish we could go make up over a beer or tea. Also, please remember I'm learning on the job without anyone to train me. John S. was training me but he's not able to right now. And recently I've been forced to learn and do a number of things that I genuinely hate, such as fixing DNS so email messages wouldn't get sent to people's Spam folders, and it made me want to slit my throat. So I'm grumpy.Pat Palmer (talk) 13:14, 20 December 2022 (CST)

merging a short, unlinked stubs

WRT merging a short, unlinked stubs, in general...

  • The Citizendium has what, about 10,000-11,000 articles, right now?
  • How many of them are stubs?
  • How many of them are unreferenced?
  • How many of them have no incoming links? Special pages:orphaned pages seems to report 641 "lonely pages". However, that number seems low, and some of the items on that list are subpages, not articles.

Are orphaned pages more of a concern than unreferenced pages? I know the legacy of the editor hierarchy, where editors were appointed who were competent to write articles that would not comply with the wikipedia restriction against "original research" allowed editors to write some fine articles that were unreferenced. In the early days of wikipedia lots of articles were routinely unreferenced. I think I did relax enough to start some small unreferenced stubs during the April to September period.

With regard to Efforts to impeach Ronald Reagan it had a Related Articles subpage.

Were Related Articles subpages supposed to replace the See also section on wikipedia articles? On the wikipedia a link from a See also section was enough to take an article off the orphan list.

I suggest another choice to take Efforts to impeach Ronald Reagan off the orphan list would have been to link to it, from the Ronald Reagan article, or some other related article. Would you have still been concerned it was an orphan if it had been linked to from Ronald Reagan/Related Articles? George Swan (talk) 11:51, 20 December 2022 (CST)

Please link it however you think is best, but it should be linked in both directions. Let it not be an orphan. Also, please see my comments above under "public fora" for suggestions for the Ronald Reagan article, if you are interested. I will try to copy those comments to the article Talk page later.Pat Palmer (talk) 13:08, 20 December 2022 (CST)

attribution when copying

Sorry Pat, but, in this comment you seemed to be saying you thought that only content that appeared on the wikipedia required attribution. I think User:Peter Jackson will join me in asserting that, since the Citizendium also relies on the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 license material copied from one article to another requires the same kind of edit summary I talked about in the fora, unless the copier drafted the text in the earlier article, as well. Richard Jensen, Mary Ash, Hayford Pierce - content they wrote is supposed to be attributed to them, when copied, even when they may have retired from the project.

Normally, since I have been prepared to put some of my intellectual property into the public domain, I wouldn't insist on attribution. In that particular case, however, it would look like someone on the Citizendium was copying the Wikipedia. That is why I raised it as an issue.

When I first saw that there were clones of the wikipedia, and I looked to see how they handled attribution, I found: (1) some wikipedia mirrors didn't provide any attribution; (2) some merely said something like "(some of) this material originally appeared on the wikipedia"; finally (3) some mirror sites list the wiki-ids of the wikipedia contributors who worked on the article.

Citizendium's {{WPAttribution}} falls into the 2nd class.

I just checked CZ:Creative_Commons_CC-by-sa_3.0#4._Restrictions. It says: "You must include a copy of, or the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) for, this License with every copy of the Work You Distribute or Publicly Perform." {{WPAttribution}} doesn't do that.

Here is the equivalent template, from wikialpha - [1]. Note it does give a link to a license, and it does help the porter to point to the wikipedia version. George Swan (talk) 12:34, 20 December 2022 (CST)

George, in case you missed it in the heat of the discussion on the Content forum, and again on the Talk page of Ronald Reagan, I acknowledged that it was a mistake that I made in not attributing the work to you when I merged it, if for no other reason than that you personally cared about it. I will try very hard not to make that mistake again. I am surprised to learn that people consider this being a big deal. The page history should always show who contributed what bits, and as long as I note WHERE it came from, the page history will show who wrote it. I have never thought of the bits of an article that I contribute as being anyone's intellectual property. I understand that Citizendium content can only be reused outside the wiki IF there is attribution, but it's a new concept TO ME that I have to give attribution if I move someone's three sentences from one page to another. I will take this under advisement and try to learn more, so please bear with me. Believe me, I have been working in here since 2007 and you are the first person who ever complained about inter-article attribution to me, and I've reorganized dozens of articles. Maybe I've been living in a state of sin? Pat Palmer (talk) 12:55, 20 December 2022 (CST)
Yes, I did see that.
Um, in this particular case, you didn't turn Efforts to impeach Ronald Reagan into redirect, preserving its revision history. You deleted it, so no revision history to refer to. I honestly didn't know, until you restored it, whether I made any improvements once I ported it. (I hadn't, but I added some new material, today.) Nor could I tell whether I had added a Talk:Efforts to impeach Ronald Reagan#provenance subsection. I should have, and I hadn't done so, until today.
Prior to porting over a hundred article here, where I was the primary author, or sole author, I ported hundreds to wikialpha. So that is hundreds of instances where I took a good look at the revision histories, and gave serious thought as to whether I genuinely remained the sole author, right to the end, and if I didn't at what point I stopped being the sole author. When I port an article for which I cannot claim to be the sole author, I usually go back to the last version for which I can claim to be sole author, and port that.
It is bad news from the wikipedia - when I look at the revision histories of articles I started, but hadn't worked on since then, they have all been edited by other people, but those edits, sometimes dozen of edits, are either edits to the metadata, or trivial edits to the spelling, punctuation, and so on. The really aggressive rude quality control volunteers have effectively driven most of the intelligent people who had been enjoying adding content, by turning that from fun, to a chore.
With regard to attribution when copying from one article to another, I am sure it is a wrinkle that practically everyone over looks. Most of my copying of passages would have been of passages that I originally wrote, that could be re-used. Some people might argue that, even then, it would have been best practice to acknowledge the material was copied, just to avoid false triggers of copyright concern. I had this issue pointed out to me about five or six years ago. While most of my inter-article copies, prior to that, would have been of material I wrote, there were probably some instances that weren't. I think it is not worth looking for them.
Copyright triggered some weird concerns on the wikipedia.
The WMF called upon all the wikis to draft a non-free use policy. The non-free use rules adopted on the language wiki are narrower than the "fair use" provisions in US law. Even so, there are quality control volunteers who want to further restrict the wikipedia's use of fair use images, even more stringently than the already narrow policy. I never saw any explanation for why these further restrictions were necessary, or desirable. It seems that a small group of people with extreme views drafted the non-free policy.
Another weird concern is "close-paraphrasing". There are a sincere group, which includes a bunch of intelligent administrators, who get riled up by what they call "close-paraphrasing".
Near as I can tell they don't only mean going through a passage, with a thesaurus, and replacing every other big word with a synonym, but without changing the word order. I agree, the thesaurus approach would be a problem. A robot could perform the thesaurus trick. Or it could be performed by someone who didn't really understand English. True paraphrasing requires genuinely understanding what the original passage said.
I'd notices these people, from afar, then one of them rewrote a passage I wrote, claiming that my version lapsed from their interpretation of close-paraphrasing. It was bizarre. IIRC, the passage was in the 80-150 characters long, so marginal as to whether it measured up to de minimis, and, worse, their replacement wasn't accurate. They hadn't understood what they thought needed replacement. George Swan (talk) 13:45, 20 December 2022 (CST)
In retrospect, I should have done the cautious thing of putting a query on the stub's Talk page and waiting a bit before acting. But if I had, I wouldn't have learned all the things that I've learned. But still, my bad. Next time, I'll go at it more slowly. This place has been so empty for so long, it's actually a relief that someone cares enough for an argument to erupt.Pat Palmer (talk) 14:25, 20 December 2022 (CST)

Request for subpages

When you have a chance, the following new article needs subpages created: https://citizendium.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Giants Thanks! Mark Widmer (talk) 18:02, 17 January 2023 (CST)

What items are allowed on the platform?

Hi Pat Palmer, thanks for the help. I wanted to ask which articles are allowed on the platform and which ones cannot be published. I ask as soon as possible so as not to have problems. Question Can articles from artists, singers, athletes, actors be on the platform? Can you take wikipedia sources as a base and redact them here to augment Citizendium articles? Can I create an article about myself as an artist or is it prohibited? Should articles be long or short? Do they have to be well written? Jorge Diazgranados (talk) 2 May 2023 (CDT)

New Jersey!

That that's really fun that you're developing the New Jersey article. I think it's an important state, one I have a lot of experience with in person. Bravo! Jack S. Byrom (talk) 13:58, 19 March 2023 (CDT)

Thank you, Jack! The Wikipedia version of Wikipedia:New Jersey is bristling with details, but it's impossible to get any sense of the place from reading it. Feel free to meddle with New Jersey if you have ideas.Pat Palmer (talk) 15:22, 19 March 2023 (CDT)
well, I'm glad you're going to focus it down to the important aspects of the state. My firsthand knowledge is outdated and is mostly of truckstops and auto auctions! But the colonial history of the state is amazing. Jack S. Byrom (talk) 15:52, 19 March 2023 (CDT)

Trying Again

Seeing if this works, apparently it didn't earlier this morning. Carl Ferré (talk) 12:32, 6 April 2023 (CDT)

Questions about creating new page

Hi, I just created a new page recently, NCS Group But there is a box shows up at the top of the page, I am not so sure what mistake I had made:

You may see this box for one of two reasons. Either: 

       A - New page has been created, or subpages template was added to an existing page
       B - Cluster move is in progress

Goh Kok Keong (talk) 9 May 2023 (CDT)

Laptop kaput

Hello, Pat. Hope you're okay. I'm afraid my laptop isn't and I'm going to shop around before I buy the next one. I can look in via tablet but that's not practical for editing. Will be back soon but not sure when. Best wishes, John (talk) 07:26, 19 May 2023 (CDT)

Farm Credit Administration

Hello, Pat. Could you look at this one, please, as I think it should go. Thanks. John (talk) 16:55, 26 May 2023 (CDT)

Good find. It's gone. Pat Palmer (talk) 07:56, 29 May 2023 (CDT)
Thanks, Pat. John (talk) 09:27, 29 May 2023 (CDT)

Subgroups

Hello again, Pat. Hope you are well. Looking through our subgroups, I think we should delete History Subgroup and Hobbies Subgroup because we have workgroups of those names, and also Cinema Subgroup which is effectively an unused duplicate of the film subgroup. All three are presently empty. What do you think?

Earlier, I finished a survey of the workgroups where I'd seen a lot of articles that had metadata issues causing them to be indexed incorrectly in an unlabelled bunch at the end of each workgroup. It was usually because of the abc parameter not being completed and some lacked the closing subpage line which meant they didn't display the metadata info. I've fixed all the ones I found.

All the best. John (talk) 05:37, 27 May 2023 (CDT)

Thanks John. I had to figure out how subgroups work (sort of). I did delete these, thanks! Pat Palmer (talk) 12:04, 27 May 2023 (CDT)
They take a bit of thinking about, Pat. I've got a routine for creating them as there are certain dependencies:
1. create Template:Ology Subgroup page and set it contents to {{Subgroup|Ology|Workgroup(s)}}
2. create Category:Ology Subgroup page and set it contents to {{Ology Subgroup}}
That seems to work. John (talk) 16:15, 27 May 2023 (CDT)
Thanks, John! I think only two steps are needed as shown above. The CZ:Ology page is not necessary. In one case, someone used it to write some text describing what the Category:Subgroup was intended to be used for, but most are self-explanatory and do not need that.
That will make things a lot easier, Pat. You asked in an earlier post if I know what the CZ pages are for and, as you say, I can only think they might be used for comments but, if it all necessary, a comment can go in the category page itself. Is there a way of removing all the CZ pages in a bundle? There are still over 200 of them. John (talk) 09:27, 29 May 2023 (CDT)

Sports subgroups

Hello, Pat. I think we have too many of these as the majority have only a handful of articles at most and little chance of substantial expansion.

I've been working through the aquatics sports and I think they should all be merged into Category:Aquatics Subgroup so that has left the following eight empty. Do you think they should go or would you keep some in case they might be expanded?

Thanks again. John (talk) 11:33, 29 May 2023 (CDT)

Groups & subgroups were supposed to be of people, not articles. With so few people actually working here, it seems rather pointless having even Workgroups, let alone subgroups. WGs are written into the metadata software, I imagine, so it might be hard to change them. What you're really thinking about here is categories. I don't know whether we've got the right software to do them as in WP. Peter Jackson (talk) 05:16, 30 May 2023 (CDT)
I see. I had the impression the groups were subject-based but you're right. I used to favour categories once upon a time but on WP they've gone completely overboard. I think we do need a way of classifying and grouping articles, though. For example, we have a lot of content about the Second World War – although that is not a subgroup – which we should hold together somehow. On the other hand, if we kept Category:Sports Workgroup, for example, I think its 105 affiliated subgroups could literally be decimated to just the few major sports and the Olympics. Perhaps we should open a forum discussion to collect ideas? John (talk) 05:54, 30 May 2023 (CDT)
The WW II articles are a mess, and I'm working on trying to organize them. I'm just mulling how to fix it.Pat Palmer (talk) 10:21, 30 May 2023 (CDT)
As for Subgroups, my preference is that we NOT create many of them, and mostly get rid of the ones we have. What they really do is put a Category tag on articles based on what we place in the subgroup section of the metadata. Of course, the Subgroups are visible within the Workgroup, which could be helpful. So I'm not saying NEVER use them, but let's use them sparingly when they are really helpful. The Netherlands subgroup is NOT helpful in my opinion. Workgroups, while not under active cultivation, still serve the purpose of grouping articles into broad classes that can be browsed and examined by new contributors or someone just looking to find a new topic to work on within their area of interest. Pat Palmer (talk) 10:28, 30 May 2023 (CDT)
AND topics like this really belong in the Content Forum (or another Forum) where other contributors may see them now or in the future. Pat Palmer (talk) 10:30, 30 May 2023 (CDT)

Need help with Nguyen_Ngoc_Bich_(1911-1966)

Hi Pat, I created the page Nguyen_Ngoc_Bich_(1911-1966), but could not fill out the MetaData Form, since "this form" is empty. See my email to you with screenshots. Thanks. Loc Vu-Quoc (talk) 08:35, 10 June 2023 (CDT)

Loc, I changed the article name to Nguyen Ngoc Bich to fit Citizendium's naming conventions and manually created the Metadata page and other associated subpages for you. Sadly, the automation for creating these does not work. TI'm happy to do it for you on any new articles you create, or you can learn the method yourself by reading CZ:Creating_an_article_with_subpages. Thanks for contributing to the wiki! Pat Palmer (talk) 10:03, 10 June 2023 (CDT)

AI & WP

As a computer scientist you should have a better idea than I, but from what I've heard there seems to be nothing to stop propagandists & vandals using AI to flood WP with masses of plausible fake material, backed by fake citations to real but obscure print publications. WP's own bots couldn't check them, & beyond a certain point they wouldn't have enough meatware to do so, making their model unworkable without serious changes. Our real names policy should potect us in the unlikely event that anyone would think us worth bothering with. Peter Jackson (talk) 04:52, 14 June 2023 (CDT)

It will be interesting to see whether anyone decides to try this in the future; it wouldn't happen without signification effort. If it does, it will be just another endictment of the anonymous contributor model. Pat Palmer (talk) 09:35, 15 June 2023 (CDT)
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