User talk:Pat Palmer

Pat Palmer

Current talk page

Archive 1, Archive 2, Archive 3, Archive 4, Archive 5, Archive 6

Schmitz

Hi Pat,

Great minds! I was just about to ask YOU if you approved of all my niggling little edits. Glad that you do! This, actually, is how CZ and WP IDEALLY should work, at least from MY point of view. Someone like you (or me, for that matter) starts putting in a LOT of basic material that maybe is jumbled and disorgangized and without precise sources and then someone else(s) comes along and dots the Is and crosses the Ts. I'm certainly happy to do so in the present case! Hayford Peirce (talk) 16:45, 8 August 2020 (UTC)

Templates for acknowledging contributors

I've unearthed a couple of old templates here and here that could be used for acknowledging article authors in the future. John Stephenson (talk) 17:57, 15 August 2020 (UTC)

Interesting, and yes maybe. Pat Palmer (talk) 18:05, 15 August 2020 (UTC)

Data visualisation / visualization

Hi Pat

Thanks for your comments. I'll leave the spelling of visualis/zation up to you. I'm British so have my habits, no doubt those in the US have theirs :-)

I didn't apply any links or citations at this stage as I was unsure if you believed the article was ready for that yet.

Thanks! Andrew Watson (talk) 06:00, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

Hi Pat

I've only just seen the message you left about images - all emails from this site (and quite a few others) were put into my spam folder. Agreed, images would help and I don't know how to add them. Is there a guide on how to do this?

Andrew Watson (talk) 16:00, 19 October 2020 (UTC)

Pali Text Society

Initial draft of article now complete, though I may well think of changes later. Peter Jackson (talk) 09:44, 19 September 2020 (UTC)

Paris TN

Dear Pat. I respectfully suggest that you perhaps have a "conflict of interest" regarding slavery / confederate statues connected with slavery in this town. Pradyumna Singh (talk) 18:09, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

Signed Articles

I'm sure you've figured out by now that there is no official / approved policy on signed articles which gives anyone special priviliges to capture topics for themselves. So what say we edit collaboratively and mutually respect our respective editorial skills, inputs and feedback ? Pradyumna Singh (talk) 03:25, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

I'm a bit rusty...

I'm a bit rusty...

and I am having trouble uploading properly licensed images taken by other people.

The upload page tells me I have to select a license, but the field for doing so is blank.

I tried putting an explicit {{CC-BY-3.0}} in the notes section, in case the upload page was clever enough to scan the pages for permissible licenses. Okay, that was grasping at straws. It didn't work.

I considered initially uploading it as PD, and then trying to manually correct it later.

What do you recommend?

Can I circumvent havin to go through the upload page? Do you recommend just filling out the template? I can do that.

Cheers! George Swan (talk) 16:44, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

• Oops. Pilot error. I seem to have clicked on "open access journals" , not from WMF. I think I would still like the option of just filling in a template though. Cheers! George Swan (talk) 16:50, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

• Do definitions include wikilinks? Thanks! George Swan (talk) 17:50, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

They can do. I tend to use them, but a little more sparsely than in a main article. John Stephenson (talk) 15:40, 11 March 2021 (UTC)

• Thanks! George Swan (talk) 03:09, 12 March 2021 (UTC)

Help with footnoting

My apologies if you're not the one to ask about this topic. If that's the case, perhaps you could point me in the right direction. I added an article this afternoon, but I have been searching in vain for how to add footnotes to it. Where could I get assistance for doing so? Thanks you! Scott Thompson (talk)

Adding photos

We do have a photograph of The Mother Church that can be added to the Christian Science article. Thanks for any pointers you can provide on that process. Scott Thompson (talk) 22:17, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

Part of Pable Picasso's famous 1905-06 portrait of Gertrude Stein.

There is an Upload file link in the menus on the lower right. When you upload the image file, the wiki will ask you questions about permissions, such as whether the image can be reused by anyone else, with or without attribution. Fill out everything you can, and then at the end after you've saved the page with the image on it, it will show you the code which needs to be added to the article to display the image, something like this: {{Image|Gertrude stein-1.jpg|right|150px|Part of Pable Picasso's famous 1905-06 portrait of Gertrude Stein.}}, which would display as shown on this comment. The parts are: {{filename.ext | placement (left,middle or right) | pixel width of thumbnail | caption}}. Whatever you do, don't lose the link to the image before you get it placed on the article; it can be difficult finding those later. Pat Palmer (talk) 23:23, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

Wakefield article

Thanks for the welcome and the assistance. This is my first attempt at an article so any help or advice is appreciated. I actually have a number of pictures, some of my dad and his shipmates, some of the ship and some of the ports they visited. I will see if I can figure out how to move the part about my dad down to a "Talk" section as that sounds like a good idea. I want to do another article on an interactive TV project I was involved in 1994-1998 in Orlando Fl. I think it would fit in the computer section of Citizendium. I tried to get it on Wikipedia but kept getting it rejected because of various reasons. There is an article there on the Full Service Network but it is about a different company but does include a section on the FSN I was involved with. I digress. Sorry for being so wordy. Thanks again for the assistance.

I tried to add the first part of the article to a talk section but now can't seem to get back to the original article to take that section out so it isn't in 2 places?

I think I figured out how to delete the first paragraph but did I add the talk section correctly?

I will start checking out the public dominion pictures and compare them to what I have and try to determine which ones to add. Thanks again. User:Warren William Mahan Mar 28, 2021

CZ: ad blurb

Pat, I just read this little bit on your Sandbox (and removed a word that looked to be left over from a previous sentence). It's a nice, sincere, gentle, welcoming statement. Good work! Roger A. Lohmann (talk) 11:48, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Talk:Gaius Iulius Caesar (name)/Draft

For some reason the system won't let me edit that page. (Maybe all Draft talk pages?)

That's an error which I'll fix. John Stephenson (talk) 13:26, 11 October 2021 (UTC)

Someone seems to have mixed up different things. Czar/tsar and Kaiser are derived from Caesar, but that didn't originally mean ruler or anything like that. It meant something like hairy. Chess comes from Persian Shah, king. Peter Jackson (talk) 10:15, 11 October 2021 (UTC)

WikiIndex

You might want to have a look into updating [1]. Peter Jackson (talk) 11:37, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

your assistance please...

I saw you have been active recently, maybe you can help me.

I ported a few articles yesterday. I was a bit rusty, but the special skills for Citizendium are coming back for me.

I first signed up over a decade ago. I spoke to my young neighbour about encouraging him to sign up, build some good skills...

But when I checked out the signup page, to see what has changed, it seems to be out of service. Do you know what that means? It doesn't mean the Citizendium is closed to new contributors, does it?

Cheers! George Swan (talk) 15:01, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

Intel 4004

Let me know where I should ask questions like this.

I worked on the Intel 4004 stub article, in 2012. I looked at it again, and saw one of the two references I provided, in 2012, had gone 404. So had webcitation.org, the cite where I thought I could mirror those references.

Luckily archive.org had archived versions, as well. However, the {{cite web}} template does not seem to have field to force the link to the archive to show, instead of linking to the original 404 location. Am I doing something wrong?

And, can you tell me where I should ask questions like this?

Cheers! George Swan (talk) 18:54, 28 February 2022 (UTC)

Deferring to the big cheese

Back when I was active here, a dozen years ago, I remember one contributor discussing with Larry his option to follow the Nelson Mandela / George Washington model of leadership... He explained, and I think he agreed, that Jimbo Wales generally did not follow this model. Both Washington and Mandela had fans, often who had worked closely with them, who first praised them, and then encouraged these two first Presidents to forget about all this democracy nonsense, and re-elections. They told Washington and Mandela that the only way to really make sure their vision came to fruition was to hold on to power, and declare themselves "President for Life".

Since reading that discussion I saw many instances where I thought Mr Wales was holding on to too much power. Discussions where he voiced an opinion stopped being about the original substantive issue, but instead polarized between whether one supported Mr Wales.

Larry, my hats off to him, saw the wisdom of the Mandela / Washington model.

Nevertheless, you took on the official leadership cap here. Thank you very much! And, I think I need to tell you I will do my best to defer to suggestions from you.

I don't know you, but so far you seem to be a very tactful considerate leader. So, thank you for that!

I am sure you remember Howard Berkowitz. He was extremely critical of many things about my contributions here, including, he didn't like me choosing to write about topics that he considered of relatively low importance, just because they were things that interested me, until after the topics he considered of higher importance had been written.

Right now I have been porting articles from the wikipedia because I am concerned my bad faith challengers will try to delete articles just because I wrote them. which means, of course, I have ported a lot of articles that are way down the hierarchy.

Pat, I don't want you to notice this, get concerned about it, yet feel uneasy about raising that concern with me.

If you think it would be better to have additional people weigh in, in one of the fora, feel free to say so.

I guess I am repeating, a third time, my thanks for you taking a leadership role...

Cheers! George Swan (talk) 23:44, 3 March 2022 (UTC)

New Server Feedback

Pat, Received the memo on the trial of the new server and the separate second mailing. Log-in worked well with no problems. Everything else seems as it should be. Roger A. Lohmann (talk) 07:38, 17 March 2022 (CDT)

• Thanks to everyone who is working hard on the upgrade!

I tried creating a new article... John Wordsworth (1776-1805). No problems there, until I tried creating the subpages.

Template:John Wordworth (1776-1805) got created on the old server.

I tried cutting and pasting that here. Maybe I did that wrong. It doesn't seem to work.

So I went to leave a description in the Technical Forum. But that sent me to the old server too.

I am not complaining. I know it is growing pains, from the port. You might already be well aware. But I thought I should document it, somewhere.

Again, thanks for all the hard work everybody!

Cheers! George Swan (talk) 12:51, 17 March 2022 (CDT)

• Looks like the upgrade is complete(?) Let me repeat my thanks to everyone who worked on that! George Swan (talk) 13:05, 19 March 2022 (CDT)

Got it...

Um, sort order is in the metadate page. Duh. Got it. Thanks... George Swan (talk) 02:53, 26 March 2022 (CDT)

https://citizendium.org/wiki/index.php?title=Kate_Macdonald_Butler&diff=next&oldid=865761

Yes! Good spotting.Pat Palmer (talk)

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 - [2]. 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)