Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 19:11, 29 August 2009

Please post new messages at the bottom of the talk page, use headings when starting new talk topics, and sign all contributions.

Portal:Thailand

Thanks for adding more item. I think the Hem article is interesting. Too bad there's no image we can use for the portal. It's such a pain that those deletionists don't consider portals worthy of fair-use! --Melanochromis 17:16, 4 August 2007 (UTC)

Day of rest / Sabbath

Some definitions of Sabbath are examples of a Day of rest, but they are not one and the same. The definition of Day of rest is linked from several other articles where a link to Sabbath (in lieu of Day of rest) would not properly define the term. As the definition stands on its own, as no content was merged into the Sabbath article, and as it would not make logical sense to place it in the Sabbath article, the changes have been reverted. Alansohn 20:02, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

Kievan Rus

You are in danger of violating the three-revert rule on Kievan Rus'. Please cease further reverts or you may be blocked from editing. --133.41.84.206 08:10, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

Herbert Dingle

I've never run across you editing to the best of my recollection, but you seem a reasonable sort. Perhaps you could take initiative on an RFC or something? At this point I'm going to guess that nobody there sees me as a neutral good faith party (I think I've managed to somehow be on the opposite "side" of everyone there)... otherwise I would do it. Consensus should not be all that hard to achieve with some influx of outside opinions.--Isotope23 14:14, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

I've thought about this, and I'm going to refrain from starting an RfC, though it's probably the best way forward. I'd rather see how others handle it, especially as I'm intending to mostly ignore wikipedia for quite a while due to other projects. Tim Shuba 04:56, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Fair enough!--Isotope23 13:53, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Advice

Yours. Thanks for it. Cheers, dfg (talk) 06:19, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Speed of light

Hi Tim. The fight against the crackpots continues on WP.

Your presence at the above article would be much appreciated. One editor continues to fill the article with his own personal and somewhat idiosyncratic views. Martin Hogbin (talk) 19:57, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Ah, that's quite the group of collaborators you are running with at that article. It doesn't look like fun at all to get involved. One problem evident there, which is endemic throughout wikipedia, is that disputes often lead to an insane number of footnotes, practically one for every sentence. Not only does this make the article less verifiable and reliable as a whole, but it encourages disjointed writing and lack of cohesion. For example, if there is agreement that the book by Zhang is an important reference for the subject, what a real article writer would do is to present the gist of how it relates to the article subject, by employing a carefully constructed set of sentences or paragraphs. Sourcing every sentence in a paragraph or section willy-nilly from different sources leads to confusion, and promotes shoddy writing. Oh, speaking of shoddy writing and bogus research, look at this excellent citation. Not only does the referenced page not support anything in the paragraph and does not refer to the speed of light even once, what it does say in part is the following.

This kind of stuff gives me a chuckle. Primarily, I use wikipedia for enjoyment rather than attempt to edit seriously. Since I am aware of how and why so much blatantly bogus information gets into articles, and why a large number of articles are highly unreliable, it doesn't affect me adversely as a user. Therefore, whether the speed of light article gets better or gets worse isn't too important to me. Good luck, though. Tim Shuba (talk) 08:09, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, I will battle on, it was an FA once. Martin Hogbin (talk) 20:45, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Your warning on my page

Tim, I undid your warning on my talk page. I guess you accidentally put it on mine, where surely you had someone else in mind. The edit I made was this one.

Or, on second thought... Did I sadly miss a good joke here? In that case... good one, I'll gladly undo my undoing ;-)

Let me know. Cheers, DVdm (talk) 16:22, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

It wasn't really a serious warning. Just read it carefully ;). Tim Shuba (talk) 16:38, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Reading it carefully was what I did and I couldn't make any sense of it indeed. Now I can :-)

Anyway, I can't believe my eyes when I read the talk page and see this David and this Bruce at work. Good grief, this is insane, worse than Usenet. I'm a bit afraid that the Bruce character cannot be stopped doing what it's planning to do :-|

DVdm (talk) 16:47, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

I did make irreverent comments concerning one of them on the administrators' incident board last month. Yes, it's crazy on one hand, but also instructive. Now I see a claim that the speed of light is exact only in SI units. Hmm, I wonder which system gives a different answer. Of course official definitions of non-SI units like foot and mile are defined in terms of meters. Any scientifically precise system will have to do something similar, given the current limitations and precisions of experiments. You stated it well in this comment but I guess it was one more fact lost in the shuffle. Tim Shuba (talk) 00:30, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

The section on the luminiferous aether

Tim, You removed a section on the luminiferous aether from the history section at speed of light on the grounds that it is not relevant to the topic. One thing that is totally lacking in the article is any mention of how the speed of light is arrived at by experimental measurements of the electric and magnetic constants. It may have been purged from the texbooks since 1983, but you can't then purge it from the history section on that basis. Your are actions are dangerously close to re-writing history by eliminating the aspects that you don't like to be reminded of. David Tombe (talk) 14:17, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for noticing. Ideally, the historical revisionism will branch out to subvert all classical sources of the Renaissance and of course Natural Philosophy of all types. I have been carefully trained to give the appearance of good faith editing under proper policy and guidelines, while actually incrementally moving toward the ultimate goal. It's not actually a personal dislike of being reminded of inconvenient historical facts, because I am able to employ techniques to ignore them. More critical is to keep these inconvenient facts away from the curious, pliable minds of our best and brightest in academic institutions and elsewhere. I hope that clears things up. Tim Shuba (talk) 17:33, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

Tim, That was a nice bit of double irony. Add a triple irony for the best and brightest in academic institutions. You've just stated your agenda quite clearly under the guise of humour. So I'm going to ignore the joke and take it at face value. You have removed the most significant aspect of the history of the speed of light from the speed of light article. And under your own admission, you have done so because of a fear that this part of history represents a threat to the current orthodoxy.

The current orthodoxy has got this part of history nicely tidied up into a definition. The textbooks have been purged of the Weber/Kohlrausch experiment over the last 26 years, and meanwhile you and your team are at the speed of light talk page trying to make out that the new definition of the metre has made no significant change to physics that is worth talking about. And that is why you are trying to prevent Brews ohare from elaborating on the matter. And your colleagues have been fooling the non-physics readership over at AN/I into thinking that all your opposition are crackpots who are engaged in tenditious editing, disruption, circular arguing, fringe theories, incivilities, and assumptions of bad faith.

And quite frankly I don't know your motive. Maybe you are one of these people who just can't believe that the authorities could have got it all wrong at the 1983 conference. One thing is sure, and that is that the new definition of the metre messed it up badly for electric permittivity. David Tombe (talk) 18:46, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

Actually Tim, your statement of espoused irresponsibility above is shocking to me. To quote your words:

“Since I am aware of how and why so much blatantly bogus information gets into articles, and why a large number of articles are highly unreliable, it doesn't affect me adversely as a user. Therefore, whether the speed of light article gets better or gets worse isn't too important to me.”

I think that disqualifies you to be editing this article at all. Brews ohare (talk) 19:11, 29 August 2009 (UTC)