Misplaced Pages

Welcome!

Hello, EdChem, and welcome to Misplaced Pages! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

• The five pillars of Misplaced Pages
• Tutorial
• How to edit a page
• How to write a great article
• Manual of Style

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Misplaced Pages:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question and then place {{helpme}} before the question on your talk page. Again, welcome! -- Ed (Edgar181) 15:09, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

DYK for Homosexuals Anonymous

Hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis

For future reference when you come across a copyright violation which isn't a clear speedy deletion case, you should use {{subst:copyvio}}. Cheers! VernoWhitney (talk) 18:40, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Hi VernoWhitney, thanks for the advice. I am inexperienced in dealing with copyright issues and was having trouble figuring out what tags to add where. Regards, EdChem (talk) 04:44, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

BARF

Hi EdChem

Nice article there... I think it's ready to be "live"? I've commented out the categories for now, as articles in the userspace should not be categorized with mainspace articles. --Rifleman 82 (talk) 22:19, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, Rifleman - I am going to get back to that article at some point, but I do want to do more before taking it live. Sorry about the categories, when I was working on the article I thought it'd be live in a day or two, so the cat-ing wouldn't matter... silly me. EdChem (talk) 13:21, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks

Thank you to you and others for taking up the idea of allowing sourced BLP articles as DYK articles. I was very pleased that the idea got such a positive response, and even more pleased that others took up the project of getting it enshrined in the DYK "rules". A great example of how collaboration happens to improve the encyclopedia. Thanks once again.

Hopefully, I'll have time to source and submit an article some time soon!!! --Slp1 (talk) 14:14, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

Thank you, it is nice to hear that the efforts I have put in to pushing for this change are noticed and appreciated. I hope the change leads to some unreferenced BLPs being properly referenced and expanded. EdChem (talk) 15:13, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

It's almost December 10

Your MMA hook held over from October is being held for DYK on December 10, but with the promise of four additional articles to be moved to main space in early December. If you've got articles for Tom Gallicchio, Shamil Zavurov, Tomasz Narkun, and Vyacheslav Vasilevsky ready to be evaluated, time is running very short to move them to main space. Good luck! - Dravecky (talk) 12:18, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

Dravecky, you are correct - I am running behind. I have moved the Narkun and Vasilevsky pages into article space. Gallicchio has been scratched and replaced by a fighter who already has an article. We could go with a four-article hook now, if you wish, or I can try to get everything done tomorrow. Thanks for asking. EdChem (talk) 16:23, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

Ok, Zavurov is done too. Will post at T:TDYK. EdChem (talk) 05:51, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks

Thank you for those very nice things you said on the DYK Nominations page. Flattery will get you nowhere (but I didn't say stop). :) - Tim1965 (talk) 02:50, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

No problem, I meant what I said.  :) EdChem (talk) 13:18, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

DYK nomination of Vyacheslav Vasilevsky

Hello! Your submission of Vyacheslav Vasilevsky at the Did You Know nominations page has been reviewed, and there still are some issues that may need to be clarified. Please review the comment(s) underneath your nomination's entry and respond there as soon as possible. Thank you for contributing to Did You Know! Metropolitan90 (talk) 05:59, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the note - I have posted a question to Paralympiakos about this, and responded at T:TDYK. EdChem (talk) 09:57, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

DYK for Shamil Zavurov

DYK for Tomasz Narkun

DYK for Vyacheslav Vasilevsky

DYK for Magomed Sultanakhmedov

DYK for Rafał Moks

DYK nomination of Bruce DuMont

Hello! Your submission of Bruce DuMont at the Did You Know nominations page has been reviewed, and there still are some issues that may need to be clarified. Please review the comment(s) underneath your nomination's entry and respond there as soon as possible. Thank you for contributing to Did You Know! The Interior(Talk) 21:28, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, I have now commented. EdChem (talk) 09:28, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

DYK for Katy Munger

DYK for A. M. M. Naushad

DYK for Bruce DuMont

DYK for Oxaziridine

Civilian casualty ratio DYK

I think the thing that dismayed me most in the whole dismaying affair was your statement that you felt manipulated by me and the implication that you're going to be generally more wary and cynical because of my actions. I certainly never meant to manipulate you, and if my actions lead, no matter how unintentionally and indirectly, to you spending time looking over your shoulder when you could be doing constructive work, I have to wonder if my presence on Misplaced Pages is beneficial. This is a depressing thought.

The only thing I knew about you before you approved the article was that you were a participant in the DYK discussion who had a technical concern about the dispute tags. After Brewcrewer and I pointed out that it was Gatoclass, a participant in the discussion, who had placed the tags, you were silent and I assumed that was the end of a technical matter. Of course I didn't see the edit summary of your comment and thus had no way of knowing that you had any other concern. Who reads edit summaries on talk pages?

Other than your comment, there was a long discussion. Many editors didn't like the hook, so I proposed two more, one of which was accepted. I also contested their objections, and was ignored. Fine. In retrospect, I think they were right. 28bytes had noted that the article was at AfD; I noted when the AfD was closed as keep. Tiamut wanted to eliminate the word "terrorism" from the article, and I let her do that. Jiujitsuguy and brewcrewer said the article was fine as is, with brewcrewer specifically objecting to Gatoclass's behavior. Mbz1 said that the article was fine and supported (on my talk page) a small change I had made after Gatoclass began his series of edits. That is the extent of the DYK concerns expressed by anyone other than Gatoclass.

Gatoclass himself clearly did not want the article to be promoted to DYK as it was, and was acting very odd about it. He spontaneously slapped dispute tags on the article without having edited it, fooling you into thinking that the tags were a product of community consensus at the article. He said that PBS's objections to recent material constituted a holdup that would have be resolved, without noting that the objections were to his own recent changes.

You later expressed at AE that the article had two flaws from your point of view. One was that there was too much Middle East and not enough other stuff. I also thought that was a flaw. The reason for the flaw was that I only did internet research, using everything relevant that I could find, and a disproportionate amount of relevant material on the web was about the Middle East. I welcomed all the material on other regions added by other editors, including Gatoclass, and I didn't object to the associated lowering of the standard of relevance from explicit use of the ratio concept to mere quantifying of civilian casualties adjacent to combatant casualties, even though that troubled me.

The second flaw that you later expressed, that of neutrality regarding Israel, I do not agree with. I had made sure that the voice of the article in the sections relating to Israel (and in the other sections) was neutral. I was aware that all the side-taking views quoted in the section supported one of the sides, but those were the views that were on the web. If someone finds and adds a significant view about the CCR in those conflicts, published in a reliable source, supporting the other side, I will be delighted. That has not happened. Gatoclass's addition of contrasting views that are not about CCR, "for balance", are in my opinion the epitome of bad editing, because they transfer the focus from describing the actual topic to balancing an arbitrarily chosen seesaw.

When you briefly wrote at DYK talk that you were now satisfied with the article, implying that you had not been satisfied with it before, I assumed that you had not been satisfied before because of issues along the lines of the first flaw. I guess this was both because that was why I hadn't been satisfied with it, and there's a tendency to interpret unclear things according to one's own views, and because your comment on Gatoclass's "contributions" brought to my mind his major additions to the article, which addressed precisely that flaw. In any case, I had no idea that you had had a problem with the Israel section.

To sum up, when I made my changes I knew the following things about the DYK discussion: that some editors had had concerns - mainly about the hook - which I addressed and which would not be affected by my changes; that other editors were satisfied with the article as it was before Gatoclass's series of edits; that brewcrewer had seen Gatoclass's behavior as problematic; that Mbz1 was satisfied with the article and had expressed support for a small change I had already made; and that you were satisfied with the article after Gatoclass's series of edits, referring - I thought - to edits that would not be affected by my changes. In other words, I had no idea that any independent editor in the discussion would see any of my changes as detrimental to the article, and had good reason to think that two would see them as beneficial. (I knew that Gatoclass himself would oppose, of course, but after his extremely odd and pushy behavior I did not see him as independent.) I am almost certain that if I had known that you or any other independent editor would see my changes this way, I would not have made them before suggesting them on the talk page and waiting for responses.

By the way, if I am not mistaken, you are the only editor in that discussion (other than Gatoclass) who now sees my changes as detrimental. And I'm not even sure why you do. The examples you gave for this were the omission of Palestinian perspectives from the "Israeli air strikes" section, and the inclusion of Dershowitz, both of which you describe as "POV". But I never omitted a Palestinian perspective from anywhere in the article - there was never a Palestinian perspective in it. I omitted UNHRC and unnamed "human rights groups" perspectives from the article, because, as I said, they were not about the topic of the article. And there is nothing POV about adding significant views published in reliable sources - even if they are partisan, which I assume you think Dershowitz is. In fact, WP:NPOV directs us to do so. But at this point I have drifted into curiosity. It's not so important to me that we see eye to eye on whether my changes were good - there will always be disagreements. What's important to me is that you not see me or newcomers at DYK as people who might be out to manipulate you. Jalapenos do exist (talk) 17:31, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

Jalapenos, there is a lot going on in the background to this incident of which you may be unaware, so allow me to sketch some of it out in hopes you might understand better my perspective. I will come back to your specific points in a bit...

1. If you look through the last few archives of WT:DYK you will see several major incidents in which the DYK process and reviewers have been criticised for failing to keep inappropriate material off the main page. Probably our most active participant in keeping the project moving was accused of plagiarism and copyright violation and ended up exercising his right to vanish, and no matter the merits of the specific issue, his dedicatio, hard work and leadership are still sorely missed.
2. Another ongoing criticism of DYK has been that we have paid excessive attention to hooks without devoting enough time to the articles themselves. Your original hook was never going to be accepted and I applaud your suggesting alternatives - that was a cooperative response, and I for one appreciated it. However, fixing the hook issue was separate from concerns about the article. A DYK rule prohibits articles nominated for deletion from promotion, which is why the AfD was noted with your nomination. If the AfD only addresses notability then its closure as keep resoles thar problem, but AfDs frequently raise other concerns and it is common practice to consider those issues. 14 of 22 editors who commented at the AfD raised issues about content, and those concerns needed to be considered. It was not just Gatoclass who expressed objections to the article's content.
3. I have recently been in Gatoclass' shoes... the article Homosexuals Anonymous was nominated for DYK, but the article was hugely unbalanced. I spent very considerable time editing the article, adding sources, presenting all available perspectives, addressing talk page concerns, going through noticeboard issues, etc. If the nominator had reverted sections of my work, having not objected during the editing, just after it appeared on the main page I would have been outraged. How can it be anything but hugely disrespectful and deceptive to not object to the edits as they are made, support the promotion of the modified version of the article to the main page, then substantially revert the content within minutes of its main page appearance? This is really the key point which influences me - you apparently see nothing wrong with this set of actions, yet it makes a mockery of consensus as an editing model. When you made those reverts, you significantly changed the balance of the article content... intentionally or not, that action said I was wrong to judge the article balanced in promoting for a main page appearance, it said Gatoclass' changes biased the article, it said the editors criticising the content at the AfD were wrong and you were right. AGK, an experienced ArbCom clerk and respected admin, characterised your behaviour as follows: "in relation to the DYK incident the complainant cites was grossly inappropriate, and I should think that, were my attention drawn to it at that time, I would have blocked him immediately for disruptive editing—especially in light of the high-profile nature of DYKs selected for display on the Main Page" Slp1 described your actions as "highly disruptive". Tznkai found your actions sanctionable. Truly, you need to stop and think whether everyone else is wrong, or whether your actions were over the line.

To address / respond to some of your direct points:

I think the thing that dismayed me most in the whole dismaying affair was your statement that you felt manipulated by me and the implication that you're going to be generally more wary and cynical because of my actions.

I think your future DYK nominations will receive careful scrutiny, and probably that some editors will watchlist those articles followin approval through to main page appearance. That is a consequence of your actions that I think you need to accept. As for my being more wary and cynical, well, all we can do is wait and see how things develop.

I certainly never meant to manipulate you, and if my actions lead, no matter how unintentionally and indirectly, to you spending time looking over your shoulder when you could be doing constructive work, I have to wonder if my presence on Misplaced Pages is beneficial. This is a depressing thought.

Please don't interpret what has happened and what I have said as a judgment that your contributions are not a net benefit to Misplaced Pages. I haven't made any such judgment about you. Plenty of editors make mistakes, act in ways that cause problems, and end up putting all that behind them. The thing is, the next few steps are up to you. You can continue to declare that you made no mistakes and were correct in all respects and have been wrongly sanctioned, you can continue to try persuading everyone to adopt your view, or you can reflect on the situation and consider what is the best way forward from where you are presently. The ball is in your court.

One point particularly to consider is the problem of projecting your views in interpreting others' comments. You have explained how your perspective led to underestimating what my concerns were. I have already stated that I should have expressed more clearly my concerns. This is a frequent problem with wiki-communication, which becomes worse when tensions are higher. And, it is continuing now... you suggest that I am the only critic of your actions, disregarding the views at AE and the likely views of the critics of the Israeli content at AfD. I could go on point-for-point on content, but that strikes me as unproductive.

So, instead, I'll close with a few last thoughts. Firstly, I have nominated articles for editors' first DYKs, and I encourage broad participation in the project. I am glad to welcome newcomers and help them with the challenges of collaborative DYK-ing, but your actions amounted to blatant gaming of the system (no matter your intentions) and have unsurprisingly provoked a strong response. I can understand why that leaves you upset and stressed, but it is the effect that follows from your actions. Second, this is not an unresolvable situation, but what happens next and how editors respond to you in the future depends on what you choose to do. I don't like seeing anyone leave but the consensus model of Misplaced Pages is not negotiable. Thirdly, as I said earlier, I could and should have communicated more effectively and clearly... I accept that I share some responsibility for mis-communication. Fourthly, I think you need to read up more on adding dispute tags, they do not require consensus for placement and unilaterally removing that can be seen as disruptive editing. Fifthly, please consider how you will look to others when you argue to include a partisan view but exclude a UN body. Finally - and most importantly - if you take nothing else from my comments, please consider this: now is the time to stop and really think deeply about what others have said and what has happened. Don't react precipitously based on how you feel, pause and reflect for a while. Please. EdChem (talk) 04:22, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

I appreciate your lengthy and often thoughtful response. I was not aware of any of those background events. I want to clear up one misunderstanding between us reflected in your comment. I did not suggest, and it would be absurd of me to think, that you were the only critic of my actions, or the manner in which I countered some of Gatoclass's changes. What I suggested was that you are the only participant in the DYK discussion who has expressed a problem with the content of the article in the form that my changes created. Indeed, the wide range of interpretations of the manner in which I did things has provoked reflection. There are many other thing to say, but I doubt saying them would be the best use of our time. Best, Jalapenos do exist (talk) 07:50, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

OK, Jalapenos. I sincerely hope that we have better interactions in the future. Generating high-quality content for the 'pedia is the reason we are here, and the DYK project welcomes such content for featuring on the main page. Nominations in controversial areas can be contentious, so I hope that your future nominations run more smoothly. Regards, EdChem (talk) 09:07, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

student pages to nominate for DYK

Hi EdChem, Last week you approached me with a couple of recommended pages to feature in the DIK section, and I now have a couple: Insertion reaction and Isolobal principle. There is one more Solvatochromism that the students have not made "live" yet, but when they do, I will let you know. This would be great for the students if these pages could be featured. Thank you! MichChemGSI (talk) 15:09, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Hi Mich... I am going to need to come back to this tomorrow because it is very late here, but I do have a couple of comments / questions after a quick look.

1. Will you or the students be available to address concerns / issues raised either by me or by the DYK reviewers? Looking quickly I can see issues that will need to be addressed to pass DYK, and also issues that should be addressed before featuring on the main page. It is up to reviewers how much of the second category is raised in the review.
2. Do you have suggestions for hooks - that is, interesting facts from the article that (in a single sentence) will grab the attention of main page readers? They have to be directly supported by a reference.
3. I see you put insertion reaction into main space, by cut-and-paste... this is not a good thing to do, and creates a problem that will now have to be addressed. In simple terms, by transferring the text to main space you asserted that you wrote it, yet the edit hisotry of the sandbox where it was developed shows that it was written by others. That is a violation of the licenses under which Misplaced Pages operates. Below the edit box it says that you "irrevocably agree to release your contributions under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 License and the GFDL", but they aren't your contributions and so you cannot give this release. It would be like me signing the copyright transfer between you and a journal for a paper you wrote - I can't hand your copyright to the journal because it isn't mine. Only the students can release their contributions. Cut-and-paste moves are discouraged partly for this reason. For the future, before any similar projects are attempted, I think we should talk about how to structure them to avoid the issues that have come up this time. By the way, this is also going to raise a problem with the DYKcredit. :(

Please don't be discouraged by any of this - Misplaced Pages takes some getting used to, and none of these issues are that big. But, the smoother the process can be, the better. Regards, EdChem (talk) 15:47, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Hi EdChem, Great! Thank you. especially for the reassurance that these are quite easy fixes.

1. is there a way for usernames to be transfered? I think that I heard that this was possible. I will get the students who were in the group to create their own usernames so that they can be contacted. Do you know how one does this? I can also do a bit of research.
2. I will think about these as I read the pages more carefully and have the students also come up with some.
3. I'm sorry, this will be solved when we establish #1 point...again, i didn't realize that this would be a problem although the students did give me permission to bypass the problems they were having and then to have their work be live before the semester ended.

Thank you again for all of your help. Let me know how we can transfer usernames. MichChemGSI (talk) 20:24, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Hi MichChemGSI... we are making progress on insertion reaction and I have nominated isolobal principle for DYK here.

1. Users can be renamed at WP:Changing Username, but a user may only be used by one single individual (see WP:U for the username policy). They can create their own users any time (I recommend choosing a pseudonym rather than using a real name) but attributing the edits of the joint account to the new account is not possible, so far as I am aware.
2. I suggested a hook for isolobal principle at the nomination - we can suggest alternatives if you have other suggestions. I can tell you now that the nomination will be considered insufficiently referenced as the guideline is one inline citation per paragraph. Something needs to be done about this.
3. Problems with student projects aren't uncommon, and you can see some of the predictions of a need to do some clean-up are coming true. I am not an administrator so I can't actually fix some things, just request others to work on them. However, I suspect I am less jaded / stressed than some people you have encountered. I don't mind helping out, I just hope that your future projects run more smoothly.  :) EdChem (talk) 02:50, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

Insertion reaction is now back, with appropriate history, and I have nominated it for DYK here. Again, you may suggest alternative hooks if you wish. I have posted a message to the insertion reaction students at User talk:Chem507f10grp3#DYK nomination and to the isolobal principle students at User talk:Chem507f10grp5#DYK nomination. EdChem (talk) 12:00, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

Student projects - attribution and licensing

I saw your comments above about problems with attribution and copyright when copy-pasting material. I'm helping out with mentoring groups of students on another project, and I think we may be about to run into a similar problem.

The plan that's been suggested is as follows:

• the teacher has drawn up a list of existing WP articles in the topic area that need improvement
• each group of students selects one article
• each student within the group has their own WP account
• one of the students copies the contents of their group's chosen article from mainspace into a Sandbox in that student's userspace
• all of the students in the group then work on the sandbox version
• somehow the completed sandbox material gets put into mainspace as the real article

Now, the good part about this, is that the "lead" student in each group, will at least have the paste-back-into-mainspace edit attributed to them. However, any content contributed by the other students within that group, would remain unattributed. (Unless of course they copy the sandbox version piece-by-piece, with each student copying their changes - or what they remember as their changes - into the mainspace article. One can imagine this not being very accurate at all.)

Of course, if they were creating an article from nothing - or completely deleting an entirely unsuitable existing article and replacing it - then the editing history of the sandbox could be brought across by moving the sandbox directly into mainspace. But that's not what's happening; they are just planning to improve the article that's already there, so the editing history for the existing mainspace article has to stay as well.

I think the intention is definitely to use a Sandbox (user sub-page) rather than to edit the existing mainspace article in situ; these are Middle School students editing Misplaced Pages for the first time, so letting several dozen of them loose on half a dozen mainspace articles simultaneously would cause chaos.

Having looked around briefly, the only solution if that's how they want to do it, is to use the {{Copied}} template on the talk page of the mainspace article that gets pasted-over; thus pointing back to the userpage sandbox and its edit history, and thereby satisfying the license conditions.

Does this make sense? Is there a better way?

Thanks in advance for your help! --Demiurge1000 (talk) 03:30, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

This seems ok to me, except for two issues...

1. The last step you propose is definitely wrong, a cut-and-paste move is not the way to go. When the sandbox version is ready, go to requested moves (WP:RM) and ask that an admin do the move, merging the history of the sandbox into the main article so that the history is transferred too.

   By the way, by transferring the history it would be possible to nominate the new version for DYK (assuming a x5 expansion) with all the collaborating students being credited.

2. Moving a whole new updated version in can annoy editors who have worked on the article, I would smooth the waters by announcing your intentions to the article's user page at the start, and when requesting the move. I can understand the concern about working in article space with new / inexperienced wikipedians, but you should be aware that working in a sandbox has disadvantages as well as advantages. Before doing any move someone should check for significant alterations to the article in main space that might have occurred as your group worked in a sand box.

Does that cover your questions? I hope so. :) Regards, EdChem (talk) 03:49, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

DYK for Isolobal principle

Sorry for the typo. It did have the desired affect and brought forward qualified help. Others can aspire Victuallers (talk) 15:36, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

It's ok. To fill you in on the background: I saw the question from MichChemGSI (the instructor of the students) and they've had a rough time with demands being made of them, so I can see the concern of being asked to do something else. You asked nicely and I understand the need (I review more than queue prep), I'm just in favour of smoothing the path for newbies where practicable.  :) Regards, EdChem (talk) 15:42, 23 December 2010 (UTC)