User talk:Norwikian: Difference between revisions

A shaky start

Hi Norwikian. Sounds like you had a rocky introduction to Wikipedia. Sorry about that. People here can be rather abrupt from time to time. (And, alas, this is one of my sins too.) No matter—welcome to the 'pedia. It seems that you have the background to contribute a great deal here, and I'll look forward to seeing more of your work. Anything you need to know, just ask. Cheers -- Tannin 12:06 20 May 2003 (UTC)

Norwikian, I marked your new article Sir Thomas Browne for deletion. I don't understand why you felt you needed to create a duplicate entry of Thomas Browne. Would you mind combining the material from the one article into the other? Thanks, -- llywrch 22:49, 5 Sep 2003 (UTC)

I moved your comment to the VfD page as that is where deletion discussions need to occur. If you leave it at the village pump it may appear that there is a consensus to delete the page when someone comes to do that; you can not assume that the deleting sysop will have read the village pump, so it is safest at VfD.

Secondly, it's best not to try and generalise the characteristics of Wikipedians as you did in your comment. It may make people defensive and therefore harder to reason with.

It is unfortunate you are becoming disillusioned, but I can not understand where the accusation of elitism is coming from. Threats to broadcast your negative views of wikipedia will again hardly help your case when you are trying to defend your article. (See Staying cool when the editing gets hot.) Decisions are rarely made in an off-hand way; there is genuinely an attempt at reaching consensus. Your point about contacting the poster of the article prior to its deletion is a good one, and I believe it is recommended by the deletion policy. Angela 15:29, 28 Sep 2003 (UTC)

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I also put this on the VdD page, and I'm duplicating it here to be sure you'll see it: To the Norwikian: Nobody is doing things behind anyone's back--we discuss it here in public, and put a note on the page. Since we don't require contributors to supply email addresses, this is about as much as can be done. And yes, the articles on Working class and Proletariat could use much expansion, but they do exist. Please improve them. Vicki Rosenzweig 16:17, 28 Sep 2003 (UTC)

In depth, and in the open,reply.

I really don't know how to address replying to your messages on my talkpage, since you obviously had experienced a very strong emotional response to my posting your article on votes for deletion. Probably it is not a good approach, but at least it is honest to remark, that I did not really think I was doing anything special when I did it. To me it was an article just like any other, which I evaluated on its merits. If it had been written by the "owner/ruler" of wikipedia, Jimbo Wales, I claim I would not have put my words more or less conciliatorily on Votes for deletion. Not that I haven't sometimes expressed myself too strongly, but in that particular case I definitely feel I did not.

I did not personally, nor do I now personally object to a listing of a librarys contents being included on wikipedia. But listing on Votes for deletion, as I see it is a matter which is precisely at right angles to that evaluation. In listing an article there, I am not making a personal judgement (ideally), but interpreting the community standards, which I have aggreed to respect (implicitly, by continuing to contribute). What I felt, was that there was a lack of a clear ruling, whether such material was appropriate for wikipedia or not. And if you take the time to read the wording of my note announcing its inclusion on Votes for deletion, you will note how betwixst and between I was about the whole thing (Please try to understand, that lots of good articles have at one time or another been listed on Votes for deletion. I don't particularly like that fact, but it remains. For my own view, of what the first step should be like, see: Dead letter office.)

I may speak to your evaluation of your perception of my philosophical outlook later, but not right now, not right at this forum. Suffice it to say, that if you knew me, I feel sincerely that you would not call me a snob. -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo-stick 00:54, 29 Sep 2003 (UTC)

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Reply.

First off. I think it is fair to note, that I am not a fan of "The Simpsons", and very rarely if ever watch them. (Have probably seen 10 episodes at the very most, and those not from start to finish).

That said, on your article, please understand that this is an alive project. There are no genuinely final verdicts on the disposition of any one page. Even if the VFD process went against you (which is still pending, so I won't comment on the likelihood or otherwise of any outcome), that is not necessarily the end of the matter. If you then thought a deletion was genuinely arrived at without a sufficient majority of people or other problems existed with the process, you might still feel you have grounds to make a case for undeletion at the appropriate page (Wikipedia:Votes for undeletion).

But on the other side of the coin, even though the page pass through unscathed, there truly is no guarantee that it will remain an independent article for all eternity. Some editor who may not even have read the arguments on VFD, may just accidentally stumble on to it, and then and there, on his own judgement, willy nilly join the material to the main article on Thomas Browne. Then again, the page may survive three centuries in the form you leave it. There just is no closure on the disposition of any article on wikipedia, nor is there ownership of the text, or control over what other editors may do to it, except through ones own diligent and diplomatic efforts to demonstrate that ones view of the disposition of this or that page or fact is the most in line with the ethos of wikipedia. This is distressing to many. But there really is no way to help it. It is the nature of this beast. One should endeavour to think of wikipedia as some elemental beast which can be surprisingly generous and forgiving, but at times incredibly capricious. That is my view anyway. -- Cimon Avaro on a pogo-stick 08:22, 2 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Fun with Onebyone

"Still say most have not grasped true status of polymath"

I think you're misunderstanding what the people who proposed/supported deletion meant. I don't think anyone argued that T.B. himself doesn't deserve an article containing as much information on him as you (or other contributors) feel is useful. The question was over whether the article as it stood at the time of the proposal seemed to be a viable topic.

So nobody was trying to put down you or your work (and likewise the Yale Dean), and I hope you won't feel unappreciated. I'm still cautious about separating it from the article on the person though. I'm not sure what "road" it was the orginal proposer was talking about in his first post, but I envisaged an organizational nightmare in which we have separate articles for Norman Cook's music collection, Leonardo's sketchbooks, Imelda Marcos' shoes, Robert Boyle's experiment log and other such collections which, while interesting because of what they tell us about their owners, might not be considered encyclopedic entities in their own right. It's a (subjective) question firstly of how far to split information up, and secondly of when lists are appropriate. Onebyone 14:29, 30 Sep 2003 (UTC)

I'm new around here too - I only mean to give my opinion rather than to say "This Is The Way Things Must Be Done". The way things have turned out, the consensus seems to be that the page is worthwhile, so keep up the good work. I'll let you get on with it, and look forward to reading more in future.

"far from a true description of the Banquet of the learned" - sounds like an opportunity for you to put things straight. Well volunteered ;-)

By the way, would you rather I used user email rather than this comments page? -- Onebyone

(I foolishly put this on *my* talk page. Oops.)

Re: TB catching.

Yep, that was pretty much what I meant - more people were getting involved in the Thomas Browne discussion. I think there was some other edit I made about the same time with a similarly bad pun, but I've got better now ;-)

And you haven't started a trend as such, there are already loads of articles of lists. Some of them are deliberate, where they're basically lists of links to other articles. Some of them seem to be stub-like, in that they might eventually be lists to other articles. Some of them do fall under the heading of "Wikipedia is not an almanac", and different people are annoyed by this to different extents. Depends on hw strictly they want Wikipedia to stick to being an encycolpedia, and how much they want it to be the one single place to find out what you want to know...

Yes, maths is my (former) academic subject. Browne would have been in the middle of the early study of calculus (Liebnitz and Newton), logarithms (Napier and others) and analytic geometry (Descartes, etc), and presumably had books on some of those subjects. Sadly he missed out on the guy who is probably the first truly top-level genius who was a specialist mathematician - Leonhard Euler.

I'm not in the US, I've just been trying to Americanize my spelling to fit in a bit better ;-) I live in Oxford. Onebyone 21:44, 2 Oct 2003 (UTC)

first truly top-level genius who was a specialist mathematician

Actually, that's not right because Fermat was a specialist mathematician earlier, and certainly a top-level genius... But anyway, Browne might have been one of the last totally polymath academics, since at around that time it was becoming more and more difficult to compete without specialisation. What do you reckon? Onebyone 22:00, 2 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Yes, if you have a list handy of mathematicians in the library send it to me and I'll test my general knowledge to see how many I recognise. It'd be interesting to see how many of them are still widely known today, and how many have vanished into a historical footnote in a textbook somewhere.

I'm not sure I'd call physiognomy "pseudoscience" - at the time it was an honest theory which turned out to be wrong. OK, so the study of physiognomy was heavily influenced by prejudice, but as an attempt to observe trends I don't think it was completely wrongheaded.

Pythagoras, by the way, was a nutter ;-) Onebyone 12:59, 3 Oct 2003 (UTC)

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I call Pythagoras a nutter not for his views on numbers and mathematics, but for his philosophy and in particular cosmogeny. He seems to have spent his time making stuff up out of whole cloth. Fair enough as a personal project, but if you're doing that you should probably consider the odds that what you think up will just happen to be true ;-)

Oughtred - name wasn't immediately familiar, but I do know what a slide rule is... Onebyone 10:31, 6 Oct 2003 (UTC)

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Do I rate Carroll as a mathematician? Well, I've not read any of Dodgson's mathematical papers so I can't say anything definite, but as an original mathematician he's pretty obscure - I don't believe he was among any of the groups doing startlingly important work at the time. But I seem to remember that he created some interesting mathematical puzzles, which would make him a good mathematician in the everyday sense, just not a great mathematician in the grand academic scheme of things.

Pythagoras' romanticisation/mysticism/worship of special numbers like 10 is another one of the things I mean when I say he was somewhat nuts. It's all very well having a favourite number (just like a favourite colour, or a favourite TV programme), or giving numbers symbolic or allegorical meaning. In my view though there's no justification at all for claims that numbers can be any more special than that, so I think it's barking up the wrong tree to take things any more seriously, and bordering on obsessive to expect your students to believe it too. I could never be a hermetic - chaos magick is about the furthest I can suspend my natural disbelief...

Use of 12 rather than 10. The only thing I can think of is that highly divisible numbers (12=3*4=2*6) are often more convenient than less divisible numbers (10=2*5). Also, physically dividing things into fifths is more difficult than into halves or thirds, so historically handling things in twelfths is going to have been easier than tenths. Electric scales make all this a bit obsolete now, of course. As for 12 months, you're never going to have a satisfactory decimal year, since 365 is a rubbish number, so probably nobody ever saw any point changing ;-) -- Onebyone 10:29, 7 Oct 2003 (UTC)

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Rubbishness of 365 - I probably wasn't very clear, I meant that it's rubbish (meaning no use) in the context of a decimal system. That's just because it isn't related in any simple way to any power of 10. It might be useful in some contexts, for example due to being the product of a reasonably large prime (73) with a small one (5), but that wasn't what I was talking about :-)

What do you mean by "number exhibits phenomena we can't explain"? It's certainly true in the sense that certain things constitute "happenstance", and there's generally no explaining that. Is this what you meant?

On the subject of Oughtred, I don't think it's vanity or arrogance, so much as a choice of priorities, that I think the invention of the slide rule is far more significant and worthy of respect than the first use of the symbol x. The use of x I consider a curiousity, of interest to etymologists and like-minded folk who want to know how mathematical conventions came about. If Oughtred had been the first person to use any letter to represent an unknown quantity, then that would be incredibly significant to the substance of maths, and I'd be in favour of a statue. This is significant rather to the choice of letter that we use when there's no particular reason to choose any other. Do you see the same difference I do?

Calculating the odds of coincidences - there have been some studies trying to look into this kind of thing. You can't calculate the odds exactly, though, because for example there's no way to judge whether people choose their house numbers entirely at random, or whether instead they are more or less likely to choose numbers they find significant, such as birthdays. I think it's fairly reasonable to assume that it's random, but you can't be certain. The other interesting thing about calculating odds of coincidences is that you don't only want to know the odds of what happened, but also the odds of anything else equally remarkable happening. That's impossible, because you can never track down every possible thing that would be remarkable. All you can do is place a lower bound on the probability. -- Onebyone 12:23, 7 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Learning with Angela

I moved your comment to the VfD page as that is where deletion discussions need to occur. If you leave it at the village pump it may appear that there is a consensus to delete the page when someone comes to do that; you can not assume that the deleting sysop will have read the village pump, so it is safest at VfD.

Secondly, it's best not to try and generalise the characteristics of Wikipedians as you did in your comment. It may make people defensive and therefore harder to reason with.

It is unfortunate you are becoming disillusioned, but I can not understand where the accusation of elitism is coming from. Threats to broadcast your negative views of wikipedia will again hardly help your case when you are trying to defend your article. (See Staying cool when the editing gets hot.) Decisions are rarely made in an off-hand way; there is genuinely an attempt at reaching consensus. Your point about contacting the poster of the article prior to its deletion is a good one, and I believe it is recommended by the deletion policy. Angela 15:29, 28 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Hi Kevin,

You asked if I recommend you leave the page in its present state. I'm not sure. If you feel you have addressed the concerns (wanting more of an intro etc) at VfD then maybe. If it's frustrating then you probably should - no use getting stressed about one article.

In regards to the "objectives, long-term plans, ownership", perhaps Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not and About might help? I can't think of anything that really answers this at the moment. If I come across anything more useful I will let you know.

Perhaps you could mention your concerns about the original author being contacted at Wikipedia talk:Votes for deletion. It may need to be addressed but I think that the assumption is that by writing on the page that is being listed on VfD then the poster will realise as if they care for the article, it will be on their watchlist.

The discussion of the page at Talk:Library of Sir Thomas Browne/Delete seems largely positive. With so many people wanting to keep it, it is not going to be deleted now. The discussion will continue until it has been there for seven days, and then the discussion will be archived so it may be used as a case study for future deletion decisions. (Not all such debates are kept, but ones that get particularly long like this one are). Wikipedia:Deletion policy might help if you want to understand it more. Angela 19:28, Oct 3, 2003 (UTC)

Since VfD got too long (93kb), the waiting time was reduced (semi-unofficially) to six days rather than 7. Your article had been listed for 6 days so has now been removed. As I said above, there were many votes to keep it, so it has of course not been deleted. The deletion debate now remains as an archive. Angela 01:06, Oct 4, 2003 (UTC)

Contents boxes?

Hi Norwikian, what do you mean by "contents boxes"?. If you mean the automatic table of contents - that appears automatically when you have more than three main headers. Norwich has one. If you don't see it, maybe it is because you turned it off in your preferences. Library of Sir Thomas Browne doesn't have one because it doesn't have any headers. You make headers using two equals sign either side of a subheading. If this is not what you meant, let me know. Angela 19:50, Oct 6, 2003 (UTC)

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Hi - there's a couple of responses for on my talk page. And seeing your name reminded me: I think a couple of weeks ago you emailed me about something - I'm really sorry I didn't reply; I'd had all sorts of problems both with my ISP and my mail software eating my mails, and your message disappeared off the face of the earth before I got the chance to respond. So sorry about that - if you want to resend it, or say whatever it was you said here or whatever, then feel free, and hopefully I'll get a reply to you this time! And if I've just got you mixed up with someone else, feel free to ignore this and suppose I've gone mad. All the best--Camembert

Thanks

Thank you for supporting me. RickK 16:22, 26 Nov 2003 (UTC)

I beg to suggest to you, Mr Norwikian, that I am much younger than the Earl of Emsworth, and, in fact, I live nowhere near Shropshire! But I thank you for your welcome in any event. Lord Emsworth 16:12, Dec 7, 2003 (UTC)

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Using wikipedia as a soapbox (on the DoD article)

Please see the response to your comments on Talk:United States Department of Defense and censor/delete your comments accordingly. B 17:48, Dec 11, 2003 (UTC)

Do not violate wikipedia policy by making personal attacks

As predicted Americans detest any form of criticism of their country, a sure sign of immaturity. --Norwikian

Norwikian, you've already been warned not to make personal attacks. Stop it. B 15:53, Dec 16, 2003 (UTC)

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Regarding the Thomas Browne quarrel with B

Hello, Norwikian. I am going to offer you some unsolicited advice, and you can take it, leave it alone, or flame me to a crisp, as you prefer. I am speaking strictly from my own hard-won experience, and there is nothing at all theoretical about it.

If you feel someone is being unreasonable and rude, you can go essentially two ways. You can be rude back and escalate it. Or you can be polite and try to see things from the other person's POV. The latter choice leaves them with another two-way choice: be reasonable back or look like an ass. Most of the time they will choose the former, and then you can both start communicating and generate light instead of heat.

I know quite well it's hard to be nice when you feel abused, but my experience has been that, even if the other person does choose to be an ass, you feel better afterwards if you haven't let yourself get dragged down.

Cheers,
Tualha 07:00, 16 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Hi, Norwikian, yoo got messij BigCat 01:39, 17 Dec 2003 (UTC) ahhh, hoo iz Benny? BigCat