User talk:Unschool/Archive 2

As to my uncivil comments—please note that I apologized for them less than 10 minutes after I made them. Again, sorry. But accusing me of instigating an edit war? I have never done this, on this or any other article. I go out of my way to use discussion pages to avoid edit wars. In fact, if you check the history, I have only made one edit to this page in the last six months. How on earth can you accuse me of starting an edit war? Unschool 01:06, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

This tag is an official warming tag of Wikipedia. Therefore, the face of warning is fixed and I cannot change it. Please accept only the line "Please remain

Questionfromjapan

02:10, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

Please remove warning tags from my talk page. If you continue to tag those on my talk page, then it is a "User page vandalism".--

Questionfromjapan

02:22, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for removing the warning tag from my talk page. And I would like to answer your quesiton. "Copy and paste" does not matter on the warning tag. Any warning tags are generally prohibited from removing by oneself. And Removing warnings on own talk page is clearly vandalism, except for clearly attack on user. That is the reason why I asked you remove the "Copy and Paste". Thank you.--

Questionfromjapan

08:37, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

Interiot

Hi, I've started a new vote with the proposal I outlined beforehand. I would appreciate it if you could head on over to the talk page and vote. Thanks, John Smith's 14:54, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

If you're really that frustrated and feel his participation has genuinely been disruptive, you may want to comment here, Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Ed_Poor_(2); others have had similar experiences, see the talk page. FeloniousMonk 04:01, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Wow, I just read through the page. If someone wrote a page like that about me I'd be so upset I'd never come back. Anyway, I'm not disagreeing with anything that anyone had to say there. But I'm just too part-time about this to get involved in such disputes. This was my first problem with Ed, and I think it was pretty minor. Frankly, I've been more upset about William Connelly—who is clearly an intelligent guy—just ignoring points on a talk page, then reverting to the way he likes it. William made the point that "Ed doesn't know this stuff [climatology]", and I wonder if that's why he won't engage my discussion points--because I lack a PhD in something that William does for a living. Ed probably is an ignorant clown, but I'm more likely to laugh off behaviour like that than the actions of someone who is an expert in a field and thinks that "non-experts" are not worth his time to engage. I don't know, maybe Ed will piss me off enough to revisit his page. I'll keep it bookmarked, in case I need it. But I'm just not into inquisitions and stuff. Maybe that's just part of being so inexperienced here. Anyway, thanks for introducing me to another side of Wik that I had never seen before. Unschool 04:15, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

• Reichenbach, the same river where Sherlock Holmes was fighting with Moriarty. The Reichenbach waterfall is below, and I was walking along this river till its beginning in the Grosse Scheidegg.
• I will upload unmodified images under GFDL. Please let me known what was wrong. Audriusa 07:11, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Please see the category commons:Category:Reichenbach. I am not expert in the image composing. If you can do better, please help. Audriusa 08:28, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Sorry. Of course you are correct and I should have written "Italics" instead of "Quotes" in the edit summary. However, you then wrote "But I think with the italics more people—especially Lomborg's critics—would like it." That's my point: with the italics in, the sentence is POV and panders to BL's critics; without the italics in it simply is factual. I won't argue that the word "official" has implied italics or quotes. That would be too silly :) Vincent 01:09, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

The fact that people would like something may imply that it's POV, but it may also imply that it has struck a fair balance, something that everyone can agree upon. But it's such a minor point, I'm dropping it. Unschool 06:01, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

In response to my edit of Lomborg's scientific dishonesty case, you accuse me of "disgusting POV": pretty strong language. The Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty in their press release on the matter makes it clear that they are not reversing their finding. Yet Lomborg says in his press release, "The committee has acknowledged that the former verdict of my book was invalid." Perhaps it's wrong to call this "spin" when it would be more accurate to call it an outright lie? Or am I missing something? Your help here will be appreciated. Philip Machanick 05:45, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Ok, Philip, the first matter that got my attention was the statement, "On 12 March 2004, the Committee formally decided not to act further on the complaints, reasoning that they had already found Lomborg not guilty of deliberate dishonesty, and that a new investigation into the complaints against Lomborg would be likely to arrive at the "same conclusion" [3]. Lomborg has spun this event as overturning the original findings, which the reader may use as a data point to judge his honesty[4]. This last sentence is entirely non-encyclopedic. "the reader may use . . . to judge his honesty"? That is throwing down the gauntlet, not writing for an encyclopedia, and, regardless of the facts of the matter, it doesn't belong in here.

But now, on to the facts. If Lomborg is wrong to say that DCSD's findings were "overturned", then the point is a fine one, merely a matter of semantics. The fact is that DCSD's findings were invalidated and set aside by its overseeing authority, and no longer have any standing. A great many of Lomborg's critics have tried to draw a distinction between outright exhonoration and merely having the case remitted back to the DCSD. But there is no meaningful distinction. If you have any doubts, read this report by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation:, [3], and pay special attention to the final sentence. It says straight up that DCSD's findings against Lomborg are invalidated. The charges mean nothing. Now DCSD did have the right to reinvestigate, but they chose not to do so. They say it would have been a waste of their time, some of us suspect it had more to do with the scathing review that MSTI did on them, which found that they failed to use sound practices in their investigation of Lomborg.

Philip, perhaps you were unaware of these facts. If so, I apologize for my tone. I don't know if Lomborg is right or not, about what he says in his book or in what he says in his defense. All I know is that the authorities who have investigated him have not been able to lay a finger on him thus far, and in the process of trying to make him look bad, his enemies come across to me as a bit irrational and unfair. Unschool 07:50, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

The page you pointed to is one I had read. I missed the following: "The Ministry explained at a later date that the decision of the Ministry must be taken to mean that the UVVU’s decision of 6 January 2003 is invalid." So I see your point. However the article as it stands lacks nuance as to the nature of the controversy. The Ministry's finding [4] for example requires it to be judged as a social science work. In their view it is unfair if someone is judged by a committee chaired by someone from outside their home discipline. That is an odd argument, because his book attacks areas which are outside his home discipline. The Economist, one of his chief backers, also claims it should [5] not be judged as a scientific work at all, which is interesting, because they consistently represent him as a "statistician", not as a "political scientist". Lomborg also represents himself as a "statistician" (perhaps this has a different meaning in Denmark?) which to most would indicate he is presenting this as a scientific work, so it should be judged as such. It is also clear that the committee has not actually withdrawn its finding. If you want to see a stronger critique, read the rebuttals of the rebuttals of the Scientific American debate [6], where some of the scientistists involved have taken more time to dissect his anti-rebuttal. The real problem here is that if someone inexpert in an area writes a tome with thousands of footnotes, it takes an enormous amount of time to debunk it. You have to track down a substantial number of the references, show how they are taken out of context, and redo the calculations to show how they are wrong. If you do a small fraction, your rebuttal can easily be nitpicked. If you do the whole thing, you end up with a 200-page book which no one reads. What's more, a large body of correct facts doesn't constitute a correct argument. You have to know which of the facts are questionable in the light of later discoveries, or are not representative of the totality of work in the field. If it is given publicity by a largely ignorant press, it doesn't become a valid piece of work.

The fact that top scientists regard something as bogus doesn't automatically mean they are right, but it also doesn't mean they are wrong.Philip Machanick 01:43, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

hey unschool, so far we agree about non schooling. Home learnig is great. I thought I had corrected the TR stuff, guess not. Im a huge TR fan and plan on writing a motivational book about him thanks [email protected]

Hey, Joe. Thanks for your comments. Say, you may be even newer to Wikipedia than I, so let me share something with you. When you make comments on someone's user page, you place your comments on that user's discussion page, not their actual user page. No worries. Unschool 04:12, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the polite edit summary. [7] My main point was/is that the Illinois article doesn't need to be a list article for universities as it was in the past. It already points to the main list and in the past 6 months or year anons routinely add / subtract their favorite / least favorite school from the deliberately short list. I was simply restoring the article to the balance that it had prior to some anon swapping in SIU. Illinois is a 45k article that is already list heavy. --Dual Freq 05:23, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

I see your point. Feel free to trim things down. I was merely correcting a factual error, but then I went a bit further, attempting (perhaps unnecessarily) to clarify things. Unschool 08:29, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

Please don't cross-post the same message to both my user talk page and the article's talk page. I have the article watchlisted, and the only thing that such cross-posting does is muddy the water if we have two separate discussions going on. SchuminWeb (Talk) 22:59, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

My general rule of thumb is that if it's related to the user specifically, then it belongs on their user talk page. If it's something that is of more general concern, even if it also is likely of concern to the user, then post it to the article's talk page and skip the user talk page. More than likely, the user in question has the page watchlisted anyway, especially if they show up in the edit history. And besides that, since Wikipedia works on consensus, the opinion of the group is the important thing, rather than any one individual user. SchuminWeb (Talk) 04:50, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Please do not edit in contravention to established formatting guidelines. The

That's a fair criticism, perhaps my edit did not give due consideration. To be specific, my problems were that a) dab page entries should consists of a sentence fragment with no period at the end of the line, and b) for links to biographies, it's standard to include birth and death dates in parentheses after the wikilink. I've restored your wording with the above minor issues addressed. Regards. --Muchness 03:20, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your offer, but for the most part, i have retired from Wikipedia. There are many reasons, but one of the biggest is all the POV passed off as politically correctness. Most of it stems from the very topic you invited me into. While i am not opposed to the use of diacritics and other foreign characters in titles and in the main article body, what I am opposed to is their use when they are the least common spelling in English. It seems to me that most of the people pushing for the "non-English" characters are not native English speakers and have their own agenda. I feel like non-English characters are being shoved down my throat with no regard to current wikipedia policies about article naming (which clearly state that the most common spelling in English be used). Wikipedia is for the layman and the most recognisable spellings to the layman are to be used. That is wikipedia policy. Masterhatch 01:41, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

Here are some articles worthy of note:

I see you have already discovered this Wikipedia:Naming conventions (standard letters with diacritics).

For some older discussions and votes on the matter, try these articles:

• Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ice Hockey/Player pages format
• Talk:Quebec Nordiques
• Talk:Teemu Selänne
• Talk:Marian Gaborik
• Talk:Jaromir Jagr
• Talk:Jaroslav Spacek

If you need anthing, don't hestitate to message me. I don't log onto wikipedia very often anymore (if had, i would have been able to toss in my two cents and a vote for that article you pointed out), but i still do check every once in a while. I think wikipedia has great potential, but currently, everywhere i look it reeks of POV and useless lists. Anyways, I hope you don't suffer the same wiki-stress fate that I did. Good luck and Happy New Year. Masterhatch 01:06, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

I reviewed the caps in united states presidential line of succession. thanks a lot!!! -- johno95 19:21, 31 December 2006 (UTC)