User talk:Retired Pchem Prof

I am starting a project of gradually improving physical chemistry articles. If you would like to provide feedback or suggestions, please place them under the appropriate heading in the "Work in Progress" section. A summary of what I have done and am planning is on my user page.

Note that Wikipedia convention is that new text is added at the end of the section, below existing text.

Work in Progress

These are things I am working on. I provide these headings if people want to comment on them.

Articles that need attention

If you would like to call my attention to a particular physical chemistry article that needs work, please post that here, together with a brief reason why you think the article needs improving.

Welcome

After having read this new editor's post at the Teahouse, I'm replacing most of the welcome message with one that I think is better suited for this editor. w.carter-Talk 23:35, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

Welcome Retired Pchem Prof!

Now that you've joined Wikipedia, there are 48,459,387 registered editors!

Hello, Retired Pchem Prof. Welcome to Wikipedia and thank you for your contributions! I'm W.carter, one of the other editors here, and I hope you decide to stay and help contribute to this amazing repository of knowledge.

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Sincerely, w.carter-Talk 23:35, 16 January 2016 (UTC)   (Leave me a message)

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A good start

You seem to be off to a very good start now. You have mastered the basics of editing, communication, creating new pages and so on. You are now ready to start with your work and I don't think I need to keep an eye on your doings. Just a note about the archives: When the first page in an archive have become sufficiently long, you just create a new one with a consecutive number. The archive on that page will detect it as soon as it has run through the system, which can take a couple of minutes. Copy the name of the first page and upgrade the number. It is important that the names of the pages are exactly the same or the archive will not detect it. For this page's archive the page following User talk:Retired Pchem Prof/Archive 1 will be User talk:Retired Pchem Prof/Archive 2. You are of course always welcome to ask things on my talk page, or 'ping' me from another page if need be. Happy editing! w.carter-Talk 08:50, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

Reverting edits

Hi Prof. In this edit you wrote "I will revert it myself, if I can figure out how." We all come across edits that should be reverted - mischief, technical errors, our own errors etc. It is very easy to revert an edit:

• select the View history tab, just to the left of the Search box
• look to the extreme right of the line that represents the latest edit and you will see undo/thank in brackets. (If it is an anonymous contributor with only an IP address, the thank option is not there.)
• select undo. Wikipedia will prepare an edit box with the offending edit removed, but you don't have to do anything with this edit box.
• Wikipedia will prepare an edit summary saying Undid revision 12345678 by (User name). You can leave this edit summary as it is, or you can add a brief explanation of why you undid the edit eg Reverted mischief or The edit was technically incorrect or Reverted my own mistake; whatever might help explain to others what the problem was.
• select Show preview or Save page or Show changes.

If the edit you want to revert isn't the latest edit, it can be a little more tricky to revert it, but that can wait until another occasion. Dolphin (t) 04:49, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

Are you disturbed by the "flow" of Wikipedia science articles?

Hi - I am a physics professor, tenured at the associate level, but close enough to not fuss about making full professor.

Speaking only for Physics, I have noticed that Wikipedia articles have mismatched styles that render them useless as reading material for students. I believe the solution to this problem is to introduce online Journals where editors can chop up these articles and "publish" them as uneditable documents. See:

• Wikiversity:Second Journal of Science
• Wikiversity:Second Journal of Science/Editorial
• Wikiversity:Second Journal of Science/About
• v:User:Guy vandegrift/Faculty_activity_report_2015

I could really use an editor or writer for Chemistry articles. More than anything I need an honest critic to serve as the second referee on physics and astronomy articles. Since we focus on undergraduate science, I believe we can streamline the refereeing policy. Somewhere in the materials describing the journal is a statement to the effect that we will not be "fact-checking" Wikipedia articles until this journal matures a bit.--Guy vandegrift (talk) 19:24, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

Very interesting. There are definitely many issues with Wikipedia science articles. The primary response should be to improve the articles, not to duplicate effort. If I understand this correctly, that is the idea: Improve Wikipedia articles and use the journal as a way of identifying and stabilizing Wikipedia content that meets standards, with a secondary objective of providing a way of publishing content that might not fit in Wikipedia. Commendable, and if this is indeed the idea, I am willing to help, at least to the extent that I can find the time. Please note that Chemistry has a divide between physical and synthetic, and I am very much on the physical side of that divide. @Guy vandegrift: Retired Pchem Prof (talk) 20:01, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

Your short paragraph tells me that you understand exactly what I am trying to do. I understand that you are busy and I respected that, even before contacting you. Look here, and a few lines lower here, where I state that the refereeing will be quick and somewhat casual. It does not hurt a journal's reputation to disclose this, especially in the early issues. If you could simply skim over these short articles and OK them, I will disclose that this is how the referees were instructed to judge. Later we can look for ways to improve on this. I presume you could referee freshman level physics articles. Conceptual astronomy is really basic, could you referee those articles as well?--Guy vandegrift (talk) 22:57, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

OK. Why don't you just suggest some articles? I will give them a look to see if I comfortable reviewing them. @Guy vandegrift: Retired Pchem Prof (talk) 15:04, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

It is very easy to referee on your own time. Just go to v:Second_Journal_of_Science/Past issues and follow the instructions. The manuscripts that need an opinion are m-002 and m-004. You may reply publicly on the talk page to each "submission", or you may email me. Since you have opted out of receiving emails via Wikipedia, you can't send them. You can use my email at guy.vandegrift@wright.edu. However since there is no single author who might feel slighted by a rejection, you have no real need to give me a confidential review.

To save you the trouble of going through the index, here are the direct links to the articles that need reviewing: 002 and 004. Your instructions are not to carefully examine the articles unless you wish to. This is the first series and I think it's OK if we focus on getting articles out, provided that we disclose this fact. When the first issue comes out in a few weeks, I will send you a link to this disclosure, which of course will be an editable wiki page.

If any reason arises to suggest that we need stricter refereeing, we can change that. Keep in mind that every article that gets published can be easily rewritten, resubmitted, and republished. The idea is to get static and focused articles into the hands of teachers, and this journal will be a big step in that direction.--Guy vandegrift (talk) 19:35, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

OK, I've got those two articles and will start working through them. I am a bit worried about version; I think I ended up getting the pdf of the current version on Wkipedia. It was the only way I saw to get the pdf. @Guy vandegrift: Retired Pchem Prof (talk) 02:10, 3 February 2016 (UTC)

Yes, both versions are PDFs of nearly the same version as appears on Wikipedia. Perhaps the only difference is the horses logo. I just felt both articles were unusually focused for Wikipedia science articles. By "focus", I mean focused on a single level of difficulty. The biggest problem with most WP articles as teaching materials is that they span many levels, from high school through post-graduate (and sometimes even beyond). --Guy vandegrift (talk) 03:47, 3 February 2016 (UTC)

I tried to submit a review, but it seems the links provided above no longer work. @Guy vandegrift: Retired Pchem Prof (talk) 21:28, 4 February 2016 (UTC)

Found a link that worked and submitted a review. @Guy vandegrift: Retired Pchem Prof (talk) 21:39, 4 February 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for your meticulous review.

1. I can see that you are doing good work here on WP, but if you ever want to join our editorial board I will enthusiastically support you, and with 3 members I would need only one more vote. Or, it would only take me a couple of hours to create the Wikiversity Journal of P-Chem and I could be on your board.
2. Would you mind if I moved your review to v:Talk:Second_Journal_of_Science/Past_issues/004?
3. If your answer to the previous question is "yes", I will post a congratulatory note, telling bewildered editors of Astronomical spectroscopy that they are the first "authors" of this new journal, and informing them of one referees vision of how the article might be expanded. This is only with your permission, of course. Do I have it?
4. And finally, are you interested in reviewing more articles? P-chem is not a freshman college topic, while is my journal is focused on science at the college freshman level.--Guy vandegrift (talk) 14:07, 5 February 2016 (UTC)

The review I provided is for the intro to quantum mechanics, so why would you want to move it to the astronomy article? P-chem is a freshman topic in the same sense as quantum mechanics or optics. Content from those areas is included in first year courses, even though courses dedicated to such topics are not first year courses. @Guy vandegrift: Retired Pchem Prof (talk) 17:14, 6 February 2016 (UTC)

Mea culpa on the mixup between quantum mechanics and astronomy. I commented on the article and your review at v:Talk:Second Journal of Science/Past issues/002--Guy vandegrift (talk) 20:38, 6 February 2016 (UTC)