User talk:The Transhumanist/Archive 27

The Transhumanist talk page email contributions edit count goodbye Please contact me concerning anything to do with outlines or the Outline of knowledge WikiProject. Questions, problems, conflicts, AfD's, etc. etc. Thank you. 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For example, all Wikipedia pages linking to Yahoo.com. External search engines – see Wikipedia:External search engines and Wikipedia:Tools#Searching Other languages – for searching other language editions of Wikipedia see http://wikipedia.org/ and the links above. Toolserver - there are multiple tools on Toolserver, most notably: CatScan — powerful search using categories, included templates, etc. Page statistics Grep — search pages titles using regexps. Outline-based summarizers 7 tools for creating mind maps and outlines Wikisummarizer Rants: The emptiness of the term "unencyclopedic" "Unencyclopedic" is an empty argument. It means "not worthy of being included in an encyclopedia", which is synonymous with "should not be included" or "I want it deleted". So when you use it as a justification for deleting something, it's a circular argument: "Delete, because it should be deleted". This is just repeating yourself. What we want to know are your reasons why the article shouldn't be included in Wikipedia. Simply answer the question, What guidelines does it violate, and how? This user is one of the 400 most active English Wikipedians of all time. Hatlink added from Japan to Outline of Japan on Aug. 24 has increased page views, but still quite low. This might be an idea worth trying with other outlines. LittleBen (talk) 17:07, 11 September 2012 (UTC) Disambiguation link notification for March 11 Hi. In your recent article edits, you've added some links pointing to disambiguation pages. Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject. Outline of computing (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver) added a link pointing to Computer mathematics Outline of software (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver) added a link pointing to Deactivation It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 11:32, 11 March 2012 (UTC) Nomination for deletion of Template:Alpha index Template:Alpha index has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 11:39, 13 March 2012 (UTC) Disambiguation link notification for March 18 Hi. In your recent article edits, you've added some links pointing to disambiguation pages. Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject. Pastoral society (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver) added links pointing to Turkana, Rendille and Pokot Outline of the humanities (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver) added links pointing to Speculative and History of opera Glossary of fencing (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver) added a link pointing to Appel Outline of society (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver) added a link pointing to Humanity It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 10:49, 18 March 2012 (UTC) Color of Template:Jazz I have reverted your edits changing the color of Template:Jazz, since colors are standardized per WP:GENRE. If you really want to change the color it should be discussed at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Music/Music genres task force, however, keep in mind that arguing over the color of templates is discouraged per WP:DEW. ANDROS1337TALK 22:28, 27 March 2012 (UTC) The color was a minor change—I was unaware of the color standardization and I don't have a problem with that or your revert. I'm happy that you liked the restructuring. The Transhumanist 23:11, 27 March 2012 (UTC) WP:4 Why did you create WP:4 as a redirect pointing to Portal:Featured content. It seems to me that WP:4 should now redirect to WP:FOUR (Wikipedia:Four Award).--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 13:55, 30 March 2012 (UTC) Why are there so many pages that link to that redirect?--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 13:57, 30 March 2012 (UTC) :: I'm glad you asked. About 5 years ago, as many as the digits (0-9) that were available were set to be quick navigation shortcuts to the subsystems of Wikipedia's contents navigation system. So Featured content got one, outlines got another, lists another, categories another, etc. Once taken and put to wide use, a shortcut is permanent because there's no way to get everyone who used links to it to agree to have those links changed. Editing 3200+ links to free up a shortcut that will only get a few uses a month just isn't going to happen. If you change a shortcut's destination, it makes all its previous embedded links erroneous, which screws up historical posts. The Transhumanist 18:12, 30 March 2012 (UTC) See also expansions I noticed you have expanded some See also sections with outlines of links. I do not think this is in keeping with style and policy. Has something changed where redundant links and complex outline structures are now encouraged? Jojalozzo 18:53, 1 April 2012 (UTC) Of course this falls within the style guidelines, because those are very loose and flexible to allow for variation and improvement. The Manual of Style states: Whether a link belongs in the "See also" section is ultimately a matter of editorial judgment and common sense. and: The links in the "See also" section do not have to be directly related to the topic of the article, because one purpose of the "See also" links is to enable readers to explore topics that are only peripherally relevant. For concepts as esoteric as these high technology topics, seeing how they fit in to the relevant theoretical and application domains is very helpful. Simple topic trees, like those I placed, present the subjects in the context of their relationships, showing what belongs to what. That is, they show how they are relevant. A few of the links were already included in the articles they were posted to, but often not displaying the same terms as those used in the articles. The corresponding embedded links were most often piped. I included the original terms in the See also section for clarity and to display relevance as mentioned above. I hope I've answered your concerns to your satisfaction. If you have further questions, please feel free to ask. Sincerely,   The Transhumanist 21:19, 1 April 2012 (UTC) I am disappointed you cherry picked style guidelines quotes and left out the basic guidance. I understand the merits of your approach but I'd prefer starting with an acknowledgement it is not compliant with the spirit of the style guide and standard practice throughout the project. If that is your position then let's not get into any drawn out discussion here and get third party input. Jojalozzo 22:23, 1 April 2012 (UTC) I believe the exceptions to the general rule are what apply here, to adapt to the special conditions. To me, the key question is "Does the erudite nature of artificial intelligence terminology warrant a more refined approach?" I think the answer is "yes it does". But since you do not, perhaps the changes weren't as intuitive as I thought they were. Sometimes my changes are, sometimes they're not. Therefore, per your complaint, I have removed the bullet indents and scary monster link dumps, and have touched up, including alpha sorting and typo fixing. I left about 4 of the links I had added in most of the articles. I have also separated out the list links into their own (non-TOC) section, as they don't alphabetize well by subject like prose articles do (which renders their order in a straight See also list somewhat arbitrary). The Transhumanist 02:12, 2 April 2012 (UTC) I think simply linking to the AI outline (or a section of it) would be better in most cases without replicating its substructure. However, I am not absolutely opposed to your approach; I see significant benefit in a more structured 'See also' organization in major overview articles. For specific, focused topics I think links back to overview, list and outline articles offer sufficient context. Jojalozzo 02:56, 2 April 2012 (UTC) That's the approach I've been following on most subjects. Thank you for your feedback. The Transhumanist 03:08, 2 April 2012 (UTC) Disambiguation link notification for April 4 Hi. In your recent article edits, you've added some links pointing to disambiguation pages. Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject. Outline of object recognition (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver) added links pointing to Context, Texture and Geons Outline of C++ (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver) added a link pointing to Method Outline of software development (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver) added a link pointing to Deactivation It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 15:19, 4 April 2012 (UTC) A barnstar for you! The Copyeditor's Barnstar Thanks for the ndashes on the Apple outline article. Zach Vega (talk) 00:58, 13 April 2012 (UTC) Outline of Northern Cyprus redlinks HI, I tried to fix the redlinks in the Outline of Northern Cyprus and couldn't tell why there were so many that didn't make sense, until I (belatedly) thought of reading the talk page, where I saw your post about outlines and redlinks, and immediately blushed and made this face. I undid my edit to the military section, but I don't know what I can write or do to make the links that are there make sense. For example, I had already made redirects for all of the non-existent military branches, but they all link to Military of Northern Cyprus, and this doesn't seem like much help to the reader. The same goes for the redlinks for the ecoregions list and article; I wanted to make those into hidden text until the articles are created, but I guess the time for that change wouldn't be readily apparent or in line with the outline policy. I also added data from the country's infobox to the geography section, and later found out that Template: Outline country doesn't have any spaces for that data, so I left it. Before I butcher the article or my edits anymore, I hope you can give me some help. SaaHc2B (talk) 05:02, 15 April 2012 (UTC) I'm happy to help. Northern Cyprus is so small that many standard subjects will probably never be written for it. For those topics, it makes no sense in letting redlinks sit in there, because they may be red for decades. Also, "{{Main}}" links in hatnotes should not be red, and those that are should be blue-linked or removed. Template:Outline country was meant as a starting point only. It was incomplete on purpose - we included as much data as we thought we could handle. The selection of standard data did not fit every country, and the team spent about a year adjusting the outlines to tailor fit them to their respective countries. It was a huge undertaking, and it looked like there was no end in sight. So when the outlines were extensive enough to be useful we moved them all into article space even though they weren't done yet. That way, other editors could find them and join in and help. And you did! Thank you. Please, by all means, develop the article. Whatever makes the most sense to you. For future reference, you may find searching titles via toolserver very helpful for gathering links on a subject (the first one matches either of 2 terms, while the second one includes redirects): http://toolserver.org/~nikola/grep.php?pattern=of+Norther+Cyprus%7Cin+Northern+Cyprus&lang=en&wiki=wikipedia&ns=0 http://toolserver.org/~nikola/grep.php?pattern=Northern+Cyprus&lang=en&wiki=wikipedia&ns=0 You also might find outlines on other small countries or autonomous territories useful as examples. See: Outline of Gibraltar Outline of Iceland Outline of Vatican City Outline of Monaco Outline of Macau Outline of the Isle of Man Outline of Somaliland I hope you find this advice useful. I've cleaned up the outline a little, and look forward to seeing the article once you have finished working on it. Good luck, and if you have any more questions, please feel free to ask. The Transhumanist 10:01, 15 April 2012 (UTC) April 2012 Welcome to Wikipedia. It might not have been your intention, but your recent edit removed content from Flute. When removing content, please specify a reason in the edit summary and discuss edits that are likely to be controversial on the article's talk page. If this was a mistake, don't worry; the content has been restored, as you can see from the page history. Take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia, and if you would like to experiment, please use the sandbox. Thank you. –sumone10154(talk • contribs) 19:08, 23 April 2012 (UTC) Typo - I was trying out one of the more technical features of AWB and must have hit save instead of skip by mistake (the buttons are right next to each other). Thank you for correcting it. The Transhumanist 20:07, 23 April 2012 (UTC) May 2012 After noticing your interest in outlines and happening across Wikipedia's "books" project, I thought I'd drop you a note and suggest looking at the organization of Book:Abrahamic_religions and... well... that looks quite similar to your project, so perhaps the two projects could assist each other? The "Books" project has some well-organized topics (Book:Abrahamic religions is one), and some poorly-developed ones (Book:Science for example). Perhaps a thought that allies can be everywhere. The converse is true also, of course. Still, the books project offers some already-half-developed outline structures that might be usable for something in the outlines project. ;-> — Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.212.79.93 (talk) 17:26, 3 May 2012 (UTC) Outline of Baha'i Faith They speedy deleted my Outline of Baha'i Faith - the content of it can be seen at [9]. The reason given was A3 - no content. I'm not sure if I should contest it, or just wait a few months. I was offline for a couple of days, and they killed it. Thoughts?Marikafragen (talk) 01:26, 9 May 2012 (UTC) Thank you for the heads up. I've posted a message to the speedy admin at User talk:Malik Shabazz#Please undo your speedy of Outline of Baha'i Faith. Please feel free to join in on the discussion there. The more editors who express their concern, the better. The Transhumanist 03:56, 9 May 2012 (UTC) Talkback Hello, The Transhumanist. You have new messages at Sumone10154's talk page. Message added 20:30, 23 April 2012 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template. –sumone10154(talk • contribs) 20:30, 23 April 2012 (UTC) Talkback Hello, The Transhumanist. You have new messages at Malik Shabazz's talk page. Message added 04:06, 9 May 2012 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template. From Malik's talk page: Please undo your speedy of Outline of Baha'i Faith There was an outline that apparently you speedy deleted. Please restore it. I believe the page included enough content as to not be eligible for speedy deletion. Also, the Outline WikiProject has a space for drafts, so there is no need to speedy, as it could be moved there. If it isn't ready for article space, please restore it and move it to the outline WikiProject's draft space (Wikipedia:WikiProject Outlines/Drafts/Outline of Baha'i Faith), so we can work on it. Thank you. The Transhumanist 03:46, 9 May 2012 (UTC) The page I deleted was a redirect to a deleted page. I've restored the page in question, Outline of Bahá'í Faith. I don't understand why it was deleted in the first place. — Malik Shabazz Talk/Stalk 04:05, 9 May 2012 (UTC) No worries. Thank you. The Transhumanist 06:02, 9 May 2012 (UTC) Help Project newsletter : Issue 1 The Help Project Newsletter Issue I - May 2012 Project news the wub has been appointed as a Wikimedia Community Fellow to lead a data-driven improvement of the English Wikipedia's help documentation, and will be working closely with the Help Project. You can read more about his plans at Wikipedia:Help Project/Community fellowship or in this Signpost article, and he has just released a first report on progress so far. The project's pages have had a major redesign, introducing tabs in order to make them more usable. If you haven't stopped by recently then check them out! A table of statistics is now available for all pages in Category:WikiProject Help Project, this includes page views, word counts and a variety of readability scores. This should be helpful in prioritising improvement work and finding redundant pages. {{Breadcrumb2}} is a new template for making attractive navigational breadcrumbs. This may be useful for linking help pages. This newsletter was started :-) From the editor Hi, and welcome to the first issue of the Help Project newsletter! This is a new monthly initiative to keep project members and the wider community informed about our work to improve Wikipedia's help pages. Any comments or suggestions for future issues are welcome at Wikipedia:Help Project/Newsletter. I've initially sent this to all existing members of the project, if you don't wish to receive the newsletter on your talk page in future then just edit the participants page and add "no newsletter" next to your name. Conversely if you've just stumbled on this newsletter (perhaps through talk page stalking) and want to receive it in future then please feel free to sign up! the wub "?!" 16:16, 23 May 2012 (UTC) Tasks Help:Diff needs to be updated for the new diff styles. Out of date outlines Thank you for the work you are doing on outlines. However, there is an issue with two outlines you wrote recently, Outline of fishing and Outline of the fishing industry. I mentioned at the time on Talk:Outline of fishing that these outlines are many years out of date, and explained where up to date information can be found. However, the note was not acknowledged, so you may have not seen it. --Epipelagic (talk) 14:44, 25 May 2012 (UTC) I'm making a start on that, but it will be a while. That's a lot of templates.Marikafragen (talk) 19:25, 25 May 2012 (UTC) Accounting outline Added annotations to most of accounting draft outline. It does still need some work.Marikafragen (talk) 19:25, 25 May 2012 (UTC) Perl question Let me know if I can clarify my answer to your perl question. I don't think my answer's very elegant, but the gist of it should work. Shadowjams (talk) 23:28, 25 May 2012 (UTC) Nevermind. Ben has a workable, elegant, and much smarter answer than mine. I'm envious. Shadowjams (talk) 00:37, 26 May 2012 (UTC) Wikipedia:Why do we have outlines in addition to...? Hi! Sorry for the delay, I've deleted this page for you now. How have you been? Still working on those outlines of topics? If you need any bot find/replace or other tasks doing, please feel free to let me know, and I'll see if I can help. :-) The Helpful One 00:25, 26 May 2012 (UTC) Outline of automation Dear Transhumanist, is it OK to add a section titled 'Social movements' to Outline of automation? The Technocracy Movement, The Zeitgeist Movement and The Venus Project all advocate for applying semi- or fully automatic systems to provide for all human needs - for example in food growth and production which will take care that no one would go hungry, in automatic construction, transportation, healthcare, etc ... In the view of these 3 movements, automated labor should be perfected and implemented on a mass scale globally, eliminating all mundane jobs that insult human capacity when they can instead be relegated to machines that will act more precisely and productively, freeing humans to do more creative work (and/or less work). Regards, IjonTichyIjonTichy (talk) 23:16, 30 May 2012 (UTC) Hello. Yes, all improvements are welcome. I look forward to seeing your contributions. Sincerely, The Transhumanist 00:48, 31 May 2012 (UTC) Great! I have added the section containing the links to the 3 movements, preceded by a brief explanation. I hope my edits are proper and OK with the team. Thanks. IjonTichyIjonTichy (talk) 13:23, 31 May 2012 (UTC) Nicely done. You inspired me to add annotations. Please take a look and make any corrections or completions needed. Thank you. The Transhumanist 00:09, 1 June 2012 (UTC) Awesome job The Transhumanist. One correction -- the Technocracy Movement seem to still be active, they have an apparently well-maintained website. Your work inspired me to add more to the outline (when I have time in the next few weeks/ months). Thanks and regards, IjonTichyIjonTichy (talk) 01:36, 1 June 2012 (UTC) Attn. lurkers: Request for help concerning energy... For those who watchlist or visit this page... There are 2 new outlines about energy that attempt to consolidate Wikipedia's coverage of their respective subjects, gathering and organizing the articles about them into one place and including descriptions for convenience. The purposes of these outlines are to make it easier for readers to survey or review a whole subject, and to choose from Wikipedia's many articles about it. The new energy outlines are: Outline of solar energy Outline of wind energy Please take a look at them, and.... if you spot missing topics, add them in. if you can, improve the descriptions. add missing descriptions. show parent-offspring relationships (with indents). fix errors. For more information about the format and functions of outlines, see Wikipedia:Outlines. Building outlines of existing material (such as Wikipedia) is called "reverse outlining". Reverse outlines are useful as a revision tool, for identifying gaps in coverage and for spotting poor structuring. Revising a work with multiple articles (such as Wikipedia) is a little different than revising a paper. But the general principles are the same... As you develop these outlines, you may notice things about the articles they organize. Like what topics are not adequately covered, better ways to structure and present the material, awkward titles, articles that need splitting, article sections lacking {{Main}} links, etc. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask me on my talk page or at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Outlines. Thank you. The Transhumanist 01:12, 2 June 2012 (UTC) P.S.: See also Outline of energy Greetings -- thank you for the invitation. I think it's a good idea and there are a lot of topics that can benefit from outlining. Writing them, as I'm sure you have observed, is not trivial, because of all the ways the subtopics can be broken out. The first thing that strikes me is we need (within the energy project) such things as Outline of nuclear energy, Outline of geothermal energy, Outline of hydroelectric energy, Outline of biomass energy (is there another or better name?), Outline of tidal energy, Outline of coal power (I never hear it called "coal energy"), Outline of natural gas power, etc. The latter two could be subsumed under Outline of fossil fuel energy. And of course you could categorize the ones you have started as "energy outlines" or even "renewable energy outlines". Antandrus (talk) 03:36, 2 June 2012 (UTC) Thanks for your note. My area of focus happens to be OTEC, but I have dug up information on things relevant to the areas you mention. These are mainly transferable technologies or glue technologies like HVDC, heat exchangers, and refrigerants used to move energy in low energy sources like wave, geothermal, heat recovery, solar and of course OTEC. I'll take a look at the documents you linked to, but I may be mostly useless due to my focus on ocean thermal stuff. J JMesserly (talk) 04:17, 2 June 2012 (UTC) WikiProject Transhumanism Hi, I've been working a bit on Wikipedia:WikiProject Transhumanism, of which you've been the sole member for a long time. You might want to have a look at it. I created a little userbox to promote the wikiproject, in case you're interested. You're very welcome to expand the project and of course improve it's articles. --Pereant antiburchius (talk) 11:32, 4 June 2012 (UTC) Nicely done. Probably the top priority of the WikiProject should be bringing its flagship article (Transhumanism) back up to featured article status. Though I'm afraid I'm spread too thin on another department's pages to be of much use to you. The Transhumanist 21:16, 4 June 2012 (UTC) Thanks for your reply. Transhumanism is definitely the top priority and it might take some effort to get it back to FA. It would be a shame if you wouldn't be able to pitch in, we could use your help! --Pereant antiburchius (talk) 13:16, 5 June 2012 (UTC) Your help would be much appreciated in Wikipedia:WikiProject Transhumanism! Perhaps this delicious pie will change your mind. :) --Pereant antiburchius (talk) 13:16, 5 June 2012 (UTC) Note I saw your work on: Outline of solar energy Outline of wind energy Just dropping by a general note, that guys at Portal talk:Renewable energy could help you, you may give a note there. Thanks, extra999 (talk) 16:47, 9 June 2012 (UTC) Nomination for deletion of Template:Cto Template:Cto has been nominated for deletion. Template:Cto creates a conditional topic overview linkbox for the See also section of an article with links to (1) the topic article, (2) the outline of the topic, (3) the index of topic-related articles, (4) the bibliography of the topic, and (5) the Wikipedia book on the topic. You are invited to comment on the discussion at Wikipedia:Templates for discussion#Template:Cto. Yours aye,  Buaidh  19:50, 12 June 2012 (UTC) Nomination for deletion of Template:TopicTOC-Mathematics Template:TopicTOC-Mathematics has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Illia Connell (talk) 17:57, 16 June 2012 (UTC) Invitation to WikiProject Electrical engineering Hi fellow editor, You are invited to join the WikiProject Electrical engineering, a collaborative effort focused on improving Wikipedia's coverage of electrical engineering. If you'd like to join, add also your name to the member list. Thanks for reading! SchreyP (messages) 19:49, 24 June 2012 (UTC) An SOS from the Community portal The Transhumanist, hello! Since I noticed that you've made some contributions to the Community portal, I'd really appreciate your input on a discussion I just started on the talk page. Thanks in advance for your thoughts on this :) Maryana (WMF) (talk) 18:16, 26 June 2012 (UTC) Help Project newsletter : Issue 2 The Help Project Newsletter Issue II - June 2012 Project news Progress on the help redesign fellowship continues apace. In-person usability testing is due to start next week, watch this space for results! A large survey about help pages was conducted. Responses are still coming in, but preliminary results are available. A new gadget has been proposed to make it easier for new- and non-editors to leave feedback about help pages. Please test it and leave your thoughts. In somewhat-related-project-news: the Teahouse has wrapped up its pilot phase with an extensive report. Planning and discussion is underway for phase 2. A discussion is taking place about the purpose and future of the venerable Community portal. From the editor Hello from the Help Project, and welcome to the second issue of our newsletter! The biggest project I've been working on this month has been a large survey of users to find out what they think of our current help pages. Preliminary results from this are now available, although there are more responses trickling in from the lower edit count groups since a batch of email invitations were recently sent out. Finalised results and further analysis should be posted next week. Any comments or suggestions for future issues are welcome at Wikipedia:Help Project/Newsletter. If you don't wish to receive this newsletter on your talk page in future then just edit the participants page and add "no newsletter" next to your name. the wub "?!" 18:48, 29 June 2012 (UTC) Tasks Calling all CSS and template gurus: Help:Diff and {{wiki diff}} need to be updated to match the new MediaWiki diff styles. Why not wander through the lower reaches of Wikipedia:Help Project/page statistics and see if there are pages that can be cleaned up or merged. Help Project newsletter : Issue 3 The Help Project Newsletter Issue III - August 2012 Project news summary Final results and conclusions from the help pages survey were released. The wub gave a presentation at Wikimania 2012 about help pages, and the slides are now on Commons. A discussion is taking place about the purpose and future of the venerable Community portal. New designs for tutorial pages have been proposed, comment from project members is welcome. From the editor Welcome to the (slightly delayed) third issue of the Help Project newsletter. The past month has once again been a busy one for my fellowship. The full results and conclusions from the extensive user survey on help pages are now available, and make interesting reading. These do confirm a number of our suspicions about Wikipedia help, and suggest that the current plan for the remainder of the fellowship is a sound approach. Also last month I was fortunate enough to attend Wikimania 2012 in Washington DC, where I gave a presentation about help pages and the aforementioned survey results. You can find the slides from this on Commons. Wikimania was also a great opportunity for many discussions with staff and community members, and these brought up some interesting ideas which I hope to follow up on. One of the things much discussed was the planned tutorial pages. I've been working on a new design for them which can be seen at User:The wub/sandbox/1, please let me know what you think (especially if you spot any bugs!). Any comments or suggestions for future issues are welcome at Wikipedia:Help Project/Newsletter. If you don't wish to receive this newsletter on your talk page in future then just edit the participants page and add "no newsletter" next to your name. the wub "?!" 13:26, 3 August 2012 (UTC) Thanks for everything A belated thanks (I have time! Finally!) for the notes on my talkpage wishing me well, during my wikibreak. They were much appreciated when I finally had time to login again. In general, I'm glad to see that nothing horrendous has occurred, though the indexes appear to be sliding into projectspace (which seems reasonable). I'll be working on glossaries for a little while, but hope to get caught up on outlines and start assisting with them again, soon. Best wishes, -- Quiddity (talk) 04:15, 6 August 2012 (UTC) Help Project newsletter : Issue 4 The Help Project Newsletter Issue IV - September 2012 Project news summary The in-person usability tests from the wub's community fellowship have been written up. Three new introductory tutorials for new users have been created: referencing, uploading images and navigating Wikipedia. The Article Feedback Tool has been deployed to pages in the Help namespace, and can be added manually to help pages in other namespaces. Read more... Page statistics were updated for the month of August. From the editor Hi, and welcome to the fourth issue of the Help Project newsletter. It's been another busy month in the world of Wikipedia help. The results from the in-person usability tests conducted as part of the help pages fellowship have been released. There are no great surprises here, the tests confirmed that people have trouble with the existing help system, and people looking for help on the same topic often end up at wildly different pages. Editors who experienced a tutorial and/or edited a sandbox as part of their learning were noticeably more confident when editing a real article. Drawing on that, three new "Introduction to" tutorials for new users have been created: referencing, uploading images and navigating Wikipedia. These join the popular existing introductions to policies and guidelines and talk pages. Feel free to edit them, but please do remember that the idea is to keep them simple and as free from extraneous details as possible. All three have been added to Help:Getting started, which is intended to be the new focal point for new editors, and will also be seeing a redesign soon. In other news, the Article Feedback Tool (AFT) can now be used to collect feedback on help pages. By default it has been deployed to all pages in the Help: namespace. It can be disabled on any page by adding Category:Article Feedback Blacklist, or enabled for pages in other namespaces by adding Category:Article Feedback 5 Additional Articles. Once a page has AFT applied, you can add feedback using the form which appears at the bottom of it. Feedback can be reviewed by clicking "View feedback" in the sidebar, or the "Feedback from my watched pages" link at the top of your watchlist. I'm now entering the final month of my fellowship, and will be focusing my efforts on making much needed improvements to Help:Contents, the main entrance point to our help system. It's been a pleasure working as a fellow, and I just want to thank all the people who have helped me or offered advice over the past months. That definitely won't be the end of my involvement in the Help Project though, I'll be sticking around as a volunteer and continuing to write this newsletter. Any comments or suggestions for future issues are welcome at Wikipedia:Help Project/Newsletter. If you don't wish to receive this newsletter on your talk page in future then just edit the participants page and add "no newsletter" next to your name. -- the wub "?!" 20:00, 7 September 2012 (UTC) MfD nomination of Wikipedia:User page design center Wikipedia:User page design center, a page you substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; please participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:User page design center and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Wikipedia:User page design center during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. IRWolfie- (talk) 15:23, 8 September 2012 (UTC) Any thoughts, or input, for the MfD thread? I left extensive notes there... Thanks :) —Quiddity (talk) 16:57, 17 September 2012 (UTC) Is it possible for you to compact the project for easier maintenance? I could try, but since you have the extensive knowledge you are better placed to do it. IRWolfie- (talk) 12:27, 10 October 2012 (UTC) Wikipedia:0 listed at Redirects for discussion An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Wikipedia:0. Since you had some involvement with the Wikipedia:0 redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion (if you have not already done so). TheChampionMan1234 07:14, 11 September 2012 (UTC) Cabinet of the Republic of Kosovo/Government of Kosovo These articles are sprouting like mushrooms, and I fear that they are like the famous definition of politics as being like mushrooms - "we keep you in the dark and feed you on shit". There is no particular reason why articles on the same thing should not be merged and have NPOV descriptions. In the case of these two articles, the Government of Kosovo, whether regarded as being merely de facto or de jure is normally described as precisely that. The quarterly reports by the UN Secretary-General to the UN Security Council refer to it as the Government, while being status-neutral. So too do both the Wikipedia articles "Kosovo", which I regard as broadly pro-Serb, and "the Republic of Kosovo", which is supposed to broadly reflect those who accept Kosovo as an independent entity. There is no legal entity in the Republic of Kosovo described as the "Cabinet of the Republic"; while in the UK "the Cabinet" means the principal Government Ministers, in Kosovo and Serbia, as in most of Europe, a "Cabinet" means the advisors, hangers-on, photocopyists, and parasites of the Ministers. Perhaps new articles on Kosovo should require permission and consensus - a sort of semi-protected state - to avoid people circumventing the existing semi-protected articles? Markd999 (talk) 19:36, 28 September 2012 (UTC) Help with the Editor Hello TT- You once helped me with an editor software problem, and I have a new one. I wonder if I might indulge again? I used to have below my editing window a choice of special characters to insert, which included the 4 tildes, and the m- and n- dashes, and many more. Those choices have vanished, and I can't find the way to turn them back on. Can you help? Thanks. JMOprof (talk) 18:58, 10 October 2012 (UTC) "You can get it back if you go to Preferences → Editing and uncheck enable enhanced editing toolbar." See many more details in dozens of current threads at WP:VPT. Lots of complaints/concerns. It might be coming back, but might not. —Quiddity (talk) 20:38, 10 October 2012 (UTC)  Done. Thank you kindly. Not progress in my POV ☺ JMOprof (talk) 21:27, 10 October 2012 (UTC) Thank you Quiddity for fielding JMOprof's question for me. My availability has been sparse as of late, but should improve in around a month. The Transhumanist 02:04, 25 October 2012 (UTC) Outlines project Hi, I know I haven't done much on outlines lately. I am retired from editing now, which doesn't mean I will be gone from Wikipedia alltogether. It just means that Wikipedia has dropped significantly on my priority list. I want to thank you for your kind invitation to the Outlines WikiProject. I hope to get around to provide some more annotations to outlines. Previously there was unfortunately too much other stuff I was doing here at Wikipedia. However, I have stopped pretty much anything that is drama ripe, such as NFCC enforcement. That might also mean that I can do a bit of stuff regarding outlines now. It might not be much I will do by myself, but if there is a specific outline you want help with, do not hesitate to drop me a message on my talkpage. Also I plan to proceed with annotating some outlines. Again, if there is a specific one you want me to provide a helping hand with annotating, please let me know. I know that it sounds a bit ridiculous, but I guess the chances I do something are higher if I receive specific requests, so please feel free to give me a slight "kick in the butt" to get me started on a specific task. I hope you can make a bit of sense of all this. Thanks again for your invitation to the project and the detailed task description on my talkpage. Best. -- Toshio Yamaguchi 09:22, 5 December 2012 (UTC) Disambiguation link notification for December 10 Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Figurative system of human knowledge, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Synthesis (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver). Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject. It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 11:12, 10 December 2012 (UTC) Disambiguation link notification for December 21 Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Outline of natural language processing, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Commercial (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver). Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject. It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 12:02, 21 December 2012 (UTC) History of encyclopedias Hello, The Transhumanist, and thank you for your contributions! An article you worked on History of encyclopedias, appears to be directly copied from http://artandpopularculture.com/Encyclopedia. Please take a minute to make sure that the text is freely licensed and properly attributed as a reference, otherwise the article may be deleted. It's entirely possible that this bot made a mistake, so please feel free to remove this notice and the tag it placed on History of encyclopedias if necessary. MadmanBot (talk) 21:13, 21 December 2012 (UTC) It was a mistake - the source you cited is a mirror of Wikipedia. The Transhumanist 21:50, 21 December 2012 (UTC) I have unreviewed a page you curated Hi, I'm TBrandley. I wanted to let you know that I saw the page you reviewed, History of encyclopedias, and have un-reviewed it again. If you've got any questions, please ask me on my talk page. Thanks, TBrandley Speedy deletion nomination of History of encyclopedias If this is the first article that you have created, you may want to read the guide to writing your first article. You may want to consider using the Article Wizard to help you create articles. A tag has been placed on History of encyclopedias requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section G12 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the article or image appears to be a clear copyright infringement. For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or printed material, and as a consequence, your addition will most likely be deleted. You may use external websites as a source of information, but not as a source of sentences. This part is crucial: say it in your own words. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously and persistent violators will be blocked from editing. If the external website or image belongs to you, and you want to allow Wikipedia to use the text or image — which means allowing other people to modify it — then you must verify that externally by one of the processes explained at Wikipedia:Donating copyrighted materials. If you are not the owner of the external website or image but have permission from that owner, see Wikipedia:Requesting copyright permission. You might want to look at Wikipedia's policies and guidelines for more details, or ask a question here. If you think that the page was nominated in error, contest the nomination by clicking on the button labelled "Click here to contest this speedy deletion" in the speedy deletion tag. Doing so will take you to the talk page where you can explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. You can also visit the page's talk page directly to give your reasons, but be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be removed without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but do not hesitate to add information that is consistent with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. TBrandley 21:29, 21 December 2012 (UTC) A page you started has been reviewed! Thanks for creating History of encyclopedias, The Transhumanist! Wikipedia editor FreeRangeFrog just reviewed your page, and wrote this note for you: Beautiful! To reply, leave a comment on FreeRangeFrog's talk page. Learn more about page curation. It was no big deal, just a split from the article "Encyclopedia". The Transhumanist 23:13, 21 December 2012 (UTC) Thanks for the suggestion Hi Transhumanist! Thanks for the suggestion to look at "The Outline of Chess". Overall it looks very good indeed and very interesting. I do think the openings section is a little unbalanced and the definition of 'double attack' isn't quite right. I might try to add a few bits here and there sometime but I must confess that although I'm an ok player (about 2100 elo) most of my non-playing knowledge is related to (relatively) old chess software, which, I grant you, is a rather overly-specialist area! :) Chessbloke (talk) 08:55, 3 January 2013 (UTC) Adjectivals and demonyms for countries and nations As a contributor to the article, you may wish to comment at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Adjectivals and demonyms for countries and nations (2nd nomination). —Wavelength (talk) 02:08, 5 January 2013 (UTC) Thank you for your support for keeping the article. —Wavelength (talk) 21:41, 22 January 2013 (UTC) Talkback Hello, The Transhumanist. You have new messages at Emmette Hernandez Coleman's talk page. Message added 14:33, 7 January 2013 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template. Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 14:33, 7 January 2013 (UTC) Talkback Hello, The Transhumanist. You have new messages at Emmette Hernandez Coleman's talk page. Message added 00:45, 8 January 2013 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template. Emmette Hernandez Coleman (talk) 00:45, 8 January 2013 (UTC) A cookie for you! Many years ago, back before I had created my current account, I created a humble little userspace navigation menu based off of two of your menus from the User Page Design Center (initially 15, but ultimately 6). Over the years it has grown, but I don't know if I ever would have started it without seeing your menus first. I just want to thank you for putting the effort into creating those menus and then sharing them at the Design Center where they have been helpful for people like me. I hope you don't mind me borrowing from your hard work! Thanks again and take care! Michael Barera (talk) 03:30, 13 January 2013 (UTC) Disambiguation link notification for January 13 Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Outline of natural language processing, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Maximum entropy (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver). Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject. It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 12:12, 13 January 2013 (UTC) Help Project newsletter : Issue 5 The Help Project Newsletter Issue V - January 2013 Project news summary Help:Contents and Wikipedia:Contact us have seen a major revamp. Page statistics were updated. Alerts are now available for discussions related to Help Project pages Many more Help Project pages now have the Article Feedback Tool (v5) enabled. GettingStarted is an experimental feature to guide new users with their first edits. From the editor Hello again from the Help Project! In the last newsletter (which was quite a while ago sorry!) I talked about my fellowship and the plans for improving the main portal page, Help:Contents. Well I'm sad to say that my fellowship is now over, but very happy to say that the proposed improvements to that page have been completed and implemented. Do check it out if you haven't already. Another important and frequently used help page, Wikipedia:Contact us, has also seen a significant revamp. You may recognise the design inspiration from the new tutorial pages. In project news, we now have a subscription to the "article alerts" service. Any deletion nominations, move discussions, or requests for comments on pages within the Help Project's scope will now show up at Wikipedia:Help Project/Article alerts. So that's definitely a page which project members might want to watch. Any comments or suggestions for future issues are welcome at Wikipedia:Help Project/Newsletter. If you don't wish to receive this newsletter on your talk page in future then just edit the participants page and add "no newsletter" next to your name. -- the wub "?!" 23:34, 13 January 2013 (UTC) Undeletion request No problem. I also removed the speedy deletion template so no-one deletes it again before you get to it. User:The Transhumanist/Nav header contents Kind regards, James086Talk 12:57, 17 January 2013 (UTC) Thank you. The Transhumanist 12:59, 17 January 2013 (UTC) Thank you Thanks for your help...I really appreciate itfrom yield3Yield3 (talk) 23:57, 20 January 2013 (UTC) You are welcome! The Transhumanist 00:00, 21 January 2013 (UTC) again ....thanks ...and by the way your last comments shows your honesty that one expects from men or women of wisdom yield3Yield3 (talk) 00:16, 21 January 2013 (UTC) I'm touched. I do my best. I'm glad you approve. The Transhumanist 00:20, 21 January 2013 (UTC) `Yield3 (talk) Hi I was able to fix the issue of the figures corresponding with the improved rearrangements and changes you made with the text......so I believe it looks fine now...again thanks for your effort...yield3 Yield3 (talk) 04:47, 21 January 2013 (UTC) Signpost No idea if it'll pass or not, but that was a brilliant proposal re: the Signpost. Mind you, there are days when I wonder what the editors are thinking, but what better sign is there of community than a newspaper? – Philosopher Let us reason together. 14:02, 21 January 2013 (UTC) Thank you. Well, I figured that because my proposal to get "Contents" put on there succeeded, they would see the logic for putting The Signpost on there too. I didn't expect such an us/them rift. By the way, if it does not pass, it will at least provide a starting point for further discussion on how to improve exposure of and traffic to The Signpost. Along with generating a list of interested editors. The Transhumanist 07:23, 23 January 2013 (UTC) Re: proposal to put The Signpost on the main menu To whom it may concern: I placed notices on the supporters' talk pages that there are replies at the discussion. It took longer than I thought it would. I'll place similar notices on the opposers' talk pages. But I've got to get some sleep first. I'll be back ASAIC. The Transhumanist 13:35, 23 January 2013 (UTC) I am a noob Thank you very much for offering to help. I haven't done much editing yet, just removed some original research from some pages. I would like to make the India related articles more reliable. If you can suggest me some tutorials to start with... that'll be great. And I haven't used any tools yet, so you can also help me there. HAKUNA MATATA Sandy13991 (talk) 11:44, 29 January 2013 (UTC) Articles for deletion/List of adjectival and demonymic forms for countries and nations You may be interested to comment at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of adjectival and demonymic forms for countries and nations. You recently moved the page, and you participated in another AfD about three weeks ago. Thanks, and happy editing. Cnilep (talk) 08:11, 30 January 2013 (UTC) Proposal: Add The Signpost to the main menu (Thread copied from Village Pump: Proposals) This is a proposal to place the words The Signpost on the main menu, in the "Interaction" section right under "Community portal". The words would be linked to Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost, Wikipedia's newsletter and community news department. As a publication title, it would be italicized. Rationale: The Community Bulletin Board (CBB) used to be the central place for posting announcements. It was located near the top of the Community Portal, but when that page was redesigned, the CBB was removed and its functions were transferred to the Signpost's WikiProject News sidebar. The main link to the Signpost used to be in the CBB, near the top of the Community Portal. But now it is near the bottom of that page. Even though the Signpost is the community's central communication instrument, it's main page gets only about 10,000 visits per month. By comparison, the Community Portal gets around 300,000 visits per month. Placing a link to the Signpost on the main menu would make it accessible from every page of Wikipedia. This would give everyone easy access to the Signpost, while increasing the community's awareness of it. This would in turn increase awareness of current events and participation in them. Since the Signpost is the WP community's main communication instrument, it would really help to centralize it by including it on the main menu. The Transhumanist 18:54, 15 January 2013 (UTC) Support Support – as nom. This will help the Signpost get the word out. The Transhumanist 18:54, 15 January 2013 (UTC) Support, this is an excellent idea. It might also have the added effect of getting readers more involved. KillerChihuahua 19:31, 15 January 2013 (UTC) We can't contact readers directly to get them more involved (because they generally do not have accounts). But we could make it easy for them to find the way in through the interface. The Transhumanist 12:32, 23 January 2013 (UTC) Support. I've thought this was a good idea for a while, but with the recent changes to the community portal, it's especially relevant. Your mileage may vary, but for me, reading the Signpost when I started was, more than anything else, the thing that made me understand and feel part of a community.--ragesoss (talk) 19:43, 15 January 2013 (UTC) Support More visibility of current WP events is a good thing. Some folks still get caught by surprise when new policies or features are rolled out, and the Signpost is a good place to keep up on those things. — The Hand That Feeds You:Bite 21:04, 15 January 2013 (UTC) Support, wonderful idea, will help to foster positive collaboration and constructive quality improvement in many varied capacities throughout. — Cirt (talk) 22:05, 15 January 2013 (UTC) Support; I echo the rationales of those above, especially ragesoss. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Theopolisme (talk • contribs) 22:37, January 15, 2013 (UTC) Support I think the central idea here is to turn readers into editors. All of us had a reason to click that first edit link. Without looking too deeply, you don't see the wiki's central nervous system, and it is easy to be completely unaware about the editor community. Having the Signpost on the main page would show this is an ongoing collaboration. --NickPenguin(contribs) 04:26, 16 January 2013 (UTC) Support Although I feel the page that is linked to should probably have some description of what the sign post is at the top rather than dumping the reader straight into the signpost itself. ·Add§hore· Talk To Me! 04:14, 17 January 2013 (UTC) Support. I don't think that adding the signpost would cause an increase in clutter, because, if I understand correctly, this proposal would add the signpost under the interaction sub-menu, which everyone can easily decide for theselves whether or not to show the contents of. AgnosticAphid talk 11:09, 17 January 2013 (UTC) Support - Newcomers have no idea this publication even exists. The publication's content helps to build understanding and participation in the project. Carrite (talk) 20:41, 17 January 2013 (UTC) Support I think I like the idea of somehow promoting that this place is a community, which seems to have faded in recent years. Casliber (talk · contribs) 09:36, 19 January 2013 (UTC) Support, not to promote the Signpost or to endorse it or anything, but because it shows we have a community and invites people to join us.– Philosopher Let us reason together. 13:58, 21 January 2013 (UTC) I came across a passage in WP about Tim Berners-Lee (creator of the World Wide Web) that has some relevance: In June 2009 then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced Tim Berners-Lee would work with the UK Government to help make data more open and accessible on the Web, building on the work of the Power of Information Task Force. Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt are the two key figures behind data.gov.uk, a UK Government project to open up almost all data acquired for official purposes for free re-use. Commenting on the opening up of Ordnance Survey data in April 2010 Berners-Lee said that: "The changes signal a wider cultural change in Government based on an assumption that information should be in the public domain unless there is a good reason not to—not the other way around." He went on to say "Greater openness, accountability and transparency in Government will give people greater choice and make it easier for individuals to get more directly involved in issues that matter to them." Similarly, I believe greater openness and transparency concerning Wikipedia development by making The Signpost more easily accessible to readers will give them "greater choice and make it easier for individuals to get more directly involved in issues that matter to them." The Transhumanist 12:03, 23 January 2013 (UTC) References Support - per Cirt, Casliber and others. Should have been done long ago. By all means, do this! Jusdafax 07:12, 25 January 2013 (UTC) Support per Cirt et al. Fredlyfish4 (talk) 01:24, 26 January 2013 (UTC) Support this proposal. Wikipedia is not merely a collection of robots, but people with their strengths and weaknesses, interests and beliefs, dislikes and flaws. By putting the Signpost on the main page in some form, we will give the world an appreciation for all that is required to produce this encyclopedia by unveiling to them the community underlying it. Wer900 • talk 20:42, 3 February 2013 (UTC) Oppose Oppose - we should be very careful about adding any new material to the interface; each incremental addition seems like a good idea, but the inevitable result is increased clutter and a more unfriendly interface. While I like the Signpost very much, I don't think this is the most appropriate place for it - why not link more prominently from the Community Portal, instead? Andrew Gray (talk) 19:44, 15 January 2013 (UTC) The Community Portal (CP) was redesigned to support active editing by channeling editors to specific pages where their help is needed. News does not fit that theme directly (it would require extra clicks to get to problem pages), and so it was moved to the bottom of the page. The changes to the CP haven't changed traffic to The Signpost much if at all. The underlying question is: Should we increase The Signpost's readership, and if so, how? A link on the main menu is about as convenient as you can get. The Transhumanist 21:26, 15 January 2013 (UTC) It's convenient and easy, but it's not free. This approach would increase readership at the cost of marginally diminishing the usability of our user interface, which is a disproportionate cost. (See similar objections in the past to linking to the Teahouse from the sidebar, or to adding new links to the "user bar" at the top.) This is a sledgehammer of a solution, and we should try to think of a better one. For example, why not look at linking to the Signpost from the standard welcome templates? The main interface isn't the only thing available to work with. Andrew Gray (talk) 10:23, 16 January 2013 (UTC) Not a sledgehammer... a billboard. We want as many readers to see it as possible. So the maximum number are drawn in with a simple click. The Transhumanist 12:53, 23 January 2013 (UTC) ...actually, this prompts an interesting thought. In the spirit of the meta:Editor engagement experiments, we could try randomly subscribing half of all new user accounts to the Signpost, with corresponding weekly notifications, and see if that causes an increase in activity... Andrew Gray (talk) 11:51, 16 January 2013 (UTC) Randomly adding people to a subscription is a Really Bad Idea™. People get testy when you mess with their watchlist. That aside, I really don't understand your argument that adding the Signpost to the sidebar "clutters the interface." — The Hand That Feeds You:Bite 15:51, 16 January 2013 (UTC) Rather than automatically signing them up for a weekly posting on their talk page, we could send newcomers a modified welcome message that includes the next best thing: The Signpost template... ...its content changes each week, making it mildly dynamic (eye-catching). But we can't send this to (non-editor) readers, because they generally don't have accounts for us to send it to. How else would we attract the maximum number of readers to edit Wikipedia? The sidebar menu is the most obvious way to reach them all. The Transhumanist 12:53, 23 January 2013 (UTC) Something like this - embedding on talkpages by default - is a pretty good approach; I think this would be a good start towards exposing it. However, I'm still fundamentally unconvinced by the main bar idea. We don't have any indication that an obscurely titled link ("The Signpost" is pretty opaque if you don't know what it is) will catch the attention of many readers; we equally don't have anything but a guess that a significant function will read it and be converted into editing. The sidebar is seen as a wall of text by many new contributors, and I've seen many either hunting aimlessly in it or ignoring it entirely; why cram more information into it unless we have to? Andrew Gray (talk) 09:51, 24 January 2013 (UTC) Oppose I read The Signpost religiously, and pore over every article of every issue. However, it is primarily an internal newsletter, of interest mostly to editors of Wikipedia and as such giving it a more prominent place on the main page represents a level of "navel gazing" that I don't think we should participate in. The link in the community portal is sufficient, posting it on the main page is a little too much "airing one's dirty laundry". --Jayron32 19:59, 15 January 2013 (UTC) Good point, but it's everybody's encyclopedia. There is no "us" or "them". Dirty laundry = problems. The more readers who know about their encyclopedia's problems, the more who will be inspired to get involved and help. There's an edit button on every page of Wikipedia. The Signpost may help readers decide to click some of those edit buttons. Transparency = good = more reader feedback. The Transhumanist 21:09, 15 January 2013 (UTC) Yes of course there is an us and them, if the Signpost were to be promoted to the general public then every article would have to be dejargonified, and internal news such as welcoming new admins would need to be dropped in favour of more stuff that is of interest to a different set of readers. ϢereSpielChequers 07:13, 17 January 2013 (UTC) It's proposed to be in the interaction sidebar, not on the main page. That sidebar can be easily hidden (assuming its not hidden by default, something I'm unsure about). Many opposes reflect this misunderstanding. It's difficult to know what these people would think if they properly understood the proposal. AgnosticAphid talk 15:42, 25 January 2013 (UTC) Oppose 90+% of people coming to Wikipedia do so to get their information and move on. They don't need further, basically insider, information and/or links to wade through. I believe it would be off-putting to many. It is like hanging another magnet on your refrigerator: the first few additions seem like a good idea, but then, one day, you can't see the door anymore. GenQuest "Talk to Me" 22:51, 15 January 2013 (UTC) Oppose per Jayron32. Unless this is tied to a broader initiative to make the Signpost more of a general-interest newsletter than a Wikipedia-specific one, I don't see that it would be of much interest to casual non-editor readers. And clutter is also a factor. For those who do want it, it's not exactly hard to find. Andrew Lenahan - Starblind 03:32, 16 January 2013 (UTC) Oppose As much as I want to support the Signpost, and as much as I think that some of the members try hard to do a good job, when it comes to a straight up or down vote of confidence, I'm going to vote no confidence. It doesn't happen often, but when the Signpost loses its way, it throws journalist integrity and neutrality out the window, and I don't think that it's a good idea to put that on the front page. Sven Manguard Wha? 04:09, 16 January 2013 (UTC) It'd be in the interaction sidebar, something that can be easily hidden if it's not hidden by default, not the "front page." AgnosticAphid talk 15:44, 25 January 2013 (UTC) No. The Wikipedia Signpost is written for the community; our readership is not our community. A newspaper has no place in a serious, neutral encyclopedia. As has already been said, we need to clearly justify the addition of new links to the Sidebar. And, most critically of all, readers who stumble onto the link are likely to be confused. Sven also makes a good point that we shouldn't be airing our dirty laundry so visibly. This proposal, while well-intentioned, is worse than wrong. AGK [•] 16:17, 16 January 2013 (UTC) Greater publicity for the Signpost is a good idea, but it needs to be appropriate publicity. A link on the birthday committee greetings or a Signpost discussion at Wikimania would be good ways to publicise the \signpost to potential readers. But the mainpage is mainly read by the general public, and publicising the singpost there would either turn it into a very different publication or turn the mainpage into something less interesting to our readers. ϢereSpielChequers 07:10, 17 January 2013 (UTC) I could be missing something here with either your comment or the proposal, but I don't think this proposal would add anything to WP:MAIN, per se, it's about adding a link to the interaction sidebar, something that appears on every page but is easily hidden. AgnosticAphid talk 11:15, 17 January 2013 (UTC) Oppose the Signpost represents neither official Wikipedia views, nor community consensus. It has, effectively, the same status as an essay. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:39, 17 January 2013 (UTC) Oppose I have contributed to the Signpost in the past, and with a few exceptions, I think it's a Good Thing. But it is a few meta-levels beyond what should be on the frontpage. It just doesn't necessarily have relevance to the general Wikipedia reader until they've become hooked on hitting that 'edit' button. —Tom Morris (talk) 01:00, 22 January 2013 (UTC) A reader can't know if things (such as issues) matter to him until he knows about them. Maybe The Signpost, which focuses on the editing community and the activities and results of editing, would inspire many thousands of readers to hit the edit button. The Transhumanist 13:00, 23 January 2013 (UTC) It'd be in the interaction sidebar, something that can be easily hidden if it's not hidden by default, not the "frontpage." AgnosticAphid talk 15:46, 25 January 2013 (UTC) My apologies for that oversight. Let me rephrase: I don't think it should be on the sidebar on every page for the same reasons. —Tom Morris (talk) 20:27, 25 January 2013 (UTC) Oppose; this prioritises the editor experience far above that for the readers. Ironholds (talk) 03:29, 24 January 2013 (UTC) Oppose this is of no interest to the genral public and has no place on the front page. Ridernyc (talk) 05:40, 24 January 2013 (UTC) How do you know that? Did you conduct a survey? I was a member of the "general public" when I became interested in editing Wikipedia. Weren't you? The Transhumanist 09:47, 24 January 2013 (UTC) because the members of the general public do not edit Wikipedia, and this publication is primarily for people who edit Wikipedia. It's kind of obvious and self explanatory is you look at from a real world POV. Ridernyc (talk) 10:12, 24 January 2013 (UTC) You misunderstood. It's not proposed to be "on the front page," it's proposed to be in the interaction sidebar, something quite easily hidden. If only people would take the time to understand proposals before rejecting them! AgnosticAphid talk 14:11, 25 January 2013 (UTC) I withdraw the proposal. The Transhumanist 09:52, 24 January 2013 (UTC) Comments: How can we get more readers involved in the community? I think this is the wrong question here - if you mean Wikipedia readers, it's too broad; if you mean Signpost readers, it's too narrow. Either way, it's more of an Idea Lab question than a VPR question. – Philosopher Let us reason together. 16:52, 23 January 2013 (UTC) Portal:Wikipedia newspapers? The Signpost is, for better or for worse, the community-wide newspaper of Wikipedia. However, there are a variety of "local" papers as well. Would the "Oppose" voters support a "Wikipedia news" link that took readers to a Portal:Wikipedia newspapers, to feature the current editions of the various papers? – Philosopher Let us reason together. 16:56, 23 January 2013 (UTC) I was idly wondering about this earlier today - some kind of portal for the various newsletters (including the non-enwiki ones), and a streamlined way to sign up for them, would be great. I'm still not convinced about putting it in the main interface, but it would definitely reward better placement in the community portal. Andrew Gray (talk) 17:03, 23 January 2013 (UTC) Support per Andrew Gray, above. GenQuest "Talk to Me" 05:00, 24 January 2013 (UTC) Question: There's already Wikipedia:News. How would the portal differ? The Transhumanist 10:10, 24 January 2013 (UTC) Heh, it wouldn't, so scratch the "create" idea. – Philosopher Let us reason together. 20:32, 29 January 2013 (UTC) Support adding Wikipedia:News. And if we wanted to save space in the Toolbar, we might consider the overlap between Help:Contents, Wikipedia:About and Wikipedia:Contact us. The "About" page in particular seems a bit "who's that for, and doesn't it duplicate Wikipedia, which most of the curious will look at anyway?" (Incidentally - five hatnotes at Wikipedia:About? Yeah, that's inviting...) Rd232 talk 17:41, 30 January 2013 (UTC) Question Would it be possible to add a link to The Signpost from each editor's watchlist page? Not in the watchlist itself but off to the left, maybe in the "interaction" box and only displaying when one's watchlist is displayed. Rivertorch (talk) 11:03, 28 January 2013 (UTC) It won't really get noticed there, and changing a sitewide interface on one page is not good UI. Why not just watchlist the Signpost by default, so that users who don't want it need to unwatch it? If we want more engagement, we need to make it happen. Rd232 talk 17:44, 30 January 2013 (UTC) Outline of principles of interpretation The discussion that started on my talk page: I came across this outline that you created. Where does this subject fit in the overall system of outlines? That is, what areas of knowledge does this fall under? Please reply on my talk page. I look forward to your reply. The Transhumanist 06:39, 9 February 2013 (UTC) The subject belongs to Outline of linguistics. Principles of interpretation is more a term describing a collection of principles than a subfield of linguistics. Exegesis and hermeneutics could be considered to be subfields of applied linguistics. I added the articles principles of interpretation, exegesis, and hermeneutics to Index of linguistics articles. Obankston (talk) 15:50, 9 February 2013 (UTC) Thank you. That helps a lot. By the way, to make the outline more useful to more people, a good strategy is to increase its availability by adding a link to it to every page that it is relevant. The Transhumanist 18:54, 9 February 2013 (UTC) To what extent can bots harvest facts from summaries? Where is the discussion area about bot technology? I'm interested in learning what bots are and are not capable of. For example, when articles are split and a summary is left in the original article, both the new article and the old section that it used to be receive development from editors after the split, creating a fork situation. New material is added by some editors to the new article, but new material also gets added to the original section in the old article. Not the same material. There are tens of thousands of instances of the summary style being used, and a great many of them have resulted in forked content, with new content being added to the summary and not to the main article. Could a bot be created that could sync up article sections with the corresponding {{Main}} articles? That is, identify — in the section — material that is not included in the main article, and copy or move that material to the main article? Is natural language processing sufficiently sophisticated to handle this? What tools are available (anywhere in the computing world) that would be useful for this? The Transhumanist 02:33, 8 February 2013 (UTC) Given the way articles develop/split/merge this type of behavior would be extremely difficult if at all possible. Werieth (talk) 03:42, 8 February 2013 (UTC) What about using fuzzy matching against the main article to eliminate sentences from the section? Then copy what's left to the main article. Would this help narrow it down? A human would have to be in the loop somewhere, to check for duplication/synonymous prose, before it is saved as part of the main article. The Transhumanist 07:16, 8 February 2013 (UTC) How the algorithm would determine where in the article to place the material is beyond me. Any ideas? The Transhumanist 07:22, 8 February 2013 (UTC) Could diffs be analyzed to determine what content has been added to the section, that was not also added to the main article? The Transhumanist 07:27, 8 February 2013 (UTC) Here's an example of section/main article content forking that I came across. Compare the history section of Natural language processing with the article History of natural language processing. The Transhumanist 08:21, 8 February 2013 (UTC) Text mining To what extent can bot technology be used for subject consolidation? For example, is this doable: gather all the mentions of a particular individual from everywhere on Wikipedia and dump it all in a project page for evaluation by human editors? Or identify and gather everything about the subject "natural language processing" regardless of what articles it appears in? Sometimes, details of a subject are added to a less relevant article. For example, details about an organization in the biographical article on its founder. Those details may be more relevant to the organization article. How can bots help find and gather material on Wikipedia about a subject that is somewhere other than the article on that subject? The Transhumanist 02:33, 8 February 2013 (UTC) Given the right filters this type of mining is trivial. Werieth (talk) 03:41, 8 February 2013 (UTC) Please elaborate. WP already has bots that can do this? If so, what are they? The Transhumanist 07:09, 8 February 2013 (UTC) What do you mean? This sort of data-mining is the domain of scripts, not bots. Using WhatLinksHere, your first example task becomes simple. You could, for example, extract the paragraph(s) or entire section(s) in which the link(s) occur to a given article. I don't know why you would want to do it, and the results you got for lists, see-also sections, etc. could well be meaningless. — This, that and the other (talk) 08:40, 8 February 2013 (UTC) Yep, that's part of what I meant. (But I don't know what he meant by filters. Search strings?) Though I've never seen scripts for this in the scripts department, and I always thought bots could be composed of scripts. I like your idea of a paragraph or section grabber. Excellent idea. The idea would be to dump all those to a WikiProject draft page (or user subpage) or to an external file, to look over for material that could be used in the main article. For example, details about a person's life might be covered in an article about some other subject. Scrolling down a page of paragraph excerpts would be a lot easier than manually navigating to all the pages with the link on them. By the way, lists and see-also sections, etc. could easily be excluded by the algorithm. So, What links here in AWB, and an external script could accomplish the paragraph grabbing you mentioned. I didn't put the pieces together until you mentioned "WhatLinksHere". Thank you! Concerning more complex subjects, like natural language processing, the relevant articles might not mention the word "natural language processing". So another way of finding the material would be needed. Any ideas? The Transhumanist 09:18, 8 February 2013 (UTC) Please give examples of filters that would be effective for this. The Transhumanist 07:17, 8 February 2013 (UTC) Filters are any base set of rules that a bot can use. Examples: Article as X and Y in it. Article in category X but does not have X Article contains X,Y or Z Or just about any other set of things you want the bot to look for/ignore. Werieth (talk) 13:23, 8 February 2013 (UTC) Adding summaries for missing subtopics This would probably be considered a form of multi-document summarization. Sometimes editors skip a subject and directly edit the article on a subtopic. There are many instances of subjects that are missing a subheading for a subtopic that has an article on Wikipedia. Is it theoretically possible to write a bot that could analyze an article, and Wikipedia with respect to that article's subject, to identify missing subtopics that have their own articles? It should be an easy matter to check for matching article titles once the subtopics have been determined. To build a section, all you'd have to do is copy the the lead (or lead paragraph) of the subtopic article. But how would the bot determine the names of the subtopics that are missing from a subject's article? The Transhumanist 07:44, 8 February 2013 (UTC) Populating empty sections that have Main template Main page: Template:Main Easier than the above described bot would be one that looked for subheadings the total content of each were a {{Main}} template. That is, the section has a "Main article" hatnote, but is otherwise empty. It's missing a summary style summary. The bot would simply insert into the empty section a copy of the lead paragraph from the article specified in the Main template. What problems am I overlooking here? The Transhumanist 07:52, 8 February 2013 (UTC) P.S.: How would a bot go about finding such sections? -TT If an article has a empty section containing just a "main" template, that probably points to greater problems in hte article structure that need to be inspected by a human. I don't think bots should be doing this sort of thing (even though they certainly could). — This, that and the other (talk) 08:35, 8 February 2013 (UTC) I see two other uses for such a bot. First, it could identify the articles you mentioned that need human attention. Second, it could fill in empty sections that an editor purposely added (rather than that editor going through the trouble of copying/pasting the lead by hand, a bot could do that part for him). In the latter case, the editor would supply a list of articles to be worked on by the bot. The Transhumanist 08:53, 8 February 2013 (UTC) Two other options for identifying those articles that contain {{main}} with no parameters: Go to Wikipedia talk:Database reports and request a new report to show articles with this issue. Go to Template talk:Main and request a tracking category be added to the template Good luck! GoingBatty (talk) 18:16, 8 February 2013 (UTC) I think the bot populating empty sections in this manner is a great idea. There should be some sort of followup on these items, sometimes the lede is not necessarily the most relevant content to copy and paste, but it's still a better start than an empty section. --NickPenguin(contribs) 18:47, 8 February 2013 (UTC) Thank you The Instructor's Barnstar This Barnstar is awarded to Wikipedians who have performed stellar work in the area of instruction & help for other editors. Just wanted to stop by and say this edit was something I wanted to do but simply did not have the "kahunas" to do so. Thank you for the bold edit :-) Moxy (talk) 07:25, 13 February 2013 (UTC) Speedy deletion nomination of Test/test If this is the first article that you have created, you may want to read the guide to writing your first article. You may want to consider using the Article Wizard to help you create articles. Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia. This is a notice that the page that you created was tagged as a test page and has been or soon may be deleted. Please use the sandbox for any other tests you want to do. Take a look at the welcome page if you would like to learn more about contributing to our encyclopedia. If you think that the page was nominated in error, contest the nomination by clicking on the button labelled "Click here to contest this speedy deletion" in the speedy deletion tag. Doing so will take you to the talk page where you can explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. You can also visit the page's talk page directly to give your reasons, but be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be removed without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but do not hesitate to add information that is consistent with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. If the page is deleted, you can contact one of these administrators to request that the administrator userfy the page or email a copy to you. reddogsix (talk) 04:20, 14 February 2013 (UTC) In answer to your question, subpages are disabled in the main part of the encyclopedia -- a page with a slash in the title is allowed, but it's not treated as a subpage, just a page which happens to have the punctuation mark / in the title. See Wikipedia:Subpages for further information. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 04:27, 14 February 2013 (UTC) Ah. Makes sense. I didn't think to look for the back link. Thank you. The Transhumanist 05:16, 14 February 2013 (UTC) Canada outline coverage Lets get all involved ...Wikipedia talk:Canadian Wikipedians' notice board#Canada outline coverage.Moxy (talk) 18:35, 14 February 2013 (UTC) How to Create a Mind I wrote an article How to Create a Mind, which I suspect could be added to WikiProject Transhumanism. The article is rated B, do I just put in B for the Transhumanism template? I'm new and I don't yet understand, if a project is in a bunch of WikiProjects, in theory it could have a different rating for each. But in practice how does it work, if someone is updating one do they update them all? I am probably going to ask for peer review for the article, to get a sense of what would need to be done for GA. So if you have any comments on those lines, let me know as well. Thanks! Silas Ropac (talk) 02:11, 18 February 2013 (UTC) First, give the article the rating you think it should have. Then update the ratings for all of the WikiProjects on there to that rating. (The ratings need to be updated over time.) The single most important factor for article development is completeness. Is the article complete? What's missing? The Transhumanist 17:58, 24 February 2013 (UTC) Disambiguation link notification for February 28 Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Outline of the United States, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Gun laws in the United States (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver). Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject. It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 11:46, 28 February 2013 (UTC) Help directory I have made a delete request for Wikipedia:Help directory to have Help:Outline of help resources moved there - as our indexes and directories use the Wikipedia name space. Not sure indexes need to be alphabetical - but non the less will move it to Wikipedia:Help directory as your right its not really just an index but a directory.Moxy (talk) 18:28, 1 March 2013 (UTC) I object to the deletion of the speedy redirect, and I object to the moving of the outline. After all, it is a hierarchical topics list, that is, it is an outline. The Transhumanist 06:20, 2 March 2013 (UTC) After talking to a few people because the bold move has resulted in a huge decline in people finding the page - I have reverted the bold move and have made a move request here. Please feel free to discus the situation as dictated by BRD on the talk page.Moxy (talk) 17:22, 3 March 2013 (UTC) Thats a great Idea....done and done.Moxy (talk) 01:52, 7 March 2013 (UTC) Support Thanks for your support on my talk page. I didn't mean to appear ungrateful, it's simply that the situation is so ludicrous. I just now discovered the blocking admin has no idea why he blocked me. I have to laugh. Rich Farmbrough, 08:14, 20 March 2013 (UTC). Help:Contents/Browse/Policies and guidelines I converted the templates in to a normal list (links in templates are small and hard to see for many). But is this to much info? should it be trimmed? Moxy (talk) 21:13, 23 March 2013 (UTC) Nice. Looks much cleaner, and can now be adapted better to this help system. Good thinking! Concerning the bloatedness, I've run into a similar problem on Help:Contents/Browse/Editing Wikipedia. If we trim links, we should include access to the removed links from a page that is still linked to on the page. What to trim/move will become clearer as you rearrange the page. The Transhumanist 21:29, 23 March 2013 (UTC) P.S.: Structuring (with indents) will also make it easier to read (like a table of contents). hello again .... I have just come back from a small informal Wiki-meetup and have discovered that 5 out of the 6 of us believe that Help:Contents/Browse is more beneficial for the main help page. I see that is was recently changed - but also see others around that like Help:Contents/Browse better too. Has there even been an attempt to have to old page back?Moxy (talk) 17:32, 25 March 2013 (UTC) People are running into problems with the current super brief help page. There's one guy on Help talk:Contents who has been analyzing the usability of the help system based on finding certain links. He couldn't find Bugzilla, and asked where he could find technical information like that. Well, the main help menu has a Technical information section. But, before we make any proposals for restoring the help menu system, we need to finish upgrading it. Proposing to replace the help page with a redesign and upgrade of the original help system will have a much better chance for approval than simply asking for the old system back. Improving both its functionality and its aesthetics could help attract support. Some development goals might include: Comprehensiveness (complete) Intuitive structure (for easy path finding) Easy to use (annotative descriptions to aid topic selection, as needed) Pleasing aesthetics (easy to read, and an attractive design) We should not replace the current help page unless we have something obviously better to replace it with. It's a game of leapfrog. The Transhumanist 18:20, 25 March 2013 (UTC)