Jump to content

User:Dicklyon: Difference between revisions

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Browse history interactively
← Previous editNext edit →
Content deleted Content added
VisualWikitext
Reverted 1 edit by 173.26.198.83 identified as vandalism to last revision by Dicklyon. (TW)
taking a year off
Line 1: Line 1:
{{wikibreak|Dick|eventually. After nearly four years and 43K+ edits, I think a year off is a good idea.}}

[[Image:Dicklyon.jpg|right|thumb|150px|Dick Lyon]]
[[Image:Dicklyon.jpg|right|thumb|150px|Dick Lyon]]


Revision as of 17:47, 28 December 2009

Dick Lyon

Hi, I'm Dick Lyon. I am a research engineer in Silicon Valley, California.

Some of my work outside Wikipedia is linked on my techie home page dicklyon.com.

Contributions to the Wikipedia

My contributions are mostly related to photography, photometry, color, electronics, and signal processing so far. My contributions on these articles range from very small to total rewrite; see the respective article histories.

Images

The galleries below show some pix I've uploaded, with links to pages that use them.

Some images of people that I uploaded:

Photography and optics

Some images about photography and optics that I uploaded:

Photometry and colorimetry

Some images about photometry and color that I uploaded:

Electronics and signal processing

Some images about electronics and signal processing that I uploaded:

Computer graphics and video

Math, science, engineering, inventors

Some images about mathematics that I uploaded:

Miscellaneous

Some other miscellaneous images that I uploaded:

Wikidrama

What do the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem, Golden ratio, Photon, Least-squares spectral analysis, Lynn Conway, Cardboard box, William Timmons, and Eric Lerner have in common? All the sites of bizarre wikidramas that I have been involved in, including at least a few that have earned people permanent bans from Wikipedia. It's hard to fathom how such seemingly innocuous topics can engender such bizarre drama, but here we go...

Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem

When an editor reverted a bunch of my work saying rv. none of these edits were helpful, I encountered my first case of a dug-in editor with a strange viewpoint, flawed logic, and, as it turns out, a bizarre conflict of interest. After fighting and arguing for a while, I found out what his trip was: he was defending text he wrote long before Wikipedia existed, in the 1995 Audio Effects FAQ; a search for some of his strange notions found that, and his name. Seemed like a sensible enough guy, but didn't understand the difference between a theorem, its converse, and a proof. The crux is this: the sampling theorem does NOT say that if you sample at a rate less than twice the bandwidth of a bandlimited signal, or if the signal you're sampling is not bandlimited, you will necessarily be unable to exactly reconstruct the original signal – in fact, that would be the converse, and it's not true, in general, but showing him counter-examples to disprove it didn't sway him. I eventually got it un-muddled, and he got himself a permanent ban, for unrelated reasons.

Golden ratio

The golden ratio is such a popular topic that it continues to attract all kinds of bizarre factoids and nonsense; but back in 2006, some of us worked on cleaning it up, to bring it into line with policies like WP:V and WP:RS as a way to contain the creeping nonsense. In a spinoff of this effort, I got involved with Jossi, an editor/admin with some strange ideas and lots of experience about how to win wikifights. He particularly wanted to credit his countryman Raúl Rosarivo for an exposition of how the golden ratio was used in the design of ancient books, and wrote several articles with such claims. He was clearly hallucinating, but since he had the obscure sources (or was citing them, anyway), and I didn't, it was hard to figure out or convince him of where exactly he was wrong. Eventually, I was able to track down copies, and in some cases translations, of the German and Spanish sources, and convincingly showed him that Rosarivo was merely referring to the ratio 3:2 as "golden" in book design. It's impossible to describe the drama that it took to get there, though. He was involved in lots of other drama about his other mystical pursuits, and eventually resigned from Wikipedia permanently, whether under pressure I know not.

Photon

There's some confusion and discussion about when to count the mass associated with the energy of a photon, and it gets a bit heated. I wasn't in as deep here as some, but the guy who posted the bit linked above had his contribution history truncated after that; it seems he got a permanent ban for threatening to call the cops on fellow editors – and not for the first time! He was also abusing WP:SOCKs, and as it turns out had worked with a couple of friends of mine in real life; I won't repeat what they had to say about him.

Least-squares spectral analysis

Starting out life as Vaníček Analysis, this article was written by an ex-student trying to make sure that all the credit went to himself and his professor. The editor in question was not at all smooth or experienced about how to get his way on wikipedia, but took a crude, blunt, incivil approach, including legal threats against me; these things earned him a number of blocks, but I also got myself blocked on this one, for violating the WP:3RR on Petr Vaníček. After a couple of months of drama (Oct/Nov 2007), he was banned permanently; his last act here was to complain to Wikipedia's attorney about me and have a bunch of his talk history removed.

Lynn Conway

When I noticed someone vandalizing the bio of my old friend and colleague Lynn Conway, I had no idea what a mess I was in for. In this edit, the vandal called her "the Al Sharpton rather than the M.L. King sort of activist", and attributed that assessment to "some scholars". I noticed why he called her "James" instead of "Conway" – because he forgot to update the attack text after posting it on Andrea James's bio just before; he later revealed that he was James Cantor, a principal in an off-wiki dispute with Conway and James and others, and that he was quoting his own web-published email to Alice Dreger, another principal in the dispute, as if he were "some scholars". Trying to fight back against a cabal of academic sexologists who would resort to such tactics to push their point of view, I ended up blocked for 3RR violation again, on Archives of Sexual Behavior, which was a dumb mistake. We ultimately went through a long mediation, and the main ringleader agreed to refrain from editing certain articles; he cleaned up his act, but continues to push the point of view of his employer and cabal, and continues to argue for a selective bias in which articles in a special issue of the Archives can be cited as reliable sources. Lynn has blogged about it on her site. Another editor provided comic relief by playing with my name through these disputes.

Cardboard box

In early 2008 I challenged the statement "The first commercial cardboard box was produced in England in 1817 by Sir Malcolm Thornhill," since the cited source mentioned the date, but not the name, and no such Malcolm Thornhill appears in any other source I could find. I found where a one-hit editor had inserted the name into the sourced statement, and the fact that it had been there a while and had been copied to a million wikipedia mirror sites. Some IP editor (User:172.159.38.218) had a problem with me taking it out, and put it back; attempts to talk about it didn't work, and he resorted to repeatedly vandalizing my user page, and making up new sock-puppet accounts to mock me (including User:Clblfgoldie123, User:Steveo521242, User:MarthaLyon, User:PaperJim12, User:truthwillcomeout, User:Martha880, and User:RichardLyon). His sockpuppets earned a permanent ban, but he comes back now and then ([1], [2]) under a different IP address to cause more trouble. Amusingly, the contested factoid has now appeared in a 2009 book by Hannah Higgins, without a source; I wrote the author to inquire where she got it, but I got no reply; probably from one of the many web pages that still has the old wikipedia copy (see Talk:Cardboard box#another non-source for Malcolm Thornhill).

William Timmons

Here I really messed up, and got two more edit-warring blocks, without actually violating the WP:3RR. I had stepped into a topic I didn't know or care anything about, to try to help resolve a sourcing controversy; I found that there was a lot of good verifiable info in reliable sources about this guy, which seemed like a good alternative to the some of the questionable "news" that got published during indecision 2008. What I didn't understand was that this Republican lobbyist still had a handful of defenders who would fight against anything they didn't want to see in the article, sourced or not. We got tons of wikilawyering from a real-life lawyer and conservative law lobbyist. For whatever reason, after a few months and a temporary lock on the article, they gave it up -- though one of them did get blocked and then put on a 0rr restriction for 6 months, with respect to all political articles and political biographiers, for tendentious editing and making legal threats against other wikipedians.

Eric Lerner

A certain apologist for mainstream science felt that Lerner's bio ought to give more voice to his critics than to his ideas, and fought most of my attempts to balance it. He was fighting on a bunch of other fronts at the same time, including trying to rewrite policy, but got in trouble with his incivility and got a series of escalating blocks, ending in a 3 month ban from wikipedia; but that's when it got interesting: he decided to rewrite Optics while banned from wikipedia, and got other editors to do his bidding to try to get it in – which they did, eventually, and it's not bad; but what a slap to the editors who followed the rules!

More

Disputes happen all the time, especially when new editors come to push a point of view and don't know that they'll be stopped by editors enforcing policies. There's no shortage of stories to tell, but most don't rise to the level of the dramas above, all of which have much longer stories behind them of course (not to mention another side...).

If anyone wants to comment or tell the other side, start a section on my talk page, and I'll link it here, or in the appropriate subsection above.


Panorama of Stein am Rhein in late afternoon sunlight, stitched for me by Laurence
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Dicklyon&oldid=334581697"