User talk:Peter Damian

Some kittens for you!

Unbanned

Peter, per the clear community consensus at the administrators noticeboard, you are now unbanned. I've unblocked this account and removed the protection on the pages. Worm^TT(talk) 13:20, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

Just an FYI—I've restored the original anti-vandal semiprotection on his userpage, since IPs seemed to enjoy screwing with it in the past. Let me know if you want it removed. As an aside, out of curiosity, what does "οὐκ ἀγαθὸν πολυκοιρανίη: εἷς κοίρανος ἔστω" mean? "Not good/useful many???: that I be (a) ???." My Greek is terrible and I don't know that word. :\ Anyways, cheers, and good luck! Reaper Eternal (talk) 18:09, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

Ouk (not) agathon (good) polykoirania (multiple leadership) , eis (one) koiranos (king, leader) let there be (esto). Hence "the rule of many is not good, let there one ruler be", quoted by Aristotle at the end of book 12 of the Metaphysics, where he 'proves' the existence of God. It's from Homer I think. Peter Damian (talk) 18:33, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

Yes Homer.Peter Damian (talk) 18:39, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

Ah, thank you! The verb "to be" always gave me trouble with its many inflected forms. Reaper Eternal (talk) 18:41, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

Congrats on being let out of the pokey.--The Devil's Advocate _{tlk. cntrb.} 03:27, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. Back in the salt mines Peter Damian (talk) 07:21, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

Congratulations William M. Connolley (talk) 10:19, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

Welcome

Ha, I'm the first to welcome you back, cool! After all that has gone down, I'm almost surprised you still want to edit this site, but I'm very glad you do, you're a great asset. Bishonen | talk 13:28, 16 April 2015 (UTC).

A warm welcome from me, too. Very glad to see you back! Huldra (talk) 20:21, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

And from me, Peter. It's nice to see your name on my watchlist again. Sarah (SV) ^(talk) 01:30, 17 April 2015 (UTC)

Thank you :) Peter Damian (talk) 06:18, 17 April 2015 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Resilient Barnstar
	Congratulations, mate. Along with your first barnstar in your new wikilife. :)) And thanks to all those who spoke up for "Peter Damian". Andreas JN466 14:20, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

Many thanks...

... to everyone who participated, for better or worse. (Perhaps a bit more thanks to those who voted for the unban, but whatever, I am sure everyone had their reasons). Peter Damian (talk) 17:21, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

Welcome back

Thanks for hanging in there, Peter, it was a long and bitter wait, I'm sure. Just remember to do your venting at the other place and to dodge conflict here. It's really not worth getting worked up over in the final analysis, there is always plenty of work remaining to be done on some other topic if someone gets in your face about something else. All the best, —Tim /// Carrite (talk) 20:52, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

Welcome back.

Here. They are ALL yours. Bonaventure, Anselm of Canterbury, Lanfranc, Robert Grosseteste, John Peckham, Robert of Melun (and any other medieval English bishop who also was a philosopher or theologian...). Oh, sooooo glad to see someone who actually likes philosophy to hand the upkeep and upgrading of those guys to... Ealdgyth - Talk 23:19, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

Hi! I am working on a paper on Grosseteste at the moment. How are you doing? Peter Damian (talk) 05:31, 17 April 2015 (UTC)

Glad you're back. Glad someone is glad to work on philosophers. I've been working on filling in obscure nobles and clerks that were in the DNB and are in the ODNB but aren't here yet. When I have the time to work on wiki. Ealdgyth - Talk 12:20, 17 April 2015 (UTC)

Glad to see you back and able to edit. For what little it might be worth, to the degree that I can help, which probably ain't much, just ask. Also, you might find the WP:RX helpful, particularly for reference works and articles or whole books. I know that I have found it, and some of the contributors there, particularly useful for getting items I don't have ready access to myself. John Carter (talk) 18:53, 17 April 2015 (UTC)

Welcome back from me too. The unban discussion closed too quickly for me to be able to participate in that (I had assumed it would stay open longer). If you ever get round to looking at Robert Boyle (still on my to do list), let me know, though I'm sure you have more than enough to do in other articles. Carcharoth (talk) 21:12, 17 April 2015 (UTC)

Thank you. I will be in touch some time. Peter Damian (talk) 08:19, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

Congrats

Due to byzantine Arbcom retardation I was unable to post to the WP:AN thread. The handful of opposes were an amusing stroll down Grudge-Holding Lane. Good luck, maybe Kohs can be the next one back into the fold. Tarc (talk) 01:25, 17 April 2015 (UTC)

Good to see you and thanks for popping by! Peter Damian (talk) 05:30, 17 April 2015 (UTC)

Welcome back encyclopedist

If I can help with anything, just ask. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 13:28, 17 April 2015 (UTC)

Honi soit qui mal y pense

While patrolling today, I came across a stub which may be of interest: structural evil. I've given it a quick wash and brush up but I suppose that there's a lot more to say on the subject. I'm not sure if you are especially interested in ethics but your experiences might add some spice to the work. Andrew D. (talk) 18:46, 17 April 2015 (UTC)

I have little competence in ethics. Clearly the subject exists, however the title does not appear to. Thanks for letting me know. Peter Damian (talk) 21:10, 17 April 2015 (UTC)

Circularity in references

I came across something today that might interest you. I recently returned to an old draft in my userspace: User:Carcharoth/Article incubator/Selig Brodetsky Memorial Lecture. I first started this back in 2010 when my interest was piqued after writing Leon Mestel and noting the existence of the lecture. I then tried (and failed) to list the initial lecture series between 1960 and 1989. The lecture series was discontinued after 1989 and revived in 2002. I then constructed a list from 2002 to 2012 using a (now dead) source from the philosophy department at Leeds (this is where I remind myself I really need to learn how to archive web pages). This dead link is the first of the two external links currently at the bottom of the userspace draft. The second link there is one I found by Googling to try and find details of the latest two lectures.

Initially, I was pleased to find that second link (this page). On closer examination, I was less pleased to find that it appears to be a direct copy of the list I had made. This is somewhat ironic. It is not the issue of licensing and copyright (as simple lists are not copyrightable), but the issues of attribution and circularity in references. If they had not copied the information direct from my userspace draft (the links to redlinks are still there!), I would not have realised. It seems the information went from the Leeds Philosophy website to my userspace to the Centre for Jewish Studies website (also at Leeds). You would have thought they would have got the information from their own records? Or am I reading all this wrong? Maybe the British Society for the History of Science will have independent records? Or even the Leeds University main site here? It make me wonder how many 'reliable' sources are copying Wikipedia... According to this search, the page in question was posted on July 28, 2013.

The other thing I noticed is that 'Charles Burnett' is a redlink - he is this bloke here (Professor of the History of Islamic Influences in Europe at the Warburg Institute). He seems to easily meet WP:PROF and seems to write on philosophical and medieval subjects at times. Do you think a Wikipedia article on Burnett would be useful, or, as I suspect you will say, should the attention be more on the articles on the subjects he writes about? Carcharoth (talk) 13:14, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

(1) This is citogenesis right? (2) Charles Burnett yes I know him, he is at the Warburg. He is a specialist in Arabic influence on medieval West. I hesitate to put him onto Wikipedia unless a clear criterion has been developed around this (that said, I will look at WP:PROF). Peter Damian (talk) 13:22, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

OK I had a look at PROF. The problem is that the criteria are easy to meet, since you only have to meet "any one of the following conditions", yet I imagine most of the eligible candidates are not on Wikipedia. E.g. my co-writer Jack Zupko, eligible on three counts ("An extremely significant contribution to the study of Scotus", chair at Alberta, editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy), has no article about him. I think most of the articles are probably written by the professors themselves. My view would be to make the criteria much tighter, and weed out 'Professor Cruft'. Peter Damian (talk) 13:36, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

Some more, and these are not mere professors, but giants in their field: Sten Ebbesen, Simo Knuuttila [1], Alain de Libera [2], Paul Vincent Spade, Lambertus Marie de Rijk, William Courtenay (medievalist), Egbert Bos etc. Some have articles in the foreign language Wikipedias. So, where does one start? Peter Damian (talk) 13:44, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

Good points and good examples. I really favour not having a biography article at all until after the subject is dead (and at that point, if needed, the historical assessment process starts, or in some cases concludes) and up until that point you either have no article, or a strictly word-limited article (plus picture if available) with a link to an official website or other resources, if they exist. The reason for limiting the word count is to make it easier to maintain BLP articles as short informative stubs (I mean really short!). On the other hand, if you don't couple that with a tightening of the notability criteria, you end up with a Who's Who directory. But that might still be better than the current situation. Not all the bios are written by the subjects themselves. If you look around the history of John Ebling, you should be able to see what happened there. Among the other drafts I have are one for the Huw Wheldon Memorial Lecture (only one redlink there) and working on ones for the Fleming Memorial Lecture (John Ambrose Fleming) and the Shoenberg Memorial Lecture (Isaac Shoenberg). One of the links on the Fleming Memorial Lecture list is a 'Samir Shah' who is this person. But Samir Shah currently redirects to some Indian comedy TV programme where there is an actor of that name. Going back to the Selig Brodetsky Memorial Lecture list, do you recognise many of the names there? Carcharoth (talk) 14:01, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

Only Burnett, on a cursory reading, and because of his work on the transmission of the classics.Peter Damian (talk) 14:27, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

Interesting that John_Ambrose_Fleming was involved in creation science.Peter Damian (talk) 17:32, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

There was a celebration of Fleming's centenary in 2004 [3]. Yeah, the ones from the Brodetsky 'new series' don't seem that prominent (yet, at least). From the earlier series, I think Wheeler is the most famous, though Ginsberg was known in his time as well. Sometimes the prestigiousness of an award or lecture can slide downhill, though this one seems to have always been a bit of a mixed bunch. It is easy to end up going a long way down a rabbit hole with some of these lists of links - the contrast with the modern presenters is fascinating, though.

In the television lecture list (which took far longer than I thought it would - it is now here for what it is worth, not much, I fear), there is a mix of famous BBC grandees, government broadcasting regulators, television executives, and as you go further back, some moderately obscure scientists and some very obscure BBC engineers who did lots of the pioneering work on early TV engineering (I had to laugh, though, when I came across Talk:Barclay Knapp).

The missing article that stands out immediately from the crowd is James Dwyer McGee, who was elected FRS. The usual slips are present in the sources. The Royal Television Society page insists that the 1963 lecture Television Signals - from Transmission to Receiver was given by a professor 'J.D.E. Ingram'. That should in fact be 'D.J.E. Ingram' (the name below him in the list is the aforementioned J.D. McGee, which may explain the typo). While trying to find out who D.J.E Ingram was (Professor and physicist David John Edward Ingram of Keele and later Kent University, in the NPG here), I came across this article about a university rare book collection unceremoniously sold off (but I digress). It is no surprise that there are four David Ingrams on Wikipedia, none of which are the one I was looking for (David S. Ingram is a more famous academic). In a similar vein (with a name almost as common), you have at least 11 people named George Russell, none of which are the Sir George Russell of Newcastle University (see here) who was at the time Chairman of the ITC.

I don't think it is so much a case of 'Professor Cruft' as 'People Cruft'. The trouble with people is that there are a lot of them... (Gordon Cook, Ronald King, Thomas Scott, and William Wright being more examples of common names - invariably, some sportsperson has taken the name first; I'm interested in the optical lens designer Gordon H. Cook and the Royal Institution professor Ronald King and the radio engineer Thomas Robertson Scott and the professor William David Wright, but there will be many other people with a similar name that have (or may one dau have) articles under the current notability guidelines). Carcharoth (talk) 19:46, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Sockpuppet investigation block opened

You were recently offered a statement in a request for arbitration. The Arbitration Committee has accepted that request for arbitration and an arbitration case has been opened at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Sockpuppet investigation block. Given the legal, privacy and BLP implications of holding the case in public the Committee has decided to run the case completely in camera, to that effect there will be no public evidence submission or workshop. Editors with direct knowledge of the events and related evidence are requested to email their to arbcom-en-blists.wikimedia.org by May 7, 2015 which is when evidence submission will close. For a guide to the arbitration process, see Wikipedia:Arbitration/Guide to arbitration. For the Arbitration Committee, Callanecc (talk • contribs • logs) 07:02, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

A kitten for you!

Surely you're just the kind of person who needs more kittens.

William M. Connolley (talk) 10:28, 25 April 2015 (UTC)
Lie, sorry 'like' Peter Damian (talk) 10:44, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

RfC on Talk:Free will

Peter:

You might be interested to participate in this Request for Comment. Brews ohare (talk) 01:24, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Phantom time hypothesis

Thanks for your edits there, but I don't agree with the use of sources that don't discuss the subject of the article. Usually I'm telling this to people pushing a fringe position, which of course you certainly aren't trying to do. Dougweller (talk) 15:50, 3 May 2015 (UTC)

Hi - can you clarify that please? The hypothesis is that the years between AD 614 and 911 didn't exist, so I added some facts about manuscripts which can be dated to that period. Or is the objection that the sources (e.g. Book of Kells) don't mention the hypothesis (which they wouldn't) so it's a form of original research? I guess that would be true. Peter Damian (talk) 16:26, 3 May 2015 (UTC)

Yes, that's it. If the sources don't mention the hypothesis, it's OR. That's in the first paragraph of WP:NOR, then below under the section "Reliable sources" it says " Even with well-sourced material, if you use it out of context, or to reach or imply a conclusion not directly and explicitly supported by the source, you are engaging in original research; see below." And 'below' links to WP:SYN. It can be a real bind in some articles, as in the Phantom Time one, where few reliable sources have bothered to tackle something that is so obviously wrong. But that also keeps out some fringe stuff as some falls below our notability threshold because of that. Dougweller (talk) 17:50, 3 May 2015 (UTC)

OK well shall I delete it? I can see it would be a problem if I was arguing for something that was obviously dodgy. However, it might help our readers to understand same basic problems with the hypothesis. Peter Damian (talk) 17:53, 3 May 2015 (UTC)

Difficult for me to actually tell you to leave it in given what I've said to other people. I wouldn't have added it, but I'm pretty keen on keeping with our NOR policy as my experience is that although it's a pain at times, as I've said, it benefits the encyclopedia. Dougweller (talk) 18:15, 3 May 2015 (UTC)

Fair enough (sob). Peter Damian (talk) 18:18, 3 May 2015 (UTC)

It is sad, I agree, Peter. I remember one time I tried to add a textbook on quantum mechanics to What the bleep do we know!? article and had my hand slapped for original research. However, I have grown accustomed to the rule and actually now think that it lends itself to a kind of rigidity in Wikipedia that allows us to remove a lot of fringe claims and nonsense that gets added with ostensible sourcing. One of my favorite things to appeal to is WP:FRIND which basically says that we are free to remove any content in Wikipedia that hasn't been substantively dealt with by reliable sources that are independent of the fringe proponents. This allows for a lot of terrible content to simply be removed rather than rebutted with original research. You might also find that WP:FTN might be a good place to hang out if you're so inclined. jps (talk) 13:55, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

It's OK I understand. I might do some research on the subject for my own website Peter Damian (talk) 13:58, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the link to that interesting paper. Have you seen New Chronology (Fomenko)? Dougweller (talk) 15:05, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

Yes I have, and there are a few others in that 'family', but none so interesting IMO as Phantom Time. Perhaps it's because Phantom Time involves some of the periods I study as part of my own work. Peter Damian (talk) 15:08, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

"However, I have grown accustomed to the rule". Another approach could be to ban those inserting fringe claims wherever you find them and remove the claims where they have inserted them. The real issue is that people writing in an encyclopaedia find themselves arguing with fringe proponents. Arguably interest in wikipedia would not have been maintained to current levels without the competitive element though. Second Quantization (talk) 00:17, 10 May 2015 (UTC)

This would not be in the "spirit of Wikipedia" of course.Peter Damian (talk) 06:30, 10 May 2015 (UTC)

Personally, I'd be quite happy reinstating "evidence against" or even changing it to "evidence disproving." It is well-known in the skeptical community that there isn't clear and unambiguous scholarship refuting some of the more insane theories that are advanced, because they are sufficiently absurd on their face that no serious scholar will devote a chunk of his or her career to dealing with them. This is such a case, and the idea that Wikipedia policy requires us to treat the "Phantom time hypothesis" as a serious piece of historiography is a mistake. Newyorkbrad (talk) 01:23, 11 May 2015 (UTC)