User talk:XOR'easter/2018a

You're everywhere!

I wanted to thank you for all the research work you did with the MBTA key bus routes - your dedication to research really made the difference in keeping that valuable article. I have some sources on the history of the routes which I'll try to add over time. And imagine my surprise when you show up doing good works at Vi Hart too! Please know how much your efforts are appreciated. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 00:32, 8 January 2018 (UTC)

@Pi.1415926535: Thanks! I browse AfD fairly regularly, because it leads me to poke into places I'd never go otherwise. I noticed another AfD about Boston bus stuff today. XOR'easter (talk) 02:30, 8 January 2018 (UTC)

@Pi.1415926535: Have you any thoughts about the Boston-bus-routes-by-area AfD? I tend to think that the interesting thing, from an encyclopedia-of-transit perspective, is how the system changed over time — e.g., companies consolidating, streetcars and trolleys being replaced by buses, etc. The number-by-number listing reads as rather dull and unilluminating to me, and I'm not sure why the regions were divided up the way they are. I think the subject would be better served by a more prose-y, less list-y treatment, with a more historical view, in a single article (MBTA Bus?). XOR'easter (talk) 20:00, 14 January 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, unfortunately I didn't get around to commenting there. I'm fine with the redirects for now; while the geographic groupings might make sense for a future historical overview (as they correspond fairly well to how the routes were operationally grouped and so on), it would take a lot of work that I currently don't have the spoons for in order to make them worthwhile. Boston has an immense and well-documented streetcar and trolleybus history - probably several good article's worth. If you're ever in the market for a really good look into this, I cannot recommend Streetcar Lines of the Hub by Bradley Clarke highly enough. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 22:28, 14 January 2018 (UTC)

@Pi.1415926535: Thanks for the book recommendation! When I was working on the key-routes article, I figured such a history must have been written, but I didn't do a very good job of finding it. XOR'easter (talk) 22:53, 14 January 2018 (UTC)

AfD List of out-of-town shopping centres in the United Kingdom

Regarding Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of out-of-town shopping centres in the United Kingdom (3rd nomination) I noticed you've done some updates on the article since nomination with sources. You also expressed a desire to change the title in the AfD. If you're satisfied, I will withdraw the nomination so you can make the move to the new name. Let me know if you want to go ahead. Ajf773 (talk) 04:52, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

@Ajf773: I'm pretty much satisfied with the updates. Cheers, XOR'easter (talk) 17:11, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for January 17

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Nomination of Joshua Claybourn for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Joshua Claybourn is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Joshua Claybourn (2nd nomination) until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article.

Notifying you about the discussion, since you have made significant contributions to articles related to this subject. --IndyNotes (talk) 03:50, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

List of unsolved problems in physics (Talkpage)

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Arianewiki1 (talk) 07:52, 1 February 2018 (UTC)

Puthoff

Am I alone in thinking that citing Puthoff is a massive red flag, given his involvement with outright pseudoscience like remote viewing? Guy (Help!) 13:52, 4 February 2018 (UTC)

No, you're not alone in thinking that. XOR'easter (talk) 16:38, 4 February 2018 (UTC)

@JzG: Somehow it's still going on. I'm almost at the point of asking someone to block me for a few days so I don't waste any more time on it. XOR'easter (talk) 02:24, 5 February 2018 (UTC)

Asato Ikeda being considered for deletion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:XOR%27easter

Merger discussion for Bayesian

An article that you have been involved in editing—Bayesian—has been proposed for merging with another article. If you are interested, please participate in the merger discussion. Thank you. Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 14:17, 20 February 2018 (UTC)

Re: your edit here

Hi XOR'easter,

Thanks for your comments. On the substantive question, I am happy to agree to disagree with you. About the tone, I am not exactly sure Sayre's law is relevant, but I would like to assure you that you personally have done nothing at all to contribute to the unpleasantness. As usual, you have been polite, acted in good faith, and explained yourself clearly and reasonably when questioned (even if, ultimately, I disagree with you about what would be the best outcome).

Also, I don't know if I've ever said this (honestly I don't know if we've ever really interacted before), but I often get a good chuckle out of your username.

All the best, JBL (talk) 12:51, 16 March 2018 (UTC)

I'm glad I can provide the occasional chuckle! Best wishes, XOR'easter (talk) 15:50, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

Predictive analytics

Hi there, I saw you'd made a constructive edit to the Predictive analytics page last week, so I wonder if you might be willing to consider my requested addition on the talk page to add a company in the Tools section. A major commercial software offering not now listed is MicroStrategy; because it's a notable company, I think it should be included. (Not so sure about the existing redlinks, though.) I have a financial COI with the topic, as I'm working with the company, so I won't edit the article directly; would you be willing to consider making the change? Best, WWB Too (Talk · COI) 15:40, 26 March 2018 (UTC)

DYK for Prime number

On 4 April 2018, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Prime number, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that prime numbers have been studied since the time of the ancient Greeks, but have had few real-world applications until the invention of public-key cryptography in the 1970s? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Prime number. You are welcome to check how many page hits the article got while on the front page (here's how, Prime number), and it may be added to the statistics page if the total is over 5,000. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.

Alex Shih (talk) 00:02, 4 April 2018 (UTC)

Invitation to WikiProject Portals

The Portals WikiProject has been rebooted.

You are invited to join, and participate in the effort to revitalize and improve the Portal system and all the portals in it.

There are sections on the WikiProject page dedicated to tasks (including WikiGnome tasks too), and areas on the talk page for discussing the improvement and automation of the various features of portals.

Many complaints have been lodged in the RfC to delete all portals, pointing out their various problems. They say that many portals are not maintained, or have fallen out of date, are useless, etc. Many of the !votes indicate that the editors who posted them simply don't believe in the potential of portals anymore.

It's time to change all that. Let's give them reasons to believe in portals, by revitalizing them.

The best response to a deletion nomination is to fix the page that was nominated. The further underway the effort is to improve portals by the time the RfC has run its course, the more of the reasons against portals will no longer apply. RfCs typically run 30 days. There are 19 days left in this one. Let's see how many portals we can update and improve before the RfC is closed, and beyond.

A healthy WikiProject dedicated to supporting and maintaining portals may be the strongest argument of all not to delete.

We may even surprise ourselves and exceed all expectations. Who knows what we will be able to accomplish in what may become the biggest Wikicollaboration in years.

Let's do this.

See ya at the WikiProject!

Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   10:25, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Farlow

Er, you left two "keep" comments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Stanley Farlow. Want to get rid of one? —David Eppstein (talk) 04:24, 4 May 2018 (UTC)

Fixed. Silly mistake on my part (forgot I had left a !vote, failed to see my own signature later). Thanks for calling it to my attention. XOR'easter (talk) 17:15, 4 May 2018 (UTC)

Thank you very much

The RfC discussion to eliminate portals was closed May 12, with the statement "There exists a strong consensus against deleting or even deprecating portals at this time." This was made possible because you and others came to the rescue. Thank you for speaking up.

By the way, the current issue of the Signpost features an article with interviews about the RfC and the Portals WikiProject.

I'd also like to let you know that the Portals WikiProject is working hard to make sure your support of portals was not in vain. Toward that end, we have been working diligently to innovate portals, while building, updating, upgrading, and maintaining them. The project has grown to 80 members so far, and has become a beehive of activity.

Our two main goals at this time are to automate portals (in terms of refreshing, rotating, and selecting content), and to develop a one-page model in order to make obsolete and eliminate most of the 150,000 subpages from the portal namespace by migrating their functions to the portal base pages, using technologies such as selective transclusion. Please feel free to join in on any of the many threads of development at the WikiProject's talk page, or just stop by to see how we are doing. If you have any questions about portals or portal development, that is the best place to ask them.

If you would like to keep abreast of developments on portals, keep in mind that the project's members receive updates on their talk pages. The updates are also posted here, for your convenience.

Again, we can't thank you enough for your support of portals, and we hope to make you proud of your decision. Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   11:07, 25 May 2018 (UTC)

P.S.: if you reply to this message, please {{ping}} me. Thank you. -TT

Academic Notability

Hello XOR'easter, I dont think we have spoke before. How are you? I wondering if you could help me? Do you think this person is notable. He is professor at an Indian University. Here is his GSchol score. Abul Hasan Siddiqi Would you say he is notable?. Thanks. scope_creep (talk) 13:18, 26 May 2018 (UTC)

He doesn't seem remarkable; his citation profile is not what I'd call outstanding, but it might be respectable for his field, which I suspect is a low-cited one overall. Are you aware of him receiving significant awards or holding important positions?

In general, I would suggest reading WP:PROF and at least skimming the archive of "Academics and educators" deletion discussions, if you haven't already done so. That way, you can get a sense of the arguments people typically use in those discussions. XOR'easter (talk) 20:28, 27 May 2018 (UTC)

Unindent template

Do tell! What problems does it cause/ Because I use it not unfrequently. Ping me please if you reply. My watchlist is at 15,000 and rising. Doug Weller talk 13:39, 8 June 2018 (UTC)

@Doug Weller: I don't use it very often, and I had had the vague impression from somewhere that it was among the templates that one was supposed to subst. But apparently it expands out into a whole lot of markup which is not very nice to read when editing in text mode. XOR'easter (talk) 17:32, 8 June 2018 (UTC)

Are we talking about {{od}}? Or have I completely misunderstood this? Doug Weller talk 18:36, 8 June 2018 (UTC)

@Doug Weller: Yes, {{od}}, or {{unindent}}. It's not a big deal — I was just making a bit of a joke about this edit. XOR'easter (talk) 18:39, 8 June 2018 (UTC)

Lol. That certainly does look ridiculous. Thanks for the explanation.Doug Weller talk 18:52, 8 June 2018 (UTC)

Draft page Einstein's thought experiments

Hi,

I've been using the draft page to demonstrate various MediaWiki errors to the developer group, since I noticed various bugs when testing the behavior of the "real" article on mobile phones. See

• https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T193926 (a behavioral bug that I've "worked around" in the real article.)
• https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T192428 (a rendering bug that I managed to find a kludge fix for.)

Please don't redirect to the "real" article. Thanks! Prokaryotic Caspase Homolog (talk) 10:03, 12 June 2018 (UTC)

OK. XOR'easter (talk) 16:38, 12 June 2018 (UTC)

On Ujjawal Krishnam

I strongly believe that article satisfies the minimum criteria of notability and should not be abruptly deleted. Instead, an improvement is needed. Please do take part in AfD. AchaksurvisayaUdvejin (talk) 18:37, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

The appropriate place for discussions

If you want to discuss edits made to an article, the appropriate forum is the article's talk page. You clearly wished to exclude my point of view from your discussions. I do not accept your apology for it because the act was clearly deliberate and the apology insincere. Rejecting all improvements from outside your clique, in the extremely unpleasant fashion you and your pals have adopted, will never produce good encyclopaedia articles. Reedsrecap (talk) 22:17, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

Your insistence to the contrary notwithstanding, I was quite sincere. I went to the WikiProject talk page because I'm used to discussions languishing on article talk pages, and, as I said, my natural inclination is to assume that people who dive deeply into the not-really-for-general-audience mathematics articles have an eye on the WikiProject anyway. This is no doubt careless on my part, but working as I do in mathematical physics, I have grown accustomed to a low level of outside interest. I essentially accepted some of your changes after a member of my "clique" had reverted them, because you made a valid point about encyclopedic tone. The rest of my "clique" appears to be entirely fine with this, too. XOR'easter (talk) 15:25, 29 June 2018 (UTC)

Abouabdillah's theorem

Could you, please, have a look at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Abouabdillah's theorem whether I have done everything well? And, of course, you can share your opinion. Thanks. --Tudor987 (talk) 00:53, 22 July 2018 (UTC)

FYI, I was asked the same question on my talk page and answered there. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 01:34, 22 July 2018 (UTC)

Similar AFD to Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of foods by calorie

You have participated at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of foods by calorie. Therefore, you might be interested in the following AFD involving lists of food Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of breakfast drinks (2nd nomination) --Tyw7  (🗣️ Talk • ✍️ Contributions) Please ping me if you had replied 11:48, 24 July 2018 (UTC)

Draft:Dori Laub

Hello. Can you take a quick look at this draft? Wrote to User:David Eppstein a week ago but got no responce yet. The subject of this article was a professor and a researcher at Yale University, a Holocaust survivor (and a friend of mine). It's a translation of the Hebrew article. Thanks. OhadUfaz (talk) 08:05, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know. It's outside my speciality, but on a quick look, the article seems like a good start. One thing which people will almost certainly want is more "inline citations", i.e., footnotes that provide references for specific pieces of information. This helps readers know where they should look in order to verify the article's content. For example, does all the information in the first three paragraphs of the "Biography" section come from reference 3? A general rule of thumb is that one per paragraph is a good minimum. Since prizes and distinguished fellowships are part of the criteria used to evaluate notability of academics, references for those would be helpful. Learned societies often have lists of their elected fellows on their websites. XOR'easter (talk) 16:42, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

Another Sealioning RfC

Talk:Sealioning#RfC about the inclusion of suggested ways to deal with sealioning

(Notifying everyone who participated in the previous RfC.) --Guy Macon (talk) 01:45, 20 August 2018 (UTC)

Hawaiian earring

Thanks a bunch for doing the merge here. I'm sorry I didn't get to it as fast as I had hoped, but I've been pretty distracted lately. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 03:30, 9 September 2018 (UTC)

A note

Hi, XOR'easter, greetings:-)

Can you clarify your intentions as to the content-additions at this edit, a bit? The article is going to be deleted and I've restored you but were you serious enough? ∯WBG^converse 18:18, 3 October 2018 (UTC)

You mean the bit about the house being Adlai Stevenson's birthplace? (I made some other changes, like fixing the erroneous language label on one of the sources and adding a reference about her son.) I wasn't trying to satirize the supposed practice of packing articles with trivia; I just found it entertaining, had a pleasant time digging around in the sources that established it, and figured its inclusion would be harmless — a slight benefit, perhaps, in terms of integrating that page with the rest of the encyclopedia. No strong feelings were involved on my part. XOR'easter (talk) 21:06, 6 October 2018 (UTC)

Strumia's talk in CERN

Hi XOR'easter, this is a delicate issue of course and I take your point not to promote petitions that are not referenced by ... (see your description of Oct19 edit). However, even after your edit of the version that I objected to as biased, the text is still biased against Strumia. It gives too much say to the mainstream (in this case CERN + "official" voice of major institutions) and this is not fair, I believe. Keeping in mind your objection of Oct19, I will now try to correct for this bias. I hope that balanced description can be reached...

Karel (kvyb6672) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kvyb6672 (talk • contribs) 19:18, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

In the future, please comment at the Talk page of the article itself, since I am not the only editor concerned here. That said, not to put too fine a point on it, but the point you raise is irrelevant. Policy forbids the inclusion of the text and link that I removed. It is our job to summarize the available reliable sources fairly, not to provide false balance or make arguments to moderation. XOR'easter (talk) 19:33, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

OK, thanks for explaining the policies. I will finish this conversation here if you allow - I don't think it was "false balance" what I wrote in my last edit and on contrary, writing "4000 signatures against" and one person supporting (=Lubos Motl) seems to me like false imbalance (i.e. larger imbalance than in reality). But you're right, it's not up to me to watch over balance on wiki - I better stay away from this. Kvyb6672 (talk) 21:21, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

"Incubation" of a deleted article

Regarding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Rick_Mehta, what is the process by which a deleted article goes into "incubation" as a userspace draft and is then reinstated as an article? Can you show me a case of this happening? Thanks.CountMacula (talk) 23:47, 19 November 2018 (UTC)

ArbCom 2018 election voter message

Hello, XOR'easter. Voting in the 2018 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23.59 on Sunday, 3 December. All users who registered an account before Sunday, 28 October 2018, made at least 150 mainspace edits before Thursday, 1 November 2018 and are not currently blocked are eligible to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2018 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:42, 19 November 2018 (UTC)