Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Astronomy/Mars task force/Archive 4

Archive 1

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Archive 5

Continuing abuses, here and in related pages

Would WP, RW, and BI please either edit articles without comments on talk pages, or edit articles with constructive comments on talk pages (knowing that to be unlikely), while dispute resolution is continuing? What articles do there continue to be issues about? Can editors who see issues about articles either go to content Requests for Comments, or summarize the issues so that editors who are familiar with the process can post the RFC's? Recent issues are:

• Clean-up templates were removed without discussion, with only an edit summary. The removal of clean-up templates, even if considered by the remover to be wrong, should be done by consensus, not unilaterally. Removal of clean-up templates is disruptive editing and interferes with clean-up. In extreme cases, it may lead to being blocked.
• An editor accused another editor of paranoid personality disorder. That is a personal attack.
• An editor made non-sensical comments about the policy against sock-puppetry, saying that there are various legitimate reasons to use sock-puppets. That was either an ignorant comment by an experienced editor, or was an attempt to justify his own accusation of sock-puppetry.

Are there any other issues for which an RFC is required? Robert McClenon (talk) 00:15, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

If you have something to say to RW and WP, please address to them. I have not fed the troll in weeks. Cheers, BatteryIncluded (talk) 00:32, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Neither of them is a troll, and I have posted to both of them. They are tendentious editors. Robert McClenon (talk) 01:12, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

As just posted to my talk page, the wikipedia policy pages list legitimate reasons for using sock puppets. That is what I was referring to. In at least one of those legitimate reasons it is also acceptable not to disclose that you are a sock puppet.

Legitimate uses

* Privacy: A person editing an article which is highly controversial within his/her family, social or professional circle, and whose Wikipedia identity is known within that circle, or traceable to their real-world identity, may wish to use an alternative account to avoid real-world consequences from their editing or other Wikipedia actions in that area.

WP did hardly any editing of wikipedia, but BI is an editor with a massive history of editing. So BI could be a legitimate sock puppet of WP, he might well do some editing that WP doesn't want to be associated with professionally or in his personal life, so that was what I thought. If that were the case, perhaps I shouldn't "out" WP, come to think of it but hadn't thought through that aspect of it. I have been an editor of wikipedia for quite a while, and of course have heard of sock puppets but never come across anyone I thought might be a sock puppet before. I found out this information about legitimate sock puppets in course of research to try to understand some bizarre coincidences that happened and other strange things over the last few weeks. On wikipedia it is not paranoid to wonder if accounts here are meat or sock puppets as wikipedia has an ongoing issue with such accounts with investigations all the time. Robert Walker (talk) 05:26, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

On Robert McLenon's main point - I feel that the material I want to add is notable and highly cited. If there is room in wikipedia for an article on the hexany, something that only a hundred or so academics and microtonal composers probably know about, surely there is a room for a separate article on the Mars sample receiving facility and sample containment and all the studies done about them and the back contamination issues. It is easily substantial enough for one. The objection that the article is larger than the MSR mission page itself doesn't matter because unlike a printed encyclopedia, prominence in wikipedia is not measured by the number of words written on a topic and many low importance articles are long. I feel it needs a place here somewhere and can't understand why it is "banned" as it seems to me. Wikipedia has a place for anything notable, I was under the impression. The discussion should surely be just about where to put it, not about whether to include it at all when it is the subject of many papers and studies all highly notable sources.

My other main issue is the POV slanting. There is one minority view, by Zubrin, that contamination issues are of no concern at all. For those who hold this view it is entirely understandable that they feel there should be almost no treatment of the subject in pages on exploration of Mars. But according to the official views of NASA and ESA which are surely the "mainstream" view if anything is, the issue is a significant one, and should be mentioned in some detail. Particularly to have almost no mention on pages on human colonization and a POV slanted section in the Mars sample return mission gives a Mars surface colonization advocacy slant to the whole of Mars project now. Robert Walker (talk) 05:26, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

Just to say for anyone reading this, I had a misunderstanding, as I thought "sock puppet" meant the same as "alternative account". The policy page makes it clear. but my eye must have slid over the vital word in the first sentence. I posted about it here: Wikipedia talk:Sock puppetry#Emphasis of improper. Robert McClenon cleared up this misunderstanding for me, and also helped me understand the complexity of issues to do with sock puppets, meat puppets, and off-wiki communication between friends and colleagues with shared objectives. The last of those is, of course, permitted. Robert Walker (talk) 11:36, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Viking spacecraft biological experiments#Labeled Release

Can someone add more views to that section? It's currently mostly based on Levin's publications. A search in Google Books finds plenty of material... Someone not using his real name (talk) 21:18, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Editor is out on a mission to delete all my contributions from the Mars project

Just want to draw your attention to this. He won an AfD against me and has declared that it is now his intention to remove all my contributions from the Mars project.

He has been extremely hostile to me, and has hurled insults at me frequently. I have totally given up trying to do anything about it.

For details of what he has deleted so far, see User talk:Robertinventor#Other sections deleted by the opposing editor

Extended content

As far as I know Warren Platts and BatteryIncluded have now deleted all my contributions to the Mars project. It is possible there is some other section I contributed to that I have forgotten about - if so I'm sure it will soon go, probably he is working back through my history. I have just reverted his edit of Manned mission to Mars as a token protest. But fully expect him to undo my revert as soon as he notices it. Robert Walker (talk) 00:29, 28 June 2013 (UTC) It was immediately undone again as expected. No point in attempting discussion or dispute resolution. See also: Contamination Concerns section - how it came about as a response to a request to restore balance to an article perceived by other editors as imbalanced I believe this amounts to censorship of wikipedia. Is there anything I can do to report it or some such? Robert Walker (talk) 03:12, 28 June 2013 (UTC) Read this. I note however that only yesterday (immediately above) you declared "No point in attempting discussion or dispute resolution". I know personal attacks can be distressing, but try to be more level-headed over this. Also, no deletes in "token protest" please. These kind of actions won't help your case. You also have had a formal third opinion already from Snow here, which was extremely fair and which I would second. I don't think you've been censored; you've been flagged up (rudely, yes) for OR and breaches in impartiality. Incidentally, I think the current Habitability section in Water on Mars is pretty good as is right now, well balanced and the right length for an article like this. However, I'm working my way through a review of that article, and will address it specifically when I get there. DanHobley (talk) 15:54, 28 June 2013 (UTC) Sorry what do you mean by "deletes in token protest"? I haven't deleted anything to my knowledge. My only edits of wikipedia for some time have been in my own user space and in the talk pages. Have just checked through my contributions since the AfD. My only edits as far as I can see is that I added POV and OPINION tags to Warren's new section on back contamination issues for MSR (which he immediately removed) I did an instant revert of his bold edit to remove all the material on contamination and telerobotics from the Manned Mission to Mars. When he undid my revert, I left it at that (as recommended). Everything else I did was on talk pages, and my own user space, as far as I can tell. Have I missed anything there? Re dispute resolution, He said "Bring it on sir. I'm all for it. Only one condition though: if it goes against you, you promise to go away from the WP:MARS project and never come back". That is after he declared a mission to delete nearly all my content from project Mars, and completed it, and insulted me numerous times in just the previous paragraph? Do you really think that he was proposing a genuine dispute resolution? Or that somehow it could be turned into one? Or just another all out war of insults and attempts to show by repeated insults that I am incompetent and not able to edit Mars on this topic? I've been burnt too many times in my encounters with this editor to believe it likely that it would be different this time around. Especially with absolutely no move of conciliation or any recognition that it is a subject that needs resolution. On water on Mars I simply gave the current consensus view on the subject, don't understand why I deserve to be treated as a troll by BI for this. I withdrew my remarks on cosmic radiation that were considered OR - and provided a citation instead, with the author listing habitability conditions in order of importance with cosmic radiation as 10th in importance out of 14. But my main point there is simply that there are numerous papers saying that these are potential habitats for present day life. It is not the job of wikipedia to judge these papers, already published and peer reviewed, and say that their conclusions are wrong. Their findings should be presented just as they are in the published literature. BatteryIncluded's argument is simply not given in the current literature on the subject. How can this be trolling when I am just saying what all the researchers say on the subject? How can his section be treated as accurate when no-one has presented that argument against habitability of the surface of Mars since about 2008? And when he is putting himself forward as an extra level of review of the conclusions of these papers, on top of the process that has already gone on before the papers were published? And on the contamination issues again almost all the deleted material concerns the official NASA / ESA / PPO studies and related material. How can it be right to delete all this from wikipedia so it has no mention of any of these topics which are subject of many papers and studies and many research papers written on them? And the risk of environmental disruption of Earth is discussed in all the official studies by NASA / ESA / PPO and all conclude it is a valid concern that can't be ruled out to the extent it can be ignored - how can it be right to remove all mention of this, and represent it as a concern solely of a fringe group? That's why it seems censorship to me. Or remove all mention of contamination issues for human spaceflight sections of wikipedia - for no good reason except the impossibility of sterilizing a human occupied spacecraft? Robert Walker (talk) 19:46, 28 June 2013 (UTC) Robert Walker (talk) 20:09, 28 June 2013 (UTC) This is not a matter of censorship. What it is, is a matter of WP:COMPETENCE, or rather, lack thereof, including: (a) factual incompetence: "the best good will is unavailing if basic understanding of the facts, their mainstream interpretation and the cultural context is lacking"; (b) social incompetence: "some people just can't function well in this particular collaborative environment--we can't change Wikipedia to suit them--[additionally] editors with disabilities that affect behavior or those that suffer certain mental health issues sometimes fall into this category"; and (c) bias-based incompetence: "some people's personal opinions are so strongly held that they get in the way of editing neutrally or collaboratively--if this continues to be disruptive and a user is unable to step away from topics where they have strong biases, a topic ban is generally appropriate." I am not saying this in order to embarrass Robert; rather, other editors that have not had close contact with him should realize what the main issue is here.... Warren Platts (talk) 20:12, 28 June 2013 (UTC) Says the editor who has got just about every single fact wrong in his article on BC for MSR. See The flaws with the current MSR_section on BC. And his insistence that "The scientific mainstream view is that the risk of harmful back contamination is very likely to be zero" is an accurate paraphrase of Contamination of Earth by putative martian microorganisms is unlikely to pose a risk of significant ecological impact or other significant harmful effects. The risk is not zero, however. Honestly! You should watch who calls the kettle black. I happen to have a high first class honours degree in maths for what it is worth. And I've been keen on human spaceflight since before Apollo 11, read widely, many astronomical, astrobiological and space scientist friends engage in frequent invigorating debates with them all, and have talked about this material with them first.Robert Walker (talk) 01:00, 29 June 2013 (UTC) Right, and you're also an expert in logic. Therefore you know that the sentences 'x is very likely to be zero' is not logically equivalent to 'x is zero'. Yet you insist they are the same thing. Warren Platts (talk) 01:44, 29 June 2013 (UTC) Guys - not the place for this discussion, no? DanHobley (talk) 02:24, 29 June 2013 (UTC) Dan, my point is that the original report says they surveyed experts who were in agreement that though there was no way to assess the probability on current understanding, it is not zero. They were in agreement that as best they could assess it, the probability is very low. The paraphrase would to most readers imply that most of the experts thought the probability was zero. If the two versions are identical in meaning, why the strong preference for his version which is not stated in that form in any of the original citations instead of the original statement which gave it exactly as stated in the original sources? To the extent that the new version is considered accurate by him and an exact quote of the original text considered misleading? This is OR and WP:SYNTH and only one of many inaccuracies in his extremely short paraphrase of the source material, which is now all that remains in wikipedia of it. See The flaws with the current MSR_section on BC. Since he accuses me of mathematical incompetence here, seems reasonable to point out that I am in fact a mathematician. This shows the quality of the reasons he gives for policing a personal ban on me from editing the Mars Project on this topic. He also deleted just about everything I wrote for the project, without discussion, in a single day. Which since it now removes all accurate statements of the POV in the official studies on this topic I regard as censorship of wikipedia as well as a personal ban by one editor of another editor from editing on a particular topic in wikipedia. It is not me that's being censored here. It is NASA, the ESA, the PPO, all those researching into the Present Day Habitability of Mars, Carl Sagan, Ledeberg, etc in the sense that any accurate statements of their views on this matter are now banned from wikipedia. He has taken on an administrator role by banning me and removing all this topic. He is also policing a total ban on the topic of forward contamination issues for human missions to Mars, and with assistance of BI, also a total ban on the topic of the present day habitability of the surface of Mars. Yet he is not an administrator, and no wikipedia decision has been made to ban me or to ban these topics from wikipedia - it is simply a personal policy decided on unilaterally by Warren Platts - but all the admins are simply standing by and letting him do this. And I know that I am not coloured by personal bias when I say this. My friends, many of them scientists and including exobiologists, think his actions are outrageous. Robert Walker (talk) 05:32, 29 June 2013 (UTC) Mathematical incompetence is the one incompetence I am not accusing him of: as a mathematician who claims a specialty in the foundations of mathematics, Robert KNOWS very well that ◊p and p are not the same thing; yet he insists that ◊p ≡ p. Since he is not mathematically challenged, his insistence that 'x is very likely to be zero' ≡ 'x is zero' can only be construed as an intentional misrepresentation: he cannot tell the truth because the truth is not worth telling. The deletions I executed were merely the result of community consensus--we've wasted more than enough hours on this. As for banning Robert, there is no ban: however, I hereby propose a formal WP:MARS project topic ban on Robert because of his bias-based, disruptive editing; I recommend that it not be a site ban since his contributions to the WP:MICROTONAL music project are certainly worthy. Warren Platts (talk) 16:28, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

Outside Comment

This issue was taken by Robert Walker to the WP:Help Desk. It appears that there are violations of the rule to assume good faith, the rule against personal attacks, and the rule against battleground editing. It is not clear to me yet how much of the fault is on which side, but there is fault on both. An AFD to delete one article does not serve as a consensus that all contributions by its author should be deleted. If there are issues as to whether to delete sections of articles, a better mechanism would be article content Requests for Comments. A project talk page is not a forum to propose a topic ban on an editor. If there is intention to have an editor topic-banned, then a better forum is a user conduct Request for Comments. The use of this talk page as a forum for proposing a topic ban amounts to a claim by the majority to ownership of the project. Stop the battleground editing and, as much as you apparently dislike each other, try to work collaboratively. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:36, 29 June 2013 (UTC) Also, Robert Walker quoted some very strong personal attacks by Warren Platts, but hasn't provided diffs to substantiate. Back up the quotes with diffs. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:36, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

Mr. McClenon, before you go throwing your weight around here, until you've slogged through the entire contents of Talk:Concerns for an early Mars sample return, Talk:Mars sample return mission, Talk:Manned mission to Mars, Talk:Life on Mars, Talk:Water on Mars, and the AfD discussion WP:Articles for deletion/Log/2013 June 16#Concerns for an early Mars sample return, and read Robert's actual content, e.g., Concerns for an early Mars sample return#Revision as of 07:32, 26 June 2013, not to mention his blog and published opinion pieces (cf.Need for Caution For an Early Mars Sample Return--Opinion Piece) you have no clue what we've been up against the last few months. Sorry for the occasional snark--but I see from your contrib history that's something you're not completely immune to as well. In fact, in 15 minutes of dealing with Robert, you're already making sarcastic comments against him. Try dealing with him on a daily basis for a month, buddy!

Ultimately, the good of the encyclopedia must outweigh the social guideline to be nice at all costs. There are some users--e.g., Robert Walker--who will hide behind the culture of WP:CIVILITY. They tend to think that if they throw up a wall o' text on a talk page to justify their every "contribution", that makes it golden. Then if anyone then edits it down, they cry uncivil!. Robert here has a hard time believing that any editor could possibly disagree with his argument that Mars presents a grave danger to Earth. Therefore, he attributes my edits to malice. Nothing could be further from the truth. Frankly, I feel sorry for Robert and the hours he's spent here--even though he doesn't give a damn about wasting hours of other people's time. The simple bottom line is that we can't let pseudoscience pass for science in an encyclopedia article. Warren Platts (talk) 00:14, 30 June 2013 (UTC)

@Warren Platts Two wrongs don't make a right, unless you are saying that they do. You say that he is attributing your edits to malice, but you are attributing his edits to malice, because you stated that he was intentionally injecting misinformation. What I can see is that this project has become a battleground. I don't have enough information to assess the blame accurately, but it falls both ways. A single AFD deletion does not in itself mean that all of his sections can be deleted on that basis. Major deletions should be discussed on article talk pages or by the Requests for Change process. Other editors have expressed concern that Manned mission to Mars is becoming promotional rather than encyclopedic.

You do not have the right to use project or article talk pages to propose to topic-ban him from Mars. There are regular forums for that action.

Your allegation that he has been spamming appears to be based on off-Wiki activity, which is irrelevant. If you have on-Wiki evidence of spamming, please present it.

I assume that you are addressing me as Mr. McClenon, to which I do not object, because that is a valid form of my name, because you have a problem with another Robert. That is all right.

There have been serious violations of Wikipedia policies. I was not involved, and I can see that both sides have been wrong. Either try to work together, or use the Dispute Resolution process. It is clear that no one has been trying to use the dispute resolution process until now, but that, except for one AFD, you have been choosing instead to do edit-wars in a project.

If there is really a desire to have a particular editor sanctioned, then use Requests for Comments on user conduct. Use caution on doing that.

Try to work together, and if that is impossible, use Dispute Resolution rather than having a battleground.::Both you and he wasted the time of the WP: Help Desk. First he came there, and then said that he was going to just go away, and didn't provide diffs for his allegations of your personal attacks. He made extreme allegations, and didn't provide diffs, or even useful links. Then I asked where to continue the discussion. You proposed this talk page, and I came here. You then continued your argument at the Help Desk, so that I had to close the discussion at the Help Desk.

Robert McClenon (talk) 02:20, 30 June 2013 (UTC)

I have never edited a Mars-related article, but I came across this dispute and would like to continue my comment from the help desk page. First, Robert McClenon, I'm sorry if I misread your remark about sarcasm there.

From my perspective, Warren Platts is out of control. Aside from the quotes already given by Robert Walker, Platts' own defense on the help desk clearly shows battleground mentality (in favor of manned missions to Mars). He added a fact tag to my brief comment there, which is just funny. He accuses Walker of lying and calls the disputed contributions "spam". Walker's contributions may be overlong or even fringe but they aren't spam. The battleground mentality is revealed by, "Robert is on a mission to save the planet ... His goal is to put the brakes on Mars exploration--as if it were on the fast track." [emphasis added]

I wouldn't take the time if this were just about Platts. The problem, as is often the case with battleground mentality, seems to be systemic among Mars editors. User:BatteryIncluded concludes that Platts showed "astonishing self-control". Elsewhere, User:Eaglizard tried to intervene on Walker's behalf and gets called a "religious zealot". Lastly, it seems the AfD for Concerns for an early Mars sample return succeeded without anyone noticing this related article, which is probably a better redirect candidate than ICAMSR.

I'm not a domain expert here but the eventual result on Mars_sample_return_mission doesn't seem entirely unreasonable. My concern is potentially ongoing abuse of process, vile behavior, and ownership mentality, the effect they can have on these articles going forward, and the wider harm they can do to the encyclopedia. beefman (talk) 17:38, 30 June 2013 (UTC)

I'd like to say, I've felt welcome here on Project Mars - despite my differing views from many here - and treated with civility and respect by all the editors of MarsProject that I've talked to - except for these two. So - in my experience they are unusual in this respect. Just wanted to say that. It is only because of my experiences of the last month that I feel I want to take a break from it all for a while. Robert Walker (talk) 20:52, 30 June 2013 (UTC)

Thank you, Beefman, for your comments, with which I agree. You noticed the irregular redirect, as did I. When an article is merged into another article, the redirect of the source article should be to the target article. The concerns were not limited to the ICAMSR. I have redirected the merged (source) article to the target article, Mars sample return mission, which was always what it should have been redirected to.

Beefman mentions the article on interplanetary contamination. It is very short and is tagged as under-sourced. The article on back-contamination is completely unsourced. If Robert Walker is willing to try to make a useful contribution to the Mars project after all, I would suggest that, since he has done considerable research on those issues, he could expand the articles. Just keep them to a moderate length. Editing of his contributions to provide proper weight and achieve neutral point of view is fine, but any deletion of his contributions because of previous battleground behavior will be disruptive editing, to be avoided. By the way, merging the two articles has been suggested, and I agree that they should be merged.

If Warren Platts or anyone else really wants another editor topic-banned, there is a procedure for that. As mentioned above, it is a user conduct RFC. I will however provide a very strong warning to consider very carefully whether that could boomerang, also known as shooting oneself in the foot. Sometimes when the ArbCom is asked to topic-ban an editor, they topic-ban that editor, and the editor making the request. Robert McClenon (talk) 00:45, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

Robert - just to say - I am willing to work on this if it is thought suitable, after a break from editing first. My idea for how to do it is to collaborate with someone with opposite views to me on contamination issues, who I feel able to work with, to help achieve balance, if I can find someone. I have someone in mind who might be able to do it, who I respect (and he respects me) and who I have had vigorous debates with on these matters.

I'd like to suggest the articles are left as stubs at present rather than combined. The problem is - that the main issues are different. For back contamination the focus is on the Earth and protecting the Earth from a very low probability but high severity risk. Also at present only Mars is seriously under consideration as a restricted Category V sample return.

For forward contamination issues, the main focus at present is on the science value of the target, with risks for humans seldom discussed much. In a general article like this, there are many Category IV targets to be considered including Mars (and its Moons), Europa, Engladus, and Titan. Another concern mentioned recently is contamination of the (probable) ice at the poles of the Moon.

With a single target like Mars you could combine both directions, provided that you also only present it from a single POV. That is what I did for the Manned mission to Mars section.

However, what I found with the MSR article is that if you leave out any of the main POVs the resulting article will seem biased to at least some readers. It is hard to find a totally satisfactory solution to this I think. The problem is there really isn't a "mainstream view" or rather, different people have different ideas of what the "mainstream view" is.

It seems that you must describe the offical POV of course, also Zubrin's POV, and also at the other extreme the ICAMSR's POV, at a minimum for a MSR. For forward contamination you have a similar range of views. Leave any of them out and the article will seem biased to some readers. It still seems biased, as I found out, if you include all the POVs, but at least the reader can hope to find their POV on the page. Hopefully having a collaborator with opposite POV to me, if it works out, could help with the perception of overall bias.

Thanks for fixing the redirect to ICAMSR, totally agree the MSR article is the appropriate place to redirect after a merge. Hope this reply isn't too long (is a second draft after I wrote another reply that was longer) Robert Walker (talk) 02:39, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

Specific thoughts on the science and where to put what: I think RW's work plan (02:39 2 July) sounds sensible. I lack the detailed knowledge and, indeed, enthusiasm for the writing the detailed modern Mars habitability/contamination material but I will happily provide disinterested third/fourth opinions on text once it's there. One major concern that I do have still is that we don't overload too many articles with this type of discussion. RW is totally right when he says the best way here is to have a detailed collaborative text with several perspectives, but this shouldn't be duplicated widely. Do it once (twice I guess - "Present day habitability of Mars" and "Contamination issues" are related but at least in part distinct), then link over to that article from other Mars articles. I say this mainly as this Project has longstanding issues with articles that are just too long, and we're only just getting a handle on this problem. I'm reluctant to let the main articles tangentially related to the life topic (e.g., Mars, Water on Mars, Climate of Mars, Atmosphere of Mars...) start getting bigger and bigger again with what is likely to be mainly duplicated text.

FWIW, my thoughts remain that consensus in the broader scientific community on modern Mars surface habitability is along the lines of what remains at Water on Mars#Habitability assessment - the radiation problem remains very severe and hasn't yet been convincingly argued away by anyone. But we should add some material (somewhere - not Water on Mars!) noting the chances of life aren't zero, and some people are notably more optimistic. (NB: I don't propose having this discussion on this page; it should be probably over at one of our existing present day habitability pages.) DanHobley (talk) 05:39, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't see why we need more Mars articles. The ones we have are in bad enough shape. If we're not going to topic ban Robert Walker, we should at least not encourage him to write more POV-biased walls o' text--it's the only thing he knows how to do. As for his idea that he collaborate with another editor with mainstream POV, I've already offered to do that with him on multiple occasions. He won't do it. It's impossible. The problem with RW is that it takes more hours to edit down his "content" than it does to write it up from scratch. If we really need more content on contamination, then step up to the plate and write it yourself. That's my opinion. YMMV. Cheers, Warren Platts (talk) 19:56, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

Do not use this project talk pages or article talk pages to propose a topic-ban on Robert Walker. If you really want him topic-banned, there is a procedure for the purpose, and it isn't demands in talk pages that he stop editing these pages. That would fall within the definition of bullying within Wikipedia. Before you choose to use administrative consensus or the Arbitration Committee, the appropriate forums for such a request,be very careful, because such a request may boomerang, because there has been wrong on both sides. If you mean that you are no longer seeking a topic ban, then we are in agreement. Robert McClenon (talk) 00:18, 4 July 2013 (UTC)

Opposite, not mainstream. IMO neither of us have a mainstream POV. Someone who removes a third of my first sole article in Project Mars without discussion, and reverts again after an attempt at BRD, and who removes nearly all my content from the Project Mars section of wikipedia without prior discussion and again doesn't respond to my attempt at BRD for the largest section deleted, isn't going to be my first choice for collaborator. Hope you understand and thanks for the offer Robert Walker (talk) 21:23, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

lol! Robert! Glad to see you still have retained your sense of humor through your whole ordeal! Cheers, Warren Platts (talk) 22:07, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

The issue is not whether Mars habitability is a notable topic, but its accurate presentation in Wikipedia. Persistent and deliberate quote-mining from scientific papers leads to misrepresentations because their context is lost, and the source is tortured to extract conclusions not indicated in the original paper. Add WP:Synthesis to the mix using quote mining, and the whole thing becomes garbage. I am not 'after RW', but scientific accuracy (and verifiability). His mere unfamiliarity with scientific procedure protocols and related terminology, easily throws him off in the direction of his expectation/fear (example: Schuerger "ruling out" the lethality of ionizing radiation, which I will address soon in the article). In addition, my attempt at collaborating with RW was quickly halted by his non-negotiable desire to remove all mention of ionizing radiation as it relates to habitability, which frankly is a very dishonest attitude given the vast amount of unambiguous references currently cited, so he practically exhausted by assumption of good-faith. As of today, I still do not wish him banned from the Project, but I request for him to be kindly moderated in the future with regards to WP:CHEESE and WP:COMPETENCE. -Cheers, BatteryIncluded (talk) 02:07, 4 July 2013 (UTC)

(indentation reduced for readability)

Please note, this discussion only happened on the talk pages. Battery Included did a bold edit to remove an existing section on water on Mars created by many authors - I only added a couple of sentences to it, and that was some months ago. He previously removed a paragraph of content I added to Life on Mars on the same subject, which was my own contribution and summarized the section of the Water on Mars page which already existed.

Recent papers focus on factors such as UV, the vacuum conditions of the atmosphere, and the extreme cold. The material BI supplied to support his argument dates from before phoenix in 2008 when the surface was thought to be uninhabitable and applies to dormant life.

The papers cited in the removed section conclude possible habitability of the surface and don't say anything about limiting effects of cosmic radiation. In my view he should not add an argument about cosmic radiation that in his view invalidates the results of these papers if the original papers do not cite it.

Peer reviewed papers should be presented exactly "as is". Criticism of the results can also be presented but only if the criticism is cited and is clearly directed at the conclusions of those papers, rather than at conclusions of other earlier papers. I have seen no recent discussion of any of these papers presenting those criticisms. Also in the recent conference in February this year, the question of cosmic radiation wasn't raised during expert questions after the talks.

To suggest I need to be supervised for raising a topic like this on the talk pages is absurd. Please note that BI took on himself to archive the talk pages of Life on Mars and Water on Mars in their entirety (leaving no discussions at all on the pages) with several open topics started by me including an open suggestion to start a new article on the habitability of the surface of Mars. He did this during the period of Warren Platt's removal of the content on contamination concerns from the main pages. I later reposted this topic and my repost was allowed to remain, but the original posts and open discussions remain archived.

The topic is not a fringe view. It is a subject under active research by at least three dozen researchers in the US, UK and Germany who publish many papers on it every year, a major conference early this year and Paige plans to start a new journal devoted to the topic.

He also engaged in totally OTT insults of me, similar to Warren, on the talk pages.

He has said several times that he will no longer discuss it with me. It is not a sufficiently clear case of WP:CHEESE to do that and indeed I would go the other way around. In my view, by adding his own extra level of criticism on top of the recent published research and refusing to acknowledge or discuss any of the material I present, the WP:CHEESE could be argued to go the other way.

He doesn't show any detailed knowledge of the recent research, and by presenting cosmic radiation as the most important limiting factor in his summary of one of the papers he goes against a video presentation in February this year by one of the authors of that same paper. He lists the 14 potential habitat limiting factors in order of importance, states clearly that they are in order of importance, and has cosmic radiation as tenth in the list. He discusses it no further in the talk and the experts listening do not raise it in questions afterwards. This surely shows it is not a major concern amongst experts researching into these topics. Robert Walker (talk) 06:49, 4 July 2013 (UTC)

Robert, I am sick and tired of your repeated whining. If you can't handle the MIGs, then stay out of MIG alley. Moreover, your allegations of sock puppetry are direct attack on the personal integrity of BI and myself that goes way beyond any of the "insults" supposedly "hurled" at you. Talk about calling the kettle black! And your idea that peer reviewed papers must be presented "exactly as is" is extremely disingenuous to put it politely. Quote mining, which is your specialty, is an easy way to twist the truth to suit your editorial opinions. Why don't you do something useful like going back to the MSR article, researching what happened with the budget cuts and new schedule? That would actually be useful and demonstrate that you're actually interested in improving Mars articles rather than merely promoting your hobby horse.Warren Platts (talk) 16:40, 4 July 2013 (UTC)

Yes, RW, you are a victim of a world-wide coverup, and Mackay submitted this astrobiology lander proposal only to ridicule you:

• Icebreaker Life.

BatteryIncluded (talk) 14:13, 4 July 2013 (UTC)

Restatement

Wikipedia is not a battleground. There are still being too many personal attacks on both sides, and the articles will not be improved if the personal attacks do not stop.

I will add one more comment on what is out of line, and that is accusations of sock puppetry. That appears to be something that Robert Walker has fabricated out of Martian thin air. The idea that Warren Platts and BatteryIncluded are sockpuppets (who is the sock and who is the puppeteer?) is patent nonsense. They have both been editing since 2007, which is longer than Robert Walker has been editing Mars. They have different styles of personal attacks. They have different approaches to their talk pages. One archives his talk page, and the other deletes his talk page. That allegation is an unsupported personal attack. There is also a forum for dealing with sockpuppets, which is Sock Puppet Investigations. If you want to make that allegation properly, go there, and be aware that that it also may boomerang. If you have decided to back off on the claim of sock puppetry, that is good.

I will comment that Zubrin and ICAMSR are both fringe, just opposite fringes, but the climate at the North Pole is not that different from the climate at the South Pole. ICAMSR at least is living in the real world (the Earth) and has an extreme opinion about how to protect it. Zubrin is only physically living in the real world (the Earth), because he wants to throw it away and replace it with Mars, and has a bizarre idea that the three hundred years it took Europeans to colonize North America is relevant to how long it would take to terraform Mars. They should both be quoted, but they are both fringe, and no article should give them undue weight.

I am not suggesting that Warren Platts and Robert Walker, or BatteryIncluded and Robert Walker, should collaborate. That is absurd. They should agree to some reasonable breakdown of how to improve the articles so that they don't get in each other's ways. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:15, 4 July 2013 (UTC)

Just to say I didn't allege that they were sock puppets. I observed many remarkable coincidences, such as:

1. WP and BI start OTT insults of me on the same day, accusing me of POV pushing, in unrelated discussions on separate pages of Project Mars, when no other editor on wikipedia has ever insulted me or accused me of POV pushing,
2. BI tags WPs version of the AfD. WP then tells me that my version was tagged (in my user space). Finally BI supports WP's version against mine in the AfD. Why would WP when he sees a tag on the page he is editing assume it applies to a page in my user space? Why would BI tag the version which he supported in the AfD?
3. When WP decided to remove all my content from Project Mars, BI archives the entire talk pages for two pages with open discussions with me, and WP then follows suit archiving the entire talk page for Manned mission to Mars.
4. Warren accuses me of retaliatory tagging when I tagged his content in the BC section of the MSR article, but it is BI who tagged and he tagged WPs version of the article. Strange to suppose I was retaliating to that.

Several other things like that. In view of this I asked more experienced wikipedians if this might possibly be evidence of sock puppetry and deserved investigation.

Also - it was clear that WP was not a sock puppet for BI created for the AFD. What I suspected was a second account created for another reason, e.g. a user who wants a second account under his real name (presuming BatteryIncluded is not someone's real name). I suspected that this second account was then taken advantage of to swing the decision in the AfD against me, which was the reason for wanting to discuss it.

There were several other irregularities in the AfD. At the start of the AfD the discussion was over WPs version of the article even though WP was the one proposing deletion of the article and the one who removed most of its content through a series of bold edits, not permitting me to create a substantial version for discussion. It was only through the intervention of N2e that I was able to work on my version for the AfD.

Also on the last day of the AfD there were several strong Delete and Merge votes from people never involved in the debate and who from their contribution history never contributed to Astronomy sections of wikipedia. Then after that WP was insistent that the debate needed to be closed, adding a new section "Rough Consensus" to the article to sway the decision of the admin. When the section was collapsed by another admin he moved the section header out of the collapsed section so you still saw "rough consensus" prominently in the page.

And the discussion didn't go into any details at all of the citations, any individual sections, nothing, just repeated WPs assessment without explanation in several different voices, with no evidence that any of them had gone so far as to read the Office of Planetary Protection page on Mars Sample Return (obvious first stop on the issue) or indeed my article. I expected a more considered AfD for such a heavily cited article.Robert Walker (talk) 12:33, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

If WP and BI were sock puppets as well, that seemed to me sufficient reason to ask for a reversal of the AfD decision due to improper conduct.

It was not obviously nonsense to me. I am not familiar with sock puppets. This is the first time I have come across behaviour that lead me to wonder if someone might be a sock puppet, (this plus some strange behaviour of an ip address on the talk page for the AfD in the middle of a discussion with WP who said they were not WP, strongly expressed very unusual views on BC almost identical to WP for just three or four posts and then vanished from the discussion) and wished for advice on the subject.

Robert McLenon advised me that they might be meat puppets. That could be so I suppose, if so I suspect they are in regular close contact, and it is still a little hard to understand the tagging - why WP thought at tag by BI of the page he was editing was a tag of the page I was editing and why WP thought my tag of his content in the MSR page was retaliatory tagging for this tag.

The rest could be explained though and I accept this is a minor point and am not familiar with sock puppetry, and also understand now that it is considered to be a serious allegation that you shouldn't make without strong evidence. I originally thought it might be a relatively simple matter to investigate, not having researched it. I don't allege them of sock puppetry. I now suspect meat puppetry or some other very close off wiki connection between the two accounts. The tagging anomalies could perhaps be explained by users permitting each other to use each others accounts or computers perhaps? I still find that very hard to accept as actions of a single user, as I can't see how anyone could see a tag of the page they are editing and immediately jump to the conclusion that it is a tag of my page in my user space.

If I understand Robert McLenon rightly, this is not considered something worth investigating and can't overturn the AfD which is my main reason for wanting to bring this all up. Robert Walker (talk) 08:31, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

Wow, now we can add Paranoid personality disorder to the laundry list... Warren Platts (talk) 18:59, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

@WP: Read the policy on personal attacks. Robert McClenon (talk) 23:59, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Warren, first, I apologise if you are a real person and not exchanging accounts or communicating off wiki with BI. The thing is, I have no way of knowing that, and wikipedia has a continuous ongoing issue with sock puppetry and meat puppetry with multiple investigations going on every day. You must admit that it was a remarkable coincidence that you and BI started OTT insults of me on the same day in unrelated talk page discussions, and that the tagging event was unusual to say the least. Then there were many irregularities in the conduct of the AfD. So please understand why it is reasonably natural of me to suspect meat puppetry or sock puppetry, and not paranoia.

For sock puppetry, seems there are many legitimate reasons for having sock puppets, and though usually you have to disclose that you are sock puppets, there are quite a few situations where you don't need to or even shouldn't disclose that you are sock puppets. What I suspected was not that you are a sock puppet created for the AfD but that you were a legitimate sock puppet taken advantage of in a way that is not legitimate during the AfD as sock puppets shouldn't be used to get extra "votes". Similarly there is nothing wrong with having lots of friends on wikipedia (as I do myself) and those of course don't need to be disclosed, it is only if you call on those friendships to sway a vote in an AfD or similar situations that you call them meatpuppets.

So I just thought it seemed quite likely there is some off wiki connection between all those accounts that voted against me in the AfD that might invalidate it. I originally thought sock puppets, now wonder if it might be meat puppets. If there is no connection I sincerely apologise. However, I don't know how you can deal with that except by seeking advice as there is no way for me to know for sure that there is no connection.

BTW in my experience people who respond with an attack as you do so often tend to be those who have something to hide, as they do it to deflect attention away from themselves. So you aren't doing too much right now to help convince me that you have nothing to hide. Robert Walker (talk) 12:23, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

@RW: Cite one Wikipedia policy that says that there are any legitimate reasons for having sock puppets. Do you really mean that, as an experienced Wikipedia editor, you haven't read the policy on sockpuppets, which provides that they are blocked and sometimes banned? Robert McClenon (talk) 23:56, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Just to say for anyone reading this, conversation continued on my talk page. Turned out that I had misunderstood and thought "sock puppet" meant the same as "alternative account" when it means "alternative account used improperly". The policy page made it clear but my eye slid over the vital word in the first sentence. I posted about this on the talk page Wikipedia talk:Sock puppetry#Emphasis of improper 13:05, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Robert Walker, your assumption, that BI and WP have some minority POV is simply wrong. The point is, that you look at the things extremely selective, mostly without the proper context. Although your citations look correct at first glance, they are partially taken out of the context of being considered as "exceedingly unlikely" (ESF report, p.36) and further reduced by applying a factor of 1e-6. I'm independent of any Mars colonization programs. I never heard of WP, BI or you ever before reading the talk about MSR resp. Concerns about BC. And I'm using a changing IP adress, because anyone knowing me in real life won't understand that I'm wasting my time with discussions about weird conspiracy theories.

I wished I could help you to get back to a reasonable POV, but I don't really know how. I'll do one try here, and then give up, if it doesn't help: Read the complete ESF report, and try to understand what "exceedingly unlikely" means, may be with the help of some of your real-life friends. Try to connect it with your idea of identifying huge numbers with infinity; look at the reciproke; remember 1/infty = 0. Consider "exceedingly unlikely" as a kind of ongoing convergence process versus zero (or the reciproke as diverging versus infinity). Read section 5 of the ESF report, and relate sentences like "When investigating what is considered to be an acceptable – or tolerable – level of risk, one often comes across the figure ‘one in a million’ or 1e-6." to your considerations about what is likely to be a neutral POV.

Think about the consequences for Wikipedia, if any "exceedingly unlikely" hazardous option would be explained in full detail for each topic. Example: There is evidence, that switching on the light can cause an explosion in rare cases, because an exposive gas-air mixture could be present in a room due to some gas leak. The explosion could result in a fire. The fire could distribute to nearby houses. One of that houses could be a biosafety laboratory. All means to stop the fire could fail, and some hazardous agent could spread and kill millions of people. There is a "remote" chance that this chain of incidents can happen. Therefore this needs to be included in a Wikipedia article about light switches, light bulbs, electricity, methane, fire, explosion, air, room, leak, house, etc.

... and anyone who deletes that kind of contents without extensive dicussion should be banned.

As a user of Wikipedia I'm glad, that there are people who keep Wikipedia clean of such stuff.

I hope, WP and BI will come back and continue their preciuos work, even if there might occur occasional minor deviations from perfect balance. Better than harsh POVs in the other direction, preventing serious editors from doing their job.

From time to time I use Wikipedia as a reference. I can't do that, if I've to fear, that it will be undermined by an anti-science movement spreading nonsense with the same right as scientifially evident results. 93.193.97.157 (talk) 15:19, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi, as far as I know they are still editing wikipedia. BI anyway, WP said he has to take time off wikipedia. The Arbitration wasn't taken out by me but I added evidence to it, was by Robert McClenon, and was based on a number of wikipedia guideline violating actions, as he so thought, and I felt so too. He is an experienced admin and I feel must have had reason for taking it to arbitration. More WP than BI, but BI enough to be mentioned in it.

I have been on the receipt of extreme personal verbal insults for many weeks now from WP particularly, as you can see from the evidence in the case, just because of my differing POV, and WP has done things like merging pages away and deleting all my content from a page just because it "nauseates him" when it is fully cited and surely needed discussion first.

On the probabilities thing - yes if the MSR containment facility works, no human error, and it is indeed a million fold reduction, that helps a lot. As a mathematician I'm not totally satisfied with that answer because you ask then " million fold reduction from what". If the original very low meant one in a thousand, for instance, and you have a million fold reduction, that's one in a billion, and as Carl Sagan said you can't take even a tiny chance with a billion lives. No-one seems to give any attempt at estimating the original probabilities or to give a target for the probability to aim for after the reduction. That is my own personal gripe as a mathematician with everyone in the debate - the officials, and the ICAMSR and Zubrin, none of them have any attempts at numbers. But I can't put this into wikipedia of course, just so you understand where I'm coming from, what my POV slant is.

Following Carl Sagan my POV is that a return to Earth possibly could be done safely but would want to be very sure about it. And I also feel, why take any risk at all when there is a safe alternative involving in situ exploration on Mars?

But the deleted material expresses the POV of the ESF. Yes I've read the complete report and glad that you have too. Yes what the report says is that the original probability is thought to be low anyay, and that by reducing it a million fold you end up with a probability low enough to be acceptable. That is what I wanted to express in the articles that got deleted.

Did you see what I wrote? Perhaps the way it comes over to others is different from intended. I didn't mean it to be in any way alarmist, just to express the findings of the ESF report clearly. If you read the report carefully, well what they said is what I meant to say in the article I wrote, of course have to reduce it to a few sentences saying what you take to be the salient points.

I feel it is notable and needs to be said. A tiny probability of risk of environmental disruption, even if very small as surely this one is, still is well worth taking precautions against. The official POV is that it is, say so clearly, and after all, why recommend a 200 million dollar + facility be built to contain and say all those things about need to contain ultramicrobacteria and GTAs if possible as well, if they didn't mean what they say in the report?

Warren Platts and Battery Included keep saying that I am alarmist and POV pushing. But I don't think I am and none of my friends outside facebook think I am, and I have friends that are very different in POV and they don't find this material alarmist and can't understand what the fuss is about. That includes the friend with POV really not that far from WP, except he respects me and also thinks the material is notable and should be included. They don't post here because I am careful to warn them not to or they would be counted as meatpuppets. See User:Robertinventor/Mars Sample Receiving Faclity and User:Robertinventor/Mars_Sample_Return_Legal_Issues_and_International_Public_Debate. Do you really think those are alarmist and POV pushing? If so why, what particularly in the article comes over as alarmist. I want to correct it if they are as that was never my intention. But you do have to present clearly that environmental disruption is the worst case possible outcome, otherwise the whole thing doesn't make any sense, why you would go to all that trouble to prevent it.

Does that make sense? I won't bite, if you disagree :). I don't engage in extreme personal insults myself and am happy to talk about this to anyone and hear what your views are and what issues you have with it or with the proposed content. Robert Walker (talk) 18:08, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Again with a new IP, probably. Don't fear to insult me unintentionally; I'm rather robust in that point.

Glad to hear, that BI and WP will continue their work for Wikipedia; hopefully you're right.

Insults shouldn't be necessary, but I think WP either didn't take your contribution for serious but for trolling, or it has simply been a sign of despair.

I think, I'm able to think in different logical paradigms (intuitionistic, constructivistic, predicative, mathematical, etc.); so I'm confident, we'll be able to get in sync at that point. Best, we try to avoid tertium non datur, if possible. Things look simple enough to do so.

The central cause, however, for disagreements seems to be the definition of "exceedingly unlikely". So we should first find at least some upper and lower bound. I feel, that you agree.

My rough understanding is "exceedingly unlikely" < "very unikely" < "unlikely".

I assume, that the definition is the same for NASA and ESA, although that's some uncertainty.

From the MSL NEPA (http://science.nasa.gov/media/medialibrary/2010/11/05/MSL-FEIS_Vol1.pdf) (page 2-43):

- "unlikely" means "1 in 100 to 1 in 10 thousand".

- "very unlikely" means "1 in 10 thousand to 1 in 1 million".

- "extremely unlikely" means "less than 1 in a million".

Not yet resolved, what "exceedingly unlikely" means, but I assume as an intermediate step, that it's at most 1 in a million, may be below an even lower upper bound. Needs more clarifying. A bit unlucky, that the ESF report doesn't quantify it or at least tries to quantify the uncertainty about quantifying.

"These factors make it exceedingly unlikely that any microorganism capable of causing human disease could originate from Mars." (ESF, p.36). I interprete this intermediately as a probability of the existence of a hazardous microorganism on Mars of below 1 to 1 million under the condition, that there exists life on Mars at all (which is unknown). This multiplied probability (which I estimate as below 1 in 1 million) has to be multiplied with the conditional probability that exactly this type of microorganism is collected. I've no probability for this. But it is explicitely intended not to collect samples from a present possibly habitable region on Mars, at least for the 2020 mission. So I estimate this conditional probability as significantly below 1. Together the probability to collect a hazardous microorganism will be significantly below 1 in a million.

This has to be multiplied by the probability of the release of single particle of a collected sample of 1 in a million. Now we are significantly below 1 in 1e-12.

This << 1e-12 probability has to be multiplied with the ratio of microorganisms in the sample in relation to the whole sample. For this ratio we will be in the lower p.p.m region as an upper bound, based on present analysis results of volatile organics in Martian samples. No such volatiles have yet been found; and the probability that those volatiles are of living organisms is again significantly below 1. So we get (taking 10 p.p.m. as an upper bound) << 1e-17.

That's a rough estimate. We may try to refine it with more precise data, if available. But at the end, I think the probability will be much lower, somewhere near 1e-20 or lower for the release of a single hazardous microorganism.

This microorgansim now has to find an organism where it can spread, again unlikely.

So from the standpoint of present scientific evidence, as I interprete it, there is no reason at all to be concerned, as long as the PP rules are obeyed. I personally wouldn't even be concerned, if no BC precaution at all would be taken, but that's my POV. I would even eat an unsterilized Martian sample without check for microorganisms; my concerns would be toxic perchlorate and radioactivity from exposure to solar and galactic particles, and possible sand, because I don't like sand between my teeth. I'm more afraid of cars and roof avalanches, or of someone having a cough.

Most of the precaution has to be taken, imho, in order to take concerns and anxiety of the public serious, even if there is no scientific basis for those concerns. And I think, that's an important point in the ESF report, which leads to the recommendations: Treat the sample as dangerous, although we are almost absolutely shure, that there isn't any danger. This improves public acceptance.

Could be that you confuse actual risk with recommendations made for public concerns, or at least don't distinguish the two things clearly. That may lead to the alarmist interpretation. 84.147.97.118 (talk) 23:22, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

(unindenting because conversation is going to right hand side of the screen on my netbook)

Okay, something though to turn that around a bit, your extra orders of magnitude, the main objective of a sample return is to find signs of life. So will target places where life is likely. If it was purely geological, they could simply sterilize the sample before return to Earth which would retain most of its geological interest while keeping it safe for BC, e.g. dry heat sterilization at moderately high temperatures no damage to the rock but kill all known life. I think even the ICAMSR would probably not object if they did that. You could dry heat sterilize the entire capsule plus contents for a few days in space before return to Earth for a purely geological sample return, indeed, dry heat sterilize during journey back to Earth. But they won't do that because by far the most exciting result scientifically would be the remote chance of present day life or well preserved or dormant ancient life.

Then if there is surface life somewhere on Mars, it isn't clear that it won't also be in the returned sample. Depends on its abundance. But Carl Sagan raised the possibility that lifeforms could be imbedded in a grain of the Martian dust and get carried protected from UV anywhere on Mars. So dormant life could be present in the dust. There is also one theory, the advancing sand dune bioreactors, according to which life might be present even in the region where Curiosity is. It is a bit unlikely but suppose it is 1 in 1000 that may still be relevant.

Then existential risks that could disrupt the environment of the Earth are hard to reason about as Nick Bostrom said. The problem is that obviously the most severe ones at least have never been encountered by humans yet and we aren't by evolution or psychology well equipped to reason about them.

As with you, I would also eat Martian micro-organisms if I had to, - and not be too concerned that they would be likely to harm me, as in a typical lifetime you run into much worse hazards than that. But when you multiply it up by the number of humans and consider all possible future humans as well, then existential risks become more important than a measure of probability would suggest. Note, in this I am going beyond the ESF to state my own personal POV. I might write a paper about it and see if I can get it published, as seems an interesting application of the ideas about existential risk, but have not attempted this yet.

Nick Bostrom suggests figures like 1 in 10^16 or even higher figures as potentially significant, if you take into account the possibility of future humans colonizing the galaxy. For that he gives figures as high as 10^34 human years (don't know how long lifetimes would be by then). So for instance a 1 in 10^10 chance of existential risk, you could argue on his 1 in 10^16 taking account of future generations for a billion years, is equivalent to a normal type risk likely to harm a million people, as that is the expected number to die (or never live) as a result. It is an ethical and philosophical question whether future possible lives should be taken account of in that way for existential risks, and what weight to put on them. Personally I feel they should at least to some extent, YMMV.

In view of that, I feel myself, why take the risk at all, tiny though it is? Eventually will want to return samples, but why not study on Mars first. For exobiologists anyway several of them have said that they think the same effort put into in situ studies with tools such as the astrobionibbler and in not too distant future, DNA sequencers etc, would yield better science return especially if it is hard to find samples with biosignatures on Mars.

But that's my personal POV and as not yet published at least not in any paper particularly talking about BC of Earth, then it can't go into any article here. If you want to find out more you can check out my science20 post, some of which I may try to make into an academic paper at some point, an exobiologist friend who publishes on Mars exobiology suggested it might be an idea to try publishing some of my contamination ideas. But I haven't yet done anything about that.

As for wikipedia articles, and the official studies, well the thing is just like my arguments just given, your argument you just gave is OR. Has anyone made this in a published paper? If not it has to be left out. You may have a point, on the other hand, I've given a couple of reasons why what you say may not be conclusive, and whatever, it is OR by the standards of wikipedia. I haven't seen it in any published paper yet, or would have included it.

But if it is like meta talking around the topic, then it is an interesting suggestion and hope you find my reply also interesting. And can sometimes be useful to talk in this way as it can suggest ways to search for new material e.g. maybe someone has made this argument in a paper, and could search to see if one can find it.

And either way, if the proposed receiving facility is totally safe, which is the conclusion of the ESF study that it is safe to acceptable levels, then still, it is a notable subject. And the article I write would put that as the conclusion as the one I already did does do. Other ideas about it such as the ICAMSR would be presented as a minority view.

My reason for including it is simply that there are numerous papers and studies on the topic, so passes the Wikiedia guidelines for notability and so should be here somewhere. Where it is put I really don't care too much just feel it should be here somewhere suitably titled so those who want to find out about it can find the information. The bias I see in Mars Project is another different but related topic. But whatever is done about that, if anything, I feel this material needs to be included somewhere. Do you see my point there? Just as is, only presenting what is in the studies, as presented in the studies, not adding any extra POV slant, and written with the help of a colleague with opposite POV to me to make sure there is no overall POV slant e.g. from selection of quotes or which things in the studies to mention.

Don't worry about discussing this using a changing ip address, I'm not bothered at all, and I understand that some contributers to wikipedia want to remain anonymous for many different reasons. Robert Walker (talk) 00:08, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

On your point about measuring volatiles, the thing is life on Mars may be extremely sparse. Any surface life is probably as sparse as desert life e.g. in the dry valleys in Antarctica. These may be below the surface of rocks for instance, or just below the surface of the soil, and may be slowly metabolizing - some of the Antarctic micro-organisms seem to have lifetimes measured in millennia. Then - if it is in the dust, similarly, may be just a few micro-organisms not enough to detect except with the most sensitive instruments yet only dormant and able to reproduce. And - many extremophiles and especially polyextremophiles can manage in a wide range of habitats. So a micro-organism adapted to Mars that is present in low concentrations there barely detectable due to the harsh conditions there, might yet be able to be a nuisance on Earth in different conditions. Of course not saying likely to be a nuisance there, just could be presumably with some low probability. Robert Walker (talk) 00:26, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

On the idea that it is a public relations exercise with no scientific basis, the ESF and NRC did go into the science. Not so much the ESF actually. The earlier NRC report is better. It goes into a lot of detail, e.g. about why the Martian meteorites argument of Zubrin is not sufficient reason to suppose that a MSR return is safe, and reasons for supposing that return of previously unencountered lifeforms is possible. Then the ESF adds to that with its discussion of the GTAs and a smaller size for the ultramicrobacteria. It is worth reading the NRC report first to put the ESF one into context. It is actually one of my main worries that if it goes ahead it might get treated as a purely public relations exercise by some of those involved in designing and running the mission who might not be totally up on the scientific background, some of them. If that happens it increases the chance of human error. After all a high proportion of missions to Mars fail, and some due to unanticipated human errors. As a totally novel mission this may also have some human errors, and those might increase the probability of release to a far higher level than the target 1 in million. That is my own POV, and the ICAMSR put a similar concern - to that extent my concerns are a bit like them but I don't share other aspects of their concerns. It was also a concern of Carl Sagan. Robert Walker (talk) 00:43, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

The OR point doesn't matter me at the moment. I just tried to understand the ESF paper and explain it in quantitative terms, especially page 36. The NASA definitions are no OR, it's cited.

I would eat the sample, especially because I'm sure, there can't be any Martian organism inside, as long as the sample is taken of the top 1 meter surface layer in a zone without permafrost, ice or hot springs, because the radiation is lethal to any thinkable organism in that zone within a few thousand years. And we have a security margin of a factor 1000.

They don't intend to find life inside the sample. They called that idea foolish. They try to find billions of years old biosigatures of petrified remnants of organisms or early predecessors of organisms meaning complex organic chemistry.

They will prefere not to heat the sample, because in that case potential organic material will react with perchlorates to carbon dioxide, and is lost for analysis.

In (aerosol) dust potential life isn't protected from UV and oxidized within short time.

In situ analysis on Mars doesn't work well enough, because the needed instruments depend on each analysis step. A sequencer doesn't help anything if there is nothing to sequence, or even if there is something to sequence, but with a different chemistry. In situ cannot do much more than some plausible preselection. Detailed questions are much too depended from stepwise found results.

I strongly disagree with the one billion years prospected existence of human beings. I don't see any reason to expect more than 10 million years, and most likely no more than 1 million years, if everything goes well. Just look in our past. The species evolves much faster.

The chance for an existential risk is most likely well below 10^-20. That's an average of well below 0.001 human beings even for a prospected population of 10^10 * 10^7 = 10^17 human years (10 billion people over 10 million years). And even severe disruptions like pest epidemies have been balanced within a few hundred years. The limiting factors have been ressources. 10^34 human years is pure speculation.

I disagree, that the material needs to be included in Wikipedia, because of missing scientific base. 99% of hypotheses turn out to be wrong. Wikipedia articles should be constrained on topics with at least some scientific evidence.

There are loads of papers with scientific evidence, which are not represented in Wikipedia. Just look at the LPSC abstracts.

Don't care; the scientits are perfectly up to date. 84.147.97.118 (talk) 01:35, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Okay, yes "exceedingly unlikely" might mean one in a million, I follow your meaning there. But they didn't define it in the paper, wouldn't they have defined it if they had a precise meaning as they did with the paper you linked to? Also as it is the informed opinion of experts, rather than a result of an experiment, I'd have liked more detail like how many experts were consulted, and was there a consensus or did some think it more likely than others? There is likely to be some variation there.

If we take it as one in a million, then the combined prob. is one in 10^12. Depends also on what the prob. is but if say one in a million for a life form to be problematic and further reduced by prob. that the sample has life in it at all, it's beginning to look not so bad, at least ordinary reasoning (not using the existential risk multipliers). That is, so long as the containment works. If just a PR exercise and not done carefully, then the human error prob. will be far higher than the 1 in a million design probability in my view, then combined prob. could be less than one in a billion which in my view is unacceptable for a potentially environmentally disrupting worst case.

You may notice the ESF study looks into issues such as crime, human error etc, and make a few remarks, but say that it is outside of their brief to look at these issues in detail. Those need to be examined by someone at some stage.

With the astronibbler, it is able to detect a single amino acid in a gram of sample so they have found ways around those issues. Urey also had some rather amazingly sensitive instruments, it still might fly I believe in some future Curiosity class mission, anyway shows what could be done.

What I feel about in situ observation is that they have got nowhere near the limit of what is possible by those means. So lets find out what we can do. I am myself much more optimistic about present day life, and actually the idea of sampling the dust for life is one of the ideas for a sample return mission to just return dust collected from the atmosphere. Well let's look at it in situ first.

Then if you find life, you know that there is life in the sample, and you know something about it. You might be able to find out its size for instance if you also have a good quality optical instrument or an electron microscope - and that's another instrument in development for future missions. And what you say about one stage following another in analysis -well curiosity does that. You can do that sort of thing in a reasonable sized rover, have several instruments and be able to move the samples from one to another during the analysis.

So if is life in the sample, everyone knows that and will treat it with much more caution, and you know its size perhaps, and something about it e.g. if DNA based, you have probably sequenced it too, since a miniaturized DNA sequencer is another instrument in development for future missions, quite advanced last time I checked their website, the team seem to think they could get it ready for the 2018 launch if they were asked to.

With the dust protection from UV, I haven't explained right. The micro-organisms aren't the dust. The idea is that micro-organisms can get imbedded inside a crevice in a grain of dust. The grains are irregular and large enough, and for a single micro-organism a grain of dust could have many locations where protected from UV and the iron oxide is known to shield against UV. As do other types of rocks but this is an example that does a good job of it. It is just a possibility an depends e.g. on whether the life forms are ever exposed to the surface of Mars. Example - don't know if any paper I've read says how it would happen, but suppose, e.g. the warm seasonal flows might well expose life to the surface and then the life in a temporarily liquid layer on the surface, if those form even briefly, could wet a dust grain that then gets blown away in the wind. With the advancing sands bioreactor idea also it would be a natural enough thing for a grain of dust to receive micro-organisms from the deliquescing salts within the dune and then be blown away.

Those exobiologists who wrote the paper pointed out that it might be hard to find old biology as well. Hard to find sediments that would preserve it and then they would be degraded by cosmic radiation, unless you can dig deep, and you don't know if the sediments that look promising actually have evidence of life in them at all. Need special conditions to preserve organics for billions of years, and you might think that it did satisfy those conditions when it didn't quite. After all, if it was easy to find samples with abundant life on them, e.g. organic rich shales, we would probably have spotted them by now, or Curiosity will find evidence soon. So the samples you can get easily probably are mainly of sparse life, perhaps localized, and many may by chance have no life in them, or not been able to preserve it. And you can only take a few grams probably of each sample in a MSR because the amounts returned are likely to be small in total mass. In the white paper they thought there was a reasonable chance a MSR would return samples no more conclusive for biology than the martian meteorites we have already.

I think the next stage should be, first more rovers like Curiosity - follow an idea by Zubrin, that since we know how to land Curiosity now, could land many copies of it, not bother to try new technology, but "churn them out" and bring the mission cost down and send lots of landers to Mars. Those would be hundreds of millions of dollar class missions not billion dollar missions. Then as funding becomes available, next step would be to send humans in orbit around Mars. They would operate rovers on the surface via telepresence and could do as much in a few ours as our current rovers do in years. Surprisingly in all this Zubrin also agrees at least his Athena double fly by, though I would differ of course in what happens next after that. He also thinks a MSR is of no value at this point. In his case because humans would bring back the samples, and for me, because the telerobots would do that after they are much better known :). So actually I pretty much go along with Zubrin as far as the humans on the surface then at that point I substitute telerobots for his humans in the near future for reasons of contamination prevention + they also can do more science return for the same cost, I believe, not having Mars surface colonization, but rather science return, as my prime objective at this stage, I think space colonies more promising than planetary surface colonies in near future that is all my POV of course, not for articles.

I agree that there are notable sources that don't belong in wikipedia, because they are repetitive and have easy access elsewhere. E.g. star catalogues easy example. Or map of entire surface of Mars.

This though I think is notable, because e.g. need for international public debate, and novel technology and the legal complexities, and the design challenge and there are many papers on it not just the NASA and ESF studies. If someone wants to do a notability debate is fine. But WP and BI just said to leave it out because it is POV slanted and alarmist, and I'm a POV pusher, and that was their reason for deleting the article I did in the AfD. And I don't think any of that is true. If the AfD was any of those, well it is something that can be addressed and an AfD can be resubmitted if you fix the things that caused the original decision, it's not a decision about the material in the article, and AfD is a decision about the article. The material can be reused elsewhere including other articles. Unless you have a topic ban which is a different thing.

So am saying that it needs debate, and propose that I create a new article or edit one of the existing articles with the help of my colleague with opposite POV - who also thinks it is notable, as do my scientific friends I discussed it with. When I originally created the article that was later deleted, then on the talk page for MSR return, then the consensus I got, from just a couple of posters there admittedly, was that it was worth writing, which is why I did it and everyone seemed happy with the way it was going until WP turned up. Robert Walker (talk) 07:15, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

On future of humanity for existential risk I can understand your skepticism. Myself, I think there may be two possible futures, one where we go extinct or regress to a non technological society due to some life shortening disaster, and the other, where we evolve into a robust long lived ET culture. Within the next century which is a tiny period compared even with human history never mind evolution, I expect we'll easily be able to build independent free flying space colonies using materials from the asteroid belt and the Oort cloud which could be moved wherever we like in the solar system using the Interplanetary Super highway. We probably will have fusion power too, and be able therefore to do mega-engineering if we want to with almost unlimited power, or to have miniature suns and live in the Oort cloud itself and would migrate to other stars just naturally without needing to even do much to encourage it. I don't think that is too over optimistic or science fictiony, just a reasonably realistic projection, we can almost see how to do most of that already with development of our technology. I think the main thing to prevent that is likely to be human nature, if we prove to be just too aggressive and unruly to survive in space. Obviously warring space colonies would soon destroy everyone in all the habitats, almost impossible to protect, so we need to be peaceful once we get into space (and I think some kind of space treaty stronger than we have now is a good way to do that) - if we get off on a good start then maybe it can become established practise to be peaceful in space. If not I can't see human colonies surviving long in space anywhere at all, either in free space or on planetary surfaces without human breathable atmospheres, if space colonies are as war like as humans on Earth. But if we can get past that hurdle, then humans could be a long lasting ET. Evolution could be stabilized with technology, or we might evolve to have more capabilities we don't have now, seems unlikely that all humans would regress to non intelligent animals in space colonies, you could imagine it happening in some perhaps - large self contained ones, everything works without maintenance and humans regress, but unlikely to happen to everyone. Robert Walker (talk) 07:37, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

I have just added this to the start of the draft article in my user space which I think addresses some of the things you said, makes the intended scope of the article clearer:

The view of NASA, the ESA and the Office of Planetary Protection is that these risks can be contained and that a sample return can be carried out safely provided the correct precautions are taken. The reports stress the need for these precautions. The ESF report, for instance, recommends that release of a Martian particle under 0.05 microns is unacceptable under any circumstances.

There are some minority view dissenters (in the ICAMSR) who think that a sample return should not be carried out yet, and that more in situ observations are needed, or recommended first. At the other end of the spectrum, Zubrin believes that the BC risk has no scientific validity at all. Then, some exobiologists believe that more in situ observation is needed first for practical reasons and reasons of cost benefit.

For: User:Robertinventor/Mars Sample Receiving Facility and sample containment

Which I think is a pretty fair assessment of the prevailing views. I am just editing that article myself at present and mainly for use in my science20 column as it seems it is not welcome here at present. My opposite POV collaborator hasn't been involved in it yet (he is a busy professional person and only want to involve him if it seems likely his help will be accepted and useful). But - maybe opinion will change and a place will be found for it here, or some of it... Robert Walker (talk) 07:56, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

The BC issue is not a PR exercise. It is taken serious, because of public concerns. NASA and ESA are vitally interested in being trustworthy. And of course they have to pay attention, not to re-contaminate the samples on Earth, because otherwise false positive data could result, as with round-trip contamination. And don't forget the billions of dollars to be spent for a returned sample. They will take very much care that no unauthorized persons can get access. I had the chance to see an Apollo moon sample. It was protected much better than gold.

There are lots of options and scenarios. You'll find much detail in the 2020 SDT papers, available via http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/m2020/ (Download buttons below dynamic graphics). Reasons, why no in situ analysis for extant life is considered as reasonable, is provided. I'm sure you'll get a better understanding by reading those papers, at least for the scientist POV, especially the way how (ancient!) biosignatures are looked for. I'm not aware, that the PPO POV is available yet. There was also a press conference, see http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl2 "Mars Rover 2020 News Telecon".

The 2020 mission is based on existing technology. A sequencer ready for space travel isn't available presently.

The next steps, how to further investigate the collected samples is open at the moment. They are just preparing for a potential MSR.

You were describing nice visions. But it's fiction. Well, sufficiently large asteroids could in principle be used for interstellar space travel, because they protect from cosmic rays and small impact bodies. And new types of thrusters are under development making accessible the most proximate stars within a few centuries, in theory. And there are enough enthusiastic candidates who would dare the travel. But that's a long way to go, and we don't know, whether it will ever be funded. 93.231.168.151 (talk) 12:21, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Glad you agree it is not a public relations exercise.

But in that case is surely notable enough for an article on it.

There are two directions to it, to prevent the sample from contamination and to prevent the EArth from contamination. The whole thing would be much simpler in design if you just needed to protect the sample from Earth, it is the two way protection that makes it really tough at least according to the studies I read.

This is the gene sequencer, they hope to be able to launch it on the next Curiosity class mission: SETG. Thanks for the links and new info, will take a look at it, not had a time to read it yet.

With the asteroids, the point was - asteroid mining to make habitats, which could be of any size. Just as you can do ISRU on Mars, you can also do it in space using Martian Moons or more generally material from asteroids. In both cases you need space suits (unless telerobotics advance to the stage where you don't need to go outside as I expect it will eventually). It was all within the solar system. Going to nearby stars I see as a few centuries in the future but if space colonization does get underway don't see how it could not happen eventually (for good or for bad depending on your POV) unless we ourselves destroy ourselves in the process through aggression.

Just thought I'd answer those two points. It's possible we have both said most of what we are going to say, I think I've probably said most of what I have to say anyway, but will check out your links and interested in your reply if you have more to say. 13:15, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

SETG has been considered for the 2020 mission as you may find in the referenced papers.

"exceedingly unlikely" means, that they never expect it to occur (http://robotics.estec.esa.int/i-SAIRAS/isairas2010/PAPERS/126-0000-p.pdf). But "below 1 in a million" seems to be a good quantification regarding other sources, with an example of a 1 in 33 million example for a meteorite hitting a given house in a year.

Cheers 93.231.168.151 (talk) 14:24, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Listened to the report. First, at 32.26, where he says "to do an extant life expedition leads you to go to regions of the planet that are particularly challenging to access" - as I understand it, the reason Curiosity was not sent to regions of Mars where present day life might be possible is because it is only sterilized to Category IVa and it is a major challenge to sterilize a rover to the Category IVb or IVc needed to go to regions of Mars where present day life might be possible. That would add enormously to the cost of the mission and they aren't actually sure how to set about it with modern components, because the Viking dry heat methods would destroy many of the modern components.

48.00 suggestion to do extant life detection experiment. Note - the reason given for searching for past life isn't because they think there is no extant life there now. But because they think if there is any extant life now, then is so sparse would be hard for anything except very sensitive equipment to detect it. Rough quote:

"We work on evidence based science, and to date the evidence that we have from observation of Mars and Mars and martian samples is that we don't have clear indications that life in such an abundance on the planet that we could go there with a simple experiemnt like viking and detct that there. So then we think, what are the steps we coudl do to answer the question " are we alone" and to look for simple organisms or not so simple organisms that could be living in that toxic harsh environment we just think is a foolish investment of the technology at this time".

So just that if there is life, is so hard to detect it doesn't seem worth targeting it specifically - and that's for the locations where they can send a mission sterilized only to Category IVa. The mission wouldn't be sterilized to the levels suitable for searching for life in the more sensitive layers such as the seasonal warm flows, or for looking for subsurface thin films of liquid brine. AFAIK there are no plans at the moment for any missions sterilized to Category IVb or IVc.

But myself, I wonder if there is a chance that some of the instruments might be sensitive to detect present day life, as they are so very sensitive, though prob. not much if any to detect where Curiosity is, yet when we know so little really....

This is the astrobionibbler work in progress, but could detect a single amino acid in a gram of sample. Urey has more advanced capabilities. The early Urey instrument which was on ExoMars but got withdrawn when NASA pulled out of the project so they had to go on a Russian rocket instead, was also a very sensitive life biosignature detector.

Robert Walker (talk) 19:15, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

I think, you are going to get a reasonable understanding. Some POV in that framework is ok and welcome!

Regions particularly difficult to access can also mean 1 kilometer underground in an old volcano with remnants of geothermal activity; that's my understanding, and those are reasonable locations to consider extant life on Mars. Forward contamination issues are much easier to overcome.

The recommendation not to include a sensitive detector, as I've been understanding, was that they think, it will be very unlikely to find evident traces of organisms (ancient or present) by in situ analysis, and they are very restricted in budget and payload. They have to maximize scientific return. If they find a single amino acid, most scientists will say, that could have been contamination from Earth. If they don't find amino acids, others will say, they have been looking for the wrong ones or at the wrong place. So either result won't be satisfying. And a clear signal is considered as too unlikely to take the risk.

Even if there could be found a clear signal, some will say: Well, that's not unexpected, because interstellar dust also contains amino acids; that's no proof for extant live; the same with single GATC bases and their derivatives.

No matter, which result can be obtained, new questions will arise with the need for further analysis. E.g. more statistics about the frequency of chemical compounds and their association with texture, until a level of confidence is reached, where scientists will agree about evidence of biosignatures, how to assess them if existent, or to evidently rule out this possibility. 93.231.153.239 (talk) 14:35, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Request for Arbitration

Please be advised that a Request for Arbitration has been filed concerning user conduct issues that make the resolution of content issues impossible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case#Mars

Robert McClenon (talk) 16:33, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Request for Arbitration declined - restatement of policies

The ArbCom has declined the Request for Arbitration.

I will restate the usual policies and guidelines for the resolution of content disputes, and perhaps the conduct issues that made the resolution of content issues impossible can be avoided.

• Do not engage in personal attacks, even when, or especially when, angry.
• Do not use Wikipedia, including talk pages, as a soapbox.
• Follow talk page guidelines. Avoid excessively long talk page posts, which have the effect of a filibuster.
• Read Wikipedia guidelines carefully before making statements based on misunderstandings of them.
• Resolve article content disputes by formal Requests for Comments.
• Avoid edit warring, including slow-motion edit-warring.

Robert McClenon (talk) 00:44, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Terrain softening

We have a newly born article! See Terrain softening (Mars). I've stuck it up for a Did You Know nomination on the main page. I'd be much obliged if someone could also take five minutes to run their eye over it to check it makes sense, give it a rating, approve my importance assessment, etc. DanHobley (talk) 18:07, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

It's ALIVE!

In other project-related news, I've just taken the liberty of removing the semi-active tag from the project page. I would say we definitely have pretty robust activity right now! DanHobley (talk) 18:14, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Comment on the WikiProject X proposal

Hello there! As you may already know, most WikiProjects here on Wikipedia struggle to stay active after they've been founded. I believe there is a lot of potential for WikiProjects to facilitate collaboration across subject areas, so I have submitted a grant proposal with the Wikimedia Foundation for the "WikiProject X" project. WikiProject X will study what makes WikiProjects succeed in retaining editors and then design a prototype WikiProject system that will recruit contributors to WikiProjects and help them run effectively. Please review the proposal here and leave feedback. If you have any questions, you can ask on the proposal page or leave a message on my talk page. Thank you for your time! (Also, sorry about the posting mistake earlier. If someone already moved my message to the talk page, feel free to remove this posting.) Harej (talk) 22:47, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Images from Mars

This is (roughly) 150th image from the Mars which I generated :)!

Hi folks, I just want to let you know that I am quite easily able make images as this one around the Mars. So if you need general overview picture of some feature, please, let me know. Also, if you think that the general view of image would be great modify somehow, also, let me know. I'd like to produce all of them in same look, so now is the best time for your feedback :) Regards --Chmee2 (talk) 10:05, 26 June 2014 (UTC)

More 27 images from Tharsis region generated&uploaded&added&categorized. Best regards --Chmee2 (talk) 13:27, 27 June 2014 (UTC)

Next 24 images done in last two days. Regards --Chmee2 (talk) 19:56, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

Hi all of you, just want to let you know that my private project "make THEMIS illustrations to all named features on Mars" is still running as I just finished today my ~160th image. It is starting to be little bit boring but hopefully, I will be able once finish pictures to all named features :) Best regards --Chmee2 (talk) 21:10, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

Thank you Chmee2 for doing this work. The images are a great addition to the project. I enjoy seeing them in articles. — Huntster (t @ c) 06:02, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

WikiProject X is live!

Hello everyone!

You may have received a message from me earlier asking you to comment on my WikiProject X proposal. The good news is that WikiProject X is now live! In our first phase, we are focusing on research. At this time, we are looking for people to share their experiences with WikiProjects: good, bad, or neutral. We are also looking for WikiProjects that may be interested in trying out new tools and layouts that will make participating easier and projects easier to maintain. If you or your WikiProject are interested, check us out! Note that this is an opt-in program; no WikiProject will be required to change anything against its wishes. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you!

Note: To receive additional notifications about WikiProject X on this talk page, please add this page to Wikipedia:WikiProject X/Newsletter. Otherwise, this will be the last notification sent about WikiProject X.

Harej (talk) 16:57, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

Dust devil

Should Dust devil be in the Mars category? 118.93.90.74 (talk) 09:46, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

• Yes. Martian dust devils are an important phenomenon and this article relates them to terrestrial dust devils, gives a narrative and examples, and is directly linked from three Mars articles. Andyjsmith (talk) 10:59, 16 June 2015 (UTC)
  • If we use you reasoning we would almost end up with every single article in every single category. And we don't want that do we. WP is in enough trouble already. So think about it: an article that is predominantly about a terrestrial phenomenon is placed in a category that is about Mars. Does the make sense? No it doesn't. You are not even considering putting it in one of the subcategories such as Geography of Mars. Have a look at how categorisation is done. Z118.93.90.74 (talk) 20:01, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

If you can find a suitable Mars subcategory, why not put it there? Andyjsmith (talk) 20:14, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

Present Day Habitability of Mars source material

Editors here may be interested in source material from: Draft:Present_day_habitability_of_Mars, for instance, for articles on liquid water on Mars, or on Mars analogue habitats, or on the Viking experiments etc.

Also, some of the material may be useful for Life_on_Mars#Habitability. I don't feel I can contribute there myself because I just don't feel I can write on this topic area if I can only mention those who think that the present day Mars surface is uninhabitable. As you will see, my draft article's section Views on the possibility of present day life on or near the surface summarizes a range of published views on the habitability of present day Mars.

The article was rejected mainly because it is too detailed for wikipedia, and relies a bit too much on primary sources.

Incidentally I'm also interested in any suggestions for other wikis to submit it to. Thanks!

Robert Walker (talk) 12:09, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

WP:WikiProject Life on Mars

As the name of this Wikiproject may provide confusion with the article located at Life on Mars (to which is it unrelated to), I thought you'd like to know about a change to the naming of that project, see WT:WikiProject Life on Mars -- 67.70.32.20 (talk) 05:57, 5 July 2015 (UTC)

Tombaugh (Martian crater) listed at Requested moves

A requested move discussion has been initiated for Tombaugh (Martian crater) to be moved to Tombaugh (crater). This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. —RMCD bot 16:33, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

To opt out of RM notifications on this page, transclude {{bots|deny=RMCD bot}}, or set up Article alerts for this WikiProject.

Nomination of MarsDrive for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article MarsDrive 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/MarsDrive 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. Andyjsmith (talk) 08:05, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

Imagemaps EVERYWHERE

Hi all,

Someone has (re-)inserted the Mars quadrangle image map ([1]) into Mars. I'm 90% sure we've had this discussion before at that page, but can't find it in archive easily. I don't necessarily object to it being there, it's just the style clashes really badly with the rest of the page. This is happening because the image is being used to anchor an entire new section, but the section contains only an effective "figure caption" for the quads. [2] has exactly the same problem. This looks like a case of badly designed template in need of an actual caption. There's also a lot of inappropriate usage - IIRC, WP guidelines recommend only putting this kind of image in as a link between items it describes; i.e., only on actual articles about Mars mapping or quads. I'm dealing with this, but wanted everyone to know. DanHobley (talk) 17:32, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

Didn't yet finish, but I think I got the most egregious examples. DanHobley (talk) 18:06, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

The quadrangle map is now only used in appropriate places, I think. Could put it into the category (?) box at the foot of most of these pages, too... DanHobley (talk) 20:47, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

All done with the rover/topo map as well now. DanHobley (talk) 21:24, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

Nice work, Dan, thanks for your effort. — Huntster (t @ c) 22:53, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

Mars geography / aereography

Can someone tell me what are considered the major geographic divisions on Mars? On Earth, they would be the (12) continents (7) and oceans (5), so if someone could list the various major regions of Mars, that would be nice. -- 70.51.44.60 (talk) 13:03, 25 October 2015 (UTC)

Cartographically, it's the Mars quadrangles, which are in fact invoked in the talk item immediately above this one. Geographically, there's lots of regions, but I don't think there's a widely accepted formal set of these. The closest you would probably come to consensus would be the hemispheric dichotomy, Northern Plains vs Southern Highlands. DanHobley (talk) 05:42, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

This is for making a Mars version of Extremes on Earth (DRAFT:Extremes on Mars) someone suggested using Category:Albedo features on Mars or what's listed at template:Mars... both seem poor choices. The quadrangles have a lower number of divisions than either of these two, making a better sized breakdown. -- 70.51.44.60 (talk) 05:01, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

Time in a bottle

Following a request here, maybe somebody can help? TREKphiler ^{any time you're ready, Uhura} 03:06, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

Mars Tectonics

Interesting article, virtually all by one author and parts read like an essay. Doug Weller talk 10:51, 16 July 2017 (UTC)

Took a pretty thorough look. Should be much improved now. DanHobley (talk) 13:00, 19 July 2017 (UTC)

Coordinate systems

I'm interested in supplying and repairing coordinates for surface features of Mars. Before I dive in, I'm wondering if this project has decided which coordinate system(s) to use. I notice, for instance, that the USGS decided to switch from "planetographic latitude with west longitude" to "planetocentric latitude with east longitude." For Mars, the difference in latitude between these coordinate systems is typically about 0.2-0.3 degrees of arc, which seems big enough to worry about. --Stepheng3 (talk) 00:28, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

If there's no objection, I'd like to start switching the articles over to "planetocentric latitude with east longitude." --Stepheng3 (talk) 02:16, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

I second that opinion. Schaffman (talk) 17:00, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

I was wondering why Wikipedia articles (e.g., "List of craters on Mars") indicate martian west longitude coordinates when everybody else apparently uses east longitude. From the foregoing above it appears that the project to convert Wiki articles to indicating east longitude hasn't progressed very much over the last half-dozen years. Michael McNeil (talk) 13:34, 2 December 2017 (UTC)

Suggestion about MArs navbox

Editors are invited to participate in the discussion of a proposal regarding the {{Mars}} and {{Mars spacecraft}} navboxes, at Template talk:Mars#Proposal: split off Exploration section. — JFG ^talk 22:31, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

Discussion about the phrase "manned mission" and weight of sources

Talk:Human mission to Mars#Requested move 5 March 2018

Is "manned mission" a gender-neutral term, and how much weight do we give to NASA's style guide? -- Netoholic @ 03:08, 6 March 2018 (UTC)

Nix Olympica

FYI, there's a deletion process tag at wikt:Nix Olympica on Wiktionary. -- 70.51.203.56 (talk) 10:52, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

WikiProject collaboration notice from the Portals WikiProject

The reason I am contacting you is because there are one or more portals that fall under this subject, and the Portals WikiProject is currently undertaking a major drive to automate portals that may affect them.

Portals are being redesigned.

The new design features are being applied to existing portals.

At present, we are gearing up for a maintenance pass of portals in which the introduction section will be upgraded to no longer need a subpage. In place of static copied and pasted excerpts will be self-updating excerpts displayed through selective transclusion, using the template {{Transclude lead excerpt}}.

The discussion about this can be found here.

Maintainers of specific portals are encouraged to sign up as project members here, noting the portals they maintain, so that those portals are skipped by the maintenance pass. Currently, we are interested in upgrading neglected and abandoned portals. There will be opportunity for maintained portals to opt-in later, or the portal maintainers can handle upgrading (the portals they maintain) personally at any time.

Background

On April 8th, 2018, an RfC ("Request for comment") proposal was made to eliminate all portals and the portal namespace. On April 17th, the Portals WikiProject was rebooted to handle the revitalization of the portal system. On May 12th, the RfC was closed with the result to keep portals, by a margin of about 2 to 1 in favor of keeping portals.

There's an article in the current edition of the Signpost interviewing project members about the RfC and the Portals WikiProject.

Since the reboot, the Portals WikiProject has been busy building tools and components to upgrade portals.

So far, 84 editors have joined.

If you would like to keep abreast of what is happening with portals, see the newsletter archive.

If you have any questions about what is happening with portals or the Portals WikiProject, please post them on the WikiProject's talk page.

Thank you.    — The Transhumanist   07:47, 30 May 2018 (UTC)

AFD discussion about article Modern Mars Habitability

Comments invited at the deletion discussion for article Modern_Mars_habitability NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 13:09, 18 August 2018 (UTC)

User BatteryIncluded = Rowan Forest

Hello. Since I have been active in this project for many years, I got feedback that I may want to communicate to the members of this Project, as well as the Spaceflight Project, that I changed my Wikipedia name from BatteryIncluded to Rowan Forest. I am a cell and molecular biologist and I worked briefly in a collaboration with NASA regarding astrobiology before my retirement. I am still interested mostly in the science perspective of astrobiology and astrobiology missions, but I am able to contribute to Wikipedia on some basic technical reports on spaceflight as published by the mass media. Cheers, Rowan Forest (talk) 01:27, 3 September 2018 (UTC)