User talk:Marc Kupper
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HGould notability
[edit]It seems funny to me how you people reach consensus based on rumors. Neither Spuyten Duyvil nor Copper Beech Press are vanity presses. It shows up the amateurishness of this project, where living people can be cited on Wikipedia, then have you so-called editors "delete" their previous entries based on supposed non-notability... then the web contains this hanger-on site basically saying "this living person is not notable". The process is offensive & laughable.
Hhgould (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 20:47, 5 March 2010 (UTC).
- Getting published has nothing to do with notability. Please see WP:N, WP:PEOPLE, and WP:AUTHOR. The first has the general notability that applies to all articles. The second expands/contracts WP:N a little when articles are about people, the third is part of WP:PEOPLE but it adds additional ways an author can be notable. All of them are based on recognition or "notice" by others and not on what the subject does.
- I truly wish this was better understood. Many articles are created every day in good faith only to be deleted. Part of the problem is that it's a Wikipedia philosophy that there be no "gatekeepers." If each person had to run their article proposal a crew of experienced sets of eyes I believe there would be far fewer heartbreaks. Those people would be "gatekeepers" and so it's not done. However, any editor can request a review or feedback from experienced Wikipedians. We *want* more articles but also want them to be about notable subjects.
- In the welcome message at the top of your talk page there's a link on creating your first article. Step 5 is where someone can ask for an initial feedback and step six allows you to create an article where you can then run it across more eyes. Also in the welcome under getting started is "Getting mentored." Finally, the article creation wizard in the getting started section is excellent.
- If you look in my userspace at User:Marc Kupper/Park Foundation I was putting an article together. I thought a scholarship fund with nearly $400 million available would be notable. As I hunted for references and evidence of notability (step 4 in "creating your first article") I came to realize the fund is not notable. The article is parked in my userspace for now though at some point I'll move my findings to Talk:Park Foundation and hopefully someone will find the notability evidence we need for Wikipedia. --Marc Kupper|talk 01:16, 6 March 2010 (UTC)
- well isn't that nice. As far as I'm concerned my criticism still stands. The process is amateurish & offensive to persons. If you so-called editors & gatekeepers cannot come to firm decisions BEFORE you publish articles, the whole system is out of whack. In fact it is more than offensive. It is positively harmful to my professional standing as a writer. [User:Hhgould|Hhgould]] (talk) 15:35, 11 March 2010 (UTC)
- Henry, you are a Wikipedia editor exactly like I am. All of us, including editors with administrator status, and IP users that don't create an account, have equal standing and say when it comes to editing and comments on talk pages. Other than the IP user accounts, all editors can also create a new Wikipedia article and start working on them. Any person, including IP editors, can nominate an article for deletion and any person can participate in the discussion on if nominator's position is valid. All of us, and that includes IP users, also have equal say in developing consensus on what the various rules and guidelines should be and/or changing them. There simply are no "gatekeepers."
- In this case, an editor created an article for Henry Gould but either did not understand, or chose to ignore, Wikipedia's notability guidelines. At some point an editor noticed the article and that the subject did not appear to be notable. They can't delete the article but rather nominate it for deletion where still more editors look it over, and also try to locate evidence that the subject is notable. Many times the effort succeeds and the article is not deleted. Or, people agree that while the evidence is weak, that the article should be retained. If there is no agreement on if an article should be deleted then the default is that it is retained. Thus, the only articles that end up deleted are those where there is community agreement that the subject is not notable.
- If you have evidence that Henry Gould is notable per WP:N, WP:PEOPLE, or WP:AUTHOR then please document the evidence and the article will instantly be restored by one of the administrators. You then add the evidence to the article and at that point the article would never be deleted other than by someone challenging the evidence and showing that it's not valid. If you don't have evidence, but feel that WP:N ... WP:AUTHOR are unfair then you can try to develop consensus to have them changed.
- Please be aware of WP:COI. While you can create and/or edit an article about yourself doing so is discouraged. It's best to run proposals past a neutral third party. The welcome message on your talk page lists resources for locating these. --Marc Kupper|talk 20:32, 11 March 2010 (UTC)
Pending changes
[edit]Notes to myself about the pending changes trial
- Help:Pending changes, Wikipedia:Pending changes (Terminology, Trial, sub-pages), and Wikipedia:Reviewing.
- Pages with pending changes (tagged), pages using pending changes, statitistics, log.
- Also see Special:ListGroupRights which lists the current rights assigned to groups of users and Wikipedia:User access levels which explains them.
- Wikipedia Signpost coverage includes:
- 31 Aug 2009 Flagged protection and patrolled revisions.
- 06 Jun 2010 "Pending changes" trial to start on June 14.
- 16 Jun 2010 Pending changes goes live.
- Pending Changes wiki is the development/test site. --Marc Kupper|talk 08:15, 16 June 2010 (UTC)
Sockpuppet notice
[edit]I have created two sockpuppet accounts for testing the pending changes functions. User:Marc Kupper (sockpuppet1) is a confirmed user account and User:Marc Kupper (sockpuppet2) is an unconfirmed user. --Marc Kupper|talk 09:30, 16 June 2010 (UTC)
TFD
[edit]Hello, see this. sent by userbox maker —I-20the highway 02:25, 10 July 2010 (UTC)
- Thank you - I removed the userbox from my page. It turned out I was the only one using it. --Marc Kupper|talk 21:56, 10 July 2010 (UTC)
Senate write-ins
[edit]I reverted your edit to Lisa Murkowski, but ended up adding a clarification to your change. She and Thurmond would be the only successful candidates to win as write-ins against a candidate whose name appeared on the ballot. Knowland's election apparently involved all write-in candidates. The difference is that being listed on the ballot is a significant advantage, so Knowland's feat is a bit less significant, since he wasn't running against someone who was listed. JTRH (talk) 13:05, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
- That makes sense to me. I saw what you did and think it would be better if we take the line you added out as it's entirely about Strom Thurmond which does not fit well in the lead for an article about Lisa Murkowski. We'd ignore Knowland in the Murkowski article and instead add the details that you brought up to the Write-in candidate article on why the Knowland write-in was atypical. Thus now we are nearly back to the original wording before my first edit about the write-ins. --Marc Kupper|talk 09:37, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
- Sounds good. Thanks! JTRH (talk) 14:27, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
Because you participated in Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:Tkguy/Asiaphile and Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:Tkguy/Asian fetish, you may be interested in subsequent discussion about these userspace drafts. I have nominated User:Tkguy/Asiaphile and User:Tkguy/Asian fetish for deletion at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:Tkguy/Asiaphile (2nd nomination) and Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:Tkguy/Asian fetish (2nd nomination), respectively. Cunard (talk) 06:50, 23 November 2010 (UTC)
- Thank you for the heads up. I added comments to both AFDs. --Marc Kupper|talk 11:33, 23 November 2010 (UTC)
Hi Marc. Please provide referenced proof for the listed awards if you can, otherwise they may be deleted under WP:BLP. Cheers, --Kudpung (talk) 06:40, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
- I replied at Talk:Carl Brandon Society#referenced proof for the listed awards and credits. --Marc Kupper|talk 19:45, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
Barnstar
[edit]![]() |
The Original Barnstar | |
This barnstar is awarded for the removal of irrelevant content on the article Nescafè, which many users would keep on the webpage for its (weak) link to the product. Happy editing! --Delta1989 (talk/contributions) 23:10, 21 March 2011 (UTC) |
Death of Osama bin Laden
[edit]Hi, there is a disagreement about how bin Laden was shot, whether it was by one person or by two, but there are enough sources saying it was by one person that it has to be included as a possibility. Special ops are well known to use the "double tap" technique so this seems plausible, but I know the CBS version says he was shot by two people. This requires more editing. Brmull (talk) 22:07, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
- Sorry - I had not realized there was a dispute about the number of shooters. I'd seen news articles that did not mention the number at all. A couple of weeks ago a more detailed description of the raid was released that appeared to be reliable and had three shots (the first missed) with the SEALs then moving into the room where OBL was with the second and third SEALs shooting (the first pushed the daughter out of the way). Unfortunately, I don't have time at the moment to hunt down the articles to re-inspect them nor to find the dispute on the # of shooters. Though I removed the double-tap mention I was thinking at the time that SEALs likely train in a two person double-tap with one doing a center of mass shot to disable and freeze the target long enough for the second to make the kill. That's my own theory - no sources at all. :-) I'd personally lean towards three or four SEALs inserting themselves into the room with two shooting as these guys train for teaamwork and coordinated assaults. There's reliable-sources on how they train but unfortunately, that does not help at all in deciding if OBL was double-tapped.
- I see you undid my edit on Death of Osama bin Laden. I undid a similar edit I'd done to the Double tap article. I simply don't have time at the moment to put the care needed into sorting out the references and seeing if any seem reliable enough on the "double tap" point. Unfortunately, the media's run wild with theories from anonymous sources. Hopefully you have more time - I may check into this next weekend. --Marc Kupper|talk 22:39, 31 May 2011 (UTC)
- Hi Marc, in the Double tap article I'm the IP-editor who brought up the subject of removing this, then called 'Famous Double Taps', section. I'm also the one who reverted your last revert. I did so, not because I don't believe OBL wasn't killed by a double tap, but because I thought this section, as it is right now, is irrelevant. Maybe if we (well someone) could elaborate on the fact of special units using the double tap, i.e. "Navy Seals have been trained to use..., in the case of OBLs assassination..." or something like that, it would contribute more to the article. I'm totally not qualified to do that and I'm not gonna revert this now, but that's just my two cents. I wrote this on the Double tap talk page as well. Regards 217.93.174.98 (talk) 01:19, 6 June 2011 (UTC)
Coverbind
[edit]Thank you and I understand about the external link. I did not realize until after I edited it that the others were links to other Wikipedia articles. I am still learning and starting to create a new article for Coverbind that educates readers and is relevant to those topics.
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Stacylstein (talk) 12:46, 29 June 2011 (UTC)
- Good luck with Coverbind. I took a look at Unibind plus VeloBind and got the impression those articles should not exist on Wikipedia as the subjects do not seem to meet Wikipedia's notability guidelines. --Marc Kupper|talk 23:38, 29 June 2011 (UTC)
Hi,
I would like to point out that the valuation of temple assets is ongoing and not officially done. The reports in media are therefore speculative. The Supreme Court of India has asked an authority on valuation -Central Valuation Institute of Lucknow- to carry out the valuations as mentioned in the article. ..असक्तः सततं कार्य कर्म समाचर | असक्तः हि आचरन् कर्म.. Humour Thisthat2011 07:56, 10 July 2011 (UTC)
- I understand - My comments were not about official or unofficial valuations but rather that people had added two sentences to the article were not supported by the sources given.
- The first sentence I removed had was far above any of the valuations reported in the media, and did not provide a source at all. Most sources say the upper possible valuation is about 1 lakh crore or about USD$ 22 billion. Someone had added a sentence to the wikipedia article "Zee news reported that the value of the Ancient offerings made to the lord Padmanabhaswamy may be in excess of 500000 crore ( USD$ 100 Billion)." That was an extraordinary claim and needs excellent sources. There were no sources and so I deleted the sentence.
- The second item I removed gave a range of valuations of 60,000 crore to 1 lakh crore. It had two sources. However, the first source states "500 billion rupees" which would be 50,000 crore, not 60,000 crore where the was no support at all for the 1 lakh crore claim. The second source did not mention values. There was a second issue with this sentence in that it did not fit in with the overall flow of that section which is chronological (earliest to newest). A couple of paragraphs down from the sentence was a paragraph about the values that's well sourced and the Wikipedia content reflects what's in the sources. A third issue was this sentence was redundant. We already had a paragraph that discussed 50,000 crore to 1 lakh crore valuations and so there was no need for a sentence that repeated what was in the paragraph. It was because of all three things that I deleted the sentence.
- Just took a look at the sources for the section that's well sourced and saw that one of that has "Rs 1.2 lakh crore." I've updated that section to have ₹1.2 trillion (US$14 billion). --Marc Kupper|talk 08:47, 10 July 2011 (UTC)
- As it is, there are people who say that valuation in media is speculative.1, by former Justice S. Rajan who is an observer appointed by the Supreme Court. Anyways, the valuations are going on and one can not be sure of the wealth, even as the speculations do not consider antique value(though it is not a museum/auction house, it is a temple and I am not sure how the offerings to the deity will be 'valued').
- According to me, it should be mentioned that the valuations in media are speculative and in any case not reported by valuation authority to the Supreme Court as directed. ..असक्तः सततं कार्य कर्म समाचर | असक्तः हि आचरन् कर्म.. Humour Thisthat2011 09:01, 10 July 2011 (UTC)
- This news article says "The committee had not been asked to appraise the value the contents of the different vaults opened so far, and instead only make an inventory of the treasures in the temple." The article then says "But having got an estimate of the kind of valuables in the temple's cellars ... rough valuations put the wealth of the temple ..." Unfortunately, that news article did not say who is making these rough valuations, if the people making the valuations have access to the inventory, photographs, etc., and what their qualifications are as appraisers of value. It's possible the entire valuation saga is uninformed rumor. Much of it is speculative.
- Per this page gold is about Rs 2.2 million per kilogram. Assuming the value is somewhere between 300 billion and 1.2 trillion rupees we have between 137,221 kilograms to 548,885 kilograms (151 to 605 tons) of gold. I doubt that seven elderly men can lift and weigh 151 to 605 tons of material in the four days it took this story to go from zero to multiple billions of rupees. Thus the odds are high that all of the valuations are uninformed speculation. It'll be funny if the "official" valuation is 50 lakh rupees. Imagine all the press and breast beating about vanished wealth. :-)
- I don't have much available time today for Wikipedia editing. My main hope is that the Wikipedia article accurately reflect what the sources are reporting. --Marc Kupper|talk 21:43, 10 July 2011 (UTC)
- Exactly, the speculations are wild and there are many interested parties, like the state Govt., making a show of security measures trying to make a point that the wealth will be safe there, though the museum value of it over time is much more and legal(more legal than loot) perhaps.
- The court has asked a valuation institute for inventory valuation, not the committee - I agree with that. The committee is just making an inventory I think with proper proofs.
- As far as value of gold in weight is considered, it does not take into account its antique worth. Some of it is thousands of years old, others hundreds and so on. As also I mentioned, it is not auction-home/museum but as offerings of temple. So I don't know who will value what and how much. As I mentioned, such weight-based speculations are just speculations. ..असक्तः सततं कार्य कर्म समाचर | असक्तः हि आचरन् कर्म.. Humour Thisthat2011 05:10, 11 July 2011 (UTC)
Hi Marc. It does not matter much at all since your removal was proper but yes it did redirect to db-web, from 2006 to 2009.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 23:16, 29 July 2011 (UTC)
Nescafe
[edit]Marc,
Last week, I tried to correct some er. vandalism on the Nescafe article which you promptly reverted. I sent you an e-mail about this (which you can now ignore because as you can see I now have a proper account). I think that I know what I did wrong to cause you to revert the change (i.e. did not explain why the change was made). I have also corrected a citation (which was a dead link), I am not totally sure what the retrieved date is. I guessed that it means the day that I found the correct citation i.e. today. Since this is the first time I have tried to contributte, I would appreciate it if you would let me know that everything is ok or if it is not, can we have a discussion?
Op47 (talk) 11:12, 30 July 2011 (UTC)
- I'm sorry, I did not see the e-mail and I also now realized I screwed up in reverting you. I read the "diff" backwards and though you were trying to add the name "Vernon Chapman" to the article without a citation. Had I spotted that you were removing it I likely would have checked the Nestle web sites. I just checked and sure enough, there's zero mention of Chapman.
- I did do a cleanup to your edit. Wikipedia allows multiple references to the same source using <ref name="some%20name">the usual ref stuff here</ref> and elsewhere in the article to use the same source you would use <ref name="some%20name"/> without needing to have a closing "</ref>." The ref you added was a duplicate of one already in the article and so I merged them. Note that the other "ref" has a sneaky little "/" at the end of it. The one that defines that named ref does not use the "/" and refs to the same source would use the "<ref .../>." version.
- I had some questions about the retrieved date myself. See Template talk:Cite web#What is the accessdate used for? for my question. While I'm still fuzzy on the value of the date it looks like you did the right thing in changing it to today's date as you also changed the URL.
- The entire Nescafé article is in really sad shape. I started to clean up the legal section but it's going to take hours that I don't have this weekend. I did discover when re-checking the name of who created the coffee that Nescafé themselves offer conflicting histories. The "Nescafé History" part of http://nescafe.com/coffee_history_en_com.axcms (identical page on nescafe.co.uk) says "Seven years later, they found the answer." However, the "The Origins of Nescafé" section of http://nescafe.com/coffee_origins_en_com.axcms (also on nescafe.co.uk) say "Eight years later, they found the answer." I updated the article to use "seven or eight years" and cited both Nescafé pages. It does not seem matter if we use nescafe.com or nescafe.co.uk for this one as both go to the same web server at 195.177.34.126. --Marc Kupper|talk 00:21, 31 July 2011 (UTC)
- Thankyou Marc Op47 (talk) 06:55, 31 July 2011 (UTC)
Virginia Seismic Zone
[edit]So i noticed this chart http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Seismic_Zone#List_of_earthquakes and saw that the magnitudes were in no particular order so i decided that it would make more sense for them to be in order. Is there a tool to order thinhs like in MS Word or is that something that I would have to do myself? Dan653 (talk) 02:25, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
- It looks like someone converted the list into a table, probably by hand, and made the table sortable. Is that what you wanted? I'd need to look at the edit history to see who did that. The table was not there yesterday. --Marc Kupper|talk 02:29, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
- It was this edit where someone converted the list into a table. I'll do one cleanup to the table to make the date's sortable. As for a "tool" - I suspect it had to have been done by hand. The problem was the old format was free format. There was some consistency in that the date was first and separated from the text with a colon. If the magnitude was known it was last and prefaced with "Magnitude ". There was no clean separator between the location and description. The editor could have used a tool such as sed to convert the old list formatting into a table but for a list this small I suspect it was done manually. --Marc Kupper|talk 02:40, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
- It's possible you may not know about how to sort the table. Click on the arrows to the right of the header names. The thing has two small arrows at first and it turns out you can select top/down or bottom/up by clicking one side or the other. --Marc Kupper|talk 02:57, 24 August 2011 (UTC)
No I didnt know that though, thnks. Though I don't get what sed is... Dan653 (talk) 01:29, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- Did you see the "sed" article on Wikipedia? For example, if look look at the edit that converted the table. You will see that the old list had:
- An asterisk "*"
- The date formatted as "month day, year" or "month day-day, year"
- A colon followed by a space ": "
- The location and sometimes a description
- Some entries have a period or semicolon, space, "Magnitude ", space, digit, dot, digit.
- Some entries have a <ref>... after the Magnitude stuff
- The entry for May 16, 2009 has the ref split over multiple lines.
- Here's three sed lines that deals with that list and converts it into the core of a wikitable
s/^\* *\([A-Z][a-z]\+ [0-9-]\+, [0-9]\{4\}\): \(.*\)/|-\n| \1|| ~magnitude~|| \2/
s/\(.*|| \)~magnitude~\(||.*\)[\.;] Magnitude \([0-9]\.[0-9]\)\(.*\)/\1\3\2\4/
s/~magnitude~/unknown/
- There's still some manual cleanup needed but 90% of the work was done including the moving of the magnitude from the middle or end of the line into column 2 of the table. The first sed line recognizes the basic layout and converts it into a wikitext table format. It puts the string "~magnitude~" in the second column. The second line parses the buffer and for those that have a period or semicolon followed by " Magnitude " followed by a digit, dot, digit, it drops the digit, dot, digit in the place of the "~magnitude~" we left earlier and deletes the old " Magnitude ..." stuff so that we have the location/description text followed by our references. The third line only matters if the second line was unable to find a magnitude and changes the "~magnitude~" to "unknown". Conveniently enough, I did not need to do anything special about that entry for May 16, 2009. Sed ends up just copy/pasting the extra lines into the result and it ends up working fine in the resulting wikitable.
- Did you see the "sed" article on Wikipedia? For example, if look look at the edit that converted the table. You will see that the old list had:
- The only thing I need to do by hand now is to scan the text and for those items where we have both a location and comments/description and to stick a "||" between the two. I doubt that task could be automated but at least the task is as simple for the human as reading the text and deciding if and where to insert a "||" in it. I then add the wikitable header and footer and am done. --Marc Kupper|talk 04:01, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
Biggest Edit
[edit]This is my biggest edit so far, I think everything looks good just wanted ur opinion http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2011_Battle_of_Tripoli&action=historysubmit&diff=446591448&oldid=446578676.
- That looks pretty good. One comment is that per WP:REPEATLINK we generally only wikilink the first instance of a word. Thus in that table we'd only link surface-to-air missile once, tank once, etc. If it's a large article then sometimes you will see a second wikilink for the same word, particularly if it's one that was not used often in the article. I went ahead with that cleanup to the table plus got rid of the word "tank" and "radar" after every instance of those in the table as they were in dedicated columns. It may be better to have "tank" once on the first line rather than linking it in the header the way I did. The General points on linking style section says "Section headings should not themselves contain links" though is silent on table headings. --Marc Kupper|talk 04:35, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
- I added the between the day and month to prevent them from wrapping onto two lines and added a
between the month and <ref> to force a wrap at that spot. It was looking ugly to see "22" over "August[124]" and so now it's "22" over "22 August" over "[124]". --Marc Kupper|talk 04:41, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
K thnks for the tip on style and the wiki markup language. Dan653 (talk) 22:03, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
Re: File Names
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Message added 07:38, 15 September 2011 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.
Apology
[edit]I feel as though I owe you an apology; Let me explain why.
I just read through Talk:Death_of_Osama_bin_Laden/Archive_4#Take_2 and spotted your comments about referencing problems in the article and how the edit notice seemed to support a certain style. I created the edit notice, and to be honest I had no idea we had different styles when I added it to the death of bin laden article. It was for me an attempt to make sure that our editors would not be stuck gong through an infinitely vast number of 404 error pages attempting to track down sources for the information then being added at a rather frantic rate to the article. If I had known it would create trouble for you or others on the page I would have refrained from adding the notice and simply accepted the fact that later editors would have to do more work to find and ensure the citations were accurate. TomStar81 (Talk) 09:56, 21 October 2011 (UTC)
- Thank you TomStar81. That was a moderately sticky situation as we had a number of editors (maybe just a couple) insisting that a particular citation form be used. I did not have a opinion for which form should be used but was concerned that they wanted to leave warning notices on the talk pages of people who used list-style references. Many of the editors at the time were newbies and I saw no reason to bite them for struggling with references as they attempted to copy the list-style that a third of the article was using. Your role was apparently accidental. --Marc Kupper|talk 10:30, 21 October 2011 (UTC)
Rank Opinion
[edit]Could use your opinion at Talk:General of the Armies. -OberRanks (talk) 18:07, 23 October 2011 (UTC)
- I just administratively sectioned one of your comments because, on my browser, the page break created a very large gap of white space on the screen. If this distorts what you were trying to say, please change it back and I offer my apologies. -OberRanks (talk) 00:14, 24 October 2011 (UTC)
- That's fine - I was surprised you, or anyone, got a white gap so large as to be disconcerting. It was supposed to be a one blank line gap. I knew that gap would be 1.5 times larger than the standard inter-paragraph gap but did not realize it would appear so huge to someone that they would be compelled to edit my comment. Unfortunately, there is no easy solution.
- I was trying to keep the second paragraph of my response at the same indent level as the first so that someone could see that it was the same person much like how this second paragraph is visually connected to the previous paragraph.
This is a third paragraph spaced from the previous paragraph using the extra blank line gap I'd used on the GoAUS talk page. There's an extra gap between this paragraph and the previous. This fourth paragraph is properly spaced but someone doing a view-source will have a "WFT" moment should they try to reply to the first part. --Marc Kupper|talk 05:01, 24 October 2011 (UTC)
- I was trying to keep the second paragraph of my response at the same indent level as the first so that someone could see that it was the same person much like how this second paragraph is visually connected to the previous paragraph.
Dead link in article 'Padmanabhaswamy Temple'
[edit]Hi. The article 'Padmanabhaswamy Temple' has a dead link that could not be repaired automatically. Can you help fix it?
- You added this in July 2011.
- The bot tested this link on 27 March, 29 March, 31 March, 7 April and today, but it never worked.
- The bot checked The Wayback Machine and WebCite but couldn't find a suitable replacement.
This link is marked with {{Dead link}} in the article. Please take a look at that article and fix what you can. Thank you!
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Executive Order 13603
[edit]Hello. You recently removed most of the content from the article on Executive Order 13603, noting that there was no ref. I looked at the first link that you removed. It was to an op-ed article in Forbes. A quick scan revealed that much or all the the removed content was in that Forbes article. Forbes is a well-known magazine. So, I think the material should be put back, but with some of the "attitude" removed. Kdammers (talk) 07:30, 19 September 2012 (UTC)
- I've replied to this at Talk:Executive Order 13603#Comment on additions by 66.191.70.10. --Marc Kupper|talk 19:14, 19 September 2012 (UTC)
Talkback
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Toddst1 (talk) 00:06, 11 November 2012 (UTC)
Orphaned non-free media (File:Zante currants.jpg)
[edit] Thanks for uploading File:Zante currants.jpg. The media description page currently specifies that it is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under a claim of fair use. However, it is currently orphaned, meaning that it is not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the media was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that media for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (see our policy for non-free media).
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- Deletion is fine - I've added comments at Talk:Zante currant#Sun-Maid image and File talk:Zante currants.jpg about this. --Marc Kupper|talk 21:04, 2 December 2012 (UTC)
Richard Nixon talk page notice
[edit]I have added a section on the talk page for the article Richard Nixon titled "Section deleted on 13 December 2012." Please share your thoughts on the talk page. Thanks. Mitchumch (talk) 16:41, 16 December 2012 (UTC)
Sandy Hook
[edit]I noticed you supported having an international reactions page/section on Sandy Hook previously. I noticed you supported a small section, but maybe you've changed your mind? A page has been made and it's been tagged for deletion. It's going to be a very close consensus. Could you lend your support again here?--199.231.184.178 (talk) 09:37, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
Edit for Page: MS SuperStar Gemini
[edit]Hi
Thanks for taking the effort to verify the edits. I have received verbal information from a tour agency personnel on the 'try-out' cruises. I apologise for one mistake where I included Dec 30 2012 to the list of 'try-out' cruises. I have a scanned copy of the price plans for SuperStar Gemini for December 28, 29 and 31 2012. Do let me know how to pass the scanned copy to you so you could give me a hand in placing the source for the new edit.
Thanks!
Gibchua (talk) 20:40, 24 December 2012 (UTC)Gibchua
Wikipedia:WikiProject Firearms, Requesting your assistance...
[edit]Hey Marc, I'm oping to recruit you to help cleanup many of the gun, firearm, and related articles along with any others that should fall under the auspices of the Firearm Project.
As you may already be aware, many of the gun and related articles are a mess. POV pushing, inconsistency, factual inaccuracy, lousy or no references, et. al. I've corresponded with the Coordinator of the Firearm Project to use the page to organize the overall efforts to clean up these articles and I'm hoping you'll be interested in joining in.
How this started was with a comparison of the Gun and Firearm articles and some of their derivatives like Gun#History, Firearm#History, History of the firearm, History of gunpowder, Gun powder, etc. There is no consistency in the use of definitions, references, or even entire History sections from article to article.
I'm going to ask others for their assistance, some of the usual suspects from the Sandy Hook, NRA, Wayne LaPierre articles and such. For the time being, we have the run of the Firearm Project page. Any effort you can contribute, however big or small, will be appreciated.
Please feel free to spread the word to others. Best regards, --Scalhotrod - Just your average banjo playing, drag racing, cowboy... (talk) 06:32, 7 April 2013 (UTC)
- Thank you - my usual model is to research something "deep" to line up the sources. At present the only gun/firearm related project on my personal plate is Magazine (firearms) vs. Clip (ammunition) and to see if I can find sufficient ammunition to have the word "controversially" deleted from a sentence such as "The detachable magazine is often controversially referred to as a clip." The articles used to say that using "clip" was in error but these days the wording has been softened to "controversially." At present the research direction is to see if I can find WP:RS for when a "magazine" started being called a "clip" in popular culture.
- As for a generalized cleanup - good luck! I've seen examples of controversy in the "letters" columns for gun and hunting magazines from the early to mid 1900s. Wikipedia is the current forum for expressing opinion (backed by WP:RS). In some cases I suspect the best we can do is to document that there is disagreement while also working to spot and filter out fringe disagreement. There's a large body of gun lore that was developed anecdotically, one person at a time, in the field. You will always find someone who disagrees with a point. As much of it is anecdotal a person who disagrees on Wikipedia can declare the original report "not a reliable source."
- An area that seems easier to work on in Wikipedia is descriptions of historical development. For example, I like M16 rifle#History and to a lesser extent AR-15#History. I noticed that the histories do not use a recently developed term, "battle rifle" though I suspect it would be useful if people understood the difference between "battle" and "assault" rifles. --Marc Kupper|talk 20:53, 7 April 2013 (UTC)
Hey Marc, thank you, I appreciate you being straightforward about the situation. Yes, I'd have to agree that's its somewhat of a daunting one, but I think its worthwhile. In my own personal "library arsenal" I have a nearly complete collection of the NRA Heritage library. It consists of many of the long thought, truly authoritative books on various subjects involving all types of firearms, shooting, reloading, and other related topics. I'm happy to do searches for legit info in these books to back up our statements. I know it won't be easy, but I'd like to see how much of the "clutter" we can eliminate or organize. --Scalhotrod - Just your average banjo playing, drag racing, cowboy... (talk) 01:54, 8 April 2013 (UTC)
The Inferior
[edit]![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/23/Nuvola_apps_edu_languages.svg/40px-Nuvola_apps_edu_languages.svg.png)
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.
--Bejnar (talk) 18:57, 21 April 2013 (UTC)
VE
[edit]It took me a while to understand what I was supposed to be looking at :) I suggest you use the new notification system instead, which directly pings @people: just link to their username (i.e. User:Marc Kupper), and they'll notice! I am looking at your reply now. Regards, Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:30, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
- User:Elitre (WMF), I'll have to get used to using WP:MENTION. Part of the issue is that normally I focus 100% on article content in talk page messages. The new system seems too much like social networking which runs into WP:NOTSOCIALNETWORK.
- Thank you for relaying the VE bug reports into Bugzilla. --Marc Kupper|talk 16:40, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
- You're welcome. I am sure you can appreciate that the new system allows you not to waste your time pasting Talkback templates into other people's talk - especially if the answer you are pointing to is merely a Yes/No or similar. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:48, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
- I use WP:Twinkle - to add a talkback notice on your page I selected TW / TB from the toolbar. Twinkle takes care of opening the page in edit mode, adding the new section with the talkback template, etc. The work on my part is about the same. With the new notification system I need to copy/paste "Elitre (WMF)" from your message to me into this message and also structure the message in such a way that you get mentioned. With Talkback the message content can stay on topic. Afterwards, if I think someone needs to be notified of the message I usually control-click on the word "Talk" for that person (which opens it in a new browser tab), TW / TB, and normally copy/paste in the section title so the person gets a direct link.
- You're welcome. I am sure you can appreciate that the new system allows you not to waste your time pasting Talkback templates into other people's talk - especially if the answer you are pointing to is merely a Yes/No or similar. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 16:48, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
- So far I have not figured out how to manage the WP:MENTION notifications. For example, the section above this on my talk page is a talkback that someone left me in April. I left it there as a reminder to myself. If I wanted, I could add a note on my talk page explaining why I left that talkback on the page plus other notes explaining my progress on a project that resulted from it. I have not figured out how to file, add notes/comments to, and/or delete items from Special:Notifications. Special:Notifications also does not offer "View source" meaning if I wanted to copy/paste one of the notification messages onto one of my user pages I'll need to convert HTML back into wikicode. --Marc Kupper|talk 18:17, 21 August 2013 (UTC)
Dewey decimal
[edit]Thanks for the notification. I have made edits. These were however merely Stiki vandalism reversions. What is the copyvio? Could you help me understand the issue? Capitalismojo (talk) 04:30, 25 November 2013 (UTC)
- User:Capitalismojo, I tried to answer your question at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of Dewey Decimal_classes#What is the copyvio?. Did that address the question? --Marc Kupper|talk 05:01, 25 November 2013 (UTC)
Vote about MH370's state on template
[edit]Hello, Marc Kupper! I have noticed how you have been supporting the idea of not keeping MH370 as the deadliest accident in the Template:Aviation accidents and incidents in 2014. Well, there is now a vote going on in the most recent section of the template's talk page. We are going to decide exactly what to do. I urge you to go there as soon as possible and vote. The more, the better! Thank you! -- Sim(ã)o(n) * Talk to me! See my efforts! 18:24, 3 June 2014 (UTC)
- Thank you Sim(ã)o(n). You may want to take a look at WP:CANVAS. I've been pretty busy with a project lately and will be working tonight until midnight.
- One of the things I'd been wanting to do is to read the entire argument carefully. Please be aware that we can agree to anything. If we agree that it was an alien abduction then that's what goes on the template. Something more likely is an agreement that MH370 is likely the deadliest incident (so far) for 2014 and the deadliest by far for the Boeing 777. We could agree do that while also agreeing there is no direct evidence there were any fatalities at all. I need to re-review the Inmarsat data to see if there's a path through it that allows for the aircraft to be put down on land. The Inmarsat assumption is the aircraft maintained a constant speed, altitude, and heading. The goal is if we throw all that out is it possible to come up with the same ping response times that Inmarsat observed.
- Thus, I wanted to read the entire thread. The last time I looked it was getting rather long and contentious... --Marc Kupper|talk 01:46, 4 June 2014 (UTC)
- OK. I am amazed, however, that you voted for MH370 to be placed as the deadliest. I mean, if there is no evidence of their deaths, why assuming everyone onboard is in fact dead? I think it's contradictory that you would mark it as the deadliest, and yet also say those deaths are not confirmed. Imagine you're in a hospital to visit a relative of yours, and the doctor comes in and says: "I haven't seen your relative yet, but he's dead. I'm absolutely sure of that." Would you find that credible? Wouldn't you demand evidence that he is dead? What if everyone began preparing a funeral, with no-one ever having seen his body? It doesn't make sense, does it? Well, that's what's being done here.
- If you would like to read the entire argument, I recommend that you start with the coloured resume I published on the third section of the template's talk page. Just to begin with.
- I took a look at WP:CANVAS. I don't think that's what I'm doing... I actually tried to stay neutral in my announcement. Of course that, based on your comments, I could guess where you would vote, but it was still your decision. Do you think I have influenced it in any way? I could be more careful the next time I do this, but I don't think my announcement was biased. Well, thanks for the warning, anyway! -- Sim(ã)o(n) * Talk to me! See my efforts! 15:38, 4 June 2014 (UTC)
- Sim(ã)o(n), you asked "Do you think I have influenced it in any way?" Yes, you mentioned WP:NPOV in your argument. I looked at that policy and was thinking about if the relatives of the MH370 passengers/crew are a "significant view" that needed to be included when deciding on the wording. I flip/flopped a few times. I then considered that it's common that relatives/friends will be in disbelief that someone is dead or a criminal. In this case the relatives are pinning their hopes on a lack of hard evidence. However, the lack evidence of a crash with multiple fatalities is not evidence there were or are survivors. The searchers are looking for where the aircraft crashed. They are looking for its final resting place. I realized when thinking about the template debate that it's drifting into WP:OR or WP:SYNTH territory for us to parse those statements and to say "there have been crashes with survivors" or "the final resting place may a hanger next to an airstrip." Those ideas are not being brought up by the people directly connected with the search. If something showed up that gave a hint that there were or are survivors then the searcher's focus will change and we can update the template and article.
- On the flip side - is there anything that would influence you? --Marc Kupper|talk 18:40, 4 June 2014 (UTC)
- OK, wait! There's something I don't understand. I asked if I may have influenced your opinion with my announcement, and you said: "Yes, you mentioned WP:NPOV in your argument." Do you mean my announcement rather than my argument? I still don't understand how I may have done that. Anyways, though, I'm sorry if I did it. Let me apologise.
- Sim(ã)o(n), I had been putting off looking at the arguments to better understand them. Your announcement prompted me to put some time into the matter. I saw that the announcement was slanted which prompted the WP:CANVAS mention but did not influence things one way or another on my end.
- One comment about your writing style is to try avoiding WP:WALLOFTEXT and WP:MWOT. Often when looking over a debate thread people will skim the walls rather than reading/parsing the entire message. --Marc Kupper|talk 21:57, 4 June 2014 (UTC)
- OK, wait! There's something I don't understand. I asked if I may have influenced your opinion with my announcement, and you said: "Yes, you mentioned WP:NPOV in your argument." Do you mean my announcement rather than my argument? I still don't understand how I may have done that. Anyways, though, I'm sorry if I did it. Let me apologise.
- I still don't quite see how my announcement could have been biased, but OK. Again, I'm sorry, and I will be more careful in the future.
- I have thought about that maybe I write comments that are too long... I always try to shorten them as I find reasonable. Normally, I try not to post any comment that occupies more than the editing window. I take that as a reference, but maybe that's not good enough. I keep trying to do my best about it. -- Sim(ã)o(n) * Talk to me! See my efforts! 16:46, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
- Now, there is a lack of hard evidence, isn't there? They're not necessarily pinning their hopes in it, but perhaps just thinking rationally, like: "Wait... If the plane did crash, why can't they show me it did?" Pretty obvious, right? Like: "Hey, your relative, who was onboard MH370, is dead. The plane crashed with no survivors." "Um... OK... Can I see his body?" "Uh... no." "Can I see the plane wreckage?" "No." "Can I see the bodies of anyone else who was in the crashed plane?" "No." "Can you tell me where it crashed?" "No." "Can you show me any photo or video of the crash?" "No." "So... How can you guys be so sure that it crashed and that my relative is dead?" Isn't this line of thought quite obvious?
- The best available evidence puts the aircraft in the middle of the ocean with no possible landing sites at the time it ran out of fuel. Had it glided to a landing on the water that would trigger the ELT and within seconds Cospas-Sarsat would have reported its location to within 1 or 2km radius. That glide and water landing would have needed a skilled human pilot. If a pilot was available then he/she should have triggered the manually operated ELT units long before they ran out of fuel. A pilot could also have dialed 7700 or 7500 on their transponder. Either action can be done by a pilot or crew member in a couple of seconds and would have resulted in instant attention.
- If an aircraft runs out of fuel then the engines stop generating electrical and hydraulic power. You loose power to the instrument panel, the autopilot, etc. The pilot is supposed to reconfigure things to route power from emergency sources to essential control systems. Without this the aircraft is configured wrong for gliding. It stalls and starts falling. If an aircraft does a vertical dive into land or water it's destroyed so quickly that the impact triggered ELT never has a chance to send a signal. A typhoon then went through the area. We did not start looking in the southern Indian ocean until six days after the aircraft was lost. That combination of events apparently resulted in no confirmed debris from the aircraft being located and recovered. --Marc Kupper|talk 21:57, 4 June 2014 (UTC)
- Now, there is a lack of hard evidence, isn't there? They're not necessarily pinning their hopes in it, but perhaps just thinking rationally, like: "Wait... If the plane did crash, why can't they show me it did?" Pretty obvious, right? Like: "Hey, your relative, who was onboard MH370, is dead. The plane crashed with no survivors." "Um... OK... Can I see his body?" "Uh... no." "Can I see the plane wreckage?" "No." "Can I see the bodies of anyone else who was in the crashed plane?" "No." "Can you tell me where it crashed?" "No." "Can you show me any photo or video of the crash?" "No." "So... How can you guys be so sure that it crashed and that my relative is dead?" Isn't this line of thought quite obvious?
- I'm not an expert on this subject, but I'll comment with what I know. How do you guys know the plane is probably in the Indian Ocean? I know, it's the pings received by Inmarsat. But what kind of pings are those? I have never heard about that! I have watched several episodes of Mayday, and I have never heard of any kind of satellite being used to track down planes! How reliable is that system? What kind of thing is that?
- Sim(ã)o(n), the word "ping" is a generic term. If the satellite link has been idle for an hour the satellite's ground control station sends a "hello, are you still there?" message. The message goes from the ground control station up to the satellite and is relayed back down to the Inmarsat terminal on board the aircraft. When the terminal receives a "hello, are you still there?" it responds back with "yes" which is sent up to the satellite and then relayed back to the ground station. The shorthand name for this is "ping."
- The ground station measures the time interval between sending "hello, are you still there?" and receiving "yes." This interval gets translated into the distance from the satellite to the terminal. The distance will be between 26,191 to 26,496 miles and the measurement is accurate to within 500 feet. They use the distance to draw an imaginary circle on the globe that's exactly that distance from the satellite. Inmarsat does not know where on the circle the terminal is but as MH370 could only fly so fast and has a limited range they could rule out parts of the circle. The arc that's been shown in media reports is the portion of the circle that could possibly have been reached by MH370 in 7.5 hours before it ran out of fuel.
- There ended up being seven pings resulting in seven arcs. The next part of the project was to see if it was possible to draw straight line from the last known position of MH370 that intersected the seven arcs at the correct times. It turned out there were several possible lines that are nearly side by side. The lines run roughly north/south. The westernmost and westernmost lines form the left and right sides of the search box. The possible fuel duration, and the arcs cutting through the area form the upper and lower sides of the box. Fortunately, there happened to be a ping 8.5 minutes before the aircraft ran out of fuel and the aircraft's attempt to send a "something is badly wrong here" message also resulted in enough traffic that they were able to draw another arc very near the one from the last ping.
- Initially the box was still fairly large and too large to be scanned in a pinger locator before the pinger battery failed. Experts who understood the fuel range at various speeds and altitudes very well got involved and using that they were able to create a new search box that's in the upper/right (northeast) part of the original box. The pinger locator focused on that area.
- There are no islands in the search area. The nearest land is 1000 miles away and is Australia which would have seen MH370 on radar had it turned in that direction.
- Some time ago, I think I watched part of an interview on TV with a Portuguese expert on the subject, and, if I'm not wrong, he said these kinds of pings aren't too reliable: they are just signals that are received by satellites, and the satellite can determine, more or less, with a rather limited degree of accuracy, from where and from which plane it came. If that's true, and you might confirm that for me, the investigators may be searching in the completely wrong location.
- The pings are fairly reliable. I could do a longer explanation but it's very technical. I don't think they are looking in the completely wrong location but they will need to re-review the available data and see if they can refine the box. Much of the data that went into defining the search box has been made public. So far no one has said "here's a way to interpret the data that constructs a new box over here."
- Some time ago, I think I watched part of an interview on TV with a Portuguese expert on the subject, and, if I'm not wrong, he said these kinds of pings aren't too reliable: they are just signals that are received by satellites, and the satellite can determine, more or less, with a rather limited degree of accuracy, from where and from which plane it came. If that's true, and you might confirm that for me, the investigators may be searching in the completely wrong location.
- In fact, the maps show the most likely routes as arcs of a circumference.
- Not really - the arc shape comes from the map projection. The maps that the media shows are flat. The aircraft is assumed to be traveling in a straight line on the globe but when they project that onto a flat map the track looks curved.
- In fact, the maps show the most likely routes as arcs of a circumference.
- What is the ELT? What is that Corpas-Sarsat? To within 2 km? What if there was no-one within 2 km to receive that message?
- The ELT are Emergency locator transmitters. MH370 had at least five. One of them is attached to the airframe and activates on impact. The antenna for it is on the roof just before the tail. Usually an aircraft's destruction is slow or incomplete enough that this unit has time to send a message. If an aircraft does a high speed dive into the ground or water the ELT is destroyed before it can transmit. Two ELT are hand operated. They look like large flashlights and are stored on the wall next to the main exits. If you toss one out the aircraft onto the ground or water then it starts sending a signal. The remaining ELT are attached to the emergency exit slides. The slides also do double duty as life rafts. If you land on water you activate the slides and can more or less walk (short jump) from the aircraft to the raft. The ELT start transmitting when the rafts hit the water. These are the same style as the manually activated units meaning you can turn them on and also remove it from the raft if needed. If MH370 had done a glide/landing onto water then all five ELT will be going off once the doors are opened, slides activated, and the crew tosses the manual ELT out onto the water.
- What is the ELT? What is that Corpas-Sarsat? To within 2 km? What if there was no-one within 2 km to receive that message?
- Cospas-Sarsat is a worldwide network of satellites that continuously listens for ELTs. The instant an ELT goes off Corpas-Sarsat is able to triangulate its location within 1 to 2 km. All it takes is a single fraction of a second signal from the ELT. In practice, the ELT keeps transmitting until the battery runs out. Modern ELT also contain a GPS meaning Corpas-Sarsat knows the location with in a couple of feet.
- How would changing the transponder code make anything different? The plane didn't even appear on radar! This being, how could changing the transponder code change the situation? What if there was a terrorist onboard who caused the plane to land on an island?
- Had this been a normal emergency the flight crew would have immediately dialed 7500 (hijacking), 7600 (radio failure), or 7700 (emergency). They were still within range of Malaysian radar at the time and would have resulted in instant scrambling of resources. My point is, the transponder was instead turned off. That could be a flight crew action, a hijacker that was able to quickly gain control, or an event such as major power outage or fire. All of these lower the probability that the aircraft was then landed safely somewhere.
- How would changing the transponder code make anything different? The plane didn't even appear on radar! This being, how could changing the transponder code change the situation? What if there was a terrorist onboard who caused the plane to land on an island?
- The plane travelled for hours, and no-one can be sure exactly where.
- The "where" is known reasonably well. It is either in the southern Indian ocean or central Asia. Asia is much much less likely.
- The plane travelled for hours, and no-one can be sure exactly where.
- My father finds it impossible for nobody to know where the plane is in 2014, and he has a point:
- It is possible as MH370 is missing! :-)
- he says today there are smartphones that can be located by a GPS system. Why hasn't anyone tried to locate the smartphones of the passengers? He says there is today all kinds of technology necessary to find planes.
- Cell phones rely on cell phone towers. Their range is one to five miles. Also, the coverage of a tower is out to the side of the tower and not up into the air though some signal leaks up into the air. It's likely that the search aircraft include a cell tower which will report on phones found in the area. As the aircraft is up in the air their range will be further, possibly out to 45 miles meaning a search aircraft can monitor an up to 90 mile wide swath for phones. Unfortunately, searchers did not realize they needed to look in the southern Indian Ocean until nearly a week after MH370 disappeared. A cell phone that's attempting to find a tower drains its battery in less than a day.
- My father finds it impossible for nobody to know where the plane is in 2014, and he has a point:
- He even says that in the 1990s, the president of the United States acknowledged that the US had heat-seeking missiles that could search for any missiles the Soviet Union would launch, and destroy them in mid-air, destroying all of the USSR's efforts to launch missiles at the US; and he rhetorically asks if it is really possible that, more than 20 years later, no-one is able to tell where a plane is.
- An ICBM or spacecraft requires so much energy that you can easily see its flight from 200 to 300 miles away. An aircraft practically invisible compared to an ICBM.
- He even says that in the 1990s, the president of the United States acknowledged that the US had heat-seeking missiles that could search for any missiles the Soviet Union would launch, and destroy them in mid-air, destroying all of the USSR's efforts to launch missiles at the US; and he rhetorically asks if it is really possible that, more than 20 years later, no-one is able to tell where a plane is.
- He says this is completely ridicule, and everyone is making us look like fools; and that it is very likely that someone is hiding something from us by turning our attention away from what really happened. What do you think?
- I have seen no evidence that would point to anything other than that MH370 turned west and then went south until it ran out of fuel. People can say whatever they believe. I ignore all that and look to see if there's any evidence that backs up the claims. If there is none I just file the claim away as an interesting theory. One of the things I've spent a career doing is extracting signals from noise. I'm not surprised that a 777 can disappear.
- He says this is completely ridicule, and everyone is making us look like fools; and that it is very likely that someone is hiding something from us by turning our attention away from what really happened. What do you think?
- I don't think there is any evidence for the crash. Don't give me technical explanations, because I'm not an expert to understand it. I just use common sense. No evidence is no evidence. Period. Circumstantial evidence merely indicates something is likely, but not certain. What if there was someone in the plane who caused the plane to land somewhere? What if that Inmarsat signal is misinterpreted? Is there any certainty that it can't be? Is a fatal crash in the ocean really the only possibility? -- Sim(ã)o(n) * Talk to me! See my efforts! 16:46, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
- There is direct evidence that MH370 crashed in the middle of the southern Indian ocean with all lives being lost. Failure to locate the crash scene does not mean the aircraft did not crash.
- The aircraft failed to respond to human and machine queries. This is the first clue that something is very wrong.
- The copilot's cell phone is pinged by a tower on the western coast of the Malaysian peninsula. This is far off the planned course and also not an area the aircraft would have flown to had they lost the ability to communicate.
- That cell phone ping allowed investigators to accurately place the aircraft and to confirm that an unidentified aircraft seen on radar was MH370. Radar tracks the aircraft out to northwest of Indonesia. I'll need to find the map but I believe they saw it turning south on radar.
- Shortly after it turned south someone attempted to call the aircraft. There's evidence the phone rang in the cockpit but it was not answered.
- One hour after the attempted call, and every hour after that, Inmarsat checked to see if the link to the aircraft was still up. It was and these were used to estimate the aircraft's location within the southern Indian ocean.
- Shortly after the missed scheduled arrival at PEK (Beijing) someone attempts to call the aircraft again. They let the phone ring for one minute. It was not answered.
- Seven hours and 37 minutes after takeoff the aircraft attempts to signal that there's a major issue. This was the time it was expected to run out of fuel meaning it was likely signalling that electrical power had been lost and that critical systems were on standby power. While it's possible a pilot activated emergency power and reconfigured the aircraft for an unpowered glide there's evidence the aircraft instead stalled and went into an uncontrolled dive. (see the next item)
- The impact with the water was apparently hard enough that there were no large pieces of debris. It was also a fast enough destruction that the emergency transmitters that fire on impact never had a chance to send a message to Cospas-Sarsat. The impact was also such that that the water triggered emergency transmitters failed to pop to the surface and signal Cospas-Sarsat.
- Inmarsat's attempts to check the communication link fail from this point on out.
- A typhoon then swept through the area.
- There are no islands in this part of ocean. It's rarely used by cargo ships with none in the region at the time of the crash.
- People looked at the evidence and concluded the aircraft likely crashed with all lives lost. --Marc Kupper|talk 09:11, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
- There is direct evidence that MH370 crashed in the middle of the southern Indian ocean with all lives being lost. Failure to locate the crash scene does not mean the aircraft did not crash.
- I don't think there is any evidence for the crash. Don't give me technical explanations, because I'm not an expert to understand it. I just use common sense. No evidence is no evidence. Period. Circumstantial evidence merely indicates something is likely, but not certain. What if there was someone in the plane who caused the plane to land somewhere? What if that Inmarsat signal is misinterpreted? Is there any certainty that it can't be? Is a fatal crash in the ocean really the only possibility? -- Sim(ã)o(n) * Talk to me! See my efforts! 16:46, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
- I don't think the investigators are sure it crashed. When they say they're looking for the place where the aircraft crashed, that means that, for the purposes of the search, they are assuming the plane crashed, but only for that purpose! They can't really assume the plane crashed for other purposes, don't you think? If they come across an island and find everyone is alive there, they'll be like: "Wow! Looks like it didn't crash at all!" Whilst there is no hard evidence of the crash, and the evidence is merely circumstancial, you can't really be sure of the crash. That's why investigators aren't happy with circumstantial evidence. It doesn't prove anything. They need absolute, irrefutable, hard evidence. Of either possibility. That's what the investigators are looking for.
- That's correct. The evidence points to that it crashed but not with 100% certainty. If an island (there are none in that area) should appear with the passengers alive then yes, "Wow! Looks like it didn't crash at all!" Many times decisions are made with incomplete information. This is one of them. --Marc Kupper|talk 21:57, 4 June 2014 (UTC)
- I don't think the investigators are sure it crashed. When they say they're looking for the place where the aircraft crashed, that means that, for the purposes of the search, they are assuming the plane crashed, but only for that purpose! They can't really assume the plane crashed for other purposes, don't you think? If they come across an island and find everyone is alive there, they'll be like: "Wow! Looks like it didn't crash at all!" Whilst there is no hard evidence of the crash, and the evidence is merely circumstancial, you can't really be sure of the crash. That's why investigators aren't happy with circumstantial evidence. It doesn't prove anything. They need absolute, irrefutable, hard evidence. Of either possibility. That's what the investigators are looking for.
- But you can't make decisions when lacking important information. Isn't is just safer to say: "Well, we can't be fully sure whether the plane crashed or not, much less how many people died, so we'd better just say we can't yet tell which one is the deadliest crash this year"? What's so hard with that? -- Sim(ã)o(n) * Talk to me! See my efforts! 16:46, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
- And you finished saying: "Is there anything that would influence you?" Well, do you mean about this subject? I hardly think so. Only when hard evidence arrive will I be able to conclude what it tells me. I prefer to wait, and not jump to conclusions right now. -- Sim(ã)o(n) * Talk to me! See my efforts! 19:18, 4 June 2014 (UTC)
- A couple of comments. 1) It's been nearly three full months and so we are not exactly "jumping" to a conclusion. It seems any survivors would have been spotted/or and notified the outside world by now. 2) We can always change our mind. For example, we can conclude that every one is dead based on available evidence. Tomorrow we could revisit that evidence, or discover new evidence, and change the conclusion the based on the new data.
- I agree with you that at present there's no hard proof there was a crash, much less a fatal one. However, the available evidence points to that the aircraft crashed into the Indian ocean and there were no survivors. This also seems to be the official consensus. --Marc Kupper|talk 21:57, 4 June 2014 (UTC)
- And you finished saying: "Is there anything that would influence you?" Well, do you mean about this subject? I hardly think so. Only when hard evidence arrive will I be able to conclude what it tells me. I prefer to wait, and not jump to conclusions right now. -- Sim(ã)o(n) * Talk to me! See my efforts! 19:18, 4 June 2014 (UTC)
- I disagree with your first comment. It's possible that any survivors would be on a lonely island, and have their mobile phones damaged. It such circumstances it is not impossible to be disconnected from the outside world for more than three months. Since there is no hard proof of a fatal crash, I think we should "play safe" and not dare to say anything more than "The plane went missing". That's what the article says. They have actually requested editors not to change its status to "crashed", nor to add a casualty number. Such claims might be revealed not to be true. Why not playing safe? -- Sim(ã)o(n) * Talk to me! See my efforts! 16:46, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
- Changing the text font to mark people as "dead" on a Wikipedia template will not change their actual status at all. If they are alive they will remain alive. If they are dead then they will remain so. Thus, it seems to be a pretty safe thing to do. :-) --Marc Kupper|talk 09:11, 6 June 2014 (UTC)
- I disagree with your first comment. It's possible that any survivors would be on a lonely island, and have their mobile phones damaged. It such circumstances it is not impossible to be disconnected from the outside world for more than three months. Since there is no hard proof of a fatal crash, I think we should "play safe" and not dare to say anything more than "The plane went missing". That's what the article says. They have actually requested editors not to change its status to "crashed", nor to add a casualty number. Such claims might be revealed not to be true. Why not playing safe? -- Sim(ã)o(n) * Talk to me! See my efforts! 16:46, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
- Wow! You know what? I have to thank you for explaining all this to me with such detail! No-one has ever done that. I really appreciate it, and I must confess that I can't be so confident of my position now. About a week ago, I could easily debunk their arguments, because all they said was meaningless stuff like "The governments have said the plane has crashed" or straw-man arguments like "The plane can't be airborne now". They had no point. But that is a very good list of evidence right now.
- All I can say is this: that is only circumstantial evidence. Two documentary series I like to watch are Mayday and Seconds From Disaster. Those series investigate disasters—aircraft-related ones in the former, and ones of different natures in the latter. They usually follow the official investigations. But it is common that, when an investigator poses an interesting and compelling possibility, and he presents evidence and arguments to support it, at some point, the narrator says something like: "But, so far, all he has are just circumstantial evidence. He needs hard evidence to prove his case." Investigators cannot state in their reports that they are sure about something without irrefutable evidence. That's why they need to find better evidence. And even then, it is common that they present in their reports the "probable cause" of the disaster, not the "certain cause" or the "absolute cause". The same thing happens here. Everything you've presented is nothing but circumstantial evidence. Such evidence cannot be used to prove absolutely that the plane has crashed.
- It looks like we are in agreement in it, though. It seems that our only difference in opinion is if that justifies that we claim in the template that everyone is dead or not. In my view of things, putting the accident in bold smallcaps is saying it is the deadliest of the year, which implies that, at least, a number of people greater than the number of fatalities of the Algeria Lockheed crash must have died in the plane. And we can't tell how many people died there. If it is found that they are, somehow, alive (perhaps the data were misinterpreted or something—I don't know, and there's no need to speculate), we will basically have lied. I think that there is no rush in going to the template straight away to say everyone is dead. Let's wait for confirmation. Until then, let's take the benefit of the doubt, and say we can't claim which crash is the deadliest.
- And now, if you don't mind, I'd just like to give some reason to my father's conspiracy theories... :) He usually questions anything he is told, which is good, since it leads to a critical thought, but this means he usually agrees with conspiracy theories. Unlike him, though, I've never agreed with conspiracy theories. In fact, right now, I'm engaging with him in a debate about 9/11. But in this case, he does have a point, and I have to agree with him in some things. He says that, nowadays, there is all kinds of technology necessary to find planes and whatever you want. There are satellites that photograph and film the earth; there are radars; there are infrared detectors that can find anything that's hot, like the two engines of a plane (even in the time of the Cold War, as I've told you, the US were capable of detecting missiles and destroying them in mid-air); there are satellites that can detect groups of fish; it is possible to measure the depth of the ocean floor, and all of it is charted; and there are smartphones that are detectable through GPS (I've mentioned this earlier, but you replied mentioning the mobile phones and the antennas that detect them—I was not referring to that, but rather to smartphones that have a GPS system, and can be detected by satellites). That's why he finds it impossible for nobody to know where a plane is in 2014. He thinks somebody knows it, but is hiding information from us, and instead is making us fools by tricking us into believing everything is being attempted to find the plane. And he goes on to say this is all a way of getting us distracted from the big deal. The news about the flight are becoming less relevant and less frequent. Within a few months, the media will hardly ever talk about it. Within a few years, everyone will have forgotten it, and the subject will only be treated occasionally in documentaries or special reports, which will say nothing new about it. And thus shall be completed one of the greatest disappearances ever in the history of aviation—the greatest magic trick ever conducted. For whatever reason. And whoever got anything out of it—whoever it was—got away with it.
- If my father is right, then the plane may not have crashed at all. But this was just an extra. And I have to agree that there is some stuff in this story that don't make sense. How does a plane just disappear without anyone knowing? Perhaps you could shed some light on this, if you will... But I still don't feel we should say right now that the plane has crashed, killing all on board. Additionally, the article about the flight still lists it as missing, with no casualty number. Why contradicting them, saying the flight has crashed? I'd rather talk about what I know, and what I've said before: the plane is missing with 239 people onboard. Period. That's all we know. All the rest is speculation. OK, it could be speculation based on something, but it's speculation. -- Sim(ã)o(n) * Talk to me! See my efforts! 12:10, 7 June 2014 (UTC)
(unindent) Sim(ã)o(n), I agree, the theory is based entirely on circumstantial evidence. However, you may be interested in Circumstantial evidence#Validity of circumstantial evidence. So far I have not said that the plane absolutely has crashed. There's a collection of circumstantial evidence that makes it likely the aircraft crashed and it's likely all lives were lost.
I believe the largest weakness with the MH370 theory is the assumption that the aircraft flew in a straight line, at a constant speed, and at a constant altitude for the last six hours of its flight. The response time data for the final ping and then that last incomplete message bolster that the aircraft was in flight for the final 8.5 minutes and not stationary on the ground. They also bolster that the straight line/speed/altitude assumption was correct but I want to check to see if it's possible to get the same response times using something other than a straight line, at a constant speed, and at a constant altitude.
Note that we as Wikipedia editors are not supposed to decide one way or another on something like if this was a fatal accident. We go by what's reported in reliable sources. In this case the Malaysian government very unambiguously said "All lives are lost" and "Malaysia Airlines deeply regrets that we have to assume beyond a reasonable doubt that MH370 has been lost and that none of those on board survived."[1] While that statement turns out to be based entirely on circumstantial evidence the statement itself passes WP:VER. So far, no one has been able to show that there's a path through the evidence that could result in survivors.
You wrote "we will basically have lied." No, we go by what reliable sources reported. In this case we also tested to see if the government's claim is plausible. We discovered it's based on circumstantial evidence but are unable to show that it's wrong. It A secondary source for Wikipedia is the www.aviation-safety.net web site which is cited by over 10,000 Wikipedia articles.[2] I'll assume that means aviation-safety.net is regarded as a WP:RS. That web site is reporting 239 fatalities.[3] Aviation-safety.net included a little bit of wiggle room with "Airplane fate: Presumed damaged beyond repair".
Regarding your father you wrote "He usually questions anything he is told, which is good, since it leads to a critical thought, but this means he usually agrees with conspiracy theories." An interesting article to read is confirmation bias. Your father looks for the conspiracy and sees confirming evidence of them everywhere! You have the opposite problem in that you seek confirmation of that a proposed conspiracy is not true. :-) An argument between the two of you about 9/11 will likely result in attitude polarization.
Regarding your father's statement about finding things. Have you ever dropped a small screw, nut, or related object? You clearly heard it hit the floor and the rattle of it skittering away. You know it must be within a few feet of you but can't see it. Usually the best way of spotting it is to get a flashlight and to shine it horizontally along the floor while looking across the floor. After searching fruitlessly for a while you will hopefully find it and discover that it was in plain sight all along. Water adds an extra challenge. A submarine running along the surface of calm water is fairly easy to see. Most likely you would first spot the wake and then see the submarine at the point of the V formed by the wake. Add a little bit of wind. The wake becomes harder to spot, particularly from the air though if you happen to see the submarine itself it's clearly visible. At a lot of wind. The wake is impossible to see. If you look at where the submarine is you likely will recognize it as a submarine. Let's go back to calm water and drop the submarine 10 meters under the surface. Let's assume it's daytime with the sun overhead. There's no wake but if you look at the right spot you'll see something that's nearly unambiguously a submarine. The submarine descends to 20 meters. Now if you look at the spot where it is you will know there is "something" there but likely are not sure if it's a submarine, whale, or a shadow. If you can observe the subject for a while you can likely determine it's a submarine. If the submarine descends to 50 meters then it becomes invisible unless it's traveling in clear shallow water with a white sand bottom. That's for a moving submarine. If it's still then it becomes much harder to detect.
The underlying technical theory of why the the dropped object, or submarine, becomes hard to find is covered by signal-to-noise ratio and also "resolution." I don't see an article about the general concept of "resolution" but angular resolution and optical resolution are close (and should be merged). Those articles are oriented toward explaining things in terms of visible light but the same concepts apply to infrared, ultraviolet, magnetic, radiation, gravity, and radio wave detection.
The general area where they have been searching for MH370 is under at least 4,000 meters of water. If it's there then it has also been broken up into small pieces and scattered over a wide area. It's the proverbial needle in a haystack problem but likely closer to several fields each with many haystacks. It's a remote region meaning an aircraft can only be over it for a couple of hours before it needs to go back to Australia for fuel. It takes a ship 2.5 days to get there from the nearest port meaning careful planning before you send the ship out.
You asked "How does a plane just disappear without anyone knowing?" We still don't know why it went off course and but once it was outside of radar coverage it became as invisible as the submarine example above. Whatever happened also disabled the normal methods of communicating with and tracking the aircraft. Had the Inmarsat terminal also been turned off we would not even known how much longer it continued to fly much less had a general idea of where it went.
You wrote "But I still don't feel we should say right now that the plane has crashed, killing all on board." We don't need to say that. The Malaysian government said exactly that. "Additionally, the article about the flight still lists it as missing, with no casualty number. Why contradicting them, saying the flight has crashed?" My discussion with you is a test case for a discussion on Talk:Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. One of the things I learned is it's better to not get into technical details. FWIW, we are free to develop a different consensus on the template though it would be cleaner if template and main article were in agreement. --Marc Kupper|talk 03:49, 8 June 2014 (UTC)
- I think this discussion, at this point, is kind of approaching an end. Circumstantial evidence may be valid, but they aren't as certain as hard evidence. In my opinion, we shouldn't list the plane as the deadliest this year. In fact, if you want to do that, you should first go the article about the flight, change the infobox summary to "crashed" and change the fatality number to 239. However, in the talk page, it is specifically requested that you don't do it, according to previous discussions. Why contradicting that article? At least, for the sake of uniformisation, let's not mark any fatalities in that template for this flight!
- My discussion with him about 9/11 might indeed result in attitude polarisation, but I am quite convinced there is no reason to suspect it was an inside job. I find the official story absolutely OK.
- But my father maintains that it is impossible for a plane to disappear in 2014. In fact, just yesterday he told me something interesting: two German tourists have recently been found dead after their left their hotel in the Portuguese island of Madeira for a walk. They were found thanks to the GPS locator of their mobile phones. How is it that nobody can find this plane, with 239 people onboard, certainly several of them with smartphones that can be detected by GPS? He says that if he owned a hundred-million-dollar plane, the minute he found it had disappeared with 239 people onboard, he would try to find it—with any possible means—and try to recover it. A hundred-million-dollar plane, as well as the lives of 239 people, would be at stake. And I have to agree, though I don't usually follow his conspiracy theories, that he does have a point here.
- Well, I've given my opinion at the template's talk page. I hope something will be done. I think I'm going to take a Wikibreak, so I'll be out of here for a few days. If you want to see why, take a look at my user page or talk page. I'm going to write it there. I'll be back soon, to see how things are going. -- Sim(ã)o(n) * Talk to me! See my efforts! 09:48, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
- Good luck Sim(ã)o(n) with the break. Maybe that girl would like you if you supported the idea of that everyone on MH370 was dead? :-) The German tourists were found as they were within cell phone range. Had they been out of range, or the phone turned off, then the GPS locator would be of zero value. MH370's "phone" got turned off early in the flight. GPS is a receive-only thing. If you want to get the location data from a GPS receiver you use something other than GPS to do it. With MH370 the GPS receiver was attached to ADS-B and ACARS boxes with the latter two systems being the devices that relay the GPS position to the ground via radio and satellite links. Whatever happened on MH370 disabled both ADS-B and ACARS, disabled the radar transponder, and disabled voice communications for both standard radio and via the the satellite link. All of the normal ways of getting the aircraft's position were not working. That's how your hundred-million-dollar plane aircraft disappeared. Two devices were still operational, the Inmarsat terminal and the satellite phone though with the phone no one ever answered calls made to the aircraft. The fact that these were still responding is direct evidence they were powered on. They were physically attached to and inside the aircraft. That's pretty good circumstantial evidence that the aircraft itself was operating well enough that it could provide power. --Marc Kupper|talk 18:33, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
- I'm back! Earlier than I planned, but I'm back! And I'm glad to see that the deadliest accident markup has been removed on that template! Yay!
- Now, my father is still pretty sceptical. He says there are satellites that can pretty much control all four corners of the world. Satellites constantly photograph the earth's surface. The Americans control all that, and everyone knows it. The CIA can monitor us if they want to. We are easily "spiable". They have the greatest technology you can fathom. They can see us every minute if they want to. How does a commercial jet, with 239 people onboard, just fade out of nowhere? It's 2014! It's not the 1950s, when radar technology was still somewhat poor, and was still being perfected. Decades have passed! The CIA have the means to monitor us, as everyone knows! And there are people with mobile phones that have a GPS system. They can be monitored all the time, since they are in connection with satellites! It is possible to track all of those! You can tell where people passed based on their GPS record! Those things are registered. There are all kinds of technology needed to track down a plane! It's the 21st century! It is unacceptable that a plane could just disappear like that.
- So how can a commercial jet with 239 people onboard just disappear? Well, my father says it's impossible, and that there's someone who knows it. Someone is hiding that information, letting the investigators play hide-and-seek, and keep moving from location to location every couple of weeks. He adds that the plane will probably never be found, and this event will eventually fall into people's forgetfulness. Within a few years, no-one will care about it, and the greatest magic trick of all time will have been completed. I, however, am not so strong with that position. I understand why investigators think the plane fell there, but I do find it very strange that a plane could have just disappeared and flown for hours undetected. I can't see how that is possible in the 21st century. I think it can be possible, but quite unlikely, really. Every system has flaws. If, by chance, an event manages to happen and go around all the reaches of every layer of systems, going right through the flaws, it may happen. That's how disasters usually happen: it's a series of events that go wrong, and that, combined together, cause the catastrophe. Fortunately, there are many things that have to fail at the same time for a disaster to occur, and that's what makes them so rare. So I understand this may be possible. But it's very strange that nobody can really tell where the plane is. There is probably some misinformation here, as my father says.
- So, I guess this is it. You can believe the official story, but I am still longing for an explanation for how this plane could have disappeared. Otherwise, the story makes no sense. I'm looking forward to the final result of the investigation. We'll see it then.
- Well, I think this discussion is ending. You believe the official story, and I have some doubts about it. Let's agree to disagree! It's been very nice to talk with you! Again, you've explained this in a way I hadn't seen before. Again, thank you! :) And, you know, that girl... She is special. She is very strong in her faith, and a very good Christian; we have several interests in common, like Science, Apologetics, and others; and she's very beautiful. Definitely the best girl I've ever met. But she says she's not interested in a relationship for now. So, I guess I'll just have to wait until she wants a relationship; or look for another one. We'll see that too. Thank you for your concern! :) By the way, do you know of any userbox for "This user has a girlfriend", or something like it? That could be useful, within some time... -- Sim(ã)o(n) * Talk to me! See my efforts! 22:39, 16 June 2014 (UTC)
- Good luck Sim(ã)o(n) with the break. Maybe that girl would like you if you supported the idea of that everyone on MH370 was dead? :-) The German tourists were found as they were within cell phone range. Had they been out of range, or the phone turned off, then the GPS locator would be of zero value. MH370's "phone" got turned off early in the flight. GPS is a receive-only thing. If you want to get the location data from a GPS receiver you use something other than GPS to do it. With MH370 the GPS receiver was attached to ADS-B and ACARS boxes with the latter two systems being the devices that relay the GPS position to the ground via radio and satellite links. Whatever happened on MH370 disabled both ADS-B and ACARS, disabled the radar transponder, and disabled voice communications for both standard radio and via the the satellite link. All of the normal ways of getting the aircraft's position were not working. That's how your hundred-million-dollar plane aircraft disappeared. Two devices were still operational, the Inmarsat terminal and the satellite phone though with the phone no one ever answered calls made to the aircraft. The fact that these were still responding is direct evidence they were powered on. They were physically attached to and inside the aircraft. That's pretty good circumstantial evidence that the aircraft itself was operating well enough that it could provide power. --Marc Kupper|talk 18:33, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
September 2014
[edit] Hello, I'm BracketBot. I have automatically detected that your edit to Ryō Hanmura may have broken the syntax by modifying 1 "()"s. If you have, don't worry: just edit the page again to fix it. If I misunderstood what happened, or if you have any questions, you can leave a message on my operator's talk page.
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- transliterated as Ryō Hammura. While he wrote books as Ryō Hanmura is real name was Heitarō Kinō (清野 平太郎(きよの へいたろう).{{fact|date=September 2014}} Hanmura was a [[Japan]]ese [[science fiction]], [[
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book conditions
[edit]Thanks for your interest in book collecting. This page is not subject to editorization. The list as seen on the Hollowell page is pretty close. You can't deviate from this. There are about 7000 serious book dealers out there who agree these were and are the definitions. -GroveGuy (talk) 06:25, 5 October 2014 (UTC)
- GroveGuy, this is Wikipedia and not a site that sets collecting standards. The main book selling systems today (Amazon, Abebooks, and Albris, etc.) are not using a system developed in 1949.
- You also can't set a rule on Wikipedia editors such as "You can't deviate from this" unless you can develop consensus for this on the article talk page.
- My edits were to bring the list in line with current usage. I also was added citations documenting this usage and removing the editorization that had existed.
- Also, using the AB Bookman list word-for word would be a WP:COPYVIO and grounds for sactions against editors that want to use their wording. We can quote someone but that quote would be a small part of a larger article and also would been to be accompanied by commentary about that quote to qualify it for fair-use under the copyright act. I could see including the AB Bookman list as part of a section documenting the history of grading standards.
- The reason I visited the article in the first place was I was not sure of the definition for "reader copy". I believed it meant a worn beat up copy but wanted to confirm this. I was rather surprised at the state of the article and worked on improving it. --Marc Kupper|talk 06:33, 5 October 2014 (UTC)
Marc - We're not trying to set collecting standards; we're trying to say what the community of people buying and selling understand what language is used to describe books. This was not developed in 1949. It came from the previous century and was codified in 1949. And yes, Amazon, AbeBooks, Alibris and the others still use these terms. There certainly aren't going to be any copyright problems. AB Bookman, if they still existed, would be delighted that we are still trying to bring order to the book world.
In your change you changed one definition to say "Poor, also known as Reading Copy". This is not true. You are placing undue emphasis on "reading copy". Also you separated the last three items from the first six. They are not "also" things; they are integral. Being a book club trumps any condition. -GroveGuy (talk) 07:30, 5 October 2014 (UTC)
- GroveGuy, do you mind if I copy/paste this thread to Talk:List of used book conditions? The discussion will be about improving that article. I had to deal with some non-WP projects this weekend and will have little time this coming week. --Marc Kupper|talk 06:43, 6 October 2014 (UTC)
It would be a good idea to copy this thread to the article's talk page. Go right ahead. -GroveGuy (talk) 08:34, 6 October 2014 (UTC)
Lack of Emergency Transmitter Message-AA-8501
[edit]Thanks for the detailed info you posted about the various transmitters; much appreciated. You might want to fix one typo I found, while reading that post: "On the 767 (MH370)" EditorASC (talk) 12:21, 6 January 2015 (UTC)
Heart and Glomerulus (kidney)
[edit]Thanks for your edits to Middle ear, Marc. I'm trying to improve the readability of some of the anatomy articles and I would really value the opinions of other Wikipedians on them as to which bits need improving and how -- if you have time would you mind commenting on these two pages at the peer reviews? In addition to helping out a fellow editor hopefully you'll find the subjects somewhat interesting! Cheers, --Tom (LT) (talk) 06:42, 21 April 2015 (UTC)
Reference errors on 2 November
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Ping
[edit]Hello, I have replied to you here. I'm telling you on your talk page because I was informed that my ping didn't work (even after correcting it). LjL (talk) 18:45, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
Disambiguation link notification for December 9
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Glossary of chess
[edit]Curious to understand: what was gained by hardcoding deault parm values at Glossary of chess? IHTS (talk) 08:57, 19 January 2016 (UTC)
- Ihardlythinkso, I landed on the Glossary of chess article via an #anchor link. While the word was in the glossary it did not have an {{anchor}} meaning I was left at the top of the article and not on the definition I wanted to look at. Of the 528 terms defined in the glossary 284 of them had anchors. Rather than adding the anchor for just the word I was interested in I reformatted all of the lines for the terms to match the regexp
^\{\{term\|term= ([a-z][a-z0-9éïó '()–-]*)\|content = [a-z0-9éïó '()[\]–-]+.* \{\{anchor\|\1(\|[a-z0-9éïó '()–./|-]+)?\}\} \}\}$
which was the pattern used by the 284 records with anchors. That regexp now matches 526 of the terms. The other two terms used wikilinks in the term but otherwise follow the same pattern.
- The reason for using content= that's the same as term= even though it seems redundant is because you can only do the {{anchor}} within the content= section. I considered doing it using:
{{term|term=name|content=content only if it's not exactly the same as ''term''}}{{anchor|''term''|alternate-terms...}}
but that would result in two styles of term definitions. As people often copy/paste from an existing record to create a new one it seemed better to use a single consistent format. --Marc Kupper|talk 09:24, 19 January 2016 (UTC)
- Yes I discovered the same (i.e. that anchor requires content=). But I guess I was thinking that many term entries don't really need anchors. (I suppose tho that cap'd/uncap'd can always be anchors, in fact I see you did that for some entries; but an anchor that is exactly redundant of the term form is the default and provides no function so is confusing why it's there, prompting my Q here.) Ok, IHTS (talk) 12:21, 19 January 2016 (UTC)
- Ihardlythinkso, I decided to shift the thread over to Talk:Glossary of chess#Letter case for entries and the anchors and responded with some ideas over there. --Marc Kupper|talk 23:13, 19 January 2016 (UTC)
There were many aspects of the Glossary where consistency & usability improvements were needed when I started editing there. (For example little or no intra-Glossary wlinking or uniformity [Bubba73 helped make that decision, I implemented it]; lots of duplication/inconsistent use of acronyms vs full names; so on.) There are still several aspects re consistency needing improvement. (Like alphanumeric order of terms re blanks/special chars/caps [but there is no WP standard re that], deciding/implementing how British vs American English is represented [if both are used], so on.) It is a big, task/Glossary w/ many heads only improvable thru evolution - nothing binary about it! OK, IHTS (talk) 12:48, 23 January 2016 (UTC)
Barnstar
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The Chess Barnstar | |
Thanks for cleaning up the Glossary of chess article, it's been a mess for some time. MaxBrowne (talk) 10:36, 23 January 2016 (UTC) |
General of the Armies
[edit]You may wish to voice your opinion at Talk:General of the Armies since you were involved with this article before. Like clockwork, another relatively new user is blanking sections of the article. You're opinion would be welcome here. Thank you! -O.R.Comms 21:03, 23 October 2016 (UTC)
- Thank you for the heads up. I'm not sure how I can best contribute given the lack of available time but added a note to the talk thread. --Marc Kupper|talk 07:53, 24 February 2010 (UTC)
- Thanks for agreeing to look at the situation. On a side note, the account that brought this up I am now wondering if its a reincarnation of someone who has been on here before. No way to know for certain, just interesting that the account is created and it's very first edit is to offer a barnstar [4], something users don't usually learn about until a few weeks or months in. I am not accusing anyone of anything, only that this article has had some blocked and banned users in its galleries, especially during the "7 star general" wave that you and I both saw about four or five years ago. I could be wrong, just something to keep in mind in case we saw edit warring or problematic edits. -O.R.Comms 20:45, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
I noticed you program in JavaScript...
[edit]The JavaScript WikiProject is now up and running. We organize and develop JavaScript articles, navigation aids, and user scripts.
The WikiProject also organizes every resource it can find about JavaScript out there, such as articles, books, tutorials, etc. See our growing Reference library.
If you would like to join the JavaScript WikiProject, feel free to add your name to the participants list.
Hope to see you there! The Transhumanist 14:59, 12 May 2017 (UTC)
Nomination for deletion of Template:Notable Women Generals in the U.S. Military
[edit]Template:Notable Women Generals in the U.S. Military has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Chris Troutman (talk) 02:52, 30 September 2017 (UTC)
Syria 'bombing'
[edit]Marc Kupper, I can't find this message at Talk:2018 bombing of Damascus and Homs:
- Sca I looked over the history at all of the page versions for April 13, 14, and 15. The Errors in In the news was always empty those days and also the word "Syria" never appears anywhere on the talk page on any of those days. The discussion you mention was either subject to WP:REVDEL or you have the wrong link. --Marc Kupper|talk 17:23, 15 April 2018 (UTC)
- — I think the link you're referring to piped to an ITN entry on the WP:errors page April 14, which later was deleted after I persuaded someone to change "bomb" to "strike" as the verb in the ITN blurb. Sca (talk) 21:44, 15 April 2018 (UTC)
- Thank you Sca - I found the discussion and added a link to it on Talk:2018 bombing of Damascus and Homs. I was looking to see what the background was on various ideas for the names and so had wanted to read the discussion you had mentioned. --Marc Kupper|talk 23:39, 15 April 2018 (UTC)
Wikipedia:MOS:DISAMBIG listed at Redirects for discussion
[edit]![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/2/28/Information.svg/30px-Information.svg.png)
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Wikipedia:MOS:DISAMBIG. Since you had some involvement with the Wikipedia:MOS:DISAMBIG redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. — Godsy (TALKCONT) 21:48, 3 June 2018 (UTC)
Technical FYI/request
[edit]The <strike>
element hasn't existed in HTML for over a decade. It's <s>
now. Please don't use the former (or <tt>
, <font>
, <center>
, <blink>
, or other deprecated elements), as it just adds to the HTML "lint" cleanup logs and impedes our conversion to HTML5, and could impact smooth migration to new parser, syntax highlighter, and editing software versions, etc. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 06:33, 10 June 2018 (UTC)
Question
[edit]At List of female United States military generals and flag officers, is there really that much disparity between the Navy and the rest of the military branches? Or is it just because you added the Navy entries and there are similar entries to be found for the others that haven't been added? It looks pretty lopsided right now, if there are more entries that can be added to the other branches, do you plan on adding them? Just curious. Thanks - theWOLFchild 00:25, 13 August 2018 (UTC)
- @Thewolfchild: The original entries I added had been found by other Wikipedians. There was a person who had a great interest in female naval officers and as a result the Navy is over-represented. A year or so ago when when I looked into finding and adding other people I discovered that the Navy had a very easy to use system that allowed a senior officer to add or update their own biography on the public web site. That likely also tilted things in favor of the Navy. I took another look and see that the Air Force now has a biography system similar to the Navy.Air Force biographies and Navy biographies The Air Force currently has 238 pages of biographies with 20 people per page (roughly 4760 biographies). Unfortunately, while the Navy list seems to be restricted to admirals meaning they are automatically notable the Air Force allows a wider group of people to be added to their site. For example, while she seems to be a senior member of the Air Force management, I don't think this person would automatically be notable. She's also not a general officer and so would not be on List of female United States military generals and flag officers. Thus it's going to be a case-by-case evaluation project though in thinking about it, I could write script that downloads all 4760 biographies and scans them for keywords such as "General."
- I am wondering if Heather Wilson qualifies. While she's not a general officer she's the United States Secretary of the Air Force. Her Air Force bio is here. --Marc Kupper|talk 06:03, 13 August 2018 (UTC)
- I discovered that the Air Force includes the title in the URL. There were 217 biographies that included /general- in the URL with three of them having what looked like women's names.
- General Ellen M. Pawlikowski and Ellen M. Pawlikowski on Wikipedia.
- General Janet C. Wolfenbarger and Janet C. Wolfenbarger on Wikipedia
- General Lori J. Robinson and Lori Robinson on Wikipedia.
- All three women were already listed on List of female United States military generals and flag officers.
- Something else I recalled when looking into this before is that the Navy forces admirals to retire within a year or two. This creates a lot of turnover at that rank. I don't know if the other services have a similar practice.
- As there's a chance I missed a woman's name when perusing the list of names here's the list of 214 Air Force generals for you to take a look to see if I missed any women.
- Here is a similar list of all 662 people that did not have /general in their URLs. It's possible people who are both generals and women are in this list.
- Thanks for replies and all the info. It seems it will take some research to learn if there are differences in branch promotional policies that result in differences in rates of turnover. It will also take quite a bit of digging to find any female general/flag/admiral officers in branches other than the Navy with the available resources. Perhaps a post on the article talk page, as well as WT:MILHIST and maybe even as pages like WT:Women, WT:Women in history, WT:Women in Red, etc. will get some people interested in helping out. If enough people join in, the research and digging needed to update this page could be done quicker and with more results. I've never really posted such proposals before... have you? Also, any more thoughts on all this? Cheers - theWOLFchild 09:25, 13 August 2018 (UTC)
- @Thewolfchild: I have posted on project pages at times. I'm ambivalent about researching the promotion policies for the various services as it's more of a slide into WP:SYNTH. Our work on Wikipedia is supposed to summarize research by others which is then published in WP:RS sources. I believe scanning the biographies of military officers looking for ones that fit into a particular category is on WP:SYNTH's slippery slope. Ideally, we would not do the research ourselves and then publish the findings on Wikipedia. --Marc Kupper|talk 21:05, 13 August 2018 (UTC)
Well, we already have the article, I was just suggesting adding to it. It is a list and likely an incomplete one at this point. Nothing wrong with searching out info to complete the list the best we can. If there's already a published list of female general/flag officers, how would we "summarize" that? (That could lead to a copyvio, unless it's a gov't site). Also, per WP:MILPERSON, basically anyone that has reached general/flag rank is notable. As long as we're just adding their name to an established article list, with either a linked BLP or a cite, there is no SYNTH vio. The point is, the list looks incredibly lopsided as is, and I was just hoping there a way to address that. Either the Navy actually does have way more flag officers than the other branches, in which case it would be helpful to provide info explaining why that is. Or, all the other branches are missing a lot of names and it would good to start adding them. I just asked you about it because of your prior involvement and thought you could help. Anyway, thanks again - theWOLFchild 21:52, 13 August 2018 (UTC)
Kingdom of Voxu
[edit]Hey, I've always thought it was kind of strange that Scipione Amati's "History of the Kingdom of Voxu" was the example picture for Secondary source. Finally decided to go back through the revisions and find where it came from, because I wanted to ask: why did you choose that? I'm not saying it doesn't belong, just seems a little out of left field! — Preceding unsigned comment added by PauloDiCapistrano (talk • contribs) 21:43, 23 April 2019 (UTC)
- @PauloDiCapistrano: My edit to that article was to revert vandalism on 29 July 2016. It appears the edit to add the picture is this one on 20 July 2013 where User:StAnselm used the edit comment "I think this article should have a picture - perhaps a better one can be found, but this is a start"
- I believe the caption can be improved. The book's Italian title is "Historia del regno di Voxu del Giapone". If the intent is to provide a translated title then it's History of the Mutsu Province of Japan. I'm undecided on if it's better to use the Italian title or to translate it for the English Wikipedia when using the work as an example. Maybe both as we should be citing the Italian title as its stated
- Historia del regno di Voxu del Giapone [History of the realm of the Mutsu Province of Japan] (in Italian)
- That format was from {{cite book}}
- Amati, Scipione (1615). Historia del regno di Voxu del Giapone [History of the Mutsu Province of Japan] (in Italian).
- --Marc Kupper|talk 23:09, 23 April 2019 (UTC)
Dopamine
[edit]Is there a particular reason you don’t trust this user? What edits, specifically, on the Dopamine main page did you find to be wrong or incorrect in any way?
I also spent time reorganizing paragraphs to make it the introduction easier to read. As is, it’s messy and jumps around.
My PhD was completed in a lab focused on spinal cord reflex modulation using DA receptor agonists and antagonists. If you don’t want actual experts to edit Wikipedia, I would certainly understand because it’s full of inaccuracies. It would be nice if you came out and said so directly.
I debated attempting to join this community; I can see why so many scientists I know say not to bother. Tracy is here (talk) 19:47, 15 July 2019 (UTC)
- Hello Tracy is here. My only edit to the Dopamine article was this one where I changed "reuptake" to "[[reuptake]]" so that the word, which is a technical term that a lay person is not likely to be familiar with, links to the reuptake article.
- It look like you then did two edits. Another user, Beyond My Ken, reverted the article back to where it was after my edit. That person is the one that used the comment "Frankly, I don't trust ths editor". It looking at your edits I can see why.
- In Wikipedia it's not "what you know" but "what you can show using reliable sources." You may well know a subject area very well but that's only useful for spotting errors and inconsistencies. When you make edits to correct those errors and inconsistencies then they need to be well sourced to reliable sources.
- One suggestion. Make smaller edits over a period of days. That will give others a chance to digest when you are doing. For example, the first part of your first edit corrected
- Old text: It functions as a both a hormone and a neurotransmitter.
- New text: It functions both as a hormone and a neurotransmitter, ...
- That change looks fine had it been done on its own would not have been reverted as you corrected a grammar issue.
- You also added "and plays several important roles in the brain and body" to the same sentence but failed to source that claim to a reliable source. That raised a red flag. If someone claims something is "important" it definitely needs to be supported by a citation. While "important" is not one of the words listed in WP:PEA it's close. I phrase I try to keep in mind when writing and when editing articles is show, don't tell. If something is important then this should be shown rather than flat out claiming it is important.
- In summary. 1) Adding material should be supported by reliable sources. 2) Removing material needs to be done with care. If it's supported by reliable sources then first take it up on the article's talk page on why it should not be in the article. A middle ground is to tag the material.
- Wikipedia also has a help desk that's useful to new editor. I have added a welcome notice to your talk page. It has links to the help desk and other things that are hopefully useful. Wikipedia also has a mentorship program that may be useful. Good luck. --Marc Kupper|talk 21:12, 15 July 2019 (UTC)
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[edit]January 2020
[edit] Please do not add or change content, as you did at Mark William Shaw, without citing a reliable source. Please review the guidelines at Wikipedia:Citing sources and take this opportunity to add references to the article. Thank you. ——SN54129 10:53, 3 January 2020 (UTC)
Disambiguation link notification for February 27
[edit]An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Wake Shield Facility, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Orbital velocity (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver).
(Opt-out instructions.) --DPL bot (talk) 07:57, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
Deleted interwikis
[edit]Hi. Please note that on metawiki I recently removed 5 interwiki links from the interwiki map. 4 of them were linked from User:Marc Kupper/sandbox as part of a list of interwiki links; I removed the uses there. See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Marc_Kupper/sandbox&diff=953041285&oldid=603941349&diffmode=source - I hope that was okay. Thanks, --DannyS712 (talk) 11:38, 25 April 2020 (UTC)
- No problem DannyS712. Thank you for your cleanup efforts. --Marc Kupper|talk 16:02, 25 April 2020 (UTC)
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[edit]May 2021
[edit] Hello, I'm Jeff G.. I wanted to let you know that one or more of your recent contributions to Greylag goose have been undone because they did not appear constructive. If you would like to experiment, please use your sandbox. If you have any questions, you can ask for assistance at the Teahouse. Specifically, this edit. — Jeff G. ツ 13:01, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
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[edit]A barnstar for you!
[edit]![]() |
The Original Barnstar |
Thank you for your years of commitment and service to Wikipedia! SpiralSource (talk) 12:29, 15 March 2022 (UTC) |
Draft:Vesper_(2022_film)
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Hi! I saw your edit on the Vesper redirection page: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vesper&type=revision&diff=1112982740&oldid=1111807071
The movie comes out tomorrow in the US and there's still no article for it. I have a small draft waiting for review, so I'd love some feedback! Thanks in advance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Vesper_(2022_film) Mictateur (talk) 09:58, 29 September 2022 (UTC)
- Thank you Mictateur for creating the draft article. I did some technical cleanup to the draft plus tightened up the wording. Overall, it looks good. --Marc Kupper|talk 18:09, 29 September 2022 (UTC)
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