User talk:Robma
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[edit] Welcome to Wikipedia!
Season's Greetings Robma, welcome to Wikipedia!
I noticed nobody had said hi yet... Hi!
If you feel a change is needed, feel free to make it yourself! Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone (yourself included) can edit any article by following the Edit this page link. Wikipedia convention is to be bold and not be afraid of making mistakes. If you're not sure how editing works, have a look at How to edit a page, or try out the Sandbox to test your editing skills.
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If, for some reason, you are unable to fix a problem yourself, feel free to ask someone else to do it. Wikipedia has a vibrant community of contributors who have a wide range of skills and specialties, and many of them would be glad to help. As well as the wiki community pages there are IRC Channels, where you are more than welcome to ask for assistance.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask me on my talk page. Thanks and happy editing, -- Alf melmac 11:04, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Image removal from William Empson site
OrphanBot took out a chunk of the intro from this site when it removed the image, losing a fair bit of basic info. Might be worth having a look at OrphanBot's approach, as this may be due to some systematic problem which could seriously affect other intros. Also, if you could restore the intro info, that would be great.Thanks. Robma 22:12, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
- OrphanBot does occasionally remove too much when it's taking out a captioned image (maybe one edit in a thousand has this problem), but when it does so, you can find the missing piece inside the HTML comment with the removed image, and whenever OrphanBot thinks it might have removed too much, it logs a message on its talk page. What happened here was that OrphanBot removed the image, then almost two months later, an anon vandalized the intro --Carnildo 02:14, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
[edit] thanks for Ehrman change
Good call on Bart D. Ehrman, even though it's a subtle change... I wish I could notice little things like that more often. --Allen 16:49, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Legoland
Heh - yes, it was very imaginative - almost tempted to leave it. Maybe articles need a "utter nonsense" section? ;)
[edit] Your question
My best advice on that would be to use a sandbox in your own space like User:Robma/Sandbox, you'd be able to make more saves before c/p into the right namespace. --Alf melmac 10:04, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Dumfries and Galloway
Unfortunately I've never been to the place myself, nor Scotland, nor the UK. I live on almost the exact opposite side of the world (New Zealand). I found an enhanced version of this image on wikicommons which has been recently voted as a featured picture. I wanted to see more info about this place and went to wikipedia where I discovered the page had no photos! So I put a non-enhanced version of the featured picture in. (The enhanced version looked too artistic and not realistic enough I thought, but if you're intererested it is: Image:Dalveen Pass from Comb Head-HDR.jpg; also this photographer has a lot of very nice photos of Scotland on Flickr.com) Cheers--Konstable 01:29, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Digital Universe
Hi, Rob, you mentioned Digital Universe. This is probably not a viable alternative, unfortunately. I was interested in this too when I first heard of it, but was immediately appalled when I learned that the principals are Joe Firmage and Bernard Haisch, whose judgement in terms of what constitutes reliable knowledge appear to be questionable. Their wikibios can be unreliable, depending on when you read them (at least one of these has been extensively edited by the subject of his own WP bio, in ways which I believe are misleading and intended to slant the article in his own favor), but for an independent and reliable source, see the extensive information obtained from an interview with Firmage in Joe Firmage, A Master of the Universe at 28, Wants to Defy Gravity and Visit the Far Corners Of His Realm, Joel Achenbach, Washington Post, March 31, 1999. (As you can see, I found this story archived at a controversial anti-cult website run by Rick Ross, but AFAIK, Achenbach's Washington Post article has been accurately transcribed at the Rick Ross website).
"Autohagiography": this brings up another irony: I caught Haisch adding links to his own book to many existing articles and also editing articles about this fringe theories as an anon (from the dsl.pltn13.pacbell.net domain in the Bay Area, where he resides), and he wasn't very happy with me for "outing" him. In a message which he left on my user talk page (after he created a user account, Haisch (talk • contribs), apparently in response to my urging him to do that), he wrote
Make no mistake about it. Wikipedia has tremendous influence, and that is precisely why must be both accurate and fair. The Wikipedia is perceived as no mere gossip sheet. Your words could deprive my organization of a million dollar grant because of your implicit judgment of my scientific career.
—Bernard Haisch
In other words, Haisch admits to having a sizable financial incentive to slant Wikipedia articles in his own favor, and he claimed the right to do just that. IOW, according to Haisch, his own personal agenda is more important than the needs of the readers of Wikipedia. This attitude suggests that Haisch is not to be trusted to run Digital Universe wisely, since he cannot be expected to act to serve the best interests of its readers whenever this conflicts with his personal agenda.
Check out Haisch's reputation for fringe publications in places like Journal of Scientific Exploration, a journal which he edited for some years. (The article JSE has also been "sanitized" at times by Haisch to make it appear mainstream, but a glance at the contents of any issue should quickly disabuse you of that impression! Typical issues contain articles allegeding to "scientifically prove the existence of the afterlife", or the Yeti, or ghosts, or UFOs... things like that.).
At this time, I know of no viable encyclopedia project which is comparable to the Wikipedia.---CH 21:26, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
