User talk:Wile E. Heresiarch
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Hello Wikipedians, feel free to scribble something here. Wile E. Heresiarch 16:03, 1 Jan 2004 (UTC)
I'm apparently around occasionally. Wile E. Heresiarch 16:25, 18 June 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Marc Fest
Wile,
I did some work on Marc Fest this morning including some writting and referencing. I'm not the original author, but I saw some merit here when I found it at AfD. I think that we have enough to demonstrate notablility now, but my standards may be beneath yours. I'd like your feedback on what is needed to make this a keeper.
Cheers!
Kevin
--Kevin Murray 17:58, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
[edit] A better outcome
Wile,
I see from your user page that you are burned out; I was sad to see that last night when I read your page on the way to leave you a note. I also visited Graham's page and read through a bit of his historic text; I was moved. I'm sorry to see that happen to dedicated wikipedians.
We probably don't share a precise perception of how WP should be, but I share your concern about vanity spam, unsupportable promotion, and other garbage. However, I do believe in the basic WP standards for notability and will work hard to protect those standards to build a more interesting encyclopedia here. I think that there is a reactionary backlash and overprotective aspect at work here and many participants in AfD are not looking beyond the obvious. I seek to counter that trend and ask people to think a bit more.
I became involved in AfD because I lost a few truly meaningful articles to thoughtless AfD's, where my logic was suspect since I was "defending" an article. Truly mindless lemming behavior was at work. I was furious! However, I am calmer now and understand the value behind the AfD after seeing the endless march of crap that is submitted each day. AfD is hard work.
In each article I have supported I saw genuine notability by the definition that the person is being noticed in more than a trivial way. I also look for a likelihood that someone might be wondering who that person is, and that at WP we can offer a balanced and objective answer to those questions. I try to work equally hard regardless of my persaonl feelings about the subject matter -- if it is notable.
Where is the tragedy if a few spam vanity article slip through?
One thing that I don't want to do is encourage more garbage being submitted, so to that end I would like to be more careful. And perhaps you will be there to let me know if I'm too far off base.
I hope that we can work together to make a better Wikipedia for the future.
Cheers!
Kevin --Kevin Murray 15:48, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
Please come back to fix the (I think) typo in the last equation in the Metropolis-Hastings article! x^t should appear as the reject alternative, I think (I'm trying to learn this stuff).
CS
Hi. I added the Shawn Lovelett page that you deleted. What validation is necessary for the page to exist? Masticore317 12:40, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Generating ancient maps
Hi there, I read your really old WP talk page discussion about using GMT to plot ancient places. This is an endeavor I'm particularly interested in, at the moment (in fact, for the last several years). I'm a member of the slow moving Historical Atlas project. It's my/our hope to have a program we can use to generate maps of ancient places, with an aim towards animation (as long as the computer is generating a map, why not generate a series of maps?). The whole thing is still in the infancy stage, but I've been using Python and GMT to do some trial and error type of programming, to see what's possible.
There is a lot that's possible, just like it's possible to find a statue of David in a big boulder, if you only dig and chisel in just the right spots. I'm not as familiar with GMT as I should be, so I would ask for your tips and tricks (and scripts, if you feel like sharing them). I'm really good with the basics of pscoast, and I'm beginning to get good at using psxy, but that's about it. I would like to learn how to take a topo-dataset and overlay it on a GMT plot (I don't know how, or when, to use grd2raster, or raster2grd, or something like that). Another Wikipedian, User:Captain Blood, made a tutorial for creating topographic maps in GMT, but I ran into errors, and he hasn't responded to my comment.
I don't know if you still care about maps, but you were right in imagining people (like me) would want to see a map showing the relative locations of two or three ancient cities/regions who were lucky enough to have their territorial campaigns recorded in some fashion to be reiterated on Wikipedia. You were right in expecting people to collect long/lat coords for this project (I'm still working on the underlying program structure before I can start deciding how the data will be formatted on the hard disk).
Actually, I'm hoping to write a Python script that will read pre-existing images and report on it's findings, allowing a user to select from several points and regions, attach a name/label to the area, and integrate the new data into a database used to produce the animation frames. If this sounds like a good idea to you (or if it just sounds like part of a good idea), leave some comments somewhere, maybe you'll start a new series of brain storms. Xaxafrad 03:36, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
