User talk:ErkDemon

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[edit] World Landmarks

(For a start it should be World landmarks). What is the category based on? Is it original research on your part, or is the category the subject of a verifiable 3rd party source? If the former than it will be deleted, if the latter you should probably have that in the category, such as XXXX's world landmarks. --Steve (Stephen) talk 07:45, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

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Well, you caught me just as I was finalising the inclusion criteria. I'd also got half-way through drafting a list of things for the discussion page, it was going to be a "community consensus" project, with a core of no-brainer inclusions (Empire State, Statue of Liberty, Parthenon, etc.,) and then we'd all get together and thrash out what else ought to be added or deleted further down the list). Landmarks are defined by visibility and distinctiveness ... it helps if they are big, exposed and architecturally unusual. Fame also helps. Perhaps Notre Dame shouldn't be in there ("plus points" for fame, "minus points" for cathedrals all looking a bit similar), but that was one of the topics that was going to be discussed, along with whether natural formations like the Grand Canyon should count.

I thought it was going to be a fun project, an interesting and useful category working entirely to a Wiki consensus (After I'd kicked things off) and I couldn't understand why it didn't already exist ... and then a few hours after the first link, I get a post telling me that the category must correspond to an existing third-party list, or "it will be deleted". There's an official Wiki rule that says that the provision of content is supposed to take precedence over legalistic arguments Wikipedia:Product_over_process WP:IAR Wikipedia:Ignore all rules " If the rules prevent you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore them. See Also

   * meta:Don't be a dick
   * Wikipedia:Use common sense
   * Wikipedia:Consensus
   * Wikipedia:Be bold
   * Wikipedia:Trifecta  "

, so this seemed to me to be okay.

You know, the "Wikipedia is not a Bureaucracy" thing.

But if deletist rule-monkeys are going to be already be warning of impending deletion before the category's page has even been finished, then really, it's not worth contributing, is it? I'm off to spend my time on something more rewarding. Deleting. ErkDemon 09:48, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

To be honest, I think your proposed category would overlap the existing Category:World Heritage Sites, which covers much the same ground but in a more verifiable way. -- ChrisO 10:46, 28 April 2007 (UTC)
Except that when you think of the high-profile architectural landmarks built in the last century that everyone would probably agree ought to be at the core of a "world landmarks" list -- the Empire State Building, the Eiffel Tower, the Sydney Opera House -- the instantly-recognisable cliches, the sorts of things that get drawn on world maps meant for kids, or destroyed in movies like "Independence Day" -- if it's less than 200 years old it probably won't be on the World Heritage list. That'll give the Pyramids and the Acropolis and a bunch of cathedrals, plus about 800 things that you've never heard of or wouldn't recognise, but it won't give modern icons like, say, the World Trade Centre (RIP). The Statue of Liberty manages to get listed, but that's all there is for New York.
Adopting the WH list, you'd tend to think that the only culturally important sites in North America are the University of Virginia (?) Independence Hall (?), a whole bunch of national parks and one statue. Everything else there is too new to be on their list. ErkDemon 13:27, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Cold fusion

Hello ErkDemon. I'm sorry I did not have the time to read your contributions in details. I'm sure that there are some fine points that are valuable. I thought it was best to revert everything because of the major issues I highlighted. I encourage you to continue to contribute to this article to make it better. Pcarbonn 11:37, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Unspecified source for Image:QuantumGravity_logo.png

Thanks for uploading Image:QuantumGravity_logo.png. I noticed that the file's description page currently doesn't specify who created the content, so the copyright status is unclear. If you did not create this file yourself, then you will need to specify the owner of the copyright. If you obtained it from a website, then a link to the website from which it was taken, together with a restatement of that website's terms of use of its content, is usually sufficient information. However, if the copyright holder is different from the website's publisher, then their copyright should also be acknowledged.

As well as adding the source, please add a proper copyright licensing tag if the file doesn't have one already. If you created/took the picture, audio, or video then the {{GFDL-self}} tag can be used to release it under the GFDL. If you believe the media meets the criteria at Wikipedia:Fair use, use a tag such as {{non-free fair use in|article name}} or one of the other tags listed at Wikipedia:Image copyright tags#Fair use. See Wikipedia:Image copyright tags for the full list of copyright tags that you can use.

If you have uploaded other files, consider checking that you have specified their source and tagged them, too. You can find a list of files you have uploaded by following this link. Unsourced and untagged images may be deleted one week after they have been tagged, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If the image is copyrighted under a non-free license (per Wikipedia:Fair use) then the image will be deleted 48 hours after 21:53, 28 October 2007 (UTC). If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you. -- RG2 21:53, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

I created the image myself, and thought that I'd selected the GFDL licence to reflect that. There was also a copyright tag embedded in the image, in the file's "info" field. But it's deleted now. Oh well, never mind.

[edit] AfD nomination of Observerspace

An article that you have been involved in editing, Observerspace, has been listed for deletion. If you are interested in the deletion discussion, please participate by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Observerspace. Thank you. MortimerCat (talk) 09:51, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the "heads-up", MortimerCat! Unfortunately I seem not to have logged in for a few months, so I missed it.
For the record, the term shows up under Google Scholar and Google books as "observer space" (two words), which would have been the proper WikiPedia title. I've mostly seen the term used in discussions of strongly-curved spacetime, where we'd expect a difference between the perceived shape of spacetime and the calculated underlying shape. It gets mentioned, for instance, in the context of applying optical metrics to black hole problems. The "Google Scholar" and "Google Books" results support the idea that the term gets used in philosophy, psychology, art ... just about any field that deals with perception and analysis.
The lack of references in the article was a problem, as was the accidental neologism of compacting "observer space" or "observer-space" into one word, when it should have been two, but the afd voters who thought that this was new term obviously didn't have a proper background in the subject(s) covered, or else they'd have already have come across it. The article could have benefited from some judicious editing, but total deletion was a bit unfortunate.


There's still a lot of material in print that someone with a specialist degree-level education will know about, but which doesn't yet appear in the standard search-engine indexes or in all the recent online abstracts. For instance, as one of the afd voters correctly pointed out, "observer space/observerspace" gives zero hits under SPIRES-HEP ... but that doesn't mean that the term doesn't exist, because if they'd tried Google Books or Google Scholar (which are both fairly recent innovations), they'd have found about ~480 and ~350 hits respectively, even though those projects are still "works in progress" (it's going to take a while for Google Books to scan and index the entire contents of our major libraries). Some of the hits will be artefacts, but if you page through some of the results, you'll see lots of hits that refer to philosophy, mathematical physics and psychology, with some older works on relativity theory and philosophy, and a bit of computer modelling and visual perception analysis thrown in for good measure.
The afd comment about "positivism" would have been valid within the context of pure philosophy, but would be rather less valid in some of the other contexts in which people find the term "observer space" useful. I don't think that many mathematicians working on black hole optics would appreciate being told that they should be using language "owned" by the philosophy department down the hall!
I think that perhaps some editors on Wiki should consider spending less time in front of a computer monitor editing articles and more time down their library actually reading books, or should at least try to limit their edits to subjects where they have a significant amount of personal knowledge, otherwise Wikipedia risks becoming a dumbed-down "best of the web" compilation, where the criteria for inclusion becomes the existence of existing webpages on a subject for Wikipedia to plagiarise. ErkDemon (talk) 02:55, 19 May 2008 (UTC)
Actually, while we're on the subject of black hole math, where's Wikipedia's article on optical metrics? I could have sworn that it had one. Maybe that got deleted too, who knows. I could start one, but if I do it some bozo is liable to type "optical metric" into Spires-HEP, get zero hits, and decide that that means that that subject isn't real, and needs to be deleted, too. Ho hum.
This is why I don't contribute articles to Wikipedia any more. Too many "deletionists" who don't appreciate the shortcomings of their own general knowledge. As long as the deletionist hordes don't delete the article on acoustic metrics ... ErkDemon (talk) 03:28, 19 May 2008 (UTC)