User talk:Hcberkowitz

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[edit] Target-Centric Approach to Intelligence

Hello again! Thank you for your advice! Someone suggested to me that I change the name of my article to Intelligence cycle (target-centric approach). So, I did that. I'm not sure that the protocol is for starting and leaving a wiki page. My advisor thinks this topic would be better suited under the intel. cycle heading.


Hello! I appreciate your assistance with this wikipedia page! I understand that it sounds like an advertisement, but I am doing my best to make it an unbiased report on this terminology. I have found little information about the term on the web so I am forced to rely largely on the book. I do not intend for it to be an advertisement, and I certainly have no benefit to sell this book! I am writing the article for an assignment, and am doing the best that I can with the given body of knowledge. Please do not delete it, as I will make changes as quickly as I am able to make it clearer. The difficulty is that we are taught about the benefits of using this methodology, and it is presented as having improvements on the older methodologies, so it is difficult to write about it without stating the method's strengths.

[edit] Sentence fragments in Soviet support for Iran during the Iran-Iraq war

Hi Howard,

A few odd sentences in the article, I won't try to fix them because I don't know what's missing:

  • "In 1981, a Defense Industries Organization of the Ministry of Defense."
  • "Motivations need to be understood in the context of the time of the Iran-Iraq War, between 1980 and 1988, in which the Soviet Union and the Cold War were still vary real. he revolution that overthrew him resented what they considered U.S. support of an unpopular ruler."

[edit] Snipers gone wild

Hi Howard,

Just wondered if you had any thoughts on this article. (If you press on the link it will throw up an ad but will allow you to go in for free after a few seconds with button on top left.) Alternatively (no ads):

Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 04:50, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Distance in military affairs

Well, in it's state at the moment, I don't think it should stay - maybe be recreated by someone else later with a more coherent subject. Would you second a Prod if I put one on it? Also, do you have a contributions log at Citizendium? Scratch that, I've found you there - and you're making me think about signing up myself. Cheers Buckshot06(prof) 21:37, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Howard, I'd like to wind CIA activities in Democratic Republic of the Congo into Congo Crisis; without anything except the assassination thing in the early 1960s, it is a bit of an isolated piece there that would have more value as part of the bigger article. How does that sound?(and would you second a prod for the distance article?) Kind regards Buckshot06(prof) 04:58, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] NOIWON

I thought I had most US intelligence/military acronyms down pat, but that one was new for me. Would you mind pointing me at what you think the best two or three sources on it are? (new article coming on, I think!) Regards Buckshot06(prof) 10:41, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

"NOIWON is a secure telephone conference-call system that the major Washington national security watch centers (National Military Command Center, National Military Joint Intelligence Center, State Department Operations Center, State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research, CIA Operations Center, NSA Operations Center, and the Situation Room) use for rapid evaluation of breaking crises." Intelligence inside the White House. Erxnmedia (talk) 14:24, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Uh...hello

I'm an editor who took a long hiatus and saw your name on someone elses talk page. I knew a Howard Berkowitz as a young teen. You wouldn't happen to be from Illinois, would you? --NinaOdell | Talk 14:05, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

No, born and brought up in New Jersey, and then in the Washington DC area for the next 40 years or so. In the small world department, there was, while I was a biochemistry technician at Georgetown University, there was a medical student of the same name -- we were constantly getting confused. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 16:04, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] New page for MILHIST copy-editors

The coordinators have decided to make it easier for copy-editors to watch the new requests by creating an own page for this purpose. On Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Logistics/Copy-editing/Requests all new and old requests are listed. Please add this page to your watchlist. Wandalstouring (talk) 11:50, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Ennui

I was very sorry to discover that you're close to having your dose. May I ask a favour and perhaps suggest a solution that will help keep a trusted and valued editor on board? Perhaps you could take a furlough from the firing line and concentrate on copy-editing? We are desperately short of copy-editors and we have many article which need a helping hand. I find there's something very stimulating and immensely rewarded about shaping a better article out of the shards. I suppose it's akin to what Michelangelo was talking about when he said that there was a statue within every piece of marble and that all you had to do was to strip away the layers to release it :) --ROGER DAVIES talk 19:15, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

I appreciate the thought, but that's not going to do it. Not too long ago, I realized something: I am absolutely uninterested in tuning my, or anyone else's article to meet the various Wiki standards. Indeed, I don't like some of the "Pillars" and such; if all my articles were suddenly FA, it would make absolutely no difference to me. The scholarship interests me, but, while I am not burning any bridges, I'm doing more and more at another venue where people have consciously chosen not to follow some of Wikipedia's axioms.
These days, when I look at my watchlist, I mostly see vandalism to fix. I see things like the radical changes in CIA article structure. WP:SYNTH really bothers me, and I am bothered by not being able to make use of my own expertise if I can't find secondary sources to document things that I may literally have designed. In other words, whether it's my inability to imagine, I'm more and more seeing Wikipedia as place that does nothing but editing--putting together articles out of secondary sources is, to me, a mechanical editing task. I'm tired of the drive-by article-wide complaints that an article isn't "encyclopedic", but with no substantive feedback; I can't conceive of why anons should be able to do such tagging when there is no way to interact with them.
So, if you define copyediting as helping an author articulate an argument, that's one thing. If it's moving articles closer to the WP stylistic criteria for higher levels, I'm not motivated to do that. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 20:02, 17 May 2008 (UTC)
As a followup, 101 "CIA in Country X" are now off my watchlist. Am I proud of that? Not necessarily. But it is a relief to choose, consciously, to pay no further attention to the result of a change I consider unworkable, done with no consensus, and with a set of "rules" agreed-to only by their creator. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 20:30, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Smile

MBisanz talk has smiled at you! Smiles promote WikiLove and hopefully this one has made your day better. Spread the WikiLove by smiling at someone else, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past or a good friend. Cheers, and happy editing!
Smile at others by adding {{subst:Smile}} to their talk page with a friendly message.

[edit] Gulf of Tonkin

See section "Gulf of Tonkin Incident" on fourth page of this article. Erxnmedia (talk) 15:45, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Your assessment requested

Hi Howard. I was wondering if you would be so kind as to assess the referencing in the article Budapest Offensive, with particular attention to the reference used to claim the operation was a joint operation.

On the more amusing side of the military history which I know you enjoy, below is, what must be the most unlikely source for naming a military operation courtesy of David Glantz, and one that has been often repeated by other authors over 25 years without so much as a question raised.

Dear Greg:

As my family and I sat around the table eating dinner one night, we were trying to come up with a "catchy" title for my Leavenworth Paper on the Manchurian offensive. My younger daughter, Susie, 11 years old at the time, asked, "Didn't the Soviets conduct their initial attacks during heavy thundershowers and rain?" Why don't you title the book, "August Storm," and so I did. Strangely enough, by now most Western sources (the Oxford Historical Atlas, for example) and some Russian books now assume that was the actual code-name for the operation. As far as I know, it was not. But that is how myths and errors are born.

You are the first (original bolding) to know that bit of historical trivia, simply because you are the first to ask that question.

All the best,

David

--mrg3105 (comms) ♠♥♦♣ 01:11, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Intelligence

I can relate first and foremost to your lament about the lack of a critical mass on extremely salient and essential topics while editors generate ever more tripe about video games and TV shows. This is certainly the case on many of the prominent university articles when I've made some admittedly dramatic or controversial changes without so much as a peep most of the time. I wrote the whole of Technological and industrial history of the United States intentionally leaving the more recent sections uncompleted to encourage collaboration, but it has remained completely stagnant but for a miscellaneous correction or random vandalism for the past 15 months.

But to your point of contradictions, I would assert that the innate intricacies and complexities of "pure" scientific processes and concepts (transesterification, et al) escape the "jargon" classification because they're non-human processes and agents - it would be silly to analogize or anthropomorphize them. I have no intuition from the outset about how socially-constructed scientific abstractions affect other abstractions. However, intelligence gathering is a human activity and despite the professional tendency to engage in systemization and abstraction, people have natural intuitions about social organizations and interactions and they import these cognitive structures/biases to their reading of the article. I can describe the kinship relations of aboriginal tribes on remote Pacific Islands, but there is a latent or universal understanding that every society requires biological parents, ruling elite(s), etc. When I read something like Intelligence cycle management, I found few landmarks around which to re-calibrate my view (whether it is accurate or not) of how the intelligence community operates. Instead there is an abundance of semi-synthesized information involving acronyms, authors, and flow-charts that I couldn't integrate with my naive intuitions. I'm a bit swamped at the moment, but this weekend I'll sandbox my thinking on improving the flow by emphasizing initial "accessibility" and explicitness of the model initially and then shifting to concise, but specific and nuanced cases and historical instances of failure types. Madcoverboy (talk) 05:01, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Library of Congress on CZ

This is a {{cn}} tag. No, it really is! Would you mind referencing the statement that the Library of Congress is the largest library in the world? Sure the British Library or something in Moscow isn't bigger? Best regards, Buckshot06(prof) 06:51, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

No worries. What are the five largest libraries then? Buckshot06(prof) 22:21, 24 May 2008 (UTC)
CZ also: check the China part of the CIA transnational proliferation article. Seems to be just two repeated sentences which doesn't actually say much. Cheers Buckshot06(prof) 05:09, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Length of articles

Hi there. I just noticed your contributions, and let me first say how impressed I am - I'm in awe of how much content you've added to Wikipedia. When most of our editors (myself included) are more concerned with making minor edits than expanding articles, we need all the people like you we can get. However, there is one point I want to raise with you - the length of some of those articles. The cost of writing a long and detailed article on a subject is that it can be very slow to load and edit, which is a problem for users on slower Internet connections; typically, long articles are split into two or more smaller articles that link to each other, for ease of reading and editing.

There are no strict rules or limits on how long an article should be, but Wikipedia:Article size provides some guidelines: an article over 60KB in length should probably be divided (although such an article can be justified if it is on a topic with extremely broad scope), and one around 100KB or more should almost certainly be divided. I have added the template {{Toolong}} to a few of your articles I feel are close to or stretching those limits. No offence is intended, and I would never go as far as to delete any of your content to reduce them in size; that would be seriously uncivil. I only want to bring them to your attention, and suggest that you consider splitting some of them into smaller sub-articles, where appropriate.

As an example, Counter-intelligence is currently 91KB long; while a long article is appropriate here, as it covers a very broad topic, it would nonetheless be better if some of it could be split into smaller articles. Take a look, and see what you think. It's up to you; if you disagree, feel free to remove my templates and leave the articles as they are. Thanks for reading. Terraxos (talk) 23:25, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply. In that case, I'll leave your articles alone for the time being, but I may come back to edit them later. I understand your feelings about Citizendium: from what I've seen of it, it's superior to Wikipedia in many ways, and I think it has the potential to become just as successful. To be honest, the only reason I edit here instead of there is because Wikipedia's articles are much more in need of cleanup. Good luck with your editing there, and thanks again for your contributions. Terraxos (talk) 02:06, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] The Military history WikiProject Newsletter : Issue XXVII (May 2008)

The Military history WikiProject Newsletter
Issue XXVII (May 2008)
Project news
  • Editors needed for Tag & Assess 2008. To coincide with the summer holidays, it will be gearing up from 15 June. As usual, barnstars galore!
  • Partner peer reviews: for a thirty-day trial period, we'll be running joint peer reviews with Wikiproject Video Games. The idea is simple: we help with their reviews; they help with ours. This way both wikiprojects benefit from new reviewers and new ideas!
  • We're notable: A new book, Simon Fowler's 2007 Guide to Military History on the Internet (UK:Pen & Sword, ISBN 9781844156061) rates Wikipedia as "the best general resource" for military research (p. 7). Of the military pages, he says: "The results are largely accurate and generally free of bias" (he also suggests people join the wikiproject). When rating WP as the No. 1 military site (p. 201) he says "Wikipedia is often criticised for its inaccuracy and bias, but in my experience the military history articles are spot on."
  • A-Class reviews: the usual four-day review period may now be extended by up to three days (ie seven days in total) in the following circumstances:
  1. the article has no opposes but has insufficient support for promotion or
  2. the article's nominator requests more time to resolve matters arising during the review.
The full text is here.
Articles of note

New featured articles:

  1. Battle of Tassafaronga
  2. Funerary Monument to Sir John Hawkwood
  3. HMS Cardiff (D108)
  4. Krulak Mendenhall mission
  5. Le Quang Tung
  6. Operation Passage to Freedom
  7. Paul Nobuo Tatsuguchi

New featured lists:

  1. List of Texan survivors of the Battle of the Alamo
  2. List of Victoria Cross recipients of the Royal Navy
  3. List of Victoria Cross recipients of the Indian Army

New A-Class articles:

  1. Battle of the Kalka River
  2. Battle of Verrières Ridge
  3. Brian Horrocks
  4. Byzantine navy
  5. Erich Hartmann
  6. Montana class battleship
Current proposals and discussions
  • A discussion has been opened into the structuring of top level operational categories, starting with Category:World War II. All interested editors are invited to help establish a consensus.
Awards and honors

To stop receiving this newsletter, or to receive it in a different format, please list yourself in the appropriate section here.

This has been an automated delivery by BrownBot (talk) 23:35, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Can you answer a quick question for me please?

I read on the IP addresses discussion that you have extensive experience of IP address stuff and I was hoping you could tell me if I should be worried about the fact that my IP address ends with a "0", so it is like 33.44.55.0 for example? I'm sure you are very busy, but please can you tell me if it is a security problem? My connection is cable broadband with Virgin Media if that helps (I know people hate Virgin Media, but please don't let that turn you off answering!) Thank-you if you can help. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.3.145.0 (talk) 18:30, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

There's no inherent reason that won't work. The number is evaluated internally as a 32 bit binary; the Internet doesn't care about decimal octets. Howard C. Berkowitz (talk) 22:45, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Citizendium

I've read your note at Folantin space. I appreciate Citizendium "peace and quiet", but I consider it an "ivory tower retreat" - a place to rest, but pointless for work. Almost nobody reads it (compared to Wikipedia), and as much as trolls and idiots annoy me here, I know that effort I put into creating or improving articles will not be wasted. I could write content for Citizendium, with 1% of stress I get from editing Wikipedia - but why waste my time writing for a website few will read? I could as well go back to playing computer games for recreation, or edit non-Wikipedia wikis about game or fiction, without deluding myself that I am doing something useful. In the end, Wikipedia is the frontline: its not easy to be here, but one's impact can be much larger than that of a civilian living behind the lines. :> I hope you don't mind my 2 cents... --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 14:30, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

I completely agree that Wikipedia peer review, well, sucks. But what can we expect when majority of the reviewers are not academic? They try their best, and if their best is a 15-year old high student best, well, that's the world of encyclopedia for everybody, by everybody.
The issue stems from the idea that "all editors are equal". Bullproduct, but the fact that experts or scholars can be freely harassed by anonymous trolls is indeed a problem. That, however, will not be fixed by itself. We can only work within the system to reform it - hence I suggested on Folantin's page a new protection level for pages that could be edited only by verified, non-anonymous experts.
The fact remains that when people look for info, they increasingly look to Wikipedia. People are lazy. We can criticize it and hide in the ivory towers, or come down, face the flames, and try to do some good in the wiki world. And as I wrote above, certainly, I think that we need to increase the position of non-anonymous editors and experts, and weaken that of the anonymous trolls.
How to do so, exactly? Write, complain, hope for a miracle :) Hard to say, seriously, when we still don't understand so many things about the wiki world. I would like in the future to write a scholarly article about why editors become disappointed with Wikipedia and leave it. Perhaps such an article would be of some use. For now, however, I am busy working on other articles, my PhD (and I am not even thinking about the next year or so when I'll have to consider looking for jobs... I hope there will be growing demand for sociologists of the 'net :). PS. Would you mind if I were to create an article on this subject? Seems notable :) --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 19:33, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
By all means feel free to email me. I do agree that some non-academics - or academics outside their discipline - can be good experts, certainly. Also, consider the "truth vs. verifiability" discussion: if it is not easy to distinguish an expert from a quack, we have to stick to verifiability, even if we have to give up on the occasional morsel of truth. It's not perfect, but how can it be improved? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 20:29, 10 June 2008 (UTC)