User talk:Margareta

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Margareta is currently busy in real life and may not respond swiftly to queries.

[edit] Welcome to the Wikipedia

Welcome, Margareta!

Here are some useful tips to ease you into the Wikipedia experience:

First, take a look at the Wikipedia Tutorial, and perhaps dabble a bit in the test area.
When you have some free time, take a look at the Manual of Style and Policies and Guidelines. They can come in very handy!
Learn about some of the Wikipedia landmarks by trying our Wikipedia scavenger hunt!
If you need any help, feel free to post a question at the Help Desk
Wikipedia has a vibrant community of editors. The village pump is a great place to see the goings on.
Remember to use a neutral point of view!
Explore, be bold in editing pages, and, most importantly, have fun!

Also, here are some odds and ends that I find useful from time to time:

Feel free to ask me anything the links and talk pages don't answer. You can most easily reach me by posting on my talk page.

You can sign your name on any page by typing 4 tildes, likes this: Guy (Help!) 18:34, 26 April 2008 (UTC).

Best of luck, and have fun! – Clockwork Soul 21:53, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

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[edit] Re: Question about OR and using a Master's thesis

You're deleting that message was an "oh, jeez" moment for me. I completely forgot that you had posted it, and I apologize for not getting back to you much sooner. To answer your query, you can use any material that is referencable, that is, has been published and is open to peer review, even if your name is on it. As for quoting text from it, that's a no-no, because even if you own the copyright, posting text from it violates the GNU license that Wikipedia uses. I apologize again, and if I can be of any more help, please let me know. – Clockwork Soul 19:20, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Changing a username

Hi, Margareta. You can read all about the procedure at Wikipedia:Changing username. Just a heads up: the procedure is still imperfect, so be sure that you follow the directions exactly. Good luck! – Clockwork Soul 14:49, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Sea urchin colours

To be fair, the picture given is kind of tealish. Probably an innocent enough edit, given teal's really just a shade of green, which was already listed. Vanished user ^talk 05:51, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Evolution vs. Natural Selection

I'd be inclined to get the main point (natural selection) across first, in clear terms, then add in the confounding factors of genetic drift and the founder effect. How about "In biology, evolution refers to the processes that cause some inherited traits to become more common relative to others from generation to generation." - that's probably the simplest, most accurate phrasing I can think of. Vanished user ^talk 03:22, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

I've had a go at a new, much longer, but accurate first paragraph, spinning off all higher-level stuff to the next two. See what ye think! Should we make a subpage to work on it in? Vanished user ^talk 03:44, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

First, evolution is not versus natural selection. Natural selection is a process of evolution. Second, evolution does not always, nor consistently, result in "inherited traits becoming more common relative to others from generation to generation." If this were true, then evolution would eventually stop when all those common traits were acquired and reached. Third, genetic drift and founder effects are not "confounding factors," they are enrichening explanatory factors. The article on evolution needs to be enrichening, fulfilling, inclusive, intriquing and progressive and up-to-date in scope. This is important to Wikipedia's purpose of being at the frontiers of science, and bold, yet accurate, in scope. In the intro, the phrase, "While most species do have a common ancestor..." should be linked to the Common ancestor article, while the phrase "descended from a common ancestor" should be linked to the last common ancestor article. Valich 04:48, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Wow, Valich, this discussion is so last year!--Margareta 05:49, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Evolution Introduction

The edit page is at Talk:Evolution/Introduction - it does look like we'll be facing some opposition, but I think, once it's done, we'll be able to get it pushed through, provided we're careful and accurate, and make sure it's simple to understand. Vanished user ^talk 12:40, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

So which of the versions do you like? Or none? On my comparison page at Talk:Evolution/LeadComparison

Margareta, do you ahve any ideas for how to smoothly work in Common descent into C1? It's an important biological concept, but I just can't fit it in today.

Who knows? I can barely keep up =) Vanished user ^talk 22:57, 16 December 2006 (UTC) I really appreciate all your efforts on trying to make the lead as clear as possible on evolution. Thanks for the barnstar as well !!--Filll 05:36, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Evolution

I really appreciate your thoughtful discourse into the whole idea of falsifiability. I think that it has allowed us to write an article on the subject, which will help people understand what is and is not science.OrangeMarlin 22:02, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Comments

Margareta, let me know which specific comments of mine you think should be deleted. You can mail links to me at msm30@yahoo.com 65.73.44.65 03:44, 26 December 2006 (UTC) Vacous Poet

[edit] Conservation biology

Adding it to my watchlist, will help out as best I can. Vanished user ^talk 21:29, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Yep, I've been delinquent. I'll delve into it, but can you outline any specific disagreements the two of you have had? Thanks. Guettarda 22:59, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

So how did Catherine Lindell end up on your committee? Guettarda 23:02, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

I knew her a few years ago when I was at Michigan State. Guettarda 01:45, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] POTY 2006

In your diff link, please refer to the IP address under which your vote was done - Alvesgaspar 22:55, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

You are right and we apologize. There was a mistake in the guide, which is fixed now. But no vote will be disregarded only for that reason. Alvesgaspar 22:51, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Prokaryotes vs. Single-celled

Well, they aren't actually the same thing... some Eukaryotes are single-celled as well, but a single Eukaryote cell is something like a collection of several prokaryotes. user/daftsod/series.php?view=archive&chapter=15764 See here for a shortish comic on the subject. On the other hand, the extra information conveyed by "prokaryotic" isn't directly relevant, so... use your judgement. =) Vanished user ^talk 17:08, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Hmm. Actually, I've just reverted the reduction to "or a pool of gene-swapping prokaryotes" - there was a lot of cutting of definitions and the creation of various other problems. And, let's face it, we can't easily cover common descent in a sentence anyway, at least not well. Vanished user ^talk 17:30, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Evolution lead refs

In reality, I suspect half the refs in Evolution's lead are vestiges: The revisions to the lead have added some refs, but I don't think they've ever been removed, so you end up with all the refs ever used in the lead in one big awkward mess. Still, they're useful cites for the Gene flow section, which is terribly undercited still. Vanished user ^talk 17:50, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

He did? Well, about time someone did. Aye, sure, but I can't guarantee fast response. Vanished user ^talk 18:29, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

I tried to clean up all of the refs in Evolution. I actually read each one (well there were some books to which I had no accesss, but I tried to find the relevant sections referenced in other articles). I know I didn't catch them all, I tried to find better ones, etc. I think a lot of references were placed there, and no one actually tried to read them. I found one reference actually downloaded some junk (maybe a virus, but I blocked it). Anyways, I appreciate that Margareta is trying to clean up some of those references. Writing the author is always a good way to do it!!! So thanks!!!! Orangemarlin 05:38, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Chicken soup

Just what the doctor ordered. Thanks. Orangemarlin 20:52, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Indels???

Hello Margareta. Thank you for your efforts to enlighten us about Valich's arguments concerning the rRNA tree. Indels are slang for insertion and deletion mutations. I get lazy too so I provided the abstract for a quick read. I thought this article was an interesting strategy to address HGT concerns. "Insertion and deletion (indel)-based analyses have great potential for rooting the tree of life, but their use has been limited because they require ubiquitous sequences that have not been horizontally/laterally transferred. Very few such sequences exist. Here we describe and demonstrate a new algorithm that can use nonubiquitous sequences for rooting. This algorithm, top-down indel rooting, uses the traditional logical framework of indel rooting, but by considering gene gains and losses in addition to indel gains and losses, it is able to analyze incomplete data sets. The method is demonstrated using theoretical examples and incomplete gene sets. In particular, it is applied to the well-studied Hsp70/MreB indel, a sequence set thought to have been compromised by gene transfers from Firmicutes to archaebacteria. By sequentially assigning all observable character states, including gene absences, to the questionable archaebacterial Hsp70 and MreB sequences, we demonstrate that this gene set robustly excludes the root of the tree of life from the Gram-negative, double-membrane prokaryotes independently of the archaeal character states. There are very few ubiquitous paralog gene sets, and most of them contain compromised data. The ability of top-down rooting to use incomplete and/or compromised gene sets promises to make rooting analyses more robust and to greatly increase the number of useful indel sets." Regards.GetAgrippa 21:34, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Re: Evolution lead edits

Silly misunderstanding

The following is an archived debate. Please do not modify it.

Hi Margareta... not sure how to send you a message, except like this. Thanks for your reply about my edits to the evolution page tonight. I don't follow Wikipedia that much, but I do teach Evolutionary Biology at the University of Texas and I was one of Steve Gould's T.A.'s at Harvard for 2 years as a grad student. I realize there is/are a lot of bureaucracy/politics with editing Wikipedia pages, and while I think the Evolution entry could be improved significantly, I don't have a lot of time to check back in here... so let me know if/when you'd like any further help with this article. Kind regards, —Preceding unsigned comment added by TxMCJ (talk • contribs) 18:35, March 26, 2007

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Hi. I realize what Wikipedia is and how Wikipedia works; but the gigantic weakness, it seems, is the free-for-all structure where anyone and everyone with an inquiring mind can chime in and complicate the discussions to reach consensus on topics they may not know a whole lot about in the first place. No offense to anyone here (at all) -- and I realize that Wikipedia is often an educational journey and a wholly different type of knowledge-base -- but perhaps it might be more educational (and informative) if there was less "discussion and consensus" standing in the way of information that anyone working professionally in the field could provide.

I guess what I mean to say is that ANYBODY working professionally as an evolutionary biologist for more than 5 years (not just me) could provide some significant improvements to the current Wikipedia article, but those professionals often don't have the time to debate, argue, and convince. I don't want to seem arrogant or discourage the wiki-process, but honestly, the tangled spaghetti of "discussion" and "consensus" (among individuals who may not all have the same background or experience) can be really discouraging to people who might have a lot to contribute -- and frankly, nobody I know in my field really has the time to deal with all of that.

This is nothing personal against the Evolution article community. I am aware that all of Wikipedia works this way, and again: I am willing to offer help and feedback on this article, but I am not necessarily able to spend a lot of time or energy on the discussion/consensus process, as rewarding as it may be to some.

Kind regards, TxMCJ 18:28, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

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P.S., if you are referring to Shuhai Xiao, yes I knew him when I was still at Harvard -- I remember when he published his article on fossil embryos, and how sensational it was at the time. I imagine he must have been a great, engaging teacher for you -- TxMCJ 18:30, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

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Hi Margareta. Thank you for your informative message. Actually the Wikipedia rules as I read them, do not say anything about blanking your *own* Talk page. Please correct me if I am wrong and direct me to the written rules to that effect.

In addition, I would like to point out that just because some Wikipedia'er somewhere is of the opinion that certain edits are "vandalism", does not make it determinately so. None of the three entries you refer to, that were subsequently deleted by other editors, fall under Wikipedia's definition of Vandalism, and two of those entries (Threepeat, WFTDA as a secret society) were arguably constructive, informative edits to those entries. The third entry (to solar system) was not an entry about roller derby as much as it was an entry about using the term "solar system" as a context within a statement of hyperbole.

It is unfortunate that users like yourself can make Wikipedia such a difficult, unpleasant environment to try to disseminate valuable information in. It is no wonder that there is not more of a professional presence here. I really don't understand how anyone has the time to write, weed through, and reply to postings such as the one you've posted here. As you ought to realize, my breaking of the "rules" has nothing to do with arrogance, and everything to do with the fact that I don't spend a lot of time on Wikipedia, and don't have a lot of time to spend studying within the Wiki School of Etiquette and Protocol. I thought I might have some valuable information to share and contribute, but beyond that, I really cannot be bothered with all of this drama.

Kind regards, and good luck with the Evolution article.TxMCJ 17:46, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

P.S., it might be an informative/interesting exercise for you to do a word count, and/or "time spent" inventory of all the back-and-forth that has gone on my Talk page, your talk page, Gnixon's talk page, and all of the related rigamarole (love that word, rigamarole... totally appropriate here...) and ask yourself: how much might the *article* have been improved, if you'd redirected that same amount of energy toward *the article*? During this whole time, I think I'm the only one that posted any significant contribution or response to the *article* talk page. Even more bewildering, is the fact that I went ahead and followed the "protocol" you demanded of me, by posting my editorial suggestions to the talk page (instead of just editing the article, as I thought Wikipedia was designed for) -- yet for the most part, my suggestions are still just "sitting" on the talk page, with no real action by anyone yet, and no substantial "consensus" or "discussion" taking place about it, or any of that. Just some food for thought, about the ratio of politics over product, around here. Farewell! TxMCJ 19:02, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Admittedly it has been many years, but I used to be in academic research in biochemistry. I recall sitting in the lab for hours on end discussing the appropriate way to create a separation column to fractionate proteins. In other words, discussion, give and take, and finally, sometimes, consensus, builds knowledge. Orangemarlin 23:49, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Absolutely. But I can bet that while you were sitting around having those discussions, you were talking about the *separation column*, and not arguing about how you were going to decide who was going to operate it, and who wasn't going to operate it, and how one person built the column one way but it didn't satisfy everyone and so we had it destroyed (several times), and what the politically correct etiquette of protein fractionation is, and a lengthy explanation of the controversy behind all that etiquette, its history, and all the etiquette mistakes that were ever made in the field of protein fractionation, accompanied by hyper-linked references to the online protein fractionation manual of protocol (also impossibly dense), and peppered with all conceivable kinds of passive-aggressive, nonprofessional and nonacademic drama that didn't get anyone anywhere. Nope, my guess is that you discussed, kept *on topic*, and finally -- *took action* and built the thing, did your work, and moved on. Question: now that I've followed protocol and taken many suggestions to the Evolution Talk page, how does the "consensus" and "progress" process unfold now, resulting in a constructive edit to the article that won't immediately be reverted? THAT is the part of Wikipedia protocol I would be interested in witnessing, in action. Thanks, TxMCJ 00:37, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

My dear Mandaclair. I made a mistake, I admitted it, and I apologized--sincerely. I have said I will move on--now might I ask the same of you? Let's forgive and forget, and both go on to be productive contributors to this fine and ambitious work in progress.--Margareta 15:54, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

Margareta, I apologize for any instances when I gave you a hard time about your interactions with MCJ. Gnixon 01:17, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Citations

For inline citations, use the templates at WP:CITET. I used to cut and paste, but now I have them memorized. I don't like the Harvard citations, because they're kind of difficult to use. But if someone uses them, I rarely change them. I like these templates, because they make very easy to track down a book or article. Actually, I've spent a lot of time reading citations that people have used. It's amazing some of the really quality ones, and well, the really horrible ones. I found someone actually used a citation to lead a casual reader astray. Hope this helps. Orangemarlin 23:39, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] your report at Wikiquette alerts

Advice in response to a report at Wikiquette alerts

The following is an archived debate. Please do not modify it.

Hello. I'm dropping by to let you know I've read your report regarding General (and openly admitted) bad faith by CameronB and reviewed the situation. I'm in the middle of something else and can't write more here at this time, but I will return soon with some ideas on how to proceed.

For now, I wanted to let you know your report has been noticed and to advise you to hold off on any direct communication with CameronB, especially avoid posting on his talk page, as you had already figured out and noted in your report, that would "possibly result in a personal attack". If there are new developments, you are welcome to update your report. It's better to add additional comments though instead of editing your original report, to keep the report history easier to follow.

Note to other Wikiquette report responders: If you find this note before I return, you are welcome to enter your comments here as well. --Parzival418 01:59, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Hi Margareta. After reviewing the situation I can see how this is frustrating and upsetting for you. I'll offer some suggestions for how to respond, and what to do if it becomes worse later. To be clear, I'm not an administrator or any other formal representative. I'm a regular user who has some experience with disruptive editors and likes to help out when I can. If it gets to the point where an administrator is needed, I'll help you find the right place to post your request.

The first thing is for you to decide what it is that is bothering you about CameronB's behavior. Are you mostly upset about his generally uncivil comments, or are you feeling offended by his comments towards you, or are you mostly concerned about making sure the articles you're working on are not damaged by his actions?

Your answer to those questions will make a difference in what you decide to do next. If you are happy editing the articles you like to work on, and mostly don't want them to be damaged, there are a variety of methods you can use if he comes around and makes trouble. By taking this path, you can continue to follow your interests in editing articles. On the other hand, if you see him as a general threat to Wikipedia and you feel strongly about taking action to protect other users from his behavior, there are ways you can work on that as well. If your desire is to eventually become an administrator and work on keeping Wikipedia functioning smoothly, then that might be a good way to proceed.

This is a fork in the road though, because if you decide to take the path of protecting Wikipedia rather than focusing on the articles you like to edit, it can easily use up a lot of time and energy. There are many troublemakers on Wikipedia. The community is huge. If you decide to take that fork in the road, it's a big job.

I'm going to assume you mostly want to edit articles of interest without getting disrupted, so I'll direct my comments that way. If I'm wrong and you really want to "protect" Wikipedia from CameronB and others like him, let me know and I'll direct you to someone who can help you with that.

The most important thing to keep in mind when you encounter someone who seems mean or insulting is - don't take it personally. Just let it go by. Ignore their personal attacks or insults, and focus on the content. Most of the time, there will be other editors on the same article who will see the difference between your behavior and the disruptive editor's behavior, and they will help you to resist or fix the problems caused by the disruptive editor.

Even when it's obvious that someone is breaking the rules, most of the time it's easier and more productive to just ignore that and continue improving the articles with the help of the other editors. If you don't respond emotionally to the person who is flinging the insults, they'll usually get bored and go elsewhere. (There are exceptions to this, when an editor feels they "own an article," but that does not seem to be happening in this situation).

So, what to do? Let's consider CameronB as he describes himself on his user page. After reading his page and his talk page, it's clear he is baiting people to tangle with him. But I don't get the sense he is malicious, I think he finds it funny, like a game. Personally, I think it's a boring game, so I'd ignore it. He also says on his user page that he likes removing citation-needed tags because he feels that they are an insult to the person who wrote the page. That's a big misunderstanding of course, but it shows that he believes he is actually "helping" the page authors when he does that. He seems to view the editors who are improving the pages as "haughty" people who are belittling the original authors. I have no idea why he feels that way, and I'm not going to try and analyze it. I only mention it to give you another way of viewing the insulting comments he posted. Well, I got off-track a bit, let's go back to what is the best response.

If I were editing the coffee article and saw his rant about Google, I would check the links he added and then respond something like this:

CameronB, thank you for providing the references. I am adding them to the article. Your insulting comments however are not appreciated and are not welcome here.

If he had not supplied any references when removing the citation tag, then I would revert his change and re-place the tag, and I would make a simliar comment on the talk page as the above but explaining why I re-added the citation tag.

Probably he's moved on by then and will not revert the change. But if he did revert it again, then I would not engage in a revert war, I would ask the other editors on the page to express a consensus. Once there are multiple editors agreeing and only one editor causing trouble, the article will be safe.

The most important part of all of that though is to not take it personally and not engage in an argument with the disruptive editor. It's hard to let insults go by without responding, but often it's the best way as long as the article isn't damaged.

Here are some useful links. It seems like a lot of reading, but now that you've run across a disruptive editor, I think you'll find them interesting. There are a lot of good ideas in these articles about how to find perspective and how to respond in difficult situations.

I hope my long "essay" here was helpful. If I'm off-track and you really just want a way to report his behavior and work on the process of stopping him from interfering with others, let me know and I'll refer you to an administrative process. I'm going to mark his situation as resolved on Wikiquette alerts and include a short explanation. If you need more help with CameronB, you're welcome to contact me or re-open the report. --Parzival418 05:17, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Coffee and Costa Rica

Hi Margareta, Pura Vida, mai! and thanks for the note. Embarrasingly I must confess that I don't remember what you were working on in Costa Rica. Coffee-related I imagine? Thanks for the welcome. I actually WAS welcomed twice before. Once by someone, a second time by someone who replaced the first welcome, before I'd even seen it, with a slightly more embellished one. Once I finally figured out that I had a talk page, I deleted the welcome note. But now I have the grandest of them all, so thanks!!

As for fixing the coffee pages, I went ahead and created Coffee and the environment as a stub, basically just copy-pasting the section from Coffee in the global economy. My comments there (merging, splitting, etc.) were out of my hope for someone else to do the legwork, not out of any editting timidity. Most of my wikipediantics were in the past month, and I can safely say that my real life (as you so perfectly put it), suffered, so I'm going to try to cut back now.

Also, I don't have answers to your questions (or sources to verify or debunk your hunches). For that, I'd need to hunt for good info from good sources, the same thing needed to do those coffee articles justice, and the same reason I balked on those.

Hasta luego. Fredwerner 04:10, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Colony collapse disorder newslinks

Yes, they were originally organized such that the most recent articles were listed at the top, so it was descending chronological order. Various subsequent editors continually muck around with this, so it has gotten rather jumbled. If you can figure out how to restore it, that would be great. Dyanega 18:36, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] League of Copyeditors

I'm very sorry I haven't had a chance to welcome you earlier, I have been incredibly busy lately. We are glad to have your help. Currently, we have really cut down the backlog of articles in need of copyedit. Therefore, a major goal at this moment is to identify new articles that are in need of work. When you run across them, be sure to tag them for copyediting.

If you have any questions at all, do not hesitate to drop me a line. Trusilver 00:56, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Falsifiability and evolution rough draft

Please take a look at the current version at [1] and let me know what you think. I want to incorporate the comments we had accumulated and clean it up a bit more. --Filll 16:19, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Intelligent Design copyedit

Margareta, hi. Thanks for all the excellent work you've been doing recently on the Intelligent design page. However, I feel I should point out that the Manual of Style WP:MOS requires commas and other punctuation to be _outside_ the enclosing quotation marks, unless they're part of the original quotation. Also, considering the article's history, I feel that it might be inadvisable to mark _any_ changes to the actual wording as "minor". Apart from that, thank you again. :) Tevildo 22:45, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

I would also like to thank you for the excellent work you are doing on the Intelligent Design article. I hope you are able to return soon. Pasado 19:29, 8 July 2007 (UTC)

Hi Margareta. Good job from me too. And we miss you around several of these articles ;) Orangemarlin 21:56, 8 July 2007 (UTC)

Awww thanks you guys (and it is all guys over there, isn't it? How interesting...) It's nice to have one's work appreciated.--Margareta 20:31, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Intelligent design FAR

Intelligent design has been nominated for a featured article review. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to featured quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, articles are moved onto the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article from featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Reviewers' concerns are here. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:41, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Shaw and Crompton FAC

Hi. I'm sorry to bother you, but as a LoCE member, I just wondered if you would be willing to have a look through the Shaw and Crompton article. It is currently a Featured Article Candidate and needs a copy-edit for grammar by someone who hasn't yet seen it. Any other ways to improve the article would also be welcome. Thank you very much, if you can. Epbr123 12:20, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Sergiodlarosa

Hello Margareta,
thank you for having patience with Sergiodlarosa. I hope we might work things out with his image contributions and I hope he will understand GFDL sooner or later. I was glad to note you could communicate with him in Spanish. I only managed a poor attempt.
If I miss anything in this case, please feel free to address me. I really want this to turn out well.
/ Mats Halldin (talk) 00:14, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] References annotations

There Is No Master Plan ;-) These are interesting articles that I came across and that pertain to the subject at hand but I don't have the expert knowledge/leisure/whatever to integrate them into the articles, or the articles are stubs and the refs are about some detail that would require expansion to add in a meaningful way, etc. In Grouse (and other explicit ornithological articles) I'm indeed collecting for a major overhaul, but this has to be part of a general reworking of Galliformes. But mostly they're just scraps to be picked up by whoever wants to add some peer-reviewed (usually) sourcing to the article, or the odd fact or two.
I was pondering whether it would not be better to create sections for collecting references on the Talk page. (I tried it a few times, but they tend to get swamped in edit war discussions and such). The only thing close to a "master plan" is to get as many high-quality refs on Wikipedia as possible. The Coffee ref for example discusses the economics and ecology of shade coffee in El Salvador on a broad and fairly theoretical basis. Dysmorodrepanis 16:07, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] re:Coffee

Thank you for taking the time to explain your edits, and for correcting potential misinformation in the article. I hadn't realized that the myth even existed, and I'm glad that you changed the article to avoid perpetuating it. Cheers, Jude. 17:48, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Re: Insufficient context AND stub?

You're right, I didn't look closely enough. I've reverted the tag. I'm still dubious about notability, but I'll leave it alone and be on my way. Thanks, and take care. --Finngall ^talk 16:46, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Re: Axolotl

Hi. The wiki commons version is the only (and thus best) version of the photo that I could find. The original was a camera phone photo so the quality wasn't great to begin with. Erzengel (talk) 04:33, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] League of Copyeditors roll call

Greetings from the League of Copyeditors. Your name is listed on our members page, but we are unsure how many of the people listed there are still active contributors to the League's activities. If you are still interested in participating in the work of the League, please follow the instructions at the members page to add your name to the active members list. Once you have done that, you might want to familiarise yourself with the new requests system, which has replaced the old /proofreading subpage. As the old system is now deprecated, the main efforts of the League should be to clear the substantial backlog which still exists there.
The League's services are in as high demand as ever, as evinced by the increasing backlog on our requests pages, both old and new. While FA and GA reviewers regularly praise the League's contributions to reviewed articles, we remain perennially understaffed. Fulfilling requests to polish the prose of Wikipedia's highest-profile articles is a way that editors can make a very noticeable difference to the appearance of the encyclopedia. On behalf of the League, if you do consider yourself to have left, I hope you will consider rejoining; if you consider yourself inactive, I hope you will consider returning to respond to just one request per week, or as many as you can manage. Merry Christmas and happy editing, The League of Copyeditors.

Melon‑Bot (STOP!) 18:19, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] re-reverted

I've re-reverted your change to Template:2008 Democratic presidential primaries delegate counts.[2] The "Actual pledged Candidates" is based on the New York Times source[3] and that source has not updated its actual pledged delegates. --Bobblehead ^(rants) 04:49, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

I think your confusion is coming from the template having two columns that are presenting two very similar bits of information. I could go into a lengthy explanation of what is meant by "Actual pledged", but fortunately the NY Times already does.[4] So the "Actual pledged" is showing the number of delegates that the state's party has confirmed assigned to each delegate, while the "Predicted pledged" column is showing how the media is currently predicting the breakdown based upon the results of the primary and caucus.--Bobblehead ^(rants) 06:37, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Request for your input

I have slowly been adding more material to the falsifiability and evolution draft. The current version is at [5]. I would welcome your comments. If you feel energetic, I am also compiling a list of other falsifiability tests which do not yet have references which can be found here.--Filll (talk) 17:15, 11 February 2008 (UTC)