User talk:MichaelCPrice/mega

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Should the term "standard IQ test" be replaced with "timed, supervised IQ test"?

That would be clearer, yes. --Michael C. Price talk 18:59, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Omni

The templates are returning an error as the article titles are not listed. When I moved in 2002, I threw out my old Omni's dating back to 1984, so I cannot help there, sorry. -- Avi 19:09, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, I've supplied in title for sure (1990) and guessed the second (1985). --Michael C. Price talk 20:56, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Attributions

I think both the constitution of the Mega Society and the list of tests accepted for membership should be attributed to the Mega Society, not to me, since both of these were voted upon by the membership as a whole (and in both cases I didn't exactly get my way ;^). -Chris Cole, Internet Officer Canon 21:24, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

I put your name on both as for the constitution you are listed explicitly and for the tests, you are listed as the author of the web-page in the HTML head codes. Of course, you could be bold and change it yourself 8-) -- Avi 21:31, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
OK, I like to check before doing things. I'll change it. Canon 21:55, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Pre-high-range-test scores

It was before my time, but I think the IQ scores reported in Guinness were either childhood IQ scores (which are ratio scores and not distributed normally) or are some kind of extrapolated scores beyond the range that the test authors claimed for their tests. In either case these scores would not be accepted now by Mega. By including them here now we might give the wrong impression. Canon 21:29, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

No one objecting, I'll trim down the Guinness reference. Canon 21:17, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] More citations

Is it possible to bring other examples besides Omni, which is no Scientific American as we all know (although any magazine that brought us Saberhagen and Longyear for fiction cannot be THAT bad)? I think that would help meet wiki's standards. -- Avi 02:46, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

There are more citations for the society, the test, and high range testing in general collected here: http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/refer.html. The articles in the Wall Street Journal, Republic magazine, and Esquire are specifically about the society. Canon 03:25, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
This article now has more footnotes than lines and is getting a little hard to read. Does anyone think we need to add more references? Canon 21:44, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
One thing I've learnt on Wikipedia is that you can't have too many references! BTW just added Uma Thurman to the list of notables who passed the Mega Test. --Michael C. Price talk 21:58, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

At this point, you may wish to inform everyone at the deletion review that this version exists, and if they would accept this as a better example. -- Avi 21:54, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I'll do so. --Michael C. Price talk 21:58, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Urban myth

It appears that a fan of Uma Thurman is claiming that she scored highly on the Mega Test. I am checking with Hoeflin that this is an urban myth and will report here what Hoeflin says. Canon 16:06, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Group references

What's the rational for grouping multiple references under one reference? It is unusual since usually one reference number points to one source. And by reducing the reference count it reduces the impression of notoriety. Also, I read someone in the AfD kangaroo court who said an article smaller than its references is a bad sign. So maybe quotes from referenced articles should be taken out of the reference section and worked into the article, like for example somewhat as I added the quote from Morris 1985. CaveBat 04:04, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

The reason I did that was because the article was becoming hard to read from all the strung-together footnotes. But you're right that some of the text in the footnotes could be moved into the article, which might make the balance of article length to footnote length better. Canon 04:11, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
The categorization of references into types is nice. But is there a way to give each member of a type a unique designator, such as members 1a, 1b, 1c, ... for each cite news type? It would be nice if the subcategories could also be visibly identified to emphasize the breadth of Mega recognition. CaveBat 07:28, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
The way the references are listed now, there are 10 references. But my count finds 31 actual references. It would be nice to have an explicit actual count. Any way to make it not so hard to tell where one reference ends and another begins? CaveBat 07:51, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
Unfortunately it took me a while to figure out how to group the references into one footnote, going beyond that to hierarchical enumeration is beyond my poor Wikipedia skills. Canon 15:06, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
PS. There also are many more than 31 references, but when is enough and when is too many? Canon 15:07, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
It's hard to count the references when each isn't explicitly defined by a unique number or bullet. I can imagine it took a while to recode for this kind of grouping, as it would to undo. Maybe I can figure something out. The categories are nice, but a viewer of the page is not informed about them. I don't think there could be too many references under the circumstances of the subjective and falsified claim used to delete the page that asserts that Mega is "not notable", ha! CaveBat 17:05, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
By the way, I've placed my organized argument that the Society's article should not be deleted here: Talk:Mega Society