User talk:Promking

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Welcome!

Hello, Promking, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome! 

You did very nice edits on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ronald K. Hoeflin! Welcome to wikipedia!

--Michael C. Price talk 15:16, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] ISBN

If you do have any ISBNs for Ron Hoeflin, I would be much obliged. Thanks. --Michael C. Price talk 18:08, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] re: your post to Mediation Cabal

Howdy! Your issue is a bit complex but let me try to point you in the right direction.

  • If you think one or more articles was deleted unfairly, you can take it to Deletion Review. Bear in mind that articles that have gone through the AfD process and closed by an administrator are generally not undeleted unless you can demonstrate that a significant number of normal editors of the article were not among those who participated in the AfD discussion.
  • If you have a dispute with a particular user or group of users, the Mediation Cabal may be able to help you. File a case. But first, I recommend you make a good faith effort to engage those users via their talk pages, or even e-mail, to see if you can work out your differences.

Also ask yourself - what is your disagreement based on? If an editor feels an article does not belong here, it is perfectly within their right to nominate it for deletion. There are all kinds of variables - but as I said before, definitly take it up with the editor first. Most editors are acting in good faith; that is, they believe that they are acting in the best interest of Wikipedia. Most editors have no problem discussing their actions. The Mediation Cabal can help a group of editors who disagree on something to find a middle ground.

I do empathize - it is rough to see an article you care about being nominated for deletion, especially when the result is that it gets deleted. Remember, explaining an article's importance and validity in an AfD discussion should be a secondary action. Primarily, you are responsible for addressing that IN the article, so that its merits are evident without your explanation. Do that well, and you can head off most deletions before they ever begin. Make sense?

Feel free to respond if you like, I am always willing to help out. --Aguerriero (talk) 15:45, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] My Prometheus Society article for Wikipedia

Archived here in case the entry is vandalized

The Prometheus Society is a high IQ society comparable to Mensa International. Their membership requirements are six hundred times more selective.

The first IQ society in history, if one excludes the Chinese mandarinate, which was selected on the basis of examinations, is Mensa. It was founded because two men happened to meet on a train. Though the reasons Ware and Berrill decided to found a high IQ club are the subject of dispute, it is likely that they realized from their first conversation that, though coming from different backgrounds, they were able to communicate and had much in common. They hypotheiszed that what they had in common was intelligence, and decided to see if a society of people selected for intelligence (using the only means available, IQ tests) would also have much in common.

Mensa selected for people in the top two per cent. Now Dr Leta Hollingworth's ground-breaking research in the late 1930's, which led to the publication of Children Above 180 IQ (1942), suggested that there is a group of people with extremely high intelligence who also have much in common, and who are as different from people at the 2% level as people at that level are from the norm. That level, 180 ratio IQ, rougly corresponds with the one in thirty thousand level. Starting in the early 1960s, when the now-defunct MM was started,there were attempts to form societies accepting people at a level approaching this. ISPE and TNS, both in existence today, were founded in the 1970s. They accepted people at the one in a thousand level, far short of Hollingworth's norms. There was a problem in going higher. Apart from certain scores achieved in early childhood, no available tests were normed at that high a level, and the paucity -- by defenition -- of data at that level made such norming very difficult indeed.

There were two possible ways of overcoming this obstacle: (1) get the raw data from standardized tests and determine if they could be normed at Hollingworth's level (2) design new tests and norm them. Starting in the late 1970's it was the latter approach that was tried. Kevin Langdon and Ron Hoeflin both developed untimed tests that claimed to have a ceiling well above the one in a million level. These tests were given to a pool of about thirty thousand test-takers, recruited through Omni Magazine, and the data was used to develop norms. The main method for norming was equipercentile equating, and an explanation of the norming can be found at www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch Using these tests and norms, Ron Hoeflin founded the Prometheus Society in 1982. It was the second society to select members at the one in thirty thousand level, the first being Kevin Langdon's Four Sigma Society founded in 1976.

The pool of members was always limited by the number of people who had taken the Langdon and Hoeflin tests... and was further limited when, in the 1990s, answers for some test questions was put on the Internet. But a tantalizingly large ocean of members was available, for tens of millions of people had taken exams such as the SAT which were in effect IQ tests. The problem was to norm them. In 1999, Prometheus formed a committee of ten members, many expert in psychometrics, to attempt this Herculean task. This committee produced a long, scholarly report examining all reputable intelligence tests, determining which tests are capable of selecting at this high 4-sigma level, and determining what these scores are. http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/MCReport/mcreport.html This report recommended that members be chosen based on scores in several widely known, and researched, standardized tests, including the SAT, the GRE, the Wechsler WAIS-R, and others. This greatly expanded the number of possible members. Today, the number of members hovers around a hundred.

The membership roster is a diverse and surprising potpourri. There are CEOs of high-tech firms, math professors, computer programmers, physics PhDs, army officers, dry cleaners, and people who work for NASA. Quite a few are involved with computer modeling of complex phenomena. As this last suggests, many members have much in common, and the officers try to link together members whos business or other interests complement each other. The society produces a 72 page magazine, Gift of Fire, published ten times a year, which contains many scholarly or specuative articles, along with poetry, artworks, and short stories.

[edit] Vandalism

Prom, you don't have to do that. The edit histories of every article are kept, as part of the copyright/GFDL policy of wikipedia. To revert, all you have to do is call up the article's history, and edit the version prior to the vandalism. However, take care not to exceed Wikipedia's three-revert rule. Welcome to wikipedia. -- Avi 16:56, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

Hi Prom, just to expand a bit on what Avi's saying: you can revert vandalism as often as you like, but make sure it really is vandalism. (Read the guides I posted at the top of your talk page to check up on what constitues vandalism, which is basically what other people will view as bad faith edits. If you're not sure best to assume it's not vandalism and try to expand and reword what's written, rather than reverting.) It takes awhile to get into the swing of things, but I now revert vandalism without really thinking about it. (See also my comments at the bottom of the closed AfD.)

BTW I like the additions you made to Prometheus Society -- some stuff there could go into High IQ society but we can sort all that out later. --Michael C. Price talk 17:06, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Biographies

I'd suggest looking here: Wikipedia:Autobiography. If you are doing the writing, that should be fine, but from my experience here I know that personal interviews are usually considered original reasearch, and that you would need to quote a secondary source, and not Dr. Hoeflen himself. -- Avi 16:43, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Prometheus

My pleasure. Sometimes a job well done is its own reward. Good luck with your edits, and feel free to drop a line if you need any help. -- Avi 05:25, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] FYI Mega Society Judgement

Hi Brian, as you know the Mega Society article was deleted awhile ago, at the end of an acrimonious AfD/DRV process. There is a wide divergence between deletion policy (as defined by various policy guideline documents) and deletion practice, as implemented by admins (who claim to be following the "spirit" of the law). Consequently there are lessons to be learnt from the experience, which will not be obvious from reading the guidelines. Here are some tips for future conduct:

  • Single purpose users are frowned upon and were a frequent bone of contention during the AfD and DRV processes. So I urge you all to "establish" yourself as Wikipedians: create, edit and even ... delete articles! There are plenty of articles that need attention.
  • It is a very good idea to put something on your user page, (it doesn't matter what) to avoid showing up as redlinked users -- being redlinked will count against you in any debate.
  • When voting, include brief reasons which are grounded in policy (votes not backed by reasoning may be discounted; too much reasoning will be ignored).

Given the bias against soliciting (see judgement) I may not be able to contact you again, so I suggest you put the Mega Society in your watchlists.

The closing admin's comments on the Mega Society:

Within the argumentation of the debate, the most significant point raised by those who supported the article was that a new draft was available. The article is not protected, so this may be posted at any time and (assuming it is not substantially similiar to the older version) it will be judged anew on its merits. This is good news for you.
The bad news for you is that it is well-established practice within Wikipedia to ignore completely floods of newer, obviously "single-issue POV", contributors at all our deletion fora. I'm among the most "process-wonkish" of Wikipedians, believe me, and even process-wonks accept that these sorts of voters are completely discountable. Wikipedia is not a pure democracy; though consensus matters, the opinion of newcomers unfamiliar with policy is given very little weight. Your vote, that of Tim Shell, and that wjhonson were not discounted. The others supporting your view were. I promise you that it is almost always true that, within Wikipedia, any argument supported by a flood of new users will lose, no matter how many of the new users make their voices known. In the digital age, where sockpuppeting and meatpuppeting are as easy as posting to any message board, this is as it should be for the sake of encyclopedic integrity. It is a firm practice within Wikipedia, and it is what every policy and guideline mean to imply, however vaguely they may be worded. (I do agree that our policies, written by laypeople mostly, could do with a once-over from an attorney such as myself; however, most laypeople hate lawyers, so efforts to tighten wording are typically met with dissent.)
If your supporters were more familiar with Wikipedia, they would realize that, invariably, the most effective way to establish an article after it has been deleted in a close AfD is to rewrite it: make it "faster, better, stronger." This is, in fact, what you claim to have done with your draft. Good show. Best wishes, Xoloz 16:22, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

So the outcome was not entirely negative, although I was disappointed by the admin's rather cavalier approach evidenced by the response to my enquiry:

.... why did you discount the votes of, say, User:GregorB or User:Canon? They are not new users, nor did I solicit them. I presume by Tim Shell you mean Tim Smith? ...... --Michael C. Price talk 16:49, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

to which I received this rather off-hand reply:

User:GregorB offered a very brief comment not supported by policy. User:Canon did take the time to offer analysis at DRV, but he had been among the first voters at the AfD to offer a mere "Keep" without explanation; therefore, I assumed he had been solicited by someone. Best wishes, Xoloz 15:50, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

which didn't fill me with confidence about Wiki-"due process".

Anyway, my grumpiness aside, the Mega Society article, is presently under userfied open-development at User:MichaelCPrice/mega, and will reappear at some point, when (hopefully) some of the ill-feeling evidenced during the debate has cooled. I am very heartened by the article's continued development, and by the development of associated articles. Thanks for everyone's help!

--Michael C. Price talk 14:38, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Request for comments

@Talk:High_IQ_society#External_link_controversy