What sort of freak then is man!
How novel, how monstrous, how chaotic, how paradoxical, how prodigious!
Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sink of doubt and error, glory and refuse of the universe!
- ―Blaise Pascal
Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood; and if there is any truth in him, if he rests at last on the divine soul, I see not how it can be otherwise. The last chamber, the last closet, he must feel was never opened; there is always a residuum unknown, unanalyzable. That is, every man believes that he has a greater possibility.
- ―Ralph Waldo Emerson
I've never seen an FA image captioned like that on the main page. Is this some brand-new procedure I missed? I don't see anything similar on any of the past or future main-page FA boxes. - Silence 16:12, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
I don't want to edit war with you, even if I disagree strongly, so I'm putting the two versions on the talk page for a vote. Adam Cuerden talk 22:39, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
...Okay, now I feel like an idiot. I hadn't noticed your (quite excellent) changes in the latest version. Very glad I didn't edit war: I'd have looked even more an idiot. Adam Cuerden talk 22:50, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
Before we go to an edit war here Silence could you take the time to read about the FA review critisisms of this section, the evolution discussion and the fact it was renamed History of Modern ET please. It is annoying that you reverted without comment on the discussion page and have done so a second time. This section needs to be shorter and you keep reintroducing details that are mentioned earlier in the article. Thanks Candy 02:33, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
If they are mentioned earlier in the article, then remove them from earlier in the article, not from the "History" section. Then discuss this on the discussion pages please You removed details that weren't mentioned earlier in the article, because you hadn't noticed that some had been removed for the express purpose of transplanting them to where they belonged—"History". Yes, it's hard to follow changes in evolution. Which is why there are talk pages to join discussions about editing. I see no justification for having such an absurdly short history section, when featured articles like Bacteria, which have infinitely less important, complex, and necessary histories, have history sections 3 times larger than ours! Probably because there is another article expressly about the history for evolution? I see no evidence that this is anything other than overcompensating for a past criticism; the fact that the article was too long in the past does not justify making it too short in the present. Articles must be self-sufficient; the fact that we have a daughter article for going into greater detail does not justify our making this section excessively short when there is more important information to be included. Then read the discussion pages please. Candy 02:57, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
I answered your questions at Talk:Misunderstandings about evolution about works in progress. Curious as to your opinion.-- Filll 02:58, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
Hi Silence. I think you may have accidentally deleted the material on Misunderstandings from Darwin's day. To avoid the risk of an edit war I've put up something on the Evolution talk page about it. Could you explain your objections (if any) and how they might be overcome, or confirm that it was deleted unintentionally and we can restore it. Together we can make Wikipedia stronger. NBeale 15:18, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
This "draft" is clearly the weakest of the 4 I have in the sandbox on this subject (the others are a rewrite of Evolution as theory and fact, Talk:Evolution/falsifiabilitydraft, and the Objections to evolution draft Orangemarlin and I have been working on). This "religion draft" contains only a small amount of real material at the top; the bottom 90% is notes and comments by myself and others of material that might be included or might be relevant. My plan at the moment is to slowly merge in my material with yours at User:Silence/Evolution to form a single Objections to Evolution draft (as long as my co-editor Orangemarlin agrees, which I suspect he will), and as long as it seems that the community is not averse to such an article. I do not know if the religion article will get enough material to be its own subarticle, or will just be a subsection alone of an Objections to evolution article. My main efforts lately, aside from slowly accumulating material and references for the Objections to evolution article and adding material and references to Support for evolution is to work on the rewrite of Evolution as theory and fact. My drafts are a bit more ragged while I work on them than yours, I suspect. When I get an idea or come across an interesting point, I just slip it on the to-do list for later, rather than stop work on another project to incorporate it. Only when the article is being prepared to go out the door do I try to clear all those notes and material. This is what I did with Support for evolution. My mistake there was after clearing out the other material to move the draft from "alpha" to "beta" condition, and while it was still in the sandbox, not to invite the community in to contribute. I think that would have built consensus, helped settle on a better name possibly, and eased its entrance into WP, rather than have to go through this AfD process.-- Filll 14:45, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
I believe that people have to see a Objections to evolution mockup in a sandbox, with the sections from the misunderstandings article included to be able to understand what we are suggesting. They do not seem to be able to imagine a full synthesis including misunderstandings and other objections. Now of course, if it gets too long, it might be necessary to have a "misunderstandings" article and an "other objections" article, but that is getting a bit complicated.-- Filll 18:55, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
Please take a look at my rough draft at User talk:Filll/beedrunk and give me your opinion.-- Filll 21:30, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
Well I do not only work on creationism and evolution issues. I sometimes like whimsical fun articles and trivia and geography. And I have decided that I will be far more careful in the future about vetting my work before posting it as an article. I will invite peers/friends/associates/experts etc to check it and make sure I am not saying something really stupid before making a new article. So the article about bees and inebriation is in the sandbox right now. And I am inviting and collecting comments and corrections. At some point, the material will be placed in one or more articles on WP or used to create a seperate WP article.-- Filll 17:25, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
Please see (re-visit ;-) wikt:Requests_for_deletion/Others#Wiktionary:Reconstructed_terms. Your contributions were not what I was referring to, rather a series of POV edits and problems we have been dealing with. Cheers! Robert Ullmann 14:55, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
Seems we still have some problems here. See Talk:Level of support for creationism.-- Filll 17:22, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
Mkdw talk 06:06, 16 January 2007 (UTC) Removing formatting content and reducing the size of the text by a considerable amount to one of my userboxes is helpful and could be considered vandalism. Please do not tamper with userboxes that do not require further maintanence. You talk page is 112kb too long. Wikipedia recommends pages over 30kb be archived. Mkdw talk 04:54, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
You must use subst:, or the template will not work properly.
Here they are:
I do not believe I showed this one to you before: Talk:Evolution/Objectionstoevolution. Bear in mind that it is a mess and has private notes etc in it. It has a long ways to go before it is ready for prime time, or inclusion into yours, although parts of it might be ok now.-- Filll 20:17, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
This is a hopefully not too controversial "Gene flow" section rewrite in progress, also including a few other sections that group well with it. I'd appreciate your views and help. Adam Cuerden talk 20:59, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
I have requested that Raspor stop engaging in debates over Intelligent Design as they violate WP:NOT and do not help with the larger goal of encyclopedia-building. I would like to ask you to likewise disengage. If he is looking for a debate on ID, evolution, and creation science, he can find a web forum offwiki. If you have any questions, please let me know either via my talk page or e-mail. (Just ignore that big ol' Wikibreak banner--I clearly am.) -- Merope 02:36, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
Excellent job with the recent sourcing of influences you've done at Regina Spektor; primary sources are always very good to use, because it pulls the rug out from under the feet of assertive know-nothings. Best, Badagnani 04:45, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
I have to learn more patience and wikirules. You are inspiring. Arguing over and over about "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin" just is tedious to me. Thanks for your calm assistance on this issue.-- Filll 16:04, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
Just saw your recent edits (physiology, genetics and deletion of classification). Much better now. David D. (Talk) 07:06, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
This entire discussion is really not productive, in my opinion. There is no content here. Just relax and lets go back to real work.-- Filll 17:52, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
Since I seem to have ignited this contretemps with my clumsiness and ignorance, please allow me to apologize again. I do not know the rules of WP very well yet and I do not want to do anything against the rules. However, I might note that sometimes the rules are not perfect, and they obviously have been evolving here for a while. People try things, and certain approaches catch on, and certain approaches are abandoned. One disagreeable feature that I have noticed, for example, is the urge to shove a large amount of extraneous information into the first sentence of the lead, including alternate birth and death dates, parental names, multiple names, titles, pronunciation guides, multiple translations and transliterations of the title (sometimes in 4 or 5 or more languages), multiple parenthetical remarks in sequence with no intervening text, and so on. In extreme cases, the first few lines of the LEAD are no longer even sentences or readable, just an incoherent string of material. When I have complained on the talk pages of the articles in question, and at the Village pump and on the MOS pages, I have been told uniformly; "it might be ugly for but it is not against the MOS." And some have claimed that it IS the approved style of WP to just have sentence fragments with no verbs and multiple languages and multiple parentheses such as
in the LEAD first sentence, and so on. And some have disagreed with me vehemently since it was either allowed in the MOS, or somehow mandated by the MOS (which I do not see, but if it is, then the MOS should be changed). So I do not think one has to worry excessively about the MOS. This is a free encyclopedia with evolving rules and protocols that anyone can edit, and anyone does edit it, with all kinds of results. This is not the Congressional Record or a paper in Nature or the Declaration of Independence. If we cannot experiment a little here and push the envelope here, where can it be done? I am not one for standing on formalities and tradition. If I was, I would never have gone into science, where one of the main things you have to know to be any good is, is that everything that came before you is potentially disposable. There are no sacred cows, because all of it is temporary. If a scientist was clever enough to come up with an alternative explanation that was more parsimonious and had greater explanatory power in any field, he would have done his job. But you cannot do that if you respect tradition too much, because to make progress, you have to replace what came before. You are always beating your brains to figure out why what they did before is a pile of crap and how you can do better. Of course, creationists read these efforts in the scientific literature and completely misinterpret the intentions and purposes. When I tell them that scientists are trying like crazy to find holes in evolution, they misunderstand. The creationists cannot believe that if scientists find a hole, that it is a very low probability event that evolution will be replaced with the Genesis account. The Genesis account has basically zero explanatory power and is not at all parsimonious. They fall into a strange way of thinking (due to basic ignorance) that if some aspect of the current theory of evolution falls, they only alternative is to invoke magic as causation. So anyway, I have rambled on but I again apologize; I do not want to break any cardinal rules here, but I think that it is not some vile sin to experiment and test the boundaries. At least I sure hope not.-- Filll 04:13, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for responding to my request for comments on the GWB first term/second term "daughter" articles. As I say there in a response I posted this afternoon, your points are well-taken as general Wikipedia/biography principles, but I am afraid as applied to the particular situation there is a problem. It has to do with the type of daughter articles, not the fact of daughter articles. Not only are those articles just overlapping/redundant with what will and should be the main content of the GWB article, but to break up a two-term president's terms into separate encyclopedia articles does not make as much sense as treating domestic policy and foreign policy with more depth, or the Darwin or Chavez examples you gave, or Ike's military career and Ike's presidency -- see especially all the other GWB daughter articles that also exist as I just listed there. Please take a look at my recent response and the situation as a whole and think about it. Thanks.- JLSWiki 20:32, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
Hi Silence, I noticed you made an edit to the death article recently. Though this doesn't related directly to the article I was wondering how you feel the religious external links should be treated - should we have a selection of links relating to the most prominent religions, a link to a single page describing religious attitudes towards death and/or links to such pages, or should we simply leave the afterlife subject out of the EL section entirely? I haven't had any responses on the talk page so I'm interested in any feedback on the issue. Richard001 23:35, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
Physics is being rewritten and we are looking for contributors and/or moderators at Talk:Physics/wip Do you have any suggestions? -- Filll 16:46, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
I've nominated a category you created, Category:Drug-using Wikipedians, for renaming/deletion. Please see Wikipedia:User categories for discussion to comment. Thanks, VegaDark 10:56, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
Hello, I dont really understand how this things work but when you moved Dharmic Religions to Religion - what happens to all the history and talk pages associated with the old page? Does that all move too or are they somewhere else. Regards, -- Blacksun 10:42, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
Silence, please be careful to do merges properly. You didn't undelete the old history after doing the move. I have restored the old history of over 300 edits. — Lowellian ( reply) 01:49, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
What sort of freak then is man!
How novel, how monstrous, how chaotic, how paradoxical, how prodigious!
Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, repository of truth, sink of doubt and error, glory and refuse of the universe!
- ―Blaise Pascal
Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood; and if there is any truth in him, if he rests at last on the divine soul, I see not how it can be otherwise. The last chamber, the last closet, he must feel was never opened; there is always a residuum unknown, unanalyzable. That is, every man believes that he has a greater possibility.
- ―Ralph Waldo Emerson
I've never seen an FA image captioned like that on the main page. Is this some brand-new procedure I missed? I don't see anything similar on any of the past or future main-page FA boxes. - Silence 16:12, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
I don't want to edit war with you, even if I disagree strongly, so I'm putting the two versions on the talk page for a vote. Adam Cuerden talk 22:39, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
...Okay, now I feel like an idiot. I hadn't noticed your (quite excellent) changes in the latest version. Very glad I didn't edit war: I'd have looked even more an idiot. Adam Cuerden talk 22:50, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
Before we go to an edit war here Silence could you take the time to read about the FA review critisisms of this section, the evolution discussion and the fact it was renamed History of Modern ET please. It is annoying that you reverted without comment on the discussion page and have done so a second time. This section needs to be shorter and you keep reintroducing details that are mentioned earlier in the article. Thanks Candy 02:33, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
If they are mentioned earlier in the article, then remove them from earlier in the article, not from the "History" section. Then discuss this on the discussion pages please You removed details that weren't mentioned earlier in the article, because you hadn't noticed that some had been removed for the express purpose of transplanting them to where they belonged—"History". Yes, it's hard to follow changes in evolution. Which is why there are talk pages to join discussions about editing. I see no justification for having such an absurdly short history section, when featured articles like Bacteria, which have infinitely less important, complex, and necessary histories, have history sections 3 times larger than ours! Probably because there is another article expressly about the history for evolution? I see no evidence that this is anything other than overcompensating for a past criticism; the fact that the article was too long in the past does not justify making it too short in the present. Articles must be self-sufficient; the fact that we have a daughter article for going into greater detail does not justify our making this section excessively short when there is more important information to be included. Then read the discussion pages please. Candy 02:57, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
I answered your questions at Talk:Misunderstandings about evolution about works in progress. Curious as to your opinion.-- Filll 02:58, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
Hi Silence. I think you may have accidentally deleted the material on Misunderstandings from Darwin's day. To avoid the risk of an edit war I've put up something on the Evolution talk page about it. Could you explain your objections (if any) and how they might be overcome, or confirm that it was deleted unintentionally and we can restore it. Together we can make Wikipedia stronger. NBeale 15:18, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
This "draft" is clearly the weakest of the 4 I have in the sandbox on this subject (the others are a rewrite of Evolution as theory and fact, Talk:Evolution/falsifiabilitydraft, and the Objections to evolution draft Orangemarlin and I have been working on). This "religion draft" contains only a small amount of real material at the top; the bottom 90% is notes and comments by myself and others of material that might be included or might be relevant. My plan at the moment is to slowly merge in my material with yours at User:Silence/Evolution to form a single Objections to Evolution draft (as long as my co-editor Orangemarlin agrees, which I suspect he will), and as long as it seems that the community is not averse to such an article. I do not know if the religion article will get enough material to be its own subarticle, or will just be a subsection alone of an Objections to evolution article. My main efforts lately, aside from slowly accumulating material and references for the Objections to evolution article and adding material and references to Support for evolution is to work on the rewrite of Evolution as theory and fact. My drafts are a bit more ragged while I work on them than yours, I suspect. When I get an idea or come across an interesting point, I just slip it on the to-do list for later, rather than stop work on another project to incorporate it. Only when the article is being prepared to go out the door do I try to clear all those notes and material. This is what I did with Support for evolution. My mistake there was after clearing out the other material to move the draft from "alpha" to "beta" condition, and while it was still in the sandbox, not to invite the community in to contribute. I think that would have built consensus, helped settle on a better name possibly, and eased its entrance into WP, rather than have to go through this AfD process.-- Filll 14:45, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
I believe that people have to see a Objections to evolution mockup in a sandbox, with the sections from the misunderstandings article included to be able to understand what we are suggesting. They do not seem to be able to imagine a full synthesis including misunderstandings and other objections. Now of course, if it gets too long, it might be necessary to have a "misunderstandings" article and an "other objections" article, but that is getting a bit complicated.-- Filll 18:55, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
Please take a look at my rough draft at User talk:Filll/beedrunk and give me your opinion.-- Filll 21:30, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
Well I do not only work on creationism and evolution issues. I sometimes like whimsical fun articles and trivia and geography. And I have decided that I will be far more careful in the future about vetting my work before posting it as an article. I will invite peers/friends/associates/experts etc to check it and make sure I am not saying something really stupid before making a new article. So the article about bees and inebriation is in the sandbox right now. And I am inviting and collecting comments and corrections. At some point, the material will be placed in one or more articles on WP or used to create a seperate WP article.-- Filll 17:25, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
Please see (re-visit ;-) wikt:Requests_for_deletion/Others#Wiktionary:Reconstructed_terms. Your contributions were not what I was referring to, rather a series of POV edits and problems we have been dealing with. Cheers! Robert Ullmann 14:55, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
Seems we still have some problems here. See Talk:Level of support for creationism.-- Filll 17:22, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
Mkdw talk 06:06, 16 January 2007 (UTC) Removing formatting content and reducing the size of the text by a considerable amount to one of my userboxes is helpful and could be considered vandalism. Please do not tamper with userboxes that do not require further maintanence. You talk page is 112kb too long. Wikipedia recommends pages over 30kb be archived. Mkdw talk 04:54, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
You must use subst:, or the template will not work properly.
Here they are:
I do not believe I showed this one to you before: Talk:Evolution/Objectionstoevolution. Bear in mind that it is a mess and has private notes etc in it. It has a long ways to go before it is ready for prime time, or inclusion into yours, although parts of it might be ok now.-- Filll 20:17, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
This is a hopefully not too controversial "Gene flow" section rewrite in progress, also including a few other sections that group well with it. I'd appreciate your views and help. Adam Cuerden talk 20:59, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
I have requested that Raspor stop engaging in debates over Intelligent Design as they violate WP:NOT and do not help with the larger goal of encyclopedia-building. I would like to ask you to likewise disengage. If he is looking for a debate on ID, evolution, and creation science, he can find a web forum offwiki. If you have any questions, please let me know either via my talk page or e-mail. (Just ignore that big ol' Wikibreak banner--I clearly am.) -- Merope 02:36, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
Excellent job with the recent sourcing of influences you've done at Regina Spektor; primary sources are always very good to use, because it pulls the rug out from under the feet of assertive know-nothings. Best, Badagnani 04:45, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
I have to learn more patience and wikirules. You are inspiring. Arguing over and over about "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin" just is tedious to me. Thanks for your calm assistance on this issue.-- Filll 16:04, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
Just saw your recent edits (physiology, genetics and deletion of classification). Much better now. David D. (Talk) 07:06, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
This entire discussion is really not productive, in my opinion. There is no content here. Just relax and lets go back to real work.-- Filll 17:52, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
Since I seem to have ignited this contretemps with my clumsiness and ignorance, please allow me to apologize again. I do not know the rules of WP very well yet and I do not want to do anything against the rules. However, I might note that sometimes the rules are not perfect, and they obviously have been evolving here for a while. People try things, and certain approaches catch on, and certain approaches are abandoned. One disagreeable feature that I have noticed, for example, is the urge to shove a large amount of extraneous information into the first sentence of the lead, including alternate birth and death dates, parental names, multiple names, titles, pronunciation guides, multiple translations and transliterations of the title (sometimes in 4 or 5 or more languages), multiple parenthetical remarks in sequence with no intervening text, and so on. In extreme cases, the first few lines of the LEAD are no longer even sentences or readable, just an incoherent string of material. When I have complained on the talk pages of the articles in question, and at the Village pump and on the MOS pages, I have been told uniformly; "it might be ugly for but it is not against the MOS." And some have claimed that it IS the approved style of WP to just have sentence fragments with no verbs and multiple languages and multiple parentheses such as
in the LEAD first sentence, and so on. And some have disagreed with me vehemently since it was either allowed in the MOS, or somehow mandated by the MOS (which I do not see, but if it is, then the MOS should be changed). So I do not think one has to worry excessively about the MOS. This is a free encyclopedia with evolving rules and protocols that anyone can edit, and anyone does edit it, with all kinds of results. This is not the Congressional Record or a paper in Nature or the Declaration of Independence. If we cannot experiment a little here and push the envelope here, where can it be done? I am not one for standing on formalities and tradition. If I was, I would never have gone into science, where one of the main things you have to know to be any good is, is that everything that came before you is potentially disposable. There are no sacred cows, because all of it is temporary. If a scientist was clever enough to come up with an alternative explanation that was more parsimonious and had greater explanatory power in any field, he would have done his job. But you cannot do that if you respect tradition too much, because to make progress, you have to replace what came before. You are always beating your brains to figure out why what they did before is a pile of crap and how you can do better. Of course, creationists read these efforts in the scientific literature and completely misinterpret the intentions and purposes. When I tell them that scientists are trying like crazy to find holes in evolution, they misunderstand. The creationists cannot believe that if scientists find a hole, that it is a very low probability event that evolution will be replaced with the Genesis account. The Genesis account has basically zero explanatory power and is not at all parsimonious. They fall into a strange way of thinking (due to basic ignorance) that if some aspect of the current theory of evolution falls, they only alternative is to invoke magic as causation. So anyway, I have rambled on but I again apologize; I do not want to break any cardinal rules here, but I think that it is not some vile sin to experiment and test the boundaries. At least I sure hope not.-- Filll 04:13, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for responding to my request for comments on the GWB first term/second term "daughter" articles. As I say there in a response I posted this afternoon, your points are well-taken as general Wikipedia/biography principles, but I am afraid as applied to the particular situation there is a problem. It has to do with the type of daughter articles, not the fact of daughter articles. Not only are those articles just overlapping/redundant with what will and should be the main content of the GWB article, but to break up a two-term president's terms into separate encyclopedia articles does not make as much sense as treating domestic policy and foreign policy with more depth, or the Darwin or Chavez examples you gave, or Ike's military career and Ike's presidency -- see especially all the other GWB daughter articles that also exist as I just listed there. Please take a look at my recent response and the situation as a whole and think about it. Thanks.- JLSWiki 20:32, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
Hi Silence, I noticed you made an edit to the death article recently. Though this doesn't related directly to the article I was wondering how you feel the religious external links should be treated - should we have a selection of links relating to the most prominent religions, a link to a single page describing religious attitudes towards death and/or links to such pages, or should we simply leave the afterlife subject out of the EL section entirely? I haven't had any responses on the talk page so I'm interested in any feedback on the issue. Richard001 23:35, 26 January 2007 (UTC)
Physics is being rewritten and we are looking for contributors and/or moderators at Talk:Physics/wip Do you have any suggestions? -- Filll 16:46, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
I've nominated a category you created, Category:Drug-using Wikipedians, for renaming/deletion. Please see Wikipedia:User categories for discussion to comment. Thanks, VegaDark 10:56, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
Hello, I dont really understand how this things work but when you moved Dharmic Religions to Religion - what happens to all the history and talk pages associated with the old page? Does that all move too or are they somewhere else. Regards, -- Blacksun 10:42, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
Silence, please be careful to do merges properly. You didn't undelete the old history after doing the move. I have restored the old history of over 300 edits. — Lowellian ( reply) 01:49, 31 January 2007 (UTC)