Welcome, newcomer!
Here are some useful tips to ease you into the Wikipedia experience:
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: ~~~~.
Best of luck, and have fun!
ClockworkTroll 16:12, 7 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I removed the “See also” link to arete, because there was already a link in the text. Incidentally, your link was in fact to a disambiguation page; if you look at the code of my message, you'll see how to write the link so that it goes where you want, without messing up the text. Have fun! Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 22:05, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I need you to help me here and talk about Arete; please see Talk:Arete (virtue). Thanks. WHEELER 14:14, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Yes, User White, and you Mel, and myself all agree on Arete (excellence) and I agree to change the links. Is this alright? WHEELER 14:56, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Two articles are up for deletion: one is specific for Classical studies, Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion/Vanavsos and the other is Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion/Family/State_paradigm. Can I ask for you help in these matters. Thanks. WHEELER 15:08, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)
My response to your change of heart.
Sorry for the yelling. it is already connected to one page and I was going to connect it to the philosophy of mixed government that belonged to the deleted Classical definition of republic. WHEELER 16:33, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)
We have an unmitigated disaster on our hands. Please check out republic. And I don't know what I am talking about. WHEELER 16:33, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Unfortunately I don't think there's a way to make polytonic Greek look easily legible in the Wiki source — a problem that's shared with a number of other languages — look at any article containing Cyrillic, not to mention Japanese! But polytonic orthography, while redundant for Modern Greek, is essential when quoting the Ancient Greek forms. At least the fairly recent adoption of the Polytonic template makes the characters legible to the reader (even in MS Internet Explorer), and I'm very strongly in favour of the view that in Wikipedia the convenience of the reader should vastly outweigh the convenience of the editors! rossb 04:48, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)
WhiteC - I'm confused by the change you made to the article epistemology. You changed this sentence:
To this sentence:
I find the second more confusing and perhaps misleading, but I am only one person. Can you tell me what you were trying to do by making the change? Thanks! -- Kzollman 00:54, May 20, 2005 (UTC)
Proposed wording is sounding better and better (see most recent discussion) Vonkje 13:22, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Yes, great. I'll add something on the Socrates/Plato use of eudaimonia in the few days. Dast 09:21, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
Hello,
Since you contributed in the past to the publications’ lists, I thought that you might be interested in this new project. I’ll be glad if you will continue contributing. Thanks, APH 11:22, 11 September 2005 (UTC)
The knowledge article's talk section contained a dialog between myself and 209.191.143.129 13:14 on 21 September 2005 (UTC) in which he said: "All our ideas should produce good and lasting results and then anything that is good NOW would have been good in the PAST and it will be good in the FUTURE and it will be good UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, so any idea that does not cover all this broad base IS NO GOOD. To be right, one's thought will have to be BASED ON NATURAL FACTS, for really, Mother Nature ONLY can tell what is right and what is wrong and the way that things should be. My definition of right is that right is anything in nature that exists without ARTIFICIAL MODIFICATION and all the others are wrong. Now suppose you would say it is wrong. In that case, I would say YOU are wrong yourself because you came into this world through natural circumstances that YOU HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH and so as long as such a thing exists as yourself, I am right and you are wrong. Only those are right whose thoughts are BASED on natural facts and inclinations."
I later said I disagreed entirely with this, but didn't feel that the knowledge article's talk section was the right place for this disagreement. OK, so here it is...
Thanks for your help with the introduction--it looks much better now. I made sure the article was accurate, but the writing style isn't always very good. Some of the other paragraphs could probably use some help too. I would like to link to golden mean from NicEth, but I'll wait until it gets sorted out a little. WhiteC 15:06, 11 October 2005 (UTC)
Thanks for your comments on Aristotle. I presented this idea there: Take the information I've added here and the general details from the Nicomachean Ethics page and combine them into Aristotelian ethics. Leave the specific information (the "Overview" section) on the Nico page there as a subpage of the general ethics page. I think that would make more sense going from very general ( Aristotle) to one subset of his philosophy (Aristotelian ethics) to a book that teaches this subset (Nicomachean Ethics). What do you think? If you're ok with it, I'll make the changes and then we can tweak. Uriah923 16:48, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
I'm going to go for it. It really makes a lot of sense. Uriah923 00:17, 28 October 2005 (UTC)
In your edit of my text on Goodness and Value Theory, you stated that their is gender neutral but cannot be used at a plural. Plese take a look at this.
Hi there Mr. White (if it is Mr.). I wasn't going to delete anything, but leave that up to you as you see fit. People get excited when you delete major blocks of their stuff. I did reorganize the names under Pre-Socratic. But if you will note, the names under Ionian school are still there. Each philosopher has its own article and some of those are outstanding. I would say this. The Encyclopedia Britannica - oh dear. I used to swear by it. Lately I've found so many errors in it that I think one might do better looking it up on Wikipedia. I would say this. If you can find a scholar who uses the term Ionian School then that would some justification for making a reference as an alternative classification. But, you know, most don't use it, as some of the Ionians are far out from the others. As for cosmologists - yup. Socrates criticised the previous philosophers for being concerned with cosmology when he, Socrates, wanted the reasons for things, not the mechanics of things. Those modern philosophers, you know, they have a great whopping chip on the shoulder. They think they and they alone know anything about anything because someone said - was it Henry? that he couldnlt be said to know anything until he could describe it in numbers. Sounds like Pythagoras. I switched from engineering to liberal arts and I had trouble with that myself. But at last I got it. You don't read into one tradition from another but you start from inside the tradition. Cosmology is definitely inside. Well I will be away from it for a while longer so bonne chance. I look forward to reading your stuff. I don't yet know how to send you a message so this will have to to. Adios, amigo. Botteville 00:40, 4 November 2005 (UTC)
Hello again, buddy. I think that is what I have to call you now. You called on me to champion the cause. I did. Check the site. Just between us, the Internet has a bad reputation in colleges and universities because of all the baloney you are likely to see there. I understand that point of view. They want precision, excellence. On the other side, their excellence excludes most everyone else. They can't seem to communicate with the general public. What happens is, a few oddballs get to promulgate their views in abundant disproportion, while the better views and even the full truth go unseen. We may lose this fight. If we do, I am just going to keep attacking terms such as "physiologists" as part of the cleanup. Physiologists? Physiology was not studied as a field until ... etc etc. Physicalists? But there was no physics in our understanding of it. We owe it to the public. But, if worst comes to worst, there is something to be said for giving in gracefully just to stay in the game. If you get mad and quit, nobody will care and from then on you can contribute nothing. Best of luck, buddy. Thanks for raising the issue and not just calling me a fool. Dave 19:44, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
Later. Hi again. I just noticed we got Langner as an opponent on this one. Tsk tsk. It seems hopeless. The problem is, he seems to be "the expert." But, it is mainly in the scientific. Perhaps you are familiar with the difference? In essence, the two types got no respect for one another. Langner no doubt believes his expertise extends everywhere in philosophy and is accepted as such by powerful Wikipedians. The classicists have a totally different tradition. You study your author, reading him in the original. Then you read what is said about him. Then after years of teaching and publishing articles you publish a book, and that is read by everyone in the field, and then you are considered an expert. To have the time-space people or the philosophers among the physicists making categorical pronouncements on an antiquity they don't know much about, having spent their time on modern topics, seems like uninitiated meddling to the classicists. I'm a classicist. Langner is a physicalist. We aren't going to agree, I predict. Since I'm the newcomer and he is the expert, it seems that we may lose. What I will do then is not keep out of philosophy, as the articles on the ancients need a lot of work. I will just work around Langner, presenting the classical view backed up with references to the authors. Can't do any better. I hate to use terms like "baloney". Everyone has something to say. I would prefer to say, "physicalist", "monist", "Ionian school" and the like are categories less apt applied from outside the topic. The classicists are pretty resistive, having had decades of experience with Marxists, Hegelians, and the like. Well, I got pulled away from some other stuff, which I want to get back to. I'll pop in when matters have gone further. Dave 00:48, 22 November 2005 (UTC)
A bit of a dispute between me and User:Ultramarine has erupted here. In particular, he is suggesting that our discussion about the criticism section of categorical imperative was resolved not by agreement, but by your giving up after being too frustrated to continue arguing with me. As that was not my appraisal of the situation at all, would you please have a look at my discussion with him, and maybe share some of your thoughts? -- Ryan Delaney talk 17:23, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
I used to teach that way. (Don't ask me how I fell into it; it just seemed 'natural.') First, courses in engineering; then courses in psychology. Didn't matter; my students universally hated it! (But they never forgot the answer to a question they had asked! —"Teach a man to fish, and you have fed him for life!") By answering a question with a question, and then going on with carefully framed questions— from the first question the student is able to answer correctly— you can build on his entire infrastructure of knowledge so that the answer to the original question is richly entwined with what he already knows, because he (eventually) answers his own question! ⇒ normxxx| talk ⇒ email 20:54, 27 February 2006 (UTC)
As someone who has contributed to the talk page discussion on List of publications in philosophy and/or that article's previous deletion debate, I thought you might be interested in participating in its new nomination for deletion which can be found here. Thanks. - KSchutte 17:20, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current
Arbitration Committee election. The
Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia
arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose
site bans,
topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The
arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to
review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on
the voting page. For the Election committee,
MediaWiki message delivery (
talk)
12:53, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
Welcome, newcomer!
Here are some useful tips to ease you into the Wikipedia experience:
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: ~~~~.
Best of luck, and have fun!
ClockworkTroll 16:12, 7 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I removed the “See also” link to arete, because there was already a link in the text. Incidentally, your link was in fact to a disambiguation page; if you look at the code of my message, you'll see how to write the link so that it goes where you want, without messing up the text. Have fun! Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 22:05, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I need you to help me here and talk about Arete; please see Talk:Arete (virtue). Thanks. WHEELER 14:14, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Yes, User White, and you Mel, and myself all agree on Arete (excellence) and I agree to change the links. Is this alright? WHEELER 14:56, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Two articles are up for deletion: one is specific for Classical studies, Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion/Vanavsos and the other is Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion/Family/State_paradigm. Can I ask for you help in these matters. Thanks. WHEELER 15:08, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)
My response to your change of heart.
Sorry for the yelling. it is already connected to one page and I was going to connect it to the philosophy of mixed government that belonged to the deleted Classical definition of republic. WHEELER 16:33, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)
We have an unmitigated disaster on our hands. Please check out republic. And I don't know what I am talking about. WHEELER 16:33, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Unfortunately I don't think there's a way to make polytonic Greek look easily legible in the Wiki source — a problem that's shared with a number of other languages — look at any article containing Cyrillic, not to mention Japanese! But polytonic orthography, while redundant for Modern Greek, is essential when quoting the Ancient Greek forms. At least the fairly recent adoption of the Polytonic template makes the characters legible to the reader (even in MS Internet Explorer), and I'm very strongly in favour of the view that in Wikipedia the convenience of the reader should vastly outweigh the convenience of the editors! rossb 04:48, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)
WhiteC - I'm confused by the change you made to the article epistemology. You changed this sentence:
To this sentence:
I find the second more confusing and perhaps misleading, but I am only one person. Can you tell me what you were trying to do by making the change? Thanks! -- Kzollman 00:54, May 20, 2005 (UTC)
Proposed wording is sounding better and better (see most recent discussion) Vonkje 13:22, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Yes, great. I'll add something on the Socrates/Plato use of eudaimonia in the few days. Dast 09:21, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
Hello,
Since you contributed in the past to the publications’ lists, I thought that you might be interested in this new project. I’ll be glad if you will continue contributing. Thanks, APH 11:22, 11 September 2005 (UTC)
The knowledge article's talk section contained a dialog between myself and 209.191.143.129 13:14 on 21 September 2005 (UTC) in which he said: "All our ideas should produce good and lasting results and then anything that is good NOW would have been good in the PAST and it will be good in the FUTURE and it will be good UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, so any idea that does not cover all this broad base IS NO GOOD. To be right, one's thought will have to be BASED ON NATURAL FACTS, for really, Mother Nature ONLY can tell what is right and what is wrong and the way that things should be. My definition of right is that right is anything in nature that exists without ARTIFICIAL MODIFICATION and all the others are wrong. Now suppose you would say it is wrong. In that case, I would say YOU are wrong yourself because you came into this world through natural circumstances that YOU HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH and so as long as such a thing exists as yourself, I am right and you are wrong. Only those are right whose thoughts are BASED on natural facts and inclinations."
I later said I disagreed entirely with this, but didn't feel that the knowledge article's talk section was the right place for this disagreement. OK, so here it is...
Thanks for your help with the introduction--it looks much better now. I made sure the article was accurate, but the writing style isn't always very good. Some of the other paragraphs could probably use some help too. I would like to link to golden mean from NicEth, but I'll wait until it gets sorted out a little. WhiteC 15:06, 11 October 2005 (UTC)
Thanks for your comments on Aristotle. I presented this idea there: Take the information I've added here and the general details from the Nicomachean Ethics page and combine them into Aristotelian ethics. Leave the specific information (the "Overview" section) on the Nico page there as a subpage of the general ethics page. I think that would make more sense going from very general ( Aristotle) to one subset of his philosophy (Aristotelian ethics) to a book that teaches this subset (Nicomachean Ethics). What do you think? If you're ok with it, I'll make the changes and then we can tweak. Uriah923 16:48, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
I'm going to go for it. It really makes a lot of sense. Uriah923 00:17, 28 October 2005 (UTC)
In your edit of my text on Goodness and Value Theory, you stated that their is gender neutral but cannot be used at a plural. Plese take a look at this.
Hi there Mr. White (if it is Mr.). I wasn't going to delete anything, but leave that up to you as you see fit. People get excited when you delete major blocks of their stuff. I did reorganize the names under Pre-Socratic. But if you will note, the names under Ionian school are still there. Each philosopher has its own article and some of those are outstanding. I would say this. The Encyclopedia Britannica - oh dear. I used to swear by it. Lately I've found so many errors in it that I think one might do better looking it up on Wikipedia. I would say this. If you can find a scholar who uses the term Ionian School then that would some justification for making a reference as an alternative classification. But, you know, most don't use it, as some of the Ionians are far out from the others. As for cosmologists - yup. Socrates criticised the previous philosophers for being concerned with cosmology when he, Socrates, wanted the reasons for things, not the mechanics of things. Those modern philosophers, you know, they have a great whopping chip on the shoulder. They think they and they alone know anything about anything because someone said - was it Henry? that he couldnlt be said to know anything until he could describe it in numbers. Sounds like Pythagoras. I switched from engineering to liberal arts and I had trouble with that myself. But at last I got it. You don't read into one tradition from another but you start from inside the tradition. Cosmology is definitely inside. Well I will be away from it for a while longer so bonne chance. I look forward to reading your stuff. I don't yet know how to send you a message so this will have to to. Adios, amigo. Botteville 00:40, 4 November 2005 (UTC)
Hello again, buddy. I think that is what I have to call you now. You called on me to champion the cause. I did. Check the site. Just between us, the Internet has a bad reputation in colleges and universities because of all the baloney you are likely to see there. I understand that point of view. They want precision, excellence. On the other side, their excellence excludes most everyone else. They can't seem to communicate with the general public. What happens is, a few oddballs get to promulgate their views in abundant disproportion, while the better views and even the full truth go unseen. We may lose this fight. If we do, I am just going to keep attacking terms such as "physiologists" as part of the cleanup. Physiologists? Physiology was not studied as a field until ... etc etc. Physicalists? But there was no physics in our understanding of it. We owe it to the public. But, if worst comes to worst, there is something to be said for giving in gracefully just to stay in the game. If you get mad and quit, nobody will care and from then on you can contribute nothing. Best of luck, buddy. Thanks for raising the issue and not just calling me a fool. Dave 19:44, 21 November 2005 (UTC)
Later. Hi again. I just noticed we got Langner as an opponent on this one. Tsk tsk. It seems hopeless. The problem is, he seems to be "the expert." But, it is mainly in the scientific. Perhaps you are familiar with the difference? In essence, the two types got no respect for one another. Langner no doubt believes his expertise extends everywhere in philosophy and is accepted as such by powerful Wikipedians. The classicists have a totally different tradition. You study your author, reading him in the original. Then you read what is said about him. Then after years of teaching and publishing articles you publish a book, and that is read by everyone in the field, and then you are considered an expert. To have the time-space people or the philosophers among the physicists making categorical pronouncements on an antiquity they don't know much about, having spent their time on modern topics, seems like uninitiated meddling to the classicists. I'm a classicist. Langner is a physicalist. We aren't going to agree, I predict. Since I'm the newcomer and he is the expert, it seems that we may lose. What I will do then is not keep out of philosophy, as the articles on the ancients need a lot of work. I will just work around Langner, presenting the classical view backed up with references to the authors. Can't do any better. I hate to use terms like "baloney". Everyone has something to say. I would prefer to say, "physicalist", "monist", "Ionian school" and the like are categories less apt applied from outside the topic. The classicists are pretty resistive, having had decades of experience with Marxists, Hegelians, and the like. Well, I got pulled away from some other stuff, which I want to get back to. I'll pop in when matters have gone further. Dave 00:48, 22 November 2005 (UTC)
A bit of a dispute between me and User:Ultramarine has erupted here. In particular, he is suggesting that our discussion about the criticism section of categorical imperative was resolved not by agreement, but by your giving up after being too frustrated to continue arguing with me. As that was not my appraisal of the situation at all, would you please have a look at my discussion with him, and maybe share some of your thoughts? -- Ryan Delaney talk 17:23, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
I used to teach that way. (Don't ask me how I fell into it; it just seemed 'natural.') First, courses in engineering; then courses in psychology. Didn't matter; my students universally hated it! (But they never forgot the answer to a question they had asked! —"Teach a man to fish, and you have fed him for life!") By answering a question with a question, and then going on with carefully framed questions— from the first question the student is able to answer correctly— you can build on his entire infrastructure of knowledge so that the answer to the original question is richly entwined with what he already knows, because he (eventually) answers his own question! ⇒ normxxx| talk ⇒ email 20:54, 27 February 2006 (UTC)
As someone who has contributed to the talk page discussion on List of publications in philosophy and/or that article's previous deletion debate, I thought you might be interested in participating in its new nomination for deletion which can be found here. Thanks. - KSchutte 17:20, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current
Arbitration Committee election. The
Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia
arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose
site bans,
topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The
arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to
review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on
the voting page. For the Election committee,
MediaWiki message delivery (
talk)
12:53, 23 November 2015 (UTC)