This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 15 | ← | Archive 20 | Archive 21 | Archive 22 | Archive 23 | Archive 24 | Archive 25 |
I suggested this to Roger, and he liked it so I am now suggesting here for everyone else to consider. I'd like to propose that we start a drive within the project to expand our academy so that we can add a link to the academy in the project's welcome template. My proposal is to create a writing contest which will run from now until the next coordinator election, during which anyone who writes an article for the academy receives a barnstar, with a bronze, silver, and gold wiki going to the three editors who add the greatest number of useful articles to the academy in the time period. With a little luck, by new years, we can have a full functional online academy for the n00bs and that should help free up some time for us coordinators and the veteran users by allowing us to link to the relevant material rather than have to explain from scratch the answer and why the answer is answered thus.
To run this I propose we create a contest section on the Academy talk page, and invite those participating to list themselves there along with the articles they have created for the drive. We can then check the added material and polish it as necessary to ensure that it is accurate and explained simply enough for our newer editors or editors unfamiliar with the territory to grasp. The goal to generate enough credible material to the academy to add a link to the academy in the project welcome template by the end of the year, if not sooner.
If you are in agreement then we can send this out in the Bugle's June edition. I created the following for publication in the "From the coordinators" section:
Back in February we introduced a new feature to our project: The Academy. Designed to be an online school for our new members and for those who may be unclear on policy or procedure as it relates to our project, the academy has the potential to assist our new members by offering self-instructional courses on all aspects of project operations. Unfortunately, though, only a few editors to the project have penned the material we need to get the academy up and running in full capacity, consequently the academy in its present state is of little use to anyone. As a result, the coordinators are initiating a contest - beginning July 1st and lasting until the end of the October coordinator elections - that aims to bring the academy up to fully operational status. During the contest period we will offer barnstars for anyone who pens an essay for the academy on a area not yet covered. If you would like to participate, add you name to the academy talk page and any articles you created under your name, and state your preference for receiving your awards at the end of the contest or as you reach each milestone. Coordinators for the project will track the academy content as it is added, polish it as needed, and answer any questions on the contest on the academy talk page.
WikiChevrons for 1 article Helping Hand Barnstar for 2 articles Guidance Barnstar for 3-4 articles Tireless contributor for 5 articles Working man for 6-7 articles Special Barnstar for 8-9 articles Writers Barnstar for 10 articles Motivation Barnstar for 11-15 articles All Around Amazing Barnstar for 15+ articles Third place overall Second place overall First place overall
Please feel free to polish and trim it as you see fit. TomStar81 ( Talk) 01:56, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
I've been working on scoring the June contest entries and had a question about some entries added by a user at 00:39 (UTC) on 1 July, and am not sure how to proceed. The main reason for asking is that the inclusion (or not) of the entries has the potential to change the winner this month.
A related (but not identical) situation was discussed here (same user, incidentally), but offers no guidance. As far as this case: on the one hand, the work for the articles was done during the month of June, and they were almost listed on time. But on the other hand, that's not necessarily fair to those who have planned ahead for their contest entries. For now, I have scored only the entries listed in June and await consensus on the "late" ones. — Bellhalla ( talk) 12:48, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
A cruft incident has taken shape on the SR-71 Blackbird article that has resulted in the creation of the article List of fictional appearances of SR-71 Blackbird. I attempted a prod earlier, and the reply I got was that this was the agreed upon course of action for the pop culture material on the page as per a talk page discussion.
Our MoS explicitly states that cruft is to be avoided. IF it has to exist then it should exist in the article, IMO. We had an article on list of fictional aircraft carrier appearances that got whacked, I'm of the mind that the SR-71 pop culture article should meet a similar fate and the article be protect to some extent to prohibit people from adding pop culture material to the article, or if the pop culture section is actually needed in the article, then to regulate the material through the use of hidden messages and the inclusion of inline citations to reliable sources. Thoughts? TomStar81 ( Talk) 02:20, 3 July 2009 (UTC)
Bryce has very kindly done the hard graft on the review statistics from the period 1 April to 30 Jun. I've tweaked it around as follows and suggest the following awards:
If there's no opposition to this, I'll awards the medals tomorrow and include them in the current issue of "The Bugle". Roger Davies talk 09:11, 4 July 2009 (UTC)
Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Cold War task force has not officially been assigned any coordinators. I think we ought to assign coordinators for this TF sooner rather than later. I'd be willing to list myself as a coordinator for the TF, but we still need one or two more coordinators to volunteer for the task force. TomStar81 ( Talk) 21:48, 4 July 2009 (UTC)
Well, that was easy. The three of us it is then, at least until October. TomStar81 ( Talk) 01:26, 5 July 2009 (UTC)
I see that Bellhalla has done the asssessments already (for which, many thanks!). Does anyone have time in the next few hours to tally up the figures for the Awards and Honours section of the June issue of "The Bugle" and award the gongs please? I've got a few other things to sort out for this issue and I'm running out of time today. If no one can spare the time immediately, I'll do it myself but perhaps not until tomorrow morning. Roger Davies talk 10:38, 5 July 2009 (UTC)
Having been long-interested in USAF units, I've just pulled one of the standard references that User:Bwmoll3 has been using to create the unit articles and have discovered what appears to be extensive near plagarism from Maurer, Air Force Combat Units of World War II. Specifically, it's nearly word-for-word on 323d Air Expeditionary Wing#World War II, second and third paragraphs, and p.203-4 of Maurer. However there are near hundreds of these pages. What should I do? Buckshot06( prof) 16:43, 6 July 2009 (UTC)
←All right. Let's see. Google books says of this, "Reprint of the 1961 ed. published by U.S. Govt. Print. Off., Washington." If the book was originally published by the United States Government Printing Office, this would be a great relief, since the odds of its being public domain soar. (Confusing the matter, another book by the author is coauthored by the United States and the USAF Historical Division, but google claims the text is copyrighted.) Buckshot06, you have your hands on the book. Can you search it for copyright indication in the front or back? -- Moonriddengirl (talk) 19:11, 6 July 2009 (UTC)
Hi. This one needs cleaning up. Please help contribute to cleanup if you can and, even if you can't, please help reach a good approach for those who can. :) Details at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history#Rather large good faith copyvio problem. I'm attempting to devise instructions for how to handle this in the subsection there. -- Moonriddengirl (talk) 13:18, 7 July 2009 (UTC)
The walk through for closing the ACR process on the review department page needs to be updated to better explain how to get the article history template fields filled in correctly; I couldn't quite get all of the fields in place for the promotion of British Army during World War I, and if I had trouble with it I am sure others probably had some trouble with it too. Incidentally, if someone out there happens to be real good with the closing and archiving of these pages you may wish to consider writing something for the academy on it; sooner or later our newer coordinators will be doing the same thing and may need some walk through advice on the process. TomStar81 ( Talk) 19:39, 8 July 2009 (UTC)
I've had a confluence of several real life problems this week and the Bugle is running a bit late. I'm aiming to finish it off tomorrow morning and get the Academy Contest Drive up and running at the same time. I've got various bits done, that just really need tying together so it shouldn't take long. Apologies, Roger Davies talk 18:24, 9 July 2009 (UTC)
We have 52 task forces. Each task force has a talk page. We also have a main project page. We invite people to post there for subjects that effect the project as a whole. Therefore, I am of the mind that there must be someway to get a message from a bot posted only on the main project talk page about a change to a system. Can we use the no bots tag to do this? Is it even possible to get bots to post a single message here? I mean I'm not trying to deny task forces the ability to keep tabs on there current events, but seeing the same message from the same bot 52 times on a watch list seems a little like overkill. TomStar81 ( Talk • Some say ¥€$, I say NO) 00:11, 12 July 2009 (UTC)
I know that there are still four more months left on 2009, but I had this interesting idea the other night and I wanted to bounce it off the coordinating body here to see if there is any support for the idea.
I'd like to propose that we run another tag and assess drive next year, but run it all year long, and split the drive into three or four distinct parts:
The idea here would be to borrow from Roger Davies and attempt to keep things fresh, in effect "relaunching" tag and assess every few months with a new goal in mind. In this manner we may be able to hold onto more contributors. We could really turn this into a competition too by creating different award trees for each of the individual elements. Another bonus for our project is that by splitting up the task we can ensure everything stays current with our high assessments, so we can trim the ones that should not be listed so as to better gauge how many higher ranking article we really have. And if we carry through the image part of the drive we could help the commons and other language milhist projects gain access to valuable media for their own articles.
Now like I said, at present this is just a crazy idea I had while lying awake in bed last night, but I am interested in hearing any feedback or suggestions on it. TomStar81 ( Talk • Some say ¥€$, I say NO) 19:20, 15 July 2009 (;UTC)
You could start a drive for people to improve them without waiting for the hammer. True though most people make a giant dummy spit if their FA gets questioned even if they are clearly worse than GA. No surprise that most people wait till the guy retires before they nominate for FAR (even if it already flagrantly violated WIAFA) YellowMonkey ( cricket calendar poll!) paid editing=POV 01:29, 16 July 2009 (UTC)
Perhaps a touch of Devil's Advocacy here, but does it really matter if articles have incomplete B-Class checklists? Those articles that someone is interested enough to develop will be nominated for proper assessment when they're ready, and the rest... unless we're going to actually do something with the article, what's the payoff in trawling through tens of thousands of articles just to update a template only we care about? EyeSerene talk 09:05, 16 July 2009 (UTC)
I've completed a routine pass through our black project pages, looking at the nature of the articles, the sources used, and there overall state. I have made the following findings and would appreciate any input on the matter. TomStar81 ( Talk • Some say ¥€$, I say NO) 02:56, 26 July 2009 (UTC)
On the matter of sourcing, I have identified the following websites being used as suspicious and would like more input on there use in the recon satellite articles before removing them.
Additionally, in this most recent pass I have identified two pages of concern:
Source | Assessment | Comments |
---|---|---|
http://www.planet4589.org/ | Reliable | Website is well established (about 20 years old), and is regarded as one of the more reliable sources in the area. The author is a doctor of Astrophysics, and a professor at Harvard University, who has a number of scientific publications. The website is mentioned in his formal biography (presumably from Harvard University), and I seem to recall that it has also been republished by at least one major space news website, although its name escapes me. |
http://www.daviddarling.info/index.html | Reliable | Author has several published works in this area. |
http://reseau.echelon.free.fr/ | Not sure | Information seems fairly accurate, but I can't be sure of reliability. Could do with someone with a better grasp of the French language than me having a look. |
http://www.zen32156.zen.co.uk/disappearencs.htm | Borderline | Information seems fairly accurate, and although I can find no formal evidence of reliability, the images published on the main page suggest that the author is fairly competent in the field of satellite observation. |
http://space.skyrocket.de/ | Fairly reliable | I have used this to find information on a number of occasions, and it has almost always proven to be a useful and accurate source. Most of its information can be backed up by other sources as well. |
http://www.sworld.com.au/steven/space/ | Handle with care | The author has been published by a number of major scientific organisations (admittedly not all in this field), and his historical information seems fairly accurate. Care should be taken when using his pages on future launches, as they are often out of date, and may even contain launches which were cancelled some time ago. |
http://www.n2yo.com/ | Reliable | Fairly well known and respected site, I believe it is currently the most used real-time satellite tracking website, which would support claims to reliability |
http://www.satobs.org/seesat/ | Handle with care | This is basically a mailing list, and most of the posts on it are not reliable. It is, however, used by a number of respected and published experts in the field of visual satellite observation, and their posts can be considered reliable sources. This specific post was by one of those experts. |
http://www.astronautix.com/ | Reliable | This website has been cited by the NASA History Office on several occasions. It also has a number of positive comments from organisations including the London Sunday Times, CNN, the New York Times and Encyclopaedia Britannica. |
http://w2.eff.org/Activism/stealthwatchers.article | Probably not reliable | Seems like a diary/journal entry. The information on satellites seems fairly useless, but there might be something to be said for the information on other topics, so someone who regularly edits articles on "black" aircraft should have a look over it. |
Hello my fellow coords! :-) An article within the scope of our project, USS Massachusetts (BB-59), has been selected to receive the recently-reactivated Spotlight during the week of 1 August. Any help that could be offered would be greatly appreciated! Some sources availiable for use in expanding the article can be found here. Cheers, — Ed (Talk • Contribs) 05:02, 28 July 2009 (UTC)
Hi, I'm not quit sure if this is the right place to ask. The article was recently promoted to A-class. However the article history was not updated. Could someone here look into this? Thanks MisterBee1966 ( talk) 10:16, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
This is something of a venue of last resort; normally I'd take such things to ANI, but my request there for a review of some of my recent admin actions has now dropped off the board with only one (productive) response, for which I'm very grateful to Fram. If anyone's got the time I'd really appreciate some outside opinions. It's complicated, but basically I've been dealing with two editors, Hiens ( talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) and Kurfürst ( talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log), who have been increasingly disruptive on various articles, notably Aircraft of the Battle of Britain and Battle of Britain. There's a potted summary at the above ANI archive link, and their talk-pages, and sections of mine (including my email inbox) are also quite instructive.
My latest concern is the mutual admiration society they seem to have formed on Kurfürst's talk page, where they've plenty to say. The snipes at me personally are neither here nor there as far as I'm concerned, but I'm not the only editor being targeted and the tone suggests that no lessons have been learned and the disruption is likely to resume once my latest block of Kurfürst expires. These editors have made some good edits, but taking a cost-benefit view of their recent performance I'm inclined to doubt their continued value to Wikipedia. My instinct is to show them both the door (or Kurfürst at least), but I may be being over-harsh given my increasing loss of patience with the situation. Since this concerns our project, I'd welcome some input... EyeSerene talk 18:33, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
Thank you all very much for taking the time to look over this; your advice and comments are most welcome :) I was really starting to wonder if I was losing perspective and handling things poorly, though I've been careful to remain uninvolved and of course will continue to do so. However, in the light of your responses I'm quite happy to run with it, so I'll wait and see how things develop when Kurfürst's block expires (and you're right, Bryce, if a further block is necessary it will likely be indef). A topic ban may effectively amount to a complete ban, given the restricted areas they edit in, but I'll certainly keep it in mind as an option, and your advice Roger about tl;dr is noted ;) Once again, I'm really grateful for everyone's input. EyeSerene talk 08:47, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
I did a pageview check on it and the essays are only getting about 2 reads per day for each of them. Do they need to be advertised more? YellowMonkey ( cricket photo poll!) paid editing=POV 07:46, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
As a heads up, this article is going through another busy period, with an editor recently making very significant unilateral changes. More eyes on this article would be great, as the status-quo seems well worth protecting given the amount of work which went into it. Nick-D ( talk) 08:33, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 15 | ← | Archive 20 | Archive 21 | Archive 22 | Archive 23 | Archive 24 | Archive 25 |
I suggested this to Roger, and he liked it so I am now suggesting here for everyone else to consider. I'd like to propose that we start a drive within the project to expand our academy so that we can add a link to the academy in the project's welcome template. My proposal is to create a writing contest which will run from now until the next coordinator election, during which anyone who writes an article for the academy receives a barnstar, with a bronze, silver, and gold wiki going to the three editors who add the greatest number of useful articles to the academy in the time period. With a little luck, by new years, we can have a full functional online academy for the n00bs and that should help free up some time for us coordinators and the veteran users by allowing us to link to the relevant material rather than have to explain from scratch the answer and why the answer is answered thus.
To run this I propose we create a contest section on the Academy talk page, and invite those participating to list themselves there along with the articles they have created for the drive. We can then check the added material and polish it as necessary to ensure that it is accurate and explained simply enough for our newer editors or editors unfamiliar with the territory to grasp. The goal to generate enough credible material to the academy to add a link to the academy in the project welcome template by the end of the year, if not sooner.
If you are in agreement then we can send this out in the Bugle's June edition. I created the following for publication in the "From the coordinators" section:
Back in February we introduced a new feature to our project: The Academy. Designed to be an online school for our new members and for those who may be unclear on policy or procedure as it relates to our project, the academy has the potential to assist our new members by offering self-instructional courses on all aspects of project operations. Unfortunately, though, only a few editors to the project have penned the material we need to get the academy up and running in full capacity, consequently the academy in its present state is of little use to anyone. As a result, the coordinators are initiating a contest - beginning July 1st and lasting until the end of the October coordinator elections - that aims to bring the academy up to fully operational status. During the contest period we will offer barnstars for anyone who pens an essay for the academy on a area not yet covered. If you would like to participate, add you name to the academy talk page and any articles you created under your name, and state your preference for receiving your awards at the end of the contest or as you reach each milestone. Coordinators for the project will track the academy content as it is added, polish it as needed, and answer any questions on the contest on the academy talk page.
WikiChevrons for 1 article Helping Hand Barnstar for 2 articles Guidance Barnstar for 3-4 articles Tireless contributor for 5 articles Working man for 6-7 articles Special Barnstar for 8-9 articles Writers Barnstar for 10 articles Motivation Barnstar for 11-15 articles All Around Amazing Barnstar for 15+ articles Third place overall Second place overall First place overall
Please feel free to polish and trim it as you see fit. TomStar81 ( Talk) 01:56, 30 June 2009 (UTC)
I've been working on scoring the June contest entries and had a question about some entries added by a user at 00:39 (UTC) on 1 July, and am not sure how to proceed. The main reason for asking is that the inclusion (or not) of the entries has the potential to change the winner this month.
A related (but not identical) situation was discussed here (same user, incidentally), but offers no guidance. As far as this case: on the one hand, the work for the articles was done during the month of June, and they were almost listed on time. But on the other hand, that's not necessarily fair to those who have planned ahead for their contest entries. For now, I have scored only the entries listed in June and await consensus on the "late" ones. — Bellhalla ( talk) 12:48, 1 July 2009 (UTC)
A cruft incident has taken shape on the SR-71 Blackbird article that has resulted in the creation of the article List of fictional appearances of SR-71 Blackbird. I attempted a prod earlier, and the reply I got was that this was the agreed upon course of action for the pop culture material on the page as per a talk page discussion.
Our MoS explicitly states that cruft is to be avoided. IF it has to exist then it should exist in the article, IMO. We had an article on list of fictional aircraft carrier appearances that got whacked, I'm of the mind that the SR-71 pop culture article should meet a similar fate and the article be protect to some extent to prohibit people from adding pop culture material to the article, or if the pop culture section is actually needed in the article, then to regulate the material through the use of hidden messages and the inclusion of inline citations to reliable sources. Thoughts? TomStar81 ( Talk) 02:20, 3 July 2009 (UTC)
Bryce has very kindly done the hard graft on the review statistics from the period 1 April to 30 Jun. I've tweaked it around as follows and suggest the following awards:
If there's no opposition to this, I'll awards the medals tomorrow and include them in the current issue of "The Bugle". Roger Davies talk 09:11, 4 July 2009 (UTC)
Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Cold War task force has not officially been assigned any coordinators. I think we ought to assign coordinators for this TF sooner rather than later. I'd be willing to list myself as a coordinator for the TF, but we still need one or two more coordinators to volunteer for the task force. TomStar81 ( Talk) 21:48, 4 July 2009 (UTC)
Well, that was easy. The three of us it is then, at least until October. TomStar81 ( Talk) 01:26, 5 July 2009 (UTC)
I see that Bellhalla has done the asssessments already (for which, many thanks!). Does anyone have time in the next few hours to tally up the figures for the Awards and Honours section of the June issue of "The Bugle" and award the gongs please? I've got a few other things to sort out for this issue and I'm running out of time today. If no one can spare the time immediately, I'll do it myself but perhaps not until tomorrow morning. Roger Davies talk 10:38, 5 July 2009 (UTC)
Having been long-interested in USAF units, I've just pulled one of the standard references that User:Bwmoll3 has been using to create the unit articles and have discovered what appears to be extensive near plagarism from Maurer, Air Force Combat Units of World War II. Specifically, it's nearly word-for-word on 323d Air Expeditionary Wing#World War II, second and third paragraphs, and p.203-4 of Maurer. However there are near hundreds of these pages. What should I do? Buckshot06( prof) 16:43, 6 July 2009 (UTC)
←All right. Let's see. Google books says of this, "Reprint of the 1961 ed. published by U.S. Govt. Print. Off., Washington." If the book was originally published by the United States Government Printing Office, this would be a great relief, since the odds of its being public domain soar. (Confusing the matter, another book by the author is coauthored by the United States and the USAF Historical Division, but google claims the text is copyrighted.) Buckshot06, you have your hands on the book. Can you search it for copyright indication in the front or back? -- Moonriddengirl (talk) 19:11, 6 July 2009 (UTC)
Hi. This one needs cleaning up. Please help contribute to cleanup if you can and, even if you can't, please help reach a good approach for those who can. :) Details at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history#Rather large good faith copyvio problem. I'm attempting to devise instructions for how to handle this in the subsection there. -- Moonriddengirl (talk) 13:18, 7 July 2009 (UTC)
The walk through for closing the ACR process on the review department page needs to be updated to better explain how to get the article history template fields filled in correctly; I couldn't quite get all of the fields in place for the promotion of British Army during World War I, and if I had trouble with it I am sure others probably had some trouble with it too. Incidentally, if someone out there happens to be real good with the closing and archiving of these pages you may wish to consider writing something for the academy on it; sooner or later our newer coordinators will be doing the same thing and may need some walk through advice on the process. TomStar81 ( Talk) 19:39, 8 July 2009 (UTC)
I've had a confluence of several real life problems this week and the Bugle is running a bit late. I'm aiming to finish it off tomorrow morning and get the Academy Contest Drive up and running at the same time. I've got various bits done, that just really need tying together so it shouldn't take long. Apologies, Roger Davies talk 18:24, 9 July 2009 (UTC)
We have 52 task forces. Each task force has a talk page. We also have a main project page. We invite people to post there for subjects that effect the project as a whole. Therefore, I am of the mind that there must be someway to get a message from a bot posted only on the main project talk page about a change to a system. Can we use the no bots tag to do this? Is it even possible to get bots to post a single message here? I mean I'm not trying to deny task forces the ability to keep tabs on there current events, but seeing the same message from the same bot 52 times on a watch list seems a little like overkill. TomStar81 ( Talk • Some say ¥€$, I say NO) 00:11, 12 July 2009 (UTC)
I know that there are still four more months left on 2009, but I had this interesting idea the other night and I wanted to bounce it off the coordinating body here to see if there is any support for the idea.
I'd like to propose that we run another tag and assess drive next year, but run it all year long, and split the drive into three or four distinct parts:
The idea here would be to borrow from Roger Davies and attempt to keep things fresh, in effect "relaunching" tag and assess every few months with a new goal in mind. In this manner we may be able to hold onto more contributors. We could really turn this into a competition too by creating different award trees for each of the individual elements. Another bonus for our project is that by splitting up the task we can ensure everything stays current with our high assessments, so we can trim the ones that should not be listed so as to better gauge how many higher ranking article we really have. And if we carry through the image part of the drive we could help the commons and other language milhist projects gain access to valuable media for their own articles.
Now like I said, at present this is just a crazy idea I had while lying awake in bed last night, but I am interested in hearing any feedback or suggestions on it. TomStar81 ( Talk • Some say ¥€$, I say NO) 19:20, 15 July 2009 (;UTC)
You could start a drive for people to improve them without waiting for the hammer. True though most people make a giant dummy spit if their FA gets questioned even if they are clearly worse than GA. No surprise that most people wait till the guy retires before they nominate for FAR (even if it already flagrantly violated WIAFA) YellowMonkey ( cricket calendar poll!) paid editing=POV 01:29, 16 July 2009 (UTC)
Perhaps a touch of Devil's Advocacy here, but does it really matter if articles have incomplete B-Class checklists? Those articles that someone is interested enough to develop will be nominated for proper assessment when they're ready, and the rest... unless we're going to actually do something with the article, what's the payoff in trawling through tens of thousands of articles just to update a template only we care about? EyeSerene talk 09:05, 16 July 2009 (UTC)
I've completed a routine pass through our black project pages, looking at the nature of the articles, the sources used, and there overall state. I have made the following findings and would appreciate any input on the matter. TomStar81 ( Talk • Some say ¥€$, I say NO) 02:56, 26 July 2009 (UTC)
On the matter of sourcing, I have identified the following websites being used as suspicious and would like more input on there use in the recon satellite articles before removing them.
Additionally, in this most recent pass I have identified two pages of concern:
Source | Assessment | Comments |
---|---|---|
http://www.planet4589.org/ | Reliable | Website is well established (about 20 years old), and is regarded as one of the more reliable sources in the area. The author is a doctor of Astrophysics, and a professor at Harvard University, who has a number of scientific publications. The website is mentioned in his formal biography (presumably from Harvard University), and I seem to recall that it has also been republished by at least one major space news website, although its name escapes me. |
http://www.daviddarling.info/index.html | Reliable | Author has several published works in this area. |
http://reseau.echelon.free.fr/ | Not sure | Information seems fairly accurate, but I can't be sure of reliability. Could do with someone with a better grasp of the French language than me having a look. |
http://www.zen32156.zen.co.uk/disappearencs.htm | Borderline | Information seems fairly accurate, and although I can find no formal evidence of reliability, the images published on the main page suggest that the author is fairly competent in the field of satellite observation. |
http://space.skyrocket.de/ | Fairly reliable | I have used this to find information on a number of occasions, and it has almost always proven to be a useful and accurate source. Most of its information can be backed up by other sources as well. |
http://www.sworld.com.au/steven/space/ | Handle with care | The author has been published by a number of major scientific organisations (admittedly not all in this field), and his historical information seems fairly accurate. Care should be taken when using his pages on future launches, as they are often out of date, and may even contain launches which were cancelled some time ago. |
http://www.n2yo.com/ | Reliable | Fairly well known and respected site, I believe it is currently the most used real-time satellite tracking website, which would support claims to reliability |
http://www.satobs.org/seesat/ | Handle with care | This is basically a mailing list, and most of the posts on it are not reliable. It is, however, used by a number of respected and published experts in the field of visual satellite observation, and their posts can be considered reliable sources. This specific post was by one of those experts. |
http://www.astronautix.com/ | Reliable | This website has been cited by the NASA History Office on several occasions. It also has a number of positive comments from organisations including the London Sunday Times, CNN, the New York Times and Encyclopaedia Britannica. |
http://w2.eff.org/Activism/stealthwatchers.article | Probably not reliable | Seems like a diary/journal entry. The information on satellites seems fairly useless, but there might be something to be said for the information on other topics, so someone who regularly edits articles on "black" aircraft should have a look over it. |
Hello my fellow coords! :-) An article within the scope of our project, USS Massachusetts (BB-59), has been selected to receive the recently-reactivated Spotlight during the week of 1 August. Any help that could be offered would be greatly appreciated! Some sources availiable for use in expanding the article can be found here. Cheers, — Ed (Talk • Contribs) 05:02, 28 July 2009 (UTC)
Hi, I'm not quit sure if this is the right place to ask. The article was recently promoted to A-class. However the article history was not updated. Could someone here look into this? Thanks MisterBee1966 ( talk) 10:16, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
This is something of a venue of last resort; normally I'd take such things to ANI, but my request there for a review of some of my recent admin actions has now dropped off the board with only one (productive) response, for which I'm very grateful to Fram. If anyone's got the time I'd really appreciate some outside opinions. It's complicated, but basically I've been dealing with two editors, Hiens ( talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) and Kurfürst ( talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log), who have been increasingly disruptive on various articles, notably Aircraft of the Battle of Britain and Battle of Britain. There's a potted summary at the above ANI archive link, and their talk-pages, and sections of mine (including my email inbox) are also quite instructive.
My latest concern is the mutual admiration society they seem to have formed on Kurfürst's talk page, where they've plenty to say. The snipes at me personally are neither here nor there as far as I'm concerned, but I'm not the only editor being targeted and the tone suggests that no lessons have been learned and the disruption is likely to resume once my latest block of Kurfürst expires. These editors have made some good edits, but taking a cost-benefit view of their recent performance I'm inclined to doubt their continued value to Wikipedia. My instinct is to show them both the door (or Kurfürst at least), but I may be being over-harsh given my increasing loss of patience with the situation. Since this concerns our project, I'd welcome some input... EyeSerene talk 18:33, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
Thank you all very much for taking the time to look over this; your advice and comments are most welcome :) I was really starting to wonder if I was losing perspective and handling things poorly, though I've been careful to remain uninvolved and of course will continue to do so. However, in the light of your responses I'm quite happy to run with it, so I'll wait and see how things develop when Kurfürst's block expires (and you're right, Bryce, if a further block is necessary it will likely be indef). A topic ban may effectively amount to a complete ban, given the restricted areas they edit in, but I'll certainly keep it in mind as an option, and your advice Roger about tl;dr is noted ;) Once again, I'm really grateful for everyone's input. EyeSerene talk 08:47, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
I did a pageview check on it and the essays are only getting about 2 reads per day for each of them. Do they need to be advertised more? YellowMonkey ( cricket photo poll!) paid editing=POV 07:46, 30 July 2009 (UTC)
As a heads up, this article is going through another busy period, with an editor recently making very significant unilateral changes. More eyes on this article would be great, as the status-quo seems well worth protecting given the amount of work which went into it. Nick-D ( talk) 08:33, 30 July 2009 (UTC)