User talk:Headbomb/Archives/2008/December

DEAULTSORT

Firstly, let me applaud your efforts in categorising biographical articles.

Several quick points, though: please read Wikipedia:Categorization of people#Ordering names in a category.

First, it's not obvious, but names with apostrophes and non-iniital capital letters actually have to be mis-spelt to have them sort correctly in categories. Thus, "Denis O'Hare" should be sorted as "Ohare, Denis", not "O'Hare, Denis", and so on, because apostrophes and capitals come before the other letters in ASCII order.

Second, ordering in categories is supposed to be case-insensitive. For example, we want "DuBois", "duBois", and "Dubois" to be next to each other in large categories, inter-sorted based on whatever first names these people have. Sadly, the sotware we use performs case-SENSITIVE sorting; to adjust for this, we conventionally capitalize the first letter of every name and un-capitalize any capitalized non-first letters of every name. Thus, the defaultsort for Wernher von Braun is "Von Braun, Wernher" (if "von" is part of his family name, see below).

Third, whether or not various name components that were historically prepositions, such as "von", "van", "di", "du", etc. are considered part of the family name and are included in the leading part of the sort key or not is culturally determined. For some cultures, it is NOT included and Wikipedia has historically respected that. For example, Ludwig van Beethoven sorts under "Beethoven".

Fourth, what is to be sorted with the DEFAULTSORT value is the article title; while we may know more of a person's full name, assuming that the article is correctly titled, the key value in the defaultsort name should have only the correctly ordered elements of the article title, and not any additional names, or spelled out initials.

Hope this helps. Studerby (talk) 19:03, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Oh, and we conventionally remove accents from accented characters (or sometimes transcribe them into unaccented characters) and break ligatures into the component letters, again because of deficiencies in the sorting software). Studerby (talk) 19:14, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Alright I'll keep that in mind. I was mostly sorting the biography within the physics-related categories. In physics, we refer to people as "von Braun" or "d'Alembert" so I sorted them according to that scheme, except in the cases where people are not usually refered to with their "von/van/de/du/..." thingy, such as Coulomb (rather than de Coulomb) or Franhoffer (rather than van Franhoffer). I'll go and correct things.Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 23:01, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Jean-Dominique Cassini

Just to let you know that I removed the merge suggestions from the two Jean-Dominique Cassini pages. They're not the same person. The one at Giovanni Domenico Cassini is the great grandfather of the other. Nick (talk) 03:21, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Quark

Hello there, Headbomb, I see you've been quite a heavy contributor to this article over the past monthish, and I know you were there at the FAC about 2 months ago. What's your opinion of the article now? Think it could be ready for another shot sometime soon? or do you think there are still areas to be improved/documented? if the latter, what needs to be done? I appreciate your help with the article thus far. Cheers, —Anonymous Dissident^Talk 14:34, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Physicist Categories

• Hi Headbomb, I see I do not understand categories very well. I started a little article about Oreste Piccioni a while back, and thought I put him in the Particle physicists category (which shows at the bottom of the page), but I don't see him in the category lists anywhere. What did I fail to do, or do wrong? Thanks — Bill Wwheaton (talk) 06:34, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

You usually have to refresh category pages to make sure they purge their cache (especially if you visited it recently). I see Oreste Piccioni listed, so you didn't do anything wrong. Just reload the page and he should be there. Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 06:39, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Acid dissociation constant - re-written lead

I have now re-written the lead for acid dissociation constant. The essential content of the lead is the same as before. The effect of this change will be that when chemists will read the explanatory material they will say to themselves, yes, I know that, but non-chemists will hopefully get the gist of what the article is about

I invite you to read it and then record your “vote”, e.g. “now support” or “still oppose”, at wp:Featured_article_candidates/Acid_dissociation_constant. I have assembled a list of names under Re-written lead, so that the responses will be collected together in one place.

Some minor disagreements will inevitably remain. These should not be a reason for opposition. Rather, put constructive ideas on the article’s talk page, so that the article can be further improved by the normal editing process. Petergans (talk) 09:31, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Itub (talk) has proposed an alternative, shorter version of the lead at User:Itub/ADC lead. Petergans (talk) 10:41, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Alt text in acid dissociation constant

Hi Headbomb,

In going through the recent edit history at Acid dissociation constant, I noticed that you added formatting such as <sub> to the alt text within images. Ordinarily, that's very helpful, but unfortunately not so in alt text. Alt text is meant to help visually-impaired people to read Wikipedia, and such formatting is not only invisible to them, but actively impairs their comprehension by adding gobbelty-gook for the screen reader. Would you be so kind as to remove your formatting from the alt texts? I'd be much obliged and so would others, I believe. Thanks, Proteins (talk) 01:39, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Well I don't know which text exactly you speak of, so it'd probably be simpler if change it yourself.Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 04:51, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm willing to do the corrections, but please allow me to explain more about alt text. Here's the wiki-text for the lead image, into which you inserted subscripts and superscripts

[[Image:ProtonTransfer.png|thumb|305px|alt=Acetic acid, CH3COOH, is composed of a methyl group, CH<sub>3</sub>, bound chemically to a carboxylate group, COOH. The carboxylate group can lose a proton and donate it to a water molecule, H<sub>2</sub>O, leaving behind an acetate anion CH<sub>3</sub>COO<sup>−</sup> and creating a hydronium cation H<sub>3</sub>O<sup>+</sup>. This is an equilibrium reaction, so the reverse process can also take place.|[[Acetic acid]], a [[weak acid]], donates a proton (white) to water in an equilibrium reaction to give the [[acetate ion]] and the [[hydronium]] ion. Red: oxygen, grey: carbon.]]

The alt text is prefixed by "alt=", beginning with "Acetic acid..." and ending with "can also take place." The alt text comes after the 305px parameter and before the final caption parameter, which reads "Acetic acid, a weak acid, donates..."

The alt text is read aloud to Wikipedians using a screen reader, such as blind Wikipedians. Unfortunately, the screen reader program is not always able to recognize formatting and other human conventions, so it's sometimes better to write out alt text differently. Proteins (talk) 12:51, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Default Sort Changes for Abdel-Moniem El-Ganayni

Hi there,

Just wanted to clarify that El-Ganayni and Abdel-Moniem are two complete names. No need to break them up. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Qahtani (talk • contribs) 13:58, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Acid dissociation constant

References: what is the justification for replacing a list of co-authors by "et. al."? This would not be acceptable in any peer-reviewed journal that I know of. Petergans (talk) 15:34, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

It's very common to replace list of authors by "et al." APA says used et al. if there are more than two authors, MLA says to use it after three. See for example this preprint (the 6th and 10th reference). I slashed after five to save space. It's not something I feel very strongly about, so if you want to re-add them, go ahead.Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 21:01, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Have done. We are following American Chemical Society guidelines for publications. I've also checked through all the references and removed all links to publishers and journals for consistency as a lot of links were invalid. Those links were redundant anyway as DOI or ISBN provide all the needed information. Petergans (talk) 12:16, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Please have a look at Planck constant

I've placed a needs expert attention template, and explained my reasoning. Time has gone by, with no action, which, given the importance of the article and the problems as I have stated them, concerns me. This seems very fixable in very short order by anyone half-serious about physics (which, sadly, no longer really describes me), could you have a look and expedite things.

Alternatively, if I have not assessed this well, please clear the template and accept my apologies.

Thanks,

-SM 21:28, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Unicite

Hi Headbomb. I note that there have been no further revisions to the Unicite template for a month now. Are there any further bugs that you're aware of? --Rlandmann (talk) 13:24, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

I've stopped receiving feedback on it, so I don't know. People were not happy with it, but rarely bothered to say what exactly was wrong with it, and instead gave rants on what a "real template" should be, and how one template to do all things was wikinazism etc... Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 21:27, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

AfD nomination of Dark current (biochemistry)

I have nominated Dark current (biochemistry), an article that you created, for deletion. I do not think that this article satisfies Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and have explained why at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Dark current (biochemistry). Your opinions on the matter are welcome at that same discussion page; also, you are welcome to edit the article to address these concerns. Thank you for your time. Fangfufu (talk) 04:37, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

xt and equal signs

I’m not having luck with equal signs. {{xt|''T'' &#x3D; 295 K}} works →T = 295 K←, {{xt|''T'' = 295 K}} doesn’t →Example text←. I have to use the hex code for the equal sign. Greg L (talk) 07:38, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Use {{=}} for them.Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 07:41, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

• Let’s see: T = 295 K. Got it. Thanks. Greg L (talk) 23:18, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Re:WP:PHY

Hello, Headbomb. You have new messages at Tinucherian's talk page.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

-- Tinu Cherian - 12:52, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

 Done: Task is done.Please see my talk page...-- Tinu Cherian - 16:23, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

CKM Matrix

I really appreciate your diligence is making this section, but I have one request: please simplify it. As it stands, I think it'd be completely incomprehensible to the average reader. You don't need to tone down the math, but perhaps explain to some degree some of the phrases and terminology you're using, such as:

• "preserve the universality of the weak interaction."
• "weak interaction eigenstate"
• "CP-violation".

All that's needed is a short parenthetic statement bound by commas or parenthesis next to these concepts, to make the section in general more clear. If the math is incomprehensible, there's not much we can do and it's not really that important anyway to gain an understanding of what's being discussed in a general way. Thanks very much, again. —Anonymous Dissident^Talk 13:49, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Well it's a first stab at it. It think the bunch of us together will find a way to may things clearer.Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 22:25, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Double redirects

Just a friendly reminder: When you move a page, you should look through Special:Whatlinkshere and fix any double redirects that you created. There are a bunch of double redirects in Special:WhatLinksHere/Cabibbo–Kobayashi–Maskawa matrix. —Keenan Pepper 15:42, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Bill Parker (MIT)

Hi. Please do not remove merge proposal tags without an explanation. If you disagree with the merge, please comment and explain why on one of the two talk pages, preferably here where I have explained my rationale for the merge, so that a consensus can be reached on the issue. Thanks and Cheers, CP 17:08, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

Bill Parker is not a plasma lamp and is already mentioned in the plasma lamp article. Plasma lamp already contains everything that from the BP article that it needs to contain (aka Bill Parker designed the modern plasma lamp), and Bill Parker is a notable person, so he need his own page.Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 01:46, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

AfD nomination of Bill Parker (MIT)

An article that you have been involved in editing, Bill Parker (MIT), has been listed for deletion. If you are interested in the deletion discussion, please participate by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bill Parker (MIT). Thank you. Cheers, CP 02:28, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

xt color

Headbomb, what do you think of using a 39.2% green, which is precisely the same as Tony’s signature. It does so using the following span code: <span style{{=}}"color: #006400; font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 108%;">:

Editors should write 5 cats and 32 dogs or five cats and thirty-two dogs, but do not write five cats and 32 dogs. Greg L (talk) 16:34, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

Here is Tony’s signature: Tony
Here is 39.2% green:       Tony

Greg L (talk) 16:34, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

How dark can we go?

• This is 39.2%: Editors should write 5 cats and 32 dogs or five cats and thirty-two dogs, but do not write five cats and 32 dogs.

• This is 38.0%: Editors should write 5 cats and 32 dogs or five cats and thirty-two dogs, but do not write five cats and 32 dogs.

• This is 36.9%: Editors should write 5 cats and 32 dogs or five cats and thirty-two dogs, but do not write five cats and 32 dogs.

• This is 36.1%: Editors should write 5 cats and 32 dogs or five cats and thirty-two dogs, but do not write five cats and 32 dogs.

• This is 34.9%: Editors should write 5 cats and 32 dogs or five cats and thirty-two dogs, but do not write five cats and 32 dogs.

• This is 34.1%: Editors should write 5 cats and 32 dogs or five cats and thirty-two dogs, but do not write five cats and 32 dogs.

• This is 32.9%: Editors should write 5 cats and 32 dogs or five cats and thirty-two dogs, but do not write five cats and 32 dogs.

• This is 32.2%: Editors should write 5 cats and 32 dogs or five cats and thirty-two dogs, but do not write five cats and 32 dogs.

• This is 31.0%: Editors should write 5 cats and 32 dogs or five cats and thirty-two dogs, but do not write five cats and 32 dogs.

• This is 30.2%: Editors should write 5 cats and 32 dogs or five cats and thirty-two dogs, but do not write five cats and 32 dogs.

• This is 29.0%: Editors should write 5 cats and 32 dogs or five cats and thirty-two dogs, but do not write five cats and 32 dogs.

What do you think? Which one is as dark as you can find perfectly acceptable? Greg L (talk) 18:16, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

Revision remark

Hi Headbomb I reverted the Neil J.Gunther page to a prior version. It´s a biography article within the scope of WikiProject Biography, WikiProject Australia, WikiProject Australian music articles and more. Gunther is not only a physicist, he is also a computerscientist, writer, musician and ... A bio has to cover these parts. If there are any remarks in a subject-specific way, let me know. Thank you for the revisions. --MusiCS 18:59, 19 December 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by MusiCS (talk • contribs)

Emphasis in the lead section of Big Bang

See Talk:Big Bang#Emphasis in the lead section. Btw I would have preferred if you had gone to the talk page rather than reverted my reversion because it's less likely to incite edit wars and maintains the status quo while the discussion is ongoing. See Wikipedia:BOLD, revert, discuss cycle for more details. Anyway it's done now. I look forward to your reply.--Patton123 15:39, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Haha too slow! I've already replied! Muahahah, my victory is complete!

And I guess yours too since I agree that it could be toned down to your compromise version. Sorry for not going to the talk page, I usually do, but I was in "massive edit mode" as I was assessing articles at the same time, and I tend to give the very minimal amount of feedback in those moments as it "ruins" my drive to assess.Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 15:43, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Hello, Headbomb. You have new messages at Wikipedia:Graphic Lab/Illustration workshop.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

List of baryons

Hi. I noticed that you created {{List of baryons}}, moving the content to that from List of baryons. As single-use templates shouldn't exist, I dug a little deeper and saw that you've now included the list in Baryon. With this setup, do we actually need List of baryons, or would just the Baryon article suffice? Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 20:10, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Well it's sort of half a test and half convenience for now. I'm playing with both articles at once to get a "feel" of the different possibilities and get some feedback on it. The LoBaryons article covered a lot more about baryons than the Baryon article did, hence the merge-and-move to Baryon. I've used the template for now, as I may expand the "list" to include other baryon states (such as 1⁄2⁻, and 3⁄2⁻, etc...). The template would provide an much easier way to edit and maintain both articles are once, and control which JP lists gets displayed on which articles. Maintenance is also facilitated in that you have 1 list to maintain, and two articles get updated.

OK, fair enough. Please make sure you keep it fairly obvious how to edit the article content, though - possibly consider putting something at the top of the talk page of the articles saying "go to Template:List of baryons to edit the list", and/or a comment in the source code for the article? (e.g. put something like <!-- To edit the list, go to Template:List of baryons --> into the source code above the template inclusion). Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 09:01, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

List of mesons peer review

Sorry I missed your replies to my review. I looked at the article and it looks much better. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 03:52, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

Justifying your recent AWB changes (to Bernoulli's principle)

Can you help me understand why AWB has the obnoxious behavior of changing HTML entities to single characters? For example, you recently changed several &nabla;'s (renders as ∇) on Bernoulli's principle to ∇'s. However, you left the non-breaking &nbsp;'s alone (because there's no other way to make a non-breaking space). The HTML entities are easier to work with as an editor; they just make more sense. —TedPavlic | (talk) 20:23, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

The logic is once the entities are entered, then they are entered. That you see &nabla; or ∇ in the edit window is inconsequential (altough more eye-pleasing I would argue, since you don't have to decipher the HTML entity), as both are rendered as ∇ when viewed by readers. Switching to the character entry rather than the HTML entry also saves a bit of space. As for the HTML entity &nbsp;, they are left alone because there is a need to distinguish between non-breaking spaces and breaking spaces in the edit window. Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 20:32, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

Pages aren't meant to be read in the edit mode. If they were, we'd be using an editor that mimicked LyX rather than an editor that has math environments. It's important to have a separation between the two contexts; that's how the rest of the publishing world works (and works well). It's just too bad that's the minority opinion here. Thanks for your explanation. I guess I'll just deal with it. —TedPavlic | (talk) 02:00, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Oh you can revert if you feel like it, I'm just telling you why the default behaviour is this. I personally don't see the point of having the explicit HTML entity for greek symbols, although I do see the point of having the HTML entity for minuses, dashes, non-breaking spaces, etc.Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 07:23, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Reconsider your !vote please

I have given two examples of sentences lifted from the arXiv paper at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gauge gravitation theory. By their very nature, copyvios can be difficult to spot, and I think there is a reasonable likelihood that there are more of them in the text. siℓℓy rabbit (talk) 17:16, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Hubble Deep Field

Hi. I have a couple of queries about your edit to the HDF article:

• Why did you change the cite web templates back to having the accessdate in the format "2008-12-27"? That was fine when the dates were autolinked, but that's gone out of fashion for some reason and they now display badly like that. Hence I figured that they should be written in full in the form "Month DD, YYYY" to match the rest of the article.
• By referencing the ADS abstract for the Williams article, rather than the article itself, I was trying to emphasise what was being referenced - the citation tracking, not any content of the article. Do you feel that is an unnecessary distinction?
• [1], which you've marked as a deadline, works fine for me.
• Why did you change the Hansen reference to a cite arxiv when the article has been published? It's fine to give an arxiv link when the article isn't otherwise freely available, but we should be referencing the article in its final place (the journal pages) rather than a preprint store.

I've tried to express my views when phrasing my questions, but am of course open to debate/corrections. Thanks for checking through the article. Mike Peel (talk) 21:03, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Last I checked, the accessdate is used to categorized articles in various maintenance categories, and must be in YYYY-MM-DD format. As for the ADS abstract, I didn't look at it in details or took context in. Why exactly would you need to reference the citation tracking rather than the content? For the arXiv link, I felt this ref is more valuable, as you have a complete text to read. Perhaps refing the conference, and also giving a link to the preprint would be in order. Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 21:08, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply. I'll have investigate the first further. ADS abstract: I'm referencing the number of times that the article has been cited, as an indicator of the observation's importance. arXiv: I'm in complete agreement that having the full text to read is the best approach, but prefer the proper format. I'll reformat the ref. Thanks again. Mike Peel (talk) 21:11, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

And for the deadlink, I meant the merlin one. I've move the comment to the appropriate place. My bad. Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 21:12, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Jodrell seems to be having webserver problems at the moment. :( I'm sure that it'll be up again later. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 21:13, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

OK, with the accessdate format, see [2]. A fix for this is apparently in the works. Unless someone raises this as an issue at the FAR, then I'm happy to have them formatted any which way. Mike Peel (talk) 21:26, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Trivial AWB changes.

I note (after you hit a couple of pages on my watchlist) that you're making _lots_ of inconsequential edits. To quote the AWB rules - * Avoid making insignificant or inconsequential edits such as only adding or removing some white space, moving a stub tag, converting some HTML to Unicode, removing underscores from links (unless they are bad links), or something equally trivial. This is because it wastes resources and clogs up watch lists.

Is this really needed? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Speedevil (talk • contribs) 02:45, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

dude what is the deal

dude those edits are facts you cannot delete those they fall under wiki policy —Preceding unsigned comment added by Elbigger1 (talk • contribs) 10:27, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Wow really?

Why cant you be help full and point it out to me cause i clearly dont see what i did wrong. and those are facts that i edited. you can even look them upElbigger1 (talk) 10:32, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Proposal to use Georgia on {{xt}}

It has been proposed to use Georgia on {{xt}}. It has a larger x-height than Times New Roman, so it wouldn't have the size problem.

Example

Write 5 cats and 32 dogs or five cats and thirty-two dogs, not five cats and 32 dogs.

What do you think? The discussion is at Template talk:Xt. -- Army1987 – Deeds, not words. 13:22, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Talk:Acid dissociation constant

I don't know the procedure, but please could the quality grading on Talk:Acid dissociation constant be reviewed in the light of the gradings assigned by the chemistry people. I'm actually quite surprised that this article comes within the scope of Wikiproject physics. Petergans (talk) 16:10, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

I've updated the rating. It's usually standard practice to update the class for all projects at once. And I agree it's a bit weird that the article is tagged with a physics template, I see very little connection with physics. I wonder who tagged it. Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 17:35, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

On second thought, I've removed the tag entirely. Revert if you feel like it. Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 17:36, 30 December 2008 (UTC)