User talk:WillowW/Archive1

WillowW
talk page archives

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Hello WillowW! Welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for signing up. Here are some recommended guidelines to facilitate your involvement. Best of luck. Have fun! --ElectricEye Getting Started Wikipedia Tutorial How to edit a page The five pillars of Wikipedia Manual of Style Be bold in editing How to write a great article Getting your info out there Cite your sources Neutral Point of View Point of View Verifiability Uploading images Image use policy Getting more Wikipedia rules Policy Library Getting Help Where to ask a question Help Desk Getting along Wikiquette Civility Sign your posts Conflict resolution Getting technical Pages needing attention Peer review Utilities Village pump

simple links

Hello. Please note that you don't need to write [[multiplole exapansion|multiplole exapansions]], since [[multipole expansion]]s suffices. Similarly if you write [[Austria]]n, [[dog]]s, [[evolution]]ary, [[hyphen]]ated, [[logic]]al, [[metaphor]]ical, [[rabbi]]ical, etc., then the whole word, not just the part in brackets, appears as a clickable link to the page whose name is in brackets. The more complicated form can be used for things like [[France|French]] or [[philosophy|philosophies]]. Michael Hardy 23:56, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Also, I think you're using too many capital letters in section headings. See Wikipedia:Manual of Style and my edits to Lamm equation. And generally the title phrase or title word should be bolded at its first appearance in an article. You don't need to add an "external links" section heading unless some external links are actually there. Michael Hardy 00:04, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Request for edit summary

When editing an article on Wikipedia there is a small field labelled "Edit summary" under the main edit-box. It looks like this:

The text written here will appear on the Recent changes page, in the page revision history, on the diff page, and in the watchlists of users who are watching that article. See m:Help:Edit summary for full information on this feature.

When you leave the edit summary blank, some of your edits could be mistaken for vandalism and may be reverted, so please always briefly summarize your edits, especially when you are making subtle but important changes, like changing dates or numbers. Thank you.

– Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 15:35, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

DYK

Did you know? has been updated. A fact from the article Edwin J. Cohn, which you recently created, has been featured in that section on the Main Page. If you know of another interesting fact from a recently created article, then please suggest it on the "Did you know?" talk page.

--Cactus.man ✍ 08:08, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

Line shift

Hey... I see we have some overlapping interests (not knitting though), so I've been editing some of the pages you created. I have noticed that you have a lot if newlines in your text, even though it is not a new section. You don't need to hit enter everytime you have filled up a line, just write it out in on any Wikipedia will take care of the formatting for you. And welcome to Wikipedia by the way.... :-) Kjaergaard 06:54, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Centripetal force

Nice rewriting! Henning Makholm 08:31, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Disulfide-thiol references

Hey... I've been looking through the Thiol-disulfide exchange article. I'm not able to find the review paper you mention on PubMed... Not one from '90 anyway.. There's this one PMID 15158710 and this one PMID 7651233 by the author you mention. Is it one of these you are thinking of.... Kjaergaard 01:35, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for following up on that!  :) I had been thinking of the second paper, PMID 7651233, and got the date wrong by foolishly relying on my memory. His isomerase paper is good, too, although others might be better suited. I have some other good papers on both topics lying around, if I can only find them. :P Thanks again for the nice welcome, and see you around in Wikispace (which I'm really liking)! WillowW 02:33, 9 May 2006 (UTC) P.S. A few protein hydrodynamics articles coming up, which you might enjoy.

Hi, Kjaergaard, it turns out my memory wasn't so bad after all. I was really thinking of the 1990 Gilbert review paper in Advances in Enzymology. I just added both ref's to the page; thanks again! :) WillowW 21:42, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Pubmed links

Btw, you can add links to Pubmed in your reference sections by using the template: PMID ..... Kjaergaard 05:27, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Ancient Greek Wikisource

I understand from your userboxes you're interested in Ancient Greek. I've submitted a proposal to add an Ancient Greek Wikisource on Meta, and I'd be very grateful if you could assist me by either voting in Support of the proposal, or even adding your name as one of the contributors in the template. (NB: I'm posting this to a lot of people, so please reply to my talkpage or to Meta) --Nema Fakei 20:10, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

Hello to another knitter

Thanks for your message! I'm thrilled to see that you're submitting fiber-arts-related articles. I'll take a peek—maybe I can contribute some pictures, since I have swatches out the wazoo. (Hazard of the occupation, as I'm sure you know.) Taking some pictures wouldn't be too difficult, if I can find my camera battery charger. Anyway, looking forward to seeing those articles develop. Hey, maybe there's even a bit I can add. :D Happy knitting and Wiki-ing both! (Doi. Forgot to sign.) —PaperTruths 03:20, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

I dunno about there being a page with all the Wikipedia tricks, but here are some pages I found useful:

• Wikipedia:Subpages has the subpage info you wanted
• Wikipedia:Template_messages has all the templates
• Wikipedia:Shortcuts has abbreviated "WP:" links, plus links to other kinds of shortcuts
• Help:Contents/Site_map has just about anything else! Much more helpful than the Help frontpage.

As far as the knitting articles go, I really like what you've done so far. The important thing is getting the pages up, I think. :D I'll work on getting some photos to add, and then might play with the things a bit and add some info. But as far as "accuracy" goes, knitting is far too international and long-standing a craft for there to be a specific orthodoxy. Since knitting is in vogue right now, I very much suspect there'll be plenty of other people contributing. Anyway, it's quite an exciting project, and thanks for getting that ball rolling! You've contributed to an impressive number of articles in a bunch of areas. (I've been getting caught up in the maintenance side of things.) Way to go! —PaperTruths 19:39, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

Hi, hi.  :) Sorry it's taken me a while to get back to you! I've been looking all over for policy on the creation of User categories, but the Help section has so much information that it can be hard to find what you actually need. I haven't found anything yet, but I'm so frustrated with the Help section that I'm planning on creating my own private index.  ;) Maybe I'll run across it then. In the meantime, I've been thinking about proposing a WikiProject dedicated to improving and linking fiber arts articles. The proposal process is noted at WP:PJ. What do you think? —PaperTruths (Talk) 21:25, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

Hey, nice work on all the knitting articles! /blahedo (t) 22:29, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

Protein structure articles

I noticed your creation of the structure prediction articles mentioned on my userpage - thanks, they look good! Nice to see another active biochemistry person. I will probably expand the DEE page first with the pairs criterion and possibly an implementation outline/pseudocode when I get a chance. I'm thinking of separating the mean-field method of structure prediction off the main mean field theory article, since people looking for Ising models probably don't care about proteins and vice versa. I'll see what I can do about the Ewald summation derivation but honestly, my familiarity with the method is from molecular dynamics, so I've never paid too much attention to the original derivation :)

Thanks for the additions to alpha helix and beta sheet. I've made a few organizational changes (not much new content) if you want to take a look. Opabinia regalis 05:18, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the note. I've replied on my talk page to keep things together. Opabinia regalis 01:42, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

Userbox tip

Hi WillowW,

Nice userboxes you've been putting up! :-) I have one tip on formatting. If you put the following codes together on one line like this,
"</includeonly><noinclude>"
it saves an extra space below the box when displayed. An example of what I mean is at Template:User dressmaker. Regards, Rfrisbie^talk 19:25, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

wikiprojects invite

You might enjoy visiting the talk pages of Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics and Wikipedia:WikiProject Physics. In particular, I'd encourage you to add your name to the "participants" list on both these projects. linas 19:28, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

I replied on my talk page. linas 15:11, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

Style note

Hi. Thank you for your work on Hamilton-Jacobi equations. And just a small suggestion. It is good to not leave more than one space between sections, as it does not look very appealing. :) If this were HTML, it would strip extra space, but unfortunately the Wiki markup does not do that. Just thought I would let you know. You can reply here if you have comments. Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 16:30, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, Oleg! I should've realized that there was a Wiki-policy about white space :( Personally, I like the 2-line white space between sections and even at significant breaks in the argument, just to give some "breathing room" for the reader. I did notice that, every so often, someone would eliminate my extra spaces without making other edits, but I never thought about why they were doing that. Thanks from a clueless newbie! ;) WillowW 08:19, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

There some rather strong imposition of uniformity in the presentation and layout of articles. You'll catch on to it soon enough (or you can simply read the guidelines, if you wish). Basically, the idea is that although any one given bit of markup and formatting might look OK in one article, when taken in the context of hundreds of others, it will stick out like the proverbial "sore thumb". Double-blanks in particular jump out visually. linas 15:11, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

Xfig, SVG

Does your version of xfig do SVG ("scalable vector graphics") format yet? If so, it would be best to upload the svg files instead of png for the sweater pattern templates you made. If not, if you email me the .fig files I can convert them to .svg for you and post them.... /blahedo (t) 22:43, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

The difference between SVG and PNG is not how big or small the files are, but how they're represented. PNG (like GIF and for that matter JPG) is what's called a "raster" format—it's broken down into individual pixels. If you zoom it to twice its size, you get jagged edges. SVG (like PostScript and PDF) is a "vector" format, meaning that to represent a line, you actually just say "line from (0,0) to (3,4) with thickness 2" or some such. It means that when you zoom in, the picture is just as sharp. So basically, if you're storing photos you use JPG, if you're making icons or other images you use PNG, but if you're making diagrams you use SVG if you can.

You make an excellent point about the current portability of SVG—not all browsers display it—but Wikimedia is well aware of that, and it actually converts them to PNG on the fly for display purposes. So pretty much everyone can see them. Why bother with SVG then? Well, if someone clicks on your thumbnail, they'll get a full-size diagram that still looks good, and they can print it out and it'll still look good. Still probably not worth it for people who are e.g. scanning in diagrams, but if you're making your own diagrams and still have the .fig file, it's very easy to save it as an SVG (assuming a recent enough version of xfig, and if not, there are other programs that can do it for you). /blahedo (t) 22:15, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

Waistline

Thanks for your thanks, but I'm not a general clothing maven (I just have a somewhat selective historical interest in the women's styles of the 1795-1820 period, and to a lesser degree the surrounding periods). I was pleased because I had been aware of the sad state of "Waistline" for months, but wasn't really able to fix it myself. I've now linked "Waistline" and "Neckline" from Portal:Fashion. To make clear drawings of different necklines, you would have to be a lot better artist than I am... ;-) Churchh 15:43, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

Maybe the waistline article could mention "A-line" (or is that covered by "Princess")? Churchh 16:13, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

Action (physics)

Hi,

I left a note on the talk page of action (physics) complaining about the confusion between action-angle and Hilbert's principal function. This is an area in which you have developed many/most of the co-requisite articles; perhaps you'd be motivated to clear up the confusion? p.s. I also answered at Talk:constant of motion. linas 16:50, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

The principle of least action was not first formulated by Maupertius; I just got done amending the article on action to say that. I see that you undid these edits; please revise. linas 18:12, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

To the best of my understanding, Euler discusses the principle in 1744, in "Methodus Inveniendi Lineas Curvas Maximi Minive Proprietate Gaudentes" (online copy given in references section). This is contemporeanous to Maupertius. I have not actually tried to read the thing or to figure out which page it might be discussed on; I am assuming (given the suggestive title "minimi maximi" and historical research by others) that this is the case. linas 18:20, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

You also changed to article to say "a third meaning is..." but in fact, its not a third meaning, its the same action, its the Legendre transform of it. Since you just finished writing the action-angle varables and legendre transform articles, I was hoping you could make this correction, rather than perpetuating the error ... See the talk page Talk:Action (physics) for details, which is where this conversation should be continued. linas 18:27, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

Hi Linas, I haven't translated the articles myself, but I do know that Euler strongly defended Maupertuis' priority on the principle of least action in 1751 when M.'s priority was attacked by König. That suggested to me that Euler agreed that Maupertuis had priority, unless Euler was being modest -- or using M. as a sockpuppet ;) I'll check out the 1744 Euler article once I finish up on this two-body article. Perhaps it's a general calculus of variations paper, rather than one on motion? WillowW 18:28, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

Oops! I missed your last message; our messages crossed in the ether. I'll continue the conversation at Talk:Action (physics), as you suggest. WillowW 21:04, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

OK, I replied there. Perhaps Euler's defense of Maupertius should be mentioned in the article proper. Euler's "paper" is not a paper, it appears to be a 320 page book! linas 22:36, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

More chemdraw?

I just cleaned up the beta peptide article a bit and added an existing image from beta-alanine, but I think it would be more informative to have a direct comparison of alpha and beta amino acids as in this explanation. I don't think the specific amino acid used as an example matters much, but a label on the alpha and beta carbons would probably help. Can I call on your chemdraw ability again? Opabinia regalis 23:26, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

Hi O! I put the image under beta-alanine, which I touched up. Is it OK? I colored the amino and carboxylate groups blue and red, respectively, thinking that you might refer to them in the text. Did you want a different β-amino acid, maybe β-phenylalanine? Hope this helps and keep up the good work! Pentomphaloids rule ::;D WillowW 01:46, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

Great, thanks! I put your image in the beta-peptide article and modified the text to reference the color scheme. Good idea! Opabinia regalis 04:22, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

Replacement Clothing categories

I am greatly concerned that the scheme you're proposing will degrade Category:Clothing by nationality. Will you consider, please, names that accord with that Category? Note that Roman-era Clothing is correctly categorized. I trust you won't attempt to destroy that, eh? --The Editrix 18:10, 23 June 2006 (UTC)