User:XOR'easter

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CONSIDERING RETIREMENT
XOR'easter is strongly considering retirement, although nothing is set in stone...


Articles created or substantially improved[edit]

I liked working on the page pseudomathematics.

I didn't think starting new pages would be my thing here, but I did create the page Ibn al-Samh, because there were multiple redlinks pointing to where it should be. In a similar vein, I happened to be looking over the WikiProject Physics quality scale, and I saw that one of its examples of mid-importance physics publications was actually a redlink. So, I created the page for Classical Electrodynamics, a.k.a. Jackson. Likewise, I started the pages for Mike and Ike and Quantum Theory: Concepts and Methods. I've occasionally rewritten pages like Mugai Nyodai or Joyce Jacobson Kaufman to save them from being deleted as copyright violations.

During the Featured Article nomination of thorium, I made a few comments and did a little improvement work. Ditto for the Good Article nomination of Prime number. After doing some editing on Gleason's theorem, I nominated it for GA status, and it was accepted after a thorough review. I took the lead on collaborative overhauls of Schrödinger equation and quantum mechanics, and I'd like to do more in that vein (Bell's theorem and density matrix come to mind), but at this rate, I doubt that I will.

I started skimming the daily "Articles for Deletion" log in order to broaden my horizons at least a little. Sometimes, I end up participating. The happy outcomes are when I can help improve a page to the point where it should plainly be kept. Instances of that general nature have included the following.

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Sweets and spiky things[edit]

Science Barnstar Hires.png The E=mc² Barnstar
For you assistance in making Bell test experiment more lay friendly — Preceding unsigned comment added by InformationvsInjustice (talk • contribs)
Choco-Nut Bake with Meringue Top cropped.jpg Thanks for your work to improve Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. North America1000 22:35, 10 December 2017 (UTC)
Copyeditor Barnstar Hires.png The Copyeditor's Barnstar
Super work on Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Rhadow (talk) 03:27, 11 December 2017 (UTC)
Barnstar of Diligence Hires.png The Barnstar of Diligence
I personally award you this barnstar for surviving literally everything that happened in Jean-Pierre Petit. Simply reading through it is an insane burden to bare! NikkeKatski [Elite] (talk) 18:33, 18 May 2019 (UTC)
Dobos cake (Gerbeaud Confectionery Budapest Hungary).jpg 7&6=thirteen (☎) has given you a Dobos torte to enjoy! Seven layers of fun because you deserve it.

To give a Dobos torte and spread the WikiLove, just place {{subst:Dobos Torte}} on someone else's talkpage, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past or a good friend.

7&6=thirteen (☎) 14:29, 28 May 2019 (UTC)


Barnstar of Humour Hires.png The Barnstar of Good Humor
... for this and this. Sign me on! Face-smile.svg - DVdm (talk) 22:57, 26 June 2020 (UTC)


Barnstar of Diligence.png The Barnstar of Diligence
You deserve something like a dozen barnstars, but let this stand for your latest and greatest editorial work. Thank you for working to keep Wikipedia less bad than it would otherwise be. jps (talk) 01:11, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
Editors Barnstar Hires.png The Editor's Barnstar
You are the WP editor's version of Indiana Jones. Especially appreciated: your work defending the integrity of the encyclopedia, and your vigilance against puffery and unsupported assertions. Well done! Grand'mere Eugene (talk) 23:14, 12 December 2020 (UTC)

On writing academic biographies and science articles[edit]

  1. Sources affiliated with an article's subject, like the university where they are employed, are generally acceptable for information that is not likely to be challenged, or for which a challenge would constitute a serious effort in investigative journalism. For example, it's fine to cite a department's own website for the year in which a faculty member was hired, and it's no problem to cite a person's own CV for the date they earned their PhD. Fraud on such documents is always possible, but we should assume them reliable unless substantial evidence exists to the contrary (e.g., if a CV lists membership in "honorary societies" that don't actually exist). Rooting out that kind of deception is (usually) not our job, and the encyclopedia as a whole benefits by our being able to write about people who don't have lengthy biographical profiles in secondary sources.
  2. That said, we're not a CV host. Lists of every grant won, every student mentored, every abstract for a conference talk — no, that's not what we do. A CV is typically list-based and all-inclusive, while we write prose and exercise a degree of editorial judgment.
  3. It can be pretty obvious when a biography is written by somebody who doesn't really know how academia works on the inside.
  4. The data points that can tip the balance towards passing WP:PROF might only deserve a brief mention in an actual article. It takes a sentence to state that a person won a major award or was Editor-in-Chief of a prestigious journal, while describing their work could take many paragraphs. The former establishes wiki-notability, but the latter is why the article would be worth reading.
  5. It is usually a bad idea to make a big deal out of research that hasn't been cited by anyone other than the original authors, even if it has technically been peer-reviewed. Remember, peer review is the opinion of a couple people, while citations are the opinion of a community. This matters both when evaluating wiki-notability to see whether an article should exist or not, and when deciding how much weight to give a topic within an article. The number of marginal ideas that the scientific community has not found interesting enough to criticize is far higher than outsiders realize. The No original research policy was originally written with physics cranks and crackpots specifically in mind [1]. In the modern age, it is quite possible for purveyors of fringe physics or pseudomathematics to publish their work in something that looks like an academic journal. Work that was published in a "journal" that provides no actual quality control and which has attracted no attention beyond its own authors is, in essence, "original research", just like a circle-squaring that was posted on the inventor's website.
  6. If a radical idea has attracted unspecific praise, but not specific criticism, it has probably not been taken seriously.
  7. A document may say that a person was "awarded" a grant, but grants are not awards in the sense of prizes, honors, or medals.

Incendiary opinions[edit]

"The business of skepticism is to be dangerous. Skepticism challenges established institutions. If we teach everybody, including, say, high school students, habits of skeptical thought, they will probably not restrict their skepticism to UFOs, aspirin commercials, and 35,000-year-old channelees. Maybe they'll start asking awkward questions about economic, or social, or political, or religious institutions. Perhaps they’ll challenge the opinions of those in power. Then where would we be?"
  1. From time to time, one hears arguments that editing for clarity, like bracketed text in quotations, is Orwellian rewriting of history. For example, It is a fact of history that Richard Feynman's closest colleagues, all of them leading lights of physics, knew him as "Dick". We do not bury the facts: all quotations in our articles must be explicit about "Dick". Wikipedia does not censor "Dick" or shove "Dick" down a memory hole. I trust we can all take this argument with the full seriousness that it deserves.
  2. I have grown to dislike the WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS guideline, or at least, to find its invocation distasteful more often than not. "Wikipedia is not the place to right great wrongs!" goes the refrain, in one backroom after another. But is ignorance not a "great wrong"? Is the restriction of knowledge to the rich or the leisured not a "great wrong"? Is the perpetuation of superficialities and stereotypes at the expense of hard-won specialist expertise not a "great wrong"? In short, isn't the point of this whole project to "right a great wrong"? The words of the guideline themselves admit that it is redundant: our policies mean that "we can't ride the crest of the wave". NPOV, NOR and V already imply that "Wikipedia doesn't lead, we follow." Having a capitalized shortcut that nominally just states this over again has created, probably unintentionally, a way to yell at anyone who cares too much. Are you honest about your passion for any topic that strays beyond a line of decorum that exists only in your critic's head? You're here to RIGHTGREATWRONGS!
  3. Being "the first X to do Y", where X is a historically marginalized group, is itself an argument for notability, because such individuals matter for understanding the history of Y. Individuals A and B might be documented to the same extent and have accomplishments that nominally look the same on paper, but B can be more noteworthy than A if A's attaining that level is ordinary while B's doing so is part of a larger social change.
  4. I think WP:PROF has been a very good thing for the encyclopedia. Being able to write about people because their work is important helps us be a better reference. That said, I have slowly become more convinced that the "WP:PROF is too strict" argument has substantial merit. It does rather come across that, say, an average professional actor is wiki-notable while an average professional scientist is not. (None of the proposals I have seen to address this, like granting wiki-notability to all tenured faculty at major institutions, would make me, personally, notable. I'm fine with that.)
  5. Spreading obvious propaganda expresses contempt for the bedrock values of journalism, history, and science. It is a worse act of incivility than any combination of four-letter words.
  6. People who complain about Wikipedia's "left-wing bias" must not know any actual leftists.

MathWorld and the naming of mathematical topics[edit]

The fact that a topic has an article in MathWorld does not imply that it should have an article here. Nor should MathWorld's choice of terminology be taken as definitive. Relevant past discussions:

Articles for Deletionating[edit]

Here are various other assorted discussions I took part in — some were kept and some deleted, but I didn't have much of a hand in the article text itself. This list is not exhaustive, only recording those items which I felt at the time I might have reason to refer to later.

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