Jump to content

User talk:Walkerma/Archive17

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other talk page archives see User talk:Walkerma/Archives. Other close archives include:

Archive1Archive2Archive3Archive4Archive5Archive6Archive7Archive8Archive10Archive11Archive12Archive13Archive14Archive15Archive16Archive18Archive19

Indium halides

Just finishing the indium halide article. Looking around there is an indium bromide stub that could be deleted in its current form as it is not very useful. An Indium(III) bromide page may be more appropriate but the only halide that actually warrants a page at the moment is InCl3 and thats there. Regarding InCl3 its main use commercally, at least according to the Indium Corporation web site Q&A is as a starting point for the manufacture of trimethylindium. Now I would think of Grignards or Al alkyls but metal contamination could be an issue. Any idea how it is actually made then this could be added into InCl3 and InMe3?. Axiosaurus 13:57, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

I've taken a quick look at this, I'll try and do some serious work on it in the next week. I've been very busy, both with my job (giving an exam tomorrow!) and because our Wikipedia CD is coming out very soon. Thanks for your work on the In halides, Walkerma 15:53, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
  • added indium and gallium halides. Thinking about aluminium halides but will put this one on the back burner for a week or so. Looking at gp 13 chalcogenides for now. Axiosaurus 22:07, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
  • Good to hear from you. Working on a rewrite of the borane article- as a family page covering all the boranes rather than the existing page which is essentially BH3. This will entail a bit of modification to all the other borane pages, decaborane diborane etc. to get the naming right etc. Got into this because i rewrote Wade's rules /PSEPT article (didn't add the capping principle because IMHO it doesn't really explain geometry of neutral BnXn - any thoughts?) which I wanted to refer to --and then added Zintl phases because it wasn't there. Now looking at borides -article is bit short. Nice area on the borders of chemistry and solid state, lovely cluster stuff and lots of applications, superconductivity etc etc. and yes I am still working on the group 13 chalcogenides. Axiosaurus 10:31, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
  • I've changed the borane article and notified folk on chemicals page. cheers.Axiosaurus 15:58, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

CD exclude list

You asked about inappropriately WPCD flagged articles. See Wikipedia:2006_Wikipedia_CD_Selection#Exclude_list. Evidently some people think proposing inappropriate articles is funny... Should be finished the selection next week. --BozMo talk 16:34, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Ok, from a request on the MediaWiki:Recentchangestext queue, I made Compressed fluid. Mind double-checking to see whether I missed something glaringly obvious? ;) Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 08:48, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

I added some categories, and made the stub more specific (Fluid dynamics isn't perfect, but it's very close, and will get seen, unlike with Science stub). Other than that, it's a long way from my expertise, so I can't really be sure. I've never heard the word steam used for anything other than H2O vapor - are you sure you can use it as a general term, as in "a steam"? Sounds wrong to me, but maybe engineers use that term. Cheers, Walkerma 19:34, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
Well, I think it is the latter, but since I am not really sure, I went with what the book and the professor said. It may as well have a real term, but I don't know about it yet. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 19:36, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
Check your mail, by the way... hopefully it came through. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 20:12, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

Version 0.5

Hi. What are the steps to follow in order to join the project? Become a member of the reviwers' team and that's it? The page is not very specific. Thanks Miskin 23:54, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm very interested but I think I'm going to wait until April before I sign up. Then I'll have some more time to spare. I wouldn't like being a signed up without being able to work on it at least once a day. Thanks for your answer, I'll contact you again soon. Miskin 22:25, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

Hey

Thanks for the message. It's good to be back. I have not really been following the WP:1.0 project, but it appears things are going great. I noticed that assessments really took off, thanks to the great bot work from Oleg and Wikiproject acceptance. I'm anxious to check out the upcoming CD release. I'll try to take a look at the new things happening around WP:1.0. Let me know if you need any favors. Cheers. GfloresUser talk:Gflores 04:11, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

I have a few questions, if you don't mind. :)
Is no more work needed for the 0.5 release, besides internal tidying and whatnot?
That MartinBot looks neat. That will help tremendously with the 300k assessed article. I was wondering, is the MartinBot planned to find appropriate articles for the 0.7 release, together with individual reviews? Or is it for 1.0?
I'm a little confused in the Review To-do list. It mentions both Core Topics and Vital Articles, which seem to have mostly the same articles, but only Core Topics has been worked on. Is the focus on Core Topics?
Lastly, where can I find the statistics for total assessed articles?
--GfloresTalk 20:04, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

Helping out

I will be more than happy to help out - although I will be out frm March 15- March 25 (I will be in Italy). When I get back I will work studiously on the project, along with the WPBiography assessment drive.. --Ozgod 10:18, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

Hello again! We are shipping a wikipedia snapshot in a few weeks to countries for children to test. Of course WP is a bit over their heads in some ways... but it's a good start. What do you think of and providing tools for saying "here's *my* favorite subset of WP 0.5"? Perhaps highlighting one or two subsets to make the point? Hope to chat soon. +sj + 23:44, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
drop a line when you are back from ACS -- and have a great time there! +sj + 17:15, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
Back from Italy :) --Ozgod 13:26, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

Re:IRC on Work via WikiProjects

Hi,

I would be willing to join in such an IRC (although I will need told how to set it up), but I would be quite limited to the times I could join you, since the amount of time I can spend online varies, and you're probably in the US to further limit things (I'm in the UK). So I could happily say I'd be willing to, but can't honestly say wheather or not I would actually could. By the way, I'm sorry to hear about your unfortunate experience with the accident at the chemical plant.... Although I thankfuly have never experienced anything like that first-hand, I know full well the lasting effect it can have - no-one deserves that. I shall take a look at the prose on the article on the 1991 fire. Thanks, Blood Red Sandman (Talk) (Contribs) 07:24, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

Children's version

saw your note on sj's talk page about a children's version of WP. I've been thinking a bit about how to do such a thing. I like your idea of a subset of 0.5, perhaps with just the lead paragraphs pulled. The children's encyclopedias I've seen have lots of topics but much less text and more pictures. In other words, comprehensiveness is not a goal. Difficult and inappropriate language is a problem, though. I don't know if there could be a successful children's fork, a la simple english (which isn't terribly successful) or if it would be better published separately. I think a lot of teachers etc. could get excited about an editable children's encyclopedia, though. -- phoebe (brassratgirl) /(talk) 01:17, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Blog, Wikipedia Weekly, and some other increasing-entropy stuff

Hello, Martin. As I said on WVWP's talk, I may be able to attend a meeting this weekend, depending on the time (I'm still UTC-7, regardless of Daylight Saving Time and such), so more info would be appreciated. By the way, check out what I wrote here... hopefully I didn't miss something obvious. (And if you want to contribute a piece for the five-article series, it would be awesome as well! ;)) By the way, that comes out in http://en.planet.wikimedia.org, so other people in the Wikimedia community would read it.

On a different front, maybe talking to WP:WEEKLY about the upcoming exciting news would be nice. They film about a few days in advance, so if we want to have the news out, we would need to ask them. Unfortunately, I don't have Skype on my Mac, and I don't have a mike on my WinXP laptop... :( do you think you could chat with them? Or who should I ask? Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 06:59, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Most definitely. I'm planning to have a piece about the release on the same day of the release, as an "unofficial" press release (by the way, when is the real press release for that going to be sent? We're getting a bit close to the date, and if we can build a bit of anticipation towards it, it would probably mean higher sales, which mean more cash to the Foundation), but you have much, much more information about what happened behind the scenes than I have, so that would really be nice. It is nice news that the CD is being pressed now, though. How many pieces are we going to end up making?
As for WP:WEEKLY, they haven't contacted me back... but hopefully they'll do so soon. I'll try to get back to you on that, hopefully soonish. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 04:20, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Some re-nominations for GA that may have your interest

Martin, some five A-Class articles got delisted from GA as their refs weren't in-line. I took care of this minor technicality, re-assessed them myself for A-Class in WP:Chem, and renominated them for GA at WP:GAC: toluene, zinc chloride, gold(III) chloride, potassium iodide, and sodium sulfate. Wim van Dorst (Talk) 01:01, 17 March 2007 (UTC).

Projects doing Assessments

Should task forces or work groups of projects doing assessments be listed separately in the list of projects doing assessments or not? John Carter 18:06, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

new userbox--what do you think?

A discus
A discus
This user is a member of WikiProject Elements.

Abridged 15:04, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia 0.7

Excellent. I can help out with reviews anytime. By the way, where can I get a copy of 0.5? Social Studiously My Editor Review! - 13:35, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. Social Studiously My Editor Review! - 12:57, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Vandalism

I think the page on menthol may have recently been vandalived by user 71.195.212.81 . I don't know anything about chemistry so I'm not certain what if the user has made valid edits. Can you make the necessary reverts?Jirt 04:31, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Vital articles and released versions

Hi, I'm in a newcomer in Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Review Team and I got confused when I encountered several lists. These are the lists:

I guess I can find more lists if I search more. Can you please explain their relationships for me? For example when I add some entries in the WP:VA what will happen in other pages? --Sa.vakilian(t-c) 07:25, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

'd like to do something like this:Wikipedia talk:Vital articles#Eurocentreism and my other discussions in that talk page. What should I do now?--Sa.vakilian(t-c) 15:12, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

Changes to copper(II) sulfate page

You write

  • Hi, I saw that you made these changes to the copper(II) sulfate page. Can you let us know the source of your information, since it is very different to what was there? I can add it in as a citation if you like. You can reply here, or on my talk page, or best is probably Talk:Copper(II) sulfate. Thanks for your help! Walkerma 13:35, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Please check the IPs! the changes you refer to were made by a different anonymous user. What I did was to remove a (bogus?) sentence, about copper sulfate killing algae by dessicating them. All the best, user:Jorge Stolfi 143.106.23.149 20:02, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Metathesis

Hi Martin! Just a quick question...do metathesis reactions take place naturally in nature? Or is the reaction purely synthetic? Also, it may be a good idea to archive soon. User:Werdnabot might be handy. --HappyCamper 12:36, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Wikicite

Hey Martin! Very keen on wikicite! Sign me up! Among other things, I am most drawn by the less cluttered view. I very much prefer adding citations in a separate pane or something, because the bulk of the text is very distracting. --Rifleman 82 17:06, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Bob Dylan

Hi Martin

I'm sorry to trouble you. A difficult dispute is taking place on the Bob Dylan Talk Page [[1]] with an editor who simply refuses to believe Dylan was ‘born again’, and who deletes all changes I make to the text, and all references. I would be grateful for your opinion. Thanks Mick gold 20:22, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

Thanks - I think your intervention injected some sanity into a difficult edit war. Mick gold 21:44, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

a little message for you.

i've been following some of the slashdot comments for the 0.5 release, and i thought i'd share one with you:

"My daughter is in first grade, and her classroom has a PC in it, but no internet connection. This CD would be very useful to her teacher. I know, Wikipedia is inaccurate, etc, but like any encyclopedia its a great jumping off point. A lot of classrooms of younger children have computers in them that are not networked. Hm. I'm off to burn a stack of these for Central Elementary!"

... :-) JoeSmack Talk 20:54, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

Really? Personally I'd never sensor the truth from my kids, even when its gruesome (lets be honest, truth is often). I can definitely see it from your angle though. Here is the reply, I put up your words (see the 're:' at the bottom). JoeSmack Talk 21:27, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

Taipei, 0.5, 0.7, blogs, and more thingies

Hi, Martin,

Sadly, it is close to impossible for me to attend Wikimania 2007. First, because I don't know one word of Chinese! :P But also, because it a logistical nightmare. It is true that it falls on my break, but since I'm taking summer classes (so I can get ahead a little bit on my classes and finish a 13-semester curriculum on 8 semesters), those are the only weeks I have left of break. Also, the greater issue would be that I've never gone on such an extended trip by myself, and I do feel a bit uncomfortable traveling so far, literally to the other side of the world. I do imagine it would be awesome to be able to go there and mingle with other Wikimedians. Maybe another year...

As for the blog, I don't know... is there anything particular you want to talk about? ;) For example, something you could write about is the future of WVWP, or a historical recollection of all the things that took place on the road to V0.5. Some sort of advertisement for inactive projects, such as the FAs First project, would be nice to have as well.

I will try to do some more things on the V0.7 front right away; that said, I won't be able to really do it justice until May 15 or so. But yeah... right now is the critical period, where we can get volunteers to stick. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 04:36, 27 April 2007 (UTC)

WP 1.0

Hello Professor Wakerma: Thanks for your note in my discussion. I am a Biology and Music student, and would like to edit or manage those articles. I hope to be of some help! Thanks. Gautam Discuss 03:02, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply as well! I guess i am a bit confused as to what to work on - the links you gave me are pages. Should I just edit them (and that will transfer over) or should I be doing something else? I'm pretty new with Wikipedia group activities, and this is indeed my first... Gautam Discuss 08:23, 1 May 2007 (UTC)
OK, thanks for clearing that up, Professor. I will work on some of the ones in Biology and Paleobio/anthro and Music ASAP. Take care. Gautam Discuss 15:03, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Re: New chemistry COTM

Thanks for your message at my talk page. If time allows, I'll try to tackle a few articles. As I have little experience editing chemistry-related articles, could you please point me toward what a good stub- or start-class chemistry article should look like, so that I may try to follow that model? Thanks, Black Falcon (Talk) 17:17, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

I don't know about Chemical Abstracts Service, but I have access to the full text of articles published in the past ten years in 30+ journals of the American Chemical Society. Having looked at the three articles you noted and also having skimmed through some scholarly articles, I doubt I'll be able to move any chemical-compound article beyond stub class. Like you advised, I think I'll focus primarily on adding basic information like solubility, density, structure, and practical uses, and sourcing information that is already present. I have edited three articles so far: iodate, silver iodate, and zinc nitride. When possible, I am also including (in the reference, not the text) the direct quote on which my additions are based, so that their accuracy can be double-checked. -- Black Falcon (Talk) 23:58, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

Gwalarn's welcome in the Wikipedia team

Hi Gwalarn, Thanks for signing up for the review team. We just released our test CD, which received a surprising amount of press coverage - this indicates that there is a lot of interest in what we're doing. Please help to make the next release even better! Let me know what you're interested in, or if you want some guidance. If you prefer, just take a look at the FAQ page and get started. Thanks! Walkerma 02:21, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for your welcome! I'll be very happy if I could help Wikipedia to be the reference. I just put an eye to the FAQ to learn what and how to do, and I don't forget your warm welcome. Thanks again. Gwalarn 19:51, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
By the way, you seem to use an other editor than the one available in Wikipedia. Is there a dedicated method to launch our own editor when clicking on "edit this page"? Gwalarn 19:57, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for getting in contact. Yes, I use User:Cacycle/wikEd for editing, and I use Outriggr's tool to see assessments. I also see you're also on the French Wikipedia - do you know fr:utilisateur:Kelson? We're good friends - and he is involved with the 1.0 project on fr. Cordialement, Walkerma 03:06, 4 May 2007 (UTC)
Thank you for "WikEd". I just installed it, and it seems to be a good improvement! Thanks also for Kelson. I didn't know the same project was on the way in the French wikipedia. I leave a message to Kelson and I subscribe to the French team of Wikipedia 1.0 too. Cordialement, Gwalarn 21:14, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Importance

Hi! For WikiProject assessments, should the importance be based on the importance within the WikiProject's scope or for Wikipedia 1.0? Thanks! By the way, I suggest archiving your talk page. Greeves (talk contribs reviews) 22:42, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

Status of Martinbot, release version inactivity?

What is the status of Martinbot? On April 17 you said that it would probably be up in about the week. Also, the release version nominations are not getting anything done. I think the release version should be suspended until Martinbot starts working because doing the same thing as V0.5 won't really get us anywhere (except more articles, but the articles from WP:WVWP will swamp that). —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Eyu100 (talkcontribs) 18:03, 6 May 2007 (UTC).

Actually, now 0.5 is out things are starting to pick up a bit, and once exams are over I expect to be doing a lot of review work, and we have several other new reviewers. We can't just suspend the project! I've left a longer reply on your talk page. Walkerma 05:36, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

Acetic acid (data page) reply

Thanks for the acknowledgment. I have been making it a project to expand data pages for a number of common organic solvents. See data pages for ethanol, methanol, acetone, formic acid, and isopropanol. There's more to come on this. Earlier I also expanded data pages for water and ammonia. My favorite of the data page projects, though, was azeotrope (data) (I also rewrote the azeotrope main article). I'm certainly glad to know that there are folks who will get some benefit out of this effort. Karl Hahn (T) (C) 23:10, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

Sorry for lack of involvement

I do apologize for committing to the Version 7.0 project and then being very limited in my involvement - reality has been very demanding the past month and a half since I returned from Italy. I am hoping in the coming weeks I will be able to jump back on board. --13:48, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

Chemistry

Certainly. Do you have recommendations for a good site or two to quote, or should I just google it? >Radiant< 11:35, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

Chemical substance

The current introductory lines of the article define a chemical substance as "any material with a definite chemical composition.[1] For example, a sample of water has the same properties and the same ratio of hydrogen to oxygen whether the sample is isolated from a river or made in a laboratory."which is neither the uniequivocal usage of the term neither very precise. For example, the Chemical substances Index published by CAS includes many substances like alloys of variable composition. Is CAS mistaken in including these substances in a list of chemical substances? CAS is an undisputed body of chemistry professionals, to say that their decisions are not in consonance with the accepted common knowledge of chemists and cite a statement on the basis of a text book would definetly not in the line of the wikipedia objectives. Secondly, the article has the phrase mechanical process; what really are mechanical processes, and are they always useful to separate the component of a mixture?Is the readership of wikipedia limited to school kids? Even if it is, wouldn't it be better to present a balanced opinion rather than harping on the traditional statement. The objective of Wikipedia, in my opinion is to reflect the changing nature of knowledge based on inputs from general public rather than repeating the oft quoted definitions for which Encyclopedia Britannica, Encyclopedia Americanna or for that mattewr MSN encyclopedia are much better known for. These are a few questions I would like to raise, simply because I am a firm believer of the spiritof Wikipedia and I do not belong to the conservative classHallenrm 07:37, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Chemical_substance"

DBPedia

Hope this is the right place to leave this... Am at the WWW 2007 conference and very excited about DBPedia - the extraction of WP content into an RDF resource. See my latest blog:

dbpedia - structured information from Wikipedia => dbchem - May 11th, 2007 

where I have tried to capture some of this. If we can get the WP templates into DBPedia then *they* have great tools for searching. We would have a search tool that could ask incredible questions over WP (obviously not substructure yet). Petermr 17:40, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

sodium sulfate needs you!

Hi Martin, I've added a lot of marketing and sales info to the sodium sulfate article. Would you please be so kind as to give the chem/phys properties section a nice combing? After that, I think it warrants both A-Class and a FA candidacy. Wim van Dorst (Talk) 23:08, 22 May 2007 (UTC).

Version 0.7 Meeting

I would love to attend - I will be in Ohio, but I can still try to meet up. What time EST? I have never done IRC before, so, yes, I will need help setting up for that! --Ozgod 04:25, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Sorry I left so abruptly - guests showed up at the front door a little earlier than I had anticipated. I do have to admit, I was quite lost during most of the discussion. --Ozgod 02:44, 28 May 2007 (UTC)
It is all good - I will continue nominating and assessing articles as fast as I can. I wish in some cases I could easily just pass an article - but it must go through the nomination process first, correct? I cannot pass an article I have nominated as well? Which means I added another twenty three articles to the "Arts" list that hopefully another editor will screen. Ah well - c'est la vie! Were you all able to decide a deadline for nominations and approvals? --Ozgod 03:07, 28 May 2007 (UTC)
I will leave a note at the Wikipedia WPBiography Project to see if any more editors from over there are interested in lending a helping hand in assessing these articles. Hopefully they may have some other articles I, or other contributors, may not have thought of nominating that are of importance (like, Juanes, for example - had never heard of him, but important nonetheless). --Ozgod 03:15, 28 May 2007 (UTC)
Good idea, thanks! Walkerma 03:25, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

Question about license of images and citing sources

Hey! I'm finally taking you up on the offer for help. After doing a report on the toxic profile of MDMA metabolism, I'd like to contribute a piece of information from an ACS journal article I found to the MDMA page. It has a proposed metabolic pathway in writing as well as in image form. I've created a similar image of the metabolic pathway and am not sure how to cite it, license it, or whether or not I'm even allowed to do this. The image is here with information citation in the description. As you can see by the history I got kinda confused and played around w/ some things not knowing what to do. Any advice would be VERY welcome. Thanks!!! Ccroberts( t · c · g ) 21:38, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Inadvertant Deletion in Release Version?

Dear Martin,

It looks like a few entries were inadvertantly deleted in this "restore" edit. For example: Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn, Bolesław Prus.

Regards, RickJP 08:25, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

GAC backlog elimination drive

This form message is being sent to you either due to your membership with WikiProject Good Articles and/or your inclusion on the Wikipedia:Good article candidates/List of reviewers. A new drive has been started requesting that all members review at least one article (or more, if you wish!) within the next two weeks at GAC to help in removing the large backlog. This message is being sent to all GA members and even members who have been recently reviewing articles. There are almost 130 members in this project and about 180 articles that currently need to be reviewed. If each member helps to review just one or two articles, the majority of the backlog will be cleared. Since the potential amount of reviewers may significantly increase, please make sure to add :{{GAReview}} underneath the article you are reviewing to ensure that only one person is reviewing each article. Additionally, the GA criteria may have been modified since your last review, so look over the criteria again to help you to determine if a candidate is GA-worthy. If you have any questions about this drive or the review process, leave a message on the GAC talk page. --Nehrams2020 23:47, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

new search possibilities?

hi hi. i remember at the meeting we were bouncing around the search capabilities we had at our disposal, and i recently found a new one. the searches we were talking about were mediawiki's search (blech) and wikiwix (not much better). however in the new Signpost i ran across this experimental one (bingo!) and it looks good. the current 0.5 query for 'Math' finds Calculus first and Mathematics second (probably because all the crap inbetween that would normally come up wasn't nominated into 0.5) - maybe a better search capability for 0.7 with this thing? we're going to have a lot more articles to wade through on the 0.7 DVD.... JoeSmack Talk 06:48, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

No problem. Good luck with the conference! Explaining wiki's sure can be exhausting; drink plenty of fluids and keep smiling and you'll get through it! ;)
On another note I like the feeling of where 0.7 is going. For one we've walked the 0.5 path, and for another it will be considerably bigger. I'm looking forward to the bigger challenge! JoeSmack Talk 07:27, 29 May 2007 (UTC)