User talk:Woonpton: Difference between revisions

Browse history interactively ← Previous edit Next edit →Content deleted Content addedVisual WikitextInline

Revision as of 18:52, 22 February 2008 editThe Rationalist (talk \| contribs)1,568 edits →HI: new section← Previous edit		Revision as of 01:18, 29 February 2008 edit undoWndl42 (talk \| contribs)2,347 edits →Hi - Bleep talk page...: new sectionNext edit →
Line 50:		Line 50:

	HI - thanks for the message. Agree with what you say but at a loss on how the article could be improved. I think I hate the current version most on grounds of style. But no improvement I can think of that will not incur the wrath of someone or other. ] (]) 18:52, 22 February 2008 (UTC)		HI - thanks for the message. Agree with what you say but at a loss on how the article could be improved. I think I hate the current version most on grounds of style. But no improvement I can think of that will not incur the wrath of someone or other. ] (]) 18:52, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

			== Hi - Bleep talk page... ==

			Woonpton, anytime someone makes a negative statement that is "to the man" as opposed to "to the argument", that is incivility, see ]. So, when someone says: "Search engine tests only give a vauge guidance on questions of relative importance or connection of subjects, for exmample. They are not used to justify ''singular opinions'' of an ''article's direction'' as ''you are now doing''", you can see that the comment was fine up to sentence one, but sentence two was a not-so-thinly veiled accusation of what is called "POV pushing" around here, and the editor who made the statement is on civility parole specifically for calling people "POV pushers", which IS a personal attack. Finding a weasle-worded way to call someone a "POV pusher" is still incivility. Thanks for asking though...] (]) 01:18, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Revision as of 01:18, 29 February 2008

Welcome!

Hello, Woonpton, and welcome to Misplaced Pages! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Misplaced Pages:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question and then place {{helpme}} before the question on your talk page. Again, welcome! -- EdChem (talk) 13:33, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Comment at talk:Sokal Affair

Hi Woonpton, I noticed your comment at the talk page for the Sokal Affair, and have acted (and commented) there. I encourage you to read the policy WP:BOLD. It is OK to act when you find mistakes (or to ask, of course, but on a page like that a question could go unnoticed for ages). If challenged on a change, take it to the talk page, just like you did. :) Best, EdChem (talk) 13:37, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Some relevant arbcomm links

This should whet your whistle. There are about a dozen more if you are interested. If I can help you any more, let me know.

ScienceApologist (talk) 19:54, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Bleep article

Hi, Woonpton. On the Talk page you said, "The assertion about meditation and crime, while refuted by the actual data, is just another example of the claims made in the movie that aren't supported by science." Maybe look at this.. The criticism by the media of the meditation study is based on Park's assertion, which Rainforth addresses. Just FYI -- not really relevant to the editing of Bleep, since this article doesn't mention Bleep. TimidGuy (talk) 22:21, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Hello again. I've had a chance to look over the rest of this article. My second impression isn't much better than the first, and your statement that the article contains data in tables form is false. Tables are rows and columns of numbers; what he shows is two graphs. There are no data in this article. (I'm a statistician and it sets my teeth on edge when people mix those up, especially people who have set out to instruct me about statistics). There's not enough information in the graphs for me to draw any conclusions from them, and it's not clear what the units are on the abscissa, but at any rate this isn't a serious research paper; it's a polemic apparently written in answer to a polemic (I haven't read Parks' and probably won't bother) and I don't draw conclusions about anything from such material. It's a lot like the kind of useless debate that seems to characterize Misplaced Pages: nyah, nyah, nyah... back and forth; there's nothing much to be learned from such posturing and taunting.

You apparently assumed, without bothering to ask, that my comment (in an aside) that the evidence doesn't support the claim made in Bleep about the meditation study, came from Park. No, I came to that conclusion by analyzing the data myself. I won't bore you with the details of my analysis, since I ran those data simply to satisfy my own curiosity and it couldn't be cited anywhere, but I am quite comfortable saying my analyses just don't find anything in those data. There's a lot of nonsense (in many fields, unfortunately, not just yours) that results from taking a GIGO approach to time series or regression analysis, so I'm not terribly surprised or impresssed that someone got some kind of result by grinding these kinds of data through such a routine; spurious results are more the rule than the exception, in my experience with this combination. A simpler approach often gives one a more accurate idea of what's going on, since if there's really something there, not just a statistical artifact, it will show up in the descriptive statistics as well as in the inferential statistics.

I'm looking right now at a table I just pulled up of crime in Washington DC from 1960 through 2006. The year 1993, the year TM supposedly reduced crime in the city by 23% for two months, Washington DC had the highest incidence of overall violent crime in the 46 years recorded in this dataset. Second highest murder rate, highest rate of rape, highest rate of assaults, which are supposed to be the three types of crime included in the study. It's kind of hard logically, never mind about the statistics, to argue that even though that was the worst year in history in DC for violent crime, it would have been worse without the meditation? There's simply no justification, in my opinion, for making such a claim (with or without fancy statistics); if Park did say that this is more likely a result of wishful thinking than an actual effect, I would be inclined to agree with him. thanks. Woonpton (talk) 04:05, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Answer to your question

Hi, Woonpton, I saw your message on my talk page. You are correct about your user name being red because you have not started a user page. In fact, any red link on WP means that the page being linked to does not exist - either because it has never been created, or because it has since been deleted. Your idea of a red link to indicate a newbie user is interesting, but would be a double-edged sword. Since there are a lot of new users who are sock puppets or interested only in vandalism or are trolling, they can be met with some suspicion. I note that you have a talk page post from ScienceApologist about ArbCom proceedings, from which I am guessing you have dived into some of the more controversial areas. I have done the same, so I can understand your decision, but this also means that there may be a little more suspicion of you as a newbie from some quarters. It isn't fair, but then, what is?

Regarding watching pages, at the top of each page there are tabs for discussion (the talk page), + (add new section), history, etc. Pressing the 'watch' tab will add that page and its associated talk page (or the associated article or user or whatever page if you are on a talk pgae) to your watchlist. Your links in the top right "Woonpton my talk ..." include a link to your watchlist, where you will see a link to the most recent edit of all pages you are watching, including who made the edit, when, and what the edit summary says. This is not only useful for watching for replies to questions, but also for changes to pages you are editing or find interesting. From the 'my watchlist' link, you can also edit your watchlist, and you can remove pages from your watchlist either there or by clicking the 'unwatch' tab on a watched page.

Another thought on red links - they can also be useful if you want to create sub pages. For example, if you wanted a sub page of your user page to work on a section of an article out of the public glare, you can simply add a link by posting a talk page message that says something like ], which produces a red link: user:Woonpton/sandbox which you can click on to create the page. If you prefer to name it something relevant to the article, that's cool too. You can also request such pages be deleted when you no longer need them.

Regarding talk page organisation, there seem to be two distinct schools of thought. Some people prefer to respond on each other's talk pages, so that you get the orange 'new message' bar. Others prefer to keep interactions on a single page, so they are coherent. I fall into the latter group, but either way is fine. If asked to reply on another page (as you requested), I'll do so, but also tend to copy responses to my own page - that way you get the orange bar notification and I get the coherent discussion that I prefer. It's up to you what you prefer.

Finally, I know that it is easy to feel ignored. You might want to try joining a WikiProject in an area of interest, and contribute to it. Long standing editors on those projects tend to be happy to welcome and help us newbies, and can also provide someone to ask for help. Of course, you can also ask me if you like! If I don't know the answer, I'll try and point you in the direction of someone who can help. If I don't answer, I'm probably busy in real life, and so have yet to see your message. Regards, EdChem (talk) 03:26, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

HI

HI - thanks for the message. Agree with what you say but at a loss on how the article could be improved. I think I hate the current version most on grounds of style. But no improvement I can think of that will not incur the wrath of someone or other. The Rationalist (talk) 18:52, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Hi - Bleep talk page...

Woonpton, anytime someone makes a negative statement that is "to the man" as opposed to "to the argument", that is incivility, see ad hominem. So, when someone says: "Search engine tests only give a vauge guidance on questions of relative importance or connection of subjects, for exmample. They are not used to justify singular opinions of an article's direction as you are now doing", you can see that the comment was fine up to sentence one, but sentence two was a not-so-thinly veiled accusation of what is called "POV pushing" around here, and the editor who made the statement is on civility parole specifically for calling people "POV pushers", which IS a personal attack. Finding a weasle-worded way to call someone a "POV pusher" is still incivility. Thanks for asking though...WNDL42 (talk) 01:18, 29 February 2008 (UTC)