Misplaced Pages

Latest revision as of 20:35, 20 January 2025

Dragons flight is suffering from physical health issues. This may affect his ability to work on Misplaced Pages. Consequently, he may not be able to respond to talk-page messages or e-mails in a timely manner. Your patience is greatly appreciated.

About my health

About three weeks ago I was diagnosed with Burkitt's lymphoma, a rare type of white blood cell cancer. The diagnosis was made in the early stages, and the prognosis is relatively good (at least as cancer prognoses goes).

However, I have a long road to recovery involving surgery and chemotherapy that is expected to take multiple months. During that time, there will likely be periods where chemo has me down and I may be unavailable for extended periods of time. There will also likely be periods of time where I am feeling relatively well (like right now) and may choose to contribute to Misplaced Pages, as I enjoy it and they encourage chemo patients to stay mentally engaged. However, my participation and responsiveness to inquiries is likely to be very hit and miss over the next several months.

If anyone wants to, a friend and coworker set up a donation page to support my costs during treatment , but I'm not expecting anything from anyone here and already have pretty good health insurance and good support.

Thank you for your understanding, and I look forward to beating this thing.

Robert Rohde aka Dragons flight (talk) 19:13, 21 April 2017 (UTC)

I wish the very best to you and I hope you are able to defeat the cancer. It is completely understandable why you might have to disengage from Misplaced Pages for a while; when you return full time, it will be celebration for the project, as we'll have you back again, and more importantly, a celebration for yourself, as it'll mean you're well again. All the best, Dragons flight, all the best. Acalamari 22:27, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

Best of luck! I am lucky not to have any such personal experience, but I recall a friend that fought some cancer for decades. There were bad years, and there were good quiet decades, but she did a lot of good stuff in between - and a few not so good, don't we all? :). And she never, ever, 'was' her disease, she was always herself. That we can fight to control. I hope I can do the same if needed someday, and again, wish you all the best. - Nabla (talk) 22:50, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

Thinking of you with sympathy and hope. Among all your more important contributions to this project and this community, I've never forgotten the effort you made to do this. With my appreciation and very best regards and wishes. Ira Brad Matetsky, Newyorkbrad (talk) 22:59, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

Good luck with your treatment and recovery! I'm sure this must be a trying time for you and it's completely understandable that you would need to take some time off from Misplaced Pages. If there are any articles that you would like us to keep an eye on while you're gone, just ask. Hope to see you back soon! Kaldari (talk) 01:03, 3 May 2017 (UTC)

<3 Keegan (talk) 21:52, 10 May 2017 (UTC)

Sorry to hear you've been dealing with this. Strength and healing go with you, and hoping for a speedy recovery <3 - Alison 22:05, 10 May 2017 (UTC)

Hi Robert! This is not happy news. I wish you a speedy and complete recovery! --Stephan Schulz (talk) 22:58, 10 May 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, everyone. It's a slow process but I am trying to stay positive and keep my eye on the goal. Dragons flight (talk) 11:52, 11 May 2017 (UTC)

• I wish you a speedy recovery --In actu (Guerillero) | My Talk 13:58, 11 May 2017 (UTC)

I am thinking of you and yours and wishing you health and fortitude. best, Keilana (talk) 18:33, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

Update

It has now been about two months since I posted about my cancer here (and about three months since the initial diagnosis).

After 2 surgeries and 6 in-patient chemotherapy treatments, I am happy to say that I am now recovering at home. Burkitt's lymphoma is one of the relatively "good" forms of cancer, and >80% patients in my position can expect to be fully cured. There will be a substantial period of rest and recovery, as well as a long period of monitoring for potential relapse, but I am optimistic about the future and being able to get on with my life.

Thank you to everyone for your support. Dragons flight (talk) 12:01, 21 June 2017 (UTC)

Good to hear you are on the mend. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:41, 21 June 2017 (UTC)

This is very welcome! I wish you a speedy rest-recovery! --Stephan Schulz (talk) 12:43, 21 June 2017 (UTC)

Super news! Delighted to hear you're well on the road to recovery :) - Alison 08:50, 23 June 2017 (UTC)

Great, hope to see you back here then.! Doug Weller talk 12:30, 23 June 2017 (UTC)

Welcome home. Glad you're better. A Train 06:53, 7 July 2017 (UTC)

ITN recognition for Maryam Mirzakhani

On 15 July 2017, In the news was updated with an item that involved the article Maryam Mirzakhani, which you nominated. If you know of another recently created or updated article suitable for inclusion in ITN, please suggest it on the candidates page. Spencer 23:01, 15 July 2017 (UTC)

Template:Editnotice load

I'm here per this comment, can you change the page protection of {{Editnotice load}} to template protection. Thank you, - FlightTime (open channel) 01:12, 12 September 2017 (UTC)

Invitation to Admin confidence survey

Hello,

Beginning in September 2017, the Wikimedia Foundation Anti-harassment tool team will be conducting a survey to gauge how well tools, training, and information exists to assist English Misplaced Pages administrators in recognizing and mitigating things like sockpuppetry, vandalism, and harassment.

The survey should only take 5 minutes, and your individual response will not be made public. This survey will be integral for our team to determine how to better support administrators.

To take the survey sign up here and we will send you a link to the form.

We really appreciate your input!

Please let us know if you wish to opt-out of all massmessage mailings from the Anti-harassment tools team.

For the Anti-harassment tools team, SPoore (WMF), Community Advocate, Community health initiative (talk) 19:52, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

ITN recognition for 2017 Las Vegas Strip shooting

On 2 October 2017, In the news was updated with an item that involved the article 2017 Las Vegas Strip shooting, which you nominated. If you know of another recently created or updated article suitable for inclusion in ITN, please suggest it on the candidates page. BorgQueen (talk) 11:06, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

--BorgQueen (talk) 11:06, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

ArbCom 2017 election voter message

Hello, Dragons flight. Voting in the 2017 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23.59 on Sunday, 10 December. All users who registered an account before Saturday, 28 October 2017, made at least 150 mainspace edits before Wednesday, 1 November 2017 and are not currently blocked are eligible to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Misplaced Pages arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

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Precious anniversary

Precious

Three years!

... and best wishes for your health and well-being! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:45, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

... and four years, with best wishes --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:44, 9 December 2018 (UTC)

... and five ... --Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:55, 9 December 2019 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Module:PassArguments

Module:PassArguments has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the module's entry on the Templates for discussion page. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pppery (talk • contribs) 15:41, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Module:Switch

Module:Switch has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the module's entry on the Templates for discussion page. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 16:01, 28 April 2018 (UTC)

Post-Glacial Sea Level Rise

Dear Robert, if You are in fact the author of the "Post-Glacial Sea Level Rise" graph (which I have on my PC since its first publication), I now would suggest to concrete the time reference "ago" to "b2k", which You probably know from the Greenland Ice core data (which I also all have on my PC), as published by the Danish team. "b2k" naturally means "before the year 2000" and would at least roughly relate to the date of the used data, otherwise becoming more and more mistaken. The correction would make the information correct and independent of the actual date. Thanks in advance and best wishes for your health! Hans J. Holm (see academia.edu/Researgate.net/google Scholar for references). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2003:DD:F13:11E9:9C2B:CACF:CD1:DDB1 (talk) 13:26, 10 May 2018 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Module:Citation

Module:Citation has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the module's entry on the Templates for discussion page. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 16:20, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Module:ExpandCitations

Module:ExpandCitations has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the module's entry on the Templates for discussion page. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 00:25, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

New global warming art

Hello Robert,

Today I started a new page with the objective of improving figures on the topic of climate change. I've been wanting to do this for a couple of years, but the high quality of the current images has put me off so far. However, I do feel it is important to have updates of the most important images related to global warming. If I understand it correctly, you have made a lot of the figures ten years ago. I was wondering if you want to contribute to the update of those images or give me advise on how to tackle this daunting task.

You have used a lot of data sets. Were you able to access them publicly or did you have to contact authors of papers yourself? Did you find review articles for the data or did you make an overview of available records yourself? Femkemilene (talk) 09:57, 22 May 2018 (UTC)

Yes, I made several dozen images 10-15 years ago. Some of those ended up in Misplaced Pages. Eventually, I found that other demands on my time were too large and I stopped working on it. (A decision that was made easier by how often Wikimedia Commons violated my copyright by reposting material without any indication of my authorship.) More recently, I have been making some new images in the last year or two, which mostly appear on my twitter feed (https://twitter.com/rarohde). A few of those may be relevant to Misplaced Pages. I would be happy discuss updates and provide pointers. Maybe I would even contribute materials now and again, but I'm not so sure. I do have original materials for some of the images (but not all due to a computer failure years ago). Most of the referenced datasets are available publicly, though there are a few where I communicated with authors directly to get copies of their published data. I'm a professional climate scientist, so I am familiar with a wide range of data. How I chose sources varied on a case-by-case basis and I couldn't really say in general whether I was looking at review papers or individual works. Dragons flight (talk) 11:29, 22 May 2018 (UTC)

Thank you very much for your quick reply. Apparently, I was following you on Twitter already, so I've seen much of those images before. I really liked the figure on the evolution of humanities energy system. I wasn't aware that Misplaced Pages Commons reposts the images stored there itself, but constant violation of copyright sounds like quite a pain. I see that you use both GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 and Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported. Could you maybe tell me what the difference is?

Fyi: I'm going to start this project together with a climate scientist working with at the Royal Meteorological Institute. I started a PhD on climate change recently myself.

We'd be very much interested in original materials. I assume that the software used for the creation of these images is now obsolete, so it's best to make the figures ourselves? For many figures, it will simply be an update on the figures from 10-15 years. Since the figures will contain new data and will look somewhat differently, I assume it's best to upload them not as a new version, but instead as a new figure with a reference (proper attribution) to the old version. Femkemilene (talk) 16:35, 22 May 2018 (UTC)

P.S. I noticed that the external links in your template for GWArt (and GWArtOld) are not working anymore.

The images were mostly created in Matlab. For some I could probably find the original code and data, though in many cases it might be better to track down more recent data / sources. If there are particular images you want to know more about and/or get code, let me know. At the very least, I could probably answer questions about the images if something is unclear. In some cases, the Matlab outputs were manually edited in Illustrator or other programs before the final format was created. (Incidentally, In hindsight, I don't recommend manually editing files because it only makes things harder to update later.)

Several years ago, I ran a site "Global Warming Art" that hosted all of these files and more, but I found that maintaining the site was taking too much of my time. So eventually I stopped maintaining it. That's why the external link is dead now.

Incidentally, I do enjoy making graphics like those, but it can get burdensome. It was mostly an unfunded side project from my grad school days, and it was hard to maintain the energy over time. In a hypothetical world where I actually had funding to work on climate science communication, this is something I would enjoy doing more of, especially if there was a team working on it. However, in my current life I need to focus on research, and other things.

Who are you working with at RMI?

For truly new works, I would suggest licensing as CC-BY 4.0 or CC-BY-SA 4.0. For updated works, it is probably better to use the same licensing as the existing works. If you really want to get into licensing, I could have a long discussion about this and the various pros / cons, but perhaps not right now. In some ways, the GFDL licensing on the images now is a legacy of the original GFDL licensing on Misplaced Pages, but even that is complicated.

As you may be aware, it is now common for most images to be hosted on Wikimedia Commons. That is typical today, though 10 years ago there was still a mixture of Commons hosted and locally hosted materials. Unfortunately, having materials hosted on Commons makes them harder to manage from the point of view of vandalism, since changes to Commons' description pages are not visible on user watchlists on the individual projects. Nevertheless most things have been moved to Commons (save fair use images). Personally, I've found the Commons community annoying to work with. People complain if your description page includes a lot of text, even though that is often necessary to describe complex figures. People complain if your charts aren't in SVG format, even if SVG versions don't look nice. (I've repeatedly had people create shitty-looking SVG conversions, replace all the image usages, and not even bother to acknowledge the original authorship or licensing.) Purists complain if there is text on the diagrams (even axis labels, etc.). I understand the argument for supporting multi-lingual versions, but I will still argue that unlabeled diagrams are harder on readers. Not to mention that irresponsible people working on Commons have a bad habit of creating derivative works (e.g. other languages, other formats, etc.) without acknowledging the original authorship or licensing. (Or argue that "it is just a graph" and hence authorship doesn't matter.)

Okay, that last part was a bit too much of a rant, but frankly I found the attitude and behaviors of some people on Commons grew to be exhausting. Even if the goal is to provide updated materials to Misplaced Pages, I would recommend having an authoritative version and description hosted somewhere off-wiki that reflects your personal best work. If you have a good way to do so, and wish to do so, providing code and data could also be useful to people. Best wishes and good luck. Dragons flight (talk) 20:27, 22 May 2018 (UTC)

Thank you very much for all the information and the rant :P. Unfortunately, I'm a disaster with Matlab.

I've made my contribution to Commons with an update of the CO2 concentrations, including a reference to your figure in the description. The python code I made available on GitHub, with a very easy language switch, so that people that don't understand python can still make their own language version. Hope that will help in keeping the Commons community content. I think you're right that figures should include some text to make it clear immediately what the figure is about.

At RMI, I'm working with Lesley de Cruz. She's now involved in a project around paleoclimate, so she should have access to most interesting data. Femkemilene (talk) 12:59, 27 May 2018 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Module:ISBN

Module:ISBN has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the module's entry on the Templates for discussion page. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 22:05, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

Nomination of AMResorts for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article AMResorts is suitable for inclusion in Misplaced Pages according to Misplaced Pages's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Misplaced Pages:Articles for deletion/AMResorts until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. Rathfelder (talk) 17:27, 29 June 2018 (UTC)

Orphaned non-free image File:AMResorts logo.gif

Thanks for uploading File:AMResorts logo.gif. The image description page currently specifies that the image is non-free and may only be used on Misplaced Pages under a claim of fair use. However, the image is currently not used in any articles on Misplaced Pages. If the image was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that images for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Misplaced Pages (see our policy for non-free media).

Note that any non-free images not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described in section F5 of the criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. --B-bot (talk) 17:09, 9 July 2018 (UTC)

Template: Cite journal - mistaken use

Hi Dragons flight, I encountered a very far-spread problem with the use of the "volume" parameter of the Cite jounal template. According to the docs, the parameter expects an entry like "Volume four", "Vol. 4", "Band VII", etc. If anything shorter than 4 characters is entered, this is printed in bold text in the citation, to mark the mistake.

Nearly all uses of the template seem to ignore this. The result is a host of Volume descriptors, that are nothing but bold printed numbers. This could lead to misunderstandings and confusion among users trying to find the cited journal. For an impression of the extent of the mistaken use, look at Candide#Sources, for example. Or really any article citing lots of journals.

I'm adressing you, as you made the last major update to the template, in 2013. Perhaps you can help or direct me to the right place on WP for this. 2.247.243.131 (talk) 16:06, 17 October 2018 (UTC)

The examples given on the template page show clearly that a number is expected and, as is commonly the style, the volume number is intentionally in bold. This is not a mistake, as the examples make clear. Mikenorton (talk) 16:13, 17 October 2018 (UTC)

Are you really sure about that? Ok. Then there is no problem. Thanks. 2.247.243.131 (talk) 16:24, 17 October 2018 (UTC)

ArbCom 2018 election voter message

Hello, Dragons flight. Voting in the 2018 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23.59 on Sunday, 3 December. All users who registered an account before Sunday, 28 October 2018, made at least 150 mainspace edits before Thursday, 1 November 2018 and are not currently blocked are eligible to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Misplaced Pages arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2018 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:42, 19 November 2018 (UTC)