User talk:Cla68

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Looking for sources

I was thinking of expanding the article on the US Navy fleet oiler USS Neosho (AO-23), perhaps bringing it up to FA-standard if I can find enough information. I haven't worked on an article involving an auxiliary ship of the US Navy before. Would you know of any book titles or other sources of information that I might look for which might have information on this ship's history? Cla68 (talk) 06:43, 12 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

No Big Book of Navy Auxiliaries that I know of, but here are some suggestions for research angles:

Obviously from the article, the DANFS entry has been used, but often I've found that other ships' DANFS entries can sometimes have other useful information, too. The USN Historical Center (I can't ever remember what their new name is) will sometimes have extra things beyond DANFS, too. (Google search.)
the HyperWar site at ibiblio.org often has an assortment of primary and secondary sources for WWII topics. A google search turns up Neosho's action report from her sinking, and from the Pearl Harbor attack
I'd also suggest books on the Pearl Harbor attack and the Battle of Coral Sea, too. A Google Books search for Coral Sea turns up several that look promising.
Newspaper searches for the building, launching, commissioning timeframe might be helpful, too. Also, according the GlobalSecurity.org, Neosho was the world's largest oil tanker at the time of her launch.

Good luck on the research and writing. I'll be happy to answer any other questions. — Bellhalla (talk) 12:11, 12 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

That's very helpful thankyou. Cla68 (talk) 22:59, 12 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Making difficult edits

I recently stumbled upon your guide to writing history articles and found it helpful, so kudos there. But one thing stuck out - choosing a non-controversial subject, where you say if you can find an article that has been left alone for some time. I would argue that it benefits the project more if users do take on highly visible topics and thoroughly research them to find the "truth" (quotes because it's a relative term on Wikipedia as we all know). Not in the bang-your-head-against-the-wall Israeli-Palestinian sense maybe, but if there's going to be a debate, I'd much rather have someone citing five different book sources than relying on "I've always heard..." and similar arguments. You're tagged as willing and able to make difficult edits, so I figured it was food for thought. Again, very informative guide. :) Recognizance (talk) 18:43, 27 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The reason I say that is if you want to take the article to FA. You're right that if we're serious about building Wikipedia as an encyclopedia, that we should tackle important, controversial subjects and fix them. If you want to, however, take an article to FA within a reasonable amount of time, it's easier, in my opinion, to avoid articles that are under the protection of POV-pushing editors with an agenda. I guess you could call it the "low-hanging fruit" analogy. Sure, a controversial article might require better sourcing to resolve the associated editing controversies, but the fairly rigorous FA review process should ensure that most, if not all, of FA articles are adequately sourced. Thank you for the kind words on the guide. Cla68 (talk) 22:21, 27 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Very good point about time. And on second thought, it probably is better to steer new users away from wiki drama that could scare them off. By the way, you might mention library exchanges and similar programs in addition to overseas booksellers. That's how I plan to get ahold of this book, which I have no intention of paying for. Recognizance (talk) 17:27, 28 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Ton That Dinh

About the NYT article that you mentioned, can you email the contents to me, I can only see the start of it. Thanks YellowMonkey (bananabucket) 06:12, 19 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately, it appears that that article has since been moved behind the pay wall of the NYTimes. One way to obtain it would be to ask someone with LexisNexus access to email a copy of the text to you. I don't have that access, but most of the participants at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Law have access because they use that tool for legal research. Cla68 (talk) 06:20, 19 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Leave my pages alone

Leave my pages alone [1]. You are not welcome William M. Connolley (talk) 07:34, 28 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Japanese ship names

Cla, I don't know if your interests extend this far, but a question involving naming conventions for IJN ships has arisen at Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Amagi class battlecruiser/archive1. If you can shed any light on the area please take a look. Regards, Kablammo (talk) 17:49, 1 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I was just coming to ask you the same thing. Appreciate if you could poke your nose in there; even if all you have to offer is OR, it has to be better than my OR :) Maralia (talk) 17:59, 1 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, you guys caught me on the weekend when it's hard for me to get on the computer for more than a few minutes at a time. I'll address this as soon as I'm confident of enough time to give it adequate attention. Cla68 (talk) 23:30, 2 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, I've answered. It appears that the battlecruiser was named after a town and the heavy cruiser after a mountain, but I'm still trying to confirm which was which. Cla68 (talk) 05:15, 5 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for looking into this. Kablammo (talk) 03:45, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Heya again Cla, what page does Lacroix say that on? Thanks :) —Ed (talk • contribs) 03:50, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The Military history WikiProject Newsletter : XLIII (September 2009)

The September 2009 issue of the Military history WikiProject newsletter has been published. You may read the newsletter, change the format in which future issues will be delivered to you, or unsubscribe from this notification by following the link. Thank you.
This has been an automated delivery by BrownBot (talk) 23:21, 2 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Advice

Here is some advice on preparing advice on preparing a history article for Featured Article: make sure you work in the correct namespace. — [[::User:RHaworth|RHaworth]] (talk · contribs) 13:58, 6 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

What did I do wrong? Cla68 (talk) 21:22, 6 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, Cla68. You have new messages at Urashimataro's talk page.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Re: Using newspapers

Newspapers are notoriously unreliable when they report on science. Even the best quality newspapers make big errors regularly. Then, if we have a wiki article that focusses on some scientific topic, it would be difficult to use a newspaper story as a source, even if for that particular case the story seems to be ok. Because you could not do that as a rule. Rather, you would have to make a judgement on a case by case basis. But then that judgement would be Original Research.

At the discussion on the RS board, I linked to an old discusssion on the Special Relativity talk page where I also noted the tension between letting not so reliable sources in and the policy against OR. Therefore it is better to only allow high quality peer reviewed journals to be used as sources. Now, if a statement can be sourced from a peer reviewed source and there also exists a well written newspaper article that makes the same statement, you could decide to also give a citation to the newspaper article. Count Iblis (talk) 00:11, 8 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

That might actually be true about newspapers. The fact is, however, that WP's current RS policy is very clear, even mentioning the NYTimes by name, that major newspapers are reliable sources and are allowed, even encouraged. The policy does not prohibit the use of newspapers in science or any other article, except maybe BLPs. Cla68 (talk) 00:52, 8 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Wiki policy making is driven mainly by what goes on in the politics pages. Editors on science pages have to use slightly different rules, otherwise they could find themselves in deep trouble. This is another dispute I was involved in. Clearly, simply sticking to the existing wiki rules would not always work for certain science articles (although most of the time there would be no problems). So, in the cases where there would be problems one would be justified to invoke WP:IAR. Count Iblis (talk) 01:53, 8 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Scientific standards is generally what we follow on scientific articles. Even major newspapers often make mistakes about science. I see no problem with this NYT article, but it's a slippery slope to the less accurate and/or more POV-ey articles. If you Google Scholar around for a paper written by the people that they mention about the temperature plateau, I'd happily send it to you and reinsert the same material with that as a RS. This current discussion has actually motivated me to try to make more formal standards for scientific articles, so I might be following up on that in ... oh, a month, after things cool down at work ;). Awickert (talk) 04:53, 8 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Hi again

Heya Cla, you're my go-to guy on anything Japan-related now I think. ;-) Would you be able to/know anything that could help resolve the image issues (see here) raised at Error: {{sclass}} invalid format code: 6. Should be 0–5, or blank (help)'s FAC? Thanks so much, —Ed (talk • contribs) 21:39, 10 October 2009 (UTC) [reply]

I left a comment at Elcobbola's talk page and added more info to the image files. Cla68 (talk) 23:03, 10 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Articles for deletion/Jeremiah Duggan (2nd nomination)‎

Just a note to say I appreciated your comments at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Jeremiah Duggan (2nd nomination)‎. The irony is that I am quite ambivalent about LaRouche, but I strongly oppose what I see as the abuse of process that has frequently been employed as a tactic by the team that controls the LaRouche articles. So, I open my mouth (figuratively speaking) and for my troubles I get branded a LaRouchie. --Leatherstocking (talk) 05:19, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

LaRouche isn't, unfortunately, the only topic in that situation. Cla68 (talk) 06:25, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Beeb

Re Isn't the BBC considered reliable? Quarstion (talk) 16:18, 11 October 2009 (UTC) I would think it would be, but you might be surprised with the "regulars" with this article. Cla68 (talk) 16:20, 11 October 2009 (UTC) - no, the Beeb isn't a WP:RS for science. [2] is an obvious counter-example William M. Connolley (talk) 17:39, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

No, it isn't. The BBC, NYTimes, and any other major media outlets reporting that climate change is not following the IPCC's predictions is significant. Those outlets synthesize the various reports from "scientific" organizations. Cla68 (talk) 17:44, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Sometimes they do but in general they don't: they do whatever they think their readers will want to hear, which results in the sensationalization of everything. For controversial articles scientific papers must be the standard. Otherwise, I predict that the GW article will become a feces-flinging-fiasco between Greenpeace and Rush Limbaugh (as pretty much any public discussion on the topic is). I imagine that with your POV, you wouldn't want a million greenies shoving the "global warming = end of the world" newspaper articles down your throat (and neither do William or I or most of the other regulars). With the scientific paper restriction, we can make the article much more accurate and avoid such issues. As I mentioned above, I will gladly send you scientific articles that you find if you want to look them over. Oftentimes, newspapers will reference press releases, which will in turn will reference the actual articles (and there is often quite a bit of change in the translation), so this could be a way to track down the original science of what you're looking for. Though not a climate scientist myself, I'm willing to lend a hand in the deciphering of said articles. Awickert (talk) 18:30, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

[copied/pasted from Awickert's talk by Awickert] I appreciate your offer to help. It's just that a blanket ban on newspapers is not only against Wikipedia policy, but also counerproductive. Mass media often sythesizes scientific opinion. This is important for us becuase we're, supposedly, not allowed to to synthesize sources ourselves. Cla68 (talk) 18:40, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I would argue that it is not against Wikipedia policy, especially when there are better sources available and newspapers actually do a poor job on GW IMO (anything that says "warming" tends to mean distaster; anything that says "global warming is complicated" tends to mean that it's a lie). I don't know if there is official policy or has been an RfC on this, but this is standard practice in scientific articles and written down in not-quite-official policy in a few places. If there isn't anything, I would welcome your opening of an RfC to create some policy. In any case, what the scientific article limitation does is hold the GW article to the standard that scientific papers are held to. There are indeed good and bad newspaper articles, but selectively choosing them is difficult and may be WP:SYN in itself! There are things called "review papers" which are syntheses of the scientific literature and may be helpful. Also, scientific sources can be used in tandem (e.g., "A et al. say Y but B and C say X and Z") without being WP:SYN. I will see what I can find about warming in the 2000's. Awickert (talk) 18:57, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Hm, I've given it a good look and can't find much of anything. Maybe you have another talk page stalker who can explain why this is the case. At the very least, newspaper articles would be appropriate for the global warming controversy page (indicating that public opinion is swaying due to recent temperature variability). Awickert (talk) 19:13, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Kongo Class

Hey, Cla68, I'm in the middle of a rewrite of Kongo class battlecruiser, with my sandbox located here. I've found resources for just about everything (design, each ship, armament, propulsion) but I've found next to nothing on the armour specifications of the class. All I have is thicknesses. Would you happen to have any information on the composition of the armour of the Kongo class? Cam ^(Chat) 20:54, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Cam, I placed some more information on User talk:Climie.ca/Sandbox/Kongo-class. Kablammo (talk) 03:44, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Australian forces

Uhm, yeah, I agree. Thanks for the correction. --Sageo (talk) 21:51, 11 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Opine for Fg2

You notified the Signpost tiproom of Fg2's death. Several editors have decided to collaborate to get one of his favorite articles to FA status. Would you care to opine on which article we should select here? Thanks. - Draeco (talk) 04:20, 12 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Cactus Air Force

There has been a series of edits to this article by an IP editor. Most seem simply matters of preferences; I doubt there was any improvement, and some changes were made to cited text, which always raises red flags. I have done some cleanup but it may have been simpler to revert, as was done with respect to the same editor's wholesale changes on two other articles (once by me, and one by another editor). When you have time, please take a look to see if the changes should be kept or reverted. Regards, Kablammo (talk) 14:10, 13 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Wikibreak

Cla68 is taking a short wikibreak and will be back on Wikipedia soon.

I'm not sure when I'll be back. If you need any information on something, please email me. Cla68 (talk) 03:50, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Good luck until whenever you get back! I'm sure I'll be emailing you soon. ;-) —Ed (talk • contribs) 04:00, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

OK, I think I'm more or less back now, although my participation may be more limited than before. Cla68 (talk) 10:59, 17 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Japanese carrier images redux

Heya again Cla. I know that you said "[t]he publishing date of the pictures in the book by the Kure Maritime Museum, (edited by Kazushige Todaka), Japanese Naval Warship Photo Album: Aircraft carrier and Seaplane carrier, is April 23, 1949"[3], but it appears that the book was published in 2005, not 1949. Did the book state that the images were first published then? —Ed (talk • contribs) 20:18, 19 October 2009 (UTC) [reply]

I've provided further comment on Commons and will check the FAC discussion again to see if progress is being made. Cla68 (talk) 23:48, 19 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for all of your help Cla! :-) —Ed (talk • contribs) 15:06, 20 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Battle of Morotai‎

Hi Cla, if you have time, would you be able to have a look at the Battle of Morotai‎ article and let me know if you have any suggestions on how it could be further improved (or just add them yourself, of course!). I'm thinking of nominating this for FA status this weekend. Thanks, Nick-D (talk) 10:15, 21 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It's been awhile since I nominated an article for FAC, but from what I've observed lately many of the reviewers have really been focusing on minutiae, especially concerning images. I went through the images and tried to make the sourcing more clear on each image's Commons pages. I see that you already have the alt text done, so that should take care of that. I checked the footnotes and refs to make sure they were properly formatted and didn't see anything out of place. So, I think as far as the MoS is concerned, it's good to go. Prose-wise, I think it's excellent but I'm often surprised by what the reviewers come up with. Good luck! Cla68 (talk) 09:57, 22 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Happy (late) birthday!

[4] :-) —Ed (talk • contribs) 20:38, 23 October 2009 (UTC) [reply]

Oh my, same here! KillerChihuahua^?!?Advice 21:28, 23 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Happy Belated Returns of the Day! KillerChihuahua^?!?Advice 21:28, 23 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/C68-FM-SV

...parties are admonished and instructed to avoid ... Unnecessary interaction between Cla68 and SlimVirgin....

Cla68, I've notice that you've been appearing on pages related to topics in which Slimvirgin is known to have longstanding interests, and where she has already posted. It appears that these are unnecessary interactions. I suggest that you avoid doing so in the future in order to comply with the ArbCom remedy. Will Beback talk 06:00, 26 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I appreciate your concern Will. SV has helped me out with an article I'm working on which is on my "to do" list on my userpage, which I thanked her for and she responded graciously. If you feel that me and her aren't getting along, please take it up with ArbCom. In the meantime, DKing has admitted that he is not neutral about LaRouche. You say that he hasn't violated NPOV with article edits, which I'm sure is debatable. Anyway, I believe NPOV also applies to talk page comments. Although we traditionally give a little more leeway on article talk pages, if you read Mr. King's comments on the LaRouche talk pages, I believe that it is clear that Mr. King is following an anti-LaRouche agenda. Therefore, if Mr. King continues the same behavior, I'm going to ask for a formal topic ban at ArbCom enforcement. As an admin, I assume you're concerned about violations of our core policies and will help out with the request? Cla68 (talk) 06:24, 26 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Do you see anything wrong with the changes that Dking has made to the article in the past year? You haven't said so. As for the ArbCom remedy, you can ask for it to be repealed if you think it's no longer necessary. While it's active it'd be best if you followed it. Will Beback talk 06:35, 26 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Like I said, it, and BLP applies to talk page discussion also. Remember, Chip Berlet was blocked for anti-LaRouche talk page comments. Cla68 (talk) 06:44, 26 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

And you're interested in this topic because? Will Beback talk 07:28, 26 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Didn't I tell you by email just a few months ago? Well, if you want to pretend like that conversation didn't happen, I'm involved for the same reason I become interested in Global warming, Intelligent design, Gary Weiss, and Prem Rawat, because Wikipedia policies are or were being violated, in this case by DKing. Please assist SV in resolving the problem. Cla68 (talk) 08:00, 26 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding your first point - there are so many topics where policies are being violated that picking one or another usually involves more than just the presence of a dispute. If you're looking for problems to fix I can make some suggestions. Regarding your second point - believe me, I'm working on it! Will Beback talk 08:49, 26 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Are there really any topics in which one editor's involvement is so obviously a problem? I mean, DKing actually links to his anti-LaRouche website right at the top of his userpage! Frankly, I'm surprised that he hasn't been told like, three years ago, to step off of the LaRouche articles. If you're working on it, then I hope that means that this particular problem is coming to an end. Cla68 (talk) 12:29, 26 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

There have even been members of the movement who've been editing the topic, believe it or not. It's amazing who they let in here. The great Yogi Berra once said of a restaurant - "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded." Will Beback talk 18:21, 26 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]