User talk:DavidGoodman

Welcome, David, to our great experiment...well, time will tell how great. --Larry Sanger 16:44, 29 October 2006 (CST)

Hi David, could I trouble you for a question?

David, I started in on the Biology article listed on the Main page. I did demolition because it was not workable and added a couple of lines and a good (I think) external link (AIBS Virtual Library). But I can't seem to make it CZ live even though I put "[[Category:CZ live]]" on the bottom of the page. Can you help? Nancy

/comments

David, I'm going to have to ask you to remove the comments you've placed on a subpage. The reason for this is to keep the user page space fairly "neat" and presentable for readers. We will have a separate wiki--a successor of the Textop-hosted CZ "planning wiki"--where you can have such material. Thanks --Larry Sanger 02:29, 1 November 2006 (CST)

thanks for welcoming

Supten 01:52, 6 November 2006 (CST)

Hello David

No problem at all. I check this sometimes. --Raphaël Walther 10:23, 9 November 2006 (CST)

Biology article

David, I see you are on-line too. Good morning. Could you assist me please? I've been trying to move that second image needed comment into a sppot on the page for a future jpeg, and I keep messing it up. I just made some kind of inadverdant text box. Can you help? thanks, nancy

Slow progress in biology, but progress. Could you kindly read biology talk page (discussion) and respond? Thanks, Nancy

Category:Biology Workgroup (Top)

David, in these articles of medicine should be included the "Category:Biology Workgroup (Top)"? --Versuri 15:32, 23 November 2006 (CST)

Sorry, I was not clear in the question...I was thinking to add tags in some articles, but I am not sure yet. Please forget this question. Thank you. --Versuri 06:49, 25 November 2006 (CST)

The long tail

Do not worry about people working on apparently obscure articles. There is a phrase in statistics and the The Long Tail. WP and CZ work by using the long tail. The Tail, (The obscure articles) are actually more important than the head. (Top articles) In addition, the top listed, head, articles are generally ok, not great, but ok; where as the tail is full of nonsense and rubbish that needs improved ASAP.

Journal article

Many thanks for your input, all absolutely right. I've contacted Julia Buckingham about the article to get images, articles, and hopefully her support and involvement(or one of her deputies)Gareth Leng 07:32, 10 December 2006 (CST)

The practice in WP is that thumbnails of the cover are fair use, & I think the same would apply here. we can add their status re Open access, but we would have to check every 6 months. I'd suggest eliminating the "indexed in:" from all of them--concentration on that seems a little old-fashioned. Obviously all biomed journals are in PubMed, & chem in CAS, etc.

Not quite true, as I've become acutely aware. PubMed have their own criteria for accepting journals; for example there are 14 chiropractic journals, only one of which to my knowledge is indexed by them

I'd suggest eliminating an historical list of all the editors, except the first and any famous ones thereafter.

Agree.

I'd similarly suggest not including all the current editorial board.

Agree.

WP doesn't do this but we can find the most cited articles with WebofScience, which won't be available to all our readers.

Agree.

Ideally I'd like to see us establish an acceptable model and then devolve it to the Journal editors themselves to maintain and update. There are 6000 journals in PubMed alone; if we can get a significant number of these on board I think the spinoff benefits to CZ will be enormous.

Gareth Leng 04:02, 11 December 2006 (CST)

Metabolism article

David, could you kindly drop back in on metabolism, the article would benefit from your input before approval. Thanks. Nancy Sculerati MD 12:12, 29 December 2006 (CST)

Horizontal gene transfer

David G, please look at HGT

and give an opinion/advice on its approval worthiness please in the talk page. David Tribe 07:15, 15 January 2007 (CST)

copy edit note

Category:Biology Workgroup (don't forget the caps) :) -Tom Kelly (Talk) 23:31, 15 February 2007 (CST)

spd

the list of journals should not be deleted Robert Tito | Talk 18:48, 18 February 2007 (CST) They are not mine, I saw somebody working on that file, that is why I asked. Robert Tito | Talk 18:53, 18 February 2007 (CST)

deletes

ah, i'll zap it. I was just tinkering. Thanks though :) -- Sarah Tuttle 18:55, 18 February 2007 (CST)

BSD

Hi David, after the initial creation of the subject work groups back in December, I set out to tag CZ articles about chemistry with the Chemistry Workgroup tag. My purpose was simply to stake out the scope of our editorial charge so that we may know what there is to manage. Since the decision to wipe the Wpedia content, most of those articles only modified by the addition of the Chemistry Workgroup category correctly deserve the BSD tag. Thanks! --William Weaver 19:02, 18 February 2007 (CST)

Lacrosse

Please explain why you want to delete the article on lacrosse. It's one of my favorites on the CitizendiumScottYoung 20:58, 18 February 2007 (CST)

Thanks, that's what I was hoping but I'm not a connoisseur of the arcane rules and regs! I may be the only lax fan so far so it might not be edited too often. ScottYoung 21:08, 18 February 2007 (CST)

Biology/Draft

There are some recent changes suggested at Biology/Draft about Anatomy versus Morphology (favouring Morphology). As far as I'm concerned its a minor issue either way, but the proponent is insistent, and I don't see why they cannot be included, unless they make confusion elsewhere. Have you any advice before another Approved version of Biology goes through? There is extensive discussion at the non-draft talk page. David Tribe 01:06, 20 February 2007 (CST)

re: L articles

I may have marked a few you've brought over for deleting in the speedy project-- if you want to check, go back and remove the tags & say they should be kept. DavidGoodman 18:54, 18 February 2007 (CST)

David, I'm not sure what you mean by this message you left on my talk page. Is an L article something different than an article beginning with the letter L? What is the 'speedy project'? And how would I find out which articles you had tagged?

Then again, there are probably many people named Nick Johnson on citizendium... --Nick Johnson 13:04, 21 February 2007 (CST)

---

Are you done with the "L" articles? If not, do you want/need help? Please let me know. Thanks!

lmcelhiney 10:59, 22 February 2007 (CST)

Deletion request...

Note The Voyage of the Beagle is indeed deletable by our rules (CZ:Article Deletion Policy), but I notice that last November in the edit summary you wrote, "just starting, plan to start all the other pts. of Darwin." Are you going to continue working on this anytime soon, or should we delete it? --Larry Sanger 20:29, 2 April 2007 (CDT)

Decision Support

As you may have some interest in it, please have a look at Clinical decision support system and, if possible, lend a helping hand in editing that. Supten 22:31, 17 May 2007 (CDT)

apologies for my recent absence--I am back working here now, and have started copyediting that article.DavidGoodman 14:21, 11 July 2007 (CDT)

Re Aristotle

David, see http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Talk:The_four_Aristotelian_causes_of_living_things for my response to your comments of The four Aristotelian causes of living things. --Anthony.Sebastian (Talk) 17:20, 20 September 2007 (CDT)

David, since I deleted the article, I reproduce our dialogue here:

I do not support approval of this page, as it is not a balanced discussion of the stated subject. It is a discussion of the specific readings of Jan-Hendrik Hofmeyr, and S. Marc Cohen on the subject. Regardless of how influential they are, or how sound their criticisms may be, Aristotle's own views should be the center of the article, and the responses of other philosophers to Hofmeyr and Cohen should be included--not just their own positions.

Even if this is not finished, and the intent is to include other views, the structure is still wrong. The sections should be I. Aristotle's views, II. Classical criticism, III. Cohen's criticism. IV Hofmeyr's criticism. [etc]

I am a biologist, not a philosopher, and I can not judge the importance of their criticism. And I do not want to go into the disc ussion of Hofmeyr's analysis of biological systems--at which I am not really a particular specialist. But I can judge the overall structure of an article. DavidGoodman 19:43, 16 September 2007 (CDT)

David, you make excellent points. This article really does not have standalone status.

I wrote the article to elaborate on a brief mention of Aristotle's views of the 'causes' of living things in Life and Life/Draft, specifically to bring in Hofmeyr and Cohen's take from a modern systems biology view. I will transform the 'article' to a separate subsection in Life/Supplementary text, which is a subpage of Life/Draft by virtue of having a link to it in Life/Draft's subpage "Related Articles]], which see. I will rename the subsection "Some modern views of the Aristotelian causes of living things".

Hopefully at some point clusters will include a specific "Supplementary Text" subpage. I've requested that of Larry and Chris.

I will therefore withdraw my request for approval of The four Aristotelian causes of living things.

Thanks for your helpful input. --Anthony.Sebastian (Talk) 17:17, 20 September 2007 (CDT)

Fair use

Hi David - do you know anything about Fair use? The progress of this article could use a Library editor. John Stephenson 01:58, 29 September 2007 (CDT)

Can you give any advice?

I'm very new here, I was wondering if I could migrate some articles I have either made or worked on extensively on wikipeida (which has been died to mean even before I found wikitruth) these articles are: Hemocyanin, Hemerythrin, Vanabins, Cellulase, what do you think I would need to do to these to make them compliant to citizendium? --Benjamin Frigo 21:12, 25 January 2008 (CST)

Please join us for Biology Week!

Hello, I am giving you this personal invitation to join us this week for Biology Week! Please join us on the wiki and add or edit biology articles. Also, please let your friends and colleagues who are biologists, biology students, or naturalists, know about Biology Week and ask them to join us, too. Any way you can help make it an event would be most welcome. Think of it as a Biology Workgroup open house. Let's see if we can kick up activity a notch! Thanks in advance! --Larry Sanger 12:21, 22 September 2008 (CDT)

The first Biology Week took place here from Sep 22-28, 2008.

biochemistry article ready for approval

It's good to see that you're back and have been making a few edits recently. Do you think you could have a look at the Large-scale trickle filters article to see whether it is ready to be approved? Milton Beychok is the main author, so I'm confident that it is well researched and written. I imagine only minor kinks remain to be worked out, if there are any at all. Thanks, Joe Quick 20:26, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

seems a at least roughly OK except for the question of copyright on the first 2 photos. Is it cleared? DavidGoodman 02

51, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

Those are both used by permission (see the "Licensing/Copyright status" sections on the photo pages), so we don't need to worry about them unless we can find similar photos under a Creative Commons license. I'll look around a bit for possible replacements right now, actually. If you have any concerns about content or presentation, I'm sure Milt would be happy to hear from you. --Joe Quick 14:05, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

Approval process for Animal

Dr. Goodman, I've been working on the Animal article, and I've just finished up its draft. Could read it over and see if it's ready for initiation of the approval process for it? I'm pretty proud of it, and I'd love to see it garner approved status quickly. Sincerely, Joshua Choi 02:45, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

You are right to be proud of it. Excellent job. Just some points to deal with. I've commented there. DavidGoodman 06:51, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Welcome back

Hi David,

good to see you back here. Lots of things to do - what do you think of combining forces to improve open access and its related articles? Cheers, --Daniel Mietchen 15:57, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

I'm not sure how much I want to do here, besides fix obvious errors, but a good deal of the content of the open access article might fit under that description. And it is now possible to work on articles on both encyclopedias simultaneously. DavidGoodman 08:48, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

Actually, I'm sorry you removed your pithy paragraph about "family friendly." That specific phrase, however, is no longer in the charter.

While I don't have a specific request, there are some ongoing discussions, on the EC wiki, about both the classification of knowledge here as well as the meaning of expertise. It's fairly clear that the existing Workgroup system doesn't serve us well, but there's no single approach to replace it. While I've had my days with AACR2, that isn't it either. You may have ideas. Howard C. Berkowitz 15:58, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

I've just seen what I consider the extremely unfortunate resolution against importing articles from Wikipedia, the details of which I find at CZ:How to convert Wikipedia articles to Citizendium articles, and I am therefore extremely unlikely to participate very much in article writing here, though I still intend to look at correcting errors, and possibly reviewing submitted articles as an editor. One of the things I disagreed with Larry about , was his decision to not automatically use Wikipedia articles as a backup for topics that did not yet have Citizendium articles. My reason was basically that they would be a good start on making better articles of our own, as an initial effort, and , much more important, why would anyone use preferentially use an encyclopedia with articles on only a few thousand topics, where they stood an excellent chance of not finding what they were looking for.

I joined both encyclopedias simultaneously, and my intention was to work simultaneously on both, in improving articles there so they could also be used here with the necessary modification; I have long known that I am more skilled at editing text than writing it de novo. I did not in the end do much of that here, because of some other problems, including the difficulties over the non-conforming copyrights. I find it regrettable that now that the copyrights are compatible, advantage is not being taken of this, but rather the opposite. I notice that the motion was passed without extended argument. I think it illustrates the dangers of a closed community. When I was on the original editorial council, I found myself in a small minority on almost every motion, and did not feel comfortable in a group that was so different from myself. I had hoped that the divergence in approach might have changed, but I see otherwise.

At Wikipedia, especially on its mailing lists, I have supported very strongly the continuing existence and growth of Citizendium, at least as a competitor, putting pressure on Wikipedia to improve its standards. In terms of an editorial model, I'm conventional enough to think that the editorial control of Citizendium might be more suited to high-quality content, and nothing at Wikipedia since then has caused me to change my mind on this. But there are merits to having an encyclopedia for general use which is not necessarily of scholarly quality, but as comprehensive as the availability of sourcing permits. At Wikipedia, there have recently been some discussions on trying to have some degree of centralized editorial control. I've been opposing it there, as being contradictory to the distinctive strengths of Wikipedia, which lie in the direction of the flexibility and wide range of content possible under its near-anarchy.

There is no meaning to expertise except that it is what other people respect as such; it often but not always can overlap with formal credentials. Citizendium does not seem to recognize that even the highest and most formal credentials as a subject expert does not imply expertise as a writer or editor. As for the nature of workgroups, the proposal to redefine it so that editorships are general as suggested in Editorships seems very reasonable--the Citizendium system needs some flexibility. But I do not see any place where I could comment. DavidGoodman 19:57, 3 February 2011 (UTC)