User talk:Howard C. Berkowitz

Welcome!

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Welcome, new editor! We're very glad you've joined us. Here are pointers for a quick start. Also, when you get a chance, please read The Editor Role. You can look at Getting Started for other helpful introductory pages. It is essential for you as an editor to join the Citizendium-Editors (broadcast) mailing list in order to stay abreast of editor-related issues, as well as the mailing list(s) that concern your particular interests. It is also important, for project-wide matters, to join the Citizendium-L (broadcast) mailing list. You can test out editing in the sandbox if you'd like. If you need help to get going, the forums is one option. That's also where we discuss policy and proposals. You can ask any constable for help, too. Me, for instance! Just put a note on their "talk" page. Again, welcome and thank you! We appreciate your willingness to share your expertise, and we hope to see your edits on Recent changes soon. David E. Volk 15:17, 29 April 2008 (CDT)

Howard, your categories are listed on the bottom of your user page. You can still be an author for any category you like and add the appropriate category tag to your home page. I see by your comment that also got fed up with the vandalism at WP. I got sick of making the same corrections repeatedly, with explainations and references, for experiments I know like the back of my hand. You might find CZ:Introduction to CZ for Wikipedians especially helpful also. David E. Volk 15:52, 29 April 2008 (CDT)

Apropos categories

I edited 4 categories into the metadata of an article, but, when coming out of edit mode, only 3 show. Is this a bug in the display code?

The metadata system currently supports a max of 3 categories per article. We can increase it, and there have been suggestions to do so... J. Noel Chiappa 21:40, 15 May 2008 (CDT)

Ave!

Another Wiki-gee joins the crew, I see! :-) J. Noel Chiappa 12:58, 30 April 2008 (CDT)

Welcome to another WP refugee

Welcome. You can always take your (uncompromised) WP contribution of 2ⁿ hacks ago (yes, the number of WP hacks is usually exponential) and start here with that version. Enjoy. --Paul Wormer 09:52, 1 May 2008 (CDT)

Hi Howard, welcome aboard. And don't forget the forums if you need help. This place can be quiet at times but new people keep arriving. It's slowing building momentum. Chris Day 10:17, 1 May 2008 (CDT)

subpages

Just so you know Historical examples of military swarming is not a subpage of Swarming (military)‎ it is a different article that goes into more depth in one area. I'll set up and example of related articles at Swarming (military)/Related Articles. For a better example see Biology/Related Articles. Don't worry you'll get there. I'll set up the subpages template at the top of those two articles too. Chris Day 16:20, 2 May 2008 (CDT)

OK I made a start. For the related page subpage we typically use the template {{r|related article}} format. Which wil show a bulleted link to the relate article AND a definition. If the definition is not present you will see a red link. You can click on that red link and write the definition. Note i added a definition blurb for two the related articles that I added to Swarming (military)/Related Articles. i don't know the field well enough to judge the parent and sub topics. That's where you come in. Another option is that you could put your own hierarchy on the page. Really it is up to you. For more information see CZ:Related Articles. Feel free to ask more questions. Chris Day 16:48, 2 May 2008 (CDT)

Great, just saw your edits to Swarming (military)/Related Articles, you're getting the hang of it :) Chris Day 17:02, 2 May 2008 (CDT)

welcome!

Hi Howard, I noticed your post on Noel Chiappa's user talk page, and then I came to your page. Just want to say I'm delighted you've joined us here. My opinion is, that our networking articles (last time I looked, maybe 3 months ago) could use a complete overhaul. Please just dig in wherever you see a need!Pat Palmer 15:15, 3 May 2008 (CDT)

HIPAA

I saw your note in the Recent Changes. I assume that move was what you wanted. If not, let me know and I can move it back. John Dvorak 19:13, 3 May 2008 (CDT)

I think he was talking about what to do with the template:HIPAA/metadata page once the name was changed. It is easiest to MOVE the template:HIPAA/metadata BEFORE you move the page because it is almost impossible to find after you move the page. I've deleted it for now. --D. Matt Innis 19:52, 3 May 2008 (CDT)

Also notice the HIPAA/Approval page needed to be moved as well. you can then delete the redirects... --D. Matt Innis 19:56, 3 May 2008 (CDT)

Not sure what happened on HIPAA

(copied to my talk page)

I'm not sure what happened. Before I started writing the page, I had searched, but only on the full text of the law, not "HIPAA". When I created metadata, it was for "Health Insurance Portability and Access Act". IIRC, I did at least 2 saves on the lengthy material before getting an edit conflict.

This is only a guess, but I suspect someone else started creating an article under HIPAA while I was writing under the long title, so the edit conflict hit only when we both had created main article text. The metadata probably didn't conflict.

There is a style question here: should articles about laws be named with the short or long title? I'm inclined to do long title, and then a redirect for the well-known abbreviation.

Howard C. Berkowitz 20:09, 3 May 2008 (CDT)

I'm betting that John created that redirect at the same time you were saving. As far as naming, see CZ:Naming conventions (don't forget to look at the talk page) for the rules we have so far. As a sysop/constable, that is all that I can go by, the rest are considered editorial/content decisions and can vary depending on the workgroup and how each wants to handle their particular situations. Your scenario sounds reasonable to me, but if you want to be sure, consider returning to the workgroup home page and leaving a message there - or find an editor and see if you can start a process to create a policy that can be a guideline for future situations. We're still very much in the building stages and your input is very important. You can always drop me a note, too, and I'll do my best to least point you in the right direction! --D. Matt Innis 20:24, 3 May 2008 (CDT)

Yes, I saw your note in the edit summary and took it to mean that you needed help moving a page. I guess I was wrong. My bad. John Dvorak 20:31, 3 May 2008 (CDT)

More subpages

Umm, generally we start subpage names with a capital letter. Also, there are a bunch of predefined subpage types which are predefined system-wide; check out CZ:Subpages (documentation) and Template:Subpage list/Doc for the predefined ones. For those, you don't need to fiddle the metadata - just create them, and they show up in the subpages nav bar. Also, make sure to add {{subpages}} at the top of any new subpage to tie together all the subpages in a cluster.

So I moved BGP/advanced to BGP/Advanced, and renamed /operations to /Operations. (There didn't seem to be a subpage of that name yet.) J. Noel Chiappa 09:16, 4 May 2008 (CDT)

Thanks! It will take a while to converge. Rightly or wrongly, the impression I had from what I had read here was that the metadata page was necessary to make things happen. Howard C. Berkowitz 09:56, 4 May 2008 (CDT)

Can you let me know where you got that impression (about the metadata), and I'll try and improve the documentation? Yes, you do need the metadata to make clusters work, but adding any of the system-wide subpage types to an existing cluster doesn't need any additional tweaking in the metadata. Thanks. J. Noel Chiappa 10:20, 4 May 2008 (CDT)

If I wasn't confused, I'd probably know better what confused me. :-) Seriously, I am going to have to look at it in detail. I have limited time today (job interview tomorrow) and may not be spending much time on this until late Monday or sometime on Tuesday.

Incidentally, is it (I hope) the convention here to keep talk page conversations on one page rather than split between the people in the discussion?

No problem.

I'm not sure we have a convention on that yet. J. Noel Chiappa 11:44, 4 May 2008 (CDT)

Actually, (sorry to butt in but I happened to look in) all article titles are supposed to be lower case unless they are proper nouns. This also includes subpages. Given that the software defaults to upper case I find this silly, but this is the policy that Larry insists on...Martin Baldwin-Edwards 09:59, 4 May 2008 (CDT)

If you look at Template:Subpage list/Doc you'll see that all the pre-defined ones start with a capital letter. I'm at a bit of a loss to explain how this matches up with Larry's preference that you describe - I would have assumed that if the capitalization didn't match his wishes, he'd have said something by now. Anyway, until this gets worked out, probably best to make the per-article ones (which aren't yet policy - Chris just wrote the Proposal for them) uppercase to match. J. Noel Chiappa 10:18, 4 May 2008 (CDT)

Your work here

Just a quick note to say that the articles you've written here are noticed, and the depth and detail they go into are appreciated! (BGP being a prime example) -Eric M Gearhart 00:02, 6 May 2008 (CDT)

def template

As the def template is never used in isolation of the {{r}} template so there is no need to point at the article in the def template. The article link will always be to the left of the colon with the definition to the right. If you add the link to the def template too then it will be appear twice on the related articles subpage. Chris Day 11:23, 6 May 2008 (CDT)

Mysterious blank lines

In most cases, that's exactly right -- I'm inserting a blank space or line. (I hope I'm doing it in such a way that it doesn't mess up the formatting of any articles; if it is messing anything up please let me know and I'll stop!) There seems to be a bug or design flaw or something that keeps articles from appearing in their assigned workgroups' lists of articles, and makes them keep appearing in the "Uncategorized articles" list, even after the metadata template has been created and has been updated to assign the article to a workgroup -- until the main article itself is subsequently updated. So I've been trying to get articles off the "uncategorized articles" page by assigning them a workgroup if necessary, or, if they already have a workgroup assigned, just making a meaningless change to the main article page so that they won't clutter up the "uncategorized articles" list. I suppose a 'bot could do it, but there isn't one, and I am looking at the pages anyway to see if they actually do need to have a category assigned, so as long as I'm there, I figure I might as well do this too. Bruce M.Tindall 13:52, 7 May 2008 (CDT)

Having fun?

You are creating tons of content :) Are you getting more familiar with the subpage quirks? Let me know if there are any problems. I have been tweeking a few things recently so don't be too surprised if you see some differences from day to day. Chris Day 10:15, 9 May 2008 (CDT)

Quirks are a good name. In some cases, I'm less concerned with the exact syntax and more with how to use them. As you've probably gathered, I'm porting over a good deal of content I wrote at Wikipedia, but immediately editing to get out of the blind alleys of their "encyclopedic" (i.e., dull) writing, avoidance of expertise and demand for secondary sources, etc.

It's good that you brought this up now, because I may have a case study for guidance. I ported an article, intelligence collection management. From that article, I extracted some more "researchy" material on the use of ontologies in intelligence, moved it to intelligence collection ontology, and then put a good deal of new material into the latter.

Several questions arise. Should there be an "advanced" tab on the intelligence collection management page, which lists the more bleeding edge examples such as the one on ontology? In both of them, how do I format an annotated bibliography? What is the relationship among "related articles", "advanced", and perhaps links and bibliography?

As you may know, I'm porting, among other things, some specific hierarchies (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hcberkowitz), of which I wrote the great majority of content. Ironically, one of my areas of disgust with WP at the moment is that an academic institution has sent students in intelligence to write Wiki articles, which, IMNSHO, just scratch the topics, and made no effort to link to existing content. In one case, I edited/talk paged material on "Analysis of Competing Hypotheses", a method that was developed by a CIA psychologist in the seventies. He resiste my suggestions about there being enhancements that used statistics, formal logic, or data visualization, yet I was able to give 5-6 peer-reviewed citations in about an hour of research.

I may or not port that specific article, or put the cites into the intelligence analysis article I will port. Again, when should some of those links be in a bibliography, and how should they be formatted? Should I redlink-reserved "advanced" articles about them?

This is a dump; you happened to be in the wrong place at the right time. Still, I have a lot of material to bring over or write anew since it didn't fit Wikipedia. Is there a place I should be discussing the outlines of the sets of military and intelligence articles?

I haven't forgotten that I have work on computer networking, where I will be largely writing afresh, hopefully with Noel, at least, reviewing.

Any suggestions are welcome.Howard C. Berkowitz 10:31, 9 May 2008 (CDT)

getting to raw metadata

There are two ways to do it, both from the talk page. You can click the orange M to the right of the subpages template to view the content of the metadata. You can enter edit mode directly from the talk page by clicking the blue text at the top of the subpages template (immediately below the tabs, "To update this checklist edit the metadata template"). We only allow three workgroups as we found it hard to envisage a scenario where more would be required. Maybe yours are such an exception? At present it is hardwired so only three are possible but that does not mean it could not be changed. Chris Day 16:16, 9 May 2008 (CDT)

Intelligence is usually thought of as military, but think of the missions of the CIA. It does a quite significant amount of econometric analysis, uses social science to build personality profiles of key figures (although medical intelligence is part of DIA), analyzes foreign basic research capabilities in a variety of disciplines, etc. An "intelligence" category might imply such a wide scope, especially in combination with another category. For example, what are the right categories for the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the U.S. Department of State? It's analyzing foreign politics, while the rest of the department acts on international politics.

Something like WMD proliferation detection draws on a great many scientific disciplines.Howard C. Berkowitz 16:22, 9 May 2008 (CDT)

Possible biodiesel article?

Howard, in response to your posting on my talk page, my candid opinion is that the article you propose would have a very narrow audience and very little appeal outside of that audience. After all, how many commercial fishermen are going to visit an online encyclopedia?

I would suggest that an article devoted to biodiesel in general (what it is, how it is produced, where it can be used, some history, some usage statistics, etc.) would have a much wider audience. In that article, your idea about fishing boats and restaurants might be included in the section on where biodiesl can be used. Regards, - Milton Beychok 17:29, 9 May 2008 (CDT)

Article titles

What resources are you drawing on in deciding what to use for article titles? (The reason that I ask is that with all the subpages, it's a pain to rename articles here, so it's best to get the right up front.) Are you following USG standards, or what? This isn't my area of expertise, so I don't know what the standards are. J. Noel Chiappa 11:01, 10 May 2008 (CDT)

Unfortunately, there really are no standards, which I agree should exist. The USG isn't consistent. I suppose I've been using the versions that are most natural to me, but that's clearly not rigorous. Howard C. Berkowitz 11:04, 10 May 2008 (CDT)

Howard, the CZ standard is that only the first word is capitalized, unless the phrase would always be capitalized, because it is a proper name or business name, for example. Thus, articles like Transmission Protocol should be named Transmission protocol. Note all of the definition examples immediately under this section as being good standard naming convensions. David E. Volk 14:47, 13 May 2008 (CDT)

We don't have a Transmission Protocol article. We do have a Transmission Control Protocol article, and that's where it is because it is always capitalized that way, because that's the formal name of one particular protocol. J. Noel Chiappa 15:16, 13 May 2008 (CDT)

definitions

Check these are OK after my edits ( I removed the articles name from the definitions). This is because they are usually used in the context of the {{R}} template that is used on related articles subpages. This is the usual location for these definitions, so in the R template as follows:

{{r|Radar intercept receiver}}
{{r|Radar warning receiver}}
{{r|Radio intercept receiver}}
{{r|Fluid catalytic cracking}}
{{r|Pump}}

The appearance on the related articles page is as follows.

• Radar intercept receiver [r]: Add brief definition or description
• Radar warning receiver [r]: Add brief definition or description
• Radio intercept receiver [r]: Add brief definition or description
• Fluid catalytic cracking [r]: A petroleum refining process that cracks the large hydrocarbon molecules in the portion of the petroleum crude oil boiling above 340 °C into lower boiling, more valuable high octane gasoline and olefinic gases. ^[e]
• Pump [r]: A device used to move fluids, such as liquids or slurries, from a lower pressure to a higher pressure adding energy to the system to overcome the difference in pressure. ^[e]

Red links mean there is no article while a blue link means there is an article. Not shown here, but a purple link means the article is a redirect or does not have a subpages format. You can also use the {{rpl}} template that will show a pictogram indicating the status of the articles that exist. This latter template will be used primarily on the workgroup pages or on user pages. It is a useful tool for tracking the progress of articles.

• Radar intercept receiver: Add brief definition or description
• Radar warning receiver: Add brief definition or description
• Radio intercept receiver: Add brief definition or description
•  Fluid catalytic cracking: A petroleum refining process that cracks the large hydrocarbon molecules in the portion of the petroleum crude oil boiling above 340 °C into lower boiling, more valuable high octane gasoline and olefinic gases. ^[e]
•  Pump: A device used to move fluids, such as liquids or slurries, from a lower pressure to a higher pressure adding energy to the system to overcome the difference in pressure. ^[e]

I hope this helps to clarify the role of the definitions. Chris Day 00:19, 12 May 2008 (CDT)

Locators and identifiers

Sorry, missed this in all the goings-on. I'm not a good writer, and don't have anything finished to point you at. The best thing is Saltzer's original paper (now available as RFC-1498), and some of the things it references (e.g. Shoch's IEN). I have that 'endpoints' paper, which is more complete and thorough than Saltzer's but it's (still!) a draft. J. Noel Chiappa 09:19, 13 May 2008 (CDT)

No problem. My inclination is to create an "advanced" (or other tab) article to which IPv4 and especially IPv6 point, which talks about some of the theory behind addressing and routing: identifiers and locators, address resolution, and route aggregation. A separate article might discuss naming and addressing, possibly the first as a DNS tutorial under the addressing and routing main articles, with perhaps an advanced article on things such as DNS-based load distribution. Somewhat apropos of the latter, I'm getting ready to put up an article about end-to-end (OSI transport) protocols, with subarticles ("advanced" tag?) about tunneling and midboxes.

Anyone else likely to be interested in such things?Howard C. Berkowitz 09:38, 13 May 2008 (CDT)

Moving clusters

When you move a cluster, don't forget to move all the subpages; I got Transmission Control Protocol/Definition for you. For extra credit, you can tag all the left-behind redirects with {{speedydelete|unneeded after rename}}. I see you created new Metadata and Approval subpages; that's fine in this case, since there was nothing of any import in their histories, but for other pages, you will need to move them (to save the history), not create new ones, of course. Yes, this is clunky; we need a MediaWiki upgrade to do it all automatically, but we have no MediaWiki hackers, it seems. J. Noel Chiappa 13:48, 13 May 2008 (CDT)

Re: Still Laughing...

Haha yes I didn't see it that way.. a roomful of officers with "jitters" after hearing the news would be pretty funny to see -Eric M Gearhart 18:48, 13 May 2008 (CDT)

Internet protocol suite

I'd go with Internet protocol suite for that one. As far as I know, the term was never formally defined/used, it's just one we use to describe the 'protocol suite' (which is a fairly well-known term). I'd always cap the Internet because that stands for either i) the protocol suite based on the Internet Protocol (PUP was an internet protocol), or ii) the protocol suite used on the Internet. Either way, it gets caps. Sorry this is all so seemingly arbitrary... :-( J. Noel Chiappa 19:43, 13 May 2008 (CDT)

As you say, it's arbitrary. For that matter, some people would say Internet protocol suite only for protocols that connect to the public Internet, while protocols in an intranet would be internet protocol suite, or perhaps since it's their internet (catenet), it should be the Intranet internet protocol suite. :-)

To clarify, the internet protocol suite is really the list of protocols, not an abstraction.

AFAIK, it's not written down anywhere in a standards track RFC, but there's a lot of well-defined IETF things that aren't written down anywhere. Believe me, after spending a number of years of my life dealing with OSI purists, this is a Good Thing (yes, capitalized).

As a more serious thing, I would tend to capitalize Internet Protocol Reference Model, although I'm not sure RFC1122 actually uses that language. In the real world, however, so many newbies come out of "education" believing in the Open Systems Interconnection Reference Model, which is definitely written out in ISO 7498, that I believe "equal-time" capitalization for the IETF informal model is a good start on getting them reoriented to the way networks actually work. Whether or not formal education improves the judgment of constables is one thing, but those educational programs that still emphasize the OSIRM, do not discuss OSI amendments such as the Internal Structure of the Network Layer, and try to coerce Internet protocols into the OSIRM, come out with worse technical judgment. Howard C. Berkowitz 19:54, 13 May 2008 (CDT)

Err, my point was that if I were discussing the Internet protocol suite, the list of protocols, not an abstraction, I would cap the "Internet" but not the rest (for the reasons given above), but you didn't above - not sure if that was a typo. So I would consider use of "internet protocol suite" to be incorrect, unless used in a sentence like 'for the company's internet, we have settled on TCP/IP as the internet protocol suite' - and even then I think that would more likely be given as 'internet's protocol suite'. I understand the concept of 'internet protocol suite' (the protocol suite used on an internet), but I have a hard time coming up with a sentence that would use it - most want to go with 'internet's'.

As to Internet Protocol Reference Model, I'm not too familiar with that, so I defer to your knowledge there. (Although you have an excellent point about the Procrustean attempts of some to map the Internet protocol suite into the 7 layer model - it's definitely not an exact match! I generally just give up and add another whole layer, 'internet', between 'network' and 'transport', rather than splitting 'network' into sublayers - the notion that the 'internetwork' layer does things in a system-wide way is I think important enough to warrant a whole new layer. Plus to which some of our more advanced work is starting to split the internet layer into sub-layers - if it's already a sub-layer of network it just gets too hairy.) J. Noel Chiappa 21:19, 13 May 2008 (CDT)

The uncapped "i" was cynical rather than a typo.

To truly be hairy, you need recursion and tunneling. IIRC, I once had a stack that started with an SONET physical entity, put ATM with AAL5 on top of that, ran 802.3 LANE with 802.2 MAC, IP on top of that, UDP on top of that, L2TP over UDP, another IP on top of that, TCP, and GRE over the TCP, carrying IP of a different address family.

Throwing something like that at someone convinced there are seven dwarves...seven deadly sins...layers! I mean layers!...is something like taking a gently reared teenager and throwing them into the shock phase of Marine boot camp. With luck, you get their attention, but a certain number will continue to go through the protocol version of epicycles, insisting BGP is a session layer protocol because it rides inside TCP. The fact that the OSI Management Framework appendix to the OSIRM, ISO 7498/4, speaks clearly of Layer Management, where the associated layer has to do with the payload, not the delivery mechanism, has never been presented to them in their simplified textbooks. If it's not in their book, it must, of course, not exist.

If one is lucky, eventually they have an epiphany, perhaps, given layered looks in fashion, analogous to my epiphany at age 11 or so: the other gender is naked under its clothes. That's what we need, Noel. Naked protocols.Howard C. Berkowitz 21:52, 13 May 2008 (CDT)

You lost me with all the acronyms and then I thought you were talking about the seven deadly lawyers (an understandable misreading on my part I'm sure you'll agree). Then you had me wondering why the supreme court had lost two members. But then i get to the textbook comment, at last I can relate. Students do find it hard to believe that text books can be oversimplified, inaccurate and even wrong. Once you've been in the game a while one realises it is the norm. Chris Day 13:09, 15 May 2008 (CDT)

If it is any help, I do have a paper where I equated the seven layers, not lawyers, to the seven deadly sins. Perhaps I should create an article, "theology and networking reference models"? There are surprising parallels: ask any audience to name the Seven Deadly Sins, and everyone first thinks of Lust. That certainly is relevant, since the OSI Physical Layer does specify how to plug things in. Matters are much more nuanced with Pride and Sloth.

Unfortunately, I have not found a useful pedagogical model (can I say pedagogical here without the Academic Union Card?) that makes effective use of the Seven Dwarves, other than to suggest that writing the understandable document was assigned to Snow White just as she bit into the magic apple. Howard C. Berkowitz 16:42, 15 May 2008 (CDT)

linking to subpages from article

Have a look at the Life article. While not really worked out Tony Seb has linked from the main page to an addendum subpage (see Life#Supplementary_text). Chris Day 12:59, 15 May 2008 (CDT)

[[ Army ]]

Howard - appreciate the edits, but yes the M-4 is a shoulder fired weapon (I've held one in my hands). There's a Sherman tank designated M4 but that's a different weapon (are you thinking of this?. See US Army FactFiles: M-4 Carbine for many gory details -Eric M Gearhart 20:19, 15 May 2008 (CDT)

Sorry, didn't mean that to be taken seriously; I know the M-4 is a shorter-barreled variant of the M-16. The U.S., however, does an amazing job of making designations confusing. Soviet doctrine went to the other extreme, with an idea that some say came from Stalin himself. Take the U.S., for example, and think of asking for 120mm ammunition, not necessarily having the exact model number. You might get mortar rounds or APFSDS rounds for the Abrams main gun.

It turns out that the Soviet system of calibers has several nuances. There are some cases, such as their 82mm mortar, where they want to be able to use captured 81mm ammunition but not vice versa. More broadly, however, they make a practice of not using the same caliber for more than one kind of weapon, or otherwise disambiguating if there were technical reasons that the same caliber was needed for different weapons. Russian 120mm is always tank main gun, while 122mm is always howitzer. As a disambiguation, when one of their multiple launch rockets happened to need to be 122mm (I don't know the engineering), it was never, never called 122mm ammunition; it was called GRAD ammunition.

How many different things has the U.S. designated as M1? This seems to be unique to the Army; Navy weapons designations, if anything, are superfine grained (5"/54 naval gun, Mark X, Mod Y). Howard C. Berkowitz 20:35, 15 May 2008 (CDT)

Wow well that was cool... I was thinking I was pointing something out and ended up learning a slice of Military history :)
I had no idea about Stalinist Soviet strategies with regards to their ammunition.... and yes the Army name designations do get confusing. To this day I don't know why they aren't more specific (and less ambiguous) with their designations (and I was in the Army myself!) -Eric M Gearhart 12:24, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

My mother was in the Navy in WWII, but was then involuntarily direct-commissioned into the Army for Korea, and stayed in the reserve. She was named Pearl Berkowitz. Just that. The Army doesn't do well with no middle name, so, officially, she was Pearl (NMI) Berkowitz. Of course, everyone in her unit pronounced NMI as "enemy", until they got distracted.

The distraction was a good old boy named R B Jones. Just like Harry S Truman, the initial wasn't an abbreviation, but what was on his birth certificate. For Army purposes, he became R(only) B(only) Jones. At mail call, the clerk loved to call out "Jones! Roooooonnnnnnly Booooonnely Jones!"

Howard C. Berkowitz 13:17, 16 May 2008 (CDT)

Welcome

Have noticed you've been very busy since you started here; good to see it! Hadn't welcomed you before this so thought I should but in now. Denis Cavanagh 20:40, 15 May 2008 (CDT)

Thanks! I just hope there's critical mass; while I still do a few things at WP, the gameplaying is such that I'm increasingly looking for a new home. Howard C. Berkowitz 21:17, 15 May 2008 (CDT)

We'll see (about the critical mass). I know there are a lot of people out there who've given up on WP, and if we can create a superior environment for the accretion of knowledge online, we should be able to recruit a lot of them (since they are clearly into the basic concept of helping with that, just didn't like the implementation at WP). J. Noel Chiappa 21:21, 15 May 2008 (CDT)

I've been doing some recruiting there. Ironically, the people that tend to be most interested, so far, are in the Military History Project, who tend to be much more rational than in some areas.

From last October on, I did a large amount of work beating the CIA articles out of being a collection of unsourced tinfoil hat allegations, with even real sins not mentioned. This took some significant diplomacy, but developing a hierarchy of related articles seemed to help a lot -- people were more willing to look at a questionable allegation when it wasn't snarled with so much other material. Ironically, the no original research, no original synthesis worked against both sides of CIA-as-Dark-Force and CIA-as-Clowns (with a competent area in the middle) -- it wasn't possible to make an unsourced hypothesis, but it was possible to state the two (or more) sides well enough that a reasonable reader could make personal decisions.

One of the subarticles was to break up the areas of the world into regions, regions which happen to mirror the way CIA is organized for geographical problems. Regional worked well much of the time, especially when there were region-level formal intelligence estimates, and also where there were regional border and cross-border conflicts with a probable dose of covert action. One individual, who acts a bit boldly for my taste, asked me if I had any objection for going one level down, for countries that had more material than really fit in the region. That seemed reasonable.

He interpreted that, however, to take every single country, at least wikilinked, and put it in its own article. One unfortunate consequence was that some countries, in isolation, were little more than stubs. When one fair-minded individual asked me today if I minded folding DRC into "Congo Crisis", I had to say I no longer cared. At the stub granularity it made sense, but as soon as things started moving out of the CIA hierarchy, the hierarchical information organization would be starting on a slide to collapse. In principle, I could boldly put 100 or so countries back into regional articles, but, with no assurance the problem won't recur, I have no motivation to bother. Most of the things I'm doing there, and I'm not sure why, is reverting near-constant vandalism. I do enjoy answering specific and substantive questions.

CZ has a few issues of its own, but at least they are being discussed openly and with personal accountability. Howard C. Berkowitz 21:34, 15 May 2008 (CDT)

Ref "reverting near-constant vandalism" - talk about bailing out the ocean with a spoon! Why they don't get a clue and just disable anon edits (they might have needed it when they had 2K articles, but with 2M, come on) I'll never know.

I hear ya about the CIA stuff. I didn't deal in that side much, but I know a fair amount about the KGB/GRU penetrations in the US, and so spent quite a while arguing with the committed people who seemed to think that e.g. Elizabeth Bentley was fake drummed up by the McCarthyists (heck, the KGB's own files, which were examined for 'Haunted Wood' show she was an agent!), etc, etc. At a certain point you just throw up your hands. J. Noel Chiappa 22:23, 15 May 2008 (CDT)

Discussions

See Talk:Clandestine_human-source_intelligence_and_covert_action. Director article seems a-okay. --Robert W King 13:38, 17 May 2008 (CDT)