Talk:Aviation Week and Space Technology

Why do we have a list of all the people working at this publication? I checked and none of them seem to have even a Wikipedia article, so individually why are they important? Do other articles on CZ have lists like this? David Finn 17:33, 9 May 2011 (CDT)

There were several very interesting and lively discussions that preceded your entry into the project and spoke to some of the issues you raise. One of the great advantages of the cluster system is that we can include pertinent but supplementary information in the cluster. I have moved the list of key staffers to the catalogue page. CZ Catalogs are designed to contained annotated lists, and Mary has begun these in a respectable manner.

Just to remind you, and other people new to CZ: notability, in the sense that it is used at Wikipedia, is not a criterion at CZ. Whether or not a person, place or entity has a Wikipedia article has no bearing on whether or not they merit a CZ article. Conversely, just because something has a WP article doesn't mean we need one at CZ. 'Gurg' was one of my favourite examples, as were the articles on minor soap opera characters. I could never figure out how those were notable.

Of course this led to other issues, like, what *would* be the criteria for deciding which Little Red Schoolhouses merited CZ clusters? Would it be reasonable to end up with an article on every single human being on the planet? These were left open; so far, so good.

Since we have been lucky enough to have intelligent writers exercising intelligent judgement, it hasn't yet been a problem. There's nothing which compels me to insist that we have to decide anytime soon, or argue in extremes just in case every inhabitant on the planet suddenly decides that CZ would be improved by an article about his grandmother.

Aleta Curry 00:36, 10 May 2011 (CDT)

Even before you were contributing to CZ they were discussing the purpose of the subpages, and all they examples the gave were "List of important stuff" and "List of important people". The catalogs page you used is for information you might find in an almanac, but what we have now is "List of current staff".

You say that questions about content were left open, but questions about content are answered regularly by Editors and Authors, often acting together, who move, rename or remove content. They have generally leaned towards what might be considered encyclopedic content, which bring me back to my original question - is this content encyclopedic?

Another question is, do you intend to maintain the "Catalog of current staff" so that it does not become the "Catalog of some current staff, some old ones, and the rest dead"? If content becomes out of date it is then someones responsibility to fix it, or more likely remove it.

I thought this was just a matter of one person adding what may be unencyclopedic content, but it is true that the CZ policy of inclusion is ill-defined. To save other Citizens from adding content that will almost certainly be deleted at some point, it seems that this is an issue that should be best discussed in a wider forum. David Finn 03:05, 10 May 2011 (CDT)

David, it's extremely difficult to carry out any conversations with you when you insist on being antagonistic at every turn.

It's also extremely difficult to know where to begin to answer when you start an argument with an incorrect premise or two or five.

Even before you were contributing to CZ they were discussing the purpose of the subpages, and all they examples the gave were "List of important stuff" and "List of important people".

Incorrect. What is your understanding of subpages, when do you believe the discussion started, and what, specifically, makes you think that that was all that was discussed?

Certainly, information goes out of date, which is one reason why the dynamic nature of a wiki is so useful. Yes, content questions, particularly as they relate to scope, should be discussed.

Aleta Curry 06:04, 10 May 2011 (CDT)

Aleta, it is likewise difficult to have a conversation with you when you insist on attacking the contributor rather than evaluating the contribution. If you'd like more information on how CZ handles subpages I suggest you start with the page on subpages which has some handy links. David Finn 07:05, 10 May 2011 (CDT)

(undent) The subject of this conversation has outgrown this talk page since it concerns site policy rather than article or workgroup policy. I'd suggest that further comments regarding subpages and their intended content be moved to the subpages discussion pages where they are more likely to get community input and review of past discussions is available. If there is no response there, and considering that subpage content is something that the EC might want to consider (and have community input with which to guide them), then a forum discussion would be a better place to carry on. D. Matt Innis 07:42, 10 May 2011 (CDT)

Without blaming anyone for anything, could we agree on the exact place for discussion? There are several pages dealing with subpages. Should this be CZ Talk: Subpages ? Howard C. Berkowitz 08:38, 10 May 2011 (CDT)

CZ Talk: Subpages looks like a great place to start. If that doesn't work as well as hoped, feel free to work toward something that works even better. Also, rather than falling prey to protracted arguments that needlessly galvanizes positions, feel free to involve the ME or Omb once there seems to be an impasse developing. D. Matt Innis 09:12, 10 May 2011 (CDT)

Back on topic?

I certainly have no problem with a catalog listing staff. Let me go a little beyond that: I would, at the very least, create lemmas for all these people, with no more than the employment status Mary has given.

Especially for the editorial staff, they may well show up in articles; I am thinking that I and others need to be more attentive to putting author names in square brackets, even if they turn red. Once the lemma is created, do a "what links here", and that may immediately give more content. You might find, for example, that the person is on the board of another organization.

I try to have links for every politician, and often lobbyist, as well as professional society member I encounter, never knowing what associations I discover. Often, I find enough to motivate me to make a full article and make the black link turn blue.

So, in this case, I might make the Catalog entries R-templates, and move the job description (e.g., Executive VP at Aviation Week and Space Technology) into the gray Definition field.

I started to do this only as a lemma for Graham Warwick, but, after I read about the sheep, I couldn't resist a brief article. Howard C. Berkowitz 21:24, 10 May 2011 (CDT)

Forum comments

For reasons of which Matt is aware, I cannot contribute to this discussion if it moves to the EC Community Input forum. That is causing a conflict with my responsibilities as an elected member of the EC.

Howard C. Berkowitz 08:30, 10 May 2011 (CDT)

Ideally, discussions should work their way through the wiki with only side discussions on the forum. We can still use CZ Talk:Editorial Council. D. Matt Innis 09:12, 10 May 2011 (CDT)

Business story

I wrote this as a straight up business story meaning you include the organizational contacts. Most business articles do include this information along with the ranking, advertising sales and readership. I was working to find independent sources to give this information. BTW Aviation Week is informally known as Aviation Leak. While the magazine tends to be somewhat accurate, based on its ability to gather accurate news information, it is considered one of the first places to look for defense news especially US defense news as the US is its primary audience. Mary Ash 10:10, 10 May 2011 (CDT)

Thorough agreement about Aviation Leak. When I was more directly in defense work, many was the time I looked at the magazine at my desk, and a recent classified publication, both saying the same thing. There were a few cases where we could get away with suggesting someone look at the magazine but we couldn't tell them anything. One of these, I remember, were the first air-to-air combat tests with the Harrier. F-4 pilots refused to close with it, and just wanted to engage it at long range with missiles. I vaguely remember one F-8 driver could just cope with it in a dogfight. The US classified the whole thing, and the British manufacture had to suggest people read AW&ST. Howard C. Berkowitz 12:50, 10 May 2011 (CDT)

References

The reference maker suggested by Matt has gone down and has been down for several days. I found an alternate reference tool maker which I used today. As to the references reference coding: What little HTML coding I know is that when you open a tag you close the tag as I did.. Example: <blah, blah></blah,blan> And as no one else has shown me how to do this at Citizendium I had to wing it with what I knew. Of course I could have gotten my kids to do this and since they taught me what little I know they would have done the same. Before you comment on my kids lack of knowledge my oldest daughter can write Basic, HTML, CSS and is learning C Program language. The youngest daughter can write HTML and some CSS. According to my oldest daughter you need to close tags too, to prevent page flooding. I am not sure how this applies with the reference tag.Mary Ash 20:37, 10 May 2011 (CDT)

But only if you need to type something immediately after. Here: * the asterisk is still an asterisk, because I put in a line space. Same after refs. Ro Thorpe 20:47, 10 May 2011 (CDT) (Curiously, I had to put in a "/nowiki" to get my signature to work, but that's beside the point.)

My daughter found this information while I was doing dishes. According to the CZ page the reference section ("In Citizendium and many other Wikis, the Wiki markup coding of embedded inline references on the edit page of an article always begins with the tag <ref>and ends with the tag </ref> . For that reason, the Wiki markup coding of embedded inline references is often referred to as the <ref> </ref> method."}See: [[1]] The reference tags are written as I did which was <ref></ref> are correct. My daughter also found at W3.org and found the HTML5 coding which supports the reference tag as suggested at CZ and also what I wrote. In other words the way I wrote the reference tags was as correct as the person who tried to tell me otherwise.Mary Ash 21:19, 10 May 2011 (CDT)

Mary, that article your daughter found while you were doing the dishes was written by me (look at the History of that article). All that is needed in the References sections is either <references/> or {{reflist}}. You do not need to write <references><references/> to "prevent flooding". Flooding by what??? The proof of the pudding is to look around at other articles that use <ref></ref> references and see that they use only either <references/> or {{reflist}} ... or you could take the time to read slowly and carefully all of the article that your daughter found. - Milton Beychok 01:09, 11 May 2011 (CDT)

The initial error was in using < instead of { to surround the word "reflist". The references page has a section about reflist where its use is explained very clearly. I have again restored the correct formatting. David Finn 02:16, 11 May 2011 (CDT)

Readership

I spent some time surfing around in Aviation Week's website before finding this sentence "Serving over 1.2 million professionals in 185 countries, Aviation Week is the largest information ...." located here.

First of all, Aviation Week is not a magazine or a publication. It is a division of the McGraw-Hill companies and that division publishes 4 or more magazines. This article is about the "Aviation Week and Space Technology" magazine which is only one of those 4 or more magazines. "Serving over 1.2 million professionals ..." simply means that someone has "guesstimated" that there are 1.2 million professionals in the worldwide aviation and space flight industries and that the Aviation Week division of McGraw-Hill publishes magazines that cater to them. The primary purpose of the Aviation Week website is to advertise their magazines and sell subscriptions to the magazines as well as advertisements in the magazines.

As of 2010, the qualified readership of the "Aviation Week and Space Technology" magazine was 86,250 as verified by the "Audit Bureau of Circulation" as verified here. On that basis, I revised the 1.2 million readership statement in this article to the correct figure of 86,250. - Milton Beychok 00:52, 11 May 2011 (CDT)

Aviation Week or Leak depending on the wag is how the magazine is referred too. The space part usually gets dropped off. The article has the correct and formal name and that's all that counts. BTW I used to read Aviation Leak look for story leads.Mary Ash 23:48, 11 May 2011 (CDT)