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)

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)