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Zonal spherical function

Take it easy, friend. I marked the article you're working on while patrolling new pages. Perhaps you should mark such articles with {{underconstruction}} next time. --/Mendaliv//_Δ's/ 23:11, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

That is not what I normally do. Now please just leave me alone. Look at my mathematical edits. I am not a 12 year old school kid and when you see the start of a mathematical article, have the humility not to intervene, particularly when the edit summary makes it clear what is going on. You left less than 2 minutes before putting in templates, which I reagrd as rather unintelligent. Try to be more patient and learn a little common sense in future. Mathsci (talk) 23:17, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Well I'm sorry for that, but considering it's Misplaced Pages, you should expect someone to come along and edit the article you've helped write. If you want an incomplete article to have some degree of protection you might want to consider placing it as a subpage in your userspace until you consider it "ready to go". Let's try to assume good faith here; I'm just trying to make sure the good articles stay in and the bad articles stay out. I figured yours was going to be good at some point. --/Mendaliv//_Δ's/ 23:34, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Not one and a half minutes after its creation, when the edit summary says "more to follow"!!! Either you are an expert in semisimple Lie groups or you are being completely disingenuous. I am an experienced editor of mathematics articles, as you can quite rapidly find out. If you have not edited any higher mathematics articles yourself, please keep your thoughts to yourself. If you have no expertise in representations of semisimple Lie groups, you will have very little to contribute to this article. Now try to be a little more patient. Mathsci (talk) 23:40, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Civility

I have observed your recent conduct on this project with some concern. I am sure it is not news to you that editors are expected to interact with each other in a civil manner and to avoid personal attacks. Elonka has in her role as an administrator attempted to calm various disputes you have recently been in. Your attitude to other editors appears extremely hostile and Elonka has been giving you good advice. Your approach of accusing her of wikistalking, name-checking her in unrelated edit summaries, making threats and digging up errors she made early in her time editing here which she clearly regrets in an apparent attempt to intimidate her are totally unacceptable. Frankly, it appears to me that you are trying to get your way by bullying people. Please reconsider your approach, which seems to be escalating matters quite unnecessarily. WjBscribe 12:30, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

She has been following me around, i.e. she has my edits on her watchlist, and I do not like that particularly. When I started editing a new and rather difficult article Zonal spherical functions, where I was interrupted by a recent changs patroller unwittingly within one minute of my first edit, where I had clearly indicated in the edit summary "more to follow", she needlessly intervened. It is precisely because she has been following my edits and unnecessarily intervening that I have shown a reaction to her. Her behaviour - having all my edits on her watchlist - is not normal. This is a situation of her own creation. I am perfectly aware of how to edit mathematics articles without her help; in fact, she has said my edits excellent, but only after calling me a revert warrior, which is not justified by my mainspace edits. Therefore I would like her to stay away from me for a while, because I have grown tired of having somebody looking over my shoulder. I found her intervention on European ethnic groups, where she failed to recognize a known anti-Turkish POV pusher, twice admonished on WP:AN/I, particularly frustrating. I have asked her on numerous times for her to stay away from me. I am not aware that I have been uncivil to her, but I can not hide my irritation at her interruptions when I am clearly actually engaged in serious editing. If this continues, I will simply stop editing WP. I have not seen behaviour of this kind from an administrator before. Before her appearance, I am unaware that there have been problems with my edits. The best idea is for her to avoid me, and I have told her that several times. There are many administrators and editors on WP, so this kind of deliberate interaction is quite needless. It is impossible to play the piano while somebody is dusting the keys. Mathsci (talk) 13:22, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I also do not understand why you describe a mistake by a recent changes patroller as a "dispute". When he added {{confusing}} and {{references}} tags within one minute of the creation of the page, he apparently had not taken into account the edit summary, which said "more to follow". He should have left a reasonable period of time before adding tags like this. Editing WP is not like playing a video game, with split second reactions. How do you expect established academics to contribute to WP if their contributions are instantly "rubbished" in this way by editors who have applied little or no thought to what they are doing. Each line of Zonal spherical function requires a lot of thought and off-wiki work, which fills in a lot of difficult material previously only sketched on the WP by my ex-colleague Charles Matthews. Thank you, Mathsci (talk) 04:45, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

The main issue is that regardless of the cause of the incident, that you should not have responded to him as aggressively as you did. But you are right, that he should not have tagged your article so quickly. I believe at this point that he's acknowledged the issue, has been willing to drop it, and the problem has not recurred. So can we just accept it as a learning experience, and move forward? --Elonka 05:03, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Let he (she) who is without sin, cast the first stone. Mathsci (talk) 05:26, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

No I will not "keep such private musings off-wiki in future". Far from being my private musings, it was a fairly formal warning that your comments were becoming unacceptable. I suggest you heed it as there will likely be consequences if your aggressive behaviour (again evident in your comment on my talkpage) continues. WjBscribe 11:27, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Wallace

Heh, you've been going through my contribs back in 2005? That's quite a bit of free time you have, I'm flattered.  ;) And sure, I'd be happy to chat with Edgar Wallace's grandson. In a nutshell, if there's an error on Misplaced Pages, he is welcome to fix it. See also WP:AUTO and WP:SELFPUB. What he wants to avoid though is adding any information from personal knowledge, that hasn't already been published somewhere. For that kind of thing, it's better to just create a personal website. But if there's an actual error, he should either fix the article, or bring it up on the related talkpage. Or of course just tell you, and then you can determine for yourself whether or not a change is appropriate. Oh, and whenever in touch with a famous person or a family member of one, definitely ask them for a picture!  :) --Elonka 13:48, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Hello. It didn't take any time - I just pressed "earliest" and looked at the first diffs. It is true that since arriving back from California a week ago I am still alas on California time as you might guess by the times of some of my edits. It was fine in the other direction, so it must be my extreme old age - remember I'm one year older than you and, according to the catastrophe theorist Rene Thom, the males of our species are "biologically more fragile" :)

I told him he would need sources. He is in fact a professional photographer and was also sort of thinking of contributing photographs to wikimedia commons with a appropriate free-use license (with attribution). He told me it's illegal for example to publish photographs of museums such as the Musee Granet here in France - I don't know what the rules are. Since what he wants to modify involves death certificates, there might be some legal problems. But I'm sure he will be delighted to provide a photograph for the page, as you have suggested, which he said was almost entirely correct (amazingly, considering the complexity of his grandfather's life). Regarding photos of mathematicians (for example), I've only done this once, with the Octacube (mathematics). However, it's unlikely I'll do that sort of thing again unless there are exceptional circumstances. (It might encourage the kind of vandalism that already occurred on Ian Grojnowski's page.) Mathsci (talk) 15:01, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages (and Commons) image policies are enormously complex, so if I can help there, please do not hesitate to ask. The policies on museum images in particular are a bit, hmm, schizophrenic. For example, though it's completely unacceptable to upload images that are someone else's copyright, when it comes to museums, the Wiki culture actively encourages uploaders to ignore museum rules (!). The community consensus is "take pictures of whatever you want in a museum, and if it's against the museum's rules, well, lie to the guards". I've argued against this policy, but haven't been able to make any headway (let me know if you'd like links to the discussions at Commons). So in the meantime, any images that your friend wishes to upload to Commons, are probably going to be welcomed with open arms. If he's confused about licenses, I recommend CC-by-SA 3.0 . That's a good one, as it lets him retain copyright, but also authorizes the image for other reasonable purposes (such as on the web). I'm not sure what the rules are about death certificates. What is the change that he wants to make? --Elonka 16:20, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I actually only wanted a picture of the outside of the museum (although there is a marvellous gigantic sculpture of the Marquis de Vauvenargues, whose family chateau became Picasso's final resting place); so perhaps he misunderstood me. It's hard to imagine that that's illegal. I will find out more about what he wants to change, if anything, and also about the photograph of his grandfather. Mathsci (talk) 16:37, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Nice pic.  :) I took a look at the vandalism on Grojnowski's page. My guess is that it's from students. Often times when someone on Misplaced Pages is an active professor, if they give a student a bad grade, the student sometimes "retaliates" by vandalizing the professor's bio. Such things happen thousands of times a day on Misplaced Pages, and it's usually a simple matter to revert the graffiti, and block the vandals. I doubt that adding a picture would increase the amount of vandalism, but that's up to you, (and/or Grojnowski. Some people are more private than others. I know a few people who are extremely notable, but they absolutely do not want Misplaced Pages bios, because they don't want the additional attention and/or noise and/or "target painted on their back". Misplaced Pages bios are definitely a mixed blessing! If you enjoy reading general rants about me, for example, you might find entertainment here. It's given me several good laughs.  :) --Elonka 17:03, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

The vandalism was by an easily identified colleague. In general it seems best to separate the real world from wikipedia "wonderland", even if it contains exemplary contributors like User:WillowW. (It's a much more pleasant experience looking at her approach to contributing - a lesson to us all - than reading mindless hate pages off WP.) Mathsci (talk) 03:38, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

I looked at the forum you linked, but off-wiki forums are full of puzzling and contradictory statements . I didn't follow the ArbCom case because I was on wikibreak while in Cambridge, but I would never question the integrity of Durova. Mathsci (talk) 06:05, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Article nominated for deletion

(comment deleted)

Cheers! --Eae1983 (talk) 23:23, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

PS: I fully support you against that weird guy Koala something... He actually gives me creeps so much he is brainwashed! Anyways it is also really good to know brains like yours exist over here!

Reply

Hi, sorry about that. This is the best I could do. Also, the reason why I reverted his comments and deleted them is so that the AfD would not get out of hand. Also see Misplaced Pages:Canvassing. Not sure how else you would prefer that I edit your talk page. In all likelihood, I will not have to edit it again unless something like this reoccurs. Khoikhoi 04:09, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Many thanks. Mathsci (talk) 04:24, 2 June 2008 (UTC)