User talk:Lexor/Archive 2003

Misc discussion from Apr-May 2003

On VFD you said "Sorry for the inconvenience, still getting my wikipedia legs". No problem -- I know it's not easy finding your way around when you start off. Most of the maintenance pages (Wikipedia:Pages needing attention, Wikipedia:Vandalism in progress, Wikipedia:Votes for deletion, etc.) have some sort of policy attached. Deletion is one of the more complicated ones, not to mention the fact that all the sysops (me included) have a different idea of how it should be done. -- Tim Starling 03:00 Apr 23, 2003 (UTC)

Hi there. Thanks for cleaning up my spelling. I want to expand the Manchester related stuff at some point so I'll probably bump into you again :-) Are you from around these parts? Alex

Actually I've never been to Manchester, just a follower/fan of the music from the late 80s/early 90s, but I did live in London for a while in the mid 90s. I'm trying to strictly stick to what I know about the music, I wouldn't know about the city itself. -- Lexor 18:30 May 14, 2003 (UTC)

Genetic drift discussion

Around 22:02-22:07 I worked on the genetic drift article, and 168 reverted my changes. I really think he misunderstands "drift" but I am about to leave my office. When you have a chance, could you check my last version, and his changes, and make sure the article is still communicating what "drift" is? Thanks, Slrubenstein

I'll try and do that. Genetic drift is a tricky concept to explain, and their are elements of both of your versions of the articles that are useful, getting the mix of intuitive and statistical descriptions is a tricky thing. I've been teaching a class on population genetics this semester and "genetic drift" is one of the more difficult concepts to convey, and the notion of random sampling of gametes does play a heavy role. We have students run simulations of drift for populations of various sizes (for neutral and non-neutral cases) which helps tune the student's intuition. When the students see variance in allele frequency outcome decreasing as population size increases and then finally see that drift goes to zero for idealized "infinite" populations, that they finally "get" that drift is a "sampling" phenomenon, and therefore described by statistics. I think will try generating some graphs from these simulations of alleles wandering to fixation (or loss) and install them in a later version of the article. -- Lexor 01:22 20 May 2003 (UTC)

I just did a major overhaul in which I tried to reintroduce the population genetics perspective, as well as some colloquial examples, without deleting anything 168 put in. I really appreciate your work on this and look forward to your comments on this version, Slrubenstein 17:59 20 May 2003 (UTC)

Lexor, I just made a change to the genetic drift article I’d like you to review. I changed this paragraph – which I think may have been written by 168, but I am not sure:

Mating with a particularly fertile partner, which tends to make a trait or allele more common, also represents random sampling for most alleles. Because the selection is random, on average alleles will be picked in proportion to how common they are. But because the sample size, the population size and the number of carriers of an allele are finite, deviations from the average or mean will occur. The "frequency" of an allele (how common or rare it is) drifts to the extent that deviations up or down over successive generations do not exactly balance out.

I think this paragraph is mixing up sexual selection, natural selection, and drift, and I think that the real issue may be the relationship between independent assortment and drift. I replaced it with this paragraph:

The principle of independent assortment may also be involved in drift. According to this principle, during gamete formation many traits combine randomly. Thus, an individual may inherit alleles that increase fitness along with alleles that are neutral (that neither increase nor decrease fitness). Natural selection favors the alleles that increase fitness, but the associated neutral alleles will also increase in frequency, as an accidental byproduct.

but I am concerned that I may have misunderstood the former paragraph, or may not be clear or fully accurate in the latter paragraph. Slrubenstein

I think what you are referring to is actually the process of drift causing linkage disequilibrium (LD) (another article I am in the process of wikifying) which is the non-random association of alleles (i.e. deviation from independent assortment). This is again a subtle issue, and probably deserves an article to itself. You also refer to associated alleles increasing in frequency, and that process is genetic hitchhiking and results when there is a linkage disequilibrium. Here's an explaination and bit of ASCI art, that helps me (I will use it in my LD article):

If selection acts directly on one loci (A) and there is linkage disequilibrium between that loci and another locus (B), then selection will alter the allele frequencies at B even though it is not directly under selection.

e.g. population in linkage disequilibrium:

              +-----+  +------------+           +------------+ +-----+  
              | AB  |  |            |	         |    AB      | |     |  
              +-----+  |            |	         +------------+ |     |
              +-----+  |    aB      |   ======> |            | | aB  |
              |     |  |            |   	 |            | |     |  
              | Ab  |  |            | selection |    Ab      | |     |  
              |     |  +------------+  for A    |            | +-----+ 
              |     |  |    ab      |	         |            | | ab  |  
              +-----+  +------------+	         +------------+ +-----+

note that frequency of b *increases* (and B *decreases), because it is in greater association of with A (haplotype Ab) i.e. than you would expect if the loci assorted independently

population in linkage equilibrium:

              +-----+  +------------+           +------------+ +-----+  
              |     |  |            |	         |            | |     |  
              |     |  |            |	         |            | |     |
              | AB  |  |    aB      |   ======> |    AB      | | aB  |
              |     |  |            |   	 |            | |     |  
              |     |  |            | selection |            | |     |  
              +-----+  +------------+    for A  +------------+ +-----+ 
              | Ab  |  |    ab      |	         |    Ab      | | ab  |  
              +-----+  +------------+	         +------------+ +-----+

note that frequency of b *stays constant* despite an increase in the frequency of A.

On a meta-note, I really think that the genetic drift article is getting a bit long and "drifting" (sic) somewhat, and tackling issues that are sort of related to drift, but aren't quite the main point (the "sampling effect). -- Lexor 02:45 21 May 2003 (UTC)

I appreciate your feedback, and your opinion in general. I am not committed to the paragraph I wrote -- but I wasn't satisfied with the previous form of that paragraph. I hope sometime soon you will reappear at that article, and perhaps offer a way out of the logjam between myself and 168. He and I have been going back and forth tediously over a variety of issues, and I am getting tired of it -- and I would defer to any suggestion you make. Slrubenstein

I provided basic content to Founder's effect -- could you please go over it and make any necessary changes? Thanks, Slrubenstein

I (as a reader) should take this opportunity to thank you for the outstanding work you have been doing. When you have a chance, please take a look at the article Selection. Personally, I think it is very poorly written, and I think at points misleading. You can guess why I will not even try to do anything. Just one thing that caught my eye is this:

Also, selection is not a guarantee that advantageous traits or alleles will come to predominate within a population. Through genetic drift, such traits may become less common or even disappear. In the face of selection, even so-called "deleterious" alleles may become universal among the members of a species.

I know from arguments between Dobzhansky and Mayr that the way drift and natural selection interact is pretty complicated and frankly I am not up to taking this on. At the very least I think the discussion can be presented more clearly. Anyway, just check it out when you have time, Slrubenstein

Also, when you have a chance please check the article Allele frequency; 168 made a link in the The modern synthesis page, and I put in a stub. Slrubenstein

Lexor, Lexor, we need you. Won't you please come back to our sandbox and at least weigh in on the matters of scientific fact? The neutral theory article has changed a fair amount since you last checked in, and the discussion around it has changed a whole lot. While I seem to have succeeded in making a point, I'm not sure how valid a point it is, or that it couldn't be improved in the article. Incidentally, since you mention teaching pop gen, I can't help wondering: Are you a population geneticist? If you don't want to compromise your anonymity by answering that, I'll understand. 168... 21:22 27 May 2003 (UTC)

Sorry folks, I'm on vacation right now, and far away from my books and study. I will try and weigh in when I'm back at work in a week or so. It's safe to say that pop-gen is one of the areas I'm involved in. -- Lexor 03:54 28 May 2003 (UTC)

Evolution article discussion

Lexor, I am concerned that our articles on science are being used bypeople with certain religious and/or political beliefs. (And as a person who has his own religious beliefs, this is not meant as an ad homenim attack against anyone. I simply don't think that it is appropriate or justifiable to let oen's religion or politics color their contributions to articles on science.) At the moment I am concerned with the article on biological evolution, which is pretty good. (And I appreciate your hard work on this article.) Unfortunately, someone set up a parallel article called Theory of evolution; it seems to me that this violates Wikipedia NPOV policy. This alternate evolution article isn't creationist, but it is very problematic. When you get a chance, please see the note I added in there: Talk:Theory of evolution. RK 23:11 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)~

Also, I am concerned when I see some people change links in science articles, which takes people away from the article on evolution, and instead directs them to a page that is non-scientific. For instance, speciation is obviously a technical scientific topic in evolutionary biology. This article requires a link to our article on biological evolution. So why does User:Anthere insist on removing the link to evolution, and replacing it with a link to the problematic theory of evolution article? That latter article is missing most of the science and details, and replaces science with religion and mysticism and Gaia theory. This makes no sense to me. When people want to learn about a very technical genetics and evolution topic such as speciation, we can assume that they do not want to study the mystical views of a Jesuit Christian priest from a century ago! Such a link seems, to me, to mislead encyclopedia readers for the purpose of promiting a certain political or religious agenda. Any thoughts? RK 23:11 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)

It's a tricky issue, and I need to give it some more thought. I'm travelling again, so I will try and weigh in more when I get back in a few days. I'm not opposed to more general views of evolution as a concept being presented (e.g. Teilhard de Chardin's stuff is interesting and has influenced thinkers on evolution, even if it's not part of the modern synthesis), I'm more concerned with labelling it as such. I think a merger would be appropriate, but I think we should be careful to preserve other non-mainstream ideas in some form (either in another article or in a subsection of the main article).

As for whether the term "theory of evolution" as opposed to "evolution" is OK, I think it is, because although "theory" is often considered to be tentative in everyday parlance, in science we often talk about the "quantum mechanical theory" or "thermodynamic theory". Unfortunately when people hear "theory", the are really confusing it with "hypothesis". A theory is what you get after a period of "hypotheses" when you have a really solid body of fact from many different angles backing up the hypothesis (or more normally the "set" of hypotheses, as the theory of evolution, for example, is composed of more than one specific hypothesis, which is why it rests on a firm foundation). Talking about "evolutionary theory" rather than "theory of evolution" would make this distinction clearer. "Evolutionary theory" is the combination of the body of mathematical population genetics, quantitative genetics, molecular biology and so on that makes it possible to predict from the current genotypes in a population of organisms, the genotypes in the next generation given knowledge of migration, selection and drift parameters. -- Lexor 04:31 13 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Misc discussion from July-Dec 2003

re "(autopoietic -> autopoietic, should avoid redirects where possible.)" - why do you think we should do this? Martin

I guess I wasn't proposing it as a wikipedia policy, but it's certainly my policy when writing articles. I note that Wikipedia:Piped_link actually lists a redirect as a valid alternative to a piped link. My thought was (and I don't know how much cost this inccurs on the database to know the scale of this is actually a problem) that redirects are probably going to inccur a greater cost on the database than a direct link, since it has to look up the other page. On the other, I think it's good to have redirects to pages, so that serendiptious linking works, but once the connection is made, in articles that I have edited I have a habit of changing the link so that it points directly to the article, but I keep the redirect page around. I've seen several others doing this systematically too, so I figured it might be good practice in terms of database performance. -- Lexor 10:23 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Another closet Aussie? Consider adding yourself to Wikipedia:Wikipedians/Australia. -- Tim Starling 00:51, Aug 5, 2003 (UTC)

Hi, Lexor, thanks for your praise of my changes to the self-organization article. I don't think it qualifies as "new", does it? -- Miguel

Not strictly, I suppose, but it's sort of "new" in it's current incarnation, less than a few weeks old. I looked at some of the current "new" pages and they are newer than I thought (i.e. 2 or 3 days at most). Oh well, just an idea. -- Lexor 21:45, 16 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Yes. Jimbo said it is OK so go ahead and use the Nupedia articles under development under the GNU FDL. It was the intent of the authors anyway to have their work under the GNU FDL, so I don't see a problem so long as proper credit is given. --mav

Hey, I like that box you put in the History of Australia section -- so much so, I'm going to steal it and put it in the History of Animation section. :) --Modemac 13:12, 23 Sep 2003 (UTC)

It seems to be an emerging standard in the History articles, otherwise I wouldn't have used it (I definitely don't want create an ad-hoc "standard"). Look at the History of Italy, History of Germany, History of the United States. Don't know whether the template is documented anywhere, let me know if it. It's definitely good to be consistent across the 'pedia! --Lexor 13:31, 23 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Adam Carr discussion

Lexor, thanks for your comments. What is your opinion of the etiquette of what I have said at Talk:Adolf Hitler and the creation of Adolf Hitler 2? Dr Adam Carr 12:19, 26 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Adam. Your comments on the actual page are fine, but wikipedia really needs to have one page ultimately. Eventually somebody will redirect your page to the old one, or you can replace the current one. In terms of a temporary page for comment, I suggest doing what I said your talk page, which is create a temporary one in your namespace, and then discuss it on the current Talk Hitler page. One way or another there will eventually be one page, wikpedia forces tend towards avoiding page "forks" and towards consensus eventually.

By the way, best to post to User talk:Lexor rather than User:Lexor, that way I get a nice little "You have new messages" on the top right hand corner of my screen when I login, which I don't get if you post directly to my user page. Thanks --Lexor 12:37, 26 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Oops sorry, that's what I meant to do - I am still finding all these pages a bit confusing. Dr Adam Carr 12:40, 26 Sep 2003 (UTC)

No problem, it can take a while to get used to thinks. I always monitor "My watchlist" carefully and set my preferences so that I "watch" any page I have edited, that way I can see what's updating etc, and it means there's a "Talk" link next to any user who has made that edit (you also have this in the "Edit history" page).

(later) OK, now I have seen the comments on Hitler you left in my talk page. I am still not clear on whether I am allowed to simply install my Hitler article over the top of the old one, or, if that is considered arrogant or discourteous (which it would be), what is the process to go through to get agreement on making that change. Dr Adam Carr 12:37, 26 Sep 2003 (UTC)

I would post the page as I suggested in your namespace and then announce your intentions on the (current) Talk page, linking back to your temporary page and see what discussion ensues. If somebody feels strongly about re-adding a section back, then they'll do it, and you can argue your case. Once you've posted your page, it's not really "yours" anymore in any case (an exception being pages in your own namespace, since they're clearly your pages, not wikipedia's). The only section I can imagine people might add back would be the "Cultural depictions" section, because wikipedia is full of people with heads for pop trivia. If you object to this, you could suggest a companion page like Cultural depictions of Hitler or somesuch and simply link it.

In any case, whether you completely replace it, and then stuff gets added back or you merge the current version with yours, at some stage in the future there will be a merge of sorts. Remember wikipedia stores the entire edit history, so it's all raw material that goes into the mill, so any page can be resurrected and/or reconfigured from any combination of that raw material, whether you replace or merge. --Lexor 12:55, 26 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Misc discussion from October 2003

Thank you for the well written article on Tierra. --JackH 13:32, 3 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Re MHC, yeah, I had to go back to work, didn't have time to beat on the redirs. Thanks for doing those! Now to add all the other MHCs... :-) Stan 02:17, 17 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Tnx for the MacArthur pages edits. I think the nagging disatisfaction with having to settle for a single column kept me thinking HTML (as if i knew how to get 2 or 3 columns out of it!) and neglecting wiki.

You're quick at getting on an edit; that's nice! Tnx for the help getting something proper out there. --Jerzy 09:16, 2003 Oct 25 (UTC)

No problems. Sometimes I don't want to think too hard so I go fix some markup. ;-) You can use HTML <table>s, it's OK since there's no equivalent as yet. They are also working on some wiki markup for tables over on http://test.wikipedia.org if you're interested. --Lexor 09:26, 25 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Misc discussion from November 2003

please, have it easy on me. It is a bit stupid, but I somehow temporary left the french wikipedia yesterday. I wanted to finish that french article, which is not entirely done, but I have already worked for hours on it; I wanted it to be translated within a day or two. Several people, such as also Angel and Brian have said they would help me to do so, but the article is not entirely done yet. And I was too tired yesterday at 5h30 am to fix everything; The article on ecology have been so poor for now nearly 2 years I have been there, I do not think a couple of more days will be horrible. More horrible that any article on which there is an edit war anyway :-) Anthere

It's OK, I just would have thought that the Talk:Ecology page would be the place to do it. I actually think that using HTML comments works the best, because all the text is in place, in the article, but the reader is hidden from the messiness, plus it means that a complete edit history is kept. Just be careful to keep some of the existing material in some (edited) form. I would suggest adding the new sections, and then leaving it, and coming back to write up date the intro and existing text after you've added the new material. Just my $0.02. --Lexor 14:00, 11 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Hello. Do you have an opinion about Ed addition at Gaia theory (science) ? Anthère

hi, I just wanted to say that I put the french text visible because Brian said he could do some translation tonight. It is much easier to show someone the paragraph in question by having it visible (I know not if you noticed, that edit section does not work with commented out text). I also told him I would hide them back when he would be done doing anything. I am very much behind schedule. Too many problems with our favorite vandal Papotages, and someone leaving, wanting to be anonymised :-( Anthère 00:25, 17 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Well, you can see it, when you edit the entire page, perhaps you could put a message at the start of the comment in caps, so he can easily spot it, like: THIS IS THE SECTION TO TRANSLATE, ADDED: 2003-11-15. I think it's more important to make things convenient for readers than editors (who after all, can easily spot the text in the edit window). I mean, this is what Talk pages are all about, to hide all that back channel stuff, we defeat the purpose of Talk when we display meta and discussion in the article. --Lexor 00:36, 17 Nov 2003 (UTC)

On the other hand...(though I fondamentally agree with you), there is something in the gfdl that is about authors, their responsability and their "ownership", so I think the french additions should appear in the article history itself. If they only appear in talk pages (that may disappear), then the original authorship of an article is not respected by gfdl principles. Anthère

We've had a long and heated discussion about scientific method which the quotes are related to. For me they are crucial to the compromise we have reached. The problem is that "scientific method" can refer a) to what scientists actually do, b) to some set of abstract steps such as "observation, hypothesis, etc, etc" or c) both, if you believe that the abstract steps capture the essence of science. Many people have heard or been taught to believe it, and so sense "c" tends to be automatic, and if one doesn't explicitly squelch it, without ever saying so one is insinuating, by the slipperiness of the term, that it not only truly captures the essence of science but that it is some real concrete thing out in the world. At the same time, one sets the stage for readers to regard the many critics of method (who I think are in the majority in science studies) as denying the obvious.168... 16:25, 22 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Hi, Lexor.

Thanks for your RMS edit and your explanation.

Just a data point: Google for "open source" and the first page and all bar one on the second page come up with "Open Source" rather than "open source". I'd always thought of this and "Free Software" as being at least as studly (titular? highlit? initially-capped?) as, say, Christian Democrats or Women's Liberation.

It's true, however, that the "pages of reference" for these movements seem to be confused about caps. Capitalization is all over the place on the OSI page (21 "Open Source" vs 9 "open source"). However, "Free Software" beats "free software" 7-1 on the gnu.org site. I can't help wondering, do these "movements" deserve acronyms (OSS, FSF) if their advocates can't even be bothered to lean on the shift key every once in a while? I say: back to World Domination (or should that be "world domination"?) 101 with both of them ;) chocolateboy 03:06, 26 Nov 2003

Well in Wikipedia, redirects will get all the folks who Google for "Open Source" or "Free Software", but there's a pretty strong consensus on reserving the use of caps for "true" proper nouns: names, companies, trademarks, locations etc. Putting caps on concepts or ideas that are more amorphous looks out of place and reminds me of old papers from the 19th Century that talk about Science and Truth. We can also put both in the slug line which generally keeps people happy, i.e.:

Open source (also Open Source) is a software methodology...

but it's safer to use the lowercase forms in the inline and titles, otherwise it sticks out and seems to add a kind of unwarranted authoritativeness to a term for which many have different meanings to different people. For example Women's Liberation should definitely be ~~Women's~~ women's liberation, as there are many people affiliated with that movement, but it is not one central organization, but the Christian Democrats may be a particular political party (or parties) in different countries, so one should cap those for each one, e.g. Christian Democrats, Germany or whatever. --Lexor 03:26, 26 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Hi again.

I respectfully disagree on the "Women's Liberation" thing: "women's liberation" (lib), maybe. But why capitalize just "Women"? Totally agree about caps overkill in bygone books: <cough>John Bunyan (473K)</cough>...

Oops! I meant women's liberation, I was actually thinking of the page title (because all Wikipedia page titles are always initial capital). Thanks for spotting that! ;-)

Re: Christian Democrat - I was thinking of a more generic use, as in: "Tony Blair may still call himself New Labour, but, really, his government is what the Germans would call Christian Democrat, a party of the centre right." [1] Although, to be fair, this is the first thing Google comes up with: "Tony Blair is a christian democrat"! [2]

How about Christian democrat? Should Christian always be initial caps, hmm, not sure. Since Muslim is regularly spelled muslim, but Islam is always Islam, never islam. For every rule there's always an exception, I suppose...

But I respect (and have spotted before with mild initial-capitalist pangs ;) the Wikipedia consensus, and appreciate your notes on the redirects. Thanks for your help! chocolateboy 04:14, 26 Nov 2003 (UTC)

No problems. ---Lexor 07:07, 26 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Article on "Race"

Dear Lexor - Thanks for your welcoming message on Nov 4. I tried to email you but that failed, and it was only recently that I realized this is an alternative way to communicate.

We seem to have some common interests and perspectives, so I was wondering whether you could offer some advice regarding two individuals who keep on reverting changes that several critics of the article on "Race" have attempted to make. I posted a brief summary focusing on the single POV issues at http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Peer_review#NPOV_dispute_on_article_about_Race

But there's much more at issue than what's mentioned there.

Thanks again. Peak 06:19, 1 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Peak, I haven't really followed the debate, but, given the topic, I'm not surprised that NPOV issues have arisen, which is why I have largely avoided the page. I'll try and have a look, but I can't promise I'll get to it any time soon. --Lexor 09:03, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)

One-sentence paragraphs

Lexor, while I agree that these are to be avoided in general, I think they have an important function as the first sentence in an article, especially perhaps the biological articles - they give a simple statement of what the creature is, and the succeeding paras then expand on that. It also provides a sensible place where the ToC will go when an article expands to the point of needing one. So I am putting such header sentences in in more or less all the articles I am doing nowadays. seglea 03:00, 21 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Seglea, I agree that for some articles it may be appropriate. Although, I tend to find that the introduction to an article is best summarised in 2-3 sentences (because in one sentence one can barely define a term) and after that point is the point to break for the ToC. I agree it varies on the article, so I'm not dogmatic about it, but I think it's looks somewhat telegraphic and dictionary-like if you make it a policy on all biology articles. I like to define in the first sentence, and describe what's interesting in the second, and maybe say who discovered in the third at that point it's ready to be expanded. Then you have a short, but complete, introduction. For an example, see Black widow spider. I prefer to follow Wikipedia:News style which puts the main points in a few sentences in the first paragraph, then break for the details. --Lexor 08:36, 21 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Misc discussion from December 2003

Re;life/exobiology -- its a valid point. Ive edited the text to remove some speculation which is best discussed at the exobiology article. Lirath Q. Pynnor

Dear Lexor: A while back, when I was a newbie, you kindly left some welcoming messages on my User_talk:Peak page. (There's a note of thanks above.) Since then, I've made some progress on various fronts, but some of my worst fears are proving to be well-founded. I notice, for example, that User:Lir seems to quite well-intentioned, but that many of the changes he or she is making to articles on biological topics are for the worse. Please note that I am only talking about changes that Lir has made to the work of others besides myself. It's a shame, because all the articles that I've looked at that Lir has touched were really very good. My wiki-energy has recently been flagging, and in any case, I just don't have the time to deal with this kind of problem. Perhaps you could keep an eye on the biological articles Lir is trampling on? Or is this is a case for the Wiki Volunteer Fire Brigade? Peak 06:20, 25 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I do generally try and keep up with changes to the biol articles I've contributed, and in general I haven't found too many problems with Lir's changes, but I'll keep a lookout. --Lexor 11:01, 31 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Dear Lexor: Regarding CAC vs Krebs — this seems to be another case of someone's good intentions causing more harm (in this case, taking up other people's time) than good. There are some really neat things that can be done with CAC graphics. Even spending the time to secure permission to copy difficult-to-reproduce interactive graphics to Wikipedia would be a better investment of time.

As for the specific issue about naming, can you tell me more about "Wikipedia policy"? I was surprised that User:Angela changed "English as a second language" (ESL) to "English as an alternative language" (EAL). She did so in part because she believes the trend is towards EAL. This may be true in England, but I haven't seen much evidence of it elsewhere. I mention this in part because I was wondering if you know if the trend to CAC is universal. If so, it seems a bit unfair to poor old Hans! Peak 05:36, 3 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Yes, I think the trend is pretty universal (see citation stats on Talk:Citric acid cycle). I don't really care that much, but it was stable at CAC for a while, and people have mostly been linking to CAC, so many redirects would have to be changed, and the article itself uses CAC in preference to Krebs, and the article should be internally consistent. It was a stable organized article with that title which had emerged over almost 2 years and the rename should be discussed. I agree, that it would be time better spent securing permissions to release nice graphics under the GFDL on wikipedia. --Lexor 09:02, 3 Jan 2004 (UTC)

FYI, User:168... has resorted to reverting Lir's changes (e.g. at DNA and elsewhere). Peak 09:17, 4 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Hi Lexor. Thanks belatedly for your interest in recruiting me to signal transduction. Although I may be too late to participate in the way you wanted, I will try to take a look at it in the not too distant future. Sorry for not responding to your call. Right around when you issued it I had to quit wiki-ing cold turkey for a while, and now I am trying to avoid piling up my wiki plate again too high or too quickly.168... 19:50, 4 Jan 2004 (UTC)