Talk:Main Page

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The old archives for this talk page can be found at Talk:Main Page/Archive 1. The old archives of "Dumb Questions" can now be found at the Help Desk.

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Parser function urlencode doesn't work

Hi Blake. I can't get get parser function "urlencode" to work, even though all the others do. See the sandbox at Antarct. J. Math.. --Brucebartlett 20:35, 15 August 2007 (EDT)

I'll look into it. Blake Stacey 22:54, 15 August 2007 (EDT)
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Templates Added

I'm not sure if this actually speed up the process of getting boards listed on pages, but I created a template for journal pages lacking boards. Just add {{needs-board}} at the bottom of the page above the categories. A message will appear telling everyone to add info about the board, and add it to the category Category:Journals with no editorial board listed. Does any feel like getting a bot to add this to all journal pages (except Journal of K-Theory) now? I'm not talented enough for that. Ben Webster 19:52, 13 August 2007 (EDT)

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Visual Appearance

  • It looks like Blake just upgraded the picture that adorns this site. Great! And, that's a nice font above the picture.
Mmm... the grey looks a bit boring, don't you think? --Brucebartlett 15:25, 19 August 2007 (EDT)
  • Should we make clicking on that picture link to a given page, where I could explain the name Eureka and the point of this wiki? Or is it more useful to have it link to the main page, as it does now?
  • Can someone figure out how to eliminate the huge phrase "Main Page" atop the main page? Our competitor doesn't have that.
Hooray, I think I found the bug in Blake's patch for eliminating the "Main Page" motif. There was a carriage return in the code where there shouldn't have been :-) More recent versions of Mediawiki - like the one which runs wikipedia - come with nice built-in .CSS and .js syntax highlighting... though I think you can download a plug-in. This is just a nice convenience for the wannabe hackers out there like me :-) Anyhow, "Main Page" has finally bitten the dust, it put up a hell of a fight. --Brucebartlett 14:55, 27 August 2007 (EDT)
A carriage return? Oh, for crying out loud. . . Good job. Blake Stacey 15:44, 27 August 2007 (EDT)

I've just changed one of the colours... hope I haven't put anyone off their breakfast. It's the background to the boxes "Here for the first time?" and "Check out these categories!", which was purple (#6633cc) and is now pink (#edcece). I know, pink's a controversial colour, and I'm fully expecting someone to have got rid of it by the time I next log on. But I thought the purple seemed too dark and unbalanced the page somehow. The other colour I thought of substituting was a lilac, #ceceed. --Tleinster 23:47, 19 August 2007 (EDT)

I found a couple of alternative pictures for the main page. They're in a comment at the n-Category Café. So also is the suggestion that we stick with the current picture but cleaned up a bit, so that it's not so fuzzy. If other people think this might be worth trying, I'll give it a go. I could also try adding some colour. --Tleinster 21:30, 20 August 2007 (EDT)

Of the possibilities I've seen so far, I like best the idea of improving the image we've got right now. We know that it's in the public domain, and I think de-fuzzifying and de-grayscaling could make it look pretty snazzy. Blake Stacey 11:36, 21 August 2007 (EDT)


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Format for dates

We should aim for a standard way of writing dates. People in Europe use dd/mm/yy (or yyyy). People in the US use mm/dd/yy (or yyyy). (I don't know what the rest of the world does.) Thus, 3/8/07 is ambiguous. The usual solution seems to be to use yyyy/mm/dd: so today is 2007/8/17. I've just changed the dates in the Ingenta page to this format. I propose that we use it as our standard. Any objections?

(Of course, there's no problem with dates when the month is written as a word: everyone understands "3 August 2007" and "August 3, 2007".) --Tleinster 09:09, 17 August 2007 (EDT)

I just found out how to enable the "dynamic dates" feature. If you write a date as [[2007-08-17]], it will render as the version of date formatting the user specifies in their preferences. Blake Stacey 11:58, 17 August 2007 (EDT)
So far I've mainly entered a bunch of dates in the (new improved!) page on K-Theory. I've been doing it in the format '7 August 2007', which seems logical and thoroughly unambiguous. As Tleinster — can I call you Tom? — points out, 7/8/2007 and 8/7/2007 are too ambiguous. But, I'm afraid stupid Americans might be confused even by '2007/8/7'.
The 'dynamic dates' trick sounds like the technically sweetest solution, and it's not far removed from what Tom describes. It leaves clueless users who don't know about dynamic date in the dark. But maybe such lusers deserve what they get.
Personally I haven't had a dynamic date for years, but that's another issue. --John Baez 14:35, 19 August 2007 (EDT)
Those user preferences are cool. I checked just about all my "Editing" boxes... now to edit a page I just double click on it, very nice. --Brucebartlett 15:25, 19 August 2007 (EDT)
John, you can call me anything you like, short of insults. What I don't understand is why I show up as Tleinster at all, when most of the rest of you are divided into two words like normal human beings. Never mind.
As for the dates, there's one situation where dynamic dates don't look good: inside links. As it happens, this was the context where I met the problem originally (in the reference list of the Ingenta page). This is because a dynamic date is itself a pair of links: 2007-08-20. It's a pretty minor point, though! --Tleinster 19:18, 19 August 2007 (EDT)
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Publicity

At some point we should try to get lots of people to come and read and contribute to this site. At the very beginning, it would have been too early. But is now the time? For instance, are we absolutely sure that we've settled on a name? Do we have any legal vulnerabilities? And are we happy enough with the main page that we're ready for all and sundry to visit?

Here are some possible places to advertise. Subject mailing lists (e.g. the category theory list, and other lists that contributors belong to). Your own university or department. Websites with similar aims: we can ask their authors if they would like to add a link to us. Newsgroups, including sci.math.research. We could even write letters to mathematics journals that publish letters (Notices of the AMS?) advertising its existence.

Of course, I'm not suggesting obnoxious in-your-face publicity. But there are many people out there who care about this issue, and would gladly do some work for this site... which they won't do if they don't know it exists! --Tleinster 10:41, 17 August 2007 (EDT)

I think we should probably wait until we have a little more data, a semi-stable page design, and a few more technical kinks worked out before going hog wild on the publicity. At the moment, we don't actually have very much information for each journal, which will hopefully be changing very soon. --Ben Webster 17:41, 17 August 2007 (EDT)

When should we publicize Eureka more?

I think the answer is 'not until we have a bit more stuff for each journal, and maybe a bigger list of journals'. This is best done by people who can handle advanced technology and automate the process. Meanwhile, people like me (and maybe Tleinster) can create some articles that are interesting to read. We don't want the masses don't get disappointed when they show up!!!

For this, one thing I'm doing is taking articles near the top of the list of most popular pages and making the less interesting ones more interesting!

By the way, this list is just one of many. --John Baez 14:46, 19 August 2007 (EDT)

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Legal issues

Tom brought up the subject of legal issues above, and it merits some discussion. I for one am a bit concerned. We don't want to be caught out!

I emailed the people behind www.journalprices.com, asking them about this issue. Here is the relevant portion of the email, and Ted Bergstrom 's response. He pointed out that the Lund Journal Info group is already using the data from journalprices.com and eigenfactor.org in a similar way - and to a much larger scale. Mmm. 

> I'm concerned about the copyright implications. It is my understanding that the JCR dataset is  
> not open-access. Wouldn't they complain about us using it, even in this indirect way? We would 
> also like to use Eigenfactor, for which I have the same fear - once the ISI get a wind of what  
> we are doing, won't they be upset and could we end up in legal trouble?

We have been careful to present our data in a form that can not be inverted to produce JCR's 
impact factors or Ulrichs' prices.  The ISI has not complained to us so far.  Eigenfactor is 
similarly cautious.  ISI is well aware of eigenfactor and so far has not objected to what they are 
doing.   Note that the Lund Journal Info group is using data from journalprices and from 
eigenfactor.

Of course if you are doing just the mathematics lists, you can afford to take more care than we in 
looking for errors.  Sometimes journals switch names or publishers and their citation data gets 
balled up.  Sometimes our perl script for reading prices may get fooled by a funny listing in 
Ulrichs.
  • If an academic were to find out the 2007 price of Journal X from his/her university library, and then record it on the site, would that be legal?

--Brucebartlett 18:06, 17 August 2007 (EDT)

See also my comment in Talk:2007 Plagiarism Ring Affair for an entirely different legal issue. I just created a stub on a respected journal which happens to have been caught up in the COMU scandal. It seems appropriate to note on Eureka articles accurate information unlikely to be found on the home pages of the journals in question, but Eureka needs a clear and concise policy so that we can summarily revert people who show up to vandalize a page complaining that such and such a journal rejected their paper. ---CH 16:02, 31 August 2007 (EDT)
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Interwiki linking

It would be nice to have interwiki linking, so that we could easily link things to, say, wikipedia (especially if we start importing wikipedia content). Any chance of that happening? Or does it just work differently here from wikipedia? --Ben Webster 19:35, 17 August 2007 (EDT)

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We're probably going to need SMW 0.7

Bad news. I couldn't seem to get inline queries working, in order to reproduce the journals that A. Einstein is editor for, to go on A. Einstein's page. However, the good news is that this does indeed work nicely in SMW 0.7. To play around with SMW 0.7, go to the ontoworld.org website, which uses SMW 0.7. They've got some test data there they jippoed from wikipedia. You can play around by making inline queries on the country pages, like the one for Guinea. So.... bad news for Blake, but good news for the rest of us I think ;-). Nevertheless, we can probably get by without this functionality for a while - we should give Blake a break, he has done such a great job already!

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EYPHKA! Archimedes cartoon.

I just had an idea : I love the image Tom dug up a while ago:

Image:Archimedes.jpg

I propose someone uses this idea and draws a cartoon of Archimedes huffing and puffing, bouncing up and down on that lever, and eventually the earth "boings" up, comes down and lands on some huge load of moneybags and stuff (?!), which are blown away by the impact, revealing the academic journals underneath them. At this point a speech-bubble from Archimedes shouts something like "EYPHKA! Sciεn Joμρnal Wαtch!" and the cartoon ends. This can all be made into an animated GIF which plays in that right hand side of the title bar on the main page.

In fact this Archimedes motif can be taken further; he can be the mascot of the site in the sense that occasionally when certain wiki pages are loading, there's a little cartoon of him (like the hourglass) huffing and puffing to lift that earth with his lever. Lol! --Brucebartlett 08:32, 28 August 2007 (EDT)

Perhaps we could keep the use of Archimedes a little more, um, restrained? I would be a favor of a more colorful icon involving Archimedes and the lever (and agree that having someone talented draw it may be the best solution, avoiding copyright problems), but let's not make things too busy. I think the Knot Atlas logo is around the right level of color and complexity. --Ben Webster 14:19, 28 August 2007 (EDT)
Bruce, that would be fun for your user page, but personally I dislike animated web pages, particularly if the animation is intrusive (anything running in a continual loop is intrusive in my book). ---CH 16:05, 31 August 2007 (EDT)
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Any volunteers to contact the AMS?

We should contact the AMS and make sure they are okay with us using their journal price survey. (This data actually goes up to 2006 and not just 2004 as it says on their website; could this be clarified too?) Any volunteers? Otherwise I'll just contact them myself; it may be better if they have contact with someone they know though. Good background reading that seems to imply the AMS can't get into trouble on this is the page on Legal bullying, which details the case where the American Insitute of Physics and American Physical Society won a court case against the publisher Gordon & Breach, who had sued them for displaying journal price information. --Brucebartlett 15:40, 30 August 2007 (EDT)

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Report back on journals discussion time at British Topology Meeting

I've just finished attending the British Topology Meeting. During the conference an hour-long journals discussion time was held. Here is a short summary of some of the matters which stood out for me during this time.

  • Andrew Ranicki said a few words about the K-Theory situation, and Ulrike Tillmann explained some of the background to the resignation of the board of Topology. She made it clear that indeed, the main reason behind the editors resigning was the excessively high price which Elsevier was charging for the journal.
  • John Baez also said a few words, advertising Eureka. He also spoke about the PRISM lobby against the proposed U.S. Congress bill, requiring research to be made open-access after a certain period of time.

Here are a few things which came up for me:

  • We should work on the Eureka vision. One of the things which came out is that Eureka can be a place where various models for the future of the academic journal system in the mathematical sciences are spelt out and discussed. People can spell out "Option A", "Option B", and so on. Some of these ideas might be quite radical - do we need publishers at all? - while others might be more pragmatic - the best way to push the prices down.
  • We should find a way for Eureka to combat the scheme of journal bundling. This scheme is unethical.
  • Eureka must find ways to encourage academics to speak to their librarians. For instance, people should find out about the journal bundling situation at the grass-roots level at their own university. It was suggested at the BTM meeting, for instance, that the AMS journal prices we have been quoting at Eureka are largely irrelevant due to journal bundling.

--Brucebartlett 20:01, 12 September 2007 (EDT)

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Suggestion : New users should be encouraged to use full names

Hi Blake, I would suggest that in the new-user-registration-page, that potential new users are told that it is quite acceptable - and indeed encouraged - to use a full name as a username, eg. "Bruce Bartlett" instead of "bart1234". I think many of the users who are currently known as "jim5678x" and such similar names wouldn't have used those names had they been explicitly told they didn't have to : they entered them simply because these are the usual kind of "usernames" one enters when you have a computer account on some system... which is different to a user account at Eureka, where human-human interaction is valued above human-computer interaction.--Brucebartlett 10:42, 13 September 2007 (EDT)

Good idea, but does anyone have any idea who this Brucebartlett guy is? He comes across a bit like my friend Bruce Bartlett.

That aside, is it possible to change the board software so that this is more automatic? At least, changing it so that it asks you not for a username but actually for your name when you register? James Cranch 11:56, 13 September 2007 (EDT)

How does it look now? Blake Stacey 14:25, 13 September 2007 (EDT)
Great - thanks Blake. --Brucebartlett 18:49, 13 September 2007 (EDT)
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AMS data has been updated

John Ewing contacted me to say that the AMS journal price survey data has been updated. It now basically goes up to 2007. That means we can get the charts going, hooray! Blake has updated the old charts so that they now look like this:

Image:AMS Chart Experimental Mathematics.png

I've asked about what the AMS prices actually mean, since most journals come bundled nowadays. We'll probably be able to get started on making new charts soon; see Volunteers needed : turning the AMS data into charts. --Brucebartlett 09:17, 3 October 2007 (EDT)

This makes me happy. Blake Stacey 11:30, 3 October 2007 (EDT)
Thanks Blake, great work on the new charts!
Perhaps we should just tweak them a bit so that the label writing is easier to read at the zoom level it gets displayed on the actual template. There are two options : to make the writing bigger or to make the images at precisely the right size for the journal info template so that no zooming out takes place (which tends to make writing more illegible). Perhaps a combination of these options is the best.
I asked John Ewing about how the AMS price data is collated, and it works as follows : the prices displayed are the "list prices". In most cases, these are found on the front cover of the journal. Sometimes, it is necessary to contact the publisher or to look at the website; which the AMS has done. Some publishers include postage in the price, some don't, some include discounts, some don't.
We should also definitely speak to librarians and find out their experience "on the ground" for having to pay for these journals; find out more about bundling, etc. --Brucebartlett 19:16, 3 October 2007 (EDT)

[Comment from John Ewing: Please see post below about how to tell the price of a journal, 11 November 2007]

I've uploaded the charts based on the new information. They're automatically generated from the data so it won't be hard to tweak the format. I suggest that comments on the charts be shifted to that category: AMS Journal Price Survey charts. Andrew Stacey 03:15, 4 October 2007 (EDT)

I tweaked Andrew Stacey's comment so that the link to the chart category works properly. Blake Stacey 12:43, 9 October 2007 (EDT)
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Is Eureka being spammed?

The user list seems fishy. Many of the user names appear randomly generated. What's going on? --Brucebartlett 15:42, 18 October 2007 (EDT)

I suspect we did get spammed. However, fortunately, none of those users with randomly-generated names have made any edits. I've installed the SpamBlacklist extension, which should prevent such edits from being made. Since there doesn't seem to be a clean way of dealing with the spam-bot users within MediaWiki, I might crawl into the MySQL database and just delete all user accounts which have not made any edits. If you're a real person who just hasn't done anything yet, speak now! Blake Stacey 14:41, 19 October 2007 (EDT)
Yes I think it would be good to delete the spurious users. Tidy things up a bit. --Brucebartlett 08:43, 23 October 2007 (EDT)
Be careful deleting users; there's an ominous warning at [1]. An alternative suggested there is to just rename the spurious users; perhaps with some prefix that shunts them to the ends of any lists, and makes it obvious they're unwanted. I've been intending to try something like this over at the Knot Atlas wiki for a while, so I'd be interested to here your experiences. (Or for that matter, help out.) --Scott Morrison 20:15, 23 October 2007 (EDT)
I had a vague memory of reading something about that; thanks for the reminder! Blake Stacey 17:09, 24 October 2007 (EDT)
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What is the price of a journal?

For that matter, what is the price of a car or a novel or a loaf of bread? All these things are frequently discounted, but we don’t throw up our hands and claim that they don't have a "real” price. Yet on several occasions recently (including comments made above), I’ve heard people say that we can't tell the price of journals because they are often discounted.

When the editorial board of the journal Topology resigned and began a competing journal, Elsevier wrote: “Because the majority of our subscribers purchase this journal in a larger set of journals, most are paying a fraction of the institutional subscription price.” I’ve heard similar arguments from other publishers, who like to compute the “price” of a journal by dividing the total revenue by the number of “subscribers”. But that’s not the price! It’s the “average revenue per subscriber."

The (list) price of a journal is set by the publisher, and it’s plainly visible to anyone who examines annual price lists. For some journals, there may be a two-tiered price, one for institutions and one for individuals, but in every case there is a price. Just as for cars or novels or bread, journals may be sold at a discount. But it's important to remember that publishers discount journals for business reasons, not because, in a sudden fit of remorse, they want to lower the price. Journals are sometimes discounted to agents, who consolidate them to help libraries purchase from multiple publishers. They are discounted to institutional members of scholarly societies as a member benefit, in return for dues. And journals are discounted to subscribers who buy bundles of journals, often making a commitment to buy for several years. In each case, the publisher is discounting journals in order to gain some advantage -- it's a simple business arrangement. ...

(For the rest of this essay, please see "What is the price of a journal?" on my blog at Mathematicsjournals Blog). (--John Ewing 10:08, 11 November 2007 (EST))

Hear hear. There seems to be a really deep flaw in the publishers' argument. After all, if the list price is misleadingly high, why don't they just lower the list price of the journal to the level people are actually paying and stop looking so greedy? (My answer: discounts don't come free, but rather are tied to buying a wide range of journals the institution may or may not want). --Ben Webster 16:42, 18 November 2007 (EST)
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Drafting the Charter

I'm finally getting to work over at Drafting the Charter. Come watch - or help out!

John Baez 21:39, 12 November 2007 (EST)

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