User talk:Chris Hillman

From Eureka

Hi Chris! A prototype journal template is available at Journal_Info_Prototype; it's not quite ready yet but we're almost there. There is also a prototype editor template at Editor_Info_Prototype. Obviously these are fake templates at the moment; they'll be hardcoded as soon as everyone agrees how they should look. I'm busy doing some coding as we speak :-)

Yes, you're right, we need to check about the Eigenfactor and journalprices.com data. I have emailed the people behind these sites; they are very co-operative and encouraging. I can forward you their full replies but the important stuff can be found at Template_talk:Journal_Info_Template_Test.

There is also some more copyright discussion at Talk:Main Page. The older discussion about how data should be stored in Eureka can be found at Talk:Data Storage and Data Storage. The main idea is that we're using Semantic Mediawiki.

It's great that you're getting involved on the physics journal front. Basically the idea is that this data will be placed into the wiki via the templates.

As to how we actually get the data from eg. Eigenfactor and journalprices.com : the latter is available as an Excel file, while the former are busy setting up a system whereby we can make live queries, since they'll be updating their data periodically (they just have this week). I have suggested we do data mines about once a month or so from Eigenfactor; it might lead to a system slow-down if we pull the data live, though it might work fine as well.

---User:Brucebartlett 15:11, 31 August 2007

OK, I think I'll just try to create some stubs, and hold off on the data. After looking at the pages you mentioned, I agree that the "clickable templates" would be far preferable to the format of my one stub too date. The goal should be to use the templates to present uniform data in a format suitable for convenient comparision, while a typical internal link could point from Classical and Quantum Gravity to Bogdanov scandal. ---CH 17:36, 1 September 2007 (EDT)

Keep creating those stubs, Chris — they look good. There's a lot of "investigative journalism" work to be done on these open access organizations, professional societies, and sneaky tricks publishers play. Heck, there's a lot of all sorts of things to do here. I'm glad you're here. --John Baez 10:10, 2 September 2007 (EDT)

Thanks! Wow, a lot of work, I think I've only done 5%. Some ideas

• use my userspace here to reconstitute in watered-down form some of my concerns about how Wikipedia has redefined "good information" from "accurate information" to "easily found and easily manipulated information", some thoughts on the future of scientific publishing (I am aghast to be watching the disappearance of the centuries-old tradition of the scholarly book and scholarly research paper, but cannot deny that this is occuring)
• (should have thought of this earlier today) use my userspace here to post Cafe comments since I can't post to the Cafe proper
• use my userspace here to help you guys draft a statement of purpose, privacy policy, wikiconstitution, style manual, etc., for the forthcoming Weekipedia
• use my userspace here to collect links to mainstream media articles on privacy issues, Wikipedia criticism, and the future of scientific publishing, for use in possible future essays somewhere,
• use my userspace here to draft Kleinian geometry articles-- I highly recommend Brian Hayes, "Sorting out the Genome", American Scientist 95 (2007). As you will probably see at once, he is talking about a wreath product C_2 \wr S_n, AKA the symmetry group of the n-cube ("front" hyperfaces positive and "back" hyperfaces negatively read genes). As you see, he is talking about the very same restoration problem I tried to describe years ago in sci.physics.research. See also a recent revival of interest in another instance, "solving" Rubik's cube. A very interesting point here is the same one I have made: wreathing regularizes.

Hmm... Blake, it looks like you don't have math markup working here? Didn't you once tell me you had found it easy to set up a wiki which worked just like Wikipedia? Have I been operating under a fundamental misunderstanding?

I took the time to read about eigenfactor and I must say I am concerned by what I found. Turns out that I misunderstood their introduction of "teleportation". I had thought this was an attempt to model the fact that people suddenly become bored and start doing something else, but when I read their papers more carefully I discovered that in fact it is an unmotivated attempt to cure a technical problem with their original model. Surely we can do better than that! ---CH 17:03, 3 September 2007 (EDT)

Journal template sort-of ready

Hi Chris, the journal template is sort-of ready. You have looked at some new sources of data which I hadn't; thus perhaps you have some suggestions for new data fields, or you might just edit the template yourself. To see how to use it, go to the template talk page Template talk:Journal Info Template. I think it should work for physics journals too. --Brucebartlett 18:51, 5 September 2007 (EDT)

Hi, Bruce, thanks. See this real example I tried out. I used the following sources:

• Eigenfactor (EF, AI)
• Journal Info (date first published, subjects)
• JournalSeek (ISSN, hompeages, standard abbreviation)
• Journal Prices (cost indices, price per article/citation)

I suggest

• change EF and AI to percentile scores for these (45 for 45% and so on).
• Classical Quant Grav (should be italicized automatically by template), i.e. the standard abbeviation, should appear instead of picture (what could possibly go there?) under "Classical and Quantum Gravity".
• add field Profit? (Y/N)
• add field arXiv? (Y/N) meaning: can authors archive their own eprints?
• add options for ISSN-print and ISSN-online
• use easily guessed abbreviations in the template so more information is visible in a given amount of vertical space, e.g. "EF %", not "Eigenfactor percentile". (The talk page for the template should of course explain these abbreviations.)

Have you and Blake explored doing for physics journals what you did for math journals, getting a delimited text file you can massage to produce the stubs via script rather than by hand?

I just looked at Experimental Mathematics. Why not write the template so the journal title is also an external link to the home page? Somehow it should be possible to write the articles on journals so that all the standard information comes in left column in easily groked format, with brief informal essay at right discussion. Or perhaps just the numerical data should go in the template, with standard non-numerical information, like abbreviation, editor-in-chief (whyever should Eureka list all the associate editors?) in first section, followed by informal essay.

Did I misunderstand the point of Semantic Wiki; I thought the point was to link to the eigenfactor.org page for this journal if you click on the magnifying glass labeled EF? Simply listing in "order" all instances where "eigenfactor" appears at Eureka doesn't seem very useful to me. Compare the ability at Eigenfactor to order physics journals (say) in order of decreasing Eigenfactor percentile.

All this fuss about Eigenfactor may be moot: I have serious concerns about whether this statistic admits a clear interpretation. If we can't say what it measures, maybe we should avoid it? Where should JB, Blake, you and I discuss this?

I'll await further input from you, Blake, and JB before inputting more stubs by hand, I think.---CH 22:59, 6 September 2007 (EDT)

Hi Chris, I've responded to some of your comments at the Template talk:Journal Info Template page. --Brucebartlett 06:19, 7 September 2007 (EDT)

Hi, Chris, I saw your questions on my user talk page. I have nothing particularly useful to say about any of these issues. I'm willing to go along with the majority regarding all of these.

My only big contributions today were to 1) delete the pictures of penguins from CH's article on CQG and 2) removing material about the Bogdanov scandal. At some point we may want to introduce material about that scandal in all the relevant journal webpages, but right now it seems 1) unfair to CQC to pick them out of many journals who got scammed and 2) likely to attract attention from precisely the wrong sort of people, not what we need at this stage of our development. --John Baez 11:23, 7 September 2007 (EDT)

Hi John, so you want me to (outraged screech) forgive and forget?! But I take your point about the "wrong sort". ---CH 13:33, 24 September 2007 (EDT)

Changes on the arXiv

When last I looked at the Turkish plagiarism incident, the arXiv people said they had withdrawn 67 papers from 15 authors. Now the same page says they've withdrawn 65 papers from 14 authors. hep-th/0110228 seems to be in the clear. Thoughts? Blake Stacey

Sorry to take so long to respond--- I did see your question some time back. When I get a chance I'll respond by email.---CH 14:08, 24 September 2007 (EDT)