User talk:GhostInTheMachine

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For the United States strikes on alleged drug traffickers during Operation Southern Spear, thank you for moving the video and not deleting it. I know you do not like these videos as much, and personally I do not mind them being left out of the infobox as long as they are included. Thank you for remembering and being so considerate. (: Historyguy1138 (talk) 13:07, 25 May 2026 (UTC)

MediaWiki message delivery 21:50, 25 May 2026 (UTC)

I noticed that you made a few changes to the List of members of the National Academy of Engineering (electronics) page in the last week or so, first moving the "Year Elected" column to the left side, and then most recently changing the "d." for death year into "Died" throughout the page. I'm not sure if you're aware, but this is one list of ~43 pages that comprise the lists of the members of the NAE and the NAS. I've been systematically updating all 43 pages with the ~10,000 names (living and deceased), pulling them from the online directories, checking and integrating with the existing Wikipedia information, etc. These pages were terribly out of date, and had a lot of incorrect information that had been added in an ad hoc manner over the years.

I believe that all 43 pages should have the same format, and I've been using the format that was set with the NAS pages, which dates back more than 12 years. This includes the "Year Elected" on the right and the indication of the death as "(d. ####)". I inadvertently overwrote your recent change of moving the "Year Elected" column because you moved it when I was in the process of updating that page with the new information between my first minor cleanup and then the full rebuild.

So, if you don't too strenuously object, I would like to revert your change of "d." -> "died" on this page, just so that all ~43 pages are a consistent format. But let me know what you think. LocusAndLeaf (talk) 12:11, 30 May 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for the thoughtful response. I see two (unrelated) aspects:

• Column ordering — The lists could be seen as either:
  1. "lists of people" (ordered by surname, so having the name in the first column) or
  2. "lists of elected people" (ordered by the year that they were elected, so having the year in the first column)

  The lists are currently #1 and I currently prefer #2 (chronological lists just make more sense to me). However, since the tables can be sorted, the choice is not very important.

• Died — MOS:DOB advises the use of the whole word rather than just d. – space would need to be very tight to require the saving of just two characters.

To ensure consistency, I am willing to change "d." to "died" in all 43 of the articles.

Of course, there is also an argument for not saying "d." or "died" at all – it should really include DOB as well: M. Robert Aaron (1922–2007), but that is probably a step too far ... — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 11:15, 31 May 2026 (UTC)

On the column order, I think I would more strongly prefer to keep the name as the first column. These pages are "Lists of members...", not timelines of elections, and the primary entity in each row is the person. The election year is essentially a secondary attribute, and as you say, it is already an easily sortable table.

On d. vs died, I see your point about MOS. My reading is that “d.” is permitted where space is limited. I was more focused on consistency, and since d. was used historically in these tables, I had kept it that way when updating them. I am fine with either, but generally I had preferred the compactness of "d." over "died" since there are some longer names and institution names that make the table wide.

I'm not in favor of adding the date of birth, as that is more biographic than membership-relevant information, and it's not information supplied by the NAS/NAE directories, so there would be loads of incomplete entries.

Thanks for fixing the short descriptions (I saw that adding those had created redundancy at the top), and for the discussion. LocusAndLeaf (talk) 14:17, 31 May 2026 (UTC)

Y — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 16:32, 1 June 2026 (UTC)

@LocusAndLeaf: An aside: should the articles be named with an upper case suffix or a lower case one? List of members of the National Academy of Engineering (aerospace) vs List of members of the National Academy of Engineering (Bioengineering). There seems to be a fairly even split... — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 13:01, 1 June 2026 (UTC)

If it were up to me, I would have them all capitalized, because those are the titles of the NAS and NAE sections. But, there was a discussion about this (somewhat buried) in the talk page for the NAE Aerospace page before I came onto the scene as an editor. An editor decided that these were common descriptive titles and not proper nouns, and there was one supporting vote, so proceeded to change all of them to lowercase. Perhaps they missed a few, like Bioengineering - and I am in favor of consistency, even if lowercase was not my preference, so I would vote in favor of switching to lowercase; it seemed like the time to debate upper vs lower had passed. LocusAndLeaf (talk) 14:18, 1 June 2026 (UTC)

I also thought that UC was better ... Done them all anyway — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 14:39, 1 June 2026 (UTC)

Thanks. This reminded me that another change that I was considering was adding the official section number in the header at the top of each table, because the section numbers are designated by NAS and NAE, but are not currently in these tables or even clearly described in the main articles about the NAS and NAE. It would look something like:

== Section 1: Aerospace ==

and so forth for all the pages. This might reduce the redundancy of the table header with the page header. I haven't gotten around to this, obviously, but let me know if you think that's a good idea, bad idea, or are indifferent. LocusAndLeaf (talk) 15:43, 1 June 2026 (UTC)

No-ish. When reading an article, the numbers would have no significance. The article should not aim to reproduce all aspects of the source — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 08:24, 2 June 2026 (UTC)

Okay; it sounds like the main article on the NAE would be a better place to describe the organization into sections, perhaps with a table listing the 12 sections in the membership section. The NAS has a separate page on membership and a section describing the major disciplines, but nothing on the 31 named sections within those disciplines (which is how the lists of members are organized). So maybe a table there would be appropriate? LocusAndLeaf (talk) 13:40, 2 June 2026 (UTC)

Just a note that I made these two changes, adding brief tables to each page to list the formal sections and classes (for NAS). LocusAndLeaf (talk) 15:47, 3 June 2026 (UTC)

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Hello there. You reverted my insertion of a map showing xenophobia protests in Durban. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_and_March Not sure why. Wikipedia made a wonderful map of protests in the US https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:George_Floyd_protests_map. The same is needed here. Derek J Moore (talk) 19:51, 1 June 2026 (UTC)

The March and March article is about an organization. A map of protests in Durban might be appropriate in an article about protests in Durban — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 20:09, 1 June 2026 (UTC)

March and March are a national organisation. They have organised protests in Durban, Johannesburg, Pretoria. Derek J Moore (talk) 13:14, 2 June 2026 (UTC)

MediaWiki message delivery 21:06, 1 June 2026 (UTC)

Hi! I saw you recently updated the list of National Academy pages with died instead of 'd.' As I'm one of the main people (somewhat sporadically) updating those pages, I just wanted to say thank you for updating all of the pages and not just one, and ask for your thoughts behind using 'd.' when space is limited versus writing out 'died' in the tables? I'm fine with either option, as it was an arbitrary decision I made in the first place. I'm just curious on if there's a guideline beyond 'when space is limited' or anything beyond what's listed in MS:DDOT. Thanks! Cyanochic (talk) 16:45, 3 June 2026 (UTC)

Geniologists often use d. or †, but WP has to assume a very general readership and so we should avoid abbreviations - especially where they are not explained. The words born and died are also only four letters, so a two character abbreviation saves very little space and is hard to justify — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 09:32, 5 June 2026 (UTC)

Thank you! Makes plenty of sense to me. I'll make sure to keep with the new formatting. Cyanochic (talk) 17:35, 5 June 2026 (UTC)

A tag has been placed on Category:Kuwaiti companies established in 2012 indicating that it is currently empty, and is not a disambiguation category, a category redirect, under discussion at Categories for discussion, or a project category that by its nature may become empty on occasion. If it remains empty for seven days or more, it may be deleted under section C1 of the criteria for speedy deletion.

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MediaWiki message delivery 16:46, 15 June 2026 (UTC)

Hello, GhostInTheMachine. Pleasure to meet you. I am affiliated with Fanfix and have declared my COI as per Wikipedia regulations. I noticed your participation in Project computing and would be grateful for your assistance with the edit request I posted for Fanfix, the subscription crowdsourcing platform. If you approve these edits, I can make them myself to save you time. Appreciate your review. Looking forward to hearing from you, Bluecenter2020 (talk) 23:17, 16 June 2026 (UTC)

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MediaWiki message delivery 13:03, 23 June 2026 (UTC)

Hi GhostInTheMachine. Thank you for your work on Bag of holding. Another editor, Mariamnei, has reviewed it as part of new pages patrol and left the following comment:

Thank you for your work on this article. Please establish notability as per WP:GNG. Thanks and have a wonderful day!

To reply, leave a comment here and begin it with {{Re|Mariamnei}}. (Message delivered via the Page Curation tool, on behalf of the reviewer.)

Mariamnei ✦ ^{reach out 🕊️} 10:15, 25 June 2026 (UTC)

@Mariamnei: That was somewhat aggressive ... — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 10:31, 25 June 2026 (UTC)

@GhostInTheMachine - Sorry I missed this. I read through my comments again and I do not see anything aggressive, but I apologise if something came off too strongly. Have a good day! Mariamnei ✦ ^{reach out 🕊️} 07:26, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

@Mariamnei: It was a combination of things... I had edited the page to restore an older version that had content. An hour later, I started editing the article. While I was working on my next change, you reversed everything. This was just 101 seconds after my last edit. My talk page then received a post that said "Please establish notability". I had thought that I was working towards that. The post ended with "... have a wonderful day!". So: a very fast eradication of my work in progress, followed by a rather odd comment to "have a wonderful day!". I suspect we also have a cultural issue with jolly injunctions followed by a trailing exclamation mark. To the English, the American style of terminating comments with an exclamation mark often comes over rather poorly. In this case it compounded the effect: Hey! I just did something negative to you, but I need you to suck it up.... Now I really do assume that you did not mean it that way at all and that was just me overreacting, but I did feel rather "aggressed". Hence my 25 June response. Sorry for the essay, but I do feel that we need to understand each other. I really am fully aware that American is not just a poor form of English with missing prepositions and wrong spelling, but is instead a separate language with a separate culture, but it is sometimes difficult to keep that in mind in the heat of the moment. — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 07:55, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

I apologise if you took my comments as harsh; that was not my intention. I simply asked you to establish notability as per GNG. I do not see that I reverted anything you had done. I very often end comments wishing the editor a good day, especially in reviews.

I am originally Italian. While my English spelling is generally British, my cultural references my be something that you are not familiar. Anyway, I am glad that we appear to have resolved this. Mariamnei ✦ ^{reach out 🕊️} 10:11, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

Dear GhostInTheMachine, Thanks for trying to improve my new articles "seco" and "meso". However, as a chemist (specialized in chemical information retrieval/chemoinformatics), I have some comments and reservations concerning your efforts:

The term "meso" has quite different meanings in chemistry, even within the narrow field of "tetrapyrroles" (see Footnote in "meso"). The description I gave is the chemically exact definition; if that is considered too long or too specific for a SHORT DESCRIPTION, the version "bridging positions between pyrrole rings" I now changed it to should be OK; "Bridges linking rings in organic compounds" is not appropriate here, far too general, and meaningless regarding this very specific case.

I can imagine that the gallery feature in Wikipedia is useful for articles that contain a lot of figures relative to the size of the text, as is indeed the case for "seco" (but IMHO not so for "meso"). So far, I have not encountered galleries for chemical reaction schemes in Wikipedia, and not used them myself. There are IMHO several reasons for this: First, a gallery displays pictures, standing for themselves - but the formulas in "meso" and "seco" are closely related to the text; collecting formulas at the end of text in galleries will NOT foster understanding. The gallery with figs. 3 & 4 must therefore be placed between the two paragraphs explaining them.

Second, Galleries are great for fotos, where a "one height/width fits all" works, but chemical formulas and even more so chemical reaction schemes are too diverse to be presented that way in most cases. Figs. 3 & 4 in "seco" are OK in your gallery, an exception to the above "rule", because they group schemes with chemical structures of the same type and size. However, unless you - based on your long-term experience - tell me how to size gallery items individually (within limits at least), the other galleries just won't fit.

Chemists have a close esthetic relation to formulas, the unique language of their field, influencing perception. In this respect, lumping together figs. 1 and 2 in "meso" doesn't look proper, fig. 1 being far too "big". I reverted it to a separate display, but with fig. 1 at left.

Figs. 1 & 2 in "seco" look now really terrible due to the very different sizes of the COMMON pentacyclic pyrrole rings - this MUST NOT be left that way, as it will reflect negatively on the quality of the article as a whole for readers interested in chemistry, used to proper formulas in Wikipedia and elsewhere. I would rather eliminate both figs. 1 & 2, or at least fig. 2 in "seco" than keep them that way - but this would be against my major intention to illustrate the rather abstract term "seco" with important examples! Refering just to the literature instead of using fig. 2 would not do: both refs are NOT Open Access (i.e. not generally accessible). The only acceptable alternative to show them "gallery-like", but in the same size (as changed by me now) would be to combine them in ONE scheme, joining the captions under the heading "Seco-tetrapyrroles as products of biological and chemical degradation". Let me know if this would be preferable.

Best regards Easyloc (talk) 05:41, 26 June 2026 (UTC)

I do not pretend to understand the chemistry, but thanks for the post re my edits to Meso position (tetrapyrrole) and Seco (tetrapyrrole).

Your SD changes seem fine. Short is good.

Meso: Starting an article with an image on the left is truly evil, so I have moved the two images so that they both sit to the right side of the text that discusses them. Strictly speaking, the second image is too big. See MOS:IMAGESIZE

Seco: Galleries are indeed designed to offer a row of images displayed at the same height (but possibly different widths). I changed the image placement to reflect the effect you probably wanted, with the two images side-by-side.

All OK enough? — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 14:37, 26 June 2026 (UTC)

OK INDEED! Thank you very much for your help.

I followed up your remark on image size in "meso", resizing fig 2 from 460 to 400px, center-ing it after the related paragraph, and resized fig 1 from 264 to 220 to keep both "in size". Easyloc (talk) 14:13, 27 June 2026 (UTC)

Y ... All seems well — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 14:48, 27 June 2026 (UTC)

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Arbitration

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MediaWiki message delivery 16:09, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

Just FYI, you reverted the wrong edit/editor. I've fixed it though. 10mmsocket (talk) 07:29, 14 July 2026 (UTC)

Oops. Sorry about that, maybe just an ec — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 07:32, 14 July 2026 (UTC)

Hello, I'm Qwerfjkl (bot). I have automatically detected that this edit performed by you, on the page Plame affair grand jury investigation, may have introduced referencing errors. They are as follows:

• A unsupported parameter error. References show this error when you use a parameter name that does not exist. Please replace the parameter with one that the template supports, or remove it if no such parameter exists. (Fix | Ask for help). Below are the references causing this error:
  • "TAP: Web Feature: Plugging Leaks. by Murray S. Waas. March 8, 2004". www.prospect.org. Archived from the original on August 11, 2006. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  • "null". Archived from the original on September 30, 2007. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)

Please check this page and fix the errors highlighted. If you think this is a false positive, you can report it to my operator. Thanks, Qwerfjkl (bot) (talk) 22:06, 14 July 2026 (UTC)

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