User talk:InformationToKnowledge

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Hello, InformationToKnowledge! Welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. You may benefit from following some of the links below, which will help you get the most out of Wikipedia. If you have any questions you can ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking or by typing four tildes "~~~~"; this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you are already excited about Wikipedia, you might want to consider being "adopted" by a more experienced editor or joining a WikiProject to collaborate with others in creating and improving articles of your interest. Click here for a directory of all the WikiProjects. Finally, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field when making edits to pages. Happy editing! ➤ Tajwar – thesupermaN! 【Click to Discuss】 09:32, 31 August 2021 (UTC)
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October 2022

Information icon Thank you for your contributions to Wikipedia. It appears that you copied or moved text from one or more pages into another page. While you are welcome to re-use Wikipedia's content, here or elsewhere, Wikipedia's licensing does require that you provide attribution to the original contributor(s). When copying within Wikipedia, this is supplied at minimum in an edit summary at the page into which you've copied content, disclosing the copying and linking to the copied page, e.g., copied content from [[page name]]; see that page's history for attribution. It is good practice, especially if copying is extensive, to also place a properly formatted {{copied}} template on the talk pages of the source and destination. Please provide attribution for this duplication if it has not already been supplied by another editor, and if you have copied material between pages before, even if it was a long time ago, you should provide attribution for that also. You can read more about the procedure and the reasons at Wikipedia:Copying within Wikipedia. I see you're making some good updates to tipping points in the climate system. If there was more text you copied from other articles, please make a dummy edit to provide attribution in the edit summary. Femke (talk) 18:38, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

Took me a little while to understand that template, but *I think* it's done correctly now. Do not think it needs to be done anywhere else for now.
A question, if I may: what exactly are Wikipedia's rules on including graphics (figures) from scientific papers? I tried to check out the copyright-related help pages and FAQs, but none of them appear to address this question specifically. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 15:11, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
Thanks :). One small point of improvement: ideally you should link to the article in your edit summary. No need to correct this however, as you were copying your own text.
Figures from scientific papers can be uploaded to Wikipedia if they are published under a compatible license, such as a suitable Creative Commons licence. Some / (almost all?) open-access papers have a suitable licenses. Really old images are the public domain and can be uploaded too. Otherwise, you'll have to ask the original author if they're willing to upload the image to Wikipedia themselves (or do it for them with a layer of bureaucracy to verify they are okay with it).
If you have a specific question, feel free to ask. (For difficult question, I'll refer you to Wikipedia:Media copyright questions). Femke (talk) 16:06, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
Thank you :) For context, I was working on the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation page recently, and I feel like I finally got its text to a pretty good state (except for one questionable section - see the talk page), but it's now considerably longer and would certainly benefit from a few more graphics to break up solid walls of text in its latter half.
This is what I was thinking of:
  • AMOC stability section: could either do with a Stommel Box model schematic from this page (which been proposed for a merge into the AMOC page, but I rather favor reworking it into a Stommel Box Model page instead) or one of these three graphics from a February study describing the issues with classic box models. I think the third graphic is the best looking-one, but the fourth one is likely easier to understand (and to fit on the page).
  • Impacts of a slowdown: I think that this graphic from an ESD study is by far the best option here. Other options, like these two candidates from this study just cannot compare.
  • Impacts of a shutdown: unfortunately, most of the relevant studies are not open-access. Vellinga-Wood pdf is now 20 years old, so I suspect the images from may now count as public domain, and would still be relevant as an example of the general theory of impacts. Additionally, if we are to remove one of the more speculative sections like I suggested on the talk page, and instead extend this section with studies like this one, then there would be enough space for an additional graphic: i.e. this one or this one.
  • Observations: I believe that this graphic from here is a good way of demonstrating the difference between the direct observations of the AMOC and its reconstructions.
  • Climate model projections: I think that this graphic from here would be very useful.
InformationToKnowledge (talk) 17:55, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
I can't immediately find a licence on the Science article you linked, but the Nature and ESD articles are published under a suitable license ("Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License"), so you should be able to upload those, as long as you provide attribution.
You'll have to look for similar licenses for each article. Unfortunately, the law on public domain is insane, and it often boils down to material entering the public domain 70 years after the author's death.
Two quick tips
  • It's usually more effective on Wikipedia to write shorter talk page messages. People are busy/lazy
  • Wikipedia has it's own "peer" review processes (with peer here meaning an editor who doesn't necessary have topic expertise). When you're happy with the article, you can sign it up as a WP:Good article nominee. It's a great process to ensure articles are sufficiently easy to read for a broad public, and to get to know Wikipedia's ins and outs.
Femke (talk) 16:18, 5 October 2022 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

The Original Barnstar
Very impressive work on sea level rise and tipping points in the climate system! Femke (talk) 07:34, 23 October 2022 (UTC)

The type of sources Wikipedia loves

Again, very impressed by your contributions, thanks for all the effort you put in them.

I noticed you cite a lot of primary sources. Primary sources have their place on Wikipedia, but if possible, reviews / assessment report are preferred. See WP:SCIRS ("Cite reviews, don't write them"). This also allows you to write in WP:WIKIVOICE; with statements such as

  • Sea level rise is higher along US coasts than the global average
  • rather than source X in year Y estimates that sea level is higher along US coasts.

Writing things directly is the preferred style on Wikipedia. Occasionally a primary source is really ground-breaking and gets immediate support from the scientific community. In that case, primary sources can be really valuable. Femke (talk) 07:48, 23 October 2022 (UTC)

Fair enough! I can certainly see the purpose of the policy.
The reasoning behind my approach was that in a lot of the climate-related articles I looked at, the body of the text is a tangled crow's nest of primary sources that are added in waves whenever one gets a burst of widespread media coverage (or just the news articles without primary sources), and with little regard for how they fit together, or even the specifics of what they say. The reviews like IPCC reports end up somewhere awkwardly in the middle of a section, with a range of alarming citations before them and a passage or two claiming they were too conservative/already outpaced by newer research right after 1. The readers just wouldn't understand how the review arrived at its findings, so I decided to re-arrange those articles to walk any reader through a rough timeline of notable research on the subject. I agree I might have overdone it at times, but so far, I have not seen anyone else challenge the sections I rewrote on those grounds. There'll probably be more discussion about which sources to keep and which to let go once any of those articles are nominated for Good/Featured status.
1 The NOAA report citation you trimmed from the SLR page was originally the perfect example of what I meant. "In February 2021, researchers suggested that past projections for global sea level rise by 2100 reported by the IPCC were conservative, and that sea levels will rise more than previously expected. In 2022, NOAA published a detailed Sea Level Rise Technical Report suggesting a rise of between 0.6 and 2.1m with high confidence." The first sentence is that Ocean Science citation I had to expand significantly for it to make sense in context, and the second is a completely out of place suggestion that the NOAA was contradicting the IPCC based on a misunderstanding of what the report actually meant. So, the statement I moved to lead was a compromise to avoid junking the (otherwise reliable) citation entirely. I have adjusted it a little further by now. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 14:56, 23 October 2022 (UTC)
You're absolutely right that most content on Wikipedia gets added in waves, and requires a lot of tidying up to make sense :). Your approach is better than that.
A timeline of scientific thought is a way of organising info I dislike (but other editors may disagree), because usually it's more wordy than necessary. A typical reader on Wikipedia only spends a couple of minutes on an article, so that shorter articles can more effectively convey information. That means that older research is deleted or omitted unless newer research often looks back on the changes in understanding of a topic.
We often get edits like "It's even worse than we thought", which can breach WP:neutral point of view. Thanks for spotting it + tidying it up.
One less important thing: the lead is meant to be a summary of the body. So any information found there, should also be found in the body of the article. I'm especially conservative with adding information about a single country in the lead, to make sure I don't contribute to the WP:systemic bias towards the global north that is so prevalent on Wikipedia. Here, singling out the US might make sense, as I believe it to be one of the more extreme cases. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 15:32, 23 October 2022 (UTC)
A fair point about wordiness. For me, a counterpoint is that a timeline also allows one who is short on time to quickly scroll to the end anyway, while for those who want more detail, they help to establish the history to those phenomena and that they (generally) did not come out of the blue to the scientific world. (Which would then help to cut down on "ripped from the headlines" edits a bit.)
I am very well aware of the systemic bias issues as well, but unfortunately it's not the only example in the article: i.e. "Future effects" subsection of "Coastal areas" has only two paragraphs, and the second one is written entirely from the US POV. I presume that digging into AR6 would allow one to expand/re-write that whole section with a more global focus, and then update the lead accordingly. Perhaps enough info can be pulled together from the country-level impact articles as well. Either way, I'll have to look at it next time.
One last thing: I guess you can see that I decided to assign an image to each climate tipping point sub-section in that article, and I think it works quite well now. Unfortunately, it seems that for the last, more speculative one, stratocumulus clouds, the only good image might be this one, from a Carbon Brief article. Carbon Brief uses CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, which apparently makes the files from there unsuitable for Wikimedia. I was told in an unrelated conversation that files with this or similar license could be uploaded directly to Wikipedia under fair use, but I am not sure if any of the licensing options in Wikipedia's uploader would fit for such files. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 19:12, 23 October 2022 (UTC)
AR6 is always to go-to location for globalising Wikipedia articles :). It's such a shame that the National Climate Assessment reports only reported on global issues once, and have reverted to only publishing info about the US. They usually wrote with less jargon.
I'm not the most knowledgeable on fair use on Wikipedia, but in general we're quite strict on it, so I don't think it will qualify. See WP:fair use.
That said, there's been talk with CarbonBrief about the release of some images under a suitable license. User:Clayoquot will know more. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 19:27, 23 October 2022 (UTC)
I'm pretty sure this image would not qualify as fair use in the English Wikipedia. Unfortunately, this particular image doesn't belong to Carbon Brief; the Carbon Brief article attributes it to a copyrighted paper by Schneider et al. I checked the Schneider paper and it contains the same image, which means that the image is under an exclusive license to Springerlink and lord knows Springerlink won't release it in a million years. So even if/when Carbon Brief loosens the licensing on its own images, this image wouldn't be affected. The volunteers at Wikipedia:Graphics Lab might be able to create a free version of this image if you ask there. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 21:08, 23 October 2022 (UTC)
Normally, the original author would retain the copyright after publishing, unless something shady happens. I don't trust Springer to not do shady things, so that would need to be confirmed with them (I doubt the original author will have sufficient copyright knowledge). If they confirm, you could contact the author, and ask them to upload it via the Upload Wizard on Commons. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 16:12, 24 October 2022 (UTC)
My understanding is that when an author grants an exclusive license to a journal, they are effectively transferring the copyright. "An exclusive licensee of one or more of the exclusive right (sic) is considered to be the owner of those rights." I'm not an expert in this stuff though, so the people at Wikipedia:Media copyright questions would know better. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 16:27, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

A welcome to Wikipedia climate change topics!

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Hi InformationToKnowledge, thank you for your contributions. I know you've already received the general Welcome note but I'd like to add another one as I can see you're editing on climate change topics which is great. I suggest that you put a sentence or two on your user profile page so that your user name no longer show up in red?

WikiProjects bring groups of editors together on particular topics. You might like to join this WikiProject:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian!

Also, if you have time in the future, can you help me with effects of climate change and effects of climate change on oceans? Both are important articles which pull together info from many other articles. EMsmile (talk) 12:49, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

Hi EMsmile! I have noticed your edits before, and I did spot the WikiProject as well; I guess I just did not bother to make my participation official until now.
So far, my plan was to start at tipping points in the climate system and then radiate outwards from it to update all of the related articles to the same high standard. I am nearly done with this goal, and the "effects" articles are certainly one of the things I would like to start cleaning up after that. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 19:26, 24 October 2022 (UTC)
Great! I don't know if you've already seen this project (under which most of my work on Wikipedia currently falls), see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/SDGs/Communication_of_environment_SDGs. I'm curious how you got onto Wikipedia editing? You seem very knowledgeable on climate change topics and have some time to edit Wikipedia and you've grasped the editing rules quickly. That's exactly the kind of people we need! So I am curious about your motivation for this work, or the "spark" that got you started. If you prefer to reach out to me directly about this, please see here on how to contact me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:EMsmile#Contact_me. EMsmile (talk) 21:40, 24 October 2022 (UTC)
Oh, it's going to be a rather long story, so some other time, maybe. :) Always glad to read your kind words, though!
And thank you for linking me to the SDG meetup. Not only is it a handy reference for the articles themselves, but the internal stats it uses like that quality score and its calculation are certainly something to keep in mind. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 22:15, 27 October 2022 (UTC)
Ah that's good. I feel very strongly about this quality scoring system. It's more accurate than the B and C labels on the talk pages. But also more time consuming to assess. EMsmile (talk) 11:15, 28 October 2022 (UTC)
By the way, I'd love your critical brain to take a look at the new article on ocean temperature. It needs more inputs. The difficulty here is to not repeat all the details again from other articles but to just give an easy to understand overview what ocean temperature is, how it impacts on other processes, how it's measured and how a changing ocean temperature impacts the other processes again. Can you believe it we didn't actually have a Wikipedia article on "ocean temperature" until a few days ago? We only had one on sea surface temperature and "ocean temperature" used to redirect to there. EMsmile (talk) 11:15, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

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