CreationWiki:Coffeehouse/archive3

Two things
First of all, is there any article mentioning how the Gospel of John starts out its narrative with a summary of Creation? I think it's rather relevant to the wiki deal with how Jesus is introduced as the Creator of the world.

Secondly, I think the Bible Character category should be renamed. "Character" seems to imply that they are part of some work of fiction. I already added a comment regarding this on the Bible Character talk page. Of course, this would mean going through all the articles and changing their categories as well.

--Zephyr Axiom 22:36, 2 March 2007 (EST)

I suggest we mention those features of John in a new section of the article on Jesus. In addition, we would add other points on which Jesus refers to Genesis and creation such as in Mark 10. Also, Jesus repeatedly quoted or referred to the Old Testament and Genesis (IE, sin, marriage and so forth). Davelr 23:20, 2 March 2007 (EST)


 * Sounds good. I wonder if I'll eventually be the one to get down to that.
 * --Zephyr Axiom 18:11, 5 March 2007 (EST)

Interwiki links
Wikipedia and a few other wikis have been added to our interwiki table. This means you dont have to supply the entire URL. Simply place the name "wikipedia" and the article title separated by a colon. Using the interwiki format produces a cleaner link with no arrow or spacing that typically follows.

The format for the link is otherwise similar to other internal links - with a double bracket, and the verticle line (|) is used to separate the address from the title. Examples follow.

The address alone. creationism


 * - Appears like this: creationism

Address with title. Creationism


 * - Appears like this: Creationism

Titled address with description. Creationism by Wikipedia


 * - Appears like this: Creationism by Wikipedia

--Mr. Ashcraft 22:15, 15 March 2007 (EDT)


 * Sounds great! But I have two questions:
 * Where can I see a list of the Interwiki table, so that I may know which Wikis this applies to?
 * Does this table include Conservapedia?


 * BTW: I just tried to edit this section--and I had to get to it by prentending to be editing the "Two Things" section. Something's gone wrong with the section-number assignment.--Temlakos 00:21, 16 March 2007 (EDT)

The interwiki table is internal and not visible through the website. To my knowledge Conservapedia is not in it yet.

I noticed the problem with the edit link also - its the header in the template (Posted Discussion) thats causing the trouble. It was doing thing on the main page. I worked it out.--Mr. Ashcraft 11:31, 16 March 2007 (EDT)

Resource for any article
One of the things I've been doing to enhance articles with evidence against evolution is to take any given topic and search Creation-Evolution Headlines for articles on the subject. You can find some fantastic science news that bolsters creationism or that contradicts the claims of evolution or that throw a wrench into evolutionary theories. I'm not affiliated with them (although I have had them publish some contributions of mine) but they are a fantastic resource for most topics.

--Davelr 01:49, 16 March 2007 (EDT)

That is a VERY good idea, mainly because whatever they post will have the article with the accompanied scientific journal! --Tony Sommer 17:11, 13 June 2007 (EDT)

Stubs and References
A significant number of stubs have been created lately with only 1-2 sentences and no supporting references. Both activities are discouraged. Unless you are prepared to contribute more significantly to their development, please hold-off from creating new articles.

General new article guidelines:
 * The minimum article length should be considered somewhere near 1/2 page (~2-3 paragraphs).
 * For instruction on formatting references - see CreationWiki:Style_guide.

--Mr. Ashcraft 10:05, 19 March 2007 (EDT)

Article Placement

 * Controversial Human Ancestor Gets Major Facelift

It's on Homo rudolfensis being dethroned as a human-ape hybrid. Lest anyone should have his faith shaken, however, there is a humorous group of article links on the side with such intuiging titles as "Intelligent Design: An Ambiguous Assault on Evolution", "Top 10 Missing Links", Creation Myths, Vestigal Organs, and Plus: How Evolution Works. The first one in particular has an ominous air about its description: "This 3-part series explores the modern assault on evolution theory and what's really behind it."

--Zephyr Axiom 14:07, 31 March 2007 (EDT)

Activity flush?
I haven't been on in a few weeks, and I wanted to see the recent activity. However, I noticed that my Watchlist cuts off at May 31, and the "New Pages" page doesn't have anything prior to June 1. Was there a log flush, or a database reset, or something around the beginning of the month that purged the historical data? PharosTalk 18:26, 7 June 2007 (EDT)

Two ideas/suggestions
Hey,

I recently found this wiki and have been quite impressed with it. I have two suggestions for the website.

IMHO:

1: Make "guides" for convincing somone that creation is true. I believe that there is enough information on this wiki to convince most people, but I think most will not go searching through every little article and end up changing their mind. Having a well-written guide with the common misconcieved information about creation, common logic and science evidences against evolution, some more proof for creation, and something fairly witty to sum it all up would help turn many people I think.

2: I like how the wiki is done from a creationist-only point, and that there are pro-evolution articles linked to and debunked. This makes it somewhat less biased, though you will always have some bias no matter what. However, I feel that some of the "Christianese" aspects to this website might be repulsive to many people. I know I might get flamed for saying this, but I think that this is too "Christian cultured". I believe in Christianity, but I've also noticed that most Christians have joined under a "Christian culture" that seperates them from the rest of the world. I have found that Christians act like the secular world knows every term that they use, and focus more on themselves than reaching the lost. Some Christians do not understand secular people at all, and despise them - is this something Christ would have done? Yes, secular people do not always treat us fairly but we do not have to treat them the same or worse. Also, if we don't explain why only creationists are alowed to edit this, how would they know? They will probably think that we are too scared to allow both sides editing it since they think evolution would be proven. However, I think that you get a fair bias by looking at this site and at pro-evolution sites (as well as CW's debunked evolution articles) -- this or something like it should be mentioned. If we allowed everyone to edit this, even though the proof exists for creation, many people would write contradicting things. I also think that the wiki should state that it is not trying to prove creation out of ignorance, but prove what has been proven. If something else were the truth, then I hope we all would be trying to prove it than creation - as there would be no rational reason for proving creation.

Also, if one doesn't exist yet, perhaps an IRC channel could be made for this project? Might be good to password it, or have two channels - one for open discussion, and one closed discussion one for people with accounts in CW. Jabber wouldn't be bad either, it's quite a nice protocol but is used and supported less.

Cheers, Teran McKinney (sega01) - Sega01 22:42, 12 July 2007 (EDT)

Interwiki Tables and Language Interconnectivity
Good news, everyone! CreationWiki now exists in four languages: English, Spanish, German, and Korean.

Better yet, all four are mutually interconnectable, and each can connect to the Media Pool, through the Interwiki tables that are part of all five databases (one for each language and one for the pool).

Also: Conservapedia is now in the Interwiki table for the English-language version. (Adding it to the other three languages is currently under review--comments are welcome!) The Interwiki prefixes for Conservapedia are "conservapedia" and "cp".

How to Use the Different Language Versions
The language Interwikis have special handling, and this handling might be confusing to some.

The Interwiki prefixes for all languages are the same as the Internet domain prefixes:

To link directly to the main page in another language, use this form in your article: es:

To link within your article to an article of any title in another language, use this form: es:article

To provide a sidebar link to the article you are writing in another language, use this form, which you can place anywhere in your article, but preferably near the top or bottom of your text: article

You can also link to any namespace that is available in that other language. Translation into that other language should be automatic. I have tried it with the Special and User namespaces, and it does work.

What this project needs, more than anything else, is translation! I urge anyone having multilingual facility to begin at once to translate articles from English into Spanish, Korean, and German. I am going to start translating some of my own articles, using a free-translation service--and I hope that I can master the idiomatic turns of phrase. I have already noticed that many articles have been merely copied from English into, say, German--and they are still English-readable.

I also urge us to move all images out of the English-language database and into the Pool, if the Pool does not already hold copies of them.

I have begun building elementary user pages in the other languages. (Korean will be my weak spot; when I get it built, I'd like to have a Korean reader try to back-translate it into English to make sure that I said what I meant! Same for the Spanish and German, though they should be easier.) --TemlakosTalk 15:51, 20 July 2007 (EDT)

Where is the article?
While looking through all of the CreationWiki articles and information, I discovered something very surprising. There is not article about gravity. As it is one of the major forces at work in the universe, it deserves an article.

If no one else will or wants to make it, I suppose I will begin putting together some information for it.

--GvD Sam 13:55, 20 July 2007 (EDT)


 * Suggested article topics are customarily posted on the help wanted page, but by all means write the article if you think its important.

--Mr. Ashcraft - (talk) 14:11, 20 July 2007 (EDT)

Transwiki
There seem to be quite a few articles "Wanted" that could be found elsewhere. What is the CW policy/guideline/preference on copying articles from other GFDL sources, such as Wikipedia? For example, I didn't see much evolutionary content in gravity. ~ MD Otley (talk) 00:51, 14 September 2007 (EDT)
 * Speaking more as "elder statesman" than as policy judge, I wouldn't recommend a straight copy out of WP into CW.
 * Rather than that, I would go to the original sources that WP cited in its article on, say, gravity, and rewrite the article myself, in my own words, and make it my own original content.
 * Here is a heads-up about the GFDL: when an author releases content under GFDL (and that's exactly what he does when he publishes to a GFDL project like CW), he relinquishes his right not to have his content edited. Once edited, the content belongs to the project, not to him. But--and here is the key--he retains the full right to submit his original work to any other project, so long as that project does not demand exclusive rights. In other words, once you publish to CW, you might not be allowed to publish in a trade magazine, because you could not offer them exclusive rights or even first-appearance rights.
 * The upshot: An author may submit content to a GFDL project and a non-GFDL project (like Conservapedia), so long as his submission does not include any edits by anyone else.
 * I recognize that you're asking a different question: may you copy content from WP onto CW? And as I said: I wouldn't.
 * Now if CW didn't have its own article on gravity, and was not likely to have one, then I would use the Interwiki link, as you did, to reference the gravity article. Nothing wrong with that; if there was, then we would not have added WP to our Interwiki tables (as we have done in all languages, BTW). In fact, in my article on Uzziah, I referenced the WP article on siege engines, because King Uzziah was the first of the Hebrew kings to use them. But--I did that because the concept siege engine falls outside the scope of CW, which is an encyclopedia of creation science first and Biblical history second. Gravity is within scope, so arguably CW needs its own article on gravity anyway.
 * But--we ought to write it ourselves, and include in it certain concepts that WP would never treat--such as that God gave us the gift of gravity, and will likely take it away when He dissolves the earth, as II Peter predicts.--TemlakosTalk 09:02, 14 September 2007 (EDT)


 * Thanks, you're exactly the sort of person I had hoped to hear from. I had thought that moving a WP article over could "jumpstart" that article, and perhaps related ones.  And since there are less than 3,200 articles, that seemed to me to be an important consideration. ~ MD Otley (talk) 22:37, 14 September 2007 (EDT)


 * Mr. Otley, I need to share with you another consideration that overrides what you mentioned. True enough, we don't have many articles. I take partial responsibility for that; I haven't been editing as much as I should lately. (Never mind why.) But when you copy anything even from one GFDL project to another, you must attribute your contribution. And attributing anything on CW to Wikipedia, or any other project as liberal-oriented as Wikipedia, would be embarrassing, if not mortifying.


 * That's one reason why, when I started writing articles on the kings of the Divided Kingdoms of Israel, I never directly quoted Wikipedia on any of them. And as an administrator, I can tell you that we don't even like to cite Wikipedia. For two reasons:
 * Because Wikipedia is what it is, and
 * Because Wikipedia is held in very low regard as a source--so much so that no serious teacher, having assigned a term paper to a student, ever accepts a citation from Wikipedia in a student's submission.


 * As I said: See the Wikipedia entry on, say, gravity, if you must--but do it to see its references. Then go to those references and write something on your own. And if the WP entry doesn't even have any references--then someone is citing received and accepted wisdom on a subject, and we at CW need to back up what we say with authoritative sources. Which means you have to find them on your own, as I did with the Hebrew kings.--TemlakosTalk 09:37, 15 September 2007 (EDT)


 * Actually, even Wikipedia doesn't accept other WP articles as sources!
 * You would be embarrassed to use WP? I would think they would be even more embarrassed to find that we were using their own contributions against them, (accepting your premise that they are dedicated liberals).  I would say that that's an example of working smarter, not harder.
 * Don't worry, I don't intend to buck the community consensus, I just want to help. ~ MD Otley (talk) 17:38, 15 September 2007 (EDT)


 * We want our articles to be original works. Mirroring content is discouraged (see policy), especially from wikipedia. This is simply because there are several Wikipedia mirrors already, and we should avoid giving the impression that we are just another of the same.


 * It is perfectly acceptable to follow Wikipedia examples regarding formatting guidelines and to use their templates. I also dont think anyone has a problem with using them as a reference. IMHO - Teachers dont like students using it simply because of its open editing policy, and they dont understand the level of oversight and expertise afforded much of its content.


 * US national government agencies are other sources of content that could be used, and are perhaps more trustworthy. Publications by employees of agencies such as NASA, USGS, and NIH are in the public domain and could be copied at least in part to provide something to build upon. --Mr. Ashcraft - (talk) 21:51, 15 September 2007 (EDT)


 * All excellent points. Just to clarify my original question, I wasn't expecting to copy content and expect it to be unedited (ie, mirroring) -- my thought was that the articles could be jumpstarted by using existing content that's already released under the appropriate license.  I see, however, that the community does not favor that solution, so I don't intend to push the issue.  Thanks for your comments! ~ MD Otley (talk) 14:34, 20 September 2007 (EDT)