Category talk:Biography

From ResearchID.org, a nexus for researching Intelligent Design

Contents

Initial Organization

I put in a category for people who have critiqued the design theoretic, such as Provine, Dennet. I labeled it 'Anti-ID-Current' because I couldn't think of anything better.--SierraEcho 22:35, 26 February 2006 (CST)

Yes, that's good stuff! We may also have to make a section for people who kinda' don't fit into any of these categories. I had an undergrad biology prof who was not anti-ID, was not pro-ID, but offered some helpful criticism to me about how ID could be made rhetorically stronger in biology. So perhaps eventually we will have to make a section for 'Neutral - ID - Current', once these people become more visible in the public. -- JosephCCampana 23:23, 26 February 2006 (CST)
Why is Provine categorized differently than the other anti-ID people listed, such as Darwin and Dawkins under biology and Darrow under law? Since he is a professor of evolutionary biology shouldn't he be under "biology" with those others? -- Arctura 10:38, 3 March 2006 (CST)
Or are all the scientists mentioned eventually going to be categorized both under pro-, anti-, or neutral to ID, and under their fields? Because it also seems odd to have people like Dawkins but not Behe under biology, when arguably Behe has made the greater contribution to the field. --Arctura 11:02, 3 March 2006 (CST)
I have two proposals for this: 1) Perhaps instead of having pro, neu, anti sections we could have graphic icons next to their name representing their positions? Maybe a pair of dice or a die? (symbolizing cosmological or biological randomness) or 2)Maintain 3 additional Biography categories for the positions. Both of these ideas would visually represent our purpose, what does everyone think? -- JosephCCampana 11:11, 3 March 2006 (CST)
I like the idea of graphic icons next to the names. It may be useful at some point to be able to call up a list of all the pro-, anti- or neutral people in our database--would it be possible to not have those lists on the main biography page, and still have that option? --Arctura 06:57, 4 March 2006 (CST)
Actura, your idea sounds good. Is that possible?--SierraEcho 08:12, 4 March 2006 (CST)
I think we can accomplish this with a categories-subcategories schema. I'll work on a proposal and see what everyone thinks. -- JosephCCampana 00:03, 5 March 2006 (CST)

Standard format for photo inclusion

Anyone have an opinion on the display format for the photos? I like the 'thumb' tag myself. I think it brings a nice consistentcy throughtout Biography articles. -- JosephCCampana 19:50, 3 March 2006 (CST)

'Thumb' tag looks good. --SierraEcho 08:10, 4 March 2006 (CST)

Clarifying: the role of the Webmaster in decisions here…

Please remember that though I am the webmaster, I want this wiki to be a community where we all contribute to the final product. The only time I will intervene is if someone is doing something illegal, unsafe, or someone is violating our mission. -- JosephCCampana 00:20, 4 March 2006 (CST)

The Ideal Biography article @ ResearchID.org

Always keep in mind that our #1 goal is to be a springboard to research, summary and key points are our focus. The ideal biography would be... (fill in your thoughts here)

One that has a nice picture in the corner (preferably in color) :-)--SierraEcho 19:14, 4 March 2006 (CST)
Would also include a comprehensive summary of the subject's research, written in a clear way so that all important bits are highlighted. Perhaps a list of all published papers, maybe as an additional page if this is too long for the main biography page (for those people who publish a good deal)? And maybe links to those as well, though they would be more useful for those of us in universities with library subscriptions. For that matter, should we include links to things that you can only get through subscriptions (i.e., some academic journals), or not? --Arctura 21:53, 12 March 2006 (CST)
Great points, Arctura. We want to create access to this type of resource on the sub-layer of the site, which makes additional pages for lists an excellent idea. See talk section "Biography sub-pages" below for a brief explanation of this. Including subscription material is fine, let's just be sure to specify that it is a subscription link, perhaps even make the word "subscription" a part of the link text/name i.e. "[http://www.researchid.org Researching Platypus Lips [subscription]". Any thoughts? -- JosephCCampana 23:44, 12 March 2006 (CST)

Biography sub-pages

We're talking here about setting up a simple structure for organizing detailed information while keeping the top layer of the site in a summary format. The easiest way I know of, to manage subpages of this type on a wiki, is by naming the subpage (the list of papers) as a slashed variant of the parentpage (the bio). For example, for an exhaustive list of Dembski's papers, the pagename could be: Biography:William Dembski/papers. This is how they do it at Wikipedia and I think it's a good system. What do we think? -- JosephCCampana 23:44, 12 March 2006 (CST)

Curriculum Vitae

Seeing this is a research site, it makes sense to me that a full-blown curriculum vitae, especially of published (and ePublished) material, would be in each biography. Any thoughts? -- JosephCCampana 00:20, 4 March 2006 (CST)

Bibliography citations

We are going to have to hammer this out. Do we want to choose a predefined format (i.e. APA, Chicago) or do we want to do our own thing?

My original thought was to use a very simple style, providing the title, how the person being biograph’ed was involved, with the ISBN. The ISBN number would be the key to deeper information, because the wiki uses it to make a page linking to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, et al where our users can get more details, sneak peaks, thorough reviews, etc. An example of this bib entry for “Darwinism, Design, and Public Education” on Stephen Meyer’s bio page (Meyer was one of two editors for the book) would read something like: Darwinism, Design, and Public Education, Stephen Meyers (ed. et al) (ISBN 0000000000). If someone is a contributor and not the principal author, we could put (contrib.) next to their name. This scheme would keep the entries concise, while still providing the link to a plethora of information through the ISBN.

What does everyone think? -- JosephCCampana 00:20, 4 March 2006 (CST)

Maybe that's best. I like the way it's been done so far in biographies
Title, year, ISBN (number)
but this does cause a problem when you have books that are co-authored or edited. --Arctura 15:18, 4 March 2006 (CST)
We could do:
Title, Name, coauthor, year, ISBN # ------- for a coauthored book
Title, Name, contributor, year, ISBN # ---- for a contribution to a collection
Title, Name, editor, year, ISBN # --------- for an editor
Title, Name, co-editor, year, ISBN # ------ for a coedited book
Title, Name, editor et al, year, ISBN # --- for a book with many editors
How about this? -- JosephCCampana 00:03, 5 March 2006 (CST)
I like that JosephCCampana. I almost wonder if we should put the publishing house between the editor/author and the year -- it's interesting to know whether Cambridge University Press published it or any of the other publishers. That would probably make this list way to complicated though.--SierraEcho 23:19, 5 March 2006 (CST)
Thank you, SierraEcho. By the way, you can call me Joe, I'm not one for formalisms. :) Publisher is an interesting issue. It can be good to know where the book is being published...perhaps we can make the listing of the publisher optional. If giving the name is helpful, we'll do it. Otherwise, if it's published by an unknown company, like "Suzie's Squeeky Press," we'll just skip the publisher name. What does everybody think? Nay, yeah? -- JosephCCampana 23:31, 5 March 2006 (CST)
That sounds good, Joe. If the book is published in "Suzie's Squeeky Press", it might be better not to know that. :-)--SierraEcho 23:39, 7 March 2006 (CST)

Personal accounts

Perhaps personal or eyewitness accounts can be submitted on a sub-page under the bio. For example: Biography:William Dembski/eyewitness can be a page about eyewitness accounts. Same for personal info. Although, I don’t ever want to put personal info like their emails or ANY contact info on our website. We want to respect their privacy, and we will. -- JosephCCampana 00:20, 4 March 2006 (CST)

NPOV

This is just my opinion, but I think that NPOV, ironically, is very subjective on a wiki. This is because of the focus on a consensus for the article. Anyone who has been a part of a controversial wikipedia.org article will tell you this. To me, NPOV = a tedious, stressful, frustrating editing process that typically results in a boring and sterile article. We certainly don’t want opinion-based bios, but who wants to read a boring article? So I think we should focus on conciseness and factuality. The compaction of the factual information will automatically produce an engaging style of writing, because it will move quickly, while simultaneously relaying the relevant information. If I have lost anyone, let me know, I can clarify this. Any thoughts? -- JosephCCampana 00:20, 4 March 2006 (CST)

I like that. It's pretty hard to be "neutral" and whenever I think of impartiality I think of what G.K. Chesterton said about it-- "Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance." So we can try to be fair-minded and leave out opinions and biases while at the same time not reaching for the unattainable and sterile ground of complete neutrality. --Arctura 16:56, 4 March 2006 (CST)

Immediate focus

For the purposes of preparing for the site opening, it seems best to work through our list of wanted biographies and put a bit up for each of those. Longer bios can come later. Everyone has been doing some great work on that end of the site. Keep up the good work! -- JosephCCampana 00:20, 4 March 2006 (CST)

Seeing everything at a glance

I noticed over at Wikipedia for David Hume's biography they have neat box where you can see some of the important facts about his life in a glance. It might be nice to eventually incorporate something like that into our biographies. We could then add a section in the box to say whether they are pro-id, anti-id, and what their contributions to design theoretic are. --SierraEcho 15:41, 4 March 2006 (CST)

That is nice, huh! Maybe once the articles are longer and more developed, we can make an 'overview' box. -- JosephCCampana 00:03, 5 March 2006 (CST)

Reference footnotes

Is there a way to incorporate reference footnotes in the biographies?--SierraEcho 23:25, 5 March 2006 (CST)

The instructions from below are taken directly from the template for new research applications.

  • How to use "wikified" citations Step-by-step:
  1. Where you want the citation to appear in the article, type in: {{ref|descriptionname}}, replacing 'descriptionname' with a unique name of the footnote.
  2. In the "Notes" section, type in: # {{note|descriptionname}}
  3. All of the notes under this section should be surrounded by these "div style" tags in order to make the text smaller:
    1. <div style="font-size: 90%">...Notes and citations here...</div>
  4. Be sure to remove the 'nowiki' tags all the way through, if they ended up in your wiki code.
  • Use the citation and notation style of choice for the field, or the style that you would prefer use. Consistency within the article is the goal. If you want some ideas on style, check out Wikipedia's citation style examples.

Hope this helps! Let me know if it doesn't. -- JosephCCampana 23:41, 5 March 2006 (CST)


"Annoying" labels

In the category page the articles are listed with the prefix "Biography:" before each one, which in a list like this looks somewhat odd-- especially as it makes all of them begin with "B" in the ordering system. Is there any possible way, aside from writing each name out, to change it so that at least on this page they are just listed by name? --Arctura 07:10, 24 June 2006 (CDT)

Arctura, I honestly don't know what would be the best answer. (I'm thinking off the top of my head right now.) As the wiki is currently setup there are two options for changing the Biography section:
A) Establish a new namespace
B) Rename all of the bios using simply the person's name, using the move/redirect function
I don't think establishing a new namespace would accomplish anything towards our goals here. I think renaming is the best option. Let me sleep on it and I will post any more ideas tomorrow (Sunday, June 25).
I've considered some other options and I think the general well-being of the site would be best served by simply renaming the bio pages to the name of the person without the "Biography:" prefix. This will also make linking much easier by eliminating the need for a piped-link. I will make these changes tonight. -- JosephCCampana 12:49, 26 June 2006 (CDT)
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