Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Gene Nygaard

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Gene Nygaard (talk · contribs · logs)

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Statement of the dispute

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Description

Gene Nygaard is frequently uncivil, and engages in edit wars to impose his own personal style preference on scientific articles. He ignores all evidence that his edits go against what scientists actually use. Worldtraveller 13:53, 10 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Gene Nygaard seems to have absolutely no sense of how units are grammatically expressed in the English speaking world; so much so that he will go so far as to re-title external articles using his own homemade abbreviations and style usages that are completely un-grammatical and not even found in the linked-to-articles. As an example, if you check the history of the temperature article he has been making ungrammatical edits of units going as far back as '05 (see [1] for a case in point) --Sadi Carnot 14:25, 10 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Evidence of disputed behavior

(Provide diffs. Links to entire articles aren't helpful unless the editor created the entire article. Edit histories also aren't helpful as they change as new edits are performed.)

Imposing style preferences against consensus: [2], [3], [4], [5]
Incivility: [6], [7], [8], [9], [10]

Applicable policies and guidelines

{list the policies and guidelines that apply to the disputed conduct}

Evidence of trying and failing to resolve the dispute

(provide diffs and links)

Extensive conversation at Talk:Pleiades (star cluster)#Plural_of_kelvins
Extensive conversation at User talk:Gene Nygaard#Kelvins
Further conversation at Talk:HD_217107#Should_be_delisted_from_GA
Attempts made at User talk:Gene Nygaard#Kelvins_vs_Kelvin

Users certifying the basis for this dispute

{Users who tried and failed to resolve the dispute}

Other users who endorse this summary

I can't comment on the writing of units because I don't know what's correct, but my experience is that Gene is a very aggressive and insulting user who I've seen more than once reduce a talk page to chaos with posts that, to me, were impenetrable. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 05:42, 17 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
exact same as above, Slrubenstein | Talk 10:43, 18 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Tendentious and known to throw the first punch. FeloniousMonk 14:55, 18 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I've noted the same issues; an obsession with aggressively enforcing very specific language usages, combined with volumes of lengthy and nearly incomprehensible Talk: page comments. Jayjg ^(talk) 18:04, 18 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Extremely obsessive editor in general -M^ask 19:29, 19 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Argumentative. --Dogaroon 07:47, 29 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
While I like Gene, and the same stubbornness was useful against User:rktect, he really should attempt to be more collegial. I have added a policy suggestion to the talk page. Septentrionalis 18:19, 29 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Response

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1. There is no clear statement of any dispute.

2. It is not endorsed by two users involved in the same dispute.

3. There are unexplained links which have nothing to do with any dispute with either WorldTraveller or Sadi Carnot. Sadi Carnot merely raises different, unrelated issues, objecting to my replacement of an ambiguous "billion" with the SI prefix "giga-".

4. Worldtraveller's claims edits "against consensus". For that to make any sense, he needs to show that a consensus of Wikipedia editors which is in opposition to my edits in these articles exists. He has not even attempted to do so; furthermore, he cannot do so.

5. Sadi Carnot has not participated in any disputes involving me and Worldtraveller. My only contact with Sadi Carnot, to the best of my knowledge, was on one article where he claims that I "will go so far as to re-title external articles". That, of course, is nowhere near the truth. The wording involved a description of an external link. That description, on the article page at heat, was "Plasma Heat at 2 Billion Kelvin". However, if you follow the link, that is not the article title; the article title is "Scientists Generate Unimaginable Heat in Lab Experiment". Furthermore, that description is also not the title of the html page; the html title is "FOXNews.com - Scientists Generate Unimaginable Heat in Lab Experiment - Science News | Current Articles". What I changed was Wikipedian's ungrammatical, ambiguous description of that page. There was absolutely no re-titling involved on my part. Someone else obviously did make an entry look like it might be an article title (I haven't checked yet to see who that was, whether it was Sadi Carnot or someone else).

7. The only disputes I have been involved with as far as Worldtraveller goes deal with the capitalization of the kelvin as a unit of temperature (it should be lowercase, unlike the past usage when the name was "degree Kelvin" and the "K" was capitalized in that proper adjective just as the "C" is in degrees Celsius and the "F" is in degrees Fahrenheit) and the plural form (it takes a normal plural by adding an s),

a. In this edit on Talk:HD 217107, I cited six authorities for the fact that the proper plural of kelvin is kelvins (NIST, BIPM, Journal of the Astronomical Society of New South Wales, American Meteorological Society, Rand Corporation, and National Geographic).
b. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition (2005), Springfield, Massachusetts, USA: Merriam-Webster, Inc.

kelvin [punctuation omitted] n (1968): The base unit of temperature in the International System of Units, that is equal to 1/273.16 of the Kelvin scale temperature of the triple point of water.

[Note that there is no plural listed in this dictionary entry; that's because the only plural is the regular plural in English, formed by adding an "s". The front matter of this dictionary explains the conditions under which it does list plurals, including cases with a "zero plural" so if this dictionary considered either "kelvin" as the only plural or both "kelvin" and "kelvins" as acceptable plurals, they would have been listed.]

This can probably best be seen by the entries for other, similar units in the 11th Collegiate, which do list the plural forms because they aren't cases where the only plural is the regularly formed plural (pronunciations omitted):

hertz n, pl hertz
lux n, pl lux or luxes
henry n, pl henrys or henries
siemens n, pl siemens
gauss n, pl gauss also gausses

The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary at http://www.m-w.com/mw/netdict.htm is based on the Eleventh Collegiate. It may not always be identical to it, but it is the same for these entries.

c. In contrast to the various references I have provided in the discussions Worldtraveller (evidence items 1 and 2 above), he has only offered his personal opinion, augmented by his own original research into usage patterns—and not very good research at that:
- 1. Almost all of his original research has shown significant use of "kelvins" as the plural form.
- 2. He has cited as evidence of the use of "Kelvin" as the plural form totally irrelevant stuff, such as
  - (a). References to the person William Thomson, Lord Kelvin
  - (a). The use of "Kelvin" as an adjective relating to Lord Kelvin
  - (b). The use of degrees Kelvin. Of course people using this old name aren't going to add an "s" to the adjective Kelvin; in this old name for the unit, the "s" is added to the noun, degree.
  - (c). The use with numbers whose value is greater than zero and less than or equal to one, which should be singular (BTW, that is of course the situation with the electronvolt measurements which are singular because they are less than one in the difference [1] listed above by Sadi Carno).
  - (d). The use in constructions such as "2.7 kelvin background radiation", where the "kelvin" is a prenominal adjective, which also does not take the plural form in standard English grammar. It is just like saying a "ten-foot pole", which has, of course, a length of 10 feet. Talking about a "10 foot pole" doesn't mean the plural of foot is foot, nor does talking about that "2.7 kelvin radiation" mean that the plural of kelvin is kelvin.
  - (e). References to various other people whose last name is Kelvin.
  - (f). References to various other people whose first name is Kelvin.

6. Then, to top things off, Worldtraveller has the gall to characterize this as "his [Gene Nygaard's] own personal style preference".

7. More than that, too; Worldtraveller has actually removed references that I cited in the articles. [11] [12]

7. I reserve the right to respond to if a clear statement of any other dispute is made; I'm reasonably sure that there is no other one, however. Gene Nygaard 06:08, 12 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Users who endorse this summary:

From my outside observation, is Mr. Nygaard obsessive? Yes? Is he correct? Also yes. Lord Bob 20:57, 19 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Not unless you put a coat on when it drops below 40 Fahrenheits he isn't. Grace Note 10:27, 27 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'm a PhD physicist and a professional proofreader working mainly on scientific documents, and I've proofread thousands of pages of scientific literature covering topics over every field of science for numerous journals. That is why I spend my days caring about things like the correct way to write units and I'll flatter myself that I do know what I'm talking about. My encounters with Gene Nygaard, who apparently is a farmer, according to his own web page, gave me the impression that not only did he not know what he was talking about, but he was obsessed with imposing his own views of what was right or wrong onto Wikipedia regardless that it merely reflected his own ignorance. I found his attitude highly distasteful, and he went as far as to remove perfectly correct information from articles merely because it did not substantiate the thoroughly ignorant point of view he was choosing to impose. --Dogaroon 07:54, 29 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia needs people like Mr. Nygaard who care about getting things right. Sure, it would be nice if he had superlative charm and diplomacy, but wishing won't make it so. I will happily accept a bit of curmudgeonliness in return for articles that have correct use of units. Gdr 22:05, 23 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Outside view by William M. Connolley

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I really think this is less a user conduct dispute (I don't see any great incivility) than an content dispute: kelvin or kelvins? I think the discussion would naturally belong at the kelvin talk page William M. Connolley 21:58, 22 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

(ps: Personally, I'd write "3 kelvin"; but you don't have to endorse that if you endorse this view)

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Outside view

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Discussion

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