User Talk: Modest Genius

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Request for review

Hello, Modest Genius

I am working on a draft biography of geophysicist Alexander A. Kaufman:

<nowiki>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Alexander_Arkadyevich_Kaufman_(geophysicist)</nowiki>

The draft has gone through several AfC reviews, but the reviewers so far have not had a geophysics background, and some of the technical aspects and sources may not have been fully appreciated.

I think some of the geophysics-specific aspects may benefit from review by someone familiar with the field.

I found that you have contributed a lot into the "Geophysical Journal International: Revision history".

Because of your experience with geophysics topics on Wikipedia, I would be grateful if you could review the article.

Many thanks in advance,

Greg GITSK (talk) 03:59, 18 December 2025 (UTC)

:{{ping|GITSK}} Sorry, I'm not an expert on geophysics or Wikipedia biographies of academics. On a quick glance, that looks like a carefully written article. I cannot comment on whether Kaufman meets WP:NACADEMIC ↗. <b style="font-family: Times New Roman; color: maroon;">Modest Genius</b> ^talk ↗ 18:35, 18 December 2025 (UTC)
::No problem, sir. Today the article was accepted for publication. Thanks for your time and regards. Greg. GITSK (talk) 04:41, 19 December 2025 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for January 28

An automated process has detected that when you recently edited Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society ↗, a link pointing to the disambiguation page Simple majority ↗ was added.

(Opt-out instructions.) --DPL bot (talk) 19:55, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

:The reference is unclear on which of those meanings applies. Best to leave it ambiguous. <b style="font-family: Times New Roman; color: maroon;">Modest Genius</b> ^talk ↗ 12:21, 29 January 2026 (UTC)

ITN recognition for Mike Cruise ↗

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|1=On 14 February 2026, '''''In the news ↗''''' was updated with an item that involved the article '''''Mike Cruise ↗''''', which you nominated. If you know of another recently created or updated article suitable for inclusion in ITN, please suggest it on the candidates page ↗. —Bagumba (talk) 08:16, 14 February 2026 (UTC)
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ITN recognition for 2026 Men's T20 World Cup final ↗

{{ivmbox
|1=On 11 March 2026, '''''In the news ↗''''' was updated with an item that involved the article '''''2026 Men's T20 World Cup final ↗''''', which you updated. If you know of another recently created or updated article suitable for inclusion in ITN, please suggest it on the candidates page ↗. Black Kite (talk) ↗ 12:03, 11 March 2026 (UTC)
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"Trying"

re special:diff/1347571083 ↗. I wasn't "trying" anything. I was doing. What I did speaks for itself. I added the standard noticeboard template to a noticeboard. This is both self-explanatory and supported by the guideline WP:BIDI ↗ the applicability of which is also self-explanatory. So I do not appreciate the feigned "I'm not sure what you were trying to do" pitch in your edit summary. But the implication the edit had for the T:MP was unintended. I had forgotten to check for potential other tranclusions of this header. This is primarily my message for you about how your edit summary is pretty crap. —Alalch E. 16:20, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

:I'm afraid I still don't understand what you intended to accomplish with that edit; it certainly wasn't self-explanatory. Wikipedia:Main Page/Errors/header ↗ is not an article in mainspace. Re-reading my edit summary, it seems factual and unobjectionable, and explains why I was reverting. I was not feigning anything, and calling it 'pretty crap' seems uncalled for. Please WP:AGF ↗. <b style="font-family: Times New Roman; color: maroon;">Modest Genius</b> ^talk ↗ 17:53, 15 April 2026 (UTC)
::Wikipedia:Main Page/Errors ↗ is one of Wikipedia's noticeboards. Its static top content has been separated out into Wikipedia:Main Page/Errors/header ↗, to be transcluded back, as is common with many noticeboards. The header page is the {{em|noticeboard header}} for said noticeboard. Noticeboard headers use a well-known template named "Noticeboard header" ↗, which provides some non-essential (but generally non-problematic and familiar) formatting in addition to its primary purpose: navigation. This is because it includes Template:Noticeboard links ↗, which is a navigation template ↗.
::Because the Main Page errors noticeboard is a noticeboard and is justifiably linked from the noticeboard navigation template, that same navigation template should be included on the page itself to prevent the navigation path from arbitrarily breaking. From the user's perspective, the "box with links" is a navigational interface element that suddenly "disappears" when it shouldn't. Perhaps the user is clicking from one noticeboard to another to see what they are about, or perhaps they want to go back to a page they visited two or three steps prior in their navigation history.
::This is what the principle of bidirectional navigation means in practice, and it is not at all specific to articles. The logic is the same for all types of Wikipedia pages. The fact that the guideline mentions "articles" instead of "pages" is a quirk of many Wikipedia policies and guidelines; pages outside of article space are also subject to editorial logic and can be improved in many of the same ways as articles.
::The edit was a completed action that speaks for itself, and an intelligible edit summary was provided. I recognize that you did not understand the change, which I do not mind at all, but it is factually incorrect and objectionable to me that you labelled it as any kind of "trying to do". Nothing was being tried. The noticeboard header template was added to a noticeboard header.
::The negative implication that this had elsewhere, due to the fact that the header is transcluded to yet another page (which is unusual) is unfortunate, and was addressable once noticed. A factual edit summary would have been: "it has inserted an unintended navbox into T:MP ↗ and broken the navigation there."
::That said, I can tell from your statement that "Wikipedia:Main Page/Errors/header is not an article in mainspace" that you genuinely did not understand the change. It was wrong of me to say that you were feigning something, and I apologize for that. —Alalch E. 19:32, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

Glossary of Cricket Terms: Nuggety

1. That's far too long for a glossary
:Given the fuzzy nature of the term, I doubt that a short definition would prove durable. If you think it's too long, feel free to be a really useful editor and edit it, rather than just cutting it all. You don't back your opinion here with reference to any style guide of what a glossary should be. I think it would be a pity if this one is rendered down to a small collection of references to other glossaries.

2. None of those references provide a definition of its use in cricket, only some examples and a non-cricket definition
:All of the references are citations of the use of the term in cricket and there is no non-cricket content in any of them. Why should it be necessary to cite actual definitions? The OED doesn't do that, it cites evidence of usage according to the definition offered. The references support the use. If you want to be really fussy about OR there won't be any content on this page, and you're leaving a lot of content in place that is merely schoolboy colloquialism with no attempt to cite anything. This page does need cleaning up I agree. If it is cleaned up to any particular standards a version of my offering should still stand rather than a lot of the hearsay that is here.

3. None of the sources support the detailed commentary in that whole paragraph of text.
:There is no detailed commentary, it is merely a colon-separated list of nuances of use that is supported by the references. Atconsul (talk) 14:23, 5 June 2026 (UTC)

::{{ping|Atconsul}} I looked at all of the references you provided. None of them contained a description of what the term 'nuggety' means in a cricketing context. There was a single dictionary definition that said nothing about cricket and did not match the description you inserted; and some cricket player profiles or match reports that used the word without any explanation of its meaning, even by implication. That's not enough to support an entry in our article, and nor did they support the long paragraph that you wrote. Note that Wikipedia is not a dictionary, so your OED example isn't relevant. We need to satisfy WP:V ↗ and WP:RS ↗.
::If you find a reference that gives a clear explanation of what that term means in cricket, and write a short (two or three sentence) definition, I'm happy for it to appear in the glossary. New entries that are far too long and not supported by the references are not appropriate. There's no point in me editing down your text if the necessary reference(s) cannot be found.
::I agree that not every entry on that page is adequately referenced. If you have concerns about specific entries, I'm happy to discuss them and remove any that cannot be verified (after a suitable search for references). Just because some current entries aren't great doesn't mean we should add more poor ones - there needs to be a good reason to change the status quo. See also WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS ↗. <b style="font-family: Times New Roman; color: maroon;">Modest Genius</b> ^talk ↗ 18:32, 9 June 2026 (UTC)
:::Thank you for the polite and thoughtful response. I do understand the principles you cite, in principle, and I am keen to continue to apply them in my offerings, but I don't see anything prescriptive or normative in WP that states that a *reference to a definition* is required for a glossary entry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Glossaries#definition supports my point I feel. No WP is not a dictionary, but a dictionary is a special case of a reference work system that obeys strong principles of verifiability and reliability, so it is not irrelevant even if it does not necessarily follow that the exact principles WP will apply are the same. A modern dictionary is a reference work that is descriptive in intent, and grounded by reliable, verified reference to actual usage. The threat in MOS is rather that, if the entries become too dictionary-like, the page should be moved to the more specialised Wiktionary.
:::Also I wonder if you are modelling 'definition' in the sense that it should be applied to cultural studies. I don't know why you think that the sources I cite don't explain the meaning by implication: I think they do exactly that when taken as a whole, and if you don't agree, we should seek even more references to use. Clearly context matters in making this judgement (WP:CONTEXTMATTERS), and one needs to read the sources with an amount of goodwill and even an allowance for uncertainty of meaning. An abstract concept of personal character or cultural expression is ultimately going to be a collection of overlapping ideas that I would not settle for in other domains.
:::I've no interest in dying in a ditch on 'nuggety' but I do think WP cricket deserves a stronger glossary of cricket terms than current. It should both explain the domain language of cricket and reveal the figures of speech in use, that may well be geo-special. Reliable, sourced evidence of use must be a necessary criterion, and perhaps sufficient in some cases, subject also to some notion of notability. But I feel we risk being a mere concatenation of the few sources of cricket glossary on offer if "reference to a definition" must pertain. That would limit our acknowledged vocabulary and risk promoting a globally normative glossary. If the reality is that you just don't agree with me about what 'nuggety' means and you are looking for backup from the MOS I think you should just say so, but I'm sceptical that we will find sources that actually disagree with each other, or that the meaning is in any way contentious or the subject of disputation.
:::I put this conversation on your User Talk page because I think it is essentially endopedian, but at some level I'd like to think contributors to Cricket Terms might find it useful.
:::Thank you again for the objectivity of your reaction. Atconsul (talk) 13:56, 11 June 2026 (UTC)