Talk:Albert Rees

General Article Discussion/request for assistance

Can someone find out who Prof. Ree's dissertation advisor(s) at Chicago was/were? This person or people were almost certainly notable, and thus already have a Wikipedia bio (or bios) that should link Rees from their infobox (and should be linked from this bio).

The thesis advisor(s) are customarily required by university librarians to be listed in the front matter of theses, in the acknowledgements section. Albert Ree's thesis is held on microfilm at a number of libraries, and in book format at the Manuseuto library at the University of Chicago.

It should also be available on PDF from anyone with access to the ProQuest database (available at most US universities.)

Can someone with access to Proquest or one of the libraries in these records look up his thesis advisor/committe in the Acknowledgements section at the front of his thesis. Then, can you add the appropriate links (if any) to his infobox and his advisors' infoboxes as influences/influencers (or just post the names here and I'll eventually add them)?

Here are URLs for where the thesis is held: https://catalog.lib.uchicago.edu/vufind/Record/4272060 http://www.worldcat.org/title/effect-of-collective-bargaining-on-wage-and-price-levels-in-the-basic-steel-and-bituminous-coal-industries-1945-1948/oclc/31280726?referer=di&ht=edition

http://www.proquest.com/products-services/dissertations/ (for those with access) Dk3298371 (talk) 16:45, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Can we also get an importance rating from at least one of these projects? I've greatly expanded this article & located a lot of additional sources, but don't have the time to do this justice, so would appreciate help from editors to flesh out this biography. An importance rating would probably help with that effort. This guy was the 1st head of a new U.S. government agency, something his NYT obit did not do a good job IMHO of explaining, possibly because there wasn't enough space in their physical print run at the time (they had to also mention he was Princeton Provest, Sloan President & noted author). That NYT bio is probably the best bio out there at the moment, however. 1st head of a new U.S. gov't agency or Princeton Provost has to be mid-importance for one of these projects. Dk3298371 (talk) 01:14, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

AWB Citation Tweaks on auto-generated citations

Hi Trappist_the_monk. Noticed you deleted the ASIN associated with two citations for Albert Rees. In your comment you cite AWB. Thanks for fixing this. I just want to point out that I created those citations using the Visual editor's auto-cite tool followed by the citation bot by pointing it at the Amazon page for those books. (I think visual editor left the ASIN and then citation bot fetched the ISBN, but it might have been visual editor that fetched both from the Amazon URL. The other books don't have an ASIN because I manually copied the ISBN for some reason. (I think I was in "edit source" rather than visual editor when I decided to add those additional books.) My point is that those AWB-violating citations were generated completely automatically using automated tools plus the Amazon page. Being able to use Amazon search and the Amazon URL is really convenient -- I needed to find the old out-of-print edition so that I could point out the book went through at least six editions (six editions in the US with Harper Collins; probably international editions I don't know about), and therefore he was notable as author for reasons beyond the mention of those books in his NYT obit. Without using amazon's search, it would have been much harder to find those old editions and get their ISBN. I never entered the ASIN in an edit window; visual editor pulled the ASIN, and then citation bot pulled the ISBN without deleting the ASIN. Since it appears automated tools (Visual editor citation bot?) violated AWB by keeping the ASIN after citation bot also fetched the ISBN, I suggest having citation bot or Visual editor or whatever updated to apply this rule automatically might save you some effort. @Trappist the monk:Dk3298371 (talk) 00:54, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

AWB is a tool that allows editors to write scripts that perform simple or complex tasks on page after page after page ... I wrote a script that looks for certain ASINs and then removes them or converts them to ISBNs.

{{cite book}} added the Albert Rees page to Category:CS1 maint: ASIN uses ISBN. My script reads the list of pages in that category and then operates on those pages.

When Amazon's ASIN is ten digits (or nine digits and the tenth character an uppercase 'X') then the ASIN is an ISBN. The last digit of an ISBN is a check-digit so, to prove that the ASIN is really an ISBN, my script does the necessary calculation to confirm that the ASIN is a valid ISBN. If the citation template has |isbn= then |asin= and its value is deleted; if not, |asin= is converted to |isbn=.

At {{cite book}}, the documentation for |asin= is:

• asin: Amazon Standard Identification Number; if first character of asin value is a digit, use isbn.
  • asin-tld: ASIN top-level domain for Amazon sites other than the US; valid values: au, br, ca, cn, co.jp, co.uk, de, es, fr, it, mx

The 'violation', if there is one, is a violation of a local (en.wiki) cs1 template rule. VE and Citation bot are not beholden to these local rules.

Sure, Amazon's pages may be helpful but Amazon is in the business of selling books and making money. It is not the purpose of Wikipedia to supply them with a steady stream of customers. If I follow the link to |isbn=9780673994745, I end up at Special:BookSources/9780673994745 which gives me a variety of ways to locate a copy of The Economics of Work and Pay including a collage library not half an hour away (the WorldCat link) and even to Amazon.

You should not assume that the automated tools here do everything correctly and that they are all somehow interlinked. They don't and they aren't. Each tool is written by separate teams who may or may not be in communication with each other. Each of the different language Wikipedia's have different rules. There is no hierarchy to coerce them all into doing the same thing with the data that they have. So, VE does stuff that en.wiki finds unpalatable but that fr.wiki likes. Still, you can always comment at the VE feedback page.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 02:03, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

Hi Trappist_the_monk,

Thank you for your lengthy explanation. If VE's automatic citations don't meet en.wikipedia's rules, and if it is too hard to 'localize' VE so it detects en.wikipedia and 'does the right thing,' then I suppose someone should write a bot to automatically clean after VE on en.wikipedia. (it could hunt for the VE edit tag.) While this solution would work (and would reduce the manual workload on dedicated editors such as yourself), I will find it funny that one bot corrects another bots errors (or another automated software's errors). I suppose it is the chaotic, collaborative, and international nature of how Wikipedia grew up, and the fact that it is still a work in progress.

The reason I think this is funny is that I can imagine we can easily end up with two approved bots -- one will delete ASINs when ISBNs are present, and other will add them back. They will engage in edit wars. With all this talk of dangerous AI, it may not be clear if these bots have passed the Turing test, and are engaged in edit warring out of self-awareness, or if this was just sloppy bot approval process. The Terminator "rise of the machines" could start on Wikipedia. Humanity might not end with a bang, but with the whimper of a bot edit war. Better they fight themselves than us, no?

As for the larger question of ASINs, I was actually referring to Amazon's search engine being useful (and VE essentially extracting ISBNs from that.) That VE also pulled ASINs was a side-effect that I am OK with. Many books (esp free e-books) have only an ASIN, which is presumably why the VE functionality exists in the first place, since ASIN field will be needed if there is no ISBN. I don't have a strong opinion on whether or not ASIN linking should be allowed if ISBN, OCLC, DOI or other 'noncommercial' ID Is present. (non-commercial is in quotes because the ISBN authorities are commercial, Worldcat links to amazon, and evil commercial amazon provides information, such as cover art & reviews, that is lacking from these other, less evil sources. In this case I believe these books are out-of-print so no one will be making much money, but hopefully they have a greater understanding of this individual after following the links.) I also under the problems that linking to a dominant player like Amazon can cause. So, I can see arguments either way, which may be why fr.wikipedia allows it. it seems en.wikipedia policy has made the decision for me.

I will post a comment on the VE feedback letting them know about this comment thread..

Thanks again for your comments.@Trappist the monk:Dk3298371 (talk) 06:46, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

Just to be clear, I don't know if fr.wiki likes or doesn't like ASINs that are ISBNs. That comment was about the different Wikipedias and their tools doing things differently.

Before yesterday, I had not run my script for months. The category had accumulated about 50 pages in that time so this is hardly an onerous task.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 11:14, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

Split - Council on Wage and Price Stability

Should Council on Wage and Price Stability be split into its own article?

• Support - it looks like the Council on Wage and Price Stability is notable in its own right and it would be useful to have a separate detailed article. Jonpatterns (talk) 13:46, 31 January 2016 (UTC)

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