Talk:Outline of space science

message: Wikieditors please feel free to discuss this article with Michael Hooten;  mlhooten@gmail.com.
Reverted the edit by User:Uncle G - removed perfectly good references 
However this page is a mess and need a great deal of tidying up Jaster 16:39, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Science fiction 

message: After some surfing on the web I get the impression that the term "Space science" is used with two distinct meanings:
* Space science is the same thing as space research, i.e. scientific studies carried out using scientific equipment in space. This definition includes a much broader set of scientific disciplines than what is covered in the current article on space science (compare it to the article space research).
* Space science is astronomy, the study of the universe outside Earth, with special emphasis on the type of astronomy that became possible in the space age. This is essentially the definition currently used in the preamble of the article space science, but the actual content of the article is slightly broader. 
I believe it is important to agree on whether or not both the above usages of the term space science are common, before deciding on the future of the articel space science. 2011 Jan 3 / 216Kleopatra (talk) 15:26, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  What is Space science ? 

message: Last night I removed an unsourced claim, attributed to Alex Dessler, that the Van Allen radiation belts may be due to volcanic activity.  I think this is physically very unlikely, and not at all main-stream, though I am not an expert on Van Allen radiation.  A little Google search found ~9000 hits on {'Alex Dessler' 'Van Allen'}, but looking at the top few I see only things that seem to quote our previous Wikipedia article verbatim — almost all having all or part of the phrase: 
"while Alex Dessler has argued that the belt is a result of volcanic activity".  
Most appear to be blogs & other lightweight material, nothing that looks like a reliable source.  A full-text search of the Astrophysics Data System for  {"ALEX DESSLER" "VAN ALLEN BELT"} found no hits between 1952 and 2003.  (Where would one search for older space physics information, I wonder?)
At first glance it appears to me as if there may have been an avalanche or loop of citations stemming from that very early (~2002) Wikipedia mention.  The editor who made the claim was blocked indefinitely in 2008 as a troll, although that was not at first enough to convict the edit.  Although "Alex Dessler" is redlinked, he is a reputable worker in space science.  
I looked around a bit for a proper source, and commented out the dubious claim, thinking that if there is a peer-reviewed article in a scientific journal that supports the claim, we should probably restore it.  But I now it looks like this is a classic Wikipedia horror story.  
When I could find no reasonable sources (glancing at only 30 or 40, of course not 9000), I sent an email, to Dessler, who quickly responded:
I am (sort of) shocked that this is what is reported.  It is true that I once made a verbal joke at a meeting where I was making fun of someone (Tom Gold as I recall) to make the point that correlations were not proof of physical causality.  You need a viable theory to make the connection.  For example, I like this quote, "It has been proven by thousands of experiments that the beating of tom-toms during an eclipse will restore the Sun."  This is from E. Bright Wilsons's book (which I read as a graduate student in the early 1950s) Introduction to Research.  Wilson did not believe this correlation was true, as I did not believe volcanoes could cause or have any effect on the Van Allen Belt.  My point was regarded as funny enough that I believe Wilmot Hess, in one of his books, quoted me in the spirit of a physicist having fun.  If he did, the book would have been published in the 1960s.  I never put such nonsense in print -- OMG!
The edit that did the damage was:
:   07:44, 18 November 2002 Lir (talk | contribs) (7,275 bytes) (undo)
Lir made many many edits, often on other subjects, for over 6 years before being blocked, many of which probably need to be reviewed carefully.  So it is potentially a more general Wikipedia problem.  I think this case history needs to be reported (and discussed) on some of the project pages — physics, astronomy, space science,... as many as are relevant, and wherever Lir made many edits.  (I have by now put an expanded version this into the physics, astronomy, and space exploration project pages, and put this here as there is no space science project, and this article is central to the subject.)
This is the first clear instance I have encountered of what appears to be an attempt to undermine the integrity of Wikipedia by deliberate covert fallacious editing.  It is not trolling, which I think is defined as a deliberate attempt to create destructive conflict by stirring up conflict, outrage & emotion, etc — ie, not hidden.  
The appalling thing is that at this moment there hundreds of "sources" out there on the Internet—and none of them are reliable.
Cheers, Wwheaton (talk) 03:34, 19 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Van Allen radiation belt" -- a Wikipedia horror tale ? 

message: As requested by tags, I've begun a major restructuring of the article.  The current content is highly redundant with astronomy but is a basically a bunch of links and catalog headings.  I'm merging the links and any factual information with subarticles, and leaving behind a master list here (which then we'll need to decide whether to keep, further merge, or expand back into an article). -- Beland (talk) 04:55, 21 August 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Major restructuring underway 

message: I removed: "Geothermometry (heating of the earth, heat flow, volcanology, and hot springs)"
Just leaving a note here in case someone wants to create this article or make a redirect or add a mention to the article of a parent field. -- Beland (talk) 03:42, 26 August 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Geothermometry 

message: "Outline" is short for "hierarchical outline". There are two types of outlines: sentence outlines (like those you made in school to plan a paper), and topic outlines (like the topical synopses that professors hand out at the beginning of a college course). Outlines on Wikipedia are primarily topic outlines that serve 2 main purposes: they provide taxonomical classification of subjects showing what topics belong to a subject and how they are related to each other (via their placement in the tree structure), and as subject-based tables of contents linked to topics in the encyclopedia. The hierarchy is maintained through the use of heading levels and indented bullets. See Wikipedia:Outlines for a more in-depth explanation.  The Transhumanist 00:10, 9 August 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Quick explanation of Wikipedia outlines