User talk:Sylvain Ribault

Surface Tension submission
I have a few thoughts about the Surface Tension submission:


 * 1) Judging the quality of a Wikipedia article is always subjective, but the WP article fits my definition of the ideal WP article on science: It is not overly sophisticated or cluttered with material that only a few would find interesting.  I think the plagiarism check raised so many flags because the article was so good that it was copied.
 * 2) Unlike astrophysics, biophysics, nanotechnology and a handful of other fields in physics, the topic is not subject to a great deal of "cutting-edge" research, which may explain why I am having trouble finding expert reviewers.
 * 3) In some ways Surface tension resembles Lead in this respect, except that lead poisoning is an active subject of research. And lead is more interesting to historians.  I can imagine the industrial revolution without surface tension, but not without lead.  Also, as far as I can tell from informal observation, most chemists seem equally interested in all the elements.
 * 4) This is not the proper venue for discussing what we should do about the Lead article, but you should know that up to the section on measurements, I think any trained physicist is qualified to referee it with only a minimal literature search to verify the equations (and conventions) introduced.
 * 5) We have some complicated matters to deal with regarding this article.  On one hand, it hard to find  "experts" on the subject.  On the other hand, the topic introduced at all levels of education and for that reason the submission falls exactly into what many of us imagine to be the scope of the WJS. --Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 23:42, 19 July 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the thoughts. I agree that much of the article on Surface Tension is relatively basic. So we expect that review by experts will not bring much improvement, since Wikipedia's collaborative editing process already did a very good job. However, it will be good to have experimental confirmation of this expectation.

Surface tension is related to many topics of active research, some of them mentioned in Surface_tension (say Microfluidics), some of them not (say Ultrahydrophobicity). Experts of these topics may well suggest new points of views / analogies / links with further topics.

And you can never say for sure that a subject is closed. We thought we knew all there was to know on basic thermodynamics, and in 1996 comes Jarzynski's equality, just as basic but more powerful than the known inequalities. Sylvain Ribault (discuss • contribs) 07:57, 20 July 2018 (UTC)


 * I agree. And since we never know when a subject is closed, "old" topics need to be understood by a wide variety of researchers. That is one of the most important reason why we need these WikiJournals to succeed.--Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 15:34, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

Peer review for Binary search algorithm
Hi Sylvain, Thomas asked me to help you out with organizing the peer review for WikiJournal Preprints/Binary search algorithm. Let me know how I can help and I'll be glad to do so. I have a background in web development and I know a few other programmers who I could ask to do a peer review. However, they are not academic people. What kind of reviewers are you looking for? CS degrees? Professors? Practical programmers? Logicians? Mathematicians? --Felipe (discuss • contribs) 01:02, 9 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Hello Felipe, thanks for offering to help! At the moment I am looking for a guest editor, not for reviewers. I have just uploaded a template for the invitation email. Since we need only one guest editor, I am not sending several invitations simultaneously, so this takes time. I think that we need the guest editors and the reviewers to be researchers in computer science. Sylvain Ribault (discuss • contribs) 21:45, 9 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Hi, sorry for not answering before but I expected you to ping me, I didn't notice your reply until now. Anyway, I'm quite unfamiliar with this role of the guest editor, but can't I be the guest editor? Or do I need to be a Computer Science PHD? And why can't you be the guest editor? What's the point of multiplying roles like this? Sorry if these questions sound a bit rude, but I don't understand. Also, if a guest editor different from you or me is necessary, then should I help trying to find this guest editor? --Felipe (discuss • contribs) 18:29, 14 November 2018 (UTC)
 * According to general practice and to our (admittedly limited) experience, an editor should be a recognized specialist of the reviewed article's subject, so that potential reviewers are likely to accept his invitations, or at least cannot ignore them. This also helps when it comes to reach an informed decision based on the reports. In the case of the Binary search algorithm, nobody on the board is a specialist, hence the need for a guest editor. (See this invitation email template.) At the moment I have some names of plausible guest editors, and I am contacting them, which takes time. I will ask for help if these attempts end in failure. Sylvain Ribault (discuss • contribs) 19:03, 14 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Understood, let me know if and when I can help. Please remember to use the Template:Ping so that I'm notified of your replies. Cheers! --Felipe (discuss • contribs) 20:39, 26 November 2018 (UTC)

RIP Boris Tsirelson
Boris Tsirelson, the main author of WikiJournal_of_Science/Spaces_in_mathematics and a regular contributor to Wikiversity, died in January 2020. Sylvain Ribault (discuss • contribs) 08:12, 27 April 2020 (UTC)