Talk:Peter Woit

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Position[edit]

Peter Woit does not have a "permanent position" at Columbia University. He only has a renewable appointment as a teacher of low level courses and as an IT technician.

Start[edit]

Updated and expanded the brief Peter Woit entry using public domain information, on the basis that his moderated weblog, 'Not Even Wrong', is now drawing a great deal of attention from leading string theorists and their critics.

Is Peter Woit self-promoting? (apparently not)[edit]

A large number of anonymous edits both here and at not even wrong appear to be emanating from an AOL account. (AOL addresses start with 172.188 and similar numbers). I just removed a huge amount of linkspam and Peter-Woit-promotion from there. zowie 00:14, 5 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I just got an e-mail from Peter. He says it's not him. zowie 14:34, 6 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Can you not delete links without discussion here first?[edit]

Zowie and others, stop editing Wiki if you don't know the rules. You should discuss proposed changes here before deleting content, or it is VANDALISM. The links you have removed are to newspaper articles, and it is a feature of Wikipedia that information can be added of this sort.

You aren't doing any service by removing information.

Peter Woit does not do a good job of keeping a concise list of relevant information and links abailable to the media coverage of the problems in string theory, so this is not a duplicate. You have destroyed the work over the last year of keeping an up to date list of relevant references. 172.189.165.249 15:47, 28 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Copy of question to Zowie being placed on personal page, so that there is some chance he might see it and read it:

Hi - I notice you say you have removed all the links to not even wrong newspaper articles I placed as they appeared over several months? The AOL account is England. Can I ask why you vandalised the article? (I'm anon because I get more abuse from string theorists and their defenders if I disclose my name - for example the abuse you would probably dish out seeing that you've deleted links to information for a bogus reason of "self-promotion????".) It is an information resource on the work being done to expose the bogus self-promotion by the community of string theorists which results in alternatives such as my work, being prevented from being allowed updates on the CERN Document Server and other places which are now controlled by arxiv. (Cern ext section has closed and the docs there can't be updated; cern only accepts ext docs via arxiv which censors scientific work without it being read or checked, in preference to string theory/mainstream speculation.) 172.189.165.249 15:37, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

(For what it's worth, I responded to this on my personal talk page 'way back in June...) zowie 19:52, 3 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Irrelevant trivia[edit]

There seems to be a battle going on between someone semi-anonymous ("The Undertow") and someone completely anonymous (193.164.130.30) about whether it matters - if true - that PW took a French exam for Nathan Myhrvold at Princeton and whether PW's grandfather was a Nazi collaborator in Latvia. These things - if they can be verified - ought to belong to a separate "trivia" section rather than being in the main article. Cgoakley 09:04, 2 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Birthday confirmed[edit]

Peter Woit has confirmed on his blog at [1] that he was born on September 11, 1957. 82.21.56.129 (talk) 16:42, 13 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Atheist?[edit]

I'm pretty sure he's an atheist, not in the anti-religious sense, but I'm hesitant to add the tag because I haven't found a reference for it. I have found his review of Hawking's new book, which states that he's all for leaving God out of physics (but then also states that Hawking is pretty pathetic to use M-theory as a weapon, well, not pathetic, but that's the tone, heh). Anyways, I was wondering if anyone found any actual sources. 64.234.0.101 (talk) 23:31, 28 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Position at Columbia[edit]

This is an easy one folks. Look up his faculty bio on Columbia's website. It is clear and completely unambiguous. It seems that some interested parties (Woit himself?) are intent on covering up the fact that part of his employment status at Columbia is as the Departmental Computer Administrator. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.85.192.227 (talk) 05:53, 23 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I suppose it's about the relative importance of those positions. Per the guideline on the manual of style for biographies (WP:OPENPARA), the opening paragraph of a biography should only say why the person is significant. Judging by the article Woit's position as departmental computer administrator is of neglible importance and this information is not appropriate in the lead. 92.2.91.151 (talk) 03:56, 7 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
To further the point, Woit is significant because of his book, blog and related opinions about string theory. In turn these are significant because they come from someone with a background in professional physics and who is a senior lecturer in mathematics at a reputable university. Being departmental computer administrator does not factor into this. — 92.2.91.151 (talk) 04:09, 7 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah it kinda does, if you know how academic departments operate. But then, if you know this, you will also have a good feel for how this character should be rated. I just wonder how young folk and lay outsiders can tell the wheat from the chaff, when wikipedia pages can make a person look more accomplished than they really are.137.205.183.109 (talk) 16:00, 30 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified[edit]

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