This is a Wikipedia user discussion page. This is not an encyclopedia article. If you find this page on any site other than Wikipedia, you are viewing a mirror site. Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user this page belongs to may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia itself. The original page is located at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Donald_Albury.
To leave a message on this page, click If you email me, be aware that even if I am actively editing, I cannot always access my email and it may be a day or two before you receive a reply. *Post new messages to the bottom of my talk page. *Use headlines when starting new talk topics. *Comment about the content of a specific article on the Talk: page of that article, and not here. *Do not make personal attacks or use the page for harassment. *Sign your post using four tildes ( ~~~~ ) Comments which fail to follow the rules above may be immediately deleted.
--> Archive 14 - Archive 13 - Archive 12 - Archive 11 - Archive 10 - Archive 9 - Archive 8 - Archive 7 - Archive 6 - Archive 5 - Archive 4 - Archive 3 - Archive 2 - Archive 1	Archives

Licensing rights granted to Wikimedia Foundation

I grant non-exclusive permission for the Wikimedia Foundation Inc. to relicense my text and media contributions, including any images, audio clips, or video clips, under any copyleft license that it chooses, provided it maintains the free and open spirit of the GFDL. This permission acknowledges that future licensing needs of the Wikimedia projects may need adapting in unforeseen fashions to facilitate other uses, formats, and locations. It is given for as long as this banner remains.

I represent the Dunedin History Museum and the city historian. The reference link(s) to the first land grant and the incorporation of the city is from an old incorrect city of Dunedin page. The dates 1852 and 1925 are incorrect for the first land grant and the founding of the city.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.96.115.241 (talk • contribs) 15:10 4 August 2021 (UTC)

In fact that editor has repeatedly refused to advise me of what the problem is. I'm surprised to hear that editor is an experienced editor as I had not seen need to check. Right off attempting to inject FRINGE political bias and going on to repeatedly demand I debate positions I don't hold is strange for an experienced editor. I have said several times that we can remove and change any parts of my added text and asked how he wants to do that: He still refuses to reply instead insisting on these debates. Invasive Spices (talk) 31 January 2022 (UTC)

News and updates for administrators from the past month (March 2024).

Administrator changes

• Kbdank71
• Kosack
• NrDg
• TLSuda

Guideline and policy news

• An RfC is open to convert all current and future community discretionary sanctions to (community designated) contentious topics procedure.

Technical news

• The Toolforge Grid Engine services have been shut down after the final migration process from Grid Engine to Kubernetes. (T313405)

Arbitration

• An arbitration case has been opened to look into "the intersection of managing conflict of interest editing with the harassment (outing) policy".

Miscellaneous

• Editors are invited to sign up for The Core Contest, an initiative running from April 15 to May 31, which aims to improve vital and other core articles on Wikipedia.

News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2026).

Administrator changes

Vacant0

• Crisco 1492

• Deepfriedokra
• Hbdragon88
• Karl Dickman
• Worm That Turned

CheckUser changes

Daniel Quinlan

Vanamonde93

Mkdw

Oversight changes

Daniel Quinlan

Arbitration

• Due to the result of a recent motion, a rough consensus of administrators at the arbitration enforcement noticeboard may impose an expanded topic ban on Israel, Israelis, Jews, Judaism, Palestine, Palestinians, Islam, and/or Arabs, if an editor's Arab-Israeli conflict topic ban is determined to be insufficient to prevent disruption. At least one diff per area expanded into should be cited.

Miscellaneous

• Voting in the 2026 Steward elections started on 06 February 2026 at 14:00 (UTC) and will end on 27 February 2026 at 14:00 (UTC). The confirmation process for current stewards is being held in parallel. You can automatically check your eligibility to vote.

Sorry I didn't get back to you sooner. I've half-resolved the touchpad issue I was having. I should say that I've used ChatGPT much more than I have Claude. I haven't used Claude for cleaning up wikicode like I have the different iterations of ChatGPT, but I find that it performs about the same at finding sources, with the usual caveats that both sometimes still hallucinate, which become obvious when checking results, which will be of varying quality.

I'll email you with links to a couple of my queries as an examples of Claude's performance. Claude Sonnet 4.5 is presently the default free version. I find that Claude is also good at finding, or attempting to find, the location of something I read on the internet, but can't remember exactly where I read it. You might want to try the Sider AI file analyst, which is the tool Scholar GPT uses to search the internet—it's compatible with Claude 4.5. The Sider fusion utility allows you to switch between different AI models from OpenAI or Anthropic on the fly for a particular task. I'm still learning how to use it. Good luck. Please let me know what kind of experience you have when you try them. Carlstak (talk) 17:49, 16 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I will try those. It can be very frustrating tracking down something I read but didn't make a note of at the time because I was looking for something else. The one time I used ChatGPT to search for sources, it returned one source I was already using, one source that was real, but useless to me, and one fictitious source. Donald Albury 18:01, 16 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I guess you already know I've sent you an email. Just read this article in Wired today. Ugh. Carlstak (talk) 22:14, 16 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sitting here thinking radical thoughts about AI and oligarchs, but we had wine with dinner and I should probably wait til later to make proclamations. Donald Albury 00:26, 17 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I empathize.;-) Carlstak (talk) 00:57, 17 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Did you ever try Claude? I assume you saw my emails. This Beltway insider article is illuminating and scary: "Anthropic is willing to loosen its usage restrictions, but wants to wall off two areas: the mass surveillance of Americans, and the development of weapons that fire without human involvement... The Pentagon says it's unduly restrictive to have to clear individual uses with the company, and has demanded that all AI labs make their models available for "all lawful uses."

Although I find GPT useful, I'm now disinclined to use it. Carlstak (talk) 15:40, 23 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Barely started. Learning how to word prompts. We went to Daytona for a couple of days last week so my wife could go to a quilt show. I've been slow getting up to speed again. I'm going to see how it does finding sources for an article (Zamia oligodonta) I plan to start today, and then maybe ask it to draft the article for me. Donald Albury 15:52, 23 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Ah. My grandma used to participate in quilting bees, lots of gossip going on.;-) I found GPT was very good at cleaning up grammar and spelling mistakes, as well as correcting misformatted ref parameters in a draft (with very specifically worded prompts); haven't really tried Claude for those purposes, although I expect it will work just as well. Carlstak (talk) 16:05, 23 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

My great-grandmother was a prolific quilt maker, but my daughter has the only one of her quilts that I know of in the family. I don't know how many quilting bees there are these days. My wife went to classes (with my sister) for a while, but the quilting shop where they were held closed. I am curious to see if Claude could reduce the time I spend writing an article, especially if I give it examples of articles I have written on related topics. . Donald Albury 16:43, 23 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I think it might perform very well at such tasks on related articles with your close editorial supervision, especially in certain types of articles such as botanical articles that necessarily adhere to regular taxonomy and nomenclature. Carlstak (talk) 17:07, 23 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I hope to see later today. Donald Albury 17:35, 23 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Carlstak: It is done. Claude included only a couple of in-line citations (parenthetical, at that), so I had to spend a lot of time finding just where each bit of content was supported in a source. I'll try specifying in-line citations in future prompts. Anyway, the article is at Zamia oligodonta and the prompt and Claude's output are at Talk:Zamia oligodonta/Claude prompt and output. The biggest saving of time in this attempt was in gathering sources. All of the sources Claude presented were real and pertinent to the article. There was one place where Claude made a statement that I thought was correct, but not directly supported by anything I could find in the sources, so I brought in another source to support a more conservative version of the statement. I am pleased with the result. Donald Albury 16:12, 25 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Nice work, and congrats. Good to see, and pretty impressive, if you ask me. Your work on botanical articles is top-notch, and Claude should be a real time-saver. I've always had a thing for cycads, and was thrilled when I first found a "stand" of coontie in the hammock bordering the saltmarsh near where I lived in the woods for years. I still know the numerous spots in that area where it occurs. Carlstak (talk) 17:17, 25 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

It's a sample of one, but I think AIs like Claude will eventually be essential to growing and maintaining Wikipedia. I started editing Zamia articles because we have a pair of coontie plants in the front yard, a male and a female. I've collected a couple of crops of seeds and have 11 seedlings growing (out of 22 seeds I planted). They are slow growing, and it is a toss up whether I will live long enough to see those plants reach reproductive age. Donald Albury 17:55, 25 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that Claude and other LLMs will eventually be essential to growing and maintaining Wikipedia, and even perhaps useful for weeding out unedited LLM crap (wouldn't that be ironic.;-) I grew coontie from its orange seeds, and as you say, they are very slow-growing—mine were still about a foot high the last time I saw them. I see them used in plantings only occasionally nowadays, but they're great landscaping plants—I planted them on the sides of the footpath to my cabin. I've seen some large ones in the yards of Victorian houses in St. Augustine proper that might be a hundred years old, I think. Carlstak (talk) 19:23, 25 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know how old these are. They were there when we bought the house 12 years ago, and the house is close to 70 years old, so they are somewhere in that range. They survived being buried under a pile of wood chips for six months about 10 years ago. There are some pictures of them at Zamia integrifolia#Reproduction. I prompted Claude for another article, asking for in-line citations, and it complied. Of course, I had to reformat all of the citations, but that was easy with find and replace. Now I have to find the page numbers for the cites. Off to the grocery store now, so no Wikipedia for a couple of hours. Donald Albury 19:44, 25 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Coonties are well-nigh indestructible. Glad to have a powerful AI tool in the editing toolkit. I'll be using Claude since OpenAI's president gave $25 million to the MAGA Inc super PAC. I hope Anthropic doesn't capitulate to that poser Hegseth. Carlstak (talk) 22:43, 25 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, that is a worry. Donald Albury 00:13, 26 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

For what it's worth: AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations, "Leading AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games in 95 per cent of cases." Good lord. Carlstak (talk) 02:56, 26 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

PS: I forgot to say "nice pics!" Carlstak (talk) 03:01, 26 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

We have been warned before about giving AIs access to weapons. Have you read any of the Berserker (novel series)?

Even putting AIs in the decision-making loop is scarey. Donald Albury 17:16, 26 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, as if Donald Trump having control of the nuclear codes wasn't scary enough. Sheesh. I haven't read the Berserker series, but it seems to be the sort of science fiction I could get into. The bit about Homo sapiens being "the only sentient species aggressive enough to counter Berserkers" is kinda grimly funny. I used to read a lot more fiction than I do now; I thought that when I "retired" I'd have more time to do things I've been wanting to do, but somehow it hasn't worked out that way.;-) Carlstak (talk) 22:42, 26 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I'm reading a lot less fiction than I used to. That is partly due to Wikipedia. It certainly seemed to me that I had less free time after I retired. I was semi-retired for 12 years, got laid-off in a staff reduction when I was 60 and never found another full-time job. Donald Albury 00:08, 27 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, Donald Albury. This is a bot-delivered message letting you know that Draft:Kotbara, Aurangabad, a page you created, has not been edited in at least five months. Drafts that have not been edited for six months may be deleted, so if you wish to retain the page, please edit it again or request that it be moved to your userspace.

If the page has already been deleted, you can request it be undeleted so you can continue working on it.

Thank you for your submission to Wikipedia. FireflyBot (talk) 20:08, 19 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Donald Albury. Thank you for your work on Northern Highlands of Florida. Another editor, SunDawn, has reviewed it as part of new pages patrol and left the following comment:

Thank you for creating the article! Have a good weekend!

To reply, leave a comment here and begin it with {{Re|SunDawn}}. (Message delivered via the Page Curation tool, on behalf of the reviewer.)

✠ SunDawn ✠ Contact me! 03:23, 21 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Glades culture is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Glades culture until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article until the discussion has finished.

Iljhgtn (they/them · talk) 19:12, 27 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

News and updates for administrators from the past month (February 2026).

Administrator changes

• Brendanconway
• Calmer Waters
• Hut 8.5
• Joe Roe
• VersedFenrir

CheckUser changes

Ks0stm

Oversight changes

Ks0stm

Guideline and policy news

• Following an RfC, the web archival service archive.today has been deprecated; links to the site should be removed.
• A request for comment is open to discuss retiring CSD criterion R3 in favour of handling such redirects through RfD.

Arbitration

• Following a motion, remedy 9.1 of the Conduct in deletion-related editing case has been amended to limit TenPoundHammer to one XfD nomination or PROD per 24-hour period.
• Following a motion, the Iskandar323 further POV pushing motion has been rescinded.
• The Arbitration Committee has passed a housekeeping motion rescinding a number of outdated remedies and enforcement provisions across multiple legacy cases. In most instances, existing sanctions remain in force and continue to be appealable through the usual processes, while some case-specific remedies were amended or clarified.

Miscellaneous

• Following the 2026 Steward Elections, the following editors have been appointed as stewards: A09, AmandaNP, Barras, Count Count, M7, SHB2000, Teles and VIGNERON.
• An Unreferenced articles backlog drive is taking place in March 2026 to reduce the backlog of articles tagged with {{Unreferenced}}. You can help reduce the backlog by adding citations to these articles. Sign up to participate!