Talk:Elinor Smith

	NOTICE, please do not remove from top of page.
	I brought this over from Wikipedia. I am the sole contributor to the corresponding article there. (There were two edits by others; one fixed my wikisyntax and the other added a category that I have not copied over).
	Joseph L. Mabel

Sole authorship

I brought this over from Wikipedia. I am the sole contributor to the corresponding article there. (There were two edits by others; one fixed my wikisyntax and the other added a category that I have not copied over).

I have not been able to determine whether contributions like this, which merely duplicate my work at Wikipedia, are welcome here or not. I'm trying this one as an experiment. Please feel free to leave me a note on my user talk page (or to mail me) to let me know whether this is welcome or not: I've been getting mixed signals about that. If it is welcome, I probably have a few dozen of comparable quality where I'm the sole author that I'd be glad to contribute here. - Joseph L. Mabel 06:11, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

Hobbies?

Why the "hobbies" workgroup? She was a professional aviator. I didn't go into the routine work of taking tourists up for sightseeing flights, test piloting, transporting new airplanes to their owners, etc., because she's famous for her record-setting exploits, not for being a working pilot. We could add this, but if she was far less a "hobbyist" than, for example, Lindbergh. -- Joseph L. Mabel 18:29, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

Actually I added it with a question mark. See the edit summary here. Sport was my other option, I was thinking of the records. Certainly she is a professional too, and that is one reason I added engineering, due to her test piloting but again I'm not sure if that is really the appropriate workgroup. Can you think of other more appropriate workgroups that encapsulate her career? Chris Day 18:35, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks; this helps me think about how to categorize non-military aviation. Transponder does have military and civilian aspects, so tentatively used engineering. COSPAS-SARSAT is more than aviation alone, but I used Engineering.

Usually, I think of air refueling as a military discipline; it's easy to forget that early civilian aviators did it as well. It sounds as if transportation generally belongs in engineering. As an aside, there seem to be several defunct food- and agriculture-related workgroups; since I do work with commercial fishing electronics as well as cooking, I would like to see one come back. Fishery should be engineering and food/agriculture. Howard C. Berkowitz 18:58, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

Military was another option I was considering, especially given her membership of the Air Force Association. Chris Day 19:08, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

Air Force Magazine tends to be fairly active; it's their journal, available online. If you do make the mention, while I'm not sure we are quite ready to do press releases, I think they might find this interesting -- a new view on them. Howard C. Berkowitz 19:17, 7 January 2009 (UTC)