User talk:Rich Farmbrough/Archive/2010 September

This is an archive of past discussions about User:Rich Farmbrough. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

hey, why is Divya Singh page is appealed for deletion ? i am adding content to it. all the sources given their is true for the person. she is representing Indian team. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.177.162.236 (talk) 16:37, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

I have no idea, perhaps if you look at the deletion discussion you will find out. Rich Farmbrough, 16:45, 31 August 2010 (UTC).

I just checked and I don't see it on the articles for deletion page. --Kumioko (talk) 16:52, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Neither her article nor her sister's have ever been listed for deletion, let alone review. I have removed both tags, also the wikify tags which seem unnecessary, and cleaned up a little. Rich Farmbrough, 16:58, 31 August 2010 (UTC).

Thanks a lot..:) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.177.170.243 (talk) 04:08, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

A tag has been placed on Delete me now, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section G1 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the page appears to have no meaningful content or history, and the text is unsalvageably incoherent. If the page you created was a test, please use the sandbox for any other experiments you would like to do. You may also wish to consider using a Wizard to help you create articles - see the Article Wizard. Feel free to leave a message on my talk page if you have any questions about this.

If you think that this notice was placed here in error, you may contest the deletion by adding {{hangon}} to the top of the page that has been nominated for deletion (just below the existing speedy deletion or "db" tag - if no such tag exists then the page is no longer a speedy delete candidate and adding a hangon tag is unnecessary), coupled with adding a note on the talk page explaining your position, but be aware that once tagged for speedy deletion, if the page meets the criterion, it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the page that would render it more in conformance with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Lastly, please note that if the page does get deleted, you can contact one of these admins to request that they userfy the page or have a copy emailed to you. ROCKOPREM^talk 13:09, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Sorry for this message! Was that page created on some purpose?? Looked like it had some history! ROCKOPREM^talk 13:12, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Y Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 13:25, 2 September 2010 (UTC).

I wonder if you can explain why you keep creating Delete me now? On the face of it you seem to be doing things which would be more appropriate in either a userspace page or the sandbox, rather than an article. I am intrigued to know your reason. JamesBWatson (talk) 13:16, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes I usually use test pages (you can see a list of them, together with other cruft at User:Rich_Farmbrough#All_my_pages), or sometimes I go to test-wiki. However sometimes I need a page in mainspace and on the live wiki. This is fairly harmless as the page only exists for a few minutes at most, and is not linked to from anywhere (except my talk archive!). Rich Farmbrough, 13:44, 2 September 2010 (UTC).

Please do no remove a CFD tag for something in progress. Thanks. Soundsboy (talk) 17:56, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Well how many days does it take to list a category for discussion? There is still no entry on the CfD page, and the previous tagging was incomplete.Rich Farmbrough, 18:57, 2 September 2010 (UTC).

I am not unduly alarumned, this example is likely due to the bot working double time to catch up with the recent delays. Rich Farmbrough 19:46 2 September 2010 (UTC).

I don't know what that means - does it mean you are duly alarmed and fixed the problem, or that you don't plan to address the problem at all? The speed of the bot shouldn't affect the actual edits it makes, no? I'm commenting here just to avoid stopping the bot. — Carl (CBM · talk) 22:38, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

Due to the backlog separate threads were running. This is not normally a problem, since the the article will not generally pick up additional changes from a second visit. The number of pages that don't get fixed on the first visit is normally about 1%, and the place I would prefer to be putting my effort is reducing this 1% - my target is about 0.25% which would be due to new templates and the like, and would be harder to automate, especially as I am, remember, using a third party tool, and an out-dated hacked version at that. The more my effort gets distracted from this, the more the pool of undated articles gets polluted with "problem" items, and the harder it becomes to see quick win improvements (for example I resolved several hundred today by a template fix, which with a backlog of 7000+ articles was almost invisible, but normally would be a sore thumb - I also built a useful management tool that enables me to see which categories are having problems). Also bear in mind that where category lag is a problem, successfully suppressing "minor" edits just means I will have to null-edit the article by hand. Rich Farmbrough, 23:15, 2 September 2010 (UTC).

In AWB, we recently did some progress in reducing the number of additional changes on second runs, recently. I keep recording cases that AWB failed to make a fix in the first run or that parsing an article created a new issue that needs fixing. -- Magioladitis (talk) 08:22, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

That's cool but I use a special hacked version that doesn't arrange references, so I will have to do some kind of source merge. I used to just pick the latest release. Rich Farmbrough, 21:39, 3 September 2010 (UTC).

[1] LOL. -- Magioladitis (talk) 07:27, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Funnily enough I have misread that "adult" myself. Rich Farmbrough, 13:57, 4 September 2010 (UTC).

Hi. I have an AWB request for you. Can you split the giant category Category:Populated places in Slovenia by municipal category? I've done the first two but its best done with AWB. You can find the categories at User:Dr. Blofeld/Launch Pad 1. Dr. Blofeld 12:23, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Somethign went wrong with this. Also some of your recat claims don't recat and are just minor fixes.. Dr. Blofeld 17:59, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Yeah you;re forgetting the the Municipality of part to the categories. Please fix! Dr. Blofeld 18:00, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Wow, excellent job!! Yes you have a point about it seeming weird replacing the municipalities in the by municpality cats but they are both about the town and muncipality. Given the lack of info on them it would be unfeasible right now to split the town form the munciipality. You could place the articles in the relative municipal categories for the time being until I or Kaktus or any of the others has enough energy to split the towns from the muncipality with enough content? Ideally we should have seperate articles on the muncipalities form the main towns though.... Eventually I'm sure we will... Dr. Blofeld 18:15, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Dunno. OK we'll leave it for now then, i'll addressing the idea of splitting the municpialities form the towns at a later date. Dr. Blofeld 18:30, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for making the change clarifying the title. I had kicked that idea around and never got around to it. I went through and changed all 300+ articles that linked to it to the new one. Just wanted to let you know. --Kumioko (talk) 18:00, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Good stuff, I was going to drop you a note. I saw your edit summary on a page in Recent Changes, funnily enough, that's what triggered the action. Rich Farmbrough, 13:59, 4 September 2010 (UTC).

Hi Rich, I notice you've made a couple of edits to the MoMK article and and that you have accidentally buggered-up the template at the top of the page. Could you please fix it? The page is currently protected, so mere mortals such as me cannot fix the problem. I assume you have the necessary super-powers to do so. Thanks. Maybe there is a wider point too. The page has been protected to enforce editing by consensus only and the admins who are policing that protection have come in for some criticism for wielding their powers. I think it looks bad if another admin (you in this case) can just walk in and make edits without consensus. I appreciate that you are just tidying up mistakes in the article but it could be seen as an admin flaunting their privileges, especially by the several editors who are new to Wikipedia. At the very least, a note of what you are doing, in the talk page, might clarify things for those who have not necessarily worked it out for themselves. Cheers. Bluewave (talk) 08:09, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Rich, I noticed this too, and have fixed it. If it was a AWB bug, you may want to fix that. If it was a user error, well, .. umm, I'm sure you are below your quota for this year. ;-)

Bluewave, besides the mangled bit, which was an accident, Rich's edits didn't change any of the text, and the layout&formatting changes he made have project wide consensus already. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 08:59, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for fixing that. I'm not trying to make a big thing of this, but a note on the talk page to say that the changes being made would not affect the text and already have a wider consensus might have been tactful at a time when some of the editors (not me, as it happens) seem a bit upset at admins preventing people from editing the article. Particularly so, as some of the editors concerned are very new to Wikipedia and are probably unaware of the project-wide consensus. Bluewave (talk) 09:24, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for your notes, yes it is me typing into the edit pane instead of the search box... Rich Farmbrough, 13:52, 4 September 2010 (UTC).

Sorry - saw them redlinked after the others had been created yesterday, and I thought that a decision on renaming them had been taken. I'll tag them for deletion as soon as I can. --Ser Amantio di Nicolao^{Che dicono a Signa?}_{Lo dicono a Signa.} 18:25, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Awesome, thanks. --Ser Amantio di Nicolao^{Che dicono a Signa?}_{Lo dicono a Signa.} 18:40, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Thx for response. There is a fair chance that I may only need 1 search and that is to search for all section titles containing the word "abuse". It is not important that a bang uptodate version of Wikipedia is used. --Penbat (talk) 19:30, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

User:Rich Farmbrough/temp78 Rich Farmbrough, 23:18, 4 September 2010 (UTC).

thx very helpful. I have copied it to my user space.--Penbat (talk) 07:32, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

just occurred to me that it would be very useful to have a list of redirects with the word "abuse" in the title. Any chance of that ? --Penbat (talk) 10:35, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes, easy enough. Rich Farmbrough, 10:36, 5 September 2010 (UTC).

524 results, same place. Rich Farmbrough, 10:59, 5 September 2010 (UTC).

thx. i have copied them to my userspace. --Penbat (talk) 11:06, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Regarding your recent work on subcategorizing settlements in Slovenia, could I ask you to double-check the coding you're using to do it? Just between A and K alone, I've found at least a dozen articles today where your edit was a weirdly formatted error, such as "[[Category:Populated places in the Municipality of the [[Gorenja vas-Poljane]]" (complete with the excess brackets) instead of the actual Category:Populated places in the Municipality of Gorenja vas-Poljane or "[[Category:Populated places in the Municipality of City Municipality of Ljubljana]]" instead of the actual Category:Populated places in the Municipality of Ljubljana. Bearcat (talk) 06:56, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Scanning.... Scanning.... Rich Farmbrough, 10:36, 5 September 2010 (UTC).

OK all odd ones are fixed. Rich Farmbrough, 17:26, 5 September 2010 (UTC).

Hi, can i now remove the uncategorized tag from the EVER_TEAM page since it has been categorized. thanks.--Sazarian (talk) 07:10, 3 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes. Rich Farmbrough, 07:36, 6 September 2010 (UTC).

I've just spotted an edit SmackBot made[2] which added {{Use dmy dates}} to an article. This doesn't appear to be on the bot's list of tasks, so while I'm not objecting, I'm concerned that it's impossible for another editor to know whether this is SmackBot behaving as desired, or if it's malfunctioning and needs to be shut off. me_and (talk) 11:30, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Y Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 17:26, 5 September 2010 (UTC).

Can I ask, then, how SmackBot decides to tag things? I'm dubious of the decision in that case, at the least—I find it difficult to see how a bot could determine "close national ties", and at the time of that tagging, yyyy-mm-dd dates considerably outnumbered d mmmm yyyy ones in that article. me_and (talk) 17:53, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Right, that makes sense. Thanks for clearing it up!

I am indeed Enfield-based; I moved here a little over a year ago. Why'd you ask?

--me_and (talk) 18:19, 5 September 2010 (UTC)

Ah, cool! I'm just the other side of Enfield Town. Whereabouts are you based now? me_and 17:15, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

Archive Rich Farmbrough, 20:20, 5 September 2010 (UTC).

+++

Rich, thanks for making the picture on the Douglass High School - Kingsport article. When I uploaded the picture originally, it was huge and I had no way to make it smaller.

I would like to upload more pictures, but the resolution of the camera is rather high. Can you tell me how to lower it, or could I send you the pictures and you do it? I would appreciate it. I'd like for it to conform to WIKI standards, but I've a novice at adding pics to anything. Please get back to me at: douglassriverview@gmail.com Thanks!

Calvin

Y Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 20:21, 7 September 2010 (UTC).

Archive; Rich Farmbrough, 20:21, 5 September 2010 (UTC).

Hi there. Do you have time to please delete this subpage which I created last year and completely forgot about it? Thank you. Amsaim (talk) 19:56, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

 Done Rich Farmbrough, 20:04, 7 September 2010 (UTC).

Thanks very much. Amsaim (talk) 20:06, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

I forgot to mention the documentation page. That needs to be deleted as well. Thank you. Amsaim (talk) 20:12, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks again for your assistance. Amsaim (talk) 20:16, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

Could you explain the rationale behind using DEFAULTSORT only to capitalise the first letter in the second word of articles with >1 word titles? JFW | T@lk 22:37, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

These are the instructions in Template:DEFAULTSORT to have correct categorisation. -- Magioladitis (talk) 22:54, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

yes but they are not great, our documentation falls down on this. I started writing a documentation page somewhere - I have put a little in my FAQ, which I include here for what it is worth.

Generally, in order to sort categories without regard to case, and people by family name.

• Example John Smith => Smith, John
• Example SCUBA diving => Scuba Diving

No, the name listed in the category will be the name of the article,

Diacritics are sorted differently from normal letters so they are replaced with the nearest typographical equivalent in the sort key.

There are many exceptions where specific categories have therr own sorting rules. These are best dealt with by giving each category entry its own explicit sort key.

There are also a few exceptions where numbers are best expressed in leading-zero numeric format rather than words or normal ordinals (third or 3rd might become 3, 03 or 003, depending on the nature of the article).

Rich Farmbrough, 22:59, 7 September 2010 (UTC).

Oh addendum, - "Why are the words capitalised rather than lower cased or upper cased?"

• Because that is how we treat names, for historical reasons, and while names like "Smith, John" will the same with respect to, say, "Smith and Co" regardless of the case of "and", some names like "Alfred the Great", names form the Far East, and so forth will not have a comma. Rich Farmbrough, 23:03, 7 September 2010 (UTC).

Hi Rich -I notice that in October last year (yeah - strange that it wasn't noticed earlier) SmackBot added both {{EAntarctica-geo-stub}} and {{Antarctica-stub}} to a bunch of geo-stubs. They should have had only the geo-stub, since the other one is redundant to them. Any chance of a quick bot-run to find anything tagged with both and remove the generic one? Cheers, Grutness...wha? 01:01, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

Y Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 01:15, 8 September 2010 (UTC).

Cheers, Grutness...wha?

(Copied back ) Do you have an example? Rich Farmbrough, 01:07, 8 September 2010 (UTC).

Never mind looks like there are 13 such articles, easy to fix. Rich Farmbrough, 01:10, 8 September 2010 (UTC).

Fixed, guess you'll find that like this diff, SB moved the stub templates to the end rather than adding them. Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 01:14, 8 September 2010 (UTC).

I need data to reduce reparsing in AWB. For example I need reports like Wikipedia_talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Bugs/Archive_17#Handling_format_parameter_after_removal_of_dead_end_in_references and Wikipedia_talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Bugs/Archive_17#Adding_bullets_AND_removing_break_lines. Or cases like this one.

If you have any please report on AWB's bug page or my talk page. -- Magioladitis (talk) 16:46, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

Hi

I notice on AWB's page you said that you had to install a new directory to get it to work. Can I ask how you did this? At the minute it won't even let me install :( --5 albert square (talk) 22:04, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Hm, it's a bit of a memory stretch, but I think I manually extracted the contents. Rich Farmbrough, 23:17, 4 September 2010 (UTC).

Can I ask how you do that? I'm a complete novice at stuff like that so it would have to be in laymans terms lol --5 albert square (talk) 23:19, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

Is there any way to stop SmackBot from doing this? It's defaultsorted Big Kenny as "Kenny, Big" several times. "Big Kenny" is treated as a stage name, not a first-lastname combo (his real middle name is Kenneth), so it should stay sorted under B. Ten Pound Hammer, his otters and a clue-bat • ^{(Otters want attention)} 19:14, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes thusly, {{DEFAULTSORT:Big Kenny}}. I have done several thousand of these, mostly musical groups and names such as "George the Helpless" but including a lot of DJs and MCs. By the way were those M*A*S*H episodes ever merged? Rich Farmbrough, 19:24, 8 September 2010 (UTC).

I don't know. Ten Pound Hammer, his otters and a clue-bat • ^{(Otters want attention)} 20:18, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

[3] and the two edits following. -- Magioladitis (talk) 23:11, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

• All the more reason to leave the re-arranging to AWB!

mtx stand for mazda transmission standard

75 is actually the ft/lb rating of the trans. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.227.148.56 (talk) 07:51, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Great to know. What article are we talking about again? Rich Farmbrough, 12:50, 9 September 2010 (UTC).

SmackBot does a great job. However, I am puzzled by a change in build 513. I am curious what prompted adding code to change "cite" to "Cite" in the citation template. According to Template:Cite news: "All parameter names must be lower case." In a recent SmackBot edit to Lambert-St._Louis_International_Airport this edit occured. I also vaguely remember another bot recently changing "Cite" to "cite" in another article. --Dan Dassow (talk) 14:05, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Parameters are the bits like "title =" - and keeping them lower case is something I support in general (I prefer ISBN = to the bastardized "isbn =" - the template does support both). As far as capitalizing template names, SmackBot has a list of templates that it canonicalizes, I noticed recently that there are a lot of uses of "Citeweb" "Citebook" etc, replacing these with "Cite book" and Cite web" helps reduce the learning curve for editors - template names should be made up of space separated whole words (or standard acronyms like NASA, ISBN etc.) in sentence case, wherever possible. Rich Farmbrough, 14:13, 9 September 2010 (UTC).

Rich, Thank you for the clarification. I generally think of parameters as the arguments of a subroutine or function. However, there are some formal language theorists who insist that the subroutine or function name is also a parameter. Wikipedia:Citation_templates follows the convention of capitalizing "Cite". I prefer this convention. Unfortunately, or ironically, Template:Cite news follows the convention of "cite" in the examples given. I also cringe at seeing "isbn ="; it is visually jarring. --Dan Dassow (talk) 17:06, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

I wanted to leave a message on the bot's talk page but it seems to be protected. Would it be possible to add {{userspace draft}} to the list of templates to which the bot adds dates? The Article Wizard covers most new drafts, but occasionally the template is added manually without the date parameter. I've asked at the template talk page about the advisability of it, but nobody has responded so I'm going to be bold and just request it. Thanks. 69.181.249.92 (talk) 03:00, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

I think this thread may have been overlooked. 69.181.249.92 (talk) 19:09, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes, it does already date {{Userspace draft}}, however I am always cautions about running out outside mainspace (and usually do it semi manually), so it doesn't get done very often. Rich Farmbrough, 19:13, 9 September 2010 (UTC).

Fair enough. Thanks for the consideration (and the Bot itself, which, despite it's critics, does a very important task). 69.181.249.92 (talk) 19:51, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

UB-7 is found in August 2010 in Black Sea 15 miles south of Varna. First it was taught that this is S-34 /С-34/ Russian submarine sunk in 1942, but later it was found that this is UB-7 / sunk September 1916. Video: http://dnesplus.bg/VideoNews.aspx?n=502100

My e-mail: i.l.bekyarov@gmail.com

Bekyarov —Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.190.193.153 (talk) 06:42, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

How interesting.Rich Farmbrough, 06:45, 10 September 2010 (UTC).

Why does this change {{flagicon}} away from the direct transclusion to the redirect {{Flag icon}}? example. Thanks, Rambo's Revenge (talk) 10:34, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

Flag icon is easier to read and to remember, being made up of real words. The cost of the redirect is negligible, we should move the template as we have done with thousands of others with run-together words, extra capitals, extra hyphens, camel case, abbreviations and so forth, however there is/was resistance to this and I was too lazy to go and put the case for a move. (We did BR of BRD.) Rich Farmbrough, 16:57, 10 September 2010 (UTC).

I am getting tired of seeing AWB or bot edits turning an unreferenced tag on a living people categorised page into a BLPunreferenced tag without checking that the article did actually lack references and the living person cat was valid. ie this article has references, so BLP sources is the appropriate tag to use. Please take full responsibility for your AWB edits, don't just assume both the tag and the cat are valid, and I'm going to call for a block on any bot that does likewise. Make a database list and go through it manually, if you want to, but please stop putting incorrect tags on articles.The-Pope (talk) 05:45, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

What do you mean both tags are valid? {{Unreferenced}} and {{BLPunreferenced}} {{BLP unsourced}}^>[RF] are mutually exclusive. Unreferenced article which is about a biography of a living people (BLP) should be tagged with BLPUnreferenced. -- Magioladitis (talk) 06:29, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

I've clarified my statements above to hopefully make it clear what my problem is. To be fair to Rich, this is the first AWB one I've seen, most of the others are by bots, mainly MZBot, I think.The-Pope (talk) 07:34, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

OK. Now it makes sense. -- Magioladitis (talk) 07:46, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

And here's one by Smackbot. I think that this task should be removed from all bots and put into a database intersection list so that a human can check if the cleanup tag (look for all BLP specific templates, not just unref) should be converted to a BLP equiv tag, or if either the living people cat or tag is invalid. There are just too many errors to leave it with bots. Of course I know that the bot doesn't cause the error - someone else has either tagged wrongly or cleaned up without removing/changing the template, but the Bot is propagating the error.The-Pope (talk) 08:48, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

BLPunreferenced is more accurate than unreferenced for living people. Then we need user's intervention to determine if the article is really unreferenced. But BLPunref will attract more attention than unref anyway. So, in most cases the edit is useful (in the worst case, not worse than the previous tag). -- Magioladitis (talk) 09:11, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

It isn't more accurate if the article already has references or isn't actually a BLP. Where is the bot request/approval for this task? "attracting more attention" is a very poor reason to be propagating errors. You are attracting attention to articles that don't need attention - thereby reducing attention on those that actually do need attention. Can we at least try a list instead? The-Pope (talk) 09:51, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Do you have any example where the template was added in a non-BLP? -- Magioladitis (talk) 09:57, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Do you have any stats on how many unref to BLPunref changes the bot makes in a day? If an editor was doing this we'd be warning him/her and not accepting it. Why are accepting a bot making incorrect edits?The-Pope (talk) 12:32, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

OK. Here's the situation: We have a BLP that it's marked with unref tag. This may be wrong or not. This can only be decided by a human. A bot goes and re-categorises article into the BLP unref category by changing the tag. Now, editors dealing with BLPs can spot the page in question easier and decide to keep or discard the tag. This is an improvement. Of course, there is a question if we can do better but what is sure is that the bot helps us with this change. -- Magioladitis (talk) 12:38, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

It is correct to say that the tag is wrong, however in this case it is the unref part of it that is wrong, not the BLP part. There's no reason we can't fix some unref. to refimprove (I thought we already did). Clearly we must assume that the BLP identifiers are correct, we need to err on the side of caution with BLP. Z-Bot has converting to BLP-unref as a specific task and Erik9-Bot tagged a large number (many htousands) articles as unreferenced, with very high accuracy - I was able to review that group automatically and remove several thousand that had had references added since. In short, what a bot can do (with moderate effort) is:

• Categorise articles as being referenced or unreferenced.
• Categorise articles as being about living people.

Automated systems cannot, without a lot of effort,

• Categorise articles as being poorly or well referenced.
• Categorise articles as not being about living people.

This means that of the six tag states an article can be in a bot can move articles only into five, and not from each of the other states.

From/To	Unref BLP	Refimprove BLP	Referenced BLP	Unref	Refimprove	Referenced
Unref BLP	No change	Yes	No	No	No	No
Refimprove BLP	No	No change	No	No	No	No
Referenced BLP	Yes	No	No change	No	No	No
Unref	Yes	Yes	No	No change	Yes	No
Refimprove	No	Yes	No	No	No change	No
Referenced	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	No change

This is quite limited, and the agents currently running are even more conservative than this in their changes. I think that on the basis of this, it right to say that what has happened is an invalid tag has been replaced with another invalid tag, and it is also correct to say that a less conservative agent could have changed this to the valid tag you chose eventually (BLP sources) although spotting references conservatively would not guarantee that it would always be able to make such a change when it would be OK to do so. (For example, unref tagging will not tag an article with external links, but conversely an article with external links will not be promoted from unref to refimprove, let alone referenced.) I will look into this. Rich Farmbrough, 12:49, 9 September 2010 (UTC).

Maybe it was just bad luck on the first smackbot one I checked was wrong. Maybe the AWB one that Rich did was just testing, so he was looking for other things. I understand all of the above and if you think that the bot can accurately move an article from unref to BLPrefimprove, then that is great. I've previously been told (here and here) that a bot can't do that. But if there is doubt, uncertainty or a relatively high chance that we go from one incorrect tag to another, why don't we simply make a list of them, so that real people can work through the list and decide what the right tag is? Do you have any rough indication of how many of these sort of "incompatible" tag changes happen each day? The idea that moving articles into a group that currently has 25500 members to give it "more attention" is also a bit misguided, in my opinion. Sticking it onto a list of a few hundred, maybe a thousand, articles that are in Category:Living people but have a non-BLP specific tag (how many BLP specific tags are there? UBLP and RefimpBLP I know... any others?) would be more useful than dropping it into the already overwhelmingly large UBLP pile.The-Pope (talk) 14:31, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

I'm actually scanning for BLP unsourced => BLP sources right now, the headline figure looks like between .1 and 1%. The category living people is about 485,000, compared with 25,000 in BLP unsourced and 35,000 in BLP articles lacking sources. I would suspect that there are many more unref. or lacking BLPs than we see. Rich Farmbrough, 15:47, 9 September 2010 (UTC).

Good luck, I tend to agree with some people who think that it is just too hard and qualitative to automate a BLPunref to BLPsources... how do you rule out IMDB/personal sites/blog/deadlinks etc. I've just gone through a portion of BLPUnref from April 2010 and found about 14 of about 80 that had refs, about 3 or 4 BLPPROD candidates and the rest valid BLPunrefs.

I was a big proponent of the "if you let us know, we'll ref them" approach. I've spent hours over the past few months allocating UBLPs to WikiProjects and working with Tim to get the Dashbot lists set up. We now have virtually complete coverage of the 25500 UBLPs into the 700 odd wikiproject lists... but even when I notify the projects, we rarely have a list drop by 10 a day, unless one of the 10-20 people who are fairly active do a run through a section. That isn't a sustainable way to reference 25,000 articles, especially, when like you say, many "new" UBLPs are being found each day from old Unrefeds or Untaged. I'm wondering if Kevin, Scott etc were right. Give it a couple more months then delete the remainder.The-Pope (talk) 16:52, 9 September 2010 (UTC)

Well, at least we have the information; AS I remarked on another discussion, a three year backlog means articles are leaving the category due to death. If we started deleting I would suggest we use a trailing automated AfD, probably posting a months worth on a single page - the trailing months do seem small but I've not kept statistics over time. Rich Farmbrough, 17:56, 9 September 2010 (UTC).

What are Refereneces (sic)? And do offline references not count anymore? This is the problem I'm talking about. Automated process don't work well. Humans reading articles would not make these errors, or if the do, they'll be warned about it. I'm not actually trawling through hundreds of your edits to find these problems, they are just appearing in almost every one I've checked, maybe I'm just (un)lucky.The-Pope (talk) 05:37, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

[Post-archive note:Of course the type was my (human) typo while investigating the editor's queries. RF.]

Rich, why did SmackBot remove this: {{[[Template:Wikibooks|Wikibooks|How to reduce energy usage]]}} here: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Energy_conservation_in_the_United_States&diff=380584021&oldid=380538082 and mark is deceptively as merely m (Date maintenance tags and general fixes: build 478:) --Elvey (talk) 21:59, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

The {{Citation needed}} tag and can achieve reductions in energy consumptions of up to 69%.^{[citation needed]} was dated, and the Wikibooks template was moved to where belongs in External links. Rgds, Rich Farmbrough, 22:10, 10 September 2010 (UTC).

Ah, moved, not deleted.  :-) --Elvey (talk) 23:09, 10 September 2010 (UTC)

Someone has been deleting sources and references from a page about me. If there is a hidden reason for silent blindside attacks on a disabled pensioner you might want to let me know. Any claim made about me can be confirmed by talking to real people on the phone or emailing them. I want direct contact with the people who are editing reputable sources and a reference to an article in a News Limited publication. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dupisha (talk • contribs) 09:54, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

In fairness the IP was removing a statement about "notoriety" not suppressing references. By the way leaving a link to the article you are talking about does help. I have cleaned the article a little. Rich Farmbrough, 11:20, 11 September 2010 (UTC).

Hello, why is SmackBot removing stub templates from stubs? {{Uncategorized stub}} doesn't encompass what kind of stub a stub is. 70.29.210.72 (talk) 02:10, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Well it is a WP:AWB General Fix to remove stub templates from longer articles. It is however a SmackBot specific fix to change {{Uncategorized}} to {{Uncategorized stub}} if there are stub templates present. SmackBot generally applies its fixes first and GF's second - doing it the other way around creates different problems. However, there is a bug/feature request (Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser/Bugs) current to get AWB to make the template change as a GF which would solve this particular order effect. Rich Farmbrough, 02:17, 12 September 2010 (UTC).

Howdy. When you create new cats for articles with dead ext. links, you may want to add some parameters to fix what is displayed.--Rockfang (talk) 07:47, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

{{Monthly clean up category/Messages/Articles with dead external links}} deals with the "message" part, "hidden" is default, "cat" is worked out by the template itself, I have created {{Monthly clean up category/Messages/Type/Articles with dead external links}} to deal with the remaining parameter. See Category:Articles with dead external links from October 2010 (although this category is nominating itself for speedy deletion, due to not being quite smart enough). Rich Farmbrough, 15:05, 12 September 2010 (UTC).

Incidentally these cats are generally created from Wikipedia:List_of_monthly_maintenance_categories_given_month which means that the previous month's paramters, interwikis, comments etc are simply copied over. However editors quite rightly create them when they see the need, sometimes significantly before month end, due to another editor incorrectly dating a template, hence the drive to simplify the syntax to the greatest extent possible, even though it means more complex apparatus behind the scenes. Rich Farmbrough, 15:11, 12 September 2010 (UTC).

I understand why the categories are created, and what their purpose is. All I'm saying is {{Cleanup-link rot|date=October 2010}} probably shouldn't be listed on any month pages for that category since {{Cleanup-link rot}} doesn't appear to populate it. Some step in the process should be adjusted so that the suggestion to use {{Cleanup-link rot}} doesn't show up.--Rockfang (talk) 16:36, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for that, I see you fixed the message. Rich Farmbrough, 16:43, 12 September 2010 (UTC).

You are welcome. I figured I could learn some stuff along the way. :) Rockfang (talk) 16:45, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

I noticed you tried to tag Category:Anotheca for deletion WP:CfD has the instructions for doing this. The same may apply to Corythomantis, Itapotihyla, Nyctimantis, and Scarthyla. All have a page in them. Rich Farmbrough, 04:33, 12 September 2010 (UTC).

OK, I'm not sure what you're hinting at. I added the cfd template, gave my reasons as to why, and left the article in the category until it could be discussed. The tag was added on 8 September 2010, its now only 12 September 2010, and we're supposed to allow 7 days for discussion. Where am I dropping the ball? Dawynn (talk) 10:10, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Ah, it's nothing major, since you listed them (I didn't follow up - or even look at the other cats) but the CfD notice should be substituted {{subst:Cfd}}, this creates a link to the discussion and puts it in the correct category. I am an occasional visitor to CfD, so I can't quote precedent, but there does tend to be exceptions made for small categories that are part of a scheme, although up-merging also occurs. Rich Farmbrough, 15:24, 12 September 2010 (UTC).

Y Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 15:44, 12 September 2010 (UTC).

Is there a good reason that Smack Bot is replacing transclusions of {{WPMILHIST}} with {{WikiProject Military History}} when the former is the correct title of the template? If there was a change in policy, we should have been informed of it, don't you think... -MBK₀₀₄ 04:54, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes, pretty much every project uses a "WikiProject XXXXXX" banner, so people know what to expect, nothing to stop you using MILHIST if you find it quicker to type and reckon the time is worth being obscure (Millennium History? Militant History? Words per minute, Illinois history?), but basically using the full expression is much clearer to people who may not be project members. Rich Farmbrough, 01:23, 13 September 2010 (UTC).

• moved back from User talk:Sladen#Smackbot

It's dating the tag "{{Use British English}}" and doing minor clean-up at the same time. Rich Farmbrough, 18:23, 12 September 2010 (UTC).

Which is awesome, but doesn't explain the removing of an unbalanced equals sign from the heading further down. I might be able to point you towards the broken rule if the bot was configured to put a list of the executed rules (or as many as will fit) into the summary. —Sladen (talk) 18:29, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

(Room/rule, I knew what you meant.) Yes, I can probably find it. I take it you mean the unbalanced removal of an =. Anyway I'll investigate. Rich Farmbrough, 18:33, 12 September 2010 (UTC).

Found it, correcting a bug arising from the move of "article issues" to "multiple issues" combined with a rule to deal with multiple = signs in that template's parameters, combined with the actual bug... Rich Farmbrough, 21:04, 12 September 2010 (UTC).

Fixed build 526. Rich Farmbrough, 21:07, 12 September 2010 (UTC).

Maybe you missed a comment I did in SmackBot's talk page: You have to prevent this from happening. One idea of reducing the number of your personal customisations is to use Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Custom_Modules#Customised_.22General_Fixes.22 and remove unwanted features for bots (ReorderReferences for example). "Skip if only whitespace changed" must be activated too. This will probably reduce error ratio and save you from, I presume, hundreds of extra lines of codes. -- 21:10, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Skip if only white-space cannot be activated because SB fixes June2010 => June 2010. And in fact category lag is so bad (around a month) that I have to force null edits to clear my queue in some circumstances. And the fix for the Sada Tomson is not to leave trailing spaces, I have implemented this in my version, and given the basic code on AWB pages, although I can probably (and will) continue to improve the definition of minor changes. Rich Farmbrough, 21:18, 12 September 2010 (UTC).

Trailing spaces fixes are defined as minor for some time. Rich Farmbrough, 21:19, 12 September 2010 (UTC).

"Skip if only white-space fixed" refers only to the built-in whitespace fix functions which only remove whitespaces from line ends and spaces between sections, stubs, etc. If white-space is added by other functions and/or F&R, AWB won't skip. You can give it a shot I think. -- Magioladitis (talk) 00:03, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Makes no diff, I have skip if no F&R anyway, and skip if only minor F&R. Rich Farmbrough, 00:05, 13 September 2010 (UTC).

Ta. Thank you for finding/fixing it before having re-enabled the bot. —Sladen (talk) 21:39, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Hi, with these edits you moved Template:Mirror to Template:Wikipedia mirror with edit summary "Clarify - and free name" and then protected the original template with "Protected Template:Mirror: Highly visible template ([edit=sysop] (indefinite) [move=sysop] (indefinite))". Please could you reconsider those edits? The Template:Mirror mirror had been in use for some time in all the subpages of Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks. The move has caused the history of those pages to be practically unreadable. I agree with clarifying the name Mirror" to Wikipedia Mirror, but I do not agree with freeing the name, instead a redirect would be better. I had been using the history of those Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks subpages to determine when certain websites get entered there, and now the old versions are frankly messed up. I find it disturbing that such a template can be usurped without discussion. I do hope you will seriously consider this request. -84user (talk) 21:26, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

Hm, this is a reasonable point. Let me give it some thought. Rich Farmbrough, 22:33, 12 September 2010 (UTC).

Please could you roll it back first, then give it thought. Regressions have the tenancy to really annoy people. —Sladen (talk) 00:44, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

It's not a regression. 84 did not seem to be in a tearing hurry. Rich Farmbrough, 01:07, 13 September 2010 (UTC).

Hi,

I saw your reply at Wikipedia talk:Mirrors and forks/Abc#Blogspot and I determined that this revision is the once copied in the blog posting. Since you are a significant contributor to the article, you should file the copyright complaint, as I have not edited the article. RJaguar3 | u | t 03:57, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

You removed the Enron Trader Tapes section form California electricity crisis article. I wonder how it violates NPOV? —Preceding unsigned comment added by VinnieCool (talk • contribs) 04:11, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

"A powerful indictment" "It appears to acknowledge that Enron executives were involved in the trading, were aware of the illegality of it, and were involved in covering it up." I would have just tagged the section, and done some improvement, but I couldn't find any sources including the LA Times article which is cited for the last para. However looking at Time-line of Enron scandal points us to http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/04/national/04energy.html so there is some citable source for some of the material - well probably for all of it. But fairly clearly "Bill and Rich" aren't both traders - supported by the NY Times. The purpose of the section is to display Enron in a bad light, not difficult, but not what we are here for. There is nothing about the source of the material, which is interesting in itself, since the FBI were made to hand it over by legal action. I am surprised that this isn't the subject of a whole article, and would have expected the transcripts to be available on-line and analysed to death by the media - perhaps they are. Rich Farmbrough, 06:51, 13 September 2010 (UTC).

Line 188. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:38, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. Rich Farmbrough, 19:26, 13 September 2010 (UTC).

Why didn't you bother to discuss this with me before raising a DRV? Spartaz ^Humbug! 15:07, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Y Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 19:27, 13 September 2010 (UTC).

Hey there Rich Farmbrough, thank you for your contributions. I am a bot, alerting you that non-free files are not allowed in user or talk space. I removed some files I found on User:Rich Farmbrough/temp82. In the future, please refrain from adding fair-use files to your user-space drafts or your talk page.

• See a log of files removed today here.

• Shut off the bot here.

• Report errors here.

Thank you, -- DASHBot (talk) 05:02, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Slightly amused. Rich Farmbrough, 12:13, 14 September 2010 (UTC).

Hi Rich. Its been borught to my attnetion that the Counties of China by province are in need of cleaning. There are just too many parameters that will never be used. They need cleaning and condensing like this. Are you up for the task? If possible if the infobox doesn't ave a county map can you copy the one from German wikipedia, they generally have the county maps. Dr. Blofeld 12:15, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Yep, all in commons. See Xinjiang maps and locator maps of china. I believe the naming system is consistent too which may make the task easier. Dr. Blofeld 12:36, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

OK lets see if this works: Boo!. Rich Farmbrough, 12:42, 14 September 2010 (UTC).

Hmm... Rich Farmbrough, 12:43, 14 September 2010 (UTC).

Some don't have infoboxes, mainly Sichuan I think like Garzê County etc. The majority do have infoboxes though. If you could ensure they are consistent with infoboxes and clean ones at that this would be great. NOte though that Prefectures are the second level divisions, counties are the third -level divisions. Dr. Blofeld 12:48, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Scarily there are 47,000 towns/townships in China and like a 1 million villages. Here is our current coverage of townships. About 15 out of 47,000. And some people think wikipedia has an article on everything known to man... Dr. Blofeld 13:41, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, certainly the Internet issue is partly the reason but actually the Hudong Encyclopedia has detailed info about most of the counties of China online in Chinese and lists the townships and summary of them at the bottom of the articles and often has population figures. So technically is is possible to compile lists, the problem is that half of them translate too literally into some thing like "Chicken Head Town" etc so only a few townships names can properly be compiled. Unless you speak fluent Chinese and are willing to list all 47,000 then at present its not possible. At some point I hope a comprehensive source will become available in english to just copy the names and make all of the lists. Dr. Blofeld 13:52, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

If you really look you may find some info about townships like this. But as I say finding the resources to make a full 47,000 list is a tremendous task. Dr. Blofeld 14:08, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

DNB? Well it seems there is general consensus that these articles are wanted, the main problem is transferring the texts and making them encyclopedia worthy with minimal manual work and adding a link to ONDB. If you can devise a way to do so and Charles,myself and the rest of the new project are content with it go for it. Dr. Blofeld 14:13, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Monsterous. List of townships of Anhui. At least if I can get the Chinese names written down I can hopefully motivate a Chinese speaking wikipedian to translate properly. This will take months to do but if I can get some support from WikiProject China to help it is possible. As far as I can see there is no english language documentation of Chinese townhips by province, perfecture and county on the Internet so this is a must I think. Dr. Blofeld 15:12, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Hi. Can you not remove image skyline, image map, area and population parameters? Those at least are important...At some point some has to add the population an area to the infoboxes so if the parameters are missing it makes it doubly time consuming. I just meant a trim like in the example above rather than removing all unused paramters... Also the documemtnation is showing see here. Dr. Blofeld 17:10, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Please respond and tell me why you removed the population, area and image map parameters? Dr. Blofeld 19:42, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

You've actually made it harder now to go through and add the basic info, I kind of asked for you to give it a hair cut and only remove the extra parameters that will never be filled not the bare essential ones, but you've given it a Blofeld hair do so to speak!!!... Also if I want to add the translit info now I have to go and find the name parameter just to list it. Instead of taking 30 seconds to add the info now it will at least 4 times as long. I thought I said that they need cleaning and condensing like this. I gave you that example for a specific reason. I wanted them like this so the info can be added and then anybody can add the other info at a later date. Dr. Blofeld 19:58, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

If you could add the essential parameters from here and copy those into the infoboxes that would at least allow me to go through adding the population/area data and map...20:12, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Well those are the parameters I really need bare minimum. The full sized templates did take up a ridiculous amount of kb but I really do need to have the image skyline, image map, population and area and chinese translit parameters empty ready for adding the data... Dr. Blofeld 21:05, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Almost but they were in the wrong order. Try http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Qujiang_District,_Quzhou&action=edit. That would be perfect I think. Dr. Blofeld 21:10, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Excellent job Rich. Thanks for that. I'll begin the slow arduous process of adding data to the infoboxes shortly... Dr. Blofeld 10:12, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

Please stop changing instances of [Ff]lagicon to Flag icon, as the latter is a redirect to the main template. A template with hundreds of thousands of transclusions needs to be brought to WP:Requested moves to change its name, but to be honest, I think that well-known template names like {{reflist}}, {{navbox}}, {{flagicon}}, {{nowrap}}, etc. are perfectly acceptable with names that aren't separate words. Thanks — Andrwsc (talk · contribs) 16:42, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Anything to make wiki-source more readable is good, we do not have the editor numbers we need. I think we forget the learning curve involved. There is no real downside to using the clearer form, people can carry on using the run-together version if they find it that much easier, no one who know one version will be "thrown" by the other, and it is perfectly OK for the rate of change to be slow. Rich Farmbrough, 03:42, 15 September 2010 (UTC).

Sure, the use of the alternate template name is an editing convenience for some editors, but that doesn't mean that your bot should go changing wiki markup to use the redirect name. I sincerely hope you aren't changing {{navbox}} into {{Navigation box}}, for example, and your bot shouldn't change flagicon either. Thank you — Andrwsc (talk · contribs) 04:09, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

This is a courtesy note to thank you for your assistance in date-sorting, and inform you that I have now written a script, whose objective is to render article dates compliant with WP:MOSNUM. FYI, it incorporates regex code written by User:Lightmouse and User:Plastikspork. --Ohconfucius ^¡digame! 05:43, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

What was it you were saying about speaking to Charles? Dr. Blofeld 15:35, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

We me at a Cambridge meet. I was talking about extracting data from DNB - it is quite a tricky proposition to do it properly. He gave me a better understanding of the source material. I did a little investigation, other projects are ahead in the queue though. I joined the new DNB project. Rich Farmbrough, 16:48, 15 September 2010 (UTC).

There is another contributor who slapped a {{userspace draft}} template on every subpage under User:Geo Swan, even though I asked, well over a dozen times not to. I asked, on WP:Village pump (technical), and had confirmed, to my satisfaction, that this template was redundant if a page already had a __NOWIKI__ on it.

I noticed that you tuned up many of those tags. I suspect you wouldn't have bothered if you had known that someone other than the author had applied those tags, and that those subpages were all, already, protected by a __NOWIKI__.

Do you concur with the advice I was given in the final answer to my question: "{{userspace draft}} is the only one of the 3 that provides a visual note in addition to noindexing; if you don't care about the box, then yes, its redundant."

Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 16:53, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for your quick response.

I drafted User:Geo Swan/An introduction to the notes on subpages under User:Geo Swan. And I put a link to it on User:Geo Swan.

Is this close to what you meant to suggest?

Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 18:06, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

Let's be clear here there is no community consensus not to use the NOINDEX tag and {{userspace draft}} together. Geo does not own these pages and some of these pages might be even better deleted. Consider also that there are about 700 of these pages. Visual warnings are important as these are all biased controversial information about Guantanamo and the war on terror and we have to make sure that our readers do not get confused. IQinn (talk) 23:58, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

Hey there

I've tweaked your template to disambiguate it. I think it is working, and I've checked a few times, but I thought you might be able to take a look. --Rifleman 82 (talk) 05:14, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Not sure if you realize this, but you're adding the template to the talk pages which in many cases are not the applicable article of the broadcast. For example, Popper on In Our Time at the BBC is about Karl Popper -- putting the note on Talk:Popper is a little baffling. older ≠ wiser 12:24, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes, as the note on the docs page says, some need checking. But I have modified the template to be a little less certain of its own applicability, and encourage wise relocation. Rich Farmbrough, 16:33, 16 September 2010 (UTC).

In regards to "1995 Palo Verde, Arizona derailment ‎ ", I have solid knowledge of the incident and wished to provided two reliable print sources to back up my information.

1. The Phoenix New Times Newspaper with the exact date of the article & author, who was on the ground as incident occurred and spoke to almost all parties involved. http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/content/printVersion/165145/
2. "The Medusa File" hardcover investigative book by Craig Roberts. ISBN #: 0-9639062-4-0.

The previous editor removed my edits by stating "dead links"...but then suddenly...content not deemed reliable. How was content determined not to be reliable if it's a dead link? Everything was sourced accordingly, if it's not, then it was removed by someone. Here is the link, it is 100% valid. http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/content/printVersion/165145/

I thought much more of Wiki, now I think it's total garbage. If editors don't like the content or it's too controversial, they remove it, even though facts are only being stated. What a joke WIKI is!!!!!!

Mark99199 (talk) 15:55, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Well you can challenge the removal, as indeed you have. Rich Farmbrough, 16:35, 16 September 2010 (UTC).

What is even more of a joke is the current version of information has absolutely NO references listed whatsoever, so how can you post this original version in the first place with no references to back up any of the article???? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mark99199 (talk • contribs) 16:05, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

I have restored the text of the note, which is available from WP:RS. I suggest you engage the other editor in conversation if you wan tot make progress with the article. Rich Farmbrough, 20:08, 16 September 2010 (UTC).

7 months, 3 non-edits but nobody noticed an obvious vandalism in [4]. -- Magioladitis (talk) 16:30, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes. Unobvious vandalism exists too if you go looking for it. This I found based on searching for likely keyboard mashing... What to do? Rich Farmbrough, 22:02, 17 September 2010 (UTC).

And another! YYYYYYYY A very patrolled article too. Rich Farmbrough, 22:54, 17 September 2010 (UTC).

Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that there currently is a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. The thread is Battle of the bots: Reflinks vs. SmackBot. Thank you.--70.130.130.6 (talk) 04:48, 18 September 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, just realized I should let you know. Sorry someone beat me to it. Your input would probably be appreciated. -Selket ^Talk 16:27, 18 September 2010 (UTC)

I thought u were the 1 who contributed to the vandalism of TDWT. I'm sorry. (RealityShowsRock (talk) 17:10, 18 September 2010 (UTC))

Re your old bug report db dump file from network share – I had this myself today, rev 7155 fixed for me: we were opening the db dump file read+write when I only had read over network share. Db dump file access is now read only, hopefully that will fix your problem too. Rjwilmsi 21:37, 19 September 2010 (UTC)

Ah, many thanks! Rich Farmbrough, 21:41, 19 September 2010 (UTC).

diff

SmackBot added "September", which is an error. {{Update after|2010|September|15}}

Should have added "09" instead. {{Update after|2010|09|15}}

Regards, --Bob K31416 (talk) 05:07, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, fix building now. Rich Farmbrough, 05:13, 20 September 2010 (UTC).

"Thanks for adding the merge notice. You have to separate the "date=" with a | ... "|date=September 2010}}" or the system will think you are using a parameter called "this article is also about him date". Rich Farmbrough, 05:38, 20 September 2010 (UTC)."

Would you be so kind as to fix this for me? I've tried, and I can't figure out what I might be doing wrong. Worc63 (talk) 23:37, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

Y Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 02:43, 21 September 2010 (UTC).

Hi Rich. Per AWB#2 - "Don't edit too quickly; consider opening a bot account if you are regularly making more than a few edits a minute." Maybe you should setup a bot to do these changes. Thanks. Lugnuts (talk) 07:25, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

Maybe. Rich Farmbrough, 07:26, 21 September 2010 (UTC).

Hi Rich,

Back in May you were able to filter the March 12 dump for unformated IPA.(discussion) I've finally gotten through it (actually, 9 articles to go, which I've asked for help with). Would you be able to do that again, with a more recent dump?

Slightly different search:

ɐɑɒɓɔɕɖɗɘɚɛɜɝɞɟɠɡɢɣɤɥɦɧɨɩɪɫɬɭɮɯɰɱɲɳɴɵɶɷɸɹɺɻɼɽɾɿʀʁʂʃʄʅʆʇʈʉʊʋʌʍʎʏʐʑʒʓʔʕʖʗʘʙʚʛʜʝʞʟʠʡʢʣʤʥʦʧʨʩʪʫʬʭʮˈˌːˑʰ˥ʷ˦ʲ˧ʱ˨ˠ˩ˤˀᵊⁿˡʼꜛꜜ

(No schwa this time--too many false hits--and adding some diacritics and tone marks. Is it possible to search for a combining diacritics as well, such as the ones on k̚t̪s̺s̻θ̼s̬n̥ŋ̊a̤a̰ə̆ə̯ə̃z̴ə̋ə́ə̄ə̀ə̏ə̌ə̂t͡ʃβ̞r̝?)

Thanks for your help, if you've got the time. — kwami (talk) 11:36, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

Only if they are combined Maybe. Should we exclude {{Respell}} ? Rich Farmbrough, 12:29, 21 September 2010 (UTC).

No, no reason to exclude Respell or Azeri, as the only overlap should be with schwa, and I'd like to not search for schwa this time. (Same for {{USdict}}.) There may be other stuff in those templates/articles that should be caught. Also, no need to exclude anything per article title or links this time; anything in the article should be templated regardless. (That is, of the exclusion parameters at temp14, only part of the first is relevant: "but not containing {{IPA|{{Audio-IPA|{{[Pp]ron". (Regular {{Audio should still be searched.)

(edit conflict) Okay, if we can only search for combined diacritics, then most combinations wouldn't be worth bothering with. I'd suggest the following: t̪, d̪, n̪, l̪, e̞, o̞, r̝, ŋ̊, s̺, s̻, l̥, r̥, n̥, m̥, œ̃, ə̯, ə̃, t͡, s͡, d͡, z͡, p̚, t̚, k̚, n̩, z̴, s̴, l̩, r̩, n̩, m̩, β̞.

— kwami (talk) 12:44, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

• Navajo mythology
• Uxbridge
• Atlantic languages
• Wolof language
• Karihi
• Radiography
• Heliopolis (ancient)
• Ha
• Apep
• Maat
• Istro-Romanian language
• Qin Shi Huang
• Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner
• Omdurman

I seem to be hitting rather a lot of pages... the above are random examples. Rich Farmbrough, 12:56, 21 September 2010 (UTC).

Thanks. I'll take a look. Also, β should be included, as it isn't the same coding as Greek beta. (I'd modified some of the other parameters above before writing that.)

Yeah, those all look like legitimate hits. Apart from radiography, I see an IPA letter outside of a template in each. — kwami (talk) 12:58, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

I saw the change, I'll let this scan finish then re-run. Looking like 2-3000 articles. Rich Farmbrough, 13:17, 21 September 2010 (UTC).

Okay, thanks.

Oh, are you searching for articles that do not have {{IPA etc at all, or are you searching for articles with those characters outside of {{IPA etc. templates? I suspect there are a lot of articles that have the IPA only partially formatted. — kwami (talk) 13:23, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

Without IPA. I'm sure you are right, this list should keep you busy for a while though! Rich Farmbrough, 13:24, 21 September 2010 (UTC).

Yes, I suspect it will!

Several hundred articles have Semitic transliterations that use IPA letters without actually being IPA. I should check with the wikiproject--I didn't reformat those last time, and they'll keep coming up unless I do something. Should be able to automate their prefs. — kwami (talk) 13:27, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

Hm, well many of these can be wrapped in {Lang|he}. Rich Farmbrough, 13:30, 21 September 2010 (UTC).

User:Rich Farmbrough/temp14 is with the more-or-less initial conditions. I'll do a re-run more accurately later on today. Rich Farmbrough, 13:30, 21 September 2010 (UTC).

Looking at your last change to temp14:

"and not containing interwiki links with the above IPA characters in them"

I don't see a reason for avoiding those. Even links would need to be formatted for IE to display them properly.

"but not containing {{IPA|{{Audio|{{[Pp]ron "

Could you make that specifically {{Audio-IPA}}? AFAIK, other Audio templates shouldn't have IPA in them. — kwami (talk) 13:33, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

Interwiki language links don't display. And yes to the other point. Rich Farmbrough, 18:22, 21 September 2010 (UTC).

Not sure you have the right β there? it's picking up thousands of additional articles. Rich Farmbrough, 19:14, 21 September 2010 (UTC).

OK  Done without the Beta. Rich Farmbrough, 21:44, 21 September 2010 (UTC).

Thanks!

You're right. I thought there were separate Latin & Greek betas, but there aren't. Next run maybe we can add β̞ to the list.

What was the date of that dump? — kwami (talk) 22:50, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

4 September. Rich Farmbrough, 22:52, 21 September 2010 (UTC).

Thanks. 2600 hits, of which a huge number are Semitic or use the ejective diacritic in place of an apostrophe. I've asked at one of the wikiprojects what to do about those. — kwami (talk) 00:08, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

About your recent edits, just so you know, large scale semi-automated page creations must be approved by BAG at WP:BRFA, please see Wikipedia:BOTPOL#Mass_article_creation. Cheers, - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 23:03, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes it's not exactly large scale, though - 1966 to 2005 is 30 pages for the technology award (I already fully manually created 2006+). Rich Farmbrough, 23:14, 21 September 2010 (UTC).

One way to go about this would be to create them in your userspace and move them to mainspace after you've massaged them. –xeno^talk 23:16, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

I was rather hoping that others would chip in and do some pages. Rich Farmbrough, 00:17, 22 September 2010 (UTC).

You... you were expecting people to work together, at Wikipedia?? *wink* Okay, that sounds fine, I just wasn't sure if you were going to continue doing a lot more or not :). Best, - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 10:53, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

Line 243. It's also weird that between two edits of SmackBot there wasn't any other edit and a "the" was removed. -- Magioladitis (talk) 23:32, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes, its a RF bug really. The revisit is due to recalcitrant category, the edit is due to a bug I introduced and removed. Fixed, reviewing other edits (maybe a dozen) at risk. Rich Farmbrough, 23:42, 21 September 2010 (UTC).

OK, the replacing "catmain" with "catmore" was probably not necessary. But "Catmore" is the preferred template for use in the category namespace, while "main" is the preferred template for article and project namespace, so I stand by those edits. I had requested a bot task for this a few months ago, but at the time there were no bots available for the task. --Eastlaw ^talk ⁄ _contribs 03:48, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

I've noticed that Reflinks converts {{Cite web}} to {{cite web}} while SmackBot converts {{cite web}} to {{Cite web}}, which seems rather silly. Is it possible to get these two to agree on one case? --AussieLegend (talk) 07:18, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes I left a message for Dispenser, and am waiting to hear. Rich Farmbrough, 07:19, 22 September 2010 (UTC).

Perhaps you might like to involve the rest of the community as well, who by-and-large do not capitalize {{cite}} templates? –xeno^talk 13:14, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

FYI: Wikipedia talk:Citation templates#Template caps: "Cite" or "cite"?. –xeno^talk 18:30, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

You were so kind to clean up June Card, thank you. But please explain, for me to learn, why you changed the order of references from oper/papageno to papageno/oper? Please reply here, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 05:52, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

The papegeno reference has the same name as reference 1, so it gets moved first. In fact they are the same reference in slightly different format - I have merged the two, which should make it clearer. Rich Farmbrough, 06:08, 23 September 2010 (UTC).

Understood. It feels a bit funny because operissimo was the first source for the article, all others added later, papageno much later, but is ok. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:17, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

When doing your cleanup you remove spacing from section headers. Why do you do that? ΔT _{^{The only constant}} 21:27, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

There's a lot of unbalanced headers so I regularise them all. Unspaced is preferred 5:1. Rich Farmbrough, 22:23, 23 September 2010 (UTC).

Hi, I happened to click on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Rich_Farmbrough/dabpages while I was looking what else links to an article which changed name. It appears clicking on that slowed my browser down that much that I believed it was completely hung. What is that list for? Any way to make it more invisible? Just imagine, people still use metered connections in some cases. Richiez (talk) 22:02, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

There was a special page "Lonelypages" and it was full of dab pages. It could only lists 1000. So I hoped this allowed fresh pages on that were real orphans. However the lonleypages functionality is now disabled, so I have deleted 'dabpages'. Rich Farmbrough, 22:20, 23 September 2010 (UTC). (P.S. try editing "List of wind turbines in Denmark ‎" - 469 k... ) Rich Farmbrough, 22:20, 23 September 2010 (UTC).

Nice reading the "wind turbines", trying edit was not that bad. Is there some bot that would flag if some page gets terribly long? I would imagine bots might occassionaly create such pages.Richiez (talk) 23:32, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

It's the actual save that causes problems - yes long pages are are flagged under "special pages"->"long pages" - but limited to article space. There are bots that create huge multi-page reports, most of which no one looks at - but some of them are used so they continue. Rich Farmbrough, 01:50, 24 September 2010 (UTC).

{{Flag icon}} is a redirect to {{Flagicon}}, but SmackBot (talk · contribs) changes it. Why? Armbrust ^Talk _Contribs 11:48, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

Readability. Rich Farmbrough, 11:50, 24 September 2010 (UTC).

Why not move the template? PC78 (talk) 17:04, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

Please do not. I will instantly revert any move that is not supported by consensus at WP:Requested moves. {{flagicon}} is a very well-known and widely used template, just like {{reflist}}, {{nowrap}}, etc. so it is utterly pointless to make these edits and claim "readability" is improved. Rich, there is no consensus for these edits, so I'll ask again that you please stop. — Andrwsc (talk · contribs) 17:28, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

Hi. In this edit by Smack, it removes the spacing between the equal signs and the header text. Whereas, the default format is with spaces (use the auto add header link to see for yourself). So just thought if it would be better to, I don't know, maybe recode the bot to not do that? ;) Thanks! Rehman⁽⁺⁾ 12:54, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

There's a lot of unbalanced headers so I regularise them all. Unspaced is preferred 5:1, despite the software. Rich Farmbrough, 22:23, 23 September 2010 (UTC).

Template:Infobox Candidate has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Thank you. Magioladitis (talk) 12:17, 25 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for all your proofreading and copy editing that makes Wikipedia a higher-quality encyclopedia! -- Ssilvers (talk) 13:47, 25 September 2010 (UTC)

You are most welcome. Rich Farmbrough, 13:49, 25 September 2010 (UTC).

You may want to adjust SmackBot's "general fixes" regarding the rewrite of links to the family of IMDb templates; they are currently all spelled "IMDb …". -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 15:34, 25 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes I saw the move, as a result of the rule generation. It's not one I agree with but it's not a big deal, will add support presently. Rich Farmbrough, 19:11, 25 September 2010 (UTC).

{{Mirror thread|7357}}

The related Category:Cathead has been nominated for deletion, merging, or renaming. You are encouraged to join the discussion on the Categories for discussion page.

2010 September 19*Rich Farmbrough/Archive/2010 September

SmackBot corrected a clarify tag in Scosta. This is how I incorrectly added the tag - {{Clarify| September 2010}}. But is how SmackBot corrected - {{Clarify| September 2010|date=September 2010}}. btw - What do you think of this link for bork. Slightsmile (talk) 21:11, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes I know, I can't assume that parameter 1 is intended to be a date - especially as leaving it should be harmless. I could, I suppose, only do so if it is the current month year. Nice link. Rich Farmbrough, 21:13, 20 September 2010 (UTC).

Odd. Yesterday and today, when I click on the bork link I made, an error box pops up,

Stop running this script? A script on this page is causing Internet Explorer to run slowly. If it continues to run, your computer might become unresponsive. "Yes" "No".

Should I take this to Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)? Slightsmile (talk) 00:11, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

Oh I get that a lot on Firefox, at least it tells you what the script is. IE won't even run on my main machine, speaking of borken. Rich Farmbrough, 12:58, 26 September 2010 (UTC).

Like you did here (and presumably elsewhere). They are standardized to lowercase all across Wikipedia. Thanks. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 22:21, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

Indeed, the {{Cite looks out of place when compared to the standard. Also, you probably shouldn't change the ==spacing around headings== either (see MoS:HEAD#Section headings). All of these little changes make it harder to read the diff. –xeno^talk 22:25, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

And can't you just please use a bot-flaged account for those edits so that they don't always fill up my watchlist? I'm normally all for consistency and cleanup tasks, and fine with bots making edits like this as long as I don't see them in my watchlist and they are clearly marked as a bot-made edits in the history (although I find it odd that you seem to be pushing your personal capitalization preference, I've yet to see consensus for any of this). You're obviously letting it run in auto-mode anyway, and have bot accounts. Use them. Amalthea 09:15, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

No comment at all? Amalthea 14:08, 25 September 2010 (UTC)

I've moved stuff across to botland. Rich Farmbrough, 14:10, 25 September 2010 (UTC).

Thanks. Amalthea 13:39, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

Again, could you stop capitalizing those templates? It's really annoying. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 10:00, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

I'll make some changes. Rich Farmbrough, 10:06, 26 September 2010 (UTC).

Building a new ruleset now. Rich Farmbrough, 11:29, 26 September 2010 (UTC).

Built manual ruleset to exclude canonical template names for cite templates when creating canonicalization rules, unfortunately reckoned without {{Cite_Web}} etc. Rich Farmbrough, 11:29, 26 September 2010 (UTC).

Also a bug in the build process. Rich Farmbrough, 11:36, 26 September 2010 (UTC).

← You're still doing it as far as I can tell? [5] Please stop capitalizing template names - if the editors who put it there made a human decision to use small case, you should not use an automated process to change it absent consensus to do so. –xeno^talk 13:58, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

See build (manual) 550, I'm in the middle of some manual runs on stuff like "3 january 3" and I'm not going to retype all the specialist rules. Rich Farmbrough, 14:11, 26 September 2010 (UTC).

If you're doing a run focused on stuff like "3 January 3" (which is noble, useful and helpful), could I ask why are any there capitalisation shuffling rules enabled? The last time I had cause to stop the bot, you investigated and after approximately three hours traced the issue down to an unexpected interaction between rule-sets. If you're not (intentionally) using a rule at any one moment, please do not have it enabled. In this case, please do not have capitalisation adjusting rules enabled, unless you are exclusively on a capitalisation adjusting run—and doing the latter on the basis of a previously agreed and documented project-wide mandate. —Sladen (talk) 15:11, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

It's the pull of opposites. Minimising the number of edits vs. making them clear. It's crazy to fix a date, fix a DEFAULTSORT, date a tag via three seperate edits when it can all be done in one. Moreover really minor but worthwhile changes (like moving a ref after punctuation, or replacing "Web reference" with "Cite web") are generally not considered "worth" even a bot minor edit, but are good rolled into other stuff. Rich Farmbrough, 15:19, 26 September 2010 (UTC).

Yes, these are all (date formatting, DEFAULTSORT, dated cite) noble, clear-cut and good. Capitialisation adjustments are not clear-cut and—looking further up this conversation—are not universally considered good. Please disable capitalisation adjustments unless there is a project-wide concensus for them (which at the moment, does not appear to be the case). —Sladen (talk) 19:13, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

Progress? —Sladen (talk) 17:32, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

WILL YOU STOP DOING THIS?. If you keep acting like a deficient bot, I swear next time I'm going to ask an admin to block you like they would a deficient bot. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 20:14, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Hello Rich, I've undone your edits to Template:Unreferenced because they were causing huge red letters to appear on articles that Template:Unreferenced was transcluded on. Regards, Airplaneman ✈ 03:47, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

I think that was just a caching effect, form the earlier edit. See [[6]]. Rich Farmbrough, 03:50, 23 September 2010 (UTC).

Oh, OK. Works now! :) Thanks, Airplaneman ✈ 20:46, 25 September 2010 (UTC)

121.54.29.98, who you blocked for 3 hours, is at it again, adding redundant cleanup tags with dates from 2-3 years ago, interwiki links to nonexistent articles, and linked dates inside {{Persondata}}. I got BOLD and blocked him for 31 hours instead of going through the motions at ANI, but if you think it would be more appropriate I can open up a thread there just to get consensus. rʨanaɢ (talk) 16:41, 24 September 2010 (UTC)

That's the right next step. It's almost like 121 is a training AI, replicating the types of additions to articles that are most often not reverted. Rich Farmbrough, 19:09, 25 September 2010 (UTC).

I went ahead and blocked the IP for a year, it seems like there's nothing good to come out of leaving it unblocked. rʨanaɢ (talk) 01:38, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

(BTW, I did leave a note at ANI yesterday, see WP:ANI#IP adding broken interwikis, but no one ever responded. I guess there was more interesting drama elsewhere... rʨanaɢ (talk) 01:38, 27 September 2010 (UTC))

Originally sourced and properly cited'Rahstrapati Award' a category of national awards before 1968 box info was deleted - Citation requested to support the editor named Shshshsh 24 hrs ago claim support needed. Please protect National Film Award article by vandalism list of national awards among 'Rashtrapati Award 'deleted in the last 24 hrs by that editor please try to undo the edit if he again commits to vandalism. support needed from you thank you. please protect if Shshshsh deletes the National award list again.Report him to the administrator full support requested, your originally edited National award article was completely deleted through vandalism by the user 'Shshshsh ' support requested to (Prabhu6 (talk) 12:02, 25 September 2010 (UTC)). —Preceding unsigned comment added by Prabhu6 (talk • contribs)

Y Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 07:07, 26 September 2010 (UTC).

E.g. here the expansion of {{lifetime}} can lead to duplicate categories and DEFAULTSORT. Would you add logic for this (could invoke MetaDataSorter after such an expansion to clean up). Rjwilmsi 16:46, 25 September 2010 (UTC)

This shouldn't happen much, if at all (that was 2009), as 1. lifetime is now very rare, 2. SB invocations start with GF's after F&R, and only gradually do I manually change them to "before" to deal with intransigent items. If I could invoke General Fixes both before and after search and replace... Incidentally the duplicates are there anyway, just not visible. This is one of the reasons for expansion of the template. Rich Farmbrough, 19:16, 25 September 2010 (UTC).

I hadn't seen it was last year, thought it was three weeks ago. No worries then. Rjwilmsi 21:35, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Hi Rich. Can you do a similar run for Burma like you did with Chinese counties cleaning the infoboxes. Basically the infoboxes of the towns and Townships of Burma need stripping like this. They are far too bloated and empty. ALso many of them contain "religion=Buddhism and an empty government parameter which should be removed as in the Tuimu example and replaced with the time zone given. Also the division names need linking properly. If you see Tuimu now you'll see what I mean. Can you go through the town by division/state Category:Populated places in Burma and clean them and the Townships of Burma. Note that some of them are called states not divisions so in the infobox you just need to change Division to "State". Please though can you at least keep the very basic paramters like image skyline, pushpin map option, area, population and altitude. You can remove flag/shield option too as obtaining those are unlikely.♦ Dr. Blofeld 17:00, 25 September 2010 (UTC)

Any response?♦ Dr. Blofeld 21:24, 25 September 2010 (UTC)

State/division - just pick that from the article name? Rich Farmbrough, 21:58, 25 September 2010 (UTC).

Incidentally I sorted the categories out, thy were a bit of a mess, sub-catting various "people in foo" cats, etc. ~~

Nice one. That'll do. Don't worry about any more as I'm gradually going through anyway and replacing the infoboxes/cleaning up the articles.♦ Dr. Blofeld 13:34, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

When Smackbot is adding categories such as Category:Living people or birth and death year categories to an article that's tagged as being uncategorized, would it be possible to also have it switch the tag from {{uncategorized}} to {{morecat}}? Not a big deal if not, but I thought it worth asking anyway, because I've come across a few articles today where that would have been helpful. Bearcat (talk) 23:19, 25 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes, it would be a useful AWB function - AWB is very conservative about uncat, though, assuming that any unrecognised template might hide a category - which mostly they don't or shouldn't. Comics especially has a wonderful categorising mechanism, but of course the cats aren't in the page source and don't work with intersections etc. This sort of project specific cleverness is a real problem sometimes. Rich Farmbrough, 23:30, 25 September 2010 (UTC).

We use the API to get categories, so whether they're explicit in page or not doesn't matter. Rjwilmsi 21:36, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Maybe so, but the tagger code I saw looked a the page text. I'll check it out tomorrow. Rich Farmbrough, 21:40, 27 September 2010 (UTC).

            // skip article if contains any template except for stub templates
            // because templates may provide categories/references
            foreach (Match m in WikiRegexes.Template.Matches(articleText))
            {
                if (!(WikiRegexes.Stub.IsMatch(m.Value)
                      || WikiRegexes.Uncat.IsMatch(m.Value)
                      || WikiRegexes.DeadEnd.IsMatch(m.Value)
                      || WikiRegexes.Wikify.IsMatch(m.Value)
                      || WikiRegexes.Orphan.IsMatch(m.Value)
                      || WikiRegexes.ReferenceList.IsMatch(m.Value)
                      || WikiRegexes.NewUnReviewedArticle.IsMatch(m.Value)
                      || m.Value.Contains("subst")))
                {
                    summary = PrepareTaggerEditSummary();

                    return articleText;
                }
            }

Rich Farmbrough, 18:00, 28 September 2010 (UTC).

In this edit SmackBot incorrectly tagged an article as uncategorized — there is a comment at the bottom of the article clearly state that the appropriate categories are present at redirects rather than at the article itself, but the comment is obviously human-readable only. Is there a way to automatically inform bots such as SmackBot that the categorization of articles such as this one is not problematic, to prevent it from coming around and making the same bad edit again? —David Eppstein (talk) 06:19, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

Well not a good way! Let me look closer. Rich Farmbrough, 06:20, 26 September 2010 (UTC).

Y Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 07:41, 26 September 2010 (UTC).

Hi Rich I added references to an article I am working on titled "Youssef Elsisi", could you please let me know if it satisfies the notability and/or references for wiki. Any feedback is greatly appreciated. Regards.

Y Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 14:33, 26 September 2010 (UTC).

		The Redirect Barnstar
		Despite our disagreements on other sundry matters, I would like to extend my sincere thanks and gratitude for generating the AWB rules for the list of WikiProject banner redirects used in my WikiProject shelling task. –xenotalk 14:33, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

You are welcome. Speaking of Xenbobots, did the Chicagoland problems resolve themselves? Rich Farmbrough, 14:36, 26 September 2010 (UTC).

Hmm, you'll have to jog my memory? I am working without the assistance of a beverage made by straining hot water through ground beans. –xeno^talk 14:40, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

I too have an empty earthenware container at my elbow. It's one of Xenobot IV(?)'s project labelling tasks. WikiProject Chicago. However many of the pages once labelled were disputed and now have various "nobots" templates on their talk pages. I know you suggest this as one solution on your bot's talk page, but it has two flaws: firstly it doesn't solve the underlying problem, whether it is mis-categorisation, or poor project definition (assuming the banner doesn't belong), secondly if a project wants to include pages with little or no apparent connection to the subject of the project, it's not really for the pages "owners" to say them nay. Anyway the reason I ask is that I periodically try to clean up bots/nobots, and have managed to remove a couple of hundred plus (not least from the templates with red-links pages which were all denying AWB for no real reason - although that got me into updating the pages, which are quite owned at the moment). Rich Farmbrough, 14:49, 26 September 2010 (UTC).

Ah yes. It's a bit of a dispute over how wide a metropolitan area spans. One user feels that CHI is casting their net too wide, but on the other hand (as you note), projects are generally free to set their scope as wide as they wish. I didn't really feel like getting in the middle of it, to be honest, so I was fine with them denying Xenobot on a case-by-case basis. –xeno^talk 15:32, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

At Carbon dioxide, you used AWB to change multiple occurrences of "cite web" to "Cite web". Why? The cite web template explicitly uses the lower case version. Q Science (talk) 15:49, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes some of the documentation does although it is not prescriptive in that sense. However

1. Template:Web reference
2. Template:Web-reference
3. Template:Web cite
4. Template:Cite website
5. Template:Cite-web
6. Template:Citeweb
7. Template:Web
8. Wikipedia:Citeweb
9. Template:Web citation
10. Template:Cite url
11. Cite web
12. Wikipedia:Cite web
13. Template:Cite blog
14. Template:Cite Web
15. Template:Cite webpage
16. Template:Cita web
17. Template:Lien web
18. Template:C web
19. Template:Cit web
20. Template:Cw
21. Template:Cite tweet

all redirect to {{Cite web}}, and from the 6 September I started to pick these up. Capitalising is an added bonus (the majority of templates are capitalised), although there are some people that have objected, notably Amalthea for reasons of watchlist noise (which seems valid), for that reason I have created a new manual version of the clean-up rules that skips some of these corrections. Rich Farmbrough, 04:20, 27 September 2010 (UTC).

Actually, whether capitalizing templates really is a "bonus" is yet to be determined. I haven't seen objections to bypassing redirects, but many complaints about changing e.g. {{cite web| to {{Cite web|. I think I see your reasoning, and can see it as a good guideline to improve readability in meta templates. Not so much in articles though.
You'd save yourself much grief (and, from the looks of it, an ANI thread or RFCU sooner or later) if you just stopped changing capitalization of the first letter of transcluded templates (cites, tags, reflist, ...) and looked for consensus at some pump first. As I've said elsewhere, I'm in principle all for cleanup tasks and canonicalization, but this is a consensus driven community project – if members of the community object, you'll need to look for consensus, as annoying as it may be. I know you don't normally have BAG approve all your tasks, and you've been given lots of leeway since you generally stay within the important BAG guidelines. In this case though you aren't. Amalthea 12:35, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Indeed in meta-templates it has the big advantage of making .....{{{{entity and ....{{{{{Entity clear nine times out of ten (or more). But there is not really much objection except to the Cite family, and that mainly since I have been busy manually over the last few days - and I understand the reasoning since "cite" is seen as something that fits into running text (I did cap a lot in numbered or bulleted lists with no complaints). In fact it rarely isin running text, it is usually offset from (or at least within) a sentence with ref tags, but as I said I have done a rebuild so I get a separate manual fixes that won't cap inline cites, unless it's replacing a redirect. (Well at the moment it will ail with most redirects but that's another story.) I completed one of the 8 tasks I was working on yesterday, another will be done in a couple of minutes, one I think I can bot (I will have to check my BRFAs) and the rest I might put on hold anyway as I want to look at 0.8, and work on Mirror Bot. Rich Farmbrough, 12:47, 27 September 2010 (UTC).

I don't understand what "redirect" has to do with this. When you actually go to the Template:Cite web page, the examples are in all lower case. This has nothing to do with page names, but instead is the fact that the examples and the new text do not agree. As a result, I think it is wrong to use mixed case anytime, even when "it's replacing a redirect". Q Science (talk) 18:41, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

As noted in several other places on just the recent talk activity, the lowercase is used in examples and the lower case seems to be want is preferred. If you wish to change the direction of Wikipedia, this can be done by gaining traction for a policy on the matter, rather than eroding the standardisation that there is. —Sladen (talk) 17:36, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

I must have mis-read what was said above. The bot is still changing "cite journal" to "Cite journal". Also "cite news", "cite web", and more. Please stop. Q Science (talk) 19:00, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Hi,

I just wondered why you interchanges {{flagicon}} with its redirect {{Flag icon}}, like you did here and here amongst many? Anyway, I thought that general Wikipedia consensus is you don't make an edit to a page just to update the template name, according to WP:R? lil2mas (talk) 21:25, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

• Yes you are quite right (by and large) you don't make an edit to a page just to update the template name, in the first edit I replaced mark-up with a template ( Edit summary - replace markup with template and general fixes.) in this case <br clear="all"> with {{Clear}}, added a DEFAULTSORT and a couple of other minor changes, in the second (Datefixes and general fixes) replaced "22 April 22" with "22 April", and {{bda}} with {{Birth date and age}}. And there also lies the nub (or the rub, or the rub of the nub) - "bda", <br clear="all">, "flagicon" and "commonscat" (common scat?) are less readable than "Birth date and age", "Clear" "Flag icon" and "Commons category". And what is more they are less memorable, don't conform to simple rules to help users predict and remember the names of templates (whole words, normal capitalisation, no extra underscores, hyphens, Infobox foo, not Foo infobox etc.). And while none of these things is insurmountable, a simple interface encourages new users - I do remember when the only mark-up I knew was == [] - and a few minutes earlier not even that. There is a steep learning curve with Wikipedia, and we need to make it as shallow as possible. Rich Farmbrough, 03:48, 27 September 2010 (UTC).

Twice in this month, I've found some funky writing, and look to the talk page of the article, only to discover that the Kaki King article was being edited by one of her record label executives, using a copyrighted photo which had been hanging in King's MySpace ..."with King's permission".  ?!! Today, the Easy Star All-Stars page had an album inserted into their article. A photo of former members from that band that I uploaded a year ago to Wikimedia Commons came under scrutiny by a new user at Commons, who asked to delete the image "because the people in the photo were no longer in the band". (I should have guessed this was the problem).. my response was to ask whether I should delete photographs of Mick Taylor since he no longer plays with The Rolling Stones! I was incredulous that anyone would ask to delete a photo that could be used in discussing the history of the band from Commons!! Today, I read on the talk page that the primary editor of what is a redundant article- with the text merely repeating the lead-- identifies themself as a new editor but never registered in the usual manner so it's not possible to leave a template on their talk page if they haven't got one! What to do with these people??!!--Leahtwosaints (talk) 01:59, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Tbanks. I never learned how to really interact with other editors on the Wikipedias, mainly being a Wikignome type, cleaning up after others. Just wanted to be sure that my efforts with these outsiders with definite POV interests regarding their clients don't screw up the BLP pages. I watched while others had a helluva time with the record folks on the article for Josh Klinghoffer (Red Hot Chili Peppers backup guitarist)-- who has now taken John Frusciante's place in the touring band, if not permanently. --Leahtwosaints (talk) 15:42, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Hi Rich Farmbrough/Archive/2010 September! an article you have contributed to, has been selected for the Wikipedia Version 0.8. offline release on DVD and iPhone. If you would like to make any last minutes changes or improvements, you are most welcome to do so. Deadline is midnight UTC on Monday, 11 October. See also: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Worcestershire/Archive 1#Worcestershire articles have been selected for the Wikipedia 0.8 release.--Kudpung (talk) 04:47, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Cool! Rich Farmbrough, 04:48, 27 September 2010 (UTC).

BTW if you're watching my tp anyway, I'll drop these silly tb templates.

Hello. Concerning your edit here, one minor point: Clicking on the icon "Level 2 headline" above gives automatically "== abc ==", not "==abc==", hence you should adapt your general fix accordingly or you will find yourself always editing against the general format trend. Regards Gun Powder Ma (talk) 10:02, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

You would think so, however "==abc==" outnumbers "== abc ==" 5 to 1. Rich Farmbrough, 10:04, 27 September 2010 (UTC).

How you know? Gun Powder Ma (talk) 10:28, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

I counted them. Rich Farmbrough, 10:33, 27 September 2010 (UTC).

My impression, however, is quite the opposite, and that Wikipedia has automated the task to "== abc ==", not "==abc==" gives it much more force. Gun Powder Ma (talk) 10:58, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes I understand, however the decisions of MediaWiki developers 10 years ago, however sagacious, aren't really too relevant. Rich Farmbrough, 11:02, 27 September 2010 (UTC).

Whatever, you can propose a Wikipedia-wide change on the relevant talk page, but meanwhile I revert it on Andrew Wilson (and any other article I created). Thanks for your understanding. Gun Powder Ma (talk) 11:15, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

By all means. Rich Farmbrough, 11:19, 27 September 2010 (UTC).

Bracketing the place of birth is actually encouraged: Check out Wikipedia:Persondata#Using the template, the Magellan example.

It is also quite implicit recommended below: "For example, there's no need to link "Mount Juliet, Tennessee" as "Mount Juliet, Tennessee" (resulting in "Mount Juliet, Tennessee") when "Mount Juliet, Tennessee" ("Mount Juliet, Tennessee") is available." Please do your homework. Gun Powder Ma (talk) 11:38, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Ah yes I beg your pardon. Rich Farmbrough, 11:44, 27 September 2010 (UTC).

Another trivial fix to suit a personal preference. –xeno^talk 18:59, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Rich

You posted an Orphan article notice on the article I posted about Radio City 1386AM any chance you can take another look I have added some more links just curious how many links are required for an article to not be classified an orphan?

Thanks David —Preceding unsigned comment added by DABenji (talk • contribs) 14:27, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Y Answered on user's talk page. Rich Farmbrough, 14:31, 27 September 2010 (UTC).

Thanks a lot, new to the Wiki World so not sure on the etiquette of removing what others have added.

David —Preceding unsigned comment added by DABenji (talk • contribs) 14:36, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Hi Rich, Please, check the article "Tjaarke Maas", which was improved. since you tagged it. Thanks (Yuryo (talk) 16:18, 27 September 2010 (UTC))

Thanks Rich, for giving me a hand. Its looks better now.(93.45.20.221 (talk) 23:32, 27 September 2010 (UTC))

Hidden maintenance categories don't make an article properly categorized, and neither do the presence of categories on redirects. If SWAT and WADS conferences doesn't have at least one visible content category directly on it, then it's still an uncategorized article that needs to be tagged as an uncategorized article. Bearcat (talk) 18:42, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Categorization does say that every article needs to have at least one category on it. Bearcat (talk) 18:56, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Is there any good reason why certain articles should be exempt from the rules that apply to most others? If so, then why bother having a category system at all? Bearcat (talk) 18:58, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Categorization tagging isn't something I do because I particularly like being perceived as an obsessive-compulsive little "rules for the sake of rules" geek. I certainly don't enjoy sitting here for hours on end clicking "save" in AWB over and over again — but when there's a backlog of almost 50,000 uncategorized articles, as there was two months ago when I started devoting almost all of my Wikipedia attention to this particular task, it's something that has to get done. I don't really see the point in essentializing it into a debate about whether there are "inherent" reasons why the rule is what it is. The simple fact that the rule is there, in and of itself, means that it's not particularly my responsibility to justify why an article should be categorized — it's the job of the other person to justify why a special exception to the rule should be made in their particular case. Bearcat (talk) 19:39, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

I got the following warning message in preview mode of my userpage. I'm not sufficiently technically-minded to appreciate what it means. Any help in deciphering it would be most appreciated:

Warning: This page contains too many expensive parser function calls. It should have less than 500 calls, there are now 546 calls.

I suspect it may have to do with the cleanup category boxes I just included there. Thanks. --Ohconfucius ^¡digame! 01:32, 28 September 2010 (UTC) {{Dating maintenance categories progress box}}

Yes indeed it is quite irritating that "expensive" parser function calls - in this case "if exists" are hard limited to 500 per page. You can call {{some template that doesn't exist}} or make a red redlink - which must invoke some kind of "exists" functionality - which mean that blue links do too, so it is kinda silly (maybe a bugzilla). And I wanted a nice dashboard of all the progress boxes, sigh. However, good news is ... (as documented on my blog^follow - currently broken!) the progress box (abocve) on the right which is a rely helpful management tool for working with SmackBot. Rich Farmbrough, 03:48, 28 September 2010 (UTC).

Hi Dude! Made a little AWB re-work (month days) for you here (See history record) with an edit conflict situation. I got most of it (your updates to the old) manually... but had to balance a stale edit I'd started hours back and left in my que. If it matters run the BOT again to lengthen those month names! Be well. // FrankB 01:37, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know. I'll pick the article up again sooner or later, or someone/something else will. Rich Farmbrough, 03:51, 28 September 2010 (UTC).

Hi Rich. Regarding your recent edit to British Waterways article. I noticed that AWB changed the template names from cite to Cite. Reason for commenting is that the two cites I added last week used the new popup cite template tool in the editor: cite is being added by this new tool, rather than Cite. This would seem to be creating extra work for you (well, for AWB!) -- EdJogg (talk) 08:41, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

OK thanks for the note. It's not a big deal and the latest versions of my manual tools are skipping it anyway, but useful to know. Rich Farmbrough, 08:42, 28 September 2010 (UTC).

Hello. Please can you keep AWB out of the title= parameter of cite templates, as in this edit. thanks, Struway2 (talk) 09:05, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

I'll see what I can do.... Rich Farmbrough, 09:13, 28 September 2010 (UTC).

Hi Rich. Two things:

• Adding "Find sources" to {{unreferenced}} was a great idea.
• Shouldn't it also be in {{BLP unsourced}} as well? Alzarian16 (talk) 10:36, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

• Thanks!
• Done. Rich Farmbrough, 10:39, 28 September 2010 (UTC).

Thanks. Alzarian16 (talk) 10:45, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Do you want to correspond with me e-mail? I from Czech Republic and I want to be better in English. Write me on my takl page. Hi K123456 (talk) 10:36, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

I think, private e-mail. My e-mail is XXXX . I know, how it goes on wiki. K123456 (talk) 10:55, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Cool. Rich Farmbrough, 10:57, 28 September 2010 (UTC).

It means yes? K123456 (talk) 10:58, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Yes. Rich Farmbrough, 10:59, 28 September 2010 (UTC).

OK :-), I will write you, about me as soon as possible. I can not wait. Hi K123456 (talk) 11:01, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

192.93.164.28 (talk) 15:20, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

That's a pretty silly mistake tbh. Especially since it took 13 minutes to fix... Modest Genius ^talk 15:25, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

NOtified 15:20, reverted 15:21- Between 0 and 120 seconds. Took you at least 180 seconds to say how slow I am. Rich Farmbrough, 15:28, 28 September 2010 (UTC).

Ehhh, everyone makes mistakes. :/  f o x  15:45, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Hey, Mr Farmbrough. Does Neuroscience stubs count as a category? Basket of Puppies 15:31, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Not for the purpose of "uncategorised", "orphans" are pages which are not linked to by another page. Rich Farmbrough, 15:35, 28 September 2010 (UTC).

I added Category:Symptoms and signs: Nervous and musculoskeletal systems to Vertiginous epilepsy. Rich Farmbrough, 15:37, 28 September 2010 (UTC).

Cool. Basket of Puppies 19:15, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

HI RIch I have another task request. Can you go through the Category:Townships of Burma by area and simply add Category:Township capitals of Burma to the capital/seat of the townships. Note don't add this category to the articles on townships themsevles but to the "principal towns". Effectively it should produce a very useful category of the main cities and towns in Burma and allow people to work through them later like Homalin etc. There should be over 300 although some of the townships and capitals have yet to be started majority are in place though.♦ Dr. Blofeld 19:04, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Mmm maybe I'd better do it manually, give me a good chance to see what needs doing anyway..♦ Dr. Blofeld 20:01, 28 September 2010 (UTC)