User talk:Anomie/Archives/2009

Final Fantasy (video game)

You seem to be the only one taking care of this article, and I'm guessing you're a lot more knowledgeable about the topic than I am. Anyway, I was wondering why all the parentheses in the plot section are included, example: "Lefeinish (Lufenian)". Is it because the word in the parenthesis refers to the later version's names, and if so, are they really necessary? I've also sent user:Gary King a similar message here. Thanks. The Prince (talk) 01:24, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Yes, that's exactly right. At some point a year or so ago, I got sick of the random mish-mash people had made of it, so I went through and changed everything to use the original NES translation. I then put alternates in parentheses so people coming here after playing later remakes wouldn't be too confused. If you remove the parentheticals, expect people to resume changing names randomly to match their favorite translation; this might be held off if you add a note explicitly pointing out the translation used. And if you choose the NES translation, I will be able to help revert changes; I am not familiar with any other translation, so I would not be able to assist if you choose any other translation.

The remake sections originally contained additional information on translation and gameplay changes, but I see that has been removed since. I suppose that's because there are no "reliable" sources for it, but IMO the article is worse for it.

BTW, if you want to talk to some people who are very familiar with this game in all its incarnations, visit the GameFAQs forum. Too bad nothing there is considered a reliable source. Anomie⚔ 01:43, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

We could also use an Edit Notice to let people know what the article's conventions are before they edit. Gary King (talk) 02:04, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

I would prefer that the original terms from the North American NES version be used since they were the first ones to be established in any English-language release of the game. I like Gary's idea of an Edit Notice, like in this article. If you want to add back any information that I have removed, then feel free to do so; any incorrect edits made by me must be reverted by someone familiar with the subject. The reason I removed so much information was because I thought the section's large size affected readability (at least for me), but again, if there's any information you believe should be included, don't hesitate in adding it back. As for reliable sources, I'm sure we can find something in reviews about the other versions from IGN, GameSpot etc. The Prince (talk) 04:37, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

I agree with the reasoning for using the NES translation; it's actually the same reasoning I used originally. I would like to add back some of the information, but I have no reliable sources so I won't. If you come across anything reliable about Nintendo's censorship of the English version, bugs fixed/not fixed in the remakes, the gameplay changes for Origins (particularly easy versus normal modes), or DoS's lack of anything besides even-easier mode, let me know. Anything about how many of the monsters and some of the game mechanics were based on D&D (and how some monsters were changed for the English version to be further from D&D) might be interesting to work in the development section too. Anomie⚔ 04:58, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

I'll let you know if I find anything. The Prince (talk) 13:01, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

Template:CDCVesselSanitationScore

Thanks for your help with this template. It works well now.--Rtphokie (talk) 20:24, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

AFDMergeFromCleaner

The test run appears to have worked perfectly. The only tweak that I'd suggest is the addition of a "(talk)" link to the right of the article link in the report's "AFD merge to" column:

Page	AFD merge to	Redirect to	Note
Fraternity and Sorority Pins	Fraternities and sororities (talk)	Fraternity and sorority pins
List of Springfield Elementary School students	List of characters in The Simpsons (talk)	List of recurring characters in The Simpsons
Lu-Tze	List of Discworld characters (talk)	Discworld characters
The No Game	Sid Sackson (talk)	A Gamut of Games

Thanks again for doing this! It will be very helpful. —David Levy 07:19, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

Partially in response to your bot's work, I wrote {{afd-merged-from}}. It should be directly substitutable (diff) for {{afd-mergefrom}} following a completed merge. There is a little background at Template talk:Afd-mergefrom#Should template be removed after performing the merge?. Flatscan (talk) 00:00, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

WP:RFBOT

Your recent bot approvals request has been approved. Please see the request page for details. RichardΩ612 Ɣ ɸ 14:29, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

LivingBot

Argh! This is really annoying me; I had to ask someone for help and you seemed like a knowledgeable person, so here goes (maybe you could forward this on if you didn't know):

I have my basic bot, which I'm playing around with. It can load my user page and display it to me. However, when it tries to grab the "edit this page" (I'm using a php framework btw), it gets an "IP address blocked" sort of a message ("open proxy"). This is despite the bot being logged in and the page itself using my username.

What am I doing wrong? Please help, Jarry1250 (talk) 20:59, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

Hmm... the IP address for the server on which I am running the bot is quite similar to this "open proxy": mine is 65.254.250.101 and I get presented with "Editing from 65.254.224.34 (your account, IP address, or IP address range) has been disabled" when I try to edit. How can I get this sorted? Jarry1250 (talk) 21:05, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

It might be that your hosting company has a transparent proxy set up that is making your traffic seem to be coming from 65.254.224.34; you could try having the bot download http://whatismyip.com/ and see what IP address is reported. If that is the case, and you can have that turned off, that may well solve your problem. Otherwise, you'll just have to follow the instructions at Wikipedia:Appealing a block. Maybe an admin will "soften" it to anon only, or maybe the open proxy has since been closed and it can be unblocked completely (I do note the block notice at User talk:65.254.224.34 references a domain that is now on a different netblock). Or you could always find a better hosting company... Anomie⚔ 22:31, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

None of my latest comments on my application for bot approval appear of the big parent page, just the individual sub-page. Any ideas? Jarry1250 (talk) 20:50, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Try purging the (parent) page. Anomie⚔ 20:58, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

I seriously need to take a wikibreak. I just can't see the wood for the trees. Oh, and I'm up to 4 edits where the bot has picked out articles, I've checked them and the people actually were dead. There are, unfortunately some false positives I could just never completely eradicate, so it mught have to be manually assisted after all, we'll see.Jarry1250 (talk) 21:03, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

(de-indent) Okay, so now I'm getting bored of manually changing the pages; I've decided a bot would be useful for a slightly different task (same application). - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 17:00, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

The previous task wasn't bad, just probably better as "reporting these articles for human attention" than fixing it itself. The new task is more appropriate for an automatic fix. BTW, did you get the email I sent you? Anomie⚔ 20:22, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Yes and changed appropriately. - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 21:19, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Good! Anomie⚔ 21:25, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice. Trial complete. - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 15:31, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

Orphaned refs bot

		The da Vinci Barnstar
		Very elegant bot, much help with keeping sources in order in highly edited articles. Nice work. Professor marginalia (talk) 02:00, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

Thank you! Anomie⚔ 02:29, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

Template:Oldffdfull

Err... changing link names in a template that is not substituted breaks all old uses. :-) --MZMcBride (talk) 09:52, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, go ahead and change it back. But all new uses of the template for IFDs/FFDs since mid-December have been broken, not sure what to do there. Anomie⚔ 12:09, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

Panic

I was just running the remnants of the task I got permission for LivingBot to do, when, after a couple, the bot jumped logins from the bot account to this account. (I think this was because of another tab I had open logging in.) Is there anything that can be done, or is it too late now? It's a shame to have approximately 50 edits that should have been on the bot account on my contribs. - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 20:48, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

There's nothing you can do about it. I suppose if you really wanted to, you could ask one of the sysadmins to change the user on those edits in the database, but it's a near certainty they'd say "No". Anomie⚔ 22:33, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Quick request

Hi there, I was wondering if it would be possible for you to sort the names at List of people from Akron, Ohio by last name? If not, I'll pop into WP:BOTR for someone. Thanks for your time! §hep • ^Talk 17:58, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

You have just saved me a lot of time. Thank you very much! §hep • ^Talk 02:53, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

(edit conflict) No problem. FYI, the perl snippet used was

perl -nwe 'BEGIN { %people=(); $cols=1; } if(/\Q{{Multicol-break}}\E/){ $cols++; } elsif(/^\*\[\[[^]]*? ([^] ]+(?: Jr\.?| II)?)\]\]/){ $people{"$1 $_"}=$_; } else { die "WTF?"; } END { my @keys=sort keys %people; my $percol=@keys/$cols; $x=0; while(($k=shift @keys)){ print $people{$k}; if(++$x>=$percol){ print "{{Multicol-break}}\n"; $x=0; } } }'

Anomie⚔ 02:57, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

My bot.

Will run and continue to become more improved weither you like it or not because I dont give a damn about approval and it may not look like much but in time it will be perfected just like any other bot on Wikipedia.

WP:IAR states "If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it." well I am applying that to my bot so it can IMPROVE AND MAINTAIN this aging collection of knowledge that everyone has spent there time on Earth helped make reality. AndysCrogz1 (talk) 02:37, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

thank you

WikiThanks

Anomie thanks for taking the time to comment on Wikipedia_talk:Notability_(fiction)#Final_adoption_as_a_guideline. I am glad you see how important this guideline will be, since it will determine the inclusion or exclusion of television character and television episodes. It looks like a lot of editors are making a point to comment on your statements, which means you made some really good points. Ikip (talk) 01:24, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

FilperBot

Sorry about the unclosing, I inadvertantly picked up an old version when putting a comment on Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/FilperBot I. With User:Signalhead, I have previous knowledge of this user under other names and would like him to be a good editor, however his behaviour last time got worse quite quickly. --Stewart ^{(talk | edits)} 17:06, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

No problem. It would be nice if he becomes a good editor, but until he does do so the community has no reason to trust him to run a bot. Personally, I don't think a new user wanting a bot is a good sign, but I'd like to be proven wrong. Anomie⚔ 17:15, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

Re: Code review

Well, it seems those long, empty hours in my diary have just been filled. ;) - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 07:46, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

Okay, so I've worked through most points. Would you mind checking that the ones I've struck though on my talk page are indeed fixed in User:LivingBot/WikibotDev? Much better than before (and so different now from the original code I can almost call it my own), but still a few things left to do. I did try, md5 hases with PHP's md5() function, but it thought they were wrong every time. Obviously, echo's and so forth will need tidying, but the major bases have been covered, no? - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 22:16, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

I see a few things yet, besides what's still unstruck:

• You have a bug in postAPI, in the extremely unlikely case that $postdata doesn't have a '&' in it. If adding that '&' is conditional at all, make it conditional on $postdata = for correct behavior.
• You should probably urlencode $username and $password.
• I just realized that the repeated "array_shift"s to get the page_id will break if the title is entered in a non-normalized form. Instead, pull $array['query']['pages'] explicitly, do one array_shift on that, and then access ['page_id'] explicitly.
• create_page will probably fail on an API error.
• You shouldn't mess around with the continuation values the API returns, as you're doing in your category function. Just urlencode it and you'll be fine.
• You're still not going to be correctly handling edit conflicts. Sure, it will always be possible to get around it, but as it is right now it's impossible to not get around it. You need two functions: one to get the old page text + edit tokens, and one to take the edit tokens + the new page text and perform the edit.
• Your page editor will think it always succeeds if you edit a page with "success" in its title. Don't use strpos to try to check the responses.

Anomie⚔ 23:44, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

IRC navigation templates

Just wanted to let you know I left you a reply at WikiProject Computing#IRC navigation templates Tothwolf (talk) 21:01, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

Try to focus on the discussion by reading it

.... instead of obsessing about me for a paragraph. I didn't read the rest of your post any more than you read mine, or the one it was in response to. So, when you decide to stop inflaming the situation by focusing on attacking editors who repeat themselves in response to request to repeat themselves, let me know if you actually include any discussion.

The best way to show that your intention is to focus on the discussion, by the way, is to focus on the discussion, not to introduce your response by rambling on about another editor's comments in a manner that only shows you did not read the discussion, so you can't possibly focus on it.

You made your choice. --KP Botany (talk) 21:42, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Doctor Checkup

Hey there. I would love for you to take a look at my bots code. Drop me a line on irc now (if your there) Current username = Addshore_ Thanks. ·Add§hore· ^{Talk To Me!} 22:47, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Tagging for Wikipedia:WikiProject Physics/Taskforces

Moved to User talk:AnomieBOT

Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Sambot 2

Hi Anomie. You volunteered (bravely!) to have a look at the source code for this BRFA. Could you email me so I can send it to you? Many thanks. [[Sam Korn]] ^(smoddy) 15:32, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

RE:File:Super NES designs.png

Quoted from User talk:Fastily:
“	You couldn't take a few seconds to slap the appropriate non-free image template on File:Super NES designs.png based on the contents of the {{Non-free use rationale}} template? It's things like this that give non-free image taggers a bad name. Anomie⚔ 11:52, 25 February 2009 (UTC)	”

Two Things:

1. That tag was a Di-no license tag, not a {{Non-free use rationale}} tag.
2. I find it rather surprising and offensive to have just received such brash comments from an editor with your experience and stature. Please avoid making such personal attacks in the future. - Fastily (talk) 05:17, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Replies:

1. Yes. {{Non-free use rationale}} was the tag the uploader put on the page, which specifically stated where the image came from and its non-free copyright status. The uploader just left off the "license" template (which isn't really a license so much as "Yes, this is a fair-use image"), possibly because we don't have one specifically for images from magazine articles.
2. Where is a personal attack? Back when I watched the village pump, a fairly common complaint was "drive-by tagging": where someone slaps a tag on an article instead of taking two seconds to just fix the problem. I was simply pointing out that that particular edit exemplifies that behavior.

Good day. Anomie⚔ 12:14, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks

Thanks for this edit. I coulda swore I followed the instructions right.--Rockfang (talk) 22:28, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

No problem. I don't think the instructions mention that you need to edit the preloaded title and template for requests beyond the first, actually. Anomie⚔ 22:38, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

EL bot for film articles

I assume that you were the creator of the Anomiebot that is removing the IMDb-etc. links from the film infoboxes and putting a link in the EL sections. The same discussion took place over at the TV community, and I was wondering if we could request a duplicate bot (or maybe could we get our articles tacked on) for the TV pages?  BIGNOLE  (Contact me) 19:05, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

I would have no problem doing this, but I'll need more details: which templates, which parameters, which replacement external link templates (if any), and can you give me a link to the discussion? Also, is there a convenient category or other list of other external link templates (like Category:Film external link templates) the bot can look for? Anomie⚔ 00:30, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

We have a similar category (Category:Television external link templates). The discussions took place twice (on two different pages. the second discussion was started by someone who did not realize the first discussion had taken place). The first discussion, and the second discussion. The second one garnered more attention (probably because most people don't frequent the infobox talk page. The main template is Template:Infobox Television. When you say, EL templates, are you referring to those IMDb templates that are used in EL sections? If so, we use the same ones as the Film community, except that they don't use Template:Tv.com (we do). I think we opted to allow the official website to stay in the box (for now), and only move IMDb and TV.com to the EL sections. As for "parameters", I'm not sure what you mean. If you can explain that a bit more I'll try and give you those as well.  BIGNOLE  (Contact me) 00:50, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

You answered the question about parameters already: imdb_id and tv_com_id, but not the website or production_website. Consensus looks good at the discussions too. I'll file a BRFA shortly (it'll be at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/AnomieBOT 25). Anomie⚔ 01:35, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, I really appreciate it. We've kind of been doing this all by hand lately, and when I noticed that the film bot had managed to get approved (and actually saw a couple articles on my list get swapped out), I thought I'd shoot you a line since it's virtually an identical procedure. I'll spread the news to the people over at the TV community. Cheers.  BIGNOLE  (Contact me) 01:52, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

I was going trough the first logs of the botrun, and I notice it makes a recurring "error". Many articles, like for instance Dances_with_Wolves, have their Ext. links as a h3 under "References". This seems to be a common convention in some Film articles. Anyways, the bot ignores this h3 section and adds the links (often for a 2nd time). I think this is a case that could relatively easily be correct, and it will help avoid some cleanup work. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:04, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

Ugh, I'll stop the bot until I get that fixed. BTW, in the future don't hesitate to stop the bot following the instructions on its user page (in this case, by editing User:AnomieBOT/shutoff/TemplateReplacer13). Anomie⚔ 21:22, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

I'll be sure to do that next time. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 00:13, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

This is apparently an issue with the TV articles as well. Someone came to the talk page to notify us of what was going on.  BIGNOLE  (Contact me) 23:41, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

Huh? The version of the code for the TV project hasn't started running yet. The code did have the same bug, though, which I'm in the process of testing the fix for now. Anomie⚔ 23:58, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

Ah, you know what. I saw "Miami Vice", and immediately thought someone was letting us know about the television show. I didn't notice the "film" attached to the title of the page. My bad on that.  BIGNOLE  (Contact me) 00:20, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

No problem at all, and thanks for alerting me since User:El Greco didn't see fit to. Anomie⚔ 02:01, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

The problem should be fixed now; if either of you see any more problems, put any non-whitespace at User:AnomieBOT/shutoff/TemplateReplacer13 to stop the bot task and drop me a note here. Anomie⚔ 02:16, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

• One suggestion, your bot's edit summary sends people here, but what about after you archive this? perhaps create a subpage to explain the bot's activity instead (the content of which could just be a reproduction of this thread). –xeno (talk) 19:20, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

  Unless I suddenly get a ton of talk page messages, this'll hang around until January 2010. I'll keep that in mind for the future, though. Anomie⚔ 02:15, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

I stopped the bot because it seems it has trouble with recognizing html comments after Ext.link headers. See addition of section where it already exists. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:30, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks! Should be fixed now. Anomie⚔ 02:15, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

official template

Maybe you already know about this but some of your bot's edits like this one doesn't make much sense. I can understand why you would want to remove the link to the official site from the infobox but it should probably check to see if it's already in the EL section before adding it there. Also, the official template only has one parameter, and that's the link to the website. The name it put after that is not being used. For An Angel (talk) 01:07, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

The bot actually does check for links already being present; in that case, the infobox contained "http://www.moondancealexander.com" while the External links section had "http://www.moondancealexander.com/". I've made a change to take that into account in the future. As for the extra parameter, it's ignored by {{official}} so it doesn't hurt anything for it to be there. Anomie⚔ 01:16, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

Re: SNES article blurb in Edge Magazine

Just got my hard copies of the magazine today, and I copied up the blurb on the SNES article to my talk page. Check it out. :) — KieferSkunk (talk) — 22:03, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Your bot request

Hi Anomie I wanted to let you know that Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/AnomieBOT 26 has been approved. Please visit the above link for more information. Thanks! BAGBot (talk) 19:15, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

WP:The Elder Scrolls and Template:WPTES

Hi, Izno suggested I contact you regarding the Template:WPTES project tag used on articles from the former Elder Scrolls project—it has been turned into a VG task force. Izno said you had a bot that did something similar for the former Nintendo project. I noticed you're on a break, so there's no real rush to do this. Thank you. (Guyinblack25 ^talk 14:34, 13 March 2009 (UTC))

Sure, but I'm glad you said no rush. I have two bot tasks in the programming queue ahead of you ;) Anomie⚔ 23:55, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Much appreciated. Would you please post at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Video games/Inactive project cleanup#The Elder Scrolls when the bot completes the task? Thanks again. (Guyinblack25 ^talk 16:55, 16 March 2009 (UTC))

Hate to be a bother, but I was going through the older clean up discussions and stumbled across similar templates for projects that are now VG task forces. If you could add these to the queue, I'd really appreciate it.

• Template:Wikiproject Pro Gaming: Supported by Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games/Pro gaming
• Template:MortalKombatProject: Supported by Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games/Mortal Kombat

Again, sorry for the late additions. (Guyinblack25 ^talk 19:29, 16 March 2009 (UTC))

Sorry it took so long to get to this; it took longer to write the code than I anticipated, and then it tool longer for AnomieBOT 28 to be approved than I anticipated too, and then I ran into some database issues that made the WikiProject Japan tagging take longer than expected (the bot kept crashing with "database is locked" errors). It looks like someone took care of Template:WPTES, but I'll start on the other two soon. Let me know if there's anything else I can take care of. Anomie⚔ 18:56, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

Done, already. Looks like someone stole the MK detagging too (grr). Let me know if there are any more, now that I have the code approved I can start as soon as I see the message and fill in the appropriate configuration (instead of having to wait for approval each time). Anomie⚔ 20:09, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

Much appreciated. I'm sure we'll end up sending a few more your way in the future. (Guyinblack25 ^talk 21:36, 11 April 2009 (UTC))

Just checking in for an update

You had indicated some interest in handling this request, but it's been a few days since then with no further comments. Are you still interested in helping out there? Please let me know, and thanks for your time. ···日本穣^{? · Talk to Nihonjoe} 00:18, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, I've been busy the last few days. Your task is on the top of my list, chances are good I'll file the BRFA in the next 24 hours. Anomie⚔ 00:50, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

No problem. I was just curious. :) ···日本穣^{? · Talk to Nihonjoe} 05:24, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

At the moment, I have about an hour and 45 minutes left on my "24 hours"; it doesn't look like I'll have it ready. I didn't have as much time today as I thought, for various reasons. Still working on it though. Anomie⚔ 23:10, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Just checking back with you as it looks like that section on the bot requests page is getting close to being archived (not sure how the archiving is set up there). Thanks! ···日本穣^{? · Talk to Nihonjoe} 19:54, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

I haven't forgotten, I just have had no time this week. Anomie⚔ 01:04, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

No problem. I appreciate your work on this. ···日本穣^{? · Talk to Nihonjoe} 01:53, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

PUI

Hi, I was wondering how does User:AnomieBOT tags the discussion on PUI as complete. Does it only looks at pages which are still listed at the main page? I finished some pages and was wondering if I could already remove them from the main page or is it better to wait till the bot closes the discussions? Garion96 (talk) 23:08, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

AnomieBOT only looks at pages that are linked from the main WP:PUI page, and closes discussions where the image does not exist. It never edits WP:PUI itself, so if any day's page has no more active discussions a human should remove it.

The situation at IFD is different: since every discussion there is required to be closed using the "blue box" template, the bot can easily determine how many sections are still active for any day and thus can easily maintain the Old discussions section. Anomie⚔ 23:38, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the info. Then I will simply delete the files (if needed) and remove the daily PUI page a day later. That way the bot will have time to close the discussions. Garion96 (talk) 09:35, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

Romhacking.net

The romhacking.net links on SNES seem to be dead. Their titles and authors mention Anomie. Are they related to you and if so, are there current links? —Ost (talk) 22:11, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

Yes, that's me. It looks like romhacking.net implemented HTTP referer checking to prevent direct linking to the files; we can fix it easily enough by linking to the description page instead of directly to the file. Anomie⚔ 22:36, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the help. I appreciate your response and that you already fixed up the links. —Ost (talk) 12:45, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

RFC on signature subst'ing

Since you were involved in shaping the current guideline on substing signatures, you may wish to see WT:SIG#Substrfc. –xeno (talk) 04:00, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

AnomieBOT tweak for WP:GLASS

I left a message on the bot's talk page. I don't know how to stop the bot so I'm notifying you (hopefully you are around). It's not a biggie, but it'll be less of a pain to fix the problem.Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 03:02, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Replied there. FYI, instructions on stopping the bot are on the bot's userpage, I suppose the only difficulty might be in determining which bot task is the right one. Anomie⚔ 03:29, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Yes, but there are no subpages for AutoAssesser.Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 05:43, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

The line for AutoAssessor2 links to User:AnomieBOT/shutoff/AutoAssessor2; I didn't think it was confusing that the page doesn't exist, do I need to have the bot create a blank page there? Anomie⚔ 11:41, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Well it would have been less confusing to me. Can't really say what the reaction of the population in general would have been..Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 13:19, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

AnomieBOT - RandomPage

Would it be difficult to expand the bot's power so that it could indicate the article's versions before and after the article was picked (e.g., updating the previous collaboration information on {{CurrentGCOTW}}. —Ost (talk) 16:30, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

PUI move

Hi, there is still a leftover from the poorly planned PUI move. User:Howcheng/quickimgdelete.js still directs to possible unfree images instead of possible unfree files. I asked Howcheng but no response. Could you fix it? I am not much of a coder myself so don't want to risk breaking it. Garion96 (talk) 10:50, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

This change should fix it. Anomie⚔ 12:54, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks and done. Garion96 (talk) 13:14, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

Award

For your great work with bots and BAG, I award you this custom-made bot-helper's barnstar. – Quadell (talk) 18:43, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

Wow, a custom barnstar! Thank you! Anomie⚔ 19:27, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

TfD nomination of Template:Uw-rollbackremoved

Template:Uw-rollbackremoved has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for Deletion page. -- IRP ☎ 20:44, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

Barnstar

		The Barnstar of Diligence
		For your excellent work on helping BRFAs (not just mine :)) reach approval by reading & commenting on people's code. ThaddeusB (talk) 16:08, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

Thank you! I like helping make bots better. Anomie⚔ 00:19, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

WP:RFBOT

Your recent bot approvals request has been approved. Please see the request page for details. All the best, – Quadell ^(talk) 12:29, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Speaking of which, I noticed you made this fix. Does User:SQL/How to close a BRFA need to be updated? – Quadell ^(talk) 12:48, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

I suppose it could be made more clear that it's {{subst:BRFAA}} when substing. Someday I should really write a patch to add "<substonly>" and/or the "substall:" that I've seen mentioned once or twice before, so we can do {{<substonly>subst:</substonly>#switch:.... Anomie⚔ 13:03, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Doh! I missed an A. – Quadell ^(talk) 13:25, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Requested page contents

Here you go User_talk:Anomie/DABARKADS.JPG. This was the version that was deleted, containing the GFDL tag that was referred to at Wikipedia:Possibly_unfree_files#File:DABARKADS.JPG. Mfield (Oi!) 17:16, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. It turns out my guess was right: someone marked it "GFDL" and gave it a non-free image rationale. Anomie⚔ 11:10, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

Calvin and Hobbes

I have nominated Calvin and Hobbes for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Grsz¹¹ 22:49, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

That's sad, although it does seem people have added much crap since I dewatchlisted it a while back. I messed with the FA process once, and decided not to bother about it any more. Anomie⚔ 21:22, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

Please close

Apologies, can you do the needful and close that BRFA? I am feeling quite silly asking him to seek approval, our global bot policy having been in place for nearly a year. =) –xeno ^talk 22:44, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Already done. Don't worry too much about it, it's better to request approval unnecessarily than to not request it when it is needed. Anomie⚔ 22:47, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. Learn something new every day... –xeno ^talk 23:05, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Is Anomiebot feeling well?

Greetings. I noticed that WP:FFD still doesn't link April 21, 22, or 23 under "Older Discussions". I'd thought Anomiebot updated this. Do we humans need to manually keep this list up to date, or should the bot be doing it? Thanks, – Quadell ^(talk) 02:56, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

It was choking on "File:Z%27ev_StefanWeisser_Smiling.jpg" in April 27; it seems to be working now that I added in a uri_unescape on the image filenames. Thanks for letting me know. Anomie⚔ 12:17, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Removal of comment

This apparently refers to this edit.

I have removed your edit to prevent possible vandalism. Probably not an issue but just in case. User F203 (talk) 18:37, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Not a chance of vandalism, as every page in the MediaWiki namespace is automatically fully protected. If some admin were to want to vandalize, better they do it so they can have their permissions revoked. Anomie⚔ 18:43, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Any idea what this means

WebCiteBOT has died twice on the same page (16th Regiment Royal Artillery) with the API returning the following "hookaborted: The modification you tried to make was aborted by an extension hook." I search on [[MediaWiki:]] but it didn't have any real info. I assumed it was a temporary error, but then it died a second time on the same page.

For now, I just changed the code to just move on, rather than dieing, but if you have any insight (or know where I can get some :)), let me know.

Thanks, --ThaddeusB (talk) 01:50, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

It's AbuseFilter. In general, "hookaborted" means it's an extension using the EditFilter, EditPage::attemptSave, or EditFilterMerged hooks (and not the APIEditBeforeSave hook) note none of those categories are necessarily complete. Anomie⚔ 02:26, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Looks like the page in question lists the author's email as part of the "author" meta tag. I'll have to add a filter for that. Thanks! --ThaddeusB (talk) 02:44, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

linkclassifier.js

After experiencing the benfits of the gadget de:MediaWiki:Gadget-bkl-check.js in the German Wikipedia (they provide it as a selectable gadget in their preferences de:Spezial:Einstellungen), I tried your script linkclassifier.js in conjunction with linkclassifier.css, alas, without any success, meaning no wikilinks get colored or adorned. Instead, every page on the English Wikipedia produces this error in IE8 (Browser Mode: IE8 Compat View, Document Mode: IE7 Standards; none of the other combinations works any better in this regard, but this combination allows the Gadget Navigation popups to function):

 Webpage error details
  
 User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; GTB5; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; InfoPath.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
 Timestamp: Thu, 7 May 2009 14:18:49 UTC
  
  
 Message: Object doesn't support this property or method
 Line: 124
 Char: 9
 Code: 0
 URI: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Anomie/linkclassifier.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript

The code at line 124 is this:

        a=Array.map(a, function(a){

Firefox 3.0.4 shows the colorisation and adornments as intended. Unfortunately, I installed IE8 just before I started to use your script, so I don't know whether this behaviour already existed in IE7.

Is this a known issue with Internet Explorer? And is there a way to fix it, or should I consider using Firefox as the more suitable browser for Wikipedia? Regards, Michael Bednarek (talk) 14:42, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

I doubt it ever worked in IE7 either. I added some code that should fix your above error (remember to bypass your cache); I can't promise there aren't more errors to find, though. I don't have IE to try it myself with at the moment. Anomie⚔ 16:52, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for attempting to fix it, but it has made no difference (I verified that I had bypassed the browser's cache — IE8's built-in Developer Tools are a most useful new feature). So it's FF for browsing Wikipedia, although there seem to be other severe shortcomings. IE8 shows in this version the image of the Swiss network perfectly where I intended it (below the section "Current density/Switzerland" to the left of that section's text, in the modes described above; in strict mode the image is shown below the section "Speed limits"); in FF it's way out of position, overlaying some text below. I suspect that's a problem how MediaWiki renders Extended image syntax. Ah well, swings & roundabouts. Thanks again, Michael Bednarek (talk) 05:01, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

If you feel link giving it another try, I made additional modifications. Actually, IE has that float wrong. According to the CSS2 specification, the top of any floated box may not be above the top of any block or floated box that appears earlier in the document. Which is why the image ends up even with the top of the second right-floated image (unless your font size is so large that the "Germany" paragraph takes up more than the height of the first image, of course). WP:BUNCH might help you there. Anomie⚔ 12:27, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

It now works in IE. But I must admit that my previous statement about verifying that I had bypassed the browser's cache was in error: although I had pressed all the right buttons, it's trickier than I thought to inspect an included module in IE's Developer Tools. I'm somewhat confident that your latest change in User:Anomie/util.js was what swung it.

Thank you also for your succinct explanation of the relevant CSS2 specs; they got me on the right path to fixing the problem with that bunch of images in the Autobahn article, although the fundamental problem is "too many images in too little space", but that's a "content" problem. Many thanks again for fixing linkclassifier.js. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 18:24, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

bas/BASIC

Back in March (Wikipedia:Bot_requests/Archive_26#User_bas), you helped the Amazonien with moving User bas to User BASIC. You said to contact you if he decided to also move {{user bas-0/1/2/3/4/N}}. He seems to have dropped the ball on that, and so I am requesting for help with the move. ~ 10nitro (talk) 20:11, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

I went ahead and moved the templates, and the bot is now in the process of replacing all the uses. I recommend waiting until the corresponding WhatLinksHere report (0/1/2/3/4/N) lists no transclusions before changing each redirect into the new template. Anomie⚔ 02:15, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Thank you. ~ 10nitro (talk) 03:31, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

The bot is done. There are still a few uses left on userpages where the actual transclusion of the userbox is in a <includeonly> on a subpage, and one where the userpage is fully protected; you'll have to take care of those manually. Anomie⚔ 14:50, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Ajax preview and User:Magnus Manske/less edit clutter.js

I'm a very happy user of your Ajax preview script. However, I've been testing Magnus Manske's javascript revision of the editing interface, which isn't compatible with your script. And while that wouldn't necessarily be that big a deal (I'm experienced enough with the classic editing interface to be able to use that very productively), I'm hoping to recommend both scripts to a brand new bunch of hard science editors. But I can't do that if they don't work together.

Would you be able to take a look at why your script doesn't work when the other script is running? And if it's something that Magnus should fix, I'll be happy to contact him and ask him about changing his script.

Thanks! -- John Broughton (♫♫) 02:37, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

I haven't tested it, but it looks like this is what's happening: Magnus's script screws up the text in the edit box, and unscrews it just before any of the standard buttons are pressed. My script adds an alternate button, which misses Magnus's "unscrew" operation and thus does a preview on the screwed-up text.

I've added a hook to my script, so the "get editbox text content" function can be replaced. Magnus's script needs a function like less_edit_clutter_rejoin() that returns the unscrewed text without actually modifying the text boxes, and when window.AJAXPreview is defined it needs to assign that function to AJAXPreview.getTextContent inside less_edit_clutter_init() (e.g. if(window.AJAXPreview) AJAXPreview.getTextContent = less_edit_clutter_unscrew_text;). Anomie⚔ 03:01, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Very helpful. I've posted a request at the user talk page of Magnus, to continue making progress on this. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 13:44, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Rescuing orphaned refs

I really like your bot's "Rescuing orphaned refs" function. The thing is, though, more than half the time the page is missing a ref because of a recent edit (usually by an anon, and without an edit summary) that inappropriately removes a large chunk of text. Could this bot produce a log? It isn't easy to plow through its edit history and find only those edits concerned with this task, so a log on a subpage would be helpful. If I had access to such a page, I could investigate those cases as candidates for investigating and possibly restoring content. What do you think? All the best, – Quadell ^(talk) 20:51, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

You're not the first to request a log: User:AnomieBOT/OrphanReferenceFixer log. Anomie⚔ 22:02, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Well then! Great job preminitorally fulfilling my request! :) – Quadell ^(talk) 23:29, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

OnThisDay

Anomie,

The bot is a nice bot and gets a botcookie.

Perhaps I am wrong but it's only few days the {{OnThisDay}} has turned up on my watchlist (and I have about 500 articles on my watchlist). It's a bit unhelpful because most of the bot's edits are not anything to do with "On This Day" so it lays False Scent. I suggest it would be better not to put that. SimonTrew (talk) 02:14, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Note that the past two days the bot was dealing with 5 years worth of backlog ;) Can you give me diff links to these edits that have nothing to do with "On this day"? Anomie⚔ 02:29, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Forget it, it's kinda disappeared off my horizon. If I see it again, I'll let you know.

It's a nice bot and thanks for your work maintaining it. It gets a bot-biscuit. SimonTrew (talk) 16:53, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Script / monobook.js

I was wondering if you could tell me (and if you want, explain me) what is a monobook.js or user script or whatever... and what is it for? - Damërung ^{...ÏìíÏ...}_{_ΞΞΞ_} . --  19:56, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

A "user script" is JavaScript code that is loaded for every page when logged into your account, as opposed to the site-wide scripts at MediaWiki:Common.js and MediaWiki:Monobook.js. These scripts normally do things that help maintain the encyclopedia; for example, one of my more popular scripts makes it easier to spot links to disambiguation pages by giving them a different background color.

The subpage "monobook.js" in your userspace is where you put the javascript code to load user scripts in order to actually use them if you are using the default MonoBook skin (other skins have different subpages). Anomie⚔ 20:31, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

And what is the difference between .css and .js? - Damërung ^{...ÏìíÏ...}_{_ΞΞΞ_} . --  21:03, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

A .js file is a script and does something. For instance, it might add a new button to a page for you, that does something when you click it. A .css file is a way of specifying how things look. It doesn't add a new button, but it could make all links look green for you, for instance. – Quadell ^(talk) 21:50, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

See JavaScript (.js) and Cascading Style Sheets (.css) for more information. Anomie⚔ 22:53, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

Re: Bot Request

Context: Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Angria77Bot‎

There is absolutely no chance of me still being on here in a few months. I will certainatly get blocked along the way. Angria77 ^{Banter, Edits} 15:10, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Sorry to hear that, but all the better reason not to approve your bot request. Anomie⚔ 17:38, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

(That is, I think, the funniest argument for bot approval I've ever seen.) – Quadell ^(talk) 17:45, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Table of Contents, etc, etc.

Yes, I would love to know how to do that, but I think I'll leave all developments of that sort until after the RfC is resolved. No point worrying about it in the meantime. - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 15:50, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

Adapted from the code in Parser.php. Coming into the code below, $headings contains an object for each heading which has a "level" property which basically indicates the number of ='s in the heading.

$prevlevel = 0;
$prevlevels = array();
$toclevel = 0;
$toclabels = array();
foreach( $headings as $h ) {
    if( $h->level > $prevlevel ) {
        $toclevel++;
        $toclabels[$toclevel] = 0;
    } else if( $h->level < $prevlevel ) {
        for( $i = $toclevel; $i > 0; $i-- ) {
            if( $prevlevels[$i] == $h->level ) {
                $toclevel = $i;
                break;
            } else if( $prevlevels[$i] < $h->level ) {
                $toclevel = $i + 1;
                break;
            }
        }
        if( $i == 0 ) $toclevel = 1; /* Note! */
    } else {
        /* $toclevel stays the same */
    }
    $prevlevels[$toclevel] = $prevlevel = $h->level;
    $toclabels[$toclevel]++;
    $h->toclevel = $toclevel;
    $h->toclabel = implode('.', array_slice($toclabels,1,$toclevel));
}

The line labeled "Note!" is actually not done by MediaWiki (yet), except in the special case that $toclevel is 2, which causes this misrendering. (fixed in the latest scap) Anomie⚔ 01:16, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

RE: NoMultiLicense message delivery

Hi there,

I certainly will, I tried to look through the list to begin with to fix this problem, but I couldn't seem to do it. I'll go ahead and fix those now, otherwise all of the other ones are  Done!

The Helpful One 20:33, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

nested=yes

Wow. I just noticed. I am so sorry. I opened a second AWB to do some test edits, then I pout to background and I completely forgot. I stopped it immediately. I noticed some change in the behavior of KingbotK plugin after the last revision and I wanted to test that. -- Magioladitis (talk) 15:18, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

No problem. IMO, the removal of "nested=yes" can be done as a side effect of more necessary edits; for example, AnomieBOT takes care of that whenever it edits a page for one of its approved WikiProject tagging runs. Anomie⚔ 15:22, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

re: Questions

Some interesting stuff there I'd like to agree with and comment on. Can I take it from the multiple signatures that it'd be preferable to discuss each question in its own section rather than discuss downwards? - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 18:39, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

I thought it would be easier to keep things straight if I made each question its own subsection, otherwise I feared it would end up a big jumble and probably one or two points taking over and the rest being ignored. At least this way if any get ignored I know it wasn't because they were accidentally overlooked. Anomie⚔ 00:52, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

By the way, sorry for abandoning you and Mr. Z-man on IRC yesterday (RL and all that). Method two does indeed using an SQL query very similar to the one you suggested. You know, I'd forgotten the tl_namespace condition! No wonder it was taking so longer to execute. Having fixed that, it looks like that method trumps an API call every time, so I think I'll make it the only option. The databse even manages to cache responses to some degree, though I don't know for how long that lasts. Anyhow, thanks for the reply. - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c)} 11:30, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

The big win with that query, once you remember the tl_namespace, is that MySQL will just check the index to perform the count. I don't know about caching beyond that the index data is likely to still be in the operating system's IO cache and thus doesn't need to be reloaded from disk, though. Anomie⚔ 11:59, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Licensing update

Hi, would you mind giving me some more background on these changes to the licence agreements, and why this change is necessary? Thanks. (You can reply here; I'm watching!) — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:17, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

The Free Software Foundation included as part of the GFDL version 1.3 a clause that allows "Massive Multiauthor Collaboration Sites" currently licensed under that license (i.e. Wikipedia, which is "GFDL 1.2 or later") to relicense their content as CC-BY-SA 3.0; see GFDL#Compatibility with CC-BY-SA for more info. The Wikimedia Foundation took a poll (which was advertised in the site notice), with the result that 75.8% of respondents were in favor of using that clause to transition to CC-BY-SA-3.0 with most content dual licensed under the GFDL. Based on those results, the Board issued a resolution that the change would be made, and set a transition date of June 15, 2009. So in a bit under 4 days, Wikipedia's copyright licensing terms are going to change.

We here at enwiki have various templates by which people can multi-license their text contributions under licenses in addition to Wikipedia's licensing; it is, of course, not possible for anyone to not license their contributions as specified by the Wikimedia Foundation. The templates I edited (or tagged with {{editprotected}}) specifically said Wikipedia's licensing terms are "GFDL" when making the multi-license grant, which will no longer be true as of June 15; the change I made/requested is to simply replace "GFDL" with "Wikipedia's copyright terms", which is true now and remains true after June 15. Anomie⚔ 11:26, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Hi, There are a number of other pages that may need looking at as well for licensing changes. For example:

• Wikipedia:User page
• Wikipedia:TourBusStop

A number of the pages that link to the GFDL article page may also need looking at. -- WOSlinker (talk) 12:50, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, I've attended to all those requests (I think!), nearly got caught out by the one that was a little different. Serves me right for trying to do it the lazy way. If there are any more, feel free to drop a message on my talk page. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 13:54, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

MastiBot

You recently added this bot to /Approved. However, it isn't registered and therefore cannot have its user rights altered... —Anonymous Dissident^Talk 02:05, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

I'll drop a note on Masti's talk page. I checked the SUL status before approving it, it's SUL-registered on many other projects. Anomie⚔ 02:08, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

mastiBot

Now it should work. Thank for such fast approval. Masti (talk) 20:39, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Bot problem

Hi Anomie, a problem with your bot. I'm currently working to improve the refs for Marshalsea. As I'm making changes, your bot is making others, which is leading to some confusion. Are you able to fix it so that it doesn't respond to my Marshalsea edits? SlimVirgin ^{talk|contribs} 23:15, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

(A talkpage stalker chimes in.) I think that if you add {{nobots}} temporarily somewhere on the page, that will prevent Anomie's bot from making any changes to the article. Then you can remove the template when you're done, if you like. All the best, – Quadell ^(talk) 23:46, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Brilliant, thank you. :) SlimVirgin ^{talk|contribs} 01:49, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Or {{inuse}}, which will tell human editors what's up too. Anomie⚔ 02:03, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

User:LivingBot/Wikibot.php5

Any chance of getting you to do my work for me regards maxlag error codes? You pretty much wrote it the first time around, IIRC. - Jarry1250 ^{(t, c, rfa)} 20:39, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

I'll take a look, after I finish my own bot. Unless Roan decides to revert the change, I just asked him about it on #mediawiki (the change is logical from one viewpoint, but IMO illogical from a more important one). Anomie⚔ 20:55, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

Reverted in rev:53353, so no bot changes needed. Anomie⚔ 12:56, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

Lancbot

Hey, in my request for giving Lancbot a botflag, you said "No. You have NO experience with any wiki". That's wrong. In all the other wikis, my name is Lancy. And in the german Wiki, I'm very active, watch here. In the english Wiki, the name is not aviable.--Podas (talk) 06:44, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Since you did not reveal that until just now, how was I to know what other name you might use? I did mention "unless it's under a different name", for what that's worth. BTW, you may be able to get User:Lancy here by posting a request at WP:CHU/SUL.

You still need to build a familiarity with this Wikipedia before running a bot here. Anomie⚔ 11:12, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

AnomieBot on the blink?

Greetings. I notice that Wikipedia:Files for deletion isn't being auto-updated in some of the backlogs. Is AnomieBot stymied, waylaid, or otherwise distracted? All the best, – Quadell ^(talk) 14:55, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

User:Rjanag screwed up {{ffd2}} on the 15th. So the 15th-19th had lots of section headers non-linked, and AnomieBOT only works on listings with the header linked to the file. Anomie⚔ 18:02, 26 June 2009 (UTC)

Banner shells

Hi, you've gone quiet over at Template talk:WikiProjectBannerShell. Can your bot handle it? Do you have any other concerns? Or are you just waiting for some more input? Cheers, — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:40, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

Waiting for more input, no one besides the two of us has commented in the latest round of discussion. Although it'll need a few minor changes to match the latest consensus, I already have the code ready: [1] Anomie⚔ 13:38, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

Okay, that sounds sensible. I've asked Happy-melon and Jim Cubb to comment when they can, as they were the other main participants. Based on his latest contributions it seems that the main previous opponent will now be happy with the proposal. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 15:21, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

---

Now that the dust has settled and all that is left is what your bot is doing, I am curious. Why were and are you opposed to {{WBS}}?

JimCubb (talk) 18:49, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

I like {{WPBS}}; I suspect you meant {{WPB}}. I personally think WPBS looks better, and I'd rather see the list of projects than just a box saying projects exist. Anomie⚔ 00:44, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I meant {{WPB}}. I am sorry for my error.

I understand your point, really. I think that a Talk Page should be for discussion not for the display of administrative matters. In my opinion {{skiptotoc}} should never be necessary. The Table of Contents should be on the first screen no matter the size of the screen.

Thank you for your response.

JimCubb (talk) 01:25, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

Anybot edit list

You have a list of anybot started articles.User:Anomie/Pages created by anybot and edited by non-bots I checked all blue-linked articles on this list, and they are either not started by anybot or were corrected by other editors. --69.226.103.13 (talk) 23:54, 4 July 2009 (UTC)

I'm not quite sure what you are saying. If you're informing me that you have checked the list and verified that the remaining articles should continue to exist, thank you and I hope you found the list useful. If you're implying that there were errors in the list, you are mistaken: Every bluelink remaining in the list was created by Anybot (many were subsequently deleted and then recreated by other editors), and every one was edited afterwords by the listed non-bot editors (whether those edits were improvements is not something I attempt to evaluate). Anomie⚔ 05:09, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

Some of the articles were started by other than anybot. There may be something I can't see in the edit histories, like their being recreated by another user after anybot's was deleted, but that wasn't the point of this post.

The point of this post was this list has been checked, all the blue-linked article remaining on it, and all articles have either been deleted or verified, that's all, so that list can be deleted, and I will check the other two lists you generated as I find time.

I'm only checking edible seaweeds that I'm familiar with and going by their "what links here" to find useful redirects created by anybot that can actually be kept, simply because I'm interested in edible seaweeds and often write food and cooking articles for wikipedia, your list shows up in the what links here. I'm trying to clean up all articles generated by anybot, all that's left are redirects, and articles Martin made from anybot content, in addition to cleaning up all lists of "articles made by anybot" so these, too can be deleted. --69.226.103.13 (talk) 05:24, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

Ok then, thank you for helping to clean up the mess!

In case you're curious what you might be missing, there are two possibilities I can think of: redirects and deletions. As an example of the first, Acicularia was created by anybot but it currently redirects to Acetabularia; if you miss the fact that you were redirected and look at Acetabularia's history instead of Acicularia's, you might be confused. As an example of the second, Chilomonas was recreated by Arcadian about five days after it was deleted per the AfD (see the deletion log for Chilomonas), which could mislead you if you didn't notice the very recent timestamp on the first edit. If you need to find the logs for a page, click the "View logs for this page" link just under the title on the article's history page. Anomie⚔ 05:40, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

I didn't look at the deletion logs, but I was wondering why I didn't catch Arcadian's name in my earlier sweep since he/she seemed to have made a lot of algae articles. I'll check blue link on the other two lists as I get time then post here. --69.226.103.13 (talk) 19:35, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

Chrisbot

I've no objection to Chrisbot restarting. Have stated this at WT:BRFA. Mjroots (talk) 13:16, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Indiana bot request

I half replied to you at the bot request page. Thanks. AHRtbA== ^Talk 20:01, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

Linkclassifier

Hi, could you possibly give me a hand with this? I tried to install your link classifier (which I found on the village pump a little while ago) but I haven't managed to get it to work. I've made changes to User:J Milburn/monobook.js and User:J Milburn/monobook.css, but links/images aren't showing up in different colours yet. Could you make the changes necessary/explain what the issue is? Thanks. J Milburn (talk) 19:16, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

Try reloading your cache now? (God, I hope that works. Incidentally, Anomie wouldn't have been able to change your files for you.) - Jarry1250 ^{[ humorous – discuss ]} 19:27, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

Brilliant, thank you. Will take some getting used to, but I'm definitely going to appreciate some of these features. Thanks for the script Anomie. J Milburn (talk) 19:35, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

You're welcome! And thanks Jarry for handling the admin editing; I clarified the instructions in User:Anomie/linkclassifier.css to hopefully make it more clear in the future. Anomie⚔ 20:03, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

It would be less confusing if you used CSS import instead of invoking it using JavaScript to do the same:

@import "/w/index.php?action=raw&ctype=text/css&title=User:Anomie/linkclassifier.css‎";

— Dispenser 23:01, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

Although that has interesting implications for IE, as IE seems to wait on all @imports until the entire page is loaded. And then it has to be made clear that the @import must be at the top of monobook.css. I'll have to think about it. Anomie⚔ 23:10, 18 July 2009 (UTC)

WikiProject Banners Template

Hello, I notice your bot has been doing some updating on the WikiProject Banners templates. I use those pretty exclusively on radio station pages. Please see the List of radio stations in Virginia and List of radio stations in West Virginia for all the pages I have used the templates on. Not sure if your bot will be updating those pages, if it isn't, would you mind adding them to your bot's "to do list"? :) Take Care...NeutralHomer • Talk • 01:43, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

The bot is only processing pages in Category:WikiProject banner shells with deprecated parameters at this time. So if you want to attract the bot to the page, put in a banner shell with any of the numbered parameters 2–10 used. Anomie⚔ 02:00, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

I do use the numbered fields on mine. I didn't see them listed on the category. I guess they will get updated in the next go-round. :) Take Care...NeutralHomer • Talk • 02:32, 24 July 2009 (UTC)

Motorcycling WikiProject

Is it possible that one of your bots can tag all the project articles as stub-class which have the motorcycling stub {{Motorcycle-stub}} in the articles for our recently formed assessment department? I estimate about 500+ articles use the stub. The talk pages that are already (mainly incompletely) tagged use the {{Motorcycling}} project banner. If you are not the best person to deal with this, please advise me. Cheers ww2censor 16:38, 6 August 2009

linkclassifier error

On Vector with Safari 4, I get the error: "TypeError: Result of expression 'Array.map' [undefined] is not a function. index.php:174". —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:57, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

That's very odd, since User:Anomie/linkclassifier.js loads User:Anomie/util.js and that defines Array.map (for browsers not supporting Javascript 1.6 array functions) at line 124. Does it work in Safari 4 with non-Vector skins? Anomie⚔ 23:20, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Date delinking code available

I thought you might like to take a look, forsee problems and so forth. - Jarry1250 ^{[ In the UK? Sign the petition! ]} 10:26, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Done, thanks for the heads-up. That code needs a good bit of work. Anomie⚔ 18:53, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Replied to your comment: Wikipedia:Bot requests#Dealing with: Category:Non-free Wikipedia file size reduction request

Hi,

I replied to your comment on this page. Tim1357 (talk) 23:10, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

AJAX preview script

Can you tell me how to get this working in Greasemonkey? Thanks..69.65.42.44 (talk) 19:48, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

I don't use Greasemonkey, so I wouldn't know where to begin on that. You could always create an account to use it the normal way. Anomie⚔ 23:25, 11 September 2009 (UTC)

If you have a moment

If you have a moment, could you look at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/ContentCreationBOT‎ and confirm that the posted code does indeed accurately take the information from the posted database?

Currently the proposal is stalled due to a rather demanding IP whose objection seems to be entirely philosophical (or person against me). He has repeatedly refused to provide any specific problems for me to address (presumably because there are none). Hopefully if someone with programming knowledge confirms that the code is solid, we can finally start moving forward again.

Thanks, ThaddeusB (talk) 20:46, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

Done. To avoid confusing the issue there, I left out a few comments that would not affect the bot as proposed:

• Your section-splitting regex has a few issues, although it will work fine for the articles in question:
  • It will fail for any section whose header contains characters other than [a-zA-Z0-9_] and whitespace.
  • It will falsely trigger on certain non-header constructs, see here for examples.
    • Not sure why I used \w\s there - what I would normally do is split (/\n==+[^=].*?==/, $text);. I see now that is inadequate as well. Would split (/\n==+[^=].*?==+\n/, $text); work properly?
      • You can see AnomieBOT's header-splitting code in split_sections in User:AnomieBOT/source/d/Sections.pm. The basic idea is something like /(?:^|(?<=\n))(=+)([^=\n](?:.*[^=\n])?)\1((?:[ \t]*<!--.*?-->)*[ \t]*)(?:\n|$)/, but with a bit of extra preprocessing to handle nowikis (and comments differently), and to allow me to say "only split on level 3 or 4 headings".
• Technically, you shouldn't depend on the edit token being the same for every page. The devs could change that, although chances are they won't.
  • Good to know.
• I'm not sure about the use of split to pull out the genus, wouldn't a regex with a capturing group be more clear?
  • Yes, probably. I used to use split for most things before I really knew regrexes well, so I still fall back on it sometimes.
• If you really want to take the belt and suspenders approach, use the "md5" parameter and "assert=bot" in your action=edit.
  • Couldn't hurt.
• As a style issue, I personally always "use strict" so it will error out if I typo a variable name.

• Yah, everyone says its a good idea to "use strict" and I don't disagree. I just never got into the habit of doing it.

Anomie⚔ 16:41, 13 September 2009 (UTC)

Thank again, ThaddeusB (talk) 03:28, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

No problem. Anomie⚔ 04:19, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

P.S. I've added a ton of stuff to WebCiteBOT since it was approved. Feel free to take a look at the latest code (uploaded today) & comment if you like: [2] (But don't feel obligated to by any means.) --ThaddeusB (talk) 03:28, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

I'll do that, unless I forget. Anomie⚔ 04:19, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

Quick question

Lately WebCiteBOT has been getting a lot of "504 Gateway Time-out" errors when uploading large pages (>150k) via the API. The strange part is the edit usually goes through despite the error (i.e. the changes are made, but no data is returned to me.) Any ideas on how to reduce the number of these errors? Thanks! --ThaddeusB (talk) 02:51, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

What's happening there is that MediaWiki is taking too long to process the API query, so the squid eventually times out and gives that error. But the MediaWiki process doesn't stop, and so the edit does go through eventually. No idea what you can do to avoid the errors if it's an edit that's doing it, besides figuring out what is being slow and submitting a patch for it; I had a similar problem a while back with eilimit=max after many eicontinues that was worked around by lowering the limit, but that doesn't really apply to an edit. Anomie⚔ 20:28, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Ref templates

What is your opinion of {{r}} and {{sfn}}? ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 00:24, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

"Ugh." More specifically, I don't see how the slight savings in typing is worth the very likely breaking of possible syntax highlighting, scripts, and bots. Anomie⚔ 03:16, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

User:Anomie/useridentifier.js - Wrong icon on user group "confirmed"?

Hi there. I love to use User:Anomie/useridentifier.js to easily access user information. Could you check something though? It seems that the script uses the yellow ! for admins on those users as well who are only in the group "confirmed" (see User:Programmer101 for example). Regards SoWhy 12:42, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Fixed, along with 'import', 'transwiki', and 'abusefilter'. Don't forget to bypass your cache. Anomie⚔ 17:25, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, you are a master coder :-D Regards SoWhy 17:43, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Query regarding template changes

Hello. Sorry to bother you, but past experience has shown you to be one of the "go to guys" when it comes to understanding the complicated template parser operations used by WP:UTM. Earlier this year, edits intended to "fix code" actually made things worse, so since then I have been rather wary of un-discussed code changes. As such, the latest edits to "simplify code" to eight of the templates ([3], [4], etc.) make me nervous, especially since I cannot figure out exactly what they are doing. Do you understand the parser changes? Thanks, — Kralizec! (talk) 17:54, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

I don't mind at all, especially since I don't really watch the templates anymore (too much wikistress in general, I had to give up something). The two changes you ask about are fine; the change to uw-unsourced1 is a basic simplification ({{{var|default}}} is equivalent {{#if:{{{var|}}}|{{{var}}}|default}}, with the advantage that it doesn't leave behind any parser functions when the template is substed). The (other) change to uw-spam1 is making it so using the |subst=subst: parameter works as intended, just as was already existing in the first #if. Anomie⚔ 19:02, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

Let's stick to the topic alone

If you really think "polemics" are not necessary, please don't call people's comments polemics. Discuss, instead, the merits or demerits of the issues raised by the other editor. This shows that you don't want polemics. After all, the other editors on wikipedia are smart enough to write an encyclopedia, they can think, and make value judgments for themselves. --69.225.5.4 (talk) 20:32, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

polemic (noun): "The art or practice of aggressive debate, attack on [...] the opinions or principles of another". FWIW, I did comment on the content of the post in question: the content of your post was a rant based on an assumption that "oh well, I can't find the error" would be accepted and the bot approved, with a (rhetorical?) question as to what else the problem could be besides the code. I answered the rhetorical question and cautioned you that your rant was not productive. And it turned out that the underlying MediaWiki bug was found, no thanks to the rant.

Your work in fixing the anybot mess was good, and it's good to have someone call foul when something is not right. But continuing to call the same foul over and over in the same discussion when the point is already being discussed quickly crosses the line into disruption. You are gaining a reputation as someone who aggressively repeats the same points ad nauseam, which quickly decreases the signal-to-noise ratio of the discussion. I refuse to play that game. Anomie⚔ 12:30, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

"Rant." No good comes of name calling. It just lowers standards of discussion.

I'll call problems as I see them, when they continue to occur, regardless of your aggressively continuing to turn my calls to me and away from problems and potential problems with bots.

For example, the issues I raised about ContentCreation bot have proven accurate-the bot was coded in a way for the reasons I suggested that caused it to create an anybot type error of the sort I was concerned about. Now we're working as a group to try to address the issues I raised to see if the bot can run rather than fighting me. We're working together as a community for a solution, rather than discussing my "ranting" or calling my suggestions names to try to move focus from the suggestion to me.

Maybe you could get over that, as ThaddeusB and Abyssal seem to want to move forward. There are a couple of other editors on board, also, of the type I suggested the bot needs before it can be operated.

Its time to back off of my behavior and get back to wikipedia by looking next time with good faith on the content of what I say and assuming it's meant as a suggestion to improve and protect wikipedia and bots as all of my "rants" thus far have turned out to be about important issues that should not be dismisssed. The bot operator, in this particular case, has no problem with simply rerunning the trial, and it's good coding practice-most programmers would simply rerun a trial no matter what the source of the error. It's not only good practice, it's routine. The energy expended in telling me "my polemics are unnecessary" contributed zip. Staying away from addressing "my" anything would not cause any loss. --69.225.5.4 (talk) 06:03, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

Font finding

It's been bugging me for a while, but where can I find a font that has your talk link character in it? OrangeDog (talk • edits) 00:39, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

Oddly enough, you're the second person to ask that recently. I don't know which fonts might have it, it's a part of the Miscellaneous Symbols block in Unicode. A quick check on my system turns up at least DejaVu Sans. Anomie⚔ 02:00, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

Aha, all is revealed. Thanks. OrangeDog (talk • edits) 14:19, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

Quick question

I've pretty much completed the local tests of the specialized version of WebCiteBOT, but I had one quick question before beginning the live edits. (There are 24677 links to be archived.) Do you think I should go ahead and make it use deadurl=yes since the links will be dead very shortly? --ThaddeusB (talk) 03:50, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

Yes. Anomie⚔ 16:18, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

I love OrphanReferenceFixer

This thing is great. I see it's been around for a while, but I just noticed it within the last couple weeks, when it's made my life much easier. Great idea and well-executed, and quick, too. So thanks :) Equazcion (talk) 05:40, 19 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, it's good to have my programming work appreciated (: Anomie⚔ 12:25, 19 October 2009 (UTC)

Template:Cite episode vs. WP:CIRCULAR

These template seems to be at odds with this policy. The template is used to cite sub-articles from the same group. However (particularly in the case of the article I am cleaning up) this seems very poor form as the cited article is, itself, uncited. I feel I should remove these citations, but as there is a readily used template for just this type of citation I am suffering from a conundrum. Any thoughts? LeilaniLad (talk) 18:52, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

It seems you are misunderstanding {{cite episode}}. That template exists to cite a particular episode of a television series, radio program, or the like. For example, if an article about an urban legend were to cite an episode of the television show MythBusters to support the plausibility of the legend being true, it could use {{cite episode}}. The citation would be to the television episode itself, not whatever is in our articles MythBusters or List of MythBusters episodes. Anomie⚔ 19:12, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

But {{cite episode}} has a parameter for "episodelink", which autofills to a Wikipedia page for the episode in question, does it not? LeilaniLad (talk) 00:46, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

Which is exactly the same thing as {{cite book}}'s "authorlink" parameter. You don't assume that's trying to cite the author's article for any reason, do you? Anomie⚔ 02:56, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

ZhBot

Hey Anomie, if you have some free time in the next couple days would you be able to look at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/ZhBot? There appears to be unanimous consensus there and we're just waiting for approval to do a trial run; I tagged the page with {{BAGAssistanceNeeded}} but I don't know if that puts it in a category or anything (so apologies if this message of mine is redundant). Thanks, rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 23:14, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Naming conventions (capitalization)

You recently commented in the discussion concerning consensus on this page. You may be interested to know that the conversation appears to still be ongoing and another used has removed the section, in it's entirety, from the page. Dpmuk (talk) 10:55, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Fast approvals

I've asked BAG to slow down on fast approvals after trials. There was no urgency in CobraBot task 2 that required immediate approval without interested editors examining the trial. Now, it seems there was an AN/I link that, imo, should have been linked on the BRFA discussion when I first raised my concerns about CobraBot task 1.[5][6] --IP69.226.103.13 (talk) 16:29, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

I waited over 3 days for any comments, in part because of your recent complaints about not having time to comment on trials. The ANI thread you mention was completed well before CobraBot 2 was even requested, and CobraBot 2 was specifically stated to not be adding external links (even indirectly) which is what the ANI (and later VP) brouhaha was all about. Anomie⚔ 16:43, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

I was asked how long I thought it was appropriate to wait. I said a week. No one disagreed. So, 3 days is not sufficient. A week is. I was okay with CobraBot 2 until it turned out that there was more to the CobraBot 1 story that its operator was not discussing. --IP69.226.103.13 (talk) 16:52, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Just because no one disagreed with your suggestion of a week doesn't mean that everyone agreed with it; perhaps they were just tired of arguing with you? And just because you personally were not aware of the ANI thread doesn't mean that I did not take it into account in granting the trial and in approving the bot. Anomie⚔ 17:00, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

And, let's forestall opportunities to accuse me of discussing this in too many places by keeping the discussion at the suggested links. I posted linked to my discussions. This was to alert you to the discussions. --IP69.226.103.13 (talk) 16:54, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Actually, I thought this was just to raise your concerns about the speed of the BRFA approval to me as the approving BAG member, for which this certainly is an appropriate forum. Were it to have turned out that your goal here was to have me de-approve CobraBot 2 rather than to just discuss your concerns, I would have then pointed you to WT:BRFA as the appropriate forum for that discussion. Anomie⚔ 17:00, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Userbox

Pardon my french, but what the hell was that for? I'm sorry, but how come I can't use the image? -- Rue Ryuzaki  jam  20:53, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

That was for compliance with Wikipedia's Non-free content policy, item 9: images that are not available under a free license are absolutely not allowed on user pages. You could replace it with a free alternative if you want. I would have done that replacement myself, but that replacement file wasn't available at the time. Anomie⚔ 22:46, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Nintendo character images from US patents

Hello, at Commons I noticed that you uploaded a bigger version of Yoshi.png, which was previously taken from Google Patents, as well as more images of Nintendo characters from US patents. There are drawings for another patent (several pages) at Google Patents that include some pictures of the character Mario. Could you also check this patent if there isn't specific notice that portions are copyrighted, and when it is safe, upload bigger versions of the Mario images (if available) at Commons? --Grandy02 (talk) 13:08, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't have time to do the uploads myself, but I can help you with checking the copyright text and with finding the larger images. It's really pretty easy:

1. Find the patent at the USPTO website. You can get the relevant patent or publication number from the Google search result.
2. Check for copyright notices. According to the USPTO, two things must be done to preserve the copyright protection over items included in a US design or utility patent or patent application[7][8] (I've found nothing about other types of US patents). IMO, if either one is actually included we should probably give the benefit of the doubt and not use images from the patent.
   1. The text "A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material which is subject to (copyright or mask work) protection. The (copyright or mask work) owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by any­one of the patent document or the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but otherwise reserves all (copyright or mask work) rights whatsoever." must be included in the text of the patent.
   2. A copyright notice (e.g. "©1983 John Doe") must be placed adjacent to each item.
3. Find the images; unfortunately this part may be a bit tricky. At the top of the patent page (e.g. [9]) is a link for "Images". The images are in TIFF format, and at least Firefox 3.5 on Linux won't display them as embedded in the pages there. But if you view the HTML source of the page, you can find near the end an "<embed>" tag with a src something like "/.DImg?Docid=us20080070682ki&PageNum=1&IDKey=3EF6C16EAFAF&ImgFormat=tif".
4. Loading each of the images directly gives you a good-sized image that is basically a scan of a page from the patent. Save the full-size TIFF, load it into your favorite graphics editing program, and extract all the useful images. In general, PNG will be the best format to save in as patent drawings tend to be line drawings.
5. Upload the images to Commons. I suggest copying the format I used:
   • In the "source" section, link to both the patent text on the USPTO site and the particular TIFF image file.
   • Include both {{PD-US-patent-no notice}} and {{trademark}} in the "permissions" section.
   • Include at least one appropriate category.
6. If anyone hassles you, you can point to Commons:Commons:Undeletion_requests/Archive/2009-10#File:Yoshi.png as precedent. Be polite, some commons admins are just unaware of this potential source of public domain images (not all of them are closed-minded jerks like Dodo).

The particular patent application you link to doesn't contain any copyright notices, so it looks good for uploading images. HTH. Anomie⚔ 14:07, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your help! I've found quite a few patents containing such images. However, there is currently a deletion request for the respective template, and it might pass. So I'd better not upload any Nintendo images from patents. --Grandy02 (talk) 12:27, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

I sure hope not. IMO rtc's arguments are completely bogus, but what we really need is a real lawyer to weigh in there. Anomie⚔ 12:52, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

thanks

your bot corrected my error. thank you! Teaforthetillerman (talk) 21:42, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Minor prob

[10] "rescued" three non-orphan cites. Rich Farmbrough, 10:25, 8 November 2009 (UTC).

Thanks, fixed. It was incorrectly treating "<nowiki/>" as an unclosed "<nowiki>", so it missed the whole rest of the page. Anomie⚔ 03:15, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Discussion on ConnectomeBot

I opened a discussion at the VPR (Village Pump Proposals) and advertised it at the External Links Notice Board about a bot you commented on at RFBA, ConnectomeBot. --IP69.226.103.13 (talk) 03:28, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Bot question

Based on your suggestion at Wikipedia:Bot_requests#"Special district governments" page creations?, i have moved that discussion to Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Municipal authorities/special district governments to establish notability.--Blargh29 (talk) 23:06, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Template request

After the discussion about the ugly wikipedia banner "WIKPEDIA FOREVER," a couple of users made their own banners, and I knocked of theirs to produce:

[+] [Hide]

ARTHROPODS  80px

Now, a user suggests mine should rotate among many different arthropod feature pictures.[11] I agree. Any chance you would do this for me? It's not really wikipedia useful enough to post a proper request for it. But it would be a great user page banner. --IP69.226.103.13 (talk) 03:47, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Use a switch something like this to select the random image; of course, it will only change when MediaWiki decides to re-render it or someone purges the page. Anomie⚔ 04:07, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks-more fun with the switch. It's fine only changing with purges, that's what I wanted, blinking is annoying.--IP69.226.103.13 (talk) 00:40, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

IMO, it'd be even better if it changed on every page load, but that would break the caching. Anomie⚔ 00:54, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Question

Would it be possible to use a bot without the flag specifically within a user subpage, i.e. User:MikemoralBot/Test page? --The New Mikemoral ♪♫ 00:50, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, as long as it's not disruptive in some way. From WP:BOTPOL:

In addition, any bot or automated editing process that affects only the operators', or their own, user and talk pages (or subpages thereof), and which are not otherwise disruptive, may be run without prior approval.

Anomie⚔ 00:58, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Okay thanks. So a bit of testing for now until I decide something new... Thanks. --The New Mikemoral ♪♫ 01:09, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Cypbotproto denial

OK - Thanks for the pointer to using a wikipedia dump, and to the pharmacology project. I completely understand that you won't want to grant automated access to a user who hasn't made any contributions yet. We'll go down the dump route for now, compare it with our other sources, and try to make appropriate contributions in the future. Cypbotproto (talk) 23:13, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Sounds like a good plan. BTW, you shouldn't be editing with your "bot" account, you should be using your regular user account. Anomie⚔ 23:45, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Wondering about past talk of having a real programming language

Anomie, I was wondering about this past discussion on the Village Pump [12] that followed a question about whether the Variables extension was installed. You posted a link to a discussion about extending the programming language on wikipedia [13]? Thanks, stmrlbs|talk 03:53, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I did. It turned out that nothing much really came of that discussion, besides a list of requirements. The replacement language must be securely embeddable (e.g. no way to break out of the sandbox), easy to resource limit (no way to DoS the WP servers), easy to learn (bonus points if contributors are likely to already know it), and have a pure-PHP implementation so sites on restrictive hosting that cannot install PHP extensions and cannot shell out to an external executable can still reuse templates from Wikipedia. This last is the real killer. Anomie⚔ 12:24, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply. How do other sites "reuse templates" from Wikipedia? Are you talking about sites that install the wikipedia software to bring up their own wiki? stmrlbs|talk 02:49, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, exactly. We want them to be able to copy our templates (under the terms of the CC-BY-SA and/or GFDL) if they want. Anomie⚔ 03:04, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. I forgot about the wikipedia software being available to the public. I wonder if Wikipedia knows how many sites using straight wikipedia software are on restrictive hosting? Are there a lot of them? stmrlbs|talk 04:29, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, I thought that was a rhetorical question. I have no idea how many there might be, try asking on one of the village pumps or maybe the reference desk. Anomie⚔ 14:44, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. I will check it out. stmrlbs|talk 20:40, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/AnomieBOT 34

Hi there Anomie. Just letting you know that I've approved this bot as is for the moment. If you are bothered about making any of the changes, feel free to discuss at WT:BRFA, or in a new approval request. Best, - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 19:26, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Wikiproject tagging bot?

Regarding my request for a bot to tag a series of pages with the WikiProject Pennsylvania banner at Wikipedia:Bot requests#WikiProject tagging for Wikipedia:WikiProject Pennsylvania, I have completed the cleaning of the categories at User:Blargh29/Subcats of Category:Pennsylvania. I'm not sure what else I need to do. Thanks!--Blargh29 (talk) 06:33, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

Kingpin13 wanted to do it, so first thing to do would be to give him a chance to respond (in certain parts of the world, Thursday was a major holiday and Friday was a day of mass consumerism, so give him until Monday or Tuesday to reply). I'd personally insist on having other editors from WikiProject Pennsylvania look over the list before doing anything, though. At a quick glance, I see a few questionable categories: for example, Category:Ballrooms in Manhattan or Category:Battle Fields of the Gettysburg Campaign of the American Civil War (there are a number of non-Pennsylvania battlefields in there, which is why I question it). Anomie⚔ 14:50, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

Request

Hello, you've worked so diligently on the article SNES. Do you have any sources that would be of use for F-Zero (video game)? « ₣M₣ » 23:57, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

Not really, the few I had in SNES seem to already be in use. Anomie⚔ 04:23, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Bot 35

What is the status of Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/AnomieBOT 35? It is now listed at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval#Bots that have completed the trial period, but nothing else. What are we waiting for? Many thanks, Reywas92^Talk 02:39, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Waiting for some other BAG member to get around to approving it. Speaking of which, I need to find time to look at the non-AnomieBOT requests and see if I can do anything for them. Anomie⚔ 04:24, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Talkback (Alph Bot)

{{tb|Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Alph Bot}}

I've temporarily blocked the bot, feel free to unblock if I've over-stepped! GedUK  10:13, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

You haven't over-stepped, the block was appropriate at the time. I can't unblock though, as I am not an admin. Since I have now approved the bot, please unblock if no one beats you to it. Anomie⚔ 15:11, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

Support; isn't already? Oh, this isn't RFA! PeterSymonds unblocked. I just assumed you were an admin, you crop up all over the place! ;) GedUK  08:43, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

Bot request feedback

Anomie, since you helped out with another bot request of mine (or at least, trying to help out), I was hoping to get your input on another bot request I made but has since received little feedback. When you have a moment, please take a look here and let me know what you think. Thanks.—NMajdan•talk 19:25, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

Policy Report

The community gave feedback on a couple of policy pages at WT:SOCK#Interview for Signpost and WT:CIVILITY#Policy Report for Signpost, and there will be another one in Monday's Signpost that we're putting together at WT:Username policy#Signpost Policy Report. I'm asking for your participation because you made an edit this month or last month at that talk page. If you have questions, feel free to ask at WT:Username policy#Signpost Policy Report or my talk page. The best guide to what the community is expecting from the surveys is to follow the links above to see what they've already done; we haven't had any complaints. Thanks for your time. - Dank (push to talk) 16:54, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Thanks!

		The da Vinci Barnstar
		Thanks for your expertise with running bots and for helping me out by running Task 35! Reywas92Talk 22:16, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Thanks! Anomie⚔ 04:25, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

Linkclassifier

Hi, Anomie! I discovered your excellent linkclassifier.js tool yesterday and after giving it a try I just love it! My only gripe is the color of the links to the stub-class articles—it is way too similar to the color of regular visited links (I've already missed a couple in my watchlist due to that). I realize I can just copy the whole script to my own page and color the hell out of it any way I see fit, but I can't help but wonder if others might have a similar problem. Would you by any chance consider changing this color to something else? On a different note, a documentation page would probably be most useful as well—I couldn't figure out what that light purple color is supposed to be until I looked it up in the actual css sheet. Thanks!—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 22:37, December 16, 2009 (UTC)

You should be able to override just that one color in your skin.css. Even if you want to change all the colors, you don't have to copy the javascript at all, just use your own css file instead of loading mine.

I'm willing to take suggestions for different color schemes. And I really should write a doc one of these days. Anomie⚔ 04:22, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

I am not very good with colors (worse yet with color schemes); I was just hoping you'd be able to think of a better one :) To me it doesn't really matter what that color is, as long as it's possible to easily tell it from other colors.

Thanks for the css tip, by the way; I'll do that. Best,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 15:16, December 17, 2009 (UTC)

XXII

No sound objection, no BAG presence, no movement, want the bulk of this out of the way before the next database dump. Lack of progress is getting in the way of improving the encylopedia. Rich Farmbrough, 13:00, 21 December 2009 (UTC).

MK2 on the SNES

I took a look at the talk pages, I was wondering why you don't trust the Wikipedia top selling games list sales info?
Coming from a guy named after Luigi, who had a Super NES and Sega Genesis both as a kid, I completely believe the sales numbers I see on the Wikipedia top selling games list. Sega MK2 - 1.78 Million, SNES MK2 - 1.51 Million, they're both there and sourced from pages who have had their validity checked with.
I took the liberty of searching for other sources for the MK2 sales numbers, and either most people just copy them off of Wikipedia, or there's a unanimous understanding of these sales numbers.
I know you want your article to be as accurate as possible, and not as silver lined as possible, so I thought you'd like to know my personal opinion as well.--PimpUigi 08:43, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

I added links into PimpUigi's signature. Cheers. delirious & lost ☯ ^~hugs~ 14:26, 28 December 2009 (UTC)