User:CmdrObot/archive1

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

Welcome!

Hello, CmdrObot/archive1, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome! Mushroom (Talk) 00:19, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

Bad spelling corrections

This diff contains an error: you changed "glorifying an merging leading power" to "glorifying and merging leading power”. The change should have been "glorifying an emerging leading power".

--Akhilleus 21:09, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

Hmm, that was rather silly of me. Thanks for catching the mistake. CmdrObot 21:39, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

[1] Another bad correction. Should be "an honorable" not "a honorable". Aitches are complicated in English, and not everyone agrees on all of them, but I think both Brit. and American English have this as "an honorable". Thanks, Mak emi 20:47, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

Hi Makemi, thanks for catching that. Interestingly enough, I was already handling hono(u)r, hono(u)rable, hono(u)red etc as special cases, but I missed out on hono(u)rably.

In Zeiss formula you changed a quote to "correct" it. Is that legit? If you want to fix "a object" (which you can verify is in the quoted source), shouldn't you either say "[an] object" or "a (sic) object"? Dicklyon 19:53, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Hi Dick, thanks for catching that mistake. You're quite right; the correction I made was to some reported speech and, as such, it should be left as it is, warts and all. Cheers, CmdrObot 20:06, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Your bot recently corrected "an release" to "a release", but in context "release" is a verb, and the correct phrase should have been "and release". Obviously I don't expect the bot to recognise context but where the word is a verb too perhaps more caution could be taken ;) -- Run! 21:17, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

Hi Run!

thanks for catching that. I manage to catch those kind of mistakes most of the time, but the occasional one slips through the net. Cheers, CmdrObot 21:22, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

It's probably not a good idea to correct spelling in source code, like the bot did in this change. "Words" in computer language source code are tokens, not necessarily meant to be words in some spoken language for human beans. -- Mikeblas 23:23, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

family guy source

what was your source for the untitled family guy history? Grande13 23:06, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

Hi there Grande13,

I'm afraid you've got the wrong person; the only edit I've made to the List of Family Guy episodes article is to compact two Amazon URLs. Cheers, CmdrObot 17:39, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

CmdrObot error

On 22-APR-2006, CmdrObot made the following edit to Working Men's Club and Institute Union:

was changed to

The spelling of Mens in the {{mergefrom}} tag was incorrectly changed to Men's , breaking the link between the two articles that are in need of merging.

This bot should NOT be correcting spelling inside of template tags.

Kevyn 04:35, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

Hi Kevyn, thanks for spotting my miscorrection on Working Men's Club and Institute Union. It's quite obviously wrong, especially given the merge in question. More coffee for me in future, I guess! Cheers, Cmdrjameson 13:17, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

Spelling

Just wanted to point out a small error with your bot. Works great overall, but spelled destruction wrong (distruction). [2] – Someguy0830 (Talk | contribs) 23:38, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

D'oh! Thanks for spotting that. I've updated my bot. Cheers, CmdrObot 22:04, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

No problem. – Someguy0830 (Talk | contribs) 22:07, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

disappointing is more correct than disapointing... [3] Ans e ll 12:45, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

Dependent or Dependant... Make sure you are not changing these words out of tense, ie, one spelling is for nouns and the other for adjectives. [4] Ans e ll 12:52, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

supercede and supersede are synonymous with each other, what is your reference for converting between them? [5] Ans e ll 13:10, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

Hi Ansell. According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, supersede is the standard spelling of the word. It goes on to mention "The spelling supercede is recorded as early as the 16th century, but is still regarded as incorrect."

You're quite right about dependant/dependent: I'll be more careful with it in future.

My use of 'disapoint' was a mistake on my part. I've fixed it up, thanks for catching it!

Cheers, CmdrObot 21:20, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

List of places in Hawaii

Your recent edit to List of places in Hawaii was reverted by an automated bot that attempts to recognize and repair vandalism to Wikipedia articles. If the bot reverted a legitimate edit, please accept our apologies – if you bring it to the attention of the bot's owner, we may be able to improve its behavior. Click here for frequently asked questions about the bot and this warning. // Tawkerbot2 19:36, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Hi there,

User:CmdrObot 'collapsed' a bunch of unnecessarily piped wikilinks on this article and for some reason it trigered your vandalism detector. No real harm done, but I'm curious; what heuristic did CmdrObot run afoul of? Cheers, Cmdrjameson 19:45, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

The funny thing is that CmdrObot is an account with the bot flag enabled, so it's actions should have been ignored. Oh well...

Cool. We have a bot that reverted a bot! An edit war in the making. ;) --Stephane Charette 19:52, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Everytime

Might want to add an exception for "Everytime" in quotes - see [6]. TheJabberwʘck 22:48, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Quotations

There are several mentions above about overcorrections that occur within quoted text. Perhaps it might be better for the bot to just ignore quoted text? Ardric47 00:48, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

Hi Ardric,

I've thought a bit about ignoring stuff in quotations, but due to the freeform nature of wiki markup, and the inconsistent ways people use single quotes, double quotes, the 'proper' left and right hand versions of these, and how all the above interact with apostrophes, spacing, parentheses, punctuation etc, it's actually surprisingly difficult to recognise what's quoted and what's not.

In any event, I have the feeling that even if I did get this right, I'd miss out quite a lot text that should legitimately be corrected; and while the combo of my bot and I do generate some false positives, it's quite low compared to the number of corrections I've done.

On the other hand, if you've any suggestions, I'd be interested to hear them.

Cheers, Cmdrjameson 16:30, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

Errors

this edit changed "an completed" to "and completed", but it should actually be "a completed".
From this edit, it seems that "techniques" is misspelled as "tenchiques" in the bot's database.
The change to "a vogue" probably should have been to "in vogue" instead.
This edit included a change that was not even in the edit summary: it changed "[[Category:Jak and Daxter characters| ]]" to "[[Category:Jak and Daxter characters|Jak and Daxter characters]]". A space is often used as a sortkey in order to have an article appear at the beginning of a category page. Ardric47 01:32, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

Hi Ardric,

You're quite right: I did misspell "techniques" in my bot's table of corrections. Rather stupid of me; thanks for noticing!

Edits 1 and 3 are entirely human error: there's no easy automatic way to detect what the appropriate correction should be in those cases, and I neglected to catch the errors before I saved those pages.

Edit 4 is an interesting one. I wasn't aware of this use of spaces as sort keys for Category Pages. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. I'll add a special case for this to my link compacting code.

Cheers, Cmdrjameson 16:18, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

Kindergarten

Please make an exception for the Kindergarten page. Your bot corrected this text:

"Many private businesses in the USA name their day-care businesses 'Kindergarten' or, misspelled, 'Kindergarden'."

--Kinst 17:17, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

Hi Kinst,

thanks for the message. I've added the exception to my list as requested.

Cheers, Cmdrjameson 17:20, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

>x<INO

Hey thanks a lot! I dunno if you are a robot, cheap robot, gangbanger, human, or what so ever. But you always seem to help me when I am working with articles:P Helping me correcting my mistakes. Thanks again:P

>x<ino 08:41, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Communes of the Oise département and others

Your bot compacted some of the links, which would normally be fine, except it seems whoever originally set these up left them that way as a visual indication that these references needed disambiguating (but then didn't finish the job). For example, there is more than one commune called Avricourt, but none of them have an article, so there's no disambig page to refer to. So I'd prefer if you didn't do any more compacting on the links in the Communes of the ... département pages please - it make disambigging harder. Colonies Chris 12:48, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Hi Chris,

thanks for pointing that out. It's an interesting way of using pipes, although it is rather fragile as people like me can come along, not notice the subtle distinction being made, and compact the links.

I would have thought HTML comments might be more suitable for this kind of to-do note.

In any event, I'll hold off from doing any more compacting on these articles.

Cheers, Cmdrjameson 13:20, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Erroneous removal of underscores

See edit here. Case citations for U.S. Supreme Court cases are composed of the volume number of the printed reporter that the case will appear in and the page of that volume on which it starts. When the case is new and the bound volume has not yet been printed, the volume number will be known but not the page: these pending citation forms will therefore be given as, for example, Smith v. Smith, 547 U.S. ___ (2006). It would be great if you could program in a way around removing that underscore placeholder. Cheers, Postdlf 21:19, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Hi Postdlf,

oops! My apologies, it's quite clearly a mistake, and thanks for pointing it out.

Cheers, Cmdrjameson 21:24, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Womens Bay

You may want to make an exception for Womens Bay, Alaska, which shouldn't have apostrophes inserted into the name. —Zero Gravitas 05:54, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

Ta, I've added that exception as requested. Cheers, CmdrObot 13:37, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

U.K. -> UK

Could this bot be made to correct the usage of U.K.? According to the MoS, the usage of U.K. is incorrect. I would think this could be easily done by a bot since there doesn't seem to be any correct usage of U.K. (with the periods). US should also be changed to U.S. but there are exceptions to that though, so a bot might not be best for this half of the equation. Thoughts? Dismas|^(talk) 22:17, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

Hi Dismas,

it's a good idea, and as you say, it'd be an easy case to add, but are you sure 'UK' is the preferred useage? IMHO 'UK' looks a lot better than 'U.K.', but I don't see any mention of it in the MoS.

Cheers, Cmdrjameson 22:27, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

Arg, someone has changed the page. It was there the last time I looked at it. Although, the article for United Kingdom points out what I was referring to on the first line. Dismas|^(talk) 22:56, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

Hey, you might be interested to know that there are around 4700 occurrences of U.K. in the current Wikipedia, vs about 66000 UKs. I know a consenus when I see one! :) I've modified my script to fix the former as I come across them. Cheers, Cmdrjameson 22:14, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the info... And the change to your bot! Dismas|^(talk) 05:10, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

Changing spelling of a quotation from a newspaper

If the newspaper used a colloquialism, is it appropriate to change the spelling when it is a direct quote?David 22:27, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

Hi there,

in a direct quote, no it's probably not valid. Thanks for catching that. What article is it in please?

Cheers, CmdrObot 22:31, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

thru to through in Johnny Coulon David 22:52, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

No, that is not appropriate (unless square brackets are used). Ardric47 23:09, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

Thru to Through

I reverted (for the second time) changing "thru" to "through" on Image:HitlerEagleNest45.jpg as it was a quote of the caption by the person who took the image. (BTW, given at least a century and a half of use in print which I'm familiar with, I'd say that "thru" is at worse a slangy variation rather than inherently wrong -- or has there been some judgement to the contrary for use on Wikipedia?) Cheers, -- Infrogmation 23:33, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

D'oh! Sorry about that. I thought I'd put that article in my list of exceptions, but it appears I hadn't. I've done it now, so it definitely won't be miscorrected again.

And yeah, I agree it's more slangy than outright incorrect, but I don't think informal language like that is appropriate in an encyclopedia. And of course there are phrases such as 'drive-thru' and 'thru-path' where it is the correct useage.

Again, apologies, Cmdrjameson 23:44, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. Cheers, -- Infrogmation 23:49, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

whotsoever

Please notice, that this bot changes whatsoevver to whotsoever, while the former is a correct word, the later isn't. Please correct this bot accordingly. --84.184.84.146 18:19, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

Deletion vote: NA Temple Youth

Hi, since you were involved with the article, please see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/North American Federation of Temple Youth - Mid-Atlantic Region (2nd nomination). Best wishes, IZAK 12:03, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

Removing referer ids

Do you use regex expressions for removing referer ids? I am very interested if you can provide me with that code. Thanks! --mboverload @ 04:37, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

Hi Mboverload,

yeah, I do use a set of regular expressions for removing referrer IDs. As an example, here's my allmusic.com (Python) code. I feed it the text inside wikilinks

allmusicre = re.compile(r'(http://www\.allmusic.com)(.*?)( |$)')
allmusictokenre = re.compile(r'&token=[^&]*')
allmusicuidre = re.compile(r'&uid=[^&]*')
allmusicsearchlinkre = re.compile(r'&searchlink=[^&]*')
allmusicsampleslinkre = re.compile(r'&samples=[^&]*')
def fixallmusic(match):
	'''Remove the token=... referer ID and other unneeded query terms from allmusic.com URLs'''
	global allmusicrefcount
	tmp = match.group(2)
	tmp = allmusicuidre.sub('', tmp)
	tmp = allmusictokenre.sub('', tmp)
	tmp = allmusicsearchlinkre.sub('', tmp)
	tmp = allmusicsampleslinkre.sub('', tmp)
	if tmp != match.group(2):
		allmusicrefcount += 1
	return match.group(1) + tmp + ' '

print allmusicre.sub(fixallmusic, "[[http://www.allmusic.com The Allmusic website]]")

Hope this helps, Cmdrjameson 23:01, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! --mboverload @ 09:28, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

LoPbN "corrections"

As to '"David Forbes" journalist' in In the work on [List of people by name: Fo]]

info that in principle might have been important was falsified,
the meaning became more obscure,
no useful correction was made, and
nothing visible to non-editors was involved in the first place.

Specifically:

Upper-casing "canada" disrupted the accuracy of info copied and pasted directly from a Google search pane. AFAIK that was harmless bcz AFAIK Google ignores casing, but some such search-engine copies could produce different results for the changed version you left behind, so this behavior is dangerous inside a wiki-comment.
The wording
to offer an promising abstracts to verify it.

was indeed erroneous, but altering it to
to offer and promising abstracts to verify it.

is also nonsense, and made it harder for readers to infer the correct version, which is
to offer any promising abstracts to verify it.

It should have been left alone by anyone responsibly operating the bot.
Making search keys "read" better is a waste of time at best, and changes like "an" to "and" (what, on the grounds that changing it to "a" didn't seem right?) need to be foregone if not enuf care is going to be devoted to the task to get real English out of the process.
In general, "bad" text inside comments is seen only by those who are better disposed to fix it than a bot, which means attempting to fix it is more likely to waste human effort than save it.

My suggestions:

Have the bot recognize commented material & ignore it.
Just off the top of my head (i don't pay much attention to any but very specialized bots), why isn't there a rule that any bot that makes guesses must leave a comment next to the correction saying e.g. ? Maybe with a WP:-namespace ref discussing the fact that the comments should be removed by native-speakers who verify the bot got it right. Please note that RC review is clearly not enuf: this lasted 36 hours, and i caught it only bcz i am compulsive abt reviewing LoPbN changes.
--Jerzy•t 03:24 & 03:40, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for editing at Maratha Clan System -- From Vishal1976

Maratha Clan System Maratha Clan System Thanks for editing at Maratha Clan System -- From Vishal1976

01:18, 28 May 2006 CmdrObot m (sp (5): Allthough→Although, prominant→prominent, supressing→suppressing, vegitable→vegetable)

Unicodify

Can you reconsider this is articles such as Born coordinates? It messes up a project of my own. What is the rationale, anyway? Do you have reason to think this greatly reduces server stress or something like that? ---CH 02:48, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

Hi there, I could switch off the HTML entity->UTF-8 conversion, and I'd be happy to do so for a specific set of articles (especially if they're easily identified), but could I ask why it's causing a problem?

The reasons I'm doing it are threefold:

It saves a little space in the wikipedia databases. On pages with lots of non-Roman characters or symbols it can save rather a lot of space.
For people who want to work with the raw wiki markup, it 'canonicalises' the representation, and makes it easier to read. You don't have to worry about Cmdr and Cmdr being the same, and I find Αγγελος a lot easer to read in an edit window than Αγγεο&fsigma;. Ditto Seán and Se´n. This also helps if you want to do string searches on database dumps.
In my opinion it's a bit inelegant to mix together HTML markup with wiki markup when it's possible to avoid it. Since raw Wikipedia articles are 'officially' interpreted as UTF-8, why not take advantage of it?

Anyhow, I'd be interested in your feedback. Cheers, Cmdrjameson 00:00, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

PS I took a quick skim through some of the stuff you've add to Wikipedia and I must say I'm impressed! Thanks so much for your contributions; it's this sort of thing that makes Wikipedia such a valuable resource.

Thanks for the kudos! Although you might be disappointed by what I say next (migration).

As for unicodifying: ironically, it is precisely because I find it easier to work with &gamma"semicolon" in connection with a migration project involving turning the raw wiki markup into latex code. If you can provide a simple script which automatically fixes this problem for me, I think that might solve the problem. (I am a linux user, so perl or bash or tsch scripts would be a good choice.) ---CH 00:06, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

Aah, I see your problem. OK, if Python will be acceptable, I can knock together a script that'll turn all non-ASCII unicode characters into their HTML entity equivalents.

As regards your other messages, I'm just a normal wikipedia user; I'm not responsible for any changes to the code behind wikipedia, so I'm not sure what's going on there. You might want to take a look at Help:Special characters though.

Is there a particular set of pages that you're interested in migrating If there is and they can easily be identified (say, by all falling into a particular list of wikipedia categories) then I'll be happy to make exceptions for them. In any event, until we figure out how to resolve this, I'll switch off my unicode conversion completely; I'm more interested in spelling mistakes and the likes anyways.

BTW, what is this migration project you mentioned? It sounds interesting...

Python should work for me.

For my migration project see this, see also this list of articles I want to archive and latexify. So I am interested in any tool which helps me minimize the work involved in converting raw wikicode for specific articles into something which can be compiled under latex on my local machine! (I have played with my own scripts, but as you probably know, conversion is never as easy as it might look, even though in this case much wikicode markup is transparently related to analogous latex commands. Still my immediate problem is preparing the raw wikicode for the actual translation.)

By the way, if you are interested in cruft patrol, I am considering some troubling projects which involve querying Wikipedia databases to ease the amount of high level intervention currently required to discover and revert vandalism and many other kinds of bad edits (of the sci/math pages). It's a Hobson's choice; if I want to stay at WP, something like these projects will be required to make my work worthwhile. Sadly, given the glacial pace of policy change at WP, it seems that it would be easier to garner a developer's account and implement autocruftchecking myself than it would be to change policies to place the burden of ingenuity on those trying to vandalize or push a cranky point of view in the sci/math pages. Either way, it seems that by trying to help improve the WP I let myself in for much more work than I anticipated, work not related to creating new articles/organization and improving old articles/organization, which is all I wanted to do when I came here about a year ago. ----CH 19:52, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

Hi again, just a quick note. I've put a small Python script up at User:Cmdrjameson/utf8tohtml.py. Hopefully it'll do what you want as regards UTF8. Cheers, Cmdrjameson 15:22, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

Re Cathedrals blah blah

Thanks for fixing my spelling. Someone needs to, rgularly. It's this kkeyboard that does it, you know. It doesn't have a memory. It just likes rrrepeating itself.

Amandajm

Thru is not a typo

Thru is found in dictionaries and is certainly not a spelling mistake. It is very unlikely that when a user types thru they do so by mistake. It is true that it is regarded as informal and there are arguments why some people would wish to avoid it. However this is the sort of thing humans must decide. Your bot is an excellent tool but maybe thru should be removed.Dejvid 12:30, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply. BTW I wasn't trying to convince you that cases like "sections 32 thru 35" are correct only that whoever wrote it surely considers it correct. A lot of people seem to favor it in those contexts, probably because it is shorter. Anyway, thanks for concentrating your bot on less controversial areas. I have seen how much it picks up -keep up the good work.Dejvid

Pharoah Sanders

Please realize that Pharoah Sanders does not spell his first name in a standard way; it's "Pharoah," not "Pharaoh." This could have been looked up first. Badagnani 19:27, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Oops, my bad! Sorry about that, and thanks for catching the miscorrection. Cmdrjameson 19:41, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

I found about 15 or more instances of others who "corrected" Pharaoh to Pharoah (including in the Pharoah Sanders article) and just fixed them all (and added a hidden tag to this effect at the top of that article). I think Pharoah must have spelled it himself without looking it up, and spelled it to rhyme with the exclamation "whoah"! :) Badagnani 19:44, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Ah, that's interesting. If it's being frequently miscorrected, something that can help is to put a HTML comment in the text directly before/after the name saying that it's meant to be spelt this way. People may not notice a comment at the top of a page, but it's hard to miss one right beside the word in question. I saw a similar problem with articles on a band called Descendents before.

Again, apologies for not paying closer attention; usually I'm fairly good at noticing the context and not blindly correcting misspellings, but every now and then I slip up.

Cheers, CmdrObot 19:56, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Signallers

In Privatisation of British Rail your bot recently changed "signallers" to "signalers". In British usage it's definitely double-l. -- Arwel (talk) 02:09, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Editing Project Space

Your bot edited Wikipedia:Infestation, a failed policy. I question the wisdom of bot-edits to project space in the first place, but editing an inactive page gives a false impression of activity. Robert A.West (Talk) 04:10, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Non-US spelling

Note that non-US spelling does not mean spelling errors. Words like colour, neighbour, favour, and honour are all valid international English spellings. :) I point this out because of this diff with an edit summary seeming to indicate it was due to spelling. Thanks! --Stephane Charette 19:39, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps, but in Canada (the article in question is a Canadian school board) we definitely have the word honourary, such as Honourary Professors, Honourary Patrons, Honourary Advisory Board, and Honourary Membership.

I see the word is in use in Australia as well, such as Honourary Life Memberships.

And this link would seem to indicate the word Honourary is in use in the UK.

Again, I repeat my request that your automoted bot recognize words like colour, neighbour, flavour, and honour -- including honourary -- as valid words not needing to be corrected. Though I don't have a dictionary with me at my desk, a quick check of the official Government of Canada web site brings up many references to the word honourary. --Stephane Charette 20:18, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Various quotes from an official press release from the Government of Canada:

MINISTER NAULT NAMED HONOURARY CHIEF OF MILLBROOK FIRST NATION
The Chief and Council of the Millbrook First Nation today named the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, the Honourable Robert D. Nault, an Honourary Chief.
"I am proud to bear the title of Honourary Chief, and I extend my thanks to Chief Lawrence Paul for bestowing this honour upon me.

(Emphasis is mine the quotes above.) Yes, I agree, they overruse the word honour in the press release, but nevertheless, I'm relatively certain it is a valid spelling. --Stephane Charette 20:28, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Firstly, I'd like to make it clear that I have never 'corrected' words like colour/color, flavor/flavour, neighbor/neighbour or honor/honour, so please don't make it sound like I have. I'm well aware that those are all correct spellings. I'm surprised that the OED doesn't list 'honourary' as an acceptable variant if it's in common use in Canada, although I guess it is possible that they're in error. In any event, I've now removed 'honourary' from my list of misspellings. Cheers, CmdrObot 20:28, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! --Stephane Charette 20:33, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Request

Could you unicodify Scrabble letter distributions? This looks too much for any human... Soo 08:04, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Consider it unicodified! :)

Cheers, CmdrObot 21:30, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Disambiguation links

Could you snap for example "[[Lust for Life (song)|Lust for Life]]" to "[[Lust for Life (song)|]]"? The latter is a little-known but incredibly convenient bit of Wiki markup for handling disambiguation pages. Ta! — ciphergoth 10:23, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

How to Force a Misspelling

There is a song on the Maize (album) called "Tounge." This is the way it appears on the album liner, and on Amazon and other sites. The misspelling appears to be intentional. It keeps getting changed to "Tongue" by spelling bots. How can I mark this song such that it stays misspelled? UnhandledException 15:09, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

Hi there. Since all of the spellchecking bots are human-assisted, the best way to mark words as deliberately misspelled is to put HTML comments into the wiki markup beside the misspelled words. When the bot users check what edits a bot has made, they'll notice the comment, and avoid miscorrecting the words. For example, you might write something like Everyone thought that his girlfreind  was no good.. Hope this helps, CmdrObot 15:26, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

Actually I have a standard for WP:RETF. I put "spellfixno" in the code and it will auto skip that article. Also you can use {{sic}} --mboverload @ 03:09, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

this edit

Why did you remove the space in the sortkey? --SPUI (T - C) 15:43, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Hi there. My bot did it because when I coded it, I assumed that spaces at the start or end of a wikilink (or the components of a piped wikilink) were unneeded. I see now that this is not the case for category sortkeys. Thanks for pointing this out, I'll fix up my code to handle this properly. Cheers, CmdrObot 15:33, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

% and spaces!

Hello! As you (or rather the one behind you) seems to be sure of what you're doing, could you comment on this: Talk:Percentage#Space or not?? Thank you in advance. Jobjörn (Talk ° contribs) 23:26, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

"an" before a vowel or "h"

I believe that it is correct in English (assuming there is anything as correct) to use "an" before a vowel or a word beginning with "h". See my entry Mud Clerk, "an helper" was changed to "a helper". Jimaginator 18:05, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

It's more complicated than that, I'm afraid, as deciding when to use a or an is related to the sound of the word rather than its spelling. So, for example, you write 'a human', because 'an human' would sound strange. Even with vowels it's not entirely cut and dried, as there is a whole class of words spelt with vowels, but pronounced differently, such 'a Euro' and 'a euphemism'. 'Helper' is a little trickier. Personally, I'd say it as "a helper" rather than "an 'elper", but I guess tastes may vary on this one. Cheers, CmdrObot 18:40, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

As I recall, (and it's been many years since I was taught this in school) it was not dependent on pronounciation at all. Rather, it was all vowels and h, period. Believe me, I agree that "an helper" does sound pretty bad, but I thought it was a hard and fast rule, which is why I pointed it out. I cannot seem to find any "authority" on the web which specifically calls out the rule. If you have something which talks about it, I would love to see it. A google search for the exact phrases "a human" and "an human" yields 121,000,000 and 162,000 hits respectively, so regardless of what is or was "the rule", it is pretty obvious that most are writing "a human" at a ratio of 750:1. Microsoft Word flags neither as a spelling error. Even if it was a rule at one point, language always changes, and certainly English leads the pack. So, "a helper" is fine by me. Jimaginator 18:54, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

One possible source which confirms your pronunciation criterion: [7] Jimaginator 18:58, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Ah, that's interesting. One thing I've noticed is that a major source on Wikipedia of 'an h' where it makes (modern) pronounciation awkward is text quoted from the Bible. Since they occur in quoted material and clearly aren't typos, I've left them alone, but they would support your idea that it used to be a rule. However, it just occurred to me that I have seen this issue discussed before: take a look at the article A, an. Cheers, CmdrObot 19:06, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

My schooldays are long behind me, but I'm pretty sure that I never learned that "an" was always used before a vowel and h. To confirm this, I've just consulted a modest little work called The Elements of Grammar by Margaret Shertzer. She writes under The Articles: Use the indefinite article a before words in which the first sound is a consonant, a sounded h or a long u. After giving examples, she then writes: Use an before words in which the first sound is a vowel, except long u, and before words beginning with silent h. So it would appear that CmdrObot is correct when he says that it depends on sound, not spelling. Hayford Peirce 23:21, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

With regards to the correction of "an homosexual" in The Picture of Dorian Gray, I have found this on the wikitionary entry for "homosexual":

“

Pronunciation: The word "homosexual" derives from the Greek word for "same", which is traditionally pronounced /ˈhɒməʊ/, /"hQm@U/ in words derived from it, rather than the Latin word homo, meaning "man", which is pronounced /ˈhɒməʊ/, /"hQməU/ (RP) in English words derived from it. Hence the etymology indicates that the appropriate pronunciation of the vowel in the first syllable is /ɒ/, /Q/, but the pronunciation with the long vowel /əʊ/, /@U/ in this position is much more commonly heard, and is the only correct pronunciation of the shortened form homo.

”

I hope this helps to clear matters. Although, as always, a cited source would be more helpful! -Adasta- 12:47, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

My watchlist

Thanks for great scripting bot. I found an odd thing though after it made the edit. The page disappeared from my watch list. I tried to unwatch and watch again and it still would not show up. It wasn't until I made another edit to the page that it reappeared on my watchlist. I've never had that problem and I thought it odd. I can only contribute it to the CmdrObot as it was working fine before the edit, disappeared after the bot edit, and didn't reappear until I made a new edit. Anyway.. thought I would share in case anyone else saw this. Morphh 00:16, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the kind words. I'm pretty sure that my bot isn't responsible for the odd watchlist behaviour you've seen, as it uses Wikipedia's web user interface to view and edit articles just like a normal user does. The only thing that makes it a bot is that it corrects the text in the edit box; clicks the show changes and save buttons; and loads the next article in my list automatically.

It is very odd behaviour though. I wonder could there be some subtle bug in Wikipedia that pops up every now and then. Sorry I couldn't be of more assistance, CmdrObot 14:16, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Spelling of Medieval

The standard spelling on Wikipedia is "Medieval". It is the modern form. See Wikipedia:WikiProject Middle Ages/British spelling of Medieval. Although it is sometimes spelled with an "a" in England, Medieval is still the most common form, even in England. -- Stbalbach 00:28, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

This is in regards to this edit. -- Stbalbach 00:30, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Absolutely. You're quite right, and I've updated my spelling list to reflect that. Cheers, CmdrObot 14:08, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Rabbi

In an article on Itche Goldberg you capitalized rabbi, when a specific rabbi was not mentioned. If it is an individual person being referred to as a rabbi (such as "Rabbi Levine") it would be correct. But, as a class of people the word should not be in capitals. For instance, "General Smith is one of the generals." mwinog2777

Ah! Thanks for pointing that out. I hadn't thought it through fully for rabbis; your example does make it a lot clearer though. Cheers, CmdrObot 17:57, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Barnstar

		The Minor Barnstar
		The Minor Barnstar goes to an incredibly helpful, minor-editing bot. Gray Porpoise 19:10, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

The preceding template was incorrectly terminated, preventing further additions to this page; so I've modified it.

OrangUtanUK 10:10, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Summons

I doubt you'll ever get to encounter this elsewhere, but you might want to add Administrative divisions of Tuva to the list of exceptions. "Sumon" here is correct, "summon" isn't. Cheers,—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 21:09, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Ah. Thanks for the note, and sorry for messing up the article. I've added it to my exceptions. Out of curiosity, do you know why they spell summons differently in Tuva? Cheers, CmdrObot 21:15, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

It isn't spelled differently, it is a different word. See Sum_(subnational_entity). --Stacey Doljack Borsody 21:38, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Crossposted from my talk; I see Stacey has already answered this.

Hello, Commander! Thanks for taking care of it. As a matter of fact, they don't spell summon (a verb) differently in Tuva; the word sumon (a noun with one "m") is simply a transliteration from Russian/Tuvan "сумон" and has no relations to the English verb whatsoever. "Sumon" is a variation of sum, a unit of administrative division. Hope this satisfies your curiosity :))—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 12:25, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

'and correct' is incorrect!

perhaps you'd prefer 'a correct' to 'an correct', but such trifles pale in comparison to what 'and correct' does to the meaning in that sentence. Please fix! (I don't revert)

Oops. It does indeed mangle the meaning of the sentence. I've fixed it now. My apologies!

Haven't ever seen 'et-cetera' in 45 years of avid reading either. Hmmmm, apparently we're both correct, but that's an odd form of it and hence you shouldn't be changing something you also know to be an alternative and correct formulation to some other you prefer. If someone writes behaviour (behavior), or other words commonly spelt (spelled) differently it's impolite to force your prejudices upon the other parts of the English speaking world. There is and never has been a standardized (standardised) spelling—outside of elementary school, where alas, many teachers mistakenly believe there is such—'tis but a myth in the minds of the uninformed!

Cheers! // FrankB 06:20, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Absolutely. I agree that there are many many English words that have multiple correct spellings, and I've no problem with that (as long as it's consistent: it annoys me to see mixed American and British spellings within an article for example). It's just that I know the etymology of the word/phrase, and it (incorrectly) led me to belive that 'et cetera', or 'et-cetera' was the correct spelling. Thanks for pointing that out to me though; I've learned something new today! Cheers, CmdrObot 13:55, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

See reply thread here // FrankB 18:19, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

TfD nomination of Template:17th Lancers

Template:17th Lancers has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for Deletion page. Thank you.. Because you were in the history, I wanted to pass this along. — MrDolomite | Talk 01:48, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

unicodifying mdash and ndash

Please don't. The problem with the unicode versions of — and – is that they are indistinguishable in the fixed-width font generally seen within Wikipedia's editing environment. —Bunchofgrapes (talk) 02:05, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

May I ask what browser you're using? On Safari on my Mac, the editing textbox has a proportional font and the width of the different dashes is readily apparent. Admittedly, Camino (which is Gecko-based), the other browser I generally use, uses a monospaced font, but even there, the characters are drawn slightly differently. Cheers, CmdrObot 14:38, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

I use Firefox on Windows. —Bunchofgrapes (talk) 16:18, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

"Decision"

Good day. I believe that if the word "Desicion" is used, it is much more likely that the editor intended to use "Decision" rather than "Desition". I am referring to this edit. Just thought I'd let you know. Later, Newnam^(talk) 06:13, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

I can't help but roll my eyes (at myself) over my edit. Yes, of course decision is the more likely word, and I should have caught that when proof reading the changes! I've updated my spell list now, thanks for spotting it. Cheers, CmdrObot 14:30, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

Don't replace   with spaces

Because non-IE browsers - quite correctly - consider a table cell without any contents as non-existing which means that it will have no border. & nbsp ; should never be replaced in tables, because it is IE who is non-compliant. KittenKlub 16:42, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

Hi there. I'm aware of the problem with table cells with normal spaces in them appearing empty. However, I'm not replacing the nbsp entity with plain spaces, I'm actually using the Unicode no break space character (U+00A0). I've just tested a table cell using the unicode no break space character in IE 6, Camino and Safari, and it renders correctly in all of them. Cheers, CmdrObot 17:06, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

You'd still have the problem that you can't see that it is a nbsp, because that's what the diff showed. The nbsp disappeared, so 00A0 is not an option, since nobody can tell the difference so you'll never able to find out what the character is. nbsp is clear and the people using it, know that it is a special character. So don't change it. KittenKlub 17:09, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

OK, consider it done, or more accurately, not done in future :) Cheers, CmdrObot 17:45, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

Installment / Instalment

The word should always be spelt with one L in UK articles, as that is the UK spelling. Angmering 10:23, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

Theta Beta Potata PUNK HOUSE Deletion Review

Theta Beta Potata

This article was first started by me and was deleted back in May '06. I was reading the punk house article and saw that the link for the TBP article was no longer red so I clicked on it and there was an article back up, started by another user. I dont know who started it because, it was deleted soon after I saw it. The decision made in the "Article for Deletion" debate should be reconsidered. The article is about a punk house not a fratenal organization. It seems that the debate, run by User:ChrisB and results were reported by User:Mailer Diablo. I will post this on their talk pages. This is the first time I have requested a deletion review so please let me know what else I need to do. If there is anything. I am on wikipedia frequently and I want to learn. Thanks. Xsxex 16:28, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Erroneous changes to Faerie Queene

This article contains portions of the original text which uses the archaic spelling of Edmund Spenser.--Ibis3 20:06, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

So it does, thanks for pointing that out. I've reverted my incorrect changes and made a note of them so it wont happen again. CmdrObot 20:13, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Frazione

Could you add the word ‘comune’ to your dictionary, please. You changed it to ‘commune’ in Frazione. The word is Italian and quite widely used in articles on the country. Thanks. —Ian Spackman 20:55, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Hi there. I hesitated over making that edit for a minute or so as I wasn't sure whether it was meant to be a quoted Italian word or not. I guess I made the wrong choice; sorry about that. Out of curiosity, what does it best translate to in English? Cheers, CmdrObot 21:23, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Well, in this case it does mean commune! In the sense of municipality. And indeed I always write it as commune. But there’s no consensus: some editors prefer municipality, while others, as in this article, deem it best to leave it in the Italian. I think I have seen three votes on the issue, in various places, with three different winners. Cheers! Ian Spackman 22:10, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

pastime → passtime: huh?

Edit to Culture of the United States: [8] wikt:pastime→wikt:passtime. This is incorrect, surely. EdC 00:48, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

D'oh! That is indeed a mistake. I got the misspelt and correct strings the wrong way around for that entry in my spell list. I'll go back through the previous miscorrections I made and fix them up. Cheers, CmdrObot 19:14, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

Developement

This edit changed "developent" to "developement". The former is a typo all right, but so is the latter. The correct spelling is "development". Henning Makholm 14:28, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

It certainly is. *sigh* I took a whole bunch of typo corrections from one of the AutoWikiBot pages and it looks like not all of them are correct. I think I'd better go spellcheck all the corrections. Thanks for that. CmdrObot 14:33, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

"Thorugh"

Just for information: recent change "thorugh" to "thorough" [9], should have been "through". --Stemonitis 10:07, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

Oops. And it's also the more likely typo to make IMHO. Thanks for spotting it. Cheers, CmdrObot 22:35, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

Template:WPBeatles changes

Hi. I have reverted the changes this bot made, please leave this template alone, your automation breaks the careful line breaks we added to make this extremely complex template's code human readable. In fact I'd advise staying away from all project talk page templates as they all have similar code in them.... thanks! ++Lar: t/c

Ah, that's a good point, and I hadn't really considered it. I was only really interested in spelling mistakes in templates, as they can have a knock-on effect on a lot of pages. I'm done with template pages for the time being, but thanks for the note. CmdrObot 18:39, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks in turn for your reply and cheers. Your bot's efforts are appreciated. ++Lar: t/c 18:43, 31 August 2006 (UTC)